Food History

I’ve talked in other posts of other places to buy herbs and spices online, but today I received a little parcel from Herbie’s. They only had a third of my dream list of hard-to-get stuff, but they got me my herbs and spices incredibly quickly and the quality is just gorgeous. I keep picking up my packets of chilli and admiring the gorgeousness of their content.

I have grains of paradise and file powder, long pepper and cinnamon leaf. I have Eucalyptus Olida, Mexican chocolate and three different types of chilli. And I have my favourite spice of all: cubebs. Expect posts on all these as I revisit them with my class and elsewhere later in the year.

Today’s ingredient is sumac berries. There are various types of sumac. Some are more poisonous than others. The ones that are most readily available are the poisonous North American one (rhus vernix) and the fruit used in Middle Eastern cooking (rhus coriara). Some people call the latter “Lebanese thymusâ€?. It has a lovely tart and slightly sour flavour and is useful in a wide range of dishes. In languages ranging from English to Hebrew, it’s known as ’sumac’. If you want the technical specifications for poisonous sumac or more about the origins of the plant, check here.

Edible sumac has a nice long history. I suspect that nice long history takes it as far back as Ancient Egypt, but I still have to explore it a bit. There are some mentions of it imported into Europe during the Middle Ages, but evidence of how it was used is much harder to discover.

A very easy salad is tomatoes, lots of parsley, olive oil, lemon juice and lots of sumac. I also add a generous amount to meat patties.

Coriander (coriandrum sativum) is cilantro or Chinese parsley in US English if you’re talking about the leaf, and coriander if you’re talking about the seed. In Telugu it’s dhaniya and in Hindi it’s dhaniya. In French it’s coriandre.

Never leave home without it. It’s a key herb in several culinary traditions and appears as a less crucial part in a range of others.

It has a very long and exceedingly distinguished culinary history. It was used in Ancient Egypt (my theory is that even Moses ate the stuff) which is reassuring for those who do not like the distinctive scent. It can add sparkle to a salad, or savour to a stew.

The root is also good to cook with. One of my favourite coriander root recipes is Thai.

Chicken party snacks

Grind coriander root with garlic and chicken and perhaps some salt (all quantities to taste). Spread the paste on small squares of toast. Heat some vegetable oil and fry the squares face down until they are crisp.

Today’s ingredient is coconut (cocos nucifera). In Sinhalese it’s called pol. This delectable nut is high in fat and very unhealthy; it is hard to live without, and hard to live with.

A common method of using the nut in the West used to be coconut cream aka creamed coconut, which is a form so thick of coconut milk that it has solidified. These days it’s harder to find, and we tend to look for coconut in cans or powdered form and to use it as milk.

Coconut milk is santen in Indonesian, and absolutely crucial to Indonesian cooking. When used in South East Asian cooking, coconut milk is generally described according to three general consistencies. Thick milk is so dense it flops rather than flows. Medium milk is thick but quite flowing and wet. Thin milk is runny and watery.

The very best coconut milk is fresh - you grate the coconut and run water through it until you get sufficient milk of the right consistency. You keep the water, and use the grated (and now much less flavoursome) nut as a garden fertiliser.

In Australian and UK cooking desiccated coconut used to be far more popular than than the milk. It’s still used in classic Aussie recipes such as lamingtons and coconut ice. If you want to get a bit closer to fresh coconut but still only have access to the dried version, try fluffing the shreds out with a little water and let them sit for an hour or so.

I mentioned candlenuts the other day, very much in passing, so I thought they deserve a post of their own.

Candlenut (aleurites moluccana, macadamia terifolia) is native to this region - from northern Queensland through to Indonesia and its neighbours. It’s particularly important in Indonesian cooking and is called kemiri in Indonesian.

Botanically this nut leaves me bewildered. Candlenut is definitely a kind of macadamia or a close relative, and I’ve seen it postulated that it might have been carried over to Indonesia and Malaysia by traders up north long before white settlement. I don’t know any of it for certain.

In Australia, the candlenuts on sale are definitely more shrivelled than the macadamia, but otherwise very similar. Unlike the macadamia, you can’t eat them raw.

My favourite use for candlenut is in spice mixes. My Indonesian friends also rub it around a frypan so they can cook without it sticking. It has an incredibly high oil content, which makes sense, given its name. You can also grind them to make a very rich thickening for stews and curries.

Both candlenut and macadamia go rancid easily, so if you want to hang onto them for a long, long time, then buy unshelled macadamias. Macadamias won’t taste quite the same as using a candlenut - there is a very slight bitterness to the candlenuts I have eaten (but I’ve never been able to buy them fresh) - so the substitution is possible but not perfect.

Deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna) is not a food. I know that. It’s important to include here, though, because it’s part of a vast family of delicious food plants. It is cousin or sister or brother to eggplant, potato and tomato, just for starters. It is also related to the Aussie bush tomato which bears the splendid name of solanum chippendalei. If plants had theme songs, bush tomato’s would obviously be the one with the sexy beat.

I had a deadly nightshade plant when I was in my teens (along with a two-headed skeleton under my bed). My family carefuly mislaid it when they realised what it was.

It used to be used as a cosmetic (eye brightener) and is still used in some medication. Whatever you do though, don’t eat it unless you are certain exactly which variety you are eating. Some of them contain a interesting chemicals or rather, chemicals with interesting side effects, hence the name.

Belladonna refers to the way it made eyes wide and lustrous. ‘Deadly’ refers to the fact that too much (and not very much at all can be too much) is poison. I don’t even recommend its use cosmetically unless you are an expert - lead used to be used as a face powder before the effects of lead poisoning were known, which was about the same time belladonna was used to brighten the eyes.

I have a recipe for you this post. The best baked potatoes ever. It’s not good on the specifics because even perfect baked potatoes in summer don’t feel quite right. Besides, everyone who has ever baked a potato has their own dream method - I obviously like a strong contrast between the textures of the skin and the flesh, for instance.

Baked Potatoes

Bake your potatoes whole, in their skin, until the outside is perfect and crunchy and the inside is perfect and crumbly. Split them open, add a nice knob of fresh butter and the sprinkle generously with bush tomato.

Ginger (zingiber officinalis) appears in an awful lots of cuisines, going back an awful long way. In French it is gingembre and in German ingwer . In Indonesian it’s jahe and very important to the cuisine. Apparently the botanical and English names come from a Sanskrit root.

Ginger isn’t just a culinary spice. It also has a whole bunch of useful medicinal effects, which is why I’m blogging about it tonight. All you need to do is find out what its effects are and you can work out what’s wrong with me.

Ginger probably came from China originally, and was dried and sent all over the ship-linked world from quite early. I haven’t traced when ginger was first imported into Europe, but I know that by the High Middle Ages it was a very important spice and that India was one of the sources. It’s one of the major spices - in fact - that help typify Western European Medieval cooking.

Much of the world’s crystallised ginger is from Southern Queensland. The factory is not too far from lots of fabulous beaches.

You can find more information (and some lovely pictures) of ginger here.

Ginger is related to some other interesting roots. My favourite is galingale. I first discovered cooking with galingale (as opposed to reading historical texts mentioning galingale) when my Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean friends taught me their home cooking. Since then, it has been an indispensible element in my pantry.

The fresh root is brilliant; the dried root amazingly tough; the powder simple to use. It is like a fragrant and soft ginger, and one of my favourite spices. I have seen the occasional medieval recipe which calls for galingale where if you replace the galingale with ginger it will suddenly look frightfully modern. It’s a worry.

The trouble with galingale is that it can easily get confused with one of its near relatives. The name of that near relative is kencur in Indonesian, and kaemferia galanga is its botanical name. It’s also handy in cooking, though not nearly as much.

I wrote myself a small table to help me identify the versions of the names of galingale where they appear in cookbooks, and I present it here (with much flourish) for your delight and delectation. (Please send corrections - these are very tangled webs)

Galingale
galingale galanga
Languas galanga
Greater or Java Galingale
light galingale
galanga or lenguas (Malaysian)
Thai ginger
Laos ginger
Siamese ginger

Kencur
Alpinia officinarum
Languas officinarum
Lesser Galingale
heavy galingale

Galingale is more aromatic, to my mind, and kencur has a slight medicinal flavour. I sometimes use kencur in a relaxing but strange-flavoured drink friends taught me - it’s very effective for tension headaches. Kencur can substitute for galingale in an emergency, but the flavours really are a bit different and the dish won’t taste quite the same.

Both are very fibrous. Galingale was very popular in the Middle Ages and remains deservedly popular in Indonesian and Malaysia cooking.

Asafoetida (ferula foetida, ferula assa-foetida or ferula narthex) has a lovely variety of really glamorous common names. My favourite is ‘devil’s dung.’ The names in different languages are unexpectedly varied, too. For instance, in French it is férule perisque, German: teufeldreck (Devil’s Dung), in Italian it is assafetida and in Spanish, asafétida. The most important language to know the name in is Hindi, where it is hing.

