Food History

A Pepsi ad for you, because I’m having a quiet day (what can be sexier than Bollywood stars?):

Today I feel like exploring the difference between exotic food and the everyday. As you might guess, it’s pretty subjective and very strongly culturally/regionally/family based. When I teach about this I normally tell the story of the rabbi who banned pineapples in his congregation, because they were so unfamiliar he couldn’t place them on the food spectrum. Today I want to try a slightly different approach. I want to explore (briefly) four blogs and see how what they say in their everyday posts illuminates the subject.

Let start with Victoria Garson, who gives an overview of the food possibilities for mothers’ day in San Diego, CA. It’s a good place to start because the post was about a foodway that screams ‘exotic’ at me. Why are restaurant brunches exotic? My mother won’t even eat breakfast in bed on mothers’ day - a phonecall and a cup of tea is all she wants. Whether we go to restaurants for big events is very much driven by family habits.

Let’s move from that to the more familiar. Mark Woodgate at All About Fatherhood gives a list of things not to do for Mother’s Day. The things he suggests as ‘ought to be done’ are closer to home than the brunch out. They’re familiar for more people simply because when he suggests a picnic we can replace the word ‘picnic’ with the stuff we know and love for picnics. Our own customs back up his words and so his suggestions are homey and comfortable. My favourite picnic might be exotic to someone else (chicken sofrito, pitta bread, chummous and tabouli, for instance, served in a Thai layered container that keeps each food separate) but the word ‘picnic’ makes us think of the familiar and hides family and cultural and regional differences to an extent. People who don’t take picnics wouldn’t be deceived into familiarity, of course.

Bobbi Chukran, guest writer at FictionScribe, points out that for writers the details are what counts ( say this regularly on my other blog - every now and again I rant about ‘telling details’ and their use in world building - this is why I chose Bobbi’s post). This is just as true for foodways as for fiction - it’s the detail that creates the sense of the familiar and help us identify with a food. The exotic is partly exotic because we don’t have that familiarity and link to the details. If you sample a dish and can say exactly where the cook has gone wrong, you know the dish is part of your foodways and is no longer exotic.

It all comes down to familiar vs unfamiliar. When global warming was something none of us were familiar with (see Environmental Talk for more on global warming) we treated it as something exotic. You know, not part of our lives. As we learn more about it and how it touches us everyday, it becomes more familiar. One day taking measures to cut down on global warming will be a standard part of more people’s lives, just as one day you might eat chicken sofrito on a picnic. Or maybe not.

The trick is that there is a continuum. At one end is the impossibly exotic. Food so strange it’s something we think aliens eat. At the other end is the stuff of everyday life, so familiar we don’t think twice about it.

New recipes happen all the time. Sometimes they’re modifications of things we know and love. Sometimes they’re the product of necessity. Sometimes they’re genuinely different to food that has gone before due to taste or texture or use of ingredients.

Tonight two of my friends, Trudi and Donna, mixed ingredients at a party and came up with results that I suspect everyone present will try to emulate. It’s an excellent example of how specific conditions and interests can cause our eating habits to change slightly. (Trudi and Donna - if you’re reading this and would like me to link to your webpages/books, I would be happy to, but I wasn’t going to do it without your permission and I thought if I rang you at 1.15 am for your permission you might not be happy with me. Everyone else - if links magically appear in a day or two you can find out who Trudi and Donna are, and if they don’t you might have to wonder eternally. My blog has always needed a bit of mystery, so this is not a bad thing.)

Tonight we were at Donna’s. Trudi brought her a chocolate fountain and we all had fun eating couverture chocolate melted in it. The fact that it was couverture is important: Trudi knows her chocolate.

After a while we became curious about the other possibilities that chocolate fountains produce, so Trudi added some pure cream. This made a lovely ganache, but caused the fountain to sound as if it was about to lift off. When the contents of the top section of the fountain turned into a turgid mess of blocked lava, Trudi added Bailey’s. And more Bailey’s. And more Bailey’s. The result was totally delicious. It flowed nearly as smoothly as the original chocolate, but was considerably more alcoholic.

When we sat down to watch movies, we stopped playing with the chocolate fountain. After Flash Gordon (important viewing for speculative fiction writers and artists), Donna asked if anyone wanted a cup of hot chocolate. She took some of the chocolate/cream/Baileys mix and dissolved it in hot milk. A very adult form of hot chocolate.

