borne by the tree Coula edulis, which grows in W. Africa from Sierra Leone to Angola. It is not cultivated, but the nuts are an important part of the diet of the people in some regions, e.g. the Cabinda district of Angola.
The tree is not related to the true WALNUT, but its fruits and their kernels look like walnuts, so are sometimes called ‘African walnuts’. The flavour is milder, between that of HAZELNUTS and CHESTNUTS. The kernels are eaten boiled or roasted, sometimes mixed with meat and sometimes fermented by being buried in the ground. They yield an oil which can be used for cooking.
a speciality of the island of Guernsey, is a semi-sweet fruit bread (see TEA BREADS AND TEA CAKES) highly enriched with butter, milk, and eggs, sweetened with brown sugar, sultanas, and candied peel, and baked in a cake tin. If rich Guernsey milk and butter, with their characteristic yellow colour, are used, the gache is especially good. The earliest written recipes are of the 18th century; but it had been made for some time previously. The name ‘gache’ is also known in Normandy, where it applies both to a flat, plain bread and, in the Ille-et-Vilaine area, to a richer type similar to that made on Guernsey.
Anas strepera, a WILD DUCK which often associates with the MALLARD but is smaller and more slender. Although rare in the British Isles, it has a wide distribution across Europe, Asia, and N. America and exists in large numbers in many regions. Its breeding range is further south than those of other surface-feeding ducks, and some specimens have even reached tropical areas. Its diet consists mainly of vegetable matter and its flesh is described as delicious at any time of the year.
(or galingale), a spice consisting of the dried rhizomes of plants of the genus Alpinia, especially A. galanga (greater galangal) and A. officinarum (lesser galangal), in parts of India and E. and SE Asia. Greater galangal grows in the tropics, while the lesser can be grown in warm but not tropical climates. They are members of the GINGER family, and the spice, in the form of dried rhizomes or powder, has a general resemblance to ginger. The flavour is like a mixture of ginger and pepper; aromatic and pungent. The greater galangal rhizomes are cream coloured with pink shoots that turn brown with age. The texture is fibrous. Those of the smaller variety resemble a bunch of small fingers joined at the tip. The skin is reddish brown with a yellowish flesh.
Galangal was known to the Arabs at least as early as the 9th century; Flückiger and Hanbury (1879) cite two Arab writers of that time who referred to it, and say that the name galangal came from an Arabic word which in turn came from a Chinese name which meant ‘ginger of Kau-liang’, the ancient name for a part of Guangdong. This is interesting because it seems to imply that the Arabs knew where it came from (China) long before Europeans did. The same authors, whose writing on this and other subjects abounds in erudite and often obscure references, note that it was known to Welsh physicians early in the 13th century. Certainly, it became a popular spice in medieval Europe, although its region of origin was at that time unknown to Europeans; see Redgrove (1933) for the tale of the ‘discovery’ of A. officinarum in Hainan in 1867, several centuries after it had more or less disappeared from European kitchens (despite a residual export trade from China to Russia, where Tatars used it with tea). The name galingale, universal in previous centuries, is now reserved for the Cyperus longus, a sedge that goes under the common name of English or sweet galingale, whose roots were once used as a cheaper, homegrown substitute for the real thing (see TOAST).
The lesser galangal has a more medicinal and stronger flavour than the greater, which is the one most widely used in Thai, Malay, and Indonesian cooking and known as ka in Thailand, laos in Indonesia, and lengkuas in Malaysia. It is used in soups (tom ka ghai), stews (RENDANG), and curry-type dishes, sometimes sliced as a garnish or to season sauces or flavour baked goods.
The rhizomes of Kaempferia galanga, known as kencur in Indonesia, have uses similar to those of galangal, and are also cultivated in tropical Asia.
a culinary term in both English and French, whose derivation presents complicated questions which have been summarized by Ayto (1993).
In early English cookery books, the term referred to a sauce, previously written as ‘galandine’ and before that as ‘cameline’. Even in the late 17th century it is clear from the recipes of Robert May (1685) that galantine then was a dark-coloured sauce made with vinegar, breadcrumbs, cinnamon, and sometimes other spices.
