Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Make more jam

Possibly in response to the previous post about ecological entrepreneurs, a reader recommends The Jamlady Cookbook, by Beverly Ellen Schoonmaker Alfeld. ((That’s not a typo; there’s no space in the title, which is why I am giving full details of the author’s name.)) I haven’t seen it, but it contains advice and recipes for using every conceivable type of fruit. Maybe it will inspire others to become micro-entrepreneurs, although my understanding is that in Europe at any rate, if you propose to prepare food for sale, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to do so legally.

One thing that has struck me on recent jaunts through the Italian countryside had been the profusion of fluffy white flowers on the elder (Sambucus nigra) bushes. Of course, the Italians make Sambuca from elder, though I can detect almost no elderflower or elderberry flavour in there, only the anise note of licorice, its other main ingredient (beside alcohol). But they do not seem to know about either elderflower champagne or elderflower cordial. I must put them to rights. Maybe they do know elderflower fritters; I’ve been unable to find out. Here’s just the book to help: The Elder in history, myth and cookery, from the ever-wonderful Prospect Books.

While we’re on the subject of books for this sort of thing, I have two stand-bys, admittedly unused for the past few years as I have not had anywhere to use them. One is Putting Food By, by Ruth Hertzberg, Beatrice Vaughan and Janet Greene. If it isn’t in there, it isn’t worth doing. The other is an astonishing book from Britain’s old Agriculture and Food Research Council (when such things mattered). Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables contains a good amount of sensible advice and practical recipes.

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EU puts Trust in Sheep

A new Consortium to study heritage sheep breeds across Europe got off the ground recently with a meeting in Yorkshire, England. The meeting came at the end of a project set up by the European Union, although I confess I have found it very difficult to find out more. Help, if you can.

Heritage breeds are not necessarily rare, but they are often geographically isolated and that can put them at risk. After the most recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in England man thousand Herdwicks were dead in England, and blue tongue threatened the Mergelland sheep of the Netherlands. The project will study threats and how to conserve and make use of sheep breeds. According to Amanda Carson, of the Sheep Trust, who is leading the new European consortium, “the information we gather will also inform policy-makers, nationally and at European level, about the best way to look after our farm animal genetic resources”.

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Wheat “blends” out-perform monocultures

This is astonishing. Luigi said that a dominant meta-narrative in our circles is that selection and breeding displace diversity. Another is that well-bred monocultures improve yields. There’s always been an opposing point of view, most closely associated with the name of Professor Martin Wolfe. Now no less a leviathan than the United States Department of Agriculture seems to agree.

In a ground-breaking experiment, USDA scientist Christina Cowger made mixtures — blends — of two or more wheat varieties and planted them in experimental plots in North Carolina. The results?

The blends outyielded the pure varieties by an average of 2.3 bushels per acre. … That’s a 3.2-percent yield advantage. Blends and pure varieties did not differ in test weight or quality across environments, and blends were either beneficial or neutral with respect to diseases.

Blends are also more stable from year to year, a fact that may be behind farmers taking matters into their own hands: 10 to 15 per cent of the wheat area of Kansas and Washington states was planted to mixtures over the past four years.

I’m looking forward to seeing the full published paper.

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Separating the cows from the goats

Some lactose intolerant people drink goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk because it is more digestible. Turns out they could be at risk of vitamin A deficiency. Well, not really. But a recent French study that compared farmhouse cheeses made from cow’s milk and goat’s milk discovered that chevres contained no beta carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. Vive la difference.

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A prickly question

Carciofi

Dealing with a Carciofo alla Giudea I seldom wrestle also with the more fundamental existential question of what exactly an artichoke is. A flower, of course, although for the most part one is eating bracts and the receptacle. A thistle, too. But beyond that, I have to confess I have never really considered relationships among the various varieties of artichoke nor between the artichoke and its obvious cousin the cardoon (where one eats the blanched petiole, preferably in a tasty bechamel sauce).

Real taxonomists, of course, consider this sort of question all the time. And by and large they have concluded that in the genus Cynara the cultivated artichoke is C. scolymus, with cardoon — wild and cultivated — in a separate species, C. cardunculus. Then again, maybe they all belong to C. cardunculus. And how did they evolve? As crops, artichoke and cardoon are pretty recent, only a couple of thousand years old at most. Which wild species were they selected from?

I need concern myself with these prickly issues no more. A recent paper ((G. Sonnante et al. (2007) On the origin of artichoke and cardoon from the Cynara gene pool as revealed by rDNA sequence variation. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 54: 483-495. DOI – 10.1007/s10722-006-9199-9)) from the Institute of Plant Genetics in Bari is clear: artichokes and wild and cultivated cardoons belong to a single species, C. cardunculus. How exactly they evolved is less clear. Cardoon and artichoke were domesticated separately and independently, the artichoke around 2000 years ago and the cardoon 1000 years later “at the beginning of the second millennium AD”. Where all this happened is still mysterious. Artichoke’s origins are probably to the east, while the cardoon was domesticated in northern italy, southern France and Spain. But some of the wild “cardoons” of Spain, which differ considerably from those in the eastern Mediterranean, might be feral artichokes.

All of which is delicious. But beyond knowing more about artichoke and cardoon, these findings should also feed into the rational conservation of the species’ biodiversity, being undertaken thanks to a euros 4 million project in Italy ((For which we thank the photograph above.)).