Food Through Time

Early Refrigeration

2012-02-09T23:25:00.000-05:00

I had known for a while that certain ancient peoples, supposedly including the Persians and Romans, used preserved ice in the summer for cooling drinks (for the wealthy) and making special treats, but I'd always assumed that this was a some time thing, depending upon weather conditions and how carefully you tended your cave or storage cellar or whatever.

Yakhchāl, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Recently, I learned that the technology used for this purpose at least by the Persians (I don't know what the Romans did) was much more sophisticated than a cave or pit, and was quite effective. The Persians built structures called yakhchāl for the purpose of keeping ice and perishable foods. Yakhchāl, literally means "ice pit," but what the Persians did was more sophisticated than a hole dug in the ground to store ice. This article explains how they were built and how they worked. The spiral tracks channel water from evaporation and melt water to the bottom where it can refreeze at night, when the desert is cold. Often, the yakhchāl was adjoined by a separate structure that directed windflow over the ice, chilling the chamber. The main building material for the yakhchāl--mud.

A truly elegant solution to the problem of keeping foods cold--solved with Bronze Age technology.

The Ancient Greeks Write About Food

2012-01-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

The next Christmas present I intend to write about is another slender tome. This time, the subject matter is ancient Greek cuisine:

Ricotti, Eugenia Salza Prina. Meals and Recipes from Ancient Greece. J. Paul Getty Trust (English ed. 2007).

It is clear from the very first pages of Ms. Ricotti's book that a scholar of ancient Greek cuisine has the very opposite problem to the problem Ms. Mehdawy and Mr. Hussien had in ascertaining the secrets of ancient Egyptian cuisine. The ancient Egyptian food scholar has plenty of archaeological finds of food remains and a large number of illustrations of cooking in both two-dimensions and three dimensions.

Ms. Ricotti, on the other hand, as a scholar of ancient Greek literature, has a body of writing about food to draw upon, including even some recipes--but no illustrations of the food preparation process and few, if any, tomb finds.

At first, the difference seems to be a fortunate one. Ms. Ricotti begins her book by regaling the reader with interesting tidbits from the Illiad; apparently the heroic attackers of Troy dined every night on roast meat and little else, and were proud of it. Anecdotes about dinners fancy and modest, Spartan cooking (they made and enjoyed a black soup that seems to have been the ancient world's equivalent of haggis, i.e., a food no foreigners would eat), and Cleopatra's attempt to poison Mark Antony with a floral coronet, liven the pages.

But problems arise when Ms. Ricotti attempts to give us actual ancient Greek recipes. The first problem, which is likely attributable to the fact that Ms. Ricotti is drawing her recipes largely from literary sources, is that the recipes give a bizarre and unbalanced picture of ancient Greek cuisine. On the one hand, we get simple, plain foods such as Zeno's recipe for lentil soup (which required exactly 12 coriander seeds). On the other, the book contains a large number of recipes for simple preparation of all types of sea creatures, some of which probably cannot be found outside the Mediterranean. (Thornback ray? Stewed conger eel, anyone?) She claims that hyacinth bulbs were prescribed to men in ancient Greece as an aphrodisiac, and she reports several recipes containing them with the comment, "In all likelihood they were none too tasty."

The second problem is that Ms. Ricotti appears to be lost when she cannot refer to ancient literary sources. As a result, those of her recipes that are not clearly paraphrased from an ancient source raise authenticity questions that she makes little attempt to answer. For example, she makes modern substitutions for ancient ingredients (e.g., Vietnamese fish sauce for garum) without explaining clearly why she's doing so. She also throws in modern food trivia, such as the following, for no clear reason, since her proposed ingredient is still unlikely to be easy for most modern Westerners to find:

In bazaars in both Turkey and Egypt, the red pistils of safflower, or "false saffron," are passed off on the unsuspecting tourist, who believe he or she is getting genuine saffron. It is nevertheless delicious. (page 62)

More seriously, she gives a recipe for "cooked water," an all-vegetable soup, that includes potatoes, even though potatoes are a New World plant and wouldn't have been available to the ancient Greeks, or to anyone in Greece until after Europe's discovery of the New World. Her only explanation for her decision to add the potatoes, given inconspicuously in the margin, is this: "Today dishes based on field and wild herbs have changed somewhat, owing to the introduction of New World plants, but they are directly derived from the traditional recipes. For example, the following recipe for 'cooked water' combines Old and New World foods." (page 57) No explanation is given as to how we know that "cooked water" is "traditional" or why we should believe that the "tradition" in question goes all the way back to ancient Greece, potatoes or no.

I suspect that the real source of both of these problems is that Ms. Ricotti knows her ancient Greek literature well but has less than expert knowledge of the history of food in general. As a result, she falls back on spotty personal background knowledge when speaking of food history matters not directly attested to by her literary sources. For example, Ms. Ricotti comments, after reporting that several characters in ancient Greek plays long to eat grasshoppers or cicadas:

I don't know whether these insects would have been cooked as Istanbul clams are cooked today, skewered three by three on sticks, floured and then fried, but even prepared this way, I would not be tempted to try them. However, if anyone should wish to do so, feel free. In Africa, they are often talked about and my African nanny assured me that "grasshoppers are sweet as cafe latte."

Insects have been eaten in many cultures, both as a delicacy and otherwise. That's even true of our own culture. My mother told me she had enjoyed chocolate-covered ants when she was a young woman.

Despite its limitations, I enjoyed Ms. Ricotti's little book. Although it doesn't give the clearest picture of ancient Greek cuisine, it appears to have some genuine details from that world which, though in some ways familiar to us, was very different from ours. My favorite recipe from the book is a short one, so I'll reproduce it here:

Turnips in Mustard

4 white turnips, cleaned;

1 rounded teaspoon mustard seed, crushed;

1/2 cup (125 ml) oil;

1/2 cup (125 ml) vinegar.

Slice the turnips thinly and put into a pot of boiling water for one minute, and then rinse them and dry them, and let them cool. Stir the other ingredients together in a jar and toss in the dry, cooled turnip slices. Cover the jar, and let the turnips sit for at least two days. They can last about a month and are served directly out of the jar. (page 50)

This may not be the most authentic recipe in the book, but in some ways it's the most homey and appealing one. It conjures up a picture of people striving to take the simplest ingredients and, not just preserve them but make them into a tasty treat. This is a more appealing picture, to me, of ancient Greek food than the image of the Homeric heroes flaunting their status by dining on roast meat, night after night, while camping in a war zone.

The Pharoah's Surprisingly Changeless Kitchen

2011-12-29T20:22:00.000-05:00

As I said in my last post, I received three different books on historic cuisines for Christmas. I finished the book on historic Egyptian cuisine first, so that shall be the first book I will review for this blog. Here's the citation:

Mehdawy, Magda & Hussien, Amr. The Pharoah's Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Egypt's Enduring Food Traditions. (American University in Cairo Press 2010).

The Preface indicates that The Pharoah's Kitchen was originally published in Arabic, and won a prize in its original edition. Perhaps that was because of the manner in which it combines readability with information density; at any rate, there is much interesting information in the book about ancient Egyptian food preparation tools, and available animals, plants and herbs, even if one doesn't credit all of the authors' conclusions.

The authors, one of whom is an archaeologist, begin by noting that the ancient Egyptians have left us many, many depictions of food preparation and cooking (both two-dimensional paintings and three-dimensional dioramas and sculptures). These sources also contain information about the foods and seasonings that were available and used. However, no written ancient Egyptian recipes have been found. How do we bridge the gap between the methods and materials available and their use to produce actual meals?

Model of an ancient Egyptian kitchen

Mehdawy and Hussien have chosen to bring the gap by looking to surviving modern-day cooking in southern Egypt (confusingly known as "Upper Egypt") and Nubia, an area that was relatively unaffected by the series of conquerors who controlled the north of Egypt. According to the authors, people in this region continue to use many of the primitive cooking and baking techniques of their ancestors.

"Modern" Egyptians baking bread

Pictures like the recent Wikimedia Commons photograph to the left showing bread making certainly suggest that, except for the importation of New World and other foreign ingredients (which the authors carefully acknowledge were not available in Pharonic Egypt), cooking in Upper Egypt and Nubia hasn't changed much in 8,000 years. But it's still a long step from "many modern Egyptians still use the tools and techniques of ancient cooking" to "modern Egyptians make the same simple foods with the same simple spices that were made by their Pharonic ancestors."

And the "recipes" provided in the book are very simple indeed. According to Mehdawy and Hussien, most meats were (and are) boiled and eaten with the broth, or roasted, stuffed with cracked wheat, or not. Onions were (and are) a frequent accompaniment. Lentils and other legumes (and are) were commonly eaten. The recipes given are modern, and the authors say "ancient recipes would have been similar but without things like maize, tomatoes, chili pepper, etc." A few plants strange to modern Americans, such as okra and fenugreek, turn up with some frequency. Seasonings at most consist of salt and black pepper (*did* the ancient Egyptians have black pepper? I'm not certain, and the authors do not answer the question) and perhaps one other spice such as cumin, coriander, or cinnamon. Most of them seem boring to a modern palate.

I am of two minds as to how convinced I am by the author's approach. On one hand, as an amateur researcher of Dark Ages European costume, I understand what it is like to confront a dearth of data and to seek to bridge gaps in knowledge about an area of material culture for a particular period. I also believe that tomb finds and tomb paintings confirm that many of the foods that are enjoyed today were enjoyed by the ancient Egyptians, and that some of the same cooking methods survive.

But it seems to me that the sort of surviving dishes apply only to the poorest Egyptians living in what was once Upper Egypt. Are we to believe that all Egyptians continue to eat the same diet eaten by their forebears for the last 7,000 years? I don't think so. And the authors candidly admit that Lower Egypt's cuisine changed with the conquerors of Egypt (suggesting that the "Pharoah's Kitchen" of the title is probably also a misnomer).

Still, I'm not sorry I have read this book. It is a powerful reminder of how technology as well as botany and zoology shape the things that people can obtain to eat. It also has made me think about how different the land of Egypt is, both now and over its colorful past, than any other place in which I have ever lived.

I may do some experimenting with recipes in the book. Some of the lentil dishes and flatbread recipes seem to be worth trying. The book also claims that fenugreek was made into a beverage as well as eaten in food, and this is of interest to me as an insulin-dependent diabetic, because modern research suggests that this ancient herb helps moderate blood glucose levels. As always, I will write about my experiments and what I learn from them on this blog.

Christmas Present Books For This Blog

2011-12-25T20:21:00.000-05:00

Today, I received three different books about historic cuisine as Christmas presents:

Jacobs, Martin & Cox, Beverly. Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking. Stewart Tabori & Chang (1991).

Ricotti, Eugenia Salza Prina. Meals and Recipes from Ancient Greece. J. Paul Getty Trust (English ed. 2007).

Mehdawy, Magda & Hussien, Amr. The Pharoah's Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Egypt's Enduring Food Traditions. (American University in Cairo Press 2010).

The friends that kindly gave me the Jacobs and Cox book even tracked down a small bag of acorn flour, so I can try some of the recipes that require it.

I'm looking forward to reading through these books, and writing about them here. I'm also looking forward to trying out some of the more congenial recipes featured therein in the coming winter weeks and writing about them as well. If any of you have particular questions about any of these books or the subjects discussed in them, drop me a comment and I'll see whether I can satisfy your curiosity.

In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday.

Rakfisk

2011-12-11T17:07:00.001-05:00


Rakfisk (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

While I was looking on the Internet for historical information about gingerbread, I ran across an odd Norwegian dish I'd never heard of before: Rakfisk.

According to Wikipedia and other sources I found, rakfisk is a form of pickled preserved fish, usually made from trout or char. The word element "rak" means "soaked" and soaking is key to preparing it. First, raw fish is soaked in vinegar for about a half an hour. Then each fish is stuffed with sea salt and the stuffed fish are packed in layers, preferably under pressure, with a tiny pinch of sugar added to each. Then the container of packed fish is put in a cold place. If the process works correctly, the vinegared, salt-stuffed fish generate their own brine, which preserves them; additional brine may be added to help the process along. Understandably, recipes for rakfisk caution against allowing the fish to touch soil at any point in the preparation, lest the batch be tainted by botulism. How the technique works is imperfectly understood and a study of it is being planned.

The first written source to mention rakfisk dates to 1348 C.E., but since medieval cookbooks generally include recipes that are much older, it is likely that rakfisk is older as well, though I'm not ready to assert that Norse Vikings made and ate the stuff.

The picture above gives an idea both of how the finished product may look and how it is eaten (sour cream and red onion are two traditional accompaniments.) Intriguingly, it is associated with Christmas, which may be why I stumbled across it while chasing gingerbread links. That association may simply have resulted from the fact that preserved fish is likely to be eaten in the dead of winter, when fresh foods are unvailable and fishing is likely to be precluded by foul weather. Since I have the choice, I'd rather eat turkey, with gingerbread for dessert.

The Gingerbread House

2011-12-11T14:20:00.001-05:00

Today, Cake Wrecks has posted a page of beautiful gingerbread houses. That makes it a great time to think about how gingerbread houses became a Christmas tradition in the first place.

The story of gingerbread houses starts with the story of gingerbread, and gingerbread goes back to Europe during the Middle Ages. Medieval gingerbread was not a building material, even for doll-sized houses. It was sticky and somewhat cakelike, and often contained bread crumbs. These medieval recipes indicates the types and proportions of ingredients involved, though the primary spices used--ginger and cinnamon--are still characteristic of the modern product.

By the 16th century gingerbread had changed into a more cookie-like product and was already being baked into novel shapes, often with molds. The Portuguese Honey Bread recipe I have written about in the past is likely a hybrid of the two gingerbread types--made with sticky liquid yet ultimately yielding a firm and rather dry product. The Food Timeline cites an article claiming that Queen Elizabeth I was an early adopter of gingerbread figures, having her bakers make gingerbread images of her noble guests. According to the Food Timeline, original development of Gingerbread as Christmas Cookie lies with one (or, perhaps both) of the following places: "the honey-based gingerbreads of Middle European origin--mostly Germany--and the molasses shortbreads that developed in England or Scotland, depending upon which historian you wish to believe." Supposedly, the Pennsylvania Germans of central Pennsylvania and beyond were making foot-tall gingerbread men to stand in their homes' windows as Christmas decorations.

As for the gingerbread house, it is speculated that they first became popular as a result of similar motifs that appear in the Grimm Brothers' stories, which were first published in the 1810s. Nowadays, of course, you don't even have to bake to be able to make yourself a gingerbread house, though there are gingerbread house recipes such as this one on the Internet if you want to bake one yourself. You can buy kits in the supermarket with pre-baked, pre-shaped gingerbread house components--all you need to do is make icing and add your own decorations! I can't prove this just now, but I bet such kits were first sold in the late 20th century.

For my part, I don't plan to make a gingerbread house--who would eat it? Me and my husband? We hardly need so much cookie in our Christmas. But my husband's mother makes wonderful gingerbread men, and I'm looking forward to eating one of those. Just one, mind you--they are a least a half-an-inch thick--one will certainly last through my holiday.

A Sea of American Cookbooks

2011-11-08T00:46:00.000-05:00

My friend, John Desmond brought to my attention a very interesting website, Feeding America, which is an on-line library of historic American cookbooks assembled by the University of Michigan. It begins with Amelia Simmons's book, which I have previously written about, and proceeds with a number of other American cookbooks written and published through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Although the last 200 years is not my favorite period of historic interest, these works make a fascinating read, and I commend them to the attention of those curious about the evolution of American food.

Carrots Won The Trojan War?

2011-10-05T23:53:00.003-04:00

From the cover (by Gilbert Ford)

My last post was about carrots, and their long history as part of Western cuisine. Shortly after I wrote that post, I spied the following book in a local bookstore:

Rupp, Rebecca. How Carrots Won The Trojan War: Curious (but True) Stories of Common Vegetables. Storey Publishing 2011.

Actually, what caught my eye first was the cover art, which features a row of carrots, tastefully outfitted as ancient Greek warriors with toothpick-like spears and bushy-crested helmets. I've scanned one of the carrot warriors to give the militantly carroty flavor of the cover.

Ms. Rupp's book consists of a series of chapters, each featuring a different vegetable. Each chapter has a faux-Victorian-epic style title which effectively summarizes the most interesting tidbits of information therein. The carrot chapter, for example, is titled, "In Which Carrots Win The Trojan War, plus A Badly Behaved Rabbit, Henry Ford's Food Fetish, A Dose Of Devil's Porridge, The Amazing Career of Cat's-Eye Cunningham, and A Royal Embroidery Contest."

