Food History

It’s been too many days since I gave you a retro recipe or since I mentioned chocolate. Life’s too short to last that long with nothing from the fifties and without chocolate. I would give you an icecream recipe, but we had a most amazing last-whiff-of-summer ice storm on Tuesday night and I am entirely over giving out icecream recipes right now. Hailstones thigh deep do that.

Today’s recipe is my grandmother’s very 1950s version. No-one round me makes Dolly Varden cakes anymore. They used to be very popular, though. The Old Foodie (about whom I’ll do a proper post one day soonish) talks about the Dolly Varden cake and its origins in the link I subtly attached to her name.

Even more subtle is that this is my first Women’s History Month post on this blog. March is Women’s History Month in the US and in Australia. I will do more substantial posts later on (and am very happy to hear your food history stories that celebrate women’s history or the history of a particular woman), but for today I though the bringing together of the unknown history preservers (my grandmother and her notebook), the writers/interpreters of history (The Old Foodie) and fictional views of women and how they extend culturally (Dolly Varden) makes a neat beginning. And it includes chocolate icing. You can’t go too far wrong if it includes chocolate.

Dolly Varden Cake

6 ozs shortening
8 ozs sugar
3 eggs
12 ozs SR flour
1 gill milk essence
2 tablespoons sultanas
1 tablespoon lemon peel
2 level teaspoons spice

Cream shortening and sugar, add eggs one by one, then flour, milk and essence. Divide mixture into three parts, putting fruit and spice in one part, leaving two parts plain. Cook in three oblong tins in a moderate oven for 20 mts. When cool join together with mock cream and ice with chocolate icing and decorate with raisins, nuts or pink icing.

There are many old cookbooks that have been scanned or translated or transcribed. I’ve been using some of them for the Regency Gothic Banquet preparation, in fact.

There are a few sites which are rather special in the way they present these cookbooks, for one reason or another. One of my favourites is the British Library’s Learning site. They have very abbreviated and rather general overviews of food habits that are really only useful to the newcomer to the field. The trick is to go to the links on the right of the page. You can get a feel for the original manuscripts and printed books and read more detailed commentary. Worth it for the facsimiles alone!

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.

What is it about flu that makes one crave carbohydrates? I’m not hungry, but my mind is lusting after a piece of fresh-baked sour dough bread with fresh butter and a smidgeon of orange blossom honey.

I found two websites with historical sourdough starters. This one and this. Some are more authentic than others (the Tasmanian one is not demonstrably historical at all), but they’re all interesting. Alas, it would be quite illegal to import them into Australia. If any of you make bread from these starters, I would love an email or a comment to let me know what they taste like.

Today you deserve a URL. This is a site devoted to reviews of historical cookbooks. Everyone needs more reviews of historical cookbooks in their lives.

And no, the carrots have nothing to do with the book - I’ve been testing early nineteenth century recipes tonight and carrots represent the way I feel. Very, very orange and exhausted.

I love kitchen superstitions, beliefs, lore. The stuff we do without thinking about it because we’ve always done it that way or because our mother taught us or because our best friend said. Some of this is genuinely good cooking technique. Some of this was good cooking but the food we eat has changed and it just doesn’t apply any more. And some of it is pure bumpf.

This site on food myths looks at some of the stories about food and its qualities and explains why certain things are popular but not true (I like the alcohol evaporation one, myself - I have always wondered how people managed to get tipsy on fruitcake) and so on. It’s not a terribly technical site and it makes for very fun reading. It’s a pity about the carb soda, though.

PS The incorrect factoid I come across most often is how long chick peas need to cook. Australian chick peas only need 15-20 minutes if they’ve ben soaked, because they’re a particular variety. I always look at country of origin when I buy chick peas and I adjust preparation times accordingly. This isn’t a food myth though - this is a side effect of breeding plant varieties. Like lettuce not really being a bitter herb any more, because iceberg lettuce has almost all the bitterness bred out of it.

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.

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.

