Brassica oleracea, var capitata, the first cultivated vegetable in the diverse genus Brassica, is the ancestor of most of its numerous relations such as CAULIFLOWER and BRUSSELS SPROUTS.
The original wild plant, known as wild or sea cabbage, still grows in some coastal areas of Europe, is occasionally gathered and eaten, and has a cabbagy flavour. However, it is a spindly plant with few leaves and no ‘head’. Indeed, it is more like KALE, another of its descendants. Other wild brassicas grow around the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in the Balearic Isles. These and the wild ancestors of our mustard plants were no doubt interbred with wild cabbage during the early stages of its cultivation.
Cabbage has been highly valued as a food since the time of the ancient Egyptians. From surviving pictures and reliefs it is clear that Egyptian cabbage was headless. The Greeks, too, cultivated headless cabbages and invested them with a religious significance. They ascribed the origin of cabbage to the chief of the gods, Zeus, believing that when he was earnestly trying to explain two conflicting prophecies, he worked himself into a sweat and that from this sweat sprang cabbage. There may be some connection here with the strong smell of cooking cabbage.
Both the Greeks and the Romans thought cabbage a very healthy food, which it is; and a protection against drunkenness, which it is not. A Greek proverb states roundly: ‘Cabbage served twice is death.’ This sounds sinister but seems to have reflected no more than a dislike of leftovers on the part of people who knew nothing of BUBBLE AND SQUEAK. The saying was used to disparage anything stale or secondhand.
At some time in the 1st century BC the first headed cabbages appeared. The head, an enlarged terminal bud, was at first a small one at the top of a long stem, but Pliny the Elder in the 1st century AD was already writing of a head 30 cm (12″) in diameter. He probably knew of this only by hearsay, since the new, headed cabbage is now thought to have evolved in N. Europe, where it later developed into the hard, white ‘Dutch’ or ‘drumhead’ varieties. But it was not until well into the Middle Ages that headed cabbages spread throughout Europe to supplement the staple ‘colewort’ or KALE.
Cabbage arrived in N. America in 1541, on the occasion of the third voyage of Jacques Cartier, but the first written record of its being planted in what is now the USA is dated 1669. The immigrant cabbages came mainly from Germany and the Low Countries, no doubt because German settlers were anxious to make SAUERKRAUT. However, boiled cabbage was established at an early date as a traditional dish in New England, where British connections were dominant.
The categorization and nomenclature of brassicas have been difficult, and rival systems have found favour at different times. Attempts in the 20th century to introduce order into what is essentially an unruly scene have involved the creation of what are called Groups. By this device, reflected in some of the names below, a main variety of a species can be subdivided at a level higher than that of commercial cultivars.
When new varieties began to be developed, one of the earliest, in the 16th century, was the red cabbage, now classified as B. oleracea var capitata, Rubra group. It was followed by many types of loose-leafed cabbage, light or dark green and sometimes tinged with red or purple. The increasing number of varieties made it possible to extend the growing season from the first spring greens, picked before a head has formed, to winter’s end.
The cabbage which is generally rated the best as a cooked vegetable, the Savoy cabbage, has wrinkled leaves and a loose head. It was a variety separately developed in Italy and probably descended from the old Roman types. It is now classified as var capitata, Subanda group.
The most suitable cabbage for sauerkraut is a hard white cabbage, var capitata, Capitata group. The same cabbage is also used for COLESLAW. See also KIMCH’I.
One curious survivor from the early days of headed cabbages is the enormously tall Jersey or walking stick cabbage, whose stem is as high as a man and has been recorded as reaching 5 m (16′).
Two other types of cabbage stand outside the main line. One is Portugal or Braganza (or Galician) cabbage, also called by its Portuguese name, couve tronchuda. This variety, developed well before the 17th century, has no proper head but instead wide, spreading leaves with very thick midribs. It looks rather like seakale, and its ribs may be cooked in the same way. The other outsider is the Kerguelen cabbage, a botanical oddity. It grows only on the Antarctic islands of Kerguelen and Heard, and could not possibly be related to any European cabbage. Yet it closely resembles an ordinary leafy cabbage. It is classified in a separate genus as Pringlea antiscorbutica.
CHINESE CABBAGES do not belong to the same species as European brassicas and are treated separately.
The name ‘cabbage’ is applied to a few other plants of quite different kinds, such as the ‘palm cabbage’ (see PALM).
The smell of cooking cabbage, which few people like, comes from various sulphur compounds. All vegetables contain and give off substances of this type, but those in cabbage (and some related brassicas) are usually copious and pungent. In particular, cabbage contains a moderate quantity of ‘mustard oils’ (isothiocyanates), which are what give mustard, horseradish, and onions their characteristic ‘bite’. The taste is quite noticeable in the raw leaves.
One way of reducing the sulphurous smell is to stir-fry cabbage sliced into thin strips in the Chinese manner. The coating of hot oil seals the surface and reduces the emanation. For the same reason more flavour is retained, while the texture is appetizingly crisp.
Red cabbage presents a special problem. If exposed to even slightly alkaline conditions it loses its red colour, going progressively mauve and slate blue or, when cooked, dirty green. Hard water is often alkaline enough to discolour its sensitive anthocyanin pigments. All traditional recipes for red cabbage therefore include acid fruit, vinegar, or wine, additions which not only preserve the colour, but also improve the flavour. Red cabbage pickles well, and is popular in this form in Britain.
There are many variants of cabinet pudding, hot, cold, and even made with ice cream. The political link, though unexplained, is constant. Ude (1828) gives, as an alternative name, poudin à la chancelière. Another name is Diplomat pudding, which may just be a translation of the French Pouding à la diplomate. Only the names differ; the puddings are all alike.
The general method is to grease a pudding basin; stick currants or glacé fruit to the grease; line it with sponge fingers or soaked MACAROONS; and then fill this lining with layers of dried fruit, sponge fingers, and CUSTARD (in cold versions including GELATIN). Most versions include some spirit or liqueur as a flavouring. Hot ones are boiled; cold ones are made with a custard or cream that needs no further cooking.
alla cacciatoria, the Italian for a culinary term current in many languages, meaning ‘huntsmen-style’ and usually indicating the presence of forest mushrooms. The Poles say bigos and the French chasseur.
a French term, possibly connected with the CASHEW nut, for a small, scented, hard sugar sweet sucked by tobacco smokers to freshen the breath. It is often perfumed with violets or other flowers. A popular French variety is cachou Lajaunie, invented by the pharmacist Leon Lajaunie in Toulouse in 1890. These, based on LIQUORICE, scented with mint, and mixed with various secret ingredients, are a relatively modern example of a confection with a history that extends back at least to the 17th century, when ‘kissing COMFITS’, flavoured with musk, were served as part of the BANQUET course in England.
Laura Mason
one of the principal and oldest cheeses of the south of Italy, is usually made from cow’s milk, although a mixture of cow’s and ewe’s milk is sometimes used. The compressed curd is fermented in hot whey and then sliced and covered with hot water to give it further elasticity and to permit shaping it into the typical caciocavallo forms, which are gourd- or spindle-like. A finished cheese has a pointed bottom and a neck and head at the top and weighs about 200 g (7 oz).
The cheeses are hung in pairs joined by a cord to drip-dry. One explanation (among several) of their name is that they then look like saddle bags: thus ‘cheese on horseback’ (cacio a cavallo, cacio being an old word for cheese).
Caciocavalli vary in the time they take to mature; but young ones are always mild (dolce) and suitable for eating at table, while older ones develop a sharp taste (piccante) and may be used for grating. They are good quick-melting cooking cheeses at any age.
Scamorza is another Italian cheese, belonging to the region of buffalo milk (although now made from cow’s milk), of the same group; but the name can also be applied to a type of MOZZARELLA.
The Balkan cheeses described under KASHKAVAL are all related to caciocavallo, but made from ewe’s milk. Which came first is unlikely ever to be resolved; so far as etymology is concerned, some believe that the Balkan name derives from the Italian one, others the contrary.
an Italian word meaning ‘little cheese’, is used as a general name for a wide variety of cheeses, which have nothing in common except their small size (up to about 1 kg or 2 lb), a tendency to be round and flattish in shape, and the fact that they are mostly made on farms or by small-scale producers. They are not confined to, but are most common in, C. Italy. They may be made with cow’s, sheep’s, or goat’s milk, or a mixture; may be young and moist or aged and sharp; and vary greatly in flavour.
The general name caciotta often embraces a cheese properly called caciofiore, so named because it is made with the creamy top (fiore) of the milk; or, say some, because it is usually prepared with a vegetable RENNET extracted from the flower (fiore) of the CARDOON.
This is a yellow, buttery cheese, coloured with SAFFRON, now hard to find outside the areas of production in Umbria though it used to be on sale elsewhere. Caciofiore Aquilano is the most renowned; according to di Corato (1977) its flavour is so delicate that it was formerly regarded as one of the finest presents anyone could give or receive.
a large group of plants of which some are edible. The best known are BARBADOS GOOSEBERRY, PITAYA (strawberry pear), and PRICKLY PEAR.
There is also Peniocereus greggii, a night-blooming cactus (hence the name reina de la noche in Mexico), which is sometimes eaten in e.g. Louisiana; it bears tubers which can be made into fritters or french fries, or roasted.
a pale, almost white cheese called after the Welsh town of that name, otherwise famous for its ruined castle. The Welsh justly claim the cheese by origin, for Caerphilly became a cheese-making centre in the first half of the 19th century; but most Caerphilly cheese is now made in the English counties of Somerset and Wiltshire.
There were two reasons for this move. Welsh population growth around the start of the 20th century increased the demand for milk in Wales, so less was available for cheese-making; but the demand for cheese had also risen. Across the border the makers of CHEDDAR, who had ample supplies of milk, saw a chance to expand their activities and speed up their financial return by starting to make Caerphilly too. Cheddar takes a long time to mature, whereas Caerphilly ripens in 10 days. Nonetheless, a revival of the Welsh farmhouse version of this cheese in the 1980s has ensured that its Welshness (as caws Caerffili, caws meaning cheese) continues to be recognized.
Caerphilly is a moist, whole-milk cheese with a crumbly, softish texture and a mild, acid tang, which was a favourite of Welsh miners. Some attribute this preference to the saltiness of the cheese; additional salt is supposed to be needed by persons doing heavy manual work. Others point to the fact that it does not dry out; and that it can be cut into wedges which fit in the flattish miner’s wallet and are convenient to eat in the cramped conditions underground. A third explanation is that it is more digestible than most cheeses, which matters to men working (and digesting) in cramped positions. All three explanations probably have some truth in them.
in French, means coffee house as well as coffee. The English and the Dutch, for example, tended to distinguish place and substance. There has ever been a wealth of words to describe locales devoted to eating and drinking—trattoria, inn, tavern, hôtel, cabaret, BISTRO, chophouse, dining room, restaurant, snack bar, and the like—and each has usually had a specific history and significance. Some, however, have seen their meaning broadened: RESTAURANT and café in particular, perhaps reflecting the importance of the French contribution to eating out. Cafés or coffee houses (the koffeehuis in Holland) were first started with the adoption of COFFEE in W. Europe in the 17th century. There are remarkable parallels with their earlier establishment in the Middle East as coffee spread beyond its S. Arabian heartland (Hattox, 1985). Now, linked to three exotic substances (coffee, sugar, tobacco), all more or less stimulating, the new enterprises were focus to an emerging urban class that embraced the opportunity for interaction and exchange. The café in France took into its remit the sale of other drinks, as well as food, so that some of the earliest restaurants included ‘café’ in their names, Café Anglais being one of them, just as one of the most famous Victorian English restaurants was the Café Royal. However, the pre-revolutionary journalist Louis Mercier’s view of the 500 or 600 (his estimate) cafés in Paris was that they were the ‘refuge of the feckless’. Their number by the end of the 19th century had perhaps expanded to 27,000 in the capital (about 1 to every 70 inhabitants) although many of these should be more properly described as bars. The construction of broad boulevards, permitting indoor and outdoor tables (rather as in the garden-cafés of Vienna), certainly gave cafés the presence that allowed them an important role in social life, no longer the hole-in-corner affairs implied by Mercier’s strictures. He had, however, already identified them as essential places of public discussion, performance (café-theatres were to be a vital part of the Paris scene), criticism, and display—as they were portrayed in Henry Mürger’s Latin Quarter narrative Vie de Bohème (1851)—a role set in stone by the 20th-century image of the Paris intellectual. Thus far, the social function of the café seems to outweigh the provision of food (as might be said of those in many European cities, such as Vienna, Milan, or Copenhagen). In England, the coffee house had had its glory days in the age of Addison and Steele and gone into decline. But while adopting the French hotel and restaurant formats, the English had not taken the café to their hearts and it was only at the end of the 19th century that the word surfaces as a new sort of catering business. Probably the first cafés in England were refreshment rooms run by continental immigrants in Soho while, on a wider plane, the temperance movement had been attempting to wean the working classes off alcohol by creating a variety of coffee-and-tea-drinking simulacra called coffee taverns, coffee public-houses, coffee palaces, and, significantly, a small chain called the People’s Café Company. Their rapid growth, but equally rapid commercial failure, left a vacuum that was filled by multiple-outlet businesses such as Pearce & Plenty, Lockharts, the Express Dairy, and the Aerated Bread Company to take advantage of the need of an urbanized workforce for refreshment and light meals. While most called their places coffee rooms or dining rooms (Lyons called many of theirs teashops though soon expanding beyond the provision of tea to drink and light tea-type meals), others went for the name of café. For example, Lyons opened its giant Popular Café in Piccadilly in 1904 and even its first Piccadilly teashop, opened in 1894, had been decorated in the Louis XVI style to take advantage of the sophisticated overtones of French café and restaurant culture. All these had the same aim: light meals, snacks, and no alcohol. The prescription was successful and the word café was to stick as its descriptor, to spread over the country in the next twenty years, helped by the expansion of other chains such as Kardomah, Fullers, and Cadena. Though there were no tables on the pavement, the Swansea Kardomah in the 1930s, where Dylan Thomas chatted daily with his friends Daniel Jones, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, and Vernon Watkins, could even match the Left Bank. However, the traditional British café of Formica counter, grumbling coffee boiler, and pinafored waiting staff has never measured up to the elegance encountered on European boulevards. In America, there were plenty of metropolitan French café-restaurants such as Café Chambord or Café Martin (just as Sydney had its Paris Café), and swish new hotels had gentlemen’s bars and cafés as adjuncts, although in the long term the concept of café has probably taken root more as a homage to European ideals (often in university towns) than as a specific view of food provision. Carson McCullers wrote: ‘a proper café implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfaction of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behaviour.’ The development of the cafeteria (the word is Mexican-American), however, was a specifically American response in form and content, much like the supermarket, to the twin problems of labour costs and mass feeding. The cafeteria solution of self-service on trays was to spread to commercial outlets, industrial canteens, and educational establishments in Europe and beyond.
Tom Jaine
READING:
Acadians (‘Cajuns’) are descended from the French settlers of 17th century Nova Scotia, a colony they named Acadia, from akade, the Micmac Indian word for ‘plenty’. When they were driven off their land and into exile in the Grand Déangement of 1755, some went back to France and some to the French Caribbean islands, but others arrived in the French colony of Louisiana just as it was being handed over to Spain in 1766.
The Spanish government granted the Acadians the uninhabited land around the Atchafalaya where, in time, they learnt to harvest the natural bounty of the swamps and marshes growing rice and raising cattle on the prairies.
Interestingly, Cajun food has retained very little of its Canadian ancestry and although many of the dishes have French names, only a few have recognizable Gallic origins. The predominant influence is African, as are many of the staples: okra, aubergine, field peas, peanuts, even rice. This is due to the geographic proximity of another francophone minority—the Creoles, sometimes incorrectly called ‘black Cajuns’. See CREOLE FOOD for the various meanings of this term. The point here is that the Creoles of Louisiana, many of African or part-African descent, were better equipped by their previous history than were the Cajuns to deal with the crops which were suited to the hot climate; and this applied in the kitchen as well as in the fields.
TABASCO sauce is the standard condiment of the Cajun table. When a dish is described as ‘sauce piquant’ (Crawfish sauce piquant, Chicken sauce piquant, Alligator sauce piquant, etc.) it means that it is served in a fiery hot reddish gravy, the fiery heat supplied by Tabasco.
Gumbo (see OKRA) is the most celebrated Cajun/Creole dish. It is a spicy, soupy stew that can feature a variety of ingredients—chunks of ANDOUILLE sausage, pieces of chicken or game, crab claws, or shucked oysters. The common basis of all gumbos is the ROUX, a roughly equal combination of flour and fat cooked until very nearly burnt; it is the dark smoky roux that gives the gumbo its colour and flavour. After the roux, vegetables are added, then the main ingredients that will give the gumbo its specific identity. A traditional Lenten version is meatless; it is called Gumbo zerbes (gumbo aux herbes) and sometimes Gumbo Zaire. The word ‘gumbo’ comes from kingombo, a W. African name for okra. (There is a legend that one particularly enterprising slave brought okra seeds to the New World hidden in her hair.) However, okra is no longer considered crucial to a gumbo; it used to be added to give a mucilaginous texture to the dish, but this is less appreciated now than it was by previous generations. Likewise FILÉ powder made from the dried leaves of the SASSAFRAS tree would be added during the final stages of cooking to give the gumbo a ‘stringy’ texture. One used either okra or filé to achieve the desired texture, never both.
Jambalaya is a New Orleans dish that has been adopted by the Cajuns. It probably came from the period of Spanish rule in Louisiana, and represents a slurring together of jamón and PAELLA. In a traditional jambalaya, chicken, sausage, ham, and chopped vegetables are cooked and added with seasonings and liquid to an iron pot full of rice.
‘Dirty rice’ is rice cooked in chicken stock with chopped chicken giblets and sometimes bits of pork. Maque choux is a corn dish that varies in consistency from a stew to a chowder or soup. It always contains corn and frequently features tomato, onion, and cayenne pepper.
The most emblematic of all Cajun ingredients is the crawfish (see CRAYFISH). It is honoured with its own festival in Breaux Bridge. The simplest way to prepare crawfish is to boil them in water that has been seasoned with a ground mixture of mustard, coriander, dill seeds, cloves, allspice, bay leaves, and, most important, dried chillies.
Crawfish bisque is a rich, roux-based crawfish soup filled with sweet crawfish tail meat, often served with a bowl of rice on the side which is added to taste. At the bottom of the bowl rests a crawfish shell stuffed with chopped crawfish meat, herbs, and breadcrumbs to soak up the flavour of the soup. Sometimes a boulette (a round cornmeal fritter usually seasoned with onion, pepper, and tender crawfish tails) is substituted for the stuffed shell.
