Food for Journeys, Part 1.

For the next few days I will be on the move, travelling from Norfolk to London to Singapore to Brisbane (including a tedious seven hours in the limbo-land of Singapore airport), so my mind will once again be pre-occupied with the pre-eminent travel question of “what shall I get to eat?” (I no longer travel in terror of running out of reading material, thanks to my wonderful e-reader).

To ensure that you still get your daily stories, they will be pre-posted to pop up at the usual time. Naturally, in view of my pre-occupation this week, they will be about travel food - as seen through the eyes of travellers and cookbook writers across the centuries and around the globe.

To start with, I take you back to the thirteenth century, to Andalusia. The recipe is from an anonymous cookbook translated by Charles Perry, and made freely available to us all (grateful thanks!) here. It is for a pasty, which “is very good on journeys”. I can only hope to get something as delicious over the next few days.


Recipe for Barmakiyya
It is made with a hen, pigeons, doves, small birds or lamb. Take what you have of them, after cleaning, and cut up and put in a pot with salt, an onion, pepper, coriander and lavender or cinnamon, some murri naqî', and oil. Put it on a gentle fire until it is nearly done and the sauce is dried. Take it out and fry it in fresh oil without overdoing it, and leave it aside. Then take fine flour and semolina, make a well-made dough with leaven, and if it has some oil it will be more flavorful. Then roll out from it a flatbread and put inside it the fried and cooked meat of these birds, cover it with another flatbread and stick the ends together. Put it in the oven, and when the bread is done, take it out. It is very good on journeys. You might make it with fish and that can be used for journeying too.


Quotation for the Day.

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
Peter Matthiessen

A Rabbit in the Larder.

The packed lunch theme continues for today, with advice from the wartime Ministry of Food in Britain. Rationing remained in force in Britain for years after WW II, and the Ministry continued to put out its weekly Food Facts leaflets until well into the 1950’s.

The Ministry was mindful that the constraints of rationing could only worsen the housewife’s daily challenge of avoiding ‘the same old sandwiches’ for lunch and picnics. To assist her to get around this problem, leaflet No. 516, of May 1950, addressed the issue with a feature on the use of rabbit. It began with the following hint:

“With summer just around the corner there’s and increasing demand for cold meals and picnic snacks. This is no problem if there’s a rabbit in the larder. Here are some picnic ways with rabbit, the frozen rabbit now in the shops – a welcome change from the same old sandwiches. The family will bless you for that extra trouble.”

The leaflet went on to give recipes for Devilled Rabbit, Rabbit Paste, Rabbit Loaf, and the following nice idea for a pasty – surely a nice treat to find in the lunchbox, whatever the era.

Rabbit and Potato Pasties.
Ingredients: Pastry using 6 to8 oz. flour; 8 oz. cooked rabbit, chopped; 4 oz. grated raw potato; 1 hard boiled egg, chopped; 1 tomato, skinned and chopped; salt and pepper to taste; 2 tablespoons of stock or milk.
Method: Divide the pastry into four and roll each piece into a circle about the size of a saucer. Mix all the other ingredients and divide the mixture between the pastry rounds. Damp the edges of the pastry and fold into pasty shapes. Bake in a hot oven 25-30 minutes.

Quotation for the Day.

Luncheon: as much food as one's hand can hold.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), from his dictionary (1755)