Further back still, before developing into the name of a sauce, galantine had meant simply the jellied juices of fish or meat. This sense lingered on in France and eventually, in the 18th century, crossed the Channel to England and assumed there, as in France, its current meaning of a preparation of white meat, ‘boned, cooked, pressed, and served cold with aspic’ (NSOED).
(AD 129–99), a Greek physician who was born in Pergamum, once the capital of a kingdom, but at that time a provincial capital within the Roman Empire and still a centre of culture and learning. He studied philosophy and medicine there, proceeding to Smyrna and eventually to Alexandria as his studies advanced. He settled in Rome in 164. There he practised, lectured on anatomy and medicine, and wrote voluminously. He wrote on philosophy and literature as well as medicine, but it is the medical works that have largely survived. He moved in the highest society, and was appointed personal physician to the future emperor Commodus.
Correct diet was essential for health, in the ancient view. Galen’s medical works therefore include several on food and nutrition, notably On the Properties of Foods. This is a systematic survey of foodstuffs. Each is rated hot/cold and dry/wet: a physician was thus enabled to prescribe a diet that would keep an individual’s bodily ‘humours’ in balance and maintain health. See FOUR HUMOURS. As the earliest such manual that survives, Galen’s work can be seen to have had a strong influence on all later ones, not only in medieval times but down to the present day in those parts of the world where humoral theory still helps to determine diet. But it is also a fascinating source of food history, for Galen was a fluent writer who never lost the opportunity to reminisce on country ways in Asia Minor, on student life in Alexandria, or on fine foods and wine-tastings in Rome.
Several other works by Galen, such as On Good and Bad Juices and his commentaries on HIPPOCRATES’ dietary books, include interesting references to food and wine. What is difficult is to track them down. The only full index is in Latin, in the final volume of C. G. Kuhn’s edition of his writings (20 vols, Berlin, 1821–33); but note also Durling (1993).
Galen tried to write from observation and decried all earlier authorities (except Hippocrates). Ironically he became the authority par excellence for medieval doctors, many of his works being translated into Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and finally Latin. Many also survived in Greek in the Byzantine Empire, where commentaries, adaptations, and abridgements continued to be produced. There is renewed interest in Galen and his comments on food, resulting in new translations appearing in English and French.
a flat, round cake; the word being derived from galet, a pebble weatherworn to the shape that is perfect for skipping. Buckwheat or maize crêpes are also called galettes in some regions, e.g. Brittany, as are various cookies. ‘Flat as a pancake’ is just as graphic in French: plat comme une galette.
As a cake, a galette is made of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs in infinite variations, or simply of puff pastry. The glowing galette des rois found in Paris, Lyons, and generally north of the Loire is fashioned almost exclusively from the latter, the classic feuilletage. The ‘kings’ they honour are the three Wise Men come to pay homage to the newborn King of Kings in Bethlehem. They appear around the Feast of Epiphany. (See also TWELFTH NIGHT CAKE.)
The traditional way of eating this galette, at dinner in a French home in January, goes something like this: the warm galette is brought to table where its fragrance and beauty are admired briefly before it is cut into the proper number of wedges. A child, usually the youngest, is sent to hide under the table, there to act as oracle. To the summons ‘Phoebe’ (or ‘Apollo’) he replies in Latin, ‘Domine’ (master). As he indicates each portion, the ‘master’ asks, ‘For whom is this piece?’ and the child calls out the first name that pops into his head, without regard to age or station, until all are served and begin eating in an air of anticipation. For someone is about to find the bean in his cake and thereby become king (or queen) of the festivity.
All this has virtually nothing to do with Epiphany, the Adoration of the Magi, etc. It is a cheerful pagan rite that can be traced at least as far back as the Saturnalia and Kalends of Roman times, as Bridget Ann Henisch (1984) informs us. The magister bibendi (or toastmaster) of these winter revels was chosen by means of a bean (which had served as a voting token earlier for the Greeks). Thus when the Church, in 336, decreed 25 December as Christ’s birthday, with the clear intention of co-opting these immensely popular holidays, it was already the season to be jolly. By the end of the century, Epiphany joined it twelve days later on the liturgical calendar. The Wise Men were soon elevated to kings, to divest them of any occult connotation. The ancient ritual of bean, cake, and kingship, with its powerful, if vaguely similar, symbolism, was brought into the fold.
