Popular Food Errors.

I couldn’t help looking to see if the author of Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated (John Timbs) published in London in 1841 included any food-related issues. Indeed he did – a whole chapter of them. What is fascinating is that many of the issues he raises are still current, proving yet again that there is nothing new under the sun.

Here is what he has to say on nutrition and cookery:

It is a very mistaken idea that the nourishment in food is according to the quantity: a person may eat a great deal of some articles and receive very little nourishment from them. The quantity of nourishment depends greatly on the aromatic flavour contained in food, and whatever is insipid to the taste is of little service to the stomach. Now the difference between good cookery and bad cookery lies principally in the development of the flavour of our food; articles properly cooked yield the whole of it; by good cookery we make the most of everything, by bad cookery the least.

And on eating seasonally he says:

Forced Fruits realise a high price from the early period at which they are brought to market, and not from superiority of size or flavour, as their dearness leads many persons to imagine. Indeed Forced Fruits are very inferior to those of natural growth the former are obtained at a season when there is little light, whereas the latter are matured in the full blaze of a summer's sun. Thus melons grown in frames covered with mats and carefully excluded from the influence of that solar light which is indispensable to their perfection have, whatever may be their external beauty, none of that luscious flavour which the melon when well cultivated possesses so eminently. …Hume thus refers to this false taste of the rich ‘The same care and toil that raise a dish of peas at Christmas would give bread to a whole family during six months.’

One does not have to eat hot-house fruit in order to eat out-of-season fruit of course. One way to do this is to make it into wine.Wine is never out of season. Today’s recipe is from a popular cookery book contemporary with that of Mr. Timbs. It is A New System Of Domestic Cookery, Formed Upon Principles Of Economy by Maria Rundell (1840)

Raspberry or Currant Wine.
To every three pints of fruit, carefully cleared from mouldy or bad, put one quart of water; bruise the former. In twenty four hours strain the liquor and put to every quart a pound of sugar of good middling quality of Lisbon. If for white currants use lump sugar. It is best to put the fruit &c in a large pan, and when in three or four days the scum rises, take that off before the liquor be put into the barrel. Those who make from their own gardens may not have a sufficiency to fill the barrel at once; the wine will not hurt if made in the pan in the above proportions, and added as the fruit ripens and can be gathered in dry weather. Keep an account what is put in each time.

Quotation for the Day.
What I like to drink most is wine that belongs to others.
Diogenes , 320 BC.

How Useful are Turnips?

Unless they are tiny, and called navets, and served with duck, in Paris, by a handsome waiter (with a French accent, naturally), turnips lack both elegance and sex-appeal, methinks. Not that I don’t like them, but we are talking image here. Turnips are most likely to evoke ideas of robust peasant farmers and cold days and thick soup, and they are hardly featured in early cookery books, which describe the food of the well-to-do. Nevertheless, useful things are, well, useful, and we must celebrate useful too, must we not?

The turnip is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the fleshy, globular or spheroidal root of a biennial cruciferous plant, Brassica Rapa, var. depressa, having toothed, somewhat hairy leaves, and yellow flowers, cultivated from ancient times as a culinary vegetable, and for feeding sheep and cattle; also, the plant itself, of which the young shoots (turnip-tops) are frequently boiled as greens.’ As I said, not elegant or sexy, but an ancient, hairy-leaved, animal food. The first quotation in the OED supports its useful, nourishing quality: from Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1533) we read ‘Turnepes beinge well boyled in water, and after with fatte fleshe, norysheth moche.’ I note that the entire list of quotations is devoid of reference to turnip flavour or other deliciousness.

How useful are turnips, really? They turn up in the medicinal chapter of The Queen’s Closet Opened. Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chirugery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (1655)

Syrup of Turneps.
First bake the Turneps in a pot with houshold bread, then press out the liquor between two platters, put a pint of this liquor to half a pint of Hysop water, and as much brown Sugar Candy as will sweeten it, and boyl it to the consistence of a Syrup. It is very good for a Cold or Consumption.

And how much more useful can a recipe be than the following one from the same era – cheap bread for the poor, with medicinal qualities to boot?

Turnip bread.
Take about half a Bushel of middling sort of Turnips, not sticky, but such as will boil soft: being pared and boiled, press out the Water very hard until they are quite dry, beat them in a Mortar, and mix with the Pulp about two pound of fine Wheat-flower, and two ounces of Carraway-seeds; put in a pint, or somewhat more of new Ale-yeast, mould it up as other Bread, and let it be well soaked, and it will not only look, but tast like Bread. This is not only made for saving Charges in poor Families in a dear Year, but of late has been much in esteem for Consumptions, and those troubled with shortness of Breath and Ptissick; being very wholesome and nourishing.
William Salmon’s Household Companion (1695)

Wine is pretty useful too, although I doubt if there were some good shiraz grapes around that this recipe would be popular.

To make Turnip Wine.
Take good many turnips, pare, slice and put them in a cyder press, and press out all the juice very well. To every gallon of juice have three pounds of lump-sugar, have a vessel ready just big enough to hold the juice, put your sugar into a vessel, and also to every gallon of juice half a pint of brandy. Pour in the juice and lay something over the bung for a week, to see if it works. If it does you must not bung it down till it has done working; then stop it close for three months, and draw it off in another vessel. When it is fine, bottle it off.
The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, Hannah Glasse (1774)


Quotation for the Day.
A degenerate nobleman is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.
English saying.

Wine with Wisdom.

Today, January 29th …

Herman Melville wrote to his great friend Nathaniel Hawthorne on this day, urging him to visit, and tempting him with a promise of food and wine and conversation.

