Mock Food No. 3

April 16

The very strict dietary rules decreed for hundreds of years by the Christian Church were a very powerful inspiration for fake food. At some times in history almost half the days of the year were ‘fish’ days. There were multiple and overlapping reasons for this. The prevailing idea was that ‘flesh’ food stimulated bodily heat and lust, whereas fish, which came from the water was cooling, including cooling to the passions. The fact that fish do not have an observable sex life enhanced the belief that it was more suitable for times of religious observance when distracting thoughts were best kept to a minimum – and for those in religious orders, that meant all the time.

There were economic and political reasons too: encouraging fish consumption preserved livestock on the land, and encouraging the fishing industry meant the availability of a large cohort of men with sailing experience who could then be sent on voyages of discovery or used to supply the Navy.

The proscriptions led to the invention of some wonderful fish dishes, and some artful substitutes for meat, but the best fake food was invented for Lent. During Lent, all animal products were forbidden. Essentially it was a vegan diet, although the word was not coined until very recent times.

No milk, no butter, no eggs. What to do?

Make almond milk, that was step number one. Huge amounts of it were made in medieval times, and the mind boggles at the work involved in pounding vast quantities of almonds without the assistance of food processors – but kitchen labour was cheap in those days, I suppose.

Eggs? No problem. The following recipe is taken from the Harleian MS (circa 1430). It is difficult to follow, but essentially says to ‘blow’ the eggs (pinhole each end and … blow the contents out) then re-fill it with a ground almond mixture, half of which is coloured yellow with saffron (and cinnamon) and placed in the middle to mimic the yolk.

Eyroun in lentyn [Eggs in Lent].
Take Eyroun, & blow owt þat ys with-ynne atte oþer ende; þan waysshe þe schulle clene in warme Water; þan take gode mylke of Almaundys, & sette it on þe fyre; þan take a fayre canvas, & pore þe mylke þer-on, & lat renne owt þe water; þen take it owt on þe cloþe, & gader it to-gedere with a platere; þen putte sugre y-now þer-to; þan take þe halvyndele, & colour it with Safroun, a lytil, & do þer-to pouder Canelle; þan take & do of þe whyte in the neþer ende of þe schulle, & in þe myddel þe ȝolk, & fylle it vppe with þe whyte; but noȝt to fulle, for goyng ouer; þan sette it in þe fyre & roste it, & serue forth.

Butter? Almonds again to the rescue. The following recipe is from a Neopolitan recipe collection, Cuoco Napoletano, via Terence Scully’s excellent translation.

Butiro Contrafata.
Get a pound and a half of blanched, well ground almonds; get half a beaker of good rosewater and strain the almonds - if that rosewater is not enough, use however much you need so that the amount of almonds can be strained; then, so the almond milk will bind well, get a little starch, a little saffron if you want, and fine sugar, and lay this mixture into a mold as if were butter; like that it is good to eat.
[Scully, Terence. Cuoco Napoletano. The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: A Critical Edition and English Translation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000].

Tomorrow’s Story …

Mock Food No. 4

Quotation for the Day …

Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarrelling. William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from Romeo and Juliet.

Good Friday Buns

Today, April 6th …

Hot cross buns are traditionally eaten on this day wherever there is a historically Christian culture. The cross is intended to symbolise the crucifixion, and in their purest form the buns have no butter or milk or eggs, as befits the season of Lent.

As with so many traditional foods, a large number of myths abound, and these range from the amusing to the ridiculous. One story insists that the buns date back to pagan rituals, but as the first recorded us of the phrase ‘cross buns’ was in 1733, this seems a tad unlikely.

Some foods never date, and sweet, fruity bread buns are one of them. I give you this recipe from the ever-reliable Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (circa 1870’s). Vary them at your whim. I believe some people even put choc-chips in them.

Good Friday Buns (commonly called Hot Cross Buns)
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into two pounds of flour. Add a pinch of salt; then mix a wine-glassful of fresh, thick yeast with a pint and a half of warmed milk, and stir these into the flour till it forms a light batter. Put the batter in a warm place to rise. When sufficiently risen, work into it half a pound of currants, half a nutmeg, grated, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace. Knead these well into the dough, make it up into buns, and place them on buttered baking tins. Make a cross on them with the back of a knife, brush a little clarified butter over the top, and let them stand a quarter of an hour before the fire. Bake in a good oven.

Monday’s Story …

Next week as befits the Easter Season, we will have an Egg Theme. We will eat our way through five centuries of Egg Recipes, starting with the 16th C on Monday.

Kosher Solomon Gundy.

Today, December 13th …

One of the earliest restaurant reviewers was Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis, who ate his way around London at the end of the nineteenth-century. He compiled his reviews in a book called ‘Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in London’, and in it he describes his meal at a kosher restaurant in Bloomfield St called Goldstein’s on this day in 1899. He explained his choice thus:

'The raison d’être of the dinner was this: Thinking of untried culinary experiences, I told one of the great lights of the Jewish community that I should like some day to eat a “kosher” dinner at a typical restaurant, and he said that the matter was easily enough arranged; and by telegram informed me one day last week that dinner was ordered for that evening at Goldstein’s restaurant in Bloomfield Street, London Wall, and that I was to call for him in the City at six.'

The menu was:

HORS-D'OEUVRE.

Smoked Salmon. Solomon Gundy. Olives.