Although the galette des rois is much the most famous of all galettes, there are many others. The Larousse gastronomique has a useful list of those which are well-known regional specialities.
(gallimaufry, and other variant spellings), an obsolete culinary term, corresponding to the French word gallimaufré, meaning a dish of odds and ends of food, a hodge-podge.
The obscurity surrounding the origin of this word, whether in the French or English version, prompted Dallas (1877) in Kettner’s Book of the Table to compose one of the most elaborate and far-reaching essays in culinary etymology which has ever been written. He devoted over 14 pages to the matter, treating also several other words (galimatias, salmagundi, salmi, etc.—even Hamlet’s ‘miching malicho’ and the Anglo-Indian mulligatawny) which he perceived to be connected by the root ‘ma’, meaning in his opinion a small bird or chicken and serving as an important piece of evidence for the previous existence of a language, possibly older than Sanskrit, which had already been lost in medieval times but which was the source of numerous words used in the kitchen.
Although the term itself is of little consequence, the fact that it engendered this towering edifice of etymological speculation is more than enough to warrant giving it an entry.
in the culinary sense, is the flesh of wild animals, birds, or fish now or formerly hunted for food or ‘sport’. Use of the term in modern times varies considerably according to the environment. Thus in Africa the term would embrace just about all edible animals and birds; whereas in Britain it would normally apply only to the small number of species which are the subject of game laws. In most parts of the world many species which were formerly hunted as game are now protected, at least in theory, either completely or by prohibitions on killing them during their breeding time.
Although, as noted above, fish can be classed as game, the terminology for them is rather different. ‘Game fish’ would normally be very large fish such as the MARLIN which human beings who take Ernest Hemingway as a role model pursue in powerful motor boats with sophisticated equipment. Smaller species for which anglers (role model Izaak Walton) lie in wait may be termed sporting fish (all the more so if they make really strenuous and persistent efforts to free themselves from the angler’s hook, thus supposedly demonstrating a willingness to engage in a sporting contest with human beings), but would not normally be referred to as game.
The principal game birds of Britain are GROUSE, PARTRIDGE, PHEASANT, plus WOODCOCK, PIGEON, QUAIL, and various WILD DUCK and marsh fowl.
European game animals include various DEER, WILD BOAR, HARE, and RABBIT.
In N. America the range of game birds resembles that in Europe quite closely (with the addition of wild turkey), but there are more animals, especially in the category of ‘small furred game’ (which includes MUSKRAT, BEAVER, WOODCHUCK, RACCOON, and OPOSSUM).
The concept of game has from early times been somewhat blurred by the practice of rearing animals or birds in protected environments in order to provide a stock of game. This conflicts with the general notion that game is wild. The blurring has become more noticeable in recent times as a result of a considerable extension in the practice of ‘farming’, for example deer, pigeon, and quail, even the OSTRICH.
It is no doubt pedantic to ruminate about what can be classified as ‘genuine’ game and what has crossed the dividing line into the territory of domesticated races. There is, however, a practical point. The flesh of truly wild animals, birds, and fish is often deemed to be better, nutritionally and for health-giving qualities, than that of the farmed equivalents.
a semi-hard Norwegian cheese of exceptional mouldiness and sharp flavour. The name means ‘old cheese’ and used to refer to its old age, but the modern dairy product is ready to eat after two weeks. Gammelost is a sour milk cheese, being curdled with lactic acid-producing bacteria, rather than rennet. The curds are literally boiled in whey for several hours, killing the bacteria and leaving a clear field for the Mucor mucedo mould which will develop the flavour. The traditional farm-made cheeses were much more interesting, being flavoured by a formidable combination of moulds and bacteria. The moulds grow fast, developing a furry coating which is rubbed into the cheese every few days. When mature, the cheese is brown and has a crumbling and decayed appearance. It is drum shaped with a weight of 1.7 kg (3.7 lb). Some people like to moisten a dry cheese with juniper extract, coffee, or port: purists, however, prefer its putrid splendour unadulterated. Hulda Garborg, in 1922, described the properties of a farm-made gammelost like this:
It has the temper of a fine wine, is capricious like a far too pretty maiden; it possesses secretive powers like no other Norwegian cheese.
an English term used in the BACON industry and by butchers, originally meant the hindquarters of a PIG or swine, but in the course of time came to apply only to cured meat, still from the hindquarters and usually the upper part of the leg. It is sold uncooked, to provide gammon steaks or rashers, both of which are moderately thick, not like rashers of bacon.
