Not-Cheese.

When is a cheese not a cheese? I became puzzled during my research for Menus From History when I came across fromage on several otherwise scrupulously observant bills of fare for dinners taken during Lent. Scrupulously observant Christians of the past were expected to abstain from all animal products the forty days of Lent – and at many periods there were secular penalties too, for breaking the rules.


Historically the word cheese could also mean something compressed or moulded or shaped like a cheese. In the words of John Pinkerton, the author of Recollections of Paris, in the Years 1802-5, “… fromage at Paris is a lax term for any substance compressed. Thus a fromage d’Italie is a Bologna sausage and a fromage glacé is a kind of ice.”

I don’t know of any other references to Bologna sausage that describe it in this way, and suspect it was not universal. Even in Pinkerton’s time I would suspect that most travellers who ordered fromage d’Italie would have expected a nice slice of Gorgonzola or something, not a slice of sausage.

The best known form of non-cheese cheese today is probably that made from fruit pulp – such as the quince paste we eat with real cheese, or the damson cheese we met in a previous post – a form that would certainly have been allowed during Lent.  A form highly unlikely to be found on a modern menu is head cheese – otherwise known as brawn (or souse, or collared head). The name seems to be American in origin, and seems to have appeared sometime in the nineteenth century. The explanation is obvious, of course, the cheese being made from the head and other relatively scrappy sources of meat.

Occasionally on a modern menu we might find a bavarois or bavaroise – a sort of custard or flavoured cream set with gelatin. It was once more commonly called Bavarian Cream or Bavarian Cheese, or even Bavarian Cream Cheese.

I give you two interesting variations on this theme. The first is for a fromage glacé (iced cheese) which, interestingly, the author indicates is English in style, presumably because of the well-known love of the nineteenth century English for iced and moulded puddings. The second is from the seventeenth century and would make a fine accompaniment to a dessert of fresh fruit.

Fromages Aux Epingles ou à’l Anglaise.
This fromage is called épingle, because the cream only receives the first icing; it is put quite liquid into the mould, and is neither to be stirred or worked; thus it will form in threads of ice; these are called épingles. All sorts of creams, &c., can be served thus when not boiled, for if boiled they will not answer
Manner Of Preparing It:
Make a cream with any fruit you like; when well mixed put into a mould à fromage, and put this mould in ice well pounded, and mixed with salt or saltpetre; let it remain three or four hours without stirring or working, only taking care it is well surrounded with ice, then serve. There will be threads of ice on the cream called epingles
French confectionary adapted for English families, by Frances Crawford (1853)

[épingle translates, according to Google, as pin]

Almond-Cheese.
Take Almonds beaten fine, make a Sack-Posset made only with Sack and Cream, take off the Curd and mingle it with the beaten Almonds, set it on a Chafing-dish of Coals and put some double refined Sugar to it with a sufficient quantity of Rose-Water, then in a Pye-Plate fashion it into the form of a Cheese; put it into a Dish, and scrape a little Sugar over it, and when it is cold, serve it up.
From William Salmon’s Household Companion (1695)


Quotation for the Day …

Cheese when given with a sparing hand is wholesome.
Aphorism from the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum (the School of Health at Salerno, about 12th or 13th century)

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Rough and Icy.

April 7 ...

The New York Tribune made mention of granita on this day in 1887, in an article which explained that ‘granites … must be frozen without much beating, or even much stirring, as the design is to have a rough, icy substance.’ Mark Twain knew of granita a couple of decades earlier . In Innocents Abroad (1867) he described the scene in Venice, where people sat at small tables ‘smoking and taking granita (a first cousin to ice-cream)’. Ice-cream’s other cousin is sorbet, or sherbert, and the desirable texture for sorbet is smoother than granita but not as creamy as ice-cream.

The Italians made these frozen delights their own, and then took them with them wherever they went in the world, so the world can be forgiven for thinking them Italian. And maybe they are. But their origin was in the East. The first incarnation was what the West came to call sherbert or charbe or zerbet or several other interpretations of the Turkish/Arabic word for drink. The fruity drink was not originally chilled (ice being hard to come by at that time in that part of the world), but of course this was done when possible. By a happy coincidence the word is similar to the Italian sorbire meaning to drink, so perhaps this facilitated the Italian adoption of the concept. Of course the Italians were way ahead in things culinary during the Renaissance, and wondrous frozen creations were a feature of many of the extravagant banquets held by the obscenely rich and famous of the period.

As for granita, the word comes from the same origin as the word granite (as in the rock type) which refers to its grainy or granular (rough) texture.

We have ice-cream machines and freezers nowadays to make the job virtually fool-proof, but the earliest granita and sorbet makers had to rely on the ice and salt churn to make their sorbets and granitas – or ‘water-ices’ as they were called.

