Apple Varieties

The general section on apple above explains what a large number of varieties there are, some of great antiquity. This alphabetical list gives brief details of just a few, not including the most recent arrivals whose staying power is not yet fully established.

Allington Pippin is one of the sweet/sharp varieties which exemplifies the manner in which an apple’s taste can change with age. As Joan Morgan (1985) points out, it ‘can be almost bitter sweet in early November but mellows to a definite pineapple flavour by Christmas’. It also exemplifies complexity of flavour; one enthusiast claimed that he had found ‘pine and grape, the scent of quince and pear … the breath of honey from the hive in its gelid pores’.

Api (Pomme d’Api) or Lady apple, a small, hard, winter apple which may have originated in Roman times. Lister (1698), describing his visit to Paris in that year, wrote that it was served there for show more than use, ‘being a small flat apple, very beautiful red on one side, and pale or white on the other, and may serve the ladies at their Toilets a Pattern to Paint by’. The flavour, residing chiefly in the perfumed skin, is good.

Bismarck, unusual among British-type cooking apples in having a bright red skin, was introduced from Tasmania, its place of origin, in 1890.

Blenheim Orange, one of the best apples of the Pippin family, was popular in England for a century after its introduction around 1818. It is large, dull yellow and red, and has crisp flesh and a flavour of unusually acid quality. Season: midwinter, so traditionally a Christmas apple.

Bramley’s Seedling or Bramley, the most widely sold cooking apple in Britain, has a very long keeping season, from early autumn right through to next summer. It is usually very large and often irregular in shape. It is harvested commercially as a green apple, or green with faint red stripes, but will turn yellow if left on the tree; and there are also crimson varieties.

Calville blanche d’hiver, an old French variety, is a connoisseur’s apple. It is large, ribbed, golden, juicy, and scented. Season: January and February.

Cider apples are of varieties quite distinct from eating or cooking apples, and are indeed almost inedible. Their chief characteristics are sourness, astringency, and bitterness. (In N. America ‘cider’ usually refers to unfermented apple juice, to which the above does not apply: see CIDER.)

Cortland, a modern American variety bred from Ben Davis and McIntosh, is useful for fruit salads because its flesh hardly browns when cut. Largish, yellow and red, with a sweet, moderately acid flavour. Season: late autumn.

Costard, an extinct family of British apples, was one of the first types to have a distinct name, which was already in use in the 13th century. The first important kitchen apple, large and flavourful, much used in pies until it began to disappear towards the end of the 17th century. ‘Costard’ was medieval slang for ‘head’. The name survives in the word ‘costermonger’, although such a person may now sell any kind of fruit or vegetable.

Court pendu plat, an old French variety dating from before 1600, may well be a survival from Roman times. It is small, flattened in shape, green with faint red stripes, and richly flavoured.

Cox’s Orange Pippin, one of the best of the large family of Pippins (see Pippins, below). Since its introduction in the first half of the 19th century it has become the most popular British apple. It is a medium-sized, round apple, dull brownish-green with faint red stripes and a red flush on one side. It usually has a matt brown russeted area around the stem. The texture is crisp, the flavour solidly acid but balanced by sweetness. The skin is strongly scented and should be eaten. Season: late autumn to spring, but the best is midwinter.

Delicious, a red apple, whose name is often applied by an inept abbreviation to the unrelated Golden Delicious. Delicious began as a chance seedling on the farm of Jess Hiatt of Peru, Iowa, in 1872. He marketed it as Hiatt’s Hawkeye. Stark Brothers, a large fruit-growing concern, bought out Hiatt and renamed the variety Delicious. Since the 1940s it has been the leading American apple, is also widely grown elsewhere and has given rise to new varieties such as Starking (sometimes Star King). The fruit is large, red, and elongated, with five projections at the bottom end. The flavour is sweet but insipid, lacking in acid. Season: autumn to early winter.

Discovery, so named because it was a chance discovery by an amateur grower, was first marketed on a large scale in the 1970s. A bright green and crimson apple, like a brighter version of a Worcester Pearmain, the flesh often has a pink tinge on the sunny side. The flavour is unusual, with a hint of raspberries.

Ellison’s Orange is highly flavoured, tasting of aniseed and pear drops.

Faro, a French apple, red, large, juicy, sweet with a little acidity. Grown in Brie, a region renowned for apple cultivation, and known as long ago as the 14th century. For table use during winter and for making a TARTE TATIN.

Flower of Kent, a large, green variety now almost forgotten, but said to be the apple whose fall inspired Sir Isaac Newton to formulate his law of universal gravitation.

Gillyflower, a variety mentioned by many early authors such as Evelyn (1699) and praised for its rich and aromatic flavour.

Gladstone, a large early summer apple of pleasing flavour and aroma.

Golden Delicious, an American apple which appeared as a chance seedling on a W. Virginia farm in about 1900, is now the most widely grown apple in many countries. It is not related to Delicious: the name is due to the fact that the same nursery firm bought the rights to both varieties. The apple is elongated, tapering to five points, pale green becoming yellow and sometimes aquiring a faint flush. The texture, at first light and crisp, later becomes flabby. The flavour varies. When the apple is grown in a cool climate, so that enough acid is formed, it can be good; but when grown in a warmer region it is insipid. Popular with growers because the tree crops heavily and the apples keep from early autumn to spring, albeit becoming more limp as time passes. Golden Delicious retains its shape when cooked, so it is a good choice for dishes containing sliced apples which are exposed to view, such as the French Tarte aux pommes.

Granny Smith is unusual, perhaps unique, in being a brilliant, almost emerald, green even when fully ripe. Much grown in warm climates, notably in S. Africa, Australia, Chile, and France. The texture is crisp and juicy, the flavour distinctive, with a hint of almond.

Gravenstein originated in N. Germany or Denmark before 1800. Scions were taken to California around 1820 and it soon became a popular American variety, especially for cooking; but it is also eaten by those who like rather acid apples. It is large, roundish and slightly lopsided, yellow with bright red and orange stripes. The texture is reasonably crisp, the flavour sharp and aromatic.

Greening or Rhode Island Greening is a pale green apple first grown from seed in 1748 by a Mr Green at Green’s End, Rhode Island. Crisp and sharp in flavour, it is usually sold as a cooking apple, but is a good dessert apple too. It has a long season from late autumn to spring.

Idared (sometimes Ida Red), an American apple bred in the 1940s from the better-known Jonathan and Wagener, has become popular with British growers too because of its long keeping qualities. A medium-sized, round, red and yellow apple with a sweet, moderately acid flavour which makes it a satisfactory dessert variety; it also cooks well.

James Grieve, an English apple classified as ‘early dessert’, has a pleasantly balanced flavour and yields plenty of delicious juice.

Laxton apples, a large and important group, owe their name to the horticulturist Thomas Laxton (1830–90), whose sons produced thousands of cross-bred apples, from which many of the best British dessert apples are derived. A high proportion of them retain the family name Laxton. They bear a general resemblance to Coxes, but are usually brighter green, with less striping and russeting. The texture is crisp and the flavour light. The best-known late Laxtons include Laxton’s Pearmain and Laxton’s Superb. Laxton’s Fortune is a yellow and red striped mid-season variety.

McIntosh, a popular Canadian variety which has been designated Canada’s national apple. It was named after John McIntosh of Ontario, who discovered it in E. Ontario as a chance seedling in (probably) 1811. The apple is medium-sized, green or yellow overlaid with red stripes. The area where it grows is near the northern limits of apple country. Its texture is soft and juicy, the flavour a pleasing combination of tart and sweet; and it is aromatic. Good to eat out of hand, also a good cooking apple.

Macoun, a large, red American apple bred from McIntosh, which it surpasses in flavour. It also keeps better.

Mutsu, of Japanese origin, is grown in Britain under the name Crispin. A very late, long-keeping variety, developed from Golden Delicious but generally larger, of a duller green hue, with a more acid and more interesting flavour. For both cooking and eating.

Newtown Pippin, a fine, old established American variety, is little grown today because the tree is awkward to manage. Newtown was on Long Island, where Flushing now is. The original tree was found growing there soon after 1700. It produced a heavy crop of yellowish-green apples which were crisp but juicy, acid but sweet, and had exceptional keeping qualities.

Northern Spy, a large, yellow and red striped American apple resembling Baldwin but far better; indeed, it was for long the ne plus ultra of the cracker-barrel connoisseur and something of a legend for country people as well as urban gastronomes.

Pearmain, the oldest English apple name, was recorded in a Norfolk document of 1204. It is derived from the old French apple name ‘parmain’ or ‘permain’, referring perhaps to a group of apples rather than a single variety. All that modern Pearmains have in common is the green and red colouring typical of many British apples. The best known is Worcester Pearmain, an early autumn apple which has a good, sharp flavour, with a hint of strawberry, and a crisp texture when fresh, but does not keep. Its red parts are distinctively dark. Most other Pearmains ripen later.

Pippin, originally meaning any apple grown from a pip, is a name derived from the French ‘pépin’, meaning both ‘pip’ and the apple. By the 16th century the term had come to denote a hard, late-ripening, long-keeping apple of acid flavour. The first pippins brought over from France to England were cider apples, but eating varieties were soon developed. In relatively recent times Ribston Pippin became popular, and from it Cox’s Orange Pippin (see above) was bred. Sturmer Pippin does well in the southern hemisphere, notably S. Africa and Australia.

In America the name ‘Pippin’ was used for different kinds of apple, the most famous being a purely American variety, Newtown Pippin (see above).

Reinette, an old French apple name, originally meant an apple propagated by grafting (Latin renatus, meaning ‘reborn’). The name soon came to denote instead a type of apple which was late ripening and long keeping, with a dull green skin, sometimes flushed and often ‘russeted’. It had firm, slightly dry flesh, and a good, sharp flavour. Golden Reinette has been popular in France since before 1650. Orléans Reinette, an 18th-century variety which is unusually sweet, is generally regarded as better.

Rome Beauty, an American apple, is named for Rome, Ohio, near where it was discovered around 1820 by the farmer Joel Gillett. One of his grafted trees had shot from below the graft. The stray branch began to produce large, red striped apples of handsome appearance and rocklike solidity. These keep crisp for a long time, but the flavour is insipid. Used for cooking, especially baking, because it keeps its shape well.

Russet is the name of a group of apples with distinctive matt brown skin, often spotted or with a faint red flush, and of a flattened lopsided shape. The flesh is crisp and the apples keep well. The flavour is unusual and pearlike.

Russets are used both for eating and for cooking. Their size varies from tiny to very large. Royal Russet, a variety known in England before the 17th century, remains popular on the mainland of Europe as a cooking apple. In Britain Egremont Russet and Golden Russet are the most popular kinds. An American variety, Roxbury Russet, is claimed to have originated in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the early 17th century. If true, this would make it America’s oldest named variety.

Wealthy, a large, bright red American apple, grows well in northern climates. It was developed for that purpose in the 1860s by Peter Gideon, the first American to breed apples scientifically. The name was not bestowed to suggest opulence, but was Mrs Gideon’s (Puritan) Christian name. Has a good, sharp flavour suitable for table or kitchen use. Season: mid-autumn.

White Joaneting, an English apple known before 1600 (the Jenneting of Elizabethan writers), is still sometimes grown because it ripens before any other apple, in July. Its shiny skin is yellow, sometimes with a red flush. It has a good flavour and is juicy, but does not keep.

White Transparent, an apple of Scandinavian or Russian origin introduced to Britain and the USA in the mid-19th century. Very pale with a transparent skin and a mild flavour. The taste is mild but agreeable. Season: late summer. To be used as soon as ripe, while still crisp, and for cooking rather than dessert. Yellow Transparent is similar.

Winesap, an American apple, of medium size, elongated, bright red with a little yellow on the shaded side, and with firm, aromatic flesh.

Worcester apples form a group of which the Worcester Pearmain (see Pearmain) is the best known. Firm, sweet flesh with a strawberry flavour is characteristic of them.

York Imperial, a large American apple with good keeping qualities, much grown for use in the food-processing industry. It has crisp flesh with an attractively aromatic flavour, but its lopsided shape and patchy colour are unprepossessing, so it is seldom sold retail.

READING:

Bultitude (1983); Morgan and Richards (1993); Smith (1971).

Apples in cookery

Most of the dishes made with apples that we know today are of early origin. For example, to cook apples with fatty meats, so that their sharpness offsets the fat, is a practice which dates back at least as far as classical times when APICIUS gave a recipe for a dish of diced pork with apples. Likewise the combination of fatty fish such as herring with apple, still popular in the Netherlands and N. Europe, is of ancient origin. The versatility of apples was already being exploited in medieval times; the FORME OF CURY and the MENAGIER DE PARIS (14th century) give a range of recipes for apple sauce, FRITTERS, rissoles, and drinks.

Before the introduction of the domestic oven apples were roasted whole in front of an open fire. Practical difficulties in cooking them evenly led to the development of more complicated ‘apple roasters’. These were metal racks incorporating curved tinplate reflectors to heat the far side of the apples.

Apple pie is perhaps the most famous apple dish, and exhibits interesting variations. The American apple pie, with pastry underneath and on top, is derived from the medieval raised pies (of which the British pork pie and French pâté en croûte are surviving examples) and various sweet and savoury dishes completely enclosed in ‘coffyns’ (see COFFIN) or pastry cases. In contrast, the modern British apple pie is normally baked in a deep pie dish with a crust on top only. This form too has a long history, since pies with an upper crust only had emerged as early as the 17th century. It was common in Britain to add verjuice for extra sharpness; and old recipes often included quinces which not only sharpened the flavour but gave an attractive pink colour.

