Food History

A friend sent me to this article. It’s a lucid explanation of the problems underlying a recent piece of scientific research. It’s also fun to read.

I’m not going to repeat what it says (mostly), but I do have some comments of my own.

(more…)

Sometimes the best way to understand how food ads operate as part of our foodways is to see them from further away. Not being able to understand the ad fully gives the viewer a bit more distance and makes it easier to analyse. Sometimes the distance is time (as we’ve seen) and sometimes it’s language.

Because it’s fallen off the front page and people have been asking about it. You can find it here. Note that there are a few more days than show there, because I’ve got those lovely new books to add to the swag. I need all entries by next weekend.

I promised you more Barossa recipes, and here they are.

I’m glad I didn’t promise more than a couple of recipes though. Last night I watched five movies with friends in an epic marathon of bad taste and good chocolate. This morning I woke up early and a friend started on my costume for the Regency Gothic Banquet (I didn’t get too much in the way, truly). And so tonight I’m tired. I really need to use a stronger word than ‘tired,’ but the word that comes to mind means quite a different thing in North American English to Aussie English and I’m so terribly tired that I don’t have the energy to be offensive.

Scones are inoffensive, aren’t they?

Brown Scones (courtesy Mrs. Alb. Keil)

1/4 lb wholemeal flour
1/4 lb ordinary flour
pinch salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 oz butter
3/4 breakfast cup milk

Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Rub butter well into this and add milk. Roll out, cut into scones and rush into hot oven*.

Cinnamon Scones (given by A.A. Kuchel)

Put 1 lb 8 oz flour into a mixing bowl, add 1 tsp castor sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, mix well. Add 1 oz butter. Mix all into a moist dough with 1 cup milk. Roll out 3/4 inch thick., Bake in a hot oven.

And that’s it for today! If I had a crystal ball to gaze into, it would be showing me asleep at a terrifyingly early hour tonight. Let this be a warning against watching films with friends….

*Is it a sign of fatigue that I want to put a warning that you won’t fit into your oven and it’s best to rush only the scones there?

food history, The Barossa Cookery Book, scones, recipes

I was so excited about the books yesterday that I forgot your recipes! I’m gadding about in about fifteen minutes, so I only have a very limited time, just to add insult to injury. I’ll do you a post tomorrow with more recipes from The Barossa Cookery Book, to make up.

Let’s start with Ginger Nuts (one of my favourite biscuits) from Miss J M Bartsch, Angaston

Ginger Nuts

1 lb, 2 oz flour
1/2 lb butter
1/2 lb sugar
3/4 lb treacle
1 oz ground ginger

Mix ingredients into a stiff dough. Roll out. Cut into small biscuits. Bake in a moderate oven.

And for the second recipe? How about a classic Australian biscuit, most suitable from this classic Aussie cookbook.

ANZAC Biscuits (from A Heidenreich)

1 cup sugar
1 cup cocoanut chips
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup SR flour
2 tbs water
1 tbs golden syrup
2 oz butter
1/2 tsp baking soda

Put water, golden syrup and butter in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add baking soda. Pour over the dru ingredients while hot (care must be taken so that it does not boil over), put teaspoonsfull of the mixture on greased trays and bake in a slow oven for 20-30 mins.

Notes: 1. I’m obviously giving you Aussie biscuits, not US - one day I will give you US biscuits as well. I intend to have such a vast collection of biscuit and scone recipes that your lives will be forever changed. Or something.
2. ANZAC should never be put in lower case: it being an acronym.
3. Excuse me while I gad for an evening - happy baking!

Last week I gave you a variant of lemon/lime and meringue - this week it’s another. And of course it comes from the notebook my grandmother made in the 1950s. This time I’ve kept her paragraphing, just out of interest.

