Food History

More from Laura. She’s going to be happy to hear that the Conflux banquet is actually a Louisianan barbecue (1883 style).

She blogs, by the way. “This very evening” (mentioned below) was two days ago. That was my fault. My punishment isn’t punishment at all - I must read more of Laura’s writing!

I was not a barbecue insider until years after I left my homeland to come live in Australia. I was working on my first novel, and suddenly the characters all became deeply concerned with barbecue. I realized it was because I had become deeply concerned with barbecue. I couldn’t have it. Nobody in Australia could have it.* I would have to learn barbecue on my own, a lonely acolyte with no master but the Internet. But I needed — I mean, my characters needed — barbecue. And it had to be authentic. So I researched diligently, and I set up my first alchemical experiment. And, just to make it easy on myself, I invited 40 people in advance to come by when it was done and eat it.

Luckily for me (and for my guests), it was a triumph. It was an entirely legitimate and acceptable example of the genre.

While that book still languishes, undiscovered, I have continued to find barbecue to be a rich feast indeed for my inner writer. In fact, this very evening, The Lifted Brow will be launching its Issue #5, in which appears my story “Piggy In a Pit.” In this story, barbecue and its inscrutable alchemy figure prominently. (You can order the issue, or even subscribe, from their web site.)

I will offer, for your enjoyment, one manifestation of my favorite style of barbecue sauce. Kansas City-style is thick and sweet and complex, and it goes particularly well with a hunk of roast pork (shoulder is acceptable, but frankly, although purists would disagree, barbecue wants to be good and will forgive inconsistencies and improvisations). Your slow-cooker or a covered dish in a VERY slow oven (no more than about 220 F/104 C) is adequate for cooking the meat — it will take a long, long, long, long time. Use a meat thermometer and when the meat gets to about 190 in the center, you’re good. Shred it, pour the sauce into the slow cooker/dish, and let it cook at that same low temperature, or even lower, for as long as you can. (This is a dish to start very early the morning before, if possible; you can refrigerate the cooked meat overnight before shredding and saucing a few hours before your guests arrive.) Anyway, here’s the sauce.

Kansas City Barbecue Sauce

400 grams or so tomato paste
1/2 cup water (more if the sauce ends up too thick)
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup dark corn syrup (or, for the Australians, whatever other sweet, gooey stuff you have in the cupboard)
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon dried, ground chilli/cayenne (if you’re not actually smoking the meat, try smoked chilli powder for a better flavor)
3 or 4 cloves crushed garlic
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1/2 medium-sized minced onion
1 tablespoon sage
1 tablespoon salt
1 bay leaf

Combine all ingredients in a large, nonreactive saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring to blend well. Reduce heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure sauce does not scorch.

Note: I cut the chilli in this sauce way, way, way down, so feel free to ramp it up with dried chilli flakes, fresh chillis, whatever sears your mouth in the way you like it seared.

*I have since discovered that there is a genuine barbecue restaurant in Brisbane. It’s called Blue Smoke and it’s run by a guy who is also from the DC area. Huh, whaddaya know.

I’m in a medieval mood, mostly because I’m reading a delightful manuscript by Felicity Pulman. Just wait til it gets published, then you, too, can be in medieval mode. Or… maybe you don’t have to wait. Maybe I can introduce you to a couple of the Medieval cooking sites (not the Medieval-diet-that-is-not-Medieval-at-all site) on the internet. Then from you the medievalishness will spiral out and infect the wider world and ten thousand people will find themselves unexpectly making pomesmoille one day.

Got medieval has very little food history on it but lots of marginalia. This means lots of reproductions of interesting pictures from manuscripts, which are, themselves often food history primary sources (plus a great deal of fun). Which means that I was wrong, Got Medieval has heaps of food history. It simply doesn’t often acknowledge it.

The Old Foodie doesn’t have much Medieval either, but it has lots about food over time and is a really handy source of information about recipes and cookbooks. Janet has recently published a book about pies and one about menus will be out soon.

