Food History

No ancient history today. No profound historical contemplations or insights. Also no recipes. This is because today I was in Sydney, with friends, visiting the grave of an early nineteenth century Australian dignitary, Esther Johnson (nee Abrahams).

Her eating habits would have been very English. Not the sumptuous kind of English that you can see if you check out my posts on the Regency Gothic banquet. The cuisine we used for that banquet was very much a country house cuisine from the south of England.

The difference between early colonial Australia and England at the same time is primarily in the number of available ingredients and their amount. The early nineteenth century was important for Australian farming because it was when European crops were planted and European animals introduced. ‘Important’ doesn’t always mean prosperous or sophisticated. The early years included crop failure, dependence on imports and other exciting impediments. The early colonists worked ery hard to put food on the table, and Esther Abrahams was certainly prosperous enough (especially later in her life) to afford the finest the colony had to offer. What this mean, however, is an abundant supply of good plain food (at its best) and some uneven access to ingredients when ships didn’t arrive or new farmers failed to produce the expected crops.

For her, since she started her Australian career as a convict, exported from London in great poverty, it was probably an improvement. If Jane Austen’s family had experienced it (and one nearly did) the food would have been a let-down.

PS Happy Women’s History Month

Every week after food history, the students who are testing recipes for the Prohibition Banquet come up to me with their questions and their results. This week one set of results added into another and I am waxing rather merry.

For the Prohibition Banquet we need vegetarian options. It was never going to be as easy as last year, when we just rolled those options into the masses of food that go on a table at the same time, for the Regency Gothic banquet. There was a moment of debate with the chef, who needed to see this, but that was all. All I and my testers had to do was find dishes that went well with the sirloin and we were laughing.

This year there need to be real vegetarian choices in a couple of places. The big one is the main course, naturally. Finding dishes that made a substantial stand-alone course was always going to be a little tricky, because it was just not a facet of the sort of dinner menu I’ve been using as my 1921 base.

What I did was find lunch and brunch dishes that looked possible. These are the dishes that flooded in this week. There are maybe three more out there that might be useful, but the worst is over for that section of the menu. I have three options to test against each other and get new tasters to check. I might have four or five, because the egg dishes are proving surprisingly palatable to my testers, but that’s it. The next round for that bit of the menu is almost there. And it looks as if the ice cream dilemma might be solved next week, too.

Just a few more steps to go and we can finish looking at new recipes and move on to finding out how it all fits together. I really looking forward to it.

Tonight, my class and I spent some time in the Middle Ages. I handed out groups of books and clusters of students examined topics such as etiquette, finding evidence in literary sources and comparing cuisines. Then we took a break and ate the delicious late medieval stew one student had made and some fruit cake from Mrs Beeton. We also taste ume tea (thanks to a student, who thought we would be interested – which we were!) and a few rarer spices.

I’ve taught Medieval food so many times before (and some of these students were the recipients of my teaching) that I decided to spend the second half of the session trying a new approach. I talked about some of the underlying factors that make regions what they are. Why butter and not olive oil, why pigs and not cattle. We also talked about seasons and where people got their food and access to traded products.

If all this sounds unexciting, that’s because I’m wilting with fatigue now and can’t communicate the entire fun of the class. It’s a great class to teach because students get so involved in it. They’re a bright group, with a bunch of specialist interests that really fit what we’re doing. What’s curious though, is that I find we look at the big picture a lot. Some classes want the prices of spices or the amount of this or that – these students look happiest and ask the most joyous questions when they can sort out basic principles.

The next class will challenge that a bit. We have a week’s break and then we look at how cuisines get forgotten, intentionally or otherwise. It will be difficult emotionally, I suspect, but we’ll cover some important principles and some fabulous cuisines: it won’t all be tragedy and forgotten souls. It will counterbalance today, which was all about the larger patterns underpinning European cooking and how they helped create the food we eat today.

I talk a lot about historical trends in Australian cuisine, but I don’t think I’ve given you short and simple digest of what happened. Short and over-simple, but it will help make sense of my witterings when I wander off into bush food or start talking fusion cooking.

Once upon a time, Australian food was dull but worthy. That time wasn’t so long ago. Think of the ad I gave you the other day “Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.” The seventies, and ‘roo was only on the menu in certain parts of Adelaide.
British food was such a defining part of our cuisine that you can still say to someone “I grew up a meat and three veg person” and they will know exactly what you mean.

