Food History

I talk a lot about historical trends in Australian cuisine, but I don’t think I’ve given you short and simple digest of what happened. Short and over-simple, but it will help make sense of my witterings when I wander off into bush food or start talking fusion cooking.

Once upon a time, Australian food was dull but worthy. That time wasn’t so long ago. Think of the ad I gave you the other day “Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.” The seventies, and ‘roo was only on the menu in certain parts of Adelaide.
British food was such a defining part of our cuisine that you can still say to someone “I grew up a meat and three veg person” and they will know exactly what you mean.

There still is an underlay of this food. It’s the firm base that holds all the exciting fusion cuisine together, perhaps. You can see its influence at the food events where comfort is more important than taste. Children’s parties, for instance. Some of the continuing favourites for Aussie children’s parties are birthday cake (of course), fairy or other winged cakes, chocolate crackles, fairy bread, cocktail sausages and sausage rolls (with tomato dipping sauce), snack food (chips and twisties and other healthy delights), jelly (especially green jelly with chocolate frogs drowning inside), cheese hedgehogs, meringues. If you need recipes for any of this, please say. If you see the list and want to scream and run then my diagnosis is that you’ve been to a children’s party recently.

Dull worthiness doesn’t define our cuisine any more, but it’s still important. It’s impossible to understand Australian food without it.

From the 1940s we adopted continental European cakes as if they were our dream food. Baked cheese cake and vanilla slice. They didn’t displace scones and fruit cake – we just enjoyed more types of cakes.

Starting in the 1960s, we have layered and meshed many other cuisines. Greek and Italian and a strangely deformed Chinese food were the first. From there we branched out, and today’s exciting fusion cuisine is one of the most exciting internationally. We use ingredients from everywhere and create recipes that break new ground every day. From our own native bushfood to spices from Asia to cakes from the Mediterranean, everything adds to the amazing modern Australian melting pot. Underlying it, however, and holding it together are still the same British basics from the beginning of modern Australia.

Today I’m all about cultural dynamics over long periods of time. Since most of this concerns facets of history other than food, I won’t go into it, but since it’s haunting me, I thought you might like something a little related.

On the food front, Australia has tried to define its food history at various times. Many countries do. Self-definition is hardly a unique phenomenon. What’s really interesting, though, is that the definitions occurred in Australia just as a national food awareness exploded. The moment when the amazing fusion food coalesced is the exact same one that an advertising jingle was released that listed our national emblems. They apparently were ‘football, meat pies, kangaroo and Holden cars.’ You can see it for yourself here:

Back then, the meat pie was just the meat pie. Old-fashioned – white flour pastry with a solid beef or lamb filling. These days meat pies are full of everything from curried vegetables to steak and kidney. It’s still a part of our food culture, but it has changed to meet a more sophisticated country.

In Adelaide you can still buy pie floaters, where the pie is served upside down on a plate of mushy peas. I’ve been told it’s a great delicacy. The rest of us shake our head at such antics and argue about how you put the sauce on and the best way to actually eat the pie. We also argue whether gourmet pies are really dinkum. And while we argue about authenticity, we walk through the supermarket passing six or eight packs of old-fashioned meat pies. So far, they have outlasted every single food fashion. This probably explains why they were used as part of an advertising jingle in the 1970s.

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.

Tonight’s food history class was really fascinating. I have students who have a lot of background knowledge in their own areas of interest and who love sharing it. It makes classes interactive and fun. It also means that I come out of each week with just a little more knowledge, which is a good thing.

The theme for the night was “The Age of Exploration.” I explained that I didn’t think there was one, but that exploration and conquest and invasion and trading posts were really important for understanding some of the dynamics in food history, and that “The Age of Exploration” was a cool tag to hang these concepts on.

We talked about understanding the difference between the first time a foodstuff hits a population group and the actual acceptance of the foodstuff by the wider population. We looked at a lot of different sources to find out just what sorts of food might have been taken up in different countries and what foods could have been but were not and we established a sequence of things that probably had to be in place for a major new ingredient to be introduced into a particular culture. I brought along an iced tea from the Philippines to illustrate the sequence.

We talked a lot about North American plants and South American plants and Australian and the English diet. I managed to say ‘mangel-wurzel’ at least once.

During half time, we ate a cheese dish based on Cato’s work and my favourite Medieval brie tarts, both cooked by students. The schedule of who is bringing what food is beginning to look impressive. The class excursion is almost organised. And, to add joy to contentment, next week I get to teach food in the Middle Ages.

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.