And that’s one process of recipe change and development. Think of this in relation to my coleslaw post. Most often it’s everyday interaction of people that causes change in diet and foodways. Sometimes it’s big stuff, but mostly it’s small.

food history, chocolate fondue, new recipes, hot chocolate

During a discussion of the joys of coleslaw, an Englishman admitted he adds cheddar cheese to his. (He doesn’t admit to it on his blog, I just thought you needed to know my source - in the interests of accurate history, of course :). )

This led - as night follows day - to a request for the history of coleslaw. I thought it would be a useful exercise in how I trace recipes back in time.

I started off with nineteenth century English cookbooks and found nothing there. I wasn’t expecting anything - I know the shape of salads in the first half of the nineteenth century in England and coleslaws didn’t fit it, but I had to check. Before I got out my cookbooks from the late nineteenth century, I checked early US cookbooks.

The US in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is the obvious ‘other’ route for new entries into English food (along with the Indian subcontinent). It’s particularly handy for food that sound vaguely Spanish or Dutch and some types of French food.

So I went almost straight to Dutch foodways. ‘Cole’ is a good English word for cabbage, but ’slaw’ isn’t. Dutch and Flemish recipes are the first place I check when words are very, very close to English but not quite, because they’re so similar to English. Names of recipes are often interesting clues to foodways.

I found cabbage salads in Dutch-American foodways in the eighteenth century and my guess is that it went from New Amsterdam to New York and from New York to the broader English-speaking world. I don’t know when mayonnaise became the standard dressing - that’s a task for another day. What’s interesting, though, is that cabbage salad with a non-mayonnaise dressing is still made in some parts of the US.

At this stage, all I have are the broad tracks. I’d have to do a lot more work to find out dates of first appearance in various places and to find the actual routes it took to reach England and cheese coleslaw.

Let me give you two quite different recipes for cabbage salad, an eighteenth century one from p. 116 of The Sensible Cook (tr and ed Peter Rose), which is a book I must blog some day, all about Dutch Foodways in the New World and the other from 1980s Arkansas (from p. 93 of Calico Cupboards, which I have already blogged).

Cabbage Salad (c 1770)

2 cups of green cabbage, cut finely
2 cups red cabbage, cut finely
1/3 cup wine vinegar
1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
Salt and pepper.

Mix ingredients well and let sit.

Overnight Cabbage Salad (recipe by Debrah Brooks)

1 large cabbage, shredded
1 green pepper, chopped fine
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 tbs salt
2 cups boiling water
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp mustard seed
1 2 oz jar pimientos
1 cup cider vinegar

Combine cabbage, pepper and onion in a alrge bowl. Sprinkle with salt. Pour boiling water over cabbage mixture. Let stand one hour; wrong and dry cabbage mixture with hands. Mix remaining ingredients; ; let stand until sugar dissolves. Pour over cabbage mixture. Let stand in refrigerator overnight.

Now if I can persuade Dave to give us his cheese coleslaw recipe, you will have more ways of dealing with cabbage than you ever thought you would need.

food history, cabbage, cabbage salad, coleslaw history, recipes, cheese coleslaw

My discovery-of-the-day (courtesy a handy phone call) is that 2d during intermission in Melbourne during World War II bought a 1d icecream (small cone) and a penn’orth of sweets. Even if a twelve year old could buy Jaffas, they never rolled them down the aisle because there were sugar restrictions and they ate every sweet they could get.

There will be a second post today because I promised some people some comments about coleslaw. Keep watching this space.

food history, World War II, movie food, Melbourne history

Tonight I took a break from Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages and food of the early nineteenth century to do some gentle research for a novel. By ‘gentle research’ I mean developing an understanding of the background of my characters, which is probably going to take the rest of the year because it’s going very slowly and because it’s very engrossing. I’m developing four major characters and their age range is quite extraordinary and I need to understand, from underneath their skin, how they see the world.

What I was doing today and tonight, and what will carry me into the next few days is the type of work that doesn’t feel like work at all. I saw Superman The Movie (both versions), plus a George Reeves Superman, plus eight 1941 Superman movie shorts. Since my youngest character is fifteen, I need to go from the earliest Superman I can (the shorts - which are a lot of fun) right through to the recent release. My eye is getting attuned to the different looks and my ear is getting attuned to the different dialogue, but my brain keeps going ‘dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum-dum-dum-dumdeedum”, which is the 1941 theme music sung on one note by yours truly.

Naturally my mind casts round for what people would have eaten at the first showing of each.