In France the classic dish is Tarte aux pommes, which is topless. This is made on a round or square base of puff pastry (or simply short pastry), spread with raw apple slices arranged in elegant rows, baked, then often glazed with apple jelly. The choice of apple is important; the typical low-acid apples of the southerly growing areas, which retain their shape when cooked, are best. See also TARTE TATIN—cooked with apples underneath pastry and served ‘upside down’.

Further east the Apfeltorte (covered apple tart) and the well-known Apfelstrudel of German-speaking regions return to the completely enclosed form, which is also found in the apple dumplings which are traditional all over N. Europe as well as in Britain.

Apple dumpling (Rabot de pommes in French) used to be a conventional boiled dumpling: in 1849 Eliza ACTON recommended wrapping it in a knitted cloth to make a decorative pattern on the surface. Soon after, it became usual to bake it, the method now preferred. A whole apple is peeled, cored, and filled with a sweet mixture (e.g. brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon plus a little grated lemon rind). The apple is then wrapped in shortcrust or puff pastry and baked. Why it should retain the name ‘dumpling’, when it is made in this way, is not clear; but it does.

The standard accompaniment for apple pie is cream. A recipe of 1704, written in heroic couplets by the little-known poet Leonard Welsted (not, as sometimes stated, the work of satirist William King), cautions against tasting the pie until the cream has had an opportunity to ‘give a softness to the tarter juice’. (The recipe sounds good. It includes quinces, brown sugar, cloves, and a little orange flower water.) It is a modern American practice to serve the pie with ice cream, giving an attractive contrast of heat and cold. In Britain it was often eaten with cheese, especially Derby.

Apple cakes are made by several different methods. In England they are plain cakes based on creamed or rubbed-in mixtures with chopped or grated raw apples, and are a speciality of the south-west. Swedish applecakes, on the other hand, are puddings made from layers of apple purée with fried and spiced bread crumbs, reminiscent of apple BROWN BETTY or apple CHARLOTTE.

The preceding paragraph shows how indistinct are the boundaries between CAKE and CRUMBLE and PUDDING.

There are many other sweet or dessert confections which can feature apple. See, for examples, COBBLER; PANDOWDY.

apricot

Prunus armeniaca (syn Armeniaca vulgaris), a fruit belonging to the rose family and closely related to the plum, peach, cherry, and almond. The apricot’s original wild ancestor has long since vanished, but it is generally accepted that its home was in, or mainly in, China, and that it was the Chinese who first cultivated the fruit, before 2000 BC. Laufer (1919) gave a plausible account of its spread westwards by silk dealers, which resulted in its reaching Iran (where, significantly, it had only a descriptive name, zard-alu, meaning ‘yellow plum’) in the 2nd or 1st centuries BC, and Greece and Rome in the 1st century AD.

The Greeks, wrongly thinking that the fruit originated in Armenia, called it ‘Armenian plum’; hence Armeniaca in the botanical name. The Romans, impressed by its early ripening, named it praecocium, meaning precocious. From this derives the name ‘apricot’.

The fruit is now widely grown in the warmer temperate parts of the world. The main regions of cultivation are: a band stretching from Turkey through Iran and the Himalayas to China and Japan; S. Europe and N. Africa; S. Africa; Australia; and California. There are many varieties differing in size, colour, and flavour. The diversity found in the great apricot belt from Turkey to Turkestan is astounding: white, black, grey, and pink apricots, from pea to peach sized, with flavours equally varied. In the Near East white apricots are common, with pale skin and pink blush. Their translucent flesh resembles that of a white peach, and is of surpassing delicacy and sweetness.

A fresh apricot is ranked high among fruits, as is evident from the praise of the connoisseur Leclerc (1925), who wrote of ‘Le parfum très pénétrant de l’abricot, sa saveur balsamique et douce dont on ne retrouve l’équivalent dans aucun autre fruit.’ He thought the flesh of the apricot combined in a unique way the subtle and disturbing fragrances of the Orient with the robust and straightforward smells of the French countryside.

The apricot certainly possesses a potent sensory appeal. In one of his books, John Ruskin described it as ‘shining in a sweet brightness of golden velvet’. But appearances can be deceptive. Apricots can acquire their orange colour before they are fully ripe and before their superb flavour has developed. Fruits picked in this state, for commercial purposes, will never taste as they should.

Hence the efforts made in Britain, from the 16th century onwards—King Henry VIII’s gardener brought the apricot to England from Italy in 1542—to grow the fruit there, in spite of the unpropitious climate.

However, it was only in the 18th century that real success was achieved, notably by Lord Anson at Moor Park in Hertfordshire; the variety called Moor Park (or Moorpark) became famous in other European countries and is still grown. But the vast majority of apricots sold in the UK are imported, and despite the rapidity of modern transport these cannot match in flavour a fully ripe fruit picked from the tree in, say, N. Africa or California.

The apricot reached Virginia in N. America early in the 18th century, but the climate of the eastern states is not fully suitable. The Spaniards had earlier taken the fruit to Mexico. It was from there that its cultivation spread to California during the 18th century; and that is the state where it has since been principally grown. California’s classic variety, the Blenheim, is lusciously sweet and perfumed. In California’s golden age of the apricot, between the wars, flourishing groves of Blenheim made the Santa Clara Valley (surrounding San Jose, south of San Francisco) the world’s leading area of production. Unhappily, the development ofz‘Silicon Valley’ caused most of the growers to move to the east, on less suitable land, where inferior varieties have come to be dominant.

The consumption of freshly picked apricots out of hand is a well-known pleasure, but most apricots are fated to be dried or otherwise processed. Dried apricots are one of the best of dried fruits and at their best if they have been sun dried. Fully ripe fruits are used, so they have the real apricot flavour.

The dried apricots from Hunza are small and unprepossessing, but have a notable reputation, since the inhabitants of Hunza enjoy remarkable health and longevity, both attributed in part to this fruit. (Apricots are among the more nutritious fruits, and are particularly rich in carotene.)

Apricots are usually treated with sulphur dioxide, a preservative, before being sun dried. Apricots which have not been so treated are darker in colour, with a caramelized, almost figlike, flavour.

Turkey and Syria produce the so-called ‘apricot leather’, dried apricot flesh in the form of thin sheets, which the cook melts down for use; these have a highly concentrated flavour (see FRUIT PASTES, CHEESES, BUTTERS). Meebos is an unusual S. African conserve. Ripe but firm apricots are brined, then stoned and pressed flat, salted, and part dried in the sun over several days. The resultant sheets are stored in jars with layers of sugar between them and on top, and will keep for months.

In China, from at least the 7th century AD onwards, apricots were preserved not only by drying, but also by salting and even smoking. The black smoked apricots of Hupei were famous, and apricots in general were greatly esteemed as a food, being considered good for the heart.

Apricot jam, made from fresh or dried fruit, is not only a good spread but also an important ingredient for the confectioner. It is used as a sweet adhesive in cakes such as SACHERTORTE; and in diluted form as the apricot glaze which ‘finishes’ many confections.

In Middle Eastern cookery apricots are also used in sweetmeats, for example stoned and stuffed with almonds or almond paste, the two flavours of the related fruits complementing each other to perfection. But apricots are used in savoury dishes too, to give a ‘sweet-and-sour’ effect. The fruit blends particularly well with lamb, as in the Arab mishmishiya (which might be translated as ‘apricotery’ and goes back to the 13th century). It is also met in PILAF dishes of C. Asia and Iran.

Apricot kernels are similar to almonds and, like almonds, contain small amounts of prussic acid which is destroyed by roasting them. They are used in making apricot brandies and liqueurs; and the Italian amaretti di Saronno (see MACAROONS) owe some of their flavour and texture to them.

Other species and hybrids are noteworthy. The Chinese, and later the Japanese, have cultivated an apricot of a different species, P. mume (now Armeniaca mume), commonly known in the West as ‘Japanese flowering apricot’, although it is of Chinese origin, and often misdescribed as a type of plum. See UMEBOSHI.

Some apricots are dark in colour, for example, the ‘black apricot’ of N. India, Armeniaca × dasycarpa, which looks like a purplish-black plum but has a true apricot flavour.

A few plum-apricot hybrids with velvety purple skin, scarlet flesh, and an apricot aroma have been developed recently in California, bearing names like plumcot and aprium.

‘San Domingo apricot’ and ‘South American apricot’ are not apricots but other names for the MAMEE.

aquaculture

is the farming of fish and shellfish. Its antecedents lie in the measures taken by many cultures to breed, rear, fatten, or maintain any number of fish species so they might be consumed in the best possible condition. Examples are too many to list but should include mention at least of pioneering fish farming in early China, where freshwater fish such as CARP and mullet (see GREY MULLET) have always been widely kept in ponds and where salt-water fish are often kept alive in well-smacks—hulks with net bottoms—so that they are of the freshest when cooked. Then, in ancient Rome, fish were kept alive in sea enclosures, or fattened, even spawned and farmed artificially, in ponds. The friend of Emperor Augustus, Publius Vedius Pollio, kept MORAY EELS in his ponds, and fed recalcitrant slaves to them. What worked for Rome was equally effective in post-classical Europe. The stewponds of medieval monasteries and Georgian country houses; the tanks, ponds, and reservoirs that bred, fed, and fattened the freshwater fish so enjoyed in E. Europe; the tidal pools and the vessels equipped with wells which were used to keep sea fish in prime condition were all commonplace. And the culture of bivalves, MUSSELS and OYSTERS in particular, was well advanced by the 19th century.

However, aquaculture is more likely to be understood currently as the farming of salt-water species on a larger scale than has so far been mentioned. SALMON and tropical PRAWNS are the two most important species, but it is of mounting significance as an alternative source for a slew of others. Some hold that aquaculture is the solution to the dilemma posed by a rising human population, greater demand for fish and diminishing wild stocks. Others would counter that the ecological damage consequent on fish farms is unsustainable; that the rape of the oceans for foods to give the farmed stock is as damaging as the overfishing the farms are meant to sidestep; that the methods of feed production (entailing the concentration by boiling of small fish such as sand eels) result in contamination of farmed flesh by chemical residues; that escapees from captivity interbreed with wild stocks to their disadvantage; that the spread of disease and parasites from the farms into the wild environment is impossible to control. These are big problems, but do not seem to be inhibiting the expansion of the industry, whether major offshore developments in the USA, controlled pens for salmon in Scotland, captivity of salmon in fjords in Norway, or large coastal farms, with drastic consequences for mangrove forests, for tropical prawns.

While salmon and prawns spend their whole life in captivity, other species may be caught as infant specimens and merely fattened in pens or enclosures. This was the case until recently with the bluefin TUNA. While the arrangement eases some problems of supply, it is of no benefit to wild stocks.

Some of the species farmed around the world are as follows: carp are still raised in large numbers in C. Europe (where they also rear PIKE, ZANDER, and BREAM) and China, where they also raise PERCH; TILAPIA is farmed in Japan and the Caribbean and many tropical countries; coko and chum salmon are farmed in Alaska; TROUT is often farmed in the UK, the USA, and European countries; SEA BASS has proved easy to farm, mainly in the Mediterranean, as, too, has GILT-HEAD BREAM; HALIBUT is beginning to be farmed in Ireland, Norway, and Scotland as is TURBOT; EEL is farmed in the Far East and in Holland; mahi-mahi is farmed in Hawaii; bluefin tuna has now been bred in captivity, although the farmed product is at present more expensive than the wild.

READING:

Clover (2004).

Arab cuisine

The vast majority of Arabs live in the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, or the northern parts of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There is a 1,000-mile gap between the Egyptian and Tunisian population centres, and from the later 8th to the early 16th centuries, the sparsely inhabited southern shore of the Gulf of Sirte was nearly always a no man’s land between rival states. As a result, a line can be drawn through the middle of Libya dividing Arabs into easterners and westerners, who differ in language, customs, and cuisine.

Although the first impression of Arab food that results is one of bewildering variety, there are common culinary features throughout the Arab world. The everyday protein sources are usually dairy products and pulses (above all LENTILS, CHICKPEAS, and BROAD BEANS). Pulses are often made into pastes, called baisar in the west of the Maghreb where it is a soup of broad beans; in the east, the pastes are turned into little fried cakes (ta’miyya, FALAFEL). Milk is scarcely ever consumed fresh but made immediately into YOGHURT (laban), clotted cream (qishta, KAYMAK), clarified butter (samn, see GHEE), or cheese (jibn). A common breakfast is cheese or yoghurt with olives or dates.

Beef is eaten in Iraq and water-buffalo in Egypt, but the preferred meat nearly everywhere is LAMB. The most tender cuts go for KEBABS, the others for stews and ground meat. Markets often have butchers or cooked meat shops that specialize in the head and trotters, that is, the non-organ meats that are not suitable for stews and kebabs. Among fowl, chicken is popular but squab (see PIGEON) runs a close second in Egypt and N. Africa.

Because of Islamic dietary law, pork is rarely eaten in the Arab world, even by Christians. Islam also prohibits wine. Perhaps as a result of this, meat dishes are often given a sweet flavouring, or even more often a sour flavouring (with lemons—fresh, pickled, or dried—or yoghurt, vinegar, POMEGRANATE juice, SUMAC, or TAMARIND), which would not occur to cooks in parts of the Mediterranean where wine is a regular part of the meal.

