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 …

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.

Jim Godfrey on the Potato

The challenges for potato production in the Developing World.

It is a delight to talk to people who are interested in food. My customers are only interested that they get delivery on time, the specification that they require, on time, and at the right price.

One billion people eat potatoes every day. They are good to eat and nutritious.

Chuno and tunta are “the original processed food that can be stored”. Freeze dried, and tunta is from very high Andes, from bitter potatoes, high in glycoalkaloids. After being freeze dried they are washed in streams to remove the glycoalkaloids and make them safe to eat. “However that was discovered, I do not know.”

History of the potato. Same old same old. Three million Irish lived on the produce of 1 acre or less ((What can this mean?)) of largely one variety, Lumper.

Major shift in past years, such that more potatoes are now being grown in the developing world than in the industrial world, especially in sub Saharan Africa.

Belarus has the highest consumption in the world.

32 food deficit, low income countries that are hit very hard when supplies are tight, which they are now.

Potato has greatest potential to increase supply, 4.5% versus other major food crops growing at 1.5% per year.

Talks a bit about CIP and the rest of the CGIAR centres. Erk! His map is out of date, showing IPGRI in Rome. And there’s a photo of a smiling Jim Godfrey taking true potato seed into the Global Crop Diversity Trust’s vault in Svalbard.

Explains how CIP maps poverty, agriculture and policy and looks for intersections to decide where to work. Environmental vulnerability and the threats of climate change will affect tropical areas most. Shows reduction of growing season (for potatoes) in Africa, which will also be repeated elsewhere. Need to study mitigation, adaptation and assessment to feed that into policy changes to approach climate change.

Interesting map that shows “physical water scarcity” and “economic water scarcity” separately. What can this mean?

Cost benefit analysis of programmes shows that work on virus-free sweet potato material in one province in China alone has “paid for the whole of the investment in CIP over the past thirty years”.

On biodiversity, talks about reduction of genetic diversity from 1900 to 1970 in wheat, but that CIMMYT has worked specifically to increase that diversity. “Just as well,” because of Ug99, which, he says, could have been disastrous if it had happened in the 1970s.

On to crop genebanks, “a precious resource for future food security”. Not as simple as just shifting varieties about to respond to climate change, because need to adapt to different daylengths etc etc.

Late blight, and the arrival of A2 mating strain. Arrived in 1976, as a result of the drought in Europe, which forced down barriers and allowed in potatoes from Mexico. Salutary lesson about unforeseen consequences of food shortages. Now another strain, blue13 is rampant in Europe.

Native diversity in Peru. Each family keeps roughly 8 varieties, a whole community keeps about 122.

Solanum phureja has a very high iron variety, and other varieties that are very rich in vitamin C.

“Eating is an agricultural act. What we eat defines how we take care of our land.” Wendell Berry.

A slide of diverse local potato chips draws loud ooohs of admiration.

On orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, introduced in Africa, where vitamin A deficiency is a big problem: “We’ve seen a reduction in blindness, a reduction in under-five mortality, a reduction in maternal mortality, and a prolongation of the lives of AIDS sufferers.”

No time for questions.

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!

Vegetable Culture: Fuchsia Dunlop

Deconstructing the Chinese meal, but I’m not picking up the Chinese words. May have to get her book. Fang and Tang? Rice and the stuff used to send the rice home? School meals consist of rice and 7 or 8 vegetables at poor schools and 14 or 15 at posh private schools. Rich tastes from vegetables partially sun dried, rubbed with salt and fermented. Running through the range of things that “the average Chinese peasant” knows about. Soybeans, not good to eat but processed into a huge range of rich-tasting foods full of umami taste; flavour without meat. Whole categories not available in the west, such as water vegetables.

There is no sweet savoury divide in Chinese cuisine.

In ancient Chinese, a word for the rich was meat-eater.

There is a stigma attached to wild vegetables, partly recent because of the great famine of the 1960s. Tension. Posh urbanites go to pseudo-restaurants to eat those peasant foods. Visiting one such place, she asked whether the people ate like this all the time. Oh yes, replied the cook. No you don’t, said her host, you told me that you consider this pig food, but you’re too polite to tell Fuchsia that you consider it pig food..

Modern Buddhist restaurants serve very elaborate fake meat and fish made of vegetables.