Food History

The final post from Alma.

The people I come from, the Serbs, have something unique. Our faith celebrates a day called “Slava”, or literally “Celebration”, which is traditionally celebrated by every family on a different day – on the day that their ancestors accepted Christianity, so the story goes, and that day is celebrated and passed down over the generations, and the family takes the saint whose day it is as their own personal family saint – this guy is ours.

His name is Avramije, which translates as “Abraham”, and as a child I was terminally confused as to who had sainted the patriarch of the Jews into the Christian canon of saints and how we ended up with him as our patron saint – turns out he was quite a different “Abraham”, as it happens, and his day, November 11, is when my family celebrates our Slava.

Now a Slava is a great occasion. A tall candle is lit, and allowed to burn until it dies a natural death – it is bad luck to snuff it out by human hand. The candle flickers in the family home all day, giving a holy churchy atmosphere; all day friends and neighbours drop in with a “Sretna Slava!” (Happy Slava). There is a family feast – in fact, one time I was taken to a London Slava of a family I didn’t personally know but I went as a guest of a friend of mine, who knew them well. Being of the same cultural background, I knew what was going on – my neighbour at dinner, a hapless English innocent, did not. So, the first course arrived, the appetisers, and he helped himself to those. Then the soup came. Then, after that, they started bringing out the main course – roast goose, roast pig, roast beef, a slew of rich vegetable dishes. You could see the Englishman starting to turn green but he manfully ate up. The main course was followed by a selection of small individual cupcakes and tea cakes and biscuits, and he took one or two on his plate – and he was doing fine until one of the cooks popped her head out of the kitchen and said cheerfully, “Save room for the cakes!” (meaning those 16-egg monsters, and there were several coming…) Our Englishman simply slid under the table, groaning.

You have to grow up with this stuff to know how to pace yourself.

But one of the traditions of Slava is something called “Koljivo”, which is a dish made out of wheat… and it’s a dish of remembrance. Guests are greeted with it at the door, a small bowl of wheat and a teaspoon, and a taste of it is a reminder of those who were no longer with us, absent from the family table. Koljivo is something that is also prepared for memorial services in the church. It is the food of memory, and remembrance, and love, and loss, and also a sense that we are all always and forever part of a family, whether we still walk the vales of tears or watch over those who do from one of God’s own fluffy clouds. A taste of the wheat means that we are all, again, somehow, one – united under the name of a long-vanished saint whose day we have taken, as a family, to celebrate together.

I have a superstitious awe of this dish, and I do only make it once a year, in November. But I love it dearly, and if I weren’t constrained by its meaning and its meaningfulness I’d make it a lot more often…

So – Koljivo, or the Wheat of Remembrance –

Ingredients:
Equal amounts (by weight) of wheat, sugar, ground walnuts, ground cloves. Raisins, if your taste runs to it.

Cook the wheat in several changes of water, until it is quite soft, and then puree into a paste (we do it manually, using a meat grinder – pour in the cooked wheat at the top and collecting the “sausages” of mashed wheat in a bowl at the other end). Mix well with the sugar and the nuts (and the raisins, if you’re using them). Mix in ground cloves to taste (I like it quite strong. If you aren’t used to the taste, use a lighter hand). Place into a serving bowl, and chill until ready to serve.

There you are. May your memories stay bright. For a moment, if you make this dish, you may share my heritage, my traditions, my celebrations… my “slava”.

Alma Alexander is a novelist writing for both adult audiences (”The Secrets of Jin Shei”, “Embers of Heaven”) and YA readers (the Worldweavers trilogy, “Gift of the Unmage”, “Spellspam”, Cybermage”). Her work has been published in fourteen languages worldwide. She lives in the Pacific Northwest in the USA, with her husband and two cats. Learn more about her at www.AlmaAlexander.com, and more about the Worldweavers books at their own site, - or just come and visit at her blog.

The second part of Alma’s post.

My grandmother bequeathed me half a dozen notebooks full of carefully copied-out recipes (most of them without any reference to how long or at what temperature anything bakeable should be baked…) Most of these recipes she knew off by heart, and they were made often, to our great delight. I’ll provide you with a couple of short recipes. The first is something called “Vanil Krancle” (that last would be pronounced more along the lines of “krantzler” – this was a perennial childhood favourite which still brings back the covers on her kitchen table and the heavenly feeling of baking cookies in the oven in a room filled with love. The second is “Medenjaci” (or, “medenyatsi”) which literally means, honey cakes. These can sometimes be on the dry side – they’re to eat with tea, and were sometimes even dunked. The third is a family mystery called “Kakao Kocke” or “cocoa squares” for which half a dozen different recipes actually exist written down, all of which taste great… but none of which seem capable of actually staying solid when they’re cut up into the squares. It’s a wonderful, if messy, cake.

