Food History

Do you remember the book by Felicity Pulman - the first two parts of the Janna Mysteries? Perfect reading for teenage girls, lovers of the Middle Ages, lovers of mystery and anyone else who enjoys a good read? Well, she has kindly given me a copy to give away. Comment on any post by or about her by February 23* and you will be in the running. You want a link back to one of her posts? Maybe I’ll give it to you.

Make sure your comment has a valid email address.

*Launch date of the next book in the series, Willows for Weeping.

Today was the day the photographer came into my rather messy flat and took shots for Sunday’s Canberra Times. He rang 40 minutes early and said he would be there in five minutes (oh, how I wish tradies did this!) and I asked him if I could have ten and he gave me fifteen. This meant I could finish my block of work, which was a very good thing.

I am now much photographed. I now have a table full of food history paraphernalia.

The photographer was very good and very professional and dealt with my unphotogenic self with patience and good humour. It was interesting that he put to the side unusual things that looked modern-style commercial or plastic but kept quite common things that were a bit more colourful. This means that I can lay bets on the photo having my tin with its many spices or my antique teapot and the moustache cup. I didn’t need to introduce him to the moustache cup, you see – he introduced himself and got me to hold it.

What were the things he didn’t want in the picture? The hand washing implement (very Jewish). If I had a silver or brass one it might have been different, but mine’s a pretty purple plastic so he put it to one side. He didn’t want the pack of Community Coffee or the Colman’s mustard advertisement, either. And he was regretful that my facsimiles of the Virginia Gazette wouldn’t come out, though he did use them as background. He also used as background my reproduction 17th century coffee cup, my 1950s salt and pepper shakers, my Food history handout and an empty container of Gundowring icecream.

What was curious was that he noticed I was more relaxed when I held a teapot and a cup. Funny the things that relax us, even a little.

Now I’m relaxing more than a little. I really, really hate pictures of myself and they’re inevitable. I’ve learned over the years that the ones to hate least are the ones by newspaper photographers. They tend to know their stuff and get pictures that are more comfortable to live with. I won’t be truly relaxed until Sunday, when I can see myself staring out of the page or (maybe, if I’m lucky) see the article with no picture. I don’t think there’ll be no picture, though.

I’ll report back, I think, just to tell you if the Gundowring Icecream container made it into the final cut. I’m drinking some of my Community Coffee in apology to it for being left out. And now I must get back to the rest of my life – the small flurry of excitement is over.

PS This picture of the cup is by Donna, not the Canberra Times photographer, just in case you were wondering.

I’m in the mood for doh-re-mi. Or should that be dough-re-mi? I want to sing “Let’s start at the very beginning.” It’s a very fine place to start, you see.

Actually, I don’t have a beginning for election cakes. My research wasn’t quite serious enough to provide me with one. What it did, however, was give me the perfect place to start. The beginning place of most people who look into US food history. Yes, I’m talking about Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches by Miss Leslie (not for the first time, either).

Miss Leslie’s book is of undoubted importance, so hers is the first election cake recipe I’ll give you. I used the 1840 edition, for those who care about such things (I can’t be the only one who always notes down edition details, can I?)

Election cake

Make a sponge (as it is called) in the following manner: − Sift into a pan two pounds and a half of flour; and into a deep plate another pound. Take a second pan, and stir a large table - spoonful of the best West India molasses into five jills or two tumblers and a half of strong fresh yeast; adding a Jill of water, warm, but not hot. Then stir gradually into the yeast, &c. the pound of flour that you have sifted separately. Cover it, and let it set by the fire three hours to rise. While it is rising, prepare the other ingredients, by stirring in a deep pan two pounds of fresh butter and two pounds of powdered sugar, till they are quite light and creamy; adding to them a table - spoonful of powdered cinnamon; a tea - spoonful of powdered mace; and two powdered nutmegs. Stir in also half a pint of rich milk. Beat fourteen eggs till very smooth and thick, and stir them gradually into the mixture, alternately with the two pounds and a half of flour which you sifted first. When the sponge is quite light, mix the whole together, and bake it in buttered tin pans in a moderate oven. It should be eaten fresh, as no sweet cake made with yeast is so good after the first day. If it is not probable that the whole will come into use on the day it is baked, mix but half the above quantity.

The owner of the Carnival of Australia loves my blog and is becoming a grandmother. Two very good reasons to pay her a visit. (No, this is not the regular post of the day - this is a cool little extra - yes, there will be election cakes later. Really. Truly. Just because it’s sweltering outside doesn’t mean I don’t want to think about food today. Really. Truly.)

Three bits of news, mainly of interest to people who live in or near Canberra. I’ve added some excruciating jokes to keep non-Canberrans amused, though, because I’m in that sort of mood.