The preferred grain has always been wheat, though rice is the staple of S. Iraq and has prestige value elsewhere in the eastern Arab world. Most breads, whether cooked in the TANDOOR or the European-style brick oven, are flat. Paper-thin breads (raqîq, marqûq, khubz sâj) command special admiration. Throughout the area, bakers also make ring-shaped breads (samîd) and biscuits (ka’k).

Vegetables are stewed with meat when possible, but cold stewed vegetables dressed with oil (much like légumes à la grecque) are virtually universal. They may descend from Christian Lenten dishes. When vegetables are stuffed with rice and dressed with oil, they are called yalanji to distinguish them from meat-stuffed vegetables, just as in the Middle Ages vegetarian Christian dishes, often oil dressed, were called muzawwarât (the Arab word meaning, like the Turkish yalanji, ‘counterfeit’). Vegetables made into vinegar pickles include some rarely preserved this way in Europe, such as turnips.

Sweets and pastries are commonly flavoured with nuts but scarcely ever with fruits (with the exception of dates), which are usually eaten out of hand, either fresh or dried. In cookery, fruits are treated much like vegetables. Mixed dried fruits are often poached together and served cold, like the cold vegetable dishes. Fruits are frequently stewed with meat in the same way that vegetables are, though in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon this is now rare, probably because of the influence of Turkish cuisine, which avoids this combination.

A particular characteristic of the Arab world is the mixing of flatbread—fresh, stale, or toasted—with other ingredients. Stewed meat mixed with bread, a dish known as THARÎD, was the favourite of the prophet Muhammad, and it is no accident that Muslims make tharîd as far away as Xinjiang. But the Arab countries make many other such dishes as well, such as the tashrîb of Iraq, the fatta of Egypt and Syria, and the fatût of Yemen (which is anything you wish—meat, scrambled eggs, a mixture of honey and melted butter—mixed with toasted flatbread). In a sense, these dishes are the equivalent of the complex PILAFS that developed in Iran. During the Middle Ages, the Moors of Spain and N. Africa were obsessed with creating an ultra-thin bread for particularly elegant tharîds and this was one theatre for the development of both puff pastry and the strudel-like pastry sheets known as WARQA in Morocco today.

The cuisine of the nomads and oasis-dwellers of Arabia, monotonously based on DATES and BARLEY, had little to offer the outside world apart from tharîd and the barley and date dish ʿasîda, which subsequently developed into a more refined sort of sweet in many Arab countries. The distinctive cuisine of the Arab empire that began to develop during the days of the caliphs adopted much from the conquered peoples. From Egypt, it took kaʿk (the Coptic kʾaakʾe) and mulûkhiyya, a stew based on the leafy vegetable MELOKHIA. (Its gluey consistency is an acquired taste. In Morocco, the name mulûkhiyya is applied not to this mallow but to the similarly mucilaginous OKRA.) From the Aramaic-speaking people of the Fertile Crescent, it took a number of grain dishes: the sweet khabîsa, the hearty porridge-like dish harîsa (made with meat and whole wheat, the latter beaten to a purée at the end—see HALEEM) and a sweetened dish of whole wheat served on religious occasions, called ʿashûre (see AŞURE) by Muslims and kilbeh by Christians.

But the overwhelming influence, which affected cookery not only throughout the Arab world but much of the non-Arab Muslim world as well, came from Iran. There had been a cult of gastronomy at the court of the Sasanian Empire and the caliphs of Baghdad gratefully adopted it. As a result, the Arabic food vocabulary is as saturated with Persian words as English is with French. Among them are turshi (vinegar pickles), sanbûsak (the small triangular meat pie known as SAMOSA in India), shurbâ (soup, often with a grain thickening, see SHORBA), yakhni (meat stewed with a vegetable), kufta (ground meat, nearly always formed into balls, whether to be grilled, fried, or stewed—see KOFTA), zulâbiyâ (lattice-shaped fritters, known as JALEBI in India), and fâlûda (see PALOODEH, also known, depending on when and how borrowed from Persian, as bâlûza and balta), even the ubiquitous term MEZZE.

The relative sophistication of the various influences is symbolized by three basically similar sweets of a puddingy or porridgy consistency. At least in its original form, the Arabian ʿasîd is the peasant’s basic meal of whole grain, the Aramaean khabîsa is based on flour, and the Iranian fâlûda is thickened with cornstarch (cornflour).

The new cultural constellation of the court of Baghdad also called into being new dishes. Several that are named after famous personages have survived to the present, the most widespread being muhallabiyya (see MUHALLABIA), a smooth pudding made from rice flour, and bûrâniyya (see BURAN). In the later Middle Ages, the crêpe called QATÂʾIF developed in an unexpected direction and gave rise to the very delicate and sophisticated sweet also known as kunâfa.

Other dishes universal in the Arab world have less clear-cut antecedents, such as the date-stuffed pastry called MAʾAMOUL in the east and maqrûd in the west; the delicate butter cookie ghuraiba (see GHORAYEBAH); and the dish of fish and rice found in all coastal areas, sayyâdiyya.

Around the 12th century, parallel innovation in grain cookery took place in Iran and the western Arab world which largely superseded the traditional mushy grain preparations of the earlier Middle Ages. In N. Africa, COUSCOUS was invented. The Iranian innovation was pilaf (a method of cooking rice partly by steaming, designed to keep each grain separate), known in Arabic as rizz mufalfal. At a later but unknown time, bulghur (see BURGHUL—boiled crushed wheat dried in the sun) was invented somewhere in the east, probably in N. Iraq or what is now SE Turkey. Couscous spread to Syria in the Middle Ages and bulghur is known as far west as Tunisia today (but KIBBEH, a purée of meat and bulghur used in countless Syrian and Iraqi dishes, has spread no further west than Egypt).

The culinary differences that we see among the Arab countries today are due to the existence of three great areas of culinary innovation: Iran (a continuing influence upon Iraq); Moorish Spain, where there was a great cross-fertilization of Muslim, Christian, and Jew, of Arab, Berber, and Spaniard; and the Ottoman Empire, where, by Sultan Mehmet II’s design, there was an even greater cultural fusion in the metropolis of Istanbul (see TURKEY). But these are at bottom local colourings of a cuisine that had taken its basic shape in the 9th century.

READING:

Perry (1998, 2000), Zubaida and Tapper (1994).

Arabian food

a term used to indicate the food of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the Sultanate of Oman, which constitute the Gulf Co-operation Council countries of Arabia. They cover some 2.5 million square km (965,000 square miles) and have a population of about 25 million, of whom a substantial proportion are expatriates. This results in the availability of a very wide range of foods. (There is a separate entry for YEMEN.)

The terrain is varied with extensive desert areas, a long coastline, and mountains in the eastern and western fringes. The monsoon reaches the southern coast but the majority of the land receives only occasional rainfall. The agriculture does, however, achieve a wide range of produce although it is only well developed over limited areas of the peninsula.

The indigenous Bedouin tribes have a strong but basic food culture (see BEDOUIN FOOD). Historically the region’s food has been influenced by the surrounding cultures, Ottoman to the north, the HORN OF AFRICA to the west, and IRAN and INDIA to the east. This has resulted in a diverse and well-developed cuisine in the main population centres.

The presentation of food and the format of meals is similar to what one finds to the north, in LEBANON AND SYRIA.

LAMB is the most popular meat and khouzi, baked whole lamb, could be considered to be the national dish of several of these countries. The lamb is stuffed with a chicken, eggs and rice spiced with the baharat spice mixture (see below), saffron, and onions. The baked lamb is served on the bed of rice liberally garnished with almonds and GHEE. Lamb is also frequently cooked on skewers either as pieces or as ground meat, kebab mashwi. Chicken is the second favourite and is also available freshly roasted from shawarma stalls. These stalls sell the Gulf version of doner kebab (see KEBAB); vertical spit-roasted lamb pieces are sliced and served in some form of flatbread such as mafrooda or hollowed-out roll with tomato, parsley, and TAHINI dressing.

The baharat spice mix is prepared from black pepper, coriander, CASSIA, cloves, cumin, CARDAMOM, nutmeg, and paprika. Another important flavouring ingredient specific to this region (and for which there is no real substitute) is loomi, dried Omani limes. They are used in meat dishes and also for a refreshing sweet tea.

Fish and prawns feature significantly in the region’s food as all the countries are coastal. Hammour (grouper) and zubaidi (silver pomfret) are particularly esteemed. Machbous is a dish of prawns cooked with rice, fresh herbs, and vegetables.

Savoury dishes are eaten with rice or flat-bread. Yoghurt, laban, and strained yoghurt, labneh, are the most important milk products and are used in a number of dishes. Fresh salt pickles are prepared as an accompaniment to snacks and meat.

Vegetables and pulses are available in wide variety as accompaniments for the meat and fish. Large quantities of fresh herbs are sold in the markets in bunches, mainly parsley, spinach, mint, and coriander but including Ceylon spinach (see BASELLA), basil, dill, PURSLANE, rocket, spinach beet, MELOKHIA, radish tops, spring onions, FENUGREEK, MALLOW, and DANDELION.

DATES were the most important fruit and continue to be consumed in large quantities, particularly during the fresh date season and Ramadan, the month of fasting. Other fruits which are now available and popular include mango, melon, watermelon, orange, and banana.

Sweet dishes are often based on dates. BAKLAVA is a popular import from Turkish cuisine and the small stuffed pancakes called ʿataif (see QATAʾIF) are a RAMADAN speciality adopted from northern neighbours.

Dibis, date molasses (see DIBS), is extracted from dates as they dry and is used in many sweet dishes. There is also a large consumption of honey which particularly appeals to the sweet tooth of the populace.

Coffee, the main drink, has strong associations with the renowned hospitality of the people. It is prepared from finely ground, well-roasted beans and is usually flavoured with cardamom. Tea, the second drink of the region, is usually taken black and very sweet.

READING:

Lamees Abdullah Al Taie (1995); Heine (2004).

archaeology of food

Although previously ignored, the field of food studies is gradually expanding as archaeologists become more interested in ancient daily life and in social and economic networks. We are becoming more able to trace and appreciate the roles of food in the past.

As well as raw ingredients, methods of preparation and prepared dishes, archaeologists also need to investigate by-products, leftovers, and the disposal of food-related materials. A great deal of the archaeological record is composed of rubbish and discards. Although this material may be of little relevance or interest for the study of modern food, it forms the bulk of information available about the past. The inevitable bias this creates, together with the fragmentary nature of archaeological remains, lead to an incomplete and perhaps somewhat inaccurate view of ancient food practices.

Most archaeologists studying food have concentrated on raw ingredients. There are many sources of evidence. Animals used as food can be identified through hard body parts such as bones, teeth, scales, and shell. These usually survive for long periods, often in good condition. Diagnostic marks made by blades on bone and other hard parts show how people butchered animals and the types of tools they used. Plant remains are much more liable to decay, but can be preserved by special circumstances. Plant tissues survive most often by charring through contact with fire, commonly during cooking, but also during rubbish disposal or catastrophic fires. Charred organic remains are inert and can persist for very long periods, although they may be abraded, crushed, or otherwise damaged. More unusually, anaerobic waterlogged environments or mineralization may preserve plant material. In very arid conditions, plant remains (and other organic material) become desiccated.

Direct evidence of diet from human remains can be traced through study of elements such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, which have different molecular weights, known as isotopes. The metabolic pathways of specific plant and animal species may process isotopes differently, or the environment of the food species may contain diagnostic isotope ratios. Thus, most tropical grasses, including maize, have a different ratio of carbon isotopes compared to temperate species. Isotope analysis of the bones of people who ate maize detects this typical differential ratio, and is one way that the spread of maize through North America has been tracked.

Favourable circumstances preserve remains of consumed meals in the form of gut contents. Bog bodies from northern Europe contain such remains, but there is debate about whether the people whose bodies were preserved in this way were criminals or ritual sacrifices, and therefore whether their last meals were typical. Desiccated bodies sometimes retain gut contents, but these may be meals of the sick or invalid. Coprolites are sometimes recovered from sites in SW United States, giving a snapshot view of the meals of past inhabitants.

Occasionally, sites yield recognizable finished food products. For example, desiccated bread loaves have been retrieved from ancient Egyptian tombs. Unintentionally charred bread loaves have been discovered in bakeries at Pompeii entombed by volcanic ash, and deliberately burnt bread offerings have been excavated from Viking graves in Scandinavia.

Until recently, archaeologists have hardly addressed questions about food preparation and consumption. This is largely due to the challenges presented by ancient remains. When preparation transforms raw ingredients, foodstuffs can be very difficult to recognize. The physical and chemical changes which occur during processing make food more digestible, but also make it more vulnerable to decay. In addition, most prepared food was eaten, and scavengers likely consumed any leftovers.

Archaeologists have begun to overcome these challenges of recovery and recognition through new applications of established analytical techniques. Microscopic examinations of tiny traces of residue have revealed clues such as starch granules—which can be diagnostic of specific plants—on stone tools. Edible tuber remains rarely survive in tropical areas but archaeologists have identified cultivated tuber starch granules from ancient Panamanian grinding stones.

Extraction and analysis of invisible chemical residues adhering to pots or potsherds show what those containers once held. This type of work has begun to shed new light on ancient dairying, a practice detectable by ageing and sexing large deposits of bone from milk-bearing animal species, but otherwise little understood. The identification of foodstuffs contained in pots, though, is not a simple matter of identifying chemical signatures and matching them with modern ingredients. Biochemicals alter and break down over time and archaeological chemists need to take this into account.