Each chapter gives a brief history of the vegetable's cultivation and use by mankind, a clear description of the vegetable's scientific name and salient chemical properties, and choice anecdotes about how the vegetable was historically received. The best part of these vignettes is the author's lucid and witty style. Her description of Henry Ford's carrot "fetish" is both an interesting piece of historic trivia and gives a good idea of the book's overall style:

Ford was anti-milk ("the cow is the crudest machine in the world") and anti-meat (he promoted soybeans in lieu of beef and oatmeal crackers as a substitute for chicken), but he was devoted to the carrot which, he was convinced, held the secret to longevity. At one point he was the guest of honor at a twelve-course all-carrot dinner, which began with carrot soup and continued through carrot mousse, carrot salad, pickled carrots, and carrot ice cream, all accompanied by glass after glass of carrot juice.

One story holds that Ford became interested in the painter Titian when his son Edsel donated a Titian painting ("Judith and the Head of Holofernes") to the Detroit Institute of Arts. It wasn't the artist's work that interested him; it was the fact that Titian had reportedly lived to be ninety-nine. He wanted to know if Titian ate carrots. (Page 85)

If you yearn to know how carrots "won the Trojan War", that piece of information is blithely tucked into a sentence on page 87. But the book features many more vegetables than carrots; it includes, among others, potatoes (baffled the Conquistadors), cabbage, (confounded Diogenes) onion (offended Don Quixote), melons (undermined Mark Twain's morals), beets, (made Victorian belles blush) and turnips (made a viscount famous).

Ms. Rupp's book is a surprisingly readable collection of fascinating facts. It includes a lengthy list of sources at the end, which the student of vegetable lore (or the general reader who's wondering whether his or her leg has been repeatedly pulled) may consult for further information, though based on my knowledge I believe the book to be mostly accurate, if unorthodox, in its reporting of facts. I recommend the book highly to anyone interested in learning more about vegetables in Western cuisine who's been looking for a good place to start reading about them.

The History of Carrots

2011-09-11T17:37:00.001-04:00

Have any of you been curious about the history of carrots?

Well, I am. It turns out to be a long history; carrots have been eaten as food by humans for a long time. This page is a museum of information about carrots, including their history. Special attention is paid to the fact that carrots are not just orange; they come in a rainbow of colors. Orange is a fairly recent carrot color. There are links to references supporting the text, also.

Many thanks to my friend John Desmond for turning this one up (so to speak) and bringing it to my attention.

A 4,000 Year Old Pub

2011-09-08T00:10:00.001-04:00

On David Beard's Archaeology Blog, I found this link to an article about a find in Scotland that appears to be the site of the oldest pub in Great Britain. It sounds silly, but the information reported about the find to date suggests strongly that the find was a facility for preparing and serving alcoholic beverages and foods suitable to eat with them--though it likely was part of a great chief's holding than what we think of as a commercial business. The Daily Mail article on the find reports:

Experts including Shetland regional archaeologist Val Turner are in no doubt that - pub or not - there was beer being brewed at Jarlshof in the Iron Age. ... The building has a house next door which has a large souterrain - which was the equivalent of a Iron Age refrigerator used for storing smoked or salted meats.

So the place served beer and sausage. Clearly the taste for such a combination goes way, way back in European history.

Juniper

2011-08-21T14:28:00.001-04:00

It's still summer, and we've still been busy, so I haven't been doing a lot of historical experimenting. I have been experimenting a little with a new slow cooker recipe book, however. The recipe I'm about to try today is a stewed lamb, flavored with a sauce made from meat stock, cranberry sauce, and juniper berries.

Juniper berries have been used in cooking for a very long time. Wikipedia claims that juniper berries have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs even though the plant apparently does not grow in Egypt, suggesting that it was already a highly-desired import good in the ancient world. According to the same article the ancient Greeks used juniper berries as sports medicine, while the Romans used it heavily in cooking, in part because it was cheaper at the time than black pepper, which did not grow in the ancient Mediterranean. Some additional interesting facts about the juniper plant and its berries may be found here and a few more historical factoids here.

Interestingly, juniper berries are not true berries but are instead an unusual form of pine cone. More interestingly, there are juniper variants in both the Old and New Worlds, and the berries of the New World version were allegedly used by the American Indians to treat diabetes.I've never had anything flavored with juniper before, since I don't drink gin (a 17th-century Dutch invention), so I'm really curious as to the result of this recipe.

EDIT: I couldn't identify any discernible flavor added by the juniper berries. Perhaps the ones I used were too old, or something.

Chopsticks

2011-08-11T00:13:00.008-04:00

My husband and I spent last week at a board gaming event, the World Boardgaming Championship, so we did no cooking. However, we did play quite a bit of a card game called "Innovation", which is about scoring cultural and technological advances and achievements. In the new expansion to Innovation, one of the cultural advances is...chopsticks.

My husband thought that all world eating implements should have been included, not just the Asian chopsticks. My theory was that chopsticks counted as an advance (and a very early one at that) because it was one of the first eating implements other than a knife or fingers, to be invented.

It turned out that I was right. Chopsticks are very old indeed. Wikipedia states that chopsticks date back as far as the Shang Dynasty--roughly contemporary with ancient Greece, where people were presumably still eating with their fingers. As you would expect, they were invented by the Chinese, whose migrations spread them throughout Southeastern Asia. There is an elaborate etiquette to their use, and such etiquette differs from region to region, a fact which Wikipedia covers in some detail.

But there are other sources of information about chopsticks besides Wikipedia, even if you confine your research to the Internet. For example, this article states that chopsticks were originally a one-piece utensil, shaped like a pair of tweezers, but developed into their current form by about the 10th century CE, which is the approximate age of the earliest surviving pair.

One doesn't normally think of eating utensils as a technological development. But they are, since it is possible to eat not just more cleanly and sanitarily, but also more quickly with an implement, especially an efficient one such as chopsticks. (It also makes it possible to read while eating, as book lovers like me have long known.) It's another step on the road to civilization, and helps explain why China achieved such a high level of civilization so early in history. That's worth thinking about, the next time you pick up a cheap pair of bamboo chopsticks in your local Chinese restaurant.

Another Historical Experiment, of Sorts

2011-07-30T22:29:00.003-04:00

Tonight, an adventurous friend of mine who loves beer gave me the opportunity to taste two recreations of historic brews that were discussed in Patrick McGovern's book "Uncorking the Past": Chateau Jiahu, a no-hops brew based on archaeological reconstruction of a Chinese brew from 9,000 years ago, and Midas' Touch, a similar reconstruction based on a 2,700 year old find in Turkey presumed to be the tomb of King Midas, of the "golden touch" legend.

Sadly, I could discern no meaningful difference between them. Despite the absence of hops from both beverages (the use of hops in beer was a surprisingly late development), both early brews simply tasted like beer to me--and beer (as opposed to wine, for example) has never been a beverage of which I've been very fond. Since beer has been so significant in the development of civilization, I regret that I am so incapable of seeing what people find desirable about it (other than the raw pleasure of getting drunk, that is).

Braised Beef à la Anthimus

2011-07-28T23:08:00.001-04:00

While knocking about the Internet, I came upon an interesting page by Heather Rose Jones, documenting her experiments with recipes by Anthimus, the 6th century Byzantine who had so much to say about food. In particular, Ms. Jones's experiments with an apparently straightforward recipe for sweet and sour braised beef are fascinating. Perhaps I can adapt them for use with my crockpot.

I commend this site to the attention of anyone interested in early medieval food.

So What Does Byzantium Taste Like?

2011-07-04T16:11:00.011-04:00

Last month, I finished reading the following book on historic cuisine, which I picked up for my usual reason, namely, because I knew almost nothing about the book's subject matter.

Dalby, Andrew. Tastes of Byzantium. I.B. Taurus & Co., Ltd. 2010.

However, the title, "Tastes of Byzantium", annoys me, because even after finishing the book I'm still not sure I have a very good idea of what Byzantine cuisine was like. Let me try to explain that statement.

Dalby's book includes just a little bit of a lot of different types of information: a little general historical background about Byzantium; a discussion of available foods and food customs; excerpts from period textbooks, written to give advice about diet and general health; and a few recipes. The overall impression I have acquired from this assortment is that Byzantine cuisine is what you have when you combine the basic recipes and elements of classical Roman cooking (e.g., use of garum, sauteing in olive oil, olives, grapes, wine, and figs) with the types of spices we now consider characteristic of India (cumin, fenugreek, cardamom), and a greater fondness for seafood of all kinds than was the case in the classical period. In addition, the Byzantines had greater access to cane sugar (from India) than had the classical Mediterranean, and consequently used it more. They also had developed the fondness for resinated wines, such as retsina, that characterizes modern (but not necessarily ancient) Greece.

The end result is that many Byzantine foods seem relatively modern, modern enough to fool the reader into thinking their foodways weren't all that different...until a difference springs up to startle the unwary researcher. It is clear, for example, that the Byzantines had a fondness for seasoning meat with honey and cinnamon--a fondness that helps explain that trope in the cuisine of most of Europe during the Middle Ages, but seems odd to most moderns.

The following recipe for a souffle is a good example of this combining of elements;

Aphraton

Greek has the name afrutum [aphraton] for what is called spumeum in Latin. It is made from chicken and white of egg. You must take a lot of white of egg so that your afrutum becomes foamy. It should be arranged in a mound on a shallow casserole with a previously prepared sauce, based on fish sauce,[?] underneath. Then the casserole is set over the coals and the afrutum cooked in the steam of the sauce. The casserole is then placed in the middle of a serving tray, and a little wine or honey poured over it. It is eaten with a spoon or a small ladle. We often add fine fish or scallops to this dish, because they are very good and also common at home. (pp. 176-77)

This recipe comes from Anthimus, whose translated recipes I have written about before, but Mr. Dalby assures us that it is Byzantine rather than Frankish, because Anthimus himself was a "refugee" from the Byzantine court, even though Anthimus wrote this recipe down for the King of the Franks, in whose court he was then residing. Certainly the wealthy and noble Franks were keen on imitating the style and culture of Byzantium, the most powerful state in Europe.

I decided to share this recipe with you because I think it gives one a good idea of the types of contradiction Mr. Dalby's book reveals in Byzantine cooking. The recipe depicts an egg dish not that far from a modern souffle, but eaten with fish sauce (though Dalby notes this phrase of the original is unclear, hence my question mark) and wine or honey--the last things that a modern would reach for to season an egg dish.

Mr. Dalby also tells us that the Byzantines were very serious about the four humors theory of healthy eating, i.e., classifying foods as to whether they were "hot" or "cold", "moist" or "dry", and attempting to balance foods with one combination of humors with another food, or perhaps a sauce or herb, with different properties. I'd like to leave the reader with a quote from a period health text that purported to give food and living recommendations for each month. I'd like to quote the advice for July, since to a modern it is more amusing than anything else:

This month one should avoid sexual activity, excessive food of all kinds, stress and excessive drinking. As prescribed for June, eat, in moderation, rich kid meat from castrated animals, hare, gazelle, deer, turtle doves and wood pigeons; always eat these with some vinegar. Garden herbs as for June. Among fish eat the rich-fleshed kinds such as corkwing, wrasse and all rich-fleshed and moist fish. [Conserves] in honey vinegar and in fish sauce and vinegar. Among fruits choose the moister ones such as melons, green figs eaten with salt, and any grapes except the black ones, pear, apple, plum, peach and all that are moist to eat; avoid other fruits. Light wines; eat sparingly but take plenty of wine, also rose wine. Do not take any vegetable soups except carrot, flavored with honey and spikenard. (p. 166)

So enjoy your Carolina-style venison, apple pie, and green salad, and have a great Fourth of July!*

* My last remark above is an off-the-cuff attempt to apply the Byzantine advice on July eating given above. Venison, is of course deer flesh, and according to Wikipedia the states of North and South Carolina in the United States favor vinegar-based barbecue sauces, so this kind of barbecue amounts to eating the deer "with some vinegar." The June herbs referenced in the quote include some items, such as onion, radish, and rocket (now known as arugula), which a modern person might make into a salad. Finally, apples are among the "safe" fruits for July according to the Byzantine writer Dalby quotes, as well as being a traditional fruit from which to make pies here in the United States. You could perhaps add watermelon (a traditional summer food in the U.S.!) to the menu, since our Byzantine writer includes melons in his list of recommended foods for July. In fact, the Byzantines probably had watermelon, since it's native to Africa, and shows up by the 13th century CE in both China and Europe.

Interesting Web Site--"All Mongolian Recipes"

2011-06-19T13:08:00.000-04:00

When I was looking for the definition for "airag" the other day, I found this website: "All Mongolian Recipes: The Food of the Nomads."

As one might suppose, this website describes what Mongolians eat and drink today. For example, today's Mongolians enjoy vodka, which they obtain by trade with the Russians; however, vodka was not available to them in Genghis Khan's time. However, a lot of dishes still eaten are "traditional", and by the description of how they were made, likely were eaten in Genghis Khan's time.

Airag, by the way, is a mildly alcoholic brew made from mare's milk. English speakers may be familiar with this item under its Russian name, kumiss. The web site describes its manufacture in fascinating detail here; I commend this page to readers interested in kumiss, or in unusual alcoholic beverages in general.

"Viking" Flavored Liquor?

2011-06-18T01:25:00.112-04:00

Let's face it, Vikings attract almost as much attention (and money) as pirates (Caribbean-style) and zombies. So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that a Scandinavian vendor, Arcus, is using an herb, supposedly favored by the Vikings, to flavor liquor. According to this article from the Norway Post:

Pors is the name of the herb that apparently had such a strong effect on King Harald Hårfagre that he simply forgot to rain [sic] the country for about three years, according to the Snorre Saga. Now, a bus load of Arcus employees find the plant so fascinating that they want to produce liquor with it.

Pors (Wikimedia Commons)

Hope (Wikimedia Commons)

Wondering what a beverage flavored with pors would taste like, I turned to Google seeking answers. I didn't have much luck at first. PORS is an acronym for an American health care insurance benefits program. Adding the word "herb" made Google insist that I was looking for a recipe for herb-crusted pork. Adding the word "Norwegian" got me back into the realm of herbs, but only turned up the brief news articles about Arcus. So I tried plugging "pors" into Google Translate. The answer came back, "lane."

Continued searching turned up a reference--without a recipe, alas--to "Søgaard Randy’s Pors", a beer brewed by a man in Denmark. That started me wondering; is "pors" at all like hops, either biologically or in flavor? The Norway Post article has a picture of pors, which I was reluctant to use here because of copyright considerations. I figured it would be easy to find pictures of both pors and hops on Wikimedia Commons, and so it proved; the photographs appear with this post.

Though hops and pors look a little alike, they apparently have different flavors. I could only find a Wikipedia article about pors in Swedish, but Google Translate worked well enough for me to learn the answer to my question about the taste of pors: "[T]he gray-green and vice versa oval leaves have a strong aromatic smell coming from the substances secreted by the small yellow resin dots (this is quite similar to black currant...") According to the Swedish Wikipedia article, pors, also known in English as bog myrtle, grows wild in swamps in Sweden.

I also learned that the use of herbs like pors harked back to a much earlier stage in the development of alcoholic beverages. Before hops came to be used to make beer (a development that began shortly after the Viking era), herb mixtures now referred to as gruit were used for flavoring alcoholic brews. The idea was to balance the sweetness provided by the wort, the mashed grains used to ferment and generate alcohol for the beverage. Depending on the herbs used, the gruit could help preserve the beer or add a hallucinogenic quality in addition to affecting its flavor.

So the Vikings liked black currant flavor? I do too. Though I generally avoid alcoholic beverages, I would love to have just a taste of Arcus's new product, just to experience a taste that a Viking might have achieved.

EDIT: Today I found an article on Viking drinking customs that mentions the use of herbs like bog-myrtle in gruit. Go here to download and read it.

Mixing Old and New

2011-06-09T22:21:00.001-04:00

I haven't done much historic cookery lately, because it's been very hot here. I suspect that, in Viking times, people would have simply eaten bread and cheese on a hot day, but my husband won't eat cheese. But he will eat chicken salad, a much more recently invented dish, so I've been playing with chicken salad recipes again.

Our current favorite recipe is from About.com's Southern Food site, where I found a simple, spicy recipe called "Cajun Chicken Salad with Pecans." The novel ingredients in this concoction are finely chopped pecans and a quarter-teaspoon of Tabasco sauce. My husband, who is inordinately fond of hot sauce in general and Tabasco in particular, raved about the results.

When it was time to make up a second batch, he wanted to replace the green onions in the recipe with leeks. Now leeks are about as un-Cajun as you can get, being an old world plant that likely did feature in Viking era cuisine, if not necessarily in Scandinavia.

On the other hand, leeks have a mild oniony flavor that's not all that different from green onions, so I figured the substitution would work just fine. We tried it last night, and the result's just as good as the original recipe. I bet that any mild onion would work--maybe I'll track down some Vidalias for the purpose.

All of this just goes to show how wonderful it is to be able to visit your area supermarket, collect ingredients from two different continents and whip up an interesting multicultural experiment for dinner.

