Food History

Summer came in last night with a mutter of thunder. It’s been gently storming for a few days and I kept forgetting (because I was too busy muttering imprecations against the weather) that I meant to write a comment on the change of seasons and what it means for produce or even a thought on food for health. They’re regular preoccupations of mine, after all. All I can think of is coffee and chocolate and ginger, because they’re the foods that help most with the headaches I get from summer storms.

Ginger relaxes muscles. It’s not as effective as one of its cousins (kencur, in Indonesian – I don’t know what it’s called in English) but it tastes nicer. Galingale is near kin to both ginger and kencur, so it might also be good against storm headaches. I shall look for it in the market this morning and maybe slowcook a stew using galingale and other regional spices. I made a seventeenth century stew the other night and it used galingale and grains of paradise very effectively, so it’s not beyond me, even in grouch-weather.

Coffee was seen as a curative and as a poison early on in its European history. I suspect it was a bit like sugar. It made people feel so good that they didn’t know if it was good or bad. Most people erred on the side of good, and that’s what I shall do today. I might also hunt out some early coffee literature over the summer and actually do a more serious comment. Coffee in the seventeenth century in Europe is very exciting and warrants more than passing words.

Chocolate can wait until a bit later in the day. I must to market go! This means I shall eat it rather than write about it. I’m unrepentant. In a hurry. Off to market. Have some coffee, chocolate or ginger while I look for goose eggs and cherries.

I was going to give you a lard or ham recipe from The Neighborhood Cook Book, but the heart has gone out of me. I had the annual “Why aren’t you putting up a Christmas tree this Sunday?” discussion – this year with a group of pre-teens – and I have suddenly lost my enthusiasm for spreading the less obvious Jewish eating habits.

This is one of the major phenomena that keeps us (any cultural or religious minority) in line: when the world demands we be like them, we try very hard to be like ourselves and somehow, in the trying, become more like each other. This is one of the major reasons why not eating pork products is as much a cultural as a religious habit – it responds to outsiders’ questioning Judaism and Jewishness as much as it is a response to religious law. In fact, for many Jewish, maybe it’s more s response to the outside world than to the inner religious one.

Not everyone responds in the same way. I don’t eat ham or bacon or lard, but I rather like it that I can carve ham if asked. Other people keep glatt kosher and are amazingly strict. Still other people like their bacon with their breakfast.

Within various Jewish communities, social pressures aren’t as consistent as outsiders may think. Take this advertisement from The Neighbourhood Cook Book, for instance.

“The art of cookery depends on the quality of ingredients used. That is why more and more women every day insist upon using

HAM, BACON, LARD

These products are known for their absolute purity and wholesomeness. Under the watchful eye of the U.S. Government Inspectors, COLUMBIA BRAND Products are prepared to meet the most exacting demands for cleanliness and sanitation.

AT ALL BEST DEALERS
Made by
UNION MEAT COMPANY

In answering these ads, please mention Neighborhood Cook Book.”

So, not only recipes, but ads: ham, bacon and lard were very much a part of some Jewish lives in the US in the nineteenth century. Pressures, internal and external mean that – to study Jewish cooking over a couple of centuries even just in the English speaking world – I have to keep an eye open for these advertisements and for recipes and for reactions to both internal and external pressures.

And I always have to remember the Christmas tree argument. It goes “Why don’t you have a Christmas tree?” I always wonder why it doesn’t go “Why do you have one?” It doesn’t, however. Pressures are strange and subtle and pressures on minorities are particularly interesting. Without them, maybe more Jewish cookbooks would have really great ads for pork products.

PS The photo is entirely unrelated to the post. I am thinking of using it whenever I post on the Southern Gothic dinner and I wanted to see what it looked like. It’s the right age and very Gothic - it just comes from a bit too far south, is the problem.

I have permission! I have permission! It’s time to announce the theme of next year’s Conflux Banquet.

We’re cheating madly next year. We so loved the cocktails this year that pre-dinner drinks and etceteras shall be all themed “Mardi Gras 1945.”