There still is an underlay of this food. It’s the firm base that holds all the exciting fusion cuisine together, perhaps. You can see its influence at the food events where comfort is more important than taste. Children’s parties, for instance. Some of the continuing favourites for Aussie children’s parties are birthday cake (of course), fairy or other winged cakes, chocolate crackles, fairy bread, cocktail sausages and sausage rolls (with tomato dipping sauce), snack food (chips and twisties and other healthy delights), jelly (especially green jelly with chocolate frogs drowning inside), cheese hedgehogs, meringues. If you need recipes for any of this, please say. If you see the list and want to scream and run then my diagnosis is that you’ve been to a children’s party recently.

Dull worthiness doesn’t define our cuisine any more, but it’s still important. It’s impossible to understand Australian food without it.

From the 1940s we adopted continental European cakes as if they were our dream food. Baked cheese cake and vanilla slice. They didn’t displace scones and fruit cake – we just enjoyed more types of cakes.

Starting in the 1960s, we have layered and meshed many other cuisines. Greek and Italian and a strangely deformed Chinese food were the first. From there we branched out, and today’s exciting fusion cuisine is one of the most exciting internationally. We use ingredients from everywhere and create recipes that break new ground every day. From our own native bushfood to spices from Asia to cakes from the Mediterranean, everything adds to the amazing modern Australian melting pot. Underlying it, however, and holding it together are still the same British basics from the beginning of modern Australia.

Today at 4.20 pm East Coast Aussie Summer Time, hear all about the Worst Food Disasters in History, live. I have five minutes in Afternoons with Ingrid. Queenslanders can just tune in to ABC Queensland - everyone else might have to go via the ABC website. Apparently it’s findable from all sorts of places (not just Australia), so if you’re bored, check it out about 2 1/2 hours from the time this post goes up.

Note: ABC Australia, not America!!

A little not-quite-history to serve as snackfood. This should keep you going until tomorrow, and it should also make up for the extra post yesterday (I would so hate to burden people with too much reading!!).

It’s autumn in Australia and the falling leaves have obviously drifted into my brain and meant I didn’t sort out the Carnival dates. I finally swept out my brain and so here is the Carnival of the Recipes – a second post for the day for my regular readers and maybe not too late for everyone else to add to their cooking planning for the week. Enjoy!

I’m dividing the recipes in a very unorthodox manner this time round. They are all things I want to eat, but half of them I can’t eat. For instance, I can’t eat Katy’s lovely Steamed Mussels with Tomato and Fennel but I can most definitely rejoice in Christine’s Stuffed Peppers with Cheese (Poivron au Fromage). Instead of being sensible and dividing them according to ingredients or any other kind of logic, I’m carefully explaining to you whether I can eat them. The reason behind this is only obvious to those who live in my hometown: it’s the Monday night after a long weekend, and rationality went out the door two days ago.

Melissa’s Southwestern Meatloaf sounds like a tasty dish for the next time I have to cook for a crowd, while I shall just have to eye off Stephanie’sPepperoni Rolls.

Karen says “This is a recipe for stuffed jalapenos. These are great to serve as appetizers or finger foods for a party.” I need to find a substitute for the bacon – stuffed jalapenos is such a fabulous thought. Pasta is another fabulous food, though I rather suspect there is no substitute for shrimp (being Jewish can really limit a foodie’s joy), but I can dream, and maybe you can cook. Yi Hui Chang has a recipe for Shrimp pasta with parsley oil looks delectable. I shall have to assuage my hunger with a rather yummy Sweet and Sour Chicken Recipe from Bobby at Free Online Recipes.

Expat Chef must have had my restrictions in mind, as there are three dishes I can cook (and they look great – if it wasn’t nearing midnight I might be tempted into trying at least one of them immediately). Check it out. Also check out Marsha Hudnall’s Healthy Recipe: Whole Grain Bread.

I’ve been thinking of corned beef recently. It’s still hot during the day, but cold nights make me think about winter slowcooked meals. This is a good one from the World Famous recipes website and, for the Northern Hemisphere, you will be looking for light summer dishes.