The French influence is most evident in the traditional preparation of pork products. A boucherie is the slaughtering and preparing of a hog, originally both a social event and a means of distribution and now (despite refrigeration and modern slaughter methods) continued for social reasons. Boudin (see BLOOD SAUSAGES) is a well-seasoned sausage of rice and pork as well as varying amounts of giblets, while the traditional boudin rouge is a blood sausage or black pudding. Chaudin is a type of HAGGIS, made with a pig’s stomach, while paunce is a stuffed calf stomach. Gratons are pork scratchings (see CRACKLING). Tasso, a lean, smoked seasoning meat quite similar to beef JERKY but moister and more highly spiced, may be made from either pork or beef, and is typically used to flavour stews and soups.
Joe Roberts
READING:
is a term with a long history (the word is of Viking origin, from the Old Norse kaka) and a subject with many aspects. This entry is concerned with definitions and history; another is on CAKE-MAKING, while categories of cake and individual cakes with their own entries are ANGEL FOOD CAKE, BANBURY CAKES, BATTENBERG CAKE, BLACK BUN, BLACK FOREST GATEAU, CHIFFON CAKE, CHRISTMAS FOODS, COVENTRY GODCAKES, CUP CAKE, DEVIL’S FOOD CAKE, EASTER FOODS, ECCLES CAKES, FRUIT CAKES, GACHE, GALETTE, GATEAU, GÉNOISE, GINGERBREAD, HONEY CAKE, LAMINGTON, LARDY CAKE, MADEIRA CAKE, MADELEINE, MARBLE CAKE, MOONCAKES, PANCAKE, POUND CAKE, QUEEN CAKE, ROCK CAKES, SACHERTORTE, SAFFRON CAKE, SAVOY, SEED CAKE, SIMNEL CAKE, SPONGE CAKE, STOLLEN, SWISS ROLL, TEA BREADS AND TEA CAKES, TENNIS CAKE, TIPSY CAKE, TORTE AND KUCHEN, TWELFTH NIGHT CAKE, UPSIDE DOWN CAKE, VICTORIA SANDWICH CAKE, WEDDING MEALS AND CAKES.
Definition is not easy, but the following corresponds to English usage. Cake denotes a baked flour confection sweetened with sugar or honey; it is mixed with eggs and often, but not invariably, with milk and fat; and it has a porous texture from the mixture rising during cooking.
It is not surprising that the frontiers between cake and BREAD, BISCUIT, BUN are indistinct. The progenitor of all is bread in its simplest form. As techniques for baking and leavening developed, and eating patterns changed, what were originally regarded as forms of bread came to be seen as categories of their own, and named accordingly. The point is well brought out by Ayto (1993) who observes that certain Roman breads, enriched with eggs and butter, must have achieved a cakelike consistency and thus approached one of these indistinct frontiers. He continues:
Terminologically, too, the earliest English cakes were virtually bread, their main distinguishing characteristics being their shape—round and flat—and the fact that they were hard on both sides from being turned over during baking. John de Trevisa (1398) gives an early definition: ‘Some brede is bake and tornyd and wende [turned] at fyre and is called … a cake.’ It is this basic shape that lies behind the transference of the name to other, completely different foods, such as fishcakes, pancakes, and potato cakes.
The process whereby cakes evolved from breads was such that some items were inevitably left perched on the frontier—they could be one thing or the other, as in the case of tea breads and tea cakes.
Europe and places such as N. America where European influence is strong have always been the stronghold of cakes. One might even draw a line more tightly, round English-speaking areas. No other language has a word that means exactly the same as the English ‘cake’ (though some echo it with strange-looking forms such as ‘kek’, when meaning to refer to English-type cakes). The continental European GATEAU and TORTE often contain higher proportions of butter, eggs, and enriching ingredients such as chocolate, and often lean towards PASTRY rather than cake. Central and E. European items such as BABA and kulich (see EASTER FOODS) are likewise different.
The occidental tradition of cakes applies little in Asia. In some countries western-style cakes have been adopted on a small scale, for example the small sponge cakes called KASUTERA in Japan. But the ‘cakes’ which are important in Asia are quite different from anything occidental; for examples, see MOONCAKES and RICE CAKES OF THE PHILIPPINES.
The history of cakes, in the broadest sense of the term, goes a long way back. Among the remains found in Swiss lake villages were crude cakes made from roughly crushed grains, moistened, compacted, and cooked on a hot stone. Such cakes can be regarded as a form of unleavened bread, as the precursor of all modern European baked products. Some modern survivors of these mixtures still go by the name ‘cake’, for instance OATCAKES, although these are now considered to be more closely related to biscuits by virtue of their flat, thin shape and brittle texture. Over many centuries, by trial and error and influence from other cultures, baking techniques improved. From the basic method for making what was essentially desiccated porridge, leavened and unleavened cereal mixtures evolved into breads, cakes, and pastries.
Ancient Egypt was the first culture to show evidence of true skill in baking, making many kinds of bread including some sweetened with honey. Later the products of the island of Rhodes achieved a reputation in the classical world. Although they were probably rather breadlike, they were eaten as desserts, not staples, thus occupying a similar niche to modern cakes.
The ancient Greek word for cake was plakous, from the same root as the word for ‘flat’. From this was derived the Latin word placenta (and the modern ‘placenta’ the unborn baby’s food supply). In the 2nd century BC Cato described a type of placenta resembling a modern cheesecake. A Roman cake known as a satura was flat and heavy, made from barley with raisins, pine nuts, pomegranate seeds, and sweet wine. (The name of this cake, full of added ingredients, is linked to the word ‘saturate’; and to ‘satire’, which at first meant a literary hotchpotch.)
By the early centuries AD the Romans had acquired considerable skill in the control of YEAST, the only leavening known at the time; and barbarian peoples to the north and west of the Empire were adept at using barm, foaming yeast drawn from the top of beer, as a raising agent. During the medieval period there was no clear distinction between bread and cake in terms of richness and sweetness. Both words passed from Anglo-Saxon into English. Possibly ‘cake’ meant something small at the beginning of the period, since it was generally translated into Latin as pastillus, a little cake or pie. However, by the time Chaucer was writing in the late 14th century, immense cakes were being made for special occasions. Chaucer mentions one made with half a bushel (13 kg/28 lb) of flour. Sweet cakes containing currants, butter, cream, eggs, spices, and honey or sugar were often made. Raised with yeast, these would now be regarded as enriched fruit breads.
Cakelike survivors of this enriched bread type are still found today in the form of Alsatian KUGELHOPF and Welsh BARA BRITH. And from these enriched yeast-leavened mixtures developed a number of modern creamed cakes, particularly FRUIT CAKES. (Quite how the creaming method evolved is uncertain. It is initiated with sugar and fat and ended by adding flour, and thus is a reversal of bread-making, which begins with flour. See CAKE-MAKING.)
Italian pastry-cooks worked in both France and England during the 16th century and introduced many new baked goods. Some items, such as Genoese and Naples ‘biscuits’, had Italian names which they were to keep for centuries. Recipes such as these, which did not include yeast, were the precursors of whisked sponges (see CAKE-MAKING). The earliest surviving British recipe to use a real SPONGE CAKE mixture was given by Gervase Markham (1615). All such recipes were probably used to make small, thin, crisp cakes which their makers called ‘biscuit’.
Recipes for ‘biscuit’-type cakes are found in many 17th-century cookery books, along with yeast-leavened plum (fruit) cakes, GINGERBREAD, and small items of the MACAROON type. Spiced buns and cakes such as WIGS became common breakfast foods.
During the 18th century yeast was finally abandoned as a leavening for fruit cakes in favour of the raising power of beaten egg. Cake recipes of this period call for the mixture to be beaten for a very long time, to incorporate as much air as possible.
By the 17th century most of the ingredients important to modern cake-making had become known in Europe. Spices and dried fruits had been imported since the Middle Ages; citrus fruits were arriving in increasing quantities from the Mediterranean. The COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE with the New World brought chocolate and vanilla to the attention of Europeans. Colonization of the W. Indies and the development of sugar plantations made sugar cheaper and easier to obtain; and treacle, available in Britain from 1660, replaced honey in many products such as gingerbread.
Moulds, in the form of cake hoops or pans, have been used for forming cakes since at least the mid-17th century. Paper hoops could be improvised to contain the mixture; Sir Kenelm Digby (1669) favoured wood over metal hoops, as he found the latter were liable to rust. Metal cake hoops were similar to modern flan rings, open at the bottom, and placed on a baking sheet as a base. Elizabeth David (1977) conjectures that expanding cake hoops were known, and could be adjusted according to the amount of mixture to be baked. Cake hoops were prepared by buttering them, and floured paper was placed underneath them. Cake ‘pans’ (now known as tins in England, but still called pans in the USA) were also used.
Most cakes were eaten to accompany a glass of sweet wine (the origin of the MADEIRA CAKE) or a dish of tea. They had not found a real place in a set meal, except among the miscellaneous sweetmeats offered as dainties at the end. At large banquets, elaborately decorated cakes might form part of the display, but would probably not be eaten. In the mid-19th century when France, under Russian influence, and then by other western European countries, began to adopt the sequence of courses known as SERVICE À LA RUSSE, it became possible to have a purely sweet course. Cakes adopted a new form to fill this role. The medium-sized rich cake, iced, filled, and decorated, appeared. See GATEAU, a term used both in France and in Britain.
During the 19th century, technology made the cake-baker’s life much easier. The chemical raising agent BICARBONATE OF SODA, introduced in the 1840s, followed by BAKING POWDER (a dry mixture of bicarbonate of soda with a mild acid), replaced yeast, providing greater leavening power with less effort. Supplies of white flour, granulated sugar, and cheap shortening such as margarine all helped to make cake baking popular. Another important contribution made by technology was the development of ovens with reliable temperature control.
In most of NW Europe and N. America a well-developed tradition of home baking survives, with a huge repertoire of cake recipes developed from the basic methods. Most of these rely on additions such as chocolate or glacé cherries for their effect. Many probably owe their inspiration to recipe leaflets handed out by the manufacturers of baking powders and shortenings from the late 19th century onwards. The ability to bake a good cake was a prized skill among housewives in the early to mid-20th century, when many households could produce a simple robust, filling ‘cut and come again’ cake, implying abundance and hospitality. Although the popularity of home baking and the role of cakes in the diet have both changed during the 20th century, cakes remain almost ubiquitous in the western world and have kept their image as ‘treats’.
Laura Mason
lays much emphasis on texture. Indeed, for the consumer, texture is the most obvious feature which distinguishes cakes from other cereal products. A high proportion of enriching ingredients inhibits the formation of gluten, giving a more tender product than BREAD; and a soft, spongy ‘risen’ crumb sets cakes apart from BISCUITS and PASTRY.
Nowadays four basic methods are used in Britain and countries with similar baking traditions. All involve producing a BATTER which entraps tiny air bubbles. This is poured into a mould and baked. Heat causes the air to expand and make the cake rise; eventually PROTEIN and STARCH in the liquid phase of the cake coagulate and gelatinize, giving what in scientific terms is a stable foam and in common parlance a cake.
Many of the properties of cake batters are derived from the careful use of beaten egg to trap air. This is best seen in the ‘whisking’ method, used to make the original forms of SPONGE CAKE, known as SAVOY and GÉNOISE. This starts with prolonged whisking of eggs and sugar which incorporates air, distributing it through the mixture as tiny bubbles. Immediately before baking, flour is folded into the batter. During baking the air expands, leavening the mixture with a network of little holes surrounded by walls of coagulated egg proteins; hence the name ‘sponge cake’.
The ‘creaming’ method is the other main way of making cakes; it always incorporates fat, and the results are known as ‘shortened’ cakes. Sugar is mixed or ‘creamed’ with fat to a soft, fluffy mass, incorporating air; eggs are beaten in, one by one; and finally flour is folded in, usually with the addition of baking powder. During baking the air bubbles in this heavier mixture are augmented by tiny pockets of carbon dioxide gas generated by the BAKING POWDER when moisture and heat are applied. An example of the creaming method is the VICTORIA SANDWICH CAKE.
Shortened cakes requiring low proportions of fat may be made by the ‘rubbing in’ method, the fat and flour being worked together before the other ingredients are added. ROCK CAKES are made this way.
The ‘melting’ method (‘muffin method’ in the USA), is used for making some types of heavy cakes such as PARKIN and some sorts of GINGERBREAD; the fat, sugar, and any liquid required are heated gently, before beating in eggs, flour, and baking powder.
There are several variants on the basic recipe for shortened (creamed method) cakes.
That the order in which ingredients are added affects the result is plain from a comparison between creaming and rubbing in. In creamed cakes an airy batter of fat, sugar, and egg is mixed with flour at the last minute, allowing minimal time for protein and starch in the flour to cross-link. For rubbed cakes, cold fat is combined with dry flour before any liquid is added, and this separates the particles and prevents the flour proteins from linking to form gluten when liquid is added to the mixture. It also inhibits starch gelatinization during cooking, and the result is a yielding texture.
Cakes baked in industrial bakeries use the same basic principles as home-baked cakes. Special fats which incorporate an emulsifier, usually glyceryl monostearate, are available to the commercial baker. These ‘superglycerinated’ fats cream, emulsify, and shorten the mixture more efficiently than ordinary baking fats, allowing use of a higher proportion of sugar and moisture per unit of fat than the domestic cook. Such cakes are sometimes called ‘high ratio cakes’ in the trade. However, industrially produced cakes are poor things by comparison with those which are hand made.
Two major reservoirs of skill in cake baking exist: the (usually male) pâtissier who has learnt the classical tradition as a trade; and the housewife, whose skills are based on informal traditions derived from friends and family, but whose cakes may be just as accomplished as those made by professional bakers.
Within Europe, the Scandinavians and the British make a speciality of home baking. The Swiss, Germans, and Austrians (particularly the Viennese) are accomplished bakers, both at home and professionally. In France and S. Europe pâtissiers are more important than home bakers.
Laura Mason
READING:
(or kalamansi or calamondin/kalamondin)
formerly known as Citrus mitis, is now classified as × Citrofortunella mitis (Citrus reticulata × Fortunella sp), i.e. a hybrid of the MANDARIN orange and the KUMQUAT. It is a small citrus fruit of the Philippines which plays an important role in Filipino cookery.
The fruits, which look like small mandarins, are very acid. The juice can be used like lemon juice to season dishes, or made into a refreshing drink. Other uses of the juice include acting as a marinade or a dip. It will also arrest browning in bananas, as lemon juice does; and is good to squeeze over papaya for breakfast, or over pansit (see NOODLES OF ASIA). In addition, the fruits can be pickled. The preserved peel is often used as a flavouring.
a name used of various species of herb in the genus Calamintha (or, possibly, close relations in other genera). C. sylvatica (formerly officinalis) is cited by Morton (1976), alongside summer and winter SAVORY, as having been used in Roman kitchens for its strong aroma and pleasantly pungent flavour, reminiscent of MINT. It is sometimes, reputedly, called by names such as ‘mint savory’.
Modern Italian authorities record only very occasional culinary uses and point to a frequent confusion with another herb which is a kind of marjoram and bears Italian common names such as nepitella.
the common and generic name for certain plants of the W. Indies and S. America which have small, round tubers resembling new potatoes. These were cultivated in the Caribbean islands and Peru before the arrival of Europeans. Calathea allouia is still cultivated on a small scale, mainly in Puerto Rico. Two other species, C. macrosepala and C. violacea, have flowers which are cooked and eaten by some C. American Indians. The former may be called chufl.
Calathea roots, sometimes called ‘sweet corn roots’, have an agreeable flavour, free of the bitterness and toxins which afflict many tropical roots. A starch extracted from them is used to produce ‘Guinea arrowroot’.
The names for this plant in Trinidad and Dominica, topi tambo and topitambour respectively, are corruptions of the French name for the Jerusalem artichoke, topinambour.
a chemical element vital to living things. In its pure form it is a light, whitish metal; but it is seldom thus seen because it reacts violently with water to form lime (calcium hydroxide).
The bones and teeth of animals, including people, are largely composed of calcium sulphate. Calcium ions also play an important role in the working of the nerves and muscles, and in the clotting of blood. Quite a lot of calcium is required in the diet. An adult needs about 500 mg a day; growing children need slightly more, and pregnant and lactating women about 1,200 mg.
The main dietary sources of calcium are grains, dairy products, fish (especially small ones of which the bones are eaten) and green vegetables, especially watercress. To absorb calcium, the body needs adequate vitamin D. Lack of either can cause bone diseases such as rickets in children and osteoporosis in older people.
The outer coats of cereal grains contain phytin, a chemical which opposes the uptake of calcium. Strict vegetarians who eat wholemeal bread and coarse porridge are therefore at risk of calcium deficiency. In many countries including Britain extra calcium is added to bread in the form of chalk (calcium carbonate) which, surprisingly, can be digested to release the calcium.
Ralph Hancock
(or calalú, calulu, caruru, etc.)
is the name given to various green leaves which form the chief ingredient of the soup called callaloo, popular in the W. Indies and Brazil. Some of the plants yielding leaves for this purpose are listed below. The first three are the most used.
The soup in its simplest form will have flavourings such as garlic and other herbs, probably some other vegetables, and (often) coconut milk, plus perhaps a little salt pork. Sometimes salt beef or salt cod are used, or corned beef or crab. Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (1973) observes that in Martinique and Guadeloupe there is a more elaborate form, with creole rice and a salt cod salad as accompaniments.
units for the measurement of energy, including energy obtained from food. In the eyes of scientists the unit is now obsolete, but the word is part of everyday language, at least in English, and shows no sign of falling into disuse.
Strictly, a calorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. This is a very small amount, and dietitians found it more convenient to use the kilocalorie (kcal), 1,000 calories, in their calculations. Unfortunately they called this a ‘Calorie’ with a capital C. The use of the capital was often misunderstood or omitted, causing much confusion. In popular usage 1 kcal is ‘a calorie’.
In the modern system of measurement the unit of energy is the joule (J), defined as the work done when a force of 1 newton is exerted over a distance of 1 metre (a newton is roughly the force of a mass of 100 grams resting on the earth’s surface). This is also inconveniently small, so dietitians use kilojoules (kJ), 1,000 joules. One kilocalorie is equal to 4.18 kJ. Dietary information on food packaging normally gives energy values in both units.
All the following figures are approximate. A very active man uses 3,600 kcal (15,100 kJ) a day, a very active woman 2,500 kcal (10,500 kJ). A sedentary man needs 2,600 kcal (10,900 kJ), a sedentary woman 2,100 kcal (8,780 kJ). Most people’s needs lie between these extremes. The amount of energy used by an adult per hour is: asleep, 70 kcal (295 kJ); sitting, 85 kcal (360 kJ); standing, 90 kcal (380 kJ), walking slowly, 185 kcal (780 kJ); running at a gentle sustainable pace, 500 kcal (2,100 kJ); and walking briskly upstairs, 1,000 kcal (4,200 kJ).
