The Pacific Northwest (U.S.) includes the entire northwest corner of the United States and Canada. The region is prized by cooks for its superior tree fruits, nuts, and berries. The lush valleys of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon form a large, fertile growing region that is sandwiched between the Coastal range on the west and the rugged Cascade and Rocky Mountain ranges on the east, stretching over 400 miles north to south. The area’s dry and sunny days and cool nights are optimal for flavor and color development and mean fewer disease problems. Crops grow slowly and develop rich, complex flavor profiles.
Wild fruits and nuts grow in abundance throughout the region and were a food source for Native Americans. Many fruits were dried and used to supplement their meals during the long winter months when food was scarce. See native american. By 1830, early settlers could plant their own crops from seeds purchased at Hudson Bay Company outposts. Eighteen years later, the first commercial crops were planted in Oregon’s Willamette Valley after Henderson Luelling and his brother, Seth, transported 700 grafted fruit trees, bushes, and berries planted in the beds of their wagons over the Oregon Trail. “Bing,” the main variety of cherry produced in the United States, was named in 1860 after nurseryman Seth’s Chinese foreman, Ah Bing, who grafted the tree on which they grew. Today, in the summer, fresh Bing cherries are often made into a compote with local raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries and served over chiffon or pound cake, or barely cooked with a small amount of sugar and a splash of local eau-de-vie for a sauce for ice cream.
Another popular ice cream topper is local strawberries. The industry was born when farmers started growing strawberries as a crop while they waited for their newly planted fruit trees to reach maturity. The berries thrived, and in 1870 Asa Lovejoy opened the first cannery and began shipping berries across the country to the East Coast. In 1920, Oregon and Washington were the first to develop the preservation of fruit by freezing strawberries in barrels, which were then shipped by rail to East Coast preserve factories. Today, although the much-anticipated strawberry crop is small, it is still considered a regional treasure, and the sun-ripened berries are cherished by locals for their excellent flavor and juicy flesh that is a brilliant red inside and out. During the season, most dessert tables will feature them in some form—strawberry shortcake, strawberry pie, or fresh strawberry sauce over homemade ice cream. With strawberries’ exceptionally short season, these simple old-fashioned desserts have remained favorites because they showcase the berries and bring out the best of their luscious flavor. See pie; sauce; and shortcake.
Almost all of the nation’s commercial blackberries and black raspberries, and a high percentage of the red raspberry and blueberries, are grown here. Many blackberry cultivars, like the highly regarded “Marion” (commonly called marionberry), tayberry, and loganberry, are prized by local cooks for their excellent flavor. Fresh raspberries are available locally during summer and into fall, as well as high-bush blueberries, which grow in the same regions.
With the abundance of fresh berries available locally in the Pacific Northwest, desserts served during June and July always feature fresh berries in one form or another. The best blackberry pie is made with the flavorful wild Pacific trailing blackberry, but more often it is made with commercially grown berries like Marions, a regional favorite. The fine flavor of Marions is so intense that this simple old-fashioned dessert needs only sugar, a splash of lemon juice, a thickener, and pastry to make an exceptional sweet ending.
Cobblers and crisps made with berries, fruits, and nuts, or a mixture of them depending on what is in season, are also widely popular. Cobblers are most commonly made by tossing the fruit with sugar and a thickener, topping with a short pastry, and baking until the crust is a rich golden brown. However, they are also served with a cooked fruit filling with tender biscuits baked on top. See fruit desserts, baked.
The most traditional Pacific Northwest desserts—pies, cobblers, crisps, and cakes—are made with the beloved native wild huckleberry. Twelve species grow in the Pacific Northwest and one of them—the sweet purple berries of Vaccinium membraceum—was a significant industry a hundred years ago. From mid-August to mid-September, large huckleberry camps were set up near ancient huckleberry fields, where families picked and often canned huckleberries on the spot. Professional pickers sold their berries to a distributor, who hauled the berries to urban markets for resale and processing.
Native Americans have gathered huckleberries in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest near Mount St. Helens for thousands of years. The berries, picked and dried on tule (rush) mats in front of a smoldering log, were eaten with dried game and fish throughout the harsh winters. During the Depression, as more and more unemployed workers left the cities for the mountains in hopes of making enough money picking huckleberries to feed their families, a conflict arose with the Native Americans whose ancient berry picking fields had been invaded. They took their grievance to the U.S. Forest Service, and the issue was resolved with the Handshake Agreement of 1932 that reserved a portion of the Indian Heaven Huckleberry Fields solely for Native American use during the season. The treaty is still being honored today, and huckleberry pie is still as popular today as it was a hundred years ago. It is the quintessential Pacific Northwest dessert.
Besides the wide variety of wild and commercially grown berries, there is also a thriving tree fruit industry, including apples, pears, cherries, apricots, plums, and peaches.
From mid- to late summer and into fall, when tree fruit are perfectly ripe and harvested, local dessert choices expand exponentially. Sweet cherries, peaches, nectarines, pears, and apples are transformed into mouth-watering desserts that tend to be rustic rather than fussy, with the fruit occupying center stage. Apple crisp is popular, baked with blackberries, huckleberries, or chopped hazelnuts, while pears are often poached in spiced red wine or used as a main ingredient in cakes. It is also not unusual to find tree fruit served as a last course with locally produced cheese and nuts, following the French tradition. Local apples, cherries, and plums, as well as several berries, are made regionally into eau-de-vie, which is often served with sweets for dessert.
Almost all of the country’s hazelnuts are grown from the very southern end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley into southern Washington. The orchards are distinguished by the deep emerald green canopy that protects the nuts when, in late September or early October, they drop to the ground when ripe. These premier nuts are best known for their large size and superior flavor, making them a favorite of chefs. Chopped hazelnuts are widely used paired with chocolate or fall fruits—hazelnut chocolate mousse, pear and hazelnut tart, and hazelnut apple crisp can often be found on regional menus. Ground hazelnut flour is a favorite of pastry chefs when they want a rich, nutty pastry or a gluten-free substitute for wheat flour.
Ice cream is still as popular a dessert now as it was a hundred years ago. In the past few years, there has been an increase in small, independent ice cream producers who use local ingredients in ice creams, such as Honey Balsamic Strawberry with Black Pepper Ice Cream or Melon Ice Cream with shards of razor-thin prosciutto. See ice cream.
Sweet endings in the Pacific Northwest appear to have new beginnings.
See also dried fruit; fruit; fruit preserves; nuts; and united states.
palm sugar is one of the world’s oldest sweeteners, distinguished from cane sugar in Singhalese chronicles dating from the first century b.c.e. It is produced and consumed across a swath of Asia stretching from the Philippines to India and Sri Lanka. For anyone accustomed to thinking of sugar as either white or brown and just plain sweet, palm sugar is surprising in its complexity, ranging in color from pale yellow to almost black and with a flavor that, in addition to sweet, can be salty, sour, bitter, smoky, or any combination thereof. See sugar.
Palm sugar is produced by boiling sap collected from the cut inflorescence of many palm varieties, including palmyra (Borassus flabellifer), coconut (Cocos nucifera), kithul or fishtale (Caryota urens), date (Phoenix dactylifera), silver date (Phoenix sylvestrus), aren (Arenga pinnata), and nipa (Nypa fruticans) palms. Prior to cutting, the inflorescence is softened by beating with a stick or mallet to initiate the flow of sap. The sap is captured in tubes suspended beneath the cut inflorescence and collected twice a day; tappers often add a fermentation prohibitor such as lime, calcium carbonate, or tannic bark. Some tappers and sugar makers (often one and the same individual) include a ritual as part of the sap collection process. On northern Sumatra, ethnic Batak, most of whom are Christian, request permission from God before collecting sap. On Bali, it is believed that if the tapper speaks with or is spoken to by anyone while transferring collected sap to the pan where it is to be boiled, the sugar will become spoiled.
Once collected, the sap is reduced by evaporation, boiled and stirred for several hours in large, uncovered cauldrons. During boiling, some makers add ingredients to alter the color of their sugar; for example, Batak add the spongy reddish fiber that lines the inside of mangosteen peels to make their product darker. Once the sap has been sufficiently reduced, usually to a viscosity somewhere between the soft- and hard-ball candy stage, it is poured into molds made from coconut halves, bamboo tubes, strips of rattan joined to form a circle, and other materials, and left to cool and solidify. See stages of sugar syrup. In southern Thailand, the sugar is whipped with large whisks until it is stiff, then formed without the use of molds into lumps or swirl-topped mounds and left to dry. In Sarawak and Sabah states on Malaysian Borneo and on Sri Lanka, the sugar is taken from the fire when still liquid, allowed to cool, and then poured into jars, tubs, or bags.
In local languages palm sugar might be named for its color (gula merah or “red sugar” in Indonesia), its traditional provenance (gula jawa in Indonesia, gula Melaka in Malaysia), the variety of palm from which it is made (gula nipa and gula aren in Indonesia, gula apong or “floating sugar” on Malaysian Borneo, in reference to the nipa palm, which grows in water), or the sugar-making process (pakaskas in the Philippines from kaskasin, which refers to the process of “scraping” the sugar from the boiling sap). Palm sugar is duong thot not in Vietnamese and scor thnout in Khmer. In India, it is called gur or, confusingly, date sugar (whether or not it is made from date palms) or jaggery, a word that also refers to dark brown cane sugar.
No matter which palm it is made from, palm sugar has a lower glycemic index and is less sweet than cane sugar. The palm sap that becomes sugar has also long been used to make intoxicating toddy and distilled arak, as well as vinegar. Palm sugar is an ingredient in a staggering variety of sweet and savory foods, from Thai somtam (green papaya salad) to innumerable Indian sweets.
See also india; maple sugaring; philippines; south asia; southeast asia; sticky rice sweets; sugar and health; and thailand.
See sponge cake.
pancakes are thin, flat cakes made by pouring or ladling a liquid batter onto a hot greased surface, and baking them there until done. The simplicity of the required ingredients and equipment means that pancakes are one of the most ancient foods created by humans. Pancakes called tagenites made from wheat flour and soured milk and served warm with honey are mentioned in Greek writings from the fifth century b.c.e., but it is generally accepted that some form of pancakes has been made since prehistoric times.
Pancakes Large and Small
Two key features distinguish pancakes from other starch-based staples. The first is that liquid batter (at times very thick) is used, in contrast to the firm dough required for shaping bread. The second is that gluten is not required for successful formation—indeed, gluten is not generally desirable, as pancakes are intended to be soft, not stiff—which means that a much greater range of grains can be used.
Flour or meal made from true cereal grasses, such as wheat, oats, barley, rye, maize, and rice, collectively form the base of most pancakes eaten around the world. The grain-like seeds of plants that are not technically grasses, such as buckwheat (related to rhubarb) and amaranth (related to pigweed), and starches derived from many other seeds and plants, such as pulses (peas, beans, lentils), potato, cassava (tapioca flour), and chestnuts, may also be used. This enormous flexibility in the basic ingredient has led to pancakes being a truly global food—one that has crossed the East–West culinary divide in a way that bread has not.
The basic pancake batter may be varied in an almost infinite number of ways. It may be plain and simple, rich and sweet, or spicy and savory. Additional ingredients such as berries, nuts, or chocolate chips may be included in the batter, or the cooked pancake may be folded or rolled around a filling (sweet or savory), or served with a sauce alongside. The batter may even be colored, either artificially or with such natural ingredients as beet juice, spinach juice, or turmeric.
In terms of thickness, pancakes fall into two broad groups. The thin, unleavened form is exemplified by the classic French crêpe and embraces many European specialties (most of which are sweet dishes), such as the palatschinken of Central and Eastern Europe, Poland’s naleśniki, and Spanish frixuelos. The thicker, fluffier, leavened type is that of the American hotcake, Australian pikelet, Scottish drop scone, and Russian blini (yeast-raised, classically made from buckwheat, and often savory). Many other national specialties fall somewhere between these styles, for example Austrian Kaiserschmarrn (characteristically shredded before serving), German Pfannkuchen (the word can mean both pancake and doughnut), Czech livance, and Danish æbleskiver (plump, round balls that traditionally contain an apple filling).
The diameter of the pancake depends on personal and national preference, and is limited only by the diameter of the cooking pan or surface. The pikelet of Australasia is a few bites in size, and several are cooked at the same time in the pan, whereas Ethiopian injera may be several feet across, with a single pancake ample enough to satisfy several people. In some countries special pans have been devised with indentations for cooking multiple pancakes at once, such as Denmark’s æbleskiver and Sweden’s plättar.
Pancakes may also serve as the base for other dishes, especially cakes. Gâteau mille crêpes (thousand crêpe cake) consists of a large stack of thin crêpes sandwiched together with a sweet filling, which is then cut into slices like a cake. Hungary’s rakott palacsinta is not dissimilar. In Russia, blini are layered with farmer’s cheese and dried fruit, or sometimes simply jam, to make a tall blinchatyi pirog.
Cooking Pancakes
Although the word “pancake” is attested in English since the beginning of the fifteenth century, the exact characteristics covered by this name are far from certain. Recipes for simple, everyday dishes were not written down in times past, as they would have been part of every cook’s and housewife’s repertoire. Recipes that do appear in pre-nineteenth-century cookery texts are frequently unclear, and many dishes referred to as “pancakes” appear to more closely resemble what we would now define as fritters (fried in deep fat), waffles (cooked between two heated plates), or omelets (a predominantly egg mixture). See fritters. There is also recipe confusion and overlap with hoe-cakes, johnnycakes, griddle cakes, flapjacks, slapjacks, and other similar articles. In some instances even today, “pancakes” turn out to be flatbreads, made from stiff dough that has been kneaded and rolled or pressed out.
The first written recipe in English for something unequivocally a pancake in form and method of cooking appears in the Good Huswife’s Handmaide for the Kitchin, published in 1588:
Take new thicke Creame a pinte, foure or fiue yolks of Egs, a good handfull of flower, and two or three spoonfuls of ale, strain them altogether into a faire platter, and season it with a good handfull of Sugar, a spooneful of Synamon, and a litle Ginger: then take a frying pan, and put in a litle peece of Butter, as big as your thombe, and when it is molten browne, cast it out of your pan, and with a ladle put to the further side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold your pan aslope, so that your stuffe may run abroad ouer all the pan, as thin as may be: then set it to the fyre, and let the fyre be verie soft, and when the one side is baked, then turne the other, and bake them as dry as ye can without burning.
Leavening is not essential to pancake batter, but it does yield a lighter, fluffier result. Pancakes can be raised with eggs, yeast (including that in ale or beer), baking powder, or baking soda. See chemical leaveners; eggs; and yeast. Snow can also be used (see below), and stiffly beaten egg whites folded into the batter make an especially fine and light pancake. Leavening may also be achieved by allowing natural fermentation of the batter, which adds a characteristic sour taste to the pancake, as in traditional Russian blini made with buckwheat flour; bubbly-surfaced Ethiopian injera made from teff flour and water left to stand for several days; and the very similar Somalian lahoh, made from sorghum flour and water.
In its simplest form, a pancake can be made from flour and water only, but it would not be a delicious pancake. The choice of liquid used in the batter makes its own significant contribution to the style and flavor of the pancake. Milk in any of its myriad forms may be used, depending on preference and availability: skimmed milk serves the purposes of economy, and cream makes for a rich taste and texture. See cream and milk. Especially notable is buttermilk, which is acidic, and hence assists the leavening action of baking soda, if it is used. See buttermilk. Nondairy “milks” may also be used, as they characteristically are in Asia. Good examples include tiny rice flour and coconut milk pancakes called kanom krok in Thailand, and serabi in Indonesia. Virtually any liquid can be used, of course, and in the past, ale and wine were popular and common. The ale could also serve as the source of the yeast, which helped lighten the mixture.
For something so essentially simple, specific instructions nonetheless exist for making certain types of pancakes. Most often the pancake is turned to cook first on one side, then the other, but some thin pancakes, such as Moroccan beghrir, call for cooking one side only. When turning pancakes, the question frequently arises as to whether the pancake should be turned with a spatula or tossed. Although there is much sentiment and hype about tossing pancakes, tossing is not necessary, and it is fraught with risk to the pancake and to kitchen surfaces. However, tossing is a good party trick, and it is required at the traditional pancake-tossing races at Shrovetide.
In the Christian calendar, Shrove Tuesday is most closely associated with pancakes because it was traditionally the day to use up all eggs and milk before the long period of abstinence known as Lent. The most famous event of this day is a pancake race. Pancake racing is said to have begun in the distant past, when a woman making pancakes heard the church bell and, not wanting to waste her efforts, ran quickly to church, tossing her pancake as she went. Since 1950 the towns of Olney, England, and Liberal, Kansas, have held an International Pancake Race.
Pancakes lend themselves to serving in a wide range of situations. Their inherent simplicity means that they are most commonly associated with informal events such as family breakfasts, and they are favorites for campfire cooking. Glamorous versions are suitable for fine dinner parties and other entertainments. A prime example is the famous dessert Crêpes Suzette, whose origins are controversial. The chef Henri Charpentier claimed to have invented the dish in 1895 when he rescued a dessert from disaster in the royal kitchen of Edward, Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). Charpentier renamed the dessert in honor of the prince’s female companion and served it to great acclaim—or so the story goes. Although called by different names, recipes for essentially the same dish appeared in the cookbook published in 1896 by Oscar Tschirky, maître d’hôtel of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, and in the English edition of Auguste Escoffier’s Guide culinaire, published in 1903. Interestingly, neither recipe calls for a final stage of flambéeing, which is today considered intrinsic to the dish.
Pancakes in America
In America, the skill of pancake making certainly arrived with the earliest European settlers, and the national repertoire has been greatly expanded since then by migrant populations from around the world. The first authentic American cookery book, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, was published in 1796. It contains a pancake recipe that shows adaptation to local ingredients. Although the recipe specifies frying, it does not indicate how much fat to use, so the “Federal Pan Cake” may have been more like a fritter.
Take one quart of boulted rye flour, one quart of boulted Indian meal, mix it well, and stir it with a little salt into three pints milk, to the proper consistence of pancakes; fry in lard, and serve up warm.
An English cookbook widely reprinted in the young republic, A New System of Domestic Cookery by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell (1807), gives instructions for snow pancakes:
Is an excellent substitute for eggs, either in puddings or pancakes. Two large spoonfuls will supply the place of one egg, and the article it is used in will be equally good. This is an [sic] useful piece of information, especially as snow often falls at the season when eggs are dearest. Fresh small beer, or bottled malt liquors, likewise serve instead of eggs. The snow may be taken up from any clean spot before it is wanted, and will not lose its virtue, though the sooner it is used the better.
The quintessential modern American pancake is leavened with baking powder and served with maple syrup. See maple syrup. It is a staple at breakfasts in family kitchens and in diners across the country. In some regions it is known as a hotcake. The phrase “hot cakes” appears to be an American invention, and first appeared in 1683 in a letter from William Penn, governor of Pennsylvania, to the “Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that province residing in London.” The “hot cakes” to which he refers, however, are clearly not pancakes in the accepted sense of the word today. Penn is writing of the food of the Native Americans when he says “with hot cakes of new Corn, both Wheat and Beans, which they make up in square form, in the leaves of the Stem, and bake them in the Ashes.” See native american. Similar confusion exists with other references to hot cakes or hotcakes over the next few centuries—it is impossible to know for certain if they were fritter-like or flatbread-like.
The phrase “selling (or “going off like”) hotcakes” also first appeared in an American publication, in 1839. In The Adventures of Harry Franco, a novel about the great financial panic of 1837, Charles Briggs writes: “‘You had better buy ’em, Colonel,’ said Mr. Lummucks, ‘they will sell like hot cakes.’”
The modern concept of a hotcake as a pancake could not have appeared before the development and widespread use of chemical leaveners, which did not occur until the late eighteenth century. But once commercial baking powder became available in the mid-nineteenth century, powder-risen pancakes rapidly became an American favorite. An English reporter described his experience of an American breakfast in an article titled “Hotel Life in New York,” in the 27 December 1860 issue of the London Times. He notes that “breakfast may be obtained from half-past 6 till 11, and on a scale of which even our neighbours north of the Tweed [i.e., in Scotland] have no conception.” The intrepid reporter tackles steak, potatoes, and fried oysters, after which the waiter prevails upon him to try something more:
…a little broiled fowl, or an omelet? Well, you will have some hot cakes? Hot cakes are an American institution (every custom, I should remark, is termed an “institution” in America).
These hot cakes resemble crumpets, and are generally served in a pyramidal form, a large cake forming the base, and the small one the apex of the pile. A little butter is placed between each cake, and syrup (refined molasses) poured over the whole.
See also chestnuts and tapioca.
pandanus, though largely unknown to cooks and chefs in the West, is an important flavoring and coloring ingredient in the sweets repertoire of South and Southeast Asia, from India to the Philippines.
Pandanus is a genus of flowering trees and shrubs that includes over 600 species of tropical and subtropical plants native to Asia. Pandanus amarillifolius (formerly Pandanus odoratissimus), usually called “pandan” or “screwpine” in English, is the species that provides cooks with pandan leaves (bai toei in Thai, daun pandan in Malay, pandan in Tagalog, sleuk toey in Khmer, la dura in Vietnamese, rampe in Sinhala, and su mwei ywe in Burmese). The leaves give a delicate scent and flavor reminiscent of basmati rice, with hints of rosewater and vanilla. They also lend an attractive light green tint.
The male flowers of several species of pandanus are the source of “screwpine essence,” an aromatic, pale orange liquid used in South Asian cooking to flavor sweets and drinks. See extracts and flavorings.
Pandan leaves look a little like narrow gladiolus or daylily leaves: bright green, long, flat, and pointed. They are available fresh in Asia, Hawaii, and Australia, and occasionally in colder-climate regions. In North America and Europe, however, cooks more commonly have access only to frozen pandan, which also works well. To use pandanus, tie several leaves in a knot and then simmer in water, milk, or coconut milk until they have released their aroma and green color; the knot enables them to be lifted out easily when the dish has cooked.
In Malaysia, Indonesia, and India, pandan leaves are most often cooked with rice to add a light green tint and impart an aromatic flowery flavor; they also perfume coconut-milk-based desserts in Southeast Asia. These days in Asia, a number of factory-made ingredients, such as tapioca balls, fine rice noodles, and rice-flour-based sweetmeats are dyed green with vegetable dyes to evoke pandan.
See also india; philippines; south asia; and southeast asia.
panning is the process for making sugared almonds, comfits, dragées, jelly beans, M&M’s, and numerous other items in which nuts, spices, and pieces of candied fruit, fruit paste, sugar paste, or chocolate are coated with sugar shells. See comfit; fruit pastes; and jelly beans. The principles behind it have been known since at least the early medieval period in the Middle East.
Confectioners differentiate between hard panning—using sugar syrup in a slow process to make smooth, hard-centered items—and soft panning, which uses sugar and glucose syrup in a rapid process to make irregularly shaped candies with a soft bite. Chocolate can also be used as a coating in panning, as in chocolate-covered raisins.
Simple in principle, the panning process is, in fact, complex. For hard panning, first ingredients for the centers are prepared by shaping and drying with gentle heat in a warm room; nuts also require sealing with gum arabic and flour. These steps are important, as even tiny amounts of moisture or oil can discolor the surface of finished items.
Next, the centers are placed in large pans that are mounted at an angle. These revolve, tumbling the contents, and successive “charges” of syrup of relatively low concentration are added, a process known as “wetting.” Air, supplied to the pans through nozzles, dries each charge in a thin layer before a subsequent one is added. This, too, is important, as inadequately dried sugar gives the finished sweets a grayish cast. Air temperature varies according to the type of center: for instance, cold air is recommended for sugared almonds, warm air (104°F [40°C]) for nonpareils. Other ingredients such as perfume or color can be added to the syrup and dustings of starch help to build up the coats and absorb syrup. This “engrossing” is repeated until the coating achieves the desired thickness. A final panning with beeswax, carnauba, or paraffin wax yields a polished surface. The small silver balls used for cake decoration are made by panning with silver dust or leaf in the final stages of production. See leaf, gold and silver.
Panning is a skilled process in which subtleties of speed and temperature (for both pans and airflow) and concentration of the syrup are crucial. It is also time consuming: engrossing is slow and can be intermittent; soft panned items need periods of drying on trays both during the process and afterward.
Illustrations in early confectionery books show panning done by hand. They imply that confectioners vigorously shook the sweets in shallow, bowl-like balancing pans suspended over burning coals, thereby exaggerating a process that actually requires gentle heat and thorough stirring. Careful attention to syrup concentration produces different surface textures, and drying between coats is essential for good results. The technique of adding subsequent coats explains one of the great mysteries of British childhoods: how the enormous sweets known as gobstoppers can change color as they are sucked.
pans come in a vast assortment of shapes, sizes, and materials. The correct pan is as essential to many cakes as the batter itself. For example, French cake pans have sloping sides that make possible an even coating of melted fondant icing for classic gâteaux. English cake pans with straight sides are deeper than American ones so as to accommodate heavier fruit-laden batters; shallow American pans are designed for stacked layer cakes that are tall with straight sides. Even tart pans are different: a French tart pan is made of metal with a decorative, fluted edge and a removable base for easy unmolding, whereas an American pie plate has sloping sides for ease of serving the pie directly from it. The oval, deep English pie dish is unknown in either country.
Today’s most favored baking pans are made of heavy-gauge aluminum or Pyrex (tempered glass); others are available with a nonstick finish, or are made from cast iron or silicone. Because Pyrex transmits heat very efficiently, glass pans require a cooler oven temperature, so bakers are advised to set their ovens 25°F (–4°C) lower than when using other pans. Cast iron transmits heat inefficiently, so some recipes suggest preheating these pans before filling them with cake batter or dough. Silicone pans are appreciated for their flexibility and nonstick property, which eliminates the need for greasing, a necessary step for most baked goods to ensure their release from the pan. Paper cake pans are also on the market, although they are mainly for professional bakers.
Round pans are suited for baking single- or multilayered cakes, and elongated loaf pans accommodate quick breads. Standard rectangular pans range in size from 5 × 8 inches to 18 × 24 inches and are useful for bar cookies and brownies. See bar cookies and brownies. Muffin and cupcake pans are made of individual cups joined together in a rectangular form. Historically, muffin tins were made from individual cups soldered together into three or four rows. Today, they come in many different patterns, ranging from miniature to large, shallow indentations for baking crusty muffin tops. Some pans have sculpted patterns in the bottom; when inverted for serving, the cakes display a decorative top. See cupcakes and muffins.
Cookie sheets, jellyroll pans, and sheet-cake pans are generally interchangeable. The most important feature is a low lip edge, as a deep pan would present problems in removing drop, rolled, or pressed cookies. See drop cookies; pressed cookies; and rolled cookies. Many bakers favor cookie sheets with only a small, curved lip on one narrow side that enables the baker to pick up the sheet; it is very easy to lift or slide cookies from the three lipless sides. Shallow, 1-inch deep rectangular jellyroll pans are usually 10 × 15 inches. Like cookie sheets, they are frequently lined with parchment paper so that the baked goods will not stick.
This photograph of various pans, plates, sheets, and molds for baking appeared in a 1912 Cornell University Household Economics and Management bulletin on “Choice and Care of Utensils.” cornell university library
Pie pans, also called “tins” or “plates,” are generally made of Pyrex, aluminum, coated steel, or stoneware. Standard pans are 1 ½ inches deep; “deep dish” pans, at 2 to 2 ½ inches in depth, can accommodate more filling. Pie pans are available in sizes ranging from 6 inches to 12 inches in diameter, the most popular being 9 and 10 inch. Some (particularly those made of Pyrex or stoneware) have fluted edges to facilitate making a decorative finish to the crust. See pie. Tiny tartlet molds, including fluted and unfluted barquette tins, are used for miniature confections; various sizes of round, shallow pans, usually with fluted sides, are specifically designed for quiches and tarts.
Round torte or spring-form pans, with removable bottoms, are usually manufactured from sheet aluminum. See torte. This fairly flexible material permits the opening and closing of the pan’s overlapping sides, which are secured by the use of spring clasps. These pans, ranging from 5 to 14 inches in diameter, can be 3 to 7 inches deep for home baking; commercial pans may be deeper still. After the torte is baked and cooled, the sides are released, opened, and removed. Sometimes the torte is easier to slice and serve from the pan bottom itself, particularly when it is large or fragile, but the baked layer may also be removed to a cake plate for slicing and serving.
Special-purpose baking pans include aluminum angel food cake pans and Turks’ head or turban molds with a removable bottom and spiral patterning on the sides; both types have a central tube that allows the heat to penetrate the batter more efficiently and ensure that the cake will cook evenly. Similar pans, without a removable bottom and generally made from cast iron, aluminum, or silicone, are called Bundt pans, after the coffee cake–style Bundt cake that unmolds with a decorative pattern. See angel food cake and gugelhupf.
See also breads, sweet; cake; frisbie pie tins; and layer cake.
Paris, the capital of France, is one of the world’s great gastronomic centers. Its proximity to the famed butter of Normandy and to high-quality French flour gave the city a natural advantage in pastry making that continues to the current day. However, its fame owes at least as much to the systemized culinary techniques that its best practitioners spread internationally.
From Antiquity to Renaissance
Paris’s fertile surroundings allowed for the successful cultivation of many fruits from an early date. The Roman emperor Julian’s fourth-century description of the native Parisii tribe records that they were even growing figs by covering the trees to protect them from the harsh winter. Mesnagier de Paris (ca. 1393) provides advice to a Parisian housewife on how to cultivate violets, mint, raspberries, currants, seedless grapes, cherries, and plums. Pears were so ubiquitous that the French word poire could be used as a synonym for dessert. Apples were nearly as prevalent and remain a staple.
By the Mesnagier’s era, the city had become a thriving international metropolis with a wholesale market to match. Contact with the East during the Crusades brought exotic sugar and spices in increasing quantities. Other products came from regions across the kingdom and beyond.
