Tidbit and Trivia about Food

Part Two

‘I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.’ – Anthony Bourdain

7. Napoleons

“Napoleons…have nothing to do with Bonaparte, the daring Corsican… The name is the result of a misunderstanding of the French word “Napolitain” which should have been translated as “Neopolitan” pertaining to Naples. They are very much like the French mille-feuille or the Italian mille foglie, both of which mean a thousand leaves.”

—Rare Bits: Unusual Origins of Popular Recipes, Patricia Bunning Stevens [Ohio University Press: Athens] 1998 (p.202).

Tilly: Can’t say I have heard of them before … but they would be a winner for Significant Other as he is rather taken with flaky pastry.

8. What is ketchup?

When the term ‘ketchup’ first entered the English language, at the end of the seventeenth century, it stood for something very different from the bottled tomato sauce of today. At that time tomatoes were an expensive rarity, and the ketchups were long-keeping, often vinegar-based sauces flavoured with mushrooms, anchovies, onions, lemons, oysters, pickled walnuts, etc. They formed the essential ingredients of the proprietary sauces so popular with the Victorians, of which Worcestershire sauce is virtually the only survivor…”

An A to Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press: Oxford] 2002 (p. 177)

Tilly: We’ve done this one before! You were not impressed, Olive, when I revealed that tomato ketchup originated in China and was made from fish …

9. What exactly is “Fondue?

“Fondue, the French word for ‘melted,’ is the name of a Swiss dish made of melted cheese… There are many recipes for cheese fondue, including that given by Brillat-Savarin (1826), which has been condemned by Swiss authorities as being for scrambled eggs with cheese rather than true fondue. Eggs do not appear in classic Swiss recipes. Most Swiss would agree that a proper fondue is made with a blend of cheeses–of Gruyere, Emmental, and a softer local cheese such as Raclette or appenzell–white wine, a little kirsch, a spoonful of flour to prevent curdling, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and nothing else. Fonduta, the Italian version of fondue, is made with fontina cheese… There is also a similar Dutch dish called kaasdoop (cheese dip).”

—Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press: Oxford] 1999 (p. 312)

Tilly: In our home, whoever lost their piece of bread or meat in the sauce had to carry out a penalty. It might be something like sit under a rose bush and sing ‘Mary had a little lamb’ – backwards – to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’, remember a poem from school days, or own up to some mischief they were caught out in.

10. Garlic

“Several species of wild garlic exist, and the cultivated species may have evolved from one of these in Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean region. De Candolle (1886) points to the very wide variation in common names as evidence that the plant has been familiar in most regions of the Old World for a very long time. It has been known in China since antiquity and was an important article of diet in ancient Egypt and in classical Greece and Rome. Garlic, already developed to a form hardly distinguishable from that we know today, is commonly found in Egyptian tombs, sometimes left as an offering like other items of food, sometimes playing a role in mummification. The Israelites, as they set off on their exodus, looked back with longing at the garlic of Egypt (Numbers 11:5). Garlic was an important vegetable to Greeks… Theophrastus (c. 300 BC) remarked that several kinds were grown, and a section of the market at Athens was known simply as to skoroda (the garlic). It was considered a strengthening food, ideal for workers, soldiers, and oarsmen, and often prescribed by dieticians, but some upper-class voices were raised against its smell.”

Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press: Oxford] 1999 (p. 331)

“King Alfonso of Castile, who disliked garlic…would not have enjoyed [aioli]…although his subjects must have eaten it to excess, for in 1330 the king issued a decree forbidding any knights who had eaten garlic or onions to appear in court or to speak to other courtiers for four weeks.”

History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, translated by Anthea Bell [Barnes & Noble Books:New York] 1992 (p. 70)

Tilly: Queen Elizabeth II didn’t allow garlic in cooking at the palace. Not sure whether she didn’t like it, or was being considerate in terms of smelly breath. I suspect most of the smelly-breath aspect has been removed from garlic – that ‘bite’ and much of the aroma seems to have disappeared from what I am able to buy. Sadly.

11. Garlic in the USA

“Amelia Simmons, in the first American cookbook, wrote, ‘Garlickes, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.’ In 1896 Oscar Tschirky, better known as Oscar of the Waldorf, put 3,455 recipes in his famous cookbook, but only one featured garlic. Sixty-five years later, when Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook appeared, things were starting to change. Although only two of the fifteen hundred recipes in the book contained the word ‘garlic’ in the title, there were dozens of others in which a clove of garlic or two had made its way onto the page…

Tilly: And rightly so!

12. Escabeche

“Caveach–Name and dish come from the Arabs (iskebey, to pickle with vinegar, according to Cormomnas (by way of Spanish escabeche). OED [Oxford English Dictionary] assigns a West Indian original to caveach (a corruption of “escabeche”), a name which did not become current until mid-eighteenth [century] in England. But recipes for the dish, the characterizing note of which is dusting with flour and frying in olive oil before pickling, had long been known in England. A highly detailed recipe, To Pickle Mackrell, Flounders, Soles, or Sprats, appears in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (about 1650, or earlier) and is a perfectly classic escabeche; virtually no eighteenth-century cookbook is without similar recipes. In 1796, Mrs. [Hannah] Glass presents The Jews’ Way of Preserving Salmon, and all Sorts of Fish, also a True Escabeche; it is possible that Jews fleeing the Inquisition had brought the recipe from Spain to England. But the dish had long before penetrated France, showing up as espinbeche de rougets in Le Menagier de Paris (about 1393); name and dish persist in regional cookery to this day, demonstrating once again the difficulties of pinning down details of diffusion of a dish. Caveach fell from favor in American cookbooks, disappearing altogether by the time of Fannie Farmer (1896)…Of late, the dish has been rediscovered as secabeche, an item in ‘gourmet’ exotica, another ironic note.”

—The Virginia Housewife, Mary Randolph, facsimile 1824 edition with historical notes and commentaries by Karen Hess [University of South Carolina Press:

Columbia SC] 1984 (p. 253-264)

Tilly: Hmm! Pickled fish – nice.

End of Part Two