Food History

I should never have given you a recipe for drop biscuits. Here we eat drop scones or pikelets and life would have been fine if I had spent the day thinking of them. Instead I’ve developed a charmingly bad cold (hard to check spelling and typing if you can’t see clearly!) and my mind dwells on drop bears. Drop bears are inedible. That is all you need to know of them. Unless you’re really gullible, in which case I can send you to a number of sites for more information.

Just now I was casting my mind back to the interesting history of Jewish food in Australia. It’s not like Jewish food in the US or even the UK. Or it wasn’t. It’s more cosmopolitan now.

It started off as part of mainstream food history in this country. The first Jews here (as far as we know – maybe there were a host of fleeing Jews in the sixteenth century who set up a secret country in the middle of Western Australia, but we have no evidence. It’s possible.) came with the First Fleet. Jewish history started off as colonial history in Australia.

This means that Jewish food in the nineteenth century was very much the product of the London area, with the important change of more meat and better vegetables. Chops and steaks and sausages and a roast once a week. Fry-ups for breakfast: chops and sausages and eggs and tomatoes and mushrooms and toast. Some families ate bacon and some didn’t.

The important thing about the nineteenth century and Jewish food and Australia is that it wasn’t nearly as careful and kosher as twentieth century Australian Jewish food. The other important thing is that this is where the 1950s recipes I’ve been giving you came from. My grandmother’s recipes. She was born in the late nineteenth century and her cooking retained many of the characteristics of that earlier cuisine. That’s why I give you the recipes: they’re the memory of a lost cuisine.

Tonight I crossed nikujaga with Irish stew for dinner. It tasted entirely delicious, but made me feel very guilty about warping history. I think the moral of that story is never to make Irish stew while you’re missing your Japanese friends.

The other thing I ate today was a test recipe for the Prohibition banquet. It was a rice pudding that just doesn’t make the cut. The flavour is almost divine, but the texture was so sad I nearly wept. I wasn’t sure about rice pudding on the menu anyway, so it’s gone. Well, except the last little bit, which is tomorrow’s breakfast.

To assuage my guilt and the recipe failure, I’m giving you recipes from 1838. There’s a surety and certainty about life in 1838 that is missing today. What’s also missing today is the level of adulterated foods for purchase in shops. We have occasional problems (cassava imported into Australia is an issue right now, for instance), but that’s all.

The book is The Virgina Housewife, by Mrs Mary Randolph. It’s from Baltimore.

What she called a drop biscuit, I call a biscuit. Tavern biscuit is also a biscuit in my book. It’s rather nice when Australian and US biscuit recipes overlap for a change. What this means is terminology overlap and that things are suddenly hotting up in the little collection of biscuit and scone recipes.

To make drop biscuit

Beat eight eggs very light, add to them twelve ounces of flour, and one pound of sugar; when perfectly light, drop them on tin sheets, and bake them in a quick oven.

Tavern biscuit

To one pound of flour, add half a pound of sugar, half a pound of butter, some mace and nutmeg powdered, and a glass of brandy or wine; wet it with milk, and when well kneaded, roll it thin, cut it in shapes, and bake it quickly.

To make nice biscuit

Rub a large spoonful of butter into a quart of risen dough, knead it well, and make it into biscuit, either thick or thin: bake them quickly.

Soufle biscuits

Rub four ounces of butter into a quart of flour, make it into paste with milk, knead it well, roll it as thin as paper, and bake it to look white.

My world is suddenly crystal clear. This makes me think about the appearance of food.

The fact that my world is suddenly crystal clear because my eye person says I must wear reading glasses to use the computer rather than normal glasses is irrelevant. It’s a pain, because I can no longer just swivel to catch something on TV – I have to swivel and change glasses. This means it’s easier to dream about the look of food rather than to turn round and watch TV. Is this a good thing? Aren’t I already just a tad too obsessed with food?

