Food History

I promised my grandmother’s recipes and, after racking my brains to think what I should talk about tonight, I remembered my promise. It’s a pity I remembered that I had promised recipes, though, because I had just about decided that it was time to talk about the gabelle. Salt is important, after all. Anyhow, there’s world enough and time for a post on French salt taxes and their extraordinary effects on world history. Another day. If I remember.

The baked egg recipe is identical to a recipe that appeared in the 1920s in the US, which just goes to show that US cuisine and Australian aren’t so far away from each other as they sometimes look. The only difference between my grandmother’s recipe and the US version is that my grandmother’s follows the Jewish technique of breaking the egg into a cup first, to check for blood spots or embryos. I find it works best with the perfect rich tomatoes of high summer.

The main course of tomato and egg is so light and healthy that I’ve given a rather decadent dessert to match it.

Baked Eggs & Tomatoes
Allow 1 egg & 1 tomato to each person. Slice about 1 ¼ off the top of the tomato, scoop out the pulp. Break an egg into a cup & pour it into the tomato. Add a little butter, pepper & salt. Bake slowly until egg is set. Warm the pulp, season, and pour around each egg.

Caramel Custard
3 eggs, 1 qt milk, 2 oz lump sugar, vanilla essence. Make a custard with eggs and milk in a shallow dish, cooking it very slowly so that it will not curdle. Put sugar in a pan with a little water and warm until it is a dark coffee colour. Add vanilla. Take the brown skin off the custard when it is cold and arrange in a glass dish and pour the cold caramel sauce over it. Serve with cream.

A few weeks ago I thought I had suddenly aged ten years. Maybe twenty. I kept dreaming of flavours of Passover past. This is one of the reasons I gave you those posts about my notebook (they will return, when I have time to get back to them). “I’m getting old and grouchy,� I told myself. “Even dried fruit was different forty years ago.� Maybe it was time to buy that walking stick I joke about?

A friend and I did a market visit a week ago and I found some dried plums. These prunes reminded me exactly of the dried fruit of my childhood. “How is this possible?� I thought. I memorized their details and brought some for my mother to try. I wanted to see if it was all in my imagination, or if there was something to be learned about local food history.

They were sun-dried, with no chemicals. They were angelinas. Fresh angelinas are a very dark purple and crisp and sweet and have a very slight tartness to them. The dried fruit came from a local Canberra orchard (using the Australian definition of ‘local – anything up to two hours drive away’).

My mother tried them. She didn’t speak for a minute. She, too, had been transported back to Passovers past.

It appeared she, too, had bought from a local orchard (except local to Melbourne, not to Canberra) when I was exceedingly young. There was only a little imported kosher for Passover food back then, and very few food choices at all. Everything was supplemented by dried fruit. Mum and Dad knew someone and they grew angelinas and made the most wonderful dried fruit.

And so we repeat the past without even knowing it. This means I’m still middle-aged and can’t justify that cane yet. I can still feel grouchy if I want, but right now I don’t want.

You see, the prunes were only available for a few weeks a year then, and they are now. They’re round at the tail end of summer and the beginning of autumn. This means that, around Passover every year, this particular dried fruit has been available in south-eastern Australia since the first Angelina plum tree was planted by Europeans.

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’ve been playing with my food again.

I know it’s more about food than food history, but I thought (just for once) you might like to see the results. Potato salad with a difference. The biggest difference is in the colour of the potatoes. They are deep purple. The grower was telling me yesterday that someone complained once because they got them home, cut into them and discovered that they weren’t white or yellow. Normally I would fry them with chili and lime, but today I wanted to do something different.

I started with the potatoes and added beautiful fresh eggs from hens I have met (once). I boiled the eggs and I microwaved the potatoes. When the potatoes were cut, and still hot, I sprinkled them with as much verjuice as they would hold then added a bit of salt. I chopped the eggs and I put in some capers and pitted Kalamata olives, plus some of the heritage carrots (pale orange and white) and a bit of their leaf for the green. One of the organic growers had a ton of tiny tomatoes yesterday, so I had to include some of them, too.

I made a dressing from the chevre mixed with lashings of fresh-squeezed lime and just a bite of chili.

What’s so special about it is that the potatoes, eggs, olives, carrots, tomatoes, chevre and lime all came from the markets yesterday. The aim of this was to see what could be done with minimal effort using seasonal vegetables, focusing on the older or more exotic varieties. The result: very, very happy tastebuds.

Today is strangely sybaritic. I’m eating the most beautiful chicken pate (apart from my family’s) that I have ever tasted in Australia. The pate guy at the market gave me some. He makes two pork-free pates and one pork-free rillette. And yes, the pate has gone directly to my brain and completely blocked eloquent speech. It’s that good.