Having survived Roman occupation, Viking invasions, and years of relative obscurity, Paris had become the capital of West Francia with the accession of Hugh Capet to the throne in 987. But from the twelfth century the city’s expansion accelerated phenomenally. Its population exploded from an estimated 3,000 residents in 1100 to around 200,000 by 1300. A central, wholesale market at Les Halles was established by 1137 and quickly expanded, especially after the construction of permanent buildings in the 1180s. By the Mesnagier’s era, one could buy waffles, sugar in myriad forms, dragées, and other sweets from an impressive list of expert vendors. The core of the city began to take on recognizable form with a highly legislated food market at its physical and metaphorical epicenter.
The almond- and butter-rich gâteau du roi, which is still made throughout northern France for Epiphany, hearkens back to this era. This tradition remains so popular in Paris that many patissiers set up outdoor stands exclusively to sell this cake during the season. See twelfth night cake.
By the sixteenth century the city excelled at elaborate sugar sculptures and pastries for lavish entertainments, such as the multisensory magnificences organized by Catherine de Médici for the Polish ambassadors in 1573. See médici, catherine de and sugar sculpture. These effete celebrations differed little from analogously regal events held elsewhere in Northern Europe. However, they are remarkable because they occurred not quite a year after one of the city’s bloodiest episodes, the crown-endorsed St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which left thousands of Protestants dead. This was but one battle in nine gruesome Wars of Religion that rippled through France from 1562 until 1594. Nevertheless, in the midst of this tumult, the Venetian ambassador to France raved about the astounding array of food products available in Paris and lavished praise on its patissiers and caterers.
Ancien Régime
Paris and its cuisine grew increasingly sophisticated through the seventeenth century. Paradoxically, however, the city did not develop a distinctive gastronomic style until the court definitively left it.
Louis XIV moved the court into full-time residence at Versailles in 1682. Paris then became the center of French counterculture. The city’s first extant café, Le Procope, opened just four years later to serve the newly imported beverage coffee to a clientele featuring freethinkers. The institution of the café has epitomized Paris ever since. See café.
The Procope’s Italian-born founder gained as much renown for his ices as for his coffee. Although glacés had been served privately to elite Parisians a century earlier, they henceforth became a favored treat for public consumption at fashionable venues in the Palais Royal and on the Boulevard des Italiens, such as Tortoni’s.
The first book devoted solely to ices was written and published in Paris by M. Emy in 1768. This volume features ice creams with an egg-custard base, which are not dissimilar to those now produced by Paris’s famed glacier Berthillon (founded 1954). See emy, m. and ice cream.
A craze for thick, slightly bitter hot chocolate, which continues to be popular, matched that for glacés. Both emerged from the application of Enlightenment logic to colonial products. More broadly, they contributed to Paris’s emergence in the eighteenth century as Europe’s preeminent source of luxury goods from fashion to furnishings.
Pastry techniques made the most significant and resonant advances. Parisian manuals such as Augustin Roux’s Dictionnaire domestique portatif (1762–1764) demonstrate that even before Paris spawned the world’s first restaurant, it had developed and refined the pastry techniques that continue to underpin the French tradition.
Many of the most renowned practitioners had foreign origins. Nicolas Stohrer, who in 1730 founded Paris’s oldest extant patisserie, is presumed to be from the area of Wissembourg where he apprenticed. He is credited for bringing the baba to Paris. See stohrer, nicolas. Other new forms of biscuits, macarons, gâteaux, madeleines, and brioches that became similarly associated with the city also originated elsewhere. Paris was the hub where ideas were exchanged even as techniques codified.
Although Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake,” on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, this apocryphal phrase succinctly conveys the fact that while many struggled to afford bread, wealthy Parisians of the ancien régime were spoiled in their choice of fine pastries.
Post-Revolution to Belle Époque
In the post-Revolutionary era, the production and marketing of sweets (as was the case for many luxury trades) carried on strangely unaffected and simultaneously transformed. The newly rich enjoyed spending publicly with “see and be seen” bravura. This resulted in more glamorously appointed patisseries, cafés, and shops as well as inventiveness fueled by the need to captivate a fickle audience. Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1858–1837) documented this phenomenon in the world’s first food journal, which debuted in Paris in 1803.
Marie-Antoine (Antonin) Carême (1784–1833) was that generation’s most celebrated patissier and chef. See carême, marie-antoine. Although he worked privately, he created dazzling, architectonic pièces montées for public balls. More important, he “doubled” (by his own estimation) the range of French pastries and techniques and disseminated them through books that garnered international attention. Although his work incorporated ideas taken from stints in London and Vienna, he extolled his native Paris as the globe’s gastronomic capital.
Carême’s Pâtissier royal parisien appeared the same year as Napoléon Bonaparte’s ultimate defeat. Although French military dominance ended in 1815, Paris’s reputation as preeminent in European gastronomy ascended ever higher. Carême’s protégés Jules Gouffé (1807–1877) and Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) continued this trend into the twentieth century. See escoffier, georges auguste.
The city itself also grew exponentially, doubling its population from 700,000 in 1815 to a whopping 1.7 million in 1861 and an all-time high of 2.9 million on the eve of World War I. New immigrants, such as Viennese-born August Zang, who in Paris in the late 1830s produced the first recognizably flaky croissant, added their traditions to the mix. See croissant. However, regional and national differences got smoothed into a system no less regimented than the military.
These developments continued largely unchecked until World War I, with the exception of the infamous Siege of Paris of 1870 and the ensuing chaos of the Paris Commune. Nevertheless, Ladurée bears witness to the rapidity with which many businesses oddly thrived upon these traumatic events. A fire during the 1871 Commune burned down the original bakery of 1862. This allowed for the construction of a luxurious tearoom designed to appeal to women, whose purchasing power had already been realized by newfangled department stores such as Le Bon Marché (founded in 1852).
As steamboats, railways, and eventually automobiles brought increasing numbers of visitors to the City of Lights, its spectacle crescendoed to a feverish pitch. Glittering events and personalities often received a commemorative dessert. Many remain classics today. Escoffier invented the Poire Belle Hélène in 1864 for Offenbach’s operetta La belle Hélène; and even the Paris-Brest bicycle race that started in 1910 received its own pastry in the shape of a wheel.
World War I to the Present
World War I took an especially hard toll on Paris, which was closer to the battle lines than any other major city. Sugar and coal were the first goods to be rationed; fancy pastries were entirely banned. As a supply hub, the city became adept at prefabricating food in large quantities. Prospere Montagné (1865–1945) learned to organize approximately 16,000 bread rations per sitting that could be reheated on the battlefield. His techniques soon found their way into civilian production after the war, alongside a vogue for American jazz, cocktails, and refrigerators.
Nevertheless, a conservative backlash fought to preserve traditional craftsmanship from architecture to gastronomy. Created under this impulse in 1929, the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (best workers of France, known as MOFs), which includes categories for chocolatiers and patissiers, guard classical techniques through rigorous and extensive training.
When Paris capitulated to the Nazis in June 1940, huge swaths of the population simply fled. The city was already in rough shape economically. Yet, in spite of rationing, pastries and other luxury goods remained available to collaborators as well as to black-market purchasers.
However, German occupation cost Paris its hitherto unassailable self-assurance, which negatively affected its food. By the 1970s American-style supermarkets sold packaged sweets and rubbery croissants throughout the city, and even many specialty patissiers increasingly cut corners.
At the top of the market, Paris gradually reestablished itself as a world-class capital for luxury goods, including sweets. Parisian chocolate, exemplified by the masterful sculptures of Patrick Roger, is as stunning as it is intense. Parisian sophisticates ignited the recent worldwide craze for macarons as devotees of rivals Ladurée and Pierre Hermé sparked heated debates on the subject. See hermé, pierre. Competitions to determine the capital’s best examples of classics such as croissants, éclairs, and the Paris-Brest have recently mushroomed. Raised public awareness has been met with a proliferation of high-end patisseries. That the world’s first dessert-only restaurant, Dessance (serving three-course meals of sweets), opened in Paris in early 2014 bears witness to the city’s ongoing ability to innovate even as it upholds classical standards.
See also baba au rhum; france; macarons; madeleine; pastry, choux; and pastry, puff.
Passover, the eight-day festival of freedom celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, is probably the foremost Jewish holiday today. It is also one of the world’s oldest continually observed festivals. No products made from regular flour and no leavened food (more precisely, no fermented foods) can be eaten at Passover. This practice is based on a passage from Exodus 12:15, “For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel.” Pesach in Hebrew means “passing by” or “passing over”; the holiday was called Passover because God passed over the Jewish houses while slaying the firstborn of Egypt. During most Jewish ceremonial meals throughout the year, two loaves of the sweet, enriched bread known as challah are served, but on Passover three matzahs are placed on the table instead. Matzah, the unleavened and quickly baked bread prepared for Passover, reminds contemporary celebrants that the Jews fleeing Egypt had no time to leaven their bread or to bake it properly.
Today, the eight-day festival maintains its family character, beginning with the traditional Seder meal at home. The central object of every table is the Seder plate arranged with symbolic foods, including haroset, a sweet fruit and nut blend symbolizing the mortar that Jews used to build the ancient Egyptian pyramids or buildings (it is not clear that it was the pyramids). While the Ashkenazic mixture typically contains apples and walnuts, the Middle Eastern and Sephardic versions often include dates, but other ingredients vary according to the country and sometimes even the city of origin. Besides these symbolic foods, Passover recipes themselves have evolved over the years, reflecting the foods of the countries to which Jews immigrated. To compensate for the absence of flour demanded by the biblical rule, Jews throughout the world have created all kinds of baked goods, such as soaked matzah and, later, matzah cake meal made from carefully watched flour, meaning that it has not touched any other flour or been near anything fermented during the year, ensuring that it is acceptable for Passover.
Some Passover favorites include flourless tortes using egg whites beaten until stiff, ground nuts, sugar, and egg yolks; sponge cakes containing matzah meal or potato flour; macaroons made from almonds or coconuts; Schaumtorte, a large meringue filled with strawberries; and chremslach or krimsel, fritters made from dried fruit, nuts, and spices, and sometimes stuffed with apples or jam. Beet or carrot eingemachts (preserves) were traditionally popular in Lithuania and Russia. Jews from Morocco make preserved fruits to eat as a sweet at Passover, such as candied eggplant and candied oranges. Jews from Salonika ate candied almonds. In the United States today, Americans enjoy fruit-flavored jelly slices or jelly rings coated with chocolate. Increasingly popular desserts are made from matzah coated with chocolate or a toffee-like, buttery, crunchy topping. And in Israeli homes, one can find every imaginable Passover sweet known to mankind.
See also judaism.
pastel de nata (pl. pasteís de nata), perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Portuguese sweets, is an egg custard tart. The pastel de nata can be found in every pastry shop in continental Portugal as well as on Madeira and the Azores Islands, where the tarts are commonly referred to as queijadas de nata.
The pastel de nata originated sometime prior to the seventeenth century in the Santa Maria de Belém quarter of Lisbon. Pastry production provided religious orders with supplemental income, and the monks of the Monastery of the Hieronymites first created these tarts to help offset monastery expenses. The tarts were made from yolks left over from eggs whose whites were used to starch clothing and purify wines. See egg yolk sweets. Following the Liberal Revolution of 1820, Portuguese religious orders were closed; as a means of survival, the Hieronymite monks contracted with a nearby bakery to produce and sell their tarts. These particular pastries became known as Pasteís de Belém, and the monks’ original recipe was patented and registered. These tarts continue to be made and sold at the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, Lda., their recipe still a closely guarded secret.
Though regional variations exist, the pastel de nata is commonly made of puff pastry, egg yolks, sugar, and flour. See pastry, puff. Some recipes also call for lemon peel, cream, vanilla, and milk. Whatever the combination of ingredients, a pastel de nata hot from the oven—often sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar—is a divine tribute to Hieronymite ingenuity.
See also portugal.
pastila is an ethereal fruit confection that is one of Russia’s oldest sweets, likely dating back to the fourteenth century. It originated as a way to preserve the apple harvest by cooking tart, pectin-rich apples until soft, then sieving them into a purée dried slowly in the oven. (The name derives from the Latin pastillus, meaning a “small loaf.”) Two Russian towns lay claim to pastila: Kolomna, near Moscow, where the confection was probably first produced, and Belyov, near Tula, where the recipe was perfected. The secret to excellent pastila is the addition of air through copious beating and through egg whites, which turn the dense apple paste into a light, airy mass. After whipping the apple purée until light, egg whites beaten stiff with a little sugar are folded in (the original sweetener was honey). This mixture is spread in a thin layer on a baking sheet to dry for several hours at low heat in the oven. The Belyov version calls for reserving a little of the beaten apple mixture to spread between layers of the baked pastila. The stacked confection is then returned to the oven to dry a little more, resulting in a surprisingly moist confection that is sweet yet tart, less gelatinous than marshmallow, and softer than meringue. Although apples are traditional, pastila can also be made from berries and even hops, a version touted in the nineteenth century as a hangover cure.
During the Soviet era, the art of making pastila was largely lost, but now it is experiencing a revival. A museum devoted to pastila opened in Kolomna in 2009, and in Belyov a campaign is under way to restore the gravesite of Amvrosy Prokhorov, the nineteenth-century merchant whose layered pastila gained renown throughout Russia and Europe.
See also Russia and guriev kasha.
pastillage is a malleable sweet dough made of powdered sugar, water, binding agents such as gum tragacanth or gelatin, and acid (vinegar or cream of tartar) that is used in making edible decorations.
In recipes and illustrations dating back to the seventeenth century, pastillage is presented as part of the confectioner’s arsenal to impress the British and French nobility. Only the very rich could afford the expense of processed and pulverized white sugar and the artisanal expertise of dedicated pastry chefs.
The dough can be tinted with food colors, but historically it has remained a pristine white. After kneading, the dough is rolled thin and cut into shapes with a sharp knife following a paper template or with cutters. It can also be pressed into cavity molds and released. The pieces are laid flat to dry, or draped along curved objects until they hold their shape. The dough starts to crust immediately and fully hardens within 24 hours. Once dry, any rough edges are often sanded, and separate pieces are attached to one another using royal icing or sugar cooked to 320°F (160°C). See icing and stages of sugar syrup. In contemporary show work, an airbrush is often used to lend color and texture to the completed piece. The final results are sturdy and can be used as candy dishes, ornamental supports in wedding cakes, and architectural structures. See wedding cake. Today, pastillage is mostly used in competition work as a pièce montée for buffets.
Pastillage is not delicate enough for forming realistic sugar flowers or sculpted figurines, which are typically made of derivatives called sugar paste (in the United Kingdom and South America) or gum paste (in the United States). Nor is it used for icing cakes, for which a more emollient version exists by the names of sugar paste (United Kingdom, South Africa, and Australia) or rolled fondant (United States). See fondant.
See also cake decorating; carême, marie-antoine; competitions; and tragacanth.
pastry, choux, or cream puff pastry, when baked or fried yields a crisp exterior surrounding a characteristic hollow center, ready to be filled. Made from a paste of butter, water (or milk), flour, and eggs, this workhorse in both the savory and sweet sides of the kitchen relies for its leavening on eggs and the steam created by the water in the dough. Notable for being twice cooked, once on the stovetop and then baked or fried, versions of this dough have been around at least since Roman times. Choux pastry was widely used in the Renaissance; Bartolomeo Scappi includes a recipe for it in his 1570 Opera, using the dough to make fritters. See fritters. In pre-Revolutionary France this pastry dough was known as pâte royale; Republican France renamed it pâte à choux, since it was mainly used to make “petits choux” or cream puffs, which were seen to resemble choux (cabbages).
Whatever it is called, this dough is versatile. On the savory side, it is mixed with cheese to make gougère and with mashed potatoes to make pommes dauphines, which are fried. The dough is also widely used to create sweet fritters, whether Spanish churros or buñuelos de viento, Neapolitan zeppole di San Giuseppe, French croustillons (also known as pets de nonne), or America’s “French” crullers. See fried dough. In the French pastry repertoire, baked versions of the dough result in cream puffs, éclairs, miniature swan-shaped pastries, Gâteau St. Honoré, and Paris-Brest, among other configurations. For these particular sweets, the dough is variously shaped, baked, and finally filled.
pastry, puff, is a dough made by layering a flour–water paste with butter, resulting in very thin layers that “puff” up when baked into delicate layers or leaves; both the French pâte feuilletée and Italian pasta sfogliata derive from the word “leaf.” Bakers have figured out two ways to do this. In a technique documented in medieval Arab sources, dough smeared with liquid fat is shaped into a cylinder and then rolled thin. This technique was certainly used in medieval and early modern Spain and is still used to make Neapolitan sfogliatelle. The origin of the French technique, in which the flour–water paste is repeatedly folded around solid butter, rolled out, and refolded, is much more controversial. According to one story, a French pastry cook’s apprentice named Claudius Gele invented puff pastry in 1645, inspired by the diet of flour, butter, and water that his sick father was ordered to follow. An even more improbable tale ascribes that same discovery to the baroque French painter Claude Lorrain. Whether this technique was invented independently in France or developed out of the Arabic approach is difficult to verify. There is mention of a gâteau feuillé as early as 1311, although what this pastry actually was is pure conjecture.
Whatever its origins, the idea of layering or laminating fat, most commonly butter, into a dough of flour and water certainly gained favor in Europe, from Spain to France to Italy and beyond, and has become a staple of the pastry kitchen throughout the region. Puff pastry is considered the consummate example of the pastry maker’s art, requiring precision, patience, and time. See laminated doughs.
Ever since La Varenne’s Pastissier françois (1653) included the first printed recipe for pâte feuilletée, the basic method for making the dough has remained largely the same. In general, the weight of flour and fat is equal. The flour is mixed with water and often a small amount of fat into a smooth, elastic dough called the détrempe (from the French word tremper, meaning “to dip or soak,” alluding to the process of using one’s fingers or hand to combine the dough and water). This dough is set aside to rest under refrigeration so that it will be easy to roll during its multiple layering, known as the lamination process. Then the laminating fat is worked until it is malleable but not greasy and shaped into a thin sheet, sized to fit within the détrempe when it is rolled out.
Risolles aux poires—pear jam enclosed in light envelopes of puff pastry—are a specialty of France’s Savoie and Haute-Savoie regions. photograph by marc le prince
The process of rolling out the dough to enclose the butter, known as beurrage, may be done in one of four ways. In the first method, the dough is rolled into a symmetrical four-petaled clover shape with the center left a bit thicker than the four “petals.” The butter is then placed into the center of this “flower” and the petals are folded over the center to enclose it. The second method involves rolling the détrempe into a rectangle three times as long as it is wide. The dough is visually divided into thirds, with the butter placed on the middle third. The unbuttered dough to the left and right of the buttered third is then folded over the butter to enclose it. In the third method, the dough is rolled out to a rectangle, and one half of it is covered with the butter layer. The unbuttered half is then folded over the buttered half, and the seams are sealed. The final method, called pâte feuilletée renversée (or inversée; reverse or inverse puff pastry), is the opposite of the three previous methods. It calls for placing the butter packet on the outside of the dough to enclose it.
No matter which method is used, the dough is then rolled out with long strokes, using even pressure to ensure that the butter and dough are flattened to equal thicknesses. This rolling and folding process is known in French as the tourage. The resulting rectangle is then folded in one of two ways. A simple fold has three dough layers enclosing two layers of butter; the process of rolling and folding is repeated a total of six times. The four-layered book fold also encloses two layers of butter, but the rolling and folding are repeated only four times. In both cases, the dough is chilled well between each “turn” to allow the butter to solidify and the gluten in the dough to relax.
“Rough” or “quick” puff paste, arguably a variant of flaky pie pastry, involves a simpler process in which butter, cold but still malleable, is cut into large pieces and mixed directly with the flour, ice water, and a bit of salt. The resulting dough is then patted into a rectangle on a floured surface with firm, steady strokes of the rolling pin before being rolled out, folded, and chilled. This process is repeated three times, with the dough refrigerated after each rolling. The finished dough yields less distinct individuation of layers and only a moderate amount of inflation during baking.
Puff pastry has many uses, both savory and sweet. It can be rolled around a filling, as in Beef Wellington or salmon coulibiac, or form the base for numerous tarts and tartlets. Perhaps the best-known use of puff pastry is in the classic mille-feuille (thousand-layered pastry) or Napoleon, for which the dough is rolled into rectangles and, after baking, cut and layered with pastry cream; the top layer is traditionally coated with fondant. See fondant. The pastry shell known as vol-au-vent, containing savory and often creamy fillings, is another common use for the dough. Puff pastry also forms the basis for smaller pastries such as chaussons (turnovers usually filled with cooked fruit), sacristains (rectangular strips of dough encrusted with sugar and almonds), allumettes (“matchsticks”—thin strips of dough often coated with fondant), and palmiers (palm-leaf shaped cookies, sugar-coated and caramelized).
When properly made, puff pastry is light and airy, boasting impossibly thin, fragile, melt-in-the mouth layers, a miracle of pastry engineering based on a mere handful of ingredients.
See also france; pastry, choux; and pie dough.
A pastry chef is the person responsible for designing the dessert menu in a restaurant, hotel, or pastry shop. The pastry chef typically works in consultation with the chef in charge of the savory side of the kitchen to ensure harmony in the meal from start to finish. Depending on the size of the establishment, pastry chefs might work on their own or with a team, which can vary in size from one other person to dozens of employees in a hotel. When a restaurant cannot afford to employ a full-time pastry chef, one might be asked to consult and create a dessert menu that a more junior cook will execute, or the chef-owner might take on that responsibility. Because not all customers order desserts, whether for dietary or financial reasons, the pastry kitchen is often an area of the restaurant where budgets are trimmed.
In this engraving from around 1690, called “Costume for a Pastry Cook,” a pastry chef is fantastically outfitted in the tools and creations of his trade. It was published by Gerard Valck, a Dutchman better known for his cartographic publications. private collection / the stapleton collection / bridgeman images
Many restaurants, including high-volume operations, do not employ pastry chefs but instead rely on manufactured desserts. Some of these might be custom-made for a specific restaurant, or the establishment can choose from a large selection of standard offerings. Some independent restaurants have neither the need nor the budget for a pastry chef; these also tend to rely on consulting pastry chefs, who create a dessert menu that can be executed by an existing employee. The consultants might come in several times a year to give the menu seasonal tweaks or make other adjustments. Fine-dining restaurants, especially those with a prix fixe tasting menu that includes desserts, are more likely to have a named pastry chef whose reputation serves to attract diners.
Restaurant pastry chefs rarely create large-scale desserts, other than the occasional wedding or birthday cake and, depending on trends, full pies or cakes from which slices are served to diners. They focus instead on plated desserts, which are created and served in individual portions. See plated desserts. These desserts typically comprise multiple components, such as a cake, tart, or similar item with a smooth filling or topping like custard or pastry cream; an ice cream, sorbet, or other frozen or iced element; and a textural component like meringue, caramel shards, or crumbly freeze-dried fruit bits. In hotels, pastry chefs can handle large banquets, parties, and conferences and thus often create showpieces for display, along with a large variety of desserts that can be kept at room temperature on a buffet table for a couple of hours and serve hundreds of people, something that is harder to achieve with frozen or plated desserts. Verrines—layered desserts served in glasses or cups—are popular in high-production settings. See verrine.
Pastry chefs in pastry shops handle a different type of high-output production, focusing often on items such as macarons, éclairs, and other individually sized pastries, along with cakes and tarts one might purchase for a dinner party, and viennoiseries such as kouign-amann and croissants. In order to stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace, many pastry chefs develop specialties that can attract media and consumer attention.
The first celebrity pastry chef is also one of the most celebrated figures of modern cookery. Marie-Antoine Carême was born in Paris in 1783 and died in 1833 after authoring such books as Le Pâtissier royal parisien, Le Pâtissier pittoresque, and L’art de la cuisine française au 19-ème siècle. See carême, marie-antoine. Sculptural showpieces, a Carême trademark, are still a skill pastry chefs must master in competitions (even if restaurant pastry chefs, other than those in hotels, rarely find time to compete). See competitions and sugar sculpture. Today, some modernist pastry techniques have evolved from classic French ones. In particular, Albert Adrià of elBulli in Spain developed a large range of new practices, such as making spherified purées and edible landscapes. Other technologies, including the use of liquid nitrogen, have allowed for ice cream made à la minute or containing more alcohol than is possible with a normal freezer. See sugar in experimental cuisine. Pastry chefs have taken more liberties with their menus to reflect seasonality and their own flavor preferences, resulting in a greater diversity of desserts. However, despite these innovations, typical French techniques and dessert components, from doughs to pastry creams to cakes, remain the foundation of dessert menus and training curricula around the world.
Because pastry chefs often toil in a windowless basement, particularly in large cities, once they reach a certain level of fame working for someone else, their careers generally become less linear than those of savory chefs. For a time some opened dessert-centric restaurants, but that trend seems to have peaked in the mid-2000s. Pastry chefs who can capitalize on visibility from their work in high-profile restaurants can move into product development, consulting, or the creation of more traditional pastry or ice cream shops. They can also often parlay their fame into cookbook contracts and television appearances.
As pastry chefs have gained more attention from media and consumers throughout the United States, they have been asking for more official recognition in the form of awards, like those bestowed by the James Beard Foundation or Food & Wine magazine. As of 2014, however, the James Beard Foundation still only granted one award in this area, for best pastry chef in the country.
See also croissant; dessert; desserts, chilled; desserts, frozen; ice cream makers; macarons; and pastry, puff.
pastry schools in the United States assumed their current form during the second half of the twentieth century as the result of a unique confluence of governmental and cultural factors. Today, bakers and pastry chefs commonly learn their craft through on-the-job training, apprenticeships, and culinary schools. Although certificates and degrees are not required to work in the industry, a formal culinary education has become the preferred method for jump-starting or advancing a culinary career.
Early cooking schools catered primarily to upper-class women who studied for social and domestic prowess, as opposed to job preparation. In England, Edward Kidder operated one of the first cooking schools to include mostly baked goods during the early to mid-1700s. By the late 1700s, Elizabeth Goodfellow in Philadelphia had established a similar program in her city bakeshop for well-heeled ladies. Eliza Leslie, the heralded author of books on cookery and etiquette in the 1800s, was one of Goodfellow’s more accomplished pupils. In the larger American port cities, cooking schools were not uncommon by the nineteenth century. Already in the mid-1800s, French chef Pierre Blot had established the New York Cooking Academy, which offered separate classes for upper-class women, domestic servants, and professional cooks. In London in the late 1800s, Agnes Marshall, the acclaimed nineteenth-century English ice cream maker and culinary writer, frequently lectured on cookery and frozen desserts. See marshall, agnes bertha.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had established land-grant colleges that provided an educational outlet for women in the form of home economics. While men learned agricultural and mechanical skills at these colleges, many women chose domestic science as a route for professional and educational fulfillment. The Boston Cooking School (of Fannie Farmer fame), New York Cooking School, and Philadelphia Cooking School continued the popularity of home economics and afforded women a new avenue for success in a growing profession. See farmer, fannie.
Baking and pastry instruction in an academic setting for career preparation is a modern phenomenon. Luxury hotels had already developed training centers for their staff, including cooks and bakers, in the early twentieth century. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 provided U.S. federal funds for vocational training, and by 1927 the Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles offered what is considered the first professional culinary training program, derived from its home economics program. In Chicago, the School for Professional Cookery (Washburne School), another early culinary program, began in 1938. Before World War II, only eight American culinary vocational programs existed. After the war, the newly passed GI Bill included provisions for assisting veterans with tuition costs, thereby adding additional federal funding to higher education. In 1947 the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) opened the first culinary program in a higher education setting. It was customary for these early cooking programs to include the basics of baking and pastry as a component of the culinary curriculum. The CIA was among the first colleges to pioneer standalone 15- and 30-week baking programs in the early 1970s.
In Europe, bakers traditionally comprised a separate guild from pastry makers. See guilds. Cooks belonged to another occupation entirely. In American higher education, baking and pastry arts merged into a single academic field as cooking schools proliferated and specialized in the 1980s and 1990s. The first certificate and degree programs in baking and pastry were offered by the CIA in the late 1980s, soon followed by Johnson & Wales University, California Culinary Academy, and the French Pastry School in Chicago (Washburne). The venerable Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, in operation since 1895, eventually added a separate bakery (boulangerie) diploma in 1998.
In 1976 the American Culinary Federation (ACF) established a formal culinary apprenticeship program, followed four years later by a baking and pastry apprenticeship. The status of chefs skyrocketed during this time, in no small part thanks to cooking shows and channels like the Food Network. Culinary and baking and pastry programs became firmly entrenched in the higher education landscape as hundreds of public and private programs began appearing in the 1980s. In 1986 the ACF established the Educational Foundation Accrediting Commission (ACFEFAC) to programmatically accredit culinary schools based on industry standards. By 1989 the ACFEFAC added separate standards to evaluate baking and pastry programs. Finally, in 1990, the U.S. Department of Education designated culinary and baking and pastry programs with their own Classification of Instructional Programs codes, used to track and report fields of study within the U.S. higher education system.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, by the early twenty-first century, there were more than 400 higher education culinary programs in the United States, down from a high of 700 a decade earlier. Only 189 colleges and institutes, however, offer a baking and pastry certificate or degree, and the ACFEFAC accredits 80 of those programs. There are, of course, innumerable specialized professional development courses for bakers, pastry cooks, and chefs, as well as similar offerings for the hobbyist. Common courses include artisan breads, European pastries, chocolate work, confections, showpieces, wedding cakes, sugar artistry, and plated desserts. The baking and cupcake craze, bolstered by popular culture and reality TV competitions, has only increased esteem for the baking and pastry arts.