SOUPS

Frimsell. Matsoklese. Pease and beans.

FISH.

Brown stewed carp. White stewed gurnet.Fried soles. Fried plaice.

ENTRÉES.

Roast veal (white stew). Filleted steak (brown stew).

POULTRY.

Roast capon. Roast chicken. Smoked beef. Tongue.

VEGETABLES.

Spinach. Sauerkraut.Potatoes. Cucumbers. Green salad.

SWEETS.

Kugel. Stewed prunes. Almond pudding. Apple staffen.

Even this enthusiastic trencherman was a little fazed by the quantity of food:

'When I looked at the above I groaned aloud. Was it possible, I thought, that any human being could eat a meal of such a length and yet live? I looked at my two companions, but they showed no signs of terror, so I took up knife and fork and bade the waiter do his duty.'

The Colonel manages to perform his own duty admirably, but finishes by saying: ‘I think that a “kosher” dinner, if this is a fair specimen, is a succession of admirably cooked dishes. But an ordinary man should be allowed a week in which to eat it.’

Like all good reviewers, the Colonel looked upon his dining experiences as an opportunity to learn. At the outset he says 'I had asked to have everything explained to me.' His first puzzle came very early in the meal with the “Solomon Gundy”, which sounds unnervingly like a human name. Now, although I am not Jewish, I am quietly confident that human flesh is not, and has never been kosher. So what then, is “Solomon Gundy’? The Colonel says:

‘Of the hors-d’oeuvre, Solomon Gundy, which had a strange sound to me, was a form of pickled herring, excellently appetising.’

In other words it is a variant spelling of salmagundy (or salad-magundy, salmogundy, salmagundi ….) – a piece of information which takes us marginally closer to knowledge but still a long way from wisdom. The OED does seem to have trouble with a lot of food words, and this one is yet another with ‘obscure origins’, although an Italian parentage is suspected. It gives the definition as ‘A dish composed of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions with oil and condiments.’

There are many recipes for salmagundy in seventeenth and eighteenth century books, and just about anything goes as far as ingredients are concerned, although herrings and anchovies do seem to predominate as they did in the Colonel’s meal.

The following recipe from 1764, is from English Housewifery Exemplified by Elizabeth Moxon. She specifies it as being suitable for Lent, but it would seem to the non-Jewish me to be also entirely suitable for a kosher meal. I eagerly await comment from Jewish readers.

To make SOLOMON GUNDY to eat in Lent
Take five or six white herrings, lay them in water all night, boil them as soft as you would do for eating, and shift them in the boiling to take out the saltness; when they are boiled take the fish from the bone, and mind you don’t break the bone in pieces, leaving on the head and tail; take the white part of the herrings, a quarter of a pound of anchovies, a large apple, a little onion shred fine, or shalot, and a little lemon-peel, shred them all together, and lie them over the bones on both sides, in the shape of a herring; then take off the peel of a lemon very very thin, and cut it in long bits, just as it will reach over the herrings; you must lie this peel over every herring pretty thick. Garnish your dish with a few pickled oysters, capers, and mushrooms, if you have any; so serve them up.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Feeding the Sick.

A Previous Story for this Day …

The story on this day in 2005 was about Kosher banquet was held during the Colonial Conference in England in May 1907.

Quotation for the Day …

To remember a successful salad is generally to remember a successful dinner; at all events, the perfect dinner necessarily includes the perfect salad. George Ellwanger Pleasures of the Table (1902)

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The Baronet’s Egg.

Today, January 27th …

This day in 1860 was the birthday of Sir George Sitwell, father of the writers Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, and a superb example of an aristocratic eccentric in a country that excels in them. It might be truer, but less kind, to say his hold on reality was tenuous all his life. When he was a child travelling with his nurse, he announced to another passenger "I am Sir George Sitwell, baronet. I am four years old and the youngest baronet in England." Like all true eccentrics, he never achieved the capacity to see himself as others saw him.

Aristocratic birth and wealth facilitate eccentricity of course, as they allows the pursuit of bizarre whims and strange projects, and George had many of them. He was a prolific writer (although only one book was published), genealogist, antiquarian, and inventor of all sorts of oddities such as a musical toothbrush, a small gun for shooting wasps, and a convenient travel food which he called “The Sitwell Egg”. The “yolk” was made of smoked meat, the “white” made of rice, and a shell of synthetic lime. He supposedly arrived unannounced at the office of Sir Gordon Selfridge, wearing his usual silk hat and frock coat and saying “I am Sir George Sitwell, and I have brought my egg with me”. Sir Gordon may have been amused, but he was not impressed: Selfridges did not subsequently stock the Sitwell egg.

George firmly believed that everything was done better in the past, so perhaps his inspiration came from one of the “illusion foods” of Medieval times, such as this Lenten Egg from a fifteenth century English manuscript.

Eggs in Lent.
Take eggs, and blow out that is within at the other end; then wash the shell clean in warm water; then take good milk of almonds, and set it on the fire; then take a fair canvas, & pour the milk thereon, & let run out the water; then take it out of the cloth, &; gather it together with a platter; then put sugar enough thereto; then take half of it, & color it with saffron, a little, & powdered cinnamon; then take & do the white in the nether end of the shell, & in the middle the yolk, & fill it up with the white; but not too full, then set it in the fire & roast it, & serve forth.

On Monday: Dinner with the Crown Prince.