Food History

I’m becoming a firm believer in everything being linked. That’s the only explanation for a food history excursion including unexpected tips on how to make a shofar. Our hosts today didn’t even know what a shofar was, but Michael knew all about hollowing ram’s horns the easy (though slow) way and gave me a really good explanation why rams’ horns are used more than ewes’. Ewes have a solid portion at the thin end of their horn: they’re harder to hollow out. None of which is relevant to food history unless the breeding of sheep for meat and the breeding of sheep for musical/religious reasons work together, which they might have, somewhere and sometime.

We talked about Aylesbury ducks and their fine history while we were at the farm, but in the end we forgot to see them. We met some young male Belted Galloways, who acted very much like teenage boys. Michael tried and tried to call them, and they kept fairly disdainful gazes upon us, but they saw there was no food in meeting us so they stayed away. The thing is, we will get the ultimate revenge. Young cows should not act intolerably bored – not when they’re in the slaughter paddock. (I felt so mean typing that!)

The sheep were much cooler, and meeting Beyonce the pig is always a delight. She has grown huge and the sheep (Wiltshire, I think) looked tiny and elegant by comparison. They reminded me, in fact, of many of the sheep I had seen in Medieval Book of Hours. So did a roaming whippet.

The hens avoided the peacocks and peahens, and since the peacocks and hens decided to squawk around us enthusiastically we didn’t talk to the hens, just as we didn’t talk to the ducks. I pointed out that I knew how to cook a peacock, which amused my students immeasurably. I left out some key elements when I described the process to them, but it was a genuine error. If they cook according the (very vague) method I described, without the missing steps, they won’t have roast peacock, they’ll have some form of leather.

My enthusiasm for all the plants and Michael’s and Elizabeth’s immense knowledge of what they’re doing often transformed into discussions of how to cook everything from briar rose hips to belladonna’s uses. It was someone else, though, who knew that paddymelon fruit were not edible.

And that was our class excursion. We all bought meat to take home (which resulted in me cooking steak and kidney pie for my dinner), one of my students collected a bunch of feathers to use for calligraphy, and I’m now the proud possessor of a sheep’s skull (alas, merino – I was hoping for one of the heritage types) and a red kangaroo skull. The ‘roo skull is amazingly tiny. They act dangerously clever and sheep act stupid, so maybe the main use of a big brain is to form the base of a dish for the evening meal. And no, I didn’t buy any brains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I forgot to say that you can buy salt bush and sea parsley here. I asked and they have designed their packets specifically for posting overseas, so be daring and give them a try.

Sea parsley is apparently a must-have herb for fish eaters, but my heart is set on salt bush. This might have something to do with the fact that I have an acute fish allergy. It has equally as much to do with cooking with salt bush being one of my childhood dreams.

Since each and every way I turn right now I find bushfoods, I thought I should inflict the same thing on you. Not that it’s an affliction for me, since I have packets of herbs and spices, ready to cook, but for you, you get to hear anecdotes and then decide whether or not you want to cook with the ingredients or contemplate their history or ignore my post and hope for maybe a decent historical biscuit recipe tomorrow, to make up.

I’ve chosen just two herbs to introduce you to today. There’s a reason for this. Popular lore has it that the early British settlers used tea tree when there was no tea to be had. Apart from this and some rather good stories about native animals from a slightly later period (which I need to check up, since I suspect I’m teaching Colonial Australian food in a few weeks) the general feeling about Australian native ingredients is that we’ve ignored the bush and ignored the foods of indigenous Australia until very, very recently.

This turns out to be only half true. The early settlers used herbs like salt bush (Atriplex nummularia) and sea parsley (Apium prostratum) and then later settlers replaced salt bush with rosemary and sea parsley with common parsley. These two herbs are in front of me now, since they were part of my swag from the Show.

Maybe the move away from local ingredients and to European plants was due to homesickness. Maybe it was a distrust of the strange environment they now lived in. Maybe it was linked to the change in attitudes towards the original inhabitants of this land: the first settlers accepted that they were invading and their leaders tried to respect at least some of the indigenous rights; later settlers developed an acceptance of the concept of Terra Nullius and denied people a depressing number of human rights.

I’m going to keep my eyes open for evidence of the two shifts and see if I can work out if they happened at the same time or were linked in any way. If I find anything, I’ll let you know. I won’t have time to actively research it, though, so it may take a while before I can piece out a pattern.

Watch this space.

Once upon a time (which means over a week ago), I wrote a post about a special revolution happening with Australian food. I alerted you all to the history-in-the-making that is our bushfood industry.

My timing was totally impeccable, because when I went to the Show I found all the ingredients I had hoped were about to hit the market. The ones I had been dreaming of cooking with, less than two weeks earlier. What’s more, I got to talk to Jill and Denis Richardson, the couple responsible for making these ingredients available.

It gave me a small but important dynamic in how this bushfood revolution is happening.

