Add a bit of time, and the tempting ads look less tempting - they don’t fit our foodways anymore. Or maybe they never did, and the advertisers were just hopeful.
If I had more time, I would analyse this further, but time is playing hide and seek with me right now.
I’m not much good at giving the latest buzz and finding out what’s new in the world of food history. It’s about time I reminded you of the wide world of food history and food historians and sent you to a site where you can find out more, if that’s where your inclination lies. I’m not going away. I will continue to blog my food obsessions and my research and thoughts and teaching and lots of recipes, same as ever, but if you want just a bit more, this is a good place to start.
Warrigal greens (tetragonia tetragonoides) are also known as New Zealand spinach, warrigal and, rarely these days, Botany Bay greens - I guess Botany Bay is very built-up these days and doesn’t have much green (sorry, that was an excuse of a bad joke, hardly worth the trouble to read).
What are warrigal greens, when you find tham in a shop? Think of small leaves that have the green of spinach and a rather iron aftertaste. It makes a great Aussie pesto with macadamia nuts, and cooks well in pastries and anywhere you use spinach. I like to very, very lightly stir-fry this bush food, and get rid of the slight metallic taste with nutmeg and maybe a bit of chilli and kecap asin.
It’s cold, cold midwinter in Canberra and the only cure for cold, cold midwinter is macaroni cheese. Once you’ve had the homemade variety (from my grandmother’s fifties’ notebook) you may never bother with a box again.
Macaroni Cheese
¼ lb macaroni
¼ lb cheese
a few breadcrumbs
a little made mustard
cayenne
1 oz butter
Boil the macaroni till tender. Drain well and put a layer of it on a flat dish, and sprinkle a few breadcrumbs over it, then a little cayenne and salt and mustard some tiny pieces of butter and a spoonful of milk then grated cheese, then another layer of macaroni etc, until all the ingredients are used. Sprinkle cheese and breadcrumbs over the top. Bake in a quick oven for 20 – 25 minutes. Serve very hot.
PS The picture is of my other cure for winter blues. And yes, it’s not your imagination that you’re getting more of my grandmother’s recipes this winter - I’m away a lot and have had to resort to posting in advance, which makes wider-ranging posts hard to do. I’ll be back to my regular schedule in August.
If there are any types of posts or any subjects you’ve missed over winter, now’s the time to email (using the contact details on this page) and make your needs known. Also, if I promised you a post on something and have forgotten, now’s the time to remind me so I can crank up my brain.
Tourist brochures are useful sources of food history (used judiciously, like all sources) and even recipes. Here’s an example:
It’s a comfort food kinda day in Canbera. Nicole Murphy, the Chair of Conflux is visiting me this evening and - given she’s the kind soul who is running the Regency Gothic Banquet - I thought I’d ask her for a comforting recipe from her childhood. Think Sydney/Canberra, not too long ago. Think cold nights and tired days. Nicole’s mother would make pancake after pancake in the electric pan - they would put their favourite toppings on.
Now, I’ve already blogged pancakes, so I need to find you another recipe. Nicole’s mother also made spag bol (the Aussie version of spaghetti bolognese), so here it is.
Spag bol sauce
Brown onions in some oil. Add beef mince and brown. Add tomato paste, tomato sauce, worcestershire sauce and mixed Italian herbs. Add a little water and let simmer until the sauce thickens.
food history, spaghetti bolognese, spag bol, Nicole Murphy, Canberra, Conflux, mixed Italian herbs
Just a little extra today. A vintage food ad was mentioned on Boing Boing and I thought you might enjoy it. It combines so many of my interests into one small package: speculative fiction, food and history.
And some extra to add to the extra:
food history, Boing Boing, speculative fiction, advertisement, Jolly Green Giant The Kingsmen
Don’t forget my competition about a morsel of your family history and its delectable recipes. It’s my very first competition - it would be kinda nice to get entries :).