The dinner itself won’t be twentieth century, though it shall definitely have the flavour of the South. In fact, the dinner is to be set in Louisiana in 1883. We’re calling it Southern Gothic.

Mostly Australians think of Louisiana and New Orleans as synonymous, which would make this dinner rather vampiric, given the tradition of New Orleans horror writers, but it’s nothing like that. Louisiana is a big state and New Orleans is one corner of it and we’ve gone for quite the other corner. There was an elegant French-influenced cuisine in the south-west, you see, hidden in the dark bayous (poetically speaking) and given that Conflux attendees love their fine French food, we thought that would give us fun food to serve. It also means we get pirates and ghosts and Spanish moss.

I’m going to be learning how to menu plan Louisianan food without gumbo or po-boys. As usual, I’m not doing it alone. In fact, this year I shall need particular help with certain dishes. Testing won’t start till early New Year (now is my time for sorting out the basic menu structure and work out just how far Canberra in October can provide basic ingredients from an entirely different climate – this will be a Gulf coast menu, after all) but I’m happy to take names and eventually get back to you with yummy food to cook. I’ll be putting forward another call for testers when I have my first collection of recipes to be tested, though, so maybe you should just enjoy your Thanksgiving and your Christmas for now and think of bayou Louisiana early in the new year.

We’ve even decided which bayou the dinner will be near, in case you want to know. It’s Contraband Bayou. So many pirate stories! I have yet to learn the ghost stories and other horror, but I bet it’s there. My publisher showed me pictures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in that region and these days it’s bright and modern, but it looked dangerous back then. This time travel is going to be so cool on so many levels!

Today I found you an interview on the history of Thanksgiving to keep you out of mischief. You need to be kept out of mischief, because I’ve been working on the next banquet theme in the background this week but I’m not quite at the stage where I can get excited publicly. In other words, the link to the interview with an historian from Plimouth Plantation (a living museum) is purely as a distraction to focus your attention away from the main happening. It’s an interesting interview, in itself, and maybe it will make up for me not doing a special Thanksgiving post this year.

Australia never really developed an equivalent of Thanskgiving. We don’t have particular recipes that are part of our gratitude for being alive and etc. Which is interesting, because there was much starvation in the early colonial days. We ought to have developed a tradition and we did not. Mind you, I think the survival ratios were a bit different between the colonies. They were set up for different reasons and had different levels of knowledge brought by the settlers and different levels of help from home. But I’m not going to get distracted with that, when I’m trying to distract you from the banquet excitement.

We (the committee for the convention) hope there’ll be an announcement soon - that will mean all of us (here, now, whenever ‘now’ is) can start getting excited about the preparations. I’ll be asking for testers as usual, though it will almost all be food testing, and not drinks. Today, though, enjoy the interview and - for US readers and friends (and readers who are friends) - have a lovely Thanksgiving.

A little while ago I was comparing the cooking in The Neighborhood Cook Book, a Council of Jewish Women book from Portland, Oregon (1914 edition, because that’s the one I found online) with my own family’s cooking from that period (insofar as I know it). There are differences. Melbourne Jewish and Portland Jewish were not the same in 1914.

The Portland book has much more that isn’t kosher stuff, especially seafood and lard. Although there is a rumour in my family that lard might have been used, whenever faced with the rumour the older relatives always said “No, it was suet.” Beef dripping, not pork.

The differences say something important about us and our food history, however. Both groups – Melbourne and Portland – were Jewish and had a high level of identification with religion, culture, cuisine and community endeavour (yes, my family was as much into committee work then as it is now, which is somewhat of a worry).

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that we self-identify. I know I am Jewish and that my cooking is Jewish because I say so and I know so, through many generations of good cooking and strong Jewish food affiliation. I don’t get my food religious and cultural identification from Fiddler in the Roof (my favourite source of Jewish cultural stereotyping) or from any branch of US cooking. The branch of my family I’m thinking of, in fact, is very close in food style to middle class cuisine of London before 1850, but I think I’ve explained that before.

