Raspberry Debacle

30 March, 2007

Vegan Potato Salad and food colouring

Filed under: gluten-free, salad, spring, vegan, vegetables, vegetarian — Holly @ 1:15 pm

A kale-and-chickpea salad.

Salad is just rubbish, isn’t it? In the past five years I’ve shared a house with two vegans, two vegetarians, and three meat-eaters, and in all that time I’ve had one salad that tasted nice. I keep trying: I use recipes, I use “these vegetables all taste nice” logic, I order meals with salad in restaurants, and it just doesn’t work. I get a perfectly nice pasta dish… that somebody’s left to go cold and manky. Some delightful lettuces and tomato… that someone’s covered with a greasy slick of oil. Chickpeas and lemon and a load of crunchy stuff is still fundamentally going to taste like lemony chickpeas, and one mouthful of lemony chickpeas is enough for me.

Salad is the one food where almost every recipe includes something that you’re supposed to add “for colour”. There’s nothing wrong with colour; it might not affect the taste, but it affects our experience of the taste, and that’s the important thing. Fifty percent of us assume our cordial is lime-flavoured if it’s coloured green. The semi-arbitrary association of “blue” with “raspberry” developed partly because customers just couldn’t tell the difference between strawberry and raspberry flavourings without some sort of colour cue. I’ll put food colouring in orange cakes, and it does make them taste more orangey to me, even though there’s no flavour in it.

At the end of the nineteenth century the burgeoning margarine industry was famously kept in check by legislation controlling not the sale of margarine but its colour (which is naturally white); in the US, margarine that had been coloured an attractive yellow was taxed at forty times the rate of its uncoloured equivalent. In New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, West Virginia and South Dakota, margarine could only be sold at all if it was coloured pink (at least until the Supreme Court demurred). Even the packaging had to be unattractive, predating similar “smoking may cause lung cancer” labelling laws by decades:

In this connection, one state requires that a black band at least three inches wide be painted around the container. Another state requires the use of labels painted with lamp black and oil on all containers of butter substitutes.

And because people like things to look the right colour, this set the stage for profitable dodges:

Another man who made a highly profitable find in the food field in recent years is Leo Peters, originator of the “Pak” margarine package, made out of plastic and containing a capsule for coloring. By merely kneading the “Pak,” a housewife can give a pound of margarine the appetizing hue of butter. It took Peters a long time to put the idea across, but once it was accepted by manufacturers he began collecting royalties estimated at $1,000,000 a year.

So adding something for colour: fine. But salads don’t just have ingredients added for colour. They seem to exist at all just for the sake of that colour, to throw a pie or a bit of meat or something else that actually tastes good into relief. They’re not a decent food that I’d want to eat anyway, with a bit of adornment to make them more enticing: they’re a food that I keep trying because it makes plates look better, and because other people seem to approve, but which there’s never any point in eating. Salads aren’t horrible, they’re just pointless and dreary. They take up space on the plate, but maybe it’s time to start getting smaller plates, or saving money by having reusable crumpled cellophane, instead of wasting five minutes a day chopping up spring onions and radishes, both of which, frankly, taste of nothing at all.

The only reason I haven’t given up on salad entirely is… well, d’you remember I said that I’ve had one salad, ever, that tasted nice? Yes, well, that one tastes really really nice. It has spring onions. It has radishes. I taste the spring onions and radishes as I chop them up, and they still taste of nothing, but then I put them in this salad and they’re delicious.

It doesn’t even look very pretty, which, since “looking pretty” is the one thing most salads are good for (you can’t even throw them, they just fall into their constituent parts and get on your clothes), puts it at a disadvantage. But it doesn’t need to look pretty. It stands around on street corners and sneers at the pretty salads as they go by, and the pretty salads drop their heads and rush onward because they know it’s better than they are.

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27 March, 2007

Lemon and Raspberry Icecream Cakes, and germs

Filed under: cake, fruit, gluten-free, icecream, summer, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:32 am

Two lemon almond-and-gelati cakes

There’s nothing intrinsically better about having an individual-serving cakelet rather than a slice of a communal cake. With a communal cake, the hungry people can have a big slice, the full people can have a little slice, and then when the full people realise they’re not full after all they can have a little more; it’s all very easy. With individual desserts, it’s one-size-fits-all, and unless you’re happy passing leftovers across the table, uneaten half-cakelets just sit there taunting anyone who would have liked seconds.