The last is something that I will probably never taste home-made again. Kitnikez, or quince jelly, was something that used to be made in country kitchens and put away for the cold dark days of winter. I’ve had store-bought, and the taste brings back memories, sure, but my grandmother’s… was total heaven. I do remember, however, like most of the things that were done on a grand scale to be put away for the winter, that it was a huge and a messy job and it simply cannot be adequately done in a cramped modern kitchen with no family to help out and sit around the old kitchen table in the huge old kitchen, and steal tidbits from the sides of pots before they’re cleaned, and half a dozen willing pairs of hands to deal with all the little jobs that need to be done for the thing to be done RIGHT.

So, then. Recipes.

VANIL KRANCLE

200 grams lard (you can probably substitute about 250 grams of sweet butter0
250 grams sugar
1 egg yolk and 1 whole egg
1 sachet vanilla sugar (what, you’ve forgotten about Dr Oetker’s Vanilla Sugar Sachets already…?)
Flour as needed

Make into smooth dough. With cookie cutter, make shapes and bake on a cookie tray until light golden brown. Sandwich pairs of shapes into a doublet with strawberry or apricot jam, and then roll in a bowl of crystalline sugar until coated.

They are YUMMY.

MEDENJACI (Honey Cakes)

250 grams flour
120 grams sugar
2 tablespoons of honey (wildflower, if you have it)
2 eggs
1 level teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
a pinch of cinnamon
(raisins, if you like them, but they’re optional)

Beat eggs together, and then mix in the rest of the ingredients. Mix until smooth. Bake in a square pan (MY COMMENTS: What was that? You want to know at what temperature and for how long…?) until dark golden brown, and then, when cool, cut into squares and serve.

They are YUMMY.

As I said, I have no idea what is wrong with the ability of this next recipe to hang together. I also have no idea what the “real” recipe is. Consider it a small culinary mystery.

KAKAO KOCKE (cocoa squares)

140 grams sweet butter
2 eggs
250 grams sugar
250 grams flour
1 heaped tablespoon of cocoa
pinch of sodium bicarbonate
¼ liter milk

Smoothly mix together butter, egg yolks and sugar. Add in flour, cocoa and the sodium bicarbonate, and finally the milk. At the very end add in the firmly beaten egg whites (beat until you get stiff peaks). Mix until smooth. Bake (at indeterminate temperature, until they’re done, or a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean) cut into squares. You can serve dusted with castor sugar.

This tastes GREAT. If you can figure out how to get it to hang together, let me know

KITNIKEZ (or quince jelly)

This is deceptively simple. The recipe calls for quinces, sugar, water, cinnamon and a lemon. You use equal amounts of quince and sugar, weight-wise, and what you do is, you cut up the quince into small squares and cook in a little water on low heat until soft. When they soften, puree them. Take an equal amount one-for-one in weight of sugar, and cook it in a little water until all dissolved. Add in the pureed quinces, and the juice of one lemon. Cook on low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens, then pour into moulds previously wetted with cold water and allow to completely cool. When cool, take out of moulds and these things keep forEVER if wrapped in cellophane or cling wrap. You can serve them in slices, and this is one of the BEST. THINGS. EVER. But it’s time consuming and messy, and a modern cook will probably be wary even to try it. It’s a lost sweet glorious taste…

This week’s guest writer is Alma Alexander. Those lucky enough to be able to attend Worldcon can talk to her there, but for the rest of us, there are her books and her food. She’s been generous and given us three nights of reading joy. Her fiction has this sense, too, of wonder and a big heart. Her landscapes live and her characters are always interesting. Now, though, let’s let her talk about her food.

I was born in a part of the world where several rich cooking traditions met, collided, and re-formed in a new and rich cuisine which can only be summarised by simply stating that my people love food – the preparing of it, which is a ritual, the serving of it, which is celebration, and the eating of it, which is, well, just heaven.

It’s part of what we are and what we have become through the ages. Our kitchens are a testament to occupations by Turks and by Germans and by Hungarians and by Italians and all of this is used in ways that makes a culinary-minded person swoon at the merest whiff of the scents and aromas coming out of a traditional kitchen.

I really could talk all day about what we eat, how we eat, when we eat it, how it is prepared – but I’ll divide this up into three short(er) parts – the Way It Used To Be, the Family Memories, and the Culinary Arts of Rituals and Traditions (with recipes to match).

The Way It Used To Be

I own several cookbooks from Olden Times – both published volumes, and now-fading handwritten recipes from my grandmother’s time and possibly earlier, hand-me-downs from generations past. You have to understand one thing – my ancestors were people of the land, folks who grew their own food and ate well from it.

