Food History

I’m in the middle of all sorts of serious stuff for my other selves. The historian is editing a significant Medievalish article, for instance, and the science fiction/fantasy writer is judging an award thingummy along with a zillion other judges all of whom are wiser and read faster and think more deeply than I do (at least at this moment – tomorrow I hope to be more on top of things and then I’ll feel less overawed). What this means is that my day has run out of time. I can hardly fit cooking dinner into it, much less contemplating how sour cherries can be put alongside scotch steak in an historically correct and palate-tempting fashion.

I’ll be back in the food history zone soon, I promise. I have a paper to write in the next few weeks, after all, and one that has already made some people in my vicinity jumpy. It will be presented on my behalf in Sydney in November, the day after Australia’s Federal elections. At that moment I will find out that nothing I do is ever quite as controversial as I think it might be and that my life is uncomplicated and simple and really very straightforward. Then I’ll sit down and write a fairy tale about castles in Spain, to reflect the depths of my delusions.

This is a very long way of saying that you need something charming and entertaining to make up for my strange state of mind. And it’s no use telling me I’m always in a strange state of mind, because people tell me that about twice a week and it makes no difference.

I have rice paddies for you, as you’ve never seen them before. Food can be art, you see. And it can be pretty ordinary to look at, as well. Click on the link for the amazing and wondrous and look at the picture for the more mundane. And if you need more food in your day, it’s about time I introduced you to another food blog (I might start doing more of this – one can never have too much food or food history in one’s life). What’s cool about this blog is that it shows you the sort of food that leaves cool wrappers and strange mementos to tantalise the food historians of the future. I can’t get more theoretical than that today, I’m afraid. Editing beckons.

Ingredients as art.

Today I was extraordinarily lucky. Thanks to the kindness of a friend, I helped celebrate Spain’s National Day. (more…)

Today I have a cold.

Actually, I’ve had a cold since last Thursday, but I saw it coming, knew I was going to be travelling to Sydney and I packed extra tissues and tablets and I dealt with it. I posted a bunch of things in advance (eg this) so that you wouldn’t be inconvenienced while I was cavorting on the beach. As it was, I didn’t even see a beach, though I did get a bunch of old comics from Supanova (a pop culture convention) and I plan to mine them for what they say about food, sometime in the future.

I didn’t explore food history apart from the comics this time in Sydney. I ate pizza and Chinese takeaway and roast chicken. My friends and I ate Italian pastries, but we didn’t explore any strange food byways. It was a research trip for the science fiction side of me, to be honest, and the only food research I did (apart from those comics) was finding out more of the family history contexts for a paper I’m writing.

Now I’m back from Sydney and the cold is doing its best to annoy me before I shrug it off. I have sniffles and miseries and general ick.

So what does the person with cold give to those happy souls who are cold-free? Well, one of the small things that came out of my conversations with my cousin is my grandmother’s (she of the 1950s handwritten book you’ve been enjoying) particular way of cooking potatoes. This is pure comfort food, the sort none of us make any more because it makes us think of heart attacks and obesity.

Roast potatoes

Peel your spuds. Take a knife and make a series of slits that reach at least half way into the potato. You end up with a series of serrations and with the remaining (uncut) potato holding it all together firmly.

Now, this is where your heart may protest. Make sure your potato is well covered in fat (preferably suet). This especially includes the slits. Put your potatoes in to roast, preferably in with a roasting chicken or piece of beef. Every now and again spoon the juices from the pan over those potatoes. Cook until they are dreamily crisp and fragrant.

Yesterday I introduced you to a cookbook. Today you need recipes from it, right? Of course! And the particular recipes that will much improve the quality of your life are scones and biscuits. Scones are what the Country Women’s Association of Australia is most famous for, after all. (more…)

You have just 2 more days to send me your address if you want a Food History magnet. So far only one person from outside Australia has asked for one. Use the contact button and send me your address (which i will delete just as soon as I’ve used it to address the envelope, I promise) and you might be the only person in your state, country or even continent to possess one!

Today’s book is another Australian iconographic one.

