Limanda limanda, a FLATFISH of the NE Atlantic, with a range from the White Sea down to France. It has a brown back, often freckled, and may reach a length of almost 40 cm (16″), although commonly little more than half of that. A good fish, with a pleasing flavour, well suited to being fried either whole or in fillets, depending on size; but less esteemed in Britain than in continental Europe. In Jutland dabs are salted and dried and sold under a name which means ‘dried Jutlanders’.
In other parts of the world, where English-speaking colonists arrived and found species of fish which they thought similar to the dab which they had known in Britain, the name is often used for other members of the family Pleuronectidae. Thus Hippoglossoides platessoides is properly called the American plaice, but is also known as sand-dab or long rough dab. (This particular fish is the very embodiment of confusion in nomenclature since it has also been called a flounder and a sole, while its scientific name suggests an association with the halibut!)
an Indonesian food produced by bacterial fermentation in the same way as the Japanese NATTO. Dagé may be prepared from leftover TEMPE or ONCOM; from various kinds of seeds; from the presscake left after oil extraction from groundnuts or other nuts; or from other vegetable waste. Rice straw is often used to start the fermentation, though the usual wrapping is banana leaf. Dagé is most often used as a condiment for rice, and may also be deep fried or mixed with vegetables.
adjoin each other in the region lying just north of the Caucasus (see AZERBAIJAN and GEORGIA), one mountainous and the other on the edge of the steppe. Both border on the Caspian Sea.
Very little has been published about their cuisines, but a series of pioneer papers by Magomedkhanov (1991, and 1993; Magomedkhanov and Luguev 1990) has given quite a bit of detail about the food habits and customs of Dagestan, which may be supplemented by the relevant chapter in Chenciner (1997). The diet is a simple one, built on enduring traditions. A roll-call of the daily fare would include mutton (KEBABS, especially shashlik), dried meat, pasta DUMPLINGS, stuffed PANCAKES, flatbreads such as LAVASH, cheese and the other dairy products of the region, HONEY. Tea is the beverage.
Fish does figure in the diet, including STURGEON, but CAVIAR is not eaten by the local people, being reserved for export. Special patrol boats operate in the Caspian to control poaching.
Magomedkhanov and Luguev (1990) have given a detailed description of the feast which follows the end of RAMADAN and is given by a recently bereaved family. It seems that the symbolism of some of the items or procedures is no longer fully understood, but that what is in effect a remarkably elaborate ritual is carried out with great fidelity. There are seven ‘breads’ (some being pancakes, always garnished with melted fat from a FAT-TAILED SHEEP’s tail on top and clarified butter underneath; and one being a glazed and baked sandwich with a complex filling), and seven sweets, including a sort of ‘sherbet’ in toffee-like slabs, kompot (blackcurrants, apricots, rowanberries), and chelob rice (cf. the chelow rice of Iran) variously flavoured (ground apricot kernels, cannabis seeds, honey). Main dishes number three, and are items which also appear in daily fare: cold boiled meats; plov (PILAF); and pilmeni (PEL’MENI), filled with e.g. tvorok (curd cheese).
The above account omits one highly important item: the mountain ram, which is the symbol of Dagestan, symbolizing independence and virility. The role which it plays in the cuisines of the region was described by Chenciner and Salmonov (1988) in a paper delivered at Oxford University which bore the memorable title of ‘Little Known Aspects of North East Caucasian Mountain Ram and Other Dishes’. This recorded the culinary aspects of a journey through Dagestan and Chechnya. In a passage which vividly illustrates the continuity of foodways in the region, he describes eating khingali (large diamond-shaped PASTA) boiled in ram’s broth and served with pure GARLIC juice and pure WALNUT juice, to be eaten with large chunks of boiled ram on the bone. He explains that a 10th-century Arabic text describes similar NOODLES, also served with garlic and walnut flavourings, boiled meat (probably onager—see HORSEMEAT), and broth.
Still on the topic of sheep, Chenciner observes that both main types of sheep are eaten: the plains sheep with fat tails, and the mountain sheep without. He quotes from Thomas Love Peacock (1823):
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter,
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
(or dhal), whether the word is used to denote an ingredient or a dish prepared from it, is one of the principal foods of the Indian subcontinent. In the first sense it is a split PULSE (as opposed to GRAM, which is whole; but the distinction is not always observed, even by Indians). In the second sense it refers to a dish, of which there are at least 60 kinds, made from BEANS, PEAS, or LENTILS. A combination of LEGUME, such as dal, with cereal is especially nutritious.
One of the most common dals is made from channa, the Indian CHICKPEA. The split chickpeas are larger than the grains of other types. The colour is a medium yellow.
Several types of lentil, known as masur, are the usual source of dal consumed in Bengal and by Muslims. One common kind is malika masur, which is pinkish. The term ‘Mysore dal’ is sometimes used for lentils.
MOTH BEAN dal is brown, like Middle Eastern lentils. Both this and malika masur are often cooked to a purée or porridge.
The most popular dal in the south of India is made from the PIGEON PEA, Cajanus cajan, known as tur or arhar. It has a fine texture and is usually orange, with a few flecks of other colours.
URD (or urad) is a kind of bean, Vigna mungo, which yields an expensive and highly regarded dal; this is pale yellow in colour and is special to S. India, where it is used in savoury pancakes etc. Other names for this are mash, maan, and ulutham. Although the bean has a black coat, the very best dal, made from it, dhuli urd, is washed to pure white. Lower grades have black and green flecks. The grain size is very small.
The MUNG BEAN, similar in size to urd but with a green coat, gives a light, delicate dal of a cream or yellow colour with green flecks.
There are other dals made from ordinary peas, similar to European split peas but of various colours. HORSE GRAM, LATH, and COWPEA provide inferior dals.
Dals differ in flavour and texture, as well as in the cooking time required. An Indian recipe will say which type of dal should be used.
Methods of cooking dal also vary. In S. Indian recipes the aim is generally to produce a liquid, souplike consistency, while in northern dishes a thicker texture is usually preferred. Some recommend cooking dal without preliminary soaking and without adding salt until the end, because of its toughening effect. The dissolved salts in hard water have a similar effect, so soft water is advised. Others recommend soaking the dal for as long as overnight, but allow the addition of salt at the beginning of cooking. Whatever the advantages of either method for taste and texture, the second requires less cooking time and saves expensive fuel.
a small oval PLUM which, together with the somewhat rounder bullace plum, is classified as Prunus instititia (a botanical name whose spelling is much disputed—insititia is preferred by many authorities). The species, native to E. Europe and W. Asia, is considered to be older than P. domestica, the plum proper. Growing wild in hedgerows it is small and sour, suited only to making jam, but cultivated varieties have a fuller range of uses.
The damson had been known in W. Europe since prehistoric times (remains have been found, for example, in excavations of prehistoric Swiss lake dwellings), but was also growing in the Near East. It received its name because it was from Damascus, in Syria, that this damson reached Italy in times BC. When in about 1200 the Duke of Anjou brought the fruit back to France from a Crusade, a further baptism took place; the fruit was now called Damascene, while the shorter form ‘damson’ was still applied to fruits of the same species which had been known earlier in Europe. (There is evidence that in medieval times and indeed right up to the 19th century a distinction was preserved, at least in some quarters, between W. European damsons and Near Eastern Damascene plums.)
Britain took a more prominent role than other European countries in developing the cultivation of improved kinds of damson. Examples include Farleigh and Bradley’s King, two 19th-century varieties. Shropshire is a PRUNE variety, selected for drying. Varieties of bullace include Black (purplish with greenish yellow flesh) and white (amber with yellow flesh).
The astringency of the fruit generally requires that it be cooked with plentiful sugar, as in damson jam or damson cheese. The description by Dorothy Hartley (1954) of such a cheese, ‘crimson in a pool of port wine on a gold-washed dish’, is a vivid celebration of the place of honour once held by this delicacy at British tables.
Taraxacum officinale, one of the most widespread wild plants of temperate regions worldwide. Leaves, root, and flowers are all edible. Dandelions belong to the large family Asteraceae, in which their nearest edible relative is wild CHICORY; they resemble this in the variable form of their leaves and the slight bitterness of leaves and root. T. officinale is a native of Europe and Asia. There are also native American species, but there, too, T. officinale has spread everywhere thanks to its airborne seeds.
During the Middle Ages in Europe dandelion acquired its two common names which are shared by several languages. ‘Dandelion’ comes from the French dent de lion (lion’s tooth), which refers to the (usually) serrated leaves. The other name, the common French pissenlit and its English local equivalent ‘pissabed’ refer to the diuretic properties attributed to dandelion root. These are not recognized by conventional medicine; however, dandelion leaves are allowed to be an excellent source of vitamin C, and all parts of the plant are rich in vitamin A and iron.
When the European dandelion became common in N. America with the arrival of white settlers, the Indians also began using it as a food and for its medicinal qualities.
Cultivation of the dandelion began around the middle of the 19th century in France and Britain. Roots were taken up and planted in dark cellars to produce blanched shoots similar to the French cultivated barbe de capucin (see CHICORY AND ENDIVE). These are still well known in France, but largely forgotten in Britain.
In the USA there is a small market for cultivated dandelion greens. These are of selected varieties with large, fleshy leaves. Selection and blanching through darkness combine to give larger leaves which are not bitter, in contrast to wild dandelions, which have to be picked when very young and small if the flavour is to be acceptable.
Dandelion leaves are usually made into a salad. A traditional dressing, known in France as aux lardons, is hot BACON fat with small pieces of chopped bacon. This allays the slight bitterness and gives an agreeable blend of flavours. The leaves may also be cooked, which allows slightly older wild plants to be used, but the leaves must always be picked before the plant flowers.
The root can be chopped in salads or cooked. Dandelion root is one of the innumerable things which were tried in the 19th century as a coffee substitute. Unusually, it is still available for this purpose. The root is roasted until brown all through, then ground; but the flavour does not resemble that of real coffee, and the drink contains no caffeine.
An unusual French product is cramaillotte, a brownish-orange jelly made from dandelion flowers, with orange, lemon, and sugar. To judge by early references to the medicinal properties of dandelion flowers, this jelly may originally have been appreciated for this reason, but it is nowadays esteemed mainly for its fine taste. It is made by a specialist at Quarré-les-Tombes (Yonne), a village in whose neighbourhood there are fields of wild dandelion.
The names of Danish cheeses, of which there are 11 officially sanctioned by the government, would seem to suggest that there are 11 distinct cheeses belonging to Denmark; but this is not so. One Danish cheese, SAMSOE, is a cheese in its own right, since it has characteristics which distinguish it clearly from the Swiss cheese on which it was originally modelled: but other kinds, although some of them also have names derived from places in Denmark where they are made, are more or less copies of cheeses of other nationalities.
Rather than irritate the consumer with names of the ‘German Brie’ or ‘Finnish Emmental’ type, it was agreed at the Stresa Convention of 1951 that Danish cheeses should have their own names which, with indications where appropriate of what they imitate, are as follows:
are rich confections based on a yeast dough with milk and egg, into which butter (essential for the flavour of the pastry) has been folded by a method similar to that employed for making CROISSANTS. Before baking, the pastry is cut into small sheets and filled. Of the various fillings, the most ‘correct’ must be the traditional Danish one, remonce; this is a Danish (not French, and of unknown etymology) term which means butter creamed with sugar and often ALMONDS or MARZIPAN too. But confections called Danish pastries are made in vast numbers outside Denmark, and common alternative fillings include differently flavoured sugar and butter mixtures, almond or hazelnut mixtures, jam, crème pâtissière—alone or in any combination, often with dried fruit or candied peel.
The individual pastries are shaped by folding them in various ways, each of which has its own name. Spandauers are squares, with the corners folded to the middle, and kammar (combs) are narrow folded pastry strips filled with remonce, and nicked with short cuts to make ‘teeth’. Crescents, pinwheels, and whorls are all made, as are large marzipan-filled plaits, custard-filled strips which are cut into slices after baking, and unfilled kringler (the pretzel shape, which is the sign of the baker’s trade in Denmark). Most types are glazed with syrup or iced after baking, and decorated with nuts.
The Danish name for Danish pastries is Wienerbrød, ‘Vienna bread’ (the name by which these recipes are known throughout Scandinavia and N. Germany, where they are also popular). The reverse also applies; in Vienna a similar thing is known as ein Kopenhagener. However, as Birgit Siesby (1988) has pointed out, the Danish Wienerbrød, which must be counted as the ‘true’ Danish pastry, is very different from the sticky pastry Kopenhagener sold in Vienna and from British and American ‘Danish pastries’. They are expected to be very light and crisp, so Danish bakers make them fresh two or even three times a day. They are eaten at any time of day, often with tea or coffee.
a French term which migrated into English long ago but is now little used in either language. In modern usage, and in either language, it means a cooking utensil shaped like a very small flowerpot, in which flavoured custards or small savoury confections can be prepared, as well as the preparation itself.
Originally it meant a small cup-shaped flan baked in a thin pastry case. This was a popular dish in France for many centuries. In the 16th century Rabelais praised the darioles baked by a certain Guillot in Amiens, which led some later authorities to state that the dariole was invented at Amiens at that time. In fact, however, references to darioles de cresme (cream darioles) are found as early as the 14th century in Paris.
the basic Japanese soup stock, is made by simmering flakes of dried bonito (KATSUOBUSHI) and pieces of giant kelp (KONBU). It has a delicate flavour and is well suited to making clear soups; but it has many other culinary uses, and has been described as the primary constituent of Japanese cooking. Instant dashi in the form of a powder in packets or in liquid form in bottles is available, as Dashi-no-moto.
The fruit of a palm tree, Phoenix dactylifera, is a staple food in the desert regions of N. Africa and the Middle East; indeed, in such regions the tree is often the essential plant on which life depends, a universal provider which is said to have 800 distinct uses.
The tree, like all palms, has a single growth point at the tip, so the removal of this terminal bud kills the tree. Starting at ground level, the plant grows a new section every year, with fresh leaves on top of the previous year’s section. The leaves live for an average of five years. Thus the tree consists of about five leafy sections on top of a stack of sections whose leaves have died, and this stack rises higher and higher away from the ground. The date palm is a long-lived tree and may eventually exceed 30 m (100′) in height. However, commercial growers usually cut down their trees when they are 15 m (50′) tall because of the difficulty in managing them, since they flower and fruit only at the top.
Trees may be male or female, and only the latter produce fruit. Although natural pollination may occur by wind, cultivated trees are (and have been since time immemorial) artificially pollinated. One male provides enough pollen for 100 or more females.
The fruits are produced in large bunches of over 10 kg (20 lb) in weight and containing as many as 1,000 dates. An average yield is about 50 kg (100 lb) of fruit from each tree every year, but good trees may produce two or three times as much. A single date fruit is up to 5 cm (2″) long, depending on the variety.
The area of origin cannot be pinpointed, but must have been somewhere in the hot, dry region stretching from N. Africa through the Middle East to India—quite probably oases in the region of the Persian Gulf. Cultivation is of prehistoric origin. The palm is often shown in carvings from the earliest period of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, and it is clear that dates were then already a staple food.
The classical Romans were fond of dates, which they had to import from their Eastern Empire. The best ones came from Jericho in Palestine. Since sugar was then almost unknown, the fruit was used as a sweetener, or else stuffed to make a sweetmeat. The recipes of APICIUS include several dishes in which dates are used in sauces for meat or fish.
The Chinese came to know the date in early times but, since they could not grow date palms in their climate, even in the southern provinces, they imported dates from Persia from the time of the T’ang dynasty (AD 618–907) onwards.
Most dates are still grown in their Old World region of origin, the biggest producers being Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Large quantities are also grown in N. African countries, Pakistan, and the Gulf countries. Some are grown in the Canary Islands, and even in S. Spain, which is at the extreme northern limit of cultivation. Beyond this the tree may grow, but it will not bear fruit.
The production of dates in the drier parts of the American tropics and in the hotter parts of the USA, especially California, expanded considerably after the US industry was established at the beginning of the 20th century, but levelled out in the 1960s and is a small percentage of world production.
The chief food value of the date lies in its very high sugar content, which can be 70% by weight in a dried date, although the semi-dried dates sold in western countries only contain about 50%. The fruit contains a fair amount of protein, plus vitamins A and some of the B group. It is not a perfectly balanced staple food; but desert Arabs nonetheless exist in good health for long periods on almost nothing but dried dates and milk, which makes up most of the deficiencies.
Three main types of date are grown. Soft dates have a high moisture content, relatively little sugar in the fresh fruit stage, and a mild flavour. They are grown in the Middle East mainly for eating fresh, though they are also matured, dried, and compressed into blocks. Because of the naturally mild flavour and the concentration of sugar caused by the drying, these compressed dates are very sweet. Soft dates are not often seen in the West, although there is an international export trade within the Middle East. There is also a sporadic trade reaching further afield, as for example, during the fasting month of RAMADAN in Indonesia where dates are suddenly to be seen on every street corner, being considered a suitable way to ‘break’ the fast, whereas at other times they are unobtainable.
Hard dates, also called ‘bread’ or ‘camel’ dates, are dry and fibrous even when fresh, and when further dried become extremely hard, friable, and again intensely sweet, though with a good flavour. They may be left whole or ground into flour. Either way, they remain in good condition for years. These were the staple food dates of the Arab world, particularly for nomads. However, with the arrival of modern packaging and marketing, these dates are probably passing into history.