Things vanish, as they always do – I remember that when I was very young the village where my grandparents still had the ancestral house still boasted individually owned cows – who came home from pasture apparently by themselves every night and turned each into her own yard, which I found amazing. I drank milk still warm and frothy from being milked straight from a cow’s udder, and you know, I didn’t take any harm from it whatsoever. When I was five I tagged along with a team of wheat harvesters one summer – this was still often done by hand, and they were off to the fields with their scythes, and they naturally assumed that I had permission for this when I asked if I could come with them. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask, which meant that while I was having a wonderful time out in the waving gold of the fields of ripe wheat my parents were going out of their minds trying to figure out where I had got to – until a neighbour told them (everyone knew your business, back there, and the neighbour had seen me go). I caught hell for that, but what I brought away with me was the never-to-be-erased memory of that field of gold waving under blue skies, and the smell of heaven that was summer at harvest time.

Families also kept farmyards full of fowls, and chickens (and therefore eggs) were cheap and plentiful. One of my old cookbooks has a dozen consecutive recipes for cakes calling for more than a dozen eggs – which, today, is fairly boggling. But in the interests of chronicling food and its history, and the way things used to be, I picked a recipe which calls for SIXTEEN – sixteen, count ‘em – eggs, just so as to blow people’s minds. You may never make this cake. But close your eyes and sit back and try to imagine what it must look like, feel like, taste like – the richness that melts on your tongue, and in your memory. My ingredients are – and I will make no apology for this – given in metric terms; anyone used to ounces and things measured by “cups” should probably run for cover now, or bring out a conversion program to keep at hand…

Anyway, here it is. The Almond Cake.

Ingredients:
16 eggs
28 tablespoons of sugar
24 tablespoons finely ground almonds
3 tablespoons flour
310 grams of sweet butter
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lemon
1 bag of vanilla sugar (for those who have no clue what this is, go into your local continental food store and look for Dr Oetker’s Vanilla Sugar Sachets. One of those.)

Mix 12 eggs with 12 spoons of sugar until smooth, then add, spoon by spoon, the ground almonds and the flour. Pour the resulting dough into an oiled cake tin and bake at a medium temperature (MY COMMENT: This is why I hate these old recipes with a passion. WHAT is a moderate temperature when it’s at home? Bake for HOW LONG? No information as to these items is available in the recipe). Take out when done, allow to cool, carefully remove from baking tin and cut horizontally into three equal-thickness layers. In a separate bowl, combine 4 eggs, 10 spoons of sugar, and one grated lemon (MY COMMENT yes, they mean one grated lemon. Rind and fruit.) Stir on low heat on stove until it starts to thicken. When it does thicken, take off heat and leave to cool. Into the cooled cream add a smoothly-combined mixture of 250 grams of sweet butter and two spoons of castor sugar. Mix well, and then use the resulting cream to “sandwich” the layers of the cake together. In a separate pot, boil the last 6 spoons of sugar in a small cup of water and the vanilla sugar until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat and stir until the fondant becomes white. Add 60 grams of butter, stir until smooth, and use mixture to glaze the sandwiched cake. Decorate as you wish (MY COMMENT: I particularly love this. Decorate as you wish. OOOoookay.)

There you have it. Not just sixteen eggs, but probably an entire day or at the very least a couple of steady hours of sustained effort.

There’s other cakes in there. 14 eggs, 12, 10. Close your eyes and listen to the patient clucking of hens just outside your window. You know that all you have to do is step outside into the nests and collect all the eggs that you need…

I forgot to tell you all that on Sunday 30 August (a month and a little) there will be an online science fiction convention, and that I’m one of the guests. Every year, Conflux invites the guests of honour to be Minicon (the online version of the live event, where we shall be enjoying the banquet in October) the year of their guestliness and the year after, and this is my year after. Last year, towards the end of my guest spot, someone realised that they could talk to me about food history and they regretted not discovering this earlier. That’s why I’m telling you today that I shall be online from 10.30-11.30 am Australian Eastern Standard Time and I would be delighted to talk food history, or any history. Just because I’m also a fiction writer, doesn’t mean I can’t talk about history!

If you can’t work out international time zones, just tell me where you live and I’ll consult one of those world clocks and tell you what time/day it will be for you. If you’re in New Zealand it will be Sunday and if you’re in the US it will be Saturday, that much I know without checking.

If you’re interested in meeting me live, through the happy medium of a computer keyboard (where you don’t have to tussle with the Australian accent) then you should register http://conflux.org.au/forum/ . Registration is free. You can attend any of the sessions you want, though I do suggest that you save your food history questions for me.