What this means is that – for many of us – self-identification is more important than technical designation. And I think you need another post on the Portland cookbook, on another, maybe with a recipe featuring lard, just to show that not all Jewish cooking is kosher.

I was going to tell you all about the Kinokuniya Cookbook tonight, with its scratch and sniff chocolate panel on the front and lots of yummy recipes inside. My home made liqueur got in the way and now all I can think about is how to diminish the ginger taste so the medlar will shine forth. I think the answer is to use less ginger wine next time, but my answer this time is to add a little raspberry vinegar cordial and let it sit for a bit longer, decanted, with the extra flavours balancing things out. If it doesn’t work as a liqueur, it will most certainly work as a nice summer punch base. And summer is very much on the way here, so a punch base could come in handy.

I have at least three other 2.4 litre bottles with medlars maturing, but without the ginger wine. They’ll be much better. Much better for me, too, since apparently the ginger wine is not good for my health (I’m still dealing with an inflammatory condition and the oddest things set it off).

There is food history in all of this. Marinating fruit and sugar in high level alcohol is such a good idea – but it can’t happen until you have fruit, sugar and brandy or vodka or rum or equivalent. Fruit came early, though varieties changed gradually over time. One of my liqueurs this year was made with bullaces, which most certainly predate both distillation and refined sugar.

Refined sugar was around by the Middle Ages. Brandy was, sort of, but was rather rare and expensive. You see, homemade liqueurs of this sort were very common in the nineteenth century, when brandy became cheap, and totally impossible before the Middle Ages, when distillation was invented.

One day I’ll draw up a timeline and correlate it with recipes and tell you exactly what happened when and where, but my glass is empty today and I haven’t the heart. I won’t be making more cherry brandy this year, I suspect, which is a second reason to not have the heart to make a timeline. The cherries are nice this year, and cheap, but the right varieties are in very short supply. If I make it, I’ll give you the recipe. In the meantime, I think I shall watch an episode of Highlander. This isn’t related to anything, except that I’ve just knocked off work and am full of liqueur.

Today I’ve spent doing background work on a novel. I have characters who are friends partly because of their love of cooking and fine food, so it was important to establish the dishes they would serve each other at a series of dinner parties. I wanted a simple code that everyone could understand to show how different each of them is, but I also want extra information in there for anyone who knows a bit about food history, to alert them that one of the characters might not be what she seems. The extra information won’t change the plot, but it means that readers who share my love of history will know just a little more than those who don’t.

I can’t tell you too much about the character, but I can tell you the sorts of food I have used to give her history just that bit more depth. I have used the cuisine of the hidden Jews of Spain after the 1492 expulsion. One dinner party has green chicken, for instance, and a rather yummy dish of beans. And I have used the cuisine of the Romaniot Jews of Greece.

My character is neither Greek nor Spanish, but she is rather old and she is Jewish. I wanted to indicate that age can mean richness of background. The other thing I wanted to do was remind myself what countries her thoughts are tending towards in the year the novel is set: her memories show in what foods she’s thinking of. It’s like making oxeyes. In winter when I am nostalgic for childhood, I will fry a piece of bread (having cut a whole in its centre) then break an egg into the middle. It was a family breakfast for a cold winter’s morning in Melbourne in the sixties, and every time I eat an oxeye I remember that part of my childhood. I can’t create a whole life for this character, but I can remind herself of the richness of a life and give her some memories that are attached to certain foods.

Over the next few weeks I shall test some of the recipes. After that I’ll be working on the Conflux banquet recipes, which will be neither Hidden Jewish nor Romaniot, it seems. For a while it looked as if we might have a Secret Jewish banquet, so I’m rather glad my character needs these recipes: I so want to know what they’re like!

I’ll be looking for testers for the banquet menu soon, so watch this space.

