baba au rhum is a rum-saturated, yeast-leavened cake that is as soaked in legend as it is in boozy syrup. The name comes from the Slavic term for “old lady” and has been used by Czechs and Poles for a variety of sweet, mold-baked preparations since at least the Middle Ages. At some point before the eighteenth century, the term also became a synonym for Gugelhupf. See gugelhupf . The Nouveau grand dictionnaire françois, latin et polonois et sa place dans la lexicographie polonaise (1743) defines a “baba ciasta” (dough baba) as a yellow cake (gâteau). In France, the word was adopted for just such a saffron-tinted pastry sometime in the eighteenth century, presumably due to the influence of exiled Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński or his daughter Marie Leszczyńska, the queen consort of Louis XV.
Numerous fanciful tales recount Leszczyński’s participation in the genesis of the yeasty cake. Some credit him personally with inventing it while in residence in Lorraine in the 1710s, whereas others assign the innovation to his pastry chef Nicolas Stohrer. See stohrer, nicolas. According to one story, the king was reading the newly translated One Thousand and One Nights and spilled some fortified wine on his slice of Gugelhupf. He is supposed to have named this new creation “baba” after the Ali Baba of one of the tales. According to another story, it was Leszczyński’s young pastry cook who came up with the idea of soaking the cake in a rum syrup. The trouble with both tales is that soaking the pastry was not part of the recipe until the nineteenth century. As late as 1808, the French food writer Grimod de La Reynière noted that “the principal flavoring of the baba is saffron and Corinth raisins [dry currants].” Contemporary cookbooks confirm that the cake was little different from a Gugelhupf at this point.
Although Leszczyński most certainly did not invent the Gugelhupf—a common enough pastry throughout Central Europe—it is highly plausible that either he or his daughter popularized the idea of snacking on the yeasty cake at Versailles when the 22-year-old princess married the 15-year-old French king in 1725. Certainly, the Polish name would have been easier than its German counterpart for the French courtiers to pronounce.
Just when the rum syrup was added is a little unclear. References to “baba au rhum” begin to crop up only in the 1840s. Ever since, the ring-shaped, rum-syrup-soaked cake has become firmly rooted in the French pastry repertoire.
Curiously, it was in Naples rather than in France that the baba became a regional icon. As in the rest of Europe, French cooking was all the rage in nineteenth-century Naples, and no self-respecting aristocratic kitchen was complete without its monsù or French chef. Consequently all sorts of French tarts, crèmes, and gâteaux were commonly served in the palazzi, and many French techniques came to be adopted by Neapolitan pasticcieri. Of all the sweet Gallic imports, none came to be as loved as the baba, now often presented in the form of a mushroom-shaped single serving, split and filled with pastry cream. Today, the baba is vastly more popular in Naples (and in Italian American pastry shops in the United States) than in France. Neapolitans are so fond of the dessert that the name is used as a term of endearment. “Si nu’ baba” (you are a baba) roughly means “you’re the real deal.” It can also mean “you’re hot stuff,” if your intentions are less platonic.
Baghdad, today’s capital of Iraq, was founded by the Abbasids in 762 c.e. Built on the ruins of an ancient Mesopotamian city dating back to around 2000 b.c.e., Baghdad was a thriving trade center strategically located at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western cultures of Persia, Greece, and Rome.
Baghdad rapidly flourished under Abbasid rule. To meet an increasing demand for spices and other luxury merchandise, traders ventured to places as distant as China. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, Baghdad grew into the hub of a medieval Islamic world renowned for a remarkably diverse culinary repertoire. It drew directly on the Arabs’ native heritage and on Iraq’s indigenous foodways, and indirectly on Persian practice, which had refined these traditions throughout several centuries of dominance. Active international trade introduced foreign elements, and slave girls proficient in the art of cooking were in high demand.
The Evolution of Baghdad’s Medieval Sweets
The cultivation of ingredients such as sesame, wheat, and dates from ancient times helped nurture a sweets-loving culture in the region well before the foundation of Abbasid Baghdad. Fragments of cuneiform tablets of fruitcake recipes and other records show that making pastries and confections was already a thriving business in the region, and desserts were consumed in large amounts during the religious festivals. Among these sweets were date-filled, rosewater-infused cookies (qullupu), date halvah (mirsu), and muttaqu, a flour-based pudding. See halvah.
The only culinary source surviving from the following era of Persian presence in the region, the fourth-century Sassanian book King Khosrau and His Page, mentions almond and walnut candy (lauzenak and guzenak) as well as faludhaj, a starch pudding made with fruit juice, butter, and honey. The Arabs themselves were familiar from pre-Islamic times with sweetmeats of dates mashed with toasted flour and clarified butter, and the affluent relished the translucent faludhaj.
The cultivation and processing of sugarcane, begun in the southern regions of Iraq and Persia by the sixth century c.e., contributed to the creativity of cooks to meet the demands of the newly wealthy leisure class of the Abbasid era. Islam was not against such indulgences, since sensual delight in eating was considered legitimate. Good food, after all, was one of the promised pleasures of Paradise. Moreover, dessert, with its hot properties, was believed to aid digestion when consumed after meals. Still, in the heat of summer, connoisseurs preferred to have their crêpe-like qatayif, fresh dates, and honeycomb served on crushed ice.
Dignitaries of all ranks joined professional cooks and poets in creating gourmet dishes and writing about food, both in cookbooks and in gastronomic poetry. The caliphs loved participating in cooking contests and delighted in listening to poems about food, such as one by the famous poet Kushajim (d. 961), who described lusciously made nāṭif (nougat): “like solid silver it looks, but soft and sweet as lips it tastes.” See nougat. The story of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” from The Arabian Nights details a “shopping list” with more than 20 sweet items, imported and local, including Lebanese malban (chewy starch candy), sultanas from Yemen, and all kinds of cookies and sticky fried pastries. This was by no means fictitious fodder; a repertoire of over 100 dessert recipes has survived in al-Warraq’s and al-Baghdadi’s tenth- and thirteenth-century cookbooks, respectively, both titled Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh.
Baghdadi cooks were spoiled as to the varieties of sugar at their disposal. The best all-purpose white sugar was sukkar ṭabarzad (chiseled sugar-cone). Less-refined qand was shaped into small balls and sticks, a delicacy to nibble at the table. Powdered sugar was generously sprinkled on desserts, while unrefined crystallized brown sugar was used only for baking cookies like kaʿk. The purest sugar was crystal-clear sukkar nabat (rock candy), eaten as candy but also crushed to decorate desserts. Sukkar Sulaymāni was a hard candy made from white sugar boiled into a thick syrup, then beaten until crystallized and shaped into discs, rings, or fingers. See candy. Molasses was also produced, though it was deemed inferior to honey. Fried pastries were commonly submerged in honey or jullab, a rosewater-infused sugar syrup.
Honey was more extensively used than sugar for making jams (murabbayat) and pastes. See fruit preserves and honey. Although the main purpose of these preserves was to aid digestion, cure simple aches and pains, or invigorate coitus, they were often enjoyed as sweets. Most were locally made from rose petals, citron peel, quince, apple, dates, dried ginger root, and even celery, carrots, and radish, though mango jam imported from India was very popular.
Light milk-puddings (muhallabiyyat) were thickened with wheat starch, rice flour, or itriya (fine noodles). Thicker puddings like khabīs and faludhaj were made with wheat starch, rice flour, or crushed almonds, and sometimes with pureed carrots, melon, apples, or quince. Sweetened with honey, they were spread on flat platters and copiously sprinkled with powdered sugar; for festive events, they were often decorated with elaborate domes of honey taffy, colored almonds, and sugar candy. Hospitality was gauged by how much faludhaj was served for dessert, and no wedding was deemed complete without it.
The latticed fritters zalabiya mushabbak, fried in sesame oil and drenched in honey, were a Baghdad specialty, beautifully described by the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Rumi (d. 896):
I saw him at the crack of dawn frying zalabiya,
Tubes of reed, delicate, and thin. The oil I saw
Boiling in his pan was like hitherto elusive alchemy.
The batter he threw into the pan looking like silver,
Would instantly transform into lattices of gold.
See zalabiya. An unusual sweet called barad (hailstones) was made by binding tiny balls of crisp fried pastry with cooked honey, not unlike today’s Rice Krispies squares. Spongy, delicate cakes with and without eggs, called furniyya and safanj, were baked in the tannour, a clay oven, or steamed in special pots. Milk and clarified butter were poured over the inverted cakes, which were given a final sprinkle of powdered sugar and black pepper. The brittle double-crusted honey pie basīsa was baked in the commercial oven for controlled heat. Basketfuls of kaʿk (delicate cookies), luxuriously perfumed with rosewater, ambergris, camphor, mastic, and musk, were sent as favors and distributed during religious festivals. The nut- and date-filled cookies called khushkananaj marked the end of religious festivals.
A popular street food was sweet-savory judhaba—many thin layers of bread spread in a shallow pan, sprinkled with sugar and nuts, drenched in syrup and sesame oil or chicken fat, then baked in the tannour with a chunk of meat suspended above it. The bread was served with the thinly sliced meat, with the sweet component deemed necessary to aid digestion of the meat. Quite possibly this complex dish was an early inspiration for the Ottoman baklava and Moroccan bistilla.
Although Baghdad had much to indulge in, food was not cheap. Making desserts was labor intensive and expensive, so people with limited means satisfied their cravings by purchasing a handful of fanīd (pulled taffy) from hawkers or buying sweets at the confectioners’ market, where they were not always of top quality (people with deceptive appearances were often compared to second-rate faludhaj purchased from the marketplace). From extant market inspection books we learn that it was common to adulterate honey with grape molasses, to make cookies with flour debased with ground lentil or sesame hull, or to drench zalabiya in cane-sugar syrup rather than the more desirable bees’ honey. See adulteration. While the poor ate cheap dates and date syrup, the affluent enjoyed refined sugars and honey, sucked on crystal-clear rock candy, and chewed on small sticks of peeled sugarcane infused with rosewater. Only a few times a year were the have-nots given a taste of luxury—mainly on grand occasions like religious or public feasts.
The Heritage of Baghdad’s Medieval Sweets
The sweet legacy of medieval Baghdad spread far in place and time, to the medieval Levant, Egypt, Morocco, and Andalusia, and even beyond Muslim territories. But the Mongol invasion of 1258 eclipsed Baghdad’s star, and with the rise of the Ottoman Empire the limelight shifted to Istanbul. Even so, many Abbasid desserts were incorporated into Ottoman kitchens, for which Arab cooks were often hired. The first Turkish cookbook, Muhammed Shirvani’s fifteenth-century Kitabu’t-Tabīh, was based on his translation of al-Baghdadi’s thirteenth-century Kitāb al- ṭabīkh.
By the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, life in Baghdad was characterized by religious and ethnic diversity. Most of the traditional desserts persisted, especially at social gatherings and dinner parties. Today, a small box of baklava and zalabiya makes a handsome gift for a birthday party or circumcision, and trays full of them are served at weddings. In the heat of summer, Baghdadis enjoy chilled puddings, drinks, and ice cream. A typically Baghdadi sweet breakfast treat is kahi, thin sheets of dough generously brushed with oil, folded into squares, and baked. Kahi is served warm with light syrup and a scoop of clotted cream.
Various candies, such as ḥalqīm (Turkish delight), simsimiyya (a chewy candy of date syrup and tahini encrusted with toasted sesame seeds), and diamond-shaped lauzīna, are displayed in small bazaar shops and sold by hawkers. A distinctly Iraqi candy is the exotic mann il-sima (heaven-sent manna), whose main ingredient, manna, is harvested in the north of Iraq. See manna. It is enjoyed all year round, but the Chaldean Christians particularly offer it for their spring festival Khidr Elias. Up until the 1950s when there was still a thriving Jewish community in Baghdad, the confectioners among them were considered the best at making it. Also favored by Baghdad Jews for Purim was an unusual candy called khirret, made with pollen of cattail (Typha spp.) in the southern marshes of Iraq. See judaism. A common scene at Muslim holy shrines is that of women whose prayers have been answered showering visitors with an assortment of hard candies as they ululate shrilly.
Since the early 1990s, Iraq has been going through very harsh times, and the difficult economic conditions have made sweets a luxury beyond the reach of most people. Prices have skyrocketed and good-quality ingredients are hard to find. But sweets are so deeply ingrained in Iraqi culture that they are hard to abandon. An Iraqi newspaper interview about festive Muslim customs quoted one man as saying, “But can any of us husbands persuade the wife not to make kleicha [date and nut cookies] in these difficult times? I doubt it!”
See also dates; flower waters; middle east; pudding; pulled sugar; and ramadan.
Baked Alaska is a trick dessert that consists of frozen ice cream on a sponge cake base, encased by hot meringue. See meringue and sponge cake. The insulating properties of the air in the sponge cake and the meringue make it possible to deliver hot and cold temperatures in the same dish.
The origins of Baked Alaska are obscure. Baron Brisse (Léon Brisse), in his daily food column for the French newspaper La Liberté in 1866, told readers of a visit by the Chinese emperor to Paris, during which his chefs demonstrated for their French counterparts a dessert known in China “since time immemorial.” It consisted of ginger-accented vanilla ice cream baked in a pastry crust. The ice cream and meringue dessert known as omelette norvégienne, or Norwegian omelet, entered the French culinary repertoire in the 1890s.
In the United States, the dessert is associated with Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City, where Charles Ranhofer created a hot frozen dish called “Alaska Florida.” Many sources state it as fact, but without evidence, that he created the dessert in 1867 to celebrate the American government’s purchase of Alaska that year.
In America Revisited (1882), the British journalist Charles Augustus Sala described eating an “Alaska” at Delmonico’s, with more enthusiasm than accuracy—he mistook the meringue for whipped cream. “The nucleus or core of the entremet is an ice cream,” he wrote. “This is surrounded by an envelope of carefully whipped cream [sic], which, just before the dainty dish is served, is popped into the oven, or is brought under the scorching influence of a red hot salamander; so that its surface is covered with a light brown crust. So you go on discussing the warm cream soufflé till you come, with somewhat painful suddenness, on the row of ice” (Vol. 1, p. 90).
Ranhofer included his dessert in his massive cookbook The Epicurean (1894). The recipe calls for vanilla and banana ice cream and for the sponge base to be filled with apricot marmalade. Baked Alaska first appeared under that name in the first edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer in 1896. Constantly rediscovered, it reached peak popularity in the 1950s, enjoyed a revival in the 1970s, and, after the turn of the millennium, began attracting a fresh wave of admirers in search of a showpiece dessert.
See also ice cream.
Baker’s is an American brand of chocolate primarily associated with home baking. The modest place it occupies in today’s supermarket with its semisweet, unsweetened, and German’s line of baking chocolate belies the company’s pivotal role in inspiring Americans to make chocolate desserts in the first place. Originally, Baker’s chocolate was not made for baking. The company was established by James Baker in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1765. At first, the Walter Baker Company, as it came to be known after the founder’s grandson, manufactured tablets of drinking chocolate. They sold it locally, subsequently expanding their market across the East Coast and then nationally when, in 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad made it possible to ship the chocolate to every major American city. Prior to 1865, Baker’s sold three grades of drinking chocolate: “Best Chocolate,” “Common Chocolate,” and a low-quality “Inferior Chocolate” supplied mainly to American and West Indian slaves.
Baker’s vastly expanded its market share under the leadership of Henry Pierce (1825–1896), who assumed control of the company in 1854. Having briefly worked at a midwestern newspaper, Pierce knew the power of advertising firsthand. Consequently, once the Civil War was over, he invested heavily in promoting the brand, often using images of an attractive European waitress known as “La Belle Chocolatière,” based on a pastel by Jean-Étienne Liotard. By 1872 Baker’s was running ads in over 150 regional papers; a decade later this number had increased to over 530, and by 1896 Baker’s was reaching readers in some 8,000 newspapers nationwide. In an early version of saturation marketing, Pierce also bought full-page ads in the back of some 6 million novels and placed posters in streetcars, billboards along train routes, and cards and signs in grocery stores. At first, the company’s chocolate was touted as a wholesome, family beverage, but eventually Baker’s started promoting the idea of chocolate as a dessert ingredient.
Since women were not accustomed to baking with chocolate, they needed instruction. This tutelage came first in the form of recipe booklets and then in full-fledged cookbooks. In 1893 the company hired celebrity cooking instructor Maria Parloa of the famed Boston Cooking School to write several Baker’s cookbooks. In 1898, when Parloa protégé Fannie Farmer penned the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, it contained 16 chocolate desserts—specifying Baker’s brand chocolate in every one.
By 1897 the recently incorporated company was sold to a conglomerate of Boston capitalists headed by John Malcolm Forbes. It changed hands once again in 1927, when it was acquired by Postum (later named General Foods). Phillip Morris bought the company in 1985, and it finally spun off as a division of Mondelēz International in 2012. In 1965 the storied New England company moved to Dover, Delaware. The old Baker’s buildings in Dorchester have been converted to luxury apartments.
See also cocoa.
baker’s dozen, a phrase that denotes a cluster of 13 items, was first recorded in a pamphlet titled Have with You to Saffron-Walden, published by Thomas Nashe in 1596. According to John Hotten’s Slang Dictionary of 1864, the phrase arose from bakers’ practice of providing an additional free loaf whenever a customer bought 12 loaves, in case the loaves were underweight. The penalties for selling underweight bread were indeed severe (ranging from fines, to the destruction of the baker’s oven, to the pillory), and in England they dated back to a thirteenth-century statute known as the Assize of Bread and Ale. However, Hotten’s commonly cited explanation is probably incorrect.