The dates most popular in the West are of the semi-dry type. It is these which are sold packed in the familiar long boxes with a stem, or plastic imitation thereof, between the rows. The dates grown in the USA are nearly all of this type. The flavour is less sweet than that of the other types, and more aromatic and distinctive.
When dates are classified by their degree of ripeness and the extent to which they have been dried, it is the Arabic terms which are used internationally. These start with khalal, which refers to fruits which have reached full size but are still green and not really edible; progress through bisr (marked by colour change and the commencement of conversion to sugars) and rutab (softening and darkening); and end with tamr, the stage when the dates are ready for packing.
For details of some of the numerous named varieties of date, see the section on DATE VARIETIES which follows.
For other products of the date palm, see PALM SUGAR, SAGO, and DATE PALM FLOWER. See also PALM, for the delicacy known as ‘palm cabbage’ or ‘palm heart’ (the terminal bud at the top of the tree which can only be obtained at the cost of killing the tree, so normally taken from a less valuable species of palm).
The date is a fruit whose qualities and uses vary considerably according to the variety being grown. And there are very many varieties, as an interesting book by Popenoe (1913) attests in a readable manner.
The reproductive characteristics of the date palm ensure that growing plants from seed is a lottery with regard to the eating qualities and productivity of the palm. The only way to ensure particular characteristics is to propagate vegetatively. In practice date orchards are developed in this way as particular palms are selected for desirable aspects such as fruiting season, bearing capacity, keeping and transport characteristics, and above all flavour. Various numbers are quoted for the named varieties in any one of the main producing countries, with 600 being a common figure. Certain varieties have come to dominate the market and it is these dates which have entered world commerce.
When first studied in detail in the early part of the 20th century many of these varieties had a localized distribution in one country or even in one cultivated area. Improved transport and communications have enabled the spread of particularly fine examples to challenge the past domination of Deglet Noor in world commerce. In the main producing countries 30 to 40 named varieties will be found in the markets during the season and represent the diversity which is still available to local consumers.
A selection of the main world varieties with the characteristics which have ensured their popularity follows:
Philip Iddison
an interesting food item which is found in the markets of date-producing countries and has been described as follows by Iddison (personal communication, 1996), writing in the United Arab Emirates:
The flowers of a date palm appear in the January–February period. The flowers of the male palms are a minor commercial commodity, appearing in the markets for pollination purposes. The enclosing sheath or spadix should be intact or only just splitting for this purpose. Fortunately this is also the condition in which the flower is edible and it is common for farmers to reduce the number of flowers on a female palm to improve date size and quality. In the Al Ain market the female flowers were on sale for consumption and were more common than the male flowers. They weighed 300–400 grammes and the tough sheath enclosed a cramped mass of flower buds. These could be rubbed off the spikelets and were tried as a salad with a little lemon dressing as recommended by Popenoe (1913). There was no distinctive flavour apart from a slight astringency. Local people eat the flowers pounded together with small dried fish, gashr, as a dip for bread.
Diospyros lotus, a fruit which is related to neither the date nor the plum, but is closely akin to the American PERSIMMON, D. virginiana. It grows from the Mediterranean as far east as Japan and Korea. It is not eaten in Japan and is grown there only for its ornamental value.
Besides growing wild, it has served as an introduced and cultivated plant since ancient times, and it is no longer possible to establish its original distribution. It has been present in the Mediterranean region for a long time, and is one of the several fruits reputed to have been the ‘lotus’ of the so-called lotus-eaters of Homer; but see JUJUBE.
The fruit is cherry-sized and yellowish-brown to blue-black in colour. It is simultaneously sweet and astringent, and of a pleasant flavour bearing some resemblance to that of DATES. A seedless variety has been reported from China, but most date plums contain numerous brown, flattened seeds.
Asians appreciate the fruit, often drying it for winter use.
Lithophaga lithophaga, a member of the MUSSEL family, but slimmer than common mussels. It embeds itself in rocks, which makes it difficult to gather, but has a very good flavour and is worth the effort.
Distribution is throughout the Mediterranean. The coast near La Spezia in Italy, and parts of the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, are places where it is abundant.
The date-shell is not a mechanical borer. It makes its hole in the rock by applying to it an acid secretion whose exact composition is unknown, which softens the rock. Then it scrapes the debris away and repeats the process, until it is completely, or almost completely, encased in the hole. The purpose of this manœuvre is to gain protection against predators. The water lapping into the hole provides nutrients.
L. subula, the rock-boring mussel of California, is a Pacific counterpart of the date-shell, but is not often eaten. It is, however, to Californian authors (Ricketts and Calvin, 1978) that we owe the Syllogism of the Date-mussel.
Major premise: the date mussel’s acid secretion attacks calcareous matter. Minor premise: the date mussel’s own shell is calcareous. Conclusion: the date mussel’s acid secretion attacks its own shell.
The authors also give the explanation. The date mussel’s shell is covered with a thick brown layer of horny material, which protects it against the acid. And it is the colour of this material which, besides the shape of the mussel, is likened to a date in popular nomenclature.
a French culinary term indicating both a method of cooking and a type of dish. In both respects the meaning of the term has evolved noticeably since it was first used. It derives from the word addobbo, or seasoning, as does the ADOBO of Hispanic cultures.
In the 18th century, when the French town of Saint-Malo made a speciality of daubes, and sent them all over France, these preparations were diverse: artichokes en daube, celery, pork cutlets, goose—all these and many other foodstuffs besides were prepared en daube. Daube in fact referred to the method of preparation, which was to cook meat or other foodstuffs in a TERRINE or pot with aromatics and wine or vinegar to point up the flavour. The cooked foodstuff was then removed to be eaten ‘dry’ (without the sauce) and often cold (with jelly formed during the cooking clinging to it). If the food was eaten in its sauce, it ceased to be en daube and became en compote. Thus what is now called Bœuf en daube, the one dish in which the term remains common currency, would then have been presented as Bœuf en compote.
Daubes remained popular in the 19th century, but changed character and status; they now tended always to be meat dishes, usually of beef, and they began to be regarded as belonging to l’ancienne cuisine, a kind of relegation carried further in the 20th century when they have come to be thought of as rustic preparations. The copper or cast-iron daubière used to prepare them has become a curiosity in antique markets. However, with the emergence of the CASSEROLE as a domestic cook’s standby, the daube takes its place as an authentic example of the genre.
Philip and Mary Hyman
meaning ‘salam leaf’, the dried leaf of the tree Syzygium polyanthum, which plays an important part in Indonesian cookery.
If a single leaf is placed in the pan during cooking it gives a subtle aromatic flavour to many dishes such as soups, rice, and vegetables. Its role is generally comparable to that of the CURRY LEAF in Indian cuisines. When cooking has been completed, the leaf is normally discarded. Powdered daun salam is available.
Elizabeth (1913–92), the food writer to whom is given by common consent most credit for leading British tastes, from the 1950s onwards, in a new direction. Her keynote was struck, clear and melodious as a church bell in the Greek island where she had lived for a while, by A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950). Like the book which she acknowledged as a principal trigger for her own writing (The Gentle Art of Cookery by Mrs Leyel and Olga Hartley, 1925), it was inspirational rather than didactic. Although it impinged on a relatively small number of people (until the late 1950s and 1960s, when it and her other early books were published by Penguin in paperback for a wider audience) its influence began to show at once, for its content and style, echoed in the brilliant jacket by John Minton, matched a mood which was there in the post-war years but had not previously found expression.
French Country Cooking (1951) and Summer Cooking (1955) were charming, unpretentious books which echoed her keynote in size and style. Italian Food (1954) was more substantial: the first of the author’s books to qualify as a reference work in addition to having literary and inspirational merits. Indeed, after successive revisions, it remains one of the best surveys of its subject. The same is true of the even larger French Provincial Cooking (1960), in which some aspects of her food writing which had been nascent in the Italian book (a section on cookery equipment, a short bibliography) came into full blossom. With its really extensive bibliography it marked the author’s steady movement towards research in books as well as in markets and kitchens; and its illustrated section on French kitchen equipment brought this aspect into prominence and foreshadowed the beautiful kitchen shop which Elizabeth David subsequently planned, opened, and personally ran in Pimlico (not far from where she lived in Chelsea, London). It was unfortunate that a disagreement with her partners brought her own participation in the shop enterprise to an end.
During the 1960s she was busy with journalism (especially a series of articles in the Spectator, where she was given a free hand to write as she pleased, with results evident in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, 1984, the volume in which these and other essays were collected). The shop also took up much of her time and energy. It was not until 1970 that the next book, Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, came out. This had several remarkable features. One was that it included a charming tribute to Mrs Leyel, co-author of the Gentle Art of Cookery, for the inspiration and stimulus which she had supplied and an affectionate analysis of the merits of Mrs Leyel’s writing. Another was that she included in it material about Anglo-Indian cookery, perhaps reflecting in part the short period after the war when she lived in India (accompanying the military husband she had married in Cairo).
English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) represented the zenith of her scholarly writing. It at once became a sort of bible for home bakers and people interested in the very strong baking tradition of the British Isles, but its relatively narrow focus and its length and weight were in contrast to the earlier, lighter books. Harvest of the Cold Months (1994), on which she had begun work, was prepared for its posthumous publication by her long-time editor and close friend Jill Norman. Since her death there have been published various anthologies drawn from her writings such as South Wind through the Kitchen (1998), and a further collection of essays and occasional pieces (Is there a Nutmeg in the House? 2001).
Elizabeth David valued her privacy and was highly selective in offering glimpses, in her writings, of personal feelings. Her strong negative feelings against food snobbery, pretentiousness of all kinds, and careless writing were never concealed, but a natural kindliness prompted her to express these, for the most part, in general terms rather than personal attacks. And she allowed her admiration for a chosen few (e.g. Norman Douglas, the famous travel writer with whom, when she was in her twenties and he in his seventies, she formed a close friendship in the south of France and, later, Capri) to be fully apparent. Her writings did reflect, but not as much as they could have done, the breadth of her interests and knowledge in the arts (especially painting), history, and literature.
Davidsonia pruriens, otherwise known as ooray, the fruit of a small tree found in the rainforests of Queensland and northern New South Wales in Australia. As one would expect from its generic name, it is excellent. Cribb and Cribb (1975) state:
We regard the ooray as one of the best native fruits we know. Its blue-black, plum-like fruits with a few loose hairs on the surface have a soft, juicy purple flesh with relatively small flattened seeds with fibrous coats. The fruit is very acid, but stewed with sugar or made into jam or jelly, it provides a distinctive and most enjoyable food for anyone who likes a sharp taste in preserves.
properly any animal of the family Cervidae, although the word is sometimes used to include other animals with generally similar characteristics. The family includes CARIBOU and REINDEER, which are both large animals, as well as the MOOSE, which is the largest living deer with a shoulder height up to 2.25 m (7′ 6″). There are also numerous much smaller deer, such as the engaging MUNTJAC or barking deer of SE Asia, which stands little more than 50 cm (20″) at the shoulder, and a number which are smaller still, including the tiny chevrotain or mouse-deer.
The deer which are the main sources of meat for human consumption, whether they are truly wild deer or ‘farmed’ animals from a protected environment, belong to just four species, all of an intermediate size. Their use in cookery is described under VENISON (the name usually applied to the meat of deer, with certain exceptions such as reindeer meat). The four species are:
As common and widely distributed animals, deer have been important in the human diet since prehistoric times. Archaeological evidence from various sites around the world, and from as far back as half a million years ago, can be mustered to demonstrate this.
Although deer have never been fully domesticated, some human control has been exerted in their management, in Europe and perhaps in ancient Egypt also, from very early times. A simple form of management was to fence in a relatively small area and keep enough captured deer inside the fence to ensure an adequate supply of venison when needed. On a larger scale, there were extensive deer parks, a common phenomenon in medieval Europe. Generally speaking, these parks had a dual function. They provided sport for the aristocracy and big landowners; and they were a source of valuable meat. A feature of European history for many centuries (and even in the 20th century) has been a ding-dong struggle between those who would enclose for such purposes as much land as possible, denying access to the general population, and those who sought to minimize the enclosures. Hence many a battle of wits, or armed struggles, between poachers and gamekeepers.
One circumstance which affected the position in Britain during the 19th century was the Victorian fashion for all things Scottish, encouraged by Queen Victoria’s enthusiasm for spending long periods at Balmoral. The fashion led to management of red deer herds, on a large scale, for sport in the Scottish Highlands. The enthusiasm for deer stalking had as its main objective the larger and older animals, the ones looking like Landseer’s famous ‘Monarch of the Glen’; whereas the younger deer were the best to eat. Thus a certain dichotomy arose, in this context, between sport and gastronomy, which had so often been partners in the past.
These were not the only results. Nichola Fletcher (1987) writes that:
Strangely, though, the passion for deer stalking was indirectly responsible for the emergence of modern deer farming. In the late 1870s a shipment of deer from Invermark in Angus was imported into New Zealand. Several others followed suit and were released for sporting purposes. The deer thrived and multiplied in the lush forests, eventually causing serious destruction, and ultimately were classed as vermin to be slaughtered by any means possible. However, the price paid for the by-products of the extermination campaign (tails, pelts, velvet antlers) by Oriental medicine-makers was such that one or two entrepreneurs decided to farm these pests, much to the derision of their neighbours.
The same author, herself a deer farmer and an authority on venison, points out that deer farming in New Zealand began only in the late 1960s, and in Britain (Scotland) just a year or two later. Venison may now be either wild, park, or farmed, and it is important to know the origin and age of the deer when deciding how to cook it.
a simple process by which liquid—stock, wine, water, or cream—is added to a container after browning meat or other food, to dissolve the residue. The bits adhering to the base and sides of the pan are scraped off and incorporated into the liquid. The residue includes soluble proteins and other substances which have leached from the food onto the surface of the pan; heating induces appetizing colour and flavour changes (the Maillard reaction) in these. Deglazing is a thrifty process, ensuring that the concentrated flavours are retained and become part of the sauce served with the food.
Laura Mason
in a food context, describes what happens to PROTEINS as a first result of being heated (or as a result of acidification, or of violent agitation, or of being cooled below a critical temperature). Their structure is shaken loose, and an ‘unfolding of molecules’ takes place. This unfolding exposes the protein chains to each other to a greater extent, opening the way to cross-bonding between them, which will result eventually in first flocculation and then COAGULATION.
When denaturation takes place, some of the physical and biological properties (but not the nutritional qualities) of the proteins are affected. These changes are usually, but not invariably, irreversible. In contrast, the further changes which typically occur when proteins are subjected to higher heat and which bring about coagulation, are always irreversible.
It is natural to think of denaturation as happening to the protein in something visible and solid, such as a piece of fish or meat. However, it applies just as well to protein in a liquid (milk or blood) or in a gel (egg white).
From the point of view of the cook, it is sufficient to know the above, and to remember that denaturation is not an ‘all or nothing’ occurrence, but a matter of degree; slight denaturation may well be imperceptible.
and SWEDEN are the two Nordic countries which, for historical and geographical reasons, have been most influenced in culinary matters by GERMANY. Denmark shares with the neighbouring parts of the NETHERLANDS, especially Friesland, traditions of dairy farming and of a certain simplicity of food. The picture is completed by allowing for a more sophisticated and long-range influence, that of FRANCE, which had some effect on the eating habits of the wealthier classes.
With coastlines on both the North Sea and the Baltic, Danes have always had a fine supply of seafood. They are well known for their EELS and SHRIMP (often called Tivoli prawns, after the pleasure gardens), and rare delicacies such as green-salted (grønsaltet) fish, found on the island of Bornholm. They are devotees of PLAICE, which Danish housewives like to buy alive. The old fish market in Copenhagen was on the Gammelstrand, where a stocky statue of a lady fishmonger stands on the canal bank, impassively eyeing a pair of famous fish restaurants.
Like the Dutch, the Danes had an important trade with the Orient in past centuries. This accounts for their use of curry powder (of a mild sort), but they also have their own condiments. In any Danish fish shop there will be a bucket of fiskesennep, fish MUSTARD, a mixture of coarsely ground yellow and brown mustard seeds with mild Danish VINEGAR (made from molasses) and salt.
Frikadeller, meat patties, are everywhere. Pork is popular and the art of raising pigs, in particular those which produce a high proportion of the large amount of BACON eaten annually in Britain, is highly developed.
Classical Danish cookery books, from Fru Mangor (1837) onwards, tended to give more attention to French models than to the authentic traditions of Danish regional cookery; but a good survey of the latter by Westergaard (1974) showed how rich these traditions are. They include some unusual sweet soups, based on fruit and thickened with barley or sago.
Denmark’s international fame rests mainly, to judge by frequency of mention, on a single item, DANISH PASTRIES, although these are not Danish in origin and the Danes themselves refer to them as Wienerbrød. However, the runner-up in the international renown stakes would be a truly Danish item, smørrebrød, literally ‘bread and butter’; i.e. open sandwiches, made with RYE BREAD and having any of scores of special toppings. White bread is used if the topping is of shrimp or something similar.
Dentex dentex, a sizeable (maximum length 1 m/40″) and important fish of the Mediterranean and E. Atlantic from NW Africa to the Bay of Biscay. The colour of this fish changes as it grows older, from grey to a faintly rosy hue and then to a bluish-grey; and the number and disposition of the dark spots vary. The quality of the dentex is almost as good as that of the GILT-HEAD BREAM and it is in keen demand. Few individuals survive long enough to reach the maximum size, and those in the markets are usually in the range 20–50 cm (8–20″).
