Tree Fruit.

The very authoritative British journalist and broadcaster Richard Dimbleby hosted the very authoritative current affairs program Panorama in the 1950’s - it was, naturally, on the BBC – and you cant (or couldn’t, in the 50’s) get any more authoritative than the BBC. On this date in 1957 he reported on the springtime harvest of spaghetti in Switzerland (not such vast spaghetti plantations as in Italy). He described how the growers always had an anxious time in March for fear of frost, which harmed the flavour of the crop, but that thankfully the dreaded ‘spaghetti weevil’ had all but disappeared. He discussed the fact that each strand of spaghetti grew to the same length each year thanks to intense cultivation by growers over many generations. He even showed pictures of the crop being harvested, and the spaghetti strands being laid out to dry.

Many viewers were most intrigued by the story of something that was only familiar to them in cans: some rang in to ask where they might purchase a spaghetti bush, so that they could grow their own. A not insignificant number were not amused in the sort of way that only the British can be not amused when they realise they have been ‘had’. A few of those were apparently BBC staff. Today, he would have been sued for causing embarassmen-stress to his fellow-workers, but the Brits still had their post-war strength of character, and he got away with it. The spoof is still the best-ever April Fool’s joke. Ever.

Just to show that there were a few enlightened souls in the British Isles at that time, I give you a recipe from the wonderfully British Constance Spry Cookery Book (1956). Constance and her colleague Rosemary Hume ran the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London in the ‘50’s, so could be expected to be at the cutting edge of international cuisine.

Spaghetti a la Bolognese.
1 large onion
1 oz. dripping
¼ lb. liver (chicken, calf, or pig)
½ oz flour
1 ½ gills stock
seasoning
a bouquet garni
1 teaspoon concentrated tomato pureé or 1 tablespoon reduced tomato pulp.
1 clove of garlic, crushed with a large pinch of salt.
Freshly ground black pepper
A dash of sherry or Marsala
½ lb spaghetti
a little melted butter
chopped parsley and grated cheese.
Finely chop the onion. Melt the dripping in a sauté pan or shallow saucepan, add the onion and sauter slowly till turning colour, then put in the liver (whole if chicken liver, diced if otherwise) and cook briskly for a few minutes; draw aside. (If chicken liver is used, it must now be removed, sliced, and returned to the pan.) Sprinkle in the flour,mix, pour on the stock, season, and bring to the boil. Add the bouquet, tomato, and clove of garlic, and finish seasoning with some freshly ground black pepper. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until thick and syrupy-looking. Remove the bouquet and add the sherry. Meanwhile cook the spaghetti … and return to the pan, add a little melted butter, cover with a cloth, and leave to stand in a warm place until the sauce is ready. Pile the spaghetti up in a hot dish and pour over the sauce. Seve at once, well dusted with chopped parsley, and with a dish of cheese handed separately.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A Mighty Spread.

Quotation for the Day …

No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention. Christopher Morley

Scrambling.

Today, July 25^th

An English newspaper reported a 'scramble' at an Installation at Windsor on this day in 1771. The exact nature of the ‘Installation’ escapes me at present, and has been filed in the voluminous ‘to research’ pile until voluminous time is available, but it seemed like a mighty big well-planned, if not entirely well-executed event. The ‘scramble’ was not about eggs – or if eggs were present, they were not specifically mentioned. Perhaps they were included in ‘delicacies of every kind’.

At the Installation on the 25^th of July.

Two thousand beds were made in the Castle at Windsor, and two thousand tables were spread on Thursday. There were seventeen kitchens, and fifty cooks in each kitchen, beside other attendants. After dinner on Thursday, at Windsor, the new regulation of the Lord Steward took place about the scramble; as it was thought a better plan of œconomy to carry the victuals to the mob, than to let the mob come to the victuals. Accordingly the windows of the Castle were thrown open, and the provision tossed out to the gaping croud below. A cloud of hams, chickens, pasties, haunches, and delicacies of every kind, with knives, forks, plates, tablecloths, and napkins, their companies, darkened the air. This was succeeded by showers of liquor; some conveyed in bottles, properly corked, but the greater part in rain. The scramble was more diverting than any other part of the preceding farce. You would see one stooping to a fowl and a great ham falling plump upon his back; another, having a fork stuck in his shoulder, and looking up to secure himself from more of the arrows thus flying by day, received a creamed apple-pye full in his face. A beef-eater having lost his cap in the scuffle had his loss repaired by a pasty falling inverted upon his head. A bargeman who had just secured a noble haunch of venison, was retiring as fast as he could with his booty, and ran with it full against the back of Lord --- and made an impression on it so like a gridiron, that all the mob, after they ceased their laughter, cried out, smaok the Merry Andrew.