Lemon Meringue Tart

Make a short crust 4 oz butter 6 oz flour, salt. Rub butter into flour until it is like crumbs, mix in a little cold water using knife. Roll out and line a pie dish. Bake in a moderate hot oven until a biscuit colour. When cold fill with the following. Put 1 ¾ cups water to boil with ¾ cups sugar. Mix 3 tablespoon cornflour and add it to syrup, stir well. Take off heat and beat in 1 teaspoon butter, 2 egg yolks juice and rind of lemon. Taste and if not enough sugar add more. Fill the pie shell with mixture and top it with a meringue of stiffly beaten whites of egg and 2 tablespoon sugar. Set in cool oven until meringue is slightly brown.

I want to write “Stop Press” but it doesn’t quite fit in the instant-publishing that is the net. Besides, the reason I want to write “Stop Press!” is because I have 10 copies of David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula to give away, thanks to the generosity of the publishers. The copies came in the mail five minutes ago (I signed for them almost as soon as I replied to a worried publicist about them not having arrived yet) and this book looks perfect for all foodies. It’s a New York Times notable book. In fact, it’s a paperback package of foodie joy.

So, ten free copies of a book you will all want to read. How to avoid being mobbed?

I shall do a random draw from the entries in my competition, I think. How about I extend the competition by a few days, to give you a better chance. This means, as well as the prizes (and the possibility of an ebook), you have the chance to win a book with chapter titles like “America’s Dysfunctional Relationship with Good Food” and “Towards a McSustainable Future.” I want to skip most of today and sit down to it at once - it’s that tempting. I’ll do a draw from the entries I receive before (and on) August 4. You have eight days to send me a slice of your family food history pie, alongside a recipe or two.

PS I was looking for a photo of the cover, but the ones online aren’t the same as the cover I have. Think of a Last Supper table of US foodies.

PPS Do you think this book will explain grits? I’ve never entirely understood grits.

ETA: You can find an excerpt from the book here and the nice publisher sent me the missing cover piccie
.

food history, giveaway, book, The United States of Arugula, David Kamp

It’s far too long since I introduced you to a community cookbook, so I’m making up for it by giving you an extra-interesting one. The Barossa Valley is one of the world’s top wine-producing regions and it’s far too long since I visited it. My copy of the Barossa Cookery Book was produced by Barossa News Print, Tanunda (Tanunda is such a perfect name for a fantasy character - one day I shall invent a fantasy world using Aussie town names for all my characters, I swear). My copy is a little battered and well-used and it was one of the very first books of this kind that I ever owned.

You will be pleased to know that the book contains ‘1000 selected recipes from a district celebrated throughout Australia for the excellence of its cookery” and “Every recipe of proved merit and signed as such by the donors.” Also that the proceeds from the book went to the Tanunda Soldiers’ Memorial Hall. It cost 2 shillings and was a small brown paperback.

I have the fifth edition, and print numbers had reached 30,000 copies. One day I must find out just how many have been printed to date. It’s still very much in print, you see. The current edition is number 33, though the book’s now published by the Barossa Regional Gallery. It still has 160 pages and I bet it still has that rather fab recipe for green tomato pickle. My copy has pictures that look vaguely 1930s/40s (and one of the major editions was 1932) but apart from that, there’s no clear way of dating it. Unless Wartime Pudding recipe is indicative.

It’s such an important piece of culinary history, that it has an article all to itself in History Australia (v. 3 No. 2 December 2006). Angela Heuzenroeder talks about the cuisine in its context, discussing the fusion of German and English cultures in the cuisine. You can find the article here (it costs).

Tomorrow I’ll give you a couple of the recipes from this book. It’s hard to choose, so if you’ve got favourite recipes, just ask. Otherwise I might hunt out some biscuits or scones, to add to my little collection of biscuit and scone recipes. Also, maybe a jam recipe, so you can have your scones the traditional way, with jam and cream.

food history, Barossa, cookbook, cookery

Yesterday (or maybe the day before - term is about to start and my life is tangled) I gave you a link to Professor Martha Carlin’s food history syllabus. Today I would like to link you to her home page proper. This is because the background of food historians - what their other specialisations are, where they train, where they work, who they are - feed into their food history. Understanding of the past doesn’t operate in a vaccuum - the people who transmit the knowledge and the understanding to the rest of us are as important as the knowledge they transmit. Foodways are - after all - about people.

food history, Martha Carlin, food historians, foodways

I get asked quite frequently what university students study when they study food history. I don’t teach undergraduates (I teach evening classes - it’s part of the strange fiction writer/historian co-existence), but I found a rather nice syllabus on the web that tells you all you want to know. It’s a good course taught by an excellent scholar. For Australians, the closest you can get to this is in Adelaide.