“ … Fear not that you will cause the slightest trouble to us. Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire. But a moment ago, I looked into the eyes of two fowls, whose tail feathers have been notched, as destined victims for the table. I keep the word "Welcome" all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold. … Mark - There is some excellent Montado Sherry awaiting you & some most potent port. We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles from morning till night”.

How could anyone refuse an invitation for “mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling” from such a brilliant writer? Especially another brilliant writer? What stories did they tell over their buttered toast? Did they exchange plot details from the books they were working on? Melville must have been close to finishing Moby Dick, and Hawthorne The House of the Seven Gables at that time as both books were published later the same year.

Whatever they discussed, the mulled wine would certainly have been welcome, as the temperature at Melville’s farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts would have been below freezing. What did they mull over, over this mulled wine? And what a lovely confluence of words that is!

To mull is “to consider, ponder upon”.
Mulled wine is wine “made into a hot drink with added sugar, spices, fruit, etc., and formerly sometimes thickened with beaten egg yolk”

I did hope to find a clever connection between the various uses of ‘mull’, but a prolonged foray into the OED turned it up 11 times as an adjective, and 5 as a verb (with 5 more in the form of ‘mulled’), which was far too many for this non-linguist to unravel. The various entries were also prefaced with OED-speak such as “the origin is uncertain”, “various theories have been advanced as to the origin of this word”, and “the development of the other senses is unclear”. So I gave up. A selection of the definitions does seem to be relevant however.

‘To mull’ also means ‘to grind to a powder’ (the spices) and ‘to become wet or liquid’ (mixing the spices with the wine), and ‘to warm’, all of which fit the mulled wine concept, and are pretty good metaphors for the mental process too. There is also the possible association with the Latin word ‘mulsus’, meaning mixed with honey, which would fit with the sweetening of the drink.

It might seem likely that the name of the Anglo-Indian 'Mulligatawny Soup' would reference the grinding of the spices, but the word has a completely different (and thankfully quite unequivocal etymology), which is satisfyingly descriptive. ‘Mulligatawny” comes from a Tamil word meaning “pepper water”. There is no evidence that I am aware of that either of our two literary gentlemen ever ate it, but it would have been entirely appropriate for the mid-winter weather in Massachusetts.

I give you a recipe for the soup from the same era, from Cookery, rational, practical and economical, treated in connexion with the chemistry of food by Hartelaw Reid (1853)

Mulligatawny Soup.
Cut the meat of three pounds of a breast of veal into small pieces, and simmer the trimmings, gristles, and bones, along with a knuckle of veal broken in pieces, in about three quarts of water, until these are converted into a good strong stock. Fry (sauter) the pieces of meat in butter, in a deep stewpan, along with some sliced onion, and a slice of lean ham. When slightly browned, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, mix well, and pour over them the stock previously strained. Allow this to simmer gently for nearly an hour, skimming off the fat as it rises. Then add two or three dessert-spoonfuls of curry powder, season with salt and cayenne to taste, and continue the simmering until the veal is thoroughly cooked. Before serving, remove the ham. Carrot and turnip may be used in this soup if desired, being sliced and sautéed along with the meat and onion; apples are also sometimes employed in this way. The remains of cooked fowls or rabbits, cut into pieces of the proper size, may be warmed up in this soup and served along with, or instead of, the veal.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A dish for the Empress.

Quotation for the Day …

It is true that taste can be educated. It is also true that taste can be perverted... If any man gives you a wine you can't bear, don't say it is beastly... But don't say you like it. You are endangering your soul and the use of wine as well... Seek out some other wine good to your taste. Hillaire Belloc.

Wine for health.

Today, January 13 …

Samuel Pepys spared no expense on a “noble” dinner for friends on this day in 1663. His guests arrived around midday, and stayed on till supper, when they had “a good sack-posset and cold meat” before leaving around 10 o’clock at night.

A “posset” was a hot, sweet drink made by heating alcohol in a bowl, then pouring hot cream or milk in from a great height. It was a popular supper dish, a comfort food or treat, considered to have a restorative or medicinal benefit. It was often made with “sack” (sherry), which was also sometime called “Canary”, as the best came from those islands.

In Pepys’ day every good housewife, though she employed a cook to prepare daily meals, was expected to take responsibility herself for making preserves and simple household remedies, and books of “receipts” for these were enormously popular. One written by a contemporary of Pepys, Sir Kenelm Digby, and published posthumously in 1669 is the earliest collection of fermented drink recipes that we know. He was a colourful character – amateur scientist, linguist, privateer, diplomat, and according to some a “great mountebank”. When his beloved wife Venetia died suddenly it was widely believed that he had accidentally poisoned her with the viper wine that he gave her to preserve her beauty. There is no recipe for viper wine amongst the possets, meads, hydromels and metheglins of Digby’s book, as this was more properly in the domain of the alchemists such as John French. He published his book “The Art of Distillation” in 1651.

Posset recipes being easily available, I give you French’s instructions for viper wine. Conveniently, sherry is the basis for both.

Viper Wine is Made Thus
Take of the best fat vipers, cut off their heads, take off their skins, and unbowel them. Then put them into the best canary sack, four or six according to their bigness into a gallon. Let them stand two or three months. Then draw off your wine as you drink it.Some put them alive into the wine, and there suffocate them, and afterwards take them out, and cut off their heads, take off their skins, and unbowel them, and then put them into the same wine again, and do as before.This wine has the same virtues as the foregoing quintessence. It also provokes to venery, cures the leprosy and such like corruptions of the blood.

On Monday: Peace and Plenty.