Food History

I’ve been playing with my food again.

I know it’s more about food than food history, but I thought (just for once) you might like to see the results. Potato salad with a difference. The biggest difference is in the colour of the potatoes. They are deep purple. The grower was telling me yesterday that someone complained once because they got them home, cut into them and discovered that they weren’t white or yellow. Normally I would fry them with chili and lime, but today I wanted to do something different.

I started with the potatoes and added beautiful fresh eggs from hens I have met (once). I boiled the eggs and I microwaved the potatoes. When the potatoes were cut, and still hot, I sprinkled them with as much verjuice as they would hold then added a bit of salt. I chopped the eggs and I put in some capers and pitted Kalamata olives, plus some of the heritage carrots (pale orange and white) and a bit of their leaf for the green. One of the organic growers had a ton of tiny tomatoes yesterday, so I had to include some of them, too.

I made a dressing from the chevre mixed with lashings of fresh-squeezed lime and just a bite of chili.

What’s so special about it is that the potatoes, eggs, olives, carrots, tomatoes, chevre and lime all came from the markets yesterday. The aim of this was to see what could be done with minimal effort using seasonal vegetables, focusing on the older or more exotic varieties. The result: very, very happy tastebuds.

Do you ever get weeks where big things go wrong? You wash the dishes while life is raining hailstones onto your spring garden? Where even your metaphors are appalling?

My food history life isn’t bad, to be honest. What with my class and the Prohibition testing and the treats at the market, it’s rolling along nicely. That’s why I’m turning to it to cheer myself up now that everything else is so awry. Last time I went on a recipe testing spree. This time my waistline can’t stand it and I’m in the middle of teaching and deadlines anyhow. This means I need something else.

I can’t not do the cheering up: lots of small things are going right in my life, but several very wrong big things have happened, and I need help. I can’t wave a magic wand and sort things out. Not even my nieces believed I was capable of such magic when they were seven years old and very gullible. Now they’re teenagers, so I won’t tell you what they think of me. Except that they reassure me that no matter how strange I may be, they will still love me. And if I’m talking maudlin, then you know for certain I need a bit of brightness.

What I can do to create more joy is give away more fridge magnets. I just got a new set of them, you see (entirely new design – I’m living dangerously). I was going to give them out on my birthday, but that’s late April and I need to be made happy NOW. So, the first ten people to send me an address (anywhere deliverable, worldwide) get a really cool Food History fridge magnet. I have thirty unspoken for, right now (I ordered fifty, but they go quickly) so if more than ten people want them, I might be tempted to give more away.

Please, please ask for the magnets. Please send addresses (which will be destroyed as soon as I’ve got your magnet in the post). Use the button on the right hand column, the one that says “contact me.” That way your address won’t go on the web by mistake. Ask soon - I need to be made happy.

Today is strangely sybaritic. I’m eating the most beautiful chicken pate (apart from my family’s) that I have ever tasted in Australia. The pate guy at the market gave me some. He makes two pork-free pates and one pork-free rillette. And yes, the pate has gone directly to my brain and completely blocked eloquent speech. It’s that good.

It makes me look at a bag of carrots and see many hues, not just orange. Oh, there are multiple colours of carrot in that bag. That’s right. The vegetable guy took one look at me and said there was a bunch waiting for me which had more purple carrots than the other bunch. I can show my students four colours of carrots on Thursday. And I didn’t even have to ask.

Elizabeth and Michael made sure there was just enough lamb of exactly the right sort so dinner tonight is saltbush lamb. My friend and I shared a quarter of a lamb and it was exactly enough. Which reminds me, Michael says Elizabeth needs a good historical recipe for leg of lamb and of course I just happen to have one. This is a giant relief, because everyone has been so kind to me this morning that I feel a bit guilty.

