Food History

Tonight it will be six degrees. This is rather cold for February in Australia. I felt the weather change a few days ago and knew that autumn had come early. I even blogged about it. What I forgot to do was think about what this meant for local growing seasons.

Today I rang my favourite heritage apple grower and asked him. The summer apples were on time, but the autumn apples are early. It’s as simple as that.

Jonathon has two tonnes of bullaces to sell and just a few greengages and mirabelles. I’m sorely tempted by the bullaces, since they’re such an ancient stone fruit and I haven’t ever been able to get enough to make liqueur out of. If I can sort out delivery, this may be my year.

These are already the last of his stone fruit. I’m fascinated by the sheer amount of bullaces and that no-one is buying the mirabelles. I’m not surprised he has greengages over. They’re not a fruit that has ever tempted me unduly. It’s just because I’ve only met the wrong greengages, perhaps. I might have to try them again. Not this year, though. This year will be the Year of the Bullaces (if I can sort out the logistics).

The apples that are ready (or ready enough) right now are coxes, pommes de neige, Egremont russets (a 19th century apple), English russets, reine de reinette, calville blanc d’hiver. These are not the fruits of summer.

Soon his Five Crowns will be ready and some old pear varieties. In a couple of weeks the stone fruit will be gone from the markets, too. Winter will be here.

The seasons are so crucial to understanding food history. Every time I notice a change I’m reminded of this. I guess that’s why I do so many posts on seasonal changes.

Food was never as divorced from the seasons as it is in big developed cities today. Most of our ancestors watched the seasons closely, because what they would eat and how well they would eat was so closely linked to them. An autumn like this was the time to make sure there was food for winter, just in case the earliness of it meant a long, long winter.

If you want to know more about the varieties of plums and apples, then check out the Brogdale site. If you want to understand how the seasons and climate affect food, look outside and look at old cookbooks and novels, read account books and letters. I’ll keep talking about it here, of course, but there’s so much to understand and so many links you can make that one person’s blog just isn’t enough. I want to buy those apples and cook some bullaces. I want to understand where they fit in that gap between summer and autumn and how their presence affects people’s culinary traditions. Time, I think, to go shopping.

Tonight’s food history class was really fascinating. I have students who have a lot of background knowledge in their own areas of interest and who love sharing it. It makes classes interactive and fun. It also means that I come out of each week with just a little more knowledge, which is a good thing.

The theme for the night was “The Age of Exploration.” I explained that I didn’t think there was one, but that exploration and conquest and invasion and trading posts were really important for understanding some of the dynamics in food history, and that “The Age of Exploration” was a cool tag to hang these concepts on.

We talked about understanding the difference between the first time a foodstuff hits a population group and the actual acceptance of the foodstuff by the wider population. We looked at a lot of different sources to find out just what sorts of food might have been taken up in different countries and what foods could have been but were not and we established a sequence of things that probably had to be in place for a major new ingredient to be introduced into a particular culture. I brought along an iced tea from the Philippines to illustrate the sequence.

We talked a lot about North American plants and South American plants and Australian and the English diet. I managed to say ‘mangel-wurzel’ at least once.

During half time, we ate a cheese dish based on Cato’s work and my favourite Medieval brie tarts, both cooked by students. The schedule of who is bringing what food is beginning to look impressive. The class excursion is almost organised. And, to add joy to contentment, next week I get to teach food in the Middle Ages.

Today I updated my testing notes for the Prohibition Banquet.

From the diner’s point of view the banquet is a long way off, but the hotel chef needs information considerably sooner in order to plan their first reconstructed historic meal.

At my end, things have suddenly got simpler. I’m emailing most of the testers to say “No need to test any more meat and vegetable dishes,” though there are still vegetarian dishes out there to sort out for the main course, as I don’t have anything suitable for vegetarians yet.

The ice cream and sorbet testing has slowed down a little, but the preliminary tests mean that some of these recipes won’t need testing any more either. I’ve made a note to see if I can chat with my ice cream expert on Thursday. Given that her knowledge is rapidly outgrowing mine (which is the joy of the testing) it would be best to work on this together. I know what has to fit into the rest of the meal – she knows what’s most likely to need testing.

The numbers are getting a little worrying. They won’t become unworrying until I start getting more reports back from testers. This is the month where it feels it could all go wrong, even though really, there’s nothing to worry about. The thing is, I started off with 5,000 pages of recipes and all those menus. Now I have exactly five pages of recipes not out there being tested, and some of those recipes will be taken by my students on Thursday and then some more by me. That leaves … not much.