Gammon is, essentially, the same part of the pig as HAM. However, whereas in England ham (except for some imported specialities) is sold after being both cured and cooked, gammon has only been cured.
a name given to various edible BIVALVES which lack the ability to close their two shells tight together. The result, so far as human beings are concerned, is that they cannot be kept or transported for long distances alive, in the manner of oysters or mussels, but must be consumed, or shucked and preserved, shortly after being caught. Well-known bivalves to which the name gaper could be applied are the RAZOR CLAM, and the SOFT-SHELLED CLAM; but the latter is something of an exception in that it can survive for some time without water (indeed without oxygen).
One bivalve is regularly referred to as the gaper: Tresus nuttalli, which is large (up to 20 cm/8″, with a weight of over 1.5 kg/4 lb), common on the Californian coast, and highly esteemed.
The human kitchen draws its resources from three fields of endeavour: farming and agriculture, gardening, and hunting and foraging in the wild world. We understand our diet better if developments in each of these are fully appreciated. Not least that of gardening to which we owe not only the bulk, but also the variety of produce that we store in our larders. Productive gardens (as opposed to ornamental ones) are differentiated from agricultural land by cultivation methods and crops. Gardens are weeded, dug, hoed, and harvested by hand whereas fields are cultivated by machines or animal-drawn implements. Garden vegetables, salads, soft- and tree-fruit are largely confined to orchards and gardens.
In many parts of the world gardening was the earliest form of cultivation. People grew crops in small plots tended by hand before domesticating beasts and inventing farm implements. Thus house-lot gardens dating back to 2000 BC were made in the south-west of N. America as well as in the humid eastern woodlands. After the development of field cultivation, farmhouses continued to have gardens, manured by domestic waste and often tended by women and children. (It is significant that the first British settlers in New England took garden seeds with them in the 1630s to start a productive garden before embarking on agriculture.)
Domestic horticulture was common to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Egypt yields evidence of productive gardens from tomb paintings and archaeology. Romans in 2nd-century Pompeii had gardens for vegetables as did their soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall. Market gardens also operated in Pompeii. Productive gardens in the suburbs of classical Greek cities were fertilized by animal and human dung. Manure was delivered by specialized traders to commercial gardeners, such as the mother of the playwright Euripides.
Cities stimulate both private and commercial gardening by the need to supply a large population with food within easy reach of their houses. Market gardening around London was, in the 14th century, largely a matter of surplus produce sold at markets from large private gardens. But by the early 17th century commercial gardeners were making a noticeable contribution to the city’s markets and by 1798 there were an estimated 10,000 acres of suburban market gardens supplying the city. In America the gardens around the capital of the Aztec empire expanded in the 14th and 15th centuries to produce enough food for an estimated 100,000 people on the eve of the Spanish conquest.
Although today much garden produce is produced on large farms and transported vast distances to market (95 per cent of Britain’s vegetables are imported), in many parts of the world poverty or lack of transport ties gardens closely to cities. The fuel crisis of the 1990s in Cuba stimulated gardening in and around Havana, and an economic crisis at the same time in Russia led to the rise of vegetable production at St Petersburg in backyards and the gardens of suburban summerhouses. In the 1990s all of China’s large cities were said to be self-sufficient in vegetables produced locally.
Gardens have always served both rich and poor, producing cabbages, onions, leeks, and roots to simmer into a thick pottage for the English medieval peasant, plus turnips, parsnips, summer salads, carrots, and potatoes for his 18th-century descendant, and a changing array of ‘delicate’ produce for the tables of the better off. Delicate fare varied according to fashion and season but shared a common characteristic—scarcity. Thus technically advanced 17th-century London market gardeners grew melons, asparagus, and cauliflowers out of season with the aid of glass and the heat of rotting dung. Early garden peas were highly prized in London in May 1723 but food for the poor at the end of the following month when the main harvest was marketed. Rich Englishmen of the 18th century spent large sums raising exotics such as oranges, grapes, and pineapples under glass, culminating in the elaborate heated greenhouses and frames of Edwardian England where skilled gardeners learned to defy the seasons.