Plants and gardens and related notions (seasonal food!) can be found at The Medieval Garden Enclosed, the blog of The Cloisters. European gardens in a US museum – it’s interesting stuff.

Then there’s Medieval Cookery itself. Despite the title, the food ranges to quite late in time, with a recent post concerning the seventeenth century. Its main concern is the Middle Ages, and it was the owner of this site who did those great links to A Forme of Cury.

And that’s it for my little list. There are other sites, but that’s enough for one day. Enjoy exploring!

My first guest writer is Kaaron Warren. I’ll let her introduce herself.

I’m an Australian writer living in Fiji. We’re nearly finished our three-year stint here and it’s been very inspirational for my writing. I have two children and a husband and at the moment we have five cats, but at three grand each to take them home, I believe we’ll be going home without any. I’m talking about the cats, of course.

“Slights” is my first published novel. It’s the story of Stevie, who accidentally kills her mother in a car accident and almost dies herself. Her vision of the afterlife is terrifying; she doesn’t see a golden path, her mother and father waiting for her with welcoming arms. She sees everyone she’s every slighted, waiting to slice her, flay her, destroy her. The thing is, she is so lonely in her real life, so out of place, she goes back to this place because at least there she is centre of attention.

She’s strong, though. She believes in herself and the decisions she makes. She is confident to the last that she is right. She’s funny; some of the things she says and does still make me laugh.

My publisher is Angry Robot Books, a new imprint from Harper Collins. Their website is here.

You can download a sample of the first chapter there. I blog my Fijian adventures and some writing stuff at my livejournal and I blog mostly writing stuff, including interviews, reviews etc over at wordpress

I’ve made a list of all the food I mention in my novel “Slights”. It’s a long list, and includes: chicken breast with camembert, salad with blue cheese dressing, golden syrup dumplings, fried sandwiches, scones, lemon biscuits, chicken drumsticks, chocolate slice, baby quiches, prawn cocktails, Beef Wellington and fried rice. I’m fascinated by the fact that cold rice can harbour as much bacteria as raw chicken. Food poisoning is a bit of a thing with me, and once Gillian posts her research on ergot, the hallucinogenic mould on bread, I may well write a story about it.

Does that list make you hungry? It doesn’t me, because I deliberately avoided choosing my very favourite foods, in order to separate myself from the character. Mind you, I’d happily eat all those things, but they are not my cravings. Mind you, chocolate slice is a something we eat a fair bit of in this house. My friend calls it “cupboard slice”, because you sneak bits of it in the cupboard when the kids aren’t looking. I call it Three Piece Slice, because you can’t possibly eat only two. I love this recipe because it has melted butter. I hate that whole ‘cream the butter and sugar’ part of cooking.

Three Piece Slice

½ cup plain flour
½ cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2/3 cup caster sugar
¾ cup desiccated coconut
125g butter, melted
½ teaspoon vanilla essence
1 egg, lightly beaten.

Get your oven light to turn off at 180 degrees. Prepare a slice tin of some kind with melted butter and line the base with baking paper.
Sift flours and cocoa, then stir in sugar and coconut. Make a well, then add cooled melted butter, vanilla essence and the egg.
Press the yummy mixture into the tin. Don’t eat any off the spoon until the slice is in the oven. Smooth the top a bit unless you like it bumpy, which I kinda do. Cook for about 15 mins for a nice chewy slice, 25 for a crunchy one.

Top with chocolate icing and sprinkle with coconut, if you like. You’re supposed to toast the coconut, but I burn it every time so I gave up.

I’m going to have to check the numbers, but this is either post 998 or post 999. That means you get something ancient either tomorrow or Monday. In the interim , please get something to me so I can give away cheese. I don’t go giveaways with charm or style, but I want two addresses to be able to forward to the Perfect Italiano people and I want more recipes to share with all of you.

On matters more substantial, today I’m introducing you to a book. I took it from the precise centre of my never-decreasing stack of books that you really need to meet.