Hardtack

2011-05-10T20:12:00.005-04:00

On the trail of the breads of yore, today a friend of mine passed on a recipe for hardtack which appeared, of all places, on Boing Boing. Hardtack is simple to prepare: here's the recipe in toto:

Mix 2 cups all-purpose flour, 2 cups whole wheat flour, and 1 tsp salt. Form it into a dough using 1.5 cups of water.

Let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Then spread it into a pan, prick it all over on top with a fork, and bake it for 50 minutes at 325 degrees F.

I'm not terribly interested in trying hardtack, which, aside from the texture that earned it its name, has a reputation for becoming wormy. However, according to Boing Boing, this particular recipe comes from a cookbook called The Food Journal of Lewis & Clark: Recipes for an Expedition by Mary Gunderson; Boing Boing claims that the other recipes in that book--which presumably are of late 18th - early 19th century provenance--are much tastier. Now I'm curious about the other recipes in that book; I think I will have to track it down. If I do, I'll write about it.

EDIT: A friend of mine wrote a short article about hardtack noting that it becomes wormy only if it is not absolutely shielded from dampness. It also discusses similar bread products made to have a long shelf life, such as pilot bread. The article may be found here.

"Food in Wartime"--Advice for Today?

2011-05-08T23:54:00.003-04:00

My friend, John Desmond, recently found an interesting pamphlet on the Project Gutenberg site called Food in War Time. This interesting work, cloaked as a research piece about the ideal diet, comes across to me, at least, as a piece of propaganda in favor of austerity in eating, for both health and humanitarian reasons.

The author of this little book, Graham Rusk, then a professor of physiology at Cornell, argues in favor of a vegetarian diet, employing arguments that will be familiar to vegetarians and vegans today, such as the argument that meat is more expensive to produce because it requires more natural resources (e.g., the grain fed to the meal animals). However, his main objective was not to promote a vegetarian diet. Instead, Professor Rusk's concern was to achieve the best diet possible using the least energy to produce food, an approach that he referred to as "economy in diet". So, for example, Rusk argued that people should eat less meat, and less wheat, in favor of maize, and whole milk, and that more attention should be paid to selecting combinations of cheaper foods (such as potatoes, fruit and milk) that will deliver the same nutrients as an energy-wasteful diet. Professor Rusk concluded his analysis with the following recommendations, most of which remain familiar today:

1. Let no family (of five persons) buy meat until it has bought three quarts of milk, the cheapest protein food. Farmers should be urged to meet this demand.

2. Save the cream and butter and eat oleomargarine and vegetable oils. Olive oil or cottonseed oil, taken with cabbage, lettuce, or beet-tops, is excellent food, in many ways imitating milk.

3. Eat meat sparingly, rich and poor, laborer and indolent alike. Meat does not increase the muscular power. When a person is exposed to great cold, meat may be recommended, for it warms the body more than any other food. In hot weather, for the same reason, it causes increased sweating and discomfort. In general, twice as much meat is used as is now right, for to produce meat requires much fodder which might better be used for milk production.

4. Eat corn bread. It saved our New England ancestors from starvation. If we eat it we can send wheat to France. Eat oatmeal.

5. Drink no alcohol. In many families 10 per cent. of the income is spent for drink, or a sum which, if spent for real food, would greatly improve the welfare of the family.

6. Eat corn syrup on cereals. It will save the sugar. Eat raisins in rice pudding, for raisins contain sugar.

7. Eat fresh fish.

8. Eat fruit and vegetables.

In the present day, when saving of money as well as the enhancement of health are, once again, primary concerns, perhaps Dr. Rusk deserves re-reading. (Though I suspect that many people will treat his arguments that corn syrup should be used more as a sweetener and that milk should be consumed on a greater basis for its protein with suspicion.) An economic analysis of the reasons why it may be better to eat less meat and more, and different, grains may succeed where pure health arguments have failed.

N.B. Rusk has this to say about an early version of the Atkins (i.e., high protein, low carbohydrate) diet: "The amusing little book entitled "Eat and Grow Thin" recommends a high protein and almost carbohydrate-free diet for the accomplishment of this purpose, but its advice has made so many of my friends so utterly miserable that I am sure in the end it will counteract its own message." Hmmm.

The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook

2011-04-24T20:47:00.004-04:00

My birthday was this month, and my mother-in-law got me a copy of The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook as a birthday present.

I wondered why she'd done it. Although I'd enjoyed the Harry Potter novels, I rarely buy merchandising tie-ins of any book, and the Potterverse was not an exception for me.

Upon reading the book, however, I found that, although it included some "recipes" intended to better tie the cookbook to the novels (like a "recipe" for "Crispy Fried Bacon" that tells you to "[h]eat a large skillet. Add the bacon and fry on both sides until crisp."), most of the cookbook was dedicated to giving recipes for traditionally British food. By "traditionally British food" I mean things like Yorkshire pudding, crumpets, Scotch broth, a Chiddingly Hotpot (a type of stew), and mince pies.

It's an interesting question who the author thought her audience would be. The tone and language is geared to the 9-12 year old set, and the author makes a point of explaining things that most adults likely know (such as the terms "sunny-side-up," "over easy," and "over hard" for degrees of doneness of fried breakfast eggs). On the other hand, a lot of the recipes, including various puddings, cakes, and candies, are quite complex and/or require special equipment, such as a candy thermometer, to get right.

For my part, I'm not interested in making candy, cakes or pudding. There are a few soup recipes in here (like the Scotch broth mentioned above) that I'll probably try. To me, the value of the book lies in what it tells me about British cooking. And what's that? That British cooking is a lot like what I grew up with, except that it has a greater variety of starches. and a slightly different set of traditional sweets. In light of all the nasty things said about British cooking, that's an interesting fact to know.

My Interests Combined!

2011-04-01T00:00:00.006-04:00

Some of my readers may be aware of my other blog, Loose Threads: Yet Another Costume Blog, which focuses on historic costume.

Today I have found the perfect subject to post about: one combining historic costume and food! It is the history of raw meat hats, from the Hats of Meat web site. Talk about "two great tastes that taste great together!"*

Anyway, if historic costume interests you at all, please take a look at my other blog. Thanks.

* If you are wondering whether I'm pulling your leg about the history of meat hats, look at the date of this post.

"American Cookery"

2011-03-26T02:09:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, I bought a paperback facsimile edition of a cookbook originally published in 1796 entitled, "American Cookery": or, the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Puff-Pastes, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Sorts of Cakes, From the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake. Adopted to This Country and All Grades of Life". The book was written by a woman named Amelia Simmons, "An American Orphan." It is plain, both from her grandiose title and her Preface that she meant to write a truly American cookbook, one that took British food traditions and adapted them to life in America.

I think she succeeded. I am convinced of that point primarily because some of the recipes are oddly modern, even familiar, in content. Consider, for example, her first recipe for pound cake (quoted here without the curious f-shaped characters used for medial "s" in period):

One pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound flour, ten eggs, rose water one gill, spices to your taste; watch it well, it will bake in a slow oven in 15 minutes.

Except for the rose water (a survival from the medieval period), this is modern pound cake--which, as Wikipedia points out, got its name from the fact that its basic form required one pound each of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. Even in Ms. Simmons's time, however, there were variants with differing amounts of these basic ingredients--she provides three alternative recipes.

Ms. Simmons is also interested in the proper preparation of meats, particularly roasts, and these sound even more modern, including her recipe for stuffed turkey ("one pound soft wheat bread, 3 ounces beef suet, 3 eggs, a little sweet thyme, sweet marjoram, pepper and salt, and some add a gill of wine; fill the bird therewith and sew up, hang down to a steady solid fire, basting frequently with butter and water, and roast until a steam emits from the breast....").

To be sure, there are modern foodstuffs that do not make an appearance in Ms. Simmons's work. There are no french fries, no green salads, few "side dishes" in the modern sense. On the other hand, she pairs roast beef with potatoes--a common dish in America, even now, and includes cayenne pepper in a few dishes (notably her recipe for cooked turtle, and her "turtle style" calf's head).

Ms. Simmons's little cookbook, written a little over 200 years ago, is true to its word. It really describes American cuisine, even now. That makes it more than a historic curiosity; it provides genuine insight into the American dietary heritage. It has given me much to ponder for its $9.95 USD cover price.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the impressive amount of sugar in many of the recipes. The pound cake recipe is not atypical of the ratio of sugar to starch to fat in many of the cake, pudding, and cream recipes in Ms. Simmons's book.

Fat Tuesday

2011-03-08T18:17:00.001-05:00

For those of my readers who are Catholic, today is "Fat Tuesday", otherwise known as Mardi Gras. It's the day before Lent starts, the season during which Christians commemorate the passion and death of Jesus Christ, and it ends with the celebration of Easter.

Because Lent was associated with fasting and abstinence (not eating things defined as "meat"), Fat Tuesday also acquired its special foods--foods associated with feasting and even gluttony. I have two such foods in particular in mind. One is a soup, made in Iceland, called Saltkjöt og baunir. This is a thick soup made mainly from salted lamb and yellow split peas, and flavored with a bit of bacon; the Soupsong site gives its recipe here. The idea was that you would eat this wonderful winter soup until you burst! The recipe also appeared in one of the books I received for Christmas (a book version of some of the wit and wisdom from the Soupsong site), and I made my own version (with lamb and ham, as the author recommends if you can't get salted lamb). Even now, some of my soup sits in our refrigerator, ready to be heated for dinner.

The other Fat Tuesday food is a Polish pastry I first learned about from some friends who visited us yesterday; it's called pączki (the singular, in Polish, is pączek). Pączki are like jelly doughnuts; they are disk-shaped, powdered on the outside, and filled with an apple or other fruit filling. I didn't have the nerve to try one, since I've never been a big jelly doughnut fan and these looked as though they were about 3,000 calories apiece. Wikipedia claims that the dough for pączki is sweeter and richer than jelly doughnut dough. But the theme is the same; get in the noshing on rich foods now, before Lent starts.

If any of my readers have favorite regional or ethnic foods associated with Fat Tuesday, I'd love to hear about them!

EDIT: I looked up the calorie count for one pączek. It turns out to be between 400 and 700 calories, depending on what the filling is made from. That's still more calories than I want to eat for one snack.

Supersize Me--British Style

2011-02-21T00:02:00.008-05:00

My friend John Desmond recently pointed me to a British TV series called "The Supersizers" which was, believe it or not, about British historic food.

It's a reality TV show of sorts. Here's the basic concept: a good-looking, slender man (who happens to be a writer and restaurant critic) and an equally slender, good-looking woman (a producer and sometime-vegetarian) spend a week attempting to eat the food, and generally live the lifestyle, of their forebears from a particular historic period. Before and after the week, they are given a thorough medical exam, to determine what effect, if any, the historic culinary adventure has had on their physiques and health. (They were given a week off between each week-long adventure.)

Because this is a British series, the costumes are quite good (except for the medieval ones), and so far as I'm aware the foods and food customs depicted in the snippets I've looked at so far are fairly accurate. The periods involved include the Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian, Regency, and Edwardian eras, as well as the 1920s, 1950s, 1970s and World War II, to name a few of the more interesting ones. In light of the "Supersize" concept, our heroes opt to eat the food and live the lifestyle of financially well-off denizens of the period.

It is well known that some of these eras in British cooking involve the consumption of prodigious amounts of sugar, meat, and fat, and the Edwardian era, at least, involved the consumption of huge meals, period. Yet Giles Coren, the male half of the Supersizers duo, claimed, in an article he wrote after the series was over, that he came out of this incredible series of binges healthier than he had started. He wrote:

Every single period I ate in made me healthier. Sure, these were always the diets of the relatively wealthy, and, yes, I would probably have been stricken down young with some sort of terrible disease long ago. But as long as I did live, and had money to feed myself, I think I would have been healthier and fitter at any time in the past than I am now. We all would.

Coren's article about his experience ran in the London Times and can be found here.

I suspect the real moral of "The Supersizers" is that, in the long run, getting enough physical activity and enjoying what you eat matters a lot more to your health and your physique than the details of your diet, but the bits of the series I've been able to glimpse on YouTube so far have been amusing. Just type "Supersizers" into the text search box on YouTube and check it out.

EDIT: I've now watched all of the Supersizers episodes on YouTube, and Coren appears to be suffering from selective memory. Several of the diets (e.g. Regency and Edwardian) left him with much higher cholesterol and uric acid readings than he had had beforehand, and most of the diets led to both him and Sue Perkins gaining at least two or three pounds (sometimes more) during the week. Only the World War II regime of restricted diet and exercise left them a bit leaner and with no change in their various readings. Food for thought.

Early Celtic Beer

2011-02-04T07:45:00.001-05:00

I recently discovered this Science News article about an archaeological find of 2,550 year-old charred barley grains thanks to a post on David Beard's Archaeology in Europe Blog.

Charred grain that is over 2,500 years old does not, in and of itself, sound exciting. But context is everything. The Science News article explains that archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Sitka of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart saw a resemblance between the grain find, which had been excavated at Eberdingen-Hochdorf, an Iron Age Celtic settlement, and barley that he himself had charred in the course of experiments with beer-making techniques available in that time period.

According to Mr. Sitka, barley grains would have been soaked in the specially constructed ditches until they sprouted, at which point they would have been dried by lighting fires a the end of the ditches. The slow drying process would have added lactic acid bacteria to the grain, making the final brew more sour, and the smoking would have added a smoky taste. In addition, early brews such as this one would have been flavored with spices such as mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane. A few seeds of henbane were also found at the site, suggesting that it might have been used. The fact that henbane is also an intoxicant would have been a positive feature as it would have made the beer more intoxicating in addition to adding flavor.

As I read the Science News article, I reflected that it would be interesting to imagine an early Celt sipping such a beer while eating a flatbread like the Icelandic flatbread discussed in my last post, perhaps accompanied by a bit of cheese or smoked meat. Or was beer too precious to consume merely as an accompaniment to a meal? The early Hochdorf finds feature valuable beverage service sets, suggesting that drinking parties had a special role in the culture of the period.

Mr. Sitka's paper has been published online in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. It is available for download to subscribers of that journal; other would-be readers must pay $34 USD to obtain a copy. The article can be purchased here.

Icelandic Flatbread

2011-01-17T23:31:00.001-05:00

From the Norsefolk_2 mailing list I obtained a pointer to this page, with a video, brief history, and a recipe for making Icelandic flatbread.

The narrator claims that Icelandic flatbread goes back to Viking times, though as you'd expect no support is cited for the statement. However, the recipe does offer some suggestions for coming up with a more plausible "Viking bread".

The recipe given uses primarily rye flour, a little wheat flour, and some water (it adds baking powder, but as that was a post-Viking period invention, I would ignore it for purposes of my experiment).
The cakes should be rolled out much thinner than I rolled mine--to about a millimeter or two of thickness.
The recipe suggests poking a number of holes in the cake before frying, to eliminate air bubbles.
The recipe recommends grilling the cake until there are black spots on the side against the griddle (that matches what I did, at least).
The recipe also recommends dipping the cakes briefly in lukewarm water when they come off the grill and keeping them between damp towels so they don't dry out and harden.

The narrator goes on to relate that such breads are sold in groceries in Iceland, and that they are generally eaten with smoked lamb, smoked salmon, or trout.

I think I will try their "Icelandic" recipe. I may also re-try the recipe from the Hurstwic site, using the techniques shown in the video.

The Ancestor of the Raisin Cookie?

2011-01-17T00:21:00.005-05:00

One of the types of cookies my mother-in-law always makes for Christmas is something the family calls a "raisin cookie." These are half-circles of a sweetened dough, a little like piecrust dough in character, with a sweetened raisin filling.

After Christmas dinner this year, my husband Googled for "raisin cookie" and was frustrated to find no real information about these cookies or, for that matter, any indication that other people were making and eating them. He was mildly distressed at the thought that the "raisin cookie" might be dying out, and might soon no longer be made.

Today, I did some Googling of my own, using the search term "filled raisin cookie", and fared rather better than he had. In fact, I found a number of rather similar recipes, each of which looked as though it might produce the type of raisiny goodness that my mother-in-law bakes. Most of the recipes included a comment by the contributor to the effect that "my 80-something-year-old grandma (or mother or whatever) has baked these for many years." (My mother-in-law is also over 80). I found recipes from a number of sites, including allrecipes.com, BakeSpace, and grandmaskitchen, to name the ones I bothered to print out. Some of these sites had pictures of the cookies in question, and except for the shape they looked a lot like the cookies my mother-in-law bakes. (My husband told me after I started my research, though, that his mother used to make her raisin-filled cookies round, out of two pieces of dough, but changed to her present format, apparently because it was less work to just fold over one circle.)

However, I'm not really interested in finding cookie recipes, since I'm not interested in baking. I'm interested in finding out how and where the "raisin cookie" evolved and, if possible, whether they are still being made. The grandmaskitchen site gave me an interesting clue; it noted that the elderly female baker in question claimed that the recipe "is based on an old-fashioned British pastry called ‘Eccles cake.’" So I started Googling for the term "Eccles cake," and turned up a lot of information.