The links between women and gardening have for centuries been strong in W. Europe and elsewhere. The Menagier de Paris in 1393 included supervision of kitchen garden in his young wife’s duties and, in 16th-century England, Thomas Tusser advised ‘good huswives’ to prepare their gardens in springtime. Gervase Markham included kitchen gardening in a housewife’s duties and in 1618 William Lawson produced a short and straightforward gardening book for women. Martha Bradley’s British Housewife of 1756 has monthly instructions on the upkeep of the kitchen and fruit garden, and in the present century the link between women as gardeners and cooks has been maintained by both gardening and cookery books.
In poorer households women today play a crucial part in gardening for family food. In the suburbs of Lima, Peru, women immigrants from the countryside have, with official encouragement, taken a lead in gardening, producing food for their families and strengthening their role in society in the process.
a name applied in Britain to a herb, Achillea decolorans. This has long, thin, prettily serrated leaves used for flavouring soups and stews. Their flavour is thought to be reminiscent of MACE, the spice.
Belone belone, a fish of the Mediterranean and E. Atlantic which is remarkably thin, with a needle-like beak, and capable of planing along the surface of the water and even leaping over low rocks. It has a maximum length of 75 cm (30″) and its body is thick enough to yield good fillets of flesh, suitable for poaching or frying. However, its bones are green, not just greenish but a good strong viridian, and this puts many people off eating it, although it is perfectly wholesome.
The Indo-Pacific harbours several species of garfish, of which Tylosurus crocodilus may be taken as typical. It is longer than Belone belone, but otherwise similar and an equally fast swimmer.
Allium sativum, the most powerfully flavoured member of the ONION family, and an indispensable ingredient in many cuisines and dishes. Its cloves, of which a bulb contains six to more than two dozen, have little smell when whole but release a notoriously strong one when crushed. The question whether it is socially acceptable for people to give off this smell, as they do when they have eaten garlic, has been controversial in various parts of the world since the beginning of historical times.
Garlic’s English name is partly from ‘gar’ meaning spear (cf GARFISH), referring to the spearlike leaves. The second syllable is from ‘leac’, leek.
Several species of wild garlic exist, and the cultivated species may have evolved from one of these in C. Asia and the E. Mediterranean region. De Candolle (1886) points to the very wide variation in common names as evidence that the plant has been familiar in most regions of the Old World for a very long time. It has been known in China since antiquity, and was an important article of diet in ancient Egypt and in classical Greece and Rome.
Garlic, already developed to a form hardly distinguishable from that we know today, is commonly found in Egyptian tombs, sometimes left as an offering like other items of food, sometimes playing a role in mummification. The Israelites, as they set off on their exodus, looked back with longing at the garlic of Egypt (Numbers 11: 5).
Garlic was an important vegetable to Greeks and Romans. Theophrastus (c.300 BC) remarked that several kinds were grown; and a section of the market at Athens was known simply as ta skoroda (the garlic). It was considered a strengthening food, ideal for workers, soldiers, and oarsmen, and often prescribed by dietitians; but some upper-class voices were raised against its smell. The Roman poet Horace wrote of ‘garlic, more harmful than hemlock’, that could drive one’s lover to refuse a kiss and to retreat to the far side of the bed. It may be for this reason that garlic appears only twice in the recipes of APICIUS, one of these being for invalid food.
So far as the ancient civilizations are concerned, one could say that in general garlic was esteemed for its medicinal qualities, and eaten by the populace; but often disdained by the aristocracies and even the subject of taboos by priests.
Although garlic has been used therapeutically for thousands of years, its efficacy has been little understood until quite recent times. Its ‘power to cure or alleviate’ was attributed, in great part, to ‘magic’.
In the 1940s scientists found that a substance in garlic called alliin was the ‘parent’ compound that must be broken down before antimicrobial effects are possible, and before the characteristic odour of garlic is evident. This catalytic breakdown is accomplished with the enzyme allinase, which is also naturally present in garlic. Alexandra Hicks (1986) wrote:
Simply stated, when a clove of garlic is cut or crushed, its extracellular membrane separates into sections. This enables an enzyme called allinase to come in contact and combine with the precursor or substrate alliin to form allicin, which contains the odoriferous constituent of garlic.
