Food History

This is a big report-back post because so many people have been furiously cooking this last week. There are only about eight tests outstanding from Melbourne and a dozen others.

The big news from this batch of tests is not the wonderful recipes we now have to play with but that one of those recipes is negus. I get to make jokes about Grand Negus again!! (and I have, already - people are going to be so sick of that joke by October!)

I’ve snipped bits from the reports, because you don’t really want to read a 1000 word blogpost. Or do you?

First up is Jenny, from Melbourne. Jenny managed to get Spanish puffs to work. This is a big thing, as all the other puff recipes were complete washouts. She found that the standard ‘puff’ description was tangled by modern standards and she sorted out what the instructions actually meant by some very clever googling. Even her rather fussy daughter ate the results.

The recipe her tasters fell in love with was moonshine pudding. It’s a very rich and very delectable bread-and-butter pudding and Jenny’s decription of it made my mouth water.

Marilla and Neil entirely enjoyed their cooking stint. This is just as well, because they took most of my remaining lemon recipes. Marilla did the report-back and Neil did most of the cooking.

Green Peas Soup
“We had this cold as it was a stinkin’ot day. It was very refreshing but would also be good hot. Good flavour.”

Onion Ragoo
“Strange texture to the sauce. A bit grainy – maybe also in the cooking - it reads as if it should be smooth.”

Savoury Vegetables
“This was a winner. The mashed potato basket was impressive to look at and tasted good.”

Lemon Custards
“I liked it but not everyone would as they don’t like marmalade. It also had a funny, curdley texture …”

Lemon Puffs
“There was definitely something wrong with the proportions of this recipe. … Very nice chewy lemon toffee with the odd crispy bit. … It does say to beat for an hour but our kitchen maid has run away with the boot boy. Neil added a pint of lemon juice to provide a little liquid but they definitely did not puff. Good flavour for a lolly though!”

Lemon Sauce
“Hmmmmm. It’s very lemony - and you really need to remove the skin of the lemon segments or pretty much blend it. My lemons may be very strong in flavour and possibly large. The overall impression of the sauce on its own is mouth uckering. I added another chicken liver but it didn’t make much difference. Might be toned down enough when poured over roast chicken but I’m not holding my breath. Does have potential - with a milder lemon.” They ate it with roast chicken later on and it was much better that way.

Jane made some more recipes:

To fricassee Chickens
“Sauce wasn’t quite tangy enough. Needed extra lemon. A
bit too rich. … Four men liked it: 8/10.”

Chicken pulled
“THIS ONE IS BANQUET WORTHY!!!!! Best of the four mains
I tried. Very easy. Very nice. Looks good on the table, too.
They rated it 10/10 or 12/10.”

And finally a whole dinner-party worth of testing from Nicole:

At a sumptuous (yet totally unauthentic) gathering, four Canberrans took the plunge and tried seven Regency recipes. The first course consisted of a meat dish, two vegetable recipes and some bread rolls, desert was Spanish Cream and icecream and the meal was finished with a negus.

The rolls weren’t bad, a little overcooked because the recipe didn’t stipulate how long, but still okay. I was surprised that they were so easy to make.

The meat dish, beef in epigram, was stunning. Who would have thought that roast beef, gravy and pickles would work together? But they did. In fact, people went back for seconds, the plate was all but cleared and I commemorated the end of the night by putting some of the sauce on a bread roll after everyone had ended. YUM!!!

The French beans were nice, although an education. I put in the ingredients in the order mentioned, although one of the guests pointed out it was probably meant to be made in the order of béchamel sauce. Still, not bad.

Endive Ragoo was a terribly interesting dish. The taste was very strong, people commented particularly on the layer of asparagus and celery beneath the endive. The sauce was beautiful. I think it would be a great dish, with less endive than we used.

Onto the desserts, and the Spanish Cream was only half touched by everyone. It had very little taste (perhaps because I didn’t have orange flower water or rose water so tried orange juice) and the texture wasn’t all that attractive.