On Friday I went to the Royal Canberra Show. All Saturday I admired my swag. Just now I realized that I hadn’t told you so many important things about my visit.
I did a lot of learning at the Show. My photos will come later, so I might do you a photo-heavy slide show in a few days. Until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with knowing that the way cows and goats are judged is very different to the way cats are judged. And that I got to talk bush food. Right now, though, I want to talk about meat on the hoof, which is not bush food at all.

The Royal Canberra isn’t a place for pets, in fact. Despite it taking place in the city, it’s a rural show. It’s where all the getting-together happens for the whole of NSW, which is funny, because it’s not actually in NSW. This getting-together is mostly to do with making sure you have evidence that your animals are the best breeders and will produce the outstanding meat, milk and wool the industry needs.

The animals we saw were very different to the Belted Galloways at Mountain Creek Farm. They use the land differently, for one thing. For another, they are being actively bred to put on weight quickly to cut down the time between birth and the abattoir.

These animals aren’t the sort you put on growth hormones or who are rushed from birth to death. The idea is that the put on healthy size quickly, not that they grow unnaturally. What the Show judging does is make sure that the weight they put on is safe, really. The animals are judged for their proportions and their capacity to hold size (among other things). The beautiful liquidity of their eyes is not a factor.

The breeders love their animals. They talk proudly about them. This means that the Show helps share ethical standards and care as well as keep quality high for the market.

Those blue ribbons are important to meat history. Trace them back and we can see how meat tastes and types develop on the hoof, and how animals are treated and how the great isolations of the Aussie bush are broken down once a year. There is more food history in those blue ribbons than you can shake a hoof at.

Today was market day again and the change of seasons is already obvious. The colours of the fresh fruit and vegetables are at their brightest and most varied, but the peaches are getting fewer and the apples more numerous. Young leeks reminded me that winter means hot soups, and both my friend and I dreamed of sweating leek in butter. In my mind I added chestnut and cream. Fortunately I looked at my waistline before I bought the leeks: there will be plenty of time for wintry goodness.

It’s natural that the change of colours on the market stalls make me think of the calendar. More specifically, it makes me think of the Medieval calendar, where the march of the seasons was associated with specific cooking tasks.

From the beginning of autumn, farmers and estate manger would start their series of tasks to prepare for winter. I never remember the precise order of the tasks, because I don’t have to. All I have to do is haul out any copy of a late Medieval illuminated Book of Hours and it tells me what happened and when. There’s so much about food in these pictures: pigs fattening for later slaughter, harvest, preserving autumn crops, preserving meat, getting the fields ready for winter and getting the garden ready, too. That’s what my memory tells me.

Memory is hopelessly unreliable, however. One of the best Books of Hours of all is Les Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. I teach with it and it comes with its own bookmark, Richard III’s signature embroidered onto gauze ribbon by my remarkable accountant. Let me see what its pictures tell me about food-related activity from September. (I know it’s February, but the weather is already telling me it’s March, and in Northern hemisphere terms, that’s September. If you think that’s bad, you should come and visit during January, when it’s stiflingly hot. )

Aha! September was grape harvest (remember, Books of Hours are as regional as their artists and owners) and we have a lovely picture of the vineyard at Saumur. In the background is the castle, but, more importantly, the kitchen.

I was wrong about harvest, at least as far as this book goes, because in October there is sowing on the Seine, right near the Louvre, in fact. The birds are eating the corn s quickly as the sower can spread it, too, despite the scarecrow’s daunting bow.

November fits my stray memories. The pigs are in the forest, fattening nicely on the acorns the peasants knock off the trees.

And that’s autumn in one particularly expensive book of hours. Not even the super rich and amazingly cosmopolitan were unaware of food production. This makes me wonder about our own rich and mighty. Would they know that the colour change on the market stalls is maybe a couple of weeks early? Would they even know that the colours change?

I should never have given you a recipe for drop biscuits. Here we eat drop scones or pikelets and life would have been fine if I had spent the day thinking of them. Instead I’ve developed a charmingly bad cold (hard to check spelling and typing if you can’t see clearly!) and my mind dwells on drop bears. Drop bears are inedible. That is all you need to know of them. Unless you’re really gullible, in which case I can send you to a number of sites for more information.

Just now I was casting my mind back to the interesting history of Jewish food in Australia. It’s not like Jewish food in the US or even the UK. Or it wasn’t. It’s more cosmopolitan now.

It started off as part of mainstream food history in this country. The first Jews here (as far as we know – maybe there were a host of fleeing Jews in the sixteenth century who set up a secret country in the middle of Western Australia, but we have no evidence. It’s possible.) came with the First Fleet. Jewish history started off as colonial history in Australia.