Wikipedia reports that an "Eccles cake" is named for the town of Eccles, which is in Lancashire, and it's a small round cake, made from flaky pastry and stuffed with currants and may be sprinkled with demerara sugar. Other sites purported to give more history, tracing the Eccles cake to a shopkeeper named James Birch in the late 18th century and/or a woman named Elizabeth Raffald who published a popular cookbook in 1769 that contains a similar recipe. The Food Timeline reports both versions and notes that early versions of the Eccles cake probably contained alcohol as well as fruit. Yet another site, whose author claims to be "rather rubbish" at baking, claims that Eccles cake is an "English classic" and that it's practically required "that every Englishman (and woman) know how to make an Eccles cake."

The English angle is kind of mystifying to me. My husband's mother's family has Scottish ancestry, but Eccles is effectively part of Manchester, which makes it definitely part of northern England, but not close enough to the Scottish border to be plausibly Scottish. So far as I know, my husband's family doesn't have English forebears. EDIT: My husband read this post and confirmed that his family does not have English ancestry on either side.

On the other hand, one of the sites I found noted that Eccles cakes travel well, and were being exported to the young United States as early as 1818. That suggests, to me, that there might have arisen a fashion among U.S. bakers for trying to imitate the Eccles cake, and that fashion may have given rise to cookbooks with similar recipes--one of which my mother-in-law is using. However, the photographs of actual Eccles cakes look very different from her cookies, to me, so I don't think the case for this theory is quite proven.

I should ask my mother-in-law for her recipe, both to see how it compares to the recipes I've found on the Internet, and to have one of my husband's favorite cookie recipes handy, in case I someday want to try to bake some.

Ben Franklin's Milk Punch

2011-01-16T17:49:00.000-05:00

While browsing through some food blog URLs given to me by a friend, I found a link to this page which discusses, and displays, Benjamin Franklin's recipe for "milk punch", an alcoholic brew that features milk as a primary ingredient. It's not eggnog, because there are no eggs in it--just seasonings, milk, and brandy. The webpage, put together by the Massachusetts Historical Society, notes that Franklin's recipe is a cross between a posset and a syllabub. As the MHS explains:

Possets were used as remedies for colds, and were consumed from the spout of a posset cup, which let one drink the whey from the bottom and eat the curd later. Syllabubs combine milk with wine and lemon juice (or other acids); the acid from the wine and juice curdle the milk. Served in a glass, the foamy curd of the syllabub is eaten with a spoon and the punch drunk.

So both types of recipes combine a beverage with curds to eat--perhaps a good hangover cure? Anyway, it's an interesting recipe. If I drank brandy, I would try it.

Food Around the World

2011-01-03T21:46:00.002-05:00

My husband just pointed me to the National Geographic website, where there is a small gallery of photographs of street food in various countries. From grasshoppers on a skewer in China to ceviche in Peru, these are items you still can't find in the corner grocery, or even the local Wegmans. Enjoy!

N.B. Ad alert; there are pop-up ads and ads with sound on the National Geographic website. If that sort of thing bothers you, you may want to think twice about following the link I gave above.

Food Book Presents

2010-12-31T01:21:00.001-05:00

This Christmas, I received two interesting, quasi-historical books about food.

Solley, Patricia. An Exaltation of Soups: the Soul-Satisfying Story of Soup, As Told in More Than 100 Recipes. Three Rivers Press, 2004.

Smith, Andrew F. Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

By now, I have dipped into both books enough to be able to provide mini-reviews of them (despite the bout of flu, or food poisoning, that I contracted over Christmas weekend).

Patricia Solley is the woman responsible for soupsong.com, a site about soups of all kinds from all lands. The book is a lot like the site. It is full of good recipes and amusing cultural and historic trivia. Although many of the recipes strike me as too difficult to make or too strange to eat, I've made a list of six or eight foreign soups I must try, including spiced plum soup (a Polish dish), salted lamb and pea soup (Icelandic) and iced cucumber soup (Bulgarian). Some of the soups I'm interested in making will finally, after years of avoidance, require me to obtain either a blender or a food processor. Naturally, I will write about any of my soupy experiments here.

Mr. Smith's book is more perplexing. He announces that it was his intent to write a serious history of popcorn, and he bemoans at some length the dearth of serious, well-researched books about culinary history. Despite that fact, Popped Culture consists largely, though not solely, of a collection of trivia and anecdotes about how popcorn was popularized, made, and eaten in America. This may be because of the difficulty of collecting information about popcorn in "food histories" and Mr. Smith's concomitant need to search for evidence in indirect and unusual places (old cookbooks and newspaper articles, for example). But part of the problem is that Mr. Smith chose to organize his book by topic instead of chronologically--though a chronological organization might have suited his stated purpose--a history of popcorn and its impact on American culture--better.

On the other hand, some of Mr. Smith's trivia are very interesting indeed. His description of the archaeological investigations that led to evidence that certain Mesoamerican Indians did, in fact, make popcorn is fascinating, as is his description of the many ways in which popcorn was popped in nineteenth century America and the devices invented to make the process simpler and culinarily more appealing (by limiting the smoky flavor). And Mr. Smith's book, like Ms. Solley's book, contains a number of recipes that use popcorn (including, to my surprise, pudding recipes and stuffing recipes).

So although these books do not provide the kind of historical information that interests me most, they promise plenty of fun, as well as good eating.

Edible Christmas Joy

2010-12-24T20:38:00.000-05:00

My husband and I have just returned from the first of three festive meals at my in-laws house. Tonight's meal was at my mother-in-laws, and came complete with our choice of her wonderful Christmas cookies, including shortbread, raisin cookies (lightly sweetened dough stuffed with raisins) and gingerbread men.

It turns out that the custom of baking sweet treats for Christmas is quite old. The Food Timeline traces it at least back to the Middle Ages, and the Germans were, unsurprisingly, in the lead in its development. Gingerbread, with its now traditional spices of ginger, cinnamon, sugar, and the like, was one of the first baked goods to become firmly associated with the holiday.

Yes, it's not as though any of us really needs to indulge in calories quite as much as the traditional Christmas treats encourage, but one or two cookies, accompanied perhaps by a post-prandial walk, still strikes me as a reasonable way to celebrate our culture's biggest return-of-the-light holiday. I hope all who read this get to enjoy a cookie or two as part of a peaceful and happy holiday.

Ancient Barbecue?

2010-12-23T19:34:00.001-05:00

My husband brought my attention to a recent article on msnbc which reports on a fossil find in Eritrea suggesting that humans have eaten beef as far back in time as 2.5 million years ago.

The fossilized remains feature a longhorned skull that looks strikingly like the totem animal of a certain Texas collegiate football team. The skull was painstakingly reassembled from shards that were found in the same dig with the remains of early humans. It belonged to a species called Bos, which is described as "essentially a missing link between more modern cow-like species found in Eurasia and the earlier African cattle ancestors found alongside hominids and dating back 2.5 million years."

The article doesn't go into a lot of detail about the evidence, but the basic thrust is that humans were associating with cattle that long ago. It's particularly interesting in light of this earlier article discussing archaeological evidence that humans began grinding grains much earlier than was realized. Such finds could revolutionize the entire history of food.

Ancient Soup

2010-12-16T22:19:00.001-05:00

I found an interesting little article today about a curious archaeological discovery--a bowl of soup that is more than 2,000 years old, and is still liquid. The article may be found here.

The soup was found in a Chinese warrior's grave dated to the Warring States period (475 BCE to 221BCE), in a sealed three-legged bronze pot that likely had been used as a cooking pot. The tomb also contained a sealed bottle, believed to be wine, that was also still liquid. The soup has been sent off to a laboratory for analysis.

Surprisingly, the article mentions that this pot is not the earliest soup found in a Chinese tomb. Another pot, this one believed to be about 4,000 years old, "containing noodles was found in 2005 at a site near the Yellow River."

I have long been accustomed to the idea that an immense amount of information about material culture in the past may be gleaned through archaeology, particularly about costume and architecture. But I tend to forget that archaeology can also teach us about ancient food.

Something To Be Thankful For

2010-11-28T22:02:00.013-05:00

Today, many Americans are concerned about unemployment, and about the effect of US national debt and the national debt of other countries on the economy. The current state of the economy has been compared to the Great Depression.

That may be going too far, though. My friend, John Desmond, has entrusted me with his late father's account of what American food was like in the Philadelphia area during the Great Depression. A few excerpts from Mr. Lawrence Desmond's recollections (which were recorded back in 1996), may serve to put our current troubles into perspective.

In 1932-33 I worked as a clerk at the American Stores (Acme Markets) at 8th and Edgemont in Chester [PA]. It was the largest grocery store in town - not quite as big as a basketball court. The A&P, which started up a couple of years later, was the town's first self-service supermarket. A&P and American Stores were the large 'chains' in the area, but there were lots of neighborhood food stores, often serving a particular ethnic group.

* * * *

My hours were from 8 AM to 6 PM Monday thru Thursday, 8 AM to 9 PM on Friday, 8 AM to 10 or 11 PM on Saturday. I made 10 dollars a week.

* * * *

Ham was about 12 cents a lb. You could get a 100 lb bag of potatoes for a dollar, a can of baked beans for 5 cents. Milk was from 14 cents to 16 cents a quart. Tastykake made a "pound cake" loaf for 17 cents a pound, and Acme a "fruit loaf" - bread with raisins and candied fruit, like fruitcake - it cost 15 cents for an unsliced 2-pound loaf. The A&P made very good whole-wheat bread.

* * * *

Chicken, and all poultry, was expensive - today it's almost free. Pork chops were comparatively cheap. Italians ate a lot of veal, Irish a lot of lamb - lamb was comparatively cheaper then. People ate more seafood then than they do now.

Armour's and Swift's - the national meat packing chains - had slaughtering plants in Chester. Livestock would be shipped in by rail, and sides of beef would go to the neighborhood butcher shops. Fruits and vegetables would come from the farms to the commission markets on Edgemont Avenue between 3rd Street and the Delaware River, as well as fish, and shellfish from the oyster boats of Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. Most fruit and vegetable growers and marketers were quite small enterprises - the neighborhood merchants would go to "Commission Row" each morning and get the stock for their stores. Banana boats came from the Caribbean - if the prices were too low, they often just dumped their cargo in the ocean and headed back South.

String beans, lima beans, potatoes, beets, carrots and cabbage - corn, tomatoes, and asparagus in season - were the common vegetables. Cauliflower was scarce - dubbed "cabbage with a college education", it was regarded as a delicacy. Broccoli was unheard of until a Chester resident - Mr. Kelly, whose son was a noted WWII aviator - was the first to import it to the USA on a large scale.

What this says to me is that food in the Great Depression was less varied, and more expensive to obtain, than it is now. The supermarket where Mr. Desmond worked in 1933 was smaller than a basketball court. The supermarket I visited tonight (Wegmans) is larger than a city block, and contains an astounding array of foods from all over the United States, and the world, for surprisingly low prices.

It seems to me that despite 10% unemployment, and concerns about inflation and general economic collapse, we still have quite a bit to be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

EDIT: After I originally published this post, I found this page which applies the Consumer Price Index to convert the US dollars of earlier years into current dollars. Using the calculator to turn the 1933 prices of most the items Mr. Desmond discusses above indicates that many of them were as cheap or even somewhat cheaper than they commonly are now, but milk appears to have been surprisingly dear. He reports that milk was 14-16 cents a quart (or 64 cents a gallon), but 64 cents had the approximate buying power of $10.77 USD today. Milk in my area is about $3.30 per gallon.

Wegmans Continues To Work Hard To Please

2010-11-07T17:16:00.000-05:00

I was shopping at Wegmans today when I saw, for the first time, that they now carry the Siggi's brand of skyr in the yogurt department! And they have a greater variety of flavors than our local Whole Foods market does--acai berry, pomegranite and passion fruit, orange and ginger, vanilla.

It seems that they work to fill a consumer need as soon as they identify it. Impressive.

New Book On Japanese Food

2010-10-30T00:19:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine, who sells books on a number of subjects (including historic food and costume) and trades as Poison Pen Press just sent around e-mail about the following book that is coming out this winter:

Rath, Eric C. and Stephanie Assmann, eds. Japanese Foodways, Past and Present. University of Illinois Press; 1st Edition (Oct. 7, 2010).

This book contains a number of scholarly essays about Japanese food in the late medieval and early modern period. It's a trade paperback, 290 pages, and the list price is $28. Worth considering by historians of medieval food, as well as aficionados of Japanese food.

Paleolithic Grain

2010-10-29T00:54:00.003-04:00

This article discusses a series of new archaeological finds; stones used for grinding grain that date back to the Stone Age. The archaeologists know that the stones were used for grinding grain not simply because of the shape, but because the stones are still coated with a microscopic layer of grain. Such stones have been found in Italy, southern Moravia in the Czech Republic and the Pokrovsky Valley in Russia as well.

Yes, the grains are wild grains, not cultivated; microscopic analysis identifies them as belonging to cattail, a fern, and a type of grass. Not nearly as nourishing as barley, or wheat, or rye would become. But at least a sign that humanity was looking to eat things other than meat or berries earlier than had formerly been thought.

Ramen

2010-10-24T16:57:00.002-04:00

I have another pot of barley stew cooking in the kitchen (this time using grass-fed beef), and my husband is making instant ramen noodles for a belated lunch. Like most Americans, I associate ramen, first with the Japanese, and secondarily with cheap food eaten by college students, artists, and other folk with more dreams than money. So I looked up the story of ramen in Wikipedia, and found that it hasn't always been that way.

According to Wikipedia, ramen was originally a Chinese noodle dish--yet another of the cultural imports from China that the Japanese managed to make their own. However, the "just-add-water" form of ramen was invented by about 50 years ago by Momofuku Ando, the owner of the Japanese food company Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd. At the time, Japan was still suffering from a severe food shortage as part of the aftermath of World War II. Ironically, Ando was also a Chinese import, in a sense; he moved to Japan as a young man and obtained Japanese citizenship. Eventually, he founded Nissin, and worked on making an instant noodle product to help alleviate the food shortage.

Ramen was originally marketed as a luxury product. In 1971, Ando came up with the "cup-of-noodles" idea, providing a waterproof styrofoam container with the noodles. The built-in eating bowl enhanced the product's popularity, and it began to sell more rapidly. In short order, the taste for ramen, like the taste for falafel, became global, as it is today.

Interestingly, Momofuku Ando was a man who believed in his product. He died in 2007 at the ripe old age of 96, attributing his longevity to playing golf and eating instant ramen almost every day. An interesting claim, since instant ramen is flash fried during the manufacturing process and as a result is high in saturated fat or even trans fats.

Barley Stew again.

2010-10-17T21:22:00.005-04:00

I'm trying the putative Anglo-Saxon recipe for hare or rabbit stew again, using the last of the duck breasts I bought this winter, with a few new variations, some of which are defensibly period, others which may not be:

I've added some shredded pork roast from an earlier recipe (I'd cooked it with cranberries and honey);
I added beef broth instead of water;
I fried the leeks and garlic in the pan when I was browning the duck. I don't know if that will improve the taste of the final stew, but the house sure smells wonderful now!
I used a sea salt and rosemary blend to season it, along with some black pepper. I was able to get fresh sage, so I used it this time, and omitted the bay leaves.
I also omitted the vinegar, since it made the last batch too sour.

I suspect that the pork is a suitably period addition (it doesn't taste very strongly of cranberry, and the rest of the ingredients for the roast were period enough) and the rosemary could be defended, but I have my doubts about the pepper, and suspect that only a wealthy household would be able to combine beef broth, pork and duck in the same dish. Still, it's fun to experiment.

EDIT: My husband was delighted when he tasted the stew! I thought it was good too, though not *quite* as good as it smelled. :-)

SECOND EDIT: The stew got richer and more flavorful the longer it sat in my refrigerator! Sadly, it's mostly gone now.

Spaghetti Tacos

2010-10-07T00:16:00.003-04:00

One of the gadgets I have on this site pulls in news articles about food, particularly historic food or foods from various ethnic traditions.

Today, I noticed a strange little article about a new food trend: spaghetti tacos. The basic form of the recipe is spaghetti and meatballs, packed into taco shells. Two great tastes that could not have come together before the European discovery of the Americas! It arose from a gag by a character in the iCarly series on Nickelodeon. Or at least the story writers thought it was a gag. Apparently after the relevant episode aired a lot of American kids bugged their mothers to make it, and pronounced the results good.

So, will spaghetti tacos become the first new American classic of the 21st century? Only time will tell.