It’s much-loved. Someone has used masking tape to bind the spine together and very insecure binding it is. It’s from Melbourne. It has a fading reddish cover and is so soft and flexible and crowded that my first reaction to it was “I bet this was published during World War II.” There were paper shortages in Australia in World War II, you see. Publication continued, but lots of book appeared on cheaper paper and with every page chockers with joy. Less luxury. Fewer blank pages.

I was right. 1943. By someone called “Miranda”. In fact it’s titled ‘”Miranda’s” Cook Book.” Inside we find out that it’s compiled by her and she is of the “Weekly Times.” Also that the recipes are all signed. “Western District Lover.” “Hard Up Mother of Two (N.S.W.).” “Scotty Bob.” “Dollar Bird.” “Mimosa.” “Mother of Seven.” “A Mere Aussie.” “Cooee Lover.” Miranda’s correspondents give just as much information about Australia of the time as the recipes.

There’s infinite joy in this book and I do want to share a recipe. Which one? There are over a thousand and they are all loved by the original donor, and compiled by Miranda and used for sixty years by previous owners of the book. “Broken Gum Nut” has a recipe for coffee essence (p. 210) that looks interesting, so I’ll give you that and one other, sort of related, from “Dinah” who I rather suspect lacks taste buds.

Coffee essence

Put ½ lb. good ground coffee into a saucepan with 3 pints of water, and boil it until there is only 1 pint of liquid left; cool, and put into another saucepan and boil again; as it boils, add enough sugar (white) to make a thin syrup. Strain through muslin before boiling second time. Bottle when cold, and seal the bottles with sealing wax.

Coffee, Wheat (Delicious)

Wash 3 cups wheat and dry in oven; then mix in 3 large tablespoons black treacle, and bake slowly until what absorbs treacle; then stand in tins. It looks all burnt and lumpy like toffee. Take a piece as big as 2 walnuts and cover with boiling water, and boil half an hour. Strain this into as much boiling milk as you like. Result, a beautiful beverage, far better for you than coffee, although it tastes the same.

PS In case you were wondering, Miranda lives. I neeed to blog her story, some day.

Welcome to the June Carnivalesque. I’ve been waiting anxiously for the thousands of fascinating posts about Medieval and Ancient history to wend my way, but they didn’t come. Rather than leaving you with slim pickings (I shan’t make music-related puns today, Canberra is in the grip of cold, cold winter and any puns at all are beyond me) I’ve explored a few of my favourite blogs. This month’s theme is therefore obviously exploration. Very much the stuff of the round earth’s imagined corners. I’m going to label those imagined corners macrobiusly (according to climates, just to warm myself up a bit – I can dream of torrid zones, even if my heater is working hard to stop my computer developing icy innards), and this shall serve.

Freezing Zone (far, far, far north)

It’s impossible for me to have no food blog posts referred to in this Carnivalesque. It would be all wrong for a food history blog. It would also be all wrong for me to refer to something I wrote. So here is something someone else wrote. Right now, the thing on that list that I crave most is hypocras. Must be the cold. I did say I live near the Snowy Mountains, in Australia and it is winter? Very much winter.

Temperate zone (less north, and probably where most of you live)

It’s not quite the weather for making hay, but it’s the weather for blogging about it, with pictures from manuscripts, to boot.

It’s also the perfect time to blog 1381 and to make jokes about revolting peasants.

Torrid and wondrously warm equatorial zone

Modern Medieval maps of Charlemagne (and makes me wish I had the skills to do this section of the blog on an actual equatorial map, with links rather than descriptions).

Steve Muhlberger on Joan of Arc.

Plus some marginalia to help cure heatsickness. It’s almost impossible to have too much marginalia.

Temperate zone (south – currently freezing – the posts in this section don’t come from the south, but I do find them cheering, somehow)

Something warming: Zenobia on Zenobia. There’s also a follow-up post that includes a ring. The Ring of the Zenobias. Someone ought to write an opera about it.

Jason gave me two posts suggesting that maybe one of them didn’t entirely suck. It’s very mean and nasty of me to report his comment, so I’m including both his posts here. Besides, you need to make up your own mind on the level of suckitude (I need an Old French word meaning ’suckitude’. It would transform my life.)