See also pastry chef.
pastry tools, the varied implements from spoons to ovens used in making sweets, have remained essentially the same through the years. But in many cases, technology has improved their precision. Today’s well-calibrated ovens are a vast improvement over wood-fired ones that required a cook to be a keen judge of heat since they lacked any temperature control. In the past, cooks might put a piece of paper in the oven and judge the temperature by the time it took for the paper to turn brown. They timed baked goods by saying a prayer or a series of prayers. They would, no doubt, be impressed by the accuracy of today’s tools and their nearly infinite variety.
Today, thermometers are accurate, reliable, and highly specialized. Oven thermometers include the cable thermometer, which can be read without opening the oven door. Point-and-shoot infrared thermometers capture the invisible infrared energy naturally emitted from all objects. When aimed and activated, the thermometer instantly scans the surface temperature of an object from up to 2 feet away. This tool is useful for taking oven temperature as well as the temperature of different areas in the refrigerator or room. Instant-read thermometers are invaluable for determining temperatures of sugar syrups and baked goods. See stages of sugar syrup. They are so universal that chef’s jackets are usually designed with a pocket on the sleeve to hold one. Many pastry chefs still rely on their noses and sense of timing to judge when items are done; however, electronic timers are helpful when many things are baking at the same time.
Although spoons are one of the most basic baking tools, the symbol that best represents the pastry chef is the whisk. See whisks and beaters. Once made from a handful of twigs, wire whisks now come in an assortment of shapes and sizes and are useful for both stirring and beating mixtures. An enormous balloon whisk, 14 ½ inches in circumference, is more effective than a spatula for folding one mixture into another. Some pastry chefs make their own whisks for spun sugar by cutting the loops of a whisk to form a metal whisk “broom.”
Mechanical stand mixers are used for heavy-duty mixing in both commercial and home kitchens. Attachments include flat-paddle beaters for general mixing and whisk beaters that whip as much air as possible into a mixture. The latter are perfect for beating egg whites or batter for sponge-type cakes. Many cooks rely on hand-held electric mixers for small tasks.
Once found only in professional kitchens, food processors are now common in home kitchens. They are indispensable for grinding nuts and chocolate, grinding sugar to a superfine consistency, making pie crust, and puréeing fruit. Blenders, too, have traveled from the professional to the home baker. The hand-held immersion blender is an excellent tool for smoothly emulsifying ganache, cream sauces, and quantities too small for a stand mixer.
Scales are essential in a baker’s kitchen. Most bakers prefer the metric system, which makes it easier to scale recipes or formulae up or down.
Most new inventions build on already existing products. The microwave oven, invented in 1947, is a significant exception. It is unequaled for concentrating liquids without introducing caramelization and provides the fastest method for melting chocolate. See caramels.
Basics
An assortment of mixing bowls is essential for any baker. They may be made of stainless steel, earthenware, glass, or even bamboo. Glass bowls are microwavable, nonreactive, and do not retain odors. Double boilers, also known as bain-maries, may be a specialized set of two pans with the smaller one fitting over the larger, or simply a bowl set over a saucepan. They are valued for even and gentle heating in making sauces and curds and for melting chocolate.
Baking pans include round, square, rectangular, spring-form, tube, loaf, sheet, and muffin pans made from a variety of materials. Rimless baking sheets or the backs of sheet pans are used for baking cookies. Pie pans, tart pans with removable bottoms, round pizza pans, flan rings, and sheet pans are all among the baker’s supplies. Heavy-gauge aluminum pans with a dull finish are ideal. Dark or glass pans require baking at 25°F (−6°C) lower than the suggested temperature. Silicone is a poor conductor of heat and is therefore most effective for small pans used for cupcakes or financiers. See cupcakes and small cakes. Silicone has excellent release if cooled completely before unmolding.
This plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, illustrates the article “Pâtissier.” Pastry tools are grouped into sections: tin molds, almond paste or biscuit cakes in the shape of figures and animals, tart dishes, a mold and a cake in the form of a Turk’s cap, waffle irons, a heart-shaped tin dough-cutter, and utensils for the oven. getty research library
Cookie bakers have a nearly infinite variety of plain and fancy cookie cutters to choose from. They also use ice cream scoops of varying sizes to dispense portion-controlled cookie dough. See cookie cutters; cookie molds and stamps; and molds, jelly and ice cream.
Spatulas are another basic tool available in various materials and sizes. Silicone spatulas are resistant to high heat, which makes them invaluable for stirring sugar syrups, caramel, curds, and cream sauces. Their flexibility also makes them effective mixing-bowl scrapers.
A small metal spatula, straight or offset, with a narrow 4-inch blade, is one of the most often used implements in a pastry kitchen. It is perfect for leveling measuring spoons, dislodging crust from the sides of pans, frosting the sides of cakes, and making swirls in frosting. A long, narrow metal spatula is used for smoothing the tops of cakes or dislodging the bottom of a tart. A broad, inflexible grill spatula or pancake turner is convenient for lifting frosted cake layers and tarts.
Every baker has at least one rolling pin. The two most commonly used types are 20-inch-long solid silicone or wooden pins and small rolling pins, which are very useful for smaller pieces of fondant and tartlet dough. See fondant. When rubbed with flour, a knitted cotton rolling-pin sleeve works wonderfully to prevent sticking. (Pastry chefs use rolls of knitted cotton sleeving, available at surgical supply stores, which can be cut to exact size.)
Stainless-steel fine-mesh strainers, or sieves, are valuable for a wide range of activities from sifting flour to straining berries for purées, preserves, lemon curd, and cream sauces. The chinois is a conical sieve that is used with a pestle to help push the contents through the mesh.
Bench scrapers are the pastry chef’s third hand. Metal bench scrapers are excellent for cleaning counters without scratching them. They are effective for gathering up dough, keeping the edges of dough even, and cutting dough. Because they are flexible, plastic bench scrapers are ideal for scraping a bowl or scooping up fillings. Wire racks are a necessity for cooling baked goods.
Specialized Equipment
Today’s bakers, both amateur and professional, can choose from a vast array of utensils. Disposable pastry bags and plastic squeeze bottles are used for piping and decorating cakes and cookies, and for piping caramel, chocolate glaze, and purées when plating desserts. An advantage of the plastic squeeze bottle is that the contents can be kept warm by placing the bottle in a hot-water bath.
Reusable liners are useful because absolutely nothing sticks to them, making them ideal for caramel, meringues, and ladyfingers. See caramels and meringue. Sometimes called super-parchment or reusable parchment, they also make cleanup easy. Food service-quality Silpat, a combination of silicone and fiberglass, is not quite as nonstick as Teflon-type liners. However, it is more durable and is safe for temperatures up to 480°F (250°C), whereas the Teflon-type liner is rated as safe only up to 425°F (220°C). Parchment is ideal for lining the bottoms of cake pans. It enables the cake to release perfectly when unmolding and, if left uncoated, helps to remove the bottom crust easily for sponge cakes that will be brushed with syrup.
The Microplane grater is the most effective tool to remove the maximum amount of citrus zest quickly and easily without the bitter pith. Old-fashioned cone-shaped ridged reamers, often made of wood, efficiently extract juice from citrus fruit. Silicone brushes are best for brushing syrup onto cakes and glazes onto pastry. They are easier to clean than other brushes and are practically indestructible.
Propane torches do more than brown the top of crème brûlée. They are also used to heat the sides of a stand-mixer bowl, to warm the sides of cake pans and flan rings for perfect unmolding, and to caramelize meringue or powdered sugar on top of pies and tarts.
Baking professional-looking cakes is easier with such helpers as cake strips. Ideally made from silicone, they wrap around pans to promote evenly baked layer cakes. For large cake pans, strips can be made from aluminum foil folded around wet paper toweling.
Long-bladed serrated knives work best to cut layer cakes in half horizontally, a process called torting. See torte. A sturdy, heavyweight turntable is needed when frosting and decorating large tiered cakes.
Cake decorating tips and tubes help cooks make fanciful decorations on cakes. Larger tubes, referred to as pastry tubes, are used to pipe festoons of whipped cream, pastry cream, meringue, and batters such as ladyfingers and cream puffs. Cardboard rounds are invaluable for supporting cake layers. Slim gold or silver foil cake rounds, rather than corrugated rounds, are preferred, as they require less decorative piping to hide the sides.
Other helpful baking aids include silicone mats that help keep dough from sticking; large, soft silk brushes for whisking excess flour from dough without marring it; and wheels used to cut pastry and pizza.
Flour dredgers are canisters with small holes in the top. They are used to sprinkle the counter and pastry dough evenly with flour, though many pastry chefs use their hands. Hands, after all, have always been an essential baker’s tool.
pavlova, a large meringue cake smothered with thick whipped cream and decorated with fresh fruits such as strawberries, kiwi, or passion fruit, exemplifies the practice of naming fashionable foods after celebrities. Meringue cakes were already circulating in North America (e.g., Foam Torte and Kiss Cake) and were known in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand when the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova first toured Australia and New Zealand in 1926. Press reports emphasized the lightness of her dancing and the beauty of her costumes, and three food items reflecting these qualities were named “pavlova.” First was a multicolored, layered jelly (appearing in the Davis Gelatine Company’s recipe book in Australia in 1926 and in New Zealand in 1927). Next came small, crisp, coffee- and walnut-flavored meringues, devised by Rose Rutherford in Dunedin, New Zealand, around 1928. The third appeared in 1929, when “Festival,” a contributor to a New Zealand rural magazine, named her meringue cake recipe Pavlova Cake. The ballerina’s popularity helped cement the new name, and by 1935 several different pavlova recipes were known. No single foundation recipe existed from which all later versions derived. A similar process of renaming existing recipes occurred in Australia, though possibly later, since no printed recipe for pavlova has been found there that predates 1937.
By the 1950s both Australians and New Zealanders considered the pavlova their own. In 1973 a Perth chef, Bert Sachse, claimed that he had invented the recipe in 1935. Similar stories of origin were recorded from Sydney and Wellington, but none can be substantiated. Such claims led to the so-called pavlova wars, a rivalry underpinned by the creationist belief that recipes are invented. On the contrary, detailed chronological examination of recipes for meringue cakes and pavlovas demonstrates an evolutionary process.
Pavlovas were at first baked in two layers, later as single cakes; thickness, rather than the addition of cornstarch, predisposed them to soft centers. As with other forms of meringue, beaten egg whites and sugar are the foundation, with vinegar (or another acid) used to stabilize the foam. Cornstarch, vanilla, boiling water, and baking powder are optional extras. Although ingredients have shown only minor variations since the 1930s, mixing methods have changed significantly. Electric mixers allowed all-in-one mixing, reducing the level of skill needed. Cooks developed recipes for pavlovas to be cooked in electric frying pans and in microwave ovens. An uncooked variant was developed in New Zealand, and a rolled pavlova emerged in Australia.
From the 1950s, as afternoon teas declined, the pavlova was transformed into a special occasion dessert, invariably with the essential cream and fruit embellishment. Now internationally known, the pavlova has spread throughout the world, along with the debate over its origins.
See also meringue.
payasam is a sweet dish prepared from rice, pulses, semolina, or other starchy ingredients simmered in milk to produce puddings of varying thicknesses. It is an integral part of South Indian meals, especially feasts to mark auspicious occasions. Payasam is also used as an offering in temples and Hindu rituals, as well as being integral to traditional thali meals in restaurants that specialize in South Indian vegetarian meals.
In Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, this dish is called payasam; in Karnataka, payesa; payesh in Bengal; sangom kher in Manipur; and kheer or firni in North India. Each version of the dish uses a local variety of rice or some other regional grain. In Manipur, sangom kher is cooked with purple or black rice. In Bengal, payesh is prepared from a variety of short-grain rice called atap chal (sundried rice). Classic versions of payasam are prepared from rice bran (aval) or dehydrated rice granules (ada). In addition, payasam is made from semiya (vermicelli), sago (semolina), and pulses, particularly moong lentils (cheru payar). Kooto payasam from mixed lentils and nei payasam from broken wheat are also common.
This age-old dish has been a subject of experimentation in recent times, with cooks adding fruits such as jackfruit, mango, and pineapple and vegetables like beets, carrots, red pumpkin, and bottle gourd to give the pudding a new twist. A report in the Hindu (6 August 2012) noted that Kerala Tourism’s annual payasam festival to mark the harvest festival of Onam in Thiruvananthapuram in 2012 included both old and new payasam recipes. These recent innovations may be nothing new, however; evidence of vegetable- and fruit-based payesh recipes dates back to at least 1900. Bipradas Mukhopadhyay lists recipes of payesh prepared from potato, bottle gourd, raw mango, orange, seeds of jackfruit, sweet potato, and other foodstuffs in his book on desserts Mistanna Pak (1906).
In the southern state of Kerala, payasam is usually served at the end of a sadya, an elaborate vegetarian meal served on special occasions. It is also offered in temples across South India. At the Sabarimala Ayyappa Temple, aravana payasam, prepared from jaggery, ghee, and a special variety of rice called unakkalari (red-colored raw rice), is so popular that Ayyappa devotees can order the prasadam online through the courier company DTDC. Payasam and its counterparts payesh and kheer are also prepared at home for special occasions. One pan-Indian practice is a bowl of payasam/payesh/kheer cooked to celebrate a birthday or any good news. In Bengal, payesh is the first morsel of solid food given to a child during annaprasan, the rice-feeding ceremony. For the ceremony, the pudding is prepared from rice, milk, and sugar, although date palm jaggery (nalen gur) often replaces sugar during the winter months. This typically homemade dish has attracted the attention of the giant food corporations, so ready-to-make MTR Vermicelli Payasam Mix, Bambino Vermicelli Payasam Kheer Mix, and GITS Basmati Rice Kheer Mix can now be bought in any Indian supermarket.
See also india.
Peeps, extruded marshmallow confections marketed to coincide with American holidays, have excited a cult following for reasons likely relating to their garish colors, sweet flavorlessness, and aggressively cute and childish shapes. See marshmallows.
Peeps are made by Just Born, a company founded in 1932 by a Russian immigrant named Sam Born, who had arrived as a candy maker in 1910 and opened a Brooklyn candy-making and retail store in 1923. In 1953 the company, by then based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, acquired the Rodda Candy Company, which made a line of hand-piped marshmallows in the shape of yellow chicks, marketed at Easter to fill baskets. Sam Born’s son, Bob, a physicist and engineer, encouraged the mechanization of the process, and eventually the product line expanded to different shapes for different holidays, including pumpkins at Halloween, reindeer and snowmen at Christmas, hearts at Valentine’s Day. Today the company claims to be “the world’s largest manufacturer of novelty marshmallow treats” and to produce enough Peeps in one year to circle the globe twice.
The Peeps’ mute, fixed expressions, flexibility, and curious properties—they can be cut with scissors, stacked and used as craft materials, and inflated in microwave ovens, leading to filmed “jousting contests” people post in online forums—have made Peeps a subject of fascination that has little to do with actually eating them. Scientists have tried to dissolve them in acetone and sulfuric acid. Bloggers leave them out for months and years to look for mold or signs of spoilage (in vain; the marshmallow hardens). The candies made the switch to ironic pop culture commentary in a way that other stolid mass-produced brands did not.
Some people actually enjoy eating them. The fine coating of sugar provides a pleasing contrast to the interior, which is drier and firmer than most marshmallows. Even when Millennial irony and artisan interest have shifted focus, Peeps are likely to march on, as imperturbable as they are indestructible.
pekmez (petimezi in Greek; vincotto, sapa, or saba in Italian; dibs el inab, debess ennab, or debs el enab in Arabic) is an ancient, traditional ingredient of the Mediterranean pantry. The Romans called this grape molasses defructum. It is made from freshly extracted grape juice that is simmered to condense to roughly one-third or one-fourth of its original volume. This lengthy process makes the dark and syrupy molasses expensive and rare, and the small quantities produced every fall disappear fast.
Until the nineteenth century, when sugar became affordable, this concentrated grape syrup was an essential sweetener throughout the Mediterranean, along with honey. It keeps practically forever, and its flavor is not just sweet but much more complex, with slightly bitter undertones due to the caramelization that occurs during the lengthy cooking.
In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Persia and other Eastern Mediterranean countries, many types of fruit preserves were made with grape molasses; even today, quince and pears are traditionally cooked in grape molasses in parts of Greece and Turkey. See fruit preserves. In the mountain villages of Italy’s Romagna, the dark, densely flavored savôr is a jam of fall fruits made with the syrupy molasses from the local sangiovese grapes. Savôr traditionally accompanies the pungent formaggio di fossa, the sheep’s or cow’s milk cheese of the same region that ripens in special underground pits.
Italian recipes with names beginning with mosto or must indicate foods that were traditionally made with grape molasses—the poor people’s sweetener of old. When sugar became affordable, it replaced the dark syrup in most recipes. Thus, the formerly mosto-sweetened mustaccioli (or mostaccioli), festive cookies of Napoli and other parts of Italy, are now sweetened with sugar, honey, and spices; they get their molasses-like color from cocoa powder. In Greece, however, bakeries still sell moustokouloura, ring-shaped cookies sweetened with grape molasses. They are brown and not particularly attractive, but their deep flavor is ample compensation for their homely appearance.
Tahin-pekmez—grape molasses mixed with sesame paste, 2 parts tahini to 1 part grape molasses—is a hearty traditional Turkish breakfast with ancient roots, also popular in Lebanon and other countries of the Middle East. Pekmez lokum (moustoloukouma in Greek) is a luscious, sugarless Turkish Delight made with grape molasses and walnuts or other nuts. See lokum. Homemade pasta is drizzled with petimezi on the island of Lemnos, and on neighboring Samos grape molasses sweetens loukoumades, traditional fried dough puffs. See fried dough.
Small amounts of petimezi are used to sweeten some old Greek vinegar sauces, like the traditional savore of Tinos island, a pungent garlic, herb, and vinegar marinade-like sauce, similar to Spanish escabeche, in which fried or grilled fish was preserved in the old days.
Grape molasses dribbled over snow is said to have been the first-ever frozen dessert. Today, the syrupy pekmez is drizzled over yogurt, ice cream, or porridge to add a complex layer of sweetness. As an additional benefit, grape molasses is a naturally healthy alternative to sugar, rich in iron, potassium, and other antioxidants. No wonder chefs and bartenders throughout the world have begun experimenting with this precious old-fashioned ingredient.
See also ancient world; greece and cyprus; holiday sweets; middle east; and turkey.
See hard candy.
The Pennsylvania Dutch culture of “sweets,” which includes both confectionery (Zuckerwerk) and pastry (Backwerk), represents one of the richest regional cuisines in the United States. Referred to as “Dutch” by the colonial English, a medieval term for anyone from the Rhine Valley, this group created a hybrid food culture that evolved out of three basic eighteenth-century immigrant components: the Palatine, or Pelzer Drittel (which also includes German-speaking Alsatians); the Swabian, or Schwowe Drittel (largely derived from the German state now called Baden-Württemberg); and the Schweizer Drittel, or “Swiss Third,” represented by the Swiss Reformed, Mennonites, and Amish. Added to this hybrid mixture are influences from larger British-American cultural patterns. The Amish, who compose about 5 percent of the total Pennsylvania Dutch population, have since the 1930s been a tourist icon for the whole culture, yet the Amish have in fact had very little influence on the overall development of sweets among the Pennsylvania Dutch.
While each group may claim culinary professionals who became leaders in the area of “sweets,” it was the Swabian component that produced the most long-lasting contributions. The nonurban Plain Sects (like the Amish) devoted themselves to farming, while the Swabians became the pretzel bakers, the hotel owners and country innkeepers, and the fancy food entrepreneurs. This culinary dichotomy between town and country existed well into the 1960s, with the country Dutch eating one way and the urban Dutch eating another. Thus the discussion of sweets ultimately devolves into a barometer of class and economic status, especially since sugar was at one time a costly social dividing line.
In that respect, Pennsylvania Dutch culture was always separated when it came to sweets. Sweet foods were consumed only during holidays or festive occasions like weddings, or even more so during funeral banquets. Furthermore, confectionery was not the same as pastry, a fact well reflected in the professional confectionery books from the period. The foremost regional county towns offered a welcoming environment for emigrant confectioners and pastry bakers to set up shop and then meld their talents with local expectations, and from this process many new foods and dishes emerged. One example is George Girardey, who authored a number of cooking manuals in the 1840s. He received confectionery training in Philadelphia, and then moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where he became well known in that Pennsylvania Dutch community as the Philadelphia ice cream man.
Newspaper advertisements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal not only a large array of imported shop goods, including even Nuremberg gingerbreads and marzipan, but also the elaborately carved molds used by central European bakers for such festive foods as paste sugar ornaments, clear toy (barley sugar) candies, springerle cookies, and even bread and pie crusts made specifically for the Pennsylvania market. See barley sugar; cookie molds and stamps; gingerbread; marzipan; and springerle. During the period of industrialization following the Civil War, several enterprising Pennsylvania Dutch confectioners reinvented themselves as “manufacturing confectioners,” a term applied to firms that both sold confectionery and made the tools and utensils required by the trade. See confectionery equipment. For this reason, southeastern Pennsylvania became one of the primary centers of candy manufacturing in the nineteenth century, with Reading the uncontested candy capital of the Dutch Country, a reputation that lives on in Luden’s Cough Drops. However, one of the most internationally famous names is Milton S. Hershey (1857–1945), a chocolate manufacturer of Mennonite ancestry who first opened his shop in Philadelphia in the 1890s, then later established a chocolate empire near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. See hershey, miltons and hershey’s.
Candy (Zuckerwerk)
While the economic environment of rich Pennsylvania county towns like Reading, Lancaster, and York could support professional confectioners and a wide array of sweet goods, the targeted market was the urban middle and upper class; the situation was quite different in rural households and in general home cookery. It was common for rural Pennsylvania Dutch to buy confectionery from shops only for seasonal occasions like Christmas—marzipan and clear toy candies are prime examples—otherwise confectionery in the home was more or less based on molasses, since it was cheap when in season during cold weather. See molasses.
The most popular candies still made at home are Moschi, a hard molasses candy containing nuts (peanut brittle is considered a type of Moschi), Meerschaum (sea foam candy), and “bellyguts,” pulled molasses taffy braided to resemble the intestines of a pig. Another regional specialty is Quitteschpeck (quince paste), pureed quince cooked thick with sugar and cooled to form a thin sheet, which is then sliced into a variety of shapes and dipped in sugar. See fruit pastes. A similar paste candy is made with pears, persimmons, and sugar, or with equal parts of cooked pureed chinquapins (wild chestnuts) and sugar. This type of homemade candy, which appeals to children, was once commonly sold in nineteenth-century cake and mead shops, often small stores run by impoverished widows who also sold a variety of cakes and cookies to support themselves. Women and children socialized in the cake and mead shops, since strong alcoholic beverages were not served.
With the advent of the home economics movement in the 1890s and a proliferation of fundraising cookbooks for churches and other community organizations, home candy making moved into higher gear. All sorts of recipes were developed to raise money for special causes, and the fall of the price of sugar brought these confections within reach of even the poorest working families. Opera Fudge became popular during this period and is still one of the trademark confections of Wertz Candies, an old-fashioned candy shop in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. See fudge. One of the most popular late-nineteenth-century candies still made today is known locally as “flitch candy” or “candy flitch”—mashed potatoes mixed with confectioner’s sugar—in short, potato fondant. See fondant. It became the poor man’s substitute for marzipan, to the extent that some home cooks even flavored it with almond extract.
On the northern edge of the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where rich farmlands meet the coal mining region, candy coal, or “black diamonds” (colored black and flavored with anise or licorice), became a popular local item and one of the iconic products of the former Mootz Candies of Pottsville (now Michael Mootz Candies of Wilkes-Barre). Teaberry candies are also characteristic of the northern Dutch counties, especially the area northwest of Reading and Harrisburg. The most common teaberry candy is a form of pink granulated sugar shaped like tiny pebbles and used to decorate cakes and cookies. This candy is also ground to a powder and added to cake batter to make teaberry-flavored cakes. Where teaberry candies are scarce or unavailable, country cooks take pink Necco wintergreen lozenges, soak them overnight in milk, and use this pink milk to both flavor and color their cakes and cookies. See necco. Teaberry candy or the Necco lozenges are also used to flavor teaberry ice cream, one of the most popular brands being Leiby’s, produced in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania.
Finally, in the southwestern corner of the Dutch Country, especially in Bedford and Somerset Counties, where maple sugaring is a major local industry, various candies and confections based on maple sugar are gaining popularity. See maple syrup and maple sugaring. Due to the encouragement of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, there is now an active campaign to employ local maple sugar in Pennsylvania Dutch recipes as part of an effort to enhance regional tourism.
Cakes and Pastries (Backwerk)
Out of the more than 1,600 distinctive dishes documented in the Pennsylvania Dutch region of the United States, a good portion consists of cakes and various types of pastries. Many of these are not found in cookbooks or in restaurants, but rather remain within the sphere of home cookery. The oldest and most traditional term for cake in Pennsylvania Dutch is Siessbrod (“sweet bread”), which implies that the basic dough is the same as bread, but then other ingredients (like eggs, butter, sugar or honey) are added to give it a festive character. See breads, sweet.
The most universal Siessbrod is called Deitscher Kuche (Dutch Cake), the culture’s equivalent of South German Gugelhupf. See gugelhupf. Dutch Cake baked in elaborate molds was made for Christmas and New Year’s, and there are about 30 basic variations, depending on local custom and religious affiliation. Another yeast-raised cake is known as Datsch or Datschkuche, which was essentially a poverty dish baked down-hearth in ashes, without expensive sugar, dried fruits, saffron, or other ingredients associated with festive dishes. Heavy and dense, it served either as bread or dumpling eaten with stewed fruit or sweet gravy. Today, Datsch is generally baked in a Schales pan, a broad, shallow earthenware or metal baking dish 11 to 14 inches in diameter and about 1 inch deep.
Hutzelbrod also belongs in the Siessbrod category, since it consists of sweetened sourdough formed into a long “log” filled with dried fruit and nuts. The surface of the roll is ornamented with fancy strips and cutouts of dough, all of which is then glazed with honey and milk. Since these breads were usually large (sometimes four feet long), they were normally made by professional bakers who had ovens large enough to accommodate them. Like the giant gingerbreads made by Pennsylvania Dutch bakers for window displays during the holidays, Hutzelbrod was essentially a Christmas food. See christmas.
Historically, the Pennsylvania Dutch could be divided along economic lines into “cake families” or “pie families,” with cakes signifying a more urban and well-to-do social status. Moravian Sugar Cake (made for the Moravian Love Feast), Schwenkfelder Wedding Cake (a saffron flavored Siessbrod), and Weaverland Wedding Bread (a sweet flower-shaped saffron bread made among the Old Order Mennonites) are exceptions, in that they were made communally for specific religious functions. Other cakes, such as Apeas (from pain d’épice), were prepared at home as coffee cakes, as were hundreds of different sorts of crumb cakes, fruit-covered yeast cakes, and crossover desserts like Shoofly Cake, which began as Centennial Cake, a molasses crumb cake baked in a cake tin; it later migrated to a pie shell for more convenient eating at farmhouse tables, and it is now known as shoo-fly pie. See coffee cake; kuchen; and pie.
A full inventory of Pennsylvania Dutch pastries is impossible here, especially since many of the more unusual dishes would require extensive explanation. But a few of the most popular pies are Lemon Sponge Pie, Montgomery Pie, Funny Cake, Apple Schnitz Pie, Fish Pie (a lemon filling with cookie dough crust), Strip Pie (fruit tarts with cookie dough crust and strips across the top), and various cheese pies, such as Beer Cheese Pie, with a pretzel crust. Some pies are highly localized, such as the Maple Cream Pie of Somerset and Bedford Counties.
Also highly localized are many of the cookie recipes—sugar cookies in particular. Some can be traced to specific places of invention: snickerdoodles (from Schnecknudle) were created in Reading, Pennsylvania; Christmas Antler Cookies come from Pottsville; Frackville Pretzels (doughnuts shaped like pretzels) originated farther north; Lebanon Rusks (yeast-raised potato dough flavored with rosewater) are from Lebanon; and Teaberry Butterfly Cookies come from the Mahantongo Valley. Universal among the Dutch are traditional Christmas gingerbreads and honey cakes (Lebkuche). Most recently, whoopie cakes (or whoopie pies) have entered the culture via the Big Valley Amish of Mifflin County, who introduced them from the Midwest in the late 1960s. See whoopie pie.
See also philadelphia.
penny candy remains common in the contemporary lexicon, even though few candies can now be bought for a penny. The term “penny candy” broadly refers to cheap, bulk, sugar-based candies usually associated with children. Over the nearly two centuries of the term’s existence, relatively little has changed in its meaning.
In the United States, the origins of penny candy can be dated to 1847, when small boiled sugar sweets were pulled, crimped, colored, striped, twisted, and cut to fit the mouths of eager children. The 1847 invention of the hand-cranked lozenge candy machine by Oliver Chase in Boston made rapid mass production of boiled sugar candies possible for candy makers both large and small. Some of the dies for early candy machines resembled pennies, providing another explanation for the origin of the phrase, as the penny candies actually mimicked money in sugar form. Other dies resembled fruits, nuts, figures, animals, ships, and other objects that doubled as sugary toys for children to play with and suck on. In 1851 the first revolving steam panning cookers were imported to Philadelphia, revolutionizing the laborious process of sugar panning jujubes, gumdrops, and dragées. See panning. All manner of these candy-coated treats, previously unattainable by the masses, were now available in bulk at confectionery shops, usually sold by the scoop or piece and starting at a penny each. The proliferation of penny goods, as they came to be known in the nineteenth century, allowed children of various means to spend their own coins at the candy counter, while adults and the upper classes consumed fancier boxed chocolates and bonbons. See bonbons; chocolates, boxed; and chocolate, luxury. The strong distinction between the confectionery preferences of children and adults remains, despite the waning tradition of the old-fashioned candy store today.
See also children’s candy.