The icecream, on the other hand, was terrific. …

The negus was superb. The recipe made a huge batch, so I had some more on Sunday, and Monday (while watching the Oscars, a very nice accompaniment).

And that’s all for now, folks!

Time to introduce another member of my culinary library. The reason it’s time is because I have books sitting everywhere and I promised myself I would only put them away when I finish with them and today I have a manic passion for mild tidiness.

Today’s book is by Jean-Robert Pitte. It’s French Gastronomy. The History and Geography of a Passion. It has a very snazzy cover - lots of food spiralling out of the Eiffel Tower.

The book starts by comparing the French and English reputations with food. It also talks about a very particular kugelhopf mold, which made me wonder just how many kugelhopf recipes there are and if they only thing they have in common is yeast. My favourite recipe is a soft orange-flavoured dough, which in its most delectable incarnation is spread with jam and with butter and dried fruit and other yummies and rolled into a loaf-shape. I once made one of these for friends who were celebrating Ramadan - I quietly left it in their kitchen to be found when they came in to break their fast.

To return to the book, it looks at the focus that France has given to food and how this has spawned an outside interest in French food. It’s less about the reality of French superiority than how its perception developed. It traces the idea through the culinary critics (a well-trod path) and through the meanings of key terms in key dictionaries from different periods. And that’s just the introduction.

Chapter One sets the pattern for the rest of the book with an overview of a particular facet of French cuisine - it analyses some of the myths about French wines. Not about specific wines, but about how the matching of good production and eager drinkers developed.

The book is not a deep scholarly study. It calls on a few key authors, but it raises a number of questions that are important in culinary history. The relationships between producers, consumers, chefs, reputation, literature, art, markets and politics all help shape a national cuisine and its reputation. I really like this little book.

I mentioned candlenuts the other day, very much in passing, so I thought they deserve a post of their own.

Candlenut (aleurites moluccana, macadamia terifolia) is native to this region - from northern Queensland through to Indonesia and its neighbours. It’s particularly important in Indonesian cooking and is called kemiri in Indonesian.

Botanically this nut leaves me bewildered. Candlenut is definitely a kind of macadamia or a close relative, and I’ve seen it postulated that it might have been carried over to Indonesia and Malaysia by traders up north long before white settlement. I don’t know any of it for certain.

In Australia, the candlenuts on sale are definitely more shrivelled than the macadamia, but otherwise very similar. Unlike the macadamia, you can’t eat them raw.

My favourite use for candlenut is in spice mixes. My Indonesian friends also rub it around a frypan so they can cook without it sticking. It has an incredibly high oil content, which makes sense, given its name. You can also grind them to make a very rich thickening for stews and curries.

Both candlenut and macadamia go rancid easily, so if you want to hang onto them for a long, long time, then buy unshelled macadamias. Macadamias won’t taste quite the same as using a candlenut - there is a very slight bitterness to the candlenuts I have eaten (but I’ve never been able to buy them fresh) - so the substitution is possible but not perfect.

Yep, this post is about big answers. Answers to life, the universe and everything. Or at least about coffee souffle, because that’s what Sharyn asked for.

Mum’s thought was that it sounds like a family-specific variant of a recipe, Sharyn, which is why you’re stuck. She suggests that the only person who can re-recreate it is the person who knows the texture and the flavour ie you.

She says that if she were re-inventing a family recipe, she would start with a recipe. She has given as an example the Fudgy Chocolate Mousse on p. 230 from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. (Chocolate mousse recipes were to hand, and can have the texture you described.)

Once you have a chocolate recipe (and mousse seems the most probable - she suspects the term ’souffle’ is misleading) try to render it coffee flavoured. For a mocha flavour you could add instant coffee to a chocolate recipe, but for coffee proper you’re going to have to somehow retain the texture and lose the chocolate. Try adding gelatine to a milk-coffee custard base then maybe whipping it.

Hope this helps!

PS The picture is to celebrate my visit to the Royal Canberra Show. It has nothing to do with coffee souffle.

