What actually happened in Alyson’s tests? She blogged about it. I so want to try the one with port in. It sounds perfect for cold winter nights ie now.
Alyson’s extra report means that anyone who has become used to all the alcohol flowing in this corner of blogland doesn’t have to go cold turkey for a bit.
I’m going to post about cookbooks tomorrow after all. Tonight I want to put in a plea for more help. Four months ago I had a queue of people who wanted the food testing for the Prohibition Banquet all sorted out so that they could move on to the more joyous task of drinks testing. I still have a core of happy testers (and one new one) but most of the queue seems to have disappeared.
I have thirty-something recipes that need homes and tasting. I would very much like results by the end of May so that the committee can do the tricky job of trying all the drinks in one evening before the evenings get so long and so cold that such a task becomes dangerous. Though an extended cocktail party in mid-winter does have its attractions, and I do have a camera…
Testing these recipes is really a matter of getting the ingredients, mixing them, sipping elegantly and telling me how much you like what you taste and what, exactly, it tastes like. If you say something curious or colourful (or even curiously colourful) I might blog it. If you are three sips in and think of a splendid new science fictional or fantasy name for the drink then I can take that to the committee for consideration. We’re not renaming the food for the occasion, but we are most certainly renaming the drinks.
I’ll blog the final recipes with their new names (and slightly modified ingredients – Australian brands in 2008 and New York brands in 1921 don’t always overlap) after Conflux, which isn’t until October. This is, in other words, your last chance to taste what’s going to happen at the Banquet and at the Speakeasy the night after.
All I need is an email address and the number of recipes you’re willing to try and I’ll email them to you forthwith. In advance, thank you, because I really, really didn’t want to have to make all thirty-nine of those recipes myself.
I was offered an exceptionally wonderful opportunity to talk about a subject I love on the blog of a major Aussie publisher. If you want to see what terrible liberties I took with this opportunity, check it out here.
I promise to post about those two cookbooks later tonight.
Several thoughtful people gave me community cookbooks for my birthday. I’m delaying putting them away until I can blog them, because community cookbooks are way more fun when they’re shared. I looked at my little stack today and wondered where to start and how to go about it. The problem is that in some ways local cookbooks are all different and unique. In other ways, they’re a bit the same. It’s the latter that worries me. Normally I classify works by similarities of ideas or concepts or language. If I do that in these instances, what you will get are blog posts of the greatest boredom. It will strip the books of their individuality and quirkiness and render them intellectual sludge. That intellectual sludge might be the underlying material for really interesting academic papers, but I’ve decided against it in this case. Be proud of me.
What I thought I would do is introduce them in pairs. Not matched pairs, either. I’ll take two at random each day for three days and find you something cool in each and every one of them. After all, a lot of love and work goes into each and every community cookbook. Even the ones that use a set format and just modify it a little and then add their own recipes entails a bunch of effort.
I’m afraid my blogposts won’t lead to a sparkling little article on the nature of community cookbooks. It will help you retain your respect for them and understand just how fascinating they are, though, and the lack of sludge should mean that you won’t use my blog last thing at night to help you get a good night’s rest. So, three posts, two books a post, starting tomorrow.
Yesterday was so busy and last night so fatigued that I completely forgot to blog. Sorry about that! I blame first week of term, but the real problem lay with me coming back in the afternoon to teach a new course that evening. Naturally this means that today and tomorrow all I want to do is sleep.
Tomorrow has all kinds of paperwork lying in work, some messages, and a meeting.
I think I might take the easy way out. Today and tomorrow I’m going to give you other people’s recipes. Not Sharyn’s, though I’m certain more of them will come. More for the biscuit and scone collection tomorrow and something else the day after. I’ll decide tomorrow and the day after when they come. Today I want to talk about what I have in store for the blog over the next little while.