George Reeve’s Superman was on in the 1960s in Australia, so that’s easy: biscuits. Or rather “Mum, can I have a biscuit?” “No. Dinner is after Dr Who, You can wait.” So the absence of biscuits.

The 1941 Superman was a movie short ( I keep saying this because those ten minutes for each went by so very quickly), so food is a bit different. In Australia in the 1940s and 1950s, there was an intermission between the shorts and the feature and kids went to the local milkbar and bought snack food. I have it on good authority that the snack food normally cost 2d and that jaffas were popular in the 50s because they could be rolled down the wooden floor of the aisle. I need to do more work to find out 1940s intermission food.

The modern Superman movies (everything from the late 1970s is modern to me for the purposes of this novel, the second youngest major character being sixty) require popcorn and fizzy drinks and choc-topped icecreams.

I’d love to know what other people have as movie food, and if it has changed over time. Or TV food, since TV series have a different set of snack requirements. If any of you have favourite movie food or snack food for TV, or fond memories of foods past, please let me know!

food history, movie food, Superman, Australia

Last night was the Food History class.

We had a fine time. I thought it was just me who thought so, but one of my students is a blogger and is all kinds of starry-eyed about it.

Last night was all about the Middle Ages. I had them classify ingredients for quite a chunk of the time. They tasted spices (long pepper and sumac and cubebs and grains of paradise) and looked at recipe collections and worked out what spices went into what sort of recipes (using the sachets of spices I use for such purposes, so they could see the basic spice mixes laid out on the table). Then we talked about the implications of these ingredients and others for trade and for culture and of society. We discussed the impact of the Crusades (and I got to tell my Richard I sugar cane story and make rude comments about Godefroi de Bouillon, who I tend to call Mr Soup) and how ships travelled and where the major international ports were. We talked about Charlemagne and how many of what sort of surviving recipe books there are and what the implications of those books are for our knowledge of food. Oh, and archaeology and how it can really, really improve our knowledge of foodways. We discussed the relationship of diet with culture and what records preserve it and what limitations these records have.

Two students brought in dishes from our course manual so that everyone could taste a bit of Medieval food. We looked at medlars (of course) and sorted out our June excursion. And next week we get to do it all again!!

food hsitory, teaching Medieval food, Middle Ages, grains of paradise, sumac, sugarcane, Godefroi de Bouillon, cubebs, long pepper

The medlar (Mespilus germanica) is a fruit like no other. It has to be almost rotten (bletted) before it’s edible, but when it reaches that stage it’s entirely delicious. I’m going to test this over the next few weeks (as I do whenever I can obtain this fruit, which is a bit hard to find in Australia) as I just purchased a vast quantity from Pialligo Apples.

I was arranging an excursion to the orchard with my food history class, you see. Jonathan Banks has many rare trees and we thought it would be a good way to end the course. As it will be. Somehow, along the way, he mentioned that his medlars were ready and I ended up buying them. Simple cause and effect.

Medlars are deciduous. They’re brown and look like something that ought to be fed to pigs. Let them blett and they taste like the best dessert apples served with cinnamon, cloves and a touch of molasses. Jonathan says they have been known since Roman times, but in my frantic search last night (I spent all of fifteen minutes searching - it was not a very thorough search) I only traced them back as far as Charlemagne. Charlemagne wanted people to grow them, along with a host of other plants. Charlemagne was lousy at recipes, alas, and the oldest recipe I have so far is from the late sixteenth century. Unless it’s in my Apicius - I haven’t checked there yet.

I need to do more research. The question is, do I need more medlars to encourage the research? I have more medlars in my loungeroom than I’ve ever seen in my life before (and this is after my students took pity on quite a few of them) and I’m contemplating getting more? Yes, there is indeed something special about medlars. They have a terrible reputation, though, and I’ll refer you offsite to read about that aspect: I like them too much to write evil things about them. Now I must hide them under my bed so they can rot … blett (sorry, medlars) in peace.

To keep you out of my medlar stash, here’s a recipe. It’s from Thomas Dawson’s The Good Huswifes Jewell, London 1596.

To make a Tarte of Medlers

Take medlers that be rotten, and stamp them, then let them sit on a chafing dish and coales, and beate in two yolkes of egges, boyling it till it be somewhat thick, then season them with suger, sinamon, and ginger and lay it in paste.

food history, fruit, ingredients, medlars, recipe, Medlar Tart

I have two words for today. One is ‘bletting’ and the other is ‘medlar.’ If you want to know why I am so excited about these two words, then watch this space.