There are many old cookbooks that have been scanned or translated or transcribed. I’ve been using some of them for the Regency Gothic Banquet preparation, in fact.

There are a few sites which are rather special in the way they present these cookbooks, for one reason or another. One of my favourites is the British Library’s Learning site. They have very abbreviated and rather general overviews of food habits that are really only useful to the newcomer to the field. The trick is to go to the links on the right of the page. You can get a feel for the original manuscripts and printed books and read more detailed commentary. Worth it for the facsimiles alone!

My mother is staying with me for a couple of days. I deprived her of tea and other essential sustenance until she agreed to answer questions. She knows south-east Australian cooking (especially kosher) and ingredients going back a century. She isn’t quite a century old. In fact, she’s not even vaguely close to a century old, but she was taught by her mother and mother in law, so her inherited knowledge reaches back to before World War I. She is fantastic with anecdotes about the introduction of plastics and electrical equipment and exotic ingredients. She knows the development of decent kosher food in Australia backwards. She can cook almost anyting that’s cookable in a kosher fashion.

She’s here for the next forty eight hours, so send in your questions and I’ll report her answers back when she leaves. Your questions don’t have to be historical. They can be practical (why do we do this or that?) . Use the comments section or send me an email.

Today I began teaching a course called Jewish Culture, Jewish Food. Almost the first thing I did in the class was challenge everyone’s thoughts about how unified Jewish food is.

Just because internet denizens provide the same recipes every time a major festival comes by, does not mean the world is that boringly plain. Every year I see latke and doughnut recipes for Chanukah - this doesn’t make latkes and doughnuts the only options. Judaism is a religion and Jews belong to many cultures. When my students opened their handouts they found some of the well-known Ashkenazi recipes (like latkes and doughnuts) but they also found an Egyptian bean dish from a Sephardi.

One of my students is Spanish (Catholic) and is making that dish (loubia) for class next week. I will help the Sephardi atmosphere along by introducing the class to Sephardi music.

For the next five weeks my students will meet varied Jewish cuisines and varied Jewish music, underpinned by basics such as the Jewish life cycle and calendar.

By happenstance, we’ll be looking at the foods of Purim the week of Purim itself. This is worth celebrating. If anyone has any recipes suitable for Purim or that come from their family traditions or that they have eaten on Purim, let me know and I’ll blog them. Also your favourite grog recipes, since alcohol is a feature of the festival.

If no-one gives me a recipe, then I will blog my favourite Oznei Haman. Crunchy deep-fried pastry is something that one can’t go wrong with.

Favourite Purim recipes will be the theme. Coming soon.

This is a quick update to alert you to a blog carnival that is of great interest to foodies - it links food and travel. Reading it makes me hungry.

Clicking the link to this blog convinces me that the world is almost round. Why? Because you start here and you end nearly-here. If you keep clicking you can go almost-round and almost-round and almost-round…

Deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna) is not a food. I know that. It’s important to include here, though, because it’s part of a vast family of delicious food plants. It is cousin or sister or brother to eggplant, potato and tomato, just for starters. It is also related to the Aussie bush tomato which bears the splendid name of solanum chippendalei. If plants had theme songs, bush tomato’s would obviously be the one with the sexy beat.

I had a deadly nightshade plant when I was in my teens (along with a two-headed skeleton under my bed). My family carefuly mislaid it when they realised what it was.

It used to be used as a cosmetic (eye brightener) and is still used in some medication. Whatever you do though, don’t eat it unless you are certain exactly which variety you are eating. Some of them contain a interesting chemicals or rather, chemicals with interesting side effects, hence the name.

Belladonna refers to the way it made eyes wide and lustrous. ‘Deadly’ refers to the fact that too much (and not very much at all can be too much) is poison. I don’t even recommend its use cosmetically unless you are an expert - lead used to be used as a face powder before the effects of lead poisoning were known, which was about the same time belladonna was used to brighten the eyes.

I have a recipe for you this post. The best baked potatoes ever. It’s not good on the specifics because even perfect baked potatoes in summer don’t feel quite right. Besides, everyone who has ever baked a potato has their own dream method - I obviously like a strong contrast between the textures of the skin and the flesh, for instance.

Baked Potatoes

Bake your potatoes whole, in their skin, until the outside is perfect and crunchy and the inside is perfect and crumbly. Split them open, add a nice knob of fresh butter and the sprinkle generously with bush tomato.

This is the report I promised you. We have tested lots of recipes for the Regency Gothic Banquet over the last couple of weeks and I have the tasting notes. I’m already starting to think of combination flavours - for instance that rice cake sounds as if it might taste rather good with the raspberry cream. I can’t get too far ahead of my testers, though - there are still quite a few to report in.

First, my two recipes. I made potatoe balls (I think I like that spelling of potato - I may adopt it and annoy editors) and ginger drops. The potatoe balls would have gone down very well with gravy and would give much pleasure to lovers of plain food. They’re a bit richer than mashed potato and a bit more elegant, with a thin brown crust. I found them OK, but bland - whether they get used will depend on what else is on the table with them. If we need something simple or something that will match a rich sauce, they will be just perfect.

The ginger drops are just perfect by themselves. I adore ginger and recognised that I wasn’t a fair test subject, so I took them to a stall last Sunday and fed them to stray passers-by. They went down very nicely indeed. Let your taste buds dream of little baby ginger sweets (candies), a little soft, a little crunchy, and with a depth of flavour that most ginger sweets lack. That depth of flavour was achieved really, really simply, by adding a bit of candied peel to the mix. Ginger, sugar and mixed peel turns out to be a combination made in heaven ginger-lovers’ heaven.

Emma tested a bunch of recipes (and more to come!). This fortnight she reported on lemon cake, ginger cake, gingerbread, two types of jumbles, apple charlotte, roast lamb and stuffing for duck.

The lemon cake turned out a bit undercooked the first time and OK the second time, but Emma didn’t exclaim in joy over it. She said “The flavour is quite nice” but the orange flower flavour could be overpowering. I think this cake must go on the emergency list. It sounds like one of those things that are trickier than they look without having the total magic that makes trickiness worthwhile.

The ginger cakes were a bit like modern gingerbread, but dry if cooked well and doughy if cooked a bit less. They looked unappealing and tasted very mild. Sounds like another one that won’t go on the menu.

The gingerbread was “treacle flavoured sand.” I think I’m giving up on gingerbread for the banquet. Every single recipe has failed so far. I still have hopes that the no-bake one will work, but that’s the only one still unreported and all the baked versions have developed strange textures. This is something I will investigate, but maybe not for the banquet. I might look at The Old Foodie’s amazing collection of gingerbread recipes over time and work my way though it one day, trying to work out how gingerbread recipes have developed and in what direction. I won’t be able to do this till next year, however, so if anyone else is doing the same thing, I would love to hear from you.

The jumbles were a success. Orange flower water is nicer than rose flower water, but both recipes were so nice that the test batch was finished in no time at all.

Apple charlotte was OK, but not something that Emma would make for herself. This was quite different to the roast lamb, which turned out very nicely, as did the stuffing. We’re nearing the minimum number of delicious meat dishes to get us good menu results!

Jane tested lamb cutlets with spinach. Healthy, she says, but boring. Lamb steaks ragout were much less dull. Her tasters loved it so much they mopped all the gravy up. “Very rich but tasty,” Jane says, and I suspect that it might go well with that potato dish. And she made the Windsor syllabub again, because everyone wanted it again. I like it when recipes take on a life of their own and get made more than once. She says that it’s still “very yum. very addictive.” It gets closer and closer to being on the final menu.

Kathleen made almond jumbles, rice cake, roast, mustard and potted cheese.

Her jumbles were even more of a success than Emma’s. The rice cake was good but a bit dry. Given it will be suitable for coeliacs, I’m going to take it to the next round but (as I sad above) pair it with the raspberry cream. Her roast beef was wonderful (which gives us the possibility of the Roast Beef of Old England!). Alas, the potted cheese was ordinary and the mustard far too hot.