I told the teenager serving coffee the history of the beans she was serving today and suddenly I realised how everyone knows me. It’s good, though, to know that there will be duck pate reserved for me to buy every fortnight just as the cheese lady always goes straight to my favourite Milawa chevre. What’s also good is that I compared all this luxury food with the amount I spent in the supermarket on way inferior stuff and I found that I come out even. I’m healthier, happier and can talk to the producers and be given special treats, and it costs me the same (overall) as supermarket shopping!

Let me assuage my guilt with Alison’s question. Everyone else who has questions says I apparently have already answered them – this means the rest of you miss out and might have to find your own questions. Email me and ask anytime. I was afraid there would be a mad rush: my other blog sometimes gets a mad rush when I open the door to questions, but quite a few role playing gamers and re-enactment folk and writers who use historical backdrops who visit me there.

Alison, I don’t know the exact history of your Easter dish, but I can lay bets that it arose in the joy of leaving Lent behind. Lots of Catholic regions have special dishes to celebrate the end of Lent and they usually include foodstuffs that are forbidden during Lent. One day I might have to do a post on that whole food sequence, from before Lent to after it – it has produced some fascinating foodways.

I now return to gloating over my market goodies.

Tonight I have a bunch of test results. Some of my testers are getting really experienced at this and anticipate the questions I was going to ask them. Jane, who has tested most of the canapés has done me particularly proud and solved a whole host of problems with one simple email. She understands that it’s not all about one person’s palate, and has reported back on four different people, plus she talks about looks and how she interpreted the recipe. Stuart did the same. I guess working with me over time means they know it will save them time and me effort if I get everything I need to know at once. It has really cut down the testing time, too, because they know what they’re doing with historical recipes. In fact, I’ve been particularly lucky with my testers this year.

The menu still has some problems, but it inches ever closer to joy. This is good, because other facets of my life are less joyous.

So, let me bring you closer to happiness or, as Jane said about a nut recipe ‘oh my – I thought my mouth had died and gone to heaven.’ Now you have to wait seven months (or thereabouts) to find out exactly what nut recipe sent Jane to heaven, but hey, anticipation isn’t such a bad thing.

The other thing she said about the nuts was that they were sophisticated and yummy, which actually applies to everything so far. Subtle, sophisticated, delicate: these words occur over and over again in the comments of testers. Well, except for the soup testers. I still have problems with soups. One good one only, and that has a strong flavour, which may well conflict with the subtle sophistication of elsewhere. Hopefully I’ll get another half dozen soups tested and maybe they’ll allay my anxiety about this single course.

In terms of the rest of the menu, it really is looking rather possible. We have canapés and we have the dish that appears on the table when folks sit down and we have to make a selection between 3 delectable mains. We still haven’t looked at sorbets (but I’m not so worried about that) and a dessert is looking possible but not quite there (nothing really stands out yet) but the icecreams… the icecreams are divine. If I were persuading people to come to the banquet, it would be on the strength of that one dish alone.

I didn’t forget you yesterday. I was too emotionally exhausted to write.

It seems strange to say that, because the exhaustion arose from my teaching. Food history is one of those subjects that we tend to associate with our senses and not our emotions. All history, however, is about people. Sometimes the history of people is overwhelming.

Last night we talked about lost histories and how they are recovered, we talked about why a group of women would write down their favourite recipes while starving to death in a concentration camp, we talked about how a lost cuisine was re-established by scholars from Inquisition records and what happened to the people who underwent those investigations. In short, we talked about how food can help us understand the tragedies of history.

We also talked about the way into the records that give us this information and some of the ways they can be interpreted. We discussed the difference between a personal note (using my grandmother’s book) and fully-written recipes. Partly this is because the cuisines of the lost Jews is perfect fodder for this, but partly because either next week or the week after we’ll be exploring the rise of the modern cookbook. I wanted my students to understand that private notations and records weren’t replaced by formal cookbooks, but live alongside them.

My class compared the tragic food notes of the concentration camp women with my grandmother’s private notes with my private notes and we discussed cultural differences and stereotypes, expectations (what we read from recipes and what we’re looking for when we read private notebooks), changes in foodways. All sorts of things.