Devil’s Dung is a brilliant flavour enhancer/salt replacement, but should be measured almost by the granule. In Australia it’s possible to buy a very pure almost overpowering tiny tub of the powder. It’s also possible to buy a yellowish and less overpowering version, which has been cut with turmeric. You want to avoid the latter.

Ferulas are really giant fennel plants (which would be great in a Day of the Triffids variant - “the Devil’s Dung is taking over the world�): the sap dries into a solid resin-like mass which is the spice asafoetida. The smallest container of it lasts just about forever, even if you use it regularly. Uncooked, it smells foul for just about forever, also.

Its use goes back at least as far as Aryan settlement in India. It is even mentioned in the Mahabharata as a garnishing for meat.

My source for this last bit is K.T. Ahcaya’s Indian Food: a Historical Companion - we’re not in the Middle Ages or even in Europe anymore - but asafoetida is such a seriously cool spice that it’s worth travelling to meet. And if you’re interested in the history of Indian food, Achaya’s book is an excellent place to start.

I’ve fallen in love with the idea of posts on ingredients. I’ve had to answer so many different questions from so many of the recipe testers for the Regency Gothic Banquet that it struck me that we don’t all have a common cooking vocabulary. Besides, ingredients are FUN. Just for a little, then, I’ll do two or three posts a week on specific ingredients so when I say ‘aniseed myrtle’ and talk about its historic use , you know I’m not talking about aniseed or myrtle or even lemon myrtle. And so I can sneak in bad jokes while you’re not watching.

Speaking of aniseed flavoured spices, I thought a couple of them would be a good thing for today. My useless bit of Medieval trivia for the day is that aniseed was coated in sugar and used to aid digestion after giant meals. If that bit of trivia ever proves useful, let me know and I’ll upgrade it from ‘useless’ to ‘almost handy.’

Anise, aniseed or Sweet Cumin (pimpinella anisum) - in French is anise, in German is anis, in Italian is anice , but in Malaysian is jintan manis. It was originally from the Middle East and was used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

The name anise refers to the green leaves of the plant and not to the seeds. Oddly enough, the seeds are known as aniseed (sorry, sarcasm mode is now off). Star anise has a flavour that depends on the same essential oil (anethole), that is found in anise, aniseed and cultivated fennel but is a different plant (illicum verum), a small evergreen tree belonging to the Magnolia family. I always think star anise tastes great but looks like big black spiders invading your stew. I use it to terrify small children.

Aniseed myrtle (backhousia anisata) also called aniseed tree or ringwood (if you ringbark it, does that mean you have ringwood ringbarked?) is a native of New South Wales and Queensland. The anise scented leaves does wonders for stews, and is also magic in salad dressing.

Almonds used to be called amygdalus communis - which give rise to all sorts of strange names for almond-shaped decorations, but now they are prunus dulcis for sweet almonds and prunus amar for the bitter. It’s a shame about the name change, because I would have been all set up for bad Star Wars jokes otherwise.

In Turkish they are badem, in French amande, in German mandel, in Italian mandorla (which is handy to know if you are an art-enthusiast), in Spanish almendra, in Japanese hentou, and in Hebrew they are shaked which is the term also used for tonsils. Female French lovers of almonds are amantes des amandes, which is cute.

The English name comes from the Latin, while the Latin name comes from the Greek. Almonds themselves didn’t originate in Greece at all, though. Almonds are originally from Asia and Africa.

To keep things historic, there are some great medieval French and English almond-based recipes. My favourite is an apple-almond pudding - light and delectable. Almond is, of course, the base for marzipan, though whether it is the sweet almond we know and love or the bitter almond some Malaysian friends once fed me in a soup is something about which I have seen different opinions in different recipes - whichever you choose, just make sure it is a non-poisonous variety, since almonds are related to other kernels which have more than their share of prussic acid.

What I love about almonds (and nuts in general) is their amazingly high oil content. You can actually light almonds (kemiri and macadamias, too, but almonds are more flame shaped, which makes lighting them most impressive) - just lop a bit of the base so they will stand upright, and they’re ready to go. Who needs candles on a birthday cake?

Note: I am incredibly artistically inclined (don’t laugh, that was meant sarcastically) and from here on in will code the posts about specific ingredients with the picture used here. The picture will help you spot the posts about ingredients and it will save me from having to hunt down photos of grains of paradise.

Last night’s post got me thinking. Some people integrate their health issues with their food and have a wonderfully co-ordinated existence and some of us have sad addictions to chocolate and chips and spend a lot of the time in justification.

It’s never as simple as understanding current medical principles and applying them. Every now and then a book emerges that explains the current views in simple or suposedly simple terms and gives guidelines. I thought it would be a good idea to introduce one of these books today.