Two other approaches assist the study of ancient food. Ethnography, the study of modern traditional practices, provides invaluable insights into the actions, as well as tools and ingredients, which combine to create food. Archaeologists must carefully choose their examples, however, to ensure that they are relevant to ancient cultures. Experiments with food processing, using accurate replicas or actual examples of ancient equipment, and authentic raw ingredients, can lead to breakthrough understandings of ancient procedures.

READING:

Dalby (1996); Archestratus (1994).

Argentina

The rolling grassland each side of the River Plata which includes URUGUAY and central Argentina is the world’s richest agricultural terrain. The home of nomadic Indians before the arrival of the Spanish, no people had exploited it, nor tilled its soil. It was to prove ideal for imported cattle and sheep, as well as for any temperate crops the new colonists might wish to introduce.

The second largest republic in Latin America is more than just pampas: landscapes vary from the Andes in the north and west, whose foothills support vineyards of high quality, to the rugged terrain of Patagonia in the far south, home of myriad sheep. Nonetheless, it is the superficially romantic life of the gaucho, on the move over immeasurable grasslands, that has marked the character of Argentine, and Uruguayan, cooking.

Before meat processing had made the twin jumps to canning, then refrigeration, cattle were exploited for by-products such as hides, or for JERKY. (Buccaneers were so called because they ate boucan, the French spelling of the word for the griddle on which jerky was dried, loaned in turn from the Tupi-Guaraní language of Paraguay.) Locals, therefore, could eat as much meat as they wanted, so long as the hide was retained. W. H. Hudson comments on the gauchos’ terrific waste of meat, excess being fed to the dogs by the barrowload. Since refrigeration allowed export of raw meat, the character of Argentine beef has been improved by Scottish and English breeding stock.

Most commonly, meat is grilled or roasted on the open fire. This may be a parrilla (large, movable barbecue), or the meat can be roasted (asado), with carcasses and joints set on iron rods planted round the perimeter of the fire. Cooked con cuero, with the hide on, it is said to be juicier. Butchered in this fashion, it is sometimes baked in a pit. Although able to pick only the tenderest meat, the Argentinians have proved to be both omnivorous and careful of resources. Offal is popular: tongues cooked with almond sauce, tripe and sausages, sweetbreads grilled on the barbecue, and, most famously of all, the PUCHERO or boiled dinner of calf’s head, chicken, sausage, and beef with green corn. Economical cuts like the rib or flank are also essential for matambre (literally, hunger-killer) which is a roll of flank steak filled with vegetables and hard-boiled egg eaten cold, in thin slices, or hot.

Offcuts and trimmings from the meat could be served as cold cuts (fiambres), or were used in an EMPANADA, a crescent-shaped pastry turnover with a distinctively rolled edge filled with spiced chopped meat, vegetables, or cheese, common as a street food and for snacks. Fiambres may come with olives and butter, or with a relish or sauce like chimichurri, some versions of which are almost a hamburger relish of corn oil, onions, and pimentos, while others are more like a spicy vinaigrette. Peppery relishes also claim a place at the barbecue.

Stews that include the tougher cuts combined with indigenous vegetables such as pumpkin and corn (MAIZE) are exemplified in the carbonada criolla, cooked in the shell of the pumpkin itself, or in the adaptable LOCRO which is a soup-stew with wheat or corn as a base, enriched with SQUASH. The lack of good green vegetables in Argentina, also noted by British visitors to Uruguay, meant that chichoca de zapallo (squash cut into strips and dried) was a winter staple. Although most Indians living on the pampas were wiped out in the campaigns of General Rosa of 1879–83, leaving a population that is 97% European, their staples have persisted, for instance humitas, a rough purée of corn with milk, eggs, pimentos, and cheese. Wrapped in corn husks and steamed like tamales, it is known as humitas en chala. Other corn dishes, porridges of grits like mazamorra, or savoury hominies served with cabbage and sausages, are also common.

Argentina does not only eat beef, though no other country in the world consumes more per capita. Mutton is the meat of Patagonia, once supplemented by the guanaco (see LLAMA) like that shot by Darwin on Christmas Eve in 1833 to feed the crews of the Beagle and Adventure. Darwin also had a run-in with the lesser RHEA and the pampas hare (see GUINEA PIG) when he was in Patagonia. Chicken and turkeys are esteemed. Seafood is rich on the Atlantic shore, but Argentine fish cookery has not the reputation of Chile’s.

Spanish origins are most easily marked by an affection for sweet milk confections like the dulce de leche which is a soft fudge for spreading on bread, or use as a sauce for puddings. In The Honorary Consul (1973) Graham Greene wrote: ‘Every three months Doctor Plarr flew down to Buenos Aires and spent a weekend with his mother who was growing more and more stout on her daily diet of cream-cakes and alfajores stuffed with dulce de leche.’

Spanish influence, however, is not universal. Italian settlers, especially around the city of Mendoza, have made their own contribution to national preferences (noodles and sun-dried tomatoes, to name two), just as German-speaking migrants have guided the charcuterie industry of Buenos Aires, while in Patagonia there are the Welsh.

Armenia

one of the three countries of the Caucasus and, like the other two (GEORGIA and AZERBAIJAN), formerly a republic in the Soviet Union, has a culinary importance which transcends its present boundaries. Armenians are to be found not only in neighbouring Russia, Turkey, and Iran but also in many other places. They have been among the great emigrants of history and their communities in the USA (where they first arrived in the 17th century) are prominent. Many such Armenians have been successful in the food industry. They have speciality foodshops, delicatessens, restaurants, and bakeries.

Tradition has it that the original kingdom of Armenia was founded by a descendant of Noah in the region of Lake Van (believed to be the area where Noah’s ark landed after the deluge). In the 2nd century BC Armenia lost its independence to Rome, and thereafter was taken over by the standard roll-call of successive conquerors: Persia, Byzantium, Islam, Mongols, Turks, Persians (again), and Russia. In addition, the Armenians took to Christianity at a very early date (around the beginning of the 4th century) and have maintained their own Church ever since, with consequent attention to Lenten foods etc. Thus a wealth of cultural and culinary influences have been brought to bear on the Armenians. However, they may have influenced others more than others influenced them, as Jean Redwood (1989) suggests:

A long unbroken religious cohesion and a strong national consciousness over the centuries, despite decimation and dispersion of their numbers over the globe, has kept their culture intact. Because of this they have tended to influence rather than be influenced in their manner of cooking. They travelled around the Caucasus more than the other nationalities and were the main commercial traders.

As in the other Caucasian countries, lamb, aubergines, yoghurt, and bread are basic features of the diet. However, there are important differences between the countries in several respects, including the use of cereals. Whereas Georgians particularly like maize and Azerbaijanis favour rice, Armenians use a lot of BURGHUL (cracked wheat), notably in their plov dishes (see PILAF). Also, their practice of combining wheat processed in one way with wheat processed in another, and their liking for mixed flours (wheat, potato, maize), produce flavours which are hard to replicate where these ingredients are not readily available.

MEZZE are important to Armenians and include the standard items of the region such as those made with aubergines, lentils, beans, and chickpeas which are also renowned in Armenia; boeregs (see BÖREK), toasted pumpkin seeds, roasted and salted pistachios, DOLMA (which according to some originated in Armenia and went from there to Turkey), basturma/pastourma, a pungent, spiced meat similar to the Romanian PASTRAMI (but with fenugreek), and various sausages. LAVASH is the bread commonly served with mezze.

Salads too, often including slices of fresh or pickled cucumbers, tomatoes, and lemons, are served at most meals either as a first course or as a side dish, e.g. with the spitted chicken which is a popular dish throughout the Caucasus but takes on its Armenian character from this accompaniment.

Lake Sevan is famous for its trout, called ishkhan, which are prepared and cooked in several ways: by stuffing it with fruits such as prunes, damsons, or apricots before baking; by poaching; by first marinating the trout with red peppers; or serving with a walnut sauce.

Typical Armenian soups are prepared with a tomato, egg-and-lemon, or yoghurt sauce flavoured with onion or garlic and herbs. A cucumber and yoghurt soup called Jajik is common. Fruits, which are abundant in Armenia, are often added to soups and stews (in line with the general Caucasian liking for sweet and sour). Apricots, for which Armenia is noted, feature in many Armenian soups. The most favoured and best-known type of soup is bozbash, basically made with fatty breast of lamb plus selected fruit and vegetables. One kind, Shoushin bozbash, practically unknown outside the Caucasus, is a fragrant combination of meat, quince, apple, and mint.

Meat cookery provides few surprises. The ubiquitous KOFTA are kiufta here. Kyurdyuk, lamb fat from the FAT-TAILED SHEEP, is used in cooking instead of butter, although for certain purposes sheep’s milk butter, with its characteristic and different flavour, may be used.

Cheese is a basic Armenian food, served at almost every meal, besides being used in cooking. One of the numerous types is a ‘green’ cheese, described as similar to ROQUEFORT. Others match the generality of cheeses in the Near East and the Balkans (for which see FETA, HALOUMI, KASHKAVAL).

Armenians incorporate herbs in their cheeses (and also on their salads) in an imaginative way. One Russian author has said that they use no fewer than 300 herbs in their kitchens. Use of spices is moderate.

Rosewater, orange flower water, and honey are used to flavour many desserts and pastries, mostly similar to those made all over the region such as paklava (see BAKLAVA). Armenians also use a lot of pine nuts and pistachios.

arrowhead

(or arrowleaf) Sagittaria sagittifolia, a perennial water or marsh plant of Europe, Asia, and America, is named for the shape of its leaves, but it is the starchy, tuberous roots which are usually eaten and for which the plant is cultivated in Asia.

A distinction was formerly made between S. sagittifolia and what were regarded as two other species: S. sinensis of China and Japan, and S. latifolia of N. America. However, all are now classified as a single species.

In N. America arrowhead has long been gathered from the wild by Indians (for whom it was probably the most valuable of the available root crops) and sometimes by white inhabitants. This has the Chinook name ‘wappatoo’, now rendered as ‘wapato’, meaning potato; and is also called ‘duck potato’ because water birds are fond of the leaves.

Quinn (1938) states that arrowhead was the most valuable of American Indian root crops, and describes the procedure thus:

The Indian women gathered them by wading into the water, pushing a light canoe ahead of them, locating the tubers with their toes and tossing them into the handy canoe. They boiled them in wooden kettles with hot stones, or roasted them on sticks stuck in the ground near the fire, or in stone-lined kilns.

The tubers are more or less round and enclosed in a sheath. Once this is removed they may be cooked like new potatoes, without prior peeling. But the flavour is more pronounced than that of potatoes and at its best when the tubers are roasted to a mealy consistency. Cooking destroys bitter and possibly toxic substances in the tubers, and takes away the acrid taste which they have in the raw state.

art, food in

of interest for the evidence in paintings of the foodstuffs and eating habits of their time. The gastronomic contents of a painting are useful material for art historians for the purposes of attribution and background information.

Paintings are sometimes the only source of information about what dishes for which we have recipes may have looked like.

Glimpses of fruit and things to eat in devotional works can tell much about the appearance and variety of things like apples, cucumbers, oranges, bread, and wine, although included for their symbolic functions. The solitary cucumber and apple in Crivelli’s Annunciation with St Egidius, symbolizing the purity of Christ and the fecundity of his mother, are real earthy products, as are the slightly blemished fruit in Caravaggio’s The Meal at Emmaus, and the glorious canopies of citrus fruits in Mantegna’s Madonna of the Victories, while the golden oranges glimmering in the background of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano remind us of the palle, the round balls of the Medici crest, punning reminder of apothecaries’ pills and health-giving fruit. Tiepolo’s rapid little sketch The Banquet of Cleopatra conveys the bustle and paraphernalia of a courtly banquet, the servants bringing food and drink, musicians, pet dogs, entertainers, and the costly appurtenances of a table set with oriental carpet, covered by a starched, lace-trimmed cloth. The vast banquet scene by Veronese, originally called The Last Supper, but considered too earthy in its realism, so renamed A Feast in the House of Levi, is contemporary with the banquets described, course by course, by Bartolomeo Scappi in his monumental cookery book of 1570. Incidental details—the use of toothpicks, the serving of wine on request, the steward directing dishes to individual guests, are meat and drink to the historian avid to get beyond Scappi’s disciplined lists.

The still life and genre scenes of Spain are full of similar insights. Sánchez Cotán’s simple depictions of vegetables and fruit placed or suspended on strings on the shelf of a cantarero look almost like a naive view of a humble domestic larder but contain complex symbols, perhaps expressing both divine harmony and Pythagorean austerity. To us they are a valuable illustration of the vegetable diet of his time. Less ascetic painters give an idea of the profusion of richer fare as in Kitchen Scene: Allegory of Lost Virtue by Antonio de Pereda or kitchen and market scenes by Alessandro Loarte, and glimpses of confectionery in the work of Tomás Hiepes. Luis Meléndez, disappointed in his hopes of becoming a court artist producing grand historic and mythological scenes, made instead some stunning still life paintings, analysed by art historians in terms of composition and technique, where geometry and deft brush strokes are all. But food historians see in each canvas a ‘gastronomic situation’, a meal, or part of a meal, or a recipe, carefully arranged on a battered kitchen table, showing details of ingredients and utensils, composed with a stunning skill which endows watermelons with the regal pomp of a bloated Bourbon monarch, or a handful of plums with the bloom of a Boucher nymph. The ingredients for a gazpacho are not a random geometric essay, but an immediately recognizable selection of things. A basket piled with food for a merenda, bread, ham, fruit, and wine, is ready to be taken out of doors, and two fresh sea bream are composed along with the oil in which they will be fried, and the bitter oranges, garlic, and spices (in a little paper packet) to make their sauce. A totally different experience was that of Josefa de óbidos who in late 17th-century Portugal painted religious scenes of overwhelming sugariness, and plates of sweetmeats of enchanting realism, documents of great value to historians of bread and pastrywork, who see here detail that Juan de la Mata could never have explained so clearly in his Arte de reposteria.

