Food History

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.