What sort of things am I dreaming about instead of checking the news headlines? I’m thinking that upper class English food in the fourteenth century probably looked just a tad cooler than a lot of upper class French food. The recipes we have focus just that much more on the looks of the food in the English recipes, you see. Parsley was used to give a fresh green look, and saunders* to enrich the colour of meat stews.

I was thinking about the effect of the work of rabid gardeners like John Evelyn on the look of a dinner. He loved herbs and fresh vegetables. One day I’m going to investigate just how long it took before the looks of salad greens started to change the looks of the dinner table. By Jane Austen’s time it definitely did: the main course was just not complete in the south of England without a salad .

I’m curious about the change of generations. What did the older generation think of when ten dishes on a table was replaced by lots of little bits of things delivered to a diner’s place? Did they feel underfed? Did their eyes miss the laden board?

My idea of a good meal changed when I stayed with close friends in Japan, many years ago. They taught me that the eyes eat just as much as the stomach. I feel far more full with a small meal where my eyes are satisfied than with a big meal where they aren’t. I blame Kazuko and Yukiko for this. If any of them want the thousand and one meals owing to them for teaching me this important truth (and saving me from being obese, to boot) I would be immensely happy if they got in touch. That’s the other thing that clear vision does: it makes me miss the friends I saw last time I could see this clearly (or was that the time before? I grow old, I grow old – so old I quote TS Eliot in a food history blog!).

Tomorrow I may give you some more biscuit recipes. One can never have too many historical biscuit recipes.

* related to sandalwood, but a richer redder colour, and much easier on the digestion.

Today I want to look at food history from a slightly different angle to usual. Mostly I look at the past. That’s what history is, after all. Occasionally I link in with the present and give you surveys of markets and food fairs and try to show how what we eat fits in with out food history. Today I want to show you how some groups work actively to change the way we see our food and change the food we eat. By changing our foodways, the food history that some future historian will find, is changed.

Today I’m fascinated by how much of the food we eat was first accepted in Europe and then made its way to our plates. The US does better than Australia in this regard. Turkey and corn are far more acceptable food than kangaroo and bush tomato.

There is an active push by researchers and government and producers to change this in Australia. Fifty years ago only about five non-indigenous Australians even knew what bush tomato was, and tourists were unwilling to even think about roo on the menu. “You can’t eat Skippy,” visitors told me when I was a child.

This page has a good overview of what’s happening to change things as does this. Some of the native species have already made it into common food in Australia – lemon myrtle and wattleseed are two of these. Others are on their way. I can’t wait for the day when I can buy finger limes at my local grocer or my farmers’ market. I’m very impatient for the day when bush tomato has more predictable crop cycles (until recently it was all wild harvested, and it’s still an unpredictable buy – which is a pain in midwinter when I crave roast potatoes with butter and bush tomato).

It’s only a matter of time before Australians incorporate more bushfood into our diet. This isn’t a chance happening, however. There are a lot of people working very hard behind the scenes to make Australians aware that European tastes are not the only ones and that an environment that’s harsh for wheat or mint may be entirely perfect for quandong or aniseed myrtle. And that’s what food history is all about. Finding changes and watching them and – when they’re happening before your eyes – being astonished at amazing new directions.

I lost a day. I think it was Sunday. Sorry about that. When I find it again, I’ll let you know.

Saturday was a great deal more interesting foodwise than Sunday. A friend and I went to the multicultural festival. It’s basically a food fair. A giant food fair. I started writing down all the different stalls and their food so I could do an analysis of modern multicultural celebrations in Canberra, but there were just so many and I wrote so quickly that I got home and found I couldn’t read a word.

I kept thinking that there is a real Jewish affinity for food, even in a town like Canberra, with its miniscule Jewish community. Sarah and I kept running into people we knew (not so surprising) and they were all Jewish (which was).

I shared a Finnish cheese tart and a bag of Samoan pastries (which were simply deep-fried dough) and had a really lovely glass of Algerian mint tea. I love mint tea made that way – thick and sweet and warming. I don’t make it myself, though, because if I were to eat that much sugar I would be jumping off the ceiling. My ceiling is one of those 1970s ones, with fire-disencouraging grey pebblethings, and so is not one to encourage jumping. If ever I get a nice white ceiling, maybe I can drink thick and sweet mint tea regularly.