First I have some news and then I have a cookbook to talk about.

My news is that I have a deformed postcard to give away. It’s a proof for the Conflux banquet postcard for this year. Karen (the Conflux chair) had a few extra made so that several people could proof them and when that was all done she gave the extras to me. Anyone who wants one can email me or post a comment below here before next Sunday. I’ll pull a name out of a hat. I’m happy to post it anywhere in the world. There are very few of these postcards round – all the finals will be correct in spelling, in ingredients, in proper names. If you know anyone who collects postcards, you might want to speak up.

As I promised yesterday, today’s book is about celebrities. At least, that’s what it claims. It’s the heart Foundation’s “Celebrity Cooks Collection,” which really makes it a nice collection of food writers who were active and known around 1995. It’s a very passing kind of fame, but no less interesting for that.

It’s interesting how the celebrities have been chosen. It’s basically one per major publication and each of them has associated with a region. They’re bldly claiming the increasing internationalism of Australia in the 1990s as their own.

What’s particularly curious about this is that not all cuisines have been normalised. Most Australians (me among them) don’t really understand Nonya cuisine (Carol Selvarajah of the Australian Gourmet Traveller) and certainly don’t cook it on a regular basis, for instance. Thai cooking (Kathy Wharton, New Weekly) has been Australianised and the Mexican cooking (Di Parkes, Slimming Australia) tends to be rather adapted. Moroccan cooking (Jill Dupleix, The Sydney Morning Herald), on the other hand, is somewhat trendy right now, as is any North African dish that can fit in a tagine. I’ve seen tagines on sale at every single gourmet cookshop I’ve been in recently, while I have seen very little Thai cookware, and when I bring my Thai tiffin to a picnic everyone exclaims at it.

It goes in waves, with a few dishes in each wave sticking. Sometimes a whole branch of cuisine sticks in a current trend, when there’s a population group in Australia to support it. Thus Greek cooking (Barbara Northwood, Woman’s Day) is friendly and familiar. I’ve had numerous conversations about Masterchef in recent days (since it finished very recently) and one question that cropped up over and over again was puzzlement: how could anyone not know the basic ingredients in moussaka?

Celebrity cookbooks help us trace who is notable at a given moment in time, and whose fame continues through many moments in time, but they also provide us with yet another yardstick for measuring food trends and seeing how they shape our society.

I went to a movie tonight with friends and it ended up being two movies. We ate a bunch of junk food, which no doubt I shall regret. I nearly decided, because of this, to make this post about junk food, but then I thought that sharing regret doesn’t make it go away, so I’m writing about the effect of celebrity on our eating habits instead.

A whole generation of readers have grown up with the food from Brian Jacques’ books. I even did a cookbook for my nieces from it (a while ago, now – I wonder what became of it?) so very clear were the food descriptions. Harry Potter is a bit similar – the food at Hogwarts is integral to the enjoyment of the books and the movie. We are definitely influenced by our favourite books and movies and TV programs.

We’re also influenced by individual celebrities. Tomorrow I shall introduce you to a specific celebrity cookbook, but there are so many of them that their effect is diminished. In the nineteenth century British Empire their effect was vast. Soyer and Francatelli were tremendously important, as was Mrs Beeton. Add Fanny Farmer and her associates in the US and you can trace the shape of culinary training. The French-speaking world and the German-speaking world are even more interesting in their love of particular chefs and their foods and their methods.

Most people, though, when they think of the effect of celebrity think of foodstuffs created to celebrate a person or an event. Peaches Melba, for instance. Only a few of them last past the fashionable moment, but they can serve to highlight the taste and fragrance of a moment in time. A slice of time, if it’s a cake, perhaps.

And on that pun, I think it’s time for a cuppa and maybe some sleep.

I was teaching at the ACT Writers’ Centre on the weekend. The Centre is at Gorman House, which hosts markets every Saturday. While my students were frantically researching up and down the aisles, I stopped and chatted with a stall owner. He showed me an old homemade ice chest. I was interested in the sort that were used in the 1930s, prior to modern refrigeration, because I’m writing one into my current novel. His was quite different. It wasn’t commercially made – very much a home made ice chest. In fact, it was a solid wooden box lined with tin, with a firm double lid.

I nearly bought it, because I was so fascinated. Its role in food history was not quite the same role as a modern refrigerator. It was a direct home-made ancestor of an eskie. Safe food for picnics. Fortunately I remembered in time that I haven’t even got space for my books right now. When I find a way of extending my flat by a few more bedrooms, I shall be able to afford a home made ice chest and use it to build a 1930s picnic for my friends. In the meantime (which I find very sad to admit), I gave into another sort of historical temptation. I’m now the proud possessor of an English curling iron which may or may not be from around 1925. It definitely predates World War II. It also has nothing to do with cooking, unless I overheat it and burn some hair.