There is an Introductory Address in the third edition of Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, And Hints to Young Housekeepers. by Elizabeth E. Lea. She also claims that “The Source of Liberal Deeds is Wise Economy.”

She tells a familiar story. You run your first household and you find many gourmet recipes but no single cookbook that contains the basics. The fact that they exist doesn’t help, because you don’t know about them. So you decide to write one. If she had been born more recently, she would have blogged the recipes. This introduction is a salutary less in personalities – I know several Elizabeth E Leas. Some of them are helpful and amusing and treasures to the world; some are annoying. I leave you to judge for yourself.

“The compiler of “Useful Receipts and Hints to Young Housekeepers” having entered early in life upon a train of duties, was frequently embarrassed by her ignorance of domestic affairs. For, whilst receipt books for elegant preparations were often seen, those connected with the ordinary, but far more useful part of household duties, were not easily procured; thus situated, she applied to persons of experience, and embodied the information collected in a book, to which, since years have matured her judgment, she has added much that is the result of her own experiments. Familiar, then, with the difficulties a young housekeeper encounters, when she finds herself in reality the mistress of an establishment, the Authoress offers to her young countrywomen this Work, with the belief that, by attention to its contents, many of the cares attendant on a country or city life, may be materially lessened; and hoping that the directions are such as to be understood by the most inexperienced, it is respectfully dedicated to those who feel an interest in domestic affairs.”

I’ve decided it’s about time to announce some winners. Who has won what? I’m not sure what I promised, or what people want (I am distressingly vague today) so if your name is on the list, email me and we can work it out. That way everyone gets something they like. In fact, if you have a mad-keen preference from the various odds and sods I offered, say so in the email. If you don’t email me, I’ll assume you don’t like anything and will let fall a single tear for your sorrowful state of mind.

Congratulations to:

Judy Kennedy
Satima Flavell
Alyson Hill
Llyn (who has already received her prizes!)
John Lampard

Email me by Monday, if you can (and email me with a postal address even if I already have it), so that I can go to the post office next week: it is my great desire to make the post office lady very, very confused and I have three parcels to send already, which means all I need is preferences and mailing address and four lucky (or unlucky) readers can be added to my goal of confusion. If I don’t hear from you by the time I get to the post office (Wednesday in my timezone), be prepared with an outstanding excuse for lack of email, otherwise I’ll just assume you don’t want your little parcel. (This is a test to make sure you all actually read my blog and are not vaguely following keywords like ‘contest’ over the internet.)

Anyone who didn’t comment, sorry, it’s too late. You’ll have to wait till I decide to give something away again.

And we’re back to normal programming. I’m not travelling for weeks and weeks and weeks and so I have time to think about the important things in life, like the history of ingredients and how we train our tastebuds. I can also introduce you to all those books murmuring just behind my right elbow. Which means that, in a few weeks, I will be able to tidy my desk. Woohoo!!

We’re having a bit of weather here. Nothing serious, and certainly nothing to be concerned about. It just means that my computer time is a little unreliable … and so am I. Early summer, after all brings thunderstorms. Cherries are followed by thunderstorms and spiders: I need to remember this.

I have no food history on my mind at all. This is really unusual for me and is related to me being at the tail end of the teaching year. Three more weeks and then I have writing time and some space to find a bit more energy. Just three more weeks. Until then, food history in my life is a bit sporadic.

The main food history element in this teaching week wile b in my one-off workshop on Saturday afternoon. I need to put together a teaching kit that includes Medieval aphrodisiacs, contraceptives and abortifacients. As I keep telling everyone, there is no practical element to this course, so we don’t get to test the effectiveness of each herb or spice. We’ll talk about them, though, and how they fitted into social views of sex.

The other bit of food oddness in my week is a catalogue. I have one for the first person who emails me an address. It’s from Kinokuniya, a Sydney bookshop. In October they had a cookbook promotion and put out a catalogue of their most discounted cookbooks and obtained permission for recipes from each book to put in the catalogue. They include a chocolate scratch and sniff panel on the front. So, if you’ve always wanted a cookbook with a scratch and sniff panel, this is you big opportunity. The first person to email me with a request for it (use the contact button on this page – to the right somewhere) will fid it winging its way in the post, soon. I might even include one of my new latke recipe postcards in the package.