I also have five new cookbooks. They were birthday presents from sensible souls. I shall blog about them soon. In fact, I won’t put them away until they’re blogged, so that’s something to look forward to. They’re all community cookbooks of one kind or another, so the recipes will be interesting and the stories behind them good.
Soon we’re going to start testing cocktail recipes for the Prohibition Banquet and the next night’s Speakeasy. I feel as if I should start a chart for my hangovers.
While I was away I scored some cool cooking equipment. Most of it is modern and only of interesting to people who eel like eating at my place. My mother let me have a set of antique scales. They’re not very antique, I don’t think, but beautifully balanced and use pre-decimal weights. Now I have a 1940s scale for my big weigh-ins (for those rare occasions when I make cakes) and this other balance for the smaller things. I’m going to try to take a picture, but if you see the moustache cup at the top of the post you’ll know that I failed. The failure is probably due to a missing cord (things are a bit topsy-turvy at my place when term begins). When the cord appears I’ll try again.
And that’s the sum of my apologies. Historical scone and biscuit recipes tomorrow!
My mind has, all day, been scattered like chaff by the breeze.
Every now and again I get that way, in between-times. This particular between-time is the place between Passover and the start of term (moving from the Jewish calendar to the secular one), between kosher food and my everyday fare, between the continuous food at my mother’s and the more sporadic supply at my own home.
There are some continuities in my life. We talk about the history of food in Melbourne whenever I visit, for instance. This time round I discovered the whereabouts of the cherry farms that supplied the Eastern suburbs, fifty years ago, and the precise variety of prune that my family ate forty years ago.
Some aspects of work are also continuities. You will be pleased to know, for instance, that I am the proud possessor of a costume for the Prohibition Banquet. I bought reproduction fabric and 2 metres of silk and my mother did the rest. She can sew, thank goodness. When I sew life becomes interesting.
I maybe ought to let you know that I bought a bit of extra fabric and I’ll be making them up into picnic squares. There may be some kind of giveaway on the blog later in the year to celebrate the banquet and my guestliness. That giveaway might include picnic squares and folding instructions and recipes. The only thing that might come between you and possessor of hand-hemmed picnic squares of reproduction fabrics is if all my friends get there first. Maybe I should just squirrel two away and promise them here, now. Watch this space. You, too, could be the proud possessor of a square and recipes to go with it. It won’t happen for a few months, though.
Tomorrow I move away from between and into term time. This term I’m not teaching food history. My subject is Medieval Women and women eat food, so food won’t be entirely absent from my teaching. I have no idea how it will affect my blog. I’m in between-time, though, so I really don’t have much idea about anything.
I’ve been eating birthday cakes. Mine. Plural. My mother made me one for the day nine family members got together for a birthday dinner. She made me another one for today, since it’s my actual birthday. The first was a chocolate sponge made with potato flour (since it’s still Passover) and the second was an orange-hazelnut cake.
Friends and relatives have been drifting in and out for the last few days, too.
No, I’m not having a major birthday, although turning a prime number is a rather cool thing. I’m just lucky enough to have a birthday that coincides with an Australian public holiday and (this year, though not most years) Passover.
It’s family time and a long weekend and everyone is slowing down a bit and my parents’ place is good to visit. This means I’m having a gentle but prolonged happytime.
There is food history involved. Of course there is. How could there not be? Not just Sharyn’s lovely posts (more to come, by the way, but tonight is about birthdays), but friends and family remembering fruit past and recipes present. Sometimes they remembered fruit present and recipes past.
Between us we have eaten amazing amounts of food (I shall roll home quite soon, I think, even though home is hundreds of miles from here) and spun so many stories and made so many jokes that I can’t remember the half of them.
Anywhere, that’s where I’ve been. In a smaller world than usual, celebrating Passover and my forty-seventh birthday and remembering the past. Some of the past hasn’t been happy – ANZAC Day is not really a happy history, after all, but it’s all worth remembering.
The best thing about a birthday? The more of them I have the more I have learned and the better I understand the past.