The use of ‘scramble’ to refer to a culinary technique seems to be a very recent use of the word – the OED gives it as appearing in 1893. Here are a couple of interesting scrambles for you - one with egg, one without, one pre-WW II and one post-war. The first is from The Times of 1939, and the second from a Ministry of Food leaflet in 1947.

Kipper Scramble.
Bring the kippers to the boil in a frying pan just covered with water, and simmer for five minutes. Remove the flesh from the bones and break up with a fork. Now beat up an egg and two tablespoons of milk per kipper. Mix together and season with pepper, and stir the mixture with sufficient butter in a saucepan until it thickens. Serve on buttered toast.

Mince Scramble.
(For 4) 4 oz macaroni; ½ oz dripping; 1 medium-sized onion, chopped, 1 level teaspoon mixed herbs; 1 bay leaf and 4 peppercorns, if possible; 1 lb tomatoes, sliced; 8 oz cooked meat, minced; salt and pepper to taste.
Cook macaroni in boiling salted water until tender. Melt dripping and fry onion, herbs, bay leaf and peppercorns (if used) for 10 mins; add tomatoes and simmer for a further 15 mins. Sieve. Strain macaroni and add to sieved mixture with meat. Season to taste, heat through. Serve with potatoes and a vegetable.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Taking Cider to Lisbon.

Quotation for the Day …

Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time. Chinese proverb, perhaps (but funny, even if it is not a genuine Chinese proverb)

Miss Corson Cooks.

Today, March 13th …

Miss Juliet Corson was born in 1841, and became a librarian when her stepmother insisted she earn her own living at the age of sixteen. Her poor pay and conditions (she had to sleep at the library) gave her a great insight into the difficulties women faced when they had to join the workforce and in particular she developed a great sympathy for the poor.

In the early 1870’s she became involved in the Women's Educational and Industrial Society of New York which offered vocational training for women – and one of the few acceptable occupations was domestic work. In spite of not having any training in it herself she was asked to teach cookery – so she taught herself from books. She must have been a very quick learner and had a natural gift for cooking, because in the space of a few years it was suggested that she open a school.

The school opened in 1876 and had a sliding scale of fees, so that it was affordable for any student. On this day in 1877 she went one better and opened a new department to provide free lessons in “plain cooking” to the daughters and wives of working men. The venture was a success, and Miss Corson became the supreme champion of good nutrition and frugal cookery for the poorer folk.

In August of 1877 she published at her own expence a small book called Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Six, which gave suggested bills of fare and recipes for each day for a week. She allowed charitable organisations to distribute the book free of charge to the “families of workingmen earning less than One Dollar and Fifty Cents, or less, per day”.

The suggested Tuesday menu from her book was:

Breakfast: Broth and bread 10c.
Dinner: Baked Beans 10c
Supper: Macaroni with Cheese 12c.

The dishes will cost a little more to make today, but here are the recipes anyway:

Baked Beans.
Put one pint of dried beans, (cost six cents,) and quarter of a pound of salt pork, (cost four cents,) into two quarts of cold water; bring them to a boil, and boil them slowly for about twenty minutes, then put the beans, with about a teacupful of the water they were boiled int, into an open jar, season them with salt and pepper to taste, and one tablespoonful of molasses, (cost of seasoning one cent, ) lay the pork on the top, and bake two hours, or longer. The dish will cost about ten cents, and is palatable and nutritious. The liquor in which the beans were boiled should be saved, and used next morning as broth, with seasoning and a little fried or toasted bread in it.