One thing I noticed, simply because it was impossible not to notice. This was the biggest food fair of its kind I’ve seen in Canberra. Everyone came out and enjoyed eating. Add that to my course being booked out (and another one being set up in may for people who missed out), plus the newspaper article, plus the radio interview, plus the fact that there was Greek food yesterday and other foods at the Carnivale next weekend, plus the various farmers’ markets, plus the gourmet meat production and the wine and the growth in other local gourmet products and…. You can see where I’m going. There is an increased focus on food and its production and its history in Canberra right now. A wonderful emphasis, to be honest, because food is very powerful in bringing people together in friendship.

If someone were to write a snapshot of places and times and find out what is important to people in that place and at that time, then obviously fine food and interesting food and sharing food are all important right now in Canberra. It makes me wonder how many of my readers live in places where food has suddenly taken on a special significance?

Today I have a special guest blogger. I’ve been getting in touch with other Australian bloggers – finding out what they do and where they blog it. Even blogs about health and wellbeing, and I thought his take on food history might be interesting. Enjoy!!

It is easy to forget that food is about our life. The foodie magazines usually write about food as if it was a fashion accessory, or as a kind of entertainment. The other extreme is reducing food to a collection of nutrients - the ultimate destination of this approach would be one food, easily digested, supplemented with every possible nutrient. Hardly an attractive prospect.

Both of these approaches lose the visceral and emotional connection that we have with our food. Just thinking about our favourite foods can be enough to alter our mood. And think of how strong our reaction is to foods that we really dislike. Food is a very emotional reality (which leads to a different approach to dieting than the simple ‘calories in, exercise out’ approach; but that would be the subject of another post).

Our childhood experiences are a particularly potent source of our feelings about food. One Dutch friend can’t stand the smell of fresh bread. (During World War II his mother would smuggle fresh bread to those hiding from the military. He associates the smell of fresh bread with anxiety for his mother’s life. Whenever he smells fresh bread he feels, once again, sick with anxiety). Then there are the positive experiences from our childhood. The foods that remind us of times of delight. For instance, there are the ‘magic foods’ that I had when getting over sickness. (In years 1 and 2 I was often sick with a “viral infection of the upper respiratory tract”. I learnt to know this phrase even though I didn’t have a clue what it meant.) For me vegemite on toast and lemonade are magic foods (though calling them food may be stretching the point a bit). These were the foods I had when I was getting better from my bouts of sickness. They are forever associated for me with getting well again. They are to this day associated with indulgence for me.

Re-establishing our emotional connection with food can open up a world of delight and indulgence. A world of pleasure not contemplated by either the food magazines or the nutrition gurus. Food can become a human experience for us once again.

Evan Hadkins
www.wellbeingandhealth.net

My radio interview was about as much fun as you can have legally. I took in some props, just in case, and we used them. The interviewer was Alex Sloane and she wasn’t expecting me to hand her three little packets of spices.

I encouraged her to taste them. The saunders had a faint flavour, she reported, and was surprised to hear it was used for colouring rather than for that flavour. She fell in love with the cubebs (and so she should – I still maintain they’re one of the nicest spices in the world) and then she tasted the third spice. “What is it?” she asked. I explained while she was nibbling that it was a variety of cardamom and was used in Medieval cooking. Once she’d commented on the sharp flavour, I told her its more general name: grains of paradise. I explained it (as I always do) as “Medieval Viagra.” This means I am guilty of perverting the course of public radio. Or something.

We talked about the banquet menus I design. She read right the way through the Regency one and we discussed where the Prohibition one was up to. She was suitably envious of the ice cream tests. Alex was entirely unsurprised that so many people are willing to test cocktail recipes.

