Food History

This is just to let you know that the conversation on my regular blog has somehow turned from the history of borax (not edible) to the history of sugar (distinctly edible). The discussion - limited as it is - can be found here: http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/188018.html

The Melbourne version of bread and butter pudding is about the same age as yesterday’s. The differences in ingredients are all due to religious differences - the bread used pushed the pudding in a particular direction and the ingredients of the bread and butter pudding were modified to match this. It’s a really cool example of a simple difference creating a dish that tastes quite distinct.

Both family recipes are attested to the nineteenth century though they were preserved orally, which means that as tastes and availability of ingredients change, the recipe may have been modified. Today’s version is from my rather Jewish family (is it possible to be ‘rather Jewish?). The big difference between the Palmer pud and the Polack pud is that until recently the Polacks made our pudding on Sunday using leftover challah. This means that the whole dish is richer and messier. Challah is a plaited egg-bread eaten on Sabbath - dairy free but quite rich.

Slice leftover challah and place in a dish, sprinkling raisins generously through the layered bread. Add the same sort of custard as normal bread and butter pudding - the only differences are that the sugar can be reduced a little and you add two pinches of cinnamon. Sprinkle nutmeg and cinnamon on top of the pudding then bake. Serve with rich cream and a big pot of tea mid-afternoon on a really lazy Sunday.

This recipe comes from near Wagga Wagga (New South Wales) sometime round the late nineteenth century. It’s one of those lovely family ones that lies in the back of one’s mind, prompting memories of childhood. I’ve never tasted this version and the grand-daughter of the person who made it says “It’s fairly disgusting and I’ve improved upon the recipe”. I’m going to give you the original recipe and the improved version.

Original recipe:

Layer full slices of stale white bread in an oblong baking tray. You can butter the bread if you want. In a bowl mix 600 mls of fresh milk and 1/4 cup sugar, 3 eggs and a bit of vanilla essence. You can grate some lemon rind into the custard mix - but not much because too much will curdle the milk. Beat the custard mix and pour it over the layered bread. Sprinkle a bit of nutmeg or cinnamon on the top. Bake in a moderate oven for c 30 minutes (until the custard is set). (note from recipe-gifter: use the richest milk possible because this recipe is pre-homogenisation, which means there could be up to 30% milkfat)

Improved version: Butter the bread then quarter the bread and cut off crusts and make a charming pattern with the bread in the tray. Butter bread and sprinkle sultanas through the layers. If you like eggy custard, add more egg and if you like it rich, make it with cream or pour cream over it to eat.

This recipe is from the Palmer family. Tomorrow I’ll give you my family’s version which is the same age but from a different part of Australia and a very different ethnic background.

I just wrote a long and thoughtful post on the foodways described in ‘The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook’. I talked about how it reflected the nature and expectations of children’s cookbooks rather than the heritage foodways expressed in the Anne books. I said this with great style and in great detail, but my post was eaten in transit so the only people who got to read it are those who reside in the ether.

I have a bus to meet so you will miss my comments on how the book reflects the food assumptions of Ontario rather than the Maritime States and what it does (which it does well, if you are cooking in Canada) to get children interested in cooking. Twenty-five recipes is as much as a child can cook in a summer and be able to boast of it. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it :).

Anyhow, what I thought was going to be a post all about the Anne books as evidence of foodways turned out to be a post about how children’s cookbooks are an important part of culinary history. And now you have the gist of my lost post, I had better head towards the bus interchange. In a hurry.

I should have introduced myself first post. Some of you already know me. For this you have my deep sympathy.

I am Gillian Polack. When I’m not blogging about food history, I’m blogging about my life and writing and teaching ( http://gillpolack.livejournal.com ) or I’m writing and teaching and stuff ( http://www.gillianpolack.com ). Sometimes the writing and teaching are about history (bits of me are an historian - my little finger and my eyelashes and my teeth, perhaps) and sometimes it’s fiction (other bits of my belong to the fiction writer - all the most obscure bits, I suspect). I’m Australian and live in Canberra.

I never know what people need from an introduction, so I’ll leave it there. If there’s anything you want to know about me, ask. If it doesn’t involve standing on my head for an hour and admiring the world upside-down, I will probably answer. Answering questions is *so* much easier than working out how I should introduce myself.

Whenever I take a book from one of the cookbook shelves, three of the wrong cookbooks fall on top of it and none of the four is the one I’m after. So no Anne tonight. My books aren’t that disorderly, but I fear my brain is.