And yet cakes like these ones make me dissolve into envy: look! A whole cake for each person! Tiny muffins, too small to halve, are the same, and even cornish pasties: food that mustn’t be shared, food still in its ideal complete form, and it’s all yours so you can lick it if you like, or stick your face in it, or cut it into twelve tiny slices and eat them one at a time, and nobody can stop you. I’ve spent the last month intermittently yearning for some dessert rings, so that I too could mould perfect individual desserts; and then I realised that a dessert ring was essentially a £4 cylinder with a hole in the top, such as could be made by, say, cutting the bottom off a paper cup.

Using paper cups isn’t just cheap, it’s also historically appropriate, since paper cups were developed in response to the desire for individual servings. Until the late nineteenth century, communal drinking supplies mostly consisted of “some water” and “a single cup chained nearby”, which worked fine until people found out about germs:

In contrast to this staring death cup (as represented by the Minnesota Board of Health), early-twentieth-century paper cups were marketed as Health Kups, and in a culture postdating romanticism but predating goths, is it any surprise that the Health Kups were the more popular? Even church-goers were fretting about the crumbs floating in their single communion vessel, and digging up logical justifications of individual versions (sadly not marketed as Kommunion Kups):

It has also been claimed that Christ, when he said, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is for many,” pointed to that one cup which he had used, and thereby designated the use of one and only one cup. We shall for a moment concede them the point, however, we shall ask, Where is that cup to which Christ is claimed to have pointed? If that particular cup was “the blood of the New Testament,” then wherein are we justified in celebrating the Lord’s Supper, since we have not that cup? Again, were it possible to produce the identical cup which Christ used, how were it possible for all Christians to drink from that one cup? The absurdity of this argument against the individual cup lies in carrying it to its logical end; namely, producing that cup to which Christ is claimed to have pointed, and then use no other in administering the Sacrament. It would require long years for that one cup to make the circuit, and many would never have the divine pleasure of communing with Christ.

The societal fear of germs was of course a new and enormous thing, causing changes in everything from sanitation to fashion, playing a part in the decline of petticoats and beards: “it is detrimental to the health to allow our beards to grow into such germ-carriers, and in addition it is characteristic of laziness. Besides tickling the ladies they are a harbor for germs”. There are even slightly implausible stories of “a 1907 experiment in which two men kissed a young woman after walking through Paris”, one bearded and one unbearded, in order to compare germs ( “but of course it is vital for the experiment, Pierre! Now do it again, oui. And now you, Auguste. This time open your mouth, my little test subjects, we must get all the germs out, for science”).

In conclusion, we’ve established today that if you have a beard and want to rub it in some food, it’s probably best to go with individual servings instead of one big cake; and as individual servings go these are pretty delicious. (They’re also rabidly inappropriate for the end of winter, full of frozen raspberries and cold, but “seasonal appropriateness” versus “chance to use EXCITING NEW ICECREAM MACHINE that MAKES ICECREAM in the FREEZER and it goes WHIRR and ICECREAM” is a pretty uneven competition.)

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23 March, 2007

Honey Bee Biscuits and Flying Monks

Filed under: biscuits, shaped like other things, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:08 am

Some bee-shaped biscuits in a tree

Until I moved to England, I’d never seen a bumblebee. They’re brilliant: lumbering, fluffy, huge-bottomed, apparently convinced they should nest in my hair, and very cute. Usually I react to cute things by wanting to put them in my mouth, and bumblebees fly so slowly that you could eat them right out of the air; the only problem is that they aren’t delicious enough.

The idea that the world would be better if more things tasted nice is an old one. There are wedding dresses made of cream puffs and scale models of San Francisco made out of jelly; and there’s the mediaeval dream of Cockaigne, the country where the walls are pies and the flowers are buttered scones, and everything is the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted. The twelfth-century The Golden Dream tells the story:

There are rivers great and fine
Of oil, milk, honey and wine;
Water there serves no purpose
Except to be looked at and to wash with.