Freezing Zone (south of here – you really don’t want to go there right now)

This is intensely depressing. Though there is some cheering news on Medieval News if you explore a bit.

Chaucer is in trouble with his wife after his trip to Vegas. Ice represents the family climate rather nicely.

PS All similarity between my descriptions and any extant map (whether linked to Macrobius or not) is probably in error.

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.

Don’t you love the olden days? The days when coconut was considered an exotic ingredient and put into everything? On top of that it was often spelt cocoanut? In fact, I do recall my Nana saying coconut with 4 syllables co-co-a-nut.

Cocoanut Puffs

Mix two cups RED RIDING HOOD Cocoanut with one cup powdered sugar, the beaten whites of two eggs and two tablespoonfulls of flour. Place on buttered tins and bake quickly.

Cocoanut Crumb Custard

INGREDIENTS:- 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1 tablespoon dessicated cocoanut, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon butter, 2 eggs, 1 1/2 cups hot milk, pinch salt, few drops vanilla essence, grated nutmeg.
METHOD.- Combine beaten eggs, salt, sugar, crumbs, cocoanut, vanilla, milk and butter. Pour into buttered pyrex dish, sprinkle with grated nutmeg and bake slowly in a dish with water until set.

Cocoanut Curry

Meat, stock, curry powder, salt and apple. Mince meat and add with enough stock seasoned to taste, cut up an apple small and gently simmer together with a dessertspoonful of good pungent curry powder and two heaped tablespoonfulls of EXCELSIOR COCOANUT. Always add enough salt and a little vinegar. Serve either alone, with rice in a separate dish, or place in centre with rice round. Curry should never be made without cocoanut.

I don’t think I’ll ever see it again without hearing Nan’s voice in my head now. Really.

There is a smudgy recipe for Black Boys (that appear to be round lamingtons with plenty of cocoanut) which I’m pretty sure would be renamed for today’s press. As I’m sure Kidney Potato Cakes (which are actually a sweet), Jap Cakes, and Paper Bags would be. And here’s a hip one from the newspaper:

A Special Cake for the Kiddies
REQUIRED:
Half a pound of “Frenlite” flour
One ounce Bird’s Custard Powder
Two ounces of margarine
Two tablespoonfuls of marmalade
Two heaped teaspoonfuls of Burwick’s baking powder
A little lemon flavouring or lime-juice cordial
About half a teacupful of household milk
Mix together the flour, custard powder and baking pwder. Rub in the margarine lightly, warm the marmalade slightly, add it and the lemon flavouring to the dry ingrediants. Add as much milk as is required to make the mixture moist enough to drop heavily from the spoon, then pour into a well greased tin and bake in a moderate oven (Regulo 5, Electric 400 degrees) for about an hour. Place on a sieve to cool.

Yum. Well, at least it didn’t have cocoanut in it.

I like the title “Etceteras For The Christmas Table”. If I used that term now, my kids would wonder what on earth I was talking about - but I still remember that usage of the word. In this case the Etceteras refer to: Mince Meat Layer Pies, Devilled Almonds, Suger (sp.) Nuts, Nut Mincemeat, Glazed Fruit and Nuts and Refrigerator Fruit cake if you were wondering.

And then there’s Girdle Cookery. Is it bad that I giggle looking in this section? In my head Girdle cookery should be the recipes without 3 pounds of butter, sugar, and dripping. I know that the word Girdle is still used, but it confuses me. I want to yell “Griddle, griddle, griddle!” but even now, I’ve said it so many times that it too has lost all meaning.

Rice Girdle Scones

INGREDIENTS: I cup boiled warm rice, I cup milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 cup self-raising flour, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon melted butter.

Method: Beat the egg yolks, add milk, salt, warmed drained rice, melted butter, and sifted flour. Mix evenly and then fold in the stiffly whisked egg whites. Place spoonsful of the mixture on hot greased girdle and cook till evenly browned underneath. When surface is puffed and full of bubbles and edges appear cooked turn each cake and brown tghe second side. Serve hot with butter, maple, mock maple, or golden syrup or honey.