Instead, the phrase “baker’s dozen” likely arose from the practice of bakers giving extra loaves to “hucksters,” that is, to peddlers who sold the bread in the street. Because the price of a loaf was fixed by the Assize of Bread and Ale, the hucksters could not charge more for the loaves than what they had paid the bakers. This meant that they could make a profit only if the bakers gave them a free loaf; the bakers were happy to comply, because they could sell more bread to the hucksters who roamed the streets than they could by remaining at their stalls to sell their own bread. This free thirteenth loaf was called the “vantage loaf” (first recorded in 1612, and so named because it gave the huckster an advantage) or “inbread” (first recorded in 1639, and so named because the extra loaf was “thrown in” by the baker). In the early nineteenth century, a baker’s dozen also came to be known as a “devil’s dozen” because of the sinister associations of the number 13.
baklava is a many-layered pastry, soaked in syrup, that is made in central and western Asia and parts of the Balkans, in countries ranging from Greece to Uzbekistan and Turkey to Egypt. The most common type of baklava consists of 40 to 80 layers of tissue-thin filo, moistened with melted butter before baking, and soaked with hot syrup after baking. See filo. It is usually filled with nuts, the most common being walnuts or almonds. In Turkey, fillings also include fresh cheese and a custard made of milk thickened with starch or semolina. Other examples of regional variations are cinnamon added to the nuts in Greece, and cardamom or rosewater to the syrup in Iran. See flower waters. Baklava is usually cut into small lozenges. Variations are made by rolling or folding the pastry sheets into diverse shapes, known in Turkey as dilberdudağı (beauty’s lips), sarığıburma (twisted turban), bülbülyuvası (nightingale’s nest), vezirparmağı (vizier’s finger), and gül baklava (rose baklava). Sugar syrup is used in Turkey and the Middle East, although honey syrup and boiled grape juice were common in the past when sugar was a luxury for ordinary people. See pekmez. In Greece, honey is sometimes added to the syrup. To make the filo sheets, dough is either rolled in individual pieces or first rolled into small circles, next stacked 10 at a time, with starch sprinkled between each layer; then the whole pile is rolled out simultaneously. The latter method is often used by both professional and home cooks and is easier for the inexperienced baker. Although few city dwellers make their own baklava today, homemade baklava is still widely produced in provincial Turkish towns.
Baklava filled with fresh cheese is always eaten hot (like the cheese-filled kunāfa of the Levant). In the past, cheese was a common baklava filling in Istanbul, but it survives today only in the provincial cuisines of Urfa, Çorum, and Isparta. Kuru baklava (“dry baklava”) is a type made for sending long distances or taking on journeys. So that the syrup does not seep out of the packaging or drip when eaten, the lemon juice that ordinarily prevents the syrup from crystallizing is omitted, giving the baklava a dry and crunchy texture. Damascus has long been famed for its kuru baklava, which visitors to the city traditionally buy to take home.
Baklava, first recorded in Ottoman Turkey in the early fifteenth century, originated in pastries made of layered and folded filo that have been known in Central Asian Turkic cuisines since the eleventh century. Such dishes appear to have then joined forces with the Arab culinary tradition of soaking pastries in syrup, giving rise to baklava. A thirteenth-century Arabic cookbook Kitāb al-Wuslaila al-Habib describes a sweet pastry very similar to baklava with the Turkish name karnıyarık (“split belly”) and uses the Turkish term tutmaç for the thin pastry sheets. In this recipe each sheet of filo is rolled around a slender rolling pin, gathered into a concertina, and formed into circles, much like the baklava types known today as sarığıburma or bülbülyuvası.
An early-fifteenth-century poem by the mystic Kaygusuz Abdal mentions baklava filled with either almonds or lentils, fillings specified in two early-sixteenth-century Persian recipes. Other fillings mentioned in historical Turkish sources are clotted cream and puréed melon. Ottoman pastry cooks working for the palace or wealthy patrons sought to make baklava with an increasing number of ever-thinner layers. An account of the circumcision feast for the son of Murad III mentions “trays of many-layered baklava,” and in the mid-seventeenth century one writer refers to baklava consisting of a thousand layers, clearly an exaggeration but revealing how the number of layers had become a culinary status symbol. Moreover, the baklava had to be so delicate that a coin dropped from a height of about 2 feet pierced each layer and struck the bottom of the baking tray.
Baklava is a festive dish, associated above all with Ramazan (Ramadan in Arabic-speaking nations). Until 1826, every year on the 15th of Ramazan, janissary soldiers marched to the palace in the Baklava Procession to collect hundreds of trays of the sweet, which had been baked in the palace kitchens. One tray was shared by 10 janissaries, 2 of whom would carry the tray back to the barracks. A popular Ramazan poem about this event begins with the following verse:
As the sun and moon revolve
May divine aid be your company
The sultan gave baklava
To his loyal janissaries.
For centuries baklava has been a feature of meals on religious feast days, or at weddings and other celebrations; it also once was the custom to present baklava as a gift to neighbors and acquaintances on special occasions. Turkish novelist Aziz Nesin (1915—1995) recalled that when he was a child of five, his mother had become inconsolable because she could not afford the sugar and nuts needed to bake a tray of baklava as a gift for his schoolteacher. Today, baklava still retains this festive character in many countries and is often made or bought for family gatherings on days and nights of celebration and thanksgiving.
See also greece and cyprus; islam; middle east; persia; and turkey.
banqueting houses were small garden buildings in Tudor and Stuart England, so called because “banqueting” was the primary activity enjoyed in them. The Tudor “banquet” was not the sumptuous feast that we now associate with the word, but a delectable, intimate repast of marzipans, jellies, quince cakes, meringues, gingerbread, and other treats, washed down with ipocras, a form of mulled wine flavored with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, peppercorns, nutmeg, and rosemary, all steeped in sugar. See hippocras. Gervase Markham described the banquet in The English Housewife (first published in 1615), giving specific orders for the “making of Banquetting stuffe and conceited dishes, with other pretty and curious secrets.” The order in which the food was presented was precisely detailed, beginning with “a dish made for shew only, as Beast, Bird, Fish or Fowl,” followed by the sweets listed above, as well as marmalade, not a jam but oranges filled with sugar paste, then sliced. The elegant and decorative little delicacies were eaten off special plates or roundels, approximately the same size as dessert plates today, often decorated with witty pictures, inscriptions, and puzzles. Fine examples in embossed and painted leather survive (at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London), but the most magnificent are the set of eight silver plates, hallmarked 1586, depicting the life of the Prodigal Son (part of the Collection of the Duke of Bucchleuch). The banquet was offered to intimate friends of the host, invited into a banqueting house in the garden or sometimes on the roof. At some houses, there was a choice of going to the garden or onto the roof.
The origins of the banqueting house appear to be medieval, as in the early sixteenth century the antiquary John Leland noted that Henry VIII had moved a “praty baketynge house of tymber,” originally erected in the early fifteenth century by Henry V, from the “Pleasance” at Kenilworth into the court of the castle. Henry VIII himself built numerous little banqueting houses in his garden at Hampton Court, all carefully recorded in Wyngaerde’s drawings of ca. 1560 (at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Each of Henry’s banqueting houses was different in plan (some square, some polygonal) but each had an upper room, brilliantly glazed on all sides and accessible via a stair turret that rose to a platform on the “leads” or flat roof. Clearly, the banquet was meant to be consumed while appreciating the glories of the landscape. Nowhere is this better illustrated than at Lacock Abbey (Wiltshire), where ca. 1550 Sir William Sharington built a three-story octagonal tower with a banqueting room in the upper story with expansive windows and, at its center, a splendidly carved Purbeck marble table. Shell-headed niches in the base contain figures of Bacchus, Ceres, and the Roman epicure Apicius, wonderfully apposite banqueting companions. After enjoying their banquet, the more energetic banqueters could climb the winding stair up to the balustraded roof of the tower for splendid views over the gardens and medieval fishponds.
Banqueting houses were small garden buildings where hosts entertained guests at the end of a formal meal and served delicacies such as marzipan, gingerbread, meringues, and hippocras, a mulled wine. This drawing by the British artist Thomas Forster (1672–1722) depicts the royal banqueting house in Whitehall, London. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection
Later Elizabethan houses, such as Hardwick Hall (Derbyshire), had banqueting houses on both the roof and in the garden. At Hardwick, the great south tower room is approached via a long walk across the roof and entered through a door, above which looms a ferocious gorgon’s head, an apotropaic device to discourage evil spirits from destroying the joyful mood. On roof level, one can also look down on Bess of Hardwick’s two lozenge-shaped banqueting houses: one in the corner of the south garden and the other in the orchard, to the north of the house.
Because of their relatively small size, banqueting houses were inexpensive to build, so they were perfect for architectural experimentation. Just like banqueting food, they were meant to be “curious” and “artificiall,” according to Markham again, who wrote that they “lustre to the Orchard.” The octagonal form was particularly popular in the Tudor period and remained an option well into the seventeenth century. Even Elizabeth I, who rarely spent money on her palaces or gardens, erected an octagonal banqueting house at the end of the long terrace at Windsor in 1576 for which plans survive in the National Archives (London). Later banqueting houses were built on more unusual plans: rectangular; oval; lozenge-shaped (as at Hardwick); or in the shape of a cross superimposed on a square, as at Montacute (Somerset). When Sir Francis Drake’s ship “The Golden Hind” became unfit, he removed the cabin from its deck and turned it into a banqueting house in his garden in Deptford. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had banqueting houses at all of his houses: sketches in his own hand survive for those he built in his London garden (dated 1565; preserved at Burghley House, Northamptonshire). At his grandest house, Theobalds (Hertfordshire), visitors commented on a semicircular banqueting house with statues of 12 Roman emperors and, on the roof, lead cisterns that could be used for bathing in the summer.
Such exuberance did not please everyone, and at the turn of the century, John Stow wrote grumpily in his Survey of London (1598) that banqueting houses bear “great shew and little worth.” Although the practice of building them continued through the early Stuart period, the practice gradually died out. Those few banqueting houses that survive today generally stand empty and unused, evidence of changes in fashion that not only affected gardens but also spelled the doom of the little banquet itself.
See also dessert and sweet meals.
bar cookies are made by pouring, spreading, or pressing batter into a square or rectangular pan (sometimes in several layers) and cutting the finished product into individual pieces after baking. This type of cookie is more cake-like than are drop cookies and rolled cookies, due to the addition of more eggs or shortening to the batter. See drop cookies and rolled cookies. Bar cookies are also known as pan cookies, squares, bars, and, in Britain, tray bakes.
These cookies were not invented at a single moment in time, but rather represent a natural evolution from cakes and sweet breads cooked in a single pan. They are a style of bakery item particularly suitable for families and informal events, and because they are more quickly made than individually formed cookies, and also pack and transport well in the pan, they are popular with the busy home cook. The best known, and arguably the most popular form, are brownies. See brownies.
References to “bar cookies” appear in grocers’ advertisements in the 1890s, but their exact nature is not certain. Most of these references apply to Kennedy’s Fig Bar Cookies (later called Fig Newtons), but these are formed from extruded dough with a filling. See fig newtons. Other references to fruit and date squares at this time are clearly for a confectionery product. The first known recipe for a baked item that unequivocally fits the concept of a bar cookie appears in the Indianapolis Star on 3 July 1924 for a peanut bar cookie with a peanut frosting.
Bar cookies are still popular today, and are likely to remain so, because of their ease of preparation and great range of ingredients, flavors, and textures.
See also small cakes.
barfi (also spelled burfi), from the Persian and Urdu word for snow, is a sweet with a fudge-like consistency that is especially popular in northern India. It seems to be a relatively recent invention. The classic barfi is made from finely granulated sugar and khoa/khoya, milk solids produced by slowly boiling milk until it becomes thick, stirring constantly to prevent caramelization. These two ingredients are cooked together and, when thick, spread over a greased plate. Once cooled, the mixture is cut into squares, diamonds, or circles. At this stage it resembles snow, hence its name. According to Mrs. Balbir Singh in her classic Indian Cookery, a sugar to khoa ratio of 1 to 4 is the preferred base for barfi.
Varying proportions of other ingredients may be added, including melon seeds, guava, grated carrot, or grated coconut. Flavorings include saffron, rosewater, kewra water (an extract made from padanus flowers), vanilla, orange, mango, and especially cardamom powder. Some varieties, notably those made with pistachios and almonds, do not contain khoa; instead, ground nuts (peanuts) are boiled in a sugary syrup. Barfi is a favorite sweet at Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. When distributed to guests at weddings and other festivities, barfi is often decorated with finely beaten and edible silver leaf (vark).
A variant is Mysore pak, a popular South Indian sweet with a granular texture. It is made by roasting chickpea flour with ghee, then cooking it with sugar syrup, adding more ghee, and cutting it into squares when cool.
barley sugar is a hard, clear sugar confection with a golden color, formed in round or oval drops or long twisted sticks. It is made in the United Kingdom, Australia, and North America (“barley sugar candy”), and also in France, where it is known as sucre d’orge.
Traditionally, barley sugar is made by boiling sugar to hard crack or the start of caramel at 328° to 346°F (150° to 160°C) and adding an acid to prevent recrystallization on cooling. See stages of sugar syrup. Craft production employed lemon juice or vinegar, but mass-produced barley sugar in the United Kingdom is now often made with a mixture of sugar and glucose, which has the same effect. See glucose. Lemon essence is generally used as a flavoring in the British tradition of sugar boiling.
In Les friandises et leurs secrets (1986), Annie Perrier Roberts notes how in France, sucre d’orge is a speciality of various spa towns, as well as the city of Tours, and as Sucre d’Orge des Religieuses de Moret it has an association with convent sweets and the town of Moret sur Loing. See convent sweets.
Originally, the sweets contained a decoction of barley, but this disappeared from recipes around the start of the eighteenth century. Barley sweets were regarded in some way as medicinal; even today in Britain, sucking barley sugar is sometimes recommended as a treatment for overcoming motion sickness. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration, after discovering the complete lack of barley in modern barley sugar, has discouraged the use of this traditional name.
Baskin-Robbins, an American chain of ice cream shops, was the brainchild of brothers-in-law Burton “Burt” Baskin and Irvine “Irv” Robbins. Today, every ice cream shop in the United States seems to churn out a host of exotic flavors, from olive oil and lavender to honey jalapeño and sweet corn. But when Baskin-Robbins was launched in the early 1950s, its notion of serving 31 flavors was novel.
Burt and Irv had started out as small-time ice cream shop owners with separate businesses in Southern California. In 1945 Robbins opened Snowbird Ice Cream in Glendale, California, where he offered 21 flavors. A year later Baskin opened Burton’s Ice Cream Shop in Pasadena. By 1948 the two ice cream entrepreneurs boasted half a dozen shops in Southern California. A year later the number had jumped to more than 40. In 1953 the brothers-in-law took a leap and joined forces to create Baskin-Robbins, which became the international ice cream juggernaut we know today. They also began to franchise their operation.
For years, Americans had been fiercely loyal to the classic ice cream triumvirate of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Even Howard Johnson, who marketed 28 flavors in its famous orange-roofed restaurants dotting America in the 1950s and 1960s, could not quite manage to tear customers away from the tried-and-true ice cream standards. Baskin and Robbins changed all that. Believing that Americans were ready for a more sophisticated menu of flavors, they rolled out 31. Black Walnut, Cherry Macaroon, Chocolate Mint, Coffee Candy, and Date Nut were among the original flavors.
Not only were the men bent on expanding Americans’ palate for ice cream, they wanted their shops to project an aura of fun. The advertising firm they hired recommended that the company adopt a “31” logo, to represent Baskin-Robbins’s strategy of offering a different flavor of ice cream for each day of the month. They also created a shop décor that instantly invited customers to have a good time, with its riot of smiling clowns and pink and brown polka dots. (Today, the dots are pink and blue.)
Baskin-Robbins, believing that people should be allowed to try a range of flavors to discover the one they most wanted to buy, also introduced a now-iconic small plastic spoon with which to sample ice cream flavors. Thus was born the famous little pink spoon that spawned millions of progeny in ice cream shops around the world.
Despite Howard Johnson’s conviction that Americans would never stray from their preference for plain old vanilla, ice cream devotees flocked to Baskin-Robbins stores. At their factory in Burbank, Baskin and Robbins invented hundreds of ice cream flavors each year, including classics like Blueberry Cheesecake and Jamoca Almond Fudge. Flavors rotated through the stores so that customers would be greeted with something new whenever they stopped by for ice cream. Since 1945 the company has rolled out more than 1,000 flavors. Some, however, never made it to the ice cream shops, such as Ketchup, Lox and Bagels, and Grape Britain. More successful were flavors celebrating popular culture or special events, such as the popular Lunar Cheesecake (a nod to Neil Armstrong’s moon landing), Cocoa a Go-Go (a tribute to the go-go dancing craze), and Beatle Nut, to honor the Fab Four as they were about to embark on their first American tour.
In 1967 the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire was sold to United Fruit Company for an estimated $12 million. Six months later Baskin died of a heart attack at age 54. In the 1970s the company expanded into the global market, unveiling outlets in Japan, Saudi Arabia, Korea, and Australia. In many countries, Baskin-Robbins has introduced flavors designed to appeal to local tastes. For example, in Japan, Matcha (green tea) ice cream shares freezer space with Strawberry Shortcake. Today, Baskin-Robbins, with over 7,000 stores in nearly 50 countries, is part of Dunkin’ Brands, owner of another global snack icon, Dunkin’ Donuts. See dunkin’ donuts.
In a 1976 interview in the New York Times, Irv Robbins took credit for Americans’ newfound delight in exotic ice cream flavors. “They’re not embarrassed to ask for some of these wild flavors,” the bespectacled ice cream man said. “I think we’ve had a little bit to do with making it acceptable.”
See also ice cream.