Big stuff. A lot of material for two hours. My class is normally boisterous but last night they were quiet and thoughtful. I rather suspect they were as emotionally exhausted as me.

I’ll give you an extra day to ask any questions that have occurred to you recently, given my own slowness. I’ll do my best to answer them tomorrow. You can ask questions in the comments section to any post (and if they get caught up as spam, email me through the contact thingie just below the bio) or you can simply email me.

I was going to start answering questions today and there is indeed one question to answer. I hope you don’t mind, Alison, if I leave it until Friday. Tomorrow I have a class to blog about and today, well, today I have a charming distraction.

Once upon a time I kept a journal of recipes from friends. I started in 1977, and from 1983 until 1988 I traveled a fair amount. The recipes are the core of my first understanding of cuisines other than my own. I didn’t just travel, I lived with other people who loved cooking and we shared our cuisines. I realized that I didn’t know all my mother’s best recipes, so I wrote them down in the book. From January 2 until July 30 (it goes backwards – in the front section are nursery rhymes and other cool things) I have recipes from all the most interesting cultures and from many fascinating people.

I thought I had lost this book. Today it reappeared, magically, in a part of the flat I had already searched three times. Tonight, therefore, is for reacquainting myself with the basics of home-cooked Japanese food from near Yokohama; for wondering if I should make those Welsh recipes again; for dreaming of Canadian snack food; for yearning after Indonesian chicken.

It also means I can check my assumptions when I do my food history. I didn’t just write down the recipes because I loved them at the time (though this is certainly true) but because memory changes things, and I wanted to be certain of my understanding. Just as my students discovered that modern apples are sweeter and that their palates had memories of more savoury fruit, I can rediscover where my palate has come from and more easily allow for my own biases.

What I’m doing tonight, though, is flicking through the book and remembering the friends who wrote their best recipes down for me. This old diary may be work-related, but there is a great deal of remembered joy hidden between its battered covers.

PS If enough people are interested, I can give some of the non-secret recipes from my notebook. I can explain why the secret recipes are secret, but I can never give them away.

Every now and again on my other blog I open the floor to questions. I’ve just done that today and it suddenly struck me that maybe readers here had their own questions about food and food history.

Food history is long and complex, and there’s a fair chance that some questions will be beyond me. There’s also a fair chance that I can answer others, or at least report back later with an answer. We won’t know which is true about any given question until that question is asked.

From now, then, until Friday morning in anyone’s time zone (your time zone, my time zone, Antarctica Common Time Zone) you can ask any questions you want about food history. You can ask them as comments or you can use the email contact button near my bio. If I can answer them easily I shall and if I can’t, I’ll do my best to explain why an answer is difficult or impossible. This may be when we discover just how ignorant I really am!!

If this works, I’ll do it again. If it ends up with me in a puddle of hopeless humiliation, then I suspect I shan’t.

The thing is, that historians train using very narrow fields. It’s always a challenge translating what I know as an historian into approaches to history and to food that will be of interest to a wider public. The nuances of meaning of a particular word (one of my actual research areas) is really not frightfully interesting to most people. Cultural history does translate, as this blog shows, but there’s a difference between translating things I know and answering questions about what other people want to know.

This could be fun. Maybe. When I come out from my secret hiding place, I’ll let you know if it was fun.

I don’t know how I managed to post the same post twice, once blue and once in a perfectly normal font. I hope it didn’t confuse anyone!

Update: It wasn’t me. It was Wordpress. I feel relieved :).

Recipe testing is the name of the game right now. My SF convention may not be until October, but there are a dozen of us working madly on the menu for the banquet right now.

I’m still waiting for results on canapés, but I’m not too worried about them because they’re not really very complicated and I can rustle them up myself at the last minute if everything else goes wrong. I know the dish that goes after them and I know the exact flavour mix they need to achieve, and most of the recipes are surprisingly familiar. This means I won’t start worrying about canapés until everything else is sorted.