I have my 1/2 of 1/8 of a Galloway and my freezer is full of interesting cuts of meat. Tonight I’m cooking up my share of the bones into broth and all the osso bucco. Next time we divide and 1/8 of a cow, Kate gets the osso bucco.

While I was out, I bought a couple of heirloom tomatoes. Black Russian and Golden Jubilee. The grower claimed they were hundreds of years old (not the tomatoes - the varieties), but my inner doubter is at work and I want more information. If anyone knows when these varieties first became popular, I would love to know.

You have just over a week to get your entries in to my competition. In case you’ve lost the rules, they are here. And that’s it for this very cold Sunday night - I might huddle by the heater till my broth is brewed.

The Lemon Meringue Pudding is one of the British/Australian equivalents of the Key Lime Pie. One day I might explore some of the meringue/fruit variants, because they’re extremely interesting. In the meantime, however, I thought you’d like one of my grandmother’s recipes. Personally, I find it too sweet, but then, I find pavlova too sweet.

Lemon Meringue Pudding

1 cup sugar, 2 lemons, 2 eggs, 2 heaped tablespoon cornflour, 1 pint water, 1 oz butter, salt.

Grate the peel and squeeze the juice of the lemons. Mix cornflour with a little water, and stir into the boiling water. Mix in sugar, lemon peel, juice and yolks of the eggs. Stir all in the pan till it thickens add butter. Pour into a buttered pie dish. Beat the white stiff; add 2 tablespoon castor sugar and bake till a pale brown. Serve at once. The beaten whites should be piled high on the top of pudding.

food history, lemon meringue pie, key lime pie, lemon meringue pudding

Not all good markets are French. What I love about videos by foreigners is that they’re often presented from the view of the foreigner and miss quite a lot of the local foodways evidence in plain sight:

I’m bored, so you need something Medieval. After all, I was a Medievalist long before I turned to food history.

One of my favourite food descriptions for the Middle Ages is in the documents that survive from Richard III’s coronation banquet. In the coronation papers, there’s information about several meals as well as records for the coronation itself. Most of these are fast meals ie meals for a fasting day (no meat). One meal, for instance, has fish and seafood ranging from salt fish, pike in soup, plaice with a sauce, to roast porpoise. There are also crabs and congers and lampreys. It reminds me that Medieval food for all the major religions was dominated by the calendar. On a fast day Christians avoid meat. On a Jewish fast day, you can’t eat at all. Just as well there aren’t nearly as many Jewish fast days as Christian!

The other thing that the fast menu shows is that Richard and his new court followed religious restrictions fairly strictly, but obviously without any great denial. Given how many times I come across the stereotype of the Middle Ages being a period of great privation, this is important (at least to me). Richard’s fast day food is luxurious, but does not breach any of the church rules concerning what can or can’t be eaten.

The coronation meal itself has three courses for Richard (and presumably his company), two courses for nobles dining elsewhere, and one course for everyone else. Everyone ate according to where they belonged in society.

The first course has a variety of fowl, including pheasant, cygnet, crane and capons. There is some meat (beef and mutton, for instance) and a little fish. There is a custard (which may well have been savoury, although the great split between sweet and savoury courses that we observe today was not generally a part of 15th century dining. There was a thick soup, fritters, and a subtlety. (More on the subtleties later.) Richard may not have eaten all the foods offered him, but would have selected portions from them. Gluttony, after all, was a deadly sin.