There are several close relations. D. maroccanus is smaller, crimson in colour, and present in the W. Mediterranean and warm waters of the E. Atlantic. D. gibbosus is rosy in colour and if it survives into old age develops a noticeable forehead, giving it an intellectual appearance. It is found chiefly in the W. Mediterranean whereas D. macrophthalmus, crimson and large eyed, is more common in the eastern basin of that sea. All make good eating.
A large dentex may be stuffed and baked, using white wine and Mediterranean aromatics. Smaller specimens can be grilled whole.
an English cheese made by a process similar to that of CHEDDAR. It is pressed less hard and therefore retains a higher moisture content; it is also more definitely primrose yellow in colour, with a closer and more flaky texture, and a milder and more acid flavour.
Derby is of a thick disc shape and weighs 4 to 14 kg (9 to 31 lb). A smaller version flavoured with sage and coloured green with spinach juice was traditionally made at harvest time and Christmas; this survives as sage Derby in British cheese shops and delicatessens. See also SAGE CHEESE.
a collective name for sweet dishes considered suitable for the last course of a meal, including CAKES, ICE CREAMS, CREAMS, raw and cooked fruit, PUDDINGS, PASTRIES, and PIES. Cheese may also be included amongst desserts. In Britain, ‘dessert’ is sometimes regarded as an elegant synonym for the words ‘pudding’, or ‘sweet’, which are used in the same collective sense.
The word derives from French desservir, meaning to remove the dishes, or clear the table. Originally ‘the dessert’, singular, denoted a course of fruit and sweetmeats, either placed on the table after the meal, or served at a separate table; in English, it replaced the word BANQUET, an older name for a similar course, during the 18th century. The change in emphasis from the 18th-century French ‘dessert’ to the 20th-century miscellany of sweet ‘desserts’ appears to have taken place in N. America. The word had a wider meaning for Americans as early as the end of the 18th century, whereas this usage was not common in England until the 20th century.
Originally, dessert, apart from providing something sweet to nibble, was designed to impress. Mrs Beeton (1861) lists numerous fresh fruits considered suitable, and refers to ‘choice and delicately-flavoured cakes and biscuits’ served with ‘most costly and recherché wines’; plus candied fruits and other morsels such as chocolate (following French fashion). She devoted many words to presenting and garnishing the dessert in china, silver, and glass, and commented that ‘as late as the reigns of our two last Georges fabulous sums were often expended upon fanciful desserts’.
The latter probably owed much to French inspiration, where, during the early to mid-18th century, the dessert comprised impressive pyramids of fruit and sweetmeats, displayed in rococo style on tables decorated with flowers and tall candelabra. Finishing touches were provided by setpieces resembling anything from a Greek temple to a Chinese pavilion, modelled out of more or less edible ingredients.
A formal dessert in the old sense is now a rarity. One interesting survival is the Provençal gros souper on Christmas Eve, which finishes with a ritual presentation of les treize desserts, the 13 desserts, based on local fruits, nuts, baking, and confectionery. Elisabeth Luard (1990) quotes a Provençal woman talking about these:
We dried our own apricots, made quince paste, and we always had les mendiants, the four begging orders of friars: almonds for the Dominicans, figs for the Franciscans, hazelnuts for the Carmelites, dried currants for the Augustines. We made the dark nougat at home with hazelnuts and honey, and it was so hard you needed a hammer to break it. But we always bought the white nougat, which is a factory-made speciality of Montélimar.
Other possibilities include local orchard fruit; enriched breads such as pompe à l’huile (a BRIOCHE-type bread enriched with oil); imported oranges; and sweet or savoury panade (TARTS). Traditions vary between areas and families, but there are always 13 items, and they are said to represent Christ and the twelve apostles.
Laura Mason
a culinary term which according to the NSOED first appeared as a noun in the 18th century, and then in the early 19th century as a verb meaning to cook something with fiery hot spices or condiments. Theodora FitzGibbon (1976) remarks, however, that ‘Boswell, Dr Johnson’s biographer, frequently refers to partaking of a dish of “devilled bones” for supper’, which suggests an earlier use. The term was presumably adopted because of the connection between the devil and the excessive heat in Hell.
Devilled bones and devilled kidneys are just two examples of the dishes in this category, which could be referred to as ‘devils’. Writing about this noun, FitzGibbon distinguishes between brown devils, wet devils, and white devils, explaining the differences between these. An earlier authority, Dallas (1877) in Kettner’s Book of the Table, had stated that devils were of two kinds, the dry and the wet, but had also commented:
It is the great fault of all devilry that it knows no bounds. A moderate devil is almost a contradiction in terms; and yet it is quite certain that if a devil is not moderate he destroys the palate, and ought to have no place in cookery, the business of which is to tickle, not to annihilate, the sense of taste.
The dilemma thus stated may have proved insoluble, for devilling has fallen out of fashion.
A certain parallel exists in France in the form of dishes ‘à la diable’.
One of the British SAVOURIES which was popular for a time bore the name Devils on horseback and consisted of prunes stuffed with chutney, rolled up in rashers of bacon, placed on buttered bread and sprinkled with grated cheese, and cooked under the grill. The absence of cayenne pepper or other hot condiments suggests that in this instance the word ‘devil’ was introduced as a counterpart to ‘angel’ in Angels on horseback rather than in the sense described above.
is an American dark chocolate cake. Noting that the first recipe appeared in 1905, Mariani (1994) suggests that the cake received its name ‘because it is supposedly so rich and delicious that it must, to a moralist, be somewhat sinful, although the association is clearly made with humour’. Its dark colour, achieved by chocolate frosting which covers the entire cake, contrasted with the snowy white of the earlier ANGEL FOOD CAKE.
Rubus caesius, is closely related to and resembles the BLACKBERRY, and has a similar distribution; but it bears smaller fruits with fewer and larger druplets, which are covered by a purple bloom. Hulme (1902) declared the dewberry to be more succulent than the blackberry; but Grigson (1955) points out that it varies from season to season in abundance and quality, and that in a poor season it deserves the local Wiltshire name ‘token blackberry’.
Other dewberries include R. canadensis, with juicy fruits, and R. ursinus, the Pacific or California dewberry, whose large berries have many uses and are sometimes dried. There is some cultivation of these berries.
a well-known example of PARSI FOOD in Gujarat, India; dhaan meaning rice and sak meaning vegetables. Dhansak is a meat, vegetable, and lentil CURRY served with brown PILAF rice. The Parsis use a mix of DALS but always include moong dal (see MUNG BEAN) in this dish. A specific spice mixture, dhansak masala, is prepared just for this dish.
When the Parsis settled on the western coast of India, they adopted Gujarati as their language and absorbed local influences into their cuisine, but maintained many of their own culinary traditions, including the use of mung beans, of which this dish is the most famous example.
Helen Saberi
an Arabic word which refers to a thick sweet syrup made by boiling down grape juice. It is made in various Middle Eastern countries, and is closely related to the Turkish PEKMEZ and kindred products described under that head.
A similar product is prepared from dates; this is dibis (the same word, with a different regional pronunciation) in the Gulf States, where it is used in many sweet dishes.
what a person or a group of people habitually eat. The diet of most people reflects a combination of availability and inclination, both of which factors depend to some extent on the prevailing culture as well as on economic influences.
Special diets are followed by persons suffering from various disabilities or illnesses; diabetics are a well-known example. They are also followed, in the western world, by people who are ‘slimming’, and expressions such as ‘I’m on a diet’ commonly relate to that situation. The urge to control and influence both mental and physical states by means of food has been a constant in many cultures, whether in those organized religions which used fasting to attain heightened awareness or closer proximity to the deity, or among athletes such as sumo wrestlers, Roman gladiators, or English prize-fighters who wished to improve their strength. This manipulation of the act of eating has penetrated modern societies to such an extent that it seems inescapable. While earlier medical knowledge, particularly that founded on the humoral theories of classical Greece, had seen the consequences of eating as a continuum, an ever-present influence on an individual’s health and well-being, modern ‘diets’ often have more specific ends in view. These are often the results of ‘food fads’ or wholly erroneous medical theories. Some diets may have a short currency, in both the life of the nation and the life-cycle of the individual. Others, for example the ‘macrobiotic’ diet, or vegetarian or fruitarian diets, have more general application and may be adopted for the whole life of the proponent. One consequence of our willingness to use food for purposes much more varied than its obvious function of nourishment has been that ‘food disorders’, for example anorexia nervosa and bulimia, have become much more common.
Dietary supplements, especially vitamins, may be necessary in certain situations. There is much debate over the extent of this need, which must anyway vary according to what a person’s basic diet provides. When foodstuffs (such as flour for making bread) are ‘fortified’ with such supplements (e.g. calcium, iron, B vitamins), it is sometimes a case of putting back what was originally there before the foodstuff was processed (e.g. to produce white flour).
National or ethnic diets vary considerably according to what are the STAPLE FOODS in a given area or group. Personal diets vary to an infinite extent. The literature and the popular press often draw attention to examples which will appear freakish to most people (e.g. an English child who for several years would eat nothing except jam sandwiches) and which may, on analysis, prove to be adequate, or nearly so, or dangerously deficient.
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in the widest sense of the term, would embrace secular legislation such as the sumptuary laws which various governments from classical times up to the present have passed in an effort to stem excesses of gluttony, flagrantly unfair distribution of foodstuffs, and other practices perceived as harmful to the state. However, the term would not normally be applied to legislation, for example during the Second World War, to provide for rationing of essential foods. Indeed, the phrase is commonly used with almost exclusive reference to ‘laws’ associated with religious beliefs. In this connection, see BUDDHISM AND FOOD, CHRISTIANITY AND FOOD, HINDUISM AND FOOD, JAINS AND FOOD, JEWISH DIETARY LAWS, MUSLIMS AND FOOD. It will be apparent from these other entries that dietary laws of this type vary considerably, in scope, content, and severity, from one religion to another. Some attempts have been made to find a pattern underlying these phenomena, or a rationale explaining what human needs they satisfy; but the results are not impressive. Like the religions which have given rise to them, the religious dietary laws resist ‘explanation’. And it must be taken into account that there are very large numbers of people whose choices of what to eat are not influenced by any such laws.
See also TABOO, VEGETARIANISM, and, on a different but not wholly unrelated plane, ORGANIC FOOD.
Sir Kenelm(1603–65) an adventurous and romantic figure of 17th-century England whose eccentric and posthumously published recipe book has earned him the interest and esteem of food historians.
His father, a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, died when he was still a boy; and it was a Protestant uncle who took him, at age 14 and for two years, to Spain, where he began his lifelong habit of collecting medical and culinary receipes. Later, at Oxford, he studied under a famous mathematician and astrologer, and also fell in love, with a notorious beauty, Venetia Stanley. Opposing the match, his mother packed him off on on a three-year Grand Tour of France and Italy, but he married Venetia when he returned and the marriage lasted happily for eight years, until Venetia’s sudden death in 1633.
After Venetia’s death, Digby had a spell as an Anglican, but then reverted to being a Catholic and spent some time, after the execution of King Charles, as a spokesman seeking toleration for the Catholics in England. This and other politico-religious activities were accompanied by activity in the newly formed Royal Society and by much writing. He wrote prolifically, including works of literary criticism and philosophy. However, his most lasting work has proved to be one which he never saw in print. This was his collection of recipes, assembled after his death and published by his laboratory assistant Hartman for his own profit under the title The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened: Whereby is Discovered Several ways for making of Metheglin, Sider, Cherry-Wine, &c. Together with Excellent Directions for Cookery: As also for Preserving, Conserving, Candying, &c.
This book begins with 106 recipes for mead, metheglyn, and other drinks mostly based on fermented honey and herbs. Some had been contributed by sundry friends and professional cooks, others were the fruits of Digby’s own research. They are followed by POSSETS, SYLLABUBS, and CREAMS, and by soups and gruels for health and nourishment. There follows a somewhat jumbled collection of savoury dishes. Recipes for fruit preserves, tonic sweetmeats (including the remarkable ‘Cordial Tablets’, whose worth has been proved in the late 20th century), cosmetic cures, and a perfume for tobacco round off the collection. Because it has an engagingly amateur, yet learned, air about it and reflects the attractive enthusiasm of the author, the book, which has been twice reprinted in the 20th century, seems sure to continue finding appreciative readers.
the process by which the body breaks down food and extracts nutrients from it. The word was first used by medieval alchemists to describe a chemical reaction which dissolved materials. When the French scientist Denis Papin invented the first pressure cooker (see PRESSURE COOKING) in 1679, he called it a digesteur.
The digestion of food takes place in stages. It begins in the mouth where the ENZYME ptyalin, present in saliva, begins to break down starch in food to sugars. Chewing food, by breaking it into small pieces, exposes a large surface area for digestive enzymes to work on.
The chewed food passes down the oesophagus into the stomach. The gastric juice in the stomach contains hydrochloric acid, which helps to break down proteins and starch by the process of HYDROLYSIS, assisted by movements of the stomach wall. At the same time the enzyme pepsin begins to dismantle the PROTEINS into smaller pieces known as polypeptides, each consisting of a few AMINO ACIDS. Food remains in the stomach for several hours. The time is influenced by the amount of fat in the food, which relaxes the stomach wall and slows down the whole process. Fatty foods seem more ‘filling’ because they remain in the stomach for longer.
Some of the nutrients liberated in the stomach are absorbed through the stomach wall into the bloodstream. These include any available glucose (other sugars are dealt with later), and water-soluble MINERAL salts and vitamins of the B group and C. Any alcohol is also absorbed here; it circulates in the bloodstream, thus producing the well-known effects on the brain, and is eventually broken down to sugar by the liver.
The partly digested food moves out of the stomach to the duodenum, which is the first section of the small intestine—its name is derived from the Latin duodeni (‘twelve each’) because it is about 12 finger widths long. It contains pancreatic juice, provided by the pancreas; and bile from the gall bladder, which emulsifies fats (breaks them into small droplets—see EMULSION). Three types of enzyme are at work here. Amylases continue to break down starches to sugars (ptyalin, already mentioned, is also an amylase). Trypsin carries on with the breakdown of proteins. Lipases start work on the fats, separating them into the fatty acids and glycerol of which they are composed. By the time the food leaves the duodenum, the stomach acid has been neutralized and the rest of digestion takes place in slightly alkaline conditions.
The food now continues along the small intestine, which is 6 m (20′) long in a human adult. It is moved by peristalsis, rhythmical contractions of the intestinal wall. Here more enzymes work on sugars. Invertase splits sucrose into glucose and fructose (see SUGAR). Maltase breaks maltose down to glucose. Lactase turns lactose to glucose and galactose (but see LACTOSE INTOLERANCE). At the same time erepsin separates the protein fragments into single amino acids. More lipases complete the breakdown of fats. The liberated nutrients, including those vitamins and minerals that were not absorbed by the stomach, filter through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream.
Next, the remains of the food move into the large intestine, a wider tube which runs up from the bottom of the abdomen, across under the stomach, and down again to the anus. The main function of this stage is to absorb more water from these food remains so that they become a compact mass of faeces, ready to be eliminated. Here dietary fibre (see CELLULOSE) is important. It retains water, so that the faeces remain fairly fluid, and its bulk also helps to keep them moving.
The intestine contains bacteria which help to break down undigested solids, and also make some vitamins of the B group which can be absorbed and used by the body. These bacteria can digest some carbohydrates that the body cannot deal with. As far as is known, the body gets no useful sugars from the process. One by-product is the gas methane, which causes flatulence.
The whole process takes from several hours to several days. It does not always go smoothly, especially if one overloads the system by consuming a lot of rich, fatty food. Stress such as anxiety can increase the rate of secretion of stomach acid and irritate the stomach lining; or, conversely, it may reduce secretion so that digestion is slow and difficult. The resulting symptoms are loosely described as indigestion, dyspepsia, acidity, or heartburn—which is nothing to do with the heart, and is felt some way above the place where the trouble actually occurs. It used to be thought that peptic ulcers were caused by excessive stomach acid burning a hole in the lining of the stomach or duodenum. In the 1990s the cause was identified as a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, which thrives in the harsh conditions of the stomach. It can be killed with antibiotics.
Advice on how to promote good digestion takes many forms, often recommending particular diets or foodstuffs. Indeed, some foodstuffs recommend themselves by their names, e.g. the famous digestive biscuits of Britain which, however, have no effect one way or the other. On the other hand, the promenade digestive recommended by some French (and other) authors does seem likely to be beneficial.
Ralph Hancock
the seed of the small, mango-like fruit (sometimes called wild mango) of a W. African tree, Irvingia gabonensis, associated particularly with Gabon.
The seeds or kernels, called agbono or apon, which are oily, are sometimes eaten as nuts, or used in cooking like nuts, e.g. in Nigeria as an ingredient in soups or as a seasoning element. But they are more commonly processed into a stiff paste known as dika bread or Gabon chocolate. This is done by grinding the kernels, then heating them to melt the fat, and sometimes adding pepper or other spices. The result may also be smoked. The product is used as seasoning for meat, fish, plantain dishes, etc.
Crude dika paste as described above can be heated to yield a product called dika butter, which is comparable to cocoa butter.