The 19th-century chemist who deserves credit for being behind the whole apparatus of ‘recommended daily intakes’ and ‘energy values’ for foods, Jacob Moleschott, is the subject of an interesting essay by Jane O’Hara-May (1984).
Ralph Hancock
(‘breeches’), a Sephardic Jewish stuffed pasta which is widely consumed in the Middle East. They may be square in shape like RAVIOLI or in half-moon or oblong shapes. Calsones are mostly home made, using egg in the dough, and usually filled with a cheese and egg mixture.
Calsones with RESHTEH (tagliatelli) were a famous Jewish dish in Aleppo, Syria. The calsones and reshteh were mixed together, dressed with melting butter, and served with yoghurt.
As for the origin of calsones, Claudia Roden (1996) suggests that they came to the Aleppo community with the Italian Jews who left Italy at various times, beginning in the 16th century, when there was a mass emigration eastwards following the expulsion of Jews from Italy.
The Italian original was calzone (meaning trouser leg), which started as a dish of mortadella or sausage wrapped in a tube of dough but has since developed into the half-moon-shaped stuffed PIZZA baked in the oven, although smaller calzoni may be deep fried. Carol Field (1990, 1985) suggests it may figure in a Paduan document from 1170, but opinion is united in thinking it an Apulian speciality of the later Middle Ages (Wright, 1999).
Calzone is also applied to a sweet sugar cookie of Mexican origin.
from the tree Buchanania lanzan. This member of the CASHEW family is native to India and Burma and is cultivated there and in SE Asia. Other members of the genus are found throughout SE Asia and in N. Australia.
The acid fruits are edible, but of less importance than the kernels. These are irregularly round or pear-shaped and about 6 mm (0.25″) long. They resemble almonds and pistachio nuts in flavour, and are popular in sweetmeats such as SHRIKHAND in India, and elsewhere. Some are exported to western countries as ‘almondettes’.
Camassia quamash, a member of the lily family belonging to the western USA, whose edible bulbs were a staple food for the natives of the Pacific north-west. Camas was observed by early explorers to grow in great abundance, and still does, although European settlers ploughed many camas fields up in favour of more familiar crops.
The camas plant takes several years to bloom, but its bulb was not harvested until the blue flowers appeared. This was partly because there are other types of camas belonging to the genus Zigadenius, which are highly poisonous. Their flowers are cream (or occasionally green), in contrast to the blue (or occasionally white or pink) ones of the edible kind.
There were three camas harvests, of which the first was in the spring. The bulbs then gathered were thought to be best boiled or raw, while those from the main (summer) and autumn harvests were baked, traditionally in a fire pit. The brown meal which resulted from the baking would be formed into cakes and stored in maple-leaf-lined baskets in trees to provide food for the coming months. The flavour of camas bulbs has inspired many comparisons, not all compatible with each other. It has been likened to that of mealy potatoes, gingerbread, baked pears, maple sugar, quince, dates, and figs. It provides carbohydrates and some protein, with minerals and fibre.
Few recipes for camas have been published. Hope (1983) states that ‘the Nez Perce of today eat baked camas with sugar and cream. It is known that most new potato recipes adapt to camas. If overcooked, camas turns dark and soggy. If the taste is bland, the texture and nutrition of camas can still be used to advantage in a meat or vegetable pie.’ Early settlers in Oregon and California had made camas pie or venison-camas stew.
a country better known since the 1970s for bloodshed and turmoil than for its cookery, has nonetheless an interesting culinary history. It has been said that the work done by the cooks of the royal palace and of the aristocracy at Phnom Penh during the first half of the 20th century reflected the same capacity for taking pains and using highly developed techniques which had been displayed by the builders of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s most famous monument, in the distant past. By all accounts, such cooks produced dishes of a visual appeal equal to or surpassing those of any other cuisine. This is now no more than a piece of history, and a piece which has been insufficiently recorded.
However, the popular traditions of the people of Cambodia, like those of other countries which have been subjected to oppression or warfare, live on. Two ‘snapshots’ of Cambodian food which were taken in the third quarter of the 20th century retain their interest and much of their validity. The first of these was by Ung Teng (1967) and took the form of his doctoral thesis, on traditional Cambodian foods and their nutritional value.
Rice comes first, with rice products and ways of cooking. Ung Teng explains that both regular and glutinous rice are used, and that consumption is not confined to the two meals of the day but extends to snacks at various times and to festive occasions, when special rice confections may be made. Rice vermicelli is a main product, and is the basis of many simple dishes, including Kutiev, also known as Soupe chinoise.
Kralan is an unusual speciality, glutinous rice which needs no kitchen recipient, since it is cooked in hollow sections of bamboo, after being mixed with coconut cream and shredded coconut and given additional flavourings. The stuffed sections of bamboo are set in a fire for an hour, after which the contents are well cooked and the outside can be peeled like a banana. A rice dish which takes more time and trouble and is reserved for festive occasions is Ansam chrouk, a kind of stuffed rice cake; the stuffing is of haricot beans and pork meat or fat, and an outer covering of banana leaf, tightly secured, is provided. This preparation has numerous variations. TAPÉ is an example of a fermented glutinous rice preparation.
Rice is not the only important cereal. MAIZE plays more of a part than one might think. This is not ‘red’ maize, produced for animal fodder and mainly exported, but white maize, cultivated in smaller quantities for human consumption. Like rice, it has its retinue of derivative products and special dishes.
Besides tuk trey, their version of the FISH SAUCE which is used throughout SE Asia, Cambodians have two special fermented fish products, which help to add protein to rice-based dishes: these are prahoc and pha-âk. The preparation of both starts with cleaned, not whole, fish and takes many weeks. Prahoc finishes up as a sort of dry paste, still incorporating chunks of fish. Pha-âk, on the other hand, is preserved in brine and incorporates rice, perhaps including the special red or black form of glutinous rice.
The second snapshot is by Professor Andras Hellei (1973), who surveyed on behalf of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) the eating patterns of the Khmer people. So far as the ordinary people were concerned, he wrote, the pattern was to have two meals a day, one at about 11 a.m. and one at dusk. The basis of each meal was rice, and the invariable accompaniment soup (samla). Whenever possible, Cambodians would add further accompaniments, taking one from each of three broad categories known as:
Fish would be dominant in the grilled and fried dishes, and these would be freshwater fish. Cambodia has a relatively short coastline, but vast resources of lakes and rivers, abounding in fish.
As in neighbouring LAOS and THAILAND, foods wrapped in edible leaves are common. Sour and acid tastes are liked, and are manifest in the use of lime juice, tamarind, etc. Lemon grass is among the favourite flavouring herbs.
A characteristic sweet rice dish is made with black glutinous rice.
Marlierea edulis, a tree of the MYRTLE and eucalyptus family, grows wild in the southern coastal rainforests of Brazil. Its fruit is edible but, in the opinion of economic botanists, needs improvement before it is capable of exploitation. The medieval English game cambuca that is claimed as a distant ancestor of golf has nothing to do with it.
Nor does the similarly named Brazilian fruit cambuci (a myrtle too, Paivaea langsdorffii) which grows in the region of São Paulo, but is becoming increasingly rare. Its yellowy-green fruits, which look rather like ‘flying saucers’ some 6 cm (just over 2″) in diameter, are appreciated locally. The juicy pulp has a sweet-sour flavour.
The name is from the native Indian word cambuci, meaning a jar, and was given because the shape of the fruit resembles that of a certain type of water container.
either of two large ruminant mammals of the genus Camelus. The one-humped Arabian camel, C. dromedarius, is also known as the dromedary. C. bactrianus is the two-humped Bactrian or Asian camel. Both provide milk. Camel’s milk, a staple food for desert nomads, contains more fat and slightly more protein than cow’s milk. Stobart (1980) remarks that it ‘has very small fat globules and cannot readily be churned to make butter’. It can be made into a kind of yoghurt.
However, the principal use of camels is for carrying goods and people in desert regions of Africa and Asia. As the chief beasts of burden in these areas, they are too valuable to be slaughtered for food, but in the past, when there were probably many more camels than there are now, they were valued for their meat. This is still eaten in some regions. When camels were domesticated it seems that the development of their ‘local fat accumulations’, i.e. their humps, increased; and it is generally considered that the best part of the camel for eating is the hump.
As for the distant past, ancient Greek writers spoke of whole roast camels at Persian banquets; and the Roman emperor Heliogabalus is said to have relished camel’s heel (among many other outlandish delicacies).
one of the most famous of the French soft cheeses, belongs to the Vallée d’Auge in the department of Orne, where the village Camembert gave it its name. That is still the home of true Camembert, although ‘Camembert’ is now manufactured worldwide.
The making of good cheeses at Camembert was mentioned as early as 1708, but Rance (1989) believes that the cheeses made there then were not closely similar to the Camembert of modern times; they were smaller, brownish, and undistinguished.
Although some of the details are obscure, it seems clear that a certain Marie Harel was responsible for creating Camembert as we know it, at the end of the 18th century. She introduced changes in the method of making the cheeses and also began to use larger moulds, the size still familiar. It may be that the new cheeses were not known as Camembert until Napoleon III was presented with one of them in the middle of the 19th century, asked where it came from, and ruled that it should be known by that name. Boisard (2003) is enlightening on the development of the myth of Camembert’s creation.
However, Camembert remained a cheese of only local importance until in 1880 the chipboard cheese-box, in which it is still housed, was patented and permitted dispatching the cheeses over considerable distances. The introduction of Penicillium candidum in 1910 (P. glaucum, the local natural blue mould, was formerly used) finally set Camembert on the road to world renown. Its establishment as a truly national French cheese was sealed by the distribution of 1 million cheeses a month to the French army during the First World War.
The true Camembert is made from untreated cow’s milk (lait cru), is not less than 10 cm (4″) across, and contains at least 45% fat. The cheese is cut by hand, drained and salted, then sprinkled with the mould, poured into tall perforated forms, and left to settle and drain until it takes the characteristic round shape. The cheeses are then cured until the characteristic white surface mould appears, and are ripe when the inside has become soft and smooth, turning from white to creamy yellow.
There is some debate about the ideal time to eat a Camembert. Rance says:
To my mind, the most delicious stage of the cheese is when there is still a trace of that white at its heart in a moist but not melted state. This is called l’âme, the spirit or soul of the cheese in Brie. The combination of the two consistencies and flavours is as delightful to the palate as the aroma is to the nose. For me this is the smell of heaven.
READING:
a huge country whose area exceeds that of the USA, although its population is not much more than a tenth as large, includes vast areas which are too chilly for all but trappers and other rugged people whose professions take them there; and in contrast, regions such as the Niagara peninsula and the Okanagan Valley (in British Columbia) where the climate is warm enough for growing fruits such as peaches. It is also remarkable that Canada is much wider, west to east, than the USA, thus giving scope for a wonderful six-day coast-to-coast train ride (still available in the late 1990s).
In fact the railways used to provide some of the best dining in Canada. It used to be said, with some justification, that the dining cars of the CPR and CNR (the two major railroads) and their hotels in the principal cities were the best places to eat. P. and J. Berton (1974), while emphasizing that this was all in the past, provide a charming description of the good fare to be had:
As the decades rolled on Canadian railway dining became known the world over, for it was without doubt superior to any other. The mounds of crackling crisp Canadian bacon, the evenly grilled Calgary sirloins, the plump, pink spring lamb chops, the succulent goldeyes with their melting pat of parsley butter, the juicy lake fish, slightly charred, the Oka and cheddar cheese and the hot seasonal blueberry pies—all these came to be associated almost exclusively with our transcontinental train service. It is perhaps not too much to say that, if there is a distinctly Canadian style of cuisine, it is this; and not too surprising that, in an artificial nation bound together by bands of steel, it should spring directly from our dining cars.
Old railway hands also fondly recall the rich, steaming coffee of the old CPR, served from silver tureens.
Following an imaginary route from the extreme east over to the Pacific, a touring epicure would first encounter the conservative cuisine of Newfoundland where, despite modern intrusions, traditional seafood dishes such as fish and BREWIS (straight out of medieval England), and home baking continue to thrive—indeed, the epicure will find that home baking thrives more or less all along his route, whether derived from Scotland or the Ukraine or France or elsewhere. The seafood traditions, of both French and British origin, are equally noticeable in the Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island), and among the Scottish traditions there are various oatmeal delicacies including oatmeal bread sweetened with molasses. It is well to mention here that refugee loyalists from the American War of Independence were an important component of the eastern seaboard’s population. Their culinary contribution, therefore, was equally significant, and included those things we might otherwise think of as peculiar to the United States. E. Canada, principally Quebec, is also the home of Canadian MAPLE SYRUP.
Quebec, the French-speaking province, vast and including much of the St Lawrence River, up which the Frenchman Jacques Cartier sailed in 1535, marvelling at the fertility of the region, is the home of many French dishes which have evolved in interesting ways in their new environment, and indeed of new dishes created by the application of French cooking techniques to New World ingredients. Cretons (originally pork scratchings, now a pâté-like spread of spiced cooked pork), Tourtière (a hot spiced pork pie), Tarte au sucre, Pouding du chômeur (an economy pudding for the unemployed)—these are but a few notable examples. Best known of all is probably the Québécois pea soup, made with dried yellow split peas, smoked pork hock or ham bone, and seasonings. As well as her smoked meats, another Montreal speciality, just one of the street or snack foods for which the city is famous, is described under POUTINE.
Further west lies Ottawa, the capital, in Ontario, a province of lakes, berries, cornmeal-coated juicy back bacon, maple syrup, and other good things. The province also harbours the great multicultural city of Toronto; and Ingersoll, birthplace of the Canadian Cheddar cheese industry. Recently, some of these cheeses have recovered the old, true taste, following a return to the use of raw milk by some cheese-makers. Recently, too, the artisanal cheese-makers of Quebec have gained an enviable reputation. The Ontario cuisines include a strong German element, with Mennonite and Amish communities adding their distinctive notes, e.g. in home-smoked sausages in the Kitchener-Waterloo district, and other Old Order dishes such as the (dried fruit-cum-meat) Schnitz pie, or the charmingly named molasses dessert SHOOFLY PIE.
Next come the Prairie provinces: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. There are Arctic CHAR, WHITEFISH, pickerel (see PIKE), etc., in the rivers and lakes of this region, but the fame of these provinces rests mainly on their contribution to world stocks of wheat and other grains including WILD RICE. The influence of Scandinavians, including a tiny group of Icelanders, is noticeable in the region, as are the food traditions which immigrant Jews brought with them from Europe. However, the influence from the UKRAINE is perhaps the strongest; there are about half a million Canadians of Ukrainian origin, and the best book on Ukrainian cookery was published in Manitoba, where pierogi (see PIROG) are practically a ‘national dish’.
Over on the Pacific rim, in the far west, British Columbia provides its own matchless sockeye and coho SALMON in numerous incarnations (including the Indian method of wind-drying it as a fish JERKY). Here too are echoes of Victorian England, surviving harmoniously with modern and ethnic manifestations to rival those of Perth in Western Australia (just a hemisphere away); there is much evidence of Chinese and other Asian cuisines in the exciting city of Vancouver. Indeed, such evidence is visible elsewhere, for the pattern of immigration to Canada changed radically in the latter part of the 20th century, with major inflows from Asia (especially Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan), Africa, and the Caribbean, all adding new dimensions to Canadian foodways.
This survey has left out the north, for which (to some extent) see INUIT COOKERY, but otherwise gives a panoramic view of the variegated belt of regions, circling a sixth of the northern hemisphere, to which the transcontinental railroad used to give a special sense of identity which is not in the gift of air transport.
READING:
a French word which basically means sofa or couch, has become a culinary term in France since the late 18th century, when it was applied by analogy to the thin pieces of fried or toasted bread which served as supports for various savoury toppings. A century later, in the 1890s, it became an English word referring to a titbit of this kind. Now that yet another hundred years have passed, the usage continues, although it sounds old-fashioned and is most likely to be found in contexts such as catered receptions or ‘cocktail parties’. The modern practice of offering guests in western restaurants a titbit before the meal proper begins, calling it an amuse-gueule, may go someway towards extending the lifespan of canapés, although often departing from the ‘something sitting on a square of toast or a cracker’ formula.
Canapés may be hot or cold. If hot, they come close to what are called SAVOURIES in British English. In either case they are capable of being classified as HORS D’ŒUVRES in some culinary contexts. Large canapés trespass on the territory of the open SANDWICH.
In Italy, the term crostini continues to have much the same meaning as the old French usage. Thin slices of toast, cut into e.g. square or diamond shapes are used as a base for a savoury topping. A Tuscan speciality. Crostini can also serve as CROUTON for use in soups.
called by the Romans ‘the fortunate isles’, have had human beings in residence and enjoying their remarkably agreeable subtropical climate since the time of the Cro-Magnon culture in the south-west of France. Indeed, the first inhabitants, known as Guanche, arriving about 2000 BC, probably came from that culture and thus shared a common ancestry with the Spanish conquistadores who took the islanders under Spanish rule at the end of the 15th century. So the cuisine which had existed in the islands and that which was brought in by the Spaniards already had some features in common. Both alike were influenced by the arrival of new foods from the Americas (see COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE), for example the MAIZE which has become an important crop in Gomera.
The first major crop-plant introduction after the conquest was SUGAR CANE, brought in by Portuguese experts from Madeira. This was the main crop for a century but succumbed to competition from the New World. Meanwhile vines had been imported and produced wines which are often named in 18th-century English recipes (sack, malvasia). However, the most important successor crop was the BANANA, which has continued to be the major export of the islands with growing support from potatoes, tomatoes, citrus fruits, etc.
The effect of mass tourism has been to submerge to a large extent the indigenous dishes of the islands, including items such as gofio, formerly the staple food and still eaten by the islanders but probably invisible to visitors. This was made from wheat, maize, or barley, roasted and ground, then mixed with water to make a kind of bread. However, many good things can be had, including a large range of seafood (simply grilled or in a fish soup), and items such as the local version of jacket potatoes, Papas arrugadas. These are boiled in heavily salted water and eaten with their jackets which have a white deposit of salt on them. For local flavours, the piquant sauce called mojo is important. It goes with most things, including fish, and exists in various forms, but always based on oil, vinegar, garlic, and herbs. The red form includes red peppers and saffron; the green form has parsley and coriander.
Sweetmeats and desserts include many items based on almonds (and usually reflecting Spanish mainland inspiration) but also some maize sweets such as frangollo.
whole fruits preserved by soaking in syrup for several days until the sugar replaces the moisture in the fruit. The result is very sweet and firm textured, retaining the shape, and usually the colour, of the original.