Baumkuchen means “tree cake,” and a glance at one of these German specialties explains the name. In its uncut form, a Baumkuchen is a 3- to 5-foot-tall cylindrical column, hollow on the inside and patterned in ridged rings on the outside. The result surely suggests a tree trunk, albeit one glazed with a sheer white icing or, for more modern tastes, a chocolate frosting. To be served, it is cut horizontally in curved shavings and slices to show a series of rings much like the age rings of tree trunks. Those rings are a result of the baking process. Baumkuchen is one of a long line of spit cakes, some dating back to medieval times. These cakes are baked—or perhaps more correctly, grilled or toasted—on rotisserie spits over or in front of wood fires or, commercially today, electric grill-ovens. The spits are fitted with cone-shaped or elongated sleeves covered in layers of wet parchment. The batter for Baumkuchen is a rich, foamy, custard-like mixture that includes eggs, butter, flour, and possible flavorings of lemon, almond, or vanilla. When the spit is hot enough, portions of batter are poured over the parchment (or the spit is lowered into a trough of batter), and the thick liquid wraps around the revolving spit as it bakes. When one layer has turned pale golden brown, another is poured over and so on, accounting for the rings and often adding up to between 16 and 35 layers, depending on the width desired.
Baumkuchen is the most famous spit cake but not the only one. Lithuanians love their šakotis, Poles their sękacz, Hungarians their kürtőskalács, and Swedes their spettekaka. The French cherish the petite, cone-shaped gâteaux à la brioche still baked by artisans in the southwest part of the country. In Hampton Court, the palace of Henry VIII, one can watch Tudor-period cooking demonstrations during the Christmas season that often include the spit cake trayne roste. Oddly, Baumkuchen enjoys a loyal following in Japan, where in about 1919 a German baker, Karl Juchheim, who had been imprisoned by the Japanese, went to Kobe upon his release and opened a Baumkuchen bakery that not only survives but also has inspired many others throughout the country. Baumkuchen today is baked in the United States, especially in Chicago and in Huntington Beach, California.
See desserts, chilled.
bean paste sweets are a group of popular Asian confections filled or composed of a sweetened bean paste. Bean paste made from azuki beans is the quintessential sweet filling used in numerous Japanese, Chinese, and Korean pastries. See azuki beans. It is prepared by boiling azuki beans, pounding or chopping them, and combining and cooking the paste with sugar, and lard in some countries. For a more refined version, the paste is pressed through a sieve to remove the skins. Red azuki beans, because of their auspicious color, have meant good fortune since the Han dynasty (206 b.c.e to 220 c.e.) and are eaten on holidays, birthdays, and other festive occasions in pastries, puddings, soups, and other sweet confections.
Typical azuki desserts in Japan include anmitsu, for which an, small cubes of agar-agar jelly, and pieces of fruit are served in a syrup. Anpan is a sweet bun filled with red bean paste. (This is also a popular dim sum or sweet in China.) An is also used as a stuffing for mochi and as a topping for dango. See dango; japanese baked goods; and mochi.
In China, the most popular azuki-bean confections include tang yuan, glutinous rice balls filled with red azuki, ground sesame, or date paste that are served at banquets for festive occasions as well as on the Lantern Festival, a holiday observed 10 days after Chinese New Year. Zong-zi are conical-shaped dumplings made with glutinous rice stuffed with sweet and savory fillings and wrapped in bamboo leaves and served during the Dragon Boat Festival in the spring. Mooncakes are the traditional holiday pastry served on the Festival of the Harvest Moon. See mooncakes. Baozi or do sha bao is a steamed bun filled with sweet azuki or date paste.
Korean azuki-paste desserts are equally celebrated. The most prominent are chalboribbang, “sweet” rice pancakes consisting of two glutinous barley-flour pancakes stuffed with sweet bean paste, and patjuk, an azuki-bean porridge traditionally served during the Winter Solstice Festival.
See also china; japan; and korea.
Beeton, Isabella (1836–1865) was a writer, cook, and author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), arguably the most famous English domestic manual ever published. As an icon of Victorian culture, both during and after her lifetime, Beeton bridged the transition from tradition to modernism, typifying an era in the throes of industrialization and advancing knowledge.
Originally commissioned as a series of articles by her publisher husband Samuel Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was a compilation of essays and recipes, ranging from medicinal tonics to pineapple ice cream. In addition to recipes for kitchen classics such as boiled carrots and mashed potatoes, four extensive chapters were dedicated to cakes, confectionery, and sweet dishes—a dessert panorama showcasing traditional English recipes like Bakewell Tart alongside dishes with a more colonial twist, such as “Delhi Pudding.”
Although the publication celebrated traditionally feminine domestic skill, acknowledging the real expertise that had perhaps gone unappreciated in the past, it also strongly implied that a woman’s place was in the home, a space somewhat isolated from the public jurisdictions of men. While Beeton may not be considered a feminist by today’s standards, her work unified the domestic experience, becoming a ubiquitous title in bookshelves across the country. Her legacy lies in her unique talent for digesting and communicating information, making it accessible to the world beyond the kitchen walls.
Though it may be a surprise to most, Isabella Beeton was not the matronly or middle-aged mother that we often presume her to be; she died at the age of 28, a day after giving birth to her fourth child. Her books, however, lived on beyond her years, a timeless comment on domestic prowess and an embodiment of the nineteenth-century feminine ideal. So powerful was her influence that her subsequent publishers kept the news of her death quiet in order to give gravitas to future installments of Household Management, and even published full titles under her name.
This lithograph depicting fashionable pastries and puddings appeared in the 1888 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, England’s most famous domestic manual. The volume was popularly called Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook because more than 900 of its 1,112 pages contained recipes. british library, london © british library board. all rights reserved / bridgeman images
See also united kingdom.
See doughnuts.
Belgium, a small kingdom in Western Europe, has been internationally famous for its chocolate and waffles only since the 1970s. The country’s reputation for sweets can be explained by its long history of culinary influences and its many eras of opulence. Before Belgium became an independent nation in 1830, the region had been part of various monarchies that introduced French, Spanish, and Austrian influences, and with them Italian, Arabic, and Near-Eastern ones. With regard to foreign influences, it is telling that in the late fifteenth century the Canary Islands were known as the Flemish Isles because of the large population of Flemings who grew sugarcane there to ship to the Low Countries. As a result of their activity, the price of sugar fell by almost 60 percent within several years. See sugar trade.
Despite—or because of—foreign domination, this part of Europe flourished: agricultural output was high; international trade enriched the ports of Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp; and manufacture brought prosperity to Brussels, Liège, and Mons. Even during harsh years when prices were high, Flemish laborers ate fruit pies, sugared compotes, and pancakes with honey at fairs, harvest feasts, and weddings. See fairs. Jacques Jordaens has depicted Belgium’s sweet tooth in various versions of his painting The King Drinks (ca. 1640), which shows a celebration of the children’s feast Drie Koningen (Three Kings Day, 6 January), when a special cake containing an almond was baked. Whoever found the almond became king for a day. Jordaens’s holiday table is laden with waffles, pastries, beer, and wine. See twelfth night cake.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, austere times had arrived, and abundant sweets were for most of the population a thing of the past. Average annual sugar consumption at that time barely reached 5 kilos per capita. Very slowly, sugar intake rose to 15 kilos before World War I. In the 1930s the League of Nations estimated Belgium’s average sugar consumption to be 28 kilos, higher than the European average (22 kilos) but significantly lower than the annual intake in, for example, Great Britain (49 kilos). Belgian nutritionists encouraged higher sugar consumption because of sugar’s energy value. One way to achieve this was by promoting tea drinking (which was unpopular in Belgium) with plenty of sugar, “as in England,” to increase the number of calories consumed by the elderly. Moreover, housewives were instructed to convince their husbands and children to consume more sugar in any way possible. The campaign worked. In the 1970s average yearly sugar consumption rose to 35 kilos per capita; it is 45 kilos today.
The nineteenth century’s low intake can be explained by both the high price of sugar and the subsequently close link between sugar and higher social class. For a long time, pastries, viennoiseries, cakes, puddings, ice creams, chocolates, marmalades, cookies, and various friandises found in French haute cuisine were available exclusively to rich Belgians. Harsh living conditions caused working-class men to consider a sweet tooth a feminine trait, so they hardly even used sugar in their daily cups of coffee. Nonetheless, relatively simple pastries such as mattentaart (a small round cheesecake), pain à la grecque (crisp, thin bread that has no connection with Greece, but with the Flemish word for “ditch”), peperkoek (gingerbread), speculaas (a shortbread biscuit with cinnamon), or vlaai (a solid flan with brown sugar) were produced locally, becoming more widespread in the 1900s. See gingerbread and speculaas.
By that time, the situation had irrevocably begun to change as a result of technological and organizational innovations in the production, transportation, and retailing of sugar and candy; the lowering of taxes on sugar; and promotional campaigns by manufacturers, nutritionists, and public authorities. The price of sugar fell, and gradually more people ate it in very diverse forms, including the “invisible” sugar added to lemonade, canned vegetables, and bread. Moreover, the large biscuit and chocolate factories that had appeared in the 1880s manufactured individually wrapped products that could be advertised easily (among which was Côte d’Or, which produced individually sized chocolate bars).
Several developments illustrate the diffusion of sugar within Belgian society between the late 1880s and early 1930s. Especially telling is the story of the gâteau du dimanche, the “Sunday cake” that the governor of the province of Hainault in southern Belgium advocated in 1886: he favored establishing home economics schools for young girls, where they could learn how to prepare a sweet pie that might be used as a reward for good children (and to keep husbands away from the tavern). Significant, too, was the fact that school manuals for household education gradually included a larger number of recipes for sweets: between 1900 and 1930, desserts barely accounted for 10 percent of the total recipes in these books, but their numbers rose to 30 percent in the late 1930s to 1950s. Furthermore, the amount of sugar called for in pastries, biscuits, and other desserts in these manuals increased between 1900 and 1950. Waffles are a good example: the ratio of sugar to flour was 1 to 3 around 1900, but it rose to 1 to 1 in the 1930s to 1950s.
It was during the latter part of this sweet zenith that warnings against too much sugar consumption appeared: sugar, especially for young children, was considered bad for the health. See sugar and health. In 1956, for example, a dietician cited sugar’s energy as very harmful; he warned particularly against processed white sugar, preferring by far the unrefined cane sugar that he saw as natural. Such a view appeared increasingly in cookbooks, women’s magazines, and television programs, and it influenced the perception and usage of sugar. Since the 1970s the number of desserts in cookbooks has diminished somewhat, and the amount of sugar (for example, for making waffles) has declined significantly. Although the use of visible sugar (as added to coffee, for instance) has fallen, the use of “invisible” sugar has only grown.
The trends toward healthier and so-called authentic desserts have necessitated the upgrading of many ordinary sweets like speculaas, which nowadays appears as a flavor in honey and ice cream and as a spread for bread, as well as in numerous forms on the menus of fancy restaurants. Many of Belgium’s old, ordinary sweets have now been transformed into culinary heritage, thereby giving them a second life. This upgrading of ordinary sweets has been accompanied by the gradual trickling down of luxury sweets to the masses, leading to a great variety of chocolates, ice creams, and pastries that can be enjoyed by the Belgian population at large. Baba au rhum, bavarois, and savarin have descended from haute cuisine, while éclairs and waffles from popular cooking have gained new status.
See also chocolate, luxury and godiva.
Ben & Jerry’s is now an internationally recognized ice cream business, but that was not part of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield’s career plan when they were growing up on Long Island, New York. In fact, they had no career plan. After college, each considered different options before deciding to go into business together. Starting a bagel company was their first choice. They planned to deliver fresh bagels, lox, cream cheese, and the New York Times to customers every Sunday morning. However, after they learned how steep the start-up costs would be, they opted for ice cream.
They took a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State University and began visiting homemade ice cream shops, tasting and taking notes. In 1978, with $12,000 they had scraped together, they renovated a gas station in Burlington, Vermont, and opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and Crepes. They chose Burlington, despite its cold winters, because it was a college town and had no homemade ice cream shop. The crepes were intended as a hedge against the slow winter ice cream business. The partners stopped making crepes when their ice cream became popular enough to weather the winter.
Cohen and Greenfield created an ice cream that was richer and creamier than most because it contained more butterfat and was mixed with less air. Since Cohen did not have a strong sense of taste, they flavored the ice cream more intensely as well. Best of all, taking their cue from the mix-ins Steve Herrell had made famous in his eponymous Somerville, Massachusetts, ice cream parlor, they mixed extra-large chunks of chocolate, nuts, cookies, or candy into the ice cream. Customers flocked to the small shop.
Soon, the partners began selling ice cream to local restaurants and grocery stores. They continued to expand the business, adding shops, distributing to more stores, and franchising scoop shops. In 1984, needing capital, they sold shares in the company to Vermont residents, thereby strengthening the company’s local image as well as raising cash. The stock was priced at $10.50 a share, with a minimum purchase of 12 shares. The offering sold out quickly.
Cohen and Greenfield believed in supporting the Vermont community. In addition to selling stock only to Vermonters, they used local, non-bovine-growth-hormone milk in their ice cream. They hired a local artist to design the company graphics. They also thought work should be a pleasure. “If It Isn’t Fun, Why Do It?” was a company credo. They gave their flavors funky names like Whirled Peace, Chubby Hubby, and Chunky Monkey. They held a free ice cream cone day every year and gave pregnant women two free cones, all of which created a strong brand identity.
Values before Profits
From the beginning, the men applied their countercultural values to the enterprise. They believed that no one in the company should earn more than five times the entry-level staff’s salary. They put a profit-sharing plan in place almost before there were profits. One of the more popular company benefits was free ice cream. Each employee could have up to three pints a day.
The business was thriving and competitors noticed. When the Pillsbury corporation tried to freeze Ben & Jerry’s out of some supermarkets to protect its Häagen-Dazs brand in 1984, the company fought back with a successful “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” campaign. Cohen and Greenfield were seen as young entrepreneurs standing up to a corporate giant. The case, which was settled out of court, was a public relations triumph for Ben & Jerry’s. See häagen-dazs.
In 1985 the men established the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation with gifts from Cohen and Greenfield and an annual company contribution of 7.5 percent of pretax profits. Ben & Jerry’s was recognized as a progressive company with a strong social conscience. In 1993 the partners received the James Beard Humanitarians of the Year Award.
The company’s sales had reached $48 million by 1988, the year President Ronald Reagan presented Cohen and Greenfield with the National Small Business Persons of the Year Award in a White House ceremony. Ironically, at the time they were developing Peace Pops, a chocolate-covered ice cream bar that promoted reducing the military budget. They hardly expected an invitation to the White House.
The company continued to grow, expanding into Canada in 1988, to Russia in 1992, the United Kingdom in 1994, and Japan in 1998. To raise capital for continued growth, Cohen and Greenfield took the company public. In April 2000 the board accepted a $325 million offer, and Ben & Jerry’s became a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever.
Although no longer involved in the operation of the company, Cohen and Greenfield are active in its foundation as well as other philanthropic enterprises. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream remains a popular global brand and an inspiration to entrepreneurs.
See also ice cream.
benne seed wafers, crisp and delicate sweet wafers dotted with benne (sesame) seeds, have been a favorite cookie attributed to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia since the 1940s, both in general American cookbooks and local Charleston ones. They are typically served at weddings, funerals, and similar catered affairs, and it has been said that if benne seed wafers were not served at a Charleston wedding, the couple would not be legally married. Approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, but with the thickness and crispness of a Communion wafer, benne seed wafers are sold both in bulk and retail, usually in small packages or cookie tins in gift stores.
The typical benne seed wafer recipe calls for butter beaten until light with brown sugar; egg whites or whole eggs, flour, and benne seeds are added to make a batter thin enough to drop or pipe in rounds before baking. The wafers’ small size and quick baking time make them laborious to bake at home without specialized equipment.
Benne seeds, Sesamum indicum, were originally brought to the American colonies from Africa as a source of oil and to feed West African slaves. They grow in rows in an okra-like pod with a fuzzy green exterior that is attached to the slender stalk of a flowering plant. The word for “sesame” in the Wolof language of Senegal is benne, which came to be used in the American South; Thomas Jefferson refers to the seed with a variety of spellings, including Bene, benne, and beni.
It is likely that the original cookie was made from a drop batter in which sesame seeds were substituted for nuts. See drop cookies. Several bakeries, primarily Old Colony Bakery in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, are known for their benne seed wafers, but no compelling evidence exists for attributing the recipe to a specific bakery or creator.
See also south (u.s.).
Betty Crocker began as a simple feminine signature on the bottom of a letter from a Minneapolis flour company in 1921 and grew into a name so recognizable that, in 1945, Fortune magazine called her the second best-known woman in America—superseded only by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The ranking was especially impressive, considering that Betty never actually existed.
Betty Crocker was created out of the belief that homemakers did not want to correspond with a man when they sent letters with baking questions to the Washburn Crosby Company (the forerunner to General Mills, which was incorporated in 1928). Samuel Gale, working in the company’s in-house advertising department, believed that women wanted replies from another woman on domestic matters. The surname “Crocker” was chosen in honor of William G. Crocker, a recently retired director of the company, and “Betty” for its all-American wholesomeness.
In the first few years of Betty’s existence, a dialogue of sorts blossomed between the flour company and its customers through letters and text-heavy magazine ads. Women had questions, and Betty had answers. The need for a baking expert was understandable, since new technology was making mother’s traditional kitchen advice increasingly obsolete. More and more homes had running water and electricity. Refrigerators were replacing iceboxes, while gas and electric stoves replaced coal-burning stoves. Food was changing, too—new convenience products began to line grocery shelves, and flour was increasingly processed. To complicate matters, units of measurement were not standardized. A cup might mean either 8 fluid ounces or the teacup from the cupboard. Baking pans came in all shapes and sizes, making it difficult to plan for baking success.
