Food History

I was going to take your travelling somewhere a bit different this afternoon. To the 1970s and England. Alas, we have no Beano. We have no Beano today. Maybe tomorrow.

I simply don’t have time before the thunder outside turns into dramatic weather, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow I’ll look through my 1970s British comics and give you the low-down on what food is in them. Some of it you know already, as one of the strips is Dennis the Menace (hence today’s picture). In the meantime, I’ll take you travelling somewhere else. (more…)

It does. The more storms pass nearby (whether they hit or not) the more comfort food we need. So what comfort food do you get from me today? It can’t be anything deep-fried, beacuse it isn’t long until deepfryweek. Chanukah is just a few days away, in fact, and I’m hiding the oil till then.

When in doubt, eat chocolate. Always. And always return to your grandmother’s 1950s cookery. Even though you weren’t even born then. Comfort food is not about logic, ever.

Chocolate Souffle

2 oz butter
½ oz flour
1 ½ oz chocolate
vanilla flavouring
3 eggs
1 gill milk
1 tablespoon castor sugar

Melt butter, add flour, add chocolate & milk, then sugar while on the fire, let cook. Beat in the yolks of eggs one at a time and vanilla. Beat white very stiff add the rest. Put into a greased souffle dish. Bake in a quick over for ½ hour. Serve with cream.

We’re about to get a massive thunderstorm, so I thought I should post now, while I can still get online. What does this mean for you? It means you get more of that amazing foodie travel guide by Algernon Bastard and his mate (um, I mean ‘mate’ as in the Aussie sense of the word, not ‘mate’ as in significant other - I would hate to confuse you). Since no-one has indicated a favourite place, I’m choosing something entirely at random. Well, as random as it comes when I’ve been waxing nostalgic about places I’ve visited. Tonight I’m nostalgic about Spain, quite obviously.

Seville (more…)

Today I have another interview for you. This one has a bit of a story behind it.

When I ran the competition, earlier in the year, someone called Gary put in an entry. I liked his writing style and so I chased up the link to his website (I like it when people make things easy for me!). He turned out to be doing some very interesting things indeed and when I complimented him on them, he was so modest that I found myself stumped. Who was he and where did he come from and how did he get to write such fascinating books and claim he didn’t know much? (more…)

Early summer in the mountains is lizardly.

Have you ever watched a lizard? It’s very still and very still and very still. You think it’s dead. Then all of a sudden it flicks out of sight.

We get sun and sun and sun and then we get a rapid-fire weather shift and the sun is out of sight. This would be a good thing, if I weren’t lucky enough to be gifted with weather sense. I’m drinking cold coffee to reduce the symptoms and I’m posting earlier than I normally would, just in case the storm stays long enough to prevent me getting online later. If there’s rain, the state of my head won’t matter. We really need the rain.

The coffee I’m drinking is from a tin. ‘Can’ in the US, both probably short for ‘tin cans’. Lead poisoning was an issue with early tins (more…)

I’m off to the Aussie goldfields in a few weeks for a writers’ retreat. I have some special guest posts lined up for then and of course I’ll be bringing just as much food history back with me as my brain can handle. As well as all this, I was wondering if any of you would like to go to your local markets or greengrocers (or whatever your local equivalent is) this week or the next. If you send me descriptions of what fruit and vegetables and other edibles you find, then I’ll post the descriptions in January - something for everyone to look forward to!

It’s really simple. Whererver you are in the world this fortnight, you go to the shops. You note the new season peaches or the preponderance of turkeys or the strange imports of emu from Australia. Make us hungry: tell us about the everyday food and the food that catches your eye. In January we’ll find out what everyone else has been seeing in the shops and we’ll shrink the world just a little bit.

I know some of you aren’t native English speakers. Send your lists anyway. If you’re worried about your grammar, let me know and I’ll silently correct it. If you don’t know the words in Australian English, then use the names you know.