First of all, there will be an article of interest in the Canberra Times this Sunday. If there’s a picture of me with it you can use it to improve your dart-throwing skills. There may well be a picture, since a photographer is coming to visit me on Thursday afternoon. I plan to introduce the photographer to my moustache cup “Photographer – moustache cup; moustache cup – Photographer” because I think they may deal well together.

I don’t know what will be in the article, though I made sure to mention death-dealing molasses and suicidal gourmands when I was interviewed. The interview started off about my teaching in general, but it soon turned to food, as almost everything in my life does right now.

Secondly, Edible History, the food history course I’m teaching at the Australian National University starting 21 February is completely booked out. How about that for a totally useless announcement? By the time I told you about it, it was already too late to book. It’s a happy announcement though. It’s every educator’s dream to have courses that are much-enjoyed.

Thirdly, because Edible History has booked out so very early, the ANU decided to offer it a second time, starting 1 May. You can be absolutely certain that I will have all sorts of new ideas and enthusiasms for the second course, even though it will use the same handbook as the first.

Both courses will, of course include a formal introduction for my students. “Students – moustache cup; moustache cup – students.” They will also include a brand new element to my theory of the history of coffee, one which I shan’t say anything about till I’ve taught it at least once. After all, these hordes of food history enthusiasts need something more than a formal introduction to a moustache cup.

There is so much talk around about the US elections. They’re going to be with us for most of this year, too. Rather than ignore them, I thought it would be fun to treat them as an adjunct to food history. After all, the US is probably the only country where the results of the elections affect the rest of the world so very much.

I’m not going to tally votes or discuss policies. I would like to, but this isn’t the right blog for that (I heard that sigh of relief from most readers – it was such a big sigh of relief that it crossed continents and oceans). What I’m going to do is sample various historic US cookbooks and find their recipes for election cakes. I might even find out what other politics emerges in those cookbooks, for the minority of you who didn’t heave a sigh of relief. Either way, we’re not talking modern politics.

I’ll be watching the vote count later in the year, because my best friend and I always do an online check of the world’s level of sanity. Here, though, you’ll find recipes and places where foodways intersect politics.

Politics and foodways have natural meeting points. Polling booths in Australia often sport a sausage sizzle, which is usually a fundraiser for a local school or a local community organisation. Parties and individuals fundraise with food and cookbooks and all sorts of exciting foodie things. If any of you have cookbooks sold at election time, please email me, and I’ll mention your book as part of this new series on election food.

Election food. There’s so much of it. Conventions can have food, and caucuses. Party meetings can have food and post election get-togethers. I can’t promise to explore all of these. I can promise the historical cookbooks and other curious stuff as the occasion arises. It’s going to be fun. Even if you hate politics, some of the cakes are scrumptious. Politics can bring happiness. Sometimes.

Today was market day. The local farmers’ markets have been going for a few months now and I have been every few weeks and everyone seems to know me. They can’t always sort out food history from food technology, but they know me and will explain who I am and why I ask strange questions to anyone who happens to be near.

The maker of pâtés and rillettes sent a message today that there were “pork-free products for your Jewish friend.” I rolled up to see what he was referring to and it turned out to be pure duck rillettes. They taste very northern French and the maker, I thought, was Vietnamese. Just shows you should always ask people their background, because he’s Belgian. I know about the similarities between Belgian and Normandy pâtés and rillettes, but not a thing about the differences. Next time I go to the market I need to ask him some questions. (He knows his stuff – that duck was very good and just as rich as it ought to be – we had it with lunch.)

On the vegetable front, there was some very bad news: the wonderful purveyor of heritage carrots had his whole crop wiped out by a hailstorm. There will be a new crop in a few weeks, but in the meantime he has to weather $100,000 worth of damage. It’s bad for him, and it’s also a salutary reminder of what we no longer have to put up with.

A famine in, say, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance was typically regional (like that hailstorm). A bigger event with wider destruction could wipe out crops in a wider area (the potato famine in Ireland in the nineteenth century is a terribly depressing example of this) but for every big famine, there were maybe dozens of little ones, chronicled locally but not reported elsewhere. I have a list of some of them for the Middle Ages (put together from work by French scholars) but it’s woefully inadequate. We just don’t have reports on every famine that happened until very recently.

These days we may be guilty of neglect (due to modern communications we tend to be aware of famines, but only a very few people move to do something about them) but we have completely different transport and distribution to one hundred and fifty years ago and earlier. If the major root crop disintegrates for one area, food can be brought in from elsewhere. Australia is emerging (probably may be emerging – I’m guilty of wishful thinking) from one of the worst droughts in recorded Australian history. Farmers have gone bankrupt, but no-one local has starved to death from it.