If you’re interested in exploring food and health in more modern ways, then Talia, who comments here from time to time, has a forum with lots of stuff on emotional aspects of eating and lots of information branching off it. Emotional aspects of eating are only one part of food as medicine - if you want more, just say so in the notes and I’ll find you links to other parts.

Today’s book is Food Remedies. Facts About Foods and Their Medicinal Uses. It’s by Florence Daniel and was published in 1908. In theory, there are no remnants of Medieval science - it’s a thoroughly modern book (just not very recent). In practice, as early as the introduction, Daniel acknowledges a debt to Culpepper, and Culpepper frames his whole herbal in terms of the elements and humours and planetary influences. So her influences are modern (Dr Fernie’s Meals Medicinal), Ancient (the Talmud - though I guess it depends which part of the Talmud just how Ancient), late Medieval/Renaissance (Culpepper) and traditional (her mother).

Daniel takes us through a range of fruits and vegetables and discusses their medicinal uses. These plants are:
Almond, Apple, Asparagus, Banana, Barley, Blackberry, Blackcurrant, Brazil Nuts, Beans, Peas, Lentils, Beet, Cabbage, Caraway Seed, Carrot, Celery, Cresses, Chestnut, Cinnamon, Coconut, Coffee, Date, Elderberry, Fig, Grape, Gooseberry, Lavender, Lemon, Lettuce, Nettle, Nuts, Oats, Olive, Onion, Orange, Parsley, Pear, Peanut, Pineapple, Pine Kernel, Plum, Prune, Potato, Radish, Raspberry, Rice, Rhubarb, Sage, Strawberry, Spinach, Tomato, Turnip, Thyme, Walnut and Wheat. Quite a list, but also quite a limited list. And the rest of the book comprises indices - ways of getting at the information on each of these frutis and vegetables and herbs.

Florence Daniel is strongly fruitarian. She says on page 3 “I have myself known wonderful cures to follow on the adoption of a fruitarian dietary in cases of cancer, tumour, gout, eczema, all kinds of inflammatory complaints, and wounds that refused to heal.” She gives a general justifcation for this and cites pros and cons from various authorities.

From a modern scientific point of view, the material in this books lack validation and proof. From a food history point of view it’s fascinating.

Take her first article, on almonds. She suggests that almond soup is an excellent substitute for beef-tea for convalescents. Beef-tea was terribly standard for the invalid in 1908 - it was a pure bouillon made from good meat. Her almond soup alternative, however, is an old dish - I have seen similar recipes for broth to be used as a base for dishes five hundred years earlier.

It is made by simply blanching and pounding a quarter of a pound of sweet almonds with half a pint of milk, or vegetable stock. Another pint of milk or stock is then to be added and the whole warmed. After this add another pint and a half of stock if the soup is to be a vegetable one, or rice water if milk has been used.

In other words, one way in which older recipes have been retained or reintroduced into our diets has been through fads in food medicine. This is why Culpepper is as important in Daniel’s introduction as Dr Fernie.

I love these food history byways.

I wonder if anyone is collating medicinal treatises and food medicine books and comparing them with much earlier cookbooks? I hope so. If no-one is, then maybe one day I will. Food history is so much more than the history of cookbooks, and these food-as-medicine-manuals give us important clues on some of the wider roles food can play in a society.

I think I might have given the same recipe in two quite separate posts. This is the result of pure tiredness. Rather than do a careful check and delete a post, I will leave it and give you an extra post now. Writing is easier than careful cross-checking.

No biscuits and scones to replace the possible duplicate (though I’ve still got lots of recipes and mentions in literature I haven’t posted yet), but some thoughts on what food the tired ought to eat. Maybe thinking about foods that create alertness will help.

Using Medieval foodways as a guide, fatigue might be due to an imbalance in the humours or a body overburdened by … whatever. I’m not at all certain what bodies get overburdened by. Anyhow, if it’s overburdened, you want light food and a cleansing diet acording to Medieval theory. Things like fennel that help purify the system. Or hot pepper that warm it and help drive impurities out. And you want a hot bath strewn with appropriate herbs.

If you want to use food to balance your humours and create more energy, it becomes more complicated. If you have an excess of sanguinity (my face is red, maybe that’s the problem with me?) you want cooling food. Cucumbers, perhaps. Cold cucumbers, straight from the refrigerator.

Using food as an aspect of medical treatment was not uncommon in the Middle Ages.

We do it today. Especially when we’re tired. Food and drink as instant cure-alls. Different medical principles, same urgent desire to get some energy back into a fading day.