Luncheon Girdle Scones

INDREDIANTS: Cold cooked rolled oats porridge, self raising flour as required.

Method: Work as much sifted slef raising flour into the cold rolled oats porridge as will enable it to be rolled out about an inch in thickness. Cut mixture into triangles, place on hot, greased girdle and cook till both sides are evenly brown, turning the scones once. Split and serve hot, after spreading with butter.

Finally, I have to wonder if there is a future for food named for the Royal family? Prince Harry Cake? King William Biscuits? Not so much.

Prince of Wales Cakes

Quarter pound of this Self Raising Flour, quarter pound butter, vanilla, half small cup milk, quarter pound cornflour, 3 ozs. sugar, 1 egg. Sift flour and cornflour on to a plate or paper, beat butter and sugar to a cream, add beaten egg and essence, stir in flour and mix gradually and alternately, half fill greased patty tins and bake 10 minutes.

I wonder if Prince Charles has them for his birthday?

My life is entirely void of food history insights. Maybe I should be a bit more accurate and say that my day is actually devoid of such things. My life is still more than a little bit oriented towards food history.

My usual way of dealing with thinking about other matters or being over-busy or way too stressed is to find some really interesting recipes and subtly place them instead of a post. I have bunches prepared in the background for such eventualities. The thing is, though, that after the long break you had when the server was out of operation, you don’t need an excuse for a post. You need something with a bit more bite.

One of the things that I see very often in pop history books and one of the things that I use a lot in teaching are the cool stories. Often they’re cool stories about cool people. The ideal cool stories have some intrinsic humour or some intrinsic gross-out factor. My favourite cool stories recently have been the Franklin Expedition and the Molasses Factory Accident.

John Scalzi is the cause of a minor food history incident. He has kindly traced its progress through internetland over the time since he taped bacon onto his cat, and today he points out just how it has affected his blog. Go read his blog and trace the bacon-cat story back to its inception and you can see how foodlore can develop and how it can entirely eclipse otherwise significant items in a life.

This is an extended version (become more extended because of changes in how we get our information) of local foodways and family stories. The tens of thousands of people who know about John’s cat are the equivalent of the town full of people who would have known about it three hundred years ago. Dissemination of foodways depends very much on who talks to whom and how.

So, that was your food history theory of the day – now go and mess with Scalzi’s brain. Tell him you’re using him as an example of how foodways are created and shared. I dare you.

PS There is no bacon picture on this post: I’m Jewish. Instead, I give you the moustache cup.

I received some new teaching toys in the mail today. There’s a company in England that specialises in making little packs of reproduction ephemera. I bought these packs because they fit what we’re doing on Thursday night, and they arrived just in time. One of the topics for Thursday’s class is food during the Blitz and my students being able to handle reproduction ration books will help bring that aspect of the past to life.

In fact, ephemera is wonderfully evocative. I did a post a while back on a leaflet advertising Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills, and meant to write more, but life got in the way (as it does). And I’ve given you another variety of ephemera - think of how nostalgic some folks become when they see the favourite wrappers from their childhood.

I can’t introduce you to my wartime ephemera, because I want some surprises for Thursday’s class and how can it be a surprise if you’ve read it on your teacher’s blog two days before? Instead, I’ll talk about the tea leaflet in the Fifties pack, because it takes me back to my childhood. I wasn’t alive in the fifties, of course, but the habit of cutting coupons from tea and carefully saving them for gifts is definitely something I remember from my childhood. I don’t remember us every cashing those coupons in, but we must have. We were forever cutting them out, anyhow.

The facsimile leaflet I have in front of me is for Black and Green’s Golden Tips tea catalogue from 1954-55. It has a few drawings of jewellery on the back flap, but otherwise is just a list (with headings) of what can be got and for how many labels.