Toasters and Toaster Ovens

2010-09-25T16:23:00.011-04:00

The other day, while enjoying some garlic toast for dinner, my husband and I had a brief discussion of toaster ovens and toasters that led to each of us Googling to learn more about the history of the toaster. One of the interesting sites we located is the Cybertoaster Museum, which contains many excellent photographs of the various stages in the toaster's development.

It turns out that the toaster is an early twentieth-century invention. The first toasters were invented during the first decade of the twentieth century, and were rapidly improved thereafter. By the 1950s they had become a standard item in American kitchens. The attached photograph, which I obtained from Wikipedia, and am using here pursuant to a Creative Commons license, is a very early model dating from 1909. The toaster oven, which is based on the same principle of an electric-heating-element-in-a-metal-box, appears to have been invented in the 1960s. My home has one, supplied by one of the previous owners. That's the only way I'd be likely to own a toaster oven, since most of the things a toaster oven can do are either out of fashion or have been co-opted by more recent inventions.

So what use is a toaster oven? It's a wonderful way to make impromptu garlic bread. We do so this way:

Cut two (toaster ovens rarely will fit more) generous slices of crusty French or Italian bread.
Spread the slices generously with butter or margarine (the closer your spread is to actual butter, the better the result will taste).
Sprinkle each slice with garlic powder.
Place on aluminum foil in toaster oven, spread-side up, and toast until crunchy and/or lightly browned.

The same type of recipe can be used in an ordinary home oven, but a toaster oven is great for making a single-serving batch of garlic bread very quickly. It is, needless to say, impossible to make garlic bread in a conventional toaster, and would have been dangerous to try to make it in an early toaster such as the 1909 version above.

Flavored breads (try a rosemary and olive oil loaf from Wegmans, if there's one near you!) produce the most interesting results, though a simple boule will work well. Bon appetit!

Chili Con Carne

2010-09-13T21:27:00.006-04:00

This weekend, I had a lot of housework to do, so I confined my cooking to an old standby: chili con carne (i.e., Spanish for "chili with meat"). I make mine in my crockpot with a recipe adapted from the recipe pamphlet that came with the crockpot. Like the chili I grew up with, it features ground beef, kidney beans, tomatoes, onions, and bell pepper. The basic spices are chili powder, cumin, salt and pepper, but I usually add garlic and mustard powder to the mix, and 3 or 4 heaping tablespoons of maize flour to thicken it.

I had known for years that different people had different recipes for chili, and that there were whole debates over whether a proper chili should contain anything other than meat and sauce, and whether the meat should be ground beef or cut-up steak, but I was hazy on exactly when and how chili came to be eaten here in the U.S.

So I asked my friend, Google, and both Wikipedia and other sites attribute the popularization of chili, if not its original invention, to San Antonio, Texas beginning in the 1880s. Hispanic women, nicknamed "chili queens," would set up pots in the town square and sell their stew to passersby. The town fathers of San Antonio killed off this practice by the 1940s by passing ordinances requiring these street-food sellers to meet all of the same regulations as restaurants, but by then the dish was well-established.

There appear to be different stories about the time of chili's origin. The Food Timeline notes that the dish must be of Mexican inspiration but that even Mexican sources reject this claim.

Whatever one concludes about the origins of chili con carne, the dish is tasty and economical, which is why my husband and I eat it so often.

Navy Bean Soup

2010-08-28T19:13:00.000-04:00

Today I want to get the week's cooking over with as soon as possible with little effort, so I'm making navy bean soup.

It turns out that navy bean soup is only about as old as I am. The Food Timeline dates it to 1958, and claims that it came from a U.S. Navy mess cookbook. It provides this recipe, which is fine if you're trying to serve 100 hungry service people, but would need conversion for the rest of us.

My recipe, adapted from a crockpot version, is a bit different. It uses a 4-5 quart crockpot, three cans of Great Northern (a variety of navy) beans, a few chopped stalks of celery with leaves, 1-2 teaspoons of celery seed (very important), about a pound of cubed ham, a little cubed sausage, a chopped onion, a few bay leaves, and salt and pepper. Add water or beef broth until the fluid level is about one inch from the top of the crockpot. Cover and cook on Low for 12 hours or High for 6 hours. Other flavorings (e.g., mustard, garlic) may be added as desired.

Delicious, economical (especially if one uses ham bones or scraps instead of fresh ham), full of protein and fiber, and easy to make--no wonder the US Navy used it.

The Language of Food Blog

2010-08-22T21:54:00.001-04:00

A few days ago, my husband found this blog, called "The Language of Food". The author, Dan Jurafsky, is a professor at Stanford who teaches a course by that name about food and language across the world. One of the course requirements is to start one's own blog on the subject. (Regrettably, you need to have a Stanford computer account to access the student blogs.)

Though Professor Jurafsky's blog contains few entries, each entry is huge, and fascinating. The most recent entry is about what fish and chips and ceviche have in common, as well as a mini-history of their respective origins. It's fascinating stuff, and I recommend it heartily to anyone with an interest in food history, as well as linguists.

Now to go back and finish reading some of Jurafsky's entries.

Peace Through Falafel?

2010-08-17T23:07:00.004-04:00

Today, I did something unusual for me. I had lunch at a vegetarian kosher restaurant in downtown Philadelphia called Mama's. It's menu is simple; hummus, falafel, eggplant sandwiches in pitas; latkes; a few side dishes and a few desserts. So what brought me there?

Simple. I ate at Mama's because I love good falafel, and Mama's falafel is the best I've ever had; not too hard or soft, not too dry, and full of hearty flavor (which the staff will cheerfully enhance with hot sauce unless you ask them to desist). So are the pitas they pack the falafel into, which they bake fresh daily and will sell to you for $3.50 USD per half-dozen. They're wonderful pitas, thick enough not to tear and soft enough to bite easily (though the lack of preservatives means that, back at my home in Chester County, PA, they acquire thriving colonies of mold before long).

Like many small restaurants in cities, Mama's is physically very unprepossessing. The restaurant resides in a minimally-maintained brick store front, with an old counter, a few beverage cases, and a small counter that serves as a condiments bar. A few (6 or so) battered tables and chairs and a couple more strategically placed outside for customers to use in good weather. Despite the lack of shine and spiff, the place does land-office business--and by no means just among Jews. Yes, there were certainly Jewish customers eating there this afternoon; a nice young man in a white shirt with a black yarmulke bobby-pinned to his hair; a little boy, no more than 8 years old, with a baseball cap and an "Israeli Defense Forces" t-shirt. But there were also plenty of black office workers, getting their sandwiches to go, and I saw a pair of Chinese American girls, chatting with each other as they ate. I'd had no idea that so many different people had a love of good falafel (the most common entrée eaten there) in common.

A quick look at Wikipedia's entry on "falafel" confirms that the taste for it has become worldwide. Falafel, for those readers unfamiliar with the term, is a kind of vegetarian meatball or patty. The patty or ball is made of ground chickpeas or fava beans and then deep fried. it may be eaten as is, or packed into pitas (as Mama's does) and dosed with hot sauce, tahini, hummus, vegetables, whatever. Interestingly enough, it is believed to have originated in Egypt, but Israelis spread the taste for it first to Europe, then to the United States, sometime in the 1970s. Nowadays Israelis consider it a national dish, as do the Lebanese and other Arab groups (who apparently ate the stuff first...).

Ah well, so much for my brief dream of peace over lunch.

But I'll keep visiting Mama's as long as they continue to dish out their wonderful falafel. Good falafel is hard to find.

More Kudos for Wegmans

2010-08-12T23:56:00.002-04:00

It turns out that Wegmans, the supermarket chain of the megastore-all-things-to-all-people experience, is a family-run, privately owned company. It's also an old company--founded in 1916 in Rochester, NY. It turns out that they didn't try to spread beyond New York state until the early 1990s. As is often the case, Wikipedia has the story.

And, yes, you can follow Wegmans on Twitter and they have their own blog. Apparently they have more in common with Whirled Peace, the local frozen yogurt place, than I'd supposed.

Another Foodery That Tries To Be All Things Possible Within Its Business Niche

2010-07-30T01:23:00.007-04:00

In addition to Wegman's, there's another new (several months old) food business very close to my home. But this one is not a huge supermarket chain. It's called Whirled Peace, and they have done so well that they are thinking about opening a second location.

The primary business of Whirled Peace is selling frozen yogurt. Their major new wrinkle is this. They provide cups, four different flavors per day (today's were chocolate, mango, plain tart, and coconut), and a host of simple toppings (chopped fresh fruit, nuts, flaked coconut, granola, etc.). You fill your cup as you see fit, and at the end of the toppings line is a clerk with a scale and a register. The price? $.50 USD (50 cents) per ounce. If you like, you can have them add a fruit juice, place the mixture in a blender for a few minutes, and serve up the result to you as a smoothie.

They also sell some beverages, including high-quality fruit juices and iced teas, free trade organic coffee, and some fruit breads and food bars. And that's it.

However, don't be deceived by the simplicity and limited range. Like Wegman's, Whirled Peace is also interested in meeting a multiplicity of their customers' needs. Consider the following:

Concerned about the environment? The packaging for the foods and drinks they sell are either recyclable or biodegradable. That includes the straws and spoons. The spoons look like plastic, but are actually made from a compressed cornstarch formula that degrades peacefully and harmlessly in a landfill after 45 days or so.
Concerned about underprivileged nations? See the free trade coffee mentioned above. (I don't drink coffee, so I can't vouch for its quality.)
Want to "give back"? Whirled Peace has a "cause of the week" program, where every week they give a portion of their sales to donate to a worthy charity or project.
Watching your weight? Their frozen yogurt is only 100 calories for 4 ounces--which is a reasonably satisfying dessert portion. Just stick with fresh fruit as a topping or limit the amount of toppings you use and you're set.
Concerned about aspartame? Their frozen yogurt doesn't have any.
In addition, their frozen yogurt is kosher.
Want a breather? They've set up a little cafe area in their front parking lot, with tables and Chinese-style electric lanterns, which is surprisingly pleasant despite being located along the town's busy main street. There's also a few tables inside the facility itself, and a few old magazines on hand to skim as you're eating.
Need your caffeine fix? They sell their free trade coffee at a drive-through window every day from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Having a party? They do catering.
And they are, of course, on Facebook and Twitter.

The yogurt is delicious, by the way. Tonight, I had mango yogurt, which I topped with fresh mango pieces and fresh strawberry pieces. Yum.

Is it any surprise that they're doing land office business? I think not.

The Palace of Consumption

2010-07-18T16:03:00.010-04:00

My husband and I have just returned from the Grand Opening of a new Wegmans supermarket very near our home. It is a huge building with a lot of amenities, which my husband instantly named "the Palace of Consumption." Although I've been in Wegmans stores before, this is the first time I've really stopped to think about exactly what services Wegman's provides. It's a pretty impressive array, which includes:

A restaurant and a food court right inside the store. The restaurant includes popular foreign cuisines, such as Chinese and Indian, and both are open each night until 10 p.m. The smells from the food court are wonderful.
A pleasant lounge to sit in while you eat your food court selections. They have a free wifi network, though my spouse reports that it didn't seem to be up and running. Yet.
Take out from all of the above in-store fooderies.
A full selection of designer beers for purchase. This is an even bigger deal in Pennsylvania, where I live, because most supermarkets do not sell beers. You need a special distributor's license to sell beer in Pennsylvania, which Wegmans apparently has taken the trouble to obtain.
Amenities you can't get in most supermarkets, such as gelato (in the food court section) and truffles. Not the candy, the actual fungus. Granted, the truffles are imported, and cost $299 USD per pound, but they're there, if you want them badly enough to pay that kind of money.
Want to "eat local"? Wegmans flaunts its marketing of local produce, much of which comes from no farther than central Pennsylvania (about 2 hours from the store) and some of which comes from West Chester (about 10 miles away).
Prefer to eat at home? Wegmans publishes a free food magazine, complete with recipes about how to make great meals at home with the meats, produce and other products they sell.
Concerned about the environment? Wegmans was giving away permanent, reusable polypropylene shopping bags to opening day attendees.
Handicapped? Wegmans has a curbside service. (Presumably you can sign up for it; I saw a sign at a service window, but didn't stop to check.)
Concerned about safety? Signs proclaim that you can always get an escort back to your car; all you need to do is ask.
Prices? Quite reasonable. At worst, competitive with the local supermarket I usually patronize, and in some cases significantly cheaper.

In short, Wegmans has not only taken the trouble to sell good food at reasonable prices, and to provide a lot of service and conveniences, they are going the extra mile to send reassuring messages to its customers to make them feel comfortable shopping there. For example, the women's restroom in the front of the store is spacious and is being kept meticulously clean, It uses the store's brand of foaming hand soap (available for purchase right outside the restroom). This not only says, "we care about our customers," it also says, "we believe in our own products."

This combination of amenities, products and service may be a new development in the history of the supermarket, and in food history in general. I suspect Wegmans will do very well.

EDIT: There's two other amenities we've noticed on subsequent visits. One is that their ATM machines only charge $1 USD for a withdrawal--much lower than most ATMs around here. The other is that their in-store restaurant, the Pub, has a no-tipping policy. (On the other hand, the Pub lists calorie counts for each dish, and has limited portion sizes as a consequence. I'm not sure which way that cuts. On the one hand, I'm trying to lose weight--but I finished my last dinner there still hungry.)

SECOND EDIT: Still more amenities. 1) A large newsstand with a great variety of magazines not commonly found in supermarkets, such as Threads and Victoria; 2) A display of portable umbrellas on sale near the exit.

Chicken Salad

2010-07-17T20:37:00.020-04:00

We are now in the very middle of summer. The weather is routinely hot, and very humid even when it isn't hot, so that any exertion tends to make one feel hotter than it would if the weather were cooler or drier. So I have been short on inspiration to explore historic cuisine, and motivated to find some food that I can make in quantity that will not require cooking or need to be eaten hot.

In exploring this issue with my husband, I found that he likes chicken salad, so I set out to find a chicken salad recipe we would both enjoy. Naturally, there are hundreds of recipes on the Internet. Eventually, we settled on this one for my first foray into chicken-salad making. I bought a four-pound rotisserie chicken to dismember for the cause; it provided enough chicken that I was able to make four times the amount specified in the recipe. It was an instant success, though my husband thinks it might benefit from a bit of ginger. That's definitely something to think about.

As always, I wonder about the history of the foods I choose to eat. Surprisingly, the maintainter of the Food Timeline doesn't have anything to say about mayonnaise-based chicken salads such as mine; she only mentions a fashion for Chinese chicken salad that seems to have arisen in the 1930s. Wikipedia led me to this article which suggests that the style of chicken salad I enjoyed tonight was first devised late in the Victorian period, which makes much more sense to me.

More interestingly, this website claims that chicken salad was invented at the Russian court in the late 18th century. This article claims that the first chicken salad, called Salat Oliviye, was featured in Russian zakuska--a meal consisting of many appetizer-like foods that would be similar to the Spanish tapas if the dishes were lighter. Part of the attraction of Salat Oliviye was that it was made with mayonnaise, a French culinary innovation which was new at that time.

The article gives a recipe for Salat Oliviye that is in some ways similar to the "southern-style" chicken salad I made tonight; along with the chicken and mayonnaise it features dill pickle relish and hard-boiled eggs. However, unlike the recipe I used, Salat Oliviye also includes potatoes, capers, tomatoes and olives. Since I don't like capers and olives, and my husband doesn't like tomatoes, I'll probably be sticking with my lighter, simpler recipe.

EDIT: My husband said that zakuska is more like the Scandinavian smörgåsbord. I didn't know whether that was the case, so I did some checking. It turns out that both zakuska and smörgåsbord are laid out all at once, like a buffet, so I guess he's right. Tapas is used to describe a meal made from many appetizers, but tapas consists of small hot dishes, instead of cold ones. Also, tapas are generally charged for by the dish, and systems are implemented so the bar or restaurant serving them can keep track of how many of them a diner has eaten, so it's more like dim sum than like zakuska or smörgåsbord.

The Cheesesteak Pretzel

2010-07-05T16:16:00.006-04:00

Most Americans, at least, have heard of the Philly cheesesteak, an anti-circulatory system blend of a good Italian bread roll, thinly sliced steak, and orange cheese that is unique to the area in which I live.

Well, now there's a new twist; the Cheesesteak Pretzel. The meat and cheese remain the same, but are stuffed inside a lump of soft pretzel--itself another regional delicacy.

Stuffed breads, of course, are nothing new to the history of food. The subcontinent of India features a number of stuffed breads. The Italian calzone (also common here, due to our large several-generation-spanning Italian immigrant population) embodies the same idea, as do pasties, a meal-for-one sized meat pie still found in parts of the American Midwest and elsewhere that has its roots in Cornish cuisine and appears to go back at least as far as the 16th century. But the Cheesesteak Pretzel is remarkable for seamlessly combining two regional delicacies in one extremely filling lump of food.