Anethum graveolens, a herb indigenous to W. Asia, known in the Mediterranean region and S. Russia since long ago, has become naturalized in most of Europe and N. America and is now cultivated in many parts of the world.
However, although popular in W. Europe, dill has special associations with the Nordic countries, Poland, and Russia, where the leaves and seeds are used most abundantly, e.g. with fish—fried, boiled, and in particular GRAVLAKS; on potatoes; for flavouring pickled cucumbers, gherkins, etc. (‘dill pickle’ is well known); with yoghurt and sour cream. The Nordic connection is apparent in the name dill itself, which derives from the Old Norse dilla meaning to lull (dill water is used for soothing babies in England; and dill is a main ingredient in the gripe water used for the same purpose).
Dill is also often teamed up with broad beans in a PILAF and in KOFTA in Iran.
Dill belongs to the PARSLEY family and is closely related to FENNEL; the two plants are hard to tell apart. However, dill is an annual whereas fennel is perennial; and fennel has an anise flavour which dill lacks.
What is called Indian dill was formerly recognized as a separate species, but is now regarded as a subspecies or variety, Anethum graveolens ‘Sowa’. The plants are taller than European dill and the seeds have a more pungent and bitter flavour which is preferred for use in curries.
an important institution of Cantonese cuisine which has become increasingly visible in ‘Chinatowns’ outside China, has been described by Yan-Kit So (1992) in terms which cannot be bettered, as follows:
Literally translated as ‘so close to the heart’, they are, in reality, a large range of hors d’œuvres Cantonese people traditionally enjoy in restaurants (previously teahouses) for breakfast and for lunch, but never for dinner, washed down with tea. ‘Let’s go yumcha (to drink tea)’, is understood among the Cantonese to mean going to a restaurant for dimsum; such is the twin linkage between the food and the beverage. The familiar yumcha scene at a Cantonese restaurant, which is often on several floors, is one of young girls pushing trolleys replete with goodies in bamboo baskets piled high or small dishes set next to each other. As they mill around the dining tables, they call out the names of their wares and place the baskets or dishes on to the tables when diners signal their wishes.
The range of dimsum in a restaurant easily numbers several dozen and they come under these main varieties: the steamed, the fried and the deep-fried. Among the steamed variety, which are served in small bamboo baskets, ‘char siu bao’—buns made with flour stuffed with ‘charsiu’ or roast pork—are the most basic. Next come ‘hargow’—crescent-shaped transparent skin dumplings made with glutenless flour stuffed with shrimp; ‘siumai’—open-top minced pork dumplings wrapped with wonton skin made with wheat flour; and ‘fanguo’—flat dumplings made with glutenless flour stuffed with chopped mushrooms, bamboo shoots and pork. Three kinds of ‘tsuenfun’—steamed rice flour dough sheets stuffed with either charsiu, shrimp or minced beef—are sought after for their silken, slippery texture. Among the deep-fried variety the favourites are spring rolls, ‘wugok’ or taro croquettes, which have an almost honeycomb appearance, and ‘harmshuigok’—round dumplings made with glutinous rice flour tasting slightly sweet-savoury. ‘Law Baak Go’ and ‘Wu Tow Go’—savoury puddings made with white radish and taro—are often served shallow-fried.
Besides dumplings, a range of steamed dishes served in bamboo baskets is also popular. Pork spareribs chopped into small cubes and seasoned with black beans or a plum sauce, duck’s webs deep-fried then steamed in a spicy sauce, and steamed beef balls seasoned with tangerine peel are but the obvious examples. Beef tripe or ‘gnauchaap’ and chicken feet, the latter enjoyed perhaps more for their texture than flavour, are, for many Europeans, an acquired taste. But most people adore the dishes of suckling pig, roast pork and cold chicken found on the trolleys of those restaurants which have kitchens specialising in them.
an important American institution which originally, in the middle of the 19th century, was a railway dining car. However, by extension it came to mean a cheap roadside restaurant which could be either a disused railway dining car, or something built to resemble this, or something else giving the impression of mobility. Although diners, almost by definition, offer modestly priced food of an unsophisticated nature, they offer scope for connoisseurship and even minor cults, and various publications had been devoted to them in the latter part of the 20th century.
the main meal of the day, whether eaten at mid-day or in the evening. In Britain, the timing and composition of dinner has varied considerably over the centuries, and also regionally, by social class, and according to occasion. The same would be true, although sometimes with less striking differences, of other western countries, and the same principle of variation can be observed elsewhere—although the concept of ‘dinner’ begins to fray at the edges once one tries to transfer it to peoples whose languages and historical roots are quite different from those of Europe.
A modest dinner may be referred to as ‘supper’; but that term also signifies a meal eaten some time after dinner, e.g. at the end of a ball or after the theatre.
A survey of the successive changes in the hour of dinner in England was conducted with notable thoroughness and wit, drawing largely on literary sources, by Palmer (1952).
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a culinary term of the Philippines, comes from the word dugo (blood), and is a stew of meats—variety and/or otherwise—cooked in blood, vinegar, garlic, and hot peppers.
Most dinuguan are made from pork internal organs (heart, liver, intestines, pancreas) and meat and/or fat. They are usually by-products of the butchering of a pig, using up the blood and the organs that do not go into other dishes, or of the making of lechon (whole, spit-roasted pig).
Although dinuguan is found throughout the Philippines, there are regional variations. There is dinuguan manok made with chicken meat, internal organs, and blood. Beef dinuguan from Nueva Ecija is called cerkely. The Pampanga variant is light coloured, filled with soft internal organs, headmeat, and fat, and is called tid-tad. There is dinuguan with coconut milk. Most versions have whole chillies for fragrance.
Dinuguan is often served with rice at lunch, dinner, and feasts, but a bowl of it is also popular for the mid-afternoon merienda (snack) or breakfast, when it is accompanied by puto (see RICE CAKES OF THE PHILIPPINES) or in some places, bread.
Doreen Fernandez
separating a liquid from a mixture by boiling it off and condensing the vapour. The best-known use of the technique is to make alcoholic drinks such as brandy; but there are other, food-related, uses; flavourings such as rosewater (see ROSES) and ORANGE FLOWER WATER are prepared by a type of distillation.
Distillation can also be used to produce drinking water from sea water, a process described by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. At that time the Egyptians were already distilling turpentine from pine resin, and probably also making small amounts of alcohol for medicinal use. It was only with the rise of Arab science that the distillation of alcohol was carried out on an appreciable scale. Islam prohibits the consumption of alcoholic drinks, but certainly by the time the technique reached European countries in the 14th and 15th centuries it was being used for that purpose.
The principle of distillation is that different liquids boil at different temperatures. Ethanol, the type of alcohol found in drinks, boils at 78 °C (173 °F), considerably lower than the boiling point of water at 100 °C (212 °F). Brandy is made by heating wine to a temperature between these figures in a closed vessel—a still. The alcohol boils but the water does not. The alcohol vapour passes out through a tube at the top of the still. This tube continues as a long downward spiral in which the vapour gradually cools and condenses back to a liquid. The whole process is accompanied by complications which often make it necessary to repeat the distillation at least once to achieve the required strength and purity.
Drinking water is distilled from sea water in a vacuum still, in which pressure is reduced to lower the boiling point so that less heat is required. Even so, it is an expensive process and largely restricted to rich countries such as the Gulf States.
Distilled, and thus very strong, VINEGAR is used for making pickles. The boiling point of acetic acid, at 118 °C (244 °F), is higher than that of water so the distillation of vinegar is a process of boiling away unwanted water.
Steam distillation is used to extract essential oils from flower petals, herbs, and spices. The materials to be distilled are mashed in water. Steam is bubbled through them to heat and evaporate the oils, which are carried away by the steam. Since the oils do not mix with water, they are easy to recover from the condensed liquid.
Destructive distillation is the heating of a solid in a closed vessel until it decomposes into other substances. Artificial ‘smoke’ flavouring is made by the destructive distillation of wood.
Ralph Hancock
one of the more puzzling herb names. Geoffrey Grigson (1955) quotes Turner (1548) as saying that the name properly belonged to Dictamnus albus, pepperwort in English and Pfefferkraut in German; and added that the old form ‘dittany’, which it should have replaced, remained obstinately in currency. Other authors link either or both names with CRESS and other herb families. Thus Karen Hess (1981), Facciola (1990), and Tucker (1994) all identify ‘dittany of Crete’ with Origanum dictamnus.
It is thus no easy matter, when considering recipes for preparations like GREENSAUCE, to determine what a reference to either dittander or dittany really signifies.
an American confection related to NOUGAT and MARSHMALLOW. It is made by cooking a sugar syrup to the firm- or hard-ball stage (120 °C or 124 °C (255 °F), see SUGAR BOILING), and then beating it into whisked egg whites. Occasionally egg yolks are used instead of the whites, to give a yellow result. Vanilla is often used as a flavouring, and nuts, glacé cherries, or candied angelica added. ‘Sea foam’ is a name sometimes given to divinity made with soft light-brown sugar, rather than ordinary granulated sugar.
Laura Mason
a name applied to several plants which belong, like the SORRELS which they resemble, to the genus Rumex. Some are edible, notably patience dock, R. patientia, which is thought to have originated in S. Europe and W. Asia and was known as a food plant in classical times. It has been cultivated in some parts of Europe. The name ‘patience dock’ is also applied, in parts of England, to BISTORT; and it is this other plant which is almost invariably meant when reference is made to the English tradition of eating ‘patience dock’ at Easter. See DOCK PUDDING.
R. crispus, curled dock, and R. obtusifolius, broad-leaved or bitter dock, have also been eaten as green vegetables. The latter, which is the well-known remedy for nettle stings, was formerly used for wrapping butter, so may be called butter dock. It has been introduced to N. America and Australasia and is sometimes grown as a garden vegetable.
R. alpinus, mountain dock (or monk’s rhubarb), belongs to the mountain regions of C. Europe and the Balkans. It is eaten in salads and also cooked as a spinach substitute. It too was formerly employed to preserve butter.
Other docks are used as food in various parts of the world. R. abyssinicus, Abyssinian spinach or Spanish rhubarb dock, also has a connection with butter; it was used in the Congo for dyeing it a brick red colour. R. crispus, referred to above, is a tall herb which has succulent leaves and stems which can be stewed like rhubarb; indeed, Low (1989) asserts that in Australia some people prefer it to rhubarb.
a mixture of ‘dock’ (i.e. BISTORT, Polygonum bistorta), oatmeal, onions, and nettles, thickened with oatmeal and boiled together. There are those who profess to love it, and those who loathe it. It tastes something like a cross between spinach and asparagus. Once cooked, it is fried by the dollop or slice in plenty of old-fashioned, real, bacon fat to counteract the strong taste and green slimy consistency. When it has a crisp, fatty, salty outside, it is more palatable.
Dock pudding has become synonymous with Calderdale (in W. Yorkshire), especially Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge, and Todmorden, ever since 1971. It was in that year that the first competition to find the World’s Champion Dock Pudding Makers was held there. However, dock pudding is by no means unique to Calderdale. The truth is that bistort has been used in many similar pottages and puddings for centuries, in many areas of England and S. Scotland.
Up to the 17th century, oatmeal POTTAGE (poddige, porridge) was a universal food in Britain, eaten by rich and poor alike. It was often enlivened, both for flavour and food value, with green herbs such as daisy, tansy, dandelion, nettles, kale, etc. But at Easter time, it was invested with a special significance, partly as a seasonal ritual, partly as a vital spring blood cleanser and anti-scorbutic. (Up to the 19th century, many people had scurvy by February because of a lack of green stuff in winter.) The Easter connection of bistort pudding is reflected in various local names for bistort: passion dock or patience dock (from Passiontide), pash-docken (Littondale), Easter mangiant, Easter giant, Easter ledger, etc. It is called passion or patience dock in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and N. England, and known mainly as patience dock in Cheshire and Lancashire.
the supreme example of animals which are regarded in the western world not just as pets but as true companions, in activity and thought, for human beings, and consequently not to be even imagined as potential food. So strong are the feelings of revulsion which the mere mention of such an idea can provoke that some writers have excused themselves from even mentioning the subject. This taboo is almost as strong as that governing CANNIBALISM and, generally speaking, very much stronger than that affecting the HORSE (another animal ‘companion’). Feelings of hesitation or sadness over eating a lamb or a young pig, even though these other animals may be treated as pets and show signs of intelligence, are on a different plane. Although they may occasionally be overwhelming for individuals, they lack the strength and near universality in the western world of the feelings about dogs (and CATS). Perhaps it was as a supreme example of Albion’s perfidy that Savary asserted in his Dictionnaire universel (1741) that English brewers achieved the special flavour of their porter by adding the flesh of a flayed dog to their vats.
The situation has been quite different in some other parts of the world, and even in Europe in past times. Dalby (1996) has summed up the situation in classical Greece:
Aristotle in the Study of Animals … brackets pig and dog together as synanthropeuómena, ‘animals symbiotic with man’. Both were eaten in classical Greece, but dog, kyon, was not a food of which one boasted. It is never listed in the comedy menus or in the gastronomic poetry of the fourth century. Roast dog was, however, recommended for certain diets by the author of the Hippocratic dietary text Regimen, puppy meat for others.
Simmonds (1859), who shrank from nothing in The Curiosities of Food, a book devoted to ‘dainties and delicacies of different nations obtained from the animal kingdom’, mentions consumption of dogs in various parts of the world, including Africa, but lays emphasis on China and the Pacific islands. He explains that in China special breeds of dog are fattened for the table, ‘and the flesh of dogs is as much liked by them as mutton is by us’. The practice has been widely attested.
Turning to the Pacific islands, he refers to a traveller who had the experience of eating young dog in the Sandwich Islands. This person had to admit that everyone found it to be excellent, and that to his own palate ‘its taste was what I can imagine would result from mingling the flavour of pig and lamb’. However, he had qualms and indeed, on reflection, ‘felt as if dog-eating were only a low grade of cannibalism’.
One interesting point which is brought out in the anecdote from the Sandwich Islands is that the dogs eaten there were ‘fed exclusively on vegetables, chiefly taro’. This is seen as a mitigating circumstance, which fits in with the widespread disinclination of human beings to eat the flesh of other carnivores (whether they are pets or companions or not).
The situation in the Philippines has been described in various books about food by Filipino authors, including Gilda Cordero-Fernando (1976) and Alegre (in the book of essays by Doreen Fernandez and himself, 1988). The latter explains the interplay between the legal situation, the variable manner in which legal prohibitions are implemented, the way in which dog meat in Pampanga, for example, is part of the culinary tradition along with other exotic items, and what goes on in dog meat restaurants.
In recent times, the dog-eating habits of Korea have held centre stage, largely because of the great ingress of visitors during the Olympic Games of 1988 and the football World Cup in 2002. Dog eating has been illegal in S. Korea since 1945, but has never been banned in N. Korea, where both the Great Leader and his son the Dear Leader have been inveterate consumers. The law notwithstanding, much dog is still eaten in S. Korea, where in 2003 there were an estimated 6,000 restaurants selling poshintang or dog’s meat soup and where annual consumption of the meat ran at 8,500 tonnes. In fact, the gastronomic use of the meat is far exceeded by its employment as the base for a tonic drink that improves longevity and virility, which accounts for 93,600 tonnes. There are many Koreans who view the eating of dogs as a gesture in support of their national identity, thereby rejecting the post-war influence of America and the West.
Generally, Simoons (1994) provides the best survey of this troubling subject, drawing on information about many cultures in various parts of the world and exemplifying by well-chosen incidents the strong emotions which it continues to arouse.
the inappropriate English name given to a BIVALVE, Glycymeris glycymeris, which has a distribution from Norway and the Baltic down to the Mediterranean and the Canaries, and which is eaten in France, Spain and Portugal, and Italy. It may measure just over 6 cm (2.5″), and the shells are usually white or cream, with irregular zigzag markings. Well worth eating, but not outstandingly good.
a name given in a loose way to many of the smaller species of shark in many different languages. Why? The question is perplexing, all the more so since the doggy theme not only crosses species and genus boundaries (thus Squalus acanthias is ‘spur dog’ and Mustelus mustelus is ‘smooth hound’) but also extends into terms descriptive of lifestyle (newly born spur dogs are called a ‘litter’ of ‘pups’). Another puzzle, dealt with separately, is the English vernacular name HUSS.
This system of names does not extend to larger sharks, except for the PORBEAGLE (Lamna nasus). The species to which it applies are those which have a maximum length of anything from 60 cm (2′) to twice that. Most of them have tough, rough, sandpapery skins (which in some instances are used in place of sandpaper for smoothing). They are regarded as a nuisance by fishermen in N. America, and sometimes so in Europe; but on the whole they are seen by Europeans—and indeed everywhere except N. America—as a marketable commodity. Whereas special techniques are needed for catching large sharks such as the porbeagle, dogfish come up frequently in trawls along with other fish.
There are so many dogfish around the world that only a small proportion of them can be mentioned. They all have a maximum length of about 1.5 m (60″), but a normal adult length of half or two-thirds as much.