I didn’t even know the Gode Cookery site gave awards for historic food writing, but they do and I have been given one. What a nice way to start the working year!

Several years ago a Sydney (Australia) organisation that works to make kosher food more interesting asked me to do them a little booklet on Medieval food for Jewish New Year. I kept all my rights on it and not too long after it appeared in print I denuded it of recipes and gave the article to my publisher for her website. It’s not my most popular article on the Trivium Publishing site (that honour belongs to the one that has descriptions of Old French insults) but the number of hits it attracted was one of the reasons I started this blog.

To celebrate my article being the recipient of the January 2007 Gode Cookery Award, I think I’ll give you one of the missing recipes.

Spiced mushrooms

500 g small button mushrooms (Swiss brown are ideal, but will need to be cut into quarters)
1 small onion
olive oil
1 pinch ground pepper
1 pinch powdered ginger
1 pinch nutmeg
2 pinches coriander seed (ground)

Peel and wash mushrooms. Boil until they shrink (c 10 minutes).

Cut onion finely, then fry it in olive oil. Keep the heat high, add the mushrooms and cook for maybe 2-3 minutes. Add salt and spices, lower the heat and cook covered until golden.

Today my mother opened a jar of olives to go with lunch and a story tumbled out.

Jacob Friedman dreamt of olive groves and vast wealth in the Mt Gambier region in the 1920s. He took wild olive stock (seeded naturally, the wild trees had reverted to kind) and grafted olive varieties imported from the country that was to become Israel. Olives take a long time to fruit and he went bust. Eventually, the trees fruited and new owners saw the olives to market.

The current bushfires devastating that region aren’t the first. When the fires turned the groves into charcoal, the owners thought all that time and work was in vain. Then there was a little miracle. The roots of the wild stock turned out to be hardier than the grafts and the trees grew back.

Mount Zero Olives now sells a lovely line in preserved wild olives, which is what we had with lunch.

These tiny olives have a duskier feel than modern varieties to my taste, and I keep thinking that if they were combined with preserved wild cucumbers (available from groceries that sell food from the Middle East - think of long, thin and rather pale variants of Lebanese cucmbers) the overall effect would be of familiar flavours with a muted undertone of something a tiny bit acrid.

It’s midsummer and I’m online during a pause in the storms. I love these storms: we need the rain so desperately. I hate the storms: imagine trying to fit hours of online activity into odd minutes. Because of the time limitation at this end, I thought you might like a link today. Is it the right day to give you links? No, that’s Sunday. Just pretend today is Sunday and on Sunday I will give you today’s recipe and we will all be equally confused.

Cindy Renfrow has a great deal of interesting stuff on the various pages of her website, but the one containing culinary history links is my personal favourite. Hours and hours of exploration. Enough to keep all sorts of people out of mischief until the weather clears at this end.

I hope your festive season hasn’t been quite so spam-filled as mine. Every time I turn on the computer, a hundred new emails that clog my mailbox with cringeworthy material.

I’ve never eaten the real stuff (spiced ham) because it might upset my mother. OK, OK, it might upset me, too. Being Jewish and all that. It has a bit of a history though, with the spam song having about the same deep textual validity as a dwarf mining song from a Pratchett novel. Just replace ‘gold’ with ’spam’ and they’re almost identical, which says something gobsmackingly important but I’m not sure what. (If we were in an election period I could make bad jokes about pork-barrelling, but alas, political jokes don’t fit the holiday season at all.)

To celebrate this amazing abundance of spam, I’ve collected a few links for you. The first has to be The Amazing Spam Homepage. And you most certainly need a Hawaiian recipe for Spam. And your life would not be complete without a Spam timeline from the original manufacturers.

Now you have an overabundance of information about spam of all sorts, which was precisely what you wanted when you woke up this morning. Wasn’t it?