Macaroni with Cheese.
Boil half a pound of macaroni, as above, put into a pudding dish in layers, with a quarter of a pound of cheese (cost four cents), grated and mixed between the layers; season it with pepper and salt to taste; put a very little butter and some bread crumbs over it, and brown it in the oven. It will make just as hearty and strengthening a meal as meat, and will cost about twelve cents.

Tomorrow's Story ...

The Authentic Waldorf Salad.

A Previous Story for this Day …

Military Ice-Cream was the topic for the day.

Quotation for the Day …

Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life. Brillat-Savarin.

Macaroni: with cheese?

Today, March 6th …

The American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spent the years from 1853-1857 as United States consul in Liverpool, England. Naturally, he kept notes of his impressions of the people and the country, and on this day he ate aboard the Princeton.

These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the purposes of a dinner; being in fact, noonday dinners, with soup, roast mutton, mutton chops, and macaroni pudding – brandy port and sherry wines….There is a satisfaction in seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and on the whole, so wisely, - trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and so these three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith so long, were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures.

‘Macaroni’ is a problem word for the OED, which finds itself unable to confidently explain its origin. It may come from the Latin for a sort of dumpling, but the Romans may have gotten it from the Greek word for barley-broth, which seems a bit convoluted. In the second half of the seventeenth century the word came to refer to a particularly foolish type of young man who affected the latest fashions and fads, especially if they were from ‘the Continent’. Co-incidentally the second half of the seventeenth century was also when macaroni, the dish, started to appear fairly regularly in cookbooks.

Macaroni did not always have its current tubular form. In early recipes it seems to be more like gnocchi, but there is an intriguing recipe in the first known English cookbook, the Form of Cury (about 1390) for a dish called ‘macrows’, which sounds similar enough to be intiguing. Macrows were made with thin sheets of dough cut into pieces, which were boiled and then served with butter and cheese – perhaps justifying it as an early version of mac n’ cheese.

Macrows.
Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh. and kerve it on peces, and cast hem on boillyng water & seeþ it wele. take chese and grate it and butter cast bynethen and above as losyns. and serue forth.

By 1769 when Elizabeth Raffald published her Experienced English Housekeeper the dish was pretty well what we would recognise today.

To dress Macaroni with Parmesan Cheese.
Boil four ounces of macaroni till it be quite tender and lay it on a sieve to drain. Then put it in a tossing pan with about a gill of good cream, a lump of butter rolled in flour, boil it five minutes. Pour it on a plate, lay all over it parmesan cheese toasted, send it to table on a water plate for it soon gets cold.

But of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne had Macaroni Pudding, not Macaroni Cheese. Here is a recipe for pudding from Mrs. Beeton, who follows it with a short description for the edification of her readers.

Sweet Macaroni Pudding.
Ingredients: 2- ½ oz. of macaroni, 2 pints of milk, the rind of ½ lemon, 3 eggs, sugar and grated nutmeg to taste, 2 tablespoonfuls of brandy.
Mode: -Put the macaroni, with a pint of the milk, into a saucepan with the lemon-peel, and let it simmer gently until the macaroni is tender; then put it into a pie-dish without the peel; mix the other pint of milk with the eggs; stir these well together, adding the sugar and brandy, and pour the mixture over the macaroni. Grate a little nutmeg over the top, and bake in a moderate oven for 1/2 hour. To make this pudding look nice, a paste should be laid round the edges of the dish, and, for variety, a layer of preserve or marmalade may be placed on the macaroni: in this case omit the brandy.

MACARONI is composed of wheaten flour, flavoured with other articles, and worked up with water into a paste, to which, by a peculiar process, a tubular or pipe form is given, in order that it may cook more readily in hot water. That of smaller diameter than macaroni (which is about the thickness of a goose-quill) is called vermicelli; and when smaller still, fidelini. The finest is made from the flour of the hard-grained Black-Sea wheat. Macaroni is the principal article of food in many parts of Italy, particularly Naples, where the best is manufactured, and from whence, also, it is exported in considerable quantities. In this country, macaroni and vermicelli are frequently used in soups.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A new potato.