This means that Jewish food in the nineteenth century was very much the product of the London area, with the important change of more meat and better vegetables. Chops and steaks and sausages and a roast once a week. Fry-ups for breakfast: chops and sausages and eggs and tomatoes and mushrooms and toast. Some families ate bacon and some didn’t.

The important thing about the nineteenth century and Jewish food and Australia is that it wasn’t nearly as careful and kosher as twentieth century Australian Jewish food. The other important thing is that this is where the 1950s recipes I’ve been giving you came from. My grandmother’s recipes. She was born in the late nineteenth century and her cooking retained many of the characteristics of that earlier cuisine. That’s why I give you the recipes: they’re the memory of a lost cuisine.

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.

Teaching has started for 2008 and suddenly my life is busier. Not that it wasn’t busy before. What this means, though, is that I sit at my desk and admire the mugginess of the evening and wonder if even ice cream is possible.

Yesterday ice cream was more than possible and the day before, emails about ice cream flooded my inbox. The day before yesterday was pretty lovely, in fact. Cool rain and lots of information on the history of ice cream in the US.

What happened was that Tamara Mazzei emailed me to point out that the custard-based ice creams that our ice cream tester is checking out for the banquet were called French ice cream in her childhood and that the no-egg variety was called Philadelphia.

I found an early 20th century recipe for French and Philadelphia ice creams and, sure enough, the French was custard based and the Philadelphia wasn’t.

Tamara has a research talent, and found me some rather cool articles, too. Not all of them are about the two different ice cream styles she identified, but they each told me something I didn’t know about the history of ice cream in the US.

There was an article on the rise of the soda fountain (New York Times, September 24 1916). It suggested that the rise in popularity of ice cream sodas was directly due to the banning of alcohol. Ice cream and Prohibition linked, I thought – how very apposite.

In the Charlotte Daily Observer of 21 August 1910, we learned that ice cream and frozen custard were not always interchangeable. The heading reads “Frozen custards – they’re often better than ice cream.” My recipes for custard based ice creams comes from about a decade later. I don’t know if there was a change in terminology or (more likely) that there was a range of ways of describing ice cream made with custard. What’s also interesting about this article is that it pints to a very good reason why one should sue a custard base instead of an uncooked base: you need less rich cream for the custard.

The third article was considerably earlier. The Virginia Herald from 10 June (or it could be 6 October – US dates conspire against me sometimes) 1829 has a recipe for ice cream made from a custard base and it calls it ice cream, not frozen custard.

It’s a very easy recipe, too:

“Three quarters of a pound of loaf sugar, one quart of cream, the whites of three eggs well beat up – mix together and simmer it on the fire until it nearly boils, then take it off and strain it, and when cold put it into the mould and churn it until it freezes.” The ice cream can be flavoured or can be adapted to using milk (with more eggs).

The final article is from Kansas in1920 (which is why I saved it until last) and it clearly states that French ice cream is frozen custard and Philadelphia ice cream is frozen cream and that everything else is a variant on one or the other.

Tamara’s work proved that her childhood memory of French vs Philadelphia goes back a fair way. It was certainly extant in the 1920s and possibly much earlier. However, without more evidence we can’t tell if there are boundaries for the description or where the division between the French and the Philadelphian came from. It’s a lovely little study in how to open up an historical query, by adding new sources of information. To say anything definitive, however, we’d need that amount of information by about a hundred.

Tamara and I have worked together on matters historical before and we both know the limits of sources. She wasn’t looking for a definitive historical truth, however, she was looking for the ancestry of her own childhood usage, and she found it. This is important, too. Every query has nuances and shadings – some questions have straightforward answers (did the French vs Philadelphia division go earlier and extend to other parts of the US or were the different types of ice cream called that solely by Tamara’s family, later on?) while others need far more time and effort (what is the history of ice cream nomenclature in the US from, say 1829?).

I love this. I love that interaction with the past can be very tightly focussed or that it can be as broad as a human’s imagination. Why I love researching history doesn’t help you understand the history of ice cream descriptions, however, and I’ve hit teaching time and can’t chase it. I’ll let you know if we choose French or Philadelphian ice cream for the banquet, when we reach that far. And if more information comes my way, I promise to report it.

Today was market day and icecream day.