Elderflower Fritters

2010-07-04T16:46:00.004-04:00

I follow the blog of craftsman Robin Wood chiefly because of my interest in historical treen (bowls, mazers and other woodware for eating from). However, Robin recently posted a fascinating account of how to make fritters from elderflowers, a plant that grows wild in Great Britain. This is the kind of food that could be made at any time after flour was commonly made and used in cooking, which is why I was fascinated by his description. I commend it to any readers interested in early period food.

Trail Mix

2010-07-01T22:46:00.002-04:00

While driving home from a vacation trip to Michigan, my husband and I were snacking on a bag of trail mix from Trader Joe's. It occurred to both of us that we didn't really know how far back in history such mixes could be documented, so he Googled for "trail mix" on his smartphone. Unsurprisingly, his search pulled up the relevant text from the Food Timeline, which reported that although the concept of eating a mix of dried foods that would not spoil likely is ancient, the modern "trail mix" product only dates to 1968, when Hadley Fruit Orchards in California patented their version. Hadley's product is described in the Patent Office's records as follows:

"Word Mark ORIGINAL TRAIL MIX Goods and Services IC 029. US 046. G & S: Snack food mix consisting primarily of raisins, processed sunflower seeds, processed pumpkin seeds, processed peanuts, processed cashews, processed almonds, soybean oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or canola oil and/or almond oil and salt."

The mix we were eating contained raisins, pepitas, pecans, walnuts, almonds, and I think cranberries, but the concept is the same, and the result is very handy and flavorful too.

Blogs about Viking Food

2010-06-16T20:56:00.003-04:00

A friend on the Norsefolk_2 mailing list drew attention to two new and interesting blogs on Viking era food: Viking Food Guy and Eldrimner. I commend both to any readers specifically interested in food of that period.

EDIT: I will be going on a road trip, starting Sunday, and will not return until July 1. I may not be able to update this blog while I am gone, but that does not mean I am abandoning it. Posts will resume at the usual rate after I return.

National Iced Tea Day

2010-06-10T18:20:00.003-04:00

To my surprise, I learned from Google this afternoon that today, June 10, is National Iced Tea Day here in the U.S., and that June is National Iced Tea Month. Now, I like iced tea very much (it's my favorite beverage, done properly), but I don't think it needs both a celebratory day *and* month, somehow.

I also found this article from the on-line site of the Nashua Telegraph, which purports to give the "true" history of iced tea. According to the article, iced tea started during the Victorian era as a cold punch-like beverage made with sugar and alcohol, but Richard Blechynden, India Tea Commissioner and director of the East Indian Pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, began the process of popularizing the simple cold brewed tea that most Americans, at least, associate with the idea of "iced tea" today.

I find this bit of history interesting. Nowadays, most of my professional colleagues order iced tea with lunch as an *alternative* to alcohol. It goes to show how much a beverage can change its character in 200 years.

Revolutionary Dining

2010-06-09T23:33:00.009-04:00

Today, I had the opportunity to dine with one of our clients. A colleague of mine selected the restaurant: City Tavern.

City Tavern operates in a rebuilt American Revolutionary War era tavern, the original of which was a nexus for social and political activity at that time. The building was damaged by fire and demolished in the mid-19th century, but was rebuilt in time for the Bicentennial, thanks to the discovery of a copy of the original building plans; the decor is authentic, so far as I can tell, and the tableware includes pewter water goblets and tureens as well as china and glass. The staff wear better-than-average (but far for museum-quality) versions of mid-18th century costume, and the menu includes many 18th century dishes. I had the Pepperpot soup, a kind of spicy beef-and-cabbage soup that looked scary but tasted wonderful. The bread basket thoughtfully provided by the restaurant included some small, delicious scone-like biscuits that were identified as cinnamon pecan biscuits and supposedly were made from a recipe by Thomas Jefferson.

It would have been nice to linger, particularly since it was a gray rainy day, but all of us had other places to go and tasks to perform, so we parted after a pleasant meal. Although I've had better and more exciting cooking elsewhere, City Tavern will give you good hearty food that at least evokes the general air of the period. Its prices are at least reasonable (about $10-$25 for an entree) for a "nice" city restaurant in the Northeastern part of the United States. It makes a nice start to a ramble around the historic parts of the Old City area of Philadelphia.

EDITED after the fact to correct typos and refine language. (Most notable change; the original City Tavern was demolished in the mid-19th century, not the mid-18th century as the post originally read.)

New Old Brews

2010-06-05T01:21:00.002-04:00

Serendipitously, I ran across this article from Scientific American today, after blogging about Patrick McGovern's book on the prehistory of alcoholic beverages just a few days ago.

The article discusses three beverages that are about to hit the market. The first is called Chateau Jiahu, which is a reconstruction of a Neolithic brew from approximately 9,000 years ago. McGovern discusses it in some detail in Uncorking the Past, because it is based upon his group's archaeological discoveries in China. It's a cross between a wine and a beer. A number of the early beers incorporated fruit in order to make certain that the brew would have a high enough sugar content to guarantee fermentation. The resulting beverage tends to have attributes of both a beer and a wine (McGovern refers to Chateau Jiahu as a "beer-wine" in the book).

The second beverage is called Sah’tea, and it is described in the Scientific American article as "a modern update on a ninth-century Finnish beverage", which makes me very curious indeed--and I don't drink alcohol. The article goes on to describe the brewing process for this gem a bit more closely:

In short, brewmasters carmelize wort on white hot river rocks, ferment it with German Weizen yeast, then toss on Finnish berries and a blend of spices to jazz up this rye-based beverage. Reviewers at the BeerAdvocate universally praised Sah'tea, comparing it to a fruity hefeweizen.

Finally, the third beverage is a cocoa-based brew from South America called Theobroma. This formula was deduced from residues found on 3,200 year-old pottery shards from the Ulua Valley in Honduras, a site described in the article as "the Cradle of Chocolate." Apparently the Ulua Valley find is rewriting the history of chocolate somewhat, pushing back the earliest date for evidence of human use of cacao by about 600 years. I don't think I'd enjoy this one, though; it's described as both excessively sweet and gooey.

If any of my readers have adventurous palates and decide to try any of these beverages for themselves, please, comment about them here! I'm tempted by the first two of them, even though I am a teetotaler for health, not moral reasons, and it would be unfortunate if I tasted any of these items and found them extremely appealing.

Uncorking the Past

2010-05-26T00:01:00.001-04:00

In my copious spare time, I have been reading an interesting book I picked up from a dealer at a science-fiction convention about two months ago. The citation is:

McGovern, Patrick E. Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. (University of California Press 2009).

Professor McGovern is actually affiliated with an institution near me, namely, the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, but he has traveled widely in pursuit of information about the development, manufacture, and use of alcoholic beverages in prehistory. It is proving to be a fascinating read, not only because of the information about beer, wine, and crossover beverages that partake of characteristics of both, but because McGovern describes how he and his colleagues have used archaeological information to piece together portions of the prehistory of alcoholic drinks. I may write more about his discoveries after I finish, but in the meantime I recommend the book heartily.

I was also pleased that McGovern notes a detail I've been aware of for awhile--namely, that you don't have to be human to appreciate the pleasures of getting drunk. I learned this as a child from personal observation. We lived in a home that had a small grape arbor, and sometimes the grapes would fall before we could pick them, and would start to ferment on the ground. The butterflies and bees would sip at the decaying fruit and begin to fly in entertainingly crooked ways. It was then that I understood that homo sapiens is not alone in indulging in the fruit of the grape.

Lamb with Caramelized Onions

2010-05-20T21:46:00.002-04:00

For the past few weeks, I haven't had much time to think of food history, or indulge in any cooking experiments. Last night, however, I had a spare hour or so, and used it to attempt a lamb tagine with caramelized onions from a recipe I'd cut from a magazine years ago.

The recipe had three stages. First on the list was to cook three Spanish onions down, mix them with raisins, cinnamon, and other spices, and continue cooking until they became caramelized. Then, the meat was to be coated in a similar mix of spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, powdered ginger, salt, black pepper), seared, and cooked until medium rare. Finally, the pan was to be deglazed with a mixture of beef broth and honey, which was to be simmered until it was reduced in volume by about a quarter, and then poured as a sauce over the lamb.

This time, I followed the recipe straight, with only three minor changes:

1) I used cubed lamb instead of lamb chops, as called for in the recipe;

2) I doubled the amount of spice mix for the lamb to make certain all surfaces of the lamb cubes were properly coated, and;

3) I used beef bouillon from a mix instead of beef broth.

It took me about an hour, but was worth it. The onions were an unalloyed success. The lamb was also tasty, though my husband questioned whether the spicing was excessive (and the spices did make my mouth tingle after a while). The sauce didn't really work well. Reducing it didn't really change the sauce's texture, which remained watery and less flavorful than I'd hoped.

The recipe contemplates eating the lamb and onions from a bed of couscous, but by the time I'd finished cooking the lamb and making the sauce I was too hungry to want to take an extra 5 minutes to make couscous. Fortunately, I stock pita pockets in my kitchen, and we ate the lamb and onions in pita pockets, with a green salad on the side. It was an extremely satisfying meal.

EDIT: We had more of the lamb and onions for dinner tonight; they were even better reheated.

The Vegan "Double Down"

2010-05-05T20:52:00.004-04:00

In the wake of the furor surrounding KFC's new fried-chicken-and-cheese sandwich, the Double Down, some vegans have attempted to make vegan versions of what may be one of the world's most classically unhealthy sandwiches.

This site not only provides pictures of the original and the vegan clone, it gives the recipe for the vegan version. Being a cheerful carnivore, I don't recognize the brand names of the substitutes for chicken, bacon, mayonnaise and cheese, but Eat Me Daily claims that the bacon is made from tofu. A little web research confirms that the chicken is made from a blend of soy, wheat and pea proteins, vegetables and ancient grains (quinoa, amaranth, millet and kamut) and the cheese is primarily tofu and soy. The deep-frying, of course, remains the same, though an egg-substitute is used to make the breading stick.

What this says, to me, is that eating vegan isn't always a health-based choice!

Essay on Early Wheat Forms

2010-04-25T12:38:00.001-04:00

One of the bloggers I follow recently posted an interesting essay on prehistoric and early forms of wheat. It can be found here.

The most interesting thing the article points out is this. Early wheats were low in gluten, and thus didn't make very good bread overall. On the other hand, their texture made for good porridge! Which probably explains why early peoples often ate porridges instead of making bread.

Skyr Update

2010-04-07T21:25:00.002-04:00

I finally tried the "Siggi's" brand of skyr. Although the label insists on calling it yogurt, the ingredients list shows that it contains vegetable rennet and active cultures, and it has the same taste and texture of skyr.is, so I'd say it's also a skyr, despite the confusing labeling.

I'm noticing that I can't really detect the flavorings put in flavored skyr. (Siggi's blueberry wasn't very distinguishable from strawberry skyr.is, for example.) I've solved this problem by adding my own flavoring ingredients. Tonight with supper I had strawberry skyr.is mixed with two heaping teaspoons of lingonberry preserves. Very tasty.

Irish Stew

2010-03-28T21:28:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I simply made a conventional "Irish Stew": lamb chunks, potatoes, carrots, peas, seasoned with salt and pepper and rosemary. (Yes, I missed St. Patrick's Day, obviously.)

It occurred to me to wonder how far back "Irish Stew" goes. In its present form it can't go back much further than the 16th century or so, because the potato is not native to Europe. But the rest of the ingredients go way back. (Though Wikipedia mentioned that there are many different kinds of peas, and I'm not sure how far back the modern green pea goes.)

I expect this week to be very busy. Perhaps next week I'll be more experimental.

Barley Water

2010-03-27T23:12:00.003-04:00

The other day, I went to my supermarket and bought a bottle of "barley water". I bought the traditional lemon flavor, though an orange-flavored variety was also present. I've included a photograph of the bottle which shows the label, in case any of my readers is curious about the brand; my husband said that this brand of barley water is as about as British as they come.

Then I learned, to my surprise, that the stuff in the bottle is a concentrate, and has to be cut with water (at least 4 parts water to one of the concentrate, said my husband) in order to get a drinkable beverage. He gave me a sip after mixing one up for himself.

It wasn't carbonated. It tasted a lot like lemonade, only much less sweet.

I think I like it. And since it's so low in calories and carbohydrates made up, it shouldn't give me blood sugar problems (I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic). I've just mixed up more for myself, according to the directions on the bottle (they suggest about 3 tablespoons of concentrate for every 8 ounces of water) and am finding the results very pleasant.

Now I wish I could ask my aunt what the barley water she drank as a girl back in the Old Country was like; unfortunately, she's been dead for more than a decade.

Sweets--A History of Candy

2010-03-23T21:33:00.003-04:00

A few months ago, I picked up a copy of the following book on sale:

Richardson, Tim. Sweets: A History of Candy. (Bloomsbury Pub. Ltd. (UK)) (January 1, 2002) ISBN-10: 1422359832. [N.B.: THe ISBN information is for the hardcover edition that I purchased; a paperback version, which may be cheaper depending upon which vendor one seeks to obtain it from, is also available.]

I just finished reading it, and it occurred to me that others might find it interesting, so I'll give it a short review here.

Sweets boldly attempts to give the reader, not just a historical survey of the development of candy (which the author defines, justifiably if arbitrarily, as sweet foods made primarily from honey or sugar, as opposed to baked goods), but also a survey of the current state of the candy industry and of different regional and national preferences. There is a vast amount of information between its covers, and the bibliography is impressive in size.

The bad news is that Mr. Richardson, despite his extensive research and genuine enthusiasm for his subject, is primarily a journalist, not a researcher. Consequently, his book is written to be interesting to read, and is not organized in a manner that would allow one to easily locate facts about particular regions, time periods, candies, or nations. Reading it is a lot like sticking your fist into a jar of mixed candies and pulling out a random handful. Like other journalists who develop a passion for a particular subject (Victoria Finlay's Jewels: A Secret History and Barbara Sjoholm's The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea come to mind), Mr. Richardson makes his search for information part of his history, by describing his efforts to ferret out secrets from the very closely guarded modern confectionery industry. However, unlike the personal revelations that form a part of Ms. Finlay's and Ms. Sjoholm's books, Mr. Richardson's digressions into the particulars of his searches actually add to the book's value, by adding fascinating information about how today's candy industry operates and what its true priorities are. For that reason, I am disinclined to fault Mr. Richardson for folding his own sleuthing activities into the text.

I am much less inclined to be charitable about Mr. Richardson's repeated expressions of opinion about his own favorite sweets and his weakness for cute wordplay. Those traits, instead of enhancing the subject, occasionally get in the way of his attempts to purvey interesting historical information. Take, for example, this passage, where the author begins his discussion of chewing gum with a digression about how much he detests the stuff:

It was decided long ago that language is what separates man from the beasts; chewing gum, on the other hand, reunites us with the animals because it not only prevents us from talking properly but renders us meditatively dull and insensible, like beasts in their worst moments. All other sweets elevate mankind; chewing gum alone diminishes him. Bubble gum is another matter. Bubble gum is exceptionally fine, because it is bright pink and you can blow bubbles with it--which colour and which action immediately sets the blower apart from the animal kingdom. But spent chewing gum lurks in the mouth like some detached oral appendix, useless. And it is grey--whoever heard of a grey sweet? It is a disgrace.

This rain of personal preferences wrapped up in cutesy wordplay recurs throughout the book. Consider our author's comments about Peeps ("A Marshmallow Peep is a wonder of finely judged texture, with a slightly crispy skin and a light centre; it is the texture which makes it very difficult not to eat a whole box at one sitting."), chocolate ("Adults play too; a box of chocolates is also a toy, the plan inside treated with mock seriousness."), and a peculiar variant of hard candy called "rock" ("More than with any other confection, one has the sense that this sweet is physically attacking the teeth, clinging indefatigably to the molars so that when you finally prise it away, fraught and distracted, you can never be quite sure that you have not detached a tooth with it.").

For me, the biggest revelation of the book was the intertwining of the origin of the Western European candy tradition with the origin of the pharmaceutical industry. The earliest candies were treated as a kind of expensive health food, and typically were made by the same people who made medicines. We may frown with disapproval when we hear of a modern drug manufacturer making a medicine that looks and tastes like candy, but before we frown we should remember that such an act is part of an old tradition of mingling sweets and medicine. ("Like other spices, sugar was imported into Europe as a sophisticated medicine, to be combined by apothecaries with other ingredients in the confection of expensive medicinal preparations.")

Though as I read I occasionally wanted to bash Mr. Richardson over the head with a Nerf bat, I enjoyed Sweets immensely. The history of food would be much poorer without his sprightly, idiosyncratic book. I recommend reading it, if not buying it, to every serious food historian.

The End of the Flatbread

2010-03-16T19:04:00.002-04:00

I had to throw out my refrigerated flatbread balls today because they were beginning to develop mold. Still, my experience showed that they will keep for two weeks at least in the refrigerator. It also showed that I need to cut down the recipe when making a batch just for my husband and myself (or else freeze half of the batch). And when I recover from the virus I seem to have caught, I can try another recipe.