The CWA is famous for its scones and tea approach to communal activity. I’ll find you a couple of scone and biscuit recipes tomorrow, I think, to add to our general collection. Their location in the Australian popular belief about the CWA is quite clear (more…)

Today I thought you’d like a section of a rather older cookery book than the ones we’ve been looking at recently (though not as old as this. This is from A New System of Domestic Cookery, Formed Upon Principles of Economy, and Adapted to the Use of Private Families. by Maria Eliza Rundell, 1807. I believe it was originally published by “A Lady.” I particularly like the last bit - her advice applies to so many recipes! (more…)

I’ve been terribly, terribly negligent recently. Between Regency cooking and eating and visits to farms and general laziness, I haven’t given you a single one of my grandmother’s recipes. (more…)

This is the second book my friend Kaaron brought me from Fiji.

Carolyn Niethammer’s American Indian Food and Lore has some similarities to Kavasch’s Native Harvests. The biggest is that it also focuses on recognising foodstuffs through botanical descriptions and pencil sketches. Or maybe the biggest is that Niethammer has taken great care with her research.

I particular adore (more…)

Today is the calm before the storm. You know, one of those days when you have things to do and enough of them so you ought to be quietly rather busy for about ten hours, but you know that tomorrow is going to be positively frantic and the day after that improbably long and busy and you just don’t want to push things? Well, today is that day.

What do I do on days like this? I invent recipes, of course, using sound historical principles. I could argue (to make everything look relevant to food history) that this is another example of how recipes change over time and new classics become established, but me being lazy doesn’t create classic recipes.

The other thing I could do is give you an entirely irrelevant foodie link to someone else’s blog, to throw you and make you think that I know what I’m, doing. I suspect that’s a good idea and I’m making sure that the link is more historical than this post.

Mind you, the fact that today my mind is less-than-focussed doesn’t mean that my cooking wasn’t historically inspired. (more…)

Food History turns One on Friday. To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I’ll post Food History fridge magnets to the first 10 people who cleverly locate the contact button and send me a postal address before next Tuesday. It doesn’t matter where you live, Australia Post can find you if you give me an address. After Tuesday the blog will be too old for such frivolous behaviour.

PS I need to add something important. When the envelopes containing your magnets are addressed, I will delete the email containing them. In other words, I’m not harvesting addresses for evil purposes or supplying them to a third party or anything like that. I guess I could if anyone really wants, but honestly, it’s too much effort - I’d rather delete the addresses and maintain your privacy.

There was a lot more to the Open Day than the conversations I reported yesterday, but they helped me fit what some farmers are experimenting with. Michael and Elizabeth will visit me one night for dinner, so Michael can look at some of my history books: he believes in learning everything and applying the best and most appropriate of it – he has an old Mercedes truck that runs entirely on the leftover oil from fish and chips shops, carefully filtered by himself: his research appears to be working. And both of them are foodies. The only thing I’ve promised is not to serve them their own meat!

So much else happened on the farm that day. I could draw historical parallels or talk about local distribution of quality produce and how it’s restoring some of our older food choices. Michael has promised me that real boiling chickens will be available in the not-too-distant future, for instance, which means I can make the amazingly wonderful chicken soup of my childhood – the Jewish penicillin that appears in so many US jokes. So much and already this post is long. When I add pictures it will be very long indeed. That’s why I’ve cut it in half, inconvenient though that may be.

It’s worth the long post and the wait. Really, really worth it. Think of all the cookbooks and recipes and ingredients I talk about on this blog. Then think about where they come from. It’s not a stable and permanent place, where our ingredients come from. Farms and produce change over time and place, just as everything else does. They affect what we eat because they affect what’s available.

I need to visit more farms, I guess. If I don’t though, Mountain Creek Farm was a really excellent place to go to remind me that you can’t leave the producers out of the food history chain. Especially it reminded me that farming philosophies touch all our lives, whether we know it or not.

food history, Mountain Creek Farm

Life becomes much more interesting when we actually notice the world around us, especially the rural world. Last Saturday was a reminder of that for me. I’ve always been a city-dweller and I need (just every now and again) a nudge to remind me of reality.