The patterns of not finding food are historically radically different now from what they once were. There was always politics involved in famines – who would help whom and why never quite fades from the picture. These days, though, politics is more important and regional production less. The underlying structure of food production has changed, and our lives with it.

It’s Australia Day. Well, it was Australia Day until 44 minutes ago. The thing is, I didn’t post French recipes on Bastille Day (I don’t think I did, anyhow) or American Recipes on 4 July, or any other recipes on any other national day. So I won’t type out Australia day recipes for you here. What would I give you if I did? A selection of potato salads and some discussion of how the mayo got replaced by yoghourt and sour cream? No, it just doesn’t rock my boat tonight. There are some nice photos of Australia Day-ish things here, if this saddens you also, a link here to suitable Aussie recipes (though not potato salad, sorry).

What rocks my boat tonight is recipes from my late Grandmother’s notebook, because I spent a very long time on the phone to my kid sister today, talking deep and meaningfully about the history of coffee. This doesn’t mean I’m going to give you coffee recipes.

I prefer bananas.

There are many bananas around the moment and I can’t eat even one of them (I had an unfortunate set of experiences while I was away and I’m super-sensitised to some foods). I can still enjoy reading banana recipes, though, so that’s what I’m giving you: banana recipes from Melbourne in the 1950s.

The picture is for me, since you lot get to eat the bananas. I don’t think even I can be allergic to a moustache cup (picture by Donna, in case you’d forgotten).

Banana Cream Pie

Make short pastry. Roll out & line a flat tart tin. Prick well before cooking in moderate oven. Take 6 large bananas mash & mix with 1 cup whipped cream. Add to the cream 1 tablespoon castor sugar & ½ teaspoon vanilla. Fill shell with this mixture.

Beat whites of 2 eggs stiff add 3 tablesp granulated sugar. Beat until creamy spread over the top of tart & place in oven (slow) until the meringue is pale gold. Serve hot or cold.

Banana Cheese Toast

Beat 1 egg slightly & add ¾ cup milk, ¼ teaspoon of salt, 1 teasp sugar. Dip 6 slices of bread in this mixture & fry a golden brown. While hot, cut into squares & cover with sliced banana & then thick grated cheese.

Today you get a picture of my lunch. Kate and I shared a cheese from Milawa. It was a fine goat’s cheese, called Affine (does it count as a pun if you say similar things in two different languages?).

This is one of the cheeses I bought when Sharyn whisked me away from my retreat on Monday afternoon. We went to the Milawa Cheese Factory>, where I tasted over twenty cheeses. Not a bad one among them and the best were as good as anything I’ve tasted anywhere.

The factory isn’t that old (established 1988 according to the website) but they do use traditional methods, and it definitely shows. Please note that I said ‘traditional,’ not ‘old.’ (more…)

Next month the Kosher Cooking Carnival will be here, on this blog. Not that this helps you now, if you’re after amazing recipes for kosher food (which some of you surely are and others most certainly are not). me-ander is hosting it this month, which is good, because it means that interested readers can drop in on me-ander over the next few days and grab some good recipes, plus think about what they might want to contribute to the Kosher Cooking Carnival here, next month. Disinterested readers can ignore the whole thing and wait patiently for normal programming to mysteriously restore itself.

You know the posts you’ve been reading for the last two weeks? I haven’t been round to post them. I wrote most of them (and the ones I didn’t write are pretty obvious), but I wrote them round Christmas and then I disappeared to work on a novel. I forward-posted them to appear while I was hiding and typing madly.

I went with a group of writer-friends to Yackandandah in north-east Victoria. It’s a very lovely part of the world and I got two car trips to see bits of it. I know that area pretty well as an historian and a foodie (and even as a food historian). My greatest food history sadness was that I didn’t get to visit the sole vine (in Chiltern) that survived the Great Phylloxera Disaster, but the other members of my group made it to Chiltern and even did some shopping there. At least this means I know it still exists. Serves me right for not driving. I last saw it about a quarter of a century ago and I first saw it even earlier than that.

I can tell you about the vine, at least. All Victorian grapevines had to be replanted and the whole industry started again from scratch using resistant American rootstock. The region now produces some of the best fortifieds in the world, but it was devastated just about a century ago. I grew up thinking of it as a kind of phoenix. Maybe one day I will get to see that vine again: it’s an important part of our food history.

I finished my novel. It may take forever to find a publisher, but it’s done and over. Right now I think it is pathetic and awful and am very depressed about it. I always get like this when I read through a novel I’ve just finished, so don’t take it too seriously. I pity my fellow writers, who weren’t depressed and miserable and thinking their work was a waste of time. They were all dynamic and cheerful and incredibly hard-working while I was moping those last few days.