To help spread the gospel of good baking advice, the Washburn Crosby Company gave Betty Crocker her own radio show, with several different members of the company’s home service staff voicing the part of Betty. The powerful combination of love and baking quickly emerged as a popular theme in Betty’s radio broadcasts, recipe booklets, and advertisements. Cake, more than any other baked good, came to embody all that was Betty Crocker. Birthdays, graduations, retirement parties, and other holidays and family gatherings, she assured listeners, would not be the same without cake. Her Old-Fashioned Jelly Roll Cake, Pineapple Upside Down Cake, and Favorite Fudge Cake signified something extra, something special—a treat equal parts presentation and taste. It is no surprise that a flour company should promote recipes that used as much flour as possible, and Betty’s followers proved all too eager to “bake someone happy.”
The wholesome image of Betty Crocker, an icon of modern American convenience baking, has changed over the years to make her persona more up to date. Here she appears in advertising from 1955, 1965, and 1996.
An early recipe pamphlet series titled Foods Men Hurry Home For! included recipes for Honey Chocolate Cake with Marshmallow Filling and Almond Roca Frosting, as well as recipes for Chocolate Coconut Ribbon Cake and Kaffee Klatsch Cake (Orange Coffee Cake). Betty’s team was so serious about cakes that they introduced the finely milled Gold Medal Special Cake Flour (later renamed Softasilk). Betty devoted an entire 1935 radio broadcast “Cake Clinics” to curing “sick” cakes:
This morning I am going to talk about the food that strikes the highest note in the entire meal—the cake you serve for dessert. I think among all the foods served at your table, this is one where your reputation as a hostess and as a good provider for your family is most at stake.
For better or worse, Betty’s take on cake as one of the tenets of feminine achievement resonated with homemakers as they scrambled for Betty’s latest Pink Azalea Cake; Lord, Lady, and Baby Baltimore Cakes; Cherry Angel Food Cake; and Creole Devil’s Food Cake recipes. One woman wrote to Betty, “I don’t make your fudge cake, because I like white cake, but my neighbor does. Is there any danger of her capturing my husband?” Another wrote, “I derive so much from your lessons. Before I started listening to your talks on WCCO, I made such wretched cakes that my husband used to throw them down to the furnace to burn them. But now I am really proud of the ones I make.”
Cake continued to be big business for General Mills when it paid a large, undisclosed amount to a notorious Hollywood cake baker, the aptly named Harry Baker, for his Chiffon Cake recipe. See chiffon cake. In 1948 Betty Crocker announced her latest cake, “The Cake Discovery of the Century,” combining the richness of butter cake with the lightness of sponge cake. The secret ingredient of vegetable oil helped catapult Betty’s Chiffon Cake into sweets stardom, to become the most popular cake of the mid-century.
At around the same time, Betty Crocker’s cake mixes advertising “You Add the Eggs Yourself” eclipsed all other cake-mix brands, including Pillsbury, Swans Down, and Duff. Betty’s cake mixes still dominate grocery-store baking aisles, as if echoing her reassuring message, “I guarantee a perfect cake every time you bake … cake … after … cake … after … cake.”
See also angel food cake; cake; cake mix; hines, duncan; and upside-down cake.
biofuel, unlike the fossil fuels extracted from decomposed material, is made from living plants. Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) is the source of two major fuels: solid-based (bagasse—the fiber left over after crushing the cane—and the cane’s tops and leaves) and liquid-based (ethanol, obtained from the fermentation of sugars). Approximately 26 million hectares of sugarcane are planted worldwide (a small area compared to all major crops), of which about 5 million are currently dedicated to ethanol fuel, primarily in Brazil. Sugarcane is produced in more than 100 countries, though a handful, including Brazil, India, China, Pakistan, and Thailand, represent three-quarters of the total production.
Solid Fuel
Sugarcane is one of the most efficient energy crops. Bagasse has historically been used around the world to power sugar and ethanol mills. A well-run mill (for example, with efficient boilers) can be self-sufficient in heat and power, and also generate a large surplus that may be sold to the grid.
The potential for co-generation from sugarcane biomass has long been recognized, and many studies have investigated this vast and highly underutilized fuel. Conservative estimates from 2009 put worldwide potential at 425 million tons, equivalent to 662.4 million barrels of crude oil, located primarily in Asia (China, India, Pakistan, and Thailand) and South America (Brazil and Colombia) but also in Australia, Mexico, and Guatemala. In 2012 Brazil, for example, generated 1400 million watts from bagasse, though the potential would be 10 to 15 times greater if tops and leaves were included. Currently, a major limiting factor is the low price paid to sugarcane producers for their surplus electricity due to competition from hydropower.
Liquid Fuel: Ethanol
Ethanol can be produced from many feedstocks, but sugarcane remains king. Brazil provides the world’s leading example of ethanol from sugarcane. In 2012 about 85 billion liters were produced worldwide (approximately 536 M bbl, or million barrels oil equivalent), of which about 45 percent were from sugarcane. Fermentable sugars represent 6 to 16 percent of the sugarcane weight, making it the best feedstock for ethanol. Consequently, many sugarcane-producing countries in addition to Brazil are considering the ethanol option, primarily as a blend with gasoline in different proportions. These include China, Colombia, Central America, India (where cane is also used as feedstock in the chemical industry), Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and Thailand.
The use of ethanol as transport fuel goes back to the origin of the automobile industry. In 1826 Samuel Morey ran the prototype engine on ethanol; Nikaulos Otto in 1860 burned ethanol in his engines; and Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T, called the Quadricycle, also used ethanol. The use of ethanol fuel was so widespread that in 1902 an exhibition was held in Paris dedicated to its uses for vehicles, farm machinery, cookers, and heaters.
Sugarcane fuel ethanol has been used in Brazil since the early twentieth century (the first tests took place in 1907), but dramatic expansion began with the creation of Brazil’s National Alcohol Program in 1975. In its 2013–2014 harvest, Brazil produced about 25 billion liters of ethanol. There are currently 17 million cars with flex fuel engines (engines modified to use hydrated ethanol and gasoline in different blends), a number that could reach 49 million by 2020. In 2013 demand was estimated at 22 billion liters, of which 10 billion were anhydrous (almost pure ethanol used in a fixed blend of 20 to 25 percent with gasoline) and 12 billion hydrous. It is predicted that in 2020 demand in Brazil will reach 34.6 billion liters (16.6 billion anhydrous and 17.8 billion hydrous ethanol). This represents 60 percent of the estimated 840 million tons of raw cane production in 2020. The average productivity of ethanol is currently 6,000 to 7,000 liters per hectare (lha), but various studies indicate that with efficient management and money spent on research and development, the amount could increase to 15,000 lha.
Combining Solid and Liquid Fuels
Sugarcane stalks contain approximately 14 to 16 percent sucrose and 12 to 14 percent bagasse with other residues (for example, tops and leaves), which are increasingly used as fuel. The sugar contents represent 2.54 gigajoules per ton and 4.65 gigajoules per ton for residues. Based on an average yield of 82.4 tons per hectare in southeast Brazil, this represents 383 gigajoules per hectare. Considering a co-generation efficiency of 69 percent, about 287 gigajoules per hectare are available per ton of sugarcane. With the progressive introduction of more efficient boilers (currently 20 to 100 kilowatt hours and up to 200 kilowatt hours), and of greater amounts of sugarcane processed, huge surpluses of electricity can be generated. A modern sugarcane plantation could generate up to 15 times more energy than it consumes. In addition, current productivity is considered low compared to its agronomic potential of up to 340 tons per hectare.
Since many countries run a very inefficient sugar industry, sugarcane fuel has great potential for improvement with modest investment and hence will continue to play a key role in the future, despite the potential advances of second-generation biofuels.
A drawback of ethanol fuel is that it requires land. As the world’s population exceeds 7 billion, competition for food crops continues to increase, which has generated heated debate. However, in the case of sugarcane, the potential impact would be minimal, because it is one of the best feedstocks for ethanol production, both from an agronomic and an economic standpoint, and the total area is very small compared to what is needed for major crops such as wheat, corn, or soybean.
See also sugar refining; sugarcane; and sugarcane agriculture.
bird’s milk is the stuff of fantasy, and the name of this beloved Eastern European sweet reflects its mythical qualities and physical scarcity. The candies are indeed ethereal: small, chocolate-enrobed bars with a soft, marshmallow-like interior, colored white for vanilla or egg-yolk yellow for lemon. Bird’s milk candies were first produced in Poland by the famous E. Wedel company in the mid-1930s; in 2010 the company received a trademark for them from the European Union. From Poland the candy spread in popularity throughout Eastern Europe, especially Russia, where during the Soviet era of food deficits, obtaining a box of bird’s milk candies was considered a coup, nearly as unlikely as milking a bird.
Bird’s milk torte, a sponge cake with a soft, mousse-like filling and a chocolate glaze, is a purely Soviet invention from 1978, dreamed up by Vladimir Guralnik, the pastry chef at Moscow’s once-chic Praga restaurant. The cake soon became a cult item, almost as unattainable as its name suggests. Within a few years a factory was built to accommodate Muscovites’ yearning for this dessert, yet even the production of 2,000 tortes a day could not satisfy demand, and the cake remained a deficit item.
Still, whenever it could be obtained, bird’s milk was enjoyed by all segments of Soviet society. “As Guralnik later recalled in an interview for the Moscow Times, “I remember making a 15-kilogram sponge cake for Brezhnev’s 70th birthday. I don’t know if he really liked sponge cake, but that’s all he could eat with his constantly slipping dentures.” In the United States, bird’s milk cake is still popular among Russian émigrés, who use gelatin and Cool Whip to achieve the desired consistency.
birth is a life event associated with sweet foods that appear in various rituals, among which baptism, christening, or other formal presentation of a new child to a community are public events, while the actual birth, attended by women only (at least historically), is private. The foods served vary according to religion, culture, and personal beliefs, but sweetness fulfills various symbolic and practical roles, including bestowing good fortune on the child and wishing the mother well to recover her strength. Sweets form part of gift exchanges within a community and can symbolize joy and fertility, prosperity, and also provide visitors with refreshment.
In contemporary Britain, North America, and former English colonies in the southern hemisphere, a formal christening party provides the principal example of sweetness in a christening cake covered in icing and decorated with a pastillage plaque of an infant, or a model of a crib or baby, or possibly a more overtly religious symbol, such as a bible or religious text. Fruitcakes have been used to celebrate births in British culture since at least the seventeenth century, when a “groaning cake” (along with a cheese known as a groaning cheese) was provided for female supporters waiting to be allowed into the birth chamber. See fruitcake. These women were known as “God’s sibs” (siblings in God, hence “gossip”), and were also provided with drinks, as mentioned by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Puck talks of a gossip’s bowl containing ale and a roasted crab[apple]. Rum butter (a solid mixture of butter, sugar, and rum) was provided in the English Lake District for visitors, who left coins for the baby in the bowl it was served in.
In Continental Europe, comfits or confetti are some of the most important sweet items associated with births. See comfit and confetti. Today, countries around the northern Mediterranean use these as favors, now mostly in the form of sugared almonds. Packed in bags or boxes with colors and trimmings considered appropriate, a few are presented to each guest. Favors, essentially tokens in exchange for gifts given to mother and child, are also found in North American baby showers and christening showers. In Dutch tradition, the arrival of a child is celebrated with musjies (“little mice”), tiny pink and white anise comfits, served on top of buttered rusks. Further afield, noql (sugared almonds with an irregular, bobbly surface) are served with tea and sweet biscuits at Afghan naming celebrations.
The association of comfits with birth ritual goes back many centuries. Renaissance Italian practice included various sweetmeats provided in the birth chamber for visitors, and images on special birth trays often include depictions of attendants carrying round sweetmeat boxes; records occasionally detail items including almond or pine nut sweetmeats, cakes (pane biancho, or white cake, probably like a sponge cake), and confetti as a general term. Some items were purchased from apothecaries; others were homemade.
In the sixteenth-century poem Batchelar’s Banquet, a satirical translation of the French Quinze Joies de Mariage, the author bemoans the “cost and trouble” of laying in sweets, including various comfits, only to see female guests carry away as much as they pleased. This poem also mentions sugar for the midwife. Both sugared almonds as celebratory foods and the custom of paying the midwife partly with sweet foods appears to have been more widespread. In Sherbet and Spice (2013), food historian Mary Işın reveals that during the late Ottoman period in Turkey, at six days after the birth of a child the potty under the cradle was filled with sugar almonds, which were given to the midwife.
Informal practices are poorly recorded. Some cultures say that a child’s first taste should be sweet. In the Muslim world, this sweetness takes the form of date juice rubbed on the child’s gums, a practice carried out by the Prophet Muhammad. See islam. Madhur Jaffrey, in Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery (1982), relates that when she was newborn, her grandmother “wrote the sacred syllable ‘Om’ (‘I am’) on my tongue with a finger dipped in fresh honey.” A Turkish custom, as recorded by Işın, was to smear sugar or honey on the newborn’s mouth in the hope that the child would be sweet-spoken.
Another custom discussed by Işın is the use of large squares of grained sugar, colored red and flavored with cloves “used to make lohusa şerbeti, hot spiced sherbet traditionally made after the birth of a child to give the new mother energy and improve her supply of milk” (2013, p. 80). The color symbolized happiness, and jugs of the sherbet were sent to other households to announce the birth. Sustaining food for the mother was considered important in many cultures—for instance, as shola-e-holba, Afghanistan’s sweet rice with fenugreek, mentioned by Helen Saberi in Noshe Djan (2000)—but these foods are generally underrecorded because of the essentially female, private nature of birth.
Rituals surrounding birth may extend for several weeks, although the use of sweet foods seems to diminish as time elapses from the actual birth. However, in Chinese culture, sweetness seems to creep into the “red egg and ginger” party marking the end of the first month of a child’s life. Red symbolizes happiness, but real eggs are now sometimes replaced by chocolate ones; the warmth of ginger, sometimes candied, balances the depleted yin of the mother.
See celebration cakes.
biscotti cover a very wide range of sweetened baked goods with many regional variations, seasonal and religious significance. Recently, the Italian term has become popular in most English-speaking countries. Biscotti is derived from the medieval Latin biscoctus, a bread or cracker baked twice to dry out the moisture and prolong storing time. Pliny the Elder mentions that baked goods like panis militaris could last very long; hence, they were among the staple foods vital for the Roman Legion’s diet. The ancient Romans consumed a very dry biscuit made solely of grape must and flour known as mustaceus, and Cato included the first recipe for it baked on a laurel leaf in De re rustica; the name was eventually transmuted to mostaccioli. In Calabria, this enriched biscotto assumes a significant role with many symbolic shapes, and a guild of mostaccioli makers still endures today. Mostaccioli have evolved considerably and they now sometimes have a softer, spongy consistency, with the frequent addition of chopped nuts and dried fruit. This specialty is generally diamond- or oval-shaped, often coated with dark or white chocolate, and is available in many regions.
Perhaps the earliest recipe for these twice-cooked cookies comes from Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera of 1570. It calls for slicing up a cooked pan di Spagna (sponge cake) and baking the slices a second time. See sponge cake. Just how far back this practice goes is unclear, but presumably it did not predate the introduction of sponge cake in Italy, which may have occurred as late as the sixteenth century. Various kinds of small cakes that Italians would now call biscotti were frequently found in banquets from the Middle Ages to the baroque era, frequently served with sugared strawberries or clotted cream to begin the repast. From the sixteenth century onward mostaccioli became a popular ingredient, in crumbled form, for preparing other dishes, especially as a sauce thickener.
Today, biscotti abound in every region of Italy, sometimes as variations of the same type, like bocconotti (almond-filled pastry pockets), and sometimes typical of a region, like zaleti (crunchy yellow corn biscuits) from Veneto. Most of these are no longer baked twice, unlike their American counterparts, which are mostly derived from the biscotti di Prato variety. From north to south we find amaretti made of sweet and bitter almonds, chopped or pulverized, varying in shape, size, and consistency: those from Sassello, soft and spongy, individually wrapped in fringed paper; from Chivasso, minuscule round nocciolini; from Lazio, larger soft-centered sweetmeats; from Saronno, industrially produced crisp biscuits and an Amaretto liqueur.
In Sicily, the early medieval Arab presence influenced the monastic traditions of almond paste confectionery (frutta martorana), begun at the convent of Martorana and appreciated starting in the fourteenth century by princes and prelates alike. Viscotto da monaca (nun’s biscuit) is a popular S-shaped biscotto, also pulverized in milk for baby food. Nzuddi (St. Vincent) too was made by the nuns with honey and orange peel.
Many biscotti celebrate religious festivities and patron saints. Fave di morti (for the day of the dead) are bone-shaped or ovals of sweetened chopped almonds found in many regions. A range of biscuits dedicated to St. Anthony are made in an innovative artisanal confectionery factory in the Padua prison and include il glglio (the lily) and la corona del santo (crown of the saint) made with barley flour and fig jam, and “cavaliers” flavored with cardamom and hippocras. A special biscuit feast for Sant’ Anselmo is held at Bomarzo on 23 April every year. Christmas is the time for susamelle (dark spicy sliced biscuits) and rococo (rock-hard biscuits) from Campania; panesapa (must-sweetened cookies) from Sardinia; and ricciarelli made of almond paste dusted with sugar from Tuscany.
One of the most renowned types of biscotti is biscotto di Prato, first documented by Amadio Baldanzi in the eighteenth century and prepared by a local baker named Antonio Mattei, who garnered special mention in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. A characteristic of this traditional biscuit is the absence of butter, liquids, yeast, fat, or oil. The recipe requires only flour, sugar, eggs, pine nuts, and unskinned almonds. The damp dough is shaped into a slab and baked, then cut into slices diagonally, and baked again. Known generally as cantucci (a term of Tuscan origin, but widely found in other distant cuisines), these are typically dipped into Vin Santo or another dessert wine for a traditional after-dinner treat. Modern mass-manufactured biscotti similar to biscotti di Prato show regional deviations, including the use of yeasts or milk to make them moist, and flavorings like cinnamon, almond essence, and anise to enhance the aroma. The basic dough is often enriched with olive oil or margarine, while cheaper hazelnuts substitute for almonds.