A Previous Story for this Day …

Dried strawberries were the topic of the day.

Quotation for the Day …

Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults. Mitch Hedberg.

A Big Night.

Today, January 24th …

The movie ‘Big Night’ opened on this day in 1996 at the Sundance Film Festival. The story is about two Italian-American brothers who stage a final ‘Big Night’ at their restaurant, in a wonderfully defiant gesture in the face of imminent closure forced by the competition from the slick operators across the street.

Their ‘Big Night’ is a marvellous celebration of life, and love, and food, and of how life, and love, and food are intertwined because they are the same thing to these brothers – and to us too, if we are lucky.

The real star of the movie is the pièce de résistance of the meal – a giant timpano or timbale. A ‘timbal’ used to mean a kettle drum, but sometime, somewhere, some chef co-opted the name for ‘a dish made of finely minced meat, fish, or other ingredients, cooked in a crust of paste or in a mould.’ The mould being, of course, in the shape of a kettle drum.

The brothers could have made individual timbales for each guest, it would have been an easier and safer decision, but easier and safer options were not being celebrated this night. A single large timpano - in spite of the inherent risks in its construction (getting the layers of filling right), cooking (what if it was not cooked through?) and especially its turning out of the mould (would the unthinkable happen?) – was the only option. A single timpano was crafted with skill and care and patience - large enough to share with friends, lovers, and families - a dish that celebrated heritage and culture and joy, a grand creation that symbolised everything that the brother’s restaurant was, and the opposition restaurant wasn’t.

The essential feature of a timpano/timbale, as we have said, is its shape. The filling may be as varied as the circumstances and whim of the cook allow, and the lining of the mould – the OED definition above, notwithstanding – is not always of dough. Certainly the Big Night brothers used pasta, and in the image above (from one of Francatelli’s books), several are made with macaroni - arranged in intricate patterns as one would expect from a high-class Victorian chef - but another also uses mackerel roe. There are other choices too, as we will see from our recipe example, which is from the eighteenth century. George Dalrymple uses thin slices of veal and bacon (‘lard’) in this version, but in the succeeding recipe in the book, “Pig in a Mould named as above” he uses the pig skin to line the mould.

From: The practice of modern cookery; adapted to families of distinction, as well as to those of the middling ranks of life … George Dalrymple (1781)

Timbale à la Romaine.
The Timbal is a Mould much like a Turk’s-cap for Bleaumange, &c.
Cut slices of veal very thin; put them in your mould or stew-pan, upon slices of lard; baste them with eggs to make them join together; make a good forced-meat of veal or poultry, bread-crumbs soaked in cream, udder, rasped lard or butter, chopt parsley, shallots, mushrooms, pepper and salt, and two or three eggs; lay some of this forced meat upon the veal, then a ragoust of pigeons, sweet breads, palates, cockscombs &c; cover it over with the remainder of the forced meat and lard; bake it in the oven; when done, turn it out upon the dish you intend for table, take off the lard, and serve with sharp sauce. If lard, meaning bacon, is disagreeable, rub your mould or pan well with butter, which will answer the same purpose.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Maids of Honour.

A Previous Story for this Day …

Lobster Thermidor was discussed in A Revolutionary Dish.

Quotation for the Day …

The chef, or cook, proportions, assembles, and prepares various products of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, creating food for the epicure. The aesthetic pleasure induced by food can be so closely related to that produced by certain music and other arts, as to defy separation or separate identification. Merle Armitage in ‘Fit For A King’ (1937)

Papal Pasta.

Today, December 27th …

Giovanni Angelo Braschi was born into a wealthy aristocratic family on this day in 1717 in Cesena in northern Italy. In 1775 he was elected Pope as a compromise candidate after four months deliberation, and took the name Pius VI. He did not let his new role get in the way of the life of luxury to which he was accustomed – in fact he almost bankrupted the country partly on account of the magnificence of his entertainments.

A cookbook (Il Cuoco Maceratese) was published during his Papacy by Antonio Nebbia, which is famous on a number of counts. It documents the upper class cuisine of the time, and included mention of the fine French sauces developed by La Varenne. It also included a recipe for the famous lasagne-style dish of the Marchese region now called vincisgrassi (although he called it princisgras) which contains chicken livers, truffles and prosciutto.