Here is a recipe from 1807, from The Complete Confectioner: Or, The Whole Art of Confectionary Made Easy ... by Frederick Nutt. It sounds wonderful. We don’t use Seville oranges nearly enough.

Seville Orange Water Ice.
Take the rind of two Seville oranges off very fine and thin ; squeeze them into a bason with one lemon; add two gills of syrup* and half a pint of water; pass them through a sieve and freeze them rich.

[* My note: a standard granita syrup is made in the ratio of 1:1 sugar and water: stir over heat until the sugar dissolves, then boil for a few seconds, then take off the heat and cool]

Tomorrow’s Story …

Bon Voyage.

Quotation for the Day …

Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d’ at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips. Calvin Trillin, Third Helping.

The Colour of Food.

Today, February 23rd …

The Orange Free State was handed to the Afrikaners on this day in 1854 at the Bloemfontein Convention. One hundred years to the day later a dinner was held at the Maitland Hotel in Bloemfontein to celebrate the anniversary.

The menu was:

Grapefruit cocktail.
Eeufees Groentesop.
Rainbow Trout Meunière.
Asparagus Hollandaise.
Roast Spring Chicken with Bacon and Mushrooms.
Roast Saddle of Lamb with Mint Sauce
Potatoes Green peas Cauliflower.
Strawberries and Ice-cream
Fancy Pastries Fruit Cheese
Coffee.

I am struck by how singularly uninspiring this meal was, considering the national significance of the event it was intended to mark. It was a very generic 1950’s idea of fine dining, and the menu could have just as easily been presented anywhere in Britain, Europe, or the Americas. The one exception amongst the dishes, the only one apparently giving a nod to nationalism is the mysterious dish Eeufees Groentesop.

Afrikaans was not taught to me in the Yorkshire of my childhood, so I am sadly deficient in the language. I am however, more or less reliably informed that the Eeufees Groentesop translates as ‘Centenary Vegetable Soup’. Why this one exception? Why not all the dishes given in Afrikaans? More to the point, why not a menu of Afrikaaner dishes? What rule is this exception proving? And how many other questions does this beg?

The only answer I can come up with which may serve to answer all of the questions is: lack of imagination on the part of the organisers or the chefs.

If it was not to be a meal of Afrikaaner food (which would surely have been most delicious as well as most appropriate), why not Orange food? A colour theme would have fitted nicely, and might have been a lot more fun. The grapefruit would have been allowed in immediately, and the soup could have been made with yellow-orange vegetables. A fishy dish with saffron, and of course duck with orange would have been perfect main dishes.

There would have been no shortage of dessert choices as oranges lend themselves best of all to sweet dishes – which set me thinking that an afternoon tea party would have been a most elegant alternative to a stodgy, stuffy dinner. In Breast Cancer week in October we considered holding a ‘Pink Tea’, and discovered that the idea was not new - trendy ladies of leisure held colour-themed afternoon teas way back in the 1880’s.

From the book that gave us the Pink Tea idea, Aunt Babette's" Cook Book: Foreign and domestic receipts for the household: A vaulable collection of receipts and hints for the housewife, many of which are not to be found elsewhere. (Cincinnati, 1889) here are some ideas suitable for an Orange Afternoon Tea.

Orange Fritters.
Yelks of four eggs beaten with four tablespoonfuls of sugar, stir into this the juice of half a lemon, and just enough flour to thicken like a batter; add the beaten whites, and dip in one slice of orange at a time, take up with a large kitchen spoon and lay in the hot butter and fry a nice brown. Sprinkle pulverized sugar on top.

Orange Cake.
Beat light the yelks of five eggs with two cups of pulverized sugar, add juice of a large orange and part of the peel grated, and half a cupful of cold water and two cups of flour, sifted three times. Add a teaspoonful of baking powder in last sifting and add last the stiff-beaten whites of three eggs. Bake in layers, and spread the following icing between and on top: Beat the whites of three eggs stiff, add the juice and peel of one orange and sugar enough to stiffen. Very nice.

Orange Ice.
Take six oranges; grate the peel of three and squeeze out the juice of all the oranges. Add the grated peel to the juice, also the juice of two lemons, one pint of water and one pint of sugar. Strain into the can and freeze.

Orangeade.
Take four large, juicy oranges and six tablespoonfuls of sugar. Squeeze the oranges upon the sugar, add a very little water and let them stand for fifteen minutes; strain and add pounded ice and water.

Monday’s Story …

A Simple and Excellent Breakfast Food.

This Day, Last Year …

It was the birthday of Cesar Ritz.

Quotation for the Day …

"And every day when I've been good,
I get an orange after food."
Robert Louis Stevenson.