Apparently my post yesterday encouraged alcohol consumption. I thought you might enjoy a video that (simply by watching it) encourages even more alcohol consumption. It also teaches you how to make quesadillas (using very US ingredients) and explains how UFOs and Mexicans are linked.

I should have given you a recipe for Anzac Biscuits on ANZAC Day. I feel a bit bad about that, because it’s Australia’s holiday to remember the war dead from the disastrous Gallipoli landing. Why do I feel guilty today? Today Mexico is remembering an entirely different battle, the Battle of Puebla in 1862.

The big difference is that Australia gambles, drinks and has memorial services on ANZAC Day (New Zealand does the same thing, but without the gambling) whereas Mexico and countries linked to Mexico tend to focus on food and family and general merriment. Here are links to a bit more information about the holiday.

I’m not going to give you any recipes today, because another 451 blogger has developed a complete meal for the occasion. Start with Elementary Chef’s menu. Work your way back through the linked posts and over the next few posts Stephanie will talk you through the food prep and leave you to enjoy your party.

I do wonder what the French do on Cinco de Mayo, given that they lost that particular battle. Maybe they make bad puns. I’m carefully restraining myself from making puns about mayonnaise sinks, for instance (sinks de mayo).

Next year I might give you a biscuit recipe and talk about ANZAC Day - the Cinco de Mayo looks like a great deal more fun, though.

PS I know I linked to Texan chilli, but the truth is that chili is regional. The reason I linked to Texan - since people have asked - is because it gave us the chili that much of the rest of the world knows. There are quite specific and authentic chilis for the whole region, including Mexico. I have a really interesting recipe for an Arkansas chili, which I intend to make as soon as the overnight temperature hits zero.

food history, Cinco de Mayo, chhilli, chili, ANZAC Day

It’s Friday and we all need cake. I only need virtual cake, because I have decided to see if I can fit into my clothes for the whole of winter. It’s a daring thought.

This is another of those 1950’s recipes from my grandmother. We used to make Dundee Cake a great deal in the late sixties, but I haven’t seen it anywhere recently. I think it’s time it was revived!

The problem I’ve been noticing recently is that most of you are heading into summer while I’m heading into winter. Dundee Cake is a cake for all seasons. I wish it were a cake for all waistlines as well - I’ll have to trust that my memory will bring me the exact flavour.

Dundee Cake

4 oz butter
5 oz sugar
½ lb flour
3 eggs
2 oz citron peel
4 oz sultanas
2 oz currants
2 oz almonds
½ teaspoon baking powder
a little milk

Grease & line a plain cake tin. Cream butter and sugar, beat in egg one at a time. Pick, wash and dry fruit*. Chop peel and add to the mixture. Sift flour, and powder, and add. Mix in a little blanched almonds and sprinkle on top when mixture is in tin. Bake for 1 hour.

* Australian fruit doesn’t need to be picked and washed and dried these days. There used to be tiny stones and things in the fruit and we used to sit around the table and sort the piles needed for a family cookathon. When a family has four daughters all with a healthy number of friends and when relatives and neighbours will drop in without warning there will always be a need for preparing ingredients.

I’m now trying to remember when we stopped having to check the dried fruit. It was quite early - maybe the early seventies? Please feel free to tell me if you know more than I do about this. Emma W - you live in an important fruit area, do you know anyone who might know?

food hsitory, foodways, Dundee cake, recipe

Today I was given the most wondrous thing (thanks, Rosario!).

It’s El gizado Sefaradi, recipes of the Sephardi Jews brought together by Moshe Shaul, Aldina Quintana Rodriguez and Zelda Ovadia, published to celebrate the five hundredth year of a particularly sad occasion that led to some truly remarkable outcomes.

In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, in their wisdom, gave the Jews of Spain an ultimatum: convert, leave, or die. The Jews who left enriched the cultures of many countries. The Jews who converted often suffered through their ancestry and some retained their Judaism in secret - their recipes and some of their stories are recorded in one of my favourite cookbooks A drizzle of honey. The complete story of that particular exodus is long and complicated.

The Jews who choose to leave their homes rather than lose their religion or their lives brought to songs and music and stories and their own particular culture to new countries.