My biggest problem right now is a lack of preserves and side dishes. Not vegetables, but things like mustards and conserves. If that’s still a problem by the end of the month I might have to research more recipes or resort to commercial items. An early nineteenth century dinner without the regular items that fill in the corners is unthinkable.

And that’s all my report-ins. I can’t wait for more!

We have stormy hot weather right now. No rain, just the rest of the storm. I think our local storm-god must have mislaid the rain on the way here.

What to do with hot, stormy weather besides work on novels, prepare classes and watch bad movies? Why, dream of icecream, of course. And make sure that the bad movies have snow in them. Lots and lots of snow.

This is another of the recipes from my grandmother, written down in the 1950s. She would have made it using her electric beater: she was one of the first kids in the block to get one of those, and beat her sponges for twenty minutes just to show she could. The freezing would have been done in her icebox before the final salt and ice treatment. I wonder how this recipe would work using an icecream machine?

I’ve left it as she wrote it, since I haven’t actually tried this one yet. If the warm weather lasts I might just do so, though. I even have a jar of maraschino cherries.

Plum Pudding Ice Cream

Take ½ lb maraschino cherries, ½ lb dates, ½ figs, ½ lb raisins, ½ candied pineapples (all fruit chopped) & ½ lb chopped walnuts.
Put all together in an earthenware bowl with a cover. Pour over sufficient brandy to cover the fruits & stand over night in a cool place. Make ordinary ice cream foundation, whisk with cream, & freeze. Add the soaked fruit with the liquor & freeze until firm. Pack in ice & salt for at least an hour before serving. Serve with wafers.

TANSEY.

To make a tansey, beat up seven eggs, yolks and whites separately. Add a pint of cream, nearly the same of spinach juice, and a little tansey juice, gained by pounding it in a stone mortar; a quarter of a pound of Naples biscuit, a glass of white wine, and a little sugar and nutmeg. Set all in a saucepan, just to thicken, over the fire ; then put it into a dish, lined with paste to turn out, and bake it. Another. Beat ten eggs very well with a little salt, half a pound of loaf sugar pounded, half a pint of spinach juice, and a spoonful of the juice of tansey ; mix them well together, and strain it to a quart of cream ; grate in half a pound of Naples biscuits, and a nutmeg ; add a quarter of a pound of Jordan almonds blanched and beat fine, with a little rose water, and mix all well together ; put it into a stewpan, with a piece of butter the bigness of a golden pippin. Set it over a slow charcoal fire; keep it stirring till it is hardened ; then butter a dish very well, that will just hold it : put in the tansey, bake it in a moderate oven, taking care that it is not scorched. When it comes home, turn it upon a pie plate, cut Seville oranges in small quarters, and lay round it, and on the tansey, citron, and orange peel cut thin, with double refined sugar laid in little heaps between. If you have not Naples biscuits, grate seven ounces of the finest stale bread you have. A boiled tansey. Cut the crumb of a stale penny loaf thin, pour over as much hot cream as will wet it, and cover it over till cold ; then beat and strain six eggs to it, a little lemon peel shred fine, a little grated nutmeg, and salt ; green it as you did the baked tansey, and sweeten it to your taste; stir all very well together, butter a bason, that will hold it, butter also a cloth to lay over the top, tie it tight, and boil it an hour and quarter ; turn it into a dish, and garnish with Seville orange; stick candied orange cut thin on the top.

This post is dedicated to the author of Kidsdish. It’s yet another of those early nineteenth century recipes. It’s a reminder that I’ll be posting tasting notes for a whole bunch of recipes very soon and that recipe testers only have two more weeks to finish up.

Ginger (zingiber officinalis) appears in an awful lots of cuisines, going back an awful long way. In French it is gingembre and in German ingwer . In Indonesian it’s jahe and very important to the cuisine. Apparently the botanical and English names come from a Sanskrit root.

Ginger isn’t just a culinary spice. It also has a whole bunch of useful medicinal effects, which is why I’m blogging about it tonight. All you need to do is find out what its effects are and you can work out what’s wrong with me.