The lengthy process is not difficult, but requires patience and attention to detail. Fruit is prepared by cooking briefly in water to soften it, before immersion in syrup. The syrup is drained every day and the concentration increased by dissolving more sugar in it, before it is poured over the fruit again. (If the fruit was added to a highly concentrated syrup from the beginning, the result would be shrivelled and tough. When the concentration increases gradually, shape and tenderness are retained.) Finally, the fruit is drained and allowed to dry in very gentle heat for several days. If desired it can be coated in caster sugar to become ‘crystallized fruit’ or dipped in concentrated sugar syrup to give the smooth coating called glacé in French.
Candied fruits keep well. Citrus and stone fruits, pears, figs, and pineapple all respond to preservation by this method. Large items, such as whole pineapples or grapefruit, are usually cut into pieces before preservation, but may be treated whole for a particularly magnificent display. Soft fruits are little used, as they disintegrate before soaking is completed.
The long process and the high-quality fruit required means that, like MARRONS GLACÉS, candied fruit is now an expensive luxury. In Britain such sweetmeats are associated with Christmas. The one exception is glacé cherries, which are relatively cheap. These are important ingredients in home baking, and, along with candied ANGELICA, are frequently used for decorating desserts. Other candied fruits are rarely used as ingredients, except in a few luxurious sweet dishes such as Riz à l’impératrice.
The French regions of the Auvergne and Provence (particularly the city of Apt) are well known for candied fruit of all types; also the north-eastern city of Strasbourg, where candied mirabelle plums, flavoured with kirsch and stuffed with fruit paste, are made. Elizabeth David (1965) observed that:
Italian preserved and candied fruit is spectacular. Whole pineapples, melons, citrons, oranges, figs, apricots, red and green plums, pears, even bananas in their skins, are sugared in the most skilful way, and make marvellous displays in the shops of Genoa and Milan.
The Spanish and Portuguese also enjoy candied fruit. Candied plums are a speciality of the town of Elvas, in Portugal. These two nations also left a legacy of confectionery recipes in their former colonies, with the consequence that candied fruit, and fruits in syrup, are now popular in Mexico, S. America, and the Philippines.
On the other side of the world, in China, preserved fruits are made by salting, sugaring, and drying, particularly citrus fruit, plums, and kumquats.
The preservative qualities of syrups in relation to fruit were known to the Romans; instructions for the preservation of whole quinces in concentrated grape juice are given in the cookery book ascribed to APICIUS. An alternative method was recommended by the physician Dioscorides, in which pieces of peeled quince were wedged together in a vessel full of honey and stored for a year.
The date at which sugar was substituted for honey, and the evolution of the sophisticated method of gradually increasing syrup concentration, are unknown. A French agricultural writer, Olivier de Serres, gave some details of the method in 1600, so it was known in France by then; and versions of such recipes had already appeared in English cookery books in the late 16th century. However, instructions were sometimes sketchy, and the process of slowly increasing concentration poorly understood. Sometimes the cook was required to cut the fruit into chips—thin slivers—which would produce an acceptable result after only one or two boilings in syrup.
At this time, such confections were known in England as SUCKETS. Dry and wet suckets (a ‘wet’ sucket was fruit stored in syrup) were popular from at least the mid-16th century onwards. All kinds of fruit were used, as well as items which would now be classed as vegetables, or are no longer eaten, including lettuce stems and mallow stalks from the MARSHMALLOW plant; and stalks of ANGELICA, then as now a favourite non-fruit item for candying.
Roots, such as those of ELECAMPANE, were used too. Those of sea-holly (ERINGO ROOT) were favourites for candying and had a powerful reputation as aphrodisiacs. Eringo was invoked in this role by Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1598): ‘Let the skie rain potatoes, … haile kissing comfits, and snow eringoes.’ Day (1996a) has more to say on this and on the orchid tuber called satyricon which was another top-rated aphrodisiac.
Most things, it seems, could be made into suckets. Nuts were also preserved; a recipe for sucket of green walnuts was given by Sir Hugh Platt (1609).
Although the word ‘sucket’ went out of use, sugar-preserved fruits, both dry and wet, continued to be made. Eighteenth-century recipe books contain numerous recipes for them under the title of ‘preserves’, or ‘conserves’, plus other related confections of fruit and sugar.
By the mid-19th century, dry candied fruits seem to have moved out of the realm of the domestic cook. Imported varieties continued to appear on the tables of those who could afford them, but home preservation of fruit in syrup, a less exacting process, became a popular substitute. Fruits were now also being preserved in syrup by CANNING, the descendant of all the 16th- and 17th-century suckets.
One preserve which does carry on the tradition of wet suckets as the Elizabethans would have understood them is preserved GINGER root in syrup. Imported from China, the traditional round porcelain jars in which it is stored make charming Christmas displays in British shop windows.
Laura Mason
violet flowers preserved by a coating of sugar syrup. Hot syrup is poured over the fresh flowers, and stirred until the sugar ‘grains’ or recrystallizes. This method is still used occasionally for rose petals, and was applied to orange flowers in the past. Almonds and orange peel were also treated this way, and the results of such recipes were referred to as PRALINES. Candied violets are still made commercially at Toulouse in France, where they are known as violettes de Toulouse.
A simpler technique, used by home cooks, is to brush flower petals with egg white or gum arabic solution, and then dredge them with caster sugar. The principal use of candied flowers in modern times is as decoration for chocolates or cakes.
Laura Mason
an edible nut borne by the large tree Aleurites moluccana. This is native to the region of E. Malaysia but is now cultivated from India to the Philippines and in the Pacific islands. It bears a round, hard fruit up to 10 cm (2″) in diameter with a wrinkled papery outer wrapping and tough inner coat enclosing either one or two waxy white kernels. These bear some resemblance to WALNUTS and are therefore sometimes called Indian or Tahiti walnuts. The Malay name is buah keras (hard nut) and the Indonesian is kemiri.
The nuts contain a toxin which makes them unsuitable for consumption raw, but they are widely consumed as a flavouring ingredient, after suitable preparation, in SE Asia and especially in Java. The usual practice there is to roast the nuts until they can be cracked open and then to sauté the kernels, crushed with other ingredients such as shallots, garlic and chilli peppers, shrimp paste, to produce an aromatic mixture which is fried before being used in savoury dishes. A mixture of this sort is a standard ingredient in Indonesian cookery.
The candlenut is very oily, and was used in the past for making primitive candles, as its name indicates.
The strength and weight of the shells is such that whole nuts cannot economically be exported. But kernels are available in western countries, not always whole since the process of extracting them is difficult.
a term derived from the Arabic qandi, meaning a sugar confection. In the USA it is a general term for SWEETS of all kinds; in Britain it is used in a more restricted range of meanings, notably to indicate sweetmeats coated or glazed with sugar. For candied fruit, peel, and vegetables, see under CANDIED FRUIT etc. There is a separate entry for SUGAR CANDY.
a confection of spun sugar, is a popular item at fairs and festivals in many countries. In the USA it may be known as spun sugar or cotton candy; in France it is called barbe à papa (dad’s beard). The sugar is melted in the machine and forced through small holes by centrifugal force. This produces threads which are collected on a stick, to give something which looks like a huge lollipop made from cotton wool. It becomes sticky if stored, and therefore is made freshly for each customer.
Another sweet which has a threadlike texture is saray helvasi, made in Turkey and Iran, from flour, oil, and sugar. The mixture is worked to give numerous fine, parallel threads, rather like a skein of silk.
Laura Mason
Thryonomys swinderianus, a large African rodent which also goes by the name grasscutter (especially in W. Africa) and ground-pig (a misnomer which has been current in S. Africa, perhaps because of its bristly hairs). It can live in various environments, mostly but not always in damp areas; enjoys an excellent vegetarian diet (roots, young shoots, bark, etc.); and is capable of causing havoc in some crops such as sugar cane.
The cane rat may reach a length, not including the tail, of nearly 60 cm (24″) and provides a substantial amount of good meat. It is eaten on a large scale in sub-Saharan Africa.
Pouteria campechiana, an interesting tropical fruit which is sometimes called egg-fruit (or the equivalent in other languages), or yellow sapote (see also SAPOTA), because of its orange flesh; or by names meaning ‘drunk’ since it ferments after falling to the ground. It occurs wild in S. Mexico and a few C. American countries, and is cultivated in them and neighbouring countries and also in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and (especially) Cuba.
The fruit can measure up to 12 cm (5″) long; and contains from one to four hard brown seeds. The skin of the ripe fruit is yellow and shiny. Inside, the flesh is relatively firm but becomes softer towards the centre. ‘It has been often likened in texture to the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. The flavor is sweet, more or less musky, and somewhat like that of a baked sweet potato’ (Morton, 1987).
Processed food available today can generally be divided into three categories: food preserved according to ancient techniques, such as FERMENTATION, pickling (see PICKLE), salting, and SMOKING; food industrially processed according to modern techniques, such as canning, mechanical REFRIGERATION, and various dehydration techniques; and high value-added, wholly manufactured foods, such as MARGARINE, instant coffee, and candy bars. CANNING was a bridging technology that facilitated the transformation of food PRESERVATION from the basic methods known for ages, to highly complex, industrial processes characteristic of the current food system (Thompson and Cowan, 1995).
Since the early 19th century, industrial food processing has begun to play an important role in the diet of an increasing number of people. Canned food, which Goody considers along with refrigeration as the two pillars of industrial cuisine (Goody, 1982), was at first a rarity targeted at very specific groups of consumers who depended on long-lasting food supply, such as sea voyagers, explorers, armed forces, and expatriate western communities at remote corners of the world. However, from the 1920s onward, aided by the modernization of transport and retailing, canned food began to enter the daily diet of the general population. Automation of manufacture, which became increasingly important in the industry from the late 19th century, helped to lower the cost of canned food and ultimately led to mass production, and consumption.
Warfare has from the very outset played a prominent role in the popularization of canning. The method of the Parisian confectioner Nicolas APPERT, on which the modern industry depends, was developed on the basis of earlier practices and devices in response to an appeal of the French government for solutions in providing the army with long-life and easy to transport food. War continued to propel the production as well as consumption of canned food in various times and locations (e.g. Wilde, 1988; Bruegel, 2002). As canned food could be eaten out of season and out of place, and securely transported over great distances, canning technology seriously contributed to the strength of the western armies and navies, and therefore indirectly fostered western territorial expansion.
Imperialism constituted a major force that led to the global spread of canning. Canned food became a staple of western expatriate communities from Shanghai to Belize, not only allowing them to retain their distinctive food patterns but also protecting them from the potential danger of contagion through food. High prestige of canned food, deriving from its association with western communities, facilitated its adoption by local élites and, ultimately, among larger sections of non-western populations (Den Hartog, 2002; Wilk, 2002).
Not only the consumption, but also the production of canned food extended from Europe to other parts of the globe. The east coast of the United States was the first production site that developed on the other side of the Atlantic. Greatly boosted by the Civil War, by the end of the 19th century the American canners dominated the global industry. Canning of meat has also developed in Australia, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Collins, 1924). By the 1920s, Japanese products began to establish themselves on the global market as well. Canned abalone—exported to China—was the first export article of major importance, but was soon overshadowed by spider crab caught by the Japanese in the waters of Hokkaido, Kamchatka, Southern Sakhalin, and northern Korea. Tuna in oil and pilchards in tomato sauce followed. However, the biggest success story of them all was canned mandarin oranges. Contrary to earlier products which were copies of foreign originals, canned mandarins were a Japanese invention, inspired by a new technology of peeling and cleaning citrus fruits developed by American grapefruit canners. Up to 90% of mandarins exported during the 1930s were shipped to Great Britain, the world’s largest importer of canned food at the time (Johnston, 1976).
As Simon Naylor convincingly argued, the canning of food was a decisive moment in the growth of GLOBALIZATION. ‘The ability to move, store, sell, and consume food effectively and safely between sites around the globe greatly enhanced the possibility of a global marketplace’ (Naylor, 2000). Due to the fact that capital costs for setting up a cannery were minimal, canning technology was able to spread relatively quickly wherever fresh produce was available. Technology of canning has not only played a critical role in extending the shelf life of foodstuffs, but was critical in the formation of contemporary consumption patterns and their globalization.
Katarzyna J. Cwiertka
a large and eminently stuffable form of PASTA, formed by wrapping a sheet round itself in the shape of a tube. Cannellini are similar but smaller.
Fillings may include meat, sometimes seafood, often cheese or vegetables, usually incorporating a sauce or with a sauce poured over, or both.
formerly practised in many parts of the world (see the excellent surveys by Tannahill and Harris listed below), is now extremely rare.
When cannibals ate human flesh, it was often for ritual reasons, e.g. in connection with human sacrifices which were enjoined by some form of religion; or because it was thought that the virtues of dead relations or the martial abilities of dead enemies, or whatever, would be absorbed by the act. There have, however, been cultures in which human flesh was consumed, straightforwardly, as food, and evidence is available for the curious about which parts of the body were preferred, how the flesh was cooked, with what accompaniments it was eaten and so forth.
READING:
is an example of preserving food by SEALING. Its history is inseparable from that of bottling; so the two are treated together here. Each involves heating food to sterilize it and sealing it in an airtight container. However, the use of metal containers (cans) soon became dominant in the canning industry, while bottling in glass containers was the usual practice in domestic kitchens (although it has continued to be used in the food industry for specialized or expensive or visually attractive items (e.g. fruit in syrup)).
The theoretical basis of canning was not established until 1861, when the French scientist Louis Pasteur showed that MICRO-ORGANISMS were the principal causes of food spoilage. But empirical knowledge had pointed the way from early times. As explained under SEALING, the medieval raised pie was a confection which could serve as a preserving container; and the old practice of POTTING certain foods must have produced at least a vague realization that cooking plus excluding air made food keep. In 1680 such notions were given concrete form by the anonymous author of A Book of Receipts According to the Newest Method, who wrote:
To keep Gooseberries, Damsons, or Bullies [bullaces]. Gather Gooseberries at their full Growth, but not ripe, Top and Tail them, and put them into Glass Bottles, put Corks on them but not too close, then set them on a gentle Fire, in a Kettle of cold Water up to the Neck, but wet not the Cork, let them stand till they turn White, or begin to Crack, and set them till cold, then beat in the Corks hard, and Pitch them over. You may also do them in an Oven if you please, or cork them down hard, and pitch them over, and they will keep without scalding.
This recipe seems to have had no influence, perhaps because of the misguided advice at the end, which may have tempted people to try the invalid alternative technique ‘without scalding’. Otherwise, subject to some minor problems, the recipe should have worked.
The decisive step forward into the era of successful bottling and canning of foods was not taken until the beginning of the 19th century, when the Frenchman Nicolas APPERT perfected a method of bottling which won the approval of the French government and was described in his book L’Art de conserver (1810). An English translation appeared in 1811, and an American edition in 1812.
Appert’s technique was as follows. Food of any type—meats, soups, fruits, and vegetables—was placed in a stout wide-mouthed jar, and this was closed with a stopper composed of several layers of cork with the grain running crossways to reduce porosity. The stopper was sealed with an odd but effective mixture of cheese and lime, and wired down as for champagne. The jars, enclosed in sacking in anticipation of some bursts, were then heated in a water bath. Appert worked out cooking times for each type of food. All his mixtures were either liquid themselves or packed in liquid. Tests carried out from 1806, including the shipment of jars across the equator, vindicated the technique.
Parallel work was taking place in England. In 1808 Bryan Donkin was awarded five guineas for a method of bottling fruit, which he had borrowed without acknowledgement from Appert. His corks were kept moist, and thus airtight, by storing the jars on their sides in the manner of wine. Not long afterwards he introduced the use of tinned iron containers in place of glass jars—hardly surprising, as he was a partner in an ironworks. This idea had already been patented twice in Britain, in 1810; it is not clear whether Donkin was aware of this. In any event there was no legal challenge when he began to manufacture canned foods in 1812. He offered samples to the Royal Navy and to several explorers, and the firm of Donkin, Hall & Gamble became an established naval supplier from 1818.
Two cans made for an Arctic expedition of 1824, one of veal and one of carrots, survived unopened and were investigated 114 years later. The contents were in sound condition, only slightly spoiled by the slow chemical attack of the tin coating; they could have been eaten safely, but the investigators did not dare try.
These early cans were bulk containers, holding 1 or 2 kg (2–4 lb). The metal was thick and the seams were hand soldered; the cans had to be opened with a hammer and chisel. They were not completely closed before heating, as Appert’s jars had been; a small hole was left for the escape of steam. This was quickly soldered when the contents boiled, and heating was continued for the full processing time. To verify that all cans had been properly sealed, and that no air had been drawn in when the can cooled and pressure inside fell, the cans were left in a warm place for a month. Any faulty can would bulge, as a result of gas being formed inside from the spoilage of the food.
In the late 1840s, when still larger cans were being made—net weight over 6 kg (14 lb)—a scandal was caused by the discovery that many such cans of meat went bad. It can now be seen that this was because the distance from the outside of the can to the middle was so great that heat did not have time to diffuse right through the solid block of meat, and the centre did not reach boiling point. Cans with liquid or partly liquid contents did not suffer from the problem, however large they were, because convection currents could carry heat around inside them. Admiralty investigators, although not understanding this, wisely recommended that no cans should have a capacity of more than 2.7 kg (6 lb), and that the navy should have its own cannery, which was established in 1856 at Deptford.
This was still several years before Pasteur’s discovery, and long before the great resistance to heat of certain spore-forming bacteria had been discovered. Nevertheless, there was a feeling that greater heat was desirable, and experiments were made to raise the boiling point of the water bath (with salt, which unfortunately corroded the outside of the cans) and by PRESSURE COOKING. AUTOCLAVES (large pressure cookers) were, however, feared because they sometimes exploded, and it was not until the end of the century that they came into general use.
The earliest canned foods had been expensive items, whose use was only warranted for special situations—ships at sea for long periods, Arctic explorations. But meat was scarce and dearer than usual in Britain in the 1860s, and it became economically feasible to import canned mutton and beef from Australia. In the 1870s the USA entered the British market, followed later by S. American countries. The canned meat thus imported was cheap food for the poor. It was widely disliked for its coarse, fatty nature, as shown by some of the nicknames it acquired. The Royal Navy called theirs ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, after the victim of a notorious murder in 1867, whose victim was hacked into small pieces. This tradition proved to be durable. During the Second World War the cans of meat supplied to Axis troops were labelled ‘AM’. The Germans called it ‘Alter Mann’ (old man), and the Italians ‘Asino morte’ (dead donkey).