Sharyn (who posted here twice while I was away) saved me from myself on Monday and gave me some regional food and a bunch of local history. I’ll tell you about some of what I saw as the mood takes me. Or maybe as the cheese and mustard make me happy again.

While I was away, my friend Kate (who does those lovely photos) went to New Caledonia. She took some food pictures there, and maybe I’ll direct you to them once I’ve seen her and can tell a bit about her experiences.

Also, I have some much-delayed pictures from Trudi, who was writing away with me recently. I’ve delayed them because there’s a bit more work putting together the posts that explain them than for other posts and life has been impossibly hectic, but they’re too good to stay hidden.

In less than a month I have a course starting in Canberra. You can find details here, if you’re interested. It’s a fun course and I’m looking forward to it. I’ve taught it a few times now, but this year I plan to add a few twists. We have an excursion to a farm to meet historical cows and pigs (including, I hope, one called Beyonce) this time, for instance, plus a heap of new recipes, reflecting my recent research.

The next few days I’m still in the world of speculative fiction, though, as I have reviews to write. Isn’t it just as well that I created a menu for my just-finished novel. If any of you speak up and say “I want to see the menu” I’ll post it for you. It’s based on some rather sumptuous eighteenth century dinners, but modified for a future world that apes the eighteenth century but has certain problems re-creating it accurately.

And now you know where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing and why. Does it rejoice your heart?

Previous part
Sample recipes

“There are many soups we have given in which cream is recommended; for instance, artichoke soup, bean soup, cauliflower soup, and celery soup. After partaking of a well-made basin of one of these soups, followed by one or two vegetables and a fruit pie or stewed fruit, there are many persons who would voluntarily remark, “I don’t seem to care for any meat.” On the other hand, were the vegetables served in the old-fashioned style, but without any meat, there are many who would feel that they were
undergoing a species of privation, even if they did not say so - we refer to a dish of plain-boiled potatoes and dry bread, or even the ordinary cabbage served in the usual way. Supposing, however, a nice little new cabbage is sent to table, with plenty of really good white sauce or butter sauce, over which has been sprinkled a little bright green parsley, whilst some crisp fried bread surrounds the dish - the cabbage is converted into a meal; and if we take into account the absence of the meat, we still save enormously.

The advice we would give, especially to young housekeepers, is, “Persuasion is better than force.” If you wish to teach a child to swim, it is far easier to entice him into shallow water on a hot summer’s day than to throw him in against his will in winter time. (more…)

This is a long post, and most of it is from a late nineteenth century cookbook. To add insult to injury, there are no pictures!

I’m giving it to you for all that, though you’ll get half today and half tomorrow, to make it a little more digestible. It’s a plea for quality of life, and the preface and introduction to a vegetarian cookbook. And it’s very, very interesting and contains so much that’s fascinating that I’m going to eschew comments and leave you to enjoy it.

We’ve had recipes from this book before. It’s A.G. Payne’s Vegetarian Cookery. A manual of cheap and wholesome diet, from 1891.

“PREFACE.

The present work, though written upon strictly vegetarian principles, is by no means addressed to vegetarians only. On the contrary, we hope that the following pages of recipes will be read by that enormous class throughout the country who during the last few years have been gradually changing their mode of living by eating far less meat, and taking vegetables and farinaceous food as a substitute. Where there are thousands who are vegetarians from choice, there are tens of thousands who are virtually vegetarians from necessity. Again, there is another large class who from time to time adopt a vegetarian course of diet on the ground of health, and as a means of escaping from the pains attendant on gout, liver complaint, or dyspepsia.

The class we most wish to reach, however, is that one, increasing we fear, whose whole life is one continual struggle not merely to live, but to live decently. (more…)

You know those sorrowful stories of solitary orphans? Well, I feel in the mood for them. If I had it to hand I would be reading The Little Princess, right now and weeping into a copious lace handkerchief. (The moustache cup represents dastardly villains today, just in case you prefer your sorrowful tale with a splash of of the dastard.)

What I have to hand is something from 1798 you made passing acquaintance with over the festive season. (more…)

Those of us who live in the Southern Hemisphere get all kinds of wondrous news about Northern Hemisphere snow this time of year. January is not the hottest month: February has that honour, so we dream and dream about flakes of white cold giving us some relief from the over-abundant warmth. I have snow with me in Yackandandah just it case it all gets too much, but it’s the toy sort, not the real stuff.

This recipe is from the middle of the sixteenth century. In fact, it’s from A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye (more…)