Painters in the Low Countries provided one of the richest sources of information, in both genre and still life paintings, though our understanding of the content is beset with the sound and fury of different interpretations of the symbolism which bears heavily upon them. The majestic cheese stacks document the styles of cheese and a pride in conspicuous consumption, as well as perhaps the corruption inherent in the transformation of perishable milk into pungent solids. The landscapes of Cuyp, with their rotund cows glowing buttery gold in the afternoon light, symbolize the dream of a war-torn countryside doggedly reclaiming the land. Market scenes show stalls awash with fruit and vegetables from every season, not a premonition of present-day Dutch agribusiness, but a flaunting of horticultural skills, along with some fine and often conflicting symbols. Frequently a holy theme is relegated to the background in paintings by Aertson and Beuckelaer, while a fish or fruit market occupies the centre. But the burden of symbolism hangs heavy—the dish of herrings, two fish athwart each other symbolizing the holy cross, innocent parsnips in the same configuration, and many more, some lewd, some boring, which need not obscure the value of these visible indications of what fruit and vegetables were being cultivated at the time. The French Impressionists were sometimes inspired by Dutch masters; Manet’s still lifes occasionally referred to themes from the Low Countries (a bunch of asparagus, like that of Adriaan Courte, red mullet on a dish, a joint of beef) while others like Monet, also intent on the here and now, painted the everyday world as they knew it: modern, sometimes subversive, often unconventional, with a fresh and anti-academic eye. Food and eating are used as markers for this new relaxed atmosphere of sensual pleasure and demi-monde dissipation. The picnic food in Déjeuner sur l’herbe would have been bought on alighting from the train from Paris, and brought by waiters to the woodland glade, and the boating parties ate rustic dishes in the riverside inns, soon to become smart suburban restaurants. These indications of social and gastronomic history have been extensively explored by several historians. This small selection from the material available gives lovers of food and cooking some idea of how much information and inspiration are to be found in the art collections of the world.

asafoetida

a dried gum resin which is obtained from the rhizome or taproots of some of the species of the giant fennels, plants of the genus Ferula, particularly Ferula assafoetida. These are perennial, umbelliferous plants which grow in a wide arc from the Mediterranean to C. Asia.

The three species which are used to produce the spice asafoetida are Ferula assafoetida, F. foetida, and F. narthex, of which the first two at least are native to both Iran and Afghanistan, while the third is known in Afghanistan and is sometimes called Chinese hing.

The name asafoetida comes from the Persian word aza which means mastic resin and the Latin word foetida meaning stinking. This name was no doubt given because of the spice’s pungent and strong odour. It is interesting to note here that the Indian word hing was used in English from the 16th century; but in England it is now only recognized by oriental and Asian grocers. The apothecaries’ Latin name asa foetida, used in Latin, French, English, and other European languages since the 14th century, has become the most familiar name.

The plants, by the time they are four or five years old, have massive, thick, fleshy, and woody carrot-shaped taproots, and it is at this stage that the resin is collected. The collection is done before the plant has flowered in spring/early summer. The soil is scraped away from the roots to expose the upper part and a deep incision is made. A milky resinous juice exudes, which starts to coagulate upon exposure to air. This juice has a very strong fetid odour, somewhat similar to that of garlic, mainly due to the presence of sulphur compounds. The freshly exuded resin has a pearly appearance, although the colour darkens during drying in the air. When the product sets to a solid resinous mass, the colour can vary from a greyish or dull yellow colour to black (which should be rejected) but it is usually reddish-brown.

The spice is commercially available in several different forms: ‘tears’, ‘mass’, ‘paste’, and ‘powdered’. The tears are the purest form and are rounded or flattened, 5–30 mm (–″) in diameter.

Lump asafoetida, sometimes called mass, is the most common commercial form, consisting of tears agglutinated into a more or less uniform mass or lump. Powdered asafoetida often contains additions, notably gum arabic, turmeric, and flour (which may be added to diminish the fetid odour, to prevent lumping, or to add colour).

Although it seems that most of the 500 or so tons of ferula gum resins produced annually come from Iran and Afghanistan, asafoetida is now mainly used in India, where it is used as a flavouring for various dishes, and valued for its supposed antiseptic qualities. It is said to counteract flatulence and is often used in the cooking of pulses and other ‘windy’ vegetables such as cauliflower. It is also a popular flavouring for curries, PAKORA, KOFTA, fish, KACHORI (a kind of POORI stuffed with dal), and in pickles.

Asafoetida is used as a substitute for onions and garlic by the Kashmiri and Hindu Brahmans and by Jains, whose strict vegetarian diets forbid them to use onions.

In Afghanistan it is still used in the preparation of dried meat, on which it is sprinkled with salt. It is thought to have preservative qualities and to be a tenderizer. Strabo, in his Geography, records that Alexander the Great’s soldiers used it for this last purpose on their march through Afghanistan.

Asafoetida is not well known in the West although it is said to be one of the supposedly secret ingredients of WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE.

Only small amounts of asafoetida are needed for flavouring food. A pinch of the powder will do. When this is added to hot oil and fried, it changes character and the powerful smell becomes an oniony aroma. Chandra Dissanayake (1976) describes how in some cases when people dislike the flavour and smell of asafoetida, a small piece the size of a small marble is stuck to the inner side of the lid so that the steam melts a very small portion into the dish. This piece of asafoetida can be used over and over again.

Just how far back the use of asafoetida goes is an open question, but cuneiform tablets show that it was cultivated for medicinal purposes as long ago as 750 BC in Babylon and the Greeks and Romans certainly knew it. The Greeks called it silphion medikon, meaning silphium from Media (Iran), and the Romans used asafoetida as a substitute for SILPHIUM which was a highly prized spice. (Asafoetida, like silphium, was expensive and APICIUS describes how to make it last longer by keeping a small piece in a jar of pine nuts which then become impregnated with the strong flavour. When required for cooking, a few of the nuts were crushed and added to the dish. Fresh nuts were then placed in the jar to replace those removed.)

READING:

Saberi (1993).

Asian restaurants

have spread far beyond their countries of origin, predominantly, though not exclusively, in the western, developed world. By contrast, in their homelands, there may be, or may have been, no restaurants at all.

How and why did this spread? And why have Asian cuisines become so important when those from elsewhere—S. America, Africa, or Scandinavia—had more limited attractions?

At the root, the beginnings lie in a diaspora. This may be provoked by economic conditions, for instance the expansion of Chinese populations beyond their borders first into SE Asia, then across the Pacific to service the expanding US economy, or further afield because of the presence of Chinese personnel in merchant shipping crews or because Chinese indentured labour was recruited by 19th-century imperial administrations. Or it was the result of a combination of interests, political and economic, the engine of most population movements in the British Empire. Or such movements may be due to political upheavals creating refugees, such as those who found new homes in the USA, Australia, and SE Asia after the unification of Vietnam in 1975. Once established in a host country, an ethnic community opens eating houses for its own use, gradually discovered by the indigenous population. For migrants, catering requires relatively little capital, no qualifications, and a swift return, at the expense of long hours and cheap (often family) labour. Both Chinese and Indian restaurants partially spread through groups of migrants from specific regions, even specific villages. Although migrants were often poor, they were from cultures which had traditions of courtly and everyday cookery. They also had a willingness to adapt traditions to the produce and tastes of a host culture. For customers, the food offers value for money at unsocial hours, often with a take-away option.

The spread of Chinese restaurants has been most studied. Roberts (2002) discusses how Chinese sailors established communities in port cities such as San Francisco, London, and Liverpool in the early 19th century. Chinese labourers also migrated to the gold fields of Australia and N. America. By the 1850s Chinese restaurants, patronized to some extent by non-Chinese, existed in San Francisco. Their subsequent spread was slow until the 1950s, when they became popular with young westerners. Increased migration from China provided more entrepreneurs and cheap labour. Chinese restaurants have continued to spread and flourish, partly due to social and economic factors within the Chinese community, and with a developing appreciation of the nuances of Chinese food.

China has had a sophisticated restaurant culture for centuries, but this does not apply to India. The colonial relationship between Britain and the Indian subcontinent underlies Indian restaurants. See also ANGLO-INDIAN COOKERY. Food of this region was enjoyed by 18th-century employees of the British East India Company, who brought the notion of ‘curry’ home to appear on coffee house menus in early 19th-century London. Veeraswamy’s, the oldest surviving Indian restaurant in London, opened in 1926. A similar pattern to the spread of Chinese restaurants developed as sailors and migrant labourers, especially from Syhlet (in modern Bangladesh), established cheap curry houses in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s; these became more popular in the 1960s. A style of food which emphasized meat and sauce (often served with chips) but lessened the importance and complexity of vegetable and pulse dishes evolved. Awareness of the variety and subtlety of Indian food developed in the 1980s, alongside the British-devised BALTI style. British colonial links took Indian labour and Indian migrants to other countries, so that Indian-derived dishes spread to S. Africa and roti (flat breads filled with curry mixtures) are part of eating out in the Carribean.

A complex process underlies the spread of ‘Chinees-Indisch’ restaurants in Holland, in which Chinese migrants, present since the early 20th century, took the idea of Indonesian food in the 1950s and developed a style to suit the Dutch palate, so that they have become an institution in the way that curry houses have in Britain. The presence of ethnic Indonesian restaurants and their rijsttafels in Holland, and Vietnamese restaurants in France, is a product of the same colonial imperatives that prompted the rise of Indian restaurants in Britain.

Not all transplants of Asian cuisines are explicable by the same criteria or, at least, their history is more nuanced. To some extent, the spread of Japanese restaurants follows the economic pattern, without an imperial connection, but the relatively large-scale emigration of Japanese to Hawaii and the western states of the USA did not give rise to a core of authentically Japanese restaurants among the host communities (though restaurants there were) but rather saw the development of a cuisine worth study for its own sake (see HAWAII). Japanese restaurants across the USA came with the rise of Japan as an international economic force in the 1970s. In Europe, it was the same. There were Japanese restaurants for those conationals doing business in the capitals and among those opening manufacturing facilities in the provinces. Restaurants might be established in the wake of these bridgeheads, but it was some years before they appealed to the wider host community. The popularity of Japanese cooking has more connection, perhaps, with GLOBALIZATION and the awakening of gastronomic curiosity (see TRAVEL AND FOOD) as well as appealing to changing tastes within western cooking (see NOUVELLE CUISINE).

A diaspora along the lines experienced by the Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, or even Japanese has never been experienced by the people of Thailand. Yet Thai cooking is among the most popular Asian styles and Thai restaurants have opened everywhere (including, at the last reporting, in Kabul). The sudden spread of Thai restaurants from the 1980s does not follow earlier patterns and is the result of exposure of western societies to indigenous Thai culture through either tourism or the political and economic involvement of the USA and Australia during the Vietnam war. Thai cooking proved especially popular in Australia, which opened up to much culinary influence from SE Asia from the late 1960s. This in turn provoked a fusion style of cooking, borrowing elements from all quarters of the Pacific Rim, which fed back into the popularity of Thai restaurants themselves. In Britain, the number of Thai nationals is small indeed: 5,000 in 1996. Yet restaurants are aplenty—the first opening in 1967 in Bute Street, London.

However, the factors which distributed Chinese, Indian, and Thai restaurants around the world also apply to communities which have not developed global restaurant cultures, for instance African countries. Goody (1998) points out that, with the exception of Ethiopia, ‘There has been no effective globalisation of African food, even in the form, culturally prestigious in some circles, of “soul food” ’, something which he partly attributes to the lack of a hierarchically differentiated cuisine in Africa. Latin American cuisines, except to a limited extent that of Mexico, have not spread either.

A strength of Asian restaurant cultures is their ability to change, keeping pace with customers’ desire for dishes perceived as more authentic, or in line with contemporary tastes; and in a food retailing system which blurs the boundaries between home cooking, take-aways, and eating out, they act as links in a chain leading to the spread of Asian ingredients generally.

Visitors to Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia, may well find restaurants from Korea, Mexico, Turkey, and China available for their nourishment and amusement. Restaurants have penetrated most large conurbations that are the slightest fraction open to external commerce. Giving them an ‘ethnic’ slant seems second nature if the proprietor is him- or herself an alien. The spread of Asian restaurants, therefore, is as much a mark of changes in urban cultures as indicator of population movement. And, of course, the styles of cookery encountered in these restaurants, reflecting as it does the complex relations between host and immigrant communities, raises another long series of questions.

READING:

Bell and Valentine (1997); Long (2003).

asparagus

is the young shoot of a curious plant, Asparagus officinalis, of the lily family. There are several other Asparagus spp, native to various parts of the Old World.

The wild form of A. officinalis grows in marshy places in Europe, e.g. in Poland and Russia. In the cultivated form, selective breeding and special growing techniques have combined to give a greatly thickened, fleshy shoot which has been prized as a delicacy since ancient times. However, the much thinner shoots of wild asparagus are often edible and are still eaten.

The name ‘asparagus’ was used in classical Greece and Rome. Bitting (1937) traces it back to the Persian word asparag, meaning a sprout, and recounts the subsequent development of the name in English. ‘Sperage’ was current in the 16th and 17th centuries, but was displaced by ‘sparagus’ and by the appealing term ‘sparrow grass’. During the 19th century ‘asparagus’ took over, and ‘sparrow grass’ came to be thought of as a term used by the illiterate. However, ‘grass’ has remained in use among those who grow or process asparagus.

