Food History

May 2007 be full of good food and delicious history. My New year present to you is that if there are any aspects of food history you would like to explore, or any recipes you have yearned after then I will do my best to oblige. You might have to let me know, though, since I am not good at the telepathy thing.

There is a little bit of news for the New Year. All the 451 Press blogs are turning a little pictoral. Watch this space and you will see pictures. If they don’t quite fit the post it will be either my sense of humour that is at fault or the fact that there were no cameras at Richard III’s coronation feast.

I am seeing 2007 in with Callebaut chocolate and fortified wine from Rutherglen. Have a happy and foodie New Year!

A couple of people have asked me offline, so I am documenting it here for everyone. When you test recipes, yes, you do have to stick to them as closely as possible. If you have a problem (eg a step seems to be missing) check with me. Sometimes it’s a step missing or an ingredient implied (in which case I’ll suggest a solution that fits with other recipes of the sort from the period), but more often the dish is cooked differently to the modern dish by the same name.

If you modify the recipe then there is a large chance I will have to ask you to try it again or I will have to find someone else to do it, simply because the dish you cooked wasn’t the one in the recipe. This is the single biggest reason for lack of reportbacks on dishes cooked so far: we end up with modern variants that can’t actually be put on the banquet menu. Some of the variants are foul and some are delightful, but none of them are close enough to the original to be used.

For those testers who haven’t yet reported on their cooking sprees, I’d love to hear how you are going.

For anyone (anywhere in the world) who is interested in joining us, I have lots of amazing recipes still unassigned. I’m almost through making lists of potential recipes though, and numbers of recipes will cease growing from today.

It’s midsummer and I’m online during a pause in the storms. I love these storms: we need the rain so desperately. I hate the storms: imagine trying to fit hours of online activity into odd minutes. Because of the time limitation at this end, I thought you might like a link today. Is it the right day to give you links? No, that’s Sunday. Just pretend today is Sunday and on Sunday I will give you today’s recipe and we will all be equally confused.

Cindy Renfrow has a great deal of interesting stuff on the various pages of her website, but the one containing culinary history links is my personal favourite. Hours and hours of exploration. Enough to keep all sorts of people out of mischief until the weather clears at this end.

It’s far too long since I gave you anything about a specific ingredient. And wasn’t the last time silphium, which was enormously depressing because we can’t actually taste the stuff? Today’s spice is mustard which is at the opposite end of the extinction scale to silphium.

The history of mustard is incredibly rich and varied and amazing and wonderful. The leaf is edible and the seeds are delightful. It bugs me that it is often under-rated in terms of its importance in European food history. It grows just about anywhere, so it wasn’t nearly as much subject to taxes and other importation problems as, say pepper, so it isn’t recorded as much. But when you look at recipes, mustard has probably been in continual use in Europe for at least two thousand years and a lot longer in India and elsewhere.

Mustard as the European condiment (think Dijon, Maille, Meaux, German, English - Keen’s and Colman’s - Bordeaux, American styles) is much more recent. Maille developed its characteristic style in the eighteenth century, which is about when Keen’s mustard began its occupation of English kitchens and Colman’s established their modern formula in 1814. Dijon mustard is a bit more recent, despite the fact that mustard has been eaten in Dijon almost forever. What makes the difference is what type of mustard seed (e.g. white, black, brown), how it’s processed, what it’s mixed with. There’s a good summary of this here. While you’re reading just note how important mustard is. We still eat more of it than almost any other spice. Common as mud, and just as important.

This site has a run-down on how the different types of prepared mustard vary, some of the alternative names for it, and it has a pretty picture of the plant. Look at the picture and you will see something very strange. Even if you’ve never seen a mustard plant in your life, it looks familiar. This is because it is familiar. Mustard is a relative of an awful lot of the plants we eat. Cabbages, for instance. Broccoli. Cauliflower. Even radishes. Mustard is common, but the brassica genus is one of the staffs of life. The varieties we have eaten change over time with breeding and fashion, but leafy brassica greens are a staple of European, North African and American food history. I haven’t ever looked into natives from Australia, to see if any are brassica, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were.

My favourite source of mustard oil (awesome in tomato kasaundi) is from Cootamundra Railway Station - I used to hop off the train on the way back form seeing my family in Melbourne, buy myself mustard oil from the station shop, then get straight on the bus to Canberra. Not an important part of the history of mustard, but mustard is one of the oilseed crops Australia produces in abundances and exports, so it’s worth noting you can buy it very fresh and delightfully tangy at Cootamundra Railway Station.