Today my thoughts are all about birds. I served duck and chicken at a dinner party tonight. I invented the duck recipe and served the chicken with a late Medieval style sauce. The theme was citrus, basically, with the vegetarian guest getting grilled haloumi with fresh lemon.

I ought to have dwelled on the history of citrus, given the theme, but instead I thought abut birds. I thought about how domestication of ducks and geese and chickens and other fowl meant ready sources of food for people who didn’t have large dwelling spaces. Meat and eggs and fat are important in our diets, so domestication of birds was a major step in assuring regular supplies of nutrition.

When did it happen, though? I’ve seen speculation, but no hard evidence. A long time ago, for certain.

What’s interesting now is that my generation is reclaiming ducks. We have still to reclaim geese. Chicken and maybe turkey were for a generation the only birds readily available in shops: everything else had to be specially ordered.

I’m waiting for pheasant and grouse to be so readily available. Ten years ago I would have laughed if someone had told me I would buy duck marylands in the frozen section of the supermarket (admittedly the specialist Asian supermarket) and invent a recipe for it for a dinner party. Maybe in ten years time I shall have even more choices of fowl.

What I realised (yet again) was that history is not a simple progression in a specific direction. Fashions mean foods come and go. Unless a food is extinct (like silphium) there’s always a possibility of it coming back into fashion and all its magic being revived.

I have a giant pile of books on my desk. Every single book in the pile is waiting to be mentioned here. I could cheat madly and just list the titles and authors and get them over with and done in this past and then put them away, but really, that’s not fair.

The top book in the stack is one that you’ve been waiting on for a while. It’s the pub book that went walkabout a while ago. “Counter Meal: Recipes and stories from great Australian pubs” is its name, and was written by David Carr and Ned Meldrum. When I opened it I found an entry form for “The Ultimate Shout” Competition, which closed in 2005. I guess I’m not going to win it. I might keep the entry form inside the book, though, and contribute to the world’s collection of interesting ephemera in stray books.

This is a lovely coffee table book. It has full page pictures of hotels round Australia, form the elegant Hope and Anchor Tavern in Hobart to the lightly more raffish Three Brothers Arms in South Australia. It isn’t a vast selection of hotels, but with each one comes their best recipes and a bit of a description of the pub at the time of writing.

Unfortunately for you, I’ve got a migraine (it’s early Summer here and with early Summer comes thunderstorms and with thunderstorms, I get migraines) and just looking at the recipes makes me feel ill, so I’m, not going to even try transcribing one.

Maybe you’ll be luckier with the next book. Or the one after. I have such a stack of them and one day I will be blogging without nausea and a book will have your perfect recipe. So hang in there!

I thought you might like to know how the taste testing went.

My create-your-fantasy-world group ranges in age from 10 to 13. Let me go through each aspect of taste and how they reacted. The cuisines they created were a bit cautious, though two dishes struck me as a bit daring: couscous cake made with green chilli and mashed potato with fish sauce (made to the Roman recipe I had given them). The latter was the staple food for poor people in a coastal village.

I gave them the five basic flavours (salty, sweet, sour, umami and bitter). Let me go through them in order:

Salty: I used salt crystals. One hated them. All the others enjoyed the taste very much. One of them claimed the bag of salt and nibbled on it until it was all gone.

Sweet: one of the favourite flavours. Everyone loved the little bag of sugar. Not only did none of it come back home, but I caught one of the kids trying to pick up some spilled sugar to eat. I would have predicted this, if I had thought about predictions.

Sour: I used a Seville orange, to introduce the idea of historical varieties of fruit as well as the sour flavour. Most of the children dealt with it, but not happily. One’s mouth instantly puckered and she had to drink much cordial to reclaim her tastebuds. One child, however, adored the flavour and finished the rest of the orange.

Umami: I only had one ready-to-hand source for this and that was instant kosher chicken soup. To my tastebuds it is very strongly umami. To my students’ it was food heaven. They each had a cup full and have asked if I can bring more next week. It made me wonder just how much umami is in the Australian diet, that they found this their comfort food.

Bitter: I brought rue in for this taste. I wanted to introduce them to the idea of historical cuisines having some different herbs. Two students found rue tasteless and the others loved it. The same student who adored the salt kept coming back for more rue, too.

This test was very unscientific, but a lot of fun! Once it was over, we discussed how flavours fit together and how trade and farming influence food choices. We also read some of the rhymes from When Mabel Laid the Table, so that the students could think about the folklore of food and how they wanted it to operate in their worlds.

And that’s the closest to food history I got today!!

I’ve just put together a little teaching pack for tomorrow morning. I’m not actually teaching food history tomorrow: I’m teaching a group of young writers how to devise food systems for their fantasy worlds. Some of the essentials are the same, though.

There was one particular small collection of tastes that I thought you would be interested in. I want to start by teaching these children how to identify flavours so that they can work out what dominant flavours they want in the savoury aspects of their food. There are a bunch of approaches I could use for this, but tomorrow I’m going to sue a basic identification tool.

I start with flavours that follow the five flavour receptors: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. For salty flavours I have salt. For sweet, I have sugar. For umami, I have kosher instant chicken soup. It was the best I could do – right now my life is not full of umami, which is actually a bit odd. Anyhow, I decided that bitter could be represented by dried rue. Dried rue isn’t the best I can do, but I rather suspect it’s the most pre-teens can tolerate. They ought – at that age- be very sensitive to bitter. For sour, I have a Seville orange, because that brings a nice bit of Medieval food history in at the same time. I also have a couple of other things that I always match up with the five flavours. I have some 99.45% chocolate, for the fat texture and I have some cubebs for the heat sensation.

Once we’ve worked through these flavours and thought about textures, we can look at climate and available foodstuffs, we can talk about the needs of the plot and anything that comes up, from beriberi to food for travel. We’ll talk about farming and land ownership and, in two hours, we’ll have food for the worlds this group of children are designing.

I found an old printout just now. It’s been hanging round my place for a decade, waiting to be read. It’s someone’s notes on food indigenous to the Canberra region. These aren’t the plants that dominate the bushfood industry: Australia has such a varied flora, and so many of our plants are edible, yet most of them come from particular regions none of which is Canberra.

The fruits in our region are often small fruits and not terribly commercially viable, it seems. Apples probably weren’t commercially viable thousands of years ago, when they were small and less sweet. I can’t even tell you what they taste like, or what their names are, because the notes I have just comment on how small they are.

One plant I know is the native mint. There are umpteen varieties of them and I have my particular favourite for tea. A friend has just moved into a house with a nice bush and I intend to smile at her sweetly and ask for a handful of leaves from time to time. The tea is refreshing in summer – not quite as sharp as normal mint and it has a sweet smoky aftertaste.

Another local plant I eat is wattle. I buy my wattle seed already roasted, because I value my teeth. I know people who drink wattle as a coffee substitute, but my favourite use of wattle is in biscuits.

There are some local banksias here and apparently the nectar on them is particularly good for refreshing summer drinks. I’ve never tried it. I need to find a friend whom cultivates banksias. I can see myself with a string of friends, each important for one element I their garden. Not a good idea. I’d rather have the friends because they’re fabulous people. Still, banksias are everywhere – all I need is some flowers and fresh water.

I have more lists of indigenous plants and their food values. More detail. More wistfulness about plants I shall never grow. I just don’t have a green thumb. There’s a theme in this somewhere: plants I shall never grow, books my sister will never give me. I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and start planning some more recreational culinary history, maybe in the form of next year’s Conflux banquet. Watch this space.