PS I haven’t forgotten presents. In fact, at least one needs blogging, one day soon.
Tonight I’m part of the Absolute Writers’ Blogchain again. Last time everyone was talking about pets, as you’ll probably remember. I remember because we all ended up talking about eating strange animals, which was mostly my fault. (I need to put some work in and convince everyone that I’m a gentle and unassuming soul, don’t I? Which reminds me, you might want to take a look at the conflux guest list.)
This time the writer before me was Colby Marshall. I ought to be really grateful, because the newest post on Colby’s blog was about cockroaches and I do not really want to even think about cockroaches served on a plate for culinary delectation. If anyone has eaten a cockroach, I’d be very happy to hear all about it, though. I’m generous that way.
Colby wrote about dance and writing and how even a week without is an eternity. The most I’ve been without food is three days, and the first 36 hours are tough, and then it gets better. This got me to thinking about fasts. Ramadan is a civilised fast (unless it occurs in summer, when the no drinking during daylight hours is worse than the no eating, by a long shot). Judaism has one day fasts.
My favourite fasts though, are Christian Medieval. They’re the sort of fasts that one can get fat on. Fasts not counted by calorie, but by avoidance of certain foods. When I discovered this as an undergraduate and reported enthusiastically to my mother, she worried I was going to convert. Then I told her about the Papal Schism and she felt a bit more reassured. Then I had a Catholic boyfriend and she was de-reassured again. Then I told her that most Christian fasts involved fish and she stopped worrying about me for months. You see, the fast days were the big fish days in the Medieval calendar, and I’m fatally allergic to fish.
Give Fantastical Imagination a day or so, but make sure you visit. Otherwise you may never know where the chain takes allergies, fasts, perplexed parents and the Great Schism. Also, you might want to read the earlier posts, so here’s a list:
1. Food History is still in Australia’s top 100 blogs (March 2008) - thank you everyone who linked to me!
2. I need addresses to send those fridge magnets to. Even if I know you, I might still need the address, because I often have several friends with the same first name. If you can’t find the ‘contact me’ button, then send your address to philologa(at)gmail)dot)com These are a brand new design, so if you want to make a collection, please send me your address again.
3. For anyone in or near Canberra (or anyone who has friends in or near Canberra) the new food history course starts 1 May and still has spaces. This is the last time I will be teaching it until at least 2009 (possibly longer - I don’t know next year’s program yet). You, too, can be introduced to the moustache cup (in fact, my students were supposed to be introduced last night - now it will have to be enxt week).
The details:
Our edible past: food in history
The best and worst of historical food, from Ancient Rome to the twentieth century. Discover the joy that was Medieval pastries and things you really didn’t want to know about early margarine. Learn about famous chefs and their recipes. Sample some historical cooking.
The course will follow students’ interests – it may be thematic or chronological. The topics that we will look at will include the following, but these are just starting points:
• Overeating in Ancient Rome - Apicius and his cookbook
• When Gluttony was a Deadly Sin - Medieval and Renaissance gourmet delights
• The British Empire’s Belly - home cooking in England in the eighteenth century
• Royal Recipes (not suitable for slimmers)
• The Rise of the Modern Cookbook - Mrs Beeton and friends
• The Age(s) of Exploration - new food, new tastebuds and new national cuisine
DATES/TIMES: 5.30-7.30pm on 8 Thursdays from 1 May
FEE: $274
The Australian National University
Telephone bookings: 02-61252892
Email: enrolments.cce@anu.edu.au
http://www.anu.edu.au/cce
I’m sorry there was no post yesterday. I also suspect today’s won’t be up to much. The trouble I have a virus. The worst symptoms are over, thankfully, and I’m no longer racing to the bathroom at the mere thought of food. I’m not really up to contemplating culinary matters too closely yet, though. And yes… I can’t not post. There would be a deep wrongness about refusing to post with this illness when I’ve posted from interstate and from other illnesses. Let’s face it, I refuse to wimp out (at least now that I’m actually out of bed).