Canned fruits and vegetables were at first only prepared for the luxury trade or special purposes, but evolved into an inexpensive item for the mass market. Canning of tomatoes on a large scale began in Pennsylvania in 1847–9, at a time when this fruit had not yet won acceptance in the English-speaking world. A lively marketing campaign by the canner, who sent samples to President Polk and Queen Victoria, overcame doubts, and it was largely due to this campaign for the canned product that tomatoes came to be a common and popular food. By the 1880s large quantities of canned tomatoes were being sent to Britain from the USA. Peas, first canned on a large scale in Baltimore in the 1850s, had also progressed down market from luxury to staple. Californian peaches were widely sold in cans from the 1860s, but canned pineapple, from Hawaii, did not appear until 1892.
Cans of pork and beans were made for the fishing fleet, in Portland, Maine, in 1875; and these may be regarded as the parents of the cans of ‘baked beans’.
The first canned fish were sardines, which were commercially canned at Nantes as early as the 1820s. Sardines spoil quickly and, unless they are to be eaten on the spot, always need preserving in some way. Traditionally they had been salted and sometimes smoked. Canning in oil gave a product more like the fresh fish, and which was esteemed as a delicacy.
Another familiar canned product is condensed milk. Appert himself had bottled condensed milk for the French government trials, and others continued to make it thereafter, sometimes sweetening it. The object was not only to preserve milk (‘fresh’ milk sold in towns in the early 19th century was often sour and contaminated) but also to reduce its inconvenient bulk. The breakthrough that made condensed milk popular was achieved by Gail Borden of Brooklyn, New York, who in 1856 patented a vacuum evaporation process which worked at temperatures below boiling point and resulted in a less obviously ‘cooked’ taste. Borden’s condensed milk was sweetened, but unsweetened evaporated milk followed. (The sugar has a preservative function, and unsweetened milk has to be treated at a higher temperature.)
By the 1880s canned foods had an important place in popular diet. Cans looked much like those of the 20th century, and the metal was thin enough to permit opening with a can opener. Sealing, however, was still done by a cumbersome soldering process.
Modern methods require, for most foods, an initial blanching at a temperature slightly below boiling point. This destroys enzymes that might discolour the food or give it an off flavour, and also removes air, which helps when filling the can.
Filling is done on a continuous production line. The can is packed with food and topped up with brine, sauce, or syrup as appropriate, leaving a head space of 6 mm (0.25 ″) to allow for expansion. Then the lid is clamped on by a machine which produces a double seam. It is important that the contents are hot when this is done, so that when the can is heated later it will not burst. If necessary the can may be warmed with hot water or steam.
The can is then heated in an autoclave, which allows the contents to be heated well above boiling point. The high pressure outside the can also keeps it from bursting. The cooking temperature varies with the acidity of the food. The bacteria which cause BOTULISM cannot grow in acid conditions, so acid foods such as canned fruit and tomatoes need be heated only just enough to bring the centre of the can to boiling point. Other foods have to be heated to 121 °C (250 °F) or more for at least three minutes to destroy the spores of this dangerous organism—which is why canned vegetables often seem ‘overcooked’.
Ralph Hancock
(or cannoli, the plural form more familiar in N. America) a Sicilian sweetmeat made from flour, mixed with Marsala, cinnamon, cocoa, egg, and a mixture of water and vinegar (which is said to keep it crisp). The thinly rolled dough, cut in circles, is wrapped around metal tubes and deep fried. When cool, the cannolo is filled with sweetened RICOTTA, chocolate chips, and candied orange peel, or liqueur-flavoured ricotta in which case the ends are dipped in chopped nuts. These cakes are made for carnival, in February.
see RAPE.
is a French, semi-hard, cow’s milk cheese from Auvergne in the Massif Central. Its history is ancient; indeed, Pliny seems to have mentioned a cheese very similar to Cantal, although the Salers cattle now used to make the cheese were probably not in existence then.
The cheese is characterized by its tall drumlike shape, and can weigh up to 45 kg (99 lb). The flavour, which should be nutty in a mature cheese, is often compared to that of CHEDDAR. Rance (1989) points out that Cantal, coming from a region of volcanic rock, tends to have a metallic flavour, whereas Cheddar, coming from limestone, does not. The rind of Cantal changes colour as it matures, from yellowish up to three months (Cantal jeune) to russet and then to grey streaked with gold after six months (Cantal vieux). The inside is smooth, ivory coloured, and firm.
READING:
Aythya valisineria, a wild duck of N. America, known especially from the saltwater marshes and bays of the eastern seaboard, but also present on the Pacific coast, is the largest of what Americans refer to as ‘bay ducks’. De Voe (1866) observes that up to the early part of the 19th century there was little or no distinction made in the markets between this duck and relations such as red-heads and broad-bills; but that from the 1820s onwards the superiority of this species (if taken from suitable feeding grounds) was widely recognized. In the two paragraphs quoted below de Voe explains how the canvasback received its common name and dilates upon its merits.
Canvas-back duck received its name from the fact that a portion of the back of the drake resembles a piece of canvas. The bill of this duck is black, and higher at the base than the red-heads, and nearly in a straight line with the head, about 3″ long.
This, no doubt, is the finest and choicest wild-duck known for the table, when in season, which generally appears to be in the latter part of November and through December; and then, provided they have been killed in the Susquehanna, Chesapeake, Potomac, and Delaware Rivers, feeding on what is commonly called wild celery, they are very fat, fine, tender, and with that delicious flavours much admired. If taken at any other season and place they are but little better than some of the common sea-ducks.
Physalis peruviana, is thought to be a native of Peru and Chile, but the cape in its name is the Cape of Good Hope; the fruit enjoyed an early vogue in S. Africa, whither it was taken before 1807 and whence it travelled on to Australia and New Zealand. It thrives particularly in New South Wales and New Zealand.
It has been introduced to many other countries, including India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. It is now widely known by the Hawaiian name poha, since it is cultivated and consumed with especial enthusiasm by the Hawaiians. It is also among the fruits which are sometimes called GROUND CHERRY.
The plants bear throughout the year in Hawaii. They are annuals in temperate regions, but perennial in the tropics.
The Cape gooseberry has not become popular in N. America, despite ‘its having been reported on with enthusiasm by the late Dr David Fairchild in his well-loved book, The World was My Garden (1938). He there tells of its fruiting “enormously” in the garden of his home in Maryland, and of the cook’s putting up over a hundred jars of what he called “Inca Conserve” which “met with universal favor”. It is also remarkable that it is so little known in the Caribbean islands’ (Morton, 1987).
The fruit, as usual with PHYSALIS FRUITS, is enclosed in a papery thin calyx or husk, which is cream in colour. It is this feature which accounts for the attractive Chilean name amor en bolsa. The fruit itself is about the size of a cherry, yellow-green or orange, with a thin, waxy skin; and the juicy pulp within contains many small seeds. The flavour is distinctive and pleasant, and the fruits may be eaten raw, alone or in composite desserts. They make a good jam, but their relatively low pectin content makes them unsuitable for jelly.
the pickled olive green flower bud of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub. This is cultivated for the buds in France, where Roquevaire in Provence is the ‘caper capital’, and also in Spain and Italy. The plant, which is sprawling and has tenacious spines (hence one Turkish vernacular name meaning ‘cat’s claw’), bears small fruits which may also be pickled.
Fresh capers are not used. The characteristic and slightly bitter flavour which is the virtue of capers, and which is mainly due to the formation of capric acid, is only developed by pickling.
The buds are picked before they start to open, and pickled in vinegar. The most prized ones are called non pareilles in France, followed in increasing order of size and diminishing value by surfines, capucines, fines, and capotes. Because the buds develop fast, plants have to be picked over more or less daily, a procedure which affects their cost.
Pickled caper fruits are popular in Spain. They are somewhat larger than a grape—in fact, they somewhat resemble a coarse green grape with faint white stripes, or perhaps a lilliputian watermelon—and they have a seedy, slightly starchy texture like okra, but the flavour is that of the caper bud, though less intense. They are eaten like olives.
Capers are used in a number of sauces, for example TARTARE, RÉMOULADE, and RAVIGOTE. They are suited to sea-food. In the Mediterranean region they are particularly used with salt cod, and go well with mutton. Capers are also used to flavour the Austrian cheese LIPTAUER, and in various Provençal dishes, including tapenado; and, sparingly, to decorate or flavour salad dishes.
C. decidua, which yields pink fruits and flower buds, usually pickled or used as a pot-herb, is the caper of N. India.
(sometimes given as capercailzie) Tetrao urogallus, a bird which belongs to the same family (Tetraonidae) as the GROUSE; and has been described as ‘a very large grouse’. The average total length of an adult male is 85 cm (34″). As a result of forest clearance and other unfavourable factors, this magnificent game bird became extinct in Britain around the end of the 18th century, but successful introductions have since then taken place in parts of Scotland.
Various subspecies are recognized, but there is also another species, T. parvirostris, the Siberian capercaillie.
The reputation of the capercaillie as a table bird is less high than its splendid appearance and size might suggest. This is largely because the male birds in particular are likely to eat fir cones which give them a flavour of turpentine.
(also capirottata and other variant spellings), a Spanish term whose ancestry and original meaning are not entirely clear (see Barbara Santich, 1982, and Perry, 1983a), but which generally indicated a thick sauce served with meat or the whole dish of meat plus sauce, or sometimes a ‘medley’.
In recent times something of the same name has appeared in New Mexico as a pudding. Davidson (1984) described some he ate as ‘a bread pudding, flavoured with cinnamon, dotted with raisins, laced with rum, and topped (like so many New Mexican dishes) with melted cheese, forming an orange “skin” with raisins peeking through it. Indeed there was a thin layer of melted cheese over every layer of bread.’
Villa and Barrios (1978) give a recipe for Capirotada, which they describe as a Mexican bread pudding, ‘one of Mexico’s most popular Lenten dishes and one of the most exciting and tempting desserts of the world’. Bread is the most important ingredient but nuts and cheese also loom large. These authors, like Davidson, point to the puzzling gap between the Spanish savoury sauce or dish and the New World pudding. The question poses itself: by what process of evolution (or misunderstanding?) did the one turn into or give rise to the other? The answer may lie in the use of bread. The earliest appearance in print of a recipe using the name capirotada is in the Spanish version of the book published earlier by Ruperto de Nola in Catalan in 1520 (see CATALAN COOKERY), and this recipe, which is a meat (partridge) plus sauce recipe entitled Almodrote que es capirotada, calls for slices of bread (such as were called ‘sops’ in medieval England). This basic ingredient could have provided the bridge to the later pudding version.
Farga (1963), in his pleasantly discursive survey on food and gastronomy in Mexico (which includes a valuable short section on previous books and periodicals on the subject, comprehensive lists of game and fish, and other such items), gives capirotada in his glossary, describing it as being in Mexico ‘a dessert made of white bread fried in lard, with sugar, cheese, cinnamon, raisins and pine nuts’. This is in line with other information, but Farga adds the following, potentially useful for further research:
Elsewhere in the hemisphere, it is a Creole dish made of meat, toasted corn, cheese, lard and spices. This name is also given to a combination of fragrant herbs, eggs, garlic and other products used as a batter for other dishes, or as a sauce.
a castrated young domestic COCK, castrated in order to become fatter and tastier for table use. It is no longer legal to produce capons in Britain, where they had sometimes been used as a Christmas bird instead of turkey; but the practice no doubt continues in some parts of the world.
the botanical and also to some extent the common name for a genus of plants which includes a wide range of species: those referred to as peppers, sweet (or bell, or green) peppers, pimento, pimiento, chilli (and in other spellings).
Some of these common names, notably PEPPER and pimento (see ALLSPICE), are also used for fruits of other genera. Hence the need to use the name capsicum here for the Capsicum genus as a whole.
The CHILLI peppers, the hot ones, are described under their own heading.
The capsicums are a genus of the family Solanaceae, and are therefore related to the New World tomato and potato, and, in the Old World, to the aubergine and deadly nightshade. All capsicums are native to the Americas. The first two of the three species listed below are the most important.
Besides this closely related group annuum/frutescens/chinense, there are two other S. American cultivated species of peppers. C. baccatum is native to the west coast of S. America, and C. pubescens to the Andes. C. baccatum varieties are usually called aji and C. pubescens is known as rocoto (or locoto) from the name of the pepper in the Quechua language of the Inca.
One of Columbus’ reasons for trying to take a short cut to the E. Indies, which resulted in his accidentally ‘discovering’ America, was to obtain spices, which were in great demand and very expensive. So, when he found the Caribbean islanders using hot capsicums in their food, he was gratified and brought quantities back from, probably, his very first voyage.
Hopefully likening them to black pepper (pimienta), he called the capsicums ‘pimiento’. He also recorded that they were called axi by the Taino people of Santo Domingo. The word was pronounced ‘ashi’ by the Taino and by Columbus, but the sound changes of 16th-century Spanish led to the modern spelling and pronunciation, aji. Europeans learned the word chilli after the conquest of Mexico, but aji had become the standard word in colonial Spanish; hence its continuing use in Spanish America outside Mexico and C. America (where ‘chilli’ is the name for all capsicums). In Brazil, the word pimenta has remained the name for capsicums in general.
The naming of new foods often involves conflicts of interests among market-makers. The Spanish wanted hot capsicums to be classified as peppers, and most European consumers were happy to fall in line. Within a year of Columbus’ return, Peter Martyr described them as ‘pepper more pungent than that from the Caucasus’. Dutch traders, however, who were importing ‘ordinary’ (Piper spp) PEPPER from the E. Indies feared that this cheap new spice would outsell their expensive one. They therefore tried to enforce the use of the Nahuatl (Mexican) Indian name chilli, and were partially successful.
The sweet peppers became popular in most countries only at the beginning of the 20th century, as demand grew for a greater variety of vegetables. But spices were what the market had wanted, and the hot peppers had been a success in that role from the start, spreading eastward with extraordinary speed (see CHILLI), in striking contrast to the slow and hesitant manner in which the potato and tomato were accepted in Europe and Asia.
In English-speaking countries, pimiento (adopted into English from Spanish in the 19th century) usually refers to sweet (bell) peppers, the large red or green fruits which can be eaten raw in salads, cut into slivers for stuffing olives, or cooked as a vegetable; they are conveniently designed for stuffing. Piedmont is famous for the exceptionally large and handsome specimens grown there. Ivory or yellow varieties are known as wax peppers. There are also small, mild red cherry peppers.
Intermediate between sweet and hot types, but often mild enough to use whole in cooking, are the Ancho peppers of Mexican cuisine. Slightly hot peppers such as these often have a flavour of superior richness and interest. Another group in this category, classed by growers as Anaheim peppers, provide the Hungarian PAPRIKA.
Capsicums are rich in vitamins A and C and in carotenoids, which provide flavour and in some cases colour, the most important red colouring agent being capsanthin. (There are green varieties which lack capsanthin, though they may develop orange patches when ripe; other ‘green’ capsicums are simply unripe.)
Roger Owen
Prunus salicifolia, a true cherry (so called also by names such as cereza or cerezo, meaning cherry), has been cultivated since early times in the cooler mountainous regions of C. and northern S. America, where it grows abundantly.
The dark red fruits contain a pale green, sweet, and juicy pulp. They can be eaten either raw or stewed, and made into jam. They have been and remain an important food in the region.
The unrelated ‘Jamaican cherry’, Muntingia calabura, in the family Elaeocarpaceae, is also often known as capulin or capuli in Latin America. It is indigenous to C. and tropical S. America, but is now widely grown elsewhere, e.g. India, Malaysia (where it is known as ‘Japanese’ or ‘Chinese cherry’), and the Philippines. Its small red or yellow fruits have a light brown, soft, juicy pulp, filled with minute yellowish seeds, too small to notice when eating. It has a sweet, figlike flavour.
Hydrochoerus hydrochoeris, also known as water pig/hog or water cavy, belongs with the GUINEA PIG to the family Caviidae. This is the largest living rodent, indeed the size of a pig, 120 cm (48″) long (not counting the tail which is either missing or of negligible size). The range of the capybara is from Panama to Paraguay; it is usually found living in troops or family groups, in the vicinity of rivers, lakes, or marshes. It can swim considerable distances under water. It is hunted both on land and water, and can be tamed, but has not yet been domesticated except on an experimental basis.
The capybara lives on vegetable matter, and the flesh is ‘remarkably good eating’ (Simmonds, 1859). Others have noted a resemblance to pork, but have commented that careful preparation is needed, especially trimming off the fat, to avoid a fishy taste. Dried and salted meat, which is commonly available, is free of this problem.
The US National Research Council (1991) draws attention to one special feature about the capybara as food.
Centuries ago, Venezuelans and Colombians petitioned the Pope for special dispensation to eat this semiaquatic animal on traditional ‘meatless’ days; approval was granted, and since that time the capybara has been an important food during Holy Week.
Averrhoa carambola, a small tree or shrub thought to be native to Java or other parts of Indonesia, and perhaps also Sri Lanka. It is cultivated in SE Asia, India, and Sri Lanka; and to a lesser extent in other tropical countries. It bears an elongated yellow-green fruit up to 13 cm (5″) long which has five prominent ridges running down it so that a cross-section is star shaped. Hence the alternative name starfruit.
The fruit has a waxy, orange-yellow skin, with a crisp, yellow, juicy flesh when ripe. There are two distinct sorts of carambola, one small and very sour, the other larger, with a bland but sweeter flavour.
The Javanese propagate the trees vegetatively by ‘air layering’, a technique which involves making a parcel of soil around a branch so that it strikes root and can be cut off and planted. Growing fruit from seed may produce a sour-fruited tree, which would not suit the Javanese, who eat the fruit as dessert and like it to be as sweet as possible.
The ridges are removed before the fruit is eaten fresh. The carambola is also cooked. The Chinese and Indians both use the unripe fruit as a vegetable as well as the ripe fruit for dessert.
a food product used both as a brown colouring and for its bitter-sweet flavour, is produced in the final stage of sugar boiling when sugar is heated above 170 °C (340 °F). The exact temperature at which caramel begins to form depends on the composition of the sugar; the figure given applies to sucrose, common white sugar. The fructose present in honey caramelizes more quickly; but the dextrose (glucose) which is also present in honey is slower. The pentose sugars found in small amounts in various vegetables caramelize particularly well, and toast made from wholemeal bread owes its dark colour to the caramelization of pentoses in the wheat bran.
The formation of caramel is, as a matter of chemistry, very complex. Some of the reactions take in oxygen, but others release it; so the process can go on in a closed container, which ordinary burning cannot. As the sugars are degraded they are changed into over a hundred different compounds, some of which are brown and bitter. If the temperature rises much above caramelization point, or is maintained at it for too long, the taste becomes too bitter and the colour very dark. At a very high temperature the sugar burns to black carbon.
The caramel topping in desserts such as CRÈME BRÛLÉE is made by exposing a layer of sugar on the surface to direct heat, e.g. under a grill.
Caramel colouring has several uses. An old-fashioned product still sometimes met is gravy browning, a concentrated caramel syrup which can be made at home from sugar and water. (It serves only to add colour, whereas stock cubes or ‘gravy mixes’, which also often contain caramel, provide both colour and flavour.) Caramel colouring made from corn syrup is used to tint many brown foods, including bottled brown sauces and some drinks.