Today’s guest writer is Simon Brown, an Australian writer currently based in Thailand. Lovers of epic fantasy will know him for trilogies such as the Keys of Power and the Chronicles of Kydan. Me, I enjoy his fantasy novels, but I totally adore his short stories. My current favourite of his stories is a rather special one appearing next year in an anthology I’m editing, which was my excuse for bothering him and asking him to write a guest post. I also love his novel Winter. I think I might go drool over his writing. I’ll let him speak for himself and share a favourite recipe with you, while I go dream about his writing.

My proper writing routine occurs on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. (Wednesday and Thursday I teach small classes at my wife’s school, so can eat wonderful Thai food for free from the school cafeteria.)

I start work just after 7.00 am - when Alison and the kids head off to school -and keep at it until about 11.30. I then exercise for about 30 minutes a day, which picks up my energy again and suppresses my hunger, so when I have lunch I don’t overdo it.

My favourite lunch is a couple of toasted cheese sandwiches with salami and tomato. I figure no one needs a recipe for these. Afterwards I have a coffee (my second and last cup for the day), and watch television for one hour, the midday news if I can get it or a documentary if not. Then back to work for another three or so hours. I wind down from writing by getting dinner ready, almost always a stir fry with pork or chicken or sea food (good beef here in Thailand is very expensive, and lamb nonexistent). We eat pretty soon after the family arrives back home, usually about 6.00 pm.

My favourite meal at the moment is probably stir fried pork with cashews and spring onions:

“For four people, stir fry a good couple of handfuls of spring onions, sliced into 2 cm lengths, for 2 minutes. Add one diced red chilli. Fry for another 30 seconds and set aside. Then fry about 500 gm of pork fillet, sliced thinly, in three batches, until the last batch is nicely browned. Put all the pork back in. Add the spring onions/chilli. Add a good 2 handfuls of snow peas or sugar-snap peas. Add sauce made up of 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon fish sauce, 1 teaspoon soy sauce. Stir fry further 2 minutes. Take off heat, mix in a good handful of roast cashews (unsalted), and a bunch of coriander (well chopped). Mix it all up and serve on steamed rice.”

If you don’t like pork, this works well with chicken, and I’m sure will work well with beef. A good thing to do is to buy raw cashews and roast them yourself before you start the stir fry proper; careful they don’t burn, however.

My routine writing day usually ends with a family meal and a couple of really cold gin & tonics.

To make a very Good Great Oxford-shire Cake
Take a peck of flower by weight, and dry it a little, & a pound and a halfe of Sugar, one ounce of Cinamon, half an ounce of Nutmegs, a quarter of an ounce of Mace and Cloves, a good spoonfull of Salt, beat your Salt and Spice very fine, and searce it, and mix it with your flower and Sugar; then take three pound of butter and work it in the flower, it will take three hours working; then take a quart of Ale-yeast, two quarts of Cream, half a pint of Sack, six grains of Amber-greece dissolved in it, halfe a pint of Rosewater, sixteen Eggs, eight of the Whites, mix these with the flower, and knead them well together, then let it lie warm by your fire till your Oven be hot, which must be little hotter then for manchet; when you make it ready for your Oven, put to your Cake six pound of Currans, two pound of Raisins, of the Sun stoned and minced, so make up your Cake, and set it in your oven stopped close; it wil take three houres a baking; when baked, take it out and frost it over with the white of an Egge and Rosewater, well beat together, and strew fine Sugar upon it, and then set it again into the Oven, that it may Ice.

Spanish Cream
Put hot water in a bucket and go with it to the Milking, then poure out the Water, and instantly milke into it, and presently strain it into milk-Pans of an ordinary fulnesse, but not after an ordinary way for you must set your Pan on the ground and stand on a stool, and pour it forth that it may rise in bubbles with the fall; this on the morrow will be a very tough Cream, which you must take off with your Skimmer, and lay it in the Dish, laying upon laying; and if you please strew some sugar between them.

To make Almond Jumballs
Take a pound of Almonds to halfe a pound of double refined Sugar beaten and Searced, lay your Almonds in water a day before you blanch them, and beat them small with your Sugar; and when it is beat very small, put in a handfull of Gum-dragon, it being before over night steeped in Rose-water, and halfe a white of an Egge beaten to froth, and halfe a spoonfull of Coriander-seed as many Fennell and Ani-seeds, mingle these together very well, set them upon a soft fire till it grow pretty thick, then take it off the fire, and lay it upon a clean Paper, and beat it well with a rowling pin till it work like a soft past, and so make them up, and lay them upon Papers oyld with Oyle of Almonds, then put them in your Oven, and so soon as they be throughly risen, take them out before they grow hard.