The soup is not sorted. The soup, in fact, is the gaping hole in the menu. We have one possible fallback recipe, but it’s complicated and took an experienced cook two attempts to sort it out. All the other soups so far, though, are just not good. I need to find out why, so I’ve asked all the soup testers if they would mind brining their tests a little forward. I need to find out if it’s the nature of the soups or if it’s the nature of the ones that were tested early on. One of them was the nature of ingredients in Australia, and all it needed was a bit of constructive thought about how to achieve a basic flavour. I’m, hoping the others will be that straightforward, but right now I don’t know, and right now I’m worried.

The main course still has to be selected, but it’s between good and better. I would still like at least one more vegetarian option before I make my final selections, but we’re in a good position even if nothing else comes through.

I’ve looked at sorbet recipes and decided that they only need testing if we’ve someone who yearns and longs to make sorbets. The main decision is flavour (sorbet recipes all look a bit the same – at least the ones I found), and that entirely depends on what comes before and what comes after.

We have two lovely dessert recipes that can’t go on the menu because they just don’t fit: one is my coffee custard and another is an amazing frozen dessert with glacé fruit. The coffee is too strong for the icecream and the frozen dessert is too icecreamy to contrast with the icecream. My latest dessert report (arrived a few minutes ago) is for a rather fancy stuffed apple. It looks quite possible, and rather elegant. The tester who produced it also came up trumps last year with the beef sirloin, so I’m beginning to wonder if the good recipes gravitate towards Stuart naturally.

To make up for the complications with the dessert, our icecream tester has done everyone proud. She has found the perfect French Neapolitan. I won’t tell you about it now, except that it is subtle and delicious and perfect for where it fits into the meal.

And that’s where we’re at. Very close to a solid draft of the menu. There’s still quite a bit of work before the final menu, but (except for the soup) life feels less insecure than it did a few weeks ago. When the menu is finalized (not until may or later) I shall give you one of the yummy but excluded recipes, as a little celebration.

My mind keeps coming back to The Woman Suffrage Cook Book. I know I’ve given you the election cake from it already, but there’s another bit you might want to see. Let me start from the very beginning.

The very beginning in this case is the title, which is important to understanding why the book was put together. It’s The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, containing thoroughly tested and reliable recipes for cooking, directions for the care or the sick, and practical suggestions, contributed especially for this work. Edited and published by Mrs. Hattie a. Burr, 12 Wayne Street, Boston. In aid of the festival and bazaar, December 13-19, 1886. “Country Store,” April 21-26, 1890. Boston.

Women’s suffrage was more than the vote. It fitted the perceived role of women in society and when the vote was taken away from women in the various States, their roles diminished and their prestige suffered. The very first words acknowledge this, without being accusatory or sounding difficult.

“THIS little volume is sent out with an important mission. It has been carefully prepared, and will prove a practical, reliable authority on cookery, housekeeping, and care of the sick, especially adapted to family use. While many of the receipts are original, it is not claimed that all are so; but each has been thoroughly tested, and is vouched for as reliable by the contributor whose name is appended.

Among the contributors are many who are eminent in their professions as teachers, lecturers, physicians, ministers, and authors,-whose names are household words in the land. A book with so unique and notable a list of contributors, vouched for by such undoubted authority, has never before been given to the public.

Grateful acknowledgments are due to the kind friends,-many of them in distant homes,-who have so willingly contributed of their knowledge and experience for the accomplishment of this undertaking. I believe the great value of these contributions will be fully appreciated, and our messenger will go forth a blessing to housekeepers, and an advocate for the elevation and enfranchisement of woman.

HATTIE A. BURR.
BOSTON, NOVEMBER 25, 1886.”

Today is Good Friday for Christians and Purim for Jews. This is an unusual juxtaposition. The Jewish leap year is partly to blame – it means that all Jewish festivals are a bit later than usual. The moon cycles are also the blame: Easter is early this year.