So there are a bunch of recipes to try, and a bunch to yearn over. And they all look wonderful! I am so grateful for the existence of cooks who blog.

Today I’m all about cultural dynamics over long periods of time. Since most of this concerns facets of history other than food, I won’t go into it, but since it’s haunting me, I thought you might like something a little related.

On the food front, Australia has tried to define its food history at various times. Many countries do. Self-definition is hardly a unique phenomenon. What’s really interesting, though, is that the definitions occurred in Australia just as a national food awareness exploded. The moment when the amazing fusion food coalesced is the exact same one that an advertising jingle was released that listed our national emblems. They apparently were ‘football, meat pies, kangaroo and Holden cars.’ You can see it for yourself here:

Back then, the meat pie was just the meat pie. Old-fashioned – white flour pastry with a solid beef or lamb filling. These days meat pies are full of everything from curried vegetables to steak and kidney. It’s still a part of our food culture, but it has changed to meet a more sophisticated country.

In Adelaide you can still buy pie floaters, where the pie is served upside down on a plate of mushy peas. I’ve been told it’s a great delicacy. The rest of us shake our head at such antics and argue about how you put the sauce on and the best way to actually eat the pie. We also argue whether gourmet pies are really dinkum. And while we argue about authenticity, we walk through the supermarket passing six or eight packs of old-fashioned meat pies. So far, they have outlasted every single food fashion. This probably explains why they were used as part of an advertising jingle in the 1970s.

I just looked at the time. How can it be midnight already? And how can I not have posted? It’s because it was market day, of course, and general shopping day, and there has been progress on the Prohibition banquet front (our first good soup – thanks to Dawn, who made the recipe twice to iron out problems of interpretation) and I have made a very little progress on another culinary history project of mine (of which more, someday, perhaps).

I’m eating a late night Egremont Russet. It’s a good apple for late night munchies: sweet and soft, but not too sweet and just enough crisp and crunch through the softness. I’ve always had a fondness for russets, but right now, this is my favourite. Mind you, I’ve only tasted four. It’s all a matter of being in the right place at the right time, for seasonal and unusual produce. If I were in the UK then thing would be different, of course. More access to interesting apples, and less to saltbush.

I nearly bought saltbush lamb today, but my friend reminded me I had saltbush and I had just ordered lamb, so I was really tangling myself if I bought lamb fed on saltbush then three weeks later bought lamb and covered it in saltbush. Besides, I had just bought Belted Galloway beef and really, truly, I am not a vast meat-eater. My eyes just got too big for a moment. I wanted to find out both sets of flavour, instantly.

What ought to be obvious at this moment is that this autumn I’m taking advantage of the season to advance my understanding of any older varieties of foodstuff I can get hold of. This is partly because the recipe testing enthused me, and partly because I’m increasingly getting to talk to producers and actually understand how fruit falls in and out of fashion. I knew the theory before, but I’m trying to nuance it and to sort out other ways of interpreting primary sources by getting a better understanding of food itself. Historian cannot think using paper alone. She needs Egremont Russets to help the thinking along, perhaps.

I visited the Royal Canberra Show a little while ago. I know I’ve told you that already and I know I’ve promised you photos, but I want to talk about bush food first. Again.

Bush food doesn’t entirely occupy my attention – also in my line of sight today is a brand new second hand chafing dish. That was from Gorman House Market, though, and I don’t get to give you a pretty photo of the food stalls at the Show if I tell you about the chafing dish. Also, last post I did about the Show, I forgot a bunch of useful information without which your life would be incomplete. For instance (useful bit of information #1) the Royal Canberra Show is the second-biggest agricultural show in New South Wales. I love this piece of data, because Canberra isn’t actually part of NSW.

I found a whole variety of bush food on sale. Many stalls stocked macadamia nuts and oil, or sold lemon myrtle or even seasoned their produce with lemon myrtle. Lemon myrtle was so popular, in fact, that one showbag contained a bottle of Outback Spirit’s Lemon Myrtle Dressing.