We tend to neglect the history of mustard as it lacks a sense of the exotic and romantic. I suspect that pepper stole mustard’s glory. This means that when someone gets particularly enthusiastic about it, I want to cheer them on. Instead, though, I’ll give you a mustard recipe. All the amounts are to taste.

Dhal

mustard seeds
cumin seeds
salt
red lentils
onions (1 onion to 1 cup lentil is a good proportion to start with)
canola oil
water

Cut your onions finely. Fry them on high heat until translucent. Add the mustard and cumin and keep frying until the seeds start to pop. Add the lentils and the water and turn the heat down. Add salt to taste when the lentils start to soften. Cook until the lentils are soft and mushy and most of the water is absorbed (add more water during cooking if necessary).

If you cast your mind back, a friend (Kaaron Warren - one very scary horror writer) and I made up my aunt’s Tia Maria recipe a month ago. We made two batches: one with normal amounts of sugar and one with 2/3 sweetener (stevia and splenda) instead of sugar. Today was Kaaron’s farewell party and we broached the bottles.

Lower calorie version

One person didn’t like the faint aftertaste of artificial sweetener. One person drank it out from choice and loved it. Another couple of people sampled it and said it was OK. My personal opinion is that it is OK, but nothing special. I will try it in coffee and see if that diminishes the taste of stevia. I will try other sweeteners next time and see if I can come up with a version that has no aftertaste at all, because that would make such a good drink for people who like Tia Maria but are watching calories. We made two bottles and have just under one bottle left, so it is definitely worth making again.

“Normal” Tia Maria

Everyone’s favourite drink. Most people drank it with milk (though two people drank it neat) and if it had not been for the filling nature of the full cream milk, the whole lot would have been entirely demolished. The comments were that it has a stronger coffee flavour than commerical Tia Maria but is also more delicious. Now we know why my aunt swore by her secret Tia Maria recipe.

The recipe is here. I made two changes to it. I used real coffee (kopi jawa ie Indonesian style) instead of instant and I used raw sugar instead of white. It took about ten minutes to make from start to finish. We aged it for just under a month, because Kaaron’s departure date had to be respected, and it tasted a trifle fresh but not majorly so. A few more weeks ageing would have improved it but - as the testers proved - it was perfectly delicious today.

I hope your festive season hasn’t been quite so spam-filled as mine. Every time I turn on the computer, a hundred new emails that clog my mailbox with cringeworthy material.

I’ve never eaten the real stuff (spiced ham) because it might upset my mother. OK, OK, it might upset me, too. Being Jewish and all that. It has a bit of a history though, with the spam song having about the same deep textual validity as a dwarf mining song from a Pratchett novel. Just replace ‘gold’ with ’spam’ and they’re almost identical, which says something gobsmackingly important but I’m not sure what. (If we were in an election period I could make bad jokes about pork-barrelling, but alas, political jokes don’t fit the holiday season at all.)

To celebrate this amazing abundance of spam, I’ve collected a few links for you. The first has to be The Amazing Spam Homepage. And you most certainly need a Hawaiian recipe for Spam. And your life would not be complete without a Spam timeline from the original manufacturers.

Now you have an overabundance of information about spam of all sorts, which was precisely what you wanted when you woke up this morning. Wasn’t it?

By one of life’s very happy coincidences, the family that owns the pork pie recipe were invited to Christmas dinner yesterday by the same friends who invited me. And they have kindly given me permission to let you make up your own mind about the pie, by telling you its story.

When I was at folk dance class one Thursday night several years ago, I asked Christine how she was going in retrieving this never-written-down recipe from her mother, Mary. Christine’s son Andrew was there as he wanted to borrow the car while his parents were teaching. He overheard us talking about the pies and gave them an overwhelming endorsement.

I felt a bit concerned when Christine said that there might be some trouble getting the recipe - and that no-one had been able to work out how Christine’s mother made it, including Christine’s mother. We were discussing techniques for getting beyond the stalling point. Oral recall by making the thing with a very observant note-taker in tow, or oral recall by sitting down in a comfortable chair and recounting the makings?

In the end, Christine’s mother dictated to her daughter. This was as much for Christine and her family as for me, as the way of making these pies has now been forgotten by everyone except Christine’s mother.

Andrew, like many young men, had let his thoughts wander their own paths while his mother and I were discussing the niceties of oral recall.

“They’re the pies that killed Uncle Bob,� he inserted, at a suitable moment.

Christine turned to him and said of course not, that no-one knew for certain how Uncle Bob died and the fact that he had eaten the pork pie just beforehand was probably absolutely irrelevant. Mary was appealed to for arbitration.