When it starts flooding back, I can start playing with tastes and thinking about what needs to go to the next stage of testing. Some things ought to go straight through to the final menu. Until that happens, though, I will worry. This is the six weeks when, really, everything is out of my hands.

I forgot to say that you can buy salt bush and sea parsley here. I asked and they have designed their packets specifically for posting overseas, so be daring and give them a try.

Sea parsley is apparently a must-have herb for fish eaters, but my heart is set on salt bush. This might have something to do with the fact that I have an acute fish allergy. It has equally as much to do with cooking with salt bush being one of my childhood dreams.

Since each and every way I turn right now I find bushfoods, I thought I should inflict the same thing on you. Not that it’s an affliction for me, since I have packets of herbs and spices, ready to cook, but for you, you get to hear anecdotes and then decide whether or not you want to cook with the ingredients or contemplate their history or ignore my post and hope for maybe a decent historical biscuit recipe tomorrow, to make up.

I’ve chosen just two herbs to introduce you to today. There’s a reason for this. Popular lore has it that the early British settlers used tea tree when there was no tea to be had. Apart from this and some rather good stories about native animals from a slightly later period (which I need to check up, since I suspect I’m teaching Colonial Australian food in a few weeks) the general feeling about Australian native ingredients is that we’ve ignored the bush and ignored the foods of indigenous Australia until very, very recently.

This turns out to be only half true. The early settlers used herbs like salt bush (Atriplex nummularia) and sea parsley (Apium prostratum) and then later settlers replaced salt bush with rosemary and sea parsley with common parsley. These two herbs are in front of me now, since they were part of my swag from the Show.

Maybe the move away from local ingredients and to European plants was due to homesickness. Maybe it was a distrust of the strange environment they now lived in. Maybe it was linked to the change in attitudes towards the original inhabitants of this land: the first settlers accepted that they were invading and their leaders tried to respect at least some of the indigenous rights; later settlers developed an acceptance of the concept of Terra Nullius and denied people a depressing number of human rights.

I’m going to keep my eyes open for evidence of the two shifts and see if I can work out if they happened at the same time or were linked in any way. If I find anything, I’ll let you know. I won’t have time to actively research it, though, so it may take a while before I can piece out a pattern.

Watch this space.

Once upon a time (which means over a week ago), I wrote a post about a special revolution happening with Australian food. I alerted you all to the history-in-the-making that is our bushfood industry.

My timing was totally impeccable, because when I went to the Show I found all the ingredients I had hoped were about to hit the market. The ones I had been dreaming of cooking with, less than two weeks earlier. What’s more, I got to talk to Jill and Denis Richardson, the couple responsible for making these ingredients available.

It gave me a small but important dynamic in how this bushfood revolution is happening.

They’ve realised that the problem with Australians enjoying bushfoods in the past wasn’t just being able to obtain ingredients easily and inexpensively, but the lack of recipes to go with them. Each and every packet of spices and seasoning mixes that A Taste of the Bush sells has a recipe with it. If you want more recipes, then the company sells inexpensive cookbooks. They also promote other people in the industry. Our conversation turned to luminaries such as Ian Hemphill and I began to get an inkling of just how tight the bushfoods industry is and how everyone has to work together if these foods are going to be fully integrated into Australian cooking. Jill also knows a fair amount about what local herbs early settlers used before they established their English-style gardens.

This was quite an amazing experience for a Medievalist. One of the things I look for when I research is cultural dynamics. My key area is how things change and why things change and whether participants are conscious of the change they’re provoking. To be in the middle of a change and to talk to change agents then to suddenly realise that I’m becoming a minor change agent myself in this area puts an entirely different spin on the limits of using written sources when the writers are dead, which is what most historians do.

My biggest realisation is that widespread cultural change can come from one very dynamic but rather small source, if it’s influential enough and consistent enough. This makes sense of the whole rise of Arthurian literature in Western Europe. There was probably a small but consistent group of writers linked to just a very few courts, and they changed the world of our imagination for centuries.

I need to think about this a great deal more. My other history has fed into my understanding and interpretation of food history a great deal, but this is the first time things have gone the other way. I need to think about how to identify those dynamic forces a bit further and what other causes of widespread changes may exist.

I have no doubt I’ll get back to this, but in the meantime, I’ll enjoy cooking and teaching with my bushfoods.

