Food History

Readers have made several important comments in the last few days, some through email and some in the comments section. If I have written a post you find interesting (I can dream!), then it’s worth going back after a few days sometimes and seeing what comments readers have made, simply because some of the best insights come from you out there (I keep wanting to say ‘you lot’, but it’s not respectful).

Yesterday, Julie said, “What’s really hard is when the grandparents and great grandparents tell you a pinch of this and a fistful of that. Then you look at the size of your hands versus theirs and wonder what the actual amount should be. The pinch of this and fistful of that can be quite forgiving when it comes to savory dishes but when it comes to baking it can spell disaster.”

The trick is to learn what the mouthfeel of your family cuisine has. Mouthfeel, taste memory - textures and flavours and a sense of what goes together. It doesn’t tell you how big that pinch is, but it *does* tell you how to work to find that pinch.

My mother called it the “by guess and by God” method, but it was a lot more than that. It meant my sisters and myself learning to cook without cookbooks, even for a range of cakes (not all, just the ones that were core). I still rely on cookbooks to give me the overall proportions for the key recipes for most cakes - I’m not as confident as I ought to be with them, but I can cook many dishes I’ve eaten outside the home, just because I’ve learned to reproduce the flavours and the textures rather than the strict ingredients list.

Part of the foodways of strong family cuisines is teaching the trick of how to work out what goes into dishes. Each family has its own repertoire: we can reproduce dishes that fall within a certain range, that we understand and have techniques for. Marion, another reader, described this as ‘tam’ or taste memory. The memory alone isn’t sufficient however, it has to be combined with the cooking techniques or skills. And most of us never actually reproduce the precise dish – we reproduce a dish that’s close, but coloured by all the other dishes we know that are similar.

Even professional chefs do this. The chef who cooked our wonderful Regency banquet last year made chicken rolls his way, but with early nineteenth century seasoning. It obviously didn’t fit his feel of what a dish out to be like to strip the interior of that chicken entirely free of meat, so he left a layer of white meat and then made a stuffing of the rest. This is how dishes change over time. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to that academic paper, where I’m discussing precise change over time.

If you’re interested in seeing what sort of dishes I like, so you can work out where my tastebuds come from, Reality on Bravo is running a competition, and my little e-cookbook is this week’s prize.