There are two good solutions to a disorderly brain: chocolate and good drink. Tonight’s solution is of the alcoholic variety. It’s a 14th-15th century rhyme. I will be having a small glass of liqueur tokay while I sing it, because I don’t have any good ale on hand. I have white bread, but no brown. I have beef but it’s frozen so not much use to me. I never have bacon and seldom have mutton and never, ever eat tripe (there’s some religious reason behind not eating tripe). And this post is rapidly becoming obscure. You need the song, not my personal dietary preferences.

The song’s chorus goes:
Bryng us in good ale, and bryng us in good ale;
fore owr blyssyd lady sak, bryng us in good ale.

The verses tell us all the things we should not bring to eat and sometimes gives reasons why. Brown bread is ‘mad of brane’ (which is much less interesting translated than it is misread into modern English) and white bread is possibly a tad boring. Beef has bones whereas ale goes down at once. bacon is fat and mutton is lean and tripe is ’syldom clene’. Eggs have shells, which are a nuisance, as are the many hairs in butter. Pig’s flesh turns people into ‘borys’ and puddings have ‘gotes blod’ and venison isn’t that good either. Capon and duck are likewise intolerable.

There rests only ale. Or a rather nice Rutherglen liqueur tokay. Then I’ll go put away all those books and tomorrow I will remember that I was looking on the wrong shelf entirely and you will get that post on Anne.

Note: the song comes from one of my currently-favourite anthologies “Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries” ed RH Robbins. There is more food in there, just waiting for a suitable occcasion. Maybe next time it won’t be my sad lack of hand-eye co-ordination that will cause the occasion.

William ought to be an ingredient.  Grubby and argumentative and perfect in his own mind, he would make a rather interesting condiment, I should think.  Certainly a good start for me to contemplate historical foodways in literature. 

‘Sweet William’ was the first book I grabbed and Crompton was the first author I saw on my shelves of the ones I listed yesterday.  Great science involved in these high level decisions!  ‘Sweet William’ was once owned by my nieces, which wouldn’t be relevant if I wasn’t talking food history.  Crompton has informed two full generations of my family.  Maybe three.  And my family is quite sufficiently Anglo-Australian to relate closely to most of the food in the books: I grew up cooking food like this.

How many generations before a style of description becomes a long-term part of family food culture?  I wish I knew.  Maybe it depends on a vast and secretive array of other factors.  I’ll work it out one day. 

What foodways are described in ‘Sweet William’?  I am going to be dead lazy and just look at the first few pages.  This is a blog, after all, and not an academic exegesis. 

OK, that was a double mistake. 

Firstly, food appears in the William books in quite definite situations and those pages were not food pages.  Food has locations in time and place in the William books. 

The second reason it was a mistake is because I have leeks and butter very very gently sweating on the stove and my mind is trying to work out what I am going to do with them when the leeks are soft.  If it were autumn I would make leek and chestnut soup, but it isn’t and I can’t.  But I have some rather nice parmesan in the refrigerator.  So you see how I am distracted.

Back to William. It really *is* important that food isn’t scattered everywhere, in every story. Food has a time and a place and a focus.  This was true of my family on weekends just as much as it’s true of the ‘William’ sample.  When that time and place and focus is reached, it becomes a race to make sure you don’t miss out (I come from a big family) while retaining the appearance of civility. 

Obviously one of the joys of the Wiliam books when I was a child is that he didn’t bother with the appearance of civility. When and where food appears has an element of wish fulfilment.  Adult foodways appear as obstacles for William to deal with. 

The big food scene in ‘Sweet William’ has a lot happening; William appears and is fed.  “William, looking at the iced cake, realised that he was hungry, and that it was tea-time.  Everything, of course, in its due time and place.  There is a time to eat, and a time to bring criminals to justice.” p. 22

So William eats.  As the main story is narrated over his head and as readers puts the plot together, William devours chocolate cake. 

His brother is there and carries the family voice, noticing the way William eats and condemning it as looking like “as if he hadn’t been fed for weeks”.  William doesn’t emerge until the chocolate cake is finished, and then he sorts everything out with his usual … panache. 

His eating is way important.  He eats in a fashion that would make chocolate addicts jealous, letting the babble of reality float past while he focusses on the main game.

But how does this fit with foodways?  Apart from showing the importance of chocolate cake in the universal scheme of existence, that is. 

The luxury and joy of focussing on food is celebrated.  The qualities of childhood (and of a particular type of childhood, where the child can just ignore the exigencies of reality) are explained and so given a place in the complexities of our foodways.   

Neitehr the book nor this little essay has deep explanations.  Illumination is not the name of the game. The importance is that the William books last.  They have been read for over fifty years.  We may not emulate William, but his way of seeing food plays a small part in our way of seeing food.