Whatever the true explanation of the name ‘dogfish’, it was not bestowed in order to make these fish seem attractive to consumers. Indeed fishmongers have consistently rechristened them by more flattering names, some of which, like the British ‘rock salmon’ or the Venetian vitello di mare (veal of the sea), are outrageously misleading, although others such as the Australian ‘flake’ seem venial. Anyway, insofar as these euphemisms work, they must be applauded, since there are two reasons for encouraging consumption of dogfish. One is that they breed fast and are voracious predators, feeding often on small specimens of more valuable species. The other is that they are good to eat, if properly prepared. Even in N. America, they have been marketed and eaten with appreciation in times of need, such as the First World War. The most serious fish cookery book ever published in the USA, that by Spencer and Cobb (1922), devotes earnest attention to them.
Like all sharks, dogfish have no true bones but make do with a cartilaginous skeleton. This is good from the cook’s point of view, since there are no tiresome small bones to contend with and it is easy to lift off fillets of whatever size seems suitable. The corresponding disadvantages are more apparent than real. Dogfish do not have a delicate flavour; but this simply means that they do not need to be cooked in a delicate way. They are fine in fish and chips, or covered with a robust sauce.
(or doggie bag) is a euphemism for the container in which a restaurant customer carries home any food that he or she was served but had not the appetite to finish. Rarely is it intended for the dog but rather may be the basis of the next meal at the domestic table. Early references are from the states of Washington and California in America during the 1940s. They certainly presume the dog as beneficiary. The Pet Pakit was a model of bag in San Francisco in 1943, and another pre-printed container in Washington had the rhyme,
Are you happy over dinner?
Don’t have all the fun alone.
Remember the pup who’s waiting
And take him a luscious bone.
It cannot have taken long for diners to appreciate that they, too, could profit from this service. Restaurant portions in the USA have always been large. The reasons for this may be competition and the need to deliver value for money, or to do with a desire to express plenty through conspicuous waste, or even a subliminal drive to banish the fear of hunger ever present in a nation of refugees. The consequence is excess on the plate. Once customers had overcome their own embarrassment, the bag or box gained universal acceptance, even in exclusive places. It spread to Europe and beyond with American tourists, but has never been so widely practised in these regions, because portions are smaller.
Doggy bags are not part of private entertainments, although latterly it has become normal for British children to take a slice of birthday cake away from a party rather than eat it on the spot. This may be likened to those Japanese who would often be given bags of the sweets that had been available during a home visit. At big Japanese banquets, such as wedding feasts, ‘SUSHI or sekihan [see AZUKI BEANS] might be served at the end of the meal, not so much with the intention that the guests should eat it there and then, but that they should take it home’ (Hosking, 1996). The bag they used is called oridutsumi. The most important recent development is that, in an effort to curb drink-driving, many states in the USA, and even countries such as France, have enacted regulations enabling customers to carry home wine not consumed at the time of dining.
Tom Jaine
a small tree or shrub of which varieties grow in Europe, N. Asia, and N. America, bearing small, round, cherry-like fruits which are eaten in some countries.
The best fruit of any Old World species is that of Cornus mas, commonly called cornel or cornelian cherry. It is bright red and may be as large as a small plum. The flavour is acid and slightly bitter. The fruit was formerly used in W. Europe to make pies, sauces, and confectionery, or pickled as a substitute for olives.
It is perhaps in Turkey that the fruits are most prominent. Evelyn Kalças (1974) writes:
It is to be found in late summer piled on huge trays in Turkish markets and fruit shops. Though not considered very tasty by most westerners, I have found the tartness quite tasty, and the jelly or jam made from it is flavorsome. A number of the whole fruit taken from the jam can be added to any fruit salad as an attractive and tasty contrast. There is a fascinating Turkish legend about this fruit. It seems that when Seytan—the Devil—first saw the Kizilcik tree covered with blossoms when no other fruit showed even a bud, he said to himself: ‘Aha! This tree will produce fruit first of all. I must be first there to secure it.’ So he gathered up his scales and basket and took up his position under the tree. He waited and waited, but all other fruit trees came into bloom and fruit formed on them. Still the Kizilcik fruit was not ready and ripe for eating. Seytan was patient, but he wondered what had happened. Then to his great surprise he discovered that this was one of the very last fruits to ripen at the end of summer, so his chagrin was great. Ever since then the Turks have called the tree:—‘Seytan alditan agaci’—the tree that deceived Satan.
The same author relates, as evidence of the use of the tree in antiquity, that the famous and un-untieable Gordian knot was formed from a thong of its leathery bark. (Alexander the Great, acquainted with the problem, drew his sword and severed the knot, then went on to fulfil the prophecy that whoever could undo it would conquer the world.)
Fernald and Kinsey (1943) cite a report by the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus that the Lapps used to make a ‘dainty’ using the berry of C. suecica mixed with whey, then boiled until the mass was as thick as flummery. After the stones had been strained out, this pudding would be eaten served with cream.
American dogwoods include the miner’s dogwood, C. sessilis, whose fruits are sweet when fully ripe, and the less flavourful bunchberry, C. canadensis. Both these and others were widely used by Indians.
vegetables stuffed in the E. Mediterranean style. There are two main categories: those with meat stuffings (usually extended with grain), which are served hot, often with a sauce such as broth thickened with lemon juice and eggs; and those with rice stuffings (often enriched with nuts, raisins, or pulses), which are served cold, dressed with oil. The latter are also known as yalanji dolma (Turkish yalanci, ‘counterfeit’; namely meatless).
In Turkey, a distinction may also be made between dolma (‘stuffed thing’), made from a hollowed-out vegetable (aubergine, courgette, sweet pepper, or tomato; less often potato, artichoke, cucumber, carrot, or celery), and sarma (‘rolled thing’), where the filling is rolled in an edible leaf, such as vine leaf or cabbage. A sort of sarma may also be made from separated layers of boiled leek or onion rolled around a stuffing.
Dolmas are vernacular food in Turkey, the Balkans, the southern Caucasus, Iran, C. Asia (where the word differs in form according to the local Turkish language: dolâma in Turkmen, tulma in Tatar), and in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, and Arabia. Kåldolmar (‘cabbage dolmas’) have long been part of Swedish cuisine also, as an unplanned consequence of Charles XII’s sojourn in Turkey after his defeat by the Russians at the battle of Poltava. When he returned to Sweden in 1715, he was followed by his Turkish creditors—and their cooks—who remained until 1732.
This distribution, as well as the name dolma itself, indicates that this dish belongs to the court cuisine of the Ottoman Empire. Vegetables had been stuffed before Ottoman times, but only sporadically. For instance, the ancient Greek thrion was a fig leaf stuffed with sweetened cheese, and some medieval Arabic cookbooks give recipes for aubergine stuffed with meat (and also, curiously, for the reverse: chunks of cooked aubergine coated with meat like a SCOTCH EGG). However, it was in Istanbul that stuffed vegetables were first treated as a regular culinary genre.
The Ottoman origin is somewhat obscured by the fact that in some countries stuffed vegetables may be referred to by a native name meaning ‘stuffed’, such as yemistos (Greek) or mahshi (Arabic). Indeed, some Arabic dialects rarely if ever use the word ‘dolma’. Nevertheless, the signs of Turkish origin are clear. In places as remote as Kuwait and Damascus, instead of mahshi waraq ʿinab (stuffed vine leaf) one may say mahshi yabraq (in Kuwait, mahshi brag), which comes from the Turkish yaprak (leaf).
Charles Perry
the name properly given to various large marine mammals of the family Delphinidae, the name porpoise being reserved for some of their smaller relations; but porpoise is used instead of dolphin in some parts of the world.
From classical antiquity, and perhaps even earlier times, the dolphin has been regarded as a friend of man, to be respected rather than caught and eaten. General concern for the preservation and well-being of marine mammals (see also DUGONG and WHALE) has reinforced this attitude in the 20th century, and dolphins only appear in the present book because they have been eaten in the past in Europe and may still be in some other parts of the world.
The two best-known species are Delphinus delphis, the common dolphin, and Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin. Delightful legends and tales from classical Greece and Rome have been recounted by Alpers (1960) in a work which deals also with the remarkable swimming speed of these creatures, their playful disposition, and a pleasing vindication of the description of them given by Aristotle.
It was at Genoa that the general rule of abstaining from eating dolphins was breached. There the dried flesh of dolphins, known as musciame, has regularly been for sale.
The DOLPHIN FISH is something quite different, a true fish not a mammal.
Coryphaena hippurus, is not to be confused with the DOLPHIN, which is a marine mammal. The dolphin fish is found all round the world in tropical and semi-tropical seas, but nowhere, with the possible exception of the waters round MALTA, in the quantities desired. It may attain a length of 1.5 m (5′) and is a remarkably handsome fish, but its iridescent colours of blue-green, silver, and gold fade rapidly once it is taken from the water.
It has the habit of swimming in small shoals around patches of flotsam, or floating logs, and is attracted by rafts or drifting boats. It eats other fish.
A smaller species, C. equisetis, the pompano dolphin fish, also has a circumglobal distribution and is not easily distinguished.
The dolphin fish has excellent flesh. Slices or steaks may be grilled, fried, or steamed. In Malta they are made into a pie with vegetables.
(or döner kebabı or even, in Canada, Donair), thin slices of marinated lamb packed tightly onto a vertical spit to form a solid mass and thus roasted, pieces of meat being cut off the outside as it browns, has become a familiar sight in western countries wherever Turkish immigrants have become established. The original in Turkey itself was, as its name dictates, ‘spinning roast meat’ and consisted of a large vertical spit of mutton or lamb (with much tail fat) roasted before charcoal arranged on shelves one above the other. When Turks began to work in large numbers in Germany during the 1960s, their food followed but, although much liked by the immigrants, it did not find favour with Germans until the offering was dressed up as a pitta bread sandwich filled with the doner meat, a salad of shredded lettuce and a sauce (usually chilli, barbecue, or garlic). The meat itself may be lamb, beef, or chicken and will be both thinly sliced ‘leaves’ and minced or ground (although in Germany minced meat is not permitted to exceed 60% of the whole, in England it may well do so). The meat will be seasoned with spices (particularly some Cypriot recipes) or marinated. Doner kebab is the main type of fast food in Germany and very significant in Austria, Denmark, and Britain (where the chief entrepreneurs have been Turkish Cypriot in origin). It is also important in Australia, although it may go under other names (depending on which immigrant group is the more important) such as souvlaki or gyros. In Canada there is a variation called Donair, named after a Halifax restaurant which invented it in 1973. The gyro of Greece (also named for its turning action) is the same but different. Clifford Wright (1999) suggests it was not introduced into Greece itself until after the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s. It too has travelled, particularly to America and Australia. There is more minced or ground meat in it than in doner kebab. It may also go under the name souvlaki, which should perhaps be restricted to more traditional forms of KEBAB. The shawarma of the Middle East (which has made its own journey to the restaurants of America, and Russia too) is broadly similar, although the meat may be more highly spiced, and other sauces such as tahini may be offered. For recipes, see Helou (2002). Sharwama travelled, too, to W. Africa (see WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA) in the wake of Lebanese merchants.
Tom Jaine
Myoxus glis, distinguished from other dormice (such as shared tea with the March Hare and the Hatter) by being called the fat or edible dormouse. This rodent inhabits much of S., C., and E. Europe and was appreciated by the Romans in classical times as food. They fattened dormice on special diets, then stuffed and baked them. An adult dormouse may measure 18 cm (7″), head and body, and has a tail of about equal length. The modern European country with the strongest dormouse tradition is SLOVENIA. Dormouse hunting has long been customary there, the animal being valued for fur as well as for meat. Modern visitors to a dormouse museum may view the many devices that trapped, it was said, up to 800,000 animals in the 1873 season.
a S. Indian PANCAKE, crispy on the surface but slightly spongy inside with a faintly sour taste. Dosas may be eaten as an accompaniment, to scoop up other food, but are most often eaten for breakfast, together with a SAMBAR (S. Indian DAL, hot and soupy) and coconut CHUTNEY.
Dosas can be made with a variety of batters, each giving a slightly different texture or colour, but the traditional dosas are made with rice and lentils (urd dal) mixed with water, a little butter and sometimes flavoured with fenugreek, then left to ferment overnight. The mixture is then ground to a batter the next day before being fried on a griddle or on a traditional dosa kalu (‘dosai stone’). The dosa kalu is in fact made of cast iron. Other types of dosa include:
Dosas are often filled (or rolled up) with a variety of vegetables and spices, when they are called masala dosa.
Helen Saberi
a malleable, uniform mixture of FLOUR (or meal, which is coarser) and water. Other liquids, leavening, eggs, sweetening, flavouring, and shortening ingredients are added as recipes dictate. Doughs are common in cuisines which exploit the properties of wheat (those rooted in Europe and SW and C. Asia), where their most significant use is in making wheat BREAD. A BATTER is made from similar ingredients to a dough, but is thin, and mixed by beating, not kneading.
Methods and relative proportions of ingredients used for making wheat-based doughs vary according to the desired product, encouraging or discouraging the development of GLUTEN to give varied textures. See also BREAD CHEMISTRY. Bread dough is made with high-protein flour, leavened with yeast or sourdough, and kneaded with water to develop the gluten, yielding a characteristic spongy appearance and chewy texture. Gluten development is also encouraged in pasta and noodle dough, which is heavily kneaded but unleavened; these have a relatively low moisture content when fresh and are often dried to give compact, long-keeping foods. Pastry doughs, and those for shortbread-type biscuits and cakes, use soft flour, with a high proportion of shortening (fat), and are usually unleavened, giving a crisp, friable result.
These are generalizations, and there are numerous exceptions, including doughs for unleavened breads (e.g. CHAPATI); pastry doughs in which gluten development is encouraged, such as FILO; and doughs for unleavened biscuits or CRACKERS, such as water biscuits. Manipulation, cooking, and special operations for particular products are all used to give individual character to dough-based items as disparate as a PRETZEL or PANETTONE.
Rye is also used to make bread doughs, but is less versatile; oats and barley have limited, regional applications. Doughs based on rice, maize, and other grains are made in non-wheat cuisines, but generally lack the primary importance of wheat doughs.
Staple grains other than wheat have different protein contents, and do not develop gluten as wheat-based doughs do. They include those used for unleavened breads, such as maize-flour TORTILLAS; and those which are steamed, including maize-flour TAMALES and the numerous glutinous rice cakes made in E. and SE Asia, for instance puto (see RICE CAKES OF THE PHILIPPINES) and the Japanese MOCHI.
Laura Mason
(also donut), a deep-fried ball or ring of soft dough, sometimes enriched with eggs, leavened with yeast or (latterly) baking powder, and often sprinkled with fine sugar afterwards. Many are further elaborated with candied peel, raisins, and so forth, while others enclose a blob of jam. The doughnut forms part of that whole group of fried pastries encompassed by the CRULLER, BEIGNET, and FRITTER though many of these latter were made with choux paste or plain batter rather than a yeasted dough.
The water content of doughnut mixtures is important; the dough must be stiff enough to be shaped, but still contain plenty of moisture to give the light spongy texture of the cooked product. When small pieces of the dough are dropped into boiling fat, they quickly heat through to well above normal boiling point, so that superheated steam puffs them up to lightness before the outside hardens. The presence of air or gas bubbles formed by beaten egg or yeast also helps the process. Since the speed with which heat penetrates a doughnut (or anything else) varies in proportion to the square of half the maximum thickness, and since the thickness of a doughnut is greatly reduced by making it in a ring shape, the doughnut with a hole cooks far faster than those without.
The frontier between doughnut and fritter is often indistinct, so it is difficult to give any list of doughnuts without wandering into disputed territory. With this proviso, a very few interesting kinds of doughnut are described below, moving in a grand sweep from the Old World through the New World and the Pacific and leapfrogging most of Asia back to the Near East.
Central to the later development of the form are the oliebollen or oliekoeken of the Netherlands which are still consumed in vast quantities in their homeland, particularly at the end of the year. As their name implies, they were fried in oil, though the smoutebol of the southern districts was fried in lard, as would be most of the American doughnuts once the recipe had crossed the Atlantic via Dutch settlers in New York (or even the Pilgrim Fathers themselves, who had stopped off in Holland on the way). American books contain many recipes for doughnuts, dating from the 1805 edition of Hannah Glasse that had special American addenda, though instructions are comparatively uncommon in English literature. Washington Irving refers on a couple of occasions to the Dutch way with baked goods, extolling ‘the doughty doughnut, the tenderer olykoek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller, sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes.’ These doughnuts were still spherical, the transition to the ring form occurring, as persistent myth would have it, through the agency of a ship’s captain in New England in 1847 wishing to accelerate the cooking of his mother’s doughy ‘sinkers’. True or false, the time is correct, for it was about the mid-century that this shape seems to have developed. Useful cutters to achieve it were patented in the USA in 1857. The ring doughnut has gone on to conquer the world, specifically in the hands of two giant food chains, Krispy Kreme (founded in 1937) and Dunkin Donuts (founded 1950).
Not all American doughnuts have the hole. They may be filled, e.g. with a blob of jam; this produces the ‘jelly donut’, similar to the Berliner Pfannkuchen of Germany. Fillings have been quite common in parts of Europe, e.g. an apple filling in Denmark.
The usual mixture for an American doughnut is a combination of flour, eggs, and milk, raised by baking powder or by bicarbonate of soda activated by sour milk. The formula echoes many used in Europe in a broad region stretching from the Ukraine (pampushky, Christmas doughnuts filled with jam or poppy seeds), through Germany (all sorts of Krapfen), and Denmark.
