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.
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.
Between storms and other sundries, today hasn’t been a day where much has happened on the food history front at my place. Well, except for cool announcements about radio interviews. There was a flurry of phone calls over that one. One from the radio station to me and then one from the university to make sure I got the message. A small flurry. Or maybe it was just that I was flurried on the phone.
What I have up my sleeve (and have had for a long while but keep finding other topics I need to post about) is a bunch of fascinating websites with more information about aspects of food history than you can shake a whatever at. I’m not sure what you should shake at websites. Pastry brushes, maybe?
Today’s is a kind of advertorial site. It’s three extra words from a book of food definitions. Why I like it, is that one of those words is myrrh and another is spikenard. I have a particular soft spot for myrrh and spikenard (beyond the obvious – that I can spell them). Spikenard is an ingredient in my favourite recipe for hypocras and both it and myrrh smell rather gorgeous in perfume.
I didn’t know that spikenard was native to the Himalayas. If you look at Dalby’s article on it (on the webpage I linked to a moment ago) you will find that it’s carried in bales. This, also, I didn’t know, but it makes so much sense. It’s a very grassy stuff, spikenard.
Myrrh isn’t grassy. In fact, it’s resin from a tree. It looks a bit like a rock, but when you hold it in your palm and warm it, it gives forth its scent and you realise just how unlike amber it is. Or isn’t. Amber is, after all, fossilised resin. Which makes me wonder. If we found fossilized myrrh with a mosquito that had just dined on dinosaur blood, could Jurasic Park be remade with fragrant dinosaurs? (I think that last joke meant that the storms have officially melted my brain.)
The Absolute Write Blogchain is an unpredictable beastie. A group of writers each taking their prompt from the previous writer in the chain means that the topics can go anywhere. Normally food makes an appearance - and it did early on - but just before the chain reached me, it turned philosophical. Jim at the DeathWizard Chronicles has given me a hard act to follow. I sometimes talk about the higher meaning of food (you don’t have to click on this link, it’s basically to show that I occasionally have a brain and can almost reach platforms of higher thought) but to link from someone else’s discussion of mindful meditation to food history is a stretch.
Or it ought to be a stretch. Maybe. But maybe not.
The way we eat reflects who we are. What we eat also says a great deal about us. I once met a Buddhist monk who told me to be aware of living as I ate and to be aware of all the different moments and actions and sensations involved in the eating. This awareness of such a fundamental activity as eating might just be a variant of mindful meditation.
Judaism has something similar. Kashruth has many functions and one of them is to keep us aware of who we are as Jews, all the time.
Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed wth food. For me, food is how I reach those higher planes.
Jim gave us this lovely quote:
“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”
Living in your own body, appreciating the sensations, experiencing the precise moment you are living in - all this can be part of eating. Whether you use the food to cling to experience or to live it to the fullest and then let it go is a matter of cultural background as well as personal choice. It most certainly is part of our food history.
Monks had their fast days in the Middle Ages to remind them not to focus on corporeal matters - they used food as a tool for heightening an understanding of reality through denial. One Ancient Roman philosophy did exactly the opposite: you live every moment and you eat and have sex and generally enjoy life as proof of it.
There are so many ways of reaching the same goal. That goal is an experience of life. Of making the most of every moment.
I think this calls for chocolate. Eat it while fully focussed and aware of every microsecond of smooth richness, then breeze on over to A View From The Waterfront, to see where this chain goes next.
Today I’m taking you back to my childhood.
When I was exceedingly young, someone gave me a herb reference book by Rosemary Hemphill for my birthday. I still have it. It was the first step in the long path that led me here.
A friend recently gave me an extraordinary reference book by Rosemary Hemphill’s son and introduced me to him when I was in Sydney earlier this year. You can find him in his shop in Rozelle (where I met him), on his website, or in the pages of one of his books (click on the pictures for more details). I recommend all three. But start here - Ian has answered some questions for us.
Question 1: Your family is an important part of Australia’s food history. Can you tell us about it, and how herbs and spices have interwoven with family life? (more…)
A special guest post for my holiday period - Felicity Pulman, author of Ghost Boy and the Janna Mysteries has kindly given me something I’ve been curious about for a long, long while. Biltong - with recipe!