Let me give you some food-related examples:

A tee strainer will set you back 14 labels and a bun tin 21. You could exchange 31 for a good quality tea towel and 47 for three dessert spoons of solid nickel. If your life is incomplete without an aluminium porringer (2 pint size, best quality) then you need to drink 63 labels worth of tea, while you could get tannin poisoning if you drink enough (176 labels worth!) for three aluminium saucepans with lids. At the lowest end of the scale is a kitchen swab, which only needs 6 labels. I want the bun tin. Maybe I should get a half a dozen friends a-drinking while I build my time machine.

There’s a blog devoted to ephemera, if your appetite is whetted. It’s called Ephemera and covers a lot of the stuff of daily life that fades from our sight so quickly. Maybe Marty (whose blog it is) has a leaflet with a picture of that desirable bun tin on it?

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

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.

Welcome to the Kosher Cooking Carnival! It’s a little late, and it’s all my fault. I forgot it was my first week of university teaching when I offered to do it. I also didn’t count on thunderstorms and about a dozen articles due at once. Everything’s a little late except my class on Edible History. That went delightfully. One of my students has a particular interest in the history of ice cream and is prepared to cook to prove it.

Now that it’s here, please enjoy the Carnival. Lots of good links and a couple of rather tempting recipes.

Let’s start with one of the recipes, perhaps. An absolutely delicious parve pie crust. Thank you, Leora, US friends have been known to tell me that something is ‘as easy as apple pie’ and I always wondered just what part the crust played in this.

There’s along history of Jews making sure that fellow Jews get a decent meal for Shabbos. Poor Jews a hundred years ago would scrimp all week to try to achieve this for themselves, too. It’s lovely to see this tradition continued, and with a bake sale, too. Food turning into more food. It makes everyone just that much happier.

Batya tells us about a Chanukat ha-kitchen. Worth doing just for the challah! To balance that challah, you can read about a less-perfect bagel. Having finally found a baker in my hometown who knows how to cook a bagel, I asked him why he gave some of his bagels the toppings I associate with onion rolls. “I don’t know what an onion roll is,” he said. It turned out he hadn’t eaten kosher bagels, either. Life is a city with almost no Jews can be very entertaining.

I envy Batya being snowed in and then finding a cheap sandwich (appropriately linked to Hillel’s name). We had some snowflakes here yesterday and decided it was a miracle. It’s summer in Australia, after all.

Summer doesn’t make me feel less hungry when I look at Batya’s beautiful pictures on eating out in Jerusalem.

Girls Who Network send in a shrimp dish for the Carnival. It looks interesting, but I won’t volunteer to taste it. We all have our definitions of kashruth, and mine doesn’t include shrimp. My great-grandmother’s apparently included bacon on occasion, which I agonise over from time to time, often on this blog. Batya agonises more carefully than I do, with interesting results.

To finish on a really glorious note, Batya sent me a joke from Bangitout. I don’t know the person in question, but I really like the joke. While you spend the next hour pondering restaurant ideas, I’m going to have a cup of tea.

Top Ten Worst Kosher Restaurant Ideas

10. Shalosh Seudos, The Restaurant!

9. All German Cuisine: Gestapos!

8. Just Herring: Shmaltzys

7. Shabbos Leftovers: dubbed ‘Tinfoil’

6. The Yeshiva Dorm Experience

5. Egg Nog and other foods Jesus Consumed

4. Cholent: Greetings and Flatuations

3. Everything fake! Bacon, Cheese Burger, Shrimp: Facons!

2. Fast Day Theme: dubbed “Fast food”

1. Kosher For Passover Food, All Year Round!

Today I have a special guest blogger. I’ve been getting in touch with other Australian bloggers – finding out what they do and where they blog it. Even blogs about health and wellbeing, and I thought his take on food history might be interesting. Enjoy!!

It is easy to forget that food is about our life. The foodie magazines usually write about food as if it was a fashion accessory, or as a kind of entertainment. The other extreme is reducing food to a collection of nutrients - the ultimate destination of this approach would be one food, easily digested, supplemented with every possible nutrient. Hardly an attractive prospect.

Both of these approaches lose the visceral and emotional connection that we have with our food. Just thinking about our favourite foods can be enough to alter our mood. And think of how strong our reaction is to foods that we really dislike. Food is a very emotional reality (which leads to a different approach to dieting than the simple ‘calories in, exercise out’ approach; but that would be the subject of another post).