Showbags are bags (plastic or totes or backpacks, depending on the target market – my bit of the target market is obviously superior, because I ended up with hardy totes that currently hold teaching notes just perfectly) containing discounted products. Most of the children’s ones are for candy or popular TV shows or film characters and are very little discounted indeed. The adult showbags, on the other hand, are bigger and better and more heavily discounted. They are selling samples, basically, to encourage you to buy their product. Whether it’s candy or face cream, you will find a sample in a showbag if the manufacturers want it to be seen across Australia.

To find lemon myrtle dressing in a showbag means that bush foods are beginning to come of age. It comes alongside finding them on supermarket shelves. It’s also a sign that Australian food is still changing. We may still eat our roast meats and our seafood, but finally we have locally-produced sauces based on native plants to dress them with.

Did I remember to say that my other current obsession is identifying what shifts in food habits add up to? History in the making. Now for that Show picture I promised: admire the Aussie food!

I rediscovered something cool today. Blame apples.

Evidence is only as good as our ability to interpret it. Some types of evidence we give a bunch of authority to. Magisterial-looking monographs, for instance, make far too many people nod their heads in agreement without considering the research and thought and general reliability of the book. Someone who sounds as if they know what they’re talking about or wears the right clothes is more often assumed to be credible than to be talking for the sake of talking.

Basically, we carry with us a series of expectations when we come across information about the past. Some of them are based on our formal education while some of them are based upon what our culture has taught us. We tend to assume, for instance, that authority comes in suits and so we give just that much more credence to a salesperson who is respectably dressed.

Where do apples come in? One group often given low credibility is elderly people who say “In my day…” I say it often now I’m middle-aged, just to get a laugh. The laugh shows that the phrase and anything that follows is not nearly as likely to be believed as an earnest statement by a man aged 40, wearing a cool suit and carrying a briefcase. “The apple tart was special,” a friend said recently. “There’s nothing around like that anymore.”

The trick is that this friend isn’t old at all (I was playing with someone’s mind – probably my own). She was referring to a quite specific type of apple used to make a quite specific type of pastry in a very precise part of Arkansas. She knows the folk history of that apple tree and can give you a precise description of the apple. I was able to locate its relatives from her description. She is a reliable witness and there as never any doubt about that. So memories can be reliable sources of food history.

Yesterday I bought some older style cooking apples (not omnipresent Granny Smiths). Anyhow, I stewed some because I was too tired to fix anything more complex and besides, I had tasted one of the apples last night with my class, and I rather thought that slow stewing would create some interesting textures. I picked up some very fine cream to go with it.

When the time came to eat it, I wasn’t hungry. I thought I ought to taste it, though, in the interest of proving that elderly people who kept telling me how much nicer apples were in their day were wrong.

The complete bowl is inside me. It doesn’t matter how un-hungry I am, when an extraordinary flavour comes I find I can suddenly eat. The evidence of the old folks who talked about the stewed apples of their childhood was very sound.

I think the trick is to find out if they’re talking generically or about a specific taste memory. I think the other trick is to admit that anyone’s memory of a flavour or an event is just as likely to be accurate as an expensive monograph. Accuracy, after all, isn’t just a matter of footnotes. In this case, the elderly people who reminisced about apples all had apple trees in their gardens when they were young, and those apple trees were very probably the same variety as the ones I just cooked.

I’m having such a great deal of fun with my food history class that it’s hard to realise that I get paid to teach it. We explored those apples tonight, and two varieties of plums. We talked about local food history and heritage. We talked about how food history can change diets (knowing the changing qualities of foodstuffs, including sugar levels in fruit, is something worth watching, historically). I suggested to everyone that they might enjoy dropping in on Pialligo Apples for the open day this weekend and we sorted out when we were getting our field trip to Mountain Creek Farm (on a Saturday afternoon – and we leave before the cows get hungry, it appears).

I talked the class through foods mentioned in Charlemagne’s list and what that list was for (I’m sorry – I’m just too tired to explain it here) and we looked at what made up the core seasoning in a particular Medieval cuisine. No-one was interested in reading Nostradamus’ recipes.

That wasn’t all, but it was the core of it. The apple core of it, since we ate half an apple each, a sliver at a time.

After class, I was packing up and a found myself the recipient of several reports for the Prohibition banquet. I’ll wait until I get them in writing, but we had an interesting post-class discussion on the problems of packaged consommé for historical recipes.

