Raspberry Debacle

25 May, 2007

Poppyseed Pear Cake

Filed under: afternoon tea, cake, fruit, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:15 am

Close-up of a pear cake with poppy seeds.

Are there any proper conventions for naming recipes? Desultory research turns up a woman who likes to name recipes after the characters in books she’s written, but I haven’t written any books. I have written most of a thesis (it’s why I haven’t been posting here for a few weeks); but my housemates might object to eating Instantiating the Characteristics of Barthes’ Ideal “Writerly” Text Risotto and Convergence of Critical Theory and Computer Science Cookies.

There must be trends in recipe-naming. Mediaeval or Renaissance cookbooks mostly seem pleasantly matter-of-fact, if occasionally opaquely spelt: “a pigge”, “Peacoke Sauce wyne and salt”, “A salet with harde egges”. The seventeenth century is much the same; “To bake Apricocks green”, “To make a Foole”. When there’s a divergence from the rule, it’s a bit embarrassed: “To make red Ginger-bread, commonly called Leach-lumbar”.

The matter-of-factness breaks down more in the nineteenth century; Mrs Beeton has a “Soup a la Cantatrice”, to improve the voice, and a “Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes”, to, er, use for benevolent purposes. Recipes from the period start being named after people more frequently: “Dr. Dobell’s Flour Pudding” sounds particularly unappetising, though I’m not sure whether it’s the “Dr” or the “flour” that does it. By the 1950s half the recipes in existence seem to be named after people, many of them fictional and with no discernible relation to the food; He-Man’s Tuna Noodle Casserole, John Beresford Tipton Bars. By the fifties, recipe writers have also firmly established the policy of mentioning, in the recipe’s title, any unexpected ingredients — if you’re going to feed someone Pepsi-Cola Cake With Broiled Peanut Butter Frosting then they probably deserve to know what they’re in for.

These days the standard practice seems to be to specify the type of food, and also some distinguishing details or ingredients — more detail than a mediaeval-style “an cayke”, but stopping short of “chocolate-coffee cake with vanilla, salt, baking powder, butter, sugar and those little silver balls on the icing maybe, if there are any left in the cupboard, or hey, how about a broken-up flake”. My problem is that today’s cake has four distinguishing details (lemon, poppyseed, upside-down, pear), which is too many for a name.

Fortunately, professional chefs grapple with the same problem, as a forum discussion of “Roasted duck and goat cheese filled crepes with watermelon and cucumber syrup” demonstrates. The resolution they favour appears to involve the extensive use of nonwords; suggestions for the duck include “Quackenbaa Crepes” (ducks quack and goats baa, y’see) , “Cheese & Quackers”, and my personal favourite, “Roasduck in Crepes”. And who am I to go against the dictates of professional chefs?

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19 April, 2007

Chocolate Polenta Cake, Strawberry Ice-Cream, and Useful Kitchen Gadgets

Filed under: afternoon tea, cake, fruit, gluten-free, icecream, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:05 am

Chocolate polenta cake, a strawberry, and strawberry ice-cream from above

After I’d ordered my ice-cream maker, but before it arrived, there was an article (in the Guardian, I think) claiming that ice-cream makers were the most useless of kitchen appliances, with a high cost-to-use ratio springing from the combination of their price (twenty-five to fifty pounds) and the fact that nobody actually uses them. Several weeks of ice-cream-maker ownership has reassured me that this is not the case, but in matters of science instinct must give way to analysis; so today I have chosen to compare my ice-cream maker to a number of other kitchen appliances. This will allow me to work out whether it really is useless, or whether the Guardian is just talking charming nonsense.

The electric tablecloth: No longer available in shops, the electric tablecloth is, er, an electric tablecloth. You can stick bulbs into it and they will light up, and if you spill a drink on it, you will die.

  • Pros: an interesting demonstration of the Edwardian idea that electricity is good with everything (compare the home instruction book Things A Lady Would Like To Know, which recommends, for cramp, “Be electrified through the part which uses to be affected, or hold a roll of brimstone in your hand”, and for deafness, “be electrified through the ear”).
  • Cons: No longer commercially available. Oh, also the death thing.

A self-winding fork for spaghetti: Like the electric tablecloth, this 1937 experimental model is not comercially available.

  • Pros: Spaghetti can indeed be quite difficult to eat decorously.
  • Cons: Almost entirely useless; inventor intended it as a joke; early twentieth century novelty kitchen items are slightly amusing, through the magic of passing time, but people are still selling these, zanily no doubt.

The inside-the-shell electric egg scrambler: A needle is inserted into an egg. The electric scrambler’s scrambling process is initiated, and the needle jiggles around for eight seconds. You then have a pre-beaten egg, which you can either crack open and use as you will, or boil to get a homogenised pale-yellow boiled egg.

  • Pros: Won’t kill you; apparently not intended as a joke; quite small.
  • Cons: Homogenised pale-yellow boiled eggs? What? What?

Duck press: A duck press costs $1500 (expedited shipping not available), and is used for pressing barely-cooked duck until all its duck juice comes out. We learnt about duck presses from a recent programme on Edwardian food (housemate Brendan has already posted about it) but they’re still being manufactured and used; La Tour d’Argent apparently served its millionth pressed duck in 1996 (#253,652 was for Charlie Chaplin).