Our childhood experiences are a particularly potent source of our feelings about food. One Dutch friend can’t stand the smell of fresh bread. (During World War II his mother would smuggle fresh bread to those hiding from the military. He associates the smell of fresh bread with anxiety for his mother’s life. Whenever he smells fresh bread he feels, once again, sick with anxiety). Then there are the positive experiences from our childhood. The foods that remind us of times of delight. For instance, there are the ‘magic foods’ that I had when getting over sickness. (In years 1 and 2 I was often sick with a “viral infection of the upper respiratory tract”. I learnt to know this phrase even though I didn’t have a clue what it meant.) For me vegemite on toast and lemonade are magic foods (though calling them food may be stretching the point a bit). These were the foods I had when I was getting better from my bouts of sickness. They are forever associated for me with getting well again. They are to this day associated with indulgence for me.

Re-establishing our emotional connection with food can open up a world of delight and indulgence. A world of pleasure not contemplated by either the food magazines or the nutrition gurus. Food can become a human experience for us once again.

Evan Hadkins
www.wellbeingandhealth.net

You know the posts you’ve been reading for the last two weeks? I haven’t been round to post them. I wrote most of them (and the ones I didn’t write are pretty obvious), but I wrote them round Christmas and then I disappeared to work on a novel. I forward-posted them to appear while I was hiding and typing madly.

I went with a group of writer-friends to Yackandandah in north-east Victoria. It’s a very lovely part of the world and I got two car trips to see bits of it. I know that area pretty well as an historian and a foodie (and even as a food historian). My greatest food history sadness was that I didn’t get to visit the sole vine (in Chiltern) that survived the Great Phylloxera Disaster, but the other members of my group made it to Chiltern and even did some shopping there. At least this means I know it still exists. Serves me right for not driving. I last saw it about a quarter of a century ago and I first saw it even earlier than that.

I can tell you about the vine, at least. All Victorian grapevines had to be replanted and the whole industry started again from scratch using resistant American rootstock. The region now produces some of the best fortifieds in the world, but it was devastated just about a century ago. I grew up thinking of it as a kind of phoenix. Maybe one day I will get to see that vine again: it’s an important part of our food history.

I finished my novel. It may take forever to find a publisher, but it’s done and over. Right now I think it is pathetic and awful and am very depressed about it. I always get like this when I read through a novel I’ve just finished, so don’t take it too seriously. I pity my fellow writers, who weren’t depressed and miserable and thinking their work was a waste of time. They were all dynamic and cheerful and incredibly hard-working while I was moping those last few days.

Sharyn (who posted here twice while I was away) saved me from myself on Monday and gave me some regional food and a bunch of local history. I’ll tell you about some of what I saw as the mood takes me. Or maybe as the cheese and mustard make me happy again.

While I was away, my friend Kate (who does those lovely photos) went to New Caledonia. She took some food pictures there, and maybe I’ll direct you to them once I’ve seen her and can tell a bit about her experiences.

Also, I have some much-delayed pictures from Trudi, who was writing away with me recently. I’ve delayed them because there’s a bit more work putting together the posts that explain them than for other posts and life has been impossibly hectic, but they’re too good to stay hidden.

In less than a month I have a course starting in Canberra. You can find details here, if you’re interested. It’s a fun course and I’m looking forward to it. I’ve taught it a few times now, but this year I plan to add a few twists. We have an excursion to a farm to meet historical cows and pigs (including, I hope, one called Beyonce) this time, for instance, plus a heap of new recipes, reflecting my recent research.

The next few days I’m still in the world of speculative fiction, though, as I have reviews to write. Isn’t it just as well that I created a menu for my just-finished novel. If any of you speak up and say “I want to see the menu” I’ll post it for you. It’s based on some rather sumptuous eighteenth century dinners, but modified for a future world that apes the eighteenth century but has certain problems re-creating it accurately.

And now you know where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing and why. Does it rejoice your heart?