I feel like talking about invalid food. For some reason the beef soups that I read about as a kid always appealed to me. They sound much more pleasant than, say, a panada. The last time I encountered a panada was in Georgette Heyer, anyhow, and she was very much not a nineteenth century writer.
The method for the fine beef drink for invalids is surprisingly simple. It’s basically steamed beef, with the steaming done with the lid on. The quality stuff from the meat is supposed to be drawn out of the meat until you are left with nothing but the finest quality and most easily digestible drink. When I get well enough to work out if I have the pans to do it with (and I may just) I might use up a package of chuck steak in the process, although one recipe (according to my vague recall) specified a higher quality meat. Anyhow, my chuck steak is quality meat, just a tougher cut of quality meat, so it will have to do.
What I was going to post about yesterday was class, and what I was going to post about today were some more of the recipe tests. Both of those will have to wait, since tomorrow I had not emerged at all from illness and today I’ve only just emerged. Still, at least I’m back. And it’s only one remove from a beef drink for invalids to a fine consommé for gourmets, so life can’t be that bad. Besides, I’m a half inch thinner than two days ago.
I’m taking today off and maybe tomorrow. I’ve got a virus. Serves me right for doing an autumn post and overworking all on the same day. I taught this morning, but since then have spent vast amounts of time asleep, so I don’t feel quite as totaled, but I still need a little time out.
To entertain you while I sleep some more, here are some recipes for the biscuit and scone collection. These are from the second edition of The Neighborhood Cook Book, Portland, Oregon. It was compiled on behalf of the Portland Section of the Council of Jewish Women, originally in 1912, but this version in 1914.
Biscuits
One quart flour sifted twice with three teaspoons Crescent baking powder. Shortening size of large egg, half butter, half lard. If you only use butter, take twice the size of an egg. One rounding teaspoon salt. Sweet milk enough to make a soft dough. Roll thin and bake in hot oven seven to ten minutes.
Five o’Clock Tea Biscuits
Mix one-fourth of a pound of flour and one teaspoon Crescent baking powder, one cup of sugar, the rind and juice of two lemons with one-half pound of butter, which has been worked into a smooth paste, add to this the whites of two eggs and a little milk. Roll this and cut into biscuits, and brush them over with the yolks of the eggs. Sprinkle with a little sifted, pulverized sugar and bake in buttered tins.
Chocolate Cookies
One cup brown sugar, one cup white sugar, three sticks chocolate, one tablespoon whiskey, four eggs, three cups flour, two teaspoons Crescent baking powder, one teaspoon each of all kinds of spices. Beat the yolks of the eggs with the sugar. Add chocolate, syrup, whiskey, spices, and then the flour, and last the beaten whites over which the baking powder has been sifted. When stiff enough to roll, brush tops of cookies with beaten egg.
Drop Cookies
Three eggs, two cups brown sugar, one cup butter, level teaspoon soda, dissolved in two tablespoons boiling water, one cup walnuts chopped, three cups flour.
Date Cookies
One-fourth pound dates pitted and cut in half, one-fourth pound almonds blanched and cut lengthwise, one-fourth pound granulated sugar. Whites of two eggs, beaten very stiff. Put dates, almonds, and sugar in bowl together and mix well. Then add beaten whites. Grease tins very well. Sprinkle with cracker dust to prevent sticking. Bake in hot oven.
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.
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.
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
A few herbs, a pinch of spice and foods of the past create your perfect foodie recipe at Food History. Expand your palate with everything from hot scones to hot websites without leaving your computer. At Food History there's a gourmet’s delight of food, health, history, and an amazing side of mushrooms. From holiday food customs to any number of fabulous recipes, you can find out anything and everything about your favorite tasty tidbits.
Food History Author(s)
» Gillian-Polack