Uncle Bob apparently loved his food. He was thin, however, and no matter how much he ate, never seemed to put on any weight. Some less than reverent members of his family called him ‘Old Face Ache’ because he was just a bit too good-looking. Even at 76 years old, he had thick, black curly hair, and a particular eye for the girls. Apparently women were drawn to him like a magnet - a sure recipe for disapproval by the in-laws.

In the last fews hours of his life, he enjoyed a Christmas snack of turkey with all the trimmings (stuffing, vegies, gravy), finished off with a fair-sized lump of the famous pork pie, followed, of course, by pudding and custard. Then he simply collapsed and died.

His agitated wife tried mouth to mouth resuscitation. The sticky pudding and custard hindered her efforts a fraction, and it failed. Then she called an ambulance and waited by the front gate to direct them.

Because her sister and brother and their families were due to visit from the UK just a few days later, Uncle Bob was not buried immediately. In fact, he was laid out in his full glory in the front room. The air conditioner was turned onto its iciest and a man from the funeral parlour came round regularly and took his temperature.

Mary put it like this:

“The relatives arrived, excited at the thought of enjoying some Ozzie plonk and sunshine and maybe some leftover pork pie! The curtains were drawn back from over the archway into the front room, and there he was …

My God!� shouted the dear ones, “We thought he’d ‘ave bin buried days ago, won’t ‘e go orf?�

Andrew persisted with his version of the tale, that first night I heard it.

“Do you know,� he said to me, “I remember being asked if my sister and I wanted to see Uncle Bob. Of course we said “Yes�. We got a big shock when we walked into the living room and there he was in his coffin. We thought we were going to talk to him.�

This is not one of those recipes that must rest ever unchanged. For instance, Mary uses 8 oz of lean bacon instead of a quarter of the pork, because she likes the meat to be pinky inside the pies.

The family and Folk Dance Canbera have eaten these Engish Pork Pies with great alacrity on many occasions and the only possible fatality was Uncle Bob, over twenty years ago.

Untested. Unsuitable for *anyone* Jewish. This pie really killed a friend’s Uncle Bob. Possibly the meanest recipe I could post to end the Chanukah series.

The friend who gave it to me is from Lancashire, source of delectable pies, so if you aren’t under the disability of not being able to cook or eat pork and if your name isn’t Bob, this pie is worth baking.

Pork pie

Ingredients

Filling

2 lbs pork pieces
1 small tbs salt
1 small tsp pepper

Jelly

12 oz broken pork bones (or pigs trotters)
3 pints water
1 onion
1 bay leaf
a few sprigs parsley
a few sprigs thyme

Crust

1 lb flour
4 oz lard
2 oz milk
2 oz water

Method

Jelly

Prepare the jelly the day before.

Place the bones/trotters into a saucepan with water and onion and sprinkle with salt. Bring it slowly to the boil. Skim well.

Add the herbs (as a bouquet garni ie tied together in a small bundle, for ease of removal) and simmer all day. When strong enough to jell and of a good flavour, strain and cool. There should be less than one pint of finished stock.

Remove the fat when cold.

Filling

Cut the pork into small pieces and mix well with the seasonings.

Set aside.

Crust

Warm the flour and rub in half the lard.

Heat the milk with the water, adding the remainder of lard. When melted, cool until it is lukewarm, then add the flour and mix to a smooth, soft dough.

Mould the dough into round oven-proof pie dishes, keeping small pieces of dough aside for the lids.

Fill the pies with the seasoned meat and cover with the remaining dough.

To decorate the pie beautifully, make a rose from bits of dough and brush the crust with beaten egg.

Bake into moderately slow oven for two hours. After the first hour, cover the pies with wet greaseproof paper to prevent the crust hardening.

Cool the pies, then fill with stock through a hole in the crust. The jelly should be just barely melted for this procedure, not hot.

Once the jelly is set, the pies are ready to eat. Just not by me or persons named Bob.

This is a useless bit of history trivia rather than a recipe. A horror writer friend is descending on the poor innocent folks of Fiji in the near future. We talked about taro chips being the standard there rather than potato and she demonstrated her capacity to order a helping of them. This reminded me that our ordinary potato was not an instant favourite in Europe when it was first brought over from the Americas. Sweet potato made it into recipes and was much enjoyed, but the common spud took over a hundred years longer to tempt people’s palates.