Persia, to use its traditional name, is the civilization that dominates the Iranian Plateau, that rugged highland that separates India from the Middle East and borders on the steppes of Central Asia. There has been culinary cross-fertilization in all directions throughout this area, but mostly it has been a matter of Persia influencing its neighbors. One reason is that Persia often dominated them politically; another is simply that, despite its huge extent and dispersed population centers, Persia has spent much of the last 2,500 years politically unified, with a wealthy royal court that could support a haute cuisine.
During the Sassanid Empire (224–651), cuisine was a sharp marker of social rank. In a short sixth-century tale that has been translated as “King Hʿusrav and His Boy” (“boy” in the sense of page or servant), the king examines a young man who wants to join his retinue by quizzing him on what is finest in 13 categories. It reads suspiciously like a handbook of gourmet trends for the social climber. Three of the categories are sweets, more or less. The main one is rōn-khwartīg (side dishes). Unvala, the English translator of this tale, interpreted rōn-khwartīg as “pastries,” but several of these dishes were still being made in Baghdad three centuries later, and they were all either puddings or sweetmeats. There were marzipan-like pastes of almonds (lōzēnag) or walnuts (gōzēnag), a “coarse” or perhaps “greasy” sweet (shaftēnag), a snow-white sweet (vafrēnag), several items with illegible names, and charb-afrōshag, or “fat afrōshag.” Later, in the thirteenth century, an Arab scribe wrote down a recipe for afrūshiyya, which was made by boiling honey with cornstarch and sesame oil.
The very finest rōn-khwartīg, the social climber needed to know, was pālūdag, a word that literally means “refined.” In the later Arab cookbooks this word would refer to a pudding thickened with cornstarch, and presumably it meant the same to the Sassanids. In the sixth-century tale, pālūdag was flavored with apple and quince juices.
One of the two remaining categories of sweet in the tale is hambuk, roughly translatable as “preserved fruits.” See fruit preserves. They were probably preserved in sugar—the best, declares the young man confidently, were ginger root and a bland Indian fruit called myrobalan. The last category is nuts, or more precisely seeds, because it includes hemp seed and even lentils dressed with olive oil. See nuts. The finest nut, says the young man, is hempseed fried in the fat of wild goat. Since wild animals have little fat, this looks a lot like conspicuous consumption, as does the rōn-khwartīg that was made with the fat of the proverbially lean gazelle. (In later centuries, the tale of Hʿusrav and the young man was later translated into Arabic, and this last sweet appears in that telling as a pudding made of milk, rice flour, and gazelle fat.)
Nuts such as coconut, acorns, and chestnuts were all eaten with sugar, and there was an “excellent sweet” consisting of dates stuffed with walnuts. See dates. This usage shows an enduring Persian taste: centuries later, when we finally read of Persian pastries, they usually have a filling of sugar and nuts.
The Sassanids had already made contributions to sugar technology by developing a technique of refining sugar that involved boiling the crude syrup with milk in order to remove impurities. See sugar refining. The resulting refined sugar was proverbially white, and also rock-hard. Its name, tabarzad (struck with a hatchet), refers to the fact that sugar had to be hacked from a sugar loaf before it could be pounded to usable granules. See sugar. The Sassanids also invented pulled taffy (pānīdh).
After Muslim armies conquered Persia in 651, the Arabs speedily abandoned their traditional foods for the cuisine of the glittering Persian court. Several of the ancient Persian sweets survived in the cuisine of the Baghdad court during the eighth through tenth centuries: lauzīnaj, jauzīnaj, and fālūdhaj. See baghdad and lauzinaj. Other sweets with Persian names were recorded in Arab cookbooks of the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and some may date from the Sassanid period as well. These include khushkanānaj, the probable ancestor of all Middle Eastern cookies, made by kneading dough with sesame oil and stuffing it with sugar and almonds before baking. Another cookie, kulaijā, was similar but was shaped in a mold.
Zulābiyā, the most influential Persian sweet of all time, has generally been described as something like the Pennsylvania Dutch funnel cake—a fritter made by dribbling batter into boiling oil, either in a lattice pattern or a free-form shape. See zalabiya. However, in the tenth-century book Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, zulābiyā is described as leavened dough formed into decorative shapes before frying. In thirteenth-century Arab cookbooks we usually find the funnel cake recipe, but sometimes zulābiyā is made by frying a nut filling dipped in batter.
There are not many direct Persian culinary sources for the later Middle Ages, although the poet Abū Ishāq-e Hallāj (d. 1427), familiarly known as Bushaq, gives some glimpses. His nearly untranslatable poems are parodies of famous Sufi mystical poems, with all references to the Divine Beloved replaced by the names of foods. (Humorous though the effect is, Bushaq was a Sufi himself.) For instance, he mentions yakh dar behesht, a cornstarch-thickened sweetmeat flavored with rosewater that is still made; the name means “ice in heaven.”
The earliest Persian cookbooks, both written by royal chefs, date to the sixteenth century. They include some old favorites such as pālūda and zulābiyā, as well as an interesting pastry called qutāb, which was in effect a large, deep-fried, semicircular samosa. The later of the two books, Maddet ol-Hayât, happens to include the earliest recipes for baklava. See baklava. They scarcely resemble what we know as baklava today, consisting of thin flatbreads stacked up in a pan with a sweet filling between every two layers, drenched with syrup and butter, and cooked in a pan. They would have been soggy rather than crisp, and the filling in this case was not nuts but lentils. (Lentils were included among the nuts in the story of King Hʿusrav and his page.)
Today, Persian sweets are generally eaten alone, not as part of a meal, which may explain why a relatively narrow range of sweets is made at home. They include the rice pudding shir berenj, which may have been adopted from India in ancient times, and two other puddings, sholeh zard—a softer rice pudding of Mongolian ancestry flavored with saffron—and ferni, a baked pudding made from rice flour. There are shortbreads that include rice (nan-e berenji) or chickpeas (nan-e nokhodchi). The very descriptively named gusht-e fil (elephant’s ear) consists of deep-fried thin sheets of dough.
A wider variety is made by professional confectioners. Sohān, a specialty of the ancient city of Qom, is a sort of cross between a very buttery brittle and a somewhat crumbly fudge. Like many Persian sweets, it is flavored with saffron, rosewater, and nuts. A somewhat different version, sohān-e asali, is made from boiled-down honey. Sohān-e asali is traditional at Nouruz, the Persian New Year, which falls on the spring equinox. Sweets are prominently featured at Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the Ramadan fast, the particular favorite being zulābiyā (these days often spelled and pronounced zoluūbiyā or zolbiyā).
Many Iranian cities have their own specialties. In Isfahan, it is gaz, a nougat flavored with manna, the sugary substance found on tamarisk trees that have been attacked by a certain scale insect. See manna and nougat. The sweets capital is Yazd, an ancient oasis located between the two great Iranian deserts. It is famous for baghlāvā (baklava) and a number of sweet nut-paste confections called louz—diamond-shaped confections of ground nuts, perhaps descended from the ancient lōzēnag. Yazdi ghotāb is a spherical nut-stuffed pastry, deep-fried and then glazed. There are a number of cookie-like pastries, such as the rice-based ke’k-e yazdi. The most elaborate specialty is pashmak (wool), which looks like cotton candy but is made by a technique similar to Chinese pulled noodles. Soft hot candy is stretched and folded repeatedly until it turns into a mass of threads.
This mountainous country has an ancient tradition of harvesting ice in winter and storing it in underground ice houses called yakhchāls to chill fruits and puddings. When the technique of producing subfreezing temperatures by adding salt was introduced from Europe in the nineteenth century, Persians began making ice cream (bastani), by preference flavored with saffron, cardamom, and pistachio. See ice cream.
Ice has also been pressed into service for that most ancient of Iranian sweets, pālūdag. Now usually pronounced fāludeh, it is still sweetened with cornstarch but is no longer a “trembling” pudding, as Bushaq called it. A cornstarch pudding is cooked until quite firm and then sliced into vermicelli-like threads, which reside at the bottom of a glass of fruit juice or rosewater-flavored syrup, typically with ice for summer.
See also chestnuts; flower waters; fried dough; marzipan; pudding; spices; and toffee.
Perugina is an Italian chocolatier and confectionery based in Perugia (Umbria), Italy, whose most famous product is a hazelnut-filled chocolate called Baci. The company was founded in 1907, but since 1988 it has belonged to the Swiss-based multinational food and beverage company Nestlé. See nestlé.
The name “Perugina” (feminine form of the adjective “Perugian”) is shorthand for the company’s original full name: Società Perugina per la Fabbricazione dei Confetti (Perugian Company for the Manufacture of Confections). This company was founded by four partners, including Francesco Buitoni, son of the founder of the Buitoni food company. In the 1920s, the Buitoni family extended its control over Perugina, with the Buitoni and Perugina companies remaining in close association until their sale in 1988 (principally to Nestlé). Both Buitoni and Perugina expanded internationally in the 1930s, first to France, and then to the United States, with further expansion after World War II.
Perugina produces a wide range of confections, including chocolate drink mixes, ice cream bars and cones, seasonal baked goods (panettone, colomba), and caramels (“Rossana”), but chocolates remain the core of the business. Of these, the Baci (“kisses”) are the most popular. They are made of dark chocolate (now also of white chocolate) in which hazelnut bits and a whole hazelnut are embedded. The packaging of individual Baci is particularly distinctive and attractive: each is wrapped in blue and silver foil, beneath which is a slip of paper with a proverb or aphorism about love or friendship written on it, translated into five languages.
See also chocolate, luxury and italy.
Peter, Daniel (1836–1919), created milk chocolate in 1875, an innovation that laid the groundwork for the worldwide success of the Swiss chocolate industry. A butcher’s son who worked as a candle maker in Vevey, Switzerland, Peter married Fanny Cailler, the eldest daughter of François-Louis Cailler, founder of one of the first chocolate factories in Switzerland, in 1863. As the candle-making trade foundered, due to the introduction of kerosene in Switzerland, he subsequently opened his own small chocolate factory.
Daniel Peter, the inventor of milk chocolate, called his product “Gala Peter,” combining his name and the Greek word for “milk.” This poster from around 1900 uses a depiction of two Berber men and a camel in the desert to suggest the keeping power of Peter’s chocolate. Made from Nestlé’s dried milk powder, Gala Peter did not spoil. kharbine-tapabor / the art archive at art resource, n.y.
Other confectioners had tried to add milk to chocolate to create a smoother, sweeter blend than dark chocolate, but they had failed, because adding milk resulted in a too-liquid mix that turned rancid easily. In the early 1860s, Peter came across a new children’s food that was being made from thickened milk and flour by his neighbor in Vevey, the chemist Henri Nestlé. See nestlé. He came up with the idea of mixing Nestlé’s dried milk product with chocolate powder and sugar, thereby overcoming the problems associated with using fresh milk. In 1875 his milk chocolate for drinking appeared, followed by chocolate for eating in the 1880s.
The addition of powdered milk enabled manufacturers to cut down on the proportion of expensive cocoa in their products, and also provided Peter with a new product with which to compete with more established chocolatiers, including Cailler, Philippe Suchard, and Charles-Amédée Kohler.
See also chocolate, post-columbian.
See small cakes.
PEZ are small candies that were invented in Vienna, Austria, in 1927, when Eduard Haas III created a breath mint made of pressed sugar and peppermint oil, which he advertised as “the mint of the noble society.” Haas coined the name PEZ by combining the first, third, and eleventh letters of the German word for peppermint, Pfefferminze. PEZ candies were initially marketed as a product for adults, so it is not surprising that the first dispensers, which came on the market in 1949, strongly resembled cigarette lighters. In the 1950s the company continued to use scantily clad pinup girls to promote its products, but once PEZ broke into the American market in 1953, the company recognized the potential in targeting children. The PEZ girls were given a more respectable look, and the dispensers (which still resembled cigarette lighters to some extent) got character heads that pivoted back to dispense the candy. The first models sporting Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck heads appeared in 1962. Today, new dispensers hit the market every two months. PEZ is currently sold in some 80 countries around the world, with three- to eight-year-olds being the main consumer target group.
This young target group has inspired new flavors. Orange, lemon, cherry, strawberry, and raspberry have emerged as classics. Cola was introduced in the late 1990s. Passing fads produced such flavors as pineapple, watermelon, and green apple. Peppermint, the original flavor, is available once again after a long production break.
The candy’s hallmark shape has not changed since 1927. They resemble small rectangular bricks, with rounded corners that facilitate removal from the molds after pressing. Another obvious feature is the elongated depression in the middle that makes them more chewable, because the typical PEZ lover always pops a handful into his or her mouth at once and immediately bites into them.
See also candy and children’s candy.
pharmacology, the study of drugs and their effects, deals with how medicine is made and how it is delivered; in short, how to sugarcoat the bitter pill. The clichés may be hard to swallow, but the metaphors are grounded in reality: sugar is commonly used in making and administering drugs, both licit and illicit.
There is more to sugarcoating than meets the eye, or even the tongue: sealing, subcoating, smoothing, coloring, and polishing are involved in the process. Perhaps people would be less inclined to take their meds if the color were irregular, so manufacturers strive to prevent mottling. Sugarcoating was proposed by a pharmacist from Chambéry named M. Calloud in 1854; the idea was to envelop medicinal substances to disguise their unpleasant taste. His recipe, perhaps inspired by a French formula for happiness (vivre d’amour et d’eau fraîche), consisted of flax seed, white sugar, and spring water. Later, many layers of syrups with increasing concentrations of dye were applied, a process that could take days.
A breakthrough came in 1973 with a patent for “dry edible non-toxic color lakes” of submicron-particle size. Much as “color lakes” may suggest pills on a summer afternoon diving into a lake (rather like the old M&M’s commercial), here “lake” refers to an insoluble dye (the kind used for food coloring). The pigment is manufactured by precipitating the dye with a binder, often aluminum oxide (Al2O3). Combining an aluminum lake and an opacifier dispersed in a syrup solution made it possible to reduce the number of applications of coating. Now color-matched concentrates can be added to the coating solution. Alternatively, a film-forming polymer in aqueous solution is applied to the surface of the tablet, a procedure called film coating.
The polio vaccine is dripped onto a sugar cube for an awaiting patient, circa 1980. For well over a hundred years, sugar has helped medicine go down. wellcome library, london
Sugar is an excipient, a substance that contributes to the physical composition of the drug or aids in delivery of the active ingredient. Excipients are generally regarded as inert (having no physiological effect) and therefore safe. Occasionally, though, a difference in reaction to a generic drug versus a brand-name drug is attributable to an excipient. And excipients, even naturally occurring sugars, sometimes have adverse effects: fructose, for those who are susceptible, may cause hypoglycemia; lactose can cause diarrhea and vomiting; sucrose, of course, is infamous for its role in causing dental caries. See dental caries.
Excipients bind ingredients together; they help the pill, once ingested, to disintegrate; and they add volume, ensuring that the pill is easy to handle and swallow and that the active ingredient is at the right concentration. Excipients also serve to protect the active ingredient from moisture and light, and, of course, to sweeten.
Sweeteners, found in most pills and syrups as well as in medicated cough drops, include sucrose, fructose, dextrose (glucose), and lactose, as well as synthetic sweeteners such as aspartame and saccharin. See artificial sweeteners; fructose; and glucose. Sweeteners constitute as much as half the percentage by weight of typical oral medications taken by children; the percentage is even higher for some antibiotics, cough syrups, and cold medicines. Nonsugar sweeteners sweeter than sucrose (e.g., aspartame) are useful to manufacturers because less is needed, and the bulk of the pill can therefore be kept small. Nonsugar sweeteners may be recommended to patients, to avoid dental caries and reduce the risk of diabetes, when medication must be taken chronically.
In drug manufacture, sucrose is frequently combined with other ingredients to obtain a particular effect. Compressible sugar (direct compacting sugar) consists of sucrose plus a small amount of starch, maltodextrin, or invert sugar, as well as a lubricant. Compressible sugar is the filler in chewable tablets; it may also bind or sweeten. Confectioner’s sugar, sucrose (at least 95 percent) mixed with finely ground cornstarch, is also used to sweeten. See sugar. Its virtues are rapid dissolution and fine particle size, which contributes to pill uniformity. Sugar spheres, spherical granules 200 to 2,000 microns in diameter, form the basis of many time-release capsules, known formally as multiparticulate sustained release formulations. The spheres are coated first with the drug, then with a polymer. When the pill is ingested, a bit of the drug escapes through the mesh of the polymer, and as the polymer erodes, the active ingredient continues to be released little by little.
Some pills contain sugar (plus other excipients) without the active ingredient; these are placebos, notably used in clinical drug trials as controls. “Placebo” originally meant something that would please the patient; but in pleasing the patient, the physician was often prescribing in the dark, without having first established that the medicine did any good. Thus placebos came to be associated with medical quackery. Today, sugar pills are more commonly associated with the “placebo effect,” a sensation of relieved symptoms in the absence of an active drug.
Sugars in the form of complex carbohydrates attached to protein or fat molecules (glycoproteins and glycolipids, respectively) are ubiquitous in living cells. Such sugary molecules are the focus of glycobiology, a term coined in 1988 by the Oxford University biochemist Raymond Dwek. This field explores making drugs out of sugars, or sugar-containing molecules: heparin, a common anticoagulant, is one such drug. A sugar-based vaccine against Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) has nearly eliminated the meningitis, occasionally deadly, this organism causes. The sugars fucose and mannose have been used to treat rare disorders in which normal protein glycosylation (the addition of sugar to protein) is impaired. Sugars may also figure in therapies for diseases whose underlying cause is dysregulation of the inflammatory response, such as rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. Nanoparticles coated with sugar molecules may one day serve as cancer drugs that can target tumor cells.
Sugar in the form of sugar cubes has been used as a vehicle to administer drugs. Following the lethal poliomyelitis epidemics of the early 1950s, the Salk vaccine, consisting of virus particles inactivated by formaldehyde, was administered by injection. Batches of vaccine in which not all the virus had been inactivated caused a terrible outbreak of polio in 1955, and the vaccine was badly discredited. By passaging virus through cultured cells, a process called attenuation, Albert Sabin knocked out the capacity of the virus to cause disease, though it still elicited an immune response. The Sabin vaccine was not injected but, rather, dripped onto sugar cubes and, between 1964 and 1979, deliciously administered to millions of children. This vaccine additionally promoted “contact immunity,” as vaccinated children spread the vaccine strains to unvaccinated children. But the vaccine strains proved unstable, occasionally causing paralysis. Eventually, the Salk vaccine was reinstated, a development that has decidedly lessened the pleasure of vaccination.
Sugar cubes for drug delivery achieved notoriety when, in the 1960s, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), championed by the indefatigable Timothy Leary, ushered in the psychedelic era. Sugar cubes soaked in LSD, it was claimed, would vaccinate users against the terminal boredom of the unenhanced mind. LSD, a hallucinogen, binds to serotonin receptors on the surface of certain neurons, causing the neurons to slow down and stop firing, but the exact mechanism by which it causes hallucinations remains unknown.
Another way to sweeten mind-altering drugs is to swirl them into brownie batter. See brownies. The original recipe, found in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), is likely to yield a fruitcake- or figgy pudding–like affair, having as ingredients black pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, dates, figs, almonds, peanuts, butter, sugar—and, of course, Cannabis sativa (marijuana). The cookbook recommends that it “be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.” Today’s college students (not for nothing is it called higher education) are likely, instead, to follow a traditional chocolate brownie recipe, although the most popular method of taking marijuana remains inhalation. (Sweetened marijuana is not uniquely the gift of Western culture, however, as bhang, a concoction of cannabis leaves, milk, sugar, and spices, is drunk in India.)
The latest version of an edible mind-altering drug is Molly-on-a-lolly. Molly, another name for Ecstasy (3,4-methyl-dioxymethamphetamine), can be obtained in powder form and sprinkled on a lollipop, which both improves its taste and alleviates the less-than-delightful side effect of jaw clenching.
Sugar has thus played on the imagination of physicians, chemists, biologists, and hippies—all of whom, in one way or another, have sweetened those substances they believed do us good.
See also medicinal uses of sugar; sugar and health; and sugar cubes.
Philadelphia has a long history of confectionery that is unique both in terms of the highly specialized profession that evolved there and the pervasive influence the Philadelphia trade had on American confectionery in general. From the very earliest establishment of the city, confectioners held a special place in the community of food purveyors who derived their economic success from the mercantile nature of Philadelphia’s colonial trade networks. The Caribbean provided a ready source of sugar and exotic fruits. Shipping connections with Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean ensured a steady flow of luxury products such as fresh oranges, lemons, almonds, and syrups, while the city itself provided a niche market among the wealthy merchant class, whose lavish entertainments created a demand for European-style caterers and confectioners.
The earliest Philadelphia confectioners of record were generally of British origin, many of them women (especially Quakers), or immigrant German confectioners trained according to prevailing French notions of taste and presentation. Newspaper advertisements from the mid-eighteenth century onward listed the many enticing products of the city’s confection shops, including ices, puddings, sorbets, fruit tarts, and a vast array of candies, and they point to a noted preference for pièces montées, ornamental table constructions made of paste sugar. See sugar sculpture. The popularity of sugar-work decorations for Philadelphia banquet tables continued well into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, it is evident from newspaper notices that these figures were displayed in shop windows and available for rent, along with fancy furniture and table settings. Thus even urbanites of relatively modest means could contract with the shops to create lavish dinners and decor, if only for one evening.
The French Revolution and the slave rebellion in Haiti, both of which sent thousands of French-speaking refugees to Philadelphia in search of safety and a new life, also helped to establish the city as a preeminent center of American confectionery. Many well-known French cooks and confectioners took up residence in the city and quickly earned local reputations for ice creams, caramels, flavorings, chocolates, and fine pastries. It was also during the 1790s that fromage glacé (molded ice cream) became an integral part of city entertainments. See ice cream. Molded raspberry ice creams with a center core of mocha-chocolate were given pride of place at debutante balls into the 1950s. One of the best-known French confectioneries from the nineteenth century was the firm of Henrion & Chauveau, whose chocolate caramels were unrivaled in the United States. See caramel and chocolate, luxury.
The city’s large and affluent Quaker community also took a keen interest in confectionery, since this was considered a reputable line of work, and from a business standpoint it was an extension of the many complex and interlocking relationships among Quaker merchants, Quaker banking, and the large community of Quaker farmers in the surrounding counties. Those farmers provided the city with excellent farm produce, including the high-grade cream for which Philadelphia ice cream became famous. See cream. Elizabeth Goodfellow (1768–1851), a confectioner who moved in and out of Quakerism through a succession of widowhoods and marriages, established one of the most influential cooking schools in the United States prior to the Civil War, though she is perhaps best remembered today for introducing lemon meringue pie into American cookery. However, the most famous American Quaker confectioner is doubtless Stephen Whitman, who in 1842 established a chocolate company that survives to this day as a division of Russell Stover Candies. The Whitman’s Sampler, introduced in 1912, has become an American culinary icon. See chocolates, boxed and chocolates, filled. Another Quaker firm, Croft, Wilbur & Company (founded in 1865), survives as the Wilbur Chocolate Company, now located in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
The fame of Philadelphia ice cream is largely attributed to the British-born confectioners George and Eleanor Parkinson, who established their ice cream empire in the 1820s. The grand banquet held in Philadelphia for the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824 provided the Parkinsons with an opportunity to introduce vanilla ice cream in which flecks of the vanilla beans could be observed. This proof of purity and integrity of ingredients became a permanent feature of Philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream. Their son, James Wood Parkinson (1818–1895), also became a noted confectioner, whose restaurant in a refurbished mansion was considered one of the high altars of American cuisine prior to the Civil War. Parkinson continued his fame and influence as an editor for the Confectioners’ Journal (1874–1956), a trade publication begun in Philadelphia and now a lasting historical record of American confectionery during its early years of industrialization. See confectionery manuals and publications, trade.
Many of the leaders in mechanized confectionery were located in Philadelphia, among them the Thomas Mills Manufacturing Company (1863–1967), famous for its candy-making tools. See confectionery equipment. Among the manufacturing confectioners (firms that made both confections and tools) the names of Valentine Clad and George Endriss remain well known to collectors of fine molds, cookie prints, and copper utensils. See cookie molds and stamps. Candy factories abounded in nineteenth-century Philadelphia due to the ease of shipping products on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Many candies from that period still survive, including candy corn for Halloween, developed in the 1880s by the Wunderle Candy Company; Good & Plenty licorice candies, introduced in 1893 by the Quaker City Confectionery Company; and Goldberg’s Peanut Chews from the 1920s—not to mention bubblegum, a creation of the Frank H. Fleer Company, which began selling the gum in 1928. See chewing gum and halloween.
Philadelphia’s position as America’s candy capital has declined since the 1940s, but the tradition lives on in Shane Confectionery (opened in 1863), the oldest surviving sweet shop in the United States, and still operating from the same store (now restored) in Philadelphia’s Old City. See sweet shops. Furthermore, the Retail Confectioner’s Association of Philadelphia has kept Philadelphia at the forefront of American confectionery by sponsoring its annual Philadelphia National Candy Gift and Gourmet Show, the uncontested trial ground for all that is new and innovative in the world of American sweets.
The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,107 islands located east of the Southeast Asian mainland. More than 300 species of edible fruits and nuts are found in the country. It is customary in all three major regions—Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao—to end a meal with a selection of locally available fruits in season. Among the most popular fruits are mango, atis (sugar apple), lanzones, bananas, and citrus fruits like dalandan (native orange) and suha (pomelo)—fruits that are meant to be enjoyed in their naturally ripened state. The tradition of dessert as the last course of a meal is more Western than Asian. In the Philippines, the native way of eating is viewed not as a progression of courses but as a display of both savory and sweet dishes that allows the diner to visually plan how to allocate “stomach space” to the meal at hand. It was only after 350 years of Spanish colonial rule, and 50 more of American that the Western notion of postre (the Spanish term for after-dinner sweets) and the serving of American cakes and pies for dessert finally made their way into the Filipino mindset.
Native Sweets
Despite four centuries of daily exposure to Western culinary habits and preferences, Filipinos stay true to preserving what was theirs. Native sweets have endured, but they are primarily eaten for breakfast or merienda (snacks in between meals). The majority of these sweets are referred to as kakanin, from the Tagalog word kanin, which means “cooked rice.” Although kakanin are mostly rice based, using both regular and glutinous varieties, other sources of starch include roots, tubers (cassava or ube [purple yam]), grains like corn and millet, saba (cooking banana) and vegetables like kalabasa, a type of squash.
Although kakanin employ only three basic ingredients—starch, sugar, and liquid—the permutations of cooking and variations in regional styles produce an infinite number of sweet concoctions of different textures, levels of sweetness, stickiness, and artistry of presentation. Sometimes flavoring agents such as pandan (screwpine), anise, or sesame seeds are used, but the main flavors come mostly from the varietal choices of rice, root crops, and the wrapping leaves or bamboo containers that impart their own unique flavors and aroma to the kakanin. These sweets are usually served with grated panocha (solid blocks of muscovado), red or white sugar, and grated coconut. See sugar.
The use of glutinous rice, which produces “sticky cakes,” originated in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia and eventually spread to East Asian countries. Evolutionary and anthropological studies have shown that local peoples from this “glutinous rice zone” preferred this quality in their rice and therefore selected glutinous varieties for replanting and use for future generations.
According to the methods used for cooking them, there are four major categories of commonly available rice-based kakanin:
Many other types of native sweets are not rice-based. The most common are guinataan or root crops; sago and jackfruit simmered in coconut milk and sugar; and iced desserts such as halo halo (“mix mix”), mongo con hielo (mung beans) and mais con hielo (creamed corn). Traditionally served in tall parfait glasses, iced desserts have layers of beans, corn, palm seeds, agar agar, macapuno (also known as “coconut sport” or “mutant coconut”), and fresh fruits such as jackfruit, melons, or mangoes—all topped with shaved ice and evaporated or condensed milk. Special versions are topped with pinipig (pounded immature rice), ice cream, and flan.
Foreign Influences
The Spanish left a legacy of sweets, most of which are egg-yolk-based desserts, biscuits, and cookies. See spain. From the 1600s to the late 1800s, egg whites were used as a binding agent in building the walls of churches and cathedrals. Local women were taught by the nuns to make egg-yolk-based classics such as flans, yemas (egg yolks and sugar pastry balls dipped in sugar or hard caramel), and tocino del cielo (a very rich flan made of egg yolks, sugar, and butter steamed in small molds in a bain-marie or water bath). See convent sweets; egg yolk sweets; and flan (pudím). Many bakeries were established near churches; the most famous is the 140-year-old Panaderia de Molo in Iloilo, Visayas, which still produces egg-yolk-based biscuits such as galletas, biscocho, barquillos, hojaldres, broas, and rosquetes.
American influence is expressed in the profusion of chiffon cakes, pies, and tarts adapted to local tastes by the use of native ingredients, which gave rise to such delicacies as ube cake, mango tart, and buko (young coconut) pie. See chiffon cake and pie. Local bakeries and restaurants are quick to bring to Manila and other cities trendy baked goods or sweets from the United States, including cronuts, s’mores, cupcakes, the New York-based Momofuku Milk Bar crack pie, and Nutella soup. See cupcakes and s’mores.
Recently, European baked goods such as French macarons have been featured in local food magazines and appeared on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, and cooking classes on these delicate confections sell out quickly. See macarons. The media recently reported on the Philippine obsession with Trader Joe’s Speculoos Cookie Butter, a peanut butter alternative made from ground Dutch and Belgian shortbread cookies and vegetable oil. See speculaas. In early 2014, Eric Kayser, a Paris-based artisan baker, opened a branch of his Eric Kayser Artisan Boulanger at the Power Plant Mall in Makati; people line up not only for croissants (plain, almond, and chocolate) but also for his praline, pistachio, and lemon cream pastries and his brioche with white chocolate chips.
Because the Filipino appetite for sweets is all embracing, the home table accommodates both domestic and imported goods. However, native sweets remain the preferred comfort food, and Filipinos living both in the islands and abroad continue to crave puto, suman, and bibingka.