Icecream day first. Two new icecreams for the Prohibition banquet. Another peach and another raspberry. The raspberry got a thumbs up from me and a thumbs down by Kate. It has a slightly funny texture, as does the peach. I consulted my icecream guru and she suggested that the custard simply needed to be cooked longer ie the recipe was basically a good one. We had an interesting talk about the need to break down the starch in a custard-based icecream to get a good texture.

The market was partly about regular shopping, partly about doing some identificatory work on aspects of Australian cooking (no doubt it will emerge here in due course, just when you think everything in food history is all about the written word) but also very much about the Prohibition banquet.

I don’t have as many volunteers this year and besides, the shape of the menu is entirely different (over a hundred years and a continent apart – the differences are very obvious) and so my approach to testing is different. I started off with 5000+ pages of recipes and menu advice. More than last year, because there are more cookbooks and many more advice manuals around for the 1920s.

I got rid of breakfast recipes and lunch recipes and snack recipes and recipes that are entirely impossible to make in Australia. My shortlist, however, was well over a hundred pages, with an average of six recipes a page. This year I don’t have the resources to test that many and besides, it’s really not necessary.

There are some parts of a New York restaurant meal in the 1920s that are fairly standard and only need maybe a half dozen recipes checked to establish the best way of cooking something. There are other parts of the menu that have clear restrictions round them. My way of dealing with that this year is to focus on the high prestige dishes that are able to be made in modern Australian kitchens. In other words, I’m testing far fewer substantial dishes.

On the other hand, lots of sauces need testing. Each time I test a different meat dish (the main course) I’ll test all the key sauces that would be served with it, along with a few standard vegetables. Not many tests, but more complex ones.

Each year I do this, I find out quite different thing about food in history. The testing and the evaluation against the food available near me and its quality helps me understand how a period and place develops its prestige food, for instance. I begin to understand the social side of food in more depth. I’m also learning that, no matter how much I learn, I’ve still only seen the tip of a very, very big iceberg.

Today was market day. The local farmers’ markets have been going for a few months now and I have been every few weeks and everyone seems to know me. They can’t always sort out food history from food technology, but they know me and will explain who I am and why I ask strange questions to anyone who happens to be near.

The maker of pâtés and rillettes sent a message today that there were “pork-free products for your Jewish friend.” I rolled up to see what he was referring to and it turned out to be pure duck rillettes. They taste very northern French and the maker, I thought, was Vietnamese. Just shows you should always ask people their background, because he’s Belgian. I know about the similarities between Belgian and Normandy pâtés and rillettes, but not a thing about the differences. Next time I go to the market I need to ask him some questions. (He knows his stuff – that duck was very good and just as rich as it ought to be – we had it with lunch.)

On the vegetable front, there was some very bad news: the wonderful purveyor of heritage carrots had his whole crop wiped out by a hailstorm. There will be a new crop in a few weeks, but in the meantime he has to weather $100,000 worth of damage. It’s bad for him, and it’s also a salutary reminder of what we no longer have to put up with.

A famine in, say, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance was typically regional (like that hailstorm). A bigger event with wider destruction could wipe out crops in a wider area (the potato famine in Ireland in the nineteenth century is a terribly depressing example of this) but for every big famine, there were maybe dozens of little ones, chronicled locally but not reported elsewhere. I have a list of some of them for the Middle Ages (put together from work by French scholars) but it’s woefully inadequate. We just don’t have reports on every famine that happened until very recently.

These days we may be guilty of neglect (due to modern communications we tend to be aware of famines, but only a very few people move to do something about them) but we have completely different transport and distribution to one hundred and fifty years ago and earlier. If the major root crop disintegrates for one area, food can be brought in from elsewhere. Australia is emerging (probably may be emerging – I’m guilty of wishful thinking) from one of the worst droughts in recorded Australian history. Farmers have gone bankrupt, but no-one local has starved to death from it.

The patterns of not finding food are historically radically different now from what they once were. There was always politics involved in famines – who would help whom and why never quite fades from the picture. These days, though, politics is more important and regional production less. The underlying structure of food production has changed, and our lives with it.

Today you get a picture of my lunch. Kate and I shared a cheese from Milawa. It was a fine goat’s cheese, called Affine (does it count as a pun if you say similar things in two different languages?).

This is one of the cheeses I bought when Sharyn whisked me away from my retreat on Monday afternoon. We went to the Milawa Cheese Factory>, where I tasted over twenty cheeses. Not a bad one among them and the best were as good as anything I’ve tasted anywhere.

The factory isn’t that old (established 1988 according to the website) but they do use traditional methods, and it definitely shows. Please note that I said ‘traditional,’ not ‘old.’ (more…)