What it means in terms of food traditions is that some members of the community have a fast day and some have a feast day. It’s traditional for Ashkenazi Jews, for instance, to give two different types of food to friends (which is why I’ve invited friends over tonight to celebrate – much easier than making baskets and explaining them, especially given that my family tradition didn’t include the basket-giving), to eat particular types of pastries, to read the Book of Esther, to get drunk. Every year I announce to my non-Jewish friends that I have a religious obligation to get drunk, and every year I get appropriate reactions. There aren’t that many Jews in Australia, you see, and so there’s always someone who doesn’t have a clue about my festivals.

Tonight we’re drinking my medlar liqueur, of course, but also soft drinks and cordials and maybe wine. The foodways truth of my religious festivals is that I don’t really enjoy getting drunk and nor do any of my family. We always drank enough to ensure we were celebrating and happy, but we never became more than slightly tipsy. Foodways meet religious obligation and most of the time foodways wins. This is because, as hostess, I never have enough time to sit down and debate the issue, nor even enough time to drink more than a glass. I love the thought of being drunk on Purim, but it’s only happened twice in forty-six years.

One day I must ask a rabbi if letting my family custom and interest in enjoying drink intervene in the mitzvah of getting drunk is a problem. That last sentence was a problem, but I rather suspect that the medlar liqueur (four types thereof) will suffice, religiously, even if I only have three sips of each kind.

Foodways and religion are not always a combination made in heaven. I really need to think this out a bit.

Today is the day of the blogchain. Some of you will have met the blogchain before, others will be here because of it. For everyone else, it’s when a group of writers link to each others’ posts, using the previous one as inspiration. This month’s chain has been rather rollercoastery for me because the first few writers were talking about dogs, and I had this horrible thought that I would have to talk about dogs as food (and maybe their significance historically) which is not something I really want to talk about, to be honest. I was lucky, though, and dogs and cats faded just in time.

Polenth was before me in the chain and said “If the post is about eating bumblebees or cute froglets, I’m going to cry. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

What do I do? I have recipes for frogs and even recipes for dogs, but I won’t give them to you. The thing is, each and every culture has its prohibited areas and all these are no-go for most of us. These prohibitions are legacies of our food history. It means that some things bring us to tears when we think of them as food and some bring us to nausea. These emotions are sometimes linked to the actual foodstuff and its qualities (see yesterday’s post!) but are equally often linked to how we’re brought up and how we see food. What I love doing is tracing the growth and change in these sentiments over time. When a pet becomes food and when foodstuff turn into cosseted cuddlies – these are important to know. Why the changes happen are even more important. They help us define some very fundamental aspects of ourselves.

Now I wonder how Spontaneous Derivation will handle the next link in the chain?

Secret Government EGGO Project
Fantastical Imagination
For the First Time
Virtual Wordsmith
Polyspace
My Life, You’re Welcome to It
Polenth’s Quill
Food History
Spontaneous Derivation
Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama
Fresh Hell
SLAKE
Forbidden Snowflake
Virginia Lee’s Vagaries

I have an author interview for you. I carried the book to work today and read it on the way to the bus stop, then I read it on the bus, then I read it some more right until I got to class. Scott Gold has written a wholly entertaining volume devoted to his own experiences of eating meat. Along the way he manages to give useful advice on how to choose a good butcher, how meat ought to fit into a life (and he’s very scathing about quality) and a whole bunch more. It’s a US book, so his focus is on what is available in the US, legislation and animal rights, how hard rattlesnake is to fillet and other crucial morsels.

He throws himself so entirely into the experience of tasting 31 types of meat that the book (as I’ve found) is almost impossible to put down. I knew some of his lessons (quality not quantity; cooking counts; meat handling counts, not everything is equally edible) but that still didn’t prevent my copy of the book becoming rather battered in the 24 hours I’ve owned it.