Carquinyolis are the Catalan version of these biscotti, made with whole or sliced almonds associated with other regions such as Aragon, Batea, Prat de Comte. They are also found in Valencia, where they are called rosegons or rosegós. In Minorca, carquinyols are a simple square-shaped biscotto without whole almonds.
Among the numerous traditional Tuscan biscotti, one may count: berlingozzi and befanini (fun shapes for children); brigidini (a wafer-thin specialty often prepared at fairs); and bruttiboni (ugly but good), crunchy mounds of chopped nuts, sugar, and egg whites found especially in central Italy. Ciambelle (doughnut-shaped) are present in all regions, in many sizes, with some identifiable as biscotti, others more cake-like. The typical Lazio variety is ciambelle al vino with olive oil, sugar, flour, and white wine in equal proportions. Passover specialties include anise-flavored ciambelette prepared in the Roman Jewish ghetto. Among the many regional versions today, a variety of additions exist: nuts, raisins, chocolate, coconut, and sugar glaze.
With the increased popularity of Italian food worldwide in the 1980s, biscotti came to be absorbed into the repertoire of bakers everywhere, but especially in the United States. There, they were frequently associated with the spread of high-end coffee chains such as Starbucks and occasionally promoted as being a “healthier” choice (that is, lower in fat) than more traditional American cookies. By 2014 the English-language books published on the subject easily outpaced the Italian.
See sponge cake.
biscuits, British, describes a vast range of small baked items, mostly sweet and usually crunchy, not dissimilar to some types of North American cookies. Britain is notable for its obsession with sweet biscuits and for pioneering their industrial production. Yet despite a rich baking heritage and a revival of home baking, many traditional biscuits, such as the wafers that were popular across Europe for centuries, are nearly obsolete. Today, when most Britons think of biscuits, the endless mass-market varieties come first to mind: chocolate-covered digestives, bourbon creams, and garibaldis (irreverently nicknamed “squashed fly biscuits” because of the currants they contain). These biscuits are based on a relatively narrow range of ingredients and rely as much on shape and appearance for identity as on flavor or texture.
Biscuit eating—in adulthood, most often with a cup of tea—is a marker of Britishness but also an act of comfort and reassurance, a tiny, sanctioned dose of sugar to raise energy levels and brighten the day. The wide variety of biscuits available from the largest supermarket to the smallest grocery creates an illusion of luxurious choice at a modest price, and having a favorite is de rigueur. When, in 2009, incumbent prime minister Gordon Brown refused to disclose his favorite biscuit during a live online interview, The Observer newspaper quipped that “this raises serious questions regarding his suitability to remain in office.”
The British affection for biscuits explains the cult following of Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down, a website and book by “Nicey,” who analyzes scores of British biscuits with a mixture of enthused intellect and irony. Of the ever-popular custard cream, a sandwich biscuit with a vanilla-flavored filling, he writes:
This biscuit, perhaps more than any other, has the ability to warp the fabric of space-time and transport us effortlessly back to days gone by…. With its baroque detailing, the Custard Cream defies us to pin it down to any particular period of history. It is tempting to think that it was knocking around in the sixteenth century, its ornate swirls providing the muse for such great artists as Rubens or Caravaggio, as they nibbled on one over a late morning cuppa.
Two women package Wright’s Biscuits in this 1947 photograph. Wright’s Biscuits was a well-known company in South Tyneside, England, that started out by supplying ships in 1790 but later turned to producing more upscale biscuits. The factory closed in 1973. tyne & wear archives & museums
The quotidian custard cream—whatever its graphic niceties—has more in common with commodities such as toothpaste than it does with Dutch or Italian high art, and Nicey knows this. His anachronistic riffs underpin the importance of British biscuit-eating as an act of nostalgia, both for one’s own childhood and for the perceived simplicity of a preindustrial era.
The association of biscuits with nostalgia was deliberately forged by the biscuit manufacturers of the Victorian era, whose packaging and marketing materials featured images of children at play, often in rural settings. Chief among these manufacturers was Huntley & Palmers, and every industrial biscuit produced today, in any part of the world, is somewhat in their debt. The company’s rise roughly parallels the trajectory of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901, a period during which British society completed a seismic shift from an agricultural way of life to an urban one. It all began in 1822, when Joseph Huntley opened a shop at 72 London Street in Reading. It was only 18 feet wide and straddled a large underground bakehouse. By 1898 Huntley & Palmers was worth £2.4 million and was producing more than 400 varieties of biscuit. Several key innovations had radically reduced manpower and boosted output, including a revolving oven that enabled biscuits to be baked in a continuous flow. This oven was based on one used for manufacturing ship’s biscuit (hardtack), the plain, hard mixture of flour and water baked so dry that it could be kept months at sea during exploration and war, and was thus an unsung hero of the British Empire.
The new biscuits were considered so important that the British newspaper The Morning Star devoted a whole article to the phenomenon in 1860, explaining the difference between hardtack and the new biscuits:
Closely allied to our old friend the bread baker … is his more modernised relative, the manufacturer of that nutritious, sweet, toothsome little condiment known as a biscuit. Of course we don’t mean for a moment to pay a compliment to the great, hulky, ill-conditioned article which serves as one of the bases of England’s naval greatness. We have to write about a different genus altogether—of picnics, Osborne’s, Queen’s, caraways, lunch, coffee and wine biscuits, of cracknels, and nonsuches, and all those little creations which form a part, and a distinguished part, in our social economy, and bear as much relation to the hard-baked compound of flour and water on which sailors feed as does the full-grown intellectual man to the polypus, from which, if modern theorists speak truly, he first derived the power of existence, and launched himself upon the sliding-scale of creation.
Social Darwinism and biscuits? In Victorian England, biscuits were indeed a symptom and an enabler of a new social order. A vast proportion of British society was now laboring in large factories, making everything from widgets to biscuits. A casualty of this transition was mealtimes. Before the 1860s large breakfasts were eaten as late as 10 a.m., and the evening meal between 4 and 5 p.m. After 1860 breakfasts tended to be smaller and earlier, and the evening meal later. As lunch and tea rose in prominence, biscuits proved an efficient addition to these meals, as they do to this day.
black and white cookies, slightly mounded drop cakes frosted half in chocolate and half in white icing, are a fixture in New York City bakeries and delis. How these cookies traveled from a sturdy industrial city in the southern Adirondacks to the Big Apple remains a mystery. Perhaps a transplanted Upstate New Yorker missed the local treat and introduced a larger, two-fisted version to the city. In any case, New York City–style black and white cookies have a slightly lemony base, rather than chocolate, and they are often individually wrapped because they quickly turn stale.
Food historians trace the cookie’s origin to the 1920s and the now-closed Hemstrought’s Bakery of Utica. Locally called “half-moons,” these cookies are still featured in a number of Upstate New York bakeries and are popular in New England and even in the Midwest, where they are generally somewhat smaller than the New York City version. Hemstrought’s signature half-moon had a chocolate cake base with chocolate fudge icing on one side and thick vanilla buttercream on the other. Coconut and vanilla versions were also available.
Both city and upstate fans hold strong opinions about how best to consume the cookies: Do you eat the vanilla or the chocolate side first, or start from the middle? Opinions are also strong regarding the cookie’s best version. In a famous episode of the American TV sitcom Seinfeld, as Elaine and Jerry scour the city bakeries and corner delis for the best black and white, the cookie comes to symbolize ideal race relations. “Look to the cookie!” Jerry exclaims. In a January 2011 New York Times Magazine article, Molly O’Neill asserted that some consider the cookies an “icon of balance.”
Black and white cookies are related to other soft cake cookies, such as MoonPies, scooter pies, and whoopie pies, popularized during the same period. However, while these other treats are cream-filled sandwich cookies, black and whites are frosted only on top.
See also moonpies and whoopie pie.
See fruitcake.
Black Forest cake, or Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, is a glorious combination of a thin chocolate shortcrust base, chocolate sponge cake, sour cherries, generous amounts of kirschwasser (cherry brandy), freshly whipped cream, and dark chocolate shavings. It is without doubt the most famous German torte, at its best a marvelous combination of richness and lightness. However, the better and more widely a recipe is known, the more distorted it tends to become, and all too frequently Black Forest cake appears as a poor imitation, with cheap (but longer-lasting) buttercream, artificial chocolate sprinkles, and, worst of all, glacéed cherries.
The moment and place of birth of the Black Forest cake are difficult to pin down, and its origin is much discussed. The credit most often goes to pastry chef Josef Keller (1887–1981), a native of Radolfzell on Lake Constance, who is said to have invented the cake in 1915 while working at the Café Agner in Bad Godesberg. The first written recipe appeared in 1927. Other sources date the cake to 1930 and attribute it to a pastry chef in Tübingen.
The cake’s name may come from its resemblance to the traditional black, white, and red costume of the Black Forest region. Certainly that region claims the cake today as part of its culinary tradition, since cherry trees have long been cultivated in the Black Forest and the fruit has been distilled there into brandy. Nevertheless, because it took quite a long time for popular cookbooks to include the recipe (it appeared in Dr. Oetker’s Backen macht Freude only in 1951, for example), it seems safe to assume that Black Forest cake was a professional recipe that trickled down into private households. In the second half of the twentieth century, the cake traveled around the globe, even topping dessert charts in such unlikely places as the United Kingdom. Today, the Black Forest theme is used generally by the food industry to denote the combination of chocolate and dark cherries, omitting any link to cake and brandy.
See also germany; sponge cake; and torte.
blancmange is a pudding made of milk, cornstarch (cornflour in the United Kingdom), and sugar in Western cuisines today, although this version only appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The much-altered recipe evolved from medieval Arab cuisine. By the thirteenth century, the predecessor to blancmange—known either as maʾmûniyya or muhallabiyya (names that were also used for a variety of other dishes made with meat and rice)—was prepared from shredded chicken breast, pounded rice, milk, and sugar. A recipe for muhallabiyya in a thirteenth-century Andalusian cook book begins with the following story, suggesting that the dish originated in Sassanid Persia: “It is reported that a cook of Persia had his residence next to that of Muhallab b. Abi Safra and that he presented himself to prepare for him a good dish and so that he could test him; he prepared it and offered it to him; he was pleased and called it Muhallabiyya.”
The once-fashionable sweet milk pudding known as blancmange was originally made with shredded chicken. Meatless versions appeared in the early eighteenth century; by the twentieth century the dessert was largely relegated to the nursery or sickroom. This plate showing a blancmange mold is from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861).
The earliest surviving recipe for muhallabiyya made with chicken breast, rice, milk, and sugar is recorded by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, writing in Baghdad in the tenth century. In Europe the dish became known as blancmange, meaning “white food” (blanc-manger in French, biancomangiare in Italian, and manjarblanco in Spanish), or as mammonia, mawmenny, mamony, and various other terms deriving from the Arabic original. The two earliest European recipes, dating from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, are a recipe called blancmengier (in Traité de cuisine écritvers 1300) made with chicken, rice, sugar, and optionally milk or almond milk, and another called mammoniam (in Liber de Coquina) made of pounded capon meat, rice, almond milk, spices, and honey. In fourteenth-century France, blancmange prepared for banquets was sometimes tinted in different colors and arranged in patterns. At a state banquet given during his visit to France in 1377, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV was served blancmange with green and white stripes.
Recipes for blancmange made with shredded chicken continued to appear in European cookery books through the seventeenth century, but thereafter Europeans replaced the minced chicken and rice with breadcrumbs, then with isinglass in the early eighteenth century, and arrowroot and gelatin in the nineteenth century. See gelatin. In Britain and the United States, cornstarch took over after 1850 or so, while the French stuck to gelatin, as illustrated by Escoffier’s recipes in Le Guide Culinaire (1903), where blancmange made with gelatin is titled blanc-manger à la française, while that made with cornstarch is blanc-manger à l’anglaise. In Italy, too, bianco mangiare came to be made with isinglass and later gelatin.
Blancmange made with shredded chicken, rice, and milk entered Turkish cuisine under the name muhallebi and was frequently prepared for the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (1451–1481). Sixteenth-century records mention meatless versions of blancmange flavored with rosewater or musk. Today, Turkey is the only country where the original blancmange made with shredded chicken and ground rice remains popular. Known as tavukgöğüsü (“chicken breast”) to distinguish it from the meatless muhallebi, it is rarely made at home but is sold in Istanbul’s pudding shops (muhallebici). Since the chicken is boiled and then soaked at length in water before shredding, it has no discernible chicken flavor, only a slightly chewy texture and richer taste that distinguishes it from ordinary blancmange made with rice flour. A caramelized version of this, called kazandibi (“cauldron bottom”), evolved in nineteenth-century Istanbul to become one of Turkey’s best-loved milk puddings. Another popular type of blancmange is su muhallebisi, a light version made of wheat starch and water served sprinkled with powdered sugar and rosewater. This was originally a cheap substitute sold only by street vendors, but its light and delicate flavor gradually won su muhallebisi a place in mainstream Turkish cuisine.
Blancmange also found its way into Indian Moghul cuisine. At a banquet given by Asaf Khan in Delhi in the early seventeenth century, two versions of blancmange appeared on the menu: one meatless, made of ground rice, sugar, and rosewater, and the other made of chicken, described at length by one of the guests, the Reverend Edward Terry:
The flour of rice, mingled with sweet almonds, made as small as they could, and with some of the most fleshy parts of hens, stewed with it, and after, the flesh so beaten into pieces, that it could not be discerned, all made sweet with rose-water and sugar-candy, and scented with Ambergrease; this was another of our dishes, and a most luscious one, which the Portuguese call mangee real [manjar real], food for a King.
(Terry, 1777, p. 197)
No longer does blancmange in its modern forms deserve such praise, and certainly no one would serve it at a banquet. In France, this dish has virtually died out, despite Escoffier’s praise of both the French version with almonds and, surprisingly, of the bland English version made with cornstarch. Today in England, blancmange has become a pudding eaten mainly by children, quickly prepared from a packet in vanilla, banana, chocolate, or strawberry flavors—a sad end for a pudding once fit for gourmets. The Italian version made with gelatin, cream, and milk has been more fortunate; garnished with fruit coulis and various sauces, it is today enjoying a wave of popularity under the new name panna cotta.
See also flower waters; india; persia; pudding; starch; and turkey.
See sugar sculpture.
boardwalks in American coastal resort towns are promenades running parallel to the beach, with shops and amusements fronting them along their landward sides. The first boardwalk was built in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1870 (although Cape May, New Jersey, claims an 1868 boardwalk). Railroad officials and hotel owners proposed a planked walkway on the beach to prevent coach and lobby floors from getting covered with sand when resort patrons returned from the beach. The resulting boardwalk was a hit, and commercial establishments catering to thronging promenaders soon positioned themselves accordingly.
Spaces for strolling and carriage riding had been set aside at earlier leisure sites, such as the spas, seaside resorts, and pleasure gardens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and their facsimiles in the early United States. Though American (and Continental) coastal leisure venues were based on British models, the boardwalk itself was an American innovation. In Britain, promenading and its accompanying entertainments were brought closer to the sea not by walkways parallel to the coastline but by piers extending into the water. American resorts usually built boardwalks first, then added British-style piers. One aspect of British practice among many replicated in the United States was the architectural prominence of “oriental” motifs.
Boardwalks facilitated leisure locales’ long-established function of self-display. Well-dressed middle-class Americans on the twentieth-century Atlantic City boardwalk were engaged in the same ritual as their elite American predecessors had been in Newport, Rhode Island’s “carriage parade,” and their even earlier fashionable British counterparts on the Steine in Brighton. In all cases, the aim was to confirm, or to announce attainment of, high social position. This project by definition entailed identification of those who remained below. In 1837 in New York, it was thought undesirable “to be seen walking the same [pleasure garden] grounds with mechanics, house servants, and laboring people” (Asa Greene, Glance at New York, quoted in Conlin, 2013, pp. 144–145). In 1937 in Atlantic City, newly prosperous white Americans in rented rolling chairs (“democratized” versions of upper-class carriages) were propelled along the boardwalk by low-wage African Americans.
In 1895 at Britain’s Blackpool, about one-third of all shops in the prime beachfront district were sweets shops, and half of these shops sold ice cream. See ice cream. In early-nineteenth-century American pleasure gardens, ice cream constituted such a major attraction that “ice cream garden” became a synonym for “pleasure garden,” and in some advertisements an image of a glass of ice cream typified the delights awaiting visitors. Pleasure-garden patrons enjoyed their ice cream sitting down, in refined ice cream “parlors.” On the twentieth-century American boardwalk, ice cream was for sale, but it was not fully adapted to the strolling boardwalk milieu until the ice cream cone came into widespread use and the dress code was relaxed. See ice cream cones. A perambulator licking a cone filled with soft ice cream arrayed in a swirling pattern ascending and narrowing to a peak was consuming with his tongue the same “Moorish” exoticism that he could take in with his eyes when gazing up at the hotels along his path. A comparable aura of romance enveloped the cotton candy to which he treated his children. See cotton candy.
Fudge, funnel cakes, and other items were sold on the boardwalk, as they still are today, but the signature boardwalk sweet food is saltwater taffy, allegedly created by chance in Atlantic City in 1883 when a vendor’s premises were flooded with seawater while the taffy was being prepared. See fudge and taffy. Instead of throwing the batch away, the vendor offered it for sale as even more tasty.
