Food Fights & Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste
By Tom Nealon
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Related to Food Fights & Culture Wars
Related ebooks
Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book: The Life and Times of a Civil War Heroine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Everyday Food and Haute Cuisine in Europe Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Searching for Chipeta: The Story of a Ute and Her People Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Golden Dream: Suburbia in the 1970s Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVictorian England - Portait of an Age Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Get Back Home: A Mysterious Disease: a Fight for Life Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Yucaipa:: 1940s-1980s Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the Blink of an Eye Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fire Is Your Water: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night Falls on Damascus: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5We Must Save Jepson! (A Novella) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Prelude to Revolution: The Salem Gunpowder Raid of 1775 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHouse of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby's Cafeterias Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Death by the Glass Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMurder Among Us: The Kate Austen Suburban Mysteries, #3 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bound by Steel and Stone: The Colorado-Kansas Railway and the Frontier of Enterprise in Colorado, 1890-1960 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMurder Among Strangers: The Kate Austen Suburban Mysteries, #4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMurder on the Silk Road Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nancy Shippen - Her Journal Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Way We Live Now Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder Alfresco Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beneath the Wake: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Havoc, in Its Third Year: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Poormaster: A Saga of Poverty, Corruption, and Murder in the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The American Historical Imaginary: Contested Narratives of the Past Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAssault with a Deadly Glue Gun: An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, #1 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Cooking, Food & Wine For You
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Back to Eden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eat Plants, B*tch: 91 Vegan Recipes That Will Blow Your Meat-Loving Mind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From Crook to Cook: Platinum Recipes from Tha Boss Dogg's Kitchen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Snoop Presents Goon with the Spoon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cook Once Dinner Fix: Quick and Exciting Ways to Transform Tonight's Dinner into Tomorrow's Feast Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Small Apartment Hacks: 101 Ingenious DIY Solutions for Living, Organizing and Entertaining Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ultimate Cooking for One Cookbook: 175 Super Easy Recipes Made Just for You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quick Start Guide to Carnivory + 21 Day Carnivore Diet Meal Plan Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Joy of Cooking: Fully Revised and Updated Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tucci Table: Cooking With Family and Friends Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Homegrown & Handmade: A Practical Guide to More Self-Reliant Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Medicinal Herbal: A Practical Guide to the Healing Properties of Herbs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Taste of Home 201 Recipes You'll Make Forever: Classic Recipes for Today's Home Cooks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Meal Prep for Weight Loss Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Instant Pot® Meals in a Jar Cookbook: 50 Pre-Portioned, Perfectly Seasoned Pressure Cooker Recipes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mediterranean Diet: A Complete Guide: 50 Quick and Easy Low Calorie High Protein Mediterranean Diet Recipes for Weight Loss Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCooking at Home: More Than 1,000 Classic and Modern Recipes for Every Meal of the Day Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Art of Eating Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mediterranean Diet: 70 Easy, Healthy Recipes Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Reviews for Food Fights & Culture Wars
4 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Food Fights & Culture Wars - Tom Nealon
INTRODUCTION
As fond as I am of eating, from the beginning it was the lies and artifice of food that grabbed me. About ten years ago, I had the idea to try to cook every food mentioned in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390). I think it arose from my interest in the scurrilous cook Roger, who would drain gravy out of pies to sell in the lucrative second-hand gravy market, but also that I had ended a run of bad restaurant jobs to open my used bookshop in Boston, Massachusetts, and I wanted to splice these two lives together. One of the first dishes that I cooked in preparation for my project was a thirteenth-century recipe for chicken, that was first taken off the bone, the bone cleaned and boiled, and, finally, the chicken rewrapped around the bone and fried in place to achieve chicken disguised to look like chicken.
I’ve long had a dilettante’s interest in the food of the Late Middle Ages – that is, from around 1300 to 1500. The food of these times is so foreign to our own: turtledoves, mutton, flagons of mead, and pork fat, which seems to appear in every dish. The cuisine was loaded with experimental oddities from the spice trade, and in a constant state of flux. I cooked a weird proto-blancmange held together with rice starch and almond milk, and a mashed-up pork dish called mortorio, a recipe from a fourteenth-century manuscript. However, my attempts to find a peacock to skin, roast, and then present with the skin replaced so that it appeared as though I was serving a live, if motionless, peacock on a platter, were stymied by the fact that it is apparently illegal to kill peacocks. I tried Miami, where peacocks run free through residential neighbourhoods, but was unable to bring myself to choke one to death. After cooking and writing about dozens of dishes from early cookbooks, and holding a few memorably strange dinner parties, I began to nurse a more general interest in the history of food. As my business succumbed to the pressure of the Internet and became less about selling used paperbacks than finding old and rare books, I began to buy the best examples I could find, with the (vague) intention of issuing a catalogue of rare early cookbooks.
A Boke of Kokery (c. 1440). Held at the British Library, this is one of about fifty medieval recipe manuscripts still in existence. The first recipe, shown here, is for ‘Hare in Wortes [Herbs].’