There is a movement in Australia – linked to the Slow Food movement – to make farming styles more responsive to the needs of the land and the needs of the animals being farmed. Two friends and I visited one of these farms on Saturday, when it had an open day. Kate took some photographs specifically for this blog, so you can take a look at what we saw. I have to spread it over two days, because I didn’t realize how long this post would become. I’ve decided to be unrepentant about it, too, which is entirely wrong of me.

Last Saturday three of us visited Mountain Creek Farm, a small holding in the Australian Capital Territory. You can’t have big holdings in the ACT – it’s not a big place (actually Mountain Creek Farm is just across the border, but why spoil a good one-liner with reality?). Kate and I discovered them when we went to a local Farmers’ Market.

They sell Belted Galloway beef. It’s some of the best meat I’ve ever had. We wanted to go to the open day to find out more – and to take advantage of the barbecue lunch. Kate’s significant other came along, so there were three of us watching and looking and feeling very citified. Actually, I was the only one feeling citified.

The first thing that struck me was that, though the cows were undeniably cute and we were told stories of their doings that made several of them sounds like rather unruly teens, this didn’t turn us off eating meat for life. I was looking to find out why and I found the answer in Elizabeth and Michael, the farm’s owners.

While he was cooking the meat, Michael and I had a long talk about how careful he was to never take one animal only to the abattoir, so that they were never alone. He explained that he always booked the slot first thing Monday morning, partly to minimize chemicals, but mostly to make sure that the animals had happy lives for as long as they possibly could. This sounds hokey in print, but it works.

We talked about Peter Singer (who has apparently outgrown some of the stranger stunts he pulled when my father was his dentist) and discussed ethical farming.

Elizabeth and I talked about ethical farming from another angle. We spoke of the bushfires and their destruction. Of land-use and the need to be ready to face whatever future the climate brings.

Even now, still in the longest drought on record (those rains I was so happy about went far too quickly to actually break the drought), Mountain Creek Farm has a decent water source. They use it wisely, and plan for long-term viability as well as for the animals in their care.

food history, farming, Mountain Creek Farm, Slow Food, ethical food, climate change

I have a shocking case of insomnia, so I’m doing Tuesday’s post now and I’ll do Monday’s post late Monday and then everyone will be entirely confused except me. I never get confused. And yes, this is one of those occasions when truth lies in every sentence but the last one. I did intend to write a Tuesday post on a book Kaaron Warren (horror writer extraordinaire) brought me from Fiji and I didn’t intend to get insomnia.

Let me avoid more confusion and move to cool stuff.

(more…)

For years I’ve kept my teaching collection of herbs and spices in any container that happened to be round. This made it difficult to remember where the holes were, both in the specimen bags I use* and in the range of herbs and spices. When I was in Melbourne recently, I found a lovely antique tin that will fit about 60 sachets. Today I transferred most of my collection to the tin and heralded the new age of photography with this picture.

The new age of photography comes from the cameras of my friends Trudi and Kate and Susan, and you will see their work gracing this page on interesting occasions henceforth. In fact, there should be at least one tomorrow, as Kate took pictures during our farm visit yesterday.

Trudi and Kate and Susan all know what they’re doing with cameras and have better cameras than I have, so my blog will look much prettier soon. I’ll introduce each new picture as I use it, as there are stories attached to all of them.

Today, however, there are details you need to know about my teaching collection of spices. I only have 37 sachets in good order, and another 16 things to add when I get more sachets. The range of ingredients is just enough to show the progression from Roman to Medieval to eighteenth century Western European seasoning, with also some of the North American changes in place and time.

In my dream teaching collection, I would have about 50 more, but finding them in Australia with its quarantine rules, is rather hit and miss. I have lists to work from now so when I spot something I’m mising I know to punce on it. I’ve also started adding Australian natives to the collection.

I realise this is more interesting to me than to anyone else. Except that the tin is pretty, and relates directly to food history, being something food was bought in maybe 70 years ago.

Tomorrow I’ll do you a substantial post on Mountain Creek Farm, in abject apology for my tin-obsession tonight. Then there are some more books to introduce you to, and some recipes from my grandmother. Until then, you need a better picture of my peacock tin. (more…)