The jam doughnut is a universal offering in English bakeries today, but was once less common. In Victorian Hertfordshire it was the pastry of choice on Shrove Tuesday (which was called Doughnut Day in Baldock), as on the Isle of Wight it was the Christmas treat (see the recipe by Eliza ACTON, 1845). English recipe books of the end of the 19th century refer to both the American and Norwegian origins of the delicacy, although the evidence of their prior British existence is inescapable.
Laura Mason
Hyphaene thebaica, a native of Egypt. The Revd John Montgomery (1872), viewing it from a British standpoint, said that it ‘produces a fruit, the thick, brown, mealy rind of which has a remarkable resemblance to gingerbread’. This is confirmed by Corner (1966), who also remarks that elephants enjoy the fruits.
the French name for a sweetmeat composed of a nut or some other centre coated with layers of hard sugar. Almonds are the nuts usually chosen; alternative centres are seeds, fruit pastes, or chocolate, and occasionally liqueurs.
The manufacture of dragées is carried out using heated rotating pans, shaped a little like concrete mixers, in which a batch of almonds (for example) is tumbled. A ‘charge’ of sugar solution, mixed with gum arabic, is added. The rotating action of the pan causes the sugar to coat the centres, and the heat dries them; when the ‘charge’ is used up, another is added and the process is repeated until the sweets have reached the desired size. The sugar solution can be coloured and flavoured as the confectioner wishes; and the dragées may be polished after the final coat of sugar. The appearance and texture of the finished product is influenced by the proportion of sugar in the syrup.
Sweets made by this process, known as ‘panning’, include SUGAR ALMONDS (sometimes known as Jordan almonds in the USA), and other nut-based dragées; jelly beans; nonpareils, or HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS; and chocolate-centred dragées such as ‘Smarties’. GOBSTOPPERS are also made by panning, as are the French sweets called anis de Flavigny. Silver dragées, often used for cake decorations, are dragées given a final tumbling with a little gum solution and sheets of fine silver leaf in a glass pan.
Dragées have long been a great speciality of French confectionery. These sweets may have their origin in sugar-coated pills made by apothecaries. However, the original word ‘dragée’ is obscure although it occurs as early as the 13th century in the archives of Verdun in the north-east of France.
The word does not appear to have entered English until the middle of the 19th century, when the older terms sugar-plums or COMFITS began to be displaced. These usually employed whole spices, such as coriander and aniseed, for the centres. Aniseed balls, which are simply flavoured with aniseed, are descendants of these.
Manufacturing dragées, or comfits, by hand was a skilled task, which has long been the preserve of professional confectioners. Details of their trade secrets rarely survive, but in this case we are fortunate as instructions were published by Sir Hugh Platt (1609) in ‘The arte of comfetmaking, teaching how to couer all kinds of seeds, fruits or spices with sugar’ including details of equipment, materials, and quantities. ‘A quarter of a pound of Coriander seeds, and three pounds of sugar will make great, huge and big comfets.’ Comfits were used for decorating other sweet dishes, such as MARZIPAN, and, until the 19th century, caraway comfits (as opposed to loose caraway seeds) were used in SEED CAKES.
Jarrin (1827) observed that ‘The best comfits are made at Verdun’ and gave instructions after the method of confectioners of that town. He also noted that large hollow egg shapes were made in sugar paste: ‘They are usually filled with imitations of all sorts of fruits. In Paris they put in a number of nick-nacks, little almanacks, smelling bottles with essences, and even things of value for presents.’ These were then coated with sugar in the same manner as other comfits. Gunter (1830) disagreed with Jarrin: ‘I have been exceedingly surprised to hear it asserted, that the French make better comfits than the English; they decidedly fail in this compound and would appear … to know as little of Comfit as comfort.’
The manufacture of dragées was successfully mechanized in the mid-19th century and few would now attempt to make them by hand except out of curiosity. More recently, the range has narrowed.
Varieties listed in Skuse’s Complete Confectioner (1957) under colourful names such as green peas and coral beads, rifle balls, red and white currants, vanilla and chocolate beans, and pearls seem to have vanished; but many sweets made by panning, e.g. sugar almonds and jelly beans, are still enduring favourites.
See also CONFETTI.
Laura Mason
a kind of insect which is eaten in many Asian countries. Pemberton (1995) collected data about their capture and ways of eating them from a number of countries and by personal investigation in Bali (Indonesia). He noted that the Balinese often use the sticky latex of the jackfruit tree as a means of capture. He recalls the report by Covarrubias (1937)
that children caught dragonflies by holding latex tipped poles higher than the places where dragonflies were perched. This induced the ‘rank conscious’ dragonflies to fly up and land on the tip of the poles, where they became stuck.
Thus among dragonflies, as among other and larger species, excessive consideration for rank may spell doom.
Pemberton found that several cooking methods were employed in Bali, including some which involved coconut milk and other ingredients such as ginger, garlic, and shallots. The simplest method was to place the dragonflies directly on a grill. Cooked in this way they ‘had a carbonized crispy quality with a subtle, fat flavor’.
In Laos the preferred species for eating is Anax guttatus, which can be caught by placing a lighted candle in a large bowl of water; the unfortunate insects are attracted by the flame, singe their wings, and fall helpless into the water. Other information comes from Japan and Korea. The general impression given is that dragonflies are widely eaten, but are not an important foodstuff anywhere; catching them is a sort of ‘sport’, and this aspect is as important as anything to do with nutrition or flavour.
(drippings in USA), the fat that drips from joints of meat, especially BEEF, when they are roasted. Stobart (1980), harking back to the days ‘when meat really had fat on it’, says:
When cold and solidified, some brown meat jelly was usually trapped and preserved under the fat. When the fat (especially of beef dripping) was mixed with the jelly, salted, and spread on toast, it used to be a standard—and delicious—appetite stopper for farm workers and children at tea time on raw evenings in winter or after skating. Dripping was also commonly clarified and used as a cooking fat. In that case, the distinction between dripping and rendered fat is mainly one of usage. Chicken fat, so much a part of Jewish cooking, is not called ‘chicken dripping’.
At an open hearth equipped with a spit for roasting, the dripping was caught in a tray beneath the joint. This was the reservoir from which cook might baste the rotating meat, and it might be the dish in which YORKSHIRE PUDDINGS were cooked in front of the fire, well anointed by the juices.
Kitchen fats, including dripping and tallow, were among the customary perquisites of the professed cook in Georgian England. Their sale to candle-makers and soap boilers made a useful adjunct to the annual stipend.
a type of blood pudding made only in Cork city in S. Ireland and prepared with a mixture of sheep and beef bloods. The exact quantity of each blood used is critical; the product is too light and fragile if too much sheep blood is used and it is too dark and heavy if too much beef blood is used. The bloods are blended and a little salt is added. The mixture is left to solidify and once coagulated is scored with a knife and left overnight. By morning the blood has separated into serum and coagulated blood residue. The serum is drawn off and poured into prepared beef casings. The puddings are boiled for about five minutes. Its shape resembles an inflated bicycle tube, the colour is a brownish-grey, and it has a distinctive blancmange-like texture.
The origins of the pudding can be traced to the commercial developments of the city between 1685 and 1825. In this period Cork became the largest and most important port in the British Isles for the exportation of salted beef. The beef cuts were exported to England, Europe, and America and the blood by-product of the city’s slaughter houses was used in the manufacture of the pure blood pudding of Cork.
The pudding is simply prepared by boiling lightly in milk and is served with a rich buttery white sauce, which is seasoned with plenty of pepper. It is also sliced and fried in butter. A mixture of tripe and drisheen is another common dish.
Regina Sexton
small round confections originally made by ‘dropping’ a mixture in rounds to set. In common with words such as KISSES and LADDU (Hindi) the word describes a shape rather than a recipe. Acid, fruit, and GUM drops are all still produced. Chocolate is also made into drops, as are cake and biscuit mixtures, e.g. SPONGE drops.
Acid drops (a contraction of acidulated drops) are small clear sweets made from sugar boiled to the hard crack stage (see SUGAR BOILING), with the addition of tartaric acid to give a sour flavour. Fruit drops are similar confections, highly coloured, flavoured with natural or synthetic essences. Pear drops are a popular British sweet, coloured half-red, half-yellow, roughly pear shaped and flavoured with jargonelle pear essence, or synthetic pentyl acetate.
All these are descended from earlier fruit confections. Recipes which would have produced something close to a modern conception of fruit drops were given by La Varenne in Le Parfait Confiturier (1667). Acid juices such as lemon or pomegranate were added to boiled sugar. The acid had the desirable effect of keeping the sugar mixture clear and hard when it cooled, instead of ‘graining’, i.e. recrystallizing to granulated sugar. Other drop recipes called for powdered sugar mixed with fruit juices, giving a result similar to ICING. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, extra acid in the form of vinegar or tartaric acid (or in one recipe oil of vitriol, sulphuric acid), were added to boiled sugar, and modern drops evolved.
Other flavourings included coffee, and perfumes such as rose, violet, and bergamot. The latter survives as a French regional speciality, bergamottes de Nancy. PEPPERMINT is still used as a flavouring in Britain. Overtly medicinal ingredients, such as horehound, wintergreen, and liquorice, turned the confections into cough drops. Paregoric, added to some cough drops, originally referred to a camphorated opium compound, now reduced to a harmless flavouring.
Boiled sugar drops are usually made into attractive and varied shapes by putting the mixture, whilst still warm, through ‘drop rollers’ which both shape and cut the mixture.
‘Gum’ drops and ‘jelly’ drops rely on gelling agents for their textures and are shaped by starch moulding.
Laura Mason
or dropped scone, a term used to cover a group of baked goods which are equally well known under names such as Scots pancake.
Catherine Brown (1990) remarks that
The term dropped scone seems to have been adopted to distinguish between the thick Scots pancake and the thin French crêpe also known as a pancake. In England the term dropped scone seems to have been universally adopted, while in Scotland it is possible to come across both terms.
In any event, this excellent PANCAKE is made from a thick creamy batter of flour, milk or BUTTERMILK, a sparing amount of egg and sugar (or GOLDEN SYRUP), with BICARBONATE OF SODA and CREAM OF TARTAR. The pancakes are cooked on a greased girdle (see GRIDDLE). They are best eaten warm with butter or jam, or both.
The Welsh name for the same thing, in parts of Glamorganshire, is froes, or Welsh dropped scone. Bobby Freeman (1996), in the course of a disquisition on the importance to Welsh people of pancakes in general, speculates that Scottish miners coming south to Glamorganshire may have brought their recipe with them.
the name given to certain fish of the family Sciaenidae which are notable for the noise they can make; cf the similar name CROAKER, applied in the same family. The noise is produced by a snapping of the muscles attached to the air bladder, which acts as a resonance chamber. A curious fact is that certain other fish in the family (e.g. of the genus Menticirrhus, see KINGFISH) which lack an air bladder and cannot therefore ‘drum’, are still subject to the family impulse to make a noise, which they do by grinding their teeth.
Of the species which bear the name drum, which is mostly used on the eastern seaboard of the USA, the following are the best known:
See also SQUETEAGUE, another N. American species of the sciaenid family.
In the southern hemisphere other species of the same family occur, indeed scores of them, and some of these are referred to as drums, although mostly having a more specific common name which is used more often, e.g. Argyrosomus hololepidotus in S. African waters, better known as the kob.
the technical term for the category of fruits (from the ancient Greek for olive) which have a layer of flesh surrounding a single ‘stone’, which is called a nut if edible. Examples are PEACH and ALMOND, OLIVE AND MANGO, PLUM, CHERRY, and APRICOT.
the simplest and oldest method of food PRESERVATION, is used in almost every part of the world, and for foods of all kinds. Drying a food reduces its water content to a level so low that the micro-organisms and enzymes which cause spoilage cannot function.
When carried out by traditional methods, drying is a gradual process. Food, however, begins to decay immediately, so drying is a race against spoilage. Various factors influence the rate at which food dries. The larger its surface area in relation to its volume, the more quickly it loses liquid. In practice this means that it has to be in small pieces or cut into flat sheets, as when fish to be dried is split and opened out, or figs are squashed. The air has to be dry. It is helpful if there is a wind. Heat speeds drying, since hot air can hold, and thus carry away, more moisture than cold air; but it also speeds up decomposition. A problem which affects all dried foods containing fat is rancidity caused by the oxygen in the air. This is most severe in oily fish, whose oil is highly unsaturated and goes rancid easily. These cannot be successfully dried.
Drying is often combined with SALTING, which arrests spoilage at once. The SMOKING of food also helps to dry it, as well as depositing a layer on the surface which is antiseptic and excludes oxygen to avoid rancidity.
Chemical agents may be used to arrest spoilage while drying takes place. The chief of these (apart from salt) is sulphur dioxide, which creates acid conditions and is effective against both enzymes and micro-organisms. It is widely used on dried fruit. Pepper and spices, which are mildly antiseptic, aid the preservation of some dried foods.
Meat can be dried without salt if it is cut into thin strips or sheets. This may well have been how Attila the Hun and various barbarians reputedly dried meat under their saddles as they rode across the steppes (a proto-ready-meal). However, many dried meats include salt, often added mainly for flavour. The ‘dry-salting’ of large pieces of meat, such as some kinds of bacon or ham, is not really a drying procedure, since it relies almost entirely on the action of the salt. However, the best hams, such as Parma or jamón serrano, include very lengthy drying times after their initial cure, normally from six to twelve months.
Genuinely dried meats include the Latin American charqui (or tassajo), made with beef, and its mutton equivalent chalona. The name charqui has been Anglicized to JERKY (or jerked beef). Such foods were, and to some extent still are, used by travellers, cowboys, and other people who had to carry their food with them. See also BILTONG. Typically, these products consist of thin strips, air dried, usually salted, sometimes lightly smoked, often peppered or spiced.
Dried meats are often made in mountainous areas where windy conditions (and at great altitudes, low air pressure) favour drying: for example, conditions are good for drying pork in Nepal.
Thicker pieces of dried meat in which drying plays a significant part in the preservation process include some beef products such as the northern Italian BRESAOLA and the Swiss BÜNDNERFLEISCH, two products made in adjoining border regions. On ORKNEY AND SHETLAND wind-dried meat is known as vivda. The E. European and Turkish PASTRAMI or pasturma is another example. See also PEMMICAN.
Plain dried fish, prepared without salt, has been superseded by salted, dried fish, or fish preserved in other ways, in many parts of the world where it was formerly usual. In N. Europe, where the climate allows simple air-drying, it continues in use alongside combined salting and drying. Only white fish, whose flesh is not oily, are suitable for either process and, for drying without salt, they have to be fairly small.
In ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and the Near East salt was readily obtainable, and fish was salted to dry it from early times, as well as being preserved in brine. In medieval Europe STOCKFISH was a major food, and was the subject of considerable trade. The name, originally a German word, was a general one for any dried white fish, most often cod, but also pollack, whiting, hake, and others. These might be dried with or without salt, although the modern usage of the term ‘stockfish’ is for an unsalted kind only. SALT COD is the prime example of the salted kind.
Eggs are difficult to dry, and it was not until the early 20th century that a workable process was developed, by German engineers in China. From the 1930s onwards other countries, including the USA and Britain, began to dry eggs, for baking and other processed foods. During the Second World War dried egg was used in Britain and elsewhere, for different and obvious reasons, but domestic use of the product has since almost ceased, although its quality has improved. Eggs may be dried whole, or separated into yolks and whites.
Dried milk is another modern product, foreshadowed by the Indian condensed milk khoya (see MILK REDUCTION). This is evaporated and coagulated by slow heating, often carried to the point at which the product is quite dry and crumbly. It is not intended to keep, but is used as an ingredient in confectionery. Dried milk is now made by either drum or spray drying.
Sun-drying of most fruits is easy in warm, dry climates if there is no objection to the fruit becoming brown or black, as is considered normal in RAISINS, PRUNES, and FIGS. Dried figs were a main article of the diet of ordinary people in classical Greece and Rome. In Arabia and N. Africa dried or partly dried DATES are still a staple food.
Sun-dried tomatoes, formerly best known in the Mediterranean region (see Patience Gray, 1986, for an account of their preparation in Apulia and of how they can be stuffed), became fashionable as a speciality food in N. America and W. Europe in the closing decades of the 20th century.
In medieval Europe dried fruits were much in demand. Currants, prunes, figs, and dates were all imported from Mediterranean countries on the same ships that brought spices. Rich people used them liberally in pies, tarts, and pottages. The medieval mistrust of raw fresh fruit did not extend to exotic dried kinds. APPLES and PEARS were also dried. Rather than being sliced into rings as in more recent practice, they were peeled and cored but left whole. Threaded on strings and hung across an airy room they became brown, leathery, and sweet through concentration of their sugar as they shrank.
Vegetables are in general less suitable for drying by simple processes than are fruits. They are watery and lack sufficient protective sugar or acid to resist decay. If air-drying were attempted many vegetables would simply go bad, or leaves would wither and brown. (There are exceptions. The leaves of MELOKHIA, which is made into a soup loved by Egyptians, are sometimes air dried, and it is possible still to buy rings of dried AUBERGINE in Turkey. Dried CHILLIES are, of course, universal.)
Attempts were made long ago to dry some vegetables for use as military rations to ward off SCURVY, but it was not understood until the 20th century that the procedure would make them almost useless for that purpose. The first process was patented in 1780, but was unsuccessful, as were other early attempts, e.g. to produce by drying an instant mashed potato. Indeed, some would say that full success has still not been achieved. Modern dried vegetables (other than freeze dried, for which see FREEZING) are prepared in an air draught whose temperature is a compromise between the conflicting needs of fast drying and flavour preservation. The vacuum method, which satisfies both requirements, is sometimes used for better-quality products.