The book is called The Shameless Carnivore, the author is Scott Gold and it was released today in US time. And no, I haven’t been paid to say nice things – I was given an advance copy of the book so I would know what questions to ask. No, you can’t have my copy of the book. Here, have this interview instead:

1. Could you tell us something about yourself and about your book.

Oh my - so much to say! I’m originally from New Orleans, so the love of food is basically written in my genetic code. I studied philosophy and languages in college as well as creative writing, and was working in the publishing business in New York, hoping to maybe one day write a novel (just like everyone and his cousin). Then, through a perfect-storm of serendipity, I got the opportunity to write a book proposal for a “carnivore’s polemic.” When I started writing about food — and especially meat — the passion flew out of me in a way it had never done with any other subject. So I decided to take my passion for carnivorism to its logical extreme. This meant a two part plan:
1) to examine the subject of meat philosophically, from all angles. It would be entirely too easy to write an anti-vegetarian screed, but that was never my desire or intention. As someone with an unabiding love of meat products, I really wanted to dig deeply into the subject of what it means to be an animal who survives on eating the flesh of other animals, from angles ranging from anthropological to dietary, historical (I’m a culinary history junkie), medical, ethical and spiritual, agricultural, environmental, you name it. And
2) to become the “ultimate carnivore” by trying to eat 31 different animals in month, and then every cut and organ of a cow. Along the way there were other adventures, mostly hilarious but sometimes poignant, that included hunting squirrels in Louisiana, attending the 24th annual Testicle Festival in Montana, and even helping a family farm butcher their cow for that year’s meat. It was all pretty amazing.

2. Did any part of your family food history inspire the book (anecdotes of the “No! Keep that out of your mouth!” type are the obvious, but I was thinking as well of maybe a particular attitude towards food eg an intellectual or emotional response.).

Again, it all goes back to being a native New Orleanian. Back home, food is an integral part of the culture in a way unique from any other American city — people adore food there, but not just the rich, and not just the fancy restaurants and haute cuisine. From a floor captain at a place like Galatoire’s or Commander’s Palace to the guy who collects trash on the side of I-10, everyone in NOLA has a love affair with the local cuisine. Sometimes that means a gorgeous turtle soup au sherry (a classic) — I made it from scratch for the book, and it took two days — or maybe just a muffaletta sandwich, chicken and sausage jamballaya, red beans and rice, or a roast beef po-boy swimming in mayonnaise and gravy. NOLA cuisine, as well as an ingrained atmosphere of fun (and, yes, maybe a little sin) is the ultimate bond of the people. Also, my mother is a wonderful cook in her own right, and used our family dinner table to experiment with different cuisines, everything from spiced lamb patties with couscous to chicken and tasso pasta, and everything in between. With an upbringing like that, winding up as a food writer was almost a foregone conclusion.

Great. I’m making myself hungry. Again.

3. Being Jewish myself, I looked at the description of the book and thought “If only I had the courage to do that, I could try all those Ancient Roman recipes.” How did the Jewish aspect affect what you did? How do you explain it/justify it/deal with it?

This is how I dealt with it: I didn’t. I’ve never kept kosher…being a lifelong, rabid omnivore, any sort of dietary restrictions (other than making sure that you try to keep a relatively diet most of the time) have always seemed crazy to me. In fact, by the time I’d finished the book I’d pretty much broken every dietary law laid down in Leviticus 11, in which the “ye shall not eat” category is filled with things that are spine-meltingly delicious. Oddly, locusts and grasshoppers are perfectly kosher, but I’ve never felt an overwhelming urge to eat them. Pork belly, on the other hand…

4. What is the meat you most want to see put onto modern menus (that isn’t there already)?

A great question. I have to say, unequivocally: goat. It has such a rich tradition in so many other cultures, and yet American goat consumption has been on a sharp, steady decline over the last hundred years or so. And this despite the fact that goat is every bit as delicious as lamb (though with its own unique flavors), not to mention that most foodies have little compunction about eating goat’s milk cheeses like chevre. But suggest to them a goat pate or maybe rack of goat, and suddenly they get all squeamish. This, to me, is utter lunacy. What is it about goat that’s so off-putting? Luckily, there’s a growing number of independent goat farms that now provide outstanding, humanely and organically raised goat meat, and I’m singing its praises every chance I get.