To make poore knights
Cut two penny loaves in round slices, dip them in half a pint of Cream or faire water, then lay them abroad in a dish, and beat three Eggs and grated Nutmegs and sugar, beat them with the Cream then melt some butter in a frying pan, and wet the sides of the toasts and lay them in on the wet side, then pour in the rest upon them, and so fry them, serve them in with Rosewater, sugar and butter.

Today and tomorrow I bring you extracts from The Compleat Cook. It describes itself as “Expertly prescribing the most ready wayes, whether, Italian, Spanish, or French for dressing of Flesh, and Fish, Ordering of Sauces or making of pastry.” It was by Nathaniel Brook, 1648.

To Fricate Champigneons
Make ready your champigneons as you do for stewing, and when you have poured away the black liquor that comes from them, put your champigneons into a Frying pan with a piece of sweet Butter, a little Parsley, Tyme, sweet Marjoram, a piece of Onion shred very small, a little Salt and fine beaten Pepper, so fry them till they be enough, so have ready the lear abovesaid, and put it to the champigneons whilst they are in the Pan, toss them two or three times, put them forth and serve them.

To make buttered Loaves
Take the yolks of twelve Eggs, and six whites, and a quarter of a pint of yeast, when you have beaten the Eggs well, strain them with the yeast into a Dish, then put to it a little Salt, and two rases of Ginger beaten very small, then put flower to it till it come to a high Past that will not cleave, then you must roule it upon your hands and afterwards put it into a warm Cloath and let it lye there a quarter of an hour, then make it up in little Loaves, bake; against it is baked prepare a pound and a half of Butter, a quarter of a pint of white wine, and halfe a pound of Sugar; This being melted and beaten together with it, set them into the Oven a quarter of an
hour.

To make a Banbury Cake
Take a peck of pure Wheat-flower, six pound of Currans, half a pound of Sugar, two pound of Butter, halfe an ounce of Cloves and Mace, a pint and a halfe of Ale-yeast, and a little Rose-water; then boyle as much new-milk as will serve to knead it, and when it is almost cold, put into it as much Sack as will thicken it, and so work it all together before a fire, pulling it two or three times in pieces, after make it up.

To boyle a Capon in white broth. Boile your Capon in faire licour and cover it to keepe it white, but you must boile none other meat with it, take the best of the broth, and as much vergious as of the broth if your Vergious be not too sower, and put therto whole mace, whole pepper, and a good handfull of Endive, Letuce or borage, whether of them ye wil, small Raisins, Dates, Marow of marow bones a little stick of whole Sinamon, the peele of an orenge. Then put in a good peece of Sugar, and boile them well togither. Then take two or three yolkes of egges sodden, and strain them, and thick it withall, & boile your prunes by themselves and lay upon your Capon poure your broth upon your Capon. Thus maye you boyle any thing in white broth.

An other to boyle a capon in white broth. First take Marow bones, breake them and boyle them and take out the marrowe. Then seethe your Capon in the same licoure. Then take the best of the licoure in a small Potte to make your broth withall. Then take Corance, Dates and prunes, & boyle them in a pot by themselves till they be plum, then take them up and put them into your brothe, then put whole Mace to them and a good quantitie of beaten Ginger & some Salt. Then put the Marow that you did take from the bones, and strain the yolkes of Egges with Vinager, and put them into your broth with a good peece of Sugar but after this it must not boyle: then take bread and cut therof thin sippits, and lay them in the bottom of a dish. Then take sugar and scrape it about the sides of the dish and lay theron your Capon, and the fruit upon it and so serve it in.

I might have to take a bit of time and deal with my health. I’m not seriously ill, but I am somewhat allergic and it affects how long I can comfortably sit at the computer (you really don’t want details, trust me). I’m not going to leave you with no posts at all. What I’ll do until things improve is give you extracts from interesting books. In a good world, I’ll be fine in a matter of days. In a less good world, it may take a bit longer.

First, something sixteenth century, part today and part tomorrow. I love sixteenth century English cooking – it’s very transitional. This is from A Book of Cookrye, by A. W., London, 1591. It’s all about birds.

To stue a Capon. Take the best of the Broth of the pot, and put it in a pipkin, and put to it Corance and great raisins, Dates quartered and onions fine minced, strayned bread & time, and let them boile well togither: when they be well boyled, put in your prunes, season it with cloves, mace, pepper and very little Salte, a spoonfull or two of Vergious, and let it not be too thick. And your Capon being boyled in a pot by it selfe in fair water & salt to keepe it faire, and thus you may boyle a Chicken, vele, beef or mutton after this sort.