The greatest treasure in my nine wonderful new sachets is salt bush. Salt bush lamb has been on my secret cooking agenda since I was about thirteen. No-one I went camping with could identify salt bush for me, which was a source of constant annoyance. Now I can make my salt bush lamb.

Life is happy. My brain is occupied with interesting thoughts about the dynamics of cultural heritage and next time I go shopping for meat, lamb is on the menu.

On Friday I went to the Royal Canberra Show. All Saturday I admired my swag. Just now I realized that I hadn’t told you so many important things about my visit.
I did a lot of learning at the Show. My photos will come later, so I might do you a photo-heavy slide show in a few days. Until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with knowing that the way cows and goats are judged is very different to the way cats are judged. And that I got to talk bush food. Right now, though, I want to talk about meat on the hoof, which is not bush food at all.

The Royal Canberra isn’t a place for pets, in fact. Despite it taking place in the city, it’s a rural show. It’s where all the getting-together happens for the whole of NSW, which is funny, because it’s not actually in NSW. This getting-together is mostly to do with making sure you have evidence that your animals are the best breeders and will produce the outstanding meat, milk and wool the industry needs.

The animals we saw were very different to the Belted Galloways at Mountain Creek Farm. They use the land differently, for one thing. For another, they are being actively bred to put on weight quickly to cut down the time between birth and the abattoir.

These animals aren’t the sort you put on growth hormones or who are rushed from birth to death. The idea is that the put on healthy size quickly, not that they grow unnaturally. What the Show judging does is make sure that the weight they put on is safe, really. The animals are judged for their proportions and their capacity to hold size (among other things). The beautiful liquidity of their eyes is not a factor.

The breeders love their animals. They talk proudly about them. This means that the Show helps share ethical standards and care as well as keep quality high for the market.

Those blue ribbons are important to meat history. Trace them back and we can see how meat tastes and types develop on the hoof, and how animals are treated and how the great isolations of the Aussie bush are broken down once a year. There is more food history in those blue ribbons than you can shake a hoof at.

Welcome to the Kosher Cooking Carnival! It’s a little late, and it’s all my fault. I forgot it was my first week of university teaching when I offered to do it. I also didn’t count on thunderstorms and about a dozen articles due at once. Everything’s a little late except my class on Edible History. That went delightfully. One of my students has a particular interest in the history of ice cream and is prepared to cook to prove it.

Now that it’s here, please enjoy the Carnival. Lots of good links and a couple of rather tempting recipes.

Let’s start with one of the recipes, perhaps. An absolutely delicious parve pie crust. Thank you, Leora, US friends have been known to tell me that something is ‘as easy as apple pie’ and I always wondered just what part the crust played in this.

There’s along history of Jews making sure that fellow Jews get a decent meal for Shabbos. Poor Jews a hundred years ago would scrimp all week to try to achieve this for themselves, too. It’s lovely to see this tradition continued, and with a bake sale, too. Food turning into more food. It makes everyone just that much happier.

Batya tells us about a Chanukat ha-kitchen. Worth doing just for the challah! To balance that challah, you can read about a less-perfect bagel. Having finally found a baker in my hometown who knows how to cook a bagel, I asked him why he gave some of his bagels the toppings I associate with onion rolls. “I don’t know what an onion roll is,” he said. It turned out he hadn’t eaten kosher bagels, either. Life is a city with almost no Jews can be very entertaining.

I envy Batya being snowed in and then finding a cheap sandwich (appropriately linked to Hillel’s name). We had some snowflakes here yesterday and decided it was a miracle. It’s summer in Australia, after all.

Summer doesn’t make me feel less hungry when I look at Batya’s beautiful pictures on eating out in Jerusalem.

Girls Who Network send in a shrimp dish for the Carnival. It looks interesting, but I won’t volunteer to taste it. We all have our definitions of kashruth, and mine doesn’t include shrimp. My great-grandmother’s apparently included bacon on occasion, which I agonise over from time to time, often on this blog. Batya agonises more carefully than I do, with interesting results.

To finish on a really glorious note, Batya sent me a joke from Bangitout. I don’t know the person in question, but I really like the joke. While you spend the next hour pondering restaurant ideas, I’m going to have a cup of tea.