Among dried vegetable products, much the most important are grains. Generally, whole grains harvested in favourable conditions need only a little air-drying to make them keep, although in wet climates, such as that of Britain, fuel-burning grain dryers often have to be used.
PULSES—peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, and the like—are typically staple foods of dry areas, such as India and Mexico, where they can be spread out in the sun and left to dry naturally inside their protective seed coats.
Hard spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg are little altered by the small amount of drying necessary to preserve them. Drying may bring about a desirable change in flavour, as in pepper, where the pungency increases.
Among herbs, woody types such as rosemary and thyme stand up to drying well; slightly more fleshy plants such as marjoram and sage reasonably well; and fleshy moist ones like mint not very well. Worst is probably basil which, however carefully dried, loses the ‘top notes’ of its fragrance and has little virtue left.
Fungi have been dried with great success since early times. In a dry climate they can be air dried without any special preparation other than cutting the larger ones into slices. All kinds shrink considerably, concentrating the flavour. The best known of the dried mushrooms on sale in Europe is the CEP; the Italian funghi porcini are of this kind. The British mushroom which was most dried in former times was the champignon or FAIRY RING MUSHROOM. The Chinese dry many fungi, especially the WOOD EAR.
Various beverages are prepared from dried ingredients. TEA leaves and COFFEE beans are obvious examples. Instant coffee and tea are made by brewing the drink and drying the liquid in a spray dryer (see below) or, in the case of high-quality instant coffee, by freeze-drying. Other dried plant substances used to make infused drinks are CHICORY (dried root), COCOA (dried powdered seeds), GUARANA (dried powdered seeds, made into smoked cakes), COLA ‘nut’ (dried powdered seeds), and MATÉ (dried leaves).
For an interesting form of dried soup, see PORTABLE SOUP.
Of modern mechanized drying techniques, the most commonly used is continuous tunnel drying. The food is loaded onto wire mesh trays which are drawn slowly through a long tunnel through which heated air is blown. By the time the food emerges from the far end of the tunnel it is fully dried.
A refinement of the tunnel dryer is the fluidized bed dryer, used for small items such as peas. The food travels along perforated plates through which warm air is blown from below. The air lifts and transports the food while it is drying. The further it goes the hotter the air gets. In the case of peas, moisture content falls from 80% to 50%. The food is then transferred to a stationary drying bin where it is finished off slowly with warm air. Finally, after a total of, say, sixteen hours, the moisture content is down to 5%.
Stationary bin or cabinet dryers are used throughout for less robust foods. In a closed cabinet a partial vacuum can be applied to the food, which allows the use of lower temperatures and so avoids damage to delicate fruits and vegetables.
Liquids such as milk, fruit or vegetable juices, and pastes, such as those for breakfast cereals, may be dried in drum dryers. Two heated stainless steel drums revolve slowly, almost touching. The liquid is poured into the gap between the drums and trickles down slowly. It dries on the lower surfaces of the drums and is scraped off by a blade. Usually drying is assisted by a partial vacuum.
Another drying method for liquids or semi-liquids, including milk, eggs, and instant coffee, is spray drying. A large, funnel-shaped chamber, typically 3 m (10′) high, has a whirling nozzle at the top through which the liquid is misted into the chamber. Hot air is also blown in at the top. The mist dries to a powder and collects at the bottom. The product is less damaged by heat than in drum drying. The fine powder has to be slightly moistened and formed into granules to make a product which will dissolve without bedding down into a lumpy mass.
READING:
a bird which exists in many wild species right round the world (see WILD DUCK), but of which the domesticated kinds are those commonly eaten. Domestication began over 2,000 years ago in China, and was being practised in classical Rome (witness Columella, 1st century AD) and has been pursued with enthusiasm in many parts of the world. In Europe and N. America almost all domesticated breeds stem from the MALLARD duck, but they exhibit considerable differences in size, appearance, etc.
A duck (of either gender—the term drake is not used in a culinary context) is usually six months old or more, while a duckling is younger. The French terms are canard and caneton.
Some breeds of duck, e.g. Indian Runner, are reared for laying purposes, and may produce as many as 200 eggs (larger than hen’s eggs) a year. But the demand for duck eggs has never been overwhelming (except perhaps in the Philippines—see BALUT) and most ducks are bred for table use. The principal such breeds are:
[the birds were raised] in the abodes of the cottagers. Round the walls of the living-rooms, and of the bedroom even, are fixed rows of wooden boxes, lined with hay; and it is the business of the wife and children to nurse and comfort the feathered lodgers, to feed the little ducklings, and to take the old ones out for an airing.
However, enquiries in the 1990s showed that there was only one producer left.
Muscovy ducks are of a different species: Cairina moschata, of C. and S. America. They make good eating, especially when crossed with other ducks to diminish their tendency to muskiness. (Their name has nothing to do with muskiness or with Muscovy, perhaps deriving from the name of the indigenous people, the Muysca of Nicaragua, where they were first encountered. In S. Europe and N. Africa they are called Barbary duck, in Brazil the Brazilian, in Spain the pato, and in the Guyanas of S. America, the Guinea or Turkish duck.)
One of the most interesting treatments given to duck in the kitchen belongs to Wales. This is Welsh salt duck, the recipe for which first appeared in print in the charmingly eccentric book by Lady Llanover (1867). This was described and praised by Elizabeth David (1970), who drew attention to the resemblance between it and ‘Nanking fresh salted duck’, while remarking that the latter is eaten cold while the Welsh dish was originally intended to be eaten hot with an onion sauce.
In England the most familiar and excellent combination is roast duckling with apple sauce and peas, a dish of the late spring. In France (and, alas, in debased international cuisine) there is the well-known Canard à l’orange (or à la bigarade, using the recommended Seville oranges); and a good dish of duck with turnip. In other countries there are combinations which reflect the characteristics of their cuisines, for example duck and red cabbage in Poland; the use of sour cream, apple, etc. in E. Europe; the Iranian braised duck with walnut and pomegranate sauce (see FESENJAN).
PEKING DUCK is, however, probably the most famous of all duck dishes.
a steamed PUDDING containing fruit, especially raisins as in ‘plum duff’.
It is hard to know how to pronounce the word dough, since it might be thought to rhyme with enough or rough. It seems to have been for this reason that the pronunciation ‘duff’ emerged in the north of England, and then became a term in its own right, having the basic meaning of dough but usually with reference to a steamed pudding made with dough.
On both sides of the Atlantic plum duff began as something very plain and unpretentious. For example in a chapter devoted partly to ‘fluff-duffs’ Adams (1952) records complaints by cowboys that the cook ‘jes’ bogged down a few raisins in dough an’ called ’er puddin’. And in England a duff was for long counted as a cheap and filling item which would appear frequently in school or other institutional menus, especially for sailors. When Mayhew reported on London street foods in 1861, there were six vendors still hawking hot duff shaped either as a pudding or in ‘roly poly’ form: ‘Hot pudding used to be [20 or 30 years earlier] of much more extensive sale.’ However, plum duff can claim one illustrious relation, namely CHRISTMAS PUDDING, of which the ancestral manifestation was little more than dough and dried fruits.
the names used in SE Asia (and other Indo-Pacific regions, including N. Australia and E. Africa) and the W. Indies respectively for certain marine mammals in the order Sirenia, also commonly referred to as sea cows. The former is Halicore dugong, while the latter name corresponds to three species: Trichechus manatus, the W. Indian manatee (with two subspecies, the Florida manatee and the Antillean manatee); T. inunguis, the Amazonian manatee (inunguis because its flippers do not have the fingernails possessed by other manatees); and T. senegalensis, the W. African manatee.
The name dugong is probably a corruption of the Malay name duyong. These creatures were in the past quite common in Malayan waters, especially in estuaries and other coastal areas but also some way upstream in major rivers such as the Mekong. Now, however, they are rare and protected.
The dugong was formerly eaten in Malaya, and its cousin the manatee, according to Simmonds (1859), was eaten in the W. Indies with appreciation, having delicious white flesh like pork. The same author expressed qualms which must have affected many people:
It appears horrible to chew and swallow the flesh of an animal which holds its young (it has never more than one at a litter) to its breast, which is formed exactly like that of a woman, with paws resembling human hands.
This description helps to explain why both the dugong and the manatee have given rise to tales about mermaids, marine creatures with breasts and a forked tail. The semi-human characteristics of mermaids may in turn explain why some people in SE Asia believe that the dugong engages in philanthropic activities. Thus there are tales about how, if a pirogue sinks in the River Mekong, ‘a score or more of dugongs will appear and form a circle round the crew as they flounder in the water. The dugongs utter wheezing sighs of concern and are evidently bent on protecting the men from possible attacks by large and predatory fish.’
The manatees, like the dugong, have been hunted and eaten locally in the regions where they occur and are now also threatened by pollution and accidents with motor boats and fishing gear.
two SE Asian fruits, are both classified as Lansium domesticum, although one can readily be distinguished from the other and the two of them recognized as separate botanical varieties. L. domesticum var domesticum corresponds to the name duku and is the more widely cultivated. L. domesticum var pubescens, which is the langsat, is often called ‘wild langsat’ but it too is cultivated. Each variety has some desirable characteristics.
Cultivation takes place mainly in Indonesia (especially Java), Malaysia, and Thailand.
The tree, of medium size, takes about 15 years to reach maturity, but then bears tight clusters of fruit twice a year.
Langsat has about 20 fruits in a cluster, each oval and just under 4 cm (1.75″) long, with thin, pale fawn skin. Duku has only about 10 fruits to a cluster. They are round and larger, about 5 cm (2″) in diameter, with thicker skins. The flesh of both fruits is usually white, but in some cultivated varieties of duku it is pink. It is juicy and refreshing, with a taste ranging from sour to sweet. Each fruit is composed of five segments, some of which may contain bitter, inedible seeds. The fruits may be eaten raw or preserved with sugar.
According to folklore in the Philippines, where the fruits are known as lanzones, they used to be so sour as to be quite inedible, and indeed toxic. But it happened one day that a beautiful woman with a child, travelling through the countryside, could find nothing else to eat but lanzones. She accordingly picked one and gave it to the child. From then on the fruit acquired its present desirable characteristics; for the woman was none other than the Virgin Mary. However, the transformation which she wrought was not complete, since some lanzones still turn out to be very sour.
Palmaria palmata, probably the most widely distributed of the edible red seaweeds; it occurs in both northern and southern hemispheres, in the Indo-Pacific as well as the Atlantic, in temperate and cold waters. The rose-red or purplish plants have an average height of 30 cm (12″). Nutritious, slightly salty to taste, they are accounted among the most delicious seaweeds, although there are many countries in which they occur but are not normally eaten.
Ireland is where dulse has been consumed with the greatest enthusiasm since ancient times. It is mentioned as an item of hospitality (together with onions and salt) in the 7th-century Irish secular laws Corpus Iuris Hibernici. In modern Ireland dried dulse is chewed as a snack particularly in coastal regions and it is often used as a relish with potatoes or boiled milk. Because of this association with Ireland, the English common name ‘dulse’, which is essentially the Irish name, has come to be in widespread use, even in countries where English is not spoken.
Alexandre, père (1802–70) even by 19th-century standards an astonishingly prolific writer. The collected edition of his works comprises 303 volumes. Ironically, it does not include Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, which was his last work and the one on which, to judge by statements which he made in his last years, he expected his reputation to rest most firmly. In fact, he is far better known as the author of such books as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. But he has also retained a reputation as an authority on food and cookery; a reputation which is not entirely deserved, unless one takes the view that his quixotic personality and abundant enthusiasm entitle him to a greater meed of praise than what he actually wrote would warrant.
The dictionary was published posthumously and bore the date 1873, although copies were already being distributed in 1872. It remained in print until the 1950s, in the original edition. The surviving copies were then destroyed, which paved the way for a number of coffee-table editions. Some of these were provided with illustrations, of which the first edition had only two.
The book, which contains about 750,000 words, is poorly organized and heavily weighted down with recipes from other sources and quotations, not always acknowledged, from other writers such as Brillat-Savarin. The information which it offers is frequently inaccurate, and it is plain that when Dumas made his compilation he was unaware of or chose to ignore a number of important reference books which were available in France in the 1860s. He says himself that when he withdrew to Normandy to write the book he took only a small collection of notes and books and relied rather on his memory. This may have been a good thing, for the result was that the book was studded with personal reminiscences which were written with verve and are entertaining. The merit of the book lies in this aspect of it. It therefore cries out to be abridged. But the only abridgement published in France (Le Petit Dictionnaire de cuisine, 1882) discarded much of the good material instead of focusing attention on it. No critical study of the book has ever been made in France. Authoritative writers such as André Maurois have, however, praised it in general terms and have thus provided some cement for Dumas’s gastronomic reputation.
For examples of Dumas’ entertaining style, see GOOSE and HERMIT CRAB. See also the next article, under England.
READING:
a term of uncertain origin which first appeared in print at the beginning of the 17th century, although the object it denotes—a small and usually globular mass of boiled or steamed dough—no doubt existed long before that. A dumpling is a food with few, indeed no, social pretensions, and of such simplicity that it may plausibly be supposed to have evolved independently in the peasant cuisines of various parts of Europe and probably in other parts of the world too. Such cuisines feature soups and stews, in which vegetables may be enhanced by a little meat. Dumplings, added to the soup or stew, are still, as they were centuries ago, a simple and economical way of extending such dishes.
The dough for most dumplings has always been based either on a cereal, whichever was the staple in a given region (oats, wheat, maize, etc.), or on one of the vegetables from which a bread dough can be made or partly made (potato, pulses, etc.). Other ingredients for the basic and original dumpling were few: salt, water, and perhaps leaven. If herbs were added, for flavour or colour, this did not compromise their simplicity. Green dumplings, dumplings with herbs, were quite common. In Scotland a green suet dumpling used to be made in spring with dandelion and nettle leaves, hawthorn buds, and anything else that came to hand. Spinach was often used in a similar way, e.g. in Germany and Austria.
However, despite its simplicity, the humble dumpling, or anyway the range of foods to which the name is applied, has evolved in the course of time from the prototypes into something more complex. A first step was provided by the filled dumpling, in which the dough encloses something else, for example apple in an apple dumpling, and a sour Zwetschke cooking plum (its stone replaced by a lump of sugar) in the Austrian and Czech Zwetschkenknödel. The legitimacy of fruit-filled dumplings is rarely challenged; but it must be acknowledged that their existence takes the dumpling, at a single step, out of the role of supplement to a main dish and into the role of dish-in-itself.
Similar considerations apply to dumplings into which richer ingredients (such as finely minced liver in Leberknödel, the liver dumplings of S. Germany and Austria) have been incorporated. Yet it is no long step from them to the kind of product which reverses the proportions, being essentially a MEATBALL. In this connection see also KIBBEH and KOFTA, noting that a kibbeh from Iraq may be a meatball inside a semolina covering (which gives it some claim to be called a dumpling), whereas others have no such covering and at the most incorporate a little cereal as binder or extender. An object of the latter sort is not a true dumpling; it is but one of the numerous tribe of dumpling lookalikes, things which are neither dumplings nor English but have been called dumplings, when an English name for them has been required, on the basis of form and cooking method without regard to the third criterion, composition.
However, these excursions beyond the original meaning of the term are as nothing by comparison with what has happened in the Orient, where English-speakers, seeking a term which could be applied to various kinds of oriental filled pasta (see MANTOU; JIAOZI; etc.), unhappily chose ‘dumpling’. This heinous excursion is explained at more length under DUMPLINGS OF ASIA.
Returning to Europe, it would be fair to say that dumplings are almost ubiquitous in that continent, but by no means of equal importance in the various countries. They are more popular in colder climates, for the obvious reason. But even there they vary considerably in popularity. It might be generally agreed that there are three regions in which they have flourished most: England, which English people like to think of as the home of the archetypal and most authentic dumpling; the much larger area of C. Europe (including Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia), which is one vast hotbed of Germanic dumplings; and the specialized habitat provided by Italy for GNOCCHI, so intimately linked with pasta and outside the common run of dumplings that they are treated separately. Each of the first two regions will be considered in turn.
Early dumplings were probably balls of bread dough taken from the batch used to make bread. However, people soon began to make dumplings from other ingredients, e.g. suet or white bread. By 1747 Hannah Glasse could give no fewer than eight recipes for dumplings, of which two were for ‘hard’ dumplings made from plain flour and water, ‘best boiled with a good piece of beef’; two were for apple dumplings; and others were for Norfolk dumplings, yeast dumplings, white bread dumplings, and suet dumplings. When she indicated size, she usually said ‘as big as a turkey’s egg’.
Norfolk is the chief dumpling county of Britain, but the history of its honourable (and plain) dumplings has been obscured by French intervention. The story told by DUMAS in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873) that the Duke of Norfolk was fond of dumplings, and that they are named after him, is wrong, as is the recipe Dumas gives. Indeed, the recipe is so wildly wrong that it looks as though Dumas was the victim of a practical joker when he visited England, possibly the same person who told him that Yermouth [sic], home of bloaters, was in Ireland.