I know it’s a busy time of year now and a quiet time then, but any emails I get (use the “contact me” link in the column on the right, under the “About Food History” description) we will all enjoy. And if you find any really, really interesting ingredients, you might spark a special post about its history. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about a specific ingredient, so let’s see what happens.

Tonight the air is so dense I can taste it. We’re about to get a thunderstorm.

This takes me back to a hot and dry holiday from my childhood. We ventured into country Victoria, dragging a caravan, and everywhere we went was thirsty. Then we hit the goldfields and there was an evening like this. Six of us sat crowded round the table after dinner and we were grumpy and missing home.

It wasn’t that we didn’t love the goldfields. My mother was a geology teacher and I adore history and we’re all a bit foodie: the Victorian goldfields should have been perfect. But three teens and one near-teen and two parents crowded into a tiny van on a hot sticky evening was foul. We played Scrabble and I was thrown out for using words nobody knew.

I went to my little pup tent and then the skies broke. I lay there and watched the lightning and the rain overwhelm my little tent and I was almost perfectly happy.

The next day we went to El Dorado.

It was inevitable that when I saw the chapter on El Dorado County in California’s Golden Harvest that your recipe was going to come from there. It makes me wonder, though, if all the nineteenth century goldfields have their own El Dorado? I’d love to travel from one to the other, exploring the food and the geology and the history. Pity I no longer have a tent.

Within El Dorado, I chose The Georgetown Divide, because Laura lives there. She says the hills are beautiful. Most of the towns there started life as mining camps, which is how my El Dorado started, too.

I wish I remembered what we ate the night before El Dorado, but tonight you’re getting Lemon Chicken.

Lemon Chicken

3 tbs olive oil
4 chicken breasts, skinned
1 tsp dried parsley flakes
½ tsp dried whole thyme
¼ tsp salt
1 cup dry white wine
3 tbs lemon juice
¼ tsp pepper
¼ tsp paprila

Heat oil in heavy skillet until hot; add chicken and cook 5 minutes on either side. Place chicken in an 8 inch square baking dish and discard drippings. Add parsley, thyme, salt and wine to skillet and bring to a boil. Pour over chicken; sprinkle with lemon juice, paprika and pepper. Cover and bake a 400 degrees for 2 minutes or until tender.

And all this has made me think about goldfields and about the time of year. I might have another post in a few minutes.

Sorry everyone. I meant to do you that post on California before all my election party guests turned up because I knew I would be too tired afterwards.

The votecount has just been completed for the night (Aussie election counts stop at midnight, which I’ve never quite understood) and the broad results are in and the new government has been declared and I sat down to write you a post and realised that all I had the energy for was an apology. There’s something very cathartic about a major change in government. How can I just have realised this? Drinking champagne may also be a factor in my brain’s unwillingness to work properly, I do admit.

I’ll tell you what my party attendees ate tonight (I brought some and they brought some and all of us ate both dinner and supper out of it) and tomorrow I’ll give you that post about California. You do need to understand that voting in Australia is compulsory, which means that even souls like me who are not affiliated with any particular party feel very strongly about elections and take them very seriously (and people from other countries are horrified on a perfectly regular basis that we have compulsory voting). I do try to keep my politics away from this blog because I believe just as strongly that there are times and places for political convictions and rants and times and places for subjects that unite people rather than splinter them.

So, to help with the unification front, what did we eat tonight?

Little chicken pastries (I bought elegant little chicken sausage rolls from my neighbouring chicken shop and cut them into even more elegant tiny pastries and then baked them), baked samosas, pumpkin dip and tsatsiki and a pesto dip. Corn chips and capsicum and cucumber for the dips. Chocolate covered coffee beans, almond biscuits from China, chocolate, preserved sweet potato strips, pumpkin seeds marinated in tamari sauce, giant green olives stuffed with feta, roma cocktail tomatoes, melon and mango cream cheese.

Now I feel really mean - I’ve listed all those foods and I’m not giving you a single recipe until tomorrow! I hope this picture will help assuage your hunger.