Top Ten Worst Kosher Restaurant Ideas

10. Shalosh Seudos, The Restaurant!

9. All German Cuisine: Gestapos!

8. Just Herring: Shmaltzys

7. Shabbos Leftovers: dubbed ‘Tinfoil’

6. The Yeshiva Dorm Experience

5. Egg Nog and other foods Jesus Consumed

4. Cholent: Greetings and Flatuations

3. Everything fake! Bacon, Cheese Burger, Shrimp: Facons!

2. Fast Day Theme: dubbed “Fast food”

1. Kosher For Passover Food, All Year Round!

I renamed my food in history course. The new name was sexy and the university was very impressed at the number of students the course attracted. When I saw the list of names on my class list I wondered, though, whether the sexy new name had actually played a part at all.

This is where I admit I am totally intimidated by the first class of any session. I want my students to enjoy and learn from the first minute and there’s a bunch of stuff that must be done and it’s never easy. It’s especially not easy with 16 students.

This time was simpler than most. The names were familiar and the faces even more so. Half my students had attended other courses I’ve taught. There were three from my Medieval London course, for instance. They had said they wanted more food history and that they would turn up this year, and they have.

The stuff at the beginning, where I talk through the possibilities of the course and make the students choose their favourite topics so I can address their preferences still took time, but not as much as usual. What was really cool is that everyone was relaxed enough so a couple of new topics were added to the list and, just for once, the Middle Ages isn’t everyone’s highest priority. This may have something to do with five members of the class having taken Medieval courses with me earlier.

I love it that they’re making their interests known early this time round. I can’t meet all of them. I gave them a bit of background in why food history covers mainly Western food in this country and I refused point-blank to teach any country for which I can only manage a pop history approach. They were very understanding. They were also understanding of my need to teach about coffee at some time, and a couple have asked could I please bring some Prohibition banquet test recipes along because they might like to do a bit of testing, too.

We spent nearly an hour on Ancient Roman stuff and I wasn’t nearly as vitriolic as usual. I was almost mellow, in fact. This doesn’t mean that Roman cuisine has suddenly become my all-time favourite or that I think Apicius was a source of common sense. This was because the class is so very nice.

They even help me fill out gaps in my knowledge. I had thought calamus was a lily, for instance, but it turns out it’s like an iris. The plant bit is going to be fabulous this time round, now I stop to think about it, because at least two of the students know way more than me about plants and we have a farmer coming from next week, to boot. I shall bring them in some old herbals to delight them. I think I shall also bring in my list of Medieval herbs and their uses, even though I never quite finished it.

This history course is going to be the best kind of give and take. It will be fun.

And now let’s find out what our esteemed writers say about wheat and wheat cookery during wartime. (more…)

Today and tomorrow are two parts of the same post. I was entirely fascinated by this particular book and thought you might be, too, but I wanted to give you a decent excerpt.

Writing during wartime (even at the tail end or just after – in the case of today’s book, obviously the preparation was done during the war) has a different feel to other writing. A country’s consciousness can change or there might be some restricted ingredients.

There have been many studies of this as regards to World War II, but very few relatively of how World War I affected the US. Published in 1918, C Houston and Alberta M Goudiss’ Foods that will Win the War and How to Cook Them is a lovely source for such a study.

The introductory bits are full of laudable intentions and how to translate those into changed eating habits. These days changes to eating habits are often about us and our health, sometimes about our carbon footprint, and very seldom how we can meet the nation’s military needs.

I’ve put it behind a cut, simply because (even cut in half) it’s long. I strongly recommend it as fascinating reading. The advice on breadmaking is particularly interesting. (I wish I knew why my writing was so formal today!)

FOREWORD (more…)

Today is such a foodie day that I had to share it.

I’ve just been cutting a picture of pepperberries and wattleseed down to size so I can use it for a project. Pepperberries and wattleseed are indigenous Aussie yummy things. Some of the stuff that are changing our food history – I wrote about them in general a few days ago and today I was playing with pictures.

I have five little article-y things to write, one of which will be illustrated by said picture. When these article-y things see the light of day, rest assured I shall mention it here. They’re food rather than food history, but no less interesting for that.

The other big thing in my day is revising my course notes. These course notes are a series of recipes, in modern menu form, so that my students can fully enjoy the food from the various eras we study. I want to add a couple more menus and about ten more recipes, and there are few recipes that I need to look at carefully and possibly change for something more interesting. Previous students have told me “Don’t get rid of the mulligatawny soup recipe!” so that’s definitely staying.

I have recipes to send out to three testers for the Prohibition banquet. Mostly soups and desserts, but also a couple of canapés. We have space for more testers, but since I want most things done by Passover (late April) you might want to email banquet (at) conflux.org.au now, rather than in a month’s time.

