Food History

I meant to write a recipe today here, truly.  I got distracted.  I often get distracted.

Today what distracted me was my lemon myrtle.  I use it instead of lemon grass in a bunch of recipes because I like the scent so much better.

It’s rare to find a culinary history that has lemon myrtle, or any of the Australian natives except perhaps eucalyptus.  Yet lemon myrtle is a wonderful, wonderful herb.

I think this shows how we frame our concept of food history. We conceive of our culinary past through mainly European eyes, and lemon myrtle only entered the Western foodie imagination very recently.

The other thing is that we mainly think of culinary history in terms of other forms of history ie shaped by written documents.  Humans who don’t read and write still eat and still have history.  Their history is harder to grab hold of and often seems less glamorous.  It’s dead easy to sound impressive on subjects such as European exploration to establish routes to the Spice Islands, for instance, and much harder to talk about the use of lemon myrtle before Europeans sorted out that they wanted to live on Terra Australis.

Just because we don’t know the history of something doesn’t mean that the something doesn’t have a history. This is my deep and meaningful thought for the day. 

It would take an interesting bringing-together of traditional knowledge, anthropology, archaeology, folk history and regular history to write the story of how lemon myrtle has been used in cooking over the last few hundred years.  I hope someone one day manages this feat. 

Alas, that my history is of the wrong variety.  In the meantime, I can dream of a history of lemon myrtle and I can enjoy cooking with it.

Since today was exceptionally hot, let me give you a cooling drink as the Friday recipe. 

Lemon myrtle tea:  2 fresh leaves in a teapot with water.  I like it strong, but my late aunt liked it brewed for just two minutes.  If you make punch for summer festivities and want the taste of lemon without the acidity, a pot of strong lemon myrtle tea (cooled) will do the trick.