Being an Aussie, I don’t have Thanksgiving. I can give thanks for wonderful readers, though, and celebrate (a tad late) with a wonderful bit of foodie Americana.

Laura sent me a good book. It’s a regional semi-tourist guide, semi-cookbook. California’s Golden Harvest Travel and Cooking Guide has all sorts of importance to someone like me. Firstly, I tend to forget that California is regional, because internationally it gets presented as all a bit the same. This is true of many places – how often do you think of Australia or South Africa or Canada as being just a little bit uniform? No country is all the same in all areas, and though some regions have more distinctive differences than others because of specifics in their history.

The thing is, I’m an outsider to California. One day in the State cannot and does not equal specialist knowledge. Tourist books such as this are a godsend, therefore. (more…)

I asked Cindy Renfrow if I could interview her for my interview series and I emailed her some questions. Instead of normal interview answers, she sent me a letter for you, so I’m going to give you her thoughts without even a proper introduction. Explaining who she is would be gilding the lily, anyhow, since she explains things so beautifully clearly. Needless to say, I own one of her books.

“Hello!

My name is Cindy Renfrow and I’m the author of A Sip Through Time, A Collection of Old Brewing Recipes, and Take a Thousand Eggs or More, a Collection of 15th century recipes. I’ve always been interested in foods of other cultures, (more…)

This is a wonderful thing and you need to see the article about it! I need to see the actual recipes. I’ve added it to my long list of desirable books (speaking of which, the wonderful Laura has just sent me a cool Californian book, and annotated it ! - I’ll introduce it to all of you tomorrow, perhaps). Here’s an article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/dining/21cook.html?_r=2&ref=dining&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

I’ll do a proper post later today. I have a graet interview for you from someone who does particularly interesting things in the world of food history (actually I have 3 interviews, but I’m going to ration them to one every few days).

I’ve decided I really love being a (small) part of Project Blog. What’s not to love? I get to share recipes with deserving people, and fellow-bloggers say really nice things about me in an effort to induce you to win my recipes (go there and see!).

I feel I ought to say ‘mwa-ha-ha’ instead of ‘welcome,’ though, to all Project Blog folks who are dropping in to suss out winning historical facts. I’ve been in contemplative mood these last few days so you all have to read back a bit. Unless your useful fact is that I’ve fooled the world and don’t actually have a sense of humour? Or that Aussies don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We could roast a turkey in honour of this Saturday’s Federal election, I guess, except that not a soul is going to want to roast a turkey with the outside temperature being thirty-five degrees. (trust me, you don’t want that in Fahrenheit.)

So, what food history am I giving to you today? (more…)

Readers have made several important comments in the last few days, some through email and some in the comments section. If I have written a post you find interesting (I can dream!), then it’s worth going back after a few days sometimes and seeing what comments readers have made, simply because some of the best insights come from you out there (I keep wanting to say ‘you lot’, but it’s not respectful).

Yesterday, Julie said, (more…)

I’m madly trying to finish a conference paper. I suspect I’ll get halfway through before the storm hits tonight.

Something just struck me, though, and I thought it was worth sharing. My generation can cook (mostly without help from recipe books) at least 300 of my grandmother’s recipes. The same recipes that you’ve been enjoying. Some of them aren’t even written down in her notebook, but when we compiled our notes and thoughts and memories we added them.

If you add to that our other cooking, that’s an awful lot of dishes we don’t precisely use every day. I could cook a different lunch and dinner a day for a year if I wanted to. Except I don’t want to. And some of the variants would be quite small.

I have 150 words to write and about ten minutes before the storm hits. While I write, don’t ponder on the number of family recipes some families have. Instead think about whether or not having all those recipes at one’s fingertips actually means we can cook…. maybe I creatively burn those different lunches and dinners.

The paths that food travel show where people get their fresh food from. You can draw circles on a map and find out just how cohesive a region is by where they get their food. That marketing is a major force in social cohesion for many people.

In the Middle Ages (more…)