No-one phoned in with questions, so Alex threw ingredients at me for instant potted histories. It was like being in a quiz show for food historians. Luckily for me she stuck to things I knew somethign about: sugar, rice, potato.

And of course we talked about my teaching. She kept on telling people that they should enroll in the course that starts 1 May.

And my moment of fame? The ABC paid for a taxi and the driver had been listening to me and was really browned off that he had missed the last few minutes because he had a customer.

Between storms and other sundries, today hasn’t been a day where much has happened on the food history front at my place. Well, except for cool announcements about radio interviews. There was a flurry of phone calls over that one. One from the radio station to me and then one from the university to make sure I got the message. A small flurry. Or maybe it was just that I was flurried on the phone.

What I have up my sleeve (and have had for a long while but keep finding other topics I need to post about) is a bunch of fascinating websites with more information about aspects of food history than you can shake a whatever at. I’m not sure what you should shake at websites. Pastry brushes, maybe?

Today’s is a kind of advertorial site. It’s three extra words from a book of food definitions. Why I like it, is that one of those words is myrrh and another is spikenard. I have a particular soft spot for myrrh and spikenard (beyond the obvious – that I can spell them). Spikenard is an ingredient in my favourite recipe for hypocras and both it and myrrh smell rather gorgeous in perfume.

I didn’t know that spikenard was native to the Himalayas. If you look at Dalby’s article on it (on the webpage I linked to a moment ago) you will find that it’s carried in bales. This, also, I didn’t know, but it makes so much sense. It’s a very grassy stuff, spikenard.

Myrrh isn’t grassy. In fact, it’s resin from a tree. It looks a bit like a rock, but when you hold it in your palm and warm it, it gives forth its scent and you realise just how unlike amber it is. Or isn’t. Amber is, after all, fossilised resin. Which makes me wonder. If we found fossilized myrrh with a mosquito that had just dined on dinosaur blood, could Jurasic Park be remade with fragrant dinosaurs? (I think that last joke meant that the storms have officially melted my brain.)

Food history alert: ABC 666 (Canberra) tomorrow at 11.30 am. It’s an interview. I might get to talk about murderous molasses!

I have no idea how to get radio stations from outside a region, though I do believe it’s possible. If any of you know, I’d be happy to post the details here.

Update: The radio station is and the interview will occur at 11.30 am Australian Eastern Summer Time, on Friday 8 February. It’s a short interview though, so better to be a bit early online if you want to catch it.

Latest update: the interview is now from 11 am until 11.30 am. I’m getting nervous!!

Teaching has started for 2008 and suddenly my life is busier. Not that it wasn’t busy before. What this means, though, is that I sit at my desk and admire the mugginess of the evening and wonder if even ice cream is possible.

Yesterday ice cream was more than possible and the day before, emails about ice cream flooded my inbox. The day before yesterday was pretty lovely, in fact. Cool rain and lots of information on the history of ice cream in the US.

What happened was that Tamara Mazzei emailed me to point out that the custard-based ice creams that our ice cream tester is checking out for the banquet were called French ice cream in her childhood and that the no-egg variety was called Philadelphia.

I found an early 20th century recipe for French and Philadelphia ice creams and, sure enough, the French was custard based and the Philadelphia wasn’t.

Tamara has a research talent, and found me some rather cool articles, too. Not all of them are about the two different ice cream styles she identified, but they each told me something I didn’t know about the history of ice cream in the US.

There was an article on the rise of the soda fountain (New York Times, September 24 1916). It suggested that the rise in popularity of ice cream sodas was directly due to the banning of alcohol. Ice cream and Prohibition linked, I thought – how very apposite.

In the Charlotte Daily Observer of 21 August 1910, we learned that ice cream and frozen custard were not always interchangeable. The heading reads “Frozen custards – they’re often better than ice cream.” My recipes for custard based ice creams comes from about a decade later. I don’t know if there was a change in terminology or (more likely) that there was a range of ways of describing ice cream made with custard. What’s also interesting about this article is that it pints to a very good reason why one should sue a custard base instead of an uncooked base: you need less rich cream for the custard.

