Raspberry Debacle

30 July, 2007

Mice, and also blueberry and blue cheese salad

Filed under: fruit, gluten-free, salad, summer, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:45 am

Blueberries, walnuts and blue cheese.

We currently have a mouse. Or several mice, it’s not really clear; nobody’s ever seen more than one at a time, but if it’s a single mouse then it’s very very good at finding its way back from a distant garden, and also at making a scritching noise on two sides of the room at the same time.

Apparently mice only need three grams of food a day, so it seems quite churlish to deny them that, but on the other hand it’s quite churlish for them to skitter across the floor and jump around the side of the oven. Non-human animals aren’t supposed to be in the kitchen unless they’re very very cute, or else food.

This does point at an obvious solution to the mouse problem. It’s surprisingly difficult to find mouse recipes online — they’re all tangled up with a lot of badly-spelt mousse — but not impossible. It turns out that mice are a staple food in some parts of Zambia, for example, where broody couples are said to be longing for a son so that he can kill mice for them.

Zambian mice are generally boiled and dried before they’re eaten, and there’s even a song to mock cooks who don’t realise this, and try to prepare them differently:

Some do not know how to cook mice.
Some do not know how to cook mice.
Onion, tomatoes in the mice.
Onion, cooking oil in the mice.

Elsewhere Alice Thomas Ellis, in Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring, reports on a woman who cooks mice to her own, distinctly non-Zambian, standards:

In 1920 when I was four years old an old woman who lived near my family in Radlett and whom I used to visit on every occasion I could find, would give me sugar mice to eat. These were made by skinning mice, which she had caught in an ordinary mousetrap, emptying them and then tying them by the tail to a wooden spoon where they were suspended into a strong sugar syrup in a cast iron saucepan over a slow heat. After some hours (or days) the mice became crystallised and, when they were cold, she would give me one to eat. They were delicious and even the bones were crisp and edible.

Outside of Zambia and Radlett, fried mice have been used as a cure for whooping cough and bedwetting. Neither of these are currently major household problems but we’ll be getting a new housemate in a few weeks, so who knows?

The only problem that remains is catching the mice. A study sponsored by the Stilton Cheese Makers’ Association confirmed last year that mice aren’t all that fond of cheese, and would prefer to eat fruit, grains and nuts; so keeping some cheese in for old times’ sake, this blueberry salad seems like a pretty decent bet for luring a delicious mouse to a trap.

(more…)

6 July, 2007

Duck and Cherry Salad

Filed under: birds, fruit, gluten-free, meat, salad, summer — Holly @ 12:19 pm

Cherry and duck salad, close-up

There’s a story that the Egyptian caliph al-Aziz was very fond of cherries; so fond that he had a servant in Lebanon who tied cherries to the legs of carrier pigeons, who would fly them to Egypt each day for the caliph’s breakfast.

And then there’s another story, an old English carol, about Mary and Joseph walking in a grove of cherries. Mary asked Joseph to bring her some cherries, since she was with child and could hardly climb up to fetch them herself; Joseph responded, peevishly, with “let him pluck thee a cherry that brought thee with child”. At this point the unborn Jesus communicated with the cherry trees and asked them to bow their branches down, so that Mary could “have cherries at command”.

These supernatural and superexpensive lengths don’t seem excessive; cherries are really really nice, in strong contention for the coveted position of “my favourite food”. I’ve happily eaten a pound at a sitting, though perhaps that isn’t really such a lot - compare it, for example, to the mountains eaten by Elizabethan forerunners of today’s competitive eating (recorded by Horatio Busino, an Italian visitor to England in the early seventeenth century). Back in the early 1600s, cherries were sold in London streets still on their branches, and “it was an amusement to go out into the orchards and eat fruit on the spot, in a sort of competition of gormandize between the city belles and their admirers”.

It’s an odd competition, but no odder than “tie cherry stalks into a knot to demonstrate that you’re good at kissing and/or oral sex” (neither of which traditionally involve tying things into knots with your tongue, unless I’ve misunderstood something grievously). If you’re going put bits of cherry into your mouth for competitive purposes, it might as well be the bits that actually taste nice. On one occasion, back in Busino’s time, a young woman ate twenty pounds of cherries at a sitting, outdoing her closest competitor by two and a half pounds, and a character from Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension by sixteen:

He sat down, tugging at a white-paper package in the tail pocket of his coat.

“Cherries,” he said, nodding and smiling. “There is nothing like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially after Grieg’s ‘Ich Liebe Dich.’ Those sustained blasts on ‘liebe’ make my throat as dry as a railway tunnel. Have some?” He shook the bag at me.

“I prefer watching you eat them.”

“Ah, ha!” He crossed his legs, sticking the cherry bag between his knees, to leave both hands free. “Psychologically I understood your refusal. It is your innate feminine delicacy in preferring etherealised sensations…Or perhaps you do not care to eat the worms. All cherries contain worms. Once I made a very interesting experiment with a colleague of mine at the university. We bit into four pounds of the best cherries and did not find one specimen without a worm.”

This was more or less true; the young woman who ate twenty pounds of cherries must have eaten at at least half a pound of worms in the process. Even now, home-grown cherries are likely to be riddled with the things. There’s no point in examining them for clues, either - the eggs are laid through a hole so small as to be invisible, and any hole big enough to see is an exit, where the fat white worm has wriggled out. This means that cherries without a hole in them are, if anything, more dangerous, since any worms will still be inside. The only solution seems to be to break each cherry open before eating it - or if you’re only a bit concerned, to drop the cherries in water, and throw out any that float as probable worm-harbourers.

Despite all this talk of worms, I’m still intending to get some cherries as soon as I’ve finished this post. Ideally, of course, I’d have them tied to the legs of birds and flown in through the window, but perhaps I’d choose ducks rather than pigeons. For midsummer a week or two ago we had a twelve-course lunch-turning-into-dinner (full menu here), and the duck and cherry salad was easily my favourite course, so having all the ingredients delivered in one easy bundle would be ideal. (Yes, I know I said salads were universally pointless. It turns out I just wasn’t including enough summer fruit.)

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Powered by WordPress