They’ve realised that the problem with Australians enjoying bushfoods in the past wasn’t just being able to obtain ingredients easily and inexpensively, but the lack of recipes to go with them. Each and every packet of spices and seasoning mixes that A Taste of the Bush sells has a recipe with it. If you want more recipes, then the company sells inexpensive cookbooks. They also promote other people in the industry. Our conversation turned to luminaries such as Ian Hemphill and I began to get an inkling of just how tight the bushfoods industry is and how everyone has to work together if these foods are going to be fully integrated into Australian cooking. Jill also knows a fair amount about what local herbs early settlers used before they established their English-style gardens.

This was quite an amazing experience for a Medievalist. One of the things I look for when I research is cultural dynamics. My key area is how things change and why things change and whether participants are conscious of the change they’re provoking. To be in the middle of a change and to talk to change agents then to suddenly realise that I’m becoming a minor change agent myself in this area puts an entirely different spin on the limits of using written sources when the writers are dead, which is what most historians do.

My biggest realisation is that widespread cultural change can come from one very dynamic but rather small source, if it’s influential enough and consistent enough. This makes sense of the whole rise of Arthurian literature in Western Europe. There was probably a small but consistent group of writers linked to just a very few courts, and they changed the world of our imagination for centuries.

I need to think about this a great deal more. My other history has fed into my understanding and interpretation of food history a great deal, but this is the first time things have gone the other way. I need to think about how to identify those dynamic forces a bit further and what other causes of widespread changes may exist.

I have no doubt I’ll get back to this, but in the meantime, I’ll enjoy cooking and teaching with my bushfoods.

The greatest treasure in my nine wonderful new sachets is salt bush. Salt bush lamb has been on my secret cooking agenda since I was about thirteen. No-one I went camping with could identify salt bush for me, which was a source of constant annoyance. Now I can make my salt bush lamb.

Life is happy. My brain is occupied with interesting thoughts about the dynamics of cultural heritage and next time I go shopping for meat, lamb is on the menu.

My world is suddenly crystal clear. This makes me think about the appearance of food.

The fact that my world is suddenly crystal clear because my eye person says I must wear reading glasses to use the computer rather than normal glasses is irrelevant. It’s a pain, because I can no longer just swivel to catch something on TV – I have to swivel and change glasses. This means it’s easier to dream about the look of food rather than to turn round and watch TV. Is this a good thing? Aren’t I already just a tad too obsessed with food?

What sort of things am I dreaming about instead of checking the news headlines? I’m thinking that upper class English food in the fourteenth century probably looked just a tad cooler than a lot of upper class French food. The recipes we have focus just that much more on the looks of the food in the English recipes, you see. Parsley was used to give a fresh green look, and saunders* to enrich the colour of meat stews.

I was thinking about the effect of the work of rabid gardeners like John Evelyn on the look of a dinner. He loved herbs and fresh vegetables. One day I’m going to investigate just how long it took before the looks of salad greens started to change the looks of the dinner table. By Jane Austen’s time it definitely did: the main course was just not complete in the south of England without a salad .

I’m curious about the change of generations. What did the older generation think of when ten dishes on a table was replaced by lots of little bits of things delivered to a diner’s place? Did they feel underfed? Did their eyes miss the laden board?

My idea of a good meal changed when I stayed with close friends in Japan, many years ago. They taught me that the eyes eat just as much as the stomach. I feel far more full with a small meal where my eyes are satisfied than with a big meal where they aren’t. I blame Kazuko and Yukiko for this. If any of them want the thousand and one meals owing to them for teaching me this important truth (and saving me from being obese, to boot) I would be immensely happy if they got in touch. That’s the other thing that clear vision does: it makes me miss the friends I saw last time I could see this clearly (or was that the time before? I grow old, I grow old – so old I quote TS Eliot in a food history blog!).

Tomorrow I may give you some more biscuit recipes. One can never have too many historical biscuit recipes.

* related to sandalwood, but a richer redder colour, and much easier on the digestion.

Today I want to look at food history from a slightly different angle to usual. Mostly I look at the past. That’s what history is, after all. Occasionally I link in with the present and give you surveys of markets and food fairs and try to show how what we eat fits in with out food history. Today I want to show you how some groups work actively to change the way we see our food and change the food we eat. By changing our foodways, the food history that some future historian will find, is changed.

Today I’m fascinated by how much of the food we eat was first accepted in Europe and then made its way to our plates. The US does better than Australia in this regard. Turkey and corn are far more acceptable food than kangaroo and bush tomato.

There is an active push by researchers and government and producers to change this in Australia. Fifty years ago only about five non-indigenous Australians even knew what bush tomato was, and tourists were unwilling to even think about roo on the menu. “You can’t eat Skippy,” visitors told me when I was a child.

This page has a good overview of what’s happening to change things as does this. Some of the native species have already made it into common food in Australia – lemon myrtle and wattleseed are two of these. Others are on their way. I can’t wait for the day when I can buy finger limes at my local grocer or my farmers’ market. I’m very impatient for the day when bush tomato has more predictable crop cycles (until recently it was all wild harvested, and it’s still an unpredictable buy – which is a pain in midwinter when I crave roast potatoes with butter and bush tomato).