To stue a Capon in Lemmons. Slice your Lemmons and put them in a platter, and put to them white Wine and Rosewater, and so boile them and Sugar til they be tender. Then take the best of the broth wherin your Capon is boyled, and put thereto whole Mace, whole pepper & red Corance, barberies, a little time, & good store of Marow. Let them boile well togither til the broth be almost boiled away that you have no more then will wette your Sops. Then poure your Lemmons upon your Capon, & season your broth with Vergious and Sugar, and put it upon your Capon also.

More from Laura. She’s going to be happy to hear that the Conflux banquet is actually a Louisianan barbecue (1883 style).

She blogs, by the way. “This very evening” (mentioned below) was two days ago. That was my fault. My punishment isn’t punishment at all - I must read more of Laura’s writing!

I was not a barbecue insider until years after I left my homeland to come live in Australia. I was working on my first novel, and suddenly the characters all became deeply concerned with barbecue. I realized it was because I had become deeply concerned with barbecue. I couldn’t have it. Nobody in Australia could have it.* I would have to learn barbecue on my own, a lonely acolyte with no master but the Internet. But I needed — I mean, my characters needed — barbecue. And it had to be authentic. So I researched diligently, and I set up my first alchemical experiment. And, just to make it easy on myself, I invited 40 people in advance to come by when it was done and eat it.

Luckily for me (and for my guests), it was a triumph. It was an entirely legitimate and acceptable example of the genre.

While that book still languishes, undiscovered, I have continued to find barbecue to be a rich feast indeed for my inner writer. In fact, this very evening, The Lifted Brow will be launching its Issue #5, in which appears my story “Piggy In a Pit.” In this story, barbecue and its inscrutable alchemy figure prominently. (You can order the issue, or even subscribe, from their web site.)

I will offer, for your enjoyment, one manifestation of my favorite style of barbecue sauce. Kansas City-style is thick and sweet and complex, and it goes particularly well with a hunk of roast pork (shoulder is acceptable, but frankly, although purists would disagree, barbecue wants to be good and will forgive inconsistencies and improvisations). Your slow-cooker or a covered dish in a VERY slow oven (no more than about 220 F/104 C) is adequate for cooking the meat — it will take a long, long, long, long time. Use a meat thermometer and when the meat gets to about 190 in the center, you’re good. Shred it, pour the sauce into the slow cooker/dish, and let it cook at that same low temperature, or even lower, for as long as you can. (This is a dish to start very early the morning before, if possible; you can refrigerate the cooked meat overnight before shredding and saucing a few hours before your guests arrive.) Anyway, here’s the sauce.

Kansas City Barbecue Sauce

400 grams or so tomato paste
1/2 cup water (more if the sauce ends up too thick)
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup dark corn syrup (or, for the Australians, whatever other sweet, gooey stuff you have in the cupboard)
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon dried, ground chilli/cayenne (if you’re not actually smoking the meat, try smoked chilli powder for a better flavor)
3 or 4 cloves crushed garlic
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1/2 medium-sized minced onion
1 tablespoon sage
1 tablespoon salt
1 bay leaf

Combine all ingredients in a large, nonreactive saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring to blend well. Reduce heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure sauce does not scorch.

Note: I cut the chilli in this sauce way, way, way down, so feel free to ramp it up with dried chilli flakes, fresh chillis, whatever sears your mouth in the way you like it seared.

*I have since discovered that there is a genuine barbecue restaurant in Brisbane. It’s called Blue Smoke and it’s run by a guy who is also from the DC area. Huh, whaddaya know.

This week we have an extra guest author, because Laura Goodin is a reader of this blog and she has a barbecue story that appeared yesterday. Such things deserve celebrating. Laura is both American and Australian: I never know how much sympathy she needs for being both.

Both Laura and Lucy have stories in my next anthology, just in case you were wondering how I know them. Except I knew them before they anthology. In fact, Laura has a story in Masques, the other anthology I’ve edited. Two anthologies, two stories. Just to keep everything in multiples of two, I’m going to run her story here over two nights.

The next anthology is going to be wonderful. Not enough food, of course (though Laura’s story has pies), and it will be ten months before any of you get to read it. In the meantime, though, you can meet Laura and get to know about her passion for barbecue.

It sat on the plate: a sesame roll containing a mound of steaming, glistening shreds of meat, garishly colored by the reddish sauce. The smell spread out in ferocious, vinegary-sweet, smoky waves. Suddenly, I yearned.