This story is doubtless apocryphal, but it contains the kernel of truth that “saltwater” taffy is a marketing gimmick—a sophisticated version of what a budding Coney Island entrepreneur did in 1876: fill medicine bottles with seawater and sell them to midwestern tourists. This huckster’s medicine bottles hint at the link between saltwater taffy and the origins of seaside resorts, the emergence of which in the eighteenth century was founded on claims of the therapeutic value of sea air and sea bathing. Richard Russell (credited with launching Brighton, England, into seaside preeminence) and other eighteenth-century physicians prescribed not only bathing in seawater but also drinking it. In Brighton and elsewhere, the quest for health was superseded almost immediately by the pursuit of pleasure. A century later, Atlantic City and other American boardwalk resorts at first promised good health as the reward of a visit, but like their English counterparts, they soon were devoted almost exclusively to pleasure. So when saltwater became a crucial part of what was to be ingested when enjoying a boardwalk sweet, the purportedly healthful dimension of the seaside holiday was neatly merged with the pleasurable dimension. In the words of the advertising copy for one Atlantic City saltwater taffy vendor, “Sea Air and Sunshine Sealed in Every Box.”
See hard candy.
See desserts, chilled.
bonbons, or bon-bons, are small candies. The name is French, a duplication of the word bon, meaning “good.” Spanish uses bombon and Portuguese, bombom.
The term “bonbon” originated at the French royal court in the seventeenth century. The earliest bonbons may have been seventeenth-century Jordan (sugar-coated) almonds and small candies based on fruits. By the eighteenth century, the use of the term “bonbon” had spread to other European countries. Bonbonnières or drageoirs, ornate boxes or dishes for serving the morsels made of porcelain, glass, or metal, began to appear in Europe by mid-century. See serving pieces. At first they came in pairs. In France, a particularly popular bonbonnière was in the form of a pair of fancy shoes. Bonbons would be presented as gifts in such containers on holidays and at festivals, particularly on New Year’s Day.
By the nineteenth century, bonbons that could be contained in individual wrappers were being marketed. In 1827 the London confectioner William Jarrin wrote of bonbons, “The various envelopes in which they are put up, display the ingenuity of this gay and versatile people: fables, historical subjects, songs, enigmas, jeux des mots, and various little gallantries, are all inscribed upon the papers in which the bon-bons are enclosed, and which the gentlemen present to females of their acquaintance.” See jarrin, william alexis. In 1866 Johann Strauss II composed the waltz Wiener Bonbons for an event to raise money to construct German hospitals in Paris. On the title page, the composition’s name was spelled out in twisted bonbon wrappers.
Today in France, bonbons generally are based on fruits and fruit essences including candied fruits, nuts including brittles and nougats, boiled sugar sweets such as dragées and caramels, and chocolate-based morsels. The nineteenth-century invention of solid chocolate that could be melted and used to coat sweets before drying to form a hard shell promoted the proliferation of chocolate truffles with chocolate ganache centers and other small, chocolate-covered bonbons. In Belgium, ubiquitous chocolate bonbons with soft fondant or ganache centers are known as pralines. See belgium and fondant.
In the United States, Bon Bon is the Hershey Company’s trademarked name for a frozen sweet consisting of a dome of vanilla ice cream with a hard chocolate coating. They are sold in elongated rectangular boxes in movie theaters, and they also come in buckets elsewhere. However, in the United States as elsewhere throughout the Western world, “bonbon” continues to refer to small candies, which at their best can be produced in small lots by artisan confectioners. Some feature regional ingredients and flavors and iconic shapes and appearances, such as the whole candied fruits of Provence and Louisiana pralines. See candied fruit. The bite-sized morsels also present opportunities for confectioners’ most creative flights of imagination, offering a never-ending range of flavors, ingredients, shapes, and decorations.
See also brittle; caramels; chocolates, boxed; nougat; and praline.
Boston cream pie is a two-layer sponge cake filled with a rich pastry cream and topped with a chocolate glaze. This icon of American cookery was proclaimed the official Massachusetts State Dessert on 12 December 1996. Boston’s Parker House (today’s Omni Parker House hotel) claims to be the birthplace of Boston cream pie, but what the hotel restaurant serves is a completely different creation.
When the Parker House opened in 1856, an Armenian French chef by the name of Sanzian is said to have created a dessert called Parker House Chocolate Cream Pie, a two-layer butter sponge cake brushed with rum syrup and filled with a classic crème patissière. More crème patissière was spread on the sides of the cake, which were then coated with toasted sliced almonds. The cake’s top was decorated with a layer of chocolate fondant and squiggles of white fondant. The recipe is classically French.
The Boston cream pie that Massachusetts celebrates is a far less complicated dessert, one that likely descends from the simple Washington pie, a two-layer yellow cake filled with jam and dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Over time, the jam was replaced with pastry cream, and a chocolate glaze replaced the confectioner’s sugar, giving us today’s Boston cream pie.
These “pies” are actually cakes. The terminology is confusing because many cakes in the nineteenth century were baked in shallow, straight-sided pans called Washington pie plates or jelly-cake tins. Pie tins and cake tins were the same thing. See pans. Furthermore, the cakes themselves were referred to as “crusts,” since that word was used for both cake layers and pie crusts.
Washington pies existed long before Harvey Parker built his famous hotel in 1856. What we call a Boston cream pie today was possibly an attempt to Americanize a glorious French cake by morphing the humble Washington pie into it. The name “Boston cream pie” appeared in print for the first time in the Granite Iron Ware Cookbook, an 1878 piece of ephemera. The pie is essentially a Washington pie with a custard filling and an unadorned top layer. The Kansas Home Cook (1879) contained a recipe for Chocolate Cake, a four-layer yellow cake filled with vanilla custard and frosted on the top and sides with chocolate icing. In essence, this was a double Boston cream pie. Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion (1887), published in 1887, offered a recipe called Chocolate Cream Pie, essentially a Boston cream pie as we know it but with a thin layer of the chocolate glaze also spread over the custard.
These findings suggest that two origins exist for Boston cream pie. The first can be traced back to Washington pie. Over time, as stoves became more reliable and cooks gained more confidence, a vanilla custard became the preferred filling, replacing jam. As chocolate became more affordable, home cooks began using it in cakes and in glazes, and some inventive home cook decided to gild her Washington pie with it.
The second origin lies in the Parker House Chocolate Cream Pie, a complicated creation best left to professional pastry chefs. It is a magnificent cake, French to the core, and not American like the Washington pie.
The Boston Molasses Disaster occurred in 1919 when a molasses storage tank located in a congested city neighborhood ruptured. A flood of viscous molasses estimated to be 20 feet high and 160 feet wide tore through the streets at nearly 35 miles an hour. The disaster took the lives of 21 men, women, and children; injured 150; and demolished everything in its path.
The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 occurred when a 50-foot-tall steel tank burst, sending a flood of molasses 20 feet high and nearly 200 feet wide into Boston’s North End neighborhood. This photograph captures the resulting devastation, in which 21 people died and many more were injured. photograph courtesy of bill noonan
Long after the triangle trade of molasses, rum, and slaves had ended, molasses continued to be an important commodity in Massachusetts. In addition to sweetening gingerbread, baked beans, and cookies, it was used to make industrial alcohol for munitions manufacture during World War I. After the war, molasses was sought for rum production in anticipation of strong pre-Prohibition sales.
In 1915 the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) built a 50-foot-high steel molasses storage tank with a capacity of 2.3 million gallons at the edge of Boston’s inner harbor. The location, known as the North End, was convenient to the ships that brought molasses from the Caribbean and the railroad that transported it to distilleries. The North End was also a bustling Italian immigrant neighborhood, but on 15 January 1919 at midday, it was devastated.
USIA blamed anarchists’ bombs. However, legal proceedings that spanned several years proved that the tank was built hastily, poorly constructed, and never tested. In fact, the tank had leaked so much that local children routinely collected the molasses that spilled from its sides. In 1925 the USIA was declared culpable.
Today, children play tranquilly where the tank once stood, and an inconspicuous plaque commemorates the tragedy.
See also molasses.
Brazil has a tradition of eating sweets that arrived with the Portuguese. Indigenous Brazilians had used honey from native bees to flavor raw hearts of palm or smoked fish, and they consumed abundant amounts of fruit. But “dessert” as it is known today developed only after the Portuguese colonized Brazil, bringing a taste for sweet—in fact, very sweet. The Portuguese had developed the practice of using sugarcane when North African Muslims occupied the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. Before contact with Arabic culture, the Portuguese, too, had sweetened their food with honey.
Sugar
The first sugar plantations were planted in Brazil in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Portuguese brought sugarcane from the island of Madeira, and the plant adapted easily to the climate and soil of Brazil. Before long, the new colony had become a major producer of sugar and was exporting it via Portugal’s extensive trade routes.
Sugar production, built on the backs of African slave labor, generated great wealth for plantation owners in Brazil. The sugar mills provided an abundance of raw material for Brazil’s national sweets, many of which stem from the Portuguese tradition. They included sweets made with molasses and brown sugar (rapadura in Portuguese), which was also eaten alongside many foods, particularly farinha de mandioca (cassava flour), a tradition that continues to this day.
Among the native population, molasses quickly came to replace wild honey and was used to sweeten tubers and tuberous roots like yam, cassava, and sweet potato, all of which are served in indigenous communities not as dessert, but as breakfast or afternoon snacks.
A Mix of Influences
The amalgam of cultures that came together in Brazil adapted Old World culinary techniques to the myriad Brazilian fruits that previously had only been eaten fresh, in season. With European techniques of preservation, fruits could be dried, candied, preserved into jam, or turned into pastes and bars. Guava, which grows abundantly in Brazil, is a prime example. Fragrant and delicious, it easily took the place of quince in traditional Portuguese membrillo. The guava paste goiabada was wrapped in banana leaves and packed in cans and wooden boxes. Today, goiabada is often eaten with cheese much as the Spanish eat membrillo. This combination, dubbed “Romeo and Juliet,” is considered Brazil’s national dessert.
In addition to fruit desserts, Portuguese cooks found ways to use other abundant indigenous ingredients, such as cashew nuts, cassava, maize, and peanuts. These foods were incorporated into preparations with milk, eggs, and sugar by means of primarily European techniques, but mostly cooked by Africans. African customs also filtered down through the kitchens of Brazil, and culinary traditions from Senegal, Benin, Angola, and Mozambique can be discerned in the local desserts today. Once the coconut—Asian by origin, but easily adapted to Brazil’s climate and diet—was introduced (the earliest accounts date to the sixteenth century), the repertoire of Brazil’s popular desserts expanded greatly. Cocada is a dense sweet made of grated coconut and cane sugar that is served both crystallized and as a sweet paste; manjar is a delicate and often molded pudding made of milk, sugar, and grated coconut, thickened with a bit of cornstarch and served with a sauce of prunes in caramel; quebra-queixo (literally, “jigsaw chin”) is a chewy, syrupy street sweet made of coconut, sugar, ginger, and lime; queijadinha is a tart made with a thin pastry crust and filled with coconut egg custard; and the ever-popular quindim made with egg yolks, sugar, and eggs and often molded into a ring is a favorite party dessert.
The spices brought by the Portuguese also played an important role in the development of Brazilian sweets. Cinnamon was sprinkled on rice pudding, on sweet potatoes, and over canjica, a pudding of white maize (or hominy) and roasted banana. Whole cloves were used to flavor sweet pumpkin and grated green papaya, and anise was mixed into the batter of sweet corn cakes.
Finally, although Brazil had indigenous varieties of cacao in the Amazon region, use of the bean as a cultural practice did not take hold until the Portuguese, who had developed a taste for sweetened chocolate, introduced chocolate as a dessert in the seventeenth century. See cocoa.
Sweets in Regional Cultures
In the seventeenth century, the custom of selling cakes, sweets, and biscuits on the streets emerged in Brazil’s northeastern and midwestern regions, the hubs of the colonial agricultural empire. A set of goodies was often laid out in trays and dubbed quitanda, or grocery—a name that is still used to designate this manner of selling candy and sweet snacks today in these parts of the country.
In the northeast of Brazil, coconut and sugar are commonly combined to make coconut sweets of various kinds: creamed coconut, coconut ribbon, white coconut, burnt coconut, or coconut mixed with cassava or cassava meal for making cakes, puddings, porridges, and beijus (crepe-like wafers) of tapioca (a derivative of cassava). See tapioca. In the midwest, most sweets are made from fruit, which is also candied and made into jams and preserves. Corn, milk, eggs, and fresh cheese also find their way into desserts there. In the south, with its colder climate, wheat-based sweets introduced from Italy and Germany dominate, including apple tarts, grape cakes, and fried or baked cookies.
Sweets, especially those made from corn and peanuts, play an important role in the June festivals celebrated throughout Brazil. The most common ones include curau (corn porridge with milk, sugar, and cinnamon), canjica (for which white corn is slow-cooked with milk, sugar, cloves, and cinnamon after its germ has been removed), and various children’s sweets.
Sweets in Contemporary Brazil
In the late nineteenth century the introduction of sweetened condensed milk began to influence various recipes, particularly puddings. In the twentieth century this type of milk became wildly popular as an ingredient for party sweets, including bonbons like brigadeiros (balls of condensed milk and chocolate with chocolate sprinkles), cajuzinho (made from cashews or peanuts and condensed milk), beijinho (condensed milk and coconut), and olho de sogra (prunes stuffed with a sweet coconut and condensed milk mixture).
More recently, as Brazil has globalized and become home to diverse groups of immigrants, desserts from European and American traditions have been introduced into the national repertoire, including mousses, ice creams, puddings, pies, and custards.
breads, sweet, belong to one of three major categories within the greater bread kingdom, the other two being lean bread (little or no fat and sugar, as in French bread) and enriched breads (moderate amounts of sugars and fats, each typically less than 10 percent of the flour weight, as in sandwich breads, challah, soft rolls, and the like). Sweet breads are also known as rich breads, meaning that the ratio of sugar to total flour weight is anywhere from 1:10 to 1:4, and the ratio of butter or other fats to total flour weight is from 1:10 to 9:10. For this reason this category is referred to more properly as “sweet rich breads.”
Historically, sweet rich breads have tended to exist primarily for the elite, who could afford large amounts of butter, eggs, milk, and sugar or honey. Many of these ingredients were scarce but still available to earlier civilizations, such as the ancient Romans, who were known to make a honey-sweetened bread, which was very similar to modern-day sweet rich breads, primarily for the wealthy class. See ancient world. Whether ancient or modern, sweet rich breads have often served as social and political signifiers, and they have sometimes even been referred to as “royal bread,” exemplified by products such as brioche and its buttery European cousins like pan d’oro (literally, “golden bread”) or crown- or turban-shaped gugelhupfs. See gugelhupf.
However, sweet rich breads also became important, and even essential, for the less affluent masses, especially during various religious, commemorative, or celebratory events. For this reason, the category of sweet rich breads is best understood through both a cultural and a religious lens.
Brioche
Brioche is noted more for its butteriness than its sweetness, containing a ratio of anywhere from 1:4 to 9:10 parts butter to flour with most versions around 1:2. It is often included in the Viennoiserie family of doughs because of its use in many applications, including loaf bread, pastry crust, and morning pastries. See laminated doughs. But its best-known version is as a small roll, baked in a flared and fluted pan, with a small topknot, known as brioche à tête (“with a head”). Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, brioche gradually evolved from an everyday loaf containing only small amounts of enrichments to a highly buttered dough. It found its richest expressions during the reign of King Louis XIV and onward, when it was considered as much a cake as a bread. The process of perfecting this rich dough, through the skills of bakers from Vienna and Italy, and later from Paris, has established brioche as the benchmark against which many international sweet rich breads are compared.
Celebration Breads
It is a truism that every major world religion regards bread as a theological or cosmological symbol as well as an essential food. In many culturally specific breads, the ingredients and methodology are similar, sometimes nearly identical, to breads from other regions, and the differences may be as simple as a twist, a chosen braid, a garnish, or a particular spice, fruit, or nut. Unlike “everyday” breads, consumed primarily as a foodstuff and less for commemorative or symbolic meaning, celebration breads fulfill synchronous cultural functions regardless of their geographical context. Such breads are often used as vehicles through which stories are told and knowledge is passed from generation to generation via rituals, music, and festivities. The ample use of eggs, for example, is both symbolic and practical, as many of these breads are made after long fasting periods in which eggs, universal symbols of life and birth, are collected but not used until the actual day of festivity, when the fast is finally broken.
Celebration breads reveal both the functionality and cultural import of the sweet rich bread category. For example, Italian panettone, while clearly rooted in the Milanese region of Italy, and often baked in a tall, round, turban-like form, is not all that different from the Veronese pan d’oro that is baked in a tall, star-shaped pan. Each is made with ample quantities of butter, eggs, sugar, and various dried fruits. Both breads were originally associated with Christmas but are now available year round, and each has a similar formulation to brioche, Dresden stollen, and nearly every other sweet, rich celebration bread. See stollen. Whether baked in the shape of a star, a turban, or a folded blanket, and regardless of which nuts and spices are used or which fruit colors are chosen (usually red ones, such as cherries, for Christmas), the symbolism is embedded in each bread and not only allows for pleasant eating but also affords an opportunity for local celebratory customs. While not an exhaustive list, other international celebration breads include:
Tsoureki (or choureki) is the general name for Greek holiday breads, with specific versions designated for particular celebrations: Christopsomo, a round Christmas loaf with a cross made from the same dough embossed on top; lampropsomo, a braided Paschal (Easter) loaf with dyed eggs tucked into the braids; and Vasilopita, a large, round loaf baked with a good-luck coin hidden inside, baked to commemorate St. Basil’s Day, which is also the New Year’s Day celebration.
Vánočka is a similar Czech braided bread, enriched with raisins and almonds. There is a round Easter variation called mazanec.
Other Sweet Rich Breads
Babka has its origins in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania, where it is often baked in cylindrical, fluted pans. In Romanian tradition, babka serves as a Christmas and general holiday bread, but in the United States and Europe it is mainly associated with Eastern European Jewish communities, where the dough is typically spread with chocolate or poppy-seed fillings and then coiled into a loaf. In more contemporary versions, babkas are often made much like a baking-powder-leavened Bundt cake.