Ginger probably came from China originally, and was dried and sent all over the ship-linked world from quite early. I haven’t traced when ginger was first imported into Europe, but I know that by the High Middle Ages it was a very important spice and that India was one of the sources. It’s one of the major spices - in fact - that help typify Western European Medieval cooking.

Much of the world’s crystallised ginger is from Southern Queensland. The factory is not too far from lots of fabulous beaches.

You can find more information (and some lovely pictures) of ginger here.

Ginger is related to some other interesting roots. My favourite is galingale. I first discovered cooking with galingale (as opposed to reading historical texts mentioning galingale) when my Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean friends taught me their home cooking. Since then, it has been an indispensible element in my pantry.

The fresh root is brilliant; the dried root amazingly tough; the powder simple to use. It is like a fragrant and soft ginger, and one of my favourite spices. I have seen the occasional medieval recipe which calls for galingale where if you replace the galingale with ginger it will suddenly look frightfully modern. It’s a worry.

The trouble with galingale is that it can easily get confused with one of its near relatives. The name of that near relative is kencur in Indonesian, and kaemferia galanga is its botanical name. It’s also handy in cooking, though not nearly as much.

I wrote myself a small table to help me identify the versions of the names of galingale where they appear in cookbooks, and I present it here (with much flourish) for your delight and delectation. (Please send corrections - these are very tangled webs)

Galingale
galingale galanga
Languas galanga
Greater or Java Galingale
light galingale
galanga or lenguas (Malaysian)
Thai ginger
Laos ginger
Siamese ginger

Kencur
Alpinia officinarum
Languas officinarum
Lesser Galingale
heavy galingale

Galingale is more aromatic, to my mind, and kencur has a slight medicinal flavour. I sometimes use kencur in a relaxing but strange-flavoured drink friends taught me - it’s very effective for tension headaches. Kencur can substitute for galingale in an emergency, but the flavours really are a bit different and the dish won’t taste quite the same.

Both are very fibrous. Galingale was very popular in the Middle Ages and remains deservedly popular in Indonesian and Malaysia cooking.

What is it about flu that makes one crave carbohydrates? I’m not hungry, but my mind is lusting after a piece of fresh-baked sour dough bread with fresh butter and a smidgeon of orange blossom honey.

I found two websites with historical sourdough starters. This one and this. Some are more authentic than others (the Tasmanian one is not demonstrably historical at all), but they’re all interesting. Alas, it would be quite illegal to import them into Australia. If any of you make bread from these starters, I would love an email or a comment to let me know what they taste like.

Asafoetida (ferula foetida, ferula assa-foetida or ferula narthex) has a lovely variety of really glamorous common names. My favourite is ‘devil’s dung.’ The names in different languages are unexpectedly varied, too. For instance, in French it is férule perisque, German: teufeldreck (Devil’s Dung), in Italian it is assafetida and in Spanish, asafétida. The most important language to know the name in is Hindi, where it is hing.

Devil’s Dung is a brilliant flavour enhancer/salt replacement, but should be measured almost by the granule. In Australia it’s possible to buy a very pure almost overpowering tiny tub of the powder. It’s also possible to buy a yellowish and less overpowering version, which has been cut with turmeric. You want to avoid the latter.

Ferulas are really giant fennel plants (which would be great in a Day of the Triffids variant - “the Devil’s Dung is taking over the world�): the sap dries into a solid resin-like mass which is the spice asafoetida. The smallest container of it lasts just about forever, even if you use it regularly. Uncooked, it smells foul for just about forever, also.

Its use goes back at least as far as Aryan settlement in India. It is even mentioned in the Mahabharata as a garnishing for meat.

My source for this last bit is K.T. Ahcaya’s Indian Food: a Historical Companion - we’re not in the Middle Ages or even in Europe anymore - but asafoetida is such a seriously cool spice that it’s worth travelling to meet. And if you’re interested in the history of Indian food, Achaya’s book is an excellent place to start.