In Cockaigne, the animals want to be eaten. The pigs are fried and cheerful, walking around with knives in their backs, so that you can carve out a slice more easily. Nobody works, nobody is blind or ill, and you get paid to eat or drink. There are no laws (except against working), because everyone has everything they want. Owls lay fur coats, and horse defecate poached eggs.

The geese roasted on the spit
Fly to that abbey, God knows,
And cry out: “Geese, all hot, all hot!”
They bring along plenty of garlic.

Cockaigne is a world not just of greed but of sloth and lust and mischievous monks who fly away from the abbey when they’re supposed to be praying:

When the abbot sees for himself
That his monks fly away from him,
He takes a maiden of the company
And turns up her white behind
And beats the small drums with his hand
To make the monks alight on land.
When his monks see [him do] that,
They fly down to the maid
And go all around the wench
And pat all her white behind
And then, after their labor,
Go meekly home to drink.

No wonder that to get there, you have to wade chin-deep in pig dung for seven years. In the Netherlands, Cockaigne is Luileckerland, “lazy luscious land”, and can only be reached if you eat your way through a ten-thousand-foot-high rice pudding.

Come the 21st century, and remnants of Cockaigne hang about in Australian advertising campaigns:

Wouldn’t it be nice if the world was Cadbury?
Going to the pics would be so sweet!
There’d be no need for munchies:
Cad’bry Dairy Milk is the perfect treat.
If someone came and blocked your screen view,
Just take a bite and make a hole to see through.
Wouldn’t it be nice?

In other versions of the ad, viewers are urged to respond to ravenous sharks by saying “I’m chocolate — I invite you”. This is Cockaigne with the eater-eatee wall broken down, where it’s humans who wander the streets with benign smiles, relishing the opportunity to feed others.

Back in London, on this side of the ten-thousand-foot rice pudding hill, it’s cold and the bumblebees have gone into hiding. The best I can do is these honey-and-gingerbread bee biscuits (cookies if you’re American); inanimate, and too big to fly into your mouth in one go anyway, but crisp and chewy and not covered in hair. Just remember to pull out the eyes before you eat them.

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21 March, 2007

Simnel Cake: it’s an anagram of Anemic Elks

Filed under: cake, food origins, fruit, gluten-free, special occasions, spring, sweets, vegetarian — Holly @ 4:21 pm

An apostle ball on a slice of simnel cake

There are three stories of the origin of Simnel Cake. The first alleges that the name comes from “similia”, Latin for the fine flour from which the cake was originally made; this story is both plausible and dull. The second, more exciting, claims it was invented by Lambert Simnel, a fifteenth-century ten-year-old who impersonated the Earl of Warwick (also age ten), was crowned King Edward VI in Dublin, fought against Henry VII, and was later - aged eleven by this time - pardoned and given a job in the royal kitchen as a spit-turner. Better.

The final story of the origin of the Simnel Cake comes from an old woman from Salop, who was told the story as a child:

An old Shropshire tale has it that long ago there lived an honest old couple, Simon and Nelly, and it was their custom to gather their children around them at Easter. Nelly had some leftover unleavened dough from Lent, and Simon reminded her there was some plum pudding still left over from Christmas. They could make some treats for the visiting family.

Nell put the leftovers together, and Sim insisted the cake should be boiled, while she was just as certain that it should be baked. They had a fight and came to blows, but compromised by doing both. They cooked the cake over a fire made from furniture broken in the scuffle, and some eggs, similarly broken, were used to baste it. The delicacy was named after this cantankerous couple.

I’m very fond of stories about how particular food came to be. I recently left some balsamic vinegar to reduce on the stove and forgot about it, and found it a couple of hours later reduced to a black sponge with the texture of brittle plastic. Since I’d read a lot of stories about food origins, I took a bite, assuming it would be delicious and that in a few months I could languidly tell reporters the story of how I discovered BalsamiSnax and became a millionaire. The fact that it tasted horrible is no reason why some other unlikely concatenations of food mightn’t turn out delicious, and any food origin that involves a married couple hitting each other with stools until they break and then using those stools to bake their new cake is a story it would be churlish to disbelieve.