(A similar process takes place in an onion when it is cut. The cut allows an enzyme already present in the onion to start working, and it brings out the tear-producing element of onions.)
This is not all. The molecules released by these means are highly reactive, changing of their own accord into other organic compounds (always involving sulphur), which then in turn undergo further transformations.
Out of all this complex and sequential activity come the molecules which have the various medicinal qualities for which garlic is famed, including antibacterial, antifungal, and anti-thrombotic (preventing blood from clotting, important in the context of heart problems, for example). A wealth of scientific information on these and related matters has been provided by Koch and Lawson (1996), whose bibliography of over 2,000 items testifies to the amount of interest in and work on the subject.
Generally, garlic is a food rich in minerals, containing within the chemical complexity of its primary minerals a relatively high amount of sulphur compounds (allyl sulphides). These sulphur compounds occur in greater amounts in the genus Allium than in other vegetables; and they are higher in garlic than in its relations such as leeks, onions, etc. And it is these sulphur compounds which underlie the processes described above.
In addition garlic contains trace minerals such as calcium, phosphorus, iron; and is rich in vitamins B1 and C.
Generally, it would be fair to say that the health-giving properties of garlic are well attested and have probably not yet been fully explored.
These properties doubtless depend to some extent on the variety or cultivar being used. These differ in various parts of the world, e.g. there are marked contrasts between French and Californian varieties. California Early is the white garlic most commonly seen in the US markets, although California Late is a better keeper (it will keep from one harvest to the next). Silverskin is another very fine white garlic. Carpathian is well known in C. Europe. The name Italian is loosely used of small, strongly flavoured varieties, and among these Italian Red is favoured by connoisseurs. A plethora of varieties, many of local fame only, thrives in the huge area extending from the Mediterranean to E. Asia. See also ELEPHANT GARLIC; HEDGE GARLIC.
Well-known garlic sauces or similar preparations in the Mediterranean region include AÏOLI, PESTO, SKORTHALIA, persillade, and also gremolada, the lemon, parsley, and garlic mixture traditionally sprinkled on Osso bucco (see VEAL). Green garlic, which is the immature plant, has gained ground as an ingredient in recent years. In the Balkans and Romania, they use a black-skinned variety as their major source of green garlic, employing it as one might a spring onion.
In Asia, garlic is important in cooking, but there seem to be no parallels to the special Mediterranean dishes which are centred on garlic; for Asians garlic is just something which is used all the time to add flavour to savoury dishes, with no special fanfare attending it. Exceptions to its general popularity occur, whether partial (as in Iran, where use is relatively rare and light) or total (as among strict Buddhists, some Hindu Brahmins, and the Jains, for whom the onion family is forbidden—see JAINS AND FOOD; SHALLOT). For garlic chives, see CHIVES.
To say that by the end of the 20th century garlic had conquered the world would be something of an exaggeration. There are still ethnic and cultural groups (some in Britain and N. America, for example) who view it with dislike and distrust or who simply do not use it. But it is coming close to complete penetration of the kitchens of the world. And, if folklore is correct, its spread must be bringing ever closer the extinction of the vampire. For folkloric and light-hearted aspects of the subject, often emanating from California, see L. J. Harris (1980, 1986).
a condiment whose use was fundamental to cookery in classical times. It was made by fermenting fish, as the SE Asian FISH SAUCES, which closely resemble it, are still made.
From the numerous allusions to garum by classical authors, and in particular the descriptions of it given by Pliny (1st century AD) and in the Geoponica (10th century), it is clear that there were many methods of manufacture. Sometimes the entrails of large fish were used; sometimes small fish, whole. Such small fish were often of the genus Atherina (see sand-smelt under SILVERSIDE), which abounds in the Mediterranean and Black seas, or ANCHOVY or small GREY MULLET or SEA BREAM, or the like. The larger fish ranged down from the TUNA to MACKEREL.
The liquid drawn off after the salted fish had fermented for about two months was garum or liquamen; allec or allex was the name of the solid residue, which also had culinary uses.
Garum production was a commercial undertaking, not normally a domestic activity. Indeed in Byzantine times garum manufacture, like cheese-making, was banned from towns and villages because of the smell.