Caramel is used extensively in confectionery. BARLEY SUGAR (which formerly contained barley, but now does not) is simply sugar which has been slightly caramelized and then abruptly cooled to solidify it to a glassy state. See also PRALINE, SPUN SUGAR, and TOFFEE APPLE.
However, the word is more familiar in a confectionery context as meaning a kind of TOFFEE. Caramels and toffee are based on similar recipes, using sugar syrup enriched with milk, butter, or cream, and the choice of name for a particular confection in this category may appear arbitrary. This is recognized by confectioners, and stated in Skuse’s Complete Confectioner (13th edn, 1957):
The difference between toffee and caramel is essentially one of texture and the two types of confection merge into one another without any clear dividing line. Toffee should be hard, ‘chewy’, unlike butterscotch which is hard and brittle; caramel is soft-eating with a clean fracture.
‘Caramel’ sweets made with milk owe their flavour and colour to a different effect which has been named ‘Strecker degradation’. This occurs in heated milk when the sugar and protein in it react together. The effect is also noticeable in condensed and evaporated milk, and in the aroma of various roasted products including cocoa.
Carum carvi, a plant cultivated for its ‘seeds’ (the split halves of the dried fruits), which are an important spice, used mainly to flavour breads, especially rye bread, and other bakery goods (see COMFITS; CAKE; BISCUIT; WIGS; MERINGUE) but also cheeses (see LIPTAUER; TILSITER; LEIDEN) and PICKLES. It is an ingredient in the Arabic spice mixture TABIL and the N. African paste HARISSA. The seeds have a warm, sweet, biting taste.
The plant, which is indigenous to W. Asia and the Mediterranean region, may be the oldest cultivated spice plant of Europe. It is now mainly grown in E. and SE Europe, Germany, the Netherlands, N. Africa, and the USA. It is Germans who use it most freely, not only in cakes and breads but also in certain cheeses and pickles and in some meat dishes.
The main constituent of its essential oil is carvone, which can now be produced synthetically.
Redgrove (1933) comments: ‘Mixed with a trace of sugar, and lightly sprinkled on bread and butter, powdered caraway seed forms an admirable accompaniment to gorgonzola cheese, a combination which has only once to be tasted to be highly appreciated.’ Munster cheese is traditionally served with caraway seeds.
In Norway, the green herb karvekal is used for soup.
an important category of substances in food, include all SUGARS, STARCH, CELLULOSE, HEMICELLULOSES, PECTIN, and the various sorts of GUM. They make up most of the solid matter in plants. Animals, however, whose solid matter consists mostly of proteins, contain only a little carbohydrate (apart from any undigested food they may have on board).
Plants store energy in the form of carbohydrates. When people and animals eat the plants they release this energy and can use it for their own purposes. Carbohydrates are the main source of energy for most peoples of the world. In an average western diet, for example, 55 to 65% of the energy comes from carbohydrates, the rest from fats and proteins. In a typical Japanese diet the figure for carbohydrates is about 80%.
Carbohydrates are not a requirement for survival as are proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins, or minerals. The Inuit (better known as Eskimos) live largely on meat and fish and get their food energy from protein and fats. However, in most parts of the world this would be a wasteful way to live, since foods rich in protein and fat are relatively expensive, and their vital nutrients are lost if they are simply ‘burnt as fuel’. A diet with plenty of carbohydrates and a smaller, but sufficient, quantity of protein and fat allows the body to ‘burn’ the carbohydrates and exploit the vital nutrients in the other substances to its best advantage. Moreover, a diet with virtually no carbohydrates throws the body into an abnormal metabolic condition known as ketosis, characterized by foul-smelling breath. The popular Atkins slimming diet, which virtually excludes carbohydrates, has this effect (see DIET).
In chemical terms, carbohydrates consist of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Most of them have the general formula C6H10O5. (The term carbohydrate means ‘carbon with water’ and water consists of hydrogen and oxygen.) Plants make them by taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water from the soil; energy from sunlight falling on the leaves powers a series of chemical reactions which convert these substances to carbohydrates, which the plants retain and use, and to oxygen. This process is known as photosynthesis. The oxygen replenishes the supply in the atmosphere which is steadily used up by animals breathing and by the burning of fuels.
The molecules of carbohydrates may be relatively simple, or may consist of thousands of atoms. But they are all based on molecules of simple or ‘single’ sugars, which can be joined together in long, often branched, chains to make the more complex carbohydrates. These simple or ‘single’ sugars, called monosaccharides, are described in the entry for SUGAR, where it is also explained that all digestion of carbohydrates is a process of breaking down large molecules to monosaccharides and changing them to dextrose. Slightly more complex carbohydrates are the disaccharides or ‘double’ sugars which include sucrose (ordinary white sugar), maltose (malt sugar), and lactose (milk sugar). Oligosaccharides (‘few’ sugars) include raffinose (three units) and stachyose (five units), both found in legumes.
Carbohydrates with a large number of sugar units are called polysaccharides (‘many’ sugars). They include starch, cellulose, hermicelluloses, pectin, and gums, all of which occur naturally in plants. In starch all the units are of the sugar dextrose, but this is not true of all carbohydrates. Inulin, a substance found in Jerusalem artichokes and asparagus, is made of fructose units.
The links between the units in these substances cannot all be undone by the human digestive system, so undigested portions of molecules pass through the gut. Here there are BACTERIA which can break the links. The chemical reactions by which they do this evolve gas, which is why peas and beans cause wind.
Carbohydrates present in animals include some dextrose (glucose) in the blood. The amount is small, only about 5 g (0.2 oz) in an adult man, but it is important because of its role as a reserve of short-term energy. When the level falls low it is topped up from a 250 g (11 oz) store of glycogen, another carbohydrate, in the liver, the conversion being regulated by a hormone, insulin. Faulty control results in the disease diabetes.
There are a few other animal carbohydrates, notably chitin, the substance which constitutes the hard outer casing of insects and crustaceans.
The main mechanism by which carbohydrates are broken into their constituent sugars is HYDROLYSIS, in which the links between the monosaccharide molecules are undone by the insertion of a molecule of water. This is assisted by heat; by acid conditions, as in the stomachs of most animals; and by digestive enzymes.
The exact way in which carbohydrate bonds are made differs from substance to substance. Particular enzymes undo particular types of bond. The human digestive system has enzymes which can hydrolyse starch, but only to a certain degree. One type of starch molecule has a branched, treelike structure. An enzyme begins at the tip of a branch and dismantles the bonds all down it until it reaches a fork, where there is a differently shaped bond which it cannot break. The result is that the branched molecule is reduced to a form like a lopped tree. The indigestible remainder is called a limit dextrin.
There are other kinds of dextrin. Starch hydrolysed by heating it in acid breaks more indiscriminately to form a type of dextrin found, for example, in corn syrup. It is slightly sweet, and sticky enough to be used as a gum (‘British gum’). Starch heated dry forms pyrodextrins, some of which are compounds with a brown colour and a distinctive flavour (see BROWNING).
The human digestive system has no enzyme which can break down cellulose. But cows and other herbivorous animals have bacteria in special auxiliary stomachs ‘upstream’ of their true stomach which can and do break the bonds. Thus cows can gain nourishment from grass, which is practically non-nutritious to humans. However, indigestible carbohydrates do play a role in the diet. Dieticians refer to them as ‘crude fibre’ or ‘roughage’. They act as a bulky medium to help food travel through the intestines (see CELLULOSE).
Digestion of carbohydrates is given a head start by cooking food, which, since the process involves heat and water, performs some preliminary hydrolysis. This, and the swelling and disruption of the cellulose and hemicelluloses and dispersion of the pectin which together form the cell walls of plants, cause vegetables and fruits to soften when cooked. The cellulose is not actually dissolved or much dispersed in normal cooking conditions, though hemicelluloses are dispersed to some extent even by the fairly weak acids and very weak alkalis used in cooking.
One further class of carbohydrates occasionally encountered is the dextrans: slimy, gummy, or rubbery substances, complex in composition. These are formed by bacteria, including those active in pickles. Usually they are no more than a nuisance, something to be skimmed off; but some are now grown deliberately and used as gums by the food industry (see also NATA).
Ralph Hancock
two terms which are easily confused and which may indeed have been interchangeable, in the English language, for part of the 17th century. Both are derived from the Latin carbo, meaning charcoal (as is the Italian carbonara, which occurs in the phrase alla carbonara, meaning ‘in the style of charcoal-burners’).
Carbonade, also spelled carbonnade, now means, for English-speaking readers, a beef dish made with onions and braised in beer. This corresponds to Carbonnade à la flamande, not simply a Flemish speciality but also one of the national dishes in BELGIUM and well known in the NE corner of France.
Historically, carbon(n)ade has another meaning in French: a piece of meat fiercely grilled (broiled) on the outside but with the inside still rare. The appearance of the word in the French language goes back to the 16th century (even earlier in the form charbonnade), but it has been replaced in recent times by the English word ‘steak’ (in various spellings, as in bifteck (beefsteak) or steak frites (steak with French fries).
Carbonado, on the other hand, is a purely English term, and obsolete (at least in England); it was formerly used to mean a piece of meat or fish which had been scored and then grilled (broiled).
Dallas (1877) in Kettner’s Book of the Table commences his entry on carbonade by saying: ‘If cookery is ever to be a science it must be exact in its nomenclature, and cooks must not be allowed to confuse common-sense with their ignorant use of terms.’ Unfortunately, he seems himself to have made this confusion, believing that the appearance of the French word ‘carbonade’ in England, with the meaning of a stew, represented a corruption of the word ‘carbonado’, which had been used by no less an authority than Shakespeare in the sense indicated above (‘He scotcht him and notcht him like a carbonado’). Although Dallas’s indignation was apparently misdirected, it did have the advantage that it prompted him to some fine polemical writing (in which, for carbonade understand carbonado):
The shoulder of mutton is usually roasted, but being flat and comparatively thin, is easily grilled; and a carbonade of it, or to speak more strictly, of its blade, has for centuries been a celebrated dish. But let no one be deceived by French receipts. Let the reader go back to the word carbonade, and understand what it really means. It is a broil which has been first slashed and scored, as in devilled meats, in order to be penetrated by pepper, salt, and other condiments—but above all by the taste of fire. This we can understand. In this sense the bladebone of mutton makes an admirable carbonade. But the French cooks have determined, for the glory of the Prince of Soubise, that in their sense a carbonade of mutton shall mean a bladebone planted or larded all over with fat bacon and then stewed or brazed with a goodly faggot of vegetables. Let Mossoo have this if he likes; but John Bull, having easy access to the Southdowns, where the wethers grow fragrant on banks of thyme and trefoil, is apt to turn almost an Israelite when he hears of a proposal to dibble his shoulders of mutton with splinters of bacon.
In conclusion, and in an attempt to prove everyone right, it is to be remarked that, since the charcoal of classical Rome is accepted as the point of origin for both carbonade and carbonado, a reconciliation of contending points of view can be achieved by supposing that in one region one of the resulting medieval and post-medieval terms first meant charcoal grilled; then charcoal grilled and subsequently braised; and, finally, browned in the pan and then braised. This sequence may not yet have been fully established, but it is plausible and could have coexisted with the continuation of other and more conservative meanings of the terms in other places or subcultures.
the dried fruit of a perennial herb, Elettaria cardamomum, is the third most expensive spice, after saffron and vanilla. The plant, indigenous to S. India and Sri Lanka, belongs to the GINGER family.
As far back as the 4th century BC the Greeks were buying spices called amomon and kardamomon, and later Greek and Roman writers distinguish varieties of both; but from the descriptions by Dioscorides and Pliny it is not clear which of them, if any, was what we would now call true cardamom.
It is certain, however, that cardamoms of the true kind have been an article of trade with India and Sri Lanka for about a thousand years. India is at present the largest producer; Guatemala comes second, Sri Lanka and Tanzania rank third, while other countries, including Papua New Guinea, produce on a smaller scale.
The fruits, which are three angled and ovoid or oblong, are picked before they are fully ripe (when they would be apt to split) and cured by drying, after which they should be hard and of a good green colour. Some are bleached before sale, a practice which perhaps began as a means of disguising poor coloration but which now seems to be responsive to the demand of certain markets. Each fruit contains three cells in which there are numerous small seeds. These seeds, which turn from white to brown to black as the fruit ripens, provide the pleasing aroma of cardamom, and its warm, slightly pungent flavour. The essential oil which can be distilled from them contains cineole, which is responsible for a eucalyptus-like note in the flavour.
The emphasis placed above on ‘true’ cardamom suggests that there are other kinds, i.e. ‘false’ cardamoms. As explained below, there are lots of these. However, from the point of view of the cook, the important distinction is between the green (or white, if they have been bleached) cardamom fruits (the true ones) and the larger brown or black fruits which come from some of the other species.
Green cardamoms are normally used for flavouring sweetmeats, desserts, and tea, notably in India and W. Asia, or in certain delicate savoury dishes. In addition, a popular and traditional use is to chew them as a breath-cleanser; and they are also regarded as a good digestive (when taken, for example, in sweet green tea after a meal). The brown or black cardamoms, which are coarser in taste and aroma and tend to smell of camphor, are used more in meat and vegetable dishes, pickles, and as a flavouring for a PILAF (e.g. in Afghanistan).
Both black and green cardamoms are among the spices used in Asian spice mixtures such as garam masala.
In Arab countries cardamom is mainly employed as a flavouring for coffee. Its use in Europe has been most noticeable in Scandinavia and Germany, where it is added as a flavouring to various baked goods, and also to some pickles.
When whole cardamoms are used to flavour dishes, they are not meant to be eaten; but when the seeds, or ground seeds, are used, they are of course consumed.
What are sold as cardamoms in western countries are normally true cardamoms, but distinguishing between the commercial categories of these, and the various ‘cardamoms’ of commerce in other parts of the world, is complicated by three factors.
First, the species which provides the true cardamom, E. cardamomum, comprises two botanically recognized varieties, E. cardamomum var cardamomum and E. cardamomum var major. The former is, strictly speaking, the only true one. The latter is the wild cardamom of Sri Lanka, has larger fruits, and is less highly esteemed.
Secondly, distinctions are made by region of origin. The Malabar and Mysore types of true cardamom differ in the composition of their volatile oils and therefore in their organoleptic qualities, which are also affected by the presence of sugar in the mucilage surrounding the seeds of Mysore cardamoms and its absence in those from Malabar.
Thirdly, there are the ‘false cardamoms’, some closely related to the true cardamom and sharing to some extent its desirable characteristics, others further removed and less satisfactory as substitutes. Burkill (1965–6) commented that if the word ‘cardamom’ is used in its widest sense it refers to various species of no fewer than six genera of plants. It is in this large category that the big brown cardamom fruits, referred to above, are found. Among those listed by Purseglove et al. (1981) are:
The confusion sometimes extends to MELEGUETA PEPPER, a quite different spice.
at one time the name for a drink based on rum, has become a French culinary term indicating the colour scarlet, the colour of a cardinal’s headgear. It may turn up in connection with a SAUCE, a garnish, or a CONSOMMÉ. It is usually obtained from the coral of a LOBSTER.
Cynara cardunculus, a member of the THISTLE family, a native of the Mediterranean region with a flower head intermediate in size and appearance between ARTICHOKE and common thistle.
Long before the artichoke was developed, the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded the cardoon as a great delicacy. It was first described in the 4th century BC by the Greek writer Theophrastus, who stated that it was a native of Sicily. (Probably it was originally introduced from N. Africa.) Not only the flowering heads but also the stems and the midribs of the main leaves were eaten. Young buds were pickled in vinegar or brine with SILPHIUM and CUMIN.
The cardoon remained popular through the Middle Ages and continued to appear in English cookery books through the 18th and into the 19th century, but in recent times cultivation and consumption have been greater in N. Africa and S. Europe than in W. Europe. The blanched stalks or ribs of the inner leaves are favoured in Spain for the Madrid version of the nationally renowned COCIDO and in other dishes too.
In addition, wild cardoon heads are gathered in Italy and Spain and used as a vegetable RENNET for making certain kinds of cheese. As a wild plant, the cardoon is notably persistent and fast-spreading. Accidentally introduced to S. America, California, and Australia, it has now become a troublesome weed.
Schneider (1986), as so often, has an evocative and precise description of:
the fleshy, silver-gray stalks. They grow in bunches, like celery, but are flattened, longer, and wider, with slightly notched sides and a brushed-suède finish. Cooked, the cardoon is soft and meaty. The flavor is complex, bitter and sweet, with hints of artichoke heart, celery, and oyster plant.
Antonin (1783–1833) Here is the man who became and remains the most famous of 19th-century French chefs. His students and their successors studied his books, or at least paid lip-service to him, well into the 20th century. Gastronomes and food writers have praised him as a great genius of haute cuisine, and have held him up as an outstanding example of how a lowly apprentice, of a humble background, could rise to the topmost pinnacle of his profession. His grandiloquent claim that there are five branches of the fine arts, and that the greatest of these is confectionery, is famous.
That is one way of looking at him, and it corresponds to the image which he sought to create in his writings. Like Soyer in England, he was a great self-promoter. Yet to study his books and work with his recipes produces a different impression: of a man who was conceited, whose recipes were written in a tangled prose, whose menus were pretentious and heavy, and whose pièces montées are to modern eyes an extravagant waste of ingredients.
The truth lies somewhere in between. It is certainly true that he rose from the bottom to the top. Born into a poor family as one of either 15 or 25 children (depending on which account is accepted), he was apparently told at the age of 10 by his father to go forth and support himself, whereupon he was taken in by the proprietor of a cheap tavern, where he learned the first elements of his métier. Eight years later—having presumably learned to read and write by now—he began to work for Bailly, one of the best pastry-cooks in Paris, who had the statesman Talleyrand among his distinguished clients. There Carême rose to a position of responsibility. Bailly allowed him to take two afternoons each week to visit the nearby old royal library (which was later to become the Bibliothèque Nationale), where he studied architectural prints in the Cabinet des Estampes and read cookbooks from other countries and from past times.
At the end of three years he was ready to move on, first to another pastry-cook, whom he describes only as the successor to M. Gendron, and then opening his own shop on the rue de la Paix in 1803, which continued to operate for a decade. All through the 19th century one can see the luxury trades in France being democratized. Luxury goods and activities which had been almost exclusively the prerogatives of the court and the very rich became available to anyone who could pay for them. Excellent ingredients could be bought in the markets and shops; beautifully prepared food could be bought in restaurants. As the century went on the same thing happened with travel, clothing, and reading matter. But with the single exception of this shop, about which he has little to say, Carême held aloof from this more commercial sphere, restricting his services to the more exclusive world of power and great wealth. After his youthful work in the tavern, he never cooked in a restaurant: and in this respect his great students, Jules GOUFFÉ and Félix Urbain Dubois, resembled him.