  • Pros: For an extra $60, you can get a duck press with little duck feet; duck press can perhaps be multipurposed for pressing garlic, trousers, Oxford University, etc.
  • Cons: Takes up quite a lot of bench space.

My ice-cream maker: £36, compact, batteries included, makes delightful ice-cream and sorbet.

  • Pros: You don’t even need to pre-freeze the bowl. You just put the whole machine in the freezer (it’s quite small, but I can measure it if anyone wants one and is worried about whether it would fit in their freezer), and then a few hours later you have ice-cream. Ice-cream!
  • Cons: £36 is a fair wodge of money; and while it’s in the freezer the machine makes little shivery grinding I’m-cold-let-me-out-please noises whenever you walk past the fridge. If you’re in the habit of anthropomorphising kitchen appliances (or drawing sad faces on them), you might find this troublesome.

There’s some competition from the duck press, but I think it’s clear that the ice-cream maker is in fact the least useless kitchen appliance, and furthermore the only one that’s necessary for making chocolate polenta cake with strawberry ice-cream.

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13 April, 2007

Galangal Raspberry Friands, and Using Up Leftovers

Filed under: afternoon tea, cake, fruit, gluten-free, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:19 am

A blueberry friand and a raspberry friand

I’m dreadful at using up leftovers. Occasionally I make stock from a leftover roast, but then a week later I still haven’t used the stock for anything and it’s growing cloudy in the back of the fridge. I bake at a rate of about 120% of our household baked-goods consumption rate (and then booby-trap the baking trays, to decrease the chances of other housemates contributing to the problem), and the last slice or two of any given cake ends up in the bin. When I do manage to use leftovers, as often as not it’s in a more expensive meal than I would have cooked otherwise, after I’ve spent twenty minutes searching for recipes with everything I have to use up (kale, roast beef and banana pasta?), and then another fifteen running down to the supermarket for half the ingredients.

Obviously this is a bad thing and I need to to get better-organised, and also more local friends who eat a lot. Also obviously, it’s the result of the historically and socially unlikely luxury of being able to easily get more food than I need. Certainly the idea of using leftovers appeals to me immensely, but I’m unlikely to start rinsing the dressing off uneaten salad and freezing the carefully dried leaves, or rubbing old tealeaves on the bathroom mirror to clean it (apparently you have to buff it with a soft cloth afterwards to, er, wipe the tealeaves off). I do enjoy and use wartime advice like “if only a small amount of [lemon] juice is needed, prick one end of a lemon with a fork. Squeeze out the amount needed and store the lemon in the ice-box” (from the 1940s Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them); but modern squeamishness has me cringing at the same book’s chapter on gelatine. (Gelatine is good for using up leftovers in a number of ways, all of which boil down to “get a load of gelatine, mix it with a lot of leftovers, leave it all in a mould to set, slice, optionally give dish a name including the word ’surprise’.” This technique is consistent regardless of whether the leftovers are fish, fruit, cheese, rice, or coconut and celery.)

The use of leftovers I find most startling and delightful comes from the bijoutiers. Perhaps everybody knows about them except me, but I’d never even heard of them until yesterday, and they’re brilliant. They worked in Paris, particularly around the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but existing in some form until the middle of the twentieth, and they would walk around to embassies and restaurants and oversupplied wealthy houses, collecting the leftovers, tossing them into a basket: pie-crusts and boiled eggs, chicken wings, scraps of raw pastry, squashed fruit, nuts, uneaten vegetables. Back in the markets, the bijoutiers would arrange the leftovers on tiny plates, in jewel-like patterns, and sell them on; sometimes to hungry passers-by, sometimes even to restaurants, who would add them to their own menus.

In Versailles the waste was even more extravagant, and elaborate meals would be sent from the royal table untouched. The leftovers market differed correspondingly; no bijoutiers to collect the scraps, but rather the Versailles kitchens setting everything out in the market themselves:

The foods that come from the King’s table, and those of Princes, are barely touched when they go on sale. The bourgeois are not embarrassed to serve them since anything that was on a Prince’s table is said to be both delicious and safe to eat. At least a quarter of Versailles lives off of the food once served on the royal table and the cooks of his Majesty are, in fact, preparing foods for lowly stomachs for which these culinary masterpieces were never intended. Huge fish go untouched from his Highness’s table, or that of the Count of Artois, to a hat maker’s table, to the delight of his little family, who feed on succulent dishes and no longer need to cook for themselves.

This is the sort of leftover even I could eat consistently: elaborate delicious meals with absurd ingredients, available cheaply and conveniently. As it is, though, the only sort of leftovers I manage to use up with any regularity are egg whites and egg yolks, and that’s not much of an accomplishment: the solution to “oh, I have some leftover bits of egg” is usually “RAPID EMERGENCY CAKE: INITIATE BAKING PROCEDURES NOW”. Reasons to bake are not something I generally need more of, so egg-yolks become ice-cream or dense and gooey cakes, while egg-whites become friands, uneconomically (almond meal is not a cheap way of using up anything) but deliciously.

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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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