Cinnamon buns are associated with Germany, where they were known as Schnecken, or “snails,” for their coiled shape. Although recipes for these buns can be found in early German cookbooks from the 1500s, they may originally have been introduced from Byzantium. The buns soon spread to many places, including Scandinavia, where various forms of kanelbullar are typically served with coffee. In the early eighteenth century, many Germans moved to Pennsylvania, bringing with them their sweet pastries and other food traditions. See pennsylvania dutch and philadelphia. Cinnamon buns eventually spread to other parts of the United States, where they took on regional variations, such as pecan rolls and honey buns. Philadelphia sticky buns, for which coiled rolls filled with cinnamon sugar are baked on a glaze of sugar or honey that transforms into a gooey, caramelized topping when the rolls are inverted after baking, derive from English Chelsea buns.
Pan dulce is a large subcategory of Mexican and Latin American sweet breads whose origins lie in both Spanish and French influences over the past 500 years. These breads are made into unique shapes and embellished with designs and colorful glazes. Three of the most well-known types include conchas (shells), campechanas, and cuernos (horns); there are also religious breads such as pan de muerto (bread of the dead) and roscón de reyes (king’s cake).
Portuguese sweet bread, also known as Hawaiian bread, is a good example of a sweet holiday bread that became so popular in New England and Hawaii—thanks to the large population of Portuguese immigrants—that it is now consumed as an everyday bread.
Quick breads are leavened without yeast fermentation, either by chemical leavening (such as baking powder and baking soda) or physical leavening (by air and steam). Many popular sweet breads fall into this large subcategory, including banana bread, zucchini bread, and gingerbread. Steamed Boston brown bread, Irish soda bread, breakfast muffins, biscuits, and scones are other types of quick breads. See chemical leaveners and muffins.
breakfast cereal is an American food whose dramatic evolution in form and function has rendered it nearly unrecognizable as the same product that took hold of the American imagination in the early 1900s.
The origins of breakfast cereal can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century when religious leaders such as Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), father of the graham cracker, began advocating for dietary reforms. Advances in farming and milling technology allowed for the industrialization of food production, which in turn provoked a reaction against processed foods such as white bread and mass-produced meat. What began as a fringe belief gained currency as some Americans grew increasingly tired of their predominantly meat-and-simple-starch diets. Breakfast, before the advent of breakfast cereal, consisted of griddlecakes, beefsteak, potatoes, buckwheat breads, eggs, sausages, and porridges—a diet many considered to cause nationwide dyspepsia.
Capitalizing on the desire for a curative lifestyle, doctors and enterprising businessmen opened sanitariums across the country. In Battle Creek, Michigan, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) fed patients dry, crumbled bricks of toasted cereal grains, which became popular enough with sanitarium guests that Kellogg began to market them. Soon Charles Williams Post (1854–1914), a former patient at Battle Creek, introduced his own version of cereal: “Brains are Built on Grape Nuts” read the 1898 slogan. By 1899 Kellogg’s was a multimillion-dollar business, with Post providing the biggest competition.
Scientists joined the stampede toward toasted grains, looking to make the starch molecule more readily digestible. In 1901 a young American biochemist named Alexander P. Anderson successfully puffed rice in a test tube. Once he realized that any vessel could puff grains given enough heat and pressure, he began adapting cannons for the large-scale manufacture of puffed wheat and rice. The Quaker Oats Company quickly brought Anderson and his puffing technique into their business. At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, Quaker Oats featured eight bronze cannons that explosively puffed grains using Anderson’s technique. Despite the cereal’s spectacular debut, sales lagged until Claude Hopkins, a renowned adman, energized sales with the slogan “The Food Shot from Guns.”
Advertising proved necessary for cereal sales and was central in shaping the identity of this new breakfast food. Consumers needed to be convinced that cereal was a requisite staple in a nutritious diet; thus, early cereal companies advertised medical testimonies and nutritional facts to boost sales. As advertising media changed, the target audience of cereal advertising shifted from mothers to children. When the nutritional value of cereal failed to appeal to a young consumer base, the health benefits of cereal were dropped in favor of flashier marketing techniques. In 1926 the first singing commercial for Wheaties aired on the radio, and by the late 1950s cereal companies were sponsoring television cartoon shows. General Mills created personalities such as Trix the Rabbit and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, while Kellogg’s featured the Rice Krispies trio—Snap, Crackle, and Pop—as well as Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes.
When breakfast cereal and the technology of its production evolved to fit the changing advertising environment, the cereal underwent a simultaneous transformation in taste. Brands cast off the image of cereal as “found in nature” and began to feature products that were artificially sweetened. In 1939 the first presweetened breakfast cereal was introduced to the market: Range Joe Popped Wheat Honnies. Presweetened cereal quickly established itself as the dominant form of breakfast cereal in the United States.
Sugar content in cereals continued to increase for the next several decades. Post’s Sugar Crisp and Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, which lead the contemporary cereal market in sugar content (51 percent and 55 percent sugar weight, respectively), arrived on the market within four years of each other in the early 1950s. As sugar content levels increased, the counterculture movement of the late 1960s began advocating for a return to whole grains. Manufacturers, sensing the shift in public opinion, toned down their products by tweaking the cereal names. In the 1980s Sugar Smacks became Honey Smacks, and Sugar Crisp became Golden Crisp. When preferences for natural and organic foods became mainstream, big cereal companies diversified by creating product lines geared toward the health-conscious consumer. Products such as Cascadian Farms and Great Grains emphasized high fiber and protein content but suffered for their high sugar levels. Meanwhile, sugary cereal brands worked to decrease sugar and sodium content in order to appeal to an increasingly health-minded demographic. In 2005 General Mills announced that all of its “Big G” cereals would be made with whole grains. However, as cereal brands adjusted the nutritional content of their products, they also struggled with providing the taste their customers have grown accustomed to. Cheerios became free of genetically modified organisms in 2014, yet despite the publicity surrounding the announcement, sales remained unchanged. The same year, Post launched a GMO-free version of Grape-Nuts without the cereal’s much-vaunted vitamin benefits. Breakfast cereal will always adapt to both technological advances and trends in taste, and because of its elasticity, this century-old American invention has grown to become an industry worth $10 billion in annual revenue.
The first presweetened breakfast cereal dates to 1939. Packaged to appeal to children, artificially sweetened cereals soon dominated the U.S. market. In the early 1950s, General Foods introduced Post’s Sugar Crisp, with an astonishing sugar content of 51 percent. This advertisement appeared in the 3 September 1951, issue of LIFE magazine. gallery of graphic design
brittle is an English term for sugar, and sometimes other ingredients, boiled to the light caramel stage 345.6°F (160°C) and poured over nuts or seeds. The delicious mass is smoothed into a sheet and allowed to set before being broken or cut into pieces. Alternately, it is dropped in small lumps while still warm.
Any nut or seed can be used. Peanuts are a favorite in the United States, almonds or sesame around the Mediterranean, and pistachios in the Middle East. Chinese versions include a sesame brittle flavored with salt and pepper. As with the nuts and seeds, sugar types also vary. They include molasses (especially popular in South America) and jaggery (on the Indian subcontinent); honey is also frequently added to Middle Eastern and Mediterranean brittles.
The French term croquant and Italian croccante are quite widely used to refer to confections similar to brittle that are eaten as candy or used for decoration. Greek pasteli, Sicilian cubbaita, and chikki from Pakistan and India can also be classified as brittles. Sohan asali is a saffron-flavored mixture of sugar, honey, butter, and almonds from Iran that is formed into small pieces and sprinkled with chopped pistachios. In Noshe Djan: Afghan Food and Cookery (2012), Helen Saberi remarks that khasta-e-shireen, large “plates” of caramelized nuts or apricot kernels, are associated with festivities such as New Year and Eid al-Fitr and have been a common sight in the bazaars for as long as anyone can remember.
Brittle-type candies were almost certainly honey-based to begin with. They are so widespread, and the ingredients so widely available—especially in southwest Asia and the Mediterranean—that the confection must be an ancient one. In the English-speaking world, their history is obscure, although almond brittle was apparently known as almond hardbake in nineteenth-century London.
Caramel and almonds, ground to a powder and used for flavoring other confections, are known to the French as praline. Brittle-type confections are closely related to nougat, torrone, and Spanish turrón. See nougat.
Brix (or °Brix or °Bx) is a measurement of dissolved solids in an aqueous solution. Each degree of Brix corresponds to 1 gram of dissolved solids in 100 grams of solution. Brix is usually measured via hydrometry or refractometry. Measuring devices are calibrated using a sucrose standard. Temperature influences both types of measurement and must be taken into account if the tools used are not self-correcting.
The Brix scale was developed by Adolf Brix in the mid-1800s. The scale is essentially a recalibration of a similar scale developed by Karl Balling in 1843. Brix recalibrated the scale from a reference of 63.5° to 59.0°F (17.5° to 15.5°C). Today, most Brix tables are calibrated to 68°F (20°C).
Although newer methods of measuring Brix have been developed, such as infrared spectroscopy, the hydrometer and refractometer remain the principal Brix-measuring tools. Hydrometry determines Brix by directly measuring the density of a liquid. The hydrometer is allowed to float in the liquid; the depth at which it floats indicates the density and thus the Brix of the liquid, assuming the solution is sucrose in water. Because ethanol is less dense than water, the final Brix reading of a wine with no residual sugar will be less than zero. The measured Brix of a fermenting or fermented liquid will not accurately represent the sugar content of that liquid, but it is nevertheless a useful tool for monitoring the progress of a fermentation.
Refractometers measure the refractive index of a liquid. Brix refractometers are calibrated based on the known refractive index of sucrose–water solutions of various strengths. Since alcohol has a higher refractive index than water, its presence in solution makes refractometry unreliable. Brix is used in wine production to assess the ripeness of grapes, predict the potential ethanol content of the wine, and to monitor the fermentation. Brix is also measured to determine the water content of honey; the sugar content of maple syrup; and the optimal time to pick sugarcane, tomatoes, and some fruits. In addition, it is used as a quality-control measure for products such as ketchup, soft drinks, and fruit juices. Brix can also be utilized to measure sugar content in urine, especially in monitoring or testing for diabetes.
It is rarely the case that the measured liquid is a sucrose in water solution, so the measured Brix is only an approximation of the actual sugar content of the liquid. Nevertheless, the measurement is useful for comparison and is often sufficiently close to the actual percent-by-weight of sugar to make the measurement acceptable.
Refractometry and hydrometry are relatively simple and inexpensive techniques for measuring Brix. As a fermentation nears completion, however, these tools are of little use. The light- and/or density-altering effects of alcohol, and the differences between a pure sucrose–water solution and a wine containing fructose, glucose, dissolved acids and other dissolved solids, and ethanol, are too great to overcome. More advanced and expensive techniques such as enzymatic analysis with UV spectroscopy, or infrared spectroscopy, give the wine producer a better understanding of the amount of unfermented, residual sugar in the wine.
See also fermentation; honey; maple syrup; saccharimeter; sugar and health; sugarcane; and sweet wine.
brownies, small squares of rich chocolate cake, originally contained no chocolate. Molasses-based recipes for individual cakes called brownies appeared in both The Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1896) and The Sears, Roebuck Catalogue (1897). In 1893 the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago featured a chocolate bar cookie with apricot glaze for the Columbian Exposition, and it is this cookie that the Palmer House claims was the first chocolate brownie. This brownie was envisioned as a smaller, lighter dessert to appeal to women; it is still served at the Palmer House today. Little evidence exists for the folklore that brownies were a culinary accident, resulting from missing baking powder in a fudge cake recipe. The origin of the cake’s name is similarly uncertain, though the color of the bars may account for it, or they may have been named after a popular 1887 children’s book about elves (aka brownies).
In 1904 and 1905 versions of the recipe using chocolate appeared in a number of community cookbooks in both the Midwest and New England, including a recipe for Bangor Brownies in cookbooks published in New Hampshire, Boston, and Chicago. Between 1904 and 1910, the amount of chocolate called for in recipes increased although molasses-flavored recipes called “brownies” still appeared as late as 1926. Blondies—vanilla or butterscotch brownies—made their debut in the 1950s, sometimes frosted with chocolate or studded with chocolate chips. British tray bakes (when chocolate) bear a distant resemblance to brownies, as do the no-bake Canadian Nanaimo bars. In the United States, 8 December is National Brownie Day.
See also bar cookies; molasses; nanaimo bar; and small cakes.
See chewing gum.
bubble tea is a popular cassava-based beverage believed to have been created, or at least touted, in the early 1980s by Taiwanese entrepreneurs Liu Han Chieh, Tu Tsong-He, and/or Lin Hsui Hui. The tea relies on the starch of Manihot esculenta, which had been introduced to Taiwan from Java and the Philippines. See cassava. To make bubble tea, this tuber is cut, dried, ground, and mixed with similarly prepared sweet potato and brown sugar and shaped into balls that resemble tapioca but are larger. See tapioca. The balls are boiled for about an hour, after which they turn black, gelatinous, and somewhat translucent; they are then cooled in water. They can also be made in various other colors by means of certain proprietary processes.
Modern bubble tea recalls an earlier Taiwanese beverage that included brewed black tea, condensed milk, and ice. When the innovators added cassava balls to the tea mixture along with any number of sweet, flavored syrups and, on occasion, honey, sugar, and fruit pulp, the resulting beverage was dubbed “bubble tea”—called boba in Taiwan and by Taiwanese expats in the United States. It has also been called McBubble Beverage, pearl tea, and tapioca tea; in Chinese, the drink’s full name is zhen shou nai chai (pearl boba tea).
Bubble tea is served in dome-topped or flat-topped clear plastic containers so that the bubbles are clearly visible. Because they are heavy, the bubbles sink to the bottom of the container. The bubbles and their liquid are imbibed through a wide, often brightly colored plastic straw. Bubble tea can be served plain or as a carbonated beverage, with or without tea. The most popular flavors are lychee, peach, pear, papaya, lemon coke, and a half-tea half-coffee mixture called yuan yang. Most people enjoy bubble tea with sweet or savory snacks and drink it in places similar to coffeehouses. Adored by the young and the young at heart, bubble tea is an inexpensive, versatile, and nonalcoholic drink.
bûche de Noël, a fanciful dessert of the Christmas season, translates from the French as “yule log,” which it is made to resemble. A sheet of genoise or light sponge cake is spread with a filling such as buttercream and rolled up lengthwise, then spread with chocolate icing or ganache striated with the tines of a fork to imitate bark. Often the ends are cut off and put on the trunk, like stumps of a limb, with tree rings piped on the cut surface. Meringue mushrooms, spun-sugar spider webs, crushed pistachio moss, confectioner’s sugar snow, red berries, and angelica leaves can contribute to the visual illusion—but best not all at once! The flavors of vanilla, coffee, chestnut, chocolate, and rum can combine in this delicious gastronomic conceit.
The actual yule log of pre-Christian northern Europe, which was brought in for the winter solstice season, burned in the open hearth during the festivities, providing warmth and light. This ritual faded, along with the pagan symbols of mistletoe, holly, and ivy, as hearths grew smaller and social patterns changed. The origins of the dessert bûche de Noël are obscure, but in the nineteenth century patisseries flourished in Paris and offered elaborate pastries made by professional chefs who earlier had worked for the aristocracy. During the last century, bûche de Noël has grown in popularity, abroad as well as in France, and is increasingly prepared by cooks at home who can indulge their fantasies to share with family and friends over the holidays.
See also angelica; icing; meringue; and sponge cake.
buchty, sweet buns made with an enriched yeast dough, have the most iconic resonance of any sweet food in the Czech repertoire. During the nineteenth-century period of national revival, they featured in folk songs and tales as a culinary avatar for honest rural virtue, and to some degree they still do. To make buchty, the farmwife (neither men nor city folk could possibly have the right knack) fills pockets of butter- or lard-enriched yeast dough with sweetened farmer’s cheese, ground poppy seeds, or fruit (both fresh and fruit butters were once popular though now prune butter is most common). These pockets are arranged side by side on a generously buttered pan so that they rise into square or rectangular pastries. Buchty were typically eaten as a meal, perhaps preceded by a bowl of soup, or as a substantial snack. Cookbooks prior to the mid-nineteenth century sometimes give recipes for boiled buchty that are almost indistinguishable from dumplings, but this type is now almost unheard of.
In the Czech imagination, the homey pastry is often linked to Hloupý Honza (“Foolish John”), the folk personification of the good-hearted Czech peasant boy. When Honza leaves his simple home to make his fortune, it is inevitably with a satchel of buchty. During the nineteenth-century struggle by Czechs to forge an identity distinct from that of their German-speaking neighbors, Honza with his buchty transparently represented the antithesis of what was seen as an urban, aristocratic, and exploitative German-speaking ruling class. Not that this prevented the Austrians from adopting the recipe under the name of Buchteln. Today, you find the buttery pastry on both sides of the Danube, and as Ofen- or Rohrnudeln in Bavaria and the Palatinate.
See also breads, sweet and sweet meals.
Budapest is the capital of Hungary, a nation of sweet-lovers with one of Europe’s great baking traditions. The city offers an array of sweets from kürtőskalács (chimney cake) sold by street vendors and rétes (strudel) sold from tiny shop windows, to fairy-tale creations sold at cukrászdas (patisseries) that have been honing their skills for generations. Sweets are omnipresent in Budapest, found at elegant cafés (perfect for lingering over espresso and cake), hectic bakeries (where tables are standing-only and to-go orders are plentiful), elegant chocolate shops, and kiosks on the street. Before cane sugar was introduced in the fourteenth century, honey was the sweetener used to produce a wide range of mézeskalács (honey cake). See honey. This fondness for honey-sweetened cakes remains, particularly at festivals and fairs when vendors sell brightly iced honey cakes in various shapes. See fairs. Sugar appeared on the menus of royal feasts in the fifteenth century, a time of rigid division among craftsmen. As George Lang explains in The Cuisine of Hungary (1971), confectionery “was the exclusive privilege of the guild of pharmacists, as was the making of spiced drinks and perfumes” (p. 12).