It makes me look at a bag of carrots and see many hues, not just orange. Oh, there are multiple colours of carrot in that bag. That’s right. The vegetable guy took one look at me and said there was a bunch waiting for me which had more purple carrots than the other bunch. I can show my students four colours of carrots on Thursday. And I didn’t even have to ask.

Elizabeth and Michael made sure there was just enough lamb of exactly the right sort so dinner tonight is saltbush lamb. My friend and I shared a quarter of a lamb and it was exactly enough. Which reminds me, Michael says Elizabeth needs a good historical recipe for leg of lamb and of course I just happen to have one. This is a giant relief, because everyone has been so kind to me this morning that I feel a bit guilty.

I told the teenager serving coffee the history of the beans she was serving today and suddenly I realised how everyone knows me. It’s good, though, to know that there will be duck pate reserved for me to buy every fortnight just as the cheese lady always goes straight to my favourite Milawa chevre. What’s also good is that I compared all this luxury food with the amount I spent in the supermarket on way inferior stuff and I found that I come out even. I’m healthier, happier and can talk to the producers and be given special treats, and it costs me the same (overall) as supermarket shopping!

Let me assuage my guilt with Alison’s question. Everyone else who has questions says I apparently have already answered them – this means the rest of you miss out and might have to find your own questions. Email me and ask anytime. I was afraid there would be a mad rush: my other blog sometimes gets a mad rush when I open the door to questions, but quite a few role playing gamers and re-enactment folk and writers who use historical backdrops who visit me there.

Alison, I don’t know the exact history of your Easter dish, but I can lay bets that it arose in the joy of leaving Lent behind. Lots of Catholic regions have special dishes to celebrate the end of Lent and they usually include foodstuffs that are forbidden during Lent. One day I might have to do a post on that whole food sequence, from before Lent to after it – it has produced some fascinating foodways.

I now return to gloating over my market goodies.

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

Today I was thinking about sweetness.

I visited one of those shops that specialise in imported food, to check out what they had and to work out if I could use it for teaching. The shop had so much more sweet stuff than savoury that I started thinking about how the colonial foods of each country helped
shift regional cuisines into various levels of sugar in a diet.

The US, for instance, had more sources for sweeteners than Australia from quite early on. australia grew corn, but didn’t use it as a source of corn syrup (I need to find out if the erly US colonists did, to be honest – I might be making assumptions here). There was honey and there was sugar, mainly imported and sourced from cane.

The US around the same time (and if we’re talking about the british colonies in Terra Australis then we’re abolustely tlking about the united States of America – its political adutlhood runs very closely alongside Australia’s early European settlement) had sugar, honey, maple and possibly corn. There might also have been other sweeteners – I’m away from my library today and so I can’t be certain. The minimum number of sources for sweetener, however, are still more than were available in early Australia.

My very subjective feeling is that US food tends to be sweeter than Aussie, by and large. I’d love to know anyone else’s thoughts. Is US candy and chocolate sweeter, on average than that of Australia, or maybe than the British equivalent? Or have I taken too much time off and need to get back to proper history?

I just looked at the time. How can it be midnight already? And how can I not have posted? It’s because it was market day, of course, and general shopping day, and there has been progress on the Prohibition banquet front (our first good soup – thanks to Dawn, who made the recipe twice to iron out problems of interpretation) and I have made a very little progress on another culinary history project of mine (of which more, someday, perhaps).

I’m eating a late night Egremont Russet. It’s a good apple for late night munchies: sweet and soft, but not too sweet and just enough crisp and crunch through the softness. I’ve always had a fondness for russets, but right now, this is my favourite. Mind you, I’ve only tasted four. It’s all a matter of being in the right place at the right time, for seasonal and unusual produce. If I were in the UK then thing would be different, of course. More access to interesting apples, and less to saltbush.

I nearly bought saltbush lamb today, but my friend reminded me I had saltbush and I had just ordered lamb, so I was really tangling myself if I bought lamb fed on saltbush then three weeks later bought lamb and covered it in saltbush. Besides, I had just bought Belted Galloway beef and really, truly, I am not a vast meat-eater. My eyes just got too big for a moment. I wanted to find out both sets of flavour, instantly.

What ought to be obvious at this moment is that this autumn I’m taking advantage of the season to advance my understanding of any older varieties of foodstuff I can get hold of. This is partly because the recipe testing enthused me, and partly because I’m increasingly getting to talk to producers and actually understand how fruit falls in and out of fashion. I knew the theory before, but I’m trying to nuance it and to sort out other ways of interpreting primary sources by getting a better understanding of food itself. Historian cannot think using paper alone. She needs Egremont Russets to help the thinking along, perhaps.

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 rediscovered something cool today. Blame apples.

Evidence is only as good as our ability to interpret it. Some types of evidence we give a bunch of authority to. Magisterial-looking monographs, for instance, make far too many people nod their heads in agreement without considering the research and thought and general reliability of the book. Someone who sounds as if they know what they’re talking about or wears the right clothes is more often assumed to be credible than to be talking for the sake of talking.