5. What is the meat you least want to see again and wouldn’t even feed your worst enemy?

Bull penis (or “pizzle”), hands down. Just unconscionably disgusting. Most everything else was great, though, especially all the savory variety meats like calf’s brains, kidneys, bone marrow (oooooohhhh), tripe, blood sausage, you name it.

6. Has the experience changed how you approach everyday foods?

It always surprises people to hear this, but I actually eat less meat now than ever before. Me: The Shameless Carnivore! After everything I’ve learned in my research, I’ve made a conscious decision to try to eat only truly splendid meat. Usually, this means that I have to pay significantly more for it, and hence have it in my diet a little less often. But I’d much rather eat vegetarian a few times a week if it means sitting down to a meal of truly succulent, humanely raised, grass-fed beef or lamb at the end of the day. And when you start to really consider your meat, to take it seriously, I’ve found that you actually end up enjoying it that much more.

7. Please, can we have a favourite recipe?

It’s too hard to pick just one, but please see my book for some of my favorites, including Crock-Pot Rabbit, Tibetan Yak Momos, Herb-crusted Rack of Lamb and more!

Today I was thinking about sweetness.

I visited one of those shops that specialise in imported food, to check out what they had and to work out if I could use it for teaching. The shop had so much more sweet stuff than savoury that I started thinking about how the colonial foods of each country helped
shift regional cuisines into various levels of sugar in a diet.

The US, for instance, had more sources for sweeteners than Australia from quite early on. australia grew corn, but didn’t use it as a source of corn syrup (I need to find out if the erly US colonists did, to be honest – I might be making assumptions here). There was honey and there was sugar, mainly imported and sourced from cane.

The US around the same time (and if we’re talking about the british colonies in Terra Australis then we’re abolustely tlking about the united States of America – its political adutlhood runs very closely alongside Australia’s early European settlement) had sugar, honey, maple and possibly corn. There might also have been other sweeteners – I’m away from my library today and so I can’t be certain. The minimum number of sources for sweetener, however, are still more than were available in early Australia.

My very subjective feeling is that US food tends to be sweeter than Aussie, by and large. I’d love to know anyone else’s thoughts. Is US candy and chocolate sweeter, on average than that of Australia, or maybe than the British equivalent? Or have I taken too much time off and need to get back to proper history?

I’ve been playing with cameras and have more food history photos. I have such a backlog of pretty pictures and just haven’t had time to upload them yet for your delectation. So you have joy in store.

The latest photos are more early Sydney colonial history.

Some friends met up for lunch today in the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Two of the friends are the wonderful ones I’m staying with, so I got to tag along. We had a fabulous time and friends from at least four cities caught up with each other and shared gourmet food, which really isn’t relevant to anyone except Laura who reads this blog. Hi, Laura – it was great seeing you!

Anyhow, on the way to the rose garden (where we met up) there was food history. I’m afraid I amused two Danish tourists. My friend pointed and said ‘Food history.’ ‘Food history!â€? said I and tried to find my camera. ‘Just let me find my camera,’ I pleaded. ‘My student need to see this, so very much!’ The young men thought I was being touristy and offered to take photos for me. I explained I wanted the food and nothing but the food. My camera magically unlost itself and I got my pictures.

The Botanic Gardens has a little horticultural patch showing some of the fruit and vegtables that were grown around there during those colonial days. Corn and bananas and fruit bats. OK, I guess the colonists didn’t eat the fruit bats, but they looked like very odd fruit, hanging upside down from every tree in sight and gossiping madly.