Even when we’re not in formal class, we’re learning. In fact, our learning during half time break was mulligatawny soup and a spinach slice. These are the same recipes as last year (or close, since the mulligatawny was a bit improvised) and yet they each tasted very different. Each and every cook brings something of themselves to a recipe, even one where every skerrick of ingredient is perfectly measured and described. I think this is why I love food history so much and especially teaching it: it’s such a very human discipline.

My day is encoded in an apple. I just ate one attested (well, its variety is attested) back to 1580. It had better last me through ’til I get home tonight, because picking bullaces and making liqueurs and preparing for class on top of not much sleep has left me in need of magical succour.

Actually, there will be food in class tonight. Some of the food is from the students and some is lots of apple varieties for them (and me!) to taste. Some of the tasting will not be done by me, of course, and that is the evil variety. I have to plan my variety of evil tonight, which says something about my grand fatigue. Picking bullaces was worth it, though. Just think of the liqueur I shall drink in two years time.

If I’m too tired to tell you about the class tonight, I shall report tomorrow.

Having carefully downloaded and selected my photos of the Show and its food, I can’t write you any of those promised posts. Not for a few days, anyhow. The reasons are rather good, though.

Some of them you know already. You already know that I’m teaching my food history course right now. Tomorrow we’re looking at the Middle Ages, but we also might be looking at historical apple varieties. I’m hoping to get a half dozen of them (fresh and crisp and just in season) from Pialligo Apples, first thing tomorrow. I also hope to get enough bullaces to make much alcoholic beverage to drink in two years time, but I guess that’s a separate issue, even if the bullaces are older than the varieties of apples in season right now. In fact, the class will meet some bullaces and other plums as well as the apples. I might even let them have my favourite Japanese tonguetwister, which entirely illuminates the relationship between the various types of stone fruit. I’ll report back on all this tomorrow, probably. I will be very joyous if I can get the apples and rather sorrowful if I can’t, since this is one of those weeks of much temperament.

In between the teaching, I’ve been testing more recipes for that Prohibition banquet. In the oven right now is a coffee custard. It smells good and it looks good, but it will be an hour before I can find out just how delectable it tastes. I’m very optimisitic, though, mainly because the basic proportions are beautiful.

I couldn’t find enough deep containers for the bain-marie, so I put one shallow container in the oven. This was a mistake. Before it even started baking, that particular custard was overflowing with water. Just goes to show that you can improvise almost anything in the kitchen, but there are some directions where improvisation should not go.

It’s been so long since I’ve strained anything the old-fashioned way that my lovely cloth for straining was curiously fungal. It’s going to have two hot washes before I introduce it back into my kitchen and even then I will have a triple-think about it. I may just have to get a new cloth.

That’s the trouble with days when moods swing: things go all kinds of funny. I think I’m due a quiet night tonight. Tomorrow should be good, starting with an orchard trip and ending with my food history class.

Right now isn’t half bad, despite my imperfect cooking. How can life be bad when the room I’m in is suddenly full of the delectable fragrance of coffee?

Never watch the news. It will turn your sensible plans upside down and turn bits of your day to disarray.

I was going to give you a thoughtful post about fruit varieties, but the man on the television was so vary loud about “Hilary’s last chance to obtain nomination” that (whether he was correct or not) I felt it was time for another piece of election cake.

In honour of the most senior woman in the race for President, this recipe comes from the second edition of The Woman Suffrage Cook Book. There’s such a strong natural link between the two things. It took forever for the US to realise that women ought to be voting once they had rescinded those early rights, and now it’s just as slow a process to get a woman as President. Mind you, Australia has only had a woman a Acting Prime Minister since the last elections (ie this year) so we’re not doing much better.

I doubt if getting the recipe for cake right is an essential first step to achieving change, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And this recipe is particularly interesting. It’s enough to feed a party, but it’s a yeast-based recipe, not a quick-rise cake.

Mother’s Election Cake

Five pounds flour, six eggs, two pounds sugar, one pint yeast, three-fourths pound butter, one quart sweet milk, three-fourths pound lard, six nutmegs. Take about three pounds of the flour, and about one-third of the sugar, and stir up with the yeast and two-thirds of the milk, to rise over night, or until it begins to fall on the top; then add the rest of the ingredients and bake in loaves about the same as you would bread.
MISS M. A. HILL.