See also east asia.
pica is the scientific term for the craving and subsequent consumption of nonfood items. It is not an acronym, or an abbreviation, or a famous physician’s last name. Pica pica is, in fact, the genus and species of the common magpie. Because of their attraction to shiny objects, magpies were thought to be birds with an indiscriminate appetite. (As it turns out, they don’t swallow these items; they build their nests with them.) By analogy, the human condition of desiring nonfood items was given the name “pica” in the sixth century by a Byzantine physician, Aetius of Amida.
Although pica may seem to be a mere curiosity, it is actually ubiquitous. There are written descriptions dating back to the fourth century b.c.e., and archaeological evidence suggests that it may be millions of years old. Physicians, explorers, slavers, missionaries, and anthropologists have described its occurrence in almost every country. It is found with greatest frequency among pregnant women and young children, especially those living in the tropics; in some countries it is a hallmark of pregnancy.
Pica Substances
While there are many craved nonfood items, particular terms are used for the most common types of cravings. These terms combine the Greek names of specific items, such as geo (earth), amylon (starch), and pagos (hard objects, in this case ice), with phagein (to eat), thus yielding geophagy, amylophagy, and pagophagy. However, not just any type of earth (or starch or ice) will do. Just as we now know that the magpie’s appetite is not indiscriminate—those nonfood items in their beaks are housing materials, not lunch—pica cravings are also very specific.
Take geophagy, for example. It is manifested differently throughout the world: Mexican women prefer adobe, women in the American South are partial to plastic baggies of white clay sold in convenience stores, and Zanzibari women excavate and bake their own clays. But around the world, texture and smell are the most important qualities of geophagic earth (and most of the other nonfoods craved). The smoothest soils (i.e., those high in clay content) are the most sought after, from the Arctic to the Amazon, and everywhere in between. The smell of earth, especially after it is dampened, is the other important criterion for soil selection.
Earth as a Delicacy
Although the lengths that people go to remove dirt from their clothes, bodies, and homes make it hard to believe, “good dirt” is an absolute delicacy the world over. For geophagists, finding earth that has the “right” smell and texture brings immense pleasure, in the same way a warm Krispy Kreme doughnut might for others. Indeed, some of the terminology used for geophagic earths is similar to that for sweets. For example, in Haiti, geophagic earth is known as bonbons terres, and pregnant women there relish it like candy. Along the Swahili coast, geophagic earth is described as tamu, meaning both “sweet” and “delicious,” even though there is nothing sugary per se about the earths. Sometimes the connection is even more literal: in a Georgia hospital, a birthday cake was spotted that was made out of baked red clay, topped with butter and salt. Earth is not the only nonfood snack that is relished; hunks of raw starch (amylophagy) were once typically stocked in the snack aisle of grocery stores in the South, right next to the cookies and candy.
Strength of Cravings
To say that geophagists “eat earth” does not convey the often imperative nature of their drive. In fact, the desire for pica substances is so overwhelming that the strength of these cravings has been equated with those for tobacco, alcohol, and drugs for hundreds of years. Today, in online discussion groups about pica, people regularly use terms and phrases such as “addiction,” “getting clean,” and “staying off the stuff.” See addiction.
Compelled by these cravings, people go to extreme lengths to eat the earth that their hearts desire. They may be secretive about the whereabouts of their clay pit, walk many miles to the site with “good dirt,” tussle with the cattle who are also eating “their” clay, and hide their behavior from family members.
Given this strong desire, it should be no surprise that people have a very hard time ceasing their pica behavior. Nineteenth-century descriptions of the punishment meted out to slaves who engaged in pica make it clear that even terrible physical punishment, including whippings and iron masks, was no deterrent. These days, threats from family members, admonishment from physicians, and promises to God are often of no avail.
Explanations for the Behavior
Although pica has been dismissed as pathological and aberrant for many centuries, evidence currently available suggests that pica may actually be adaptive. Experimental data indicate that the binding capacity of at least some pica substances makes them capable of shielding us from damage that would otherwise be inflicted by harmful chemicals and pathogens. The clay content may also have soothing anti-diarrheal or anti-nausea effects, similar to Kaopectate. (Indeed, Kaopectate takes its name from one species of clay, kaolin.) Furthermore, the demographic profile of those who engage in pica most frequently—pregnant women and young children living in the tropics—is also consistent with this hypothesis, since they are most biologically vulnerable.
See also sweetness preference.
pie, at its most elemental, consists of some food completely or partially enclosed in dough and baked. This simple concept has given rise to an almost infinite number of variations, including some of the most popular and iconic dishes in the Western world.
In the English language, the words for various categories of pie are first attested in the medieval period—specifically, “pie” appears in 1303, “pasty” in 1296, “flan” (as “flawn”) in about 1300, and “tart” in about 1400. See flan (tart) and tart. The actual physical pie, however, undoubtedly predates the written record by millennia. Wrapping food in dough before cooking is a very ancient and widespread practice (it is most likely that cooking on hot rocks or boiling preceded oven-baking the dish, as less fuel was needed) and probably developed simultaneously in several areas where cereal grain was the staple food. We know that the ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed food wrapped in dough, although existing records do not contain sufficient details of ingredients or methods to be certain of the type of pastry used or the style of these “pies.”
The American photographer Berenice Abbott was hired by the Works Progress Administration to chronicle the buildings and neighborhoods of New York. This 1936 photograph, part of her Changing New York project, shows an automat at 977 Eighth Avenue, where a slice of pie was delivered at the push of a button. the museum of the city of new york / art resource, n.y.
The pie as we know it today came into being in medieval Europe, where the raw materials were in abundance: forests for wood (baking requires a lot of fuel), wheat for the best pastry, and hard fats such as lard and butter (oil does not make superb pastry.) See butter; flour; and pie dough. An open fire is fine for boiling liquid food in pots, or for roasting large pieces of meat on spits, but it is problematic for small pieces of food, soft foods such as fruit, or dishes requiring gentle cooking, such as custards. See custard. To solve this problem, cooks turned to professional bakers’ ovens, and since metal baking pans were rare, they created thick, hand-raised pastry shells called “coffins” to hold the contents. See pans. This method of cooking is reflected in the name bakemete (“meat” in the generic sense of any food), used to indicate a pie of small, soft, or mixed ingredients. A fifteenth-century Bake Mete recipe (Harleian MS. 279) turns out to be a tart of pears and “gobbets of marrow” in saffron-flavored custard cooked in “fair little coffins.”
The hard pastry coffins also facilitated preservation of the dish. By today’s standards, pies in this pre-refrigeration era were kept for a frighteningly long time. William Salmon’s The Family Dictionary: or, houshold companion, published in 1695, contains a recipe for a Boar Pie, which advises that, if sealed with butter, “it will, if it be not set in a very moist place, keep a whole Year.” The third advantage of the hard pastry coffin was that it functioned as its own container, which, along with its storage potential, enabled pies to be sent long distances as gifts, or to be used as provisions for sea voyages.
It is commonly said that the tough, thick pastry of these coffins was “not meant to be eaten,” but in an era when every grain of cereal was hard-won, and absolutely nothing was wasted, this is difficult to believe. It is likely that the well-to-do themselves did not eat 2-inch-thick hard pie-shells made solely from rye flour and water—but these crusts were surely given to those lower down in the pecking order. There is also evidence from medieval cookery books that pastry was crumbled and used to thicken liquid dishes, and that the coffins were occasionally refilled.
Gervase Markham, in his English House-wife (1615), was adamant that “our English Hus-wife must be skilfull in pastery, and know … what paste is fit for every meate, and how to handle and compound such pastes,” and he gives general advice on a number of different types of pastry, some of which are clearly meant to be eaten. The first known explicit instructions for “short” edible pastry appear in A Propre New Booke of Cokery (1545), but from hints in much earlier recipe manuscripts it is apparent that pastry meant to be enjoyed as an intrinsic part of the dish was already in existence well before this date.
To make short paest for tarte.
Take fyne floure and a cursey of fayre water and a dyshe of swete butter and a lyttel saffron, and the yolckes of two egges and make it thynne and tender as ye maye.
Cookery texts from Continental Europe show a large range of types of pastry and fillings. Le ménagier de Paris (1393) includes “pies of turtle-doves and larks,” “pies of cow and talemouse” (a cheese and egg tart), and “sugared meat tarts.” Lancelot de Casteau’s Ouverture de cuisine (Liège, 1604) gives instructions for “paste of fine flour with eggs & butter and a little water,” which is clearly intended to be eaten. The first comprehensive French text devoted to the art of the pastry cook (credited to Pierre François de la Varenne), Le pâtissier françois (Paris, 1653), contains instructions for several types of pastry, from robust “coffin” dough made with rye flour and hot water to thin, multilayered puff pastry made with butter. See pastry, puff.
Unfortunately for the cook and the historian, there is no consistent correlation between the style and the usage of the words “pie,” “tart,” and “flan,” even within national boundaries. In France, a flan remains a fruit- or custard-filled tart, whereas elsewhere the Spanish caramel custard is the more common meaning. See flan (pudím). In the north of England, the word “tart” is commonly applied to the double-crust version, which is called a “pie” in the south of the country. Similarly, the unqualified word “pie” in Australia indicates a double-crust meat pie, but in the United States it just as regularly evokes a sweet, single (bottom) crust dish. To confuse the issue further, several iconic American pies are not pies at all: Boston cream pie is indisputably a cake, and whoopie pie is a type of soft cookie. See boston cream pie and whoopie pie.
American Pies
When the first English settlers moved to North America, they took with them, as migrants inevitably do, their own recipes and style of cooking. Just as inevitably, they found the conditions quite different from their homeland, and they had to adapt their cooking to the locally available ingredients. Their English wheat did not thrive in New England, and the settlers were quickly forced to adopt maize as their staple food. The small amount of wheat that was available in the early decades of the colonies was more economically diverted to use in pies rather than bread. This situation surely sowed the seeds of the excellent reputation of New England’s pies, and of its citizens’ love of pies at breakfast.
Conversely, the apple seedlings that these early folk brought to their new home thrived, and New England apple orchards proved prolific. Americans did not invent apple pie, but there is no doubt that the roots of the nation’s love for it were laid down within the first decades of the seventeenth century.
Unlike many New World foods, the pumpkin was quickly adopted by Europeans familiar with other members of the gourd family, and recipes for “pompion” pie appear in seventeenth-century European cookery books. Amelia Simmons, the author of the first genuinely American cookbook, American Cookery (1796), gives two recipes for pie made with pompkin, the second being sweetened with molasses. See molasses. A similar situation existed in regard to the sweet potato (often called “Spanish potato”), which made for an easy adaptation of European pies made with root vegetables and tubers.
A huge repertoire of pies (particularly sweet pies) has developed in the United States since those early days. In addition to apple, pumpkin, and sweet potato, several others justify particular mention. Shoo-fly pie is a Pennsylvania Dutch specialty reminiscent of English treacle tart, but made instead with molasses. Its name supposedly comes from it being as attractive to flies as to humans. See pennsylvania dutch. Pecans are indigenous to North America and are similar in appearance to European walnuts, so it is perhaps surprising that recipes for pecan pie do not appear until the late nineteenth century. See nuts. Key lime pie owes its origins to the invention of condensed milk in the United States in 1856—an invention that must have been a godsend to cooks in pre-refrigeration days in the dairy-poor (but lime-rich) Florida Keys, who adapted the cream pie concept to the new product. Lemon meringue pie is another example of a dish evolving from an earlier concept. Lemon-flavored cream and custard puddings and pies existed in medieval times, and meringue was perfected (probably in France) in the seventeenth century. See meringue. The same process applies to the Southern favorite, chess pie, which has similar features to seventeenth-century “cheesecakes without cheese.” See cheesecake. Chilled chiffon or refrigerator pies seem to be particularly popular in the United States, and grasshopper pie—a mint and chocolate concoction with a cookie crust—is a relatively recent addition to the scene, appearing in the 1950s.
The modern pie comprises a vast number of styles, including open-face pies, which lack a top crust; double-crust pies, with a top crust; lattice-topped pies, with dough strips woven across the top; and deep-dish pies, lacking a bottom crust but always with some type of upper crust. Pies made with a dough casing can also be “raised” or freestanding (without a pie plate) or shaped as portable pockets, baked or fried, and eaten out of hand, in which case they are regionally known as “hand pies.” Pies with a bottom crumb crust are most often used for unbaked fillings such as puddings, chiffon, Bavarian cream, or ice cream. See desserts, chilled and desserts, frozen. Pies with a crumb (streusel) topping may have a crumb or pastry bottom crust with either a sweet or savory filling; these are related to crumb-topped fruit crisps and shoo-fly pie, while cobblers, slumps, grunts, and spoon-pies are in the same family but are usually topped with biscuit dough or dumplings. See fruit desserts, baked and streusel.
The love of pies has been incorporated into the American national identity. The phrase “as American as apple pie,” first cited in the 1920s, is now in common usage, and American soldiers fought for “Mom and apple pie” during World War II. It is also indisputable that pies play important roles in the nation’s cultural events and celebrations. There are regional preferences and specialties, of course, but the whole nation appears to go pie-crazy at Thanksgiving. Clementine Paddleford, in her book How America Eats (1960), wrote:
Tell me where your grandmother came from and I can tell you how many kinds of pie you serve for Thanksgiving. In the Midwest two is the usual, mince and pumpkin…. Down East it’s a threesome, cranberry, mince and pumpkin, a sliver of each, and sometimes, harking back to the old days around Boston, four kinds of pie were traditional for this feast occasion—mince, cranberry, pumpkin and a kind called Marlborough, a glorification of everyday apple.
Many states have nominated a pie as an “official” state food, including Delaware (peach pie), Florida (Key lime pie), Indiana (sugar cream pie), Maine (blueberry pie), Oklahoma (pecan pie), and Louisiana, which alone has chosen a savory pie—the Natchitoches meat pie. See state desserts. With such a volume of popular and governmental support, it seems likely that America’s love affair with the pie is set to continue indefinitely.
pie dough, a simple blend of flour, fat, flavoring, and liquid, is magically transformed by heat into a crust with deliciously varied qualities: buttery, tender, and flaky (for fresh fruit pies); tender and crisp (for open-face tarts); tender but sturdy (for soft custard pies); or tender and crisp but moisture-proof (for hand-held juicy pies or turnovers). The type of fat in the dough is a determining factor. Many American bakers today prefer to use a blend of fats, namely butter plus a small amount of shortening, which bakes into a rich, buttery crust that is tender, “short,” and also exceptionally flaky—the latter a characteristic uniquely important to American bakers.
Flakiness is created when ice-cold fat is lightly mixed with the flour and salt, then pinched into large flakes; when this dough is baked in a sufficiently hot oven, steam quickly forms, separating the starch layers and pushing up the air pockets left by melted fat so that the heat can set the starch into flakes. By contrast, the classic French dough pâte brisée, made with virtually the same ingredients (little or no sugar but always containing all-butter), has a higher fat-to-flour ratio and is mixed differently: butter is worked into the dough slightly more, by a technique called fraisage, by which bits of dough are pushed together with the heel of the hand on the countertop. Pâte brisée has a buttery flavor and toothsome texture but is somewhat less obviously flaky.
American pie dough descended from the British model and originally used lard and suet as fats, but over the past nearly 200 years, tastes and recipes have changed. In 1911, Crisco, a solid all-vegetable shortening, was introduced to the American market. After World War II, because it was heavily advertised, cheap, easy to store, and produced tender results, Crisco quickly became American bakers’ favorite fat. It was not until 1961, when Julia Child and colleagues asserted in Mastering the Art of French Cooking that butter plus a small amount of shortening yields the best result, that bakers turned once again to a blend of butter and other fat. This trend prevails today, although some home bakers now rely on a shortcut, using store-bought crusts they shape and fill themselves.
Wheat flour, the pie baker’s most important ingredient, contains gluten, an essential element that gives dough its structure. This stretchy, elastic substance develops when two of wheat’s several proteins are mixed with water: glutenin gives dough strength, while gliadin provides elasticity. Pie dough needs some gluten to bind it together, but not too much, or it will become tough. Different types of flour, with different gluten levels, absorb differing amounts of water, and all of these factors affect the resulting crust. For all-purpose pie crusts, most home bakers get excellent results using all-purpose unbleached flour, generally milled from a blend of hard and soft wheat containing roughly 10 to 13 percent gluten. For very tender baked goods, one can also use a low-gluten (8 to 9 percent protein) pastry flour, milled from soft wheat and able to hold a lot of fat without toughening, or a blend of pastry flour and all-purpose flour. See flour.
Fat, depending on the type used, and the way it is mixed into flour, affects pie dough’s texture, tenderness, richness, and taste. Fat coats the elastic strands of gluten in wheat flour, making them slippery, separated, and softened; some fats coat gluten more completely than others. The more the fat is worked, or rubbed, into the flour in the dough, the more moisture-proof, tender, and less flaky the dough will be.
Unsalted U.S. Grade A or AA butter gives dough the most delicious, rich flavor. Because salt levels vary with the brand, it is best to use unsalted butter in all baking. Butter, about 81 percent fat, contains proteins, dry milk solids, and water. It must be kept very cold during handling; if it warms up, it can release water that may develop gluten in the flour. See butter.
The flakiest crusts are made with 100 percent fats such as lard (rendered from pork fat, which must be fresh to avoid an off flavor) or vegetable shortening. See shortening.
Flakiness occurs when very cold solid fat is pinched with flour, or “smeared” into it with the heel of the hand, to make “leaves” of fat between layers of flour starch. The larger and colder the leaves of fat, the larger the flakes in the crust. When this dough is placed in a sufficiently hot oven (425°F [218.3°C] for the first 15 minutes of baking), liquid in the dough quickly turns into steam, which immediately causes the gluten strands and starch between the fat layers to puff up, set, and create flakes before the fat melts. Shortening has a higher melting point than butter, so it doesn’t melt as fast, allowing steam to push up even more flakes before it succumbs to the heat.
Liquid is needed in pie dough to moisten and activate some (but not too much) gluten in the flour, giving dough structure. Cold liquid, such as ice water, is preferred, because cold inhibits gluten development, helping dough’s tenderness, as does the addition of an acidic ingredient such as vinegar, lemon juice, buttermilk, sour cream, or yogurt. See buttermilk; sour cream; and yogurt. Acid literally cuts the gluten strands in flour, making them “shorter” (as in “short,” tender dough) so they do not become elastic or tough. Also, an acidic dough will set up faster in the heat of the oven.
Many bakers like to add an egg yolk to pie dough along with liquids, because it contains natural lecithin that helps make dough pliable for easy handling; the yolk also adds richness, color, and a little flavor. A whole egg (with the binding/drying action of its white) is added only to make a crust stronger and sturdier—good qualities for moist fillings. See eggs.
Vodka occasionally appears as a liquid ingredient in pie dough, replacing a portion of the water in specially formulated recipes. It is considered a novel tenderizing agent because, although it is a liquid and can moisten flour, it contains 40 percent ethanol (alcohol). Since this is not water, it will neither bind with or nor develop gluten. Alcohol vaporizes during baking and leaves no trace flavors.
Flavoring such as salt adds flavor to dough while enhancing the strength of the gluten; tender pie dough uses small amounts of salt. A little salt also makes sweets taste a little sweeter. Sugar, in small amounts, gives flavor and, because it caramelizes, enhances the color of a baked crust; however, since sugar weakens the elasticity of gluten, excessive amounts of sugar can transform a pliable, easy-to-handle pie dough into a sandy, crumbly texture that is very difficult to roll out. See salt and sugar.
See sugar sculpture.
See sugars, unrefined.
piñatas, candy-filled papier mâché ephemeral art, are a staple in Mexican fiestas ranging from the traditional Christmas posadas (the nine days preceding Christmas) to birthday parties. Piñatas come in all shapes and sizes and are used in celebrations of all kinds, including secular and religious holidays, bridal showers, and political rallies. These colorful containers have now made their way into mainstream culture, appearing at children’s birthday parties throughout the United States.
From its likely origins in China and subsequent travels through Italy and Spain and finally to Mexico and the United States, the piñata tradition has remained basically the same: a candy-filled container that is broken by a blindfolded player. Marco Polo, on his twelfth-century visit to China, is said to have encountered the custom of breaking a figure of an animal as part of the New Year’s celebration. The tradition eventually spread to Italy and Spain, where it was laden with new meaning: as part of Lenten festivities, the piñata came to symbolize the battle between good and evil. Breaking it open with a decorated stick, participants were rewarded with candies for having vanquished evil and temptation. In Spain, el baile de la piñata, celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent, continued the tradition as blindfolded participants struck a clay pot filled with candy until it broke.
The Spanish brought this tradition to the Americas and used it to proselytize the indigenous populations. Serendipitously, the Aztecs already had a somewhat similar celebration, during which a treasure-filled clay pot was struck and the offerings spilled to honor their god Huitzilopochtli; the Mayans also played a game in which blindfolded players struck a clay pot hanging from a string. Thus, the Spanish found an easy corollary and aligned the game with three theological teachings of the Catholic Church: faith, hope, and charity. The pot covered with colorful papel de china (tissue paper) represented evil or the Devil, who is often attractively disguised to attract gullible sinners. The shape of the traditional piñata with its seven-pointed star, one for each of the seven deadly sins, had symbolic value; the candies, fruit, and toys represented earthly pleasures. Thus, the game symbolized blind faith (the blindfolded player) conquering evil. Second, the colorfully decorated pot is a symbol of hope as it hangs overhead—in the heavens. It is only by breaking the pot with virtue (the colorfully decorated stick) that the hope for a reward for good acts can be realized. Finally, as the vessel that holds all good is broken, everyone enjoys the blessings, the reward for leading a good life.
Today, the religious symbolism of the piñata has been all but lost, although breaking a piñata remains one of the essential elements at the posadas, during which parishioners go from house to house asking for lodging, as the holy family did on Christmas Eve; each of the posada’s nine nights concludes with the breaking of a piñata. The original clay pot has given way to a papier mâché construction that uses reed cane and paper to construct elaborate and colorful shapes that range from Disney characters to political figures. At Easter, popularly known as el día de la coneja (the day of the rabbit), a piñata in the shape of a giant Easter egg or a rabbit is broken by Mexican and Latino families at outdoor picnics throughout greater Mexico, including the American Southwest.
Invariably, the piñata is filled with candy, most often individually wrapped hard candies. While in the more traditional Christmas celebration, the piñata is filled with colación, a sugarcoated anise seed hard candy, at Easter it is filled with traditional Easter candies, such as tamarindo, jelly beans, peeps, and marshmallow eggs.
See also festivals and mexico.
Pitts, ZaSu (1894–1963), enjoyed a long career as an actress that began during the silent-screen era and lasted almost 50 years, through talking pictures, vaudeville, Broadway, radio, and television. In her early twenties she was sent to Hollywood by her widowed mother to earn a few dollars at the film studios, and by 1917 was cast in her first film, The Little Princess, opposite Mary Pickford. Her transition to the talkies was seamless. Pitts was cast in many comic roles, which made the most of her big, woeful eyes and nervous, fluttering hands.
Pitts delighted in preparing candies for her friends and colleagues on the set, and she brought this joy to the writing of a cookbook that was published late in the year of her death. Candy Hits is organized along the lines of Pitts’s career path, beginning with four basic candy recipes in “Silent-Screen Days,” and continuing to more complicated procedures in “Talking-Picture Days.” The recipes are enhanced by Pitts’s humorous stories, including how she learned to dip chocolates—she advises cooks to pray before beginning that adventure. The “Stage-Tour Collection” includes recipes Pitts collected while touring, while “Television Days” contains mostly fruit and nut desserts the actress prepared for dinner parties. Pirate’s Treasure, made with fresh coconuts, was one of her favorites, as were Texas Tycoons, crispy, brittle treats made with pecans, butter, and sugar. The final section, “Candies for Holidays,” includes seasonal treats, such as lollipops, fondant Easter eggs, and candy apples.
The silent-screen star ZaSu Pitts used to bring homemade candy to Hollywood parties. At the end of her life she penned Candy Hits, a charming cookbook of her favorite recipes.
placenta is an ancient Roman cake of goat’s cheese and honey layered between a dried semolina pastry (called tracta, which some consider to be an early form of pasta) and an outer wheat pastry shell with a central knob of dough. The top and edges were scored, and the cake was said to resemble the seed pod of the mallow flower. This Roman dish was descended from the Greek plakous, which is normally understood to mean a flat cake, although some scholars believe it was named from the fact that it was “full of individual flat sheets.” The name survives in many European languages, particularly the Rumanian platchynta, which resembles the ancient cake, and the Hungarian palacsinta, which now refers to crepes. See ancient world and pancakes.
The Greek dramatist Antiphanes described the ancient pastry this way: “The streams of the tawny bee, mixed with the clotted river of the bleating she goat, placed upon a flat receptacle of the virgin daughter of Zeus, delighting in 10,000 delicate veils—or shall I simply say plakous.” In Greek and Roman culture, plakous was both a delicate dinner dessert and a sacrificial cake. It was offered at the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore in Corinth before the second century b.c.e., and ceramic votive offerings of these cakes were also found at the site. A detailed Latin recipe is preserved in Cato the Elder’s agricultural manual De Agricultura; the fact of its presence in the collection, along with a number of other similar cakes, is assumed to reflect the need to make regular offerings to the gods in the course of maintaining a successful farm.
At some point in the Middle Ages, the word placenta came to be used for the human afterbirth, which has a coincidental resemblance to the ancient cake. Throughout history the human afterbirth has been cooked and consumed by new mothers; it is said to resemble liver in texture. Currently, the placenta may be dried and rendered into pill form so that new mothers may benefit from the recognized reduction in the incidence of postpartum depression in those who consume the organ. Votive offerings in the form of cakes formed to resemble the organ were also traditionally made by new mothers in many primitive cultures, a perhaps not coincidental link to the original ancient sacrificial cake.
plantations, sugar, are large-scale enterprises that grow and process sugar for distant markets. Historically, the term “plantation” was sometimes used for products such as fish and iron, but the typical plantation produced tropical plants such as rubber, oil palm, cotton, coffee, and, above all, sugarcane, for the European market. Because sugarcane requires not only abundant water but higher temperatures than those found in the temperate zones, from the fourteenth century on, Europe turned to overseas plantations to acquire its sugar. See sugarcane. It looked first to the Mediterranean, then to the Atlantic islands, then to tropical colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, and finally to European- or American-controlled tropical lands worldwide. The height of sugarcane plantation culture was in the Caribbean around 1800. From the late nineteenth century on, cane plantations faced fierce competition from the temperate sugar beet. See sugar beet. It should be noted that India, China, and Southeast Asia did not adopt the system of sugar plantations.
Since plantations were so isolated, they were at once intensely local and part of far-flung global networks. Politically, they were controlled by Europe or by former European colonies, particularly the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the Dutch, the French, and the Americans. Their capital came from Europe, their labor from the non-European world—first from Africa, then from Asia. They were large-scale enterprises, employing from 50 to 200 people in the eighteenth century, and even more later on. Because as much productive land as possible was turned over to sugar, provisions for the owners and managers, and to some extent for the enslaved as well, were imported. Legally, the plantation owners and managers took discipline into their own hands, with cases rarely being referred to European courts.
In his series Sugar Children, the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz focuses on the children of plantation workers on the island of Saint Kitts. To create these works, Muniz took a Polaroid of his subjects, then used that image to draw each child using sugar as a medium. He photographed the drawing to get the finished result. Valentina, the Fastest dates to 1996. art © vik muniz / licensed by vaga, new york, n.y.
By the fourteenth century, Europeans had learned from Islam how to grow, crush, reduce, and refine sugar, establishing plantations in Crete, Cyprus, and Sicily in the eastern Mediterranean. Enslaved war captives from different parts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea provided the labor.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Spanish and Portuguese empires expanded, they established plantations in the Atlantic islands, New Spain, and Brazil. Sugar was shipped from Madeira from 1455, and from the Canaries from the 1480s. One of Cortés’s first actions after the Spanish conquest was to establish sugar mills south of Mexico City in the late 1520s, and by the 1540s sugar mills dotted the northern coast of Brazil. Enslaved Africans were imported to provide labor. See slavery.
Growing the cane was the work of field laborers, who planted the crop (it had to be replanted every two years), weeded it, harvested it, and with the help of ox carts hauled it to the mill. In the most modern of the mills, the vertical three-roller mill—perhaps brought to Spanish America by voyagers on the galleons that sailed annually between Acapulco in what is now Mexico and Manila in the Spanish-owned Philippines—replaced rotating stone and platform presses. Three vertical iron-plated rollers, moved by overhead gears, were powered by a water mill, windmill, or oxen. A slave fed the cane through the first and middle roller; another fed it back between the middle and third roller. The cane juice dribbled out to a collecting pan below. The bagasse (crushed cane) was thrown away.
The juice moved through a pipe to a boiling house lower down the hill, which at some point became equipped with a sequence of six copper boiling pans. Slaves moved the juice from pan to pan as it became successively thicker and boiled at a higher temperature. To get rid of the impurities, they added blood, lime juice, or lye. When the sugar began to granulize, they took it from the last boiling pan, strained it, and put it in clay jars to cure into brown sugar in the purging house. If a finer, whiter sugar was required, they packed damp clay on top of the jar. Water trickled through the sugar, removing the impurities and leaving white “clayed” sugar behind. See sugar refining.
The Portuguese and Spanish exported much of the sugar in addition to consuming it locally. Profits were sufficiently large that in New Spain (Mexico), for example, the owners of the sugar mill of San Juan de Atotonilco set aside the income from 6 percent of its sugar loaves for the construction of the convent of Santa Rosa in Puebla. The lower-quality molasses that was a byproduct of this process was either sold locally as a cheap sweetener or was distilled into cane liquor (rum, aguardiente) in the plantation distillery. See molasses and rum.