This is maybe the one time of the year when hot chips or wedges with sour cream or anything fried and potato has absolutely no temptation for me. Something must tempt me, but I feel sick at the thought of fried food. Too much Chanukah, but also too much heat.

If the miracle of the olive oil had happened during summer, then maybe we would be eating nicely dressed salads to celebrate, or maybe a good wedge of bread dipped in salt then high quality extra virgin olive oil.

Just you wait. In 48 hours you will also be entirely tired of your favourite foods and be thankful that we have so few chances to indulge so very extremely in a year.

Which reminds me, I have one more entry to give for this festival and I promised you the Pork Pie that killed Uncle Bob. It would be a bit evil to do that, wouldn’t it? It would be even more evil if I did it tonight, in the odd interval between Chanukah and Christmas. Think of all the different ways in which it would be evil. Not deep fried. Pork. Untested by me (because it’s pork). A favourite recipe of the family whence it came, despite the sad demise of Uncle Bob. A warning in fact, in all sorts of ways. And no-one to ask me if I’ve been good or bad this year and to reward me with gifts for conscious virtue, since I’m Jewish.

Watch this space and see if I fall to temptation.

Here’s the recipe for the Casserole. If you need wine to go with your dinner, check in with Farley herself. In Farley’s own words:

Cook white rice–you’ll want to end up with 3 cups or so of the finished product. Meanwhile, sautee one chopped onion and 4 stalks of celery, also chopped with a couple tablespoons of butter in a large skillet or saucepan. Once they are soft and the onions translucent, add a can of cream of chicken soup and half a can of milk, stirring well. Then add half of a Velveeta log (I don’t know what else to call it!) that’s been cut into small squares. As the cheese melts, toss in a 10 oz. bag of frozen broccoli florets and continue to stir. When everything is combined, add the previously cooked rice.

Place mixture in a casserole dish, cover with foil, then put into preheated 350 degree oven. Cook until a nice golden color, probably 20-30 minutes.

I added sliced button mushrooms when I made mine to make it a little fancier, but they’re not necessary.

Note: Farley suggests - for us living in Velveeta-free-zones- that maybe a mild cheddar will do instead.

Farley from Wine Outlook has a very different family tradition to mine. Today I’ll give you her story and just when you feel all safe and relaxed, I’ll post the casserole recipe.

In her own words (and the answer to the question is that no, I’ve not seen Velveeta in Australia):

Broccoli Rice Casserole

So, my dad’s mom was an ok cook, but she made this delicious side dish. Broccoli Rice Casserole, and if memory serves, it was always at the holiday meals. And it always took up a large portion of my plate. When my parents got divorced, my mom started making it for us at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I spent a T.G. in Montana, where I lived a few years ago and couldn’t get home, with a big group of friends who were without families as well. A few of them teased my about one of my contributions saying it sounded ‘white trash’. So yes, the B.R. Casserole does have Velveeta in it (Do you have that there?), but it’s damn tasty and they did shut up and eat…

This Thanksgiving I went to eat with some friends parents and their out-of-town parents. It wasn’t feasible to bring a BRC with my being at work all day and then travelling the night before. So when my mom asked me last night for requests for Christmas dinner, you can imagine my enthusiastic reply.

Not only is BRC good fresh out of the oven, but it’s even better the next couple days. I loved taking TG leftovers back to my apartment and always had to take more BRC, so I could eat some of it as soon as I got home. Sometimes for breakfast the next morning. (it works well cold)

Too much sugar is bad for you
Boston proved this irrefutably on January 15, 1919.

It wasn’t a simple case of acne or bad teeth or even obesity. A molasses tank exploded and brought down a train and a fire station. Twenty one people died. There’s a picture here. Every time I read about it I marvel that molasses can move at 35 miles an hour in January. Here are some more articles.

Onions are good food, but eating other bulbs can lead to jail and worse.
During the tulip mania of the seventeenth century, there are several stories of men eating tulip bulbs by mistake. For the lucky, they were simply jailed for the crime.

There’s a Japanese flour made from tulip bulbs, I believe. I do wonder what the seventeenth century Dutch would have made of it? More on tulips here and here and even here.

Poor tea-making skills can lead to violent behaviour
Making tea with salt water leads to dire consequences. Australians don’t do things like that. Only Bostonians. No links for this one - the American Revolution is common knowledge. Besides, everyone knows that you can’t make decent tea using seawater.

Gourmandise is worth the highest sacrifice
Apicius - the Roman gourmand - committed suicide rather than putting up with food that was less than the best the Ancient Roman world could offer. More here. I will translate a recipe or two of his during the year and you can judge for yourself if his death was in vain.