King Matthias I, who ruled from 1458 to 1490, and his Italian wife Beatrice loved to eat and significantly elevated the country’s cuisine by bringing back chefs, pastry chefs, ingredients, and recipes from Italy. The subsequent Ottoman occupation resulted in much suffering but also some lasting culinary influences. Right after the Ottoman army was defeated in 1686 at the siege of Buda, the Habsburgs assumed power and attempted to dominate all aspects of life, including cuisine.
During the seventeenth century, the production of sweets became its own profession, no longer the exclusive domain of the pharmacists’ guild, though at first they were made only in aristocratic homes. By the end of the eighteenth century, delicacies such as fruit syrups, candied fruit, preserves, marzipan, and sweet liqueurs became available to the general public. See candied fruit; fruit preserves; and marzipan. The first pastry shop in Pest opened in 1770, and by 1805 there were four such shops in Buda and nine in Pest. In 1827 the shop that would later be known as Ruszwurm (when Vilmos Ruszwurm married into the family) opened in the Buda Castle. In the nineteenth century, regulars included members of the nobility and the royal family, including Queen Elisabeth. The Ruszwurm sweetshop still retains its Biedermeier atmosphere, although today it is sought out by tourists rather than royalty.
With the rise of industrial sugar production in the mid-1800s, the honey cake industry started to decline, and this is when the story of Budapest’s sweets, as we still know them today, begins. At this time, coffeehouses were opening all over town, becoming second homes to poets, politicians, journalists, and artists who spent their days working and socializing in them. For women, pastry shops (which had previously been places to only buy sweets) played a similar role when their owners added tables, music, and elegant décor.
When the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy was born with the 1867 Compromise, Austria and Hungary became almost equal partners, ushering in a golden age for not only sweets but also the city itself (in 1873 Pest, Buda, and Óbuda united to form Budapest). In 1868 Frigyes Stühmer, a pastry chef from Hamburg, founded Budapest’s, and Hungary’s, first chocolate factory. Stühmer played a major role in industrializing chocolate and candy production and is considered the founder of the Hungarian chocolate industry. His brand was known for its quality and attractive packaging, and was widely exported. By 1900 there would be 60 chocolate factories in Hungary.
In 1870 confectioner Henrik Kugler relocated his elegant pastry shop to what is today’s Vörösmárty tér, where it remains the city’s most opulent cukrászda. Kugler came from a family of confectioners. He was inspired by the time he spent training in France, and when he opened his first patisserie in 1858, he wanted to provide a Parisian experience to his customers. Even before he moved to Vörösmárty tér, in the center of Pest, Kugler and his shop had gained a reputation as one of Budapest’s best. Kugler’s was by far the most luxurious patisserie in Budapest; it later even added a separate salon for the royal family who were frequent guests, as was the composer Franz Liszt. Kugler was famous for his bonbons, and he introduced French mignons, or petit fours (now called mignon or minyon in Hungarian), which he called Kuglers. See bonbons and small cakes. In 1875 Kugler became confectioner to the Imperial Royal Court. Having no heirs, he tapped Swiss confectioner Emil Gerbeaud to take over his business in 1884. Gerbeaud expanded the scale of the shop, bringing it to an even higher level. He opened a chocolate factory, focused on mechanization, and expanded the product line. The shop was immensely popular (and still is), and its style and quality greatly influenced Budapest’s pastry scene. Gerbeaud’s “biggest value was that he did not conceal his recipes,” writes Miklós Niszács in The Gerbeaud (2008). “Consequently, the novelties introduced by him became well known throughout Hungary” (p. 12).
The year 1884 was significant. Not only did Emil Gerbeaud arrive in Hungary, but József Dobos also invented his six-layer Dobos torta. See dobos torte. This cake became a sensation, which patisseries throughout Budapest tried to imitate. By then 60 pastry shops existed in Budapest; even industrial factories opened salons with elegant shop windows. Afternoon tea and cakes had become a ritual for ladies.
World War I brought high food prices and shortages. Even opulent Gerbeaud was turned into a stable for 133 days, and similar disruptions occurred throughout the city. Some level of normalcy returned during the interwar period, but World War II and subsequent Communist rule from 1949 to 1989 devastated the country and its cuisine. Businesses were nationalized during this period, and although agriculture had long been a strength of Hungary, it was neglected, and cooperatives became the norm. Food shortages arose, and many culinary traditions, products, and recipes were lost.
Today, once again, Budapest is a city of thriving bakeries, cafés, and patisseries in styles ranging from traditional to contemporary. Pastry chefs still respect the traditional recipes, and classics such as Dobos torta, krémes, and Eszterházy torta are widely available. However, today’s pastry chefs increasingly seek inspiration from beyond Hungary’s borders while still building on the city’s illustrious past. They are crafting sweets that are familiar yet novel. Chefs such as József Dobos and Emil Gerbeaud would surely have approved.
Buddhism has been practiced across most of the Asian continent for over 2,500 years, with clergy and laity in different regions embracing a range of sacred teachings, scriptural languages, liturgical calendars, and moral precepts. Given this variety, it is unsurprising that the food cultures of Buddhist institutional and lay practice should also vary widely, as these cultures naturally include the preparation, offering, and consumption of sweets.
Specific foods appear as offerings of nourishment at key junctures of influential versions of the life of the Buddha: shortly before his awakening, when he ended his ascetic trials by accepting milk gruel from a cowherd girl; and shortly before his death, when he accepted a final meal (either of pork or of mushrooms) from a metalworker. Sweet foods also appear in some biographical traditions. The first meal offered to the Buddha after his awakening, given by two merchants who became his first lay disciples, was reportedly of wheat and honey. In later Indian Buddhism, the pilgrimage center of Vaiśāli was famed as the site of a monkey’s gift of honey to the Buddha, one of the “Eight Great Events” in late accounts of his life. Another sweet appears in an episode from the monastic code of the Mīlasarvāstivāda school of Buddhism. After renouncing the world and awakening, the Buddha returned to his home kingdom. There, his former consort Yaśodharā offered him an aphrodisiac sweetmeat (vaśīkaraṇamodaka) in an effort to entice him to return to his life as a ruler and husband. Yaśodharā sent their son Rāhula to deliver it to the Buddha, but the Buddha merely returned it to Rāhula, who ate it and became so intoxicated with his father that he decided to abandon his mother to follow the Buddha. The euphemistic translation of the name of the sweet into Chinese as “balls of joy” (huanxituan) may reflect discomfort with the erotic implications of the Sanskrit name, which specifically refers to the manipulation of bewitching another person.
The preparation and offering of “balls of joy” or “buns of bliss” represent one rare example of a sweet whose use is long established within Japanese Buddhist ritual practice and has clearly Indian origins. This sweet is descended from the modaka dumpling, beloved of the Hindu deity Gaṇeśa. See modaka. In India, the modaka is subject to some variation, but it is typically made with jaggery (unrefined sugar) and coconut, in a dumpling of rice flour. As Gaṇeśa entered the pantheon of esoteric Buddhist deities as the god of joy (in Japanese, Kangiten), the rituals surrounding him were also adapted and brought to China and then to Japan. The modaka seems to have been among the earliest “foreign sweets” (kara kudamono, aka tōgashi) to reach Japan, where its name appears in a dictionary dating back to the early tenth century. Today known commercially as seijō kankidan, these “balls of joy” are on offer from just one shop among the many selling traditional sweets (wagashi) in Kyoto: Kameya Kiyonaga, founded in 1617, whose early progenitors reputedly learned to make them from a high-ranking cleric from the nearby Buddhist temple complex on Mount Hiei.
The composition of these dumplings has varied over the centuries, but the current version is made with seven different spices: sandalwood, clove, peppermint, licorice, pepper, cinnamon from the stem of the plant, and cinnamon from the trunk of the plant. These are mixed in a base of strained sweet azuki bean paste (an); wrapped in a dough of rice flour, wheat, and other spices; shaped into small pouches; and then deep-fried in sesame oil. See azuki beans. The final dumpling has eight “petals” on its top, representing an eight-lobed lotus blossom. Although these “buns of bliss” are now available for sale to the public, they still play an important role in ritual offerings to the god of joy held at Japanese Buddhist temples of the Shingon or Tendai denominations. Often represented as a “hidden image” (hibutsu) of two figures twining in an erotic embrace, the god of joy is worshipped in Japan at these temples for success in business (often by workers in Japan’s nighttime entertainment industry), the removal of obstacles, marital harmony, and the restoration of sexual potency. In this sense, too, the “ball of joy” is a faithful descendant of the sweet described in the story from the Mīlasarvāstivāda monastic code.
More generally, any celebrated Buddhist institution in Japan may be associated with a specific wagashi, used in its altar offerings and made near its precincts, adding up to a bewildering variety; most of these sweets originated in the seventeenth century. See wagashi. On special occasions, home Buddhist altars in Japan are still adorned with rakugan, pressed and dried sweets made from rice flour and Japanese refined sugar (wasanbon), and molded into colorful shapes (fruit, vegetables, money, etc.) as offerings to the buddhas and ancestors. See wasanbon. Thus, sweets still serve a role in the “economy of merit,” as introduced in the biography of the Buddha himself.
This watercolor depicts tea and sweets laid out in front of Buddhist monks. The monk on the left holds a cheroot in his mouth; those on the right are holding their throats, a reference to vocal fatigue from long periods of chanting or recitation. wellcome library, london
See also aphrodisiacs; japan; and kyoto.
See fried dough; spain; and southwest (u.s.).
See caramels.
butter is the fat element of liquid milk coalesced by agitation during the churning process. A product of ancient origin and of great importance in Eurasia and countries influenced by northern European foodways, it is an essential ingredient in many sweet foods, to which it gives structure and flavor. Butter is also boiled with sugar for certain confections, such as English toffee, in which sugar and the residual milk proteins contained in the butter combine in the Maillard reaction to produce delicious aromas and tastes.
The importance of good butter for baking and pastry is often underestimated. It is the preferred fat because of its delicate, sweet, fresh cream flavor and pleasing aroma, which are very compatible with other ingredients and make a good canvas for other flavors. Many sweet baked recipes combine butter with sugar and wheat flour to give a variety of textures—short and crisp or crumbly, as in some types of cookie and short pastries, or delicately layered, as in puff pastry and Danish pastries. See pastry, puff. In these recipes, butter shortens the gluten and gives flavor. Adding eggs allows for a whole range of cakes. Here, in addition to having a shortening effect, butter helps to hold air in the cake batter. Butter is also essential to many yeast-leavened baked goods. The mouthfeel of butter is a smooth coating of richness, compared to the more flavorful and heavy mouth coating of lard, or shortening’s naked, bland taste and greasy mouthfeel. See shortening.
The best butter contains only cream; annatto is added seasonally to create a little more color when the cows are not eating fresh grasses. Much depends on what the cows are fed, and they should be humanely treated, which means pasturing or keeping them in a clean, well-ventilated, and sanitary barn. Cows are social and complex animals that experience pain, fear, and anxiety. A stressed cow will produce inferior milk and cream. The finest butter is organic, which is best used for finer pastries. A higher fat content does not mean better flavor.
It takes 10 quarts of milk to produce 1 pound of regular butter. Regular U.S. butter is between 80 and 82 percent butterfat; the average is 81 percent. European-style butter is 82 to 86 percent butterfat; its average is 84 percent. High-fat, low-moisture butter, made by churning cream more slowly and for a longer time and often marketed as European butter, is preferred. Low moisture means a denser, firmer, and silkier texture that will hold more air when creamed or whipped. The other advantage is that it will cream faster, provide more volume, and create a stronger structure, because it is not holding extra moisture. This quality is especially noticeable in buttercreams and creamed cake recipes, such as pound cakes and cupcakes. See cupcakes; icing; and pound cake. High-fat, low-moisture butter is denser and firmer, which means it is preferable for pie and tart dough because it makes them easier to form and roll out. See pie dough. When used in puff pastry, the firmer low-moisture butter is much easier to roll and fold because it is denser and therefore remains cooler longer.
Unsalted butter (sometimes erroneously called “sweet” butter) should always be used in dessert recipes. Salt is not always needed, for instance, in buttercreams and mousses. There is no industry standard as to how much salt is added to butter; it can vary from 0.4 to 4 percent, depending on the manufacturer. Salt is added as a preservative to extend the shelf life of butter, but it affects its delicate, fresh flavor. Too much salt in dough causes the flour to overdevelop gluten structure and become tough.
Storing and Using Butter
Butter, like all fats, is a vehicle for flavor and will easily pick up other odors. It can also quickly become rancid. Butter should always be stored away from highly aromatic foods. Heat and light can also cause undesirable chemical and physical changes in butter. Leaving butter unrefrigerated can result in flavor changes, rancidity, and mold growth, which affect the texture and can give the butter a distinctive smell—stale, cheesy, or decomposed. Bring out only the amount of butter that you plan to use for each recipe. After measuring what you need, any remaining butter should be covered or rewrapped and returned to the refrigerator immediately.
Store butter in its original container or an odor-free covered container in the coldest part of the refrigerator, at 32° to 38°F (0° to 3°C). Butter can also be frozen: when properly stored between 20° and 30°F (–7 to –1°C), the shelf life is between four to six weeks. Freezing will cause gradual flavor and texture changes the longer butter is held. Never wrap it in plastic wrap, which can release unpleasant odors that the butter will absorb.
Recipes such as buttercreams or pound cakes require butter at room temperature for creaming. Allow chilled butter to stand, wrapped and away from heat or direct sunlight, for about 1 to 1½ hours, until it reaches a plastic state. When squeezed, the wrapped butter should still be cool.
For pie, tart, or puff pastry, butter should be kept refrigerated until just before use. The coldness will allow the butter to be cut into the flour more evenly and prevent it from becoming prematurely soft.
Butter, usually clarified in the form of ghee, is also important in Indian sweets, and has spiritual significance as a food.
See also cake; cream; india; maillard, henri; mithai; mousse; and toffee.
See icing.
buttermilk is a term surrounded by much historical confusion. It originally referred to the liquid that drains away from butter after churning. This buttermilk was highly unstandardized in both appearance and flavor. It could be scanty and almost as thin as whey if made from rich cream, but plentiful and creamy if made from whole unhomogenized milk. (This counterintuitive result reflects the fact that cream contains more butterfat and less of everything else than milk.) Buttermilk can be almost flavorless if the milk is “sweet” (unfermented), or pleasantly sour if the milk has undergone some lactic acid fermentation, or “ripening.”
Yet another variable is the kind of lactic acid bacteria that predominate in ripened buttermilk. In northwestern Europe and most of North America, they are usually “mesophilic” species that thrive at temperatures between about 75° and 85°F (24° to 30°C). These organisms produce a mild, delicate acidity similar to that of cultured sour cream. See sour cream. In the hotter dairying regions of western Asia and India, “thermophilic” species that thrive in temperatures between about 105° and 118°F (40° to 48°C) flourish. These happen to be the organisms used for making yogurt; in effect, Indian butter and buttermilk are churned from yogurt, and the buttermilk naturally retains more of a yogurt flavor than the Western counterpart. See yogurt.
Until the late nineteenth century, buttermilk was a humble byproduct of butter-making in many American households. Most often it had undergone some degree of ripening, since housewives usually skimmed off the cream from several days’ milking and set it aside until enough had accumulated to be practical for churning. Especially in summer, cream could be noticeably sour by the time it was churned.
Having this source of lactic acid on hand most of the time proved to be useful when alkaline leavenings such as potash and sodium bicarbonate achieved wide use in baking after about 1840. See chemical leaveners. Though the word “buttermilk” rarely crops up in recipe titles in cookbooks of the era, the ingredient itself certainly began to figure widely for starting the necessary chemical reaction with alkali in batters for quick breads, pancakes, and many quick-raised cakes. So did naturally soured milk, with which it was more or less interchangeable.
Both buttermilk and sour milk stopped being produced at home when specialized commercial dairy manufacturing triumphed in the early twentieth century. After about 1920, both were replaced by low-fat milk inoculated with laboratory-grown strains of mesophilic cultures and fermented until lightly soured and thickened. It is this cultured product that most consumers now equate with the term “buttermilk,” though it is quite unconnected with butter making.
Cultured buttermilk is still as useful as its churned or home-soured predecessors in reacting with baking soda in cake, doughnut, and muffin batters. During the twentieth century it also acquired popularity in a few desserts such as buttermilk pie (a member of the southern-style “chess pie” family) as well as ice creams and sherbets. It is also processed on an industrial scale to produce dried buttermilk powder, an important ingredient in commercial bakery and confectionery products.
See also butter; cream; and milk.
butterscotch refers to both a type of candy and the flavor associated with it. The basic recipe involves cooking together sugar, butter, and sometimes other ingredients such as glucose and flavorings until they reach a temperature of 294°F (146°C), between soft and hard crack. The texture of the finished sweet is hard but easily broken, and the combination of sugar and dairy creates a characteristic and appealing flavor that has become popular in sweet sauces and syrups, especially in North America, where butterscotch is used in numerous desserts, drinks, and other confectionery items, such as icing.
Although brown sugar is sometimes specified for the recipe, white sugar can be used. Cream is sometimes added, along with additional flavors: vanilla is used in North America, while lemon oil and salt are standard in British recipes. The origin of the name “butterscotch” remains a mystery. It may relate to the habit of cutting the confection into small squares, an action for which the word “scotching” was sometimes used; this style of presentation was a distinctive feature of the confection in the late nineteenth century. Butterscotch has been made in Britain since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when a company called Parkinson’s became famous for its production in the northern English town of Doncaster. The Dutch confection known as boterbabbelaars also has a similar texture and flavor.