Between the 1630s and the 1650s, the Dutch came to control the northern part of Brazil and its sugar plantations. When they lost hegemony over the area, cosmopolitan Dutch merchant families introduced skilled workers and knowhow to the Caribbean. Royalist refugees from the English Civil War of 1642–1651 began planting and processing sugar on the island of Barbados. By the mid-seventeenth century, the island was given over to sugar monoculture, shipping some 5,000 tons in 1650 and five times that in 1700. From the 1740s, the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the English colony of Jamaica became the largest sugar producers in the region, though plantations were found throughout the Caribbean islands.
From the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the main labor force consisted of enslaved men and women from sub-Saharan Africa. Disease, heavy labor, and often inadequate diets meant that the population was not self-sustaining but had to be constantly supplemented by a fresh supply of slaves. All in all, some 11 million Africans were forcibly moved to the New World, overwhelmingly the largest group of migrants, and making this the largest population movement in the preindustrial world. Women as well as men worked in the fields and as domestic servants. They were also expected to grow much of their own food in small plots of land allotted for this purpose. Those who escaped the harsh conditions on the plantations, the Maroons, had no hope of returning to their own lands but had to find secure refuges in the New World.
In the nineteenth century, the Caribbean sugar plantations began a long decline. In 1804, Haiti became an independent republic following a successful slave revolution. One European and American nation after another banned the slave trade and abolished slavery. The plantation economy shifted once again to tropical regions controlled by Europe or the United States, notably Hawaii, Queensland, Zanzibar, Natal, Fiji, and the Indian Ocean islands. Within the United States, sugar was grown in Texas and Louisiana. Slave labor was replaced by indentured labor, primarily Asian, but also with workers from the Caribbean and the Atlantic islands.
Toward the end of the century, beet sugar, which grew in temperate climates, challenged cane sugar. The cane industry, exemplified by the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association, responded by setting up research stations to investigate all aspects of breeding, growing, crushing, and refining sugar. New varieties of cane were introduced as a result of this work. See sugarcane agriculture. Steam, and later electric, power replaced animal, wind, and water power in the mills. Techniques developed for beet sugar, such as a partial vacuum to speed up evaporation, were also adopted by the cane sugar industry. By the late twentieth century, sugar plantations were fully mechanized, as huge machines prepared the ground and harvested the cane, trucks moved it to refineries, and the refineries themselves were automated. See sugar refineries.
Historians have produced a number of theories about the role of sugar plantations in world history. In 1944, Eric Williams, an economic historian and later prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, argued in Capitalism and Slavery that black slavery generated the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution. After decades of research and debate, historians have concluded that this cannot have been the case, since the combined profits of the slave trade and Caribbean plantations made up no more than 5 percent of Britain’s national income. In 1985, Sidney Mintz, in Sweetness and Power, argued that sugar played a key role in the growth of capitalism and imperialism as it was transformed from a luxury to a necessity, acquiring new uses and meanings and becoming “one of the people’s opiates,” at least in the British Isles.
The legacy of the sugar plantations is seen in the crumbling great houses that have been turned into tourist attractions, such as the country houses and merchant mansions in England and New England built with the proceeds from sugar and filled with furniture made from mahogany trees cleared for cane fields, or in the Tate Gallery in London, funded by the Tate family, partners in Tate & Lyle, the major British sugar refiners. See tate & lyle. Most of all, though, this legacy is seen in Africans in Brazil and the Caribbean; Indians in Fiji and Guyana; Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos in Hawaii; Indians in Mauritius; and all the other millions of people moved around the world to supply the European demand for sweetness.
See also sugar.
Plat, Sir Hugh (1552–1608), was an Elizabethan and Jacobean gentleman who lived in London and wrote on many scientific and culinary topics. Almost half of his book for women, Delightes for Ladies, published in 1600, is devoted to candying and preserving. The origins of most of the recipes are traceable in his surviving manuscripts. Not all are Plat’s own recipes; a third are from a manuscript he acquired, probably dating from the 1550s, including an extended passage that covers the whole process of comfit making, long regarded by historians as written by Plat. See comfit. Plat’s fascination with technology is reflected in many of his recipes. He revels in the complexity of sugar-plate making, describing how to mold sugar, and marzipan, into intricate shapes. See marzipan and sugar sculptures. He also liked “conceits,” created by shaping marzipan to resemble cooked rabbits and birds: “a [sugar] banquet may bee presented in the forme of a supper.” Living flowers might be candied in a garden “so you may bid your friends after dinner to a growing banquet.”
Plat consulted professionals at work, including his school friend the apothecary “Mr Parsons” and “Mr Webber one of her ma[jes]ties privie Kichin.” He was keen to outdo them; by following Plat’s recipe for syrup of violets “you gaine one quarter of sirup, more than diverse Apothecaries doe.” From personal knowledge of London tradesmen Plat gives money-saving advice: “the garble [broken pieces] of almonds will make a cheap paste” of marzipan; musk sugar is worth the trouble it takes to make because “it is sold for two shillings the pound”; and, because confectioners only use the peel, “you may buy the inward pulp of Civill Oranges … of the comfit-makers for a small matter” to make orange juice. Plat’s book was part of a general upsurge of writing on fruit and flower preservation at the time, and its 23 editions are indicative of its popularity.
See also candied flowers; candied fruit; and flower waters.
plated desserts refer to sweet offerings, usually served at the end of a meal but also as snacks, that are individually composed on a plate, in a bowl, or using another serving vessel. They are generally for the enjoyment of a single diner, although they can be shared.
Presentation has long been an important aspect of desserts, particularly in public settings such as restaurants and hotels. The nature of desserts—intended to be celebratory and indulgent rather than nourishing—is no doubt one reason for that. The fact that desserts tend to be made in advance and served cold or at room temperature, allowing for time to shape, mold, and decorate them, might be a factor, too. Complex dessert decorations go back centuries, particularly for cakes. In his 1846 British cookbook The Modern Cook, Charles Elmé Francatelli, chef to Queen Victoria, advised decorating wedding cakes with “blossoms or sprigs—or, even wreaths of orange-flowers,” and he garnished genoise cakes with pistachios, currants, meringue pearls and leaves, and stripes or dots of “any kind of bright preserves.” See cake decorating.
Elaborate decoration of plated desserts in the West is more recent and probably stems from the innovations—beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1980s—of the nouvelle cuisine chefs in Lyon and Roanne, France, such as Paul Bocuse and the brothers Pierre and Jean Troisgros, who took over their parents’ Roanne restaurant at the Hôtel des Platanes in 1954. The Troisgros’s restaurant had a trolley that rolled onto the dining room floor, and guests were offered “Le Grand Dessert,” a selection of cakes, pastries, poached fruits, ice creams, and sauces that were plated at tableside according to each diner’s preference. French chefs influenced by this nouvelle cuisine style, including Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, brought the ideas and aesthetic to the United States in the 1980s. However, they plated desserts according to their or their pastry chefs’ taste, rather than according to the whim of their guests.
The same basic French elements remained at the heart of plated desserts for the next decade, with a reliance on fruit coulis, vanilla sauce (crème anglaise), apricot glaze, and candied fruit—particularly the maraschino cherry. See candied fruit and sauce. Mint sprigs and whipped cream were also common elements. Jacques Pépin, in his 1988 book The Art of Cooking, garnished most of the desserts simply with those elements—an orange tart in the book is plated only with mint and candied orange peel.
Presentation has long been an important element of the dessert course, particularly in public settings such as restaurants and hotels. This image is from a decidedly nonpublic setting, a White House State Dinner on the occasion of French president François Hollande’s visit on 11 February 2014. The White House pastry chef Bill Yosses crafted a bittersweet chocolate malted ganache from Hawaiian chocolate. bill yosses
A typical example of a plated restaurant dessert in the 1980s was the Big Boy chain’s Hot Fudge Ice Cream Cake, which comprised two rectangles of rich chocolate cake sandwiching a rectangle of vanilla ice cream. A squirt and a half of fudge was placed on each corner, and a dollop of whipped cream was piped onto the center with a star tip. The cake was topped with a maraschino cherry.
Cooks at home and in restaurants were already getting more playful, however. In a summer fruit feature in 1979, Bon Appétit magazine advocated serving blackberries layered with whipped cream in an oversized wine glass, and presented strawberries and blueberries in a large, shallow Martini glass drizzled with liqueur-spiked vanilla sauce. A dozen years later the style had not changed much, although the flavorings became more elaborate. In 1991, in a similar summer feature, Bon Appétit presented sliced peaches and whole raspberries in a goblet of sweetened wine flavored with orange zest and cinnamon. But new elements of luxury were being added: gold leaf adorns chocolate cake on a hotel buffet in a 1991 issue of Bon Appétit. More elaborate plate decorations were also coming to the fore, as readers were taught to shape leaves out of chocolate and to garnish cheesecake with white chocolate shavings.
The 1980s and 1990s were also the heyday of fruit coulis dotted with crème anglaise, or vice versa, created by running a toothpick or skewer through them so that the sauces would streak slightly. See sauce. Symmetry was generally expected in plated desserts in the 1980s, but a new aesthetic emerged in the 1990s as squeeze bottles came into play. Multiple sauces often crisscrossed or dotted dessert plates.
Meanwhile, at higher-end restaurants, the architectural artistry (often called “tall food”) spearheaded by Alfred Portale at New York City’s Gotham Bar and Grill was within a few years being copied elsewhere in the city, in restaurants such as Aureole, which opened in late 1988. Tom Vacarro, the dean of baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America, recalls that the introduction into pastry kitchens in the late 1980s and early 1990s of new flexible molds that could be shaped according to pastry chefs’ whims allowed them to create stackable items. So, for example, a devil’s food mousse cake could be topped with a chocolate disk, and a blueberry-infused panna cotta could be unmolded on top of that. Such desserts were often accompanied by even taller decorations made of chocolate or spun sugar. When guests saw these new, eye-catching presentations being brought to neighboring tables, they were often convinced to place a dessert order themselves.
By the mid-1990s, desserts garnished with other desserts were not uncommon. An example is the key lime pie at the Greenhouse Grille in Sanibel, Florida, featured in Nation’s Restaurant News in 1995, which was garnished with a miniature key lime ice cream cone filled with key lime sorbet. More elaborate serving vessels came into play, too, such as a hand made out of ice that was used to serve sorbet at the Mansion Kempinski Bangkok in 1995.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, as food’s role in American popular culture became more pronounced, dessert presentations were subject to many shifting fads and styles. Deconstructed desserts, in which all of the elements are presented in unconventional ways, continue to move in and out of fashion. One example is the deconstructed s’mores at Recette in New York City, made by streaking marshmallow sauce on a plate and quickly torching it with a blowtorch. A streak of ganache is placed beside the sauce, and it is topped with a scoop of graham cracker ice cream, cocoa nibs, and a house-made graham cracker. See s’mores.
Miniature desserts have also come into fashion. They were introduced to chain restaurants by Cliff Pleau, the corporate chef of Seasons 52, a restaurant founded in 2003 specifically for aging baby boomers. Charged with only offering menu items with 450 or fewer calories, Pleau devised “mini indulgences,” small layered parfaits served in cylindrical dishes resembling shot glasses. They were so popular that they soon spread to other chains, and independent restaurants picked up on them when they discovered that customers who were hesitant to commit to large desserts were willing to order one or more smaller ones.
As the twenty-first century approached its second decade, the naturalist aesthetic that began to pervade savory cooking also found its way onto dessert plates. Pastry chefs began crumbling chocolate cookies to resemble soil—something that had been happening on kids’ menus for awhile (atop chocolate pudding studded with gummy worms). At Town House in Chilhowie, Virginia, in 2009, chef John Shields made a dessert called “purple mountains,” a yogurt sorbet that he shaped to look like rocks using a super-cold “anti-griddle.” Shields coated the sorbet with powdered macaroons mixed with powdered anise. Next to the mountains he served smaller “hills” made of buttercream flavored with anise and pastis. The mountains were nestled in a dark mocha curd and surrounded by black sesame oil.
Throughout their decades of evolution, plated desserts have remained a reflection of their time, in their own way reminding diners where they are and leaving them with a final memory of the meal they just enjoyed.
See also dessert; desserts, chilled; and desserts, frozen.
The politics of sugar reflect the fact that every industry has a political dimension, and the larger the industry, the more complex and dynamic its politics. Thus only some of the most interesting examples of sugar politics can be discussed here.
Because sugar remained a rare luxury for centuries after its introduction into Europe in the twelfth century, its politics reflected its modest economic status until trade accelerated in the mid-seventeenth century. By then, England, France, Holland, and Denmark had joined Portugal and Spain in establishing sugarcane operations in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of South America, notably in Brazil. See sugarcane and sugarcane agriculture. By the eighteenth century, sugar had already seduced the middle class. The proliferating working class of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution demanded it for factory tea breaks and family suppers known as high tea, transforming sugar into an essential food. The soaring sugar trade dominated Britain’s economy, and the politics of sugar dominated the national economic agenda. To supply sugar in huge quantities at affordable prices, the industry relied on enslaved Africans and their descendants to work the sugarcane plantations. See plantations, sugar and slavery.
Slavery and Sugar
The triangular commerce between Europe, the New World, and Africa generated an all-pervasive slave-sugar industrial complex that included slave traders; carters, dock workers, and harbor officials; shipbuilders and shipyard workers; seamen, captains, and ship’s bursars; freight forwarders, insurance agents, and customs agents; refiners, packagers, and bakers; grocers and confectioners; and brokers and commercial agents known as factors—all demanding (and sometimes receiving) assistance in the form of subsidies and economic protection or monopolies. See sugar trade.
This powerful and profitable industry operated within Britain’s mercantilist economic system, which dominated from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century and favored the metropolis and its shipping interests, refineries, and associated trades at the expense of subservient colonies. Sugarcane had to be refined in Britain and, to prevent defiant colonials from establishing their own refineries, the metropolis imposed onerous duties on refined sugar. See legislation, historical and sugar refineries.
Rise of the West India Interest
Within these mercantilist parameters, the powerful West India Interest sugar lobby worked hard to obtain favorable terms and conditions. The leading planters, often absentees who preferred the metropolis to their colonial sugar estates, established England’s most formidable lobby and threw themselves into politics. In the days of rotten boroughs, they bought parliamentary seats, and by the mid-eighteenth century they held the balance of power in the House of Commons. They could save governments from non-confidence votes, a service for which governments later repaid them.
The West Indians parlayed their political support into peerages and infiltrated the House of Lords. The absentee planter Lord Hawkesbury, later Earl of Liverpool, was president of the Privy Council for Trade and a fervent advocate for the West India Interest, including the slave trade. Other West Indians held municipal offices: William Beckford, the fabulously wealthy heir to vast Jamaican sugarcane estates, was twice lord mayor of London.
The West India Interest set new standards for political pressure tactics. They were organized, focused, and capitalized. They intermarried and allied themselves with influential landed and mercantile interests. See sugar barons.
Rum Deals and Snow for Sugar
The West India Interest lobby persuaded lawmakers to institute the extremely profitable naval rum ration—half a pint of molasses-derived grog per seaman. See rum. After the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in a deal nicknamed Snow for Sugar, the lobby convinced the English government to return the prolific sugar island of Guadeloupe to France and to retain the giant fur-trading colony of Canada. Guadeloupian sugar would have benefited consumers, but it would also have competed mercilessly with the eroding West Indian sugar operations.
In the early nineteenth century, after the collapse of Haiti’s sugar commerce triggered a soaring European demand for British sugar, consumers demanded the right to buy cheaper, free-labor East Indian sugar. The West India Interest fought back, and by appealing to their past service as agents of civilization who also brought Christianity to native and African heathens, and dismissing the consumers’ right to less expensive sugar, the Sugar Interest bested their East Indian economic rivals, whose sugar was cheaper and free labor. In 1799 the Interest also won the right to found the West India Dock Company and was awarded a 21-year monopoly to load and unload all West Indian produce at the docks on the Isle of Dogs in East London, then the world’s largest.
In their competition for capital investments and loans, the stakes for the West Indians were high. Sugar was a risky business because planters were in perpetual need of legislative support to avert catastrophes such as dramatic drops in the price of sugar, sharp increases on sugar duties, foreign competition, and publicity about the brutality of sugar slavery. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the sugar lobby was losing many of these political battles. Economic theories favoring liberalization and free trade were challenging the protectionist policies that meant preferential duties for West Indian sugar. In addition, lobbyists for the growing abolitionist movement that targeted sugar slavery were implacable opponents.
Abolitionists
The abolitionist movement was as diverse as the slave-sugar complex. It included slaves, free or freed blacks, English workers, Quakers, reformists, free traders, and others who hated slavery and identified sugar as its root cause and the symbol of its evils.
As the movement set out to work through legally sanctioned means by lobbying parliament from the late eighteenth century to 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, its members were split on whether to demand an end to the institution of slavery itself, or only an end to the slave trade that fed the institution. Most blacks and a great number of women supported immediate emancipation, but, for the sake of solidarity, they acquiesced in their leaders’ more cautious, “gradualist” positions.
The abolitionists quickly learned effective lobbying. Their leaders involved themselves in the political stratagems and alliances that move the parliamentary process along, and participated in the official inquiries and studies that precede new laws. Fact-finding was a crucial tactic. Between 1787 and 1790 the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited and described slave ships, and his official evidence on the “monstrous inequity” of the slave trade ran to over one thousand pages. In the House of Commons, William Wilberforce displayed a wooden model of the Brookes, a Liverpool slave ship, with 482 recumbent Africans jammed into its hold as he urged members to vote against the slave trade. Abolitionists also distributed Brookes prints, the first mass-distributed political poster.
In 1787, outside Parliament, they formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which spawned a network of local abolitionist associations: more than 200 in 1814, and more than 800 by the mid-1820s. This network petitioned Parliament, preached the tenets of abolitionism, raised money to publish and distribute tracts and other literature, and contributed pro-abolition letters and articles to newspapers and magazines.
The slave-sugar lobby fought back, but Lord Grenville’s new Whig government, which included the abolitionist foreign secretary Charles Fox, was in tune with the popular will. In 1807, on its 16th appearance, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act passed 115 to 15 in the House of Commons and 41 to 20 in the House of Lords, and became law on 25 March 1807.
The slave trade was now illegal. Abolitionists hoped that planters, deprived of new supplies, would be forced to improve their slaves’ working and living conditions, and that, as the slaves died off, so would the institution of slavery. To stamp out slave smuggling, abolitionists also lobbied for a clerical tool to detect smuggled African imports. But the Slave Registration Bill, passed against ferocious West Indian opposition because it required slaveholders to register each slave, failed to sound slavery’s death knell.
The abolitionists regrouped and, in 1823 they founded the male Anti-Slavery Society. Though they could neither vote nor petition Parliament, abolitionist women formed Ladies’ Anti-Slavery associations, writing and distributing abolitionist literature, fundraising, collecting signatures on petitions that abolitionist men presented to Parliament, and boycotting slave-grown sugar. These associations also embraced immediate abolition and threatened to stop donating to the Anti-Slavery Society unless it dropped its gradualist stance. In 1830, in response, the Anti-Slavery Society opted for the immediate abolition of slavery.
In 1833, when the Slavery Abolition Act finally passed, its full title trumpeted the compromises politicians had crafted to ensure its passage: “An Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies; for promising the industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves.” Slaves, however, got not one cent.
The West India Interest, masters of sugar politics, lost their battle to retain slavery but won huge concessions. They warned that emancipation would devastate the sugar industry, and if slave owners were not compensated they would stop issuing credit, honoring bills of exchange, and shipping out essential supplies. In consequence, the colonial economies would be destroyed and the government would fall.
The Whigs, cornered, agreed to compensation, but with the caveat that the applicants must make their claims in England, which would force them to satisfy their creditors as soon as they were paid. The act also forced the slaves into a transitional “apprenticeship,” a slave-like arrangement devised to help planters develop a wage-labor system.
After slavery was abolished, the politics of British sugar focused on lowering its price and supporting the powerful sugar refineries. In 1846, sugar duties were repealed, and foreign slave-grown sugar was admitted into the domestic market. Soon Cuba, with more than three million slaves, was exporting half its sugar to Britain; it had become the Caribbean’s most spectacularly successful sugar producer.
Post-bellum Sugar World
After the Civil War ended American slavery in 1863, the politics of sugar in the former slave state of Louisiana changed drastically. Most plantations lay in ruins, planters were heavily indebted, and uncooperative bankers refused to lend them money. Desperate and nearly bankrupt, they could muster little political leverage against the lobbying power of the sugar refiners, who wanted cheap sugar from any source, notably domestic beet and foreign cane sugar. More gallingly, planters were even forced to pay and make other concessions to their former slaves, now busily establishing themselves as free political beings. Ironically, these freedmen made the sugar plantations where they had lived and worked together the locus for recruiting, proselytizing, and organizing their mutual aid societies, political clubs, and militias.
The planters resisted ferociously. They withheld wages, resurrected patrols to keep the freedmen on the plantations, and fired those who registered to vote or left the cane fields to attend political meetings. They formed secret societies pledged to restoring white supremacy. In 1877 they also founded the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association and created a sugar lobby to influence federal tariff policymakers and to share research information.
Reconstruction ended in 1877 when the Republican Party withdrew federal troops from the South in return for the electoral votes to send Rutherford Hayes to the White House, despite his having lost the popular vote. Whites again held the whip hand, and black sugar workers were disempowered and disregarded. Violence, intimidation, and killing became the order of the day, and the politics of sugar were now played by powerful industry lobbies.
American Sugar Barons Take Over Hawaii
The Civil War that devastated Louisiana’s sugar industry fueled Hawaii’s, which skyrocketed as it strove to satisfy the voracious appetites of the sugar-deprived North and gold-enriched California. Many of the new planters were Americans who, in 1875, over the bitter opposition of Louisiana and other southern states, succeeded in winning duty-free status for bringing Hawaiian sugar into the United States.
The politics of sugar in late-nineteenth-century Hawaii were so brutal that President Bill Clinton apologized for them in the late twentieth century. In 1887 the Hawaiian League, a quasi-secret, American-dominated cabal of sugar planters, forced Hawaii’s king to accept the “bayonet constitution,” which transferred most of his power to a cabinet they dominated, granted voting rights to non-Asian foreigners, and imposed heavy property qualifications that eliminated most native Hawaiians. Four years later, Queen Lili’uokalani, King Kalakaua’s sister and successor, attempted to abolish the “bayonet constitution” and to limit American political power in Hawaii. The sugar plantocracy, outraged, arranged for U.S. Marines to overthrow Lili’uokalani, who was forced to abdicate. President Grover Cleveland later called Lili’uokalani’s ouster “an act of war” perpetrated on behalf of the Hawaiian sugar interests. But the American sugar barons wanted even more: free access to the huge American market, and they lobbied hard until the United States annexed Hawaii, which in 1900 became an American territory.
Forced Labor in the Sugar Beet Fields
The politics of North American sugar also dealt with the challenge of recruitment for the arduous, relentless, and low-paid work of harvesting sugar beets. The Depression produced enough desperate people to man the fields. But World War II lured so many away to the military and better jobs that the sugar industry appealed for help. The American and Canadian governments responded by drafting workers from the ranks of conscientious objectors, German prisoners of war, and Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians. They classified the latter as “aliens” and shipped them to remote detention camps and, in 1942, to beet-sugar farms in the U.S. states of Oregon, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. Then they promoted beet sugar as a “patriotic” commodity.
Cuba’s 10-Million-Ton Sugar Harvest
After Haiti’s sugar industry collapsed following the 1804 Revolution, Cuba’s industry soared to become the Caribbean’s largest, with the United States its most important customer. Cuban sugar brokers, resenting Spain’s corrupt and inefficient administration, sought closer connections and even annexation to the United States. Meanwhile, Americans bought Cuban sugar estates and worked and intermarried with Cubans. By the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, American interests controlled Cuba’s sugar industry; after the war the United States granted Cuban sugar preferred status in the American market. See spanish-american war.
Soon after seizing power in 1959, Fidel Castro began wholesale nationalization of sugar holdings; in his revolutionary Cuba, politics focused on sugar as an economic lifesaver. Following the Soviet model, confiscated plantations became state farms, and workers were guaranteed permanent employment. When they drifted off to easier, equally secure jobs, Castro ordered soldiers into the cane fields. Despite low productivity, Castro staked Cuba’s economic health on sugar, specifically a projected 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970. The yield came close—8.5 million tons, 90 percent better than in 1969, the Year of the Decisive Effort—and for two decades thereafter, with sweetheart agreements with the Soviet Union that kept sugar prices high, Cuba’s leaders made sugar the economic motor of its revolution.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba’s sugar-based economy, which was 85 percent dependent on Soviet markets, collapsed along with it. Production and prices plummeted. The old politics of sugar had become obsolete.
Black Sugar
In the Dominican Republic, the politics of sugar always include the issue of the Haitian cane workers who are essential to the industry. To ensure a steady supply of labor, the Dominican government used to bribe Haiti’s usually dictatorial presidents to provide braceros. These arrangements ended in 1986, after the dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was expelled from Haiti. Today, Haitians and their descendants still cut Dominican cane, but almost all are defined as “illegals” who can be deported at will.
Unrefined Politics of Sugar
The art of lobbying is one of sugar’s enduring legacies, and both beet and cane interests benefit from the supposed “right” of citizens to enjoy abundant amounts of sugar at cheap prices.
Within the sugar industry, refiners have replaced producers as power brokers, and many dominate production as well. In the United States, the sugar lobby spends millions of dollars annually to persuade lawmakers to preserve legislative protection for cane- and beet-sugar producers, millers, and refiners by levying a prohibitive tariff that cripples foreign sugar trying to compete in the U.S. market. See sugar lobbies. Big Sugar has also devised ways to bypass U.S. anti-trust laws, primarily by marketing through cooperatives. Sugar growers have won exemptions from some labor regulations, such as the obligation to pay overtime wages.
The politics of sugar extend into pressuring nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the World Health Organization and policymakers for government food guidelines to defy known health guidelines about restricting sugar consumption. The stakes are high. These guidelines influence food labeling, government dietary education, and even school lunch programs. Worldwide, millions of people depend for meals on NGOs that base their menus on World Health Organization guidelines. As type 2 diabetes and obesity ravage much of the world’s population, sugar lobbies shamelessly work to keep the sweet stuff flowing.
See also sugar and health; sugar riots; and sugar trust.
See children’s candy.
Pop-Tarts, toaster-ready breakfast pastries with a sweet filling, have appealed to American consumers for almost five decades, thanks to their convenience, high sugar content, long shelf life, and low cost. In 1964, Post Foods introduced a pastry called Country Squares that could be heated in a toaster, but the company was slow to market it, and sales were stagnant. The Kellogg Company saw an opportunity and launched Pop-Tarts in 1967. The product soon took off, and by the 1990s sales in Kellogg’s toaster-pastry category had tripled. Pop-Tarts became the nation’s fastest-growing breakfast product, with 29 flavors in both frosted and unfrosted varieties. However, consumer complaints in 2006 forced Kellogg’s to eliminate the phrase “made with real fruit” from the packaging.
Children are the greatest consumers of Pop-Tarts. Kellogg’s targets them by offering flavors like Knock Knock Jokes Wild Berry, Barbie Sparkleberry, American Idol Blue Raspberry, NASCAR Brown Sugar Cinnamon, and Pictionary in its Printed Fun line. Pop-Tarts reflect popular culture with their brand licensing of blockbuster animated and family films like Shrek the Third, which lures children into selecting products associated with favorite characters. Critics complain that such licensing provokes unhealthy food choices based on market forces.
Walmart’s intricate inventory tracking system has revealed that Strawberry Pop-Tarts are the most commonly purchased food item for survival before and after natural disasters. When people prepare for hurricanes, they stock up on Pop-Tarts because the food can be eaten without heating, is appropriate for any meal, and has a long shelf life.
popping sugar is no longer just a candy in the form of Pop Rocks; it is also an ingredient with which chefs, particularly those with modernist inclinations, are experimenting to add unexpected texture and sensation to their food. The company Molecule-R, which sells popping sugar, describes the chemical process by which carbon dioxide is added to melted, cooled sugars (sucrose, lactose, and glucose; some manufacturers use corn syrup as well). As the mixture hardens, the carbon dioxide becomes trapped in the sugar, releasing with a pop when it encounters moisture, as in one’s mouth. Most pastry chefs purchase unflavored versions of popping sugar from companies like Molecule-R and WillPowder and add their own flavorings. Popping sugar’s surprising effect on unsuspecting diners makes it popular with pastry chefs who like to experiment with physical and molecular gastronomy.
Like many modernist products, popping sugar first emerged in food manufacturing. William A. Mitchell, a food chemist for General Foods, was trying to create an instant carbonated soda but failed to make a satisfactory one. He shelved his formula, which was rediscovered by another chemist 20 years later and developed into the candy Pop Rocks, which were introduced in 1975. Within a few years rumors began to spread that the candy, when mixed with Coca-Cola, would make the stomach explode, and the product’s popularity plummeted. Pop Rocks briefly disappeared from the market in the mid-1980s, but today they are once again being sold and appreciated worldwide. Chefs who use unflavored popping sugar appeal to their customers’ nostalgia for childhood.
See also children’s candy; cool whip; and sherbet powder.
poppy seed comes from the opium poppy flower, Papaver somniferum, whose unripe pods are incised to collect the latex known as opium, an alkaloid drug that contains a mixture of morphine, heroin, and codeine. The seeds are incapsulated in the poppy pod and harvested only when the plant is fully ripe and the opium latex flow has stopped; if the pod is not incised, the latex can still be removed when the pod is almost completely dried. At this point the seeds are devoid of opiates and are mature enough to yield a satisfactory amount of poppy seed oil, which is one of the major reasons for the plant’s cultivation.