It is not surprising, then, that at the same time as he opened his shop he set out on what was to become an intermittent but spectacular career as a specialist pastry-cook at the great imperial, social, and governmental banquets.
For the rest of his life his activities cycled between working on these events, writing and working for longer periods of time with a single employer, and trips abroad to serve monarchs and diplomats.
From 1804 to 1814 he was directing the kitchens of Talleyrand. During the same period he organized special events such as the festivities for the marriage of Napoleon to Marie-Louise of Austria (1810).
Carême never let patriotism interfere with his own career interests. For example, after the defeat of Napoleon, the English and Russians occupied Paris. Alexander I, the Tsar of Russia, accompanying his army, engaged Carême’s services during his stay at the Élysée-Napoleon palace (1814), and again for several weeks the following year. The great public eating event of 1815 was the banquet Carême organized for the Allies near Châlons in Champagne. It presented immense logistical problems, most of which were overcome.
In the same year he published his first two books: Le Pâtissier royal parisien, an illustrated two-volume compendium of recipes for all the preparations that an accomplished pastry-cook would need to know, with extensive general observations about the composition and execution of the most elaborate menus, and Le Pâtissier pittoresque, which contains more than a hundred engravings of designs for pièces montées, with more or less sketchy instructions for executing them.
There followed a period of brief, high-profile engagements and frenetic travel. July of 1816 saw him in England, directing the kitchens of the Prince Regent, first at Carlton House in London, and subsequently at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. He directed the Tsar’s kitchens at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, and later, after more work in Vienna and London, agreed to go to St Petersburg. To his annoyance, the Tsar was making a 40-day visit to Archangel, and Carême found Russian kitchen politics and cost-controls not to his liking, so he returned to Paris again; but, although the Russian visit was a fiasco, it made a deep impression on him.
While his career continued to develop on these lines, he continued to produce books. In 1821 he produced his Projets d’architecture dédiés à Alexandre 1er and Projets d’architecture pour l’embellisement de Paris, both of which attempted to use the insights gained from making pièces montées to advance the cause of planning the monumental city, based on his studies in the Cabinet des Estampes. This is perhaps the place at which to mention that, although his designs for pièces montées were meticulously drawn, they display disconcerting discrepancies. Elevations do not always match their accompanying floor plans. When one compares the plates in the works on architecture and travel to which he refers with his own designs, one finds that he has played some very strange games indeed with proportion and scale. Typically, he appropriates from monumental structures one or more ornamental features, cramming them together without any intervening plain areas. The designs he produced for the embellishment of St Petersburg reveal a similar lack of proportion, bordering on the grotesque. The eclecticism that was to characterize 19th-century art and architecture was exactly to his taste. It seems not to have mattered to him at all if one used a ‘Turkish cabana’ or a ‘Babylonian ruin’, a ‘Chinese temple’ or an ‘English belvedere’. It must be said, however, that there is a playfulness to them which can be quite charming.
His next publication was the Maître d’hôtel (1822). Later, while working for James de Rothschild, the head of the French branch of the great banking house, he published Le Cuisinier parisien (1828). He had a further and more ambitious plan, which he did not live to execute in its entirety. No doubt he was worn out by a life that began in deprivation and continued with the stress of organizing so many high-visibility meals and with his decades of hard work in carbon-monoxide-laden kitchens; there is a moving passage in his last book in which he displays great sympathy for those working in kitchens, and describes vividly the terrible conditions with which they (and he) had to contend. Anyway, he retired from Baron de Rothschild’s service to work on his last project. Unfortunately he died with only three volumes of this work, the extensively illustrated L’Art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle, completed. His student, Pluméry, added the remaining two volumes which Carême had planned to write.
Carême’s own perception of his place in the history of France and that of cuisine was exaggerated. He was a creature of the troubled times in which he lived. His attitude towards his employers and other gastronomes was one of enthusiastic servility, more deeply tinged with self-interest than he would have acknowledged. He was well repaid. He became a society pet. The Tsar gave him a diamond ring, Metternich a gold snuffbox. It was probably a real advantage to him that he lacked a sense of proportion, because his exaggerated self-importance carried him further than modesty would have done, and because it helped to fuel the ambitions of generations of chefs, in France and abroad.
Barbara Wheaton
Rangifer arcticus, a large member of the DEER family, Cervidae, and a close relation of the REINDEER. The caribou has importance as food for the indigenous inhabitants of Alaska, and other parts of the far north of the American continent, although its meat is thought to be not quite as good as that of the reindeer. However, the difference between the two animals is small and some authorities have been tempted to classify them as a single species.
The name itself is said to be derived from a Micmac Indian name meaning ‘snow-shoveller’.
Gillian Riley (1990), describing the experiences of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who from 1906 onwards spent over two decades living as an Inuit on a diet of nothing but meat and water, quotes this intrepid experimenter at length on how caribou meat was divided between a family and its dogs:
The children get the kidneys and the leg marrows nearest the hoof. All Eskimos known to me think the sweetest meat is nearest the bone; they boil the hams and round shoulder bones and the children pick from these the cooked lean that goes so pleasantly with the uncooked fat of the raw lower marrows. Perhaps the whole family and my visitors will share the boiled caribou head. The Eskimo likes the tongue well enough, and the brains; but what he prefers from the head is the jowl, and after that, the pads of fat behind the eyes. His next preference is brisket, then ribs, then pelvis. From the hams and shoulders he will peel off the outside meat as dog food, but will keep some of the inside meat for his family. The neck of the caribou is considered halfway between human food and dog food. Dog food, especially if the team is big, would consist first of the lungs, but not the windpipe or the bronchial tubes, for the Eskimo likes cartilage. The liver goes to the dogs and everything else from the body cavity except the kidneys. The heart is considered intermediate, not especially bad but not especially good. The dogs get the stomach and the entrails, but not the fat from the entrails. They also get the tenderloin and much of the meat from the backbone; but the Stone Age Eskimo likes to leave some meat on the vertebrae; he enjoys picking them when boiled.
two closely related fruits of which the former is indigenous to S. Africa and the latter to S. Asia. Carissa is a botanical as well as a common name, referring to the genus of thorny, fruiting shrubs to which both fruits belong.
Carissa, the more popular of the two species, Carissa macrocarpa, is also known as Natal plum and amantungula. In its native S. Africa the fruit is gathered from wild trees but also cultivated on a small scale; and it has now been introduced elsewhere, e.g. Florida and Hawaii. Its fruits look like small scarlet plums, with dark red streaks on the skin, and red flesh inside, flecked with white. The whole fruit can be eaten out of hand, without peeling or deseeding. The texture is slightly granular, the flavour mildly sharp. In the semi-ripe stage the fruits are used for making jellies and jams. Ripe fruits are said to make a good filling for pies.
The karanda, C. carandas, is cultivated in India (where it was popular with British residents because it reminded them of the GOOSEBERRY) and some parts of SE Asia and E. Africa. Its fruits resemble the carissa and are used in similar ways, and also for pickling when unripe. The tree grows wild in Malaysia and Indonesia, where its fruits have an additional use in curry dishes.
from Carling/Carlin/Care Sunday, the fifth Sunday of LENT, when it is a tradition in the north of England to serve a dish made of dried grey field peas, known as carlings. Constance Cruickshank (1959), author of an exceptionally charming book on Lenten food, cites a couple of old recipes. In the less common of the two, the carlings were soaked for 24 hours, then tied in a cloth and boiled as a pudding for three hours, after which they were rubbed through a sieve, beaten with salt, butter, and cream—finishing up like PEASE PUDDING but brown instead of green—and served with any kind of meat. The more usual recipe also starts with soaking and boiling, but then requires the carlings to be drained, fried briefly in butter, then: ‘mix with more butter and lots of sugar and add a small glass of rum. Eat while hot.’ It was the latter recipe which prompted someone to say that he didn’t care for the greyish-brown peas but that the gravy was wonderful.
This author’s account of the etymology and history is so good and interesting that it deserved to be quoted at length:
Originally peas and beans were fasting fare, and Brand presumed that their connection with this day goes back to the Roman association of beans with funerals. I quote his deductions though they are open to doubt. ‘In the old Roman Calendar so often cited, I find it observed on this day, that “a dole is made of soft Beans”. I can hardly entertain a doubt but that our custom is derived from hence. It was usual amongst the Romanists to give beans in the doles at funerals: it was also a rite in the funeral ceremonies of heathen Rome. Why we have substituted peas I know not, unless it was because they are a pulse somewhat fitter to be eaten at this season of the year. They are given away in a kind of dole at this day. Our Popish ancestors celebrated (as it were by anticipation) the funeral of Our Lord on this Care Sunday.’
However this may be, by the eighteenth century carlings came to be regarded as matters of jollity. A passage from 1724 says, ‘There lads and lassies will feast … on sybows [onions], and riforts [radishes] and carlings’, a reference which occurs also in an old Scots song. And we cannot imagine that those parties at the inns were occasions of great sobriety. It appears that the carlings which survived were a festive form of the original plain parched peas.
There are a number of theories about the origin of this name, in one or other of its forms. The Yorkshire people who observed their Carlin Sunday on Mothering Sunday, are said to have got the name from the word for old woman. A more usual derivation, from the other spelling, is that it comes from Care or Carle Sunday, in the way, suggests Brand, that presents from fairs are called fairlings, or as we should say, fairings.
Quite another explanation, again of this spelling, is that a ship was wrecked with a cargo of peas and the starving peasants seized the food and have ever after commemorated the event. According to this picturesque legend, the name carling comes from part of the boat’s structure, which no doubt was also washed up. Some say it was an Australian boat, others put it back to Commonwealth days; but in sober fact the name was known well before that date. The first appearance noted in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Turner’s Herbal of 1562, ‘the perched or burstled peasen which are called in Northumbria Carlines’.
Perhaps it is no wonder that such an old and persistent custom should have such a varied appearance today. It must at one time have been very widespread. Scotland knew it and most of the north of England. I am told by a firm which supplies the peas, that the custom is still observed to a certain extent in Northumberland, Durham and parts of Cumberland and Yorkshire; though they say that the tradition has been much weakened since the break in the war years.
could be regarded as a worldwide phenomenon, if the word ‘carnival’ is taken in its wide sense, meaning any occasion of riotous revelry. However, in the narrower and more commonly used sense it refers to the day or week before LENT and especially Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), when Christians bid farewell to meat for 40 days. In Venice and other Italian towns, some might say almost the ‘home’ of carnival, the period of licence extended well beyond the run-up to Lent, lasting almost six months of the year. In many towns (described so well by Carol Field, 1990), carnival was a moment to celebrate plenty and generosity not only by eating but also by squandering foods. Hence the orange fights of Ivrea in Piedmont and the incessant cannonade of confetti made from dragées or coriander seeds enlarged with layers of plaster—so dangerous that some revellers had masks of wire to protect their faces.
Carnival (a term derived from two Latin words meaning ‘meat, goodbye’) is celebrated most noticeably in Roman Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain, France, where various cities hold traditional processions with dancing, mummers, masks, lights, special street foods, etc. The custom travelled to the New World and is conspicuous in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, for example. However, some would say that the calypso and carnival tradition in Trinidad (and Tobago) eclipses by its size and exuberance anything else in the world. DeWitt and Wilan (1993) provide a vivid description of carnival time in Trinidad and of the street foods consumed by the revellers.
On the origin of carnivals in Europe, Constance Cruickshank (1959) has written:
Many of these rites undoubtedly stem from pre-Christian times. It is well known that the great Pope Gregory deliberately charged his missionaries to graft the new on to the old by purifying pagan rites and the sanctification of existing customs. In particular ancient rituals of the death of winter and the rebirth of spring can still be traced in the rites and customs of the Christian year.
Almost every Christian nation or community has customs particular to carnival. Their interpretation has afforded employment to generations of ethnologists. See BISCUIT, BLINI, CANNOLO, MAZURKA, and NUT BISCUITS for a few that are detailed in this volume, but these can but offer signposts to a rich vein of cookery.
Which of the carnival foods enjoyed in modern times can be traced back to pagan times is an interesting question. One obvious candidate is the PANCAKE, the entry for which includes much relevant material. Another is the FRITTER. An 18th-century poem entitled ‘The Oxford Sausage’ neatly pairs these items:
Let glad Shrove Tuesday bring the pancake thin Or fritter rich, with apples stored within.
Ceratonia siliqua, a long-lived evergreen tree bearing large, brown, leathery pods and seeds, rich in sugar. These, often referred to as locust beans, have been used for food in the E. Mediterranean region since ancient times.
Cultivation of the carob was practised by the ancient Greeks, who valued it highly as a sweetmeat. When the pods ripen they become full of a sweet gum with a distinctive taste and smell. Locust gum is produced by grinding the endosperm.
The Bible relates that when John the Baptist was in the desert he lived on locusts and wild honey. Opinion is divided about whether the insect or the plant is meant. Both are nutritious and locally available, and the original Greek has the same ambiguity as the English. The gum is still sometimes made into a sweetmeat called St John’s bread.
Carob pods are used for animal fodder in tropical Africa and parts of Asia, but are also used as human food and have acquired, during the latter half of the 20th century, the status of a ‘health food’ in western countries.
Broken carob pods, called kibble, are roasted and ground to produce a brown powder which has a flavour similar to CHOCOLATE or MOCHA, and is used as a substitute for chocolate. Its fat content is only 0.7%, whereas that of chocolate ranges from about 25% to 50%, depending on the form in which it is offered.
Anissa Helou (1994) reports that in the Lebanon a thick dark syrup called dibess kharroob is extracted from carob pods. ‘The long pods are picked when dark and ripe and taken to a special press to extract their juice. Dibess kharroob is served with pita bread as a sweet dip and is eaten alone or mixed with tahini. The ripe pods can also be chewed on as a sweet snack.’ In Malta a carob syrup flavoured with cloves, sugar and whisky, carob lozenges, and sweets called karamelli are made. The syrup is thought good for coughs. In Cyprus they also make a syrup, as well as simple sweets.
In classical times carob seeds were used as weights by goldsmiths. The Greek word for the seed, keration, meaning ‘little horn’, gives us the modern term for a jeweller’s carat weight.
The carob has been introduced to California, Mexico, S. Africa, Australia, and India.
the common name applied to a limited number of species in several genera of the very extensive family Cyprinidae; especially Cyprinus carpio, the best known and the one which is usually meant when a recipe refers to ‘carp’. This is a large fish, deep-bodied and reaching a length of up to 1 m (40″). It is native to the Danube River and others which flow into the Black Sea and the Aegean, but has been very widely introduced elsewhere, indeed one might almost say everywhere, mainly because of its value as a food fish. It grows quickly and is well suited to fish-farming operations.
This carp has firm flesh and has a high reputation as food in some countries, notably in C. Europe, besides being esteemed by Jewish communities, for whom it is a traditional holiday dish. However, carp which have been living in stagnant ponds are liable to acquire a muddy taste; and the flesh of larger specimens, wherever they have been living, tends to be coarse. So their gastronomic reputation, averaged around the world, is no more than moderate.
The three other best-known carp, at least for food purposes, are as follows (but note that they may all be referred to as ‘Chinese carp’):
Ruditapes decussatus, an edible BIVALVE which is better known to connoisseurs of seafood under its French and Italian names: palourde and vongola respectively. Although the range of the species extends as far north as Britain, it is little known there. The erudite Lovell (1884) recorded that people in Hampshire knew it as butter-fish, and preferred it to the cockle, but any such enthusiasm had waned 100 years later. The name carpet-shell is given because the pattern on the shell was thought to resemble those of certain carpets. The more general name VENUS SHELL may also be used, since the carpet-shell belongs to the family Veneridae.
The carpet-shell has a maximum width of 8 cm (3″), but usually measures much less. Its twin shells, or valves, are usually of a light colour (whitish, yellow, pale brown) with darker brown streaks or rays. It is highly esteemed as food, and may be prepared according to any of the standard recipes for small clams, or eaten raw as oysters are.
Besides French and Italian recipes, there are numerous Spanish and Portuguese ones. In Portugal there is an ingenious device called CATAPLANA, like an aluminium or copper globe but in two parts which are hinged together. When this is closed, with carpet-shells inside and olive oil and other ingredients of an aromatic nature, it can be set to steam. The results are excellent, especially if a little bacon or chopped Portuguese sausage has been included.
The golden carpet-shell, Tapes aureus, is the French clovisse jaune. It is only half the size of Ruditapes decussatus. The golden colour which gives it its name is on the inner side of the valves, not the outside. This species has other small relations, which share the name clovisse with it. Its range extends from the Mediterranean to Norway.
Mention should be made here of two other species. Venerupis pullastra is a close relation of the carpet-shells, although lacking their carpet-like pattern and thus more apt to be called venus shell than carpet-shell in English. It is the almeja babosa of Spain, poulette or coque bleue in French. Some think it superior to the carpet-shells, but it lives less long out of water and is therefore less common in the markets. The other is Ruditapes philippinarum, an oriental species which has been introduced to Spain, where it is being ‘farmed’ under the name almeja japonesa.
Chondrus crispus, one of the red SEAWEEDS. It is found on both sides of the N. Atlantic but associated especially with Ireland, where the Gaelic carrigín, meaning a little rock, provided its most common name and whence comes ‘Irish moss’, one of the numerous alternative names. The beautiful fan-shaped fronds, which are purplish or reddish-green, are important as the source of carrageenan, a substance which has gelling properties similar to those of AGAR-AGAR, an Asiatic product of related red seaweeds in the family Gigartinaceae.
Carrageen may be made into a delicious jelly dessert, as explained by Myrtle Allen (1987), who points out that only enough to produce a gel should be used and that a flavouring of vanilla or cocoa enhances the result. It is also used widely in Irish folk medicine as a trusted cure for coughs and colds. A curative draught is prepared by simmering some fronds in milk or water, after which the liquid is strained and sometimes flavoured with honey and lemon juice.
The same name is often used for Gigartina stellata, a related plant; and has been used in New Zealand for other relations which grow in the southern hemisphere.
Carrageen is an important ingredient for the food industry, because of its capabilities to produce and stabilize consistencies, and most of what is harvested is used in this way.
the French word for ‘square’, is used as a generic term for cheeses that are square in shape and flat. Examples are carré de l’Est, made in Lorraine, and the cheese of the same name which is made in the Franche-Comté.
Daucus carota, an important root vegetable which had an unpromising origin. The wild carrot, which grows in much of W. Asia and Europe, has a tiny and acrid-tasting root. However, when it is cultivated in favourable conditions the roots of successive generations enlarge quickly. So the evolution of cultivars with enlarged roots is easily explained; indeed, what is puzzling is that it seems to have taken a very long time for D. carota var sativa, as the modern cultivated carrot is known, to appear.