Basically, we carry with us a series of expectations when we come across information about the past. Some of them are based on our formal education while some of them are based upon what our culture has taught us. We tend to assume, for instance, that authority comes in suits and so we give just that much more credence to a salesperson who is respectably dressed.

Where do apples come in? One group often given low credibility is elderly people who say “In my day…” I say it often now I’m middle-aged, just to get a laugh. The laugh shows that the phrase and anything that follows is not nearly as likely to be believed as an earnest statement by a man aged 40, wearing a cool suit and carrying a briefcase. “The apple tart was special,” a friend said recently. “There’s nothing around like that anymore.”

The trick is that this friend isn’t old at all (I was playing with someone’s mind – probably my own). She was referring to a quite specific type of apple used to make a quite specific type of pastry in a very precise part of Arkansas. She knows the folk history of that apple tree and can give you a precise description of the apple. I was able to locate its relatives from her description. She is a reliable witness and there as never any doubt about that. So memories can be reliable sources of food history.

Yesterday I bought some older style cooking apples (not omnipresent Granny Smiths). Anyhow, I stewed some because I was too tired to fix anything more complex and besides, I had tasted one of the apples last night with my class, and I rather thought that slow stewing would create some interesting textures. I picked up some very fine cream to go with it.

When the time came to eat it, I wasn’t hungry. I thought I ought to taste it, though, in the interest of proving that elderly people who kept telling me how much nicer apples were in their day were wrong.

The complete bowl is inside me. It doesn’t matter how un-hungry I am, when an extraordinary flavour comes I find I can suddenly eat. The evidence of the old folks who talked about the stewed apples of their childhood was very sound.

I think the trick is to find out if they’re talking generically or about a specific taste memory. I think the other trick is to admit that anyone’s memory of a flavour or an event is just as likely to be accurate as an expensive monograph. Accuracy, after all, isn’t just a matter of footnotes. In this case, the elderly people who reminisced about apples all had apple trees in their gardens when they were young, and those apple trees were very probably the same variety as the ones I just cooked.

My day is encoded in an apple. I just ate one attested (well, its variety is attested) back to 1580. It had better last me through ’til I get home tonight, because picking bullaces and making liqueurs and preparing for class on top of not much sleep has left me in need of magical succour.

Actually, there will be food in class tonight. Some of the food is from the students and some is lots of apple varieties for them (and me!) to taste. Some of the tasting will not be done by me, of course, and that is the evil variety. I have to plan my variety of evil tonight, which says something about my grand fatigue. Picking bullaces was worth it, though. Just think of the liqueur I shall drink in two years time.

If I’m too tired to tell you about the class tonight, I shall report tomorrow.

Having carefully downloaded and selected my photos of the Show and its food, I can’t write you any of those promised posts. Not for a few days, anyhow. The reasons are rather good, though.

Some of them you know already. You already know that I’m teaching my food history course right now. Tomorrow we’re looking at the Middle Ages, but we also might be looking at historical apple varieties. I’m hoping to get a half dozen of them (fresh and crisp and just in season) from Pialligo Apples, first thing tomorrow. I also hope to get enough bullaces to make much alcoholic beverage to drink in two years time, but I guess that’s a separate issue, even if the bullaces are older than the varieties of apples in season right now. In fact, the class will meet some bullaces and other plums as well as the apples. I might even let them have my favourite Japanese tonguetwister, which entirely illuminates the relationship between the various types of stone fruit. I’ll report back on all this tomorrow, probably. I will be very joyous if I can get the apples and rather sorrowful if I can’t, since this is one of those weeks of much temperament.

In between the teaching, I’ve been testing more recipes for that Prohibition banquet. In the oven right now is a coffee custard. It smells good and it looks good, but it will be an hour before I can find out just how delectable it tastes. I’m very optimisitic, though, mainly because the basic proportions are beautiful.

I couldn’t find enough deep containers for the bain-marie, so I put one shallow container in the oven. This was a mistake. Before it even started baking, that particular custard was overflowing with water. Just goes to show that you can improvise almost anything in the kitchen, but there are some directions where improvisation should not go.

It’s been so long since I’ve strained anything the old-fashioned way that my lovely cloth for straining was curiously fungal. It’s going to have two hot washes before I introduce it back into my kitchen and even then I will have a triple-think about it. I may just have to get a new cloth.

That’s the trouble with days when moods swing: things go all kinds of funny. I think I’m due a quiet night tonight. Tomorrow should be good, starting with an orchard trip and ending with my food history class.

Right now isn’t half bad, despite my imperfect cooking. How can life be bad when the room I’m in is suddenly full of the delectable fragrance of coffee?

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.