The poppy plant is believed to have first been domesticated in Mesopotamia, with almost all sources acknowledging that the earliest mention of the opium poppy is in Sumerian texts dating as far back as 4000 b.c.e. Poppy’s sedative powers were apparently recognized early—the Sumerians called it hul gil, hul meaning “joy” and gil meaning “plant.” Various sources mention that the poppy’s cultivation in Asia Minor dates back to the Hittite period around 2000 b.c.e. The Hittite fertility goddess Kubaba is always depicted with a poppy pod in her hand, and her legacy continues into the later Greek and Roman periods, when poppy continued to serve an iconic role. The poppy is referred to in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (850 b.c.e.). Representations of the Greek and Roman gods of sleep, Hypnos and Somnus, show them wearing or carrying poppies. Poppy in classic Greek culture has its roots in the Minoan Poppy Goddess of the Bronze Age. Depictions of the poppy plant continued to turn up in Anatolian cultures: Seljukid period tiles and tombstones often feature depictions of the poppy, and Ottoman kilims and carpets have stylized poppy pod motifs.
Poppy seed comes in three colors—dark (blue), medium (light brown), and light (creamy white)—which are similar in flavor but preferred for different purposes. The food writer Harold McGee notes that the bluish tint of the dark variety is actually an optical illusion caused by miniscule calcium oxalate crystals covering the brown seed. The light brown variety is often reserved for oil pressing in Turkey. The bluish–dark gray variety is most commonly used for baking purposes, often ground into a paste to bring out its nutty taste. In Turkey the poppy-paste rolls haşhaşlı çörek, haşhaşlı açma, katmer, and nokul can be sweet or savory, in either case usually combined with ground walnuts.
The use of poppy seed in sweets is most widespread in German, Austrian, and Hungarian baking traditions: Blechkuchen (sheet cake) with poppyseeds, Mohnstollen (poppy stollen), Mohnstriezel (rolled poppy seed cake), Mohnstrudel/Mákosrétes (poppy seed strudel), Mohnkuchen/Mákos pite (poppy seed cake), Mohnkuchen mit Streuseln (poppy seed streusel cake), Mohntorte (poppy seed torte), and Kindli (poppy seed cookies) being the most common. The Purim sweet Hamentashen, often filled with a ground, sweetened poppy-seed paste, has numerous variations in all European countries with Ashkenazic Jewish populations. See judaism.
The rolled poppy seed cakes made in eastern Europe and the Balkans are regarded almost as national desserts. The Slovenian national specialty Premorska or Prekmurska gibanica (Prekmurian layer cake) and the Croatian Međimurska gibanica (Medjimurian layer cake) are cakes layered with poppy seeds, walnuts, apples, raisins, and curd cheese. Potica, another Slovenian speciality, is of such importance that it has even been depicted on postage stamps. The filling can consist of nuts, raisins, and sometimes apples, but a poppy seed filling is essential for the Christmas table. Although most of these rolled cakes are shaped in the form of logs to reveal a spiral design when sliced, they are sometimes baked in special tube cake pans or manipulated into a horseshoe shape.
Germknödel and Mohntaschen or mákos metélt are sweet dumplings with ground poppy seeds, sugar, and melted butter, served as desserts in Austro-Hungarian cookery. See austria-hungary. Pancakes, crepes, flatbreads, or flat griddle cakes made of egg-based batter, yeast dough, or a plain flour and water dough can be served spread or filled with poppy paste; such preparations include the Austrian Mohnpalatschinken, Hungarian mákos palacsinta, and Slovenian gıbíce.
Poppy-seed-based sweets symbolize abundance and fertility, and thus are very popular for festive occasions like Easter or weddings, but most of all for Christmas or New Year’s Eve, when the tiny seeds augur a plentiful harvest in the new year. Flat noodles with poppy seeds, melted butter, and sugar; rolled poppy seed cakes; and a poppy seed bread pudding are special treats. Mohnpielen, a bread pudding soaked in milk and doused with rum, once prepared only for Christmas Eve in the eastern German region of Silesia, is today found throughout Germany; Hungary’s mákos guba mézzel is very similar. Kut’ia is a traditional Russian Christmas porridge of wheat berries with honey and poppy seeds; during Lent the wheat berries are cooked in poppy seed “milk”—water in which ground poppy seeds have steeped. See wheat berries. In Lithuania and eastern Slovakia, small biscuits are dunked in cold poppy seed milk for the traditional Christmas Eve meal, kūčios.
See also holiday sweets.
Popsicle is a brand name for the frozen novelty known elsewhere as the ice lolly, freezer pop, or ice block. It has generic status in the United States. In a legend disclaimed by the inventor himself, the original Popsicle is said to have appeared in 1905 when eleven-year-old Frank Epperson left a glass containing water, powdered soda mix, and a stick outside overnight, only to discover it frozen the next morning. Epperson began selling Popsicles to the public in 1923, but he quickly sold his rights to the new product and its production process. By 1925 the Joe Lowe Company of New York was marketing the patented Popsicle throughout the United States. This novelty—composed of water, sugar, corn syrup, stabilizers, and artificial flavor and color, and frozen on a birch-wood stick—gained instant popularity due to its low price, bright colors, and convenience. Popsicles have typically figured among the frozen treats sold from ice-cream carts and trucks, and the Eighth Air Force of the United States declared Popsicles a symbol of American life during World War II.
The Popsicle brand subsequently expanded to include novelties like the Creamsicle, Fudgsicle, and yogurt-based Yosicle. The brand was bought in 1989 by Unilever’s Good Humor division. A host of new flavors, many associated with candies, such as Jolly Ranchers or Sour Patch Kids, or with animated characters, such as Hello Kitty or SpongeBob SquarePants, have appeared since, but cherry remains the most popular flavor among the over two billion Popsicles sold annually. Although Unilever fiercely defends its Popsicle trademark, competitors offering low-calorie, fresh-fruit, and artisanal flavors now sell frozen pops that run the gamut from chocolate-avocado to mango-chili.
See also children’s candy; good humor man; and ice cream.
Portugal, with its rich variety of confections, is a nation of dessert lovers. Sweets abound: on holiday tables, in corner cafés, and as ever-present daily delights. Portuguese desserts can be generally characterized as exceptionally sweet, with a heavy emphasis on sugar and egg yolk combinations. These egg-based creations and a wide assortment of other sweet treats are consumed not only after meals, but also in the morning with a strong cup of Portuguese espresso, or in the afternoon as a midday indulgence. As so simply stated in Fabrico Próprio, a compendium of Portuguese confectionery: “We, the Portuguese, cannot live without cakes.”
The history of Portuguese sweets began with the Moors, who occupied the southern Algarve region from the eighth to thirteenth centuries. They planted vast groves of almond trees, and almond desserts—often combined with figs and honey—are still commonly found throughout Portugal. Prince Henry the Navigator established sugarcane plantations in Portugal’s Atlantic colonies in the fifteenth century, and by 1500 Madeira had become the largest producer of sugar in the western hemisphere, soon to be dwarfed by cane cultivation in the Portuguese colony of Brazil. See brazil and plantations, sugar. Egg whites were widely used to refine sugar, and the increase in Portuguese wine exportation to England in the seventeenth century resulted in a further bounty of leftover yolks (egg whites were used to clarify some wines). The abundance of yolks and sugar led to a proliferation of new desserts. Religious orders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries capitalized most successfully on these ingredients, creating a vast array of doces conventuais (convent sweets) that were offered to visiting dignitaries and sold to supplement clerical income. Several classic Portuguese desserts—pastel de nata, barriga de freira, toucinho do céu, to name just a few—originated in convents and monasteries, and are still eaten today. See convent sweets.
In addition to fanciful convent sweets, pastries enjoy a notable role in Portuguese dessert culture. Cafés and pastelarias (pastry shops) stock a variety of popular baked goods—palmieres, queques, and bolos de arroz among them—and their delicious flavors and modest prices ensure a steady stream of regular customers. These cakes, cookies, and pastries are so widely available and expertly produced that they are very rarely made at home.
From elaborate egg-based sweets to simple pastries, the Portuguese enjoy a wide assortment of tempting and unique desserts. The following is a small selection of the most familiar and distinctively Portuguese sweets.
Cakes and Cookies
Bolo de Mel
The richly spiced bolo de mel (honey cake) originated on the island of Madeira in the mid-fifteenth century, during the expansion of sugar plantations on the island. Originally made with molasses but now often prepared with honey, this dense cake also features almonds, walnuts, candied peels, candied fruits, prunes, or a hint of Madeira. It is usually made in large batches and will keep up to a year without losing flavor. Traditionally considered a Christmas treat, bolo de mel is now eaten year-round.
Bolo Rei
Introduced to Portugal via France in the nineteenth century, bolo rei (king cake) is the ubiquitous Portuguese Christmas cake. Traditionally round with a hole in the middle (resembling a crown), the brioche-like cake is packed with raisins, nuts, and crystalized fruits. Bolo rei customarily contains a small metal charm—an owl, a key, a heart—and a dried broad bean; the one who finds the charm is cheered, and the one who finds the bean buys next year’s cake. See twelfth night cake. However, most modern versions of bolo rei have since eliminated both the charm and bean, in the interest of food safety.
Pão de Ló
Pão de ló (sponge cake) is a simple and much-loved Portuguese dessert commonly consisting of flour, eggs, sugar, salt, and lemon or orange peel. The best-known recipes are from the northern provinces, with regional differences in the proportion of eggs, flour, sugar, and cooking times. Pão de ló is served plain and, in addition to being enjoyed fresh, is also used day-old as the basis for puddings and other desserts. The Portuguese introduced an early form of pão de ló to Japan during the sixteenth century, and it is still enjoyed by the Japanese and referred to as castela, kasutera, or pan. A half-baked version of pão de ló known as alfeizerão is eaten like pudding. See japanese baked goods.
Suspiros
One of the few egg-white-based desserts in the Portuguese repertoire, suspiros (literally, “sighs”) are crisp meringue cookies flavored with lemon. Suspiros com ovos moles is a variation from the southern Algarve province, where a sweetened egg yolk filling is spread between two cookies.
Toucinho do Céu
Among the many doces conventuais, toucinho do céu (bacon from heaven) is a rich and moist cake that was created by nuns in the northern Trás-os-Montes province. It is composed of flour, sugar, butter, eggs, egg yolks, ground almonds, and cinnamon. The original convent recipe was heavier, quite possibly including lard instead of butter, though the name may simply be metaphorical, to reflect the richness of the dessert.
Custards and Puddings
Arroz Doce
Found on every typical Portuguese dessert table is the beloved arroz doce (rice pudding), whose origins lie in the northern Minho region. This creamy pudding is made much like risotto, using short-grain rice cooked with milk. Sugar, egg yolks, salt, and lemon peel are also combined in the mixture. The finished dessert is sprinkled with ground cinnamon, often laid in intricate, lace-like patterns. A variation on this dessert is aletria, where the rice is substituted with angel hair or vermicelli pasta.
Farófias
The origin of farófias is not clear, though the similarity to—and possible derivation from—the English “Floating Island” dessert is notable. Farófias is one of the few Portuguese desserts to feature egg whites, rather than the customary yolks. The egg whites are beaten to soft peaks and poached in milk, then spooned over a lemon-flavored custard, and lightly dusted with cinnamon. See meringue.
Leite-Creme
Though egg custard puddings are produced throughout Europe, the Portuguese version known as leite-creme originated in the northern Beira province. Rather than being baked in an oven, leite-creme is made on the stovetop and uses milk rather than cream. Common leite-creme ingredients are flour, sugar, vanilla, egg yolks (fewer or more depending on the richness of the desired result), and the characteristically Portuguese additions of lemon, cinnamon, or port wine.
Pastel de Nata
Perhaps the most well-known of all Portuguese pastries, the pastel de nata is commonly made of puff pastry, egg yolks, sugar, and flour. Some recipes also call for lemon peel, cream, vanilla, and milk. See pastel de nata and pastry, puff.
Pudim Flan
Though said to have originated in Spain and France, pudim flan (crème caramel) is widely enjoyed by the Portuguese; in the Azores it is also known as pudim veludo (velvet pudding) or pudim de leite (milk pudding). The Portuguese version is sometimes thickened with egg yolks rather than whole eggs, and it may not always be served with the customary caramel sauce. Milk, eggs, and sugar are the common base of pudim flan, with varying additions of vanilla, port wine or brandy, and lemon or orange peel. See flan (pudím).
Egg Confections
Barriga de Freira
One of many doces conventuais, barriga de freira (nun’s belly) was first produced in the seventeenth century by nuns in the western Beira Litoral province. The origin of the name is unknown, though the variety of cleverly named doces conventuais attests to the humor and inventiveness of medieval clerics. Egg yolks form the base of this dessert; they are combined with crumbled bread, sugar, butter, lemon peel, nuts, and sometimes dried fruit or port wine. This mixture is often spooned into rice paper casings whose bulging half-moon shapes do indeed resemble a plump belly.
Fios de Ovos
Made from sugar, egg yolks, and water, fios de ovos (egg threads) is served as a garnish on cakes and puddings, as a filling for cakes, or simply by itself in small, sweet mounds. The strands are made with a special funnel by means of which egg yolks pass through tiny, narrow openings and drop carefully—without touching—into boiling sugar syrup. Fios de ovos is also found in Japan and Thailand, most likely brought there by Portuguese explorers during the sixteenth century. See portugal’s influence in asia.
Ovos Moles
Considered one of the best-loved and most distinctive of Portuguese desserts, ovos moles (soft eggs) was created by the nuns of Aveiro, in the northern Beira Litoral province. Originally consisting of only egg yolks, sugar, and water, a modern variation substitutes rice flour for some of the yolks. Soft and spreadable, ovos moles is an extremely adaptable dessert: it can be glazed between layers of pastry, drizzled over fruit or puddings, or squirted into fanciful maritime-themed rice paper casings and popped directly into one’s mouth. In Aveiro, ovos moles is also sold in small wooden barrels (some only big enough to fit a spoon) that are colorfully decorated with nautical scenes.
Papo de Anjo
Papo de anjo (angel’s double chin) is a doce conventual that originated in Mirandela, in the northern Trás-os-Montes province, sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Though regional variants exist, the original Mirandela recipe features egg yolks, sugar, fruit preserves, and cinnamon. The egg yolks are baked, next boiled in sugar syrup that is lightly flavored with orange or lemon peel, and then served as moist, spongy cakes.
Fried Delights
Fatias Douradas
Fatias douradas or fried bread (also called rabanadas) seems to have spread across Portugal from the northern Minho region. This dessert is customarily served at Christmas Eve, and in the Azores it is enjoyed as a Carnival specialty. Similar to French toast, this treat consists of bread bathed in milk and egg, fried, and dipped in syrup or honey, or sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.
Filhós
Traditionally made on Christmas Eve or during Carnival, filhós (also known as bêilhoses in the Alentejo region) are crisp, delicate fritters made in a variety of styles, often from pumpkin or squash mixed with flour, eggs, and brandy, and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Malasadas, the Azorean version of filhós, are made without pumpkin or squash; they resemble raised, sugared doughnuts, and are another treat whose popularity has spread through Portuguese immigrant communities worldwide.
Sonhos
Another staple on Portuguese Christmas Eve tables, sonhos (literally, “dreams”) are light, fried doughnuts found throughout Portugal. Made from sweetened choux pastry dough, they are drizzled with orange- and brandy-flavored syrup and rolled in cinnamon and sugar.
See also egg yolk sweets and fortified wine.
Portugal’s influence in Asia resulted from the Atlantic kingdom’s expansion into the Indian Ocean in the closing years of the fifteenth century. Subsequently, the Portuguese established colonies in Goa, Malacca (now Melaka), and Macao, from where traders and missionaries fanned out through the region. While their success in bringing Christianity to this part of Asia was somewhat limited, the Portuguese had a profound influence on the region’s cuisines, introducing novel foods from Europe and the New World, as well as Iberian cooking techniques. Their legacy is particularly evident in the case of sweets.
Cakes, cookies, pastries, desserts, candies, and sweet preserves with probable Portuguese origins are found all over Asia, wherever the Portuguese settled or traded. Unlike other European colonial powers, which discouraged interracial liaisons, the Portuguese actively encouraged settlers to marry local women and to populate the empire with Catholic subjects. The frequency of miscegenation meant that Iberian culinary influences penetrated local cultures with unusual rapidity.
The development of Portuguese sweet making in Asia was also fostered by the entry of Iberian nuns into the region in the early seventeenth century. Like their counterparts in Portugal, the nuns at the Santa Monica convent in Goa were renowned for their baking and confectionery skills. See convent sweets. Young Christian women from throughout Portuguese Asia were sent to Santa Monica (Asia’s largest convent) for an education, which included the domestic arts. Returning home, these women passed on their skills within their local communities.
The Portuguese were experts at candying, jam making and sweet preserves, desserts, cakes, and confectionery. Some of the less perishable kinds of sweets were carried on ships as indulgences for the crew and extra nourishment for the sick. In foreign lands, sugar, marzipans, and sweet preserves were presented to local dignitaries as tokens of respect and offered as trade goods. See fruit preserves and marzipan. Portuguese marmalade, in particular, was appreciated for its fine quality. See marmalade. In 1638 the German traveler Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo enthused over the “tarts, Florentines, egg sweets, perfumed marzipans, fruit syrups and conserves” served in the dining hall of the Jesuit College in Goa.
The Portuguese grew sugarcane in the fertile region around their settlement in Bengal and introduced superior refining methods. See sugar refining and sugarcane agriculture. In Goa, bebinca, a rich layered cake made with coconut milk, rice flour, and sugar; dodol, a palm sugar fudge; preserves such as mangada (from mangoes) and figada (from bananas); and various confections made with cashews and almonds are legacies of the Portuguese presence, which endured until India annexed Goa in 1961. See palm sugar.
In Japan, European foodways were promulgated by the Japanese wives and servants of Portuguese traders living in Nagasaki, giving rise to a new culinary classification, nanban ryori. This “Southern Barbarian cuisine” included sugary confections and cakes, known collectively as nanbangashi, several kinds of which are still being produced in Japan by artisanal bakers and confectioners. See japan; japanese baked goods; and nanbangashi. Among these, kasutera (castella), a sponge cake traditionally made in Nagasaki and related to the Portuguese pão de ló, is one of the most popular. Spiky boiled sugar candies called konfeito (from the Portuguese word for comfits), presented as a gift to feudal lord Oda Nobunaga by the missionary Luis Frois soon after the Portuguese arrival in Japan, are still painstakingly made by hand. See comfit. Keiran somen, a specialty of Fukuoka, are sweet egg noodles in the tradition of Portuguese fios de ovos. They are still made by a few wagashi specialists, using the traditional Portuguese method of drizzling egg yolks into boiling sugar syrup. See egg yolks sweets and wagashi.
The peanut, a Portuguese import from South America by way of Africa, gave rise to the peanut brittle and peanut candies that are now hugely popular in China. See brittle and china. Although Macao has now reverted to Chinese rule, Portuguese-style pastelaria (cake shops) remain a fixture, some aficionados claiming that the pastel de nata from Macao is even better than the Portuguese original. In Hong Kong, pastel de nata gave rise to the dim sum dessert known as egg tart. See pastel de nata.
In Thailand, Marie Guimar, the part-Portuguese wife of an influential member of the Siamese court, is credited with teaching the Thais to make many of the “temple sweets” that are served during religious festivals and on special occasions. In the vicinity of the original Portuguese settlement in what is now Thonburi, a baked cookie with likely Portuguese origins called kanom farang kuti jin is still being made. Other Thai sweets attributed to the Portuguese include foy thong, thong yip, thong yot, and mo kaeng. See thailand.
Over time, recipes for Portuguese desserts and baked goods were modified by replacing wheat flour with rice flour and removing dairy products such as milk and cream. Sweet bean paste, cashews (introduced from Brazil by the Portuguese), rice flour, coconut, and other locally available ingredients replaced Iberian commodities such as quince paste, ground almonds, and rich egg custards. Methods were also adapted to suit local kitchen technologies. Cakes that were traditionally baked in an oven might be steamed, or browned in a contraption fashioned to mimic the top-down heat of a salamander.
Because cakes and sweets were so closely associated with Catholic ceremonial events, they were much in demand in devoutly Catholic Luso-Asian societies. Many confections and baked goods are still closely associated with religious occasions, such as Easter, Christmas, baptisms, and saint’s days. Some take elaborate shapes or are formed to represent religious objects, such as the bones of a saint or the crown of Jesus. Two pastries still made throughout the Lusophone world, coscurão (sheets) and fartes (pillows), represent the bed linen of the Holy Infant. Macanese cooks refer to aluwa, their version of Indian halwah, as his mattress. See halvah.
In Malaysia and Indonesia, cakes called putugal and bolo/boru (Portuguese for “round”), dodol-like fudges, mango pudding, and kaya, a sweet spread made with coconut milk, sugar, and eggs, are thought to be Portuguese in origin, as are thin wafer cookies called “love letters” and sweet fritters called sonhos (dreams). In Sri Lanka, bolo fiado, a layer cake, and cookies called fuguetes attest to the Portuguese presence there. Versions of Sri Lanka’s signature Love Cake, made from semolina with spices, cashews, and in some variations a candied squash preserve similar to Portugal’s doce de chila, are made in Eurasian households throughout the region.
See also bean paste sweets; coconut; custard; nuts; and portugal.
pound cake is a British invention from around the end of the 1600s or early 1700s—the actual date is uncertain—whose name derives from its proportion of ingredients: one pound each of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. The cakes were large, dense, and buttery, and they kept extremely well at room temperature, an important factor at a time when all baking was accomplished in brick ovens, and when cakes were baked only occasionally. It was advantageous to have a cake on the sideboard for the family to nibble on or to serve in case company dropped in.
Pound cakes depend upon the creaming method to make them rise. Beating the butter with the sugar creates a multitude of tiny air bubbles that expand in the oven’s heat to raise the cake during baking. The eggs, in addition to acting as leavening agents, add moisture in the form of fat and water and contribute to the cake’s tenderness. Some cookbook authors of the nineteenth century firmly believed in adding the yolks and whites separately to a pound cake batter, claiming that the beaten whites bumped up the level of aeration. No chemical leavening is used in a true pound cake.
Before the invention of the electric mixer, pound cakes were labor intensive, requiring at least one hour of whipping the batter with a hickory rod or wooden spoon. See pastry tools and whisks and beaters. Housewives used imagination to vary the flavorings of their pound cakes, adding caraway seeds, cinnamon, nutmeg, aniseed, rosewater, orange or lemon essence, or even dried fruits. Mace became the spice of choice in the southern United States. See dried fruit; extracts and flavorings; flower waters; and spices.
Versions of pound cake appear throughout Europe. For example, the French quatre quarts maintains the 1:1:1:1 ratio of the four major ingredients, while in the German Eischwerkuchen (Ei = egg, schwer = heavy), each ingredient weighs as much as the eggs.
praline, in its simplest form a confection of nuts and sugar, is a representative dish of the Francophone Atlantic world. It is a French recipe ascribed to César, duc de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin, an early seventeenth-century marshal and diplomat. In a widely circulated though unverifiable story, du Plessis-Praslin inspired his cook, possibly one Clément Lassagne, to name the sweet invention in his honor. Originally made of caramelized and sugarcoated whole almonds, pralines were a treat reserved for the elite. Only in the late 1600s, following the praline’s invention, did sugar shift from a rarity and luxury to a common and necessary ingredient consumed nearly the world over. Various iterations of the praline have since diffused across former French colonies, echoing similar, though unrelated, international sweet treats; these include the global assortment of nougats, brittles, and marzipans, all of which fuse nuts (tree nuts, peanuts, or nut-like drupes like almonds and pistachios) with sugar or honey.
In France, pralin now refers to roasted almonds, or sometimes hazelnuts, that have been coated in boiled sugar and crushed to form a crumbled or pasty topping or filler for candies, cakes, pastries, and ice creams. When mixed with chocolate, pralin becomes praliné, a petit bonbon made famous in Belgium. See bonbons. It was in Brussels in 1912 that the chocolatier Jean Neuhaus II invented the creamy fondant-filled chocolate shell that Belgians call their praline. The Neuhaus brand still sells the quintessential Belgium chocolate praline today.
The praline has also reached iconic status in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the abundant pecan tree yields the nut that gives the candy a distinctly local flavor. See new orleans. The Deep South praline folds toasted whole or chopped pecans into sugar, butter, and milk or cream; sometimes vanilla, molasses, or caramel is added. Boiled, then constantly stirred over medium-low heat, the creamy mixture thickens to a fudge-like consistency. The resulting batter is spoon-dropped onto a butter-greased baking sheet or parchment paper and allowed to cool. Rich and caramel brown in color, round or oval, the southern praline is most often eaten in hand like a cookie.
Though a slew of legends have traced the existence of the New Orleans praline to as early as the 1720s—some tales give credit to the newly arrived Ursuline nuns for introducing the confection—these stories are almost certainly a bit of local mythmaking. Sugar and milk were rare commodities in eighteenth-century Louisiana; France, followed by Spain, rarely if ever sent sugar to their young colonial outpost, while the local sugar industry did not develop until the 1790s. Instead, the earliest mentions in the historical record to a New Orleans praline culture occur in the late nineteenth century. Newspaper articles from this era trace this praline’s beginnings to the earlier antebellum period, when it became fashionable for affluent white homes to include a platter of pecan pralines with lunch or dinner.
Following the American Civil War, and the subsequent federal emancipation of all enslaved persons, African American women in New Orleans became intrinsically and intimately tied to the praline. Known in the regional French vernacular as marchands des pralines (praline merchants) or pralinières, these women made their pralines at home but sold them in the city’s streets. Alongside the traditional pecan praline, they sometimes sold a cochineal-dyed variety called “pink poodles” and a coconut-flavored version named “white mice.” Several of these pralinières became locally famous; etchings of them appeared in cookbooks, travelers recorded their street-vendor songs, and newspaper accounts documented their lives. Selling their wares from baskets, these praline ladies often chose creative nicknames and divided up the city into territories: Praline Zizi occupied a corner of the French Quarter’s Jackson Square, Gateaux Bon Marché (“Inexpensive Cake Lady”) plied her praline trade for over 30 years in the downriver Marigny district, and one Mary Louise cornered the market on Tulane University’s campus. Most always dressed in a tignon headscarf and apron, the pralinières’ romanticized and archaic Old South era uniform should be considered a shrewd marketing device that provided economic freedom and independence for these women.
The praline has since become deeply tied to New Orleans’s culinary culture. Everything from ice cream to bacon is pralined, or praline-coated, in caramelized sugar and pecans. Confectionery shops dedicated to the praline and geared toward tourists dot the modern French Quarter. And pralinières, including a few men, still sell the confection from baskets in just about every corner of the city.
See also belgium; france; and nuts.
See fruit preserves.
pressed cookies are made by forcing a smooth cookie dough through a cookie press or pastry bag fitted with a disk or nozzle that forms each cookie into a uniform shape on a baking sheet. The cookies are embossed with the same, usually symmetrical, design on top. Also known as spritz cookies, from the German word spritzen (to squirt), these cookies probably originated in Germany, where they have long been a traditional sweet at Christmas time. Now popular throughout northern Europe, they are also eaten in other parts of the world where European immigrants have settled.
A cookie press is a specialized baking utensil made of metal or plastic, consisting of a tube with a plunger at one end and a selection of removable disks, or templates, that can be fitted on the other end. These disks have designs cut into them that shape the dough as it is squeezed through the tube by the plunger and extruded onto a baking sheet. Most cookie presses are operated by hand, although some used by professional bakers are electric. A pastry bag, usually fitted with a large star or ribbon nozzle, can also be used for making pressed cookies. These utensils make it easy to produce large batches of identical cookies in a short time.
The dough consists of butter or vegetable shortening, flour, sugar, eggs, a small amount of baking powder, and flavorings such as spices, cocoa powder, extracts (vanilla, almond, rum), and grated lemon or orange zest. The dough can also be tinted with food colorings. Savory spritz cookie doughs contain less sugar and are flavored with fresh or dried herbs, paprika, chili powders, ground pepper, grated cheeses, and other seasonings.
Shapes include squares, rectangles, circles, pinwheels, rosettes, spring flowers, Halloween pumpkins, stars, wreaths, snowflakes, and Christmas trees. The cookies can also be decorated with colored sugar granules, chocolate sprinkles, chopped nuts, candied cherries, chocolate chips, nonpareils, colored dragées, confectioner’s sugar glaze, melted chocolate, or icing piped onto them with a cake decorator.
Dainty little spritz cookies are often served with afternoon tea or coffee, with after-dinner coffee, and with mulled wine during the winter holidays. Since these cookies are so quick and easy to make in large quantities, they are also popular for cookie exchanges and are sometimes even used as decorations for other kinds of baked goods.
See also drop cookies and cookie molds and stamps.
Priapus was a rustic Greek god. He is not one of the Twelve Olympians and is never mentioned in the Homeric epics, but like other Greek deities, he found his way into Roman religion and Latin literature. Humans looked to him for the protection of orchard fruit and the guarantee of male sexual potency, both themes embodied in his typical representation, a wooden statue whose exaggerated erect phallus was an explicit warning that fruit thieves of either sex would be raped.
Intruders having been scared off, Priapus’s second typical form was a statuette of a smiling, homely figure whose apron, visibly supported by his phallus, offers a lapful of ripe fruit to the householder and his guests. Such Priapi in bronze and terracotta have been found by archaeologists at Pompeii and elsewhere. Two literary sources confirm that edible Priapi in the same style were made for display at banquets. One is a verse couplet from a series written by Martial, around 100 c.e., to accompany surprise gifts: “Pastry Priapus: If you want to be replete you can eat our Priapus: you can even nibble his loins and you’ll still be clean.”
The second source is a scene in “Trimalchio’s Feast,” the best-known episode of the first-century Satyricon by Petronius. A pompa or set-piece display of fruits, cakes, and sweets is presented before the desserts, with a pastry figure of Priapus as its centerpiece. Just like the bronze figurines, he wears “an apron, supported in the usual way, loaded with grapes and fruits of every kind.” The diners’ greedy fingers soon discover that these are not real fruits but fruit-shaped sweetmeats overfilled with sticky saffron sauce. Allowing for fictional exaggeration, this scene makes clear Priapus’s role as patron of the fruits and sweets at a banquet, and it confirms the skills that Roman confectioners employed to change sweets into fruits, and gods into pastry.
