Food History

Early summer in the mountains is lizardly.

Have you ever watched a lizard? It’s very still and very still and very still. You think it’s dead. Then all of a sudden it flicks out of sight.

We get sun and sun and sun and then we get a rapid-fire weather shift and the sun is out of sight. This would be a good thing, if I weren’t lucky enough to be gifted with weather sense. I’m drinking cold coffee to reduce the symptoms and I’m posting earlier than I normally would, just in case the storm stays long enough to prevent me getting online later. If there’s rain, the state of my head won’t matter. We really need the rain.

The coffee I’m drinking is from a tin. ‘Can’ in the US, both probably short for ‘tin cans’. Lead poisoning was an issue with early tins, and an important 19th century Arctic expedition suffered from fatal food poisoning when their cans were made on the cheap and the solder leaked. I really should have mentioned it on my evil food anecdotes post a while back, but stories of ill fated expeditions to the North Pole suit the mood now, nicely. As I said, when that storm breaks (as it didn’t yesterday – the lizard went still again and the sun came back this morning, as the sun does most mornings) I will feel happy and well, but right now I want to turn all my fiction into doom and horror. If I ever write a dark cataclysmic novel, it will be in the collected half hours before storms hit.

The tinned coffee is Pokka Milk Coffee, from Singapore. I’m working my way through the different South East Asian tinned coffees I have available, just to see what I can work out about flavours.

I started working my way through icecreams, too, but alas, ube icecream turns out to not be one of my favourites. Philippino icecream in general has an oily aftertaste that I’m not yet used to, but I don’t think I like ube as an icecream flavour.

It’s very useful to taste familiar products from a country whose cuisine I only partway know, to help me move outside my own palate and reminding myself of the rest of the world. A lot of the Philippino food I cook has the lower dairy and higher oil of the icecream, for instance. I can’t cook much Philippino food, though, because of the dominance of pork and seafood, so my knowledge of the cuisines of the Philippines will always be lopsided. But if I hadn’t tried the tricolour icecream (great colours – chocolate and mango and ube) I would never have known that my tastebuds can’t comfortably encompass the beautiful purple strand.

This fits with historical cuisines, too, now I think a bit. There are some dishes that are closer to what we know and we eat and we like. There are others that are quite strange. But it’s the whole cuisine that counts, and to understand how it ought to feel in your mouth you need more than one or two forays into the kitchen. Otherwise it’s terribly tempting to match it to the food you already know, and not understand it at all. My example here is hamburgers. A real burger, Downunder, has beetroot.

Now it’s time to return you to your usual programming while I spend some valuable time stormwatching.