The puzzle is all the greater because archaeologists have found traces of carrot seed at prehistoric lake dwellings in Switzerland. Also, the plant is included in a list of vegetables grown in the royal garden of Babylon in the 8th century BC. Here there is a clue: the plant is not in the list of ordinary vegetables but in that of aromatic herbs. It was probably being grown for its leaves or seeds, both of which have a pleasant carrot fragrance. It seems likely that this had also been the purpose of carrot cultivation in classical times, for there is little or no evidence to suggest that the Greeks and Romans enjoyed eating the roots.
Many writers state that the carrot in something like its modern form was brought westwards, at least as far as the Arab countries of the E. Mediterranean, from Afghanistan, where the very dark red, even purple, carrots of antiquity are still grown. The introduction is variously dated at the 8th or 10th century AD, i.e. the period of Arab expansion into the Middle East and C. Asia. This fits well enough with the fact that the earliest surviving clear description of the carrot dates from the first half of the 12th century, and was by an Arab writer, Ibn al-Awam. He described two kinds. One, which was juicy and tasty, was ‘red’; probably the purplish-red carrot referred to above and seldom seen now. The other, coarser and of inferior flavour, was yellow and green: this sounds like a predecessor of the typical hot-climate variety still grown in the Middle East and India. Ibn al-Awam said that carrots were eaten dressed with oil and vinegar or in mixtures with vegetables or cereals.
Ibn al-Awam was writing in Andalusia, whither the Arabs had brought the carrot by his time, and whence it reached other parts of Europe. For example, it came into use in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 14th century, and in Britain in the 15th. The Dutch were foremost in the cultivation of carrots, and improved Dutch varieties were brought to England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. From contemporary botanists’ descriptions, and in particular from a painting (Christ and the Adulterers by Pieter Aertsen, Amsterdam, 1559) it is clear that all these carrots were pale yellow or purple, the purple kinds gradually falling from favour. In the mid-16th century a white type was described in Germany. (White carrots still occasionally appear as freaks in normal-coloured crops.)
The first sign of truly orange carrots is in Dutch paintings of the 17th century, and they were first described, also in the Netherlands, in the 18th. They soon assumed the dominance which they have had ever since. The orange colour is due to the presence of carotene, in its beta form; this is converted in the body to vitamin A. (The earlier purplish colour was provided by an anthocyanin pigment.)
Cultivated carrots of the European type were brought to the New World before 1565, when Hawkins mentions that they were grown on Margarita Island, off the coast of what is now Venezuela. These carrots were enthusiastically received by the American Indians, who had few good sweet roots to compare with them. In Oregon the Flathead Indians, though otherwise scrupulously honest, were said by a surveyor for the Pacific Railroad to be unable to resist digging up the white settlers’ carrots.
Modern carrot varieties are specialized into different shapes. The conventional, and oldest, fairly long and tapered shape is that of ‘main crop’ carrots, which grow slowly and are ready from the middle to the end of the season. They keep well both in the ground and in storage, and generally have the best flavour for use as cooked vegetables. ‘Early’ carrots, the second principal category, are often narrow and cylindrical, for example Amsterdam.
Carrots contain quite large amounts of sugar, and have occasionally been used as a source of refined sugar; but in this role they cannot compare with the sweeter but otherwise useless sugar beet.
Despite this sweetness, carrots are most commonly met, in western kitchens, as an ingredient for savoury soups (Potage Crécy is the famous French carrot soup) and stews, or as a cooked vegetable in their own right, or grated to be eaten raw as a salad item.
Carrots being cooked by themselves are often slightly sweetened to bring out their natural sweetness, either with sugar or by browning to caramelize their natural sugar and convert some of their starch to sweetish dextrin. Another way of accentuating the flavour is by adding a little of one of their umbelliferous relatives: celery leaves, fennel seeds, chervil, or parsley.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, when sweeteners were scarce and expensive, carrots were used in sweet cakes and desserts. In Britain, for example, carrot puddings (and puddings made from other sweet root vegetables, such as parsnips) often appeared in recipe books in the 18th and 19th centuries. Such uses were revived in Britain during the Second World War, when the Ministry of Food disseminated recipes for carrot Christmas pudding, carrot cake, and so on and survive in a small way to the present day. Indeed, carrot cakes have enjoyed a revival in Britain in the last quarter of the 20th century. They are perceived as ‘healthy’ cakes, a perception fortified by the use of brown sugar and wholemeal flour and the inclusion of chopped nuts, and only slightly compromised by the cream cheese and sugar icing which appears on some versions.
The role of carrots has a different emphasis in Asia. They are often conserved and preserved in jams and syrups. Shredded carrots are used as a colourful garnish for PILAF, notably in Iran and C. Asia. In Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, they are also the basis of some types of HALVA and KHEER.
Anacardium occidentale, a small tree which bears a strange fruit. As the drawing shows, it has two parts: at the stem end a cashew ‘apple’, and projecting from the other end of the apple a smaller cashew ‘nut’. In fact the ‘nut’ is the true fruit, and it is only after the ‘nut’ has reached its full size that the ‘apple’ develops, as a fleshy expansion of what is called the receptacle of the nut. The degree of expansion is considerable; the apple may be over 10 cm (4″) long.
When the apple is ripe, it and the nut fall to the ground together. Each then poses a problem. The apple keeps only for a very short time; it will spoil within a day at ordinary room temperature. The nut is in a hard double shell, between the two parts of which there is a caustic substance, as explained below, so the kernel is difficult to extract. In some countries the fruit is prized, for immediate consumption, or to be preserved in syrup or dried and candied; and the nuts are discarded. In other countries, the emphasis is on the nuts, and the fruits are left on the ground for animals to eat. Monkeys like them.
The native region of the cashew is thought to be NE Brazil. As long ago as the 16th century it was taken from there by the Portuguese to the E. Indies, whence cultivation spread to India. The Portuguese turned the Brazilian Tupi name acaju into caju, and names in most languages come from this. (In French acajou means ‘mahogany’, which has caused confusion. The two trees are unrelated.)
The cashew ‘apple’ is generally pear shaped; yellow or red; quite sour; and tending to be astringent and fibrous. However, a good fruit can be eaten raw, if sweetened. In Indonesia it is an ingredient in Rujak, a spicy fruit salad. However, it is usual to boil the fruit in slightly salted water for a few minutes to reduce the astringency, and it still needs sugar.
The nut is not easy to extract. The tissue between its two layers of hard shell contains strongly irritant substances, cardol and anacardic acid. This tissue has medical uses, including burning off warts, an indication of its great corrosive power. The usual way of treating the nut is to roast it whole, driving off the irritants and making the shell brittle enough to crack without crushing the contents.
The nuts, which have a delicate texture and a mild almond flavour, are highly esteemed. They are widely eaten as a snack or appetizer. The USA imports large quantities annually. In S. India and China they are often added, whole or ground, to savoury dishes.
The species Semecarpus anacardium, known as marking nut (because its outer shell yields a black, resinous liquid which can be mixed with lime to produce an indelible ink), is related to the cashew, and may be called oriental cashew. Both fruit (when cooked) and nut (once freed of toxins, e.g. by roasting) are edible, but neither is important as food.
Because its fruits resemble cashew ‘fruits’, the Malay rose apple (see ROSE-APPLE) is sometimes called French cashew or Otaheite cashew, but it is not related to the true cashew.
Sicana odorifera, also known as sikana or musk cucumber, is found throughout tropical America, sometimes being grown as an ornamental vine. It is popular for its fruit in some places, notably Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Melocotón is one name often used.
The fruit resembles a large, wide-bodied CUCUMBER (measuring up to 60 × 12 cm/24″ × 5″) in shape, and has a hard, shiny shell, which can be red, purple, or black in colour. The orangey-yellow, juicy flesh is melon-like in texture and smell, and the central cavity contains a soft pulp surrounding massive rows of tightly packed, flat, oval seeds.
Although refreshing when eaten raw, the cassabanana is more popularly used for making jams. Unripe fruit is good for soups and as an addition to stews. It keeps well in a cool, dry place, and according to Morton (1987) some people like to store it in the linen cupboard, where its pleasant melon-like fragrance is thought to repel moths.
a speciality of Sicily, where it is a traditional Easter food, was originally a sort of cake, filled with RICOTTA beaten up with sugar, chocolate, vanilla, candied fruit (especially small cubes of pumpkin), and a liqueur. This filling, according to a description quoted by Carol Field (1990), is enclosed ‘in alternating squares of sponge cake and almond paste coloured green to look like the pistachio paste with which cassate were originally made. The cake is iced and decorated in a flourish of baroque extravagance with ribbons of candied pumpkin sweeping around a candied half orange set in the center, and it is dotted with glacéed cherries and sprinkled with silver sugar balls.’ The cake’s Arabic origins, in etymology as well as cookery, are discussed in Wright (1999).
There is an echo here of some of the 16th-century recipes of Scappi (see ITALIAN COOKERY BOOKS), for mixtures of ricotta or the like with egg white, nuts, and spices, enclosed in pastry or set on a pastry base.
Nowadays, however, the name cassata is better known, internationally and in Italy, as a kind of ICE CREAM exhibiting three colours—typically chocolate, white (for vanilla), and green (pistachio or candied angelica).
Manihot esculenta, a tropical root crop which is outranked, in volume consumed, only by the SWEET POTATO. The plant is native to C. or S. America, where it has been in use since prehistoric times, and is the only member of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, which provides food. Brazil and Indonesia are the principal producing countries, but cassava has become important in the economies of many tropical countries worldwide. It is marketed mainly in the form of cassava flour, but can be eaten as a vegetable (as can the young leaves) or processed into a wide range of other products.
Cassava tubers are cigar shaped, with a brown, often pinkish, rind which is usually hairy, and ivory white flesh. They vary considerably in size, but are typically 25 cm (10″) long and 5 cm (2″) thick. They are borne in clusters of up to ten, and may spread out widely and deeply from the stem of the plant.
Varieties fall into two main groups: bitter and sweet, of which the first is the more cultivated, although cultivars of the latter are chosen when the plants are being grown for their leaves. The only cassava product with which most people outside the tropics are familiar is TAPIOCA, a refined starch. The cassava plant itself is sometimes known by this name, though the word in its original American Indian usage always meant the prepared product. Other names for cassava often used are manioc and yuca, also of American Indian origin.
The original wild species from which the cultivated one evolved is, or are, lost or unrecognized. Selection of plants for cultivation would have been directed at reducing a serious disadvantage of the plant; that it contains two substances, a glucoside and an enzyme, which react together to produce poisonous prussic acid. The reaction begins, slowly, when the tubers are uprooted and speeds up when they are cut or peeled and exposed to the air. At worst, the amount of poison can be fatal. However, prussic acid is freely soluble in water and driven off by heat, so the American Indians were able to evolve various soaking and heating processes to remove it. It was also the American Indians who bred the two main races of cassava.
Bitter cassava has a high yield of large, starchy tubers but contains an appreciable amount of poison, so that it can be consumed only after thorough treatment. Sweet cassava is of lower yield and its tubers are comparatively watery; but they contain less poison and that mainly in the skin, so that after peeling the tubers may be safely eaten as a cooked vegetable or, less often, raw, and the leaves are safe to use as a vegetable. Nearly all tapioca and other cassava products are made from bitter cassava.
As a staple food, cassava provides much carbohydrate, but very little protein; so in regions where people depend almost exclusively on cassava, malnutrition is common. Nevertheless cassava, properly supplemented with a source of protein, has a unique advantage over other roots. After the roots have grown, which they do quickly, typically in six months, they can be left in the ground for as long as three years without deteriorating. Thus cassava can be a reserve food against shortage.
The first European explorers in the W. Indies found cassava in use everywhere, in the form of meal and of dried, flat cakes. They made use of it themselves on their voyages. Cassava meal, now usually known by the Portuguese name farinha (flour) or the Creole name couac, was made by a sequence of processes which began with grating the peeled tubers and squeezing the moisture from them, and which ended with heating, either briefly to make a porridge or for longer to make a dry meal which would keep for some time.
Cassava continues to be an important food in the Caribbean region. Hawkes (1968), who writes at length on this topic, comments that: ‘Boiled, hot cassava is most often served as a vegetable in the American tropics dressed simply with butter, additional salt if needed, a couple of good grinds from the pepper mill, and a few drops of lime or sour-orange juice.’ His highest praise is reserved for a soup/stew dish of tripe (mondongo) and cassava and 15 other ingredients.
A special cassava product made only in the Caribbean is cassareep. This is a thick syrup prepared by boiling down juice from the tubers with sugar, cloves, and cinnamon. Its unique flavour is essential to the W. Indian stew PEPPER POT. A corresponding product/sauce, tucupi, plays a similarly important role in Brazil.
In Brazil a superior variety of cassava, mandiba, was ground extra fine, then pressed. Some of the fine starch escaped with the juice; but this was extracted from the liquid (tipioca) and heated to make pellets (tipioceto). That was the origin of the modern tapioca process. However, farinha was the normal everyday product, and still is in regions where cassava is the staple food.
The Indians also made a cassava beer; and they boiled the young leaves as a vegetable, a practice which continues. Like the tubers, the leaves must be cooked to remove poison. The early European explorers brought back only meal, not cuttings from which the plant could be grown, but slave traders later took cuttings to Africa, where the plant was in use by the end of the 16th century. By the late 18th century it had spread to E. Africa and was already a major food in a region beyond the southern limit of yam cultivation.
The usual African practice is to cook the tubers, then pound them to make a type of porridge called FOO-FOO in W. Africa. Sometimes this is given a short fermentation to improve the flavour. The pulp can be dried to make a dry meal called gari. Cassava also provides beverages, both non-alcoholic ones and beer.
Cassava arrived in the Malay peninsula and Indonesia during the 18th century, and in India by 1800. Neither in India nor in SE Asia did it become as important in diet as in parts of Africa. Much is grown, but most of it is made into tapioca for export. However, in Indonesia, the Javanese, with their customary skill in fermentation processes, have developed a fermented cassava delicacy, TAPÉ, as well as using fermented tuber peelings as a seasoning for rice.
During the 19th century cassava was introduced to the Pacific islands and became an important food in Polynesia. In Hawaii it is often used as an alternative to TARO in making the fermented porridge POI.
‘a covered heat proof vessel in which food is cooked and served’ (NSOED) or, by extension, the food cooked in such a vessel. The word has a complicated history, starting with a classical Greek term for a cup (kuáthos), progressing to a Latin word (cattia), which could mean both ladle and pan, then becoming an Old French word (casse, via the Provençal casa), which then became cassole (diminutive cassolette) and casserole. Besides explaining this, Ayto (1993) draws attention to the remarkable fact that there has been a complete and sudden change in the meaning of casserole in English in the last 100 years:
When English took it over from French at the beginning of the eighteenth century it meant a dish of cooked rice moulded into the shape of a casserole cooking pot and then filled with a savoury mixture, say of chicken or sweetbreads. It was also applied by extension to a border of rice, or even of mashed potato, round some such dish as fricassee or curry: Mrs Beeton’s recipe for a ‘savoury casserole of rice’ describes such a rice border. Then some time around the 1870s this sense of casserole seems to have slipped imperceptibly but swiftly into a ‘dish of meat, vegetable, and stock or other liquid, cooked slowly in the oven in a closed pot’, its current sense.
On the French side, it is of interest that when Favre (1883–92) wrote his huge culinary encyclopedia a casserole was defined as a tinned copper cooking pot, well suited to being displayed on the wall in order to impress visitors with the wealth and highly civilized lifestyle of the owners ‘who live on food prepared in these gleaming vessels’.
There are many situations in which the use of a casserole, as the term is now understood, is helpful to the cook. It is economical in the use of fuel; beneficial where long, slow cooking is desired to achieve a mingling of flavours, or tenderness; convenient when something has to be left cooking unattended; and appropriate for any household which likes to have food brought hot to the table in the vessel in which it was cooked (a point which is also of interest to whoever in the household attends to the washing up). Historically, casserole cookery has been especially popular in rural homes, where a fire is in any case burning all day and every day, and for special situations such as the requirement in JEWISH COOKERY for one-pot dishes for the Sabbath. The 20th century saw a resurgence of casserole dishes, particularly in English-speaking countries, where the form was often seen as a means of using up leftovers, and where processed foods such as canned soups or sauces allowed the time-poor cook convenient shortcuts. It is a standby for POTLUCK dinners.
Although casserole is a western term, the use of cooking pots which would be called casseroles in Europe or the Americas is almost universal in Asia. In China, for example, as Gerald and Anne Nicholls (1989) explain:
Sandpots are the casseroles of Chinese cooking. They are used for ‘clear simmering’ which involves the long, slow cooking of meat or fish with vegetables in water or fragrant sauces. They are also used for making soups and for cooking rice. They are thus an important part of the Chinese kitchen.
They are made of a mixture of sand and clay, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are called sandpots because their rough unglazed exteriors have a sandy texture. There are wide pots, shallow pots, large pots and small, pots with two handles and pots with one handle. Some have rounded sides and others are straight or bowed. Some are designed to rest on a charcoal burner; a sort of chafing dish. Many come with matching lids.
See also pot-roasting, under ROAST.
a spice resembling and related but inferior to CINNAMON (hence often known as ‘false’ or ‘bastard’ cinnamon), is the product of numerous plants, notably: Chinese cassia, Cinnamomum cassia or C. aromaticum; Indonesian cassia, C. burmannii; and Saigon cassia, C. loureirii. Each has a number of alternative names. Thus Chinese cassia may also be Kwangtun, Yunnan, Honan, or Chinese-junk cassia. Distinguishing between the various kinds is not easy. Rosengarten (1969) remarks that in the period when imports from China to the USA were banned, US chemists had to devise a system of testing cassia bark by gas chromatography in order to identify and exclude any of the Chinese kind.
Cassia is marketed and used like cinnamon, in the form of cured and curled ‘quills’ of bark, or powdered. But cassia ‘buds’, the dried, unripe fruits, are also used in China and elsewhere, much in the manner of cloves, to lend their powerful aroma to confections and other items such as pickles.
The distinction between true cinnamon and cassia was recognized from early times. Indeed, way back in the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus was in no doubt about their being different. Cinnamon sticks were used by huge birds in Arabia for the construction of their cliff-top nests, and the way of gathering the spice was to tempt the birds into flying back to their nests with pieces of meat so heavy that the nest would then collapse and its constituent parts flutter down to the Arabs waiting far below. Cassia was quite a different matter. It grew in shallow lakes, protected by batlike creatures which squeaked alarmingly and tried to ward off the Arab cassia-pickers; but the latter were clothed in leather gear from head to foot and, provided that they could shield their eyes from the squeaking assailants, could gather the crop.