See pastry, choux.
proverbs abound in all cultures, and those involving food are among the most common. Given their desirability, sweet foods are featured more often than not. The reason is that the realm of proverbs is the familiar: their purpose, after all, is to render abstract conventional wisdom into concrete and memorable forms by invoking everyday objects and situations. Few things are as familiar to a community as its food culture; hence the kitchen, dining room, and taste buds are frequently mined in the creation of proverbs. For example, in the sixteenth century, the sage counsel that mere words cannot bind people became the proverb “Promises are like pie crusts—made to be broken.” In the early eighteenth century, the truism that people have hidden agendas inspired the saying “He woos for cake and pudding.” In the late eighteenth century, the notion that things are defined by their opposites prompted the maxim “Every white has its black and every sweet has its sour.”
Proverbs continue to be a feature of contemporary speech: parents still chide their children for having unreasonable expectations by saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” However, proverbs have lost the authoritative status that they enjoyed centuries ago. The ancient esteem for proverbs is attested by the very existence of the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs, which includes maxims such as “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats” (Proverbs 23:6). Aristotle, too, is said to have written a now-lost work on proverbs. During the Middle Ages, hundreds of proverbs emerged, such as the twelfth century’s “Dearly bought is honey licked from a thorn.” Many more proverbs were resurrected in the sixteenth century, when the Dutch humanist Erasmus published a collection of 3,000 proverbs derived from ancient Greek and Roman sources, including “Hunger makes beans taste like sugar” and “Everyone thinks his own fart smells sweet.”
The veneration of proverbs began to wane in the eighteenth century, when they came to be seen as evidence of vulgarity rather than sophistication. In 1741, Lord Chesterfield belittled “common proverbs” because they were
proofs of having kept bad and low company. For example, if, instead of saying that tastes are different … you should let off a proverb, and say “that what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison” … everybody would be persuaded that you had never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids.
It is probably not a coincidence that the status of proverbs began to decline as the scientific method began to emerge, for folk sayings couldn’t compete with hard empirical evidence. The wisdom of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” diminished once scientists discovered that the caffeic acid that naturally occurs in apples is a carcinogen.
The culinary and gastronomic conventions of a culture are, of course, reflected in the food proverbs that the culture produces. The ancient Romans, for example, used to say “from eggs to apples”—meaning “from beginning to end”—because it was their custom to begin a meal with an appetizer of eggs and end it with a dessert of apples. In China, proverbs that mention rice proliferate, such as “You can’t eat the rice cake in a picture.” Halvah, a soft dessert made from honey and sesame seeds, appears in many proverbs from the Middle East, including “When things don’t go right, even halvah will break your tooth” and “Your mouth won’t get sweet just by saying ‘halvah.’”
In England, where honey was the primary sweetener up until the sixteenth century, that nectar-based bee product is found in dozens of proverbs, including “Honey catches more flies than vinegar”; “Where bees are, there is honey”; “He who shares honey with a bear, has the least part of it”; “He that in his purse lacks money, has in his mouth much need of honey” (meaning that if you lack resources you need to use sweet words); “Lick honey with your little finger” (meaning that even with desirable things you should exercise moderation); and “He licks honey through a cleft stick” (meaning that he is making things difficult for himself).
Cake, too, makes frequent appearance in the proverbs of England, such as “Life is not all cakes and ale”; “Bread today is better than cake tomorrow”; “Eaten cake is soon forgotten”; “A cake eaten in peace is better than two in trouble”; “A bad custom is like a good cake—better broken than kept”; “If wishes were butter-cakes, beggars might bite”; and “My cake is dough” (meaning “my plans have failed”). Other sweet items appear less often in the proverbs of England. Notable exceptions are “He spits out secrets like hot custard” and “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today.”
In the United States, where everything is as “American as apple pie,” it is not surprising that apples are a staple of proverbial phrases, as in “Eat an apple going to bed, make the doctor beg his bread”; “Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache”; “An apple never falls far from the tree”; “If you don’t like my apples, don’t shake my tree”; “One bad apple spoils the barrel”; and “There’s little choice in a barrel of rotten apples.”
Over the centuries, some proverbs have ceased to be current, and their meaning might now seem obscure. For example, nowadays one rarely hears the English proverb “The devil makes his Christmas pies of lawyers’ tongues and clerks’ fingers,” meaning that the lies of lawyers and the prevarications of their clerks are encouraged by corrupt officials. Also obsolete is “Every cake has his fellow,” meaning that every person has a match or soul mate. Some forgotten proverbs only make sense when their historical context is restored: the sixteenth-century adage “Pie-lids make people wise” seems nonsensical until we remember that back then the lid—or crust—of a pie was not always intended to be eaten but rather functioned to protect the inside from insects and vermin. Only when this “pie-lid” was removed would someone become “wise” as to the contents of the pie.
On the other hand, some proverbs do continue to be used even after they cease to make literal sense. The proverbial phrase “to bet dollars to doughnuts” is still familiar, even though inflation has diminished the impact of the wager’s original disparity. Likewise, the saying “the proof is in the pudding” remains popular today even though it doesn’t, upon scrutiny, actually make much sense. We have to go back to the early seventeenth century to find its original, meaningful form: “The proof of the pudding is in its taste.” Other food proverbs have also changed over time. “To eat humble pie,” for example, was originally “To eat umble pie,” the umble being deer offal that was sometimes cooked into a poor-man’s pastry. Although the words “humble” and “umble” are unrelated, their coincidental resemblance prompted people to unwittingly replace the less familiar latter word with the more common former one.
Other changes to proverbs reflect a desire to enhance the sayings. The early sixteenth-century proverb “Many things fall between the cup and the mouth” evolved by the mid-nineteenth century into the now familiar “There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip” because rhyme and rhythm make it easier to remember. Literary techniques are also at work in other proverbs, including parallelism (as in “The nearer the bone, the sweeter the flesh” and “A black plum is as sweet as a white”), alliteration (as in “The more crust, the less crumb” and “No sweet without sweat”), and antithesis (as in “Sweet meat must have sour sauce” and “A honey tongue, a heart of gall”). Humor, too, is not alien to proverbs, as in these two maxims from sixteenth-century England: “A turd is as good for a sow as a pancake” and “You were a sweet nut if you were well cracked.”
psychoanalysis is concerned with the associations and displacements that occur around a given concept. So, if a patient discusses sweets, the analyst will not be as much focused on what sweets actually are—how they affect physiology, taste buds, or the brain—as she would be with what sweets represent for the patient. While empirical studies on sweets and their physiological effects might be of some interest to the analyst, she would above all ask questions about the emotional and mental associations of sweets for the individual. The most telling of these associations often occur in the realm of the unconscious; a patient for whom sweets are a central issue would need to explore well beyond the surface of concrete data to reach the significance of sweets in his or her life. This type of inquiry foregrounds dreams, indirect links, repeated patterns of anxiety, and childhood memories.
There are as many directions in which sweets can be interpreted in psychoanalysis as there are people. The father of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), made an association among sweets, eroticism, and the oral phase of sexual development, wherein the love-object is thought of as “sweet” and “appetizing,” creating the desire to “devour … with love.” Freud states also that “in dreams sweet things and sweetmeats stand regularly for caresses and sexual gratification.” An excessive focus on sweets can also be the “the very first sign of [a] patient’s neurotic illnesses,” as is the case with a patient who for a period in his childhood “would not eat anything but sweets.” Karl Abraham (1877–1925) found that “neurotic men with a strongly suppressed libido” have a compulsive desire for sweet things, especially if the connection is made via “sucking at sweets very slowly.” The association is not limited to men: one female patient of Abraham’s substituted chocolate for masturbation, thus regressing to the oral stage of sexuality. As can be seen from these brief examples, sweets are associated with displaced and repressed sexual desire, activating guilt and pleasure at once. They also bring back strong suggestions of infancy and childhood.
Beyond the fundamental connection to sexual desire, the psychoanalytical interpretation of sweets is vast and cannot be summarized under one rubric. There are related avenues to consider, such as the role of sweets in eating disorders, cravings, and depression. Psychoanalysis remains cognizant of these, but unlike, say, cognitive behavior therapy or social work, it does not focus on giving the patient a specific remedy. Thus, for example, rather than telling a patient who is fixated on sweets what to do to eliminate the fixation, the analyst works alongside the patient to find ways to illuminate what sweets mean for the patient, and how they have come to be used to address an anxiety that is not immediately apparent. This process takes a long time and might remain open-ended. But it can, in its own right, shed light on the unconscious and the hidden links between sweets and the patient’s concerns and behavior.
publications, trade, which arose in late-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, were a vital source of information for both commercial bakers and pastry chefs in the burgeoning restaurant and hotel business. Trade journal publishers also produced high-quality professional pastry manuals.
For most of the 1800s, the confectionery shown in books remained well beyond the skill level and customer base of most bakers—their authors wrote and cooked mainly for wealthy patrons. Only at the century’s end, with printing techniques greatly improving and transportation and industry making baking products widely available and affordable, did trade publications geared for middle-class tastes, celebrations, and pocketbooks arise.
Because the authors of these books and articles were businessmen as well as practitioners of the trade, their advice was often as much financial as it was aesthetic, concentrating on “cheap cakes for quick sale” or promising “to guide the sincere baker into the most profitable channels of expression.” Trade publishers commonly set up shop in an industrial city: Chicago rather than New York; Manchester or Glasgow in addition to London; Milan rather than Rome; Nordhausen and Dresden in recently unified Germany.
To emphasize their credentials to prospective readers, authors often listed the medals and prizes they had won at trade exhibitions and competitions. Trade publishers enhanced the importance of these events by commissioning books like the 1903 Confectionery Critiques, containing one judge’s opinions on a recent London exhibition (“every intending competitor should read,” advertised the book’s publisher). Even in deprived, post–World War II England, the major baking trade publisher released Exhibition Goods in 1951. Although the typical baker could only dream of showing at an exhibition, the coverage provided by these publications afforded inspiration and access to the most up-to-date trends in pastry making, which could be copied on a less ambitious level.
Hoping to attract top confectioners who could explain their craft, publishers often hired the owners of the numerous baking schools that were springing up, men like St. Louis–based British émigré Joseph Lambeth and Chicago-based German émigré John Zenker, whose pastry work was renowned throughout the country. Sometimes their articles were collected into a book. In Zenker’s case, the Bakers’ Helper publishing company turned his columns for Bakers’ Helper magazine from 1948 to 1950 into Artistic Cake Decorating from A to Z. Other school owners—like New York’s E. M. Berling, Manchester’s Ernest Schulbe, and Dresden’s Erich Weber—self-published, as did supply and product companies like Fred Bauer and the Calumet Baking Company, both headquartered in Chicago. Where the publisher was also a supplier, catalog pages often blended in seamlessly. Trade books might also carry outside advertising: Maclaren’s 1903 Book of Cakes included full-page ads for everything from icing colors to “butter flavor” flour to Egso (a “natural egg yellow”), and even advertisements for other publishers’ books.
In the United States, in particular, trade publishers often catered to immigrant men. Herman Hueg, acknowledging the nation’s large number of German-born bakers, produced bilingual publications: his 1892 book-cum-catalog, Ornamental Confectionery and The Art of Baking in All Its Branches, had sold 90,000 copies by its 1905 tenth edition. But literacy could be a problem even for native English speakers. In 1925 the aptly named confectioner W. C. Baker celebrated that “every baker today is at least able to read,” but five years later E. M. Berling remained cautious, explaining that his manual was “presented … in language easy to understand and excluding all high-class expressions.” The editors of John Zenker’s book addressed another potential shortcoming when they claimed that cake decorating “can be mastered by people who are not artistically inclined.”
By the late 1800s, the United States already had three trade journals: Confectioners’ Journal, Confectioner and Baker, and Bakers’ Helper. Bakers’ Helper remained America’s top title for decades, issuing many manuals along with its twice-monthly magazine. In England, The Practical Confectioner and The Bakery and Confectioner’s Journal vied with two Maclaren publications, Confectionery & Baking Trade and The British Baker, the second of which became dominant. Like its British and American counterparts, Italy’s Giornale dei pasticcieri et confettieri (Journal of Pastry and Confectionery) published manuals in addition to a magazine.
The interwar years of the twentieth century were trade publishing’s zenith, when color printing and photo reproduction combined to produce both magnificent books and informative journals, as well as supply catalogs as deluxe as the books: United Yeast Company’s large-format catalog, with full-page color plates, came with an embossed metallic cardboard cover. Despite the nation’s ethnic diversity, trade publishers in the United States embraced an all-American stance during this and the post–World War II era, unlike their European counterparts, who offered manuals in many languages (such as Germany’s Erich Weber and Heinrich Killinger) as well as translations of German, Swedish, Swiss, and Danish publications (such as Britain’s Maclaren). See weber, johannes martin erich.
The line between the professional and amateur began to blur in the late 1940s when Chicago supplier Dewey McKinley Wilton discovered that his pricey professional cake decorating courses, meant for veterans on the GI Bill, were attracting hordes of housewives. By 1960, his firm’s first “amateur” manual was in its fifteenth edition, and by the mid-1970s, Wilton’s books were as vivid and their creations as intricate as the 1920s professional manuals had been.
By the late twentieth century, books for amateurs were frequently more eye catching and certainly more affordable than any professional manuals. While trade journals like Pastry & Baking in the United States, the British Baker, and Canada’s Bakers Journal were keeping professionals, especially those working for large hotels or chain restaurants, abreast of the latest business and technological news, a growing breed of mass-circulation magazines for enthusiastic amateurs and semiprofessionals offered more in the way of creative inspiration, sometimes from renowned pastry chefs themselves. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, glossies like American Cake Decorating and Britain’s Cakes & Sugarcraft and Cake Craft & Decoration had been joined by a host of “one-off” cake decorating magazines and the web-only Cake Central.
See also baker’s; food colorings; and confectionery manuals.
pudding, originally a term derived from the French boudin (itself from the Latin botellus, “sausage”) and reserved for a sausage-like item (as in “blood pudding”), is now most frequently a dessert, although its nature varies widely by region. In North America, “pudding” is a custard-like concoction. In the United Kingdom, it can refer to the sweet course that ends a meal; to any food considered suitable for this course; or, more specifically, to suet pastry or sponge-cake-type mixtures (whether steamed, boiled, or baked), batter mixtures, or baked milk and cereal mixtures. Other cultural variations include the North American “hasty pudding” or cornmeal mush, the Indian rice-and-milk-based sweet kheer, and the blood-and-chocolate pudding called sanguinaccio from Puglia. See sanguinaccio. A related word, pudim, occurs in Portuguese; and budino is an Italian custard-like dessert. The British usage of the term “pudding” is so inclusive as to be almost universal, and every culture that eats bread has some version of bread pudding. However, as Alan Davidson notes in The Oxford Companion to Food, “To focus attention on the British usage [of the term] is legitimate, since pudding may be claimed as a British invention, and is certainly a characteristic dish of British cuisine” (2006, p. 638). See united kingdom.
In the late nineteenth century British pudding gained a reputation as plain, even boringly so, lacking the nuance, artifice, and drama of other desserts. Victorian examples such as “Cold Shape” were stubbornly, drably antipoetic. Nonetheless, pudding inspires fierce devotion in a nation that has always harbored an achingly sweet tooth. British puddings exist under several broad categories, including milk or “nursery” puddings, made with a starch such as rice, tapioca, or sago; suet puddings; batter puddings; and sponge puddings (often either boiled or steamed). Many of these are served with a sauce, often custard. See custard. Despite having some ingredients and techniques in common with savory puddings (such as steak and kidney in a suet crust), pudding arguably has no single defining characteristic; indeed, nailing down a definition is almost impossible. One recurrent theme is substantiality—unsurprising, given Britain’s notoriously chilly and damp climate. Less obvious are the perceptions of gender appropriateness that the substance of a pudding gave rise to. The lighter “puddings”—creams, fools, flummeries, junkets, syllabubs, and possets—were seen as feminine, whereas heavy suet puddings were “manly.” See fools; gender; junket; and syllabub.
History
A remarkably direct line can be traced from the spiced, savory sausages of classical antiquity to the rich, sugary desserts of today. After the departure of the Romans from England, boiled suet sausages became a staple of the Anglo-Saxon diet. Medieval palates favored the blending of savory, sweet, and spicy flavors, and puddings at this time were likely to include both meat and sugar. The antecedent of the famous Christmas plum pudding was a “plum pottage” containing meat and dried fruits. Such combinations originated in the extensive Arabic influence on medieval European cooking.
Sugar became a primary cooking ingredient rather than a seasoning in the early modern period, as New World slave plantations began exporting it to Europe. See plantations, sugar and sugar trade. Although sweet items were still served alongside meats and vegetables, and many dishes retained both sweet and savory flavors, overtly sweet puddings began to evolve into a class of their own, particularly among those who could afford to use greater quantities of sugar. The Elizabethans developed the “pudding pie” (a pudding baked in a dish and covered with a pastry lid) to eliminate the use of animal guts, but perhaps the single greatest innovation in pudding’s history is the pudding cloth, which food historian C. Anne Wilson called “a vital factor in the expansion of pudding-eating” (1984, p. 285). A pudding cloth is mentioned in a 1617 recipe for Cambridge Pudding, and in the 1670s Hannah Woolley gave two recipes for almond pudding: one in guts, and one to be boiled in a “napkin.” As puddings proliferated, regional specialities, such as “Devonshire whitepot” using the famous Devon cream, began to appear. In 1747 Hannah Glasse offered two recipes for haggis, oats and offal cooked in a sheep’s stomach. One, “To Make [A Haggis] Sweet with Fruit,” offers an example of what distinguished a sweet from a savory pudding, namely, currants, raisins, and half a pint of “sack” or sweet, fortified wine. By this time the meat had begun to disappear from mince pies and Christmas “plum” puddings; recipes suggested filling boiled suet pudding with either meat or fruit, rather than both. The eighteenth century saw the advent of batter puddings such as Yorkshire pudding, baked and served with a roasted joint (but sometimes eaten as a sweet—a practice that survives in Yorkshire). It also saw a proliferation of puddings based on almonds, carrots, lemons, oranges, or other fruits, baked in pastry crusts.
In the Victorian era, the mass production of the pudding tin allowed even housewives with no servants and little cooking expertise to make complex puddings, while the overall distinction between sweet and savory puddings continued. However, as potatoes became more widely accepted by the middle classes, they began to replace suet puddings as meat’s starchy companion. Along with the growth of the British Empire, a characteristically Victorian nationalistic mythology grew up around the British pudding and the country’s particular skill in making it. As one commenter from The Saturday Review wrote in 1860 of the de facto national dish eaten by British colonialists at sweaty Christmas dinners in India: “We, too, may see in our … determination to eat plum pudding at Agra and Lahore, a sign that we are determined to have our own way wherever we go, and that we are a very vital and self-sufficing people.” The sense of nation and past that now attaches so strongly to pudding was thus already developing; in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), the old-style frumenty serves as a symbol of vanishing rural customs.
Decline and Revival
Sweet puddings continued to proliferate, though many were simply minor modifications within the larger theme of suet, sugar, and dried fruit. This (perceived) monotony was one of the factors contributing to the decline of the traditional English pudding in the twentieth century. Other reasons include the dieting craze induced by the fashion for boyish figures of the 1920s; wartime food rationing that made key ingredients scarce; a new breed of housewives with little time for the long steaming and boiling required; cheaper meat, and central heating, both of which reduced the need for filling, carbohydrate-rich puddings.
Across the Atlantic, at the close of the Great War, came the first powdered pudding mixes: the My-T-Fine brand debuted in 1918. Following World War II, in 1949, the New York Times raved about “Amazo” cornstarch-based instant pudding. Amid a cultural backlash against the Victorians and an increasing emphasis on lighter foods, scientists experimented with artificial ingredients. These mixes, often eaten alone as a snack, remain popular in Continental Europe and Southeast Asia (as in Indonesian puding coklat), as well as in North America.
Renewed interest in traditional puddings came from food writers in the 1970s and 1980s, notably Jane Grigson. Lamenting the downfall of the pudding in her landmark English Food (1974), she provided a carefully curated selection of recipes, part of a nascent consciousness of British culinary heritage. The publication of a Book of Traditional Puddings by the National Trust (1983) and the 1985 establishment of a “Pudding Club” dedicated to their preservation suggested both the hold the pudding retained on the British cultural imagination, and the widespread concern at its apparent disappearance. By 2000 the American food magazine Gourmet could state that “British chefs have rediscovered the ‘pud,’ that odd collection of boiled, steamed and baked desserts with funny names.” Contemporary British chefs like Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, and Heston Blumenthal have all published their own versions of traditional pudding recipes.
The resurgence of the pudding raises some questions about the nature of its appeal. After all, even pudding’s defenders admit its shortcomings; as food historian Jeri Quinzio diplomatically puts it, “Warm, milky rice pudding … [occupies] a special place that has much to do with nostalgia and little to do with flavour” (2012, p. 90). The answer lies partly in the fact that pudding embodies the complex relationship between sweetness and sentimentality. Ironically, however, the traditional suet or steamed pudding is now primarily produced either commercially or by professional chefs, and is frequently deployed by the latter as a marker of their authenticity, homeliness, Britishness, or class affiliation. Members of Britain’s Pudding Club are “bound by our enthusiasm for something wonderful and unchanging … something childish and yet enduring” (2012, p. 7). This powerful sense of the past appears to be pudding’s greatest advantage and also disadvantage. Puddings fell out of favor, in part, because they seemed anachronistic, yet precisely because they are antiquated enough to be viewed romantically—as a nostalgic relic of a disappearing way of life—they are regaining popularity. Pudding is thus doubly nostalgic: it belongs not only to a departed sociocultural moment, but also to one’s own (even if partially imagined) childhood.
See also blancmange; christmas; custard; eton mess; flan (pudím); payasam; sponge cake; sticky toffee pudding; and trifle.
pulled sugar is used in many traditional, eye-catching candies, including North American candy canes, British seaside rock and humbugs, French berlingots, and Swedish polkagrisar.
To make pulled sugar, sugar syrup is boiled with glucose (to prevent graining or recrystallization) to the hard crack stage (302°F [150°C]), then allowed to cool slightly before being literally worked by pulling the mass, stretching it into a rope, folding it and pulling again—a process repeated until the sugar becomes satiny and opaque. A skilled confectioner can do this by hand with astonishing speed and apparent ease, although machines are now mostly used for this hot and potentially dangerous task. Often the sugar is divided into parts, some of which are colored or left clear to make contrasting stripes or patterns on the mass before it is drawn out to its final length.
The Scottish Edinburgh rock and Turkish peynirşekeri also use the same technique, but the syrup is boiled to a lower temperature and the final confection is allowed to grain, yielding a powdery, melting texture.
Although the origins of this technique are unknown, they must be ancient. A clue to the introduction of pulled-sugar confections to the European world lies in the word “pennet,” an old English name for pulled-sugar sweets apparently similar to Edinburgh rock. This word ultimately derives from the Arabic al-fanid and is related to the archaic Spanish alphenique and Portuguese alfenim, both denoting pulled sugar. The association of a precise skill with a word originating in an area responsible for both growing sugar and transmitting the skills for working with it suggests that the two moved west together during or shortly after the Muslim conquest of the western Mediterranean, and also pinpoints the magical ability of sugar to transmit far more than mere calories.
punch, which generally refers to a blended drink of sweetened alcohol flavored with fruit and spices, has its origins in Persia and India. Nonalcoholic, iced sherbets made with sugar, lemon juice, and water and flavored with flower waters had been discovered by Europeans. One apocryphal story has Saladin serving sherbets to King Richard during the Crusades. See flower waters and sherbet. In India, among non-Muslims, alcohol was added to make a delicately perfumed drink called palepuntz, “consisting of Acquaevitae, Rose-water, juice of citrons and sugar,” as described in Mandelslo’s Travels in Western India, 1638–1639. These Indian “punches” were made with arrack (distilled palm wine) and cane sugar or jaggery, a sticky, dark brown palm sugar refined with lime juice. See palm sugar. A popular theory concerning the name suggests that “punch” is a corruption of the Hindi panch, meaning “five,” referring to the five elements of strong (alcohol), weak (water or fruit juice), sour (citrus juice), sweet (sugar), and spice, all essential to the making of punch.
In reality, punch was, and is, made in any number of variations: three (alcohol, sugar, and fruit; or alcohol, sugar, and milk or eggs); four (alcohol, sugar, citrus, and water); and five or more ingredients. The spice used is typically nutmeg. See nutmeg. Nonalcoholic punches eliminate the alcohol. From the beginning, punch has been described as being made and served in a bowl, and drunk together with friends and at celebrations.
The earliest references to punch outside of India are from the American colonies in the 1630s. In England, although the earliest references appear only in the late seventeenth century, following the Restoration, they suggest that punch was known earlier. British sailors were likely familiar with a simple, rough beverage, whereas merchants from the East India Company introduced a posher version.
Based as it is on spirits (initially, arrack and brandy, then rum from the eighteenth century on), with the addition of citrus juice and various forms of sugar as the sweetener, punch was different from the traditional European blended drinks made with wine, beer, cider, and milk, spiced, enriched, and sweetened with honey. See syllabub. Molasses was used in the vinegar-based drink switchel popular with farmers in colonial America, while Central American ponche navideño calls for piloncillo (dark brown sugar). See sugar.
A good balance of acidity and sweetness was an important element of eighteenth-century punch. Proportions varied, depending on the sourness or sweetness of the fruit and the type of alcohol used, but a Caribbean rhyme suggests that a perfect balance was found in “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak.” This proportion appears to be the usual one in the West Indies, Europe, and America during the eighteenth century. Punch often accompanied fried fish, cheese, and turtle soup—the fattiness of these foods being cut by the punch’s acidity. It is unclear whether serving punch with savory foods meant that early versions of the drink were less sweet, but the literature reveals frequent mention of the sharp acidity of lemons leading to extreme stomach cramps.
The eighteenth-century punch-making process began with a “sherbet” of sugar dissolved in citrus juice. Over time tastes appear to have changed, and the sugar–acid balance became less important, with the result that punch became sweeter. A simple sugar syrup, often readymade, became increasingly common, and a greater range of fruits was used. Recipes moved from advising the cook to “sweeten to taste” to listing specific quantities of ingredients, regardless of a given fruit’s acidity.
Although growing concern in the late eighteenth century over slavery had a passing effect on the use of “slave sugar” and rum, punch became increasingly popular in Continental Europe and America in the early nineteenth century. See slavery and sugar trade. A fashion for flaming punch developed, thanks in part to the caramel flavor created by the flame. In Germany, the popular Feuerzangenbowle (fire-tong punch), in which a lighted rum-soaked sugar cone was allowed to drip into the punch, was later captured in Helmut Weiss’s film Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944). In France, flaming brandy or rum was added to the punch. In Manuel complet de la maitresse de maison et de la parfaite ménagère (3d ed. Paris, 1834), Elisabeth Celnart suggests a November tea party with a large bowl of flaming punch surrounded by a variety of little sweets and cakes. In Britain, heated drinks such as mulled wine merged with punch, and steaming bowls of punch became a traditional Christmas drink. See mulled wine.
Pineapple-flavored rum had been popular since the eighteenth century. Some early American punches used peach brandy. Flavored liqueurs and eaux-de-vie, especially orange and cherry, became popular in the nineteenth century, providing extra alcohol, fruit, and sweetness, often enhanced by the addition of pieces of fruit. Fruit punches, with less emphasis on the sweet–acidic balance, have continued to evolve. Contemporary examples include Spanish sangria, Mexican ponche navideño with acidic tejocote (Crataegus pubescens stipulacea) and tamarind, stewed until soft; Guatemalan ponche navideño with various dried fruits, pineapple, papaya, mango and peaches, mamey (Mammea Americana), and coconut; and Austro-Hungarian Krampampuli with raisins, crystallized ginger, and dates.
The development of the ice trade, of refrigeration and ice production, encouraged the making of iced punches. Inspired by Persian sherbet and an infatuation with the Orient, iced Punch à la Romaine, made with fruit juice, whisked egg whites, and alcohol, was often served in ornate glasses as a palate cleanser between courses at grand dinners.
Several punch-flavored cakes exist. Swedish punsch, by law made with arrack, is particularly sweet, and is used to flavor small cakes called Punschrullar, made of biscuits and cacao covered in green marzipan and dipped in chocolate. Rum, oranges, and lemons are used in Germany, Austria, and Hungary to flavor Punschtorte. In Finland, Runeberg’s Torte is a small pastry seasoned with bitter almonds, Swedish punsch, and raspberry jam. It is traditionally served with a glass of punch from early January into February, to commemorate the birthday of the poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg, who was said to have enjoyed the confection with punsch for breakfast. An American trifle is sometimes called a Punch-Bowl Cake because it is made and served in a punch bowl. Eliza Acton, in Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), gives a recipe for Punch Sauce made with brandy, rum, white wine, oranges, and lemons for serving with “custard, plain bread and plum-puddings.”
Punch bowls, often large enough to serve a crowd and grand enough to be displayed, were produced in all materials and many styles. Ornate bowls on a pedestal were used for more formal events; some American glass bowls have detachable pedestals, so bowl and pedestal could be inverted to form a cake stand. See cake and confectionery stands. Special ladles, with long handles and bowls of silver (sometimes crafted of coin), were also devised for serving punch.
Alongside the twenty-first-century revival of cocktails have come a number of attempts to revive punch as well, but they have proved less successful for a number of reasons. A cocktail serves one person, whereas a bowl of punch needs a crowd. Cocktails thrive on a careful balance of new and unusual combinations, sometimes exotic and bizarre. Good punch, often drunk in greater volume, requires delicacy, less sweetness, and fresh fruit to succeed.
See also colonialism; hippocras; politics of sugar; and rum.