Sometimes we eat energy bars for the calories or the fat or the instant glucose kick. Sometimes we drink energy drinks for the sheer glucose kick. We use them as proof of the correctness of medical theory the way people did in the Middle Ages except - instead of the humours - we look to restore vitamin levels and feed ourselves minerals and amino acids and tricksy herbs with useful side effects.

I’m not a doctor, but it looks as if a vitamin drink with lots of minerals and guarana, accompanied by an iced cucumber salad should do *something*. If it doesn’t kill me, you’ll see me tomorrow, hopefully more alert.

Ambergris used to be a cooking ingredient. I learned about it first as a fixative in perfumes, but it was also used as late as the nineteenth century to add a subtle scent to certain delicate dishes. I had to explain to one of my test team that they wouldn’t be able to use either the ambergris or the musk listed as optional scents. Ambergris is a whale secretion and was found floating on the sea. It still is. This means it theoretically shouldn’t be unPC to use it, but it is and so I’ve never actually tasted it. Maybe it’s still used in perfumery, just quietly, where the politically correct can’t find it. You can find an article with more information (I don’t know how reliable it is, but there’s a great picture) here.

Musk is a far ickier proposition - maybe I’ll talk about it another time.

It’s far too long since I gave you anything about a specific ingredient. And wasn’t the last time silphium, which was enormously depressing because we can’t actually taste the stuff? Today’s spice is mustard which is at the opposite end of the extinction scale to silphium.

The history of mustard is incredibly rich and varied and amazing and wonderful. The leaf is edible and the seeds are delightful. It bugs me that it is often under-rated in terms of its importance in European food history. It grows just about anywhere, so it wasn’t nearly as much subject to taxes and other importation problems as, say pepper, so it isn’t recorded as much. But when you look at recipes, mustard has probably been in continual use in Europe for at least two thousand years and a lot longer in India and elsewhere.

Mustard as the European condiment (think Dijon, Maille, Meaux, German, English - Keen’s and Colman’s - Bordeaux, American styles) is much more recent. Maille developed its characteristic style in the eighteenth century, which is about when Keen’s mustard began its occupation of English kitchens and Colman’s established their modern formula in 1814. Dijon mustard is a bit more recent, despite the fact that mustard has been eaten in Dijon almost forever. What makes the difference is what type of mustard seed (e.g. white, black, brown), how it’s processed, what it’s mixed with. There’s a good summary of this here. While you’re reading just note how important mustard is. We still eat more of it than almost any other spice. Common as mud, and just as important.

This site has a run-down on how the different types of prepared mustard vary, some of the alternative names for it, and it has a pretty picture of the plant. Look at the picture and you will see something very strange. Even if you’ve never seen a mustard plant in your life, it looks familiar. This is because it is familiar. Mustard is a relative of an awful lot of the plants we eat. Cabbages, for instance. Broccoli. Cauliflower. Even radishes. Mustard is common, but the brassica genus is one of the staffs of life. The varieties we have eaten change over time with breeding and fashion, but leafy brassica greens are a staple of European, North African and American food history. I haven’t ever looked into natives from Australia, to see if any are brassica, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were.

My favourite source of mustard oil (awesome in tomato kasaundi) is from Cootamundra Railway Station - I used to hop off the train on the way back form seeing my family in Melbourne, buy myself mustard oil from the station shop, then get straight on the bus to Canberra. Not an important part of the history of mustard, but mustard is one of the oilseed crops Australia produces in abundances and exports, so it’s worth noting you can buy it very fresh and delightfully tangy at Cootamundra Railway Station.

We tend to neglect the history of mustard as it lacks a sense of the exotic and romantic. I suspect that pepper stole mustard’s glory. This means that when someone gets particularly enthusiastic about it, I want to cheer them on. Instead, though, I’ll give you a mustard recipe. All the amounts are to taste.

Dhal

mustard seeds
cumin seeds
salt
red lentils
onions (1 onion to 1 cup lentil is a good proportion to start with)
canola oil
water

Cut your onions finely. Fry them on high heat until translucent. Add the mustard and cumin and keep frying until the seeds start to pop. Add the lentils and the water and turn the heat down. Add salt to taste when the lentils start to soften. Cook until the lentils are soft and mushy and most of the water is absorbed (add more water during cooking if necessary).

I adore gingerbread. In fact, I adore almost anything with ginger in it. Ginger tea (going to make some now!), gingerbread, ginger beef. All very yum. The Old Foodie has just posted a bunch of gingerbread recipes, dating from the late Middle Ages until very recent. Seasonal and delicious and gingery and food history - what more can anyone ask for?