The early Greeks are not known to have cultivated the plant, but the Romans grew asparagus in their gardens from quite early times, as Cato and Columella attest. By the 1st century AD Pliny the Elder could describe asparagus spears grown at Ravenna, in heavily manured soil, as being ‘three to the pound’ (larger than modern kinds). Pliny’s ascription of medicinal virtues to asparagus was echoed and amplified in later centuries; its medical reputation may have been helped by the noticeable although harmless odour which it imparts to the urine of most but not all of those who eat it. The specific name officinalis means ‘of the dispensary’.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, asparagus cultivation continued in Syria, Egypt, and Spain, with help from the Arabs who occupied all these countries. Eventually it arrived in the main part of Europe: France before 1469 and England by 1538. Cultivation was well below the standard reached by the Romans; Gerard’s Herbal of 1597 describes the shoots as being only the size of a large swan’s quill, thinner than a pencil.

Asparagus was not grown on a large scale in N. America until the latter half of the 19th century. During the same period it was spread to China and the Malay peninsula by European influence. The Malay name, saparu keras, is evidently a corruption of ‘sparrow grass’.

The peculiar way in which asparagus has to be grown explains its high price. For the first two years after sowing, a bed of asparagus is unproductive. In the third year the shoots are thick enough to be marketed, and the bed continues to yield good asparagus for another couple of seasons, but quality then declines. So at any given time a grower has half his land in an unproductive state. Furthermore, careful tending and hand harvesting are essential.

The careful tending used to include some strange practices, including the burial of horns, especially those of sheep, in the beds. Remarking on this, Bitting (1937), whose essay on all aspects of asparagus and its production and conservation is unrivalled, observes that the detailed description of asparagus husbandry given in Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery (1744) can serve to represent standard European practice of that time, which is in turn the foundation of modern practice.

Sometimes the asparagus bed is earthed up to keep the shoots white, and they are excavated and cut when they appear at the surface. In Belgium, Germany, and most of France white is preferred. In Britain, most of Italy, and much of the USA (but with local differences) coloured asparagus is usual; but asparagus which is grown for canning is almost always blanched.

Asparagus is normally cooked, preferably by steaming in the special tall utensil designed for the purpose. Conventionally it is served lukewarm, not hot, with melted butter or HOLLANDAISE or some such rich, mild-flavoured sauce. However, eating asparagus raw is not unknown. John Evelyn (1699) wrote that ‘sperage’ was ‘sometimes, but very seldom, eaten raw with oyl, and Vinegar’, and the most tender spears are occasionally still eaten raw, especially in the USA.

The asparagus of Argenteuil, near Paris, enjoyed great fame from around 1830, when a certain M. Lhérault-Salbœuf began to introduce improvements in asparagus-growing. These led to giant blanched stalks which, according to one critic, had no flavour and would only be eaten for the sauce. The quest for ever larger stalks resulted, by the 1930s, in some which measured up to 18 cm (7″) in circumference and over half a kilo (1.25 lb) in weight. However, Parisians preferred the asparagus of Argenteuil to any other kind. At least two important cultivars are named for Argenteuil. Cultivation there ceased in 1990, but the methods used live on elsewhere.

Jersey Giant, with purple tips, is one of several varieties which compete in terms of heavy production and size of shoots; it has the advantage of being a purely male type (the male being, in this particular arena, more vigorous than the female). Some varieties are naturally dark green, some light green, and some violet.

Because cultivated asparagus is expensive, substitutes have been used. Some are wild species, e.g. A. acutifolius, of the Mediterranean region, which has a particularly strong flavour. Others include the shoots of both wild and cultivated HOPS, humulus lupulus, known as ‘hop tops’.

So-called ‘Bath asparagus’ in England is Ornithogalum pyrenaicum, a beautiful wild lily which was formerly sufficiently abundant to be gathered before flowering and sold in the markets at Bath and Bristol, for eating like asparagus.

Athenaeus

author of The Deipnosophists (‘professors of dining’ or perhaps ‘professors at dinner’). This is a compilation of Greek wisdom and anecdote on food, dining, and entertainment, threaded together in the form of a series of dinner conversations, by a Greek scholar who probably lived and worked in Rome about AD 200, when (as Gibbon said) ‘the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind’.

Athenaeus (Athenaios) was born in the old Greek trading post of Naucratis in Egypt. Nothing is known of his life, but The Deipnosophists was not his only work: he had written something on the rulers of Syria, and had compiled a commentary on The Fishes by Archippus, a 5th-century BC comedy (now lost) which had no doubt been full of obscure names of fishes. The conversations in the Deipnosophists, though evidently fictional, involve some real people, including the famous physician GALEN (died AD 199) and the great jurist Ulpian (died c.AD 223), who comes across here as a pedant. It is possible that Athenaeus knew these people, but it is unwise to imagine (as some have done) a real literary circle somehow matching the one in the Deipnosophists. These conversations are a way of recording the researches of Athenaeus himself.

There is a sequence of topics, at times almost lost in continual digressions. Book 1 deals with the literature of food, food and drink in Homer, and wine; books 2–3 hors d’œuvres, bread; book 4 the organization of meals, music; book 5 lavish display and luxury; book 6 parasites, flattery; books 7–8 fish; book 9 meat, poultry; book 10 gluttony and more wine; book 11 cups and dishes; book 12 social behaviour; book 13 love, women; book 14 more music, desserts; book 15 wreaths and perfumes.

The speakers are ready with quotations from a dizzying range of earlier Greek literature: literary (comedies, memoirs, epics), historical, medical, scientific, lexicographical. Several hundred authors are cited, many of whom are otherwise quite unknown: usually full references are given including author, title, and book number. Some of these quotations are extracted from dictionaries and other secondary sources but even so Athenaeus must have read widely in the older literature of Greece. Possibly the most recent author cited in the Deipnosophists is mentioned at the end of a survey of names for loaves.

‘Allow me not to list—since, sadly, memory fails me—all the cakes and sweets given by Aristomenes of Athens in Religious Requisites III,’ [said Pontianus.] ‘I myself, when young, knew this author as an old man, an actor in classical comedy and a freedman of that very cultured monarch Hadrian, who used to call him “Athenian Partridge”.’

‘Freedman!’ said Ulpian. ‘Now which early author used that word?’

Someone said that Freedmen, is the title of one of Phrynichus’s plays … We were at last about to get to grips with the bread when Galen said: ‘We shan’t start dinner before we have told you what the medical fraternity have to say about bread.’

The dialogue format gave Athenaeus the excuse to incorporate masses of fascinating material which any other structure would have excluded. The great advantage of it to any historian using the book is that it allowed the bringing together of verbatim quotations from many genres, bearing on the topic in different ways, contributing to a more rounded picture of Greek social life. The format also allowed Athenaeus to lay down quick, trenchant, even scurrilous opinions which would have had to be toned down if he had been writing plain history. Admittedly it brought artistic problems. Real conversation is desultory and repetitive: so is Athenaeus. However, he was an assiduous student of Greek social history, and his work is a treasury for modern readers interested in ancient food—as well as for literary scholars who burrow in it for fragments of lost works, from Sappho to Archestratus.

The Deipnosophists survived the medieval period in one 10th-century manuscript now in Venice—but the whole of books 1–2 and a few other pages were long ago lost. Although an abridgement known as the Epitome helps to fill the gaps, the abridged books 1 and 2 which it offers are unattractive to read.

READING:

Braund and Wilkins (2000).

atole

(or atolli), a beverage made from ground maize, of Maya origin. Diana Kennedy (1986) uses a quotation from Travels in the New World by the 17th-century writer Thomas Gage to show how it appeared to the incoming Europeans:

Here are also two cloisters of nuns [in the Dominican convent in Oaxaca], which are talked of far and near, not for their religious practices, but for their skill in making two drinks, the one called chocolate and the other atole, which is like unto our almond milk, but much thicker, and is made of the juices of the young maize or Indian wheat, which they so confection with spices, musk, and sugar that it is not only admirable in the sweetness of the smell, but much more nourishing and comforting to the stomach. This is not a commodity which can be transported from thence, but is to be drunk there where it is made.

The last comment no doubt reflects the fact that, unlike the other important maize drink of the Maya, POSOLE, atole calls for a cooking vessel, which would have been a heavy clay pot. So, while soldiers or messengers on the road could mix their posole with water in the lightweight and almost unbreakable calabash cups which they carried with them everywhere, they would not normally be carrying the wherewithal for preparing atole. Sophie Coe (1994) compares the two beverages in other respects, and describes some of the more complex forms of atole and some of the myths about it.

aubergine

or eggplant (the name used in N. America), Solanum melongena, botanically a fruit but usually counted as a vegetable. It originated in India, and is now grown in suitable climates worldwide.

Both its names are of interest. ‘Aubergine’ has a complicated derivation, which prompted Leclerc (1927) to write:

The word aubergine is amongst those which must fill with joy the souls of those philologists whose innocent mania is to claim that every term in the language derives from Sanskrit; without in the least being forced into the tortuous acrobatics which such exercises usually entail, they may elegantly and painlessly prove that vatin gana, the name of the aubergine in Sanskrit, gave birth to the Persian badingen, from which the Arabs derived albadingen, which via the Spanish albadingena became the aubergine.

The Arabic name produced the usual modern Indian name brinjal. Meanwhile, through the Provençal corruption meringeane, another French name, melongene, became the species name of the fruit.

‘Eggplant’ is not an appropriate name for the varieties sold in western countries, most of which look like purple truncheons. However, small round white eggplants are still popular in Spain in pickled form (en escabeche). And in Asia there is a wide range of varieties with smaller fruits, including pale green and white ones which may be spherical or egg shaped. In Australia it may be eggfruit, and in W. Africa it is often called garden egg.

A third group of names, surviving in the modern Italian melanzana and Greek melitzana, may come from the Latin mala insana, meaning ‘apple of madness’ (a term used for it by dieticians of the time) although the most recent proposal is that it too is derived from the Arabic badhinjan.

Although the aubergine is believed to be of Indian origin, the first surviving mention of it is in a Chinese work on agriculture of the 5th century AD, the Ts’i Min Yao Shu.

Aubergines soon became popular throughout Asia and the Near East, since their mild flavour and spongy texture suited them for many combinations with other vegetables and meat. They arrived in Europe both through the invasion of Spain by the Moors and by means of Italian trade with the Arabs, which became important in the 13th century. A writer of this time, Albertus Magnus, mentions them. The first types to reach Europe were egg shaped, which explains the name ‘eggplant’; they included purple and whitish or yellow ones.

For a long time Europeans considered the aubergine inedible, gave it insulting names, and grew it only as an ornamental plant. But during the 15th century it gradually gained acceptance. By 1500 it was well enough known for the early Spanish and Portuguese colonists to take it to America, where it grew well and became a popular vegetable, which it still is. In the W. Indies it bears the name ‘brown jolly’, presumably a corruption of brinjal, due to Indian immigrants.

Back in Europe, the aubergine has for some time been firmly established in regional cuisines: in Greek MOUSSAKA; in the Levantine baba ghanoush—grilled, puréed aubergines with garlic, lemon juice, and parsley (‘poor man’s caviar’); in the Italian melanzane parmigiana (topped with melted GRANA cheese); and in the Provençal mixed vegetable stew RATATOUILLE niçoise, where it blends harmoniously with tomatoes, onions, and sweet capsicums. A frequent use in the Near East is to stuff aubergines; the shape of the larger varieties is highly suitable for this purpose.

The most famous aubergine dish is of Turkish origin and called Imam bayildi—‘the priest fainted’. This consists of aubergines stuffed with onions (also, in some recent recipes, with tomatoes) and cooked with olive oil. There are two stories about the origin of the name. One is that the priest fainted because of the deliciousness of the dish; the other is that he fainted when he heard how much oil his wife had used in making the recipe. The ability of aubergines to soak up vast amounts of oil is legendary. One way to avoid it is to cover slices with salt and leave them for a while so that the salt collapses the cells. This technique was devised to draw out the bitter juice which primitive varieties contained; but with modern aubergines bitterness is not a problem.

In India, Iran, and Afghanistan, aubergines are made into a hot pickle. There and in China and SE Asia the small, round varieties, including some no bigger than grapes, are the ones most often seen in the markets. Aubergines are nearly always eaten cooked, but the small fruits of a related wild species, S. torvum, are sometimes eaten raw (and also cooked) in Indonesia.

Facciola (1990), writing of the related S. aethiopicum, the African scarlet eggplant or garden egg, states that the orange-red fruits are cooked and eaten like aubergines.

Australia

It is something of a paradox that the world’s geologically oldest continent should be developing one of the world’s newest cuisines.

Australia is a large island of some 7.7 million square km (2.9 million square miles) (including the smaller island of Tasmania, to the south), surrounded by nearly 37,000 km (23,000 miles) of coastline. While nearly two-thirds of the continent is classified as having a temperate climate, there are many different climatic zones, including palm-fringed coasts and tropical rainforests as well as arid deserts. Much of southern Australia experiences a typical Mediterranean climate with hot dry summers and predominantly winter rainfall.

Australia was physically isolated from the rest of the world for over 40 million years and has enormous biological diversity. It is rich in flora species (for example, its 25,000 plant species are more than Europe has) but relatively poor in fauna with just over 2% of world’s freshwater fish species.