These days, the qualifications for a simnel cake are a bit less stringent than they used to be: stool-smashing is optional, and there’s no boiling required, for a start. Other people’s simnel cakes seem to establish a simple but clear set of rules:
1. The cake must be made on, or for, Mothering Sunday (the 18th of March, this year) or Easter Sunday.
2. It must be a fruit cake.
4. There must be a layer of marzipan inside.
3. There must be another layer of marzipan on top.
5. There must be eleven marzipan balls on top of that, representing the Apostles, except for Judas who, as punishment for betraying Christ, was denied the right to be represented in confectionery form.
6. There must be some other endearing but slightly silly decoration on top, which should be related to Easter and rebirth in some way.

Unfortunately, I don’t like marzipan (presumably it was invented when Zeppo Marx fell into a giant pan of almonds just after he’d been for a swim in a pool that was unexpectedly filled with sugar, at which he was so angry that he broke eggs all over himself and rolled around until he was covered in a thick white paste; it certainly tastes like it).

I’m also not really very enthusiastic about fruit cake (except in the very broad sense that, say, an orange cake or a bar of chocolate with sultanas in it is a fruit cake).

Also, I realised it was Simnel Cake Day at four-thirty on Mothering Sunday, half an hour before the local supermarket closed, and one of my housemates — the one who told me about Simnel Cake in the first place — is gluten-intolerant. Fortunately I had already chosen to discount the “similia” fine-flour origin story.

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18 March, 2007

Delicious rabbit and Kensington High Street

Filed under: main, meat, rabbit, vegetables, winter — Holly @ 3:29 pm

Close-up of some delicious rabbit

Rabbits really shouldn’t be hard to find. They’re notorious for overbreeding, and they’re dreadful pests, vermin even: surely the problem should be getting rid of them, more and more rabbits appearing faster than anyone could possibly cook them.

“What was that?”

“What?”

“That noise in the freezer. Sort of… nibbly. Nibbly and cold.”

“Oh it can’t be… it is, it’s those bloody rabbits again. Get me the rabbit-poking stick, Germaine.”

But somehow they’re harder to get hold of than I’d expect. Rabbit-poachers are forced to resort to bulletproof cars:

The poachers had fitted a halogen lamp on the outside to blind their prey and shielded the car’s number plates with lead sheeting to avoid identification.

There was also a device to eject two old bicycles fixed on the back of the car on to the road.

The North Koreans are forced to resort to German breeders, hoping to bulk out the nation’s food supply with terrifying eight-kilogram super-rabbits.

And I’m forced to resort to… well:

In Battersea, it’s easy to convince yourself that you aren’t middle class. Middle-class people don’t have housemates, do they? They have multiple tablecloths instead, and matching cutlery. They have a solicitor, or at least a jug. They certainly don’t live in SW11, which the statistical analysis and glib generalisations of Up My Street characterise as “crowded flats in multi-ethnic areas”. SW is the area Alec Guinness’s disgraced mother moves to when, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, she is disowned by her aristocratic family; it has a history of gun crime stretching back to 1829, when the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchelsea fought a duel over Catholic emancipation, standing among asparagus fields in the marshes that would later become Battersea Park.

The trouble with crowded flats and gun crime, though, is that they aren’t very conducive to rabbit-hunting, so earlier this week I left SW11 (”unemployment levels are high, although given the large numbers of lone parents with children under school age, a high proportion of people are not on the job market at all”) for W8 (”in the winter, this type is the most likely to go skiing”). At High Street Kensington, a blonde woman tossed her hair: “If this bag gets stolen I’ll just cry, it has my Valentino dress and my fur coat”. Her friend looked up from a text message on her mobile phone: “She says they weren’t allowed to smoke at all, so you could just smell everyone’s bodies.” At the organic shop, the people’s rice was deepest red but the chocolate cost three pounds a bar… but ohh, this galangal stuff at last, and orange flower water across the road in Waitrose, and I don’t know what they taste like but don’t they sound exciting? And beyond, in the cold groceries section: where my local supermarket sells pork, beef chops, occasional pigs livers, and chicken, here there were shelves upon shelves of poussin! Osso buco! Rabbit!

I’ve only eaten rabbit once, and that was just a bite of somebody else’s main course in a restaurant, so I didn’t really know what to do with it, but most online sources seemed to agree on a few general points (put some wine on it, make it warm for twenty-five minutes), and everyone in the world has been urging me to put green leafy stuff in mashed potato lately; surely it would be hard to go wrong from there?

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