(EDITED to clarify my thoughts but not changing the tenor of the post as a whole.)

Skyr With Flatbread

2010-03-07T22:38:00.002-05:00

I finally tried plain skyr with some of my Viking flatbread tonight (the dough seems to be keeping forever in my refrigerator). It wasn't bad, but I thought it needed some sweetener. If I had had some preserves made from a period fruit, I would have mixed them with the skyr.

Since I didn't, I ate my flatbread with skyr and apple butter, while my husband put Devonshire cream (another gustatory experiment, courtesy of Whole Foods Market) and maple syrup on his, and we were both happy.

Barley Water

2010-03-07T19:34:00.002-05:00

All of my grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles were born in Eastern Europe, and one of my aunts used to tell me that barley water was a typical drink when she was a girl. (That would have been in the first decade of the 20th century).

My husband, who was living with his family in London in the 1960s, reports that they had barley water there, too. It was bottled and carbonated like a soda, and typically lemon-flavored. A quick follow-up with Wikipedia uncovered the following:

Barley water, usually flavoured with lemon or other fruit, is a popular British soft drink. It can be made by boiling washed pearl barley, straining, then pouring the hot water over the rind and/or pulp of the fruit, and adding fruit juice and sugar to taste. The rind may also be boiled with the barley.

Drinking boiled barley in water, strained or not, is an ancient practice. Barley water has been used as a first baby food, before feeding with barley mush. It is also used to treat cystitis. In Mexico drinks called aguas frescas are made by street vendors using similar methods. Roasted barley tea is a popular traditional Asian equivalent.

One of our local supermarkets carries the British-style lemon-soda-like barley water. Although that's not going to taste much like anything the Vikings or Anglo-Saxons might have drunk, it is the end of a long tradition that may well have involved the Vikings (who certainly used barley). I'm also curious as to how British barley water differs in taste from typical American lemon sodas.

Another Viking Food Experiment

2010-03-06T00:26:00.005-05:00

It turns out that I can try eating my flatbreads with skyr, the yogurt-like Scandinavian cheese, after all.

I was re-reading a recent Compleat Anachronist, which was about skyr and mysa and the evidence for Viking era use of both, when I noted that the author reports that the supermarket chain called Whole Foods imports skyr from Iceland.

There's a Whole Foods market about 20 minutes away from here by car.

So tomorrow, I will buy some skyr for my flatbread. I am very curious to find out what it tastes like.

EDIT: I did buy some skyr last night. I haven't had any flatbread since then, but I tried the blueberry and strawberry flavors (I'm saving a tub of the unflavored skyr to try on the flatbread.) Overall, I liked it. Skyr turns out to be more sour than yogurt (or at least the commercial variety is), and stiffer in texture. The fruit flavorings added to the batches I tried were less pronounced than they tend to be in yogurt. However, I like sour flavors, so that didn't bother me.

What Did The Vikings Eat With Their Bread?

2010-03-02T23:42:00.002-05:00

My husband and I had another meal of beef and barley stew, with more of the Viking flatbread. (The number of dough balls in the bag doesn't seem to have gone down any, and the quality remains undiminished since the last time I fried some.) Tonight, he had his with maple syrup (very unperiod) and I had mine with apple butter.

Apple butter, though consisting entirely of materials that were available in period, is itself also non-period. The Food Timeline claims that similar preparations go back only to the Middle Ages, and in its present form apple butters are traceable to the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 18th century or so.

That certainly explains how I know about them, since we live close enough to Pennsylvania Dutch country that Amish folk come out to sell their farm goods in our local markets. But it doesn't really answer the question of what the Vikings might have eaten on *their* flatbread.

My husband had one plausible idea; honey. That seems likely to me. The other possibility is skyr, a very soft cheese that was closer to yogurt in properties and flavor; it's mentioned in the sagas. Probably they sometimes combined the two, perhaps adding dried fruit.

EDIT: I take back my comment about the period ingredients in apple butter. Apple butter uses sugar, which likely would not have been available in Scandinavia in period. It sometimes also has spices, including cinnamon, which I don't believe the Viking age Scandinavians had either. Nor do I know whether the basic means of making apple butter--i.e., simmering down seasoned, sweetened apples until they form a paste--works if you use honey instead of sugar. (Though it might be interesting to find out.)

Our (Mostly) Viking Meal

2010-02-25T20:40:00.001-05:00

Since it is snowing again, and the weather forecast is dire enough that a lot of evening events (including a meeting I was supposed to attend) have been cancelled, I figured it was a good night for me and my husband to try out my beef stew glop with barley (thanks again, Eulalia!) and the flatbread.

The stew, though simple, was surprisingly tasty, and met with the approval of my husband as well. It had no apple taste to speak of, but the apple bits were nice, and the leeks, beef chunks and barley played well together.

The flatbread was a bit trickier. I greased a skillet thoroughly with butter to fry them, but found it hard to tell when they were done. The first one (with cranberries, for my spouse) did get done properly, but mine was just a bit raw on the inside. The underdoneness didn't affect the taste much, however. The taste of the flatbread was pleasant but bland; slightly nutty, slightly chewy.

"It needs to be eaten with something," said my husband.

I thought so too, and thought that something sweet would be nice. So I rummaged around for preserves or spreads made from (period) fruit, and came up with a long-held but unopened jar of apple butter, which tasted very nice with the flatbread.

We also had a green salad with cranberries and walnuts, but that wasn't particularly Viking so I won't say anything more about it.

Overall, the meal was a success. Which is a good thing, because we still have a *lot* of flatbread balls left. The bread is so filling that we could only manage to eat one flatbread apiece.

Viking Flatbread--Preparation

2010-02-23T00:02:00.000-05:00

As described in my last post, I let my experimental beef stew simmer for close to 12 hours before I packed it up for subsequent reheating. (I find that most crockpot recipes benefit from short-term storage and reheating, though I'm sure that in period it was more probable that stews simmered over a low fire until eaten.) The stew did not burn, though a few bits of meat and barley stuck to the walls of the crockpot at the very top, where the liquid didn't reach.

I deferred reheating and tasting the stew, however, until I had an opportunity to make up some Viking flatbread to go with it. Tonight, I made up the dough, since the Hurstwic recipe states that the dough can be refrigerated or frozen until use.

I used equal amounts of oat, rye, whole wheat, and barley flour. Unfortunately, I could only find reduced fat buttermilk (2%), and the Portuguese honey I had been using for all purposes ran out and had to be supplemented from a jar of tupelo honey (not terribly period, or even Old World, I'm afraid). I added walnuts, as specified in the recipe, and put cranberries in about 1/3 of the batch, to please my husband.

With only the buttermilk, egg, and honey for fluid, the dough was very sticky, as the recipe predicted, but was easy to shape into two to three-inch balls once I remembered to keep my hands flour-coated and to dust each ball with flour while shaping it. The recipe makes up about 10 to 12 balls, which I plan to grill and eat with the stew later this week.

The Experimental Beef Stew

2010-02-21T20:11:00.001-05:00

The stew I've been planning as inspired by Eulalia's recipe is presently simmering, so now is a good time to blog about what I've done. I've made substantial changes, as you will see.

1 1/2 pounds of beef stew meat, in chunks;
1 cup smoked bacon, in smallish chunks;
1 medium-sized apple (I ended up with a Braeburn apple from the supermarket), cored and chopped;
1/3 cup pearled barley;
1 cup apple cider (i.e., cloudy apple juice);
4 leek stalks (white and light green parts), chopped moderately fine;
2-3 teaspoons of dill-spiked sea salt (the blend was specially-made by a vendor I know).

In a separate pot, bring the barley to a boil, then let it simmer in about 3 cups of water until it has at least doubled in size (about 1 hour to 1 1/2 hours). Then place all ingredients into a crock pot and cook on high heat for about an hour, then turn to low heat for another 9-11 hours until the meat is thoroughly cooked.

Eulalia's idea to cook the barley with the rest of the stew is probably a more period approach than mine. However, as her recipe suggests, it carries a greater risk of burning the stew. With my method the stew can be left for long periods untended. I resisted the temptation to add black pepper (which would not have been period) but dill is, at least for England, and so far as I know leeks are. I could have added mustard powder, but decided that would clash with the apple and apple juice.

Meanwhile, I have tracked down the ingredients for making the Hurtswic "Viking" flatbread! Since the dough can be refrigerated, I figure I'll mix the dough and try cooking some to go with this stew. The Hurstwic recipe does not specify which proportions to add of the oat, barley, wheat and rye flours; I figure I'll try equal proportions for the first batch. I'm also adding walnuts. My husband agitated for the addition of cranberries (he loves cranberries with walnuts in anything) so I'm making half the batch with cranberries even though this is pretty much non-period (I could use cherries, which are arguably period for Ireland, at least, but my husband likes cranberries more, and this isn't really meant to be a rigorous experiment).

My Next Experiment

2010-02-19T07:53:00.002-05:00

I've been inspired by the following recipe from the Eulalia of Eulalia Hath a Blogge, another blogger with an interest in historic cuisine (Thanks, Eulalia, for permission to repost this):

3 oz beef stew meat (pasture-raised), in chunks
1/2 slice Trader Joe's uncured applewood smoked bacon, cut into bits
1 pippen apple, well past its prime, cored and chopped
1/4 cup pearled barley
1 cup homemade hard apple cider (very dry!)

Cook in a crock pot on high heat for 3 hours (or thereabouts) until everything is tender and all of the liquid is absorbed. Careful not to let it burn!

Now, I think Eulalia's recipe sounds very tasty. However, I seldom make any recipe exactly as it was written, and I'm not likely to do so with Eulalia's glop for several reasona. For example, I probably won't hunt down pasture-raised beef, but I likely will use more beef than in Eulalia's recipe (my husband and I are ardent carnivores). Nor am I going to Trader Joe's for bacon while a quarter cup of bacon chunks from our best local barbecue place is occupying space in my fridge. And if I use hard cider in this stew, my husband, a semi-militant teetotaler, probably will refuse to eat it. (Fortunately, good non-alcoholic apple cider is easy to get around here.) Nonetheless, I like the tenor of Eulalia's experiment, and expect to use it as a jumping-off place for experimentation of my own. Naturally, I'll report on how it comes out.

Useful Sources for Medieval Cooking Measures

2010-02-13T18:05:00.004-05:00

Robin Carroll-Mann recently reported on the SCA-cooks Yahoo list that the following sources on medieval weights and measures are available, in their entirety, on Google Books:

"Italian weights and measures from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth
century" By Ronald Edward Zupko
http://tinyurl.com/ykrd2ec

"A dictionary of weights and measures for the British Isles: the
Middle Ages ..." By Ronald Edward Zupko
http://tinyurl.com/y9o83ue

The URLs link to the Google Book location of each. I am reporting these by way of expanding access to this source of information.

EDIT: Note the comment by heroquester below. Zupko may be useful but may not be completely trustworthy.

Combination Eating Tools

2010-02-02T22:52:00.004-05:00

You've seen those all-in-one fork/knife/spoon combos they sell for picnic baskets, right? When do you suppose those were invented?

I figured they were 20th century, but it appears that the concept goes back to Roman times. Epi-log (the blog side of Epicurious) featured a short article on such a device today. (I discovered the link from the SCA Food and Feasts list; thanks!) You can find the article, and a good picture of the device, here. As the commenter noted, the user of this item "could cut or extract food with its knife or spike respectively, stir food with the spatula, eat with the tool's fork or spoon, and remove any morsels from his teeth with the toothpick."

I don't normally agree with the point of view which holds that there is "nothing new under the sun", but every once in a while, phenomena like this device make me wonder.

Things Benedict

2010-01-28T00:46:00.009-05:00

One of my favorite brunch foods is the minor classic, Eggs Benedict.

Actually, to be specific, the dish I have in mind is not the traditional Eggs Benedict, which is an open-faced breakfast sandwich consisting of an English muffin covered with ham (or Canadian bacon) and poached eggs, with Hollandaise sauce poured over them. My preferred variant, consists of Andouille sausage and a poached egg with Hollandaise sauce on an English muffin, a variant I enjoy on weekends at a cafe near us called the Magnolia Grill, which is part of my favorite bookstore, Chester County Book & Music Company.

Last weekend, I started wondering just when and how Eggs Benedict was invented. Having no handy research tools for this subject but the Internet, I quickly ended up on Wikipedia, which recounted the story that, one day in 1894, a retired Wall Street stockbroker named Lemuel Benedict ordered "buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon and a hooker [i.e., an amount of liquid equal roughly to the contents of a shot glass, not a prostitute] of hollandaise." The chef added the item to the menu, with the substitution of an English muffin for the toast and ham for the bacon, and the fabled dish, Eggs Benedict, was (supposedly) born.

The Food Timeline recounts this story, and adds a second one featuring a woman, a Mrs. LeGrand Benedict, who was a regular at Delmonico's in New York City. Feeling disinterested in the standard breakfast fare, she consulted with the maitre d'hotel, arriving at the now famous egg dish. There are other stories too (Wikipedia mentions one dated to about 1912), but several themes stand out: New York, and a fit of inventiveness by a (wealthy) customer.

The Lemuel Benedict story suggests that, even at the outset, substitution of ingredients was a feature of the Eggs Benedict story. I've eaten several variants of the tried and true dish (in addition to my favorite from the Magnolia Grill), but Wikipedia contains a real plethora of Benedict options. How many of these are actually prepared and eaten and how many of them are jokes devised by the author of the Wikipedia entry I can't tell(though I believe that the last one in the list must be such), but some are truly unusual. These in particular amused me:

* Eggs Sardou substitutes artichoke bottoms and crossed anchovy fillets for the English muffin and ham, then tops the hollandaise sauce with chopped ham and a truffle slice. The dish was created at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans in honor of the French playwright Victorien Sardou.

* Country Benedict, sometimes known as Eggs Beauregard, replaces the English muffin, ham, and hollandaise sauce with a biscuit, sausage patties, and country gravy. The poached eggs are replaced with eggs fried to choice.

* Irish Benedict replaces the ham with corned beef hash or Irish bacon.

* Dutch Benedict replaces the ham or bacon with scrapple.*

There are also variants that replace the Hollandaise sauce with another kind of sauce, or the English muffin/toast with a non-bread product, but it seems to me that once you've substituted those items, what you have is no longer anywhere near Mr. Benedict's simple hangover cure. Still, it's an interesting list, and I commend the Wikipedia article to you for that reason, if for no other.

* Scrapple is a culinary breakfast specialty of the Pennsylvania Dutch area of Pennsylvania, near where I live. Scrapple consists of pork scraps of various kinds molded together with the addition of cornmeal and flour. It is typically pan fried like bacon and served with eggs. Scrapple tends to be offputting in appearance (uncooked, it looks kind of grayish), but is tasty when fried if one likes bacon and other pork products. In texture it's a cross between a sausage and a cornbread, and its taste is unique. But it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a health food.

Viking Bread

2010-01-25T22:07:00.012-05:00

Making my "Anglo-Saxon" stew after so long a time has made me think about period foods to serve with it.

Since I usually eat stews with bread, the first thing that I thought of was a plausible Anglo-Saxon or Viking bread. (The cultures were contemporaneous in time, after all, and ate many of the same types of foods.)

A casual search revealed this recipe, from the Viking reenactment group Hurstwic. It uses a mix of wheat, oat, barley, and rye flours, and buttermilk. As is consistent from what we know of Viking cooking technology, it's an unleavened bread, cooked on a flat pan (period pans looked like this one now in the Bergen Museum), but one could make the same type of bread in a broad, greased modern skillet).

Of all the "Viking" bread recipes I've seen, this one strikes me both as one of the more plausible and the simplest to execute. I plan to make some after my next batch of the duck stew. Watch this space to see how my experiment with it comes out.

For the curious, other modern attempts at coming up with a plausible Viking bread recipe can be found at the following URLs:

http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/vikbagels.html

http://thevikingworld.pbworks.com/Traditional-Viking-Foods (Scroll about a third of the way down the page to see the recipe I'm referring to here. However, this page contains several Viking bread recipes, including the preceding one in this list, in addition to non-bread recipes.)

http://freeholds.tripod.com/bread.html

http://www.ydalir.co.uk/crafts/cook/recipes.htm (This page also contains several bread recipes, as well as non-bread recipes.)

http://www.viking.no/e/life/food/e-flatbr.htm

EDIT: The Viking Answer Lady also has a proposed recipe, here. (The recipe in question is located about halfway down the page.) This recipe is an all-barley flour variety that seems as though it would be more like a Viking crepe than a flatbread, but it would probably be tasty, and easier to digest than the Hurstwic recipe. I may try it next.

My Twist on a Putative Anglo-Saxon Recipe

2010-01-10T22:30:00.005-05:00

I found this recipe on the Internet years ago.