Here’s the recipe for the Casserole. If you need wine to go with your dinner, check in with Farley herself. In Farley’s own words:

Cook white rice–you’ll want to end up with 3 cups or so of the finished product. Meanwhile, sautee one chopped onion and 4 stalks of celery, also chopped with a couple tablespoons of butter in a large skillet or saucepan. Once they are soft and the onions translucent, add a can of cream of chicken soup and half a can of milk, stirring well. Then add half of a Velveeta log (I don’t know what else to call it!) that’s been cut into small squares. As the cheese melts, toss in a 10 oz. bag of frozen broccoli florets and continue to stir. When everything is combined, add the previously cooked rice.

Place mixture in a casserole dish, cover with foil, then put into preheated 350 degree oven. Cook until a nice golden color, probably 20-30 minutes.

I added sliced button mushrooms when I made mine to make it a little fancier, but they’re not necessary.

Note: Farley suggests - for us living in Velveeta-free-zones- that maybe a mild cheddar will do instead.

Too much sugar is bad for you
Boston proved this irrefutably on January 15, 1919.

It wasn’t a simple case of acne or bad teeth or even obesity. A molasses tank exploded and brought down a train and a fire station. Twenty one people died. There’s a picture here. Every time I read about it I marvel that molasses can move at 35 miles an hour in January. Here are some more articles.

Onions are good food, but eating other bulbs can lead to jail and worse.
During the tulip mania of the seventeenth century, there are several stories of men eating tulip bulbs by mistake. For the lucky, they were simply jailed for the crime.

There’s a Japanese flour made from tulip bulbs, I believe. I do wonder what the seventeenth century Dutch would have made of it? More on tulips here and here and even here.

Poor tea-making skills can lead to violent behaviour
Making tea with salt water leads to dire consequences. Australians don’t do things like that. Only Bostonians. No links for this one - the American Revolution is common knowledge. Besides, everyone knows that you can’t make decent tea using seawater.

Gourmandise is worth the highest sacrifice
Apicius - the Roman gourmand - committed suicide rather than putting up with food that was less than the best the Ancient Roman world could offer. More here. I will translate a recipe or two of his during the year and you can judge for yourself if his death was in vain.

The fact that the book with his name on may not be by him is perhaps a problem, but it’s still worth checking out whether his suicide was noble or whether he just should have learned to read Cato and try a simpler diet. Which reminds me, Cato has a recipe for a delicious cheesecake which would make perfect summer eating. Think of baked ricotta with a smidgeon of honey.

Murder most gourmand
John Fletcher described it as the Coward’s Weapon, but poison has a certain sexiness for lovers of detective fiction. The Lex Cornelia was brought into effect in 82 BCE by a rather desperate Sulla trying to prevent who from poisoning whom at far too rapid a rate. This didn’t stop a clever Medieval scientist turning arsenic into an edible (but highly toxic) powder and setting the scene for detective tales and early deaths.

There are too many tales of historical poisoners and they all seem to have an ill-deserved glamour: the Borgias, Catherine de Medici, la Toffana. The real experts were members of the Venetian Council of Ten, who brought a whole new meaning to the notion of combining dinner with politics. More here and here.

Grand nineteenth century exploration and the meagre diet
Exploration is sometimes only as hungry as you make it. Burke’s ill-fated expedition into central Australia was all about mishandled meetings and assuming that it was impossible to live off the land.

Burke and Wills are forever-famous in Australian history, and it was lack of food that made them that way. King is less famous but then, he ate indigenous foods properly prepared (correct cooking saved him from beri-beri, not only starvation) and he lived.

Food and drink were major concerns for the Burke and Wills expedition, whether it was supplies that had been whisked away too soon or buried beneath the trees or even camels that were tipsy. For a more balanced view (and perhaps some information on the predilection of camels for good rum) try here here and here and here.

PS I stopped at six, not because there weren’t many more bizarre foodish stories over the last millenium, but because it really is too much the fun season to weather all this gloom.

Trudy over at Elementary Chef has a rather tempting recipe for Eggs benedict, which is part of her family’s food tradition at this time of year.