Category: Cooking

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The first, best, gardening manual

William Rubel is talking about how a French garden manual, translated into English by my hero John Evelyn, is the first really useful gardening book, and is still relevant. If you were to bring together the cookbook literature, the herb books, and the gardening books of the 18th century you would find described the golden age of vegetable gardening and cooking. “The lettuce had a poetic space around it,” and this is increasingly relevant as we move to local, fresh sourcing and eating.

Andrew Marvell’s The Garden is perfection.

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

We tend the garden, “and the poetry of Eden was on the plate, of everyone who at a vegetable”. The English way of cooking was green and tender, and the French way was green and crisp.

The French intensive system of raised beds was not invented in France. What the French added was an unlimited amount of fermented manure, and hot beds. “The French remade the world, they were masters of the seasons, they had asparagus in November.”

“If you were a certain kind of snob, you would serve asparagus in November, but if you were interested in taste, you would serve frost-kissed broccoli.”

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Utica greens

Utica is a town in upper New York state where, some time ago, a dish called Utica Greens started appearing on the menu of Italian American restaurants and on home tables. How did it get there? Naomi Guttman and Roberta Krueger are telling us. Chefs say they invented it, and then households adopted it. Cooks say it was a home dish that chefs adopted.

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Utica used to be an industrial powerhouse, with lots of Italians, then crashed, now growing again with new immigrants from Asia. The researchers started talking to old time Italians from the neighbourhood. Many were from Frosinone, south of Rome, and almost all had packed vegetable gardens behind their houses. They imported their food culture, with very strong connections between gardening and cooking. Old informants all talked about fried greens as a part of summer. For them, the dish went from table to restaurant. Some informants said that it went to the restaurants with the third generation immigrants, when the guys who played golf forgot how to cook, and their wives forgot how to cook, “they went to restaurants to eat what they remembered”.

The chefs had a different view. They said it started as a special, not on the menu, then appeared on on the menu at one restaurant, The Chesterfield. And from there, it spread.

‘Mkay.

The audience is saying that there’s nothing special about this recipe, and that everybody knows someone else in Italy who does this, or at least something similar …

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Carrot cheese

Ursula Heinzelmann is writing a book on artisanal cheeses of Germany, and was “very happy” to discover Möhrenleibchen, a mild cheese flavoured with carrot juice, that “allowed her to present a paper” here on vegetables. This cheese has been a huge success. In the old days, Tacitus described the big butch uncivilized german preference for fresh meat and crude cheese, essentially curdled milk. That remains the preferred type of cheese in Germany, made form pressed, salted fresh curds. “When I grew up, cheese was just a plentiful basic alternative to cold cuts, it wasn’t really flavourful.” Some background on the anti-progress philosophies of Rudolf Steiner and the biodynamic moves to an integrated agriculture, and that is the basis now and locus of the interest in artisanal cheese-making. But cheese-making is also a reaction to the low income from liquid milk. One woman, Eva Bauer (?) at Dottenfeld started the whole thing off, making lots of mistakes and encountering a lot of skepticism. Officialdom was also very dismissive. “Anthroposophists don’t mind if people look at them and think they are quite crazy.” Her husband had been breeding a carrot for taste, and the carrot juice is added to the cheese. “It speaks very low, you have to listen to it. It doesn’t taste of carrots, but it has a very special fruity taste to it.”

I’m losing the plot here. But now we’re into the vegetarians who don’t know — “or don’t want to know” — that milk and cheese are possible only because animals are born and have to die, and this plainly named carrot cheese is attractive because it takes the cheese closer to vegan than to vegetarian.

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Vegetable Culture: Q&A

Claudia Roden explains the role of meat in the middle Eastern diet. Important, but rare. Favas and molokhia remain the main subsistence foods in Egypt.

Sri Owen asks whether they have tempeh in China. Fuchsia Dunlop has never seen it, but will look out for it.

Buddhist monasteries avoid the five pungent foods (alliums) possibly because they are smelly and could disturb meditation. Hindus and Jains strictly ban them, Jains because they do not eat anything that grows under the ground. Now the spectre of the “raised sexual energies” of monks is brought up.

Raymond Blanc asks about food and health in China. Fuchsia replies that food fades into medicine, and all foods are medicinal. There are also foods that are more medicine than sustenance.

Eliabeth Luard says that when chillies came to Europe it was associated with protection against malaria. She says that Hungarian workers on the Panama Canal, who ate lots of chillies, did not get malaria. ???

Someone’s mother, when she bought her first pressure cooker, decided to cook spinach in it, “and it all came out through the hole”. Are there cultural differences in the way different cultures cook the same vegetable?

A woman warns that chillies will not protect against malaria, because it is transmitted by mosquitoes. Then she bangs on about sickle cell, not very accurately.

Coffee!

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Exploring a Sarajevo market

I spent an interesting hour or so with Elcio exploring an open-air fruit and vegetable market in central Sarajevo last week. I think it is the very same market which was tragically attacked during the war with much loss of life. No sign of that now, thankfully, except for a memorial to the victims.

You can see some pictures of the fruit and vegetable diversity on display on my Flickr page. Here I just want to point out two curiosities. Or at least they were to me. Here’s the first.

This lady is selling necklaces of dried, perhaps immature but certainly small, okra fruits, called bamia in Bosnian (and indeed in Arabic for that matter). They are soaked in water and vinegar for a few minutes, then added to fried onions and meat to make a local stew. Or that’s what a lady buying some told us. I bought some and will try it. I’d never heard of okra being used in this dried form.

The second thing that came as a surprise to me was this fruit. Sorry I don’t have a decent picture of it being sold in the market.

Clearly some kind of Physalis, perhaps P. alkekengi? It was being sold a few fruits at a time, so probably for medicinal purposes (LATER: or as ornaments?) rather than food. I couldn’t communicate with the lady selling it, the only one in the market. Any ideas?