Their traditional language was (and still is) descended from Latin and is commonly known as Ladino. Because I’m a Medievalist (history is handy in the most unexpected ways) I can read a bit of it, and so Rosario gave me this book which is a compilation of current Sephardic recipes. They show quite clearly the Spanish origins of these people and the travels they have made through other parts of the Mediterranean.

It isn’t a complete Sephardi cookbook - the recipes seem to me to reflect the European foodways and not those (for instance) of the New World. It’s a gorgeous book, however, and I’m anticipating much pleasure in using it.

Rosario and I translated recipes to each other over tea and coffee this afternoon. Five hundred years on, and Ladino is even closer to Spanish than Yiddish is to German. It’s a pleasure to read. (Or to almost-read, since I have to admit to some strange gaps in my vocabulary.)

This week I’ve been cooking with my cookbook of the Jews of Greece again, because I’m still curious about the Sephardi culture there and the Romaniot. I found a lot of overlap between it and El gizado Sefardi. Rosario found a lot of overlap between the recipes of El gizado Sefardi and the traditional recipes of the region around Madrid. Perhaps European Sephardi cooking distils the best of the Mediterranean cuisines? Or perhaps I’m just beginning to udnerstand how rich and wonderful these cuisines are.

Since I’ve never actually learned Ladino (Djudeo-Espanyol) the likelihood of this translation being inaccurate is quite high. I would welcome any corrections from people who know this dish.

Vinagre

To go with fried eggplant, with eggs or with fried fish.

2 spoons of vinegar
3/4 cup of water
1 teaspoon of tomato paste
1 clove of minced garlic
2 spoons of flour
a pinch of salt

Mix the vinegar with the water in a pot then add the rest of the ingredients. Adjust the flour and make sure the the mixture has no lumps. Put the pot on a low heal and cook until it becomes creamy.

food history, Jewish history, Sephardic foodways, El gizado Sefaradi, recipe, Vinagre, 1492

There are lots of chili recipes in the world, but perhaps the most important region in terms of how the rest of the world views chili is Texas. Here’s a page about Texan chili with an extraordinary number of links to recipes. For everyone in the Southern Hemisphere, may they help you get through these cold nights. For everyone else, maybe the spice will help ameliorate summer heat? Well, maybe not.

I can’t offer you fries with that, so maybe a picture will do?

I’ve snuck onto someone else’s computer, mine being about 10 kilometres away and my arms being too short to reach it. I’ve just photocopied the student handouts for my Food in History course and I’ve got an hour before I have to set up the room. I’m at the stage where I’m totally bugged by having forgotten my myrtle sample (table scent of choice for many Romans) and my copy of the Satyricon. We were going to do a reading from the Satyricon and now - obviously - we can’t.

The course notes are all recipes and books and tonight’s recipes are all Ancient Roman.

I intend to talk briefly about Roman banquets, because everyone will expect it, but I will also talk about poetry and Jewish legal documents as sources of food history. I’ll talk about the major philosophies of the period in terms of how they change the way food was recorded and shape our understanding of Roman food (which sounds pretentious but truly isn’t). I have a lovely array of herbs and spices for everyone to examine, and some pickled wild cucumbers for them to taste. I was supposed to bring dates, but I forgot them, too.

I forgot so many things because I was carrying four bags. One bag of books and white board markers. One bag of food. One bag of herbs and spices. My handbag with handbaggish things and course notes. I picked them up and found they were heavy at which point my brain said “You must have everything.” Sometimes one’s brain should not be trusted.

I love it that for this course I have a bag entirely chockers with everything from sesame seeds to grains of paradise. The grains of paradise aren’t going to be mentioned tonight, but the sesame seeds will and so will items I can’t possibly bring in such as defrutum and black bryony seed.

One day I’ll introduce you to the books I have in my green bag. They include Apicius in my favourite edition and two rather important modern writers on the subject.

In an hour my fourteen students will enjoy two hours of bad jokes and good history and get a full dinner’s worth of recipes. You just get the overview and (appropriately) dessert.

Savillum (a recipe from Cato, sourced from one of the books in my bag, A Taste of Ancient Rome, by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa)

Mix 250 g of flour with 1.25 kg of soft cheese. Add 125 g honey and one egg. Grease a baking dish with extra virgin olive oil, gently spoon the mixture in, cover it and bake in a moderate to high oven until it’s almost cooked. Uncover it. Sprinkle it with poppy seeds and honey (probably not in that order) then put it back in the oven until it’s brown. It’s best hot, but not bad cold.

food history, teaching, Roman food, recipe, Savillum, Cato, Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa