Food History

This week’s guest writer is Alma Alexander. Those lucky enough to be able to attend Worldcon can talk to her there, but for the rest of us, there are her books and her food. She’s been generous and given us three nights of reading joy. Her fiction has this sense, too, of wonder and a big heart. Her landscapes live and her characters are always interesting. Now, though, let’s let her talk about her food.

I was born in a part of the world where several rich cooking traditions met, collided, and re-formed in a new and rich cuisine which can only be summarised by simply stating that my people love food – the preparing of it, which is a ritual, the serving of it, which is celebration, and the eating of it, which is, well, just heaven.

It’s part of what we are and what we have become through the ages. Our kitchens are a testament to occupations by Turks and by Germans and by Hungarians and by Italians and all of this is used in ways that makes a culinary-minded person swoon at the merest whiff of the scents and aromas coming out of a traditional kitchen.

I really could talk all day about what we eat, how we eat, when we eat it, how it is prepared – but I’ll divide this up into three short(er) parts – the Way It Used To Be, the Family Memories, and the Culinary Arts of Rituals and Traditions (with recipes to match).

The Way It Used To Be

I own several cookbooks from Olden Times – both published volumes, and now-fading handwritten recipes from my grandmother’s time and possibly earlier, hand-me-downs from generations past. You have to understand one thing – my ancestors were people of the land, folks who grew their own food and ate well from it.

Things vanish, as they always do – I remember that when I was very young the village where my grandparents still had the ancestral house still boasted individually owned cows – who came home from pasture apparently by themselves every night and turned each into her own yard, which I found amazing. I drank milk still warm and frothy from being milked straight from a cow’s udder, and you know, I didn’t take any harm from it whatsoever. When I was five I tagged along with a team of wheat harvesters one summer – this was still often done by hand, and they were off to the fields with their scythes, and they naturally assumed that I had permission for this when I asked if I could come with them. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask, which meant that while I was having a wonderful time out in the waving gold of the fields of ripe wheat my parents were going out of their minds trying to figure out where I had got to – until a neighbour told them (everyone knew your business, back there, and the neighbour had seen me go). I caught hell for that, but what I brought away with me was the never-to-be-erased memory of that field of gold waving under blue skies, and the smell of heaven that was summer at harvest time.

Families also kept farmyards full of fowls, and chickens (and therefore eggs) were cheap and plentiful. One of my old cookbooks has a dozen consecutive recipes for cakes calling for more than a dozen eggs – which, today, is fairly boggling. But in the interests of chronicling food and its history, and the way things used to be, I picked a recipe which calls for SIXTEEN – sixteen, count ‘em – eggs, just so as to blow people’s minds. You may never make this cake. But close your eyes and sit back and try to imagine what it must look like, feel like, taste like – the richness that melts on your tongue, and in your memory. My ingredients are – and I will make no apology for this – given in metric terms; anyone used to ounces and things measured by “cups” should probably run for cover now, or bring out a conversion program to keep at hand…

Anyway, here it is. The Almond Cake.

Ingredients:
16 eggs
28 tablespoons of sugar
24 tablespoons finely ground almonds
3 tablespoons flour
310 grams of sweet butter
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lemon
1 bag of vanilla sugar (for those who have no clue what this is, go into your local continental food store and look for Dr Oetker’s Vanilla Sugar Sachets. One of those.)

Mix 12 eggs with 12 spoons of sugar until smooth, then add, spoon by spoon, the ground almonds and the flour. Pour the resulting dough into an oiled cake tin and bake at a medium temperature (MY COMMENT: This is why I hate these old recipes with a passion. WHAT is a moderate temperature when it’s at home? Bake for HOW LONG? No information as to these items is available in the recipe). Take out when done, allow to cool, carefully remove from baking tin and cut horizontally into three equal-thickness layers. In a separate bowl, combine 4 eggs, 10 spoons of sugar, and one grated lemon (MY COMMENT yes, they mean one grated lemon. Rind and fruit.) Stir on low heat on stove until it starts to thicken. When it does thicken, take off heat and leave to cool. Into the cooled cream add a smoothly-combined mixture of 250 grams of sweet butter and two spoons of castor sugar. Mix well, and then use the resulting cream to “sandwich” the layers of the cake together. In a separate pot, boil the last 6 spoons of sugar in a small cup of water and the vanilla sugar until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat and stir until the fondant becomes white. Add 60 grams of butter, stir until smooth, and use mixture to glaze the sandwiched cake. Decorate as you wish (MY COMMENT: I particularly love this. Decorate as you wish. OOOoookay.)

There you have it. Not just sixteen eggs, but probably an entire day or at the very least a couple of steady hours of sustained effort.

There’s other cakes in there. 14 eggs, 12, 10. Close your eyes and listen to the patient clucking of hens just outside your window. You know that all you have to do is step outside into the nests and collect all the eggs that you need…