That’s not my whole day, but it’s my foodie day. I’m supplementing it with Milawa chevre and a parmesan/cracked pepper woodfired oven bread and green olives marinated in garlic. Foodie days are perfect when just a little gourmet food accompanies them.

Today was market day again and the change of seasons is already obvious. The colours of the fresh fruit and vegetables are at their brightest and most varied, but the peaches are getting fewer and the apples more numerous. Young leeks reminded me that winter means hot soups, and both my friend and I dreamed of sweating leek in butter. In my mind I added chestnut and cream. Fortunately I looked at my waistline before I bought the leeks: there will be plenty of time for wintry goodness.

It’s natural that the change of colours on the market stalls make me think of the calendar. More specifically, it makes me think of the Medieval calendar, where the march of the seasons was associated with specific cooking tasks.

From the beginning of autumn, farmers and estate manger would start their series of tasks to prepare for winter. I never remember the precise order of the tasks, because I don’t have to. All I have to do is haul out any copy of a late Medieval illuminated Book of Hours and it tells me what happened and when. There’s so much about food in these pictures: pigs fattening for later slaughter, harvest, preserving autumn crops, preserving meat, getting the fields ready for winter and getting the garden ready, too. That’s what my memory tells me.

Memory is hopelessly unreliable, however. One of the best Books of Hours of all is Les Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. I teach with it and it comes with its own bookmark, Richard III’s signature embroidered onto gauze ribbon by my remarkable accountant. Let me see what its pictures tell me about food-related activity from September. (I know it’s February, but the weather is already telling me it’s March, and in Northern hemisphere terms, that’s September. If you think that’s bad, you should come and visit during January, when it’s stiflingly hot. )

Aha! September was grape harvest (remember, Books of Hours are as regional as their artists and owners) and we have a lovely picture of the vineyard at Saumur. In the background is the castle, but, more importantly, the kitchen.

I was wrong about harvest, at least as far as this book goes, because in October there is sowing on the Seine, right near the Louvre, in fact. The birds are eating the corn s quickly as the sower can spread it, too, despite the scarecrow’s daunting bow.

November fits my stray memories. The pigs are in the forest, fattening nicely on the acorns the peasants knock off the trees.

And that’s autumn in one particularly expensive book of hours. Not even the super rich and amazingly cosmopolitan were unaware of food production. This makes me wonder about our own rich and mighty. Would they know that the colour change on the market stalls is maybe a couple of weeks early? Would they even know that the colours change?

Yesterday was setting a mood. Let me explain, before you get the wrong idea, that the mood was for me, not for you. It wasn’t setting a mood to lure you into some sort of dark corner of history, though, now I mention it, that sort of mood-setting seems like a good idea. What I was trying to do was remind myself that colds don’t stop work. Which they don’t. They just want to.

I’ve talked myself into enjoying work so much that I started blogging (on my other blog)about character introduction in a seventeenth century recipe book, using the opening recipe. It was possibly not the most sensible post I’ve ever written, but it was terribly educational. Almost frighteningly educational.

I’ll balance things (now that the worst of the cold is over) by giving you some more of Grandma’s recipes. After all, I mentioned them yesterday, so it’s almost as if I meant it.

Before I get to the recipes, I just thought I’d warn you that my Edible Past course starts next week. This means my thoughts will be ranging over different historical periods again. This is the time when – if you yearn for a Medieval recipe or a Jane Austen syllabub recipe – you really should say so. Otherwise I’ll go back to looking at the food descriptions in my favourite novels. I always threaten this and life always catches up with me before I can follow through. Maybe this time it will actually happen.

Now for a recipe!! 1950s Melbourne, of course.

Eggless Date Cake

Place in a mixing bowl ½ cup sugar, 1 cup dates ( chopped) & 1 tablespoon butter. Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon soda. Pour 1 cup boiling water over & beat a few minutes. Sift in 1 ½ cups flour & mix well. Bake in bar shaped tin in fairly hot oven for ½ to ¾ hours. 1 tablespoon chopped ginger.

There are just four more days to get a comment on any of the posts about Felicity Pulman or by her to be in the running for an omnibus edition of the first two novels in The Janna Mysteries.

Right now the biltong post is my favourite, because I have failed (yet again) to have a volunteer trial the Ancient Roman fish-sauce equivalent for me. Why won’t anyone make it? I mean, just because it takes six weeks and smells foul…