A good description of how Norfolk dumplings were and are made is given by Mrs Arthur Webb (c.1935):
The farmer’s wife very skilfully divided a pound of dough (remember, just ordinary bread dough) into four pieces. These she weighed, and so cleverly had she gauged the size that they weighed approximately 4 oz each. She kneaded, and rolled them in a very little flour until they were quite round, then put them on a plate and slipped them into a large saucepan containing fast-boiling water. The saucepan lid was put back immediately, and then, when the water came to the boil once more, 15 minutes’ rapid boiling was allowed for the dumplings.
Dumplings in Norfolk are not a sweet. They are a very substantial part of what might be the meat course, or they might serve as a meat substitute. In the villages I found that they were sometimes put into a very large pot and boiled on top of the greens; then they are called ‘swimmer’.
Eliza Acton (1845), apparently referring to Norfolk dumplings, specified several accompaniments: wine sauce, raspberry vinegar, or sweetened melted butter with a little vinegar.
Suffolk dumplings, unlike those of Norfolk, are made of flour and water, without yeast. (Eliza Acton recommended adding milk to make a thick batter.) They are steamed or rapidly boiled, so that they rise well. They may be eaten with meat gravy, or with butter or syrup. They often include currants if intended as a sweet dish.
Oatmeal dumplings are common in N. Britain, where oats are widely grown. Derbyshire dumplings, relatively small, are made from equal amounts of wheat flour and oatmeal, with beef DRIPPING and onion; to be added to a beef stew half an hour before serving.
In the region of Bavaria (see GERMANY), AUSTRIA, and Bohemia (see CZECH REPUBLIC and SLOVAKIA), the common material of dumplings is stale bread. This is broken into small pieces and soaked in water or milk, and combined with any available enriching ingredients: bacon, eggs, cheese, chopped liver, or herbs. There are sweet types stuffed with fruit. In some of the more refined kinds flour or semolina or (since the 19th century) potatoes are used in the basic mixture.
Another kind is the Nockerl, made from a softer dough of flour with butter, milk, and egg (or leftover noodle dough may be used). Because the dough is soft, it is not rolled into balls to make the dumplings; small pieces are picked off with the fingers and thrown into the boiling water (or the dough is spread on a Nockerlbrett, a thin wooden board from which little bits can be flipped into the water, using a knife). Small ones are sometimes formed by pressing the dough through a coarse wicker sieve, and used as garnishes in soup. This technique, the dough itself, and the name Nockerl, are clearly influenced by the Italian GNOCCHI. (Salzburger Nockerln are something different; not dumplings but sweet egg confections which defy any conventional classification.)
Another related dumpling, made in a similar manner, is the Spätzle (literally ‘little sparrow’), most common in the Alsace and S. Germany. These are tiny dumplings, made with strong white bread flour or semolina, egg, warm water, cream, or milk. They can resemble quenelles, bolstered with liver or cheese, but are usually very small and best served with a thick gravy or a dish such as lentils with bacon and cabbage.
The Dampfnudel (‘steam noodle’) is interesting. This is a medium-sized German dumpling made of yeast dough, cooked in a shallow bath of milk in a tightly lidded pan. The heat transmitted through the bottom of the pan browns the underside of the dumpling, which rests on its bottom. The steam above the milk, slightly superheated by pressure due to the close-fitting lid, hardens and browns the top. The middle, surrounded by boiling milk, which transmits less heat to it than does steam, remains soft and extensible so that the dumpling rises and, when cooked, has a brown top and bottom and a soft, white central zone. It is served with meat, or as a dessert with jam and butter or a sweet sauce.
Potato dumpling types are exemplified by Kartoffelkloss, small, light German dumplings of potato, flour, breadcrumbs, and egg. Another name for this dumpling is Glitscher (‘slider’) because it goes down easily. Other potato dumplings include the Russian pampushka, a dumpling made from a mixture of raw grated and cooked mashed potato enclosing a filling of cooked minced beef and onion or curd cheese, egg, and herbs. It is boiled in salted water and served with sour cream and onions.
See also CLOOTIE DUMPLING.
These are different from European ones. Indeed what English-speakers in the Orient call dumplings are more like what would be called filled pasta in Europe. The Chinese type of dumpling, in particular, with its thin wrapper of wheat flour and water paste folded over the filling and pressed shut, bears a close resemblance to RAVIOLI.
Chinese records of dumplings go back at least as far as the Sung dynasty (AD 960–1279), when they were described as being sold (with other foods) from stalls much in the way that snacks are in modern China. MANTOU are among the best-known Chinese manifestations of the genre, but probably originated in C. Asia rather than in China itself.
Whatever the truth may be about their ultimate origin, this type of oriental filled ‘dumpling’ has spread westwards; it is met in Tibet as momo, in Russia as PEL’MENI (usually with a meat filling), and in Jewish cuisine as the similar KREPLACH.
In their home country, these Chinese dumplings take various forms. WONTON (a pun on the Chinese for ‘chaos’) are dumplings made from a wheat dough which is usually bought in prepared sheets, folded over a filling, most often of minced pork and onion, with the edges left untidy and wavy (hence the name).
JIAOZI (the word means ‘corners’) are small semicircular dumplings made by folding a circle of plain flour and water dough over a filling, usually savoury such as chopped pork and cabbage. The joint is pressed to seal each tightly before they are boiled. All the dumplings are put simultaneously into boiling water, which at once goes off the boil. It is brought back to the boil and cooked three times: this is said to make the dough firm.
In many parts of Asia the dumplings commonly met are rice dumplings.
T’ang t’uan (boiled ball) is a small Chinese dumpling made of a kneaded dough of glutinous rice. It has a filling, usually a savoury one such as pork and onion, and is cooked by the same method as jiaozi.
Another small Chinese dumpling made of glutinous rice flour, but this time with a sweet filling, is yüan hsiao. The filling, which must be of a fairly solid consistency (e.g. a mixture of crushed nuts and sesame seed, sugar, and fat), is damped and rolled in a tray of dry flour, and picks up a coating. Then it is boiled by the same method as for jiaozi. This sweet dumpling is traditionally eaten on the ‘Festive Night’ of the 15th day of the New Year, and that is what its name means.
Japan also has glutinous rice dumplings, MOCHI. For these, the dough is wrapped round fillings of, for example, red bean paste; or the dough itself can be made into little shapes and wrapped in cherry or oak leaves. In either case the dumplings are steamed. They are featured at the Japanese New Year; and it has been known for sumo wrestlers to be mustered to achieve a sufficiently strong initial pounding of the cooked rice.
Ondé ondé is the name of a small Indonesian sweet dumpling, also made of glutinous rice flour, which contains a knob of brown sugar; it is rolled in grated coconut after boiling.
One more example, this time using sago, comes from Thailand. This is saku sai mooh: small sago dumplings enclosing a filling of pork, onion, and groundnuts; cooked by steaming; served hot or cold.
a rich, buttery Scottish FRUIT CAKE containing sultanas, ground almonds, and candied peel. Before baking, the top is covered with whole blanched almonds.
The name appears to have been first recorded in the late 19th century. According to sources in the city of Dundee, the cake originated as a by-product of the orange marmalade made by Keiller’s, the famous and long-established marmalade-makers of that city, who found it convenient to make the cakes during the part of the year when they were not making marmalade (and may well have had citrus peel to spare).
Laura Mason (1999) further observes that the bakers in the city had a gentleman’s agreement that only Keiller’s should make Dundee cake, a situation which lasted until the company became part of a multinational in the 1970s. The agreement had not, however, extended to other parts of Britain, and the cake was widely copied in the 20th century. Bakers further south also confused it with rich fruit cakes as known in England, and tended to think that it was merely the topping of almonds which distinguished it from the latter.
Laura Mason
Cancer magister, the most important commercial crab of the Pacific north-west coast of the USA. Carapace width may be as much as 20 cm (8″). The back is reddish-brown or purplish in life, turning to red or orange when the crab is cooked. This crab and C. pagurus (see CRAB, COMMON) are closely related and match each other in quality.
Ricketts and Calvin (1978) remark in connection with this species:
The exoskeleton of a crab presents a formidable barrier to love-making; and although it seems to be the general rule that mating of crabs requiring internal fertilization can take place only when the female is still soft from molting, the process has not often been observed.
They proceed to describe what two members of the Oregon Fish Commission saw when watching two Dungeness crabs mate in an aquarium. They watched for 192 hours, perhaps a record in the field of voyeurism.
A smaller relation, C. productus, called the red crab (but to be distinguished from the species described under RED CRAB), is not exploited commercially; although it is quite large enough to eat, the ratio in weight of meat to shell is unfavourable.
a hard, cow’s milk cheese, took its name from the native dairying cattle of Ayrshire, whose lowlands constitute the finest dairying region of Scotland. This all happened centuries ago, long before anyone had thought of manufacturing rubber tyres, still less of using Dunlop as a brand name for them. The coincidence almost spelled doom for the cheese, since the Milk Marketing Board, fearing that customers would suppose, even if only subconsciously, that Dunlop cheese would be rubbery, tried to drop the name in favour of the far less precise ‘Cheddar’.
It is said that Dunlop cheese came into being in 1690 or just afterwards, when an Ayrshire farmer’s daughter, Barbara Gilmour, who had been living in Ulster, in exile from religious persecution, returned with a recipe for making cheese which, at the time, was quite revolutionary. It involved using full cream cow’s milk instead of skimmed milk, and pressing it until it was quite hard and had acquired a superior keeping quality and flavour. While the old cheese was described as ‘common cheese’, the new cheese became known as ‘sweet-milk cheese’ or ‘new milk cheese’. By the 1790s, when parish accounts were compiled, it had become established as ‘Dunlop cheese’, made in five parishes of Ayrshire and two of neighbouring Lanarkshire.
The growth of the urban and industrial markets of C. Scotland, especially Glasgow and Paisley, encouraged production during the latter part of the 19th century. As late as 1930, at least 300 farms were still making Dunlop cheeses. ‘Each farm had a fully matured cheese open for cooking, and a softer one for eating. At breakfast, porridge was followed on alternate days by bacon and eggs or toasted cheese on a scone made from home-ground flour, eaten in front of the fire’ (Rance, 1982).
Although the shadow of Dunlop tyres and Milk Marketing Boards, as mentioned above, fell over the cheeses in the period of and after the Second World War, some cheese-makers, especially on the Isle of Arran, maintained the Dunlop name and tradition; and these now seem assured of survival. By comparison with Scottish Cheddar cheeses, Dunlop has a more mellow, ‘nutty’ flavour and a softer, creamier texture.
Catherine Brown
a SPICE MIXTURE used in the Near East. The word is derived from the Arabic verb meaning ‘to pound’. Claudia Roden (1985) explains that the ingredients in the mixture vary from one family to another, although typically including SESAME and CORIANDER seeds, CUMIN, salt and pepper, and perhaps hazlenut. She also quotes a 19th-century source which lists ZAATAR or wild MARJORAM or MINT, with sesame and coriander seeds and CINNAMON, plus CHICKPEAS. Roden emphasizes the texture:
It is a loose mixture of nuts and spices in a dry, crushed but not powdered form, usually eaten with bread dipped in olive oil. In Egypt it is served at breakfast time, as an appetizer, or as a snack in the evening …. Roast or grill the ingredients separately. Pound them together until they are finely crushed but not pulverized …. Dukkah should always be a crushed dry mixture, and definitely not a paste.
Landry (1978), bringing a French perspective to the subject, lists among possible ingredients nigella (BLACK CUMIN), millet flour, and even dry cheese, and paints an evocative picture of the Egyptian fellaheen sprinkling the mixture on bread such as pain baladi, which they eat in the fields.
Duqqa is commonly sold on the streets of Cairo in little cones of twisted paper; the simplest version being just a mixture of dried crushed mint, salt, and pepper. In Near Eastern markets in the USA, a brand of ‘dokka’ is sold consisting of parched wheat flour flavoured with cumin and caraway, to be mixed with oil and used as a dip.
Helen Saberi
Durio zibethinus, a tropical fruit notorious for its taste and smell, either or both of which may provoke reactions ranging from revulsion to adulation.
The large oval fruit grows on a tall tree native to W. Malaysia and cultivated elsewhere in SE Asia. ‘Duri’ is the Malay word for spike, and the tree takes its name from the hard, spiky shell which the fruit develops. A full-grown fruit may weigh 2 kg (5 lb) or more. Since the tree may be as high as 30 m (300′) and the fruit drops off when ripe, it is wise to take care when walking near such trees in the durian season. Death by durian is not uncommon. (Another hazard at this time is the appeal the fallen, split fruit has for tigers and other wild animals.)
A durian in the ripening stage changes rapidly. While still on the tree it develops its famous odour, which has prompted many people to search for an accurate description. Comparisons have been made with the civet cat, sewage, stale vomit, onions, and cheese; while one disaffected visitor to Indonesia declared that the eating of the flesh was not much different from having to consume used surgical swabs.
However, others have expressed enthusiasm with equal vigour. Alfred Russel Wallace in his Malay Archipelago (1869) declared himself ‘a confirmed durion eater’, and went so far as to announce that ‘If I had to fix on two (fruits) only as representing the perfection of the two classes, I should certainly chose the durion and the orange as the king and queen of fruits.’ In what did this perfection consist? Here is Wallace’s own description of the edible part of the fruit:
A rich butter-like custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with it come wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, brown-sherry, and other incongruities. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid, nor sweet, nor juicy, yet one feels the want of none of these qualities, for it is perfect as it is. It produces no nausea or other bad affect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat durions, is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience.
Some have found that while the smell repels them, the flavour attracts. A strange synergistic effect causes the components of the smell to combine with the unsmelled but tasted substances to produce the characteristic rich, aromatic flavour. This increases until it becomes overpowering to all but the staunchest devotees of the fruit. Even Indonesians acknowledge that prolonged exposure to the smell may have negative effects, and as a result, the carriage of durians on public transport is forbidden. Even during its two days normal ripening time a durian becomes slightly alcoholic. The Javanese believe it to have APHRODISIAC qualities, and also impose a strict set of rules on what may or may not be consumed with the durian or shortly after. As with several other very strong fruits, it is considered particularly unwise to take sweet drinks such as coffee, as the effects could supposedly be fatal. In some parts of the region people bury durian deliberately in order to ferment them prior to consumption; this because they prefer their durians slightly on the high side, much as someone in the West might have a penchant for very aged blue cheese.
Patterns of consumption have changed. As it deteriorates swiftly, durian used to be eaten only in the region where it was grown. Now, with export by air possible, it is widely available. The procedure is to split open the shell, revealing the large seeds, each with a generous coating of sticky pulp surrounding it. This is gnawed or sucked off. Some people advise drinking water out of a segment of the shell afterwards, to counter the heating effect of the durian. In the Philippines too the fruits are used for many confectionery items (fruit bars, jams, various candies, types of nougat). A specialized and delicious product of Davao is magnolia durian ice cream.
Unripe durians may be cooked as a vegetable (but not in the Philippines, where all uses are sweet rather than savoury). Also durian is sometimes cooked and made into a sausage-shaped cake which retains some of its proper flavour and very little smell. Malaysians make both sugared and salted preserves from it. The large seeds are often boiled or roasted and eaten as nuts.
Among the uses of durian Wallace cites the following: as a fermented side dish called tempoya; mixed with rice and sugar as lempog; minced with salt and onions and vinegar as boder; made into a sauce or prepared with ice and syrup; and the seeds roasted, cut in slices, fried in coconut oil, and eaten with rice or coated in sugar for use as a sweetmeat. However, his enthusiasm and list of uses provoked an attack in a quasi-limerick which was printed in Horticulture, 9 (1973):
The durian—neither Wallace nor Darwin agreed on it.
Darwin said: ‘may your worst enemies be forced to feed on it.’
Wallace cried ‘It’s delicious’.
Darwin replied ‘I’m suspicious,
for the flavour is scented
Like papaya fermented,
After a fruit-eating bat has pee’d on it.’
is cuisine French (not in standard French dictionaries) designating a mixture of chopped mushrooms sautéed in butter with onions and/or shallots and used as a garnish with many dishes.
Why this mixture is called a duxelles (or Duxelles) is the subject of much conjecture. One school argues that it was named after the Marquis d’Uxelles whose cook, LA VARENNE, wrote a popular cookery book in the 17th century (La Varenne himself, however, does not include a recipe for duxelles nor does he use this term).
A second school associates it with the town of Uxel in Brittany. These authors write duxel rather than duxelle but, unfortunately research looking into early atlases shows no reference to a town of this name in NW France (there is a town named ‘Uxelles’ in E. France and a hamlet of the same name in Burgundy).
To complicate matters, in the 18th century, dishes said to be à la Duxelle seem to characteristically contain crayfish (écrevisses) rather than mushrooms and, in what may be the earliest use of the term in a mushroom sense, Beauvilliers (1814) calls the preparation La Ducelle and describes not a mushroom garnish but a mushroom-based SAUCE. Around 1820 a revised edition of Viard’s Cuisinier impérial contains a similar mushroom sauce called La Durcelle but it was not until the 1830s that CARÊME used the modern spelling in a mushroom preparation labelled Sauce à la duxelle.
The sauce becomes a ‘dry’ garnish (Duxelles sèche) in ESCOFFIER’s day (around 1900), and in the course of this century both its spelling and preparation have been standardized by chefs who consider it an indispensable component of classic French cuisine.
Philip and Mary Hyman