When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia, at least 60,000 years ago, primitive humans all lived as hunter-gatherers; the beginnings of agriculture in the northern hemisphere were not yet apparent. In Australia they remained hunter-gatherers, in some areas developing a rudimentary agriculture but typically practising ‘firestick farming’ (deliberate burning of small patches of land to encourage plant growth and make hunting easier) as a way of curating resources and ensuring continuity of food supply, particularly of medium-size mammals. While they tended to live in harmony with the environment, they also had an impact on it; it has been argued that Aboriginal hunting was responsible for extinction of some of the giant marsupials which existed some 30,000 years ago.

As in all hunter-gatherer societies, the Aborigines ate a very wide variety of plants (fruits, roots, tubers, leaves, flowers), insects (WITCHETTY GRUBS, Bogong moths), small reptiles (SNAKES, lizards, goannas), and larger game (KANGAROO, EMU, wallaby). They developed techniques of dealing with potentially harmful foods such as CYCAD seeds (Macrozamia spp) which, when eaten untreated by some of the early explorers and settlers, caused violent vomiting and diarrhoea. Their harvesting was not indiscriminate; they knew the right time of the year for maximum flavour and nutritional value, how to identify ideal conditions of ripeness and palatability, how to dig roots so as not to disadvantage the harvest in following seasons. They also developed a kind of gastronomic code such that certain animals or certain parts of animals had greater prestige—for example, the liver of BARRAMUNDI.

Much of this local knowledge was ignored by the first white settlers who arrived (the majority as convicts) in 1788, and who sustained themselves with predominantly imported rations until about the turn of the century. From the 1830s, however, there were many who emigrated voluntarily, attracted by the potential of a new land. These colonists were more enthusiastic about the local resources and were happy enough to accept and incorporate indigenous foods, especially those having some resemblance to familiar ones, as this account by Mundy (1862) of a dinner in Sydney in 1851 demonstrates:

The family likeness between an Australian and an Old Country dinner-party became, however, less striking when I found myself sipping doubtfully, but soon swallowing with relish, a plate of wallabi-tail soup, followed by a slice of boiled schnapper, with oyster sauce. A haunch of kangaroo venison helped to convince me that I was not in Belgravia. A delicate wing of the wonga-wonga pigeon and bread sauce, with a dessert of plantains and loquots, guavas and mandarine oranges, pomegranates and cherimoyas, landed my imagination at length fairly at the Antipodes.

Virtually all species of wildlife were considered edible game—emu, possum, bandicoot, wombat, flying fox, echidna (described as excellent eating, with a flesh resembling pork). Kangaroo, in particular, was much esteemed, and was even sold on a commercial basis in the main towns. The tail was made into soup, and the meat generally roasted, stewed, or ‘steamed’. The kangaroo steamer, nominated as the national dish of Tasmania during the 19th century, was made of finely chopped or minced kangaroo plus salt pork or bacon, similarly prepared, a little seasoning and a very small amount of liquid, cooked slowly in a tightly closed pot beside the fire.

Ingredients from the plant world were also eaten or used in cooking but, being more peripheral to sustenance, were less often written about. The Tasmanian pepper leaf (Tasmannia spp) was used as a spice, and fruits such as lillypillies (Eugenia spp), rosella (Hibiscus sabdariffa, see ROSELLE) and local ‘currants’ (Leptomeria spp) were made into jams and jellies; in a letter to Eliza ACTON in 1853 William Howitt describes using a preserve of native currants in fruit puddings. Such indigenous fruits seem, however, to have been an acquired taste, and neither as desirable nor as sweetly satisfying as fruit from imported species which had been cultivated and selected over many centuries and which thrived in the temperate climate. (A recipe for native currant jam calls for almost twice as much sugar as fruit.) Among other wild plants, PIGWEED (Portulaca oleracea) and FAT HEN (Chenopodium spp) were cooked as a kind of substitute for spinach; pigweed was also eaten raw in salads.

In the early days of the colony cooking was often a matter of improvisation. Pieces of meat were jammed on sticks and cooked over an open fire (the ‘sticker-up’). Damper cooked in the ashes (see BREAD) became the ubiquitous substitute for oven-baked bread; because of the difficulty of obtaining yeast, carbonate of soda and tartaric acid were used as raising agents. The same dough, cooked as small flat cakes in a frying pan, produced ‘leather-jackets’; fried in fat, they were known as ‘fat-cakes’.

Damper and meat were inevitable partners in the monotonous bush diet, washed down by plenty of tea (up to three pints per day, according to one contemporary account)—a consequence in part of the cheapness and abundance of meat and of the primitive living conditions, but also a reflection of the basic rations decreed since convict days: flour, meat, tea, and sugar. Australian meat consumption in the 19th century was amongst the highest in the world, averaging around 125 kg (nearly 300 lb) per person. Meat was eaten three times a day, but little attempt was made to develop imaginatively complex dishes around this ingredient; rather, people continued what Muskett (1893) called ‘the conventional chain of joints, roasted or boiled, and the inevitable grill or fry’. Colonial goose and Carpet bag steak (a thick slab of rump, slit through the centre and filled with fresh oysters, then grilled over the coals and sauced with anchovy butter), which first appeared in cookery books at the end of the 19th century, may have been exceptions. (Colonial goose, also known as Barrier goose and Oxford duck, was simply a boned leg of mutton with a sage-and-onion stuffing.) Vegetable cookery was also unimaginative (protracted boiling in plenty of water), and the range of vegetables typically eaten was rather limited, though home gardens produced a great diversity, including a variety of salad greens. Tomatoes flourished, and were far more commonly eaten than in England, for example; correspondence in the Melbourne Argus in 1856 shows that they were eaten in salads, stewed, roast, fried, baked with breadcrumbs, made into sauces for immediate use or for keeping, pickled, and made into jam.

One reason for this was the lack of culinary skills amongst colonial cooks, amply testified by visitors to Australia; another was the stoic resistance to ‘dressed up’ dishes, a carryover of the English heritage. Further, at a time when physical labour demanded substantial meals for men, men’s tastes demanded plain, wholesome food and plenty of it. Thus there was little incentive to develop ‘dainty dishes’ for main courses, and even less when thrift and economy were considered more important than flavour. Stews were basically meat, water, salt and pepper, and a little flour. As in England, however, there were pretensions to a French-style cuisine amongst an educated minority; a menu from a Sydney restaurant, Paris House, in 1910 listed ‘Filets de Soles, Marguery’, ‘Artichaut vinaigrette’, ‘Bouchees Luculus’, and ‘Petit Poussin en Casserole et Salade’.

One area in which Australian women excelled, and where their creativity was indulged and expressed, was baking. Novelist Hal Porter (1963) fondly recalled his mother’s ritualistic weekend baking in the 1920s:

Saturday afternoon is for baking. This is a labour of double nature: to provide a week’s supply of those more solid delicacies Australian mothers of those days regard as being as nutritionally necessary as meat twice daily, four vegetables at dinner, porridge and eggs and toast for breakfast, and constant cups of tea. … Mother, therefore, constructs a great fruit cake, and a score or more each of rock cakes, Banburies, queen cakes, date rolls and ginger nuts. … three-storeyed sponge cakes mortared together with scented cream … cream puffs and éclairs.

Turn-of-the-century recipe books usually devote considerably more pages to pies, puddings, cakes, scones, and biscuits, etc. than to savoury dishes of meat, fish, poultry, and vegetables. While most of these sweet recipes were direct imports from Britain, a number of Australian specialities were developed, including anzacs (see BISCUIT VARIETIES), butterfly cakes (small cup cakes with a circular wedge cut from the top, the hollow filled with whipped cream, and the two halves of the wedge placed on the cream so as to look like butterfly wings), melting moments, LAMINGTONS, the SPONGE CAKE, the Australian BROWNIE, a simplified version of BARM BRACK, and PAVLOVA.

It would be easy to describe Australian cuisine as static during the first half of the 20th century, though tastes subtly shifted from mutton to lamb. Suggested family menus show little change, with dishes such as roast mutton, braised steak, STEAK AND KIDNEY PUDDING, and SHEPHERD’S PIE, typically followed by stewed fruit and baked and steamed PUDDINGS. Hostesses who entertained might have presented more sophisticated French-influenced fare, such as roast quail or squab, grilled lobster or chicken CUTLETS garnished with mushrooms, pineapple ice, or rum omelette. Nevertheless, some subtle changes are evident. First, a more urbanized population was less reliant on native foods and ingredients, and both local game and fruits faded from use. Second, changes in technology ushered in new dishes. With the introduction and acceptance of refrigerators came ICE CREAMS and ice blocks and an increased variety of chilled desserts (especially dishes using commercial gelatine and jelly crystals); with electric and gas stoves, and the new oven-to-table cooking and serving dishes, came casseroles (cooked in the oven) and ‘mornays’, a mainstay of mid-century entertaining.

On the other hand, the post-war period introduced enormous changes in what was produced, cooked, and eaten in Australia. Increased affluence coincided with a growing interest in wine, food, and in eating out, and with increased numbers of restaurants. Travel brought contact with other cultures and cuisines, both Asian and European, and familiarity with new ingredients and foods at the same time as waves of immigrants from Europe, particularly Mediterranean Europe, and then Asia, made these ingredients and foods available in Australia (see TRAVEL AND FOOD; ASIAN RESTAURANTS). The once traditional Sunday family dinner of roast leg of lamb with mint sauce has been replaced by the casual BARBECUE where kangaroo sausages might cook alongside bratwurst or MERGUEZ, chicken SATAYS next to oregano-marinated lamb KEBABS. The net effect has been the virtual extinction of the British-inherited diet and cuisine and the encouragement of distinctly and characteristically Australian culinary expressions. This has involved a reappraisal of indigenous resources, including kangaroo, emu, and other game as well as native fruits, seeds, and herbs, such as the QUANDONG, MACADAMIA NUT, bush tomato (Solanum spp), wattle seed (see ACACIA AND WATTLE), and wild lime (Microcitrus spp). Other additions to the larder are the wide variety of Asian vegetables, fruits, and herbs which can be grown in Australian climates. There is increasing recognition of regional diversity, such as the particular qualities of oysters from different sources, and of the gastronomic identity of different regions. The potential of long-established and climatically sympathetic species such as OLIVES (first introduced to Australia in 1800) is being realized. Specialized, small-scale agriculture and food initiatives—growing PISTACHIOS or producing goat- and sheep-milk cheeses analogous to traditional Mediterranean varieties—are being encouraged.

Australian kitchens have embraced Asian culinary techniques and flavour combinations; stir-frying is probably as common as were grilling and frying in Muskett’s day (most gas cooker tops are now specifically designed to accommodate a wok) and GINGER, GARLIC, and SOY SAUCE are as much staple ingredients as TOMATO sauce. In restaurants, ‘Australian’ cuisine acknowledges influences from both Asia and Europe, especially the Mediterranean regions, adapted to accommodate Australian ingredients.

READING:

Symons (1982); Beckett (1984); Isaacs (1987); Low (1989); Ripe (1993); Dyson (2002).

Austria

one of the two most direct heirs of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, might be expected to have interesting culinary traditions, and does not disappoint. Special features of the Austrian cuisine include the layer cakes such as SACHERTORTE for which Vienna is famous. HUNGARY, as the other direct heir of the former empire, enjoys similar fame for cakes; and it is hard to know whether Vienna or Budapest is the richer in Konditorei, establishments where coffee and cakes can be enjoyed.

Although the neighbouring CZECH REPUBLIC and SLOVAKIA may geographically lie at the centre of Europe, Austria is perhaps the archetypal C. European country and, having a common frontier with Italy, has played an important role in the transmission of foods and dishes from the Mediterranean region to countries further north. In this respect the S. Tyrol is of particular interest. It is there that one sees most clearly the interplay of Italian and Austrian dishes, symbolized (as Wechsberg, 1969, points out) by the title of a S. Tyrolean cookbook, Spaghetti and Speckknödel. The latter are dumplings made with Bauernspeck, carefully cured and smoked bacon, a prominent speciality of the whole of the Tyrol.

Nockerln, the Austrian (and Hungarian) version of Italian GNOCCHI, are small DUMPLINGS which accompany many main dishes; not to be confused with Salzburger Nockerln, a sweet soufflé-like confection.

However, it is not only from Italy that southern influences have played on the Austrian kitchen. The Turkish influence is also apparent, e.g. in the pastry for STRUDEL (see also FILO), although not for some other things, such as the CROISSANT, for which it is sometimes given credit (see CULINARY MYTHOLOGY).

Austria is the country to which the institution of MEHLSPEISEN belongs. Austrians would also like to think that the KUGELHOPF, which they certainly prepare very well, had its origin in their country; but the matter is dubious and likely to remain so, given the difficulty of pinpointing the origin of something which has such a long history and is found in such a wide span of European countries. However, there can be no such doubt about their beloved Linzertorte, from Linz, a jam tart decorated with a lattice work of its nut pastry—see TORTE AND KUCHEN.

Writers who have commented on the general characteristics of Austrian cuisine, not least the illustrious and above-mentioned Wechsberg, remark on the tendency of Austrians to have more than three meals a day (they add in a second breakfast, Gabelfrühstück, and a tea meal, Jause) and their liking for substantial dishes, including many with meat. Along with Wiener Schnitzel (see VEAL), which is better known internationally, the Austrian boiled beef dishes, of which Tafelspitz is probably the most popular, and Viennese steaks, Wiener Rostbraten, and various other beef, pork, and lamb dishes often feature in Austrian menus. Bauernschmaus is something like the Alsatian choucroute garnie (see SAUERKRAUT). Potatoes also lend weight to Austrian menus. The yellowish and waxy ‘Kipfler’ potatoes (of the variety whose english name is Austrian crescent—Kipfel meaning croissant) are especially good for the potato salad (with finely chopped onion and condiments) to which Austrians are exceedingly partial. Austrians also attach importance to what they call their ‘winter vegetables’, which help to keep them going in cold weather, especially if prepared with butter or cream.