“Growing up in the 50s in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as I did, one of our greatest treats was eating biltong. Our (infrequent) supplies came from a farming friend who would make it after shooting some sort of game buck, usually impala. The meat would be cut into strips, salted and seasoned, and then hung up to dry - not a problem in a country with (usually) low humidity. Our ‘drying rack’ was on the side of the lean-to shed that housed ‘V13′, an ancient black box Ford much beloved by my father and so-christened because of its number plate.
Biltong nearly broke up my relationship with my fiance, a Pom. He came out with his family from England for our wedding and was so disgusted and horrified when he saw the strips of meat drying in the sun and crawling with ants that I wondered if the wedding was off. Although we now live in Australia, I am tormented by the knowledge that my childhood home, once the ‘breadbasket’ of Africa, is on the brink of starvation and ruin because of Robert Mugabe.
It’s possible to buy (beef) biltong in some butchers’ shops here in Sydney, but my kind nephew makes his own and keeps me in supplies - yum yum!”
Biltong recipe: a topside (about 5 kg). Take fat off and separate the muscles. Cut into slices 30cm x 5 cm x 1.5cm approx along grain of muscle. Make spice mixture as follows: 3/4 cup coarse table salt; 1/3 cup brown sugar; 1/2 cup ground coriander; 1/3 cup cracked pepper; 1/4 cup Allspice. Roll meat slices in spice mixture and lay in dish. Sprinkle brown vinegar over each layer. Leave in fridge to marinate for 12 hours then turn; leave another 12 hours. Hang meat strips with fan blowing cool dry air over them for 4-6 days. NB Leave tray underneath to catch the drips. Meat should be firm when squeezed before removing. Store in fridge. Enjoy!
Felicity Pulman.
food history, Felicity Pulman, Janna Mysteries, Ghost Boy, biltong
Today I have lots of memories and recipes and thoughts about people and food to start your week off just perfectly. It is, in fact, a very food history edition of Carnival of the Recipes.
Shawn is the co-ordinator and I want to start with her food memory, since I, too, co-ordinate a carnival and it helps me appreciate the work she puts in. She says ” My mother always made it for us - and now it’s become one of my staples too.” Yum! .
That’s the easy bit of presenting peoples’ memories: start with the ones you know. Don’t you do that? When you’re talking with people about food, start with the friends and family and start with the dishes you share?
What works in a live conversation and sparks more memories and ends up with deep discussion into the wee hours over hot drinks or wine doesn’t work so well in a blog, so I’m going to order this post by the tried-and-true method of creating a menu. (more…)
One of the most interesting current trends in food history (according to my very biassed self) is how many people care about a particular aspect and want to make sure that we’re informaed and that the knowledge isn’t lost. What’s really fascinating is that there’s an audience for this. One of the most-used parts of this food history blog, for instance, is the growing number of recipes about scones and biscuits.
There are museums of cutlery and cookbook collections. There are collections of childhood memories and there are displays of fashion in school lunchboxes. Most of these I’ve already looked at at least briefly.
Food is important to us. It’s not just a matter of nutrition. There are memories of place and time and social patterns. Foodways help preserve who we are and how we live in the world, and they also help us live in the world. Formal afternon tea in Australia is full of unwritten codes that help particular social groups communicate and remember and bond.
So where does a potato museum come into this? it shows us some of the ways that potatoes have been grown and eaten and thought about over the years. The pototato has a complicated history but not (for Westerners) a long one.
It’s worth checking out and thinking about.
What’s really interesting is that there’s enough information out there, and enough interest in potato history, for the museum folks to maintain a potato blog. There’s nothing humble about recent spud history.
food history, potatoes, potato museum
There are a lot of food carnivals with links to fascinating blogs and interesting recipes. Or was that interesting blogs and fascinating recipes? Sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other, and sometimes it’s both.
The Kosher Cooking Carnival this time round has gone one very sensible step further. What the host has done is turned nearly two years of posts into a table. You will find recipe links to an array of Jewish food and culture, including some you’ve met here already. And it’s all just in time for Jewish New Year!
Note: I am not to blame for any weight you put on through enjoyment of these recipes.
food history, carnival, recipes, Jewish food, kosher food
Today, I have something rather special.