At first sight, vegetables are apparently lacking. But this is a big banquet, aimed at showing how sumptuous the royal court could be and aimed at indicating to everyone how very prosperous Richard was going to make England. And meat was the sign of prosperity. So the meat would have had flavouring and sauces, and its abundance was a positive sign to everyone that Richard was a good and generous bloke. In other words, the banquet was designed around the meat - vegetables were incidental.

The second course also has a bunch of roasts, but it also has meat done in a number of other ways. There is a jelly done up with a “device� (maybe a boar?), there is a peacock with the feathers making it look lifelike, stuffed venison pieces, and baked fish. What I find interesting is that, by and large, there is less pastry than I would have expected. One of the standards when people talk of medieval food is the abundance of pastry. In recipe books there are lots of pastry dishes. Again, Richard’s banquet demonstrates the luxury food, and maybe pastry wasn’t quite as abundant as a luxury.

Like the sauces, bread was taken as given. We have proof that bread, sauces, wafers, sweet nibbles were served that day, even though they are not on the menu. Think of menus at fine restaurants today. They often don’t list bread and butter, or breadsticks, or every condiment on the table.

As each course progresses, there are more sweet things, but even in the final course, there is a lot of meat (all with different flavourings, but a lot of meat). And with each course is a subtlety. In fact, even the other nobles get a subtlety for each course. Only the commons miss out.

Let me diverge for an instant and talk about subtleties. Like the amount of meat, they were proof that this was a special place and a special time. Subtleties were display pieces, sometimes for eating, sometimes not. Robert May, a 17th century cook, occasionally made his into big practical jokes (eg frogs jumping out onto ladies’ laps). The Sutton and Hammond papers give no indication of what they were on this occasion.

The feast for the other nobles was simpler. One course fewer, but also several dishes fewer in each course. More pastry, and more of the standard show dishes, like gilded meats. Rabbits and pike and veal and capons and geese and beef and mutton, or swans or porpoises or partridges. Still pretty impressive, but much easier to cook. Also, a lot cheaper.

The commons got some luxury food, but compared with the others, it was a poor table. Again, lots of meat - but how to celebrate without meat? In 19th century Russia, Jews felt that they had to get meat on the table for Friday night no matter how bad the week had been or how poor they were as their way of celebrating the Sabbath. Think of this emphasis on meat and banquets in terms of that. Lots of meat was proof that starvation was a very long way away, that you could afford to kill stock.

The commons ate frumenty with venison, by the way, beef, mutton, capons, “leche canell� which sounds like a gently spiced milk or custard, and custard.

Next time I get bored, I might give you a post on the provisioning for the feast.

Note: my chief source was AF Sutton and PW Hammond’s edition “The coronation of Richard III: the Extant Documents 1984.

food history, Middle Ages, Richard III, feast, banquet, frumenty, venison, leche canell, fast days, feast days, Robert May

Yesterday I cooked my grandmother’s macaroni cheese recipe. I cooked it again today, but with a slight difference.

The first time I stuck firmly to her recipe. It was tasty and filling and exactly what I needed on a cold and tired day.

The second time I changed the proportions. Normally this means adapting a recipe to modern taste, but I was curious to see what would happen if I adapted it to the taste of Jane Austen’s circles instead.

The flavour was better yesterday, which makes sense. This was the precise macaroni cheese of my childhood, after all, and my tastebuds probably remember it better than any other macaroni cheese in the known universe.

The adapted recipe was far more filling. I still feel stuffed, three hours after dinner. It’s amazing the difference a little more mustard and butter makes to the space food takes up in my stomach.

And that’s it. My great culinary history experiment for the week. The only other culinary history activity I’ve done all week is introduce an historical fiction writer to a few spices that were well-known in the Middle Ages. I bought some zedoary for myself at the same time.

PS Please excuse the picture - it’s midwinter and I needed something cheery.

food history, macaroni cheese, macaroni and cheese, zedoary, food of Jane Austen