I’m very tempted to find an Anne book tomorrow, because the contrast is immense.  And I might have the Anne of Green Gables Cookbook.  I wonder if it has any leek recipes?

You can tell a foodie by the way we read cookbooks.  We read them as if they were full of narrative and characters.  Just like fiction.  We exclaim and criticise and apostrophe and footnote.

“Why nutmeg?”

“Mm. I bet that would taste nicer if it had cream instead of butter.”

“Won’t that curdle?”

Lots of interactive thoughts that keep our relationship with food alive and growing, even if we’re on a diet.  We get that behaviour from somewhere very important, I suspect.  My thought-of-the-second links it (at least partially) to the regular reading we did as children. 

My example-of-the-second is Brian Jacques.  His Redwall series of books contains so much food nostalgia that kids I once knew (who are now teenagers I know) had me create a recipe book for them and we once spent a day cooking a Redwall feast. 

Children’s books (especially English children’s books for Australians above a certain age) contain a great deal of the yearning that we have for foods past but they also have descriptions and rules for eating.  They create templates for our memories and for our interpretations. 

One day I need to haul out a bunch of those books:  Jacques and Blyton and Crompton and maybe a Billy Bunter and definitely some Dorothy Sayers and think aloud in more detail about how we challenge our memory of eating through our memory of reading about food and how this gives us permission to argue with recipes and turn a volume of recipes into lively reading. 

How we develop food rituals as children that help develop our relationship with food and with food-based social occasions is a different subject, I guess.  So much to explore.  Maybe I’ll just work through my library a bit at a time and see what fiction has to tell me about food history. 

Today I discovered that The Essential Ingredient (an Australian shop specialising in things culinary) stocks 99.45% chocolate.  No sugar.  It has lecithin and a little vanilline, which means it’s not perfect for following early recipes, but it’s closer to perfect than anything else I have seen in Australia.  It’s a surprisingly non-bitter chocolate and at c 54% fat should work rather well with spices and in savoury dishes.

The packet says that it’s Belgian couverture, but doesn’t give any details about the source of the beans, which is a pity.  I’ll let you know how recipes go when I use it.

The other chocolates I have right now for various endeavours are Koko Black and Callebaut, but they contain sugar.  Basically, the only thing they are useful for is confectionery, drinks and some sauces.  I made some arak-scented chocolates with the Koko Black the other day and they worked nicely. 

I’ve seen such differing opinions as to when sugar and chocolate became inseparable and as to when chocolate was eaten as confectionery.  Maybe now I’ll have the motivation to sort it out.  Or maybe I’ll just play round with old recipes.

What I love about new things is all the firsts.  This is my first Sunday link so I’m making it a goodie.  The Old Foodie is another culinary history blog.  It’s as orderly as mine is disorderly and we cover quite different things.  Since I rather suspect I will be referring to Janet when she says something particularly interesting, her URL really ought to be given priority.  http://theoldfoodie.blogspot.com/

Her current entry is about the coronation of Henry IV.  I have a copy of the edition of the main documents from Richard III’s coronation, but haven’t seen Henry’s.  I need to.  And then I need to do a series of blogs on food at Medieval English coronations.  One day.  I promise.

My late aunt was famous for her home-made liqueurs.  I still make fruit brandies and liqueurs using her technique, which she had from her mother and which is identical to the one in some seventeenth and eighteenth century recipes.

One I haven’t made is her version of Tia Maria.  It isn’t hard, and it looks scrumptious (except that I would replace the instant coffee with some of the real stuff - Mocha Harar bean to give it chocolate undertones - to get a richer and deeper flavour), so it’s my Saturday recipe. 

It’s not as old a recipe as those for fruit liqueurs.  In this case what gives the youth away is the instant coffee.  The measurements are a dead giveaway that it is at least forty years old, since the recipe is definitely Australian and the metric system has been in use here that long.  Cup sizes are old-fashioned Australian, which means the cups of sugar are 6 oz each.  

I love it that even the smallest handwritten note has so much history lodged in it.  This note is ripped from a cheap notepad and has a six digit Sydney phone number for a Mr Smith on the back.  If I could be bothered checking when Sydney numbers were six digit, I could be more precise about when Auntie Joan made this note.  (I know it was before 1966, because there is a small financial calculation in a corner and it is definitely not metric.)  Mr Smith’s phone number was 24 1226.  An old phonebook would give us the suburb and show us something about Auntie Joan’s Sydney acquantaince.

Reading an old recipe is as much fun as reading a good detective novel.  In this instance I can add oral memory to the process of detecting the history in the recipe: we were all hunting this particular note a few years before my aunt died.  She couldn’t find it anywhere and had promised her favourite liqueur recipe to someone and so a great hunt was had. 

