Food History

I was looking for chicken recipes for the meeting with the Conflux chef and I kept coming across reindeer recipes. If anyone wants to cook reindeer in the manner of the second decade (or thereabouts) of the twentieth century, just say, for I have the recipes on file. Reindeer are kosher, so I am tempted, but they aren’t available in Australia, so my temptation isn’t going to stretch me very far at all.

In other non-news I still have medlars bletting and persimmons refusing to ripen. They’re more comfortable in bowls on my coffee table or in my kitchen than they would be inside me, perhaps? Or maybe they like the oranges and lemons that keep them company?

Whatever the reasons, they’re a handy reminder that when winters are cold, it’s really handy to have fruit that ripens well after picking. If I were clever, I could have fruit right through winter, in fact. I know I get fruit right through winter now, but it travels and I’m still fascinated by the paths food travels to reach us and how they grown and change.

Talking about paths, someone announced online a little while ago (and I’m sorry I’ve lost the website) that if they were transported back in time they would solve scurvy the same way Captain Cook did, by introducing vitamin C rich fruit and juice to long voyages. He seemed to have the idea that voyages in the year 1000 were inevitably crewed by scurvy-ridden sailors.

This is an alternate history Middle Ages rather than a real one, I think, because it doesn’t take into account the nature of Medieval shipping nor how distance voyages worked for the most part. It also assumes that most Medieval sailors (or those who theorise about them with insufficient checking of evidence) had zombie ancestors, but we’ve seen that before. Some days I have zombie ancestors, too – zombie female ancestors, for the most part, because it’s a time of month thing. (Have I managed to offend everyone yet – or do I need to try harder?)

The reason scurvy was such an issue in the 18th century was that voyages out of sight of land (ie with no capacity to take on supplies) could last for worryingly long periods of time. There was the Atlantic and there was the Pacific and they were being sailed more regularly and with greater intent to set up regular trading routes. Franklin’s infamous 19th century voyage, after all, was to find a north-west passage to aid trade and reduce voyage lengths.

In other words, supplying ships changed with the capacity of ships and with changes in navigation which led to changes in the prevalence of scurvy. They changed again with the advent of steam, but that’s another story. Another story again is that I had oranges for afternoon tea, just to make sure I didn’t myself come down with the dread scourge.