It’s only a matter of time before Australians incorporate more bushfood into our diet. This isn’t a chance happening, however. There are a lot of people working very hard behind the scenes to make Australians aware that European tastes are not the only ones and that an environment that’s harsh for wheat or mint may be entirely perfect for quandong or aniseed myrtle. And that’s what food history is all about. Finding changes and watching them and – when they’re happening before your eyes – being astonished at amazing new directions.

Between storms and other sundries, today hasn’t been a day where much has happened on the food history front at my place. Well, except for cool announcements about radio interviews. There was a flurry of phone calls over that one. One from the radio station to me and then one from the university to make sure I got the message. A small flurry. Or maybe it was just that I was flurried on the phone.

What I have up my sleeve (and have had for a long while but keep finding other topics I need to post about) is a bunch of fascinating websites with more information about aspects of food history than you can shake a whatever at. I’m not sure what you should shake at websites. Pastry brushes, maybe?

Today’s is a kind of advertorial site. It’s three extra words from a book of food definitions. Why I like it, is that one of those words is myrrh and another is spikenard. I have a particular soft spot for myrrh and spikenard (beyond the obvious – that I can spell them). Spikenard is an ingredient in my favourite recipe for hypocras and both it and myrrh smell rather gorgeous in perfume.

I didn’t know that spikenard was native to the Himalayas. If you look at Dalby’s article on it (on the webpage I linked to a moment ago) you will find that it’s carried in bales. This, also, I didn’t know, but it makes so much sense. It’s a very grassy stuff, spikenard.

Myrrh isn’t grassy. In fact, it’s resin from a tree. It looks a bit like a rock, but when you hold it in your palm and warm it, it gives forth its scent and you realise just how unlike amber it is. Or isn’t. Amber is, after all, fossilised resin. Which makes me wonder. If we found fossilized myrrh with a mosquito that had just dined on dinosaur blood, could Jurasic Park be remade with fragrant dinosaurs? (I think that last joke meant that the storms have officially melted my brain.)

I’m sorry there was no post yesterday. I wasn’t good for much, because I got hit by a whacking great migraine. I made a nuisance of myself at a meeting then went home and was useless.

Uselessness always gets me thinking, though, so not all is lost. And if the migraine behaves I might do you a second post (with some recipes) to make up.

The first thing I thought about is that I have a ton of Christmas posts for all of you brave souls who put up with Chanukah. I was going to post them on the 12 days of Christmas, but that really doesn’t give you much chance to play with them for your Christmas dinner. Maybe I should start later today then, and you can create timely historical fare throughout your festive season. That sounds like a good idea. Your second post today will be Christmas food from an historical cookbook.

This isn’t what the migraine made me think about, though. The migraine made me think of Medieval medicine. A whole branch of treatment in the Middle Ages was taking appropriate food for your body, to balance the humours and diminish the symptoms. (more…)

The paths that food travel show where people get their fresh food from. You can draw circles on a map and find out just how cohesive a region is by where they get their food. That marketing is a major force in social cohesion for many people.

In the Middle Ages (more…)

Today I finally found the specimen bags I need for my teaching spices and herbs. I just labelled them and put them away. This means that instead of the next book in my ‘must-out-away’ pile, you get a small celebration of these lovely things. We even get to celebrate the ammonia, though I admit that celebrating ammonia is hard to fathom.

What did I add to my tin tonight?
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This is the second book my friend Kaaron brought me from Fiji.

Carolyn Niethammer’s American Indian Food and Lore has some similarities to Kavasch’s Native Harvests. The biggest is that it also focuses on recognising foodstuffs through botanical descriptions and pencil sketches. Or maybe the biggest is that Niethammer has taken great care with her research.

I particular adore (more…)

Today is the calm before the storm. You know, one of those days when you have things to do and enough of them so you ought to be quietly rather busy for about ten hours, but you know that tomorrow is going to be positively frantic and the day after that improbably long and busy and you just don’t want to push things? Well, today is that day.

What do I do on days like this? I invent recipes, of course, using sound historical principles. I could argue (to make everything look relevant to food history) that this is another example of how recipes change over time and new classics become established, but me being lazy doesn’t create classic recipes.

The other thing I could do is give you an entirely irrelevant foodie link to someone else’s blog, to throw you and make you think that I know what I’m, doing. I suspect that’s a good idea and I’m making sure that the link is more historical than this post.

Mind you, the fact that today my mind is less-than-focussed doesn’t mean that my cooking wasn’t historically inspired. (more…)

Today I’m taking you back to my childhood.

When I was exceedingly young, someone gave me a herb reference book by Rosemary Hemphill for my birthday. I still have it. It was the first step in the long path that led me here.

A friend recently gave me an extraordinary reference book by Rosemary Hemphill’s son and introduced me to him when I was in Sydney earlier this year. You can find him in his shop in Rozelle (where I met him), on his website, or in the pages of one of his books (click on the pictures for more details). I recommend all three. But start here - Ian has answered some questions for us.

Question 1: Your family is an important part of Australia’s food history. Can you tell us about it, and how herbs and spices have interwoven with family life? (more…)

I promised you a second half to my thoughts on Richard III’s coronation feast, and here it is. It’s not as glamorous as the first half. Well, it is, but only in the minds of people like me, who find provisioning and planning seriously cool.

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