The prizes are cool, but sharing food stories with other people is even cooler. Closing date for entries is the end of July, but the earlier you get one in, the more time you have to write another :).
or How not to test historic recipes
1. When checking out different recipes for quince cheese, do not forget to make especial note that most of them result in a hot splattery mass at a crucial stage of the process.
2. When that exceedingly hot mixture does an exceedingly good job at searing your right hand, do not forget to turn the electricity off before starting first aid.
If you have successfully failed at both steps one and two (as I did when cooking quince cheese under the influence of a low grade infection), the quince cheese may well have caramelised a bit. Mine did. I had a little layer of quince toffee at the bottom of the pan. It hurt to stir and the mixture was at least three minutes from being ready, so I gave up on quince cheese and a couple of friends have been the fortunate recipients of toffee-flavoured quince sauce.
My first aid looks as if it worked - I should get full use of my hand back tomorrow (all those dishes to wash!!) but I have learned my lesson about cooking certain types of dishes while running a fever.
If anyone wants to test the sequence of events themselves (the quince sauce turned out rather delicious, after all) I can provide a recipe. it won’t be the actual ingredients I used, because I was curious about the effects of raw sugar on quince, but it’s a place to start. And you already know all the things not to do.
A crucial path into our foodways:
There is great happiness to be found in archaeology. Archaeologists can find stuff that fits alongside the literary evidence for what people ate and how they cooked it to give us a more complete picture of ancient lives. Sometimes the amazing work of patient scholars reaches the popular press, and we can all share in the joy of discovery.
Shrimp paste is a brownish reddish blackish paste very important to much South East Asian cooking. In its current form it’s quite recent, as the chilli in it must come after the European discovery of the Americas.
In Indonesian it’s terasi, in Malay balachan. There are Vietnamese, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian and even Filippino varieties. It’s used as a seasoning and also as a base for many soup dishes and stews.
To give a European flavour to this entry, the Greek word for shrimp is garides, which is very similar to the Turkish (there are strong historical reasons for this, which keep neither country very happy).
More afternoon tea snacks from the fifties, courtesy my grandmother’s cookbook. These are dangerously addictive.
Cheese Straws
2 oz grated cheese, 2 oz breadcrumbs, 2 oz flour, 2 oz butter, salt and cayenne.
Mix roll thin cut into fingers and bake a pale brown.
PS They don’t look like croissants - I used to make them and croissants when I was a teenager, however, and always associate the one recipe with the other.
Another delicious video to start your weekend properly:
The chef has examined our menu. I wasn’t there, but the Conflux chair used the word ‘excited’ to describe his reaction. The head chef at a major hotel gets excited about a menu? This suggests to me that the banquet is going to be very, very good :). The moment he’s adjusted it to reality, I’ll post it here. We get to dine in two and a half months.
By ‘adjusted to reality’ I mean that I’m not a chef and all the food history in the world won’t make up for a dish that causes problems - we’re expecting that he will fix the menu so it works for cooking and service and costing. What his excitement means is it will still be authentic and fabulous. He has a history of only making the adjustments that are essential and keeping to the heart and spirit of a menu. I’ve never met him (I’m a bit shy - it feels cheeky to give him menus and recipes when he’s forgotten more about food than I’ll ever know), but I like working with him.
People who attend the sort of feast at science-fiction conventions where turkey and potatoes ‘represent’ Medieval food, eat your heart out :). Not that eating one’s heart is a part of early nineteenth century English cuisine (in case you were wondering).
food history, Conflux, Regency Gothic, banquet, menu, recipe tests, Canberra, English history
A few herbs, a pinch of spice and foods of the past create your perfect foodie recipe at Food History. Expand your palate with everything from hot scones to hot websites without leaving your computer. At Food History there's a gourmet’s delight of food, health, history, and an amazing side of mushrooms. From holiday food customs to any number of fabulous recipes, you can find out anything and everything about your favorite tasty tidbits.
Food History Author(s)
» Gillian-Polack