The third article was considerably earlier. The Virginia Herald from 10 June (or it could be 6 October – US dates conspire against me sometimes) 1829 has a recipe for ice cream made from a custard base and it calls it ice cream, not frozen custard.

It’s a very easy recipe, too:

“Three quarters of a pound of loaf sugar, one quart of cream, the whites of three eggs well beat up – mix together and simmer it on the fire until it nearly boils, then take it off and strain it, and when cold put it into the mould and churn it until it freezes.” The ice cream can be flavoured or can be adapted to using milk (with more eggs).

The final article is from Kansas in1920 (which is why I saved it until last) and it clearly states that French ice cream is frozen custard and Philadelphia ice cream is frozen cream and that everything else is a variant on one or the other.

Tamara’s work proved that her childhood memory of French vs Philadelphia goes back a fair way. It was certainly extant in the 1920s and possibly much earlier. However, without more evidence we can’t tell if there are boundaries for the description or where the division between the French and the Philadelphian came from. It’s a lovely little study in how to open up an historical query, by adding new sources of information. To say anything definitive, however, we’d need that amount of information by about a hundred.

Tamara and I have worked together on matters historical before and we both know the limits of sources. She wasn’t looking for a definitive historical truth, however, she was looking for the ancestry of her own childhood usage, and she found it. This is important, too. Every query has nuances and shadings – some questions have straightforward answers (did the French vs Philadelphia division go earlier and extend to other parts of the US or were the different types of ice cream called that solely by Tamara’s family, later on?) while others need far more time and effort (what is the history of ice cream nomenclature in the US from, say 1829?).

I love this. I love that interaction with the past can be very tightly focussed or that it can be as broad as a human’s imagination. Why I love researching history doesn’t help you understand the history of ice cream descriptions, however, and I’ve hit teaching time and can’t chase it. I’ll let you know if we choose French or Philadelphian ice cream for the banquet, when we reach that far. And if more information comes my way, I promise to report it.

I’m torn. I promised more on ice cream history and I promised I would blog recipes alongside the US elections. I don’t have time to do two posts. I could flip a coin, but it’s a wet and tired day here, so I’ve opted for an election cake recipe, albeit with less commentary than usual. A wet and tired election post, hopefully things will pep up as we get closer to November. This means I can get on with preparing for tomorrow, which is first day teaching this year. This election cake recipe is from the second edition of The Frugal Housewife (1830).

I love it that by 1830 the writer was already claiming the election cake recipe was from an old-fashioned recipe. This means that there are earlier ones. W00t!! The trouble is that there just aren’t that many early US cookbooks. To take election cakes earlier, I would have to delve into manuscripts, which is unsurprisingly just a little hard to do from Australia. I rather suspect 1830 is as far back as we can go with this topic. This means that from now on we’re venturing into more recent cookbooks (though still old – let me race in with that reassurance.)

Election Cake

Old fashion election cake is made of four pounds of flour; three quarters of a pound of butter; four eggs; one pound of sugar; one pound of currants, or raisins, if you choose; half a pint of good yeast; wet it with milk as soft as it can be and be moulded on a board. Set to rise over night in winter; in warm weather three hours is usually enough for it to rise. A loaf, the size of common flour bread, should bake three quarters of an hour.

What have I been up to today? Why do I look so very content with life?

The answers are all to do with the Prohibition banquet.

My hardest working tester picked me up after work and we did a quick shopping trip. At 7 pm we finished cooking and at 10 pm we finished eating.

What we were doing tonight was something very special. I had talked to my friend about that possibility of reducing the number of dishes to be tested by using a different approach. This was when we were talking about the markets the other day. She asked “Can I help?”

What we’ve done is sort out the main course. Not entirely. We still have some testing. But we’ve worked out what sort of dishes were standard and why. We have the hook to hang the rest of the menu around. And we only have one more test for the whole course. This is because we cooked an incredible number of dishes in that short time.