I picked the sandwich up awkwardly and bit as meat and sauce spilled over my hands and onto the plate. I closed my eyes and chewed and swallowed. Oh. Oh, this was what they’d meant all along. This was barbecue. Tender, welcoming meat that met the teeth easily and gave up subtle riches of smoke and care and the taste of time itself. The sauce, bright and combative, making the meat an adult’s meal, something to analyze, something to quest after and understand. Like good wine or fine, fine chocolate.

Barbecue is the essence of America. It is highly regional: I had grown up never tasting it until I moved a mere few hours south to Washington, DC — and, in fact, it varies widely from region to region even where it is common. It is highly competitive: google “barbecue competition” to gain an insight into the bizarre and emotional world of trying to win at food. It is deeply esoteric and detailed: a minute to learn, a lifetime to master, impossible to fully comprehend in all its forms. We Americans love all these things.

Australians may still be puzzled. “Barbecue” in this sense does not mean chucking some protein onto a hot metal plate for a few minutes. It means a day, two days, a week of preparation, culminating in sixteen hours of slow, careful, anxious alchemy. It means smoke and embers and spices that change the meat’s very essence. The question of sauce is all-consuming. And I won’t even get into the semiotics of the side dishes, except to say that whether there is coleslaw or not, whether there is cornbread or baked beans or beans and rice, are matters of great pith and moment.

To be continued…

Today’s guest author is the wonderful Lucy Sussex. I love her short stories. Some of them are elegant, some of them are dangerous, but all of them are lovely.

It is not often that we have an author leave us a recipe as well as fiction, particularly from the nineteenth century. It is even more unusual when the author was pseudonymous for nearly all of a very long career, her identity only being established long after her death. Moreover no photograph exists of detective writer Mary Helen a Fortune (c1833–1909), and even her death date is unknown.

Fortune was born in Ireland, but had a Scots background—her father George Wilson was an engineer who emigrated to Canada, and then to Australia during the goldrush era. Mary had married Joseph Fortune, a surveyor; whom she left, taking their infant son to Australia in 1855. It is most likely that she ran away from her husband, a factor in her subsequent secrecy. Eleven months after she arrived in Melbourne, she gave birth to a second, illegitimate son, George Fortune; she later bigamously married a policeman, Percy Rollo Brett. That marriage seems to have quickly foundered, but it gave Mary Fortune knowledge of the police, something very useful when she began writing police procedurals for the Australian Journal.
She was a pioneer woman crime writer, and also wrote the longest early detective serial known, ‘The Detective’s Album’, from 1867–1909. But her private life was marred by homelessness, drunkeness and George Fortune’s life as a petty criminal, for which he spent 20 years in jail.

Women living in pioneer conditions in C19th Australia knew a lot about rough-and-ready cooking. Arriving on the goldfields of Kangaroo Flat, Fortune reported in “Twenty-Six Years Ago”, her memoirs, on a truly dire breakfast, brought in from a nearby restaurant and served in her father’s tent:
…chops that were burnt into cinders and swimming in fat, several thick slices of dirty-looking bread, and about a pound of awful butter rolled up in a bit of green paper that I afterwards discovered to be part of an ancient play bill.

It was accompanied by a billy of tea, milkless, for there were then no milk or eggs procurable on that diggings. Fortune records Wilson buying her a frying pan and a camp oven, both “two feet in diameter”, with the pan’s handle “a yard and a half in length”. Both were intended for cooking on log fires, camping out at the diggings. Instead, she made a tart “baked over a fire in the bullock-hide chimney on a short-handled frying pan, and the fruit it contained was bottled preserved gooseberries, the only fruit then obtainable on the Flat”.

Elsewhere Fortune shows a more American side to her cooking, mentioning pumpkin pies, something unusual in the very English-influenced food of the Austral colonies. But she shows her Canadian upbringing most strongly in her recipe for Buckwheat Cakes:
To one pound of buckwheat flour, add a little salt, and half a teaspoon of carbonate of soda; mix thoroughly together,and make it into as thick a batter as can be stirred with some milk or buttermilk. Butter a shallow tin (it will not rise so well in a deep one), and bake in a quick oven. This preparation, only made thinner, and poured in spoonfuls on a hot plate—the top of a stove, for instance—forms the well-known ‘Flap Jacks’ of American cooking, For [Far?] more delicate ladies prepare it with eggs and cream or milk, and bake in the same way. Buckwheat is not any good baked in any way from a thin dough.

Mary Fortune’s Three Murder Mysteries is published by Mulini Press, and will be launched by Kerry Greenwood at the Crime and Justice Festival, Abbotsford, Melbourne, on July 19th.

Lucy Sussex is an award-winning writer, working in fields ranging from the history of crime fiction to science fiction and fantasy. She has an abiding interest in the stories of nineteenth-century women. Currently she is writing “Mothers of Crime”, the story of the first women to write in the crime genre.