The fact that the book with his name on may not be by him is perhaps a problem, but it’s still worth checking out whether his suicide was noble or whether he just should have learned to read Cato and try a simpler diet. Which reminds me, Cato has a recipe for a delicious cheesecake which would make perfect summer eating. Think of baked ricotta with a smidgeon of honey.

Murder most gourmand
John Fletcher described it as the Coward’s Weapon, but poison has a certain sexiness for lovers of detective fiction. The Lex Cornelia was brought into effect in 82 BCE by a rather desperate Sulla trying to prevent who from poisoning whom at far too rapid a rate. This didn’t stop a clever Medieval scientist turning arsenic into an edible (but highly toxic) powder and setting the scene for detective tales and early deaths.

There are too many tales of historical poisoners and they all seem to have an ill-deserved glamour: the Borgias, Catherine de Medici, la Toffana. The real experts were members of the Venetian Council of Ten, who brought a whole new meaning to the notion of combining dinner with politics. More here and here.

Grand nineteenth century exploration and the meagre diet
Exploration is sometimes only as hungry as you make it. Burke’s ill-fated expedition into central Australia was all about mishandled meetings and assuming that it was impossible to live off the land.

Burke and Wills are forever-famous in Australian history, and it was lack of food that made them that way. King is less famous but then, he ate indigenous foods properly prepared (correct cooking saved him from beri-beri, not only starvation) and he lived.

Food and drink were major concerns for the Burke and Wills expedition, whether it was supplies that had been whisked away too soon or buried beneath the trees or even camels that were tipsy. For a more balanced view (and perhaps some information on the predilection of camels for good rum) try here here and here and here.

PS I stopped at six, not because there weren’t many more bizarre foodish stories over the last millenium, but because it really is too much the fun season to weather all this gloom.

My family’s schnitzel is a bit different to other varieties. Not a great deal different, just a little. It isn’t a true Chanukah dish, for one thing, as you don’t fry it in too much oil (just enough to crisp it). Canola oil is best. And our favourite variant (introduced by one of my sisters - so quite recent) is to use chicken breast and exchange the flour with ground almonds and then serve it with a dark cherry sauce (not too sweet) and a green salad. Very suitable for a late December summer meal.

SCHNITZEL

Ingredients

veal or chicken pieces (very thin)
SR Flour
beaten egg
oil for frying

Method

Dip each piece of veal in the flour then in the egg, then fry. If you like a thick batter, then dip the meat in the flour and egg at least once more.

Eat hot with slices of lemon.

This recipe comes from my European family, the side that arrived in Australia during World War I (you know, recently) and so maintained Continental cooking traditions. I’ve never tried my grandmother’s fried fish because I am allergic to fish, but I ended up the custodian of the recipe because I was the one who asked her about it.

My grandmother was very famous for this recipe in the Gold Coast Jewish Community. In the 1970s she fried it in enormous quantities before any function. Whenever I visit Southern Queensland, Jews come up to me and say “You’re Yetta’s grand-daughter - she used to make wonderful fried fish when she lived here.â€? She used to tell me stories of chasing for the right sort of fish all over Surfers’ Paradise, and of frying fish late into the night for big functions. For one function she claimed she made three sorts of everything - including fried fish. And it’s another Chanukah classic, being fried and apparently going rather well with summer salads.

Fried Fish

Beat up as many eggs as you think you will need to cover the fish. Fillet the fish and cut into appropriate size chunks. Dip each piece of fish in flour and egg, coating it very well. Heat oil (not too much oil - the fish should not be deep fried). Fry until the fish is golden brown on one side, then turn over.

I’ve had a surfeit of fats and oils in my diet and Chanukah is nowhere near ended. We’re past halfway and I keep reassuring myself that the end is in sight.

The exceptional amount of fat and oil in my diet during these eight days reminds me of something I think about annually. Every year I tell myself that this next year will be the one when I explore the more interesting byways of fats as demarcating culinary differences. It’s worth exploring, and I tell myself so every single year.

Think of it. Olive oil and the Mediterranean. Goose fat and Central Europe. Butter and Normandy. And think of the history of the colonies - how Australia has shifted from butter and lard to less butter and olive oil.

Fats are one of the absolutely key elements that distinguish one cuisine from another. Seasonings, carbohydrates, proteins and fats: sort these four out and you have a solid basis for beginning to understand any cuisine in the world.

So this year I will think about the fat issue some more. I promise. Or I will go on a low fat diet until my body has recovered from the festive season. Either way, fats will play a major role in my near future.