When my cousin let me borrow various volumes of family recipes (he’s the oldest of our generation, so he inherits them, but I’m the family custodian of cooking and food history, so I get as much time as I need to document them and make sure everyone gets copies of the recipes - it’s very fair) I found the missing recipe slipped in between two blank pages of Claire Polack’s  notebook.  I’ll blog about Claire Polack’s notebook another time - call today a celebration of finding this little gem three years after we thought it was gone forever.

Tia Maria Liqueur

 2 oz instant coffee

1/2 vanilla bean

4 cups sugar

2 cups boiling water

1 pint brandy

Pour boiling water over sugar - dissolve.  Add other ingredients then add vanilla bean.  Tightly cork.  Let stand 30 days.

I meant to write a recipe today here, truly.  I got distracted.  I often get distracted.

Today what distracted me was my lemon myrtle.  I use it instead of lemon grass in a bunch of recipes because I like the scent so much better.

It’s rare to find a culinary history that has lemon myrtle, or any of the Australian natives except perhaps eucalyptus.  Yet lemon myrtle is a wonderful, wonderful herb.

I think this shows how we frame our concept of food history. We conceive of our culinary past through mainly European eyes, and lemon myrtle only entered the Western foodie imagination very recently.

The other thing is that we mainly think of culinary history in terms of other forms of history ie shaped by written documents.  Humans who don’t read and write still eat and still have history.  Their history is harder to grab hold of and often seems less glamorous.  It’s dead easy to sound impressive on subjects such as European exploration to establish routes to the Spice Islands, for instance, and much harder to talk about the use of lemon myrtle before Europeans sorted out that they wanted to live on Terra Australis.

Just because we don’t know the history of something doesn’t mean that the something doesn’t have a history. This is my deep and meaningful thought for the day. 

It would take an interesting bringing-together of traditional knowledge, anthropology, archaeology, folk history and regular history to write the story of how lemon myrtle has been used in cooking over the last few hundred years.  I hope someone one day manages this feat. 

Alas, that my history is of the wrong variety.  In the meantime, I can dream of a history of lemon myrtle and I can enjoy cooking with it.

Since today was exceptionally hot, let me give you a cooling drink as the Friday recipe. 

Lemon myrtle tea:  2 fresh leaves in a teapot with water.  I like it strong, but my late aunt liked it brewed for just two minutes.  If you make punch for summer festivities and want the taste of lemon without the acidity, a pot of strong lemon myrtle tea (cooled) will do the trick.

The first post of a new blog is a terrifying thing.  Help me get over the terror by reading *very* quickly so I can move to post two.

Food history is one of my passions.  I’m the sort of person who looks at a spice and remembers the Renaissance trade routes or who copies down recipes so that I can trace how they pass through different places and times and what changes they undergo.

This blog will have all that and maybe a bit more. When I come across a cool anecdote, I’ll share it. I’ll give you recipes every Friday (some tested, some not) and on Saturday another recipe, from my secret family archive. OK, so it won’t be a secret family archive after a little while. This will cease to matter.  After a mere few weeks, you will want to know more about Anglo-Australian Jewish recipes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Either you will want to know more or my mind-control technique will have to be junked. 

My reason for posting family recipes isn’t to annoy my family (alas).  I’m hoping that readers will start hunting through *their* family archives and send me their recipes to blog - and Saturday will become the day when we share our family heritages.  Until readers send recipes, though, you’re stuck with Jewish Christmas pudding, inedible scones and other obscure delights from the Polack family.

Sunday I thought would a good day for exploring the web.  Every Sunday I will find a URL or two with fun stuff about food history.  Or maybe introduce a favourite book.  There are places worth visiting and people worth meeting.

The rest of the week you’re stuck with me.  Unadulterated.  Probably evil. 

The good news is that I am an historian.  Really and truly.  PhD and all.  I teach food history in Australia from time to time.  I’m a Medievalist and the culinary side is more of a serious hobby, but I will occasionally bring my odd knowledge of very dead languages and surprisingly undead cultural practises to bear on food history stuffs I come across.

The other thing you need to know is that I’ve just been seconded into planning a Regency Gothic Banquet for a science fiction convention.  I foresee lots of blogging on the subjects of Regency food, Gothic food and how on earth we talk a modern hotel into creating a Jane Austen meets Anne Radcliffe menu.  This time next year I promise to blog the whole menu, and will save all the pithiest food comments for your delectation.

This year I did a Medieval feast.  Just in case you were wondering.