******

Hare, Rabbit, Veal or Chicken Stew with Herbs & Barley
[serves 6]

In 7th century England, herbs were one of the few flavourings available to cooks and were
used heavily...

50g (2 oz.) butter;
1 -1.5kg (2-3 lbs.) (depending on the amount of bone) of hare or rabbit
joints, stewing veal or chicken joints;
450g (1 lb.) washed and trimmed leeks, thickly sliced;
4 cloves garlic, chopped finely;
175 g (6 oz.) pot barley;
900 mL (30 fl oz., 3 3/4 cups) water;
3 generous tablespoons red or white wine vinegar;
2 bay leaves, salt, pepper;
15 fresh, roughly chopped sage leaves, or 1 tablespoon dried sage.

Melt the butter in a heavy pan and fry the meat with the leeks and garlic till the vegetables are slightly softened and the meat lightly browned. Add the barley, water, vinegar, bay leaves and seasoning. Bring the pot to the boil, cover it and simmer gently for 1 - 1 1/2 hours or till the meat is really tender and ready to fall from the bone. Add the sage and continue to cook for several minutes. Adjust the seasoning to taste and serve in bowls-- the barley will serve as a vegetable.

******

You can find this recipe here; the page is somebody's e-mail post, attributing this and other recipes to The British Museum Cookbook by Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, British Museum Publications (1987). Probably it's just someone's suggestion of a recipe that could be made with period ingredients (barley instead of potatoes), available herbs (dill, sage, salt, onions and garlic), and period cooking techniques (frying, then simmering in a pot). Since we don't have any Anglo-Saxon cookery books (assuming any were written), this is as plausible a period recipe as we're likely to find.

I have made this recipe before, browning the meat and then transferring all the ingredients to my faithful crockpot for long gentle simmering. But I'd always made it with chicken. This weekend, I decided that I wanted to try it with game--either rabbit, as the recipe suggests, or duck, either of which I can obtain from my local butcher. So I bought a quantity of boneless duck breasts (boneless, so that I wouldn't have to fish bones out of the stew, later) and leeks.

Then, I decided to experiment.

I sauteed some white mushrooms (possibly not native to Britain but certainly native to Chester County, Pennsylvania where I live) in butter, and added them to the duck and barley for more bulk and flavor. Then I fried a little bacon, chopped it into bits, and added it as well. (The 13th century cookery book I reviewed a few weeks ago supports the use of bacon with chicken in early medieval cooking.) I didn't have any dill, so I used a dill and salt mixture I had handy, in addition to the garlic, sage, and bay leaves. I substituted cider vinegar for the wine vinegar because I like it better. I also added mustard powder (which I believe is period also).

I can't attest to the authenticity of my substitutions any more than I can attest to the authenticity of the original recipe, but the aroma wafting up from my crockpot is wonderful.

If my experiment comes out well, I may try rabbit eventually (but not next time--I still have more frozen duck in my freezer for another round).

EDIT: The stew was good, except the vinegar made it too sour! Next time, I will leave the vinegar out, and let the butter, sage and bacon do more flavoring. Maybe the mustard powder should go, too.

Pancake Win!

2010-01-06T23:39:00.002-05:00

My husband, Eric, received a bottle of genuine Vermont maple syrup as a Christmas present from his uncle. Eric, who has some closet "foodie" tendencies, has raved to me for years about how superior genuine maple syrup is to the synthetic, "fake" kind, and he was eager to sample his present. Since I am seldom home for breakfast, that meant Eric needed to learn how to cook something that tastes good with maple syrup. He decided upon pancakes as the simplest choice.

After considering whether to try to make pancakes from scratch or purchase a mix, Eric decided that a reasonable mix would be good enough to allow him to taste maple syrup goodness, and we accordingly bought a box of Bisquick at a neighborhood supermarket. On Tuesday morning, he began experimenting. He reported to me at lunch time that he'd scorched a few, but by the time I came home, he was making very tasty, if thin and oddly shaped, pancakes of a perfect golden brown. We enjoyed a few over supper, with the leftover batter from his breakfast experiment.

Out of curiosity, we both Googled for information about the history of pancakes. Wikipedia suggests that Eric's Bisquick pancakes, which is a common American way to make pancakes, also approximates the Scottish version of pancakes--i.e., they consist of flour, eggs and milk, and a leavening agent. usually baking powder, to help them rise a little. (English pancakes, in contrast, have no leavening agent). The Wikipedia article also indicates that pancakes are pretty close to being made worldwide, and many countries' varieties are eaten, as Americans eat them, with a sweet syrup or other sweet substance.

I didn't find the maple syrup to be that different from the "fake" syrups I grew up with, but Eric's pancakes were tasty enough, and I'm pleased at his success at extending his cooking skills.

Featured Recipe--Portuguese Honey Bread

2010-01-03T01:11:00.056-05:00

One of the things I've decided to do with this blog is share unusual recipes, or at least my favorite recipes, from time to time. This recipe is not original, but it is both a personal favorite and unusual. It is a recipe for Portuguese Honey Bread. My mother and I discovered it late one fall in the special Christmas edition of one of the "women's" magazines--I think it was Good Housekeeping, but I'm not sure. I no longer have the magazine, but Mom and I transcribed it later to contribute to a small, amateur booklet of recipes for our church, and that collection I still have, and would like to share.

Despite the fact that the bread is wonderful, we only made this recipe once. You'll understand why after you read it. Here is my paraphrase of it.

* * * *

2 1/3 cups butter
1 1/2 cups light molasses
2/3 cup honey
2 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1/3 cup cold mashed potatoes
1/2 cup sherry
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 tablespoon anise seed
1/4 cup cinnamon (yes, 1/4 cup)*
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon Royal baking powder
11 cups sifted all-purpose flour

Preheat your oven to 325 F.

In a large bowl, beat together at medium speed (with an electric mixer) the butter, molasses, honey, and sugar until fluffy. Add the mashed potatoes, sherry, cloves, anise seed, cinnamon, pepper, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix well. At low speed, beat in about half of the flour. At that point, the mixture will be too heavy to use an electric mixer; beat in the rest of the flour with a wooden spoon until just mixed in.

Transfer the batter to three (3) greased, decorated 2-quart cake molds or three (3) nine-inch cake pans. Place the pans in the oven so that none of the pans is directly above another pan. Bake 1 1/2 hours or until the bread comes away from the sides of the pan.

Cool the bread in the molds or pans on racks for 10 minutes before removing it from the pans. Let the bread cool completely to room temperature, then wrap it tightly in foil and let it "season," wrapped, for several days before serving.

* * * *

Take very seriously the advice about using a wooden spoon to beat in the second half of the flour if you do not want to damage the mixer. Mom and I were having trouble keeping the mixer in motion before the first four cups of flour were mixed in; by the time all 11 cups were in the bowl, the mixture was so stiff and heavy we could barely budge the wooden spoon. Despite that fact, the bread smelled so good while baking that, after we took it out of the oven, we attempted to pry a sliver loose from one of the loaves to taste it. At length, after nearly breaking a knife on the *extremely* hard loaf, we got a few slivers (and a lot of wisecracks from my father); it tasted of honey and cinnamon, but was dry and hard. So we wrapped it back up and let it sit for a week.

After about a week, the bread was not only cuttable and chewable, but it was moister, and wonderfully rich. It tasted a lot like gingerbread, if gingerbread were more like cake.

I have found two variants of this recipe on the Internet. This one uses only 4 1/2 cups of flour. It also contains ingredients that do not appear in the recipe I knew, such as candied fruit, port, and eggs. The other major variant, which you can see here, is more like the recipe I had, but it substitutes instant potato flakes for the mashed potatoes, includes candied fruit, and uses about 6 cups of flour. I would bet that neither of these recipes would be as hard to stir as the recipe my mom and I made, since all of them contain about as much liquid as the recipe above but much less flour.

* The parenthetical remark appeared in the original recipe.

New Year's Foods

2010-01-01T02:19:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year!

I thought it would be fun to write a post about New Year's foods. But I don't know anything about traditional New Year's foods, anywhere, so I headed over to the Food TimeLine to try to get a handle on the subject.

I found, to my surprise, that there are few easy generalizations about New Year's foods. It appears that, for every people and region that *has* a New Year's tradition, the "tradition" is to eat foods that are considered lucky or likely to bring the eaters prosperity. However, the foods that meet this criterion vary substantially from region to region.

One common thread is that, for many peoples, pork is a "lucky" New Year's food. For Germans and Swedes, cabbage is too. In New England, they cover both bases by eating pork with sauerkraut (made from cabbage, of course). Some peoples go for color symbolism; they eat gold-colored foods on the theory that doing so will bring them gold. According to the Food TimeLine, this is true in Peru and China (though the Chinese New Year, of course, falls in February, not now). Lentils are a good luck food in Brazil; Food TimeLine notes that the ancient Romans also treated lentils as a lucky New Year's food--possibly because they look a bit like coins. And many places have some kind of pastry or cake that is unique to New Year's. You can read Food TimeLine's full page account of New Year's foods here.

The message is clear. The New Year, just like Christmas and Thanksgiving, is an eating holiday, and the trick is not to turn it into an over-eating holiday. So I wish everyone who reads this post prosperity and good food, and the strength of will to enjoy both without overindulgence.

The Observance of Foods

2009-12-29T20:21:00.002-05:00

Continuing the early medieval theme, here's a few words about another obscure manuscript of which I own a translation: Anthimus's de obseruatione ciborum epistula ("the letter on the observance of foods") which was recently translated by Mark Grant. The edition I have (identifying information for which appears at the bottom of this post) includes a full transcription of the Latin text along with a page-by-page English translation.

Anthimus was a physician who lived during the 6th century CE, not a gourmand. The "letter" is essentially health advice; a kind of primer for foods to eat and foods to avoid in accordance with the accepted medical doctrine of his day. He wrote in Latin, and his letter is addressed to King Theuderic, then King of the Franks. Grant believes that he lived at the time in northern Gaul in Theuderic's court, though Grant's introduction indicates that this position is open to debate. One thing that is consistent with Grant's theory is that some of the spices and foods referenced in the letter would have been rare and expensive in 6th century Gaul.

The tenor of Anthimus's advice is interesting, not only for the fact that it implies that a rich Gaul had access to a surprising variety of foods (including pistachio nuts!) but also for what a healthy diet might be deemed to include and what modes of food preparation were deemed best. A few examples will have to suffice:

At this point I will explain how bacon may be eaten to the best effect, for there is no way that I can pass over this Frankish delicacy. If it has been simply roasted in the same way as a joint of meat, the fat drains into the fire and the bacon becomes dry, and whoever eats it is harmed and is not benefitted; it also produces bad humours and causes indigestion. But if bacon that has been boiled and cooled is eaten, it is more beneficial, regulating constipated bowels and being well digested. But it should be boiled well, and if of course it is from a ham, it should be cooked more. None of the rind should be eaten because it is not digested. Bacon fat which is poured over some foods and vegetables when oil is not available is not harmful. But frying brings absolutely no benefit. (p. 55)

* * * *
Whenever hard boiled eggs or eggs cooked in vinegar are used in a sauce, only the yolk should be eaten. For if the white is made hard, it is not digested well, but causes diarrhoea, and rather than being beneficial is harmful. And so beware of hard egg white. Egg yolks that ar runny are agreeable to the body, so my authorities inform me. (p. 65)

* * * *
Cheese, so my authorities tell me, troubles not only sick but also healthy people, particularly those who suffer from problems of the kidneys and those affected with spleen, because it congeals in the kidneys and as a consequence stones are formed.

* * * *
But fresh sweet cheese which is unsalted is suitable for healthy people. However, if it is extremely fresh it is good to dip it in honey. (p. 79)

Overall, Grant's book is a fascinating look at what constituted "healthy" and what constituted less than healthy foods, cooking and eating habits during that period when classical Roman learning was beginning to give way to the medieval world. I recommend it for any Roman scholar or medievalist.

Grant, Mark, ed. Anthimus. De Observatione Ciborum: On the Observance of Foods. (Prospect Books (UK), August 30, 2007). ISBN-10: 1903018528. ISBN-13: 978-1903018521.

The Little Book on Culinary Art

2009-12-28T21:25:00.007-05:00

One of my Christmas presents this year is a translation of a peculiar medieval recipe book, Libellus de arte coquinaria, which the editors translate as "The Little Book on Culinary Art."

This work is an interesting curiosity in more ways than one. First, it's the earliest known surviving medieval cookery book; the existing manuscripts appear to be no later than the end of the 13th century C.E. (and may be derived from a lost original that goes back at least to the 12th century).

The provenance of the text is also intriguing. The translation I am reading is based on four surviving manuscripts, known as Codex K, Codex Q, Codex D, and Codex W. Codices K and Q are written in Danish, Codex D in Icelandic, and Codex W in Middle Low German. The first three codices track fairly closely in terms of number and ordering of recipes, while Codex W, though containing a similar list, includes a significant number of recipes that do not appear in the other codices. The editors explain the issues at some length, and provide transcriptions of each codex in its original language, in addition to translating each codex and providing their proposed composite translation.

The final intriguing aspect of Libellus is the content of the recipes themselves. Though they use a similar collection of spices to later medieval recipes, they fall into only three categories: 1) condiments, including recipes for making oils from nuts, and sauce recipes, especially vinegar or wine-based sauces to use with roast meats; 2) pudding or porridge-like mushes made primarily from milk, bread, and eggs to be fed to invalids and sick people; and 3) chicken dishes. The editors state that the presence of chicken dishes is particularly indicative of the book being written for the use of a high-class audience, because chicken meat was then considered a delicacy "for people who do not do physical labor" and thus was eaten mostly by the rich. This impression is confirmed by the use of sugar and other expensive spices and by the presence of sauce recipes for roast meats.

To give the flavor of the type of foods in question, I will provide some sample recipes from each category of the composite translation section:

Take mint, parsley, cinnamon, and pepper, in equal amounts, and grind them all together with vinegar. This sauce is good for three days.

* * * *
Next grind mustard seeds with one-third as much of honey, a tenth part of anise and twice as much cinnamon, and blend it with good vinegar and put it in a cask. It is good for three months.

* * * *
Take fresh milk and crushed wheat bread, beaten egg, and well-ground saffron, and cook until it is thickened. Then put it in a dish and add butter, and sprinkle on powdered cinnamon. This is called "White Mush."

* * * *
Take fresh milk and add to it finely diced crusts of wheat bread, simmer it in a pan, and add well-beaten egg yolks to it. This is called "Kaliis."

* * * *
Take a young hen and boil it with bacon. Cool it, then tear it apart and cook it in a pan with lard, pepper, wine, and salt. These hens are good to eat while they are warm.

* * * *
Take mature hens and cut them in two; heat them in a pot without water on the coals. Add to their broth parsley, mint, pepper, lard, vinegar, and salt, and cook it in this. These are "Chickens in Brueth."

Amazon has the book, and you can probably order it through any major bookstore, but it may also be possible to obtain it through inter-library loan if your library doesn't have it. Here is the identifying information:

Libellus De Arte Coquinaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies Vol. 222). Edited and translated by Rudolf Grewe and Constance B. Hieatt. (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, Arizona, July 2001). ISBN-10: 0866982647. ISBN-13: 978-0866982641.

The Reason For This Blog.

2009-12-27T18:29:00.003-05:00

Welcome to my new blog!

Those readers who may be familiar with my historic costuming blog, Loose Threads, may wonder why I'm starting a blog about historic food.

There are several reasons. One is that I felt an urge to begin, not just another blog, but a blog empire, spanning different interests of mine. Another is that I'm generally interested in the material culture of the past--and what could be a more important piece of a society's material culture than food and the implements of its preparation and consumption?

A third reason is that I love reading recipes, and have ever since I was a little kid. I could get a good idea of the taste of a dish from a recipe, and the effort of doing so made for a pleasant bit of practical fantasy. As I got older, I became interested in truly unusual foods, first foods from other countries, and, eventually, foods from earlier times as well as exotic places. I realized that I have quite a few books on these subjects in my library, and just writing about them and what I've learned from them may provide me with material for this blog for quite a while.

Don't assume from all of this, however, that I'm a particularly good cook, or even an avid one. I do know how to cook the basics. I can scramble or fry eggs, make passable pork chops, and turn out an acceptable stir fry. I have been known to bake, and my baked goods have turned out reasonably well. I can make acceptable salads. I own two crock-pots, and they get a workout fairly often making roasts, soups and stews.

But I learned long ago that the fun I get out of cooking--and the enjoyment I get from eating the results--is swamped by the dismal prospect of having to clean up the pots, pans and other resulting mess. In short, I get much more fun out of reading about food than I do from making it, or even from eating it! So although people are welcome to post cooking and other food-related advice, don't expect me to have tons of advice on offer in return!

So that is the nature and scope of my interest in food and food history. Let's see where it all goes.