Despite its central importance in our lives, the historical record of food is very patchy. In the ancient world there is just one cookbook that survived, from around the fourth century, and some rather random texts that describe banquets (the Ancient Greek Athenaeus’ The Learned Banqueters from the late-second century C.E., and a few other minor examples). During the Renaissance, between the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, meals eaten by the European elite began to be recorded in cookbooks, but there are huge gaps in the accounts, even regarding what royalty was eating at the time. In the rise and fall of empires, the daily story of eating was very often neglected, even though discovery, exploitation, and speculation were so often food-related; as in colonial enterprises such as the spice trade, sugar plantations, and turkey-relocation programmes. A (very small) war was fought over the clove supply on Ambon Island in 1623, and while history records the war, there is no mention of why cloves, beyond their monetary value, were so beloved as to justify killing people. Diarists and historians such as Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) or John Evelyn (1620–1706) occasionally made valuable observations about what they and their contemporaries were eating, or about the opening of new restaurants, but even they give a very incomplete picture of what food was being eaten and what it meant to people. Food was everywhere and nowhere, lost in its own ubiquitous utility.
Preparing a banquet, from The Luttrell Psalter (1325–40).
As a result, fanciful stories sprang up to explain from where these new foods had come. The cooks usually had no idea of the truth and were fabricating origins long after the fact, and often with a surfeit of whimsy, so that these inventions are frequently described as delightful accidents: mayonnaise was invented to mimic thickened cream at a banquet; chocolate blew into a meat stew and created the Mexican dish mole; fresh cheese was abandoned in a cave and became Roquefort; coffee beans were discovered after herders observed their goats eating some and becoming frisky; and the Napoleon pastry was invented to outdo Beef Wellington (actually, that last one might be from Woody Allen’s film Love and Death, 1975). Because food, especially prepared food, had never been consistently recorded, it had been relegated to a fictional universe outside history.
I figured that the most sensible plan was to go back to the source. Yet what I found in the cookbooks was even weirder and less structured than I had anticipated. Since the twentieth century, we have come to expect that recipes will provide precise measurements and timings, and that the dishes have not only been attempted, but refined and perfected, by the writer. Such expectations are unhelpful when dealing with the first four centuries or so of the printed cookbook.
The very first printed cookbook – published in 1475, not long after the Gutenberg Bible, c. 1454 – announces what we should expect. Bartolomeo Sacchi’s (1421–81) De honesta voluptate et valetudine (′On right pleasure and good health′) is composed almost entirely of untested recipes cribbed from Maestro Martino da Como’s (born c. 1430) Liber de arte coquinaria (′Book of the art of cooking′). Martino da Como was the most famous chef of the Western world in the fifteenth century, whereas Sacchi, known as Il Platina, was, in fact, not even a cook: just an itinerant humanist with some publishing connections at the Vatican (he also wrote a papal history). Il Platina added to Martino’s recipes advice on diet and medicine from classical sources to create a comprehensive book about food. The fifteenth century only saw this published and, in 1498, a printing of the fourth-century Roman manuscript cookery written by Apicius, De re coquinaria (′On the subject of cooking′), but the sixteenth century ushered in a strange melange of books on diet, medicinal food, and books of secrets.
Clove Tree, ‘Zacharias Wagener, A short account of the Voyages of Z.W. perform’d in thirty-five years’, collected in Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol.2, (1732).
Chillies, from Basilius Besler, Hortus Eystettensis (1613), the most magnificent botanical book ever made.
The book of secrets had a long history in manuscript form, as people from the dawn of writing tried to keep record of tricks and recipes for such everyday tasks as making paint pigment, cleaning textiles, or mixing perfume, but also for creating aphrodisiacs, plague cures, and making sausages. The notion behind these books that the world could be better understood by travelling around and observing and cataloguing its phenomena, had a huge impact on the science of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. Two of the most popular secret books were The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piemont by Girolamo Ruscelli, first published in Italian in 1555 and reprinted in profusion (in French in 1557, and in English in 1558) for over two hundred years, and a book of secrets by the French apothecary and prophet Michel de Nostredame (1503–66), or Nostradamus, also published in 1555, in Lyon. Before becoming famous for his prophecies, Nostradamus collected recipes for his book of secrets, which featured an entire section on jams and jellies, including a ridiculously complicated and exotic jam devised to be so delicious that it would make a woman fall in love with you. The popularity of secret books was such that it took some time before cookery and secrets became disentangled, making it difficult to discern whether food or medicine was the more pressing concern in sixteenth-century Europe.
Marx Rumpolt, Ein new Kochbuch (1604).
One would have expected the sixteenth century to have produced a proliferation of written recipes featuring the new ingredients flowing into Europe from the Americas. The potato, tomato, chilli pepper, pumpkin, turkey, corn, and all those New World beans (that is, almost all beans, except soy, fava, and chickpea, or garbanzo) made their way to Europe during the 1500s, but had remarkably little impact on the recipes in printed cookbooks. What happened? Some of the new bounty just didn’t find immediate popularity: beans seemed mysterious, tomato and potato plants were refused because they are nightshades and were suspected of being as poisonous as the well-known European nightshades such as mandrake and belladonna were. European farmers were not completely mistaken on this point: all nightshades do have high (though not dangerously high, with respect to the edible plants) alkaloid content. The most famous of these alkaloids is nicotine, present in high quantities in tobacco, and in lower quantities in some nightshade foods such as tomato, potato, and aubergine, or eggplant (which is from Asia, but was adopted late in northern Europe). Corn, so popular in the Americas, was slow to catch on across the Atlantic, as Europeans already ate wheat, oats, rice, and barley. Chilli peppers, also from the nightshade family, were a little too powerful for European palates (though adopted with alacrity in Asia when introduced there by Portuguese explorers). The turkey alone was a big hit, but even that had to compete with a wide range of domestic fowl. However, one of the first great modern cookbooks, Opera (1570), by famous Italian Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi (c. 1500–1577), does contain a delightful recipe for pumpkin and cheese pie.