Category: Cooking

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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?

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Tasteful breeding

A couple of days ago the Evil Fruit Lord complained — a little bit — about an article in a Ugandan newspaper which extolled the virtues of traditional crops and varieties over new-fangled hybrids. While not doubting the many attractive qualities of landraces and heirloom varieties, he quite rightly pointed out that there’s nothing to stop modern varieties and hybrids tasting just as good:

I get really sick of the tendency to talk about plant breeding as a process which makes crops into finicky, crappy tasting garbage in exchange for yield. You absolutely can create varieties which taste as good (or better) than traditional varieties, produce more, and resist pests. In fact, plant breeding is the only way to get to that.

Now there’s an article by Arthur Allen in Smithsonian magazine which basically says — not very surprisingly, I suppose — that both those things have happened in the tomato:

Flavor … has not been a goal of most breeding programs. While importing traits like disease resistance, smaller locules, firmness and thicker fruit into the tomato genome, breeders undoubtedly removed genes influencing taste. In the past, many leading tomato breeders were indifferent to this fact. Today, things are different. Many farmers, responding to consumer demand, are delving into the tomato’s preindustrial past to find the flavors of yesteryear.

Allen has a good word to say for the wild relatives:

The architect of the modern commercial tomato was Charles Rick, a University of California geneticist. In the early 1940s, Rick, studying the tomato’s 12 chromosomes, made it a model for plant genetics. He also reached back into the fruit’s past, making more than a dozen bioprospecting trips to Latin America to recover living wild relatives. There is scarcely a commercially produced tomato that didn’t benefit from Rick’s discoveries. The gene that makes such tomatoes easily fall off the vine, for instance, came from Solanum cheesmaniae, a species that Rick brought back from the Galapagos Islands. Resistances to worms, wilts and viruses were also found in Rick’s menagerie of wild tomatoes.

And he also plugs genebanks:

…we can take comfort in the tomato’s continuing, explosive diversity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a library of 5,000 seed varieties, and heirloom and hybrid seed producers promote thousands more varieties in their catalogs.

Not quite sure where he got that number, as the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center seems to have about 3,500 accessions, but anyway.

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Tules to the rescue

The U.S. Geological Survey is growing tules and cattails on about 15 acres on Twitchell Island, about 5.7 square miles of rich but fragile peat soil 30 miles south of Sacramento.

Not particularly inspiring at first glance, but then I googled “tule,” a word I hand’t come across before. I figured cattails would be some kind of Thypha. Tules turn out to be types of sedges, although some people seem to use the words interchangeably, or indeed together. Anyway, tules have an interesting ethnobotany in the American Southwest, along with other geophytes.