Martha Carlin (who you ought to remember from my earlier posts on her work) has kindly agreed to answer a few questions. I asked her at a totally bad time of year, with university just beginning, so she had to fit it in amongst everything, which makes it a double hapiness to have this interview.
Professor Carlin teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is one of the world’s leading food historians. Her particular focus is the Midde Ages. I was going to point out how much of a superior and civilised human being this makes her, but it’s pretty obvious how crucial understanding the Middle Ages is to understanding the present, so I won’t.
Thank you, Professor Carlin!
Question 1: How is food history different from the sort of history most people learn at school?
(more…)
How long is it since I’ve given you an extract from a primary source of foodie-interest (apart from cookbooks and modern studies) - far, far too long. Tonight I make up for this derelicton of duty with something small, but very evocative.
This is from the Account Books of the Customs Port of Cardiff (I’ve been watching too much Torchwood, haven’t I?) for the year 1733.
“Novr 20. To the Collector for sending off an Express to the Officers at Newport with Orders for them to keep a good look out for a Vessel called the King of Prussia, which took in Tea Liquors Sugar &c. &c., with an intent to Smuggle the same in this Kingdom 5s.”
You ought to be able to find the original here. And I’m not going to make jokes about a Tardis or someone called Harkness. Truly.
Horseradish (cochlearia armoracia or armorsacia lapathifolia) is a fabulously pungent root. It really intrigues me that the sixteenth century German use of this root was very similar to the modern Askenazi Jewish use (as a vinegared relish with meats and fish), especially given that the roots of Yiddish are mostly the German of that period.
Eat the root grated very finely with vinegar and perhaps a bit of beetroot. The easy way to make chrain (the relish) is with the liquid from a tin of beetroot and lots of grated horseradish. I guess there is a proper way to make it, but I always do it the easy way. I’m told it goes well with gefilte fish - I know it goes magically with most roasts and most vegetables. it’s also good for clearing the sinuses.
When I was exploring the horseradish web I found a commercial site with rather a good description of making kosher chrain for Passover. It’s worth reading round the ads for the guts of it: kashruth isn’t nearly as complicated as it looks, and neither is horseradish.
The history of horseradish is complicated, however. I’ve seen mentions of it quoted by Pliny and by the Deplhic Oracle, but no-one ever gives the exact source, so I can’t check it out.
In recent centuries horseradish has become the bitter herb of choice for many Passover seders, replacing classics such as rue. This I can check out, and I do, every year at Passover.
Tonight I am here. From 9 pm Australian EST (GMT +10) I will answer any and every question that comes my way. You know this already. What you don’t know is that it means my time for blogging today is not very great, so I’m giving you one of those very special videos instead. You will probably regret looking at this, but I’m giving it to you anyway. If you want revenge, you know where to find me!
I’m a bit short on energy tonight (half the city is down with a virus, and I’m one of those in the virussed-half) so instead of a proper post, I’m giving you a link to something absolutely fascinating.
Imagine having a pizza parlour where once was a funeral parlour. Imagine leaving all the funereal signs up. Just to add to the strangeness, the building in question was a Jewish funeral parlour (you can read the words Chevra Kadisha - the top line of Hebrew in the sign with the most words) and the speciality of this particular restaurant is pork.
Thank goodness I can’t eat pork and so have a cast-iron excuse not to buy potentially haunted pizza.
(I can almost hear Trudi telling me to put evil Gillian away, but evil Gillian enjoyed finding that story and might hang around in the background for a bit. Evil Gillian will generously refrain from making jokes about long pork, however.)
A friend sent me to this article. It’s a lucid explanation of the problems underlying a recent piece of scientific research. It’s also fun to read.
I’m not going to repeat what it says (mostly), but I do have some comments of my own.
A few herbs, a pinch of spice and foods of the past create your perfect foodie recipe at Food History. Expand your palate with everything from hot scones to hot websites without leaving your computer. At Food History there's a gourmet’s delight of food, health, history, and an amazing side of mushrooms. From holiday food customs to any number of fabulous recipes, you can find out anything and everything about your favorite tasty tidbits.
Food History Author(s)
» Gillian-Polack