Actually, she cooked. I worked out the recipes, gave historically useful advice and was her kitchen assistant.

Some of the issues we dealt with were types of oil, how to cook a perfect roast tenderloin, what Madeira tastes like, why commercial breadcrumbs flake dishes, why kittens adore potato. We also worked out that shape was an important element in the look of a plate. We discovered an amazing potato recipe, a superb sauce recipe and some delightful vegetable recipes, but mostly we looked at the shape and taste of the core of the menu.

This means I can talk to the hotel with many fewer qualifications. It means we can price the menu. It means we’ve made some very good progress.

Today was market day and icecream day.

Icecream day first. Two new icecreams for the Prohibition banquet. Another peach and another raspberry. The raspberry got a thumbs up from me and a thumbs down by Kate. It has a slightly funny texture, as does the peach. I consulted my icecream guru and she suggested that the custard simply needed to be cooked longer ie the recipe was basically a good one. We had an interesting talk about the need to break down the starch in a custard-based icecream to get a good texture.

The market was partly about regular shopping, partly about doing some identificatory work on aspects of Australian cooking (no doubt it will emerge here in due course, just when you think everything in food history is all about the written word) but also very much about the Prohibition banquet.

I don’t have as many volunteers this year and besides, the shape of the menu is entirely different (over a hundred years and a continent apart – the differences are very obvious) and so my approach to testing is different. I started off with 5000+ pages of recipes and menu advice. More than last year, because there are more cookbooks and many more advice manuals around for the 1920s.

I got rid of breakfast recipes and lunch recipes and snack recipes and recipes that are entirely impossible to make in Australia. My shortlist, however, was well over a hundred pages, with an average of six recipes a page. This year I don’t have the resources to test that many and besides, it’s really not necessary.

There are some parts of a New York restaurant meal in the 1920s that are fairly standard and only need maybe a half dozen recipes checked to establish the best way of cooking something. There are other parts of the menu that have clear restrictions round them. My way of dealing with that this year is to focus on the high prestige dishes that are able to be made in modern Australian kitchens. In other words, I’m testing far fewer substantial dishes.

On the other hand, lots of sauces need testing. Each time I test a different meat dish (the main course) I’ll test all the key sauces that would be served with it, along with a few standard vegetables. Not many tests, but more complex ones.

Each year I do this, I find out quite different thing about food in history. The testing and the evaluation against the food available near me and its quality helps me understand how a period and place develops its prestige food, for instance. I begin to understand the social side of food in more depth. I’m also learning that, no matter how much I learn, I’ve still only seen the tip of a very, very big iceberg.

I was thinking today about icecream. I should get some more soon, and the weather is warm and sticky and I’m watching my waistline. Why am I thinking of icecream and watching my waistline? And why am I expecting some?

It’s banquet testing time. The first thing I’m getting sorted out are the interstices between courses. I know this is a bit of a radical approach, but I reckon that if I have 2-3 sorbets to choose from and 2-3 icecreams then it will be easier to test for what bigger food goes in between those sorbets and icecreams. I’ve already got rid of a dozen soup recipes simply because the flavour will be wrong with the dish that appears on the table as everyone sits down to dine.

The 1920s banquet is such a different beastie from the Regency one. In some ways it’s much easier, because so many of the recipes are a bit familiar. In other ways it’s harder, because I can’t compromise on service to save the hotel money. For this banquet to work, I have to sit down with the chef early and work out what suits both of us.

It’s a different chef, too. We’re at the Marque Hotel this year, not Rydges. The Rydges chef was amazing and did the most brilliant Regency banquet, but alas, the rest of the hotel wasn’t that good and left a lot of disgruntled Convention goers.

So I’m thinking icecreams and sorbets and suddenly remembering that I was supposed to tell everyone who might like a seat at the 1920s evening that the new Conflux site is up and running and we are taking registrations and that there’s a totally wonderful progress report that tells you all about everything and… I really need a scoop of 1920s icecream, right now.