There are, naturally, regional differences between the nine provinces in Austria, some reflecting differences in recent history (e.g. the occupation of Lower Austria and Burgenland by the Soviet army after the Second World War, which delayed post-war economic recovery) as well as in geographical features and neighbouring influences. Carinthia in the south has the highest mountain, numerous lakes to provide freshwater fish, and is also the home of Nudeln—small, folded noodle squares with many different fillings, Kasnudeln (with cheese) being the best known. Styria, bordering on former Yugoslavia, has a reputation for hearty eating (shared, admittedly, with the rest of Austria) and can boast a number of interesting soups, e.g. Stoss-Suppe (sour cream and milk, potato, and caraway).

READING:

MacDonogh (1992b).

avocado

(or avocado pear) Persea americana, a fruit unlike any other, with its buttery flesh and single large stone. Of all fruits the avocado is highest in protein and oil content. The latter may reach 30%; and the avocado is therefore a powerful source of energy.

The avocado tree, a member of the laurel family, is native to subtropical America, where it has been cultivated for over 7,000 years, as archaeological remains demonstrate.

There are three original races of the species. The Mexican type, which was called by the Aztecs ahuacatl (which meant ‘testicle’ and is the source of ‘avocado’), has a plum-sized, smooth-skinned, purple or black fruit, and foliage with an anise scent. It matures in the autumn and is hardier than other kinds. The Guatemalan type bears larger fruits with a rough skin which is green, purple, or black in colour; these fruits mature in spring or early summer and store well. The W. Indian type has the largest fruits, up to more than 1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) in weight with a smooth skin, usually light green and of medium thickness.

All cultivated avocados are descended from these three types. Many of them are hybrids; for example Fuerte, a prominent Californian variety, and Hass, now the leading cultivar in California, are both Guatemalan/Mexican hybrids. In all there are now at least 500 varieties, of various shapes, sizes, and colours, grown in many countries around the world.

One of the first Europeans to taste the avocado was Fernández de Oviedo, who noticed its external resemblance to a dessert pear, so ate it with cheese; but other Spaniards preferred to add sugar, or salt and pepper. They all praised it. The same applies to the first mention in English, in 1672, by W. Hughes, the royal physician, after a visit to Jamaica. He said that it was ‘one of the most rare and pleasant fruits of the island. It nourisheth and strengtheneth the body.’

However, despite such favourable comments, the avocado was slow to spread from its native region. For Europeans, it remained for a long time no more than a tropical curiosity; and commercial cultivation in N. America only began in California in the 1870s and in Florida from about 1900.

Avocados are now grown in Africa, Israel, Australia, Madeira, and the Canaries, as well as in many parts of their native continent.

The avocado ripens off the tree. If picked when fully grown and firm, it will ripen in one to two weeks in a warm room but much more slowly in a refrigerator. The fruit is ripe when it is faintly but perceptibly squashy, especially at the stem end.

The flavour of the avocado is subtle, but so mild as to be easily overwhelmed. It is often served in halves, with a vinaigrette dressing (or a stuffing of, for example, shrimp) in the hole left by taking out the stone.

Perhaps the best-known avocado dish is guacamole. So far as pre-Columbian use of the avocado is concerned, Sophie Coe (1994) comments:

The one recipe that we may be sure of is the Aztec ahuaca-mulli, or avocado sauce, familiar to all of us today as guacamole. This combination of mashed avocados, with or without a few chopped tomatoes and onions, because the Aztecs used New World onions, and with perhaps some coriander leaves to replace New World coriander, Eryngium foetidum, is the pre-Columbian dish most easily accessible to us. Wrapped in a maize tortilla, preferably freshly made, or even on a tortilla chip, it might ever so distantly evoke the taste of Tenochtitlan.

Avocado leaves, toasted and ground, are occasionally used as a mild spice; those of one variety have an anise-like flavour.

ayran

(also eyran, airan) is a Turkish and Arabic name (it is also known as laban) for a refreshing YOGHURT drink prepared in the Middle East, especially during hot, dry summer months. Yoghurt is mixed with water and thoroughly blended, then seasoned with salt and either freshly chopped mint or dried crushed mint. Finely chopped cucumber is sometimes added. In Iran and Afghanistan a similar drink is made, called abdugh and dogh respectively.

Other yoghurt drinks made in India include LASSI and mattha (literally, BUTTERMILK); chaach is yet another, sweetened and flavoured with lemon, mint, and ginger.

azarole

(or azerole) Crataegus azarolus (sometimes called Naples medlar but no relation to the ordinary MEDLAR), a native of the E. Mediterranean area and Iran. The fruit is cherry sized, red, yellow, or white, or a mixture of colours. Its flesh is crisp and slightly granular, with a strong aroma and a sharp but agreeable flavour. There are three or four hard pips. The fruits have a pit at the end away from the stem, resembling that of the medlar, which partly explains the name ‘naples medlar’.

Azarole has been grown since classical times all over its native region and as far west as Majorca and Spain. It has been introduced to N. America, where there are now named cultivars.

Azeroles are made into jam, eaten as a fresh fruit, and used to flavour a liqueur.

READING:

Iddison (1994).

Azerbaijan

is the largest and most populous of the countries of the Caucasus. Of the other two, GEORGIA is to the north and ARMENIA to the south. The other southern neighbour is IRAN, which now includes much of the larger Azerbaijan of former times.

Like Armenia, Azerbaijan underwent—and still bears the marks of—a succession of invasions, including Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, the last of whom dominated the country from the 11th century. In recent times, Azerbaijan was a republic in the Soviet Union. Around 70% of the present population are of Tatar stock, speak a language related to Turkish, and are Muslims.

The range of scenery, which is generally beautiful, includes semi-desert, alpine meadows and the coastline on the Caspian Sea. Not much land is devoted to agriculture, but crops are highly diversified, including citrus fruits, vegetables, nuts, and rice. Azerbaijan’s rice and fruit, including their grapes, have been prized since ancient times and play an important part in the cuisine.

Naturally enough, there are many points of resemblance between Azerbaijan and Georgia and Armenia. For example, all the Caucasian countries show a liking for sweet and sour. Kavourma (see KORMA) in Azerbaijan is often made with sweet and sour flavours, the latter coming from the juice of unripe grapes or lemon juice.

However, there are also noticeable differences. The MEZZE typical of Armenia and Georgia are largely absent. The traditional start to an Azerbaijani meal is simplicity itself: fresh vegetables and herbs—radishes, spring onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, watercress, coriander, and so on. In a full-scale meal, this could be followed by a further introductory course of fresh fruits such as damsons or peaches, lightly fried and maybe sprinkled with lemon juice.

Soups such as the dumpling soup called Dyushbara (see JOSHPARA) are popular, as are soups with pasta, rice, yoghurt. CHICKPEAS and PRUNES or damsons may feature in these, as may chestnuts (an azerbaijani speciality, roasted, blanched, shelled, and cooked in milk). Soups are often flavoured with herbs such as dill or crushed dried mint; and SAFFRON from Iran, which has been described as the national spice of Azerbaijan, can be used here as well as in other dishes. Meatballs can be incorporated in the famous soup/stew called bozbash (see also ARMENIA), which exemplifies the tendency in the whole region to create dishes which are on the frontier between soups and stews.

The Caspian coastline, despite pollution, has continued to yield some valuable STURGEON (and caviar), and also other fish, which Azerbaijanis prepare with an enterprising variety of ingredients, including coriander, tarragon, WALNUTS, and fresh and dried fruit such as prunes. POMEGRANATE seeds and pomegranate syrup are favourite accompaniments, as are walnuts. These stock Caucasian items also appear with poultry and game (e.g. in the dish FESENJAN, shared with Iran); and the syrup (or alternatively sour plum sauce) accompanies the ubiquitous kebabs (shashlik), which may also be flavoured with SUMAC. Stuffed meatballs may turn out to have sour plums, chestnuts, quince, or prunes inside.

But the pride of Azerbaijani cuisine probably lies with its magnificent plovs, related to the polo of Iran (usually PILAF in English). A plov, served after the fresh vegetables, soup, and a main dish of meat such as kebabs, is considered the centrepiece of the meal. One special plov is that made with kazmag, a thin round layer of dough made with egg which lines the bottom of the casserole before the rice is put in. The rice, when served, is garnished with wedges of the by now golden brown and crisp kazmag crust. The numerous toppings for plovs include orange peel and nuts, dried BARBERRIES or other dried fruits, chestnuts, beans, lentils, and so on. Demonstrating further versatility, a plov may also be made with fish and even eggs.

According to Pokhlebkin (1984), describing a full Azerbaijani meal: ‘The plov is followed by a thick sauce made of grape juice, raisins, almonds and dried apricots. This is the preliminary to the dessert course, which is generally extremely varied, including jams, halvah, sherbets and cakes, served with strong black tea.’

Aztec food

unlike MAYA FOOD and INCA FOOD, is a subject for which relatively rich written source material exists. Admittedly, all of it has to be read with an eye open for prejudices of one kind or another on the part of the authors, faults of memory, flights of imagination, and vagueness or error in nomenclature. However, the chronicle of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortés (the Spanish invader) but wrote his account much later in Guatemala, and the illustrated work in Spanish and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) of Father Sahagún, written in the 1530s, are full of fascinating detail for food historians.

The Aztecs, coming south from the deserts of N. Mexico, had in the 14th century occupied sites in the valley of Mexico, an area rich in lakes, whose produce (fowl of many kinds, fish, frogs, water insects, algae) the newcomers adopted with enthusiasm. They flourished and established their dominion over a wide area. The power wielded by their emperor Motecuhzoma (Montezuma is a Spanish mangling of his name, which means ‘angry like a lord’) was such that one might have expected them to withstand a relatively small force of Spaniards under Cortés. However, the New World had never seen anything remotely like these strangers with their ships, horses, and cannons. The impact was something like the effect which would be produced on the western world today by a combination of the second coming with an invasion by beings from outer space. The question was: were the newcomers gods or mortals? and Motecuhzoma tested the matter with gifts of food. His first offerings made the Spaniards feel ill because he had caused them to be splattered with blood, thinking that this would be suitable for gods. Later, Sahagún tells us, they feasted agreeably on ‘white tortillas, grains of maize, turkey eggs, turkeys, and all kinds of fruit’. He gives a list of 25 ‘fruits’, including four varieties of SWEET POTATO, sweet manioc (see CASSAVA), AVOCADOS, and some CACTI. It is said that they flinched from CHOCOLATE at first, but when the Indians set the example they drank and found it good.

When Cortés and his men, including Bernal Díaz, who was later to record the events, reached the capital of Motecuhzoma, they were entertained at what seemed to them to be a most sumptuous banquet, although it was a standard palace meal. The description by Bernal Díaz of how Motecuhzoma was served and ate, and of the thousands of jars of foaming chocolate, is famous. It contrasts strongly with the general impression of the Aztecs as an abstemious and frugal people, who subsisted on meagre fare and for whom fasts (of which the simplest form was abstaining from salt and chilli) were part of the way of life. Indeed, this contrast illustrates a fundamental dualism in Aztec thought. In food matters they sought to maintain an equilibrium between abstinence and indulgence.

MAIZE was the staple food of the Aztecs and the focus of a large part of their religion; the cult of the rain god Tlaloc was celebrated so that the rain would fall on the maize, and there was a maize god, Cinteotl, and a maize goddess, Chicomecoatl, as well. Maize was especially revered in the blue-husked form, but Sahagún devotes a highly poetic passage to the white:

The white maize ear—that of the irrigated lands, that of the fields, that of the chinampas … is small; it is hard, like a copper bell—hard, like fruit pits; it is clear; it is like a seashell, very white; it is like a crystal. It is an ear of metal, a green stone, a bracelet—precious, our flesh, our bones.

The food value of the maize was greatly enhanced by the process called NIXTAMALIZATION.

Beans and CHIA were important enough to figure as items of tribute paid to the aztec state, as were AMARANTH and squash seeds. CHILLI was available in many guises. To quote Sahagún again:

The chilli seller … sells mild red chillies, broad chillies, hot green chillies, yellow chillies, cuitlachilli, tenpilchilli, chichioachilli. He sells water chillies, conchilli; he sells smoked chillies, small chillies, tree chillies, thin chillies, those like beetles. He sells hot chillies, the early variety, the hollow-based kind. He sells green chillies, sharp-pointed red chillies, a late variety, those from Atzitziuacan, Tochmilco, Huaxtepec, Michoacán, Anauac, the Huaxteca, the Chichimeca. Separately he sells strings of chillies, chillies cooked in an olla, fish chillies, white fish chillies.

The short list of domesticated creatures was headed by TURKEY and included dog (carefully bred and raised to make succulent eating) as well as, on a much smaller scale, the bees.

The culinary sophistication of the Aztecs is apparent from the extraordinarily long list of spices and flavourings which they would use with chocolate. For this and also for information about the Aztec kitchen, the cooks who worked in them, and Aztec table manners, as well as numerous other connected matters (including the extent and nature of the cannibalism practised), see Sophie Coe (1994).