The name of Nebbia’s dish is the cause of some controversy, with the popular theory that it was named for the Austrian General Windisch Graetz being impossible because the Napoleonic Wars which caused him to be in the region did not happen until long after the book was published. There are other mysteries in the world of pasta words - the origin of the word ‘lasagne’ itself for example. The first written Italian recipe occurs in a fourteenth century cookbook from Naples. However, something pasta-like called ‘loseyns’ is described in The Form of Cury – the late fourteenth century cookbook of the master chefs of King Richard II of England. An even more intriguing (but less likely) contender is a Viking-era dish called ‘langkake’. Naturally the Italians wont listen to any of these other theories, and probably count it treason against the state to do so.

A third pasta-naming mystery occurs in our recipe of the day. There is absolutely no clue in the late Victorian English tome ‘Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery’ as to why this dish is styled “à la Pontiffe’. The ‘macaroni’ is in the form of ‘long ribbons’ too, which sounds closer to lasagne noodles than the small tubes that have the name today. Which is a fourth pasta-naming mystery, if my counting is correct.

Macaroni à la Pontiffe.
Boil eight ounces of long straight ribbon macaroni in the usual way, but fifteen minutes will be enough to swell it, which is all that is needed. Drain on a sieve, and when drained put a neat layer of it as a lining over a well-buttered mould; cover next with a quenelle forcemeat of fowl or rabbit, and full the mould with game or poultry, boned and filleted, some larks, also boned, and rolled with thin bits of bacon inside each, and some delicate strips or pieces cut into rounds about he size of a shilling, distributed with egg-balls and button mushrooms, previously simmered in gravy in the mould. Thicken the gravy, a littlr of which use to moisten the whole, cover with macaroni, and simmer, but do not boil, for an hour.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A terrible sea cook.

A Previous Story for this Day …

We had a story about Jane Austen on this day in 2005.

On this Topic …

Food for Cowboys and Popes.

Quotation for the Day …

Life is a combination of magic and pasta. Federico Fellini.

Back to the Future.

Today, November 15 …

In 1930 the Italian Futurists launched their “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking” in Milan. Futurism was a 20th century artistic movement that had as fundamental notions a hatred of anything rooted in the past, and a love of change, speed, noise, and machines. In things gastronomical this meant bizarre combinations of ingredients (sardines with pineapple, mortadella with nougat), arranged as edible sculptures representing such things as “Earth + North Pole”, and “Alaskan Salmon in the sun with Mars sauce”, the total sensory experience of the meal being enhanced with dynamic olfactory, tactile, sound and light devises and surprises.

The dishes – as was intended – were controversial and shocking, but they were nothing compared with the outrage felt throughout Italy at the Futurists major victim – pasta itself, which they said was “heavy, brutalising, and gross” and inducing of “sloth and pessimism”. The Mayor of Naples’ response was simple: “the angels in Paradise eat nothing but vermicelli al pomodoro”, he said.

The combination of tomatoes and pasta is actually quite new, gastronomically speaking. Before the discovery of the New World, tomatoes were unknown in Europe, and the first actual written recipe for the combination of tomatoes and pasta is in 1839!

So – what did Italians eat with pasta, before tomatoes? Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina - a papal librarian, not a cook, wrote “On Right Pleasure and Good Health” in about 1475. He gave a recipe for pasta dough, made from white flour, egg white, rosewater and plain water, which could be used in various ways.

On Vermicelli.
Beat flour in the same way as above. When it is beaten separate into bits with your fingers. You will call these bits vermiculi [worms], then place in the sun. When they are well dried, they will last two or more years. When they have been cooked for an hour in rich broth and put in a dish, season with ground cheese and spices, but if there is a fast day, cook with almond juice and goat’s milk. Because milk does not require much cooking, first make it boil a little in water, then add the milk, When they have cooked, remember to sprinkle with sugar. The cooking of all pastas made from flour is the same. They may be somewhat coloured with saffron, unless they have been cooked in milk.

Tomorrow …Tea-time memories.