Archaeologists have found fish salteries and garum factories from the time of the Roman Empire along the coasts of Spain, Gaul, and Italy, and along the northern shores of the Black Sea. They have also found amphoras which had once contained garum of various qualities; at least one find, at Pompeii, still smelled distinctively of garum when excavated. The best quality of garum was garum sociorum (literally ‘partners’ garum’, a name for which a parallel in modern times would be that used for the principal kind of Roquefort cheese, de la Société).
Some Roman recipes call for garum mixed with wine, or olive oil, or water. However, Roman use of garum may be compared, in a general way, to modern use of SALT, or that of SOY SAUCE in China and Japan, besides the aforementioned fish sauces of SE Asia.
Garum continued in use in early medieval times in both the W. and E. Mediterranean regions. The West may have lost the taste for it first; at least, when Bishop Liutprand of Cremona visited Constantinople in 949 he remarked unenthusiastically on its presence in dishes served to him.
Although garum then fell into desuetude, some kindred products have survived in the Mediterranean, notably peï salat; and a product called ‘garum’ was advertised in a 19th-century English cookery book, The Household Manager (1868), as having been made according to the Roman method, ‘the recipe for which has so long been lost, but has lately been found in the Island of Sicily’. The apparent lack of other such references to this product, which was made in Wandsworth near London, suggests that it was not a success.
In more recent times the relationship between garum and SE Asian fish sauces has become apparent to those who are interested in recreating Roman dishes, who therefore simply substitute Vietnamese nuoc mam or the like for garum. The German gastronomic writer RUMOHR (1822) was possibly the first in modern times to show awareness of the relationship. See Grocock and Grainger, forthcoming.
French for cake. The word is derived from the old French guastrel, which gave medieval English the word wastrel, meaning fine flour and loaves or cakes made from it. The word ‘gateau’ crossed the Channel to England in the early 19th century (le cake, meaning a pound cake containing dried fruit, crossed in the opposite direction, to France). In Victorian England cookery writers used ‘gateau’ initially to denote puddings such as rice baked in a mould, and moulded baked dishes of fish or meat; during the second part of the century it was also applied to highly decorated layer cakes. Judging by the amount of space given to directions for making these in bakers’ manuals of the time, they were tremendously popular. Their prices varied according to the quality of the ingredients, their size, and the amount of decoration. Most were probably rather sickly, made from cheap SPONGE filled with ‘buttercream’ (butter and icing sugar beaten together), and coated with fondant ICING. Elaborate piped decoration was added. Many fanciful shapes were made, such as trefoils, horseshoes, hearts, and butterflies, all using these basic mixtures. The primary meaning of the word ‘gateau’ is now a rich and elaborate cake filled with whipped cream and fruit, nuts, or chocolate.
French gateaux are richer than the products of British bakers. They involve thin layers of sponge, usually GÉNOISE, or MERINGUE; some are based on choux PASTRY. Fruit or flavoured creams are used as fillings. The latter are rarely dairy cream; instead crème pâtissière (confectioner’s custard—milk, sugar, egg yolks, and a little flour) or crème au beurre (a rich concoction of egg yolks beaten with sugar syrup and softened butter) are used.
Gâteau has wider applications in French, just as ‘cake’ does in English. Apart from a conventional sweet cake it can mean a savoury cake, a sweet or savoury tart, or a thick pancake. A gâteau de semoule is essentially the same as English semolina pudding, but it is enriched with eggs, butter, and rum-soaked raisins, chilled in a mould, and turned out and served with fruit purée or jam. Sweet gateaux are popular for goûter (afternoon tea), birthdays, and Sunday lunch, and are usually bought from the pâtissier. The name given to a gateau can be descriptive, indicating a flavour, e.g. gâteau au citron (lemon cake) or gâteau moka (coffee); or a place of origin, such as gâteau Pithiviers. Some specialities have more fanciful names, such as gâteau Saint-Honoré. These last two are among the better-known gateaux of the Paris region listed below.
Paris–Brest, a ring of choux pastry, sprinkled with almonds, split, and filled with praline flavoured cream or crème au beurre. Named after the Paris–Brest bicycle race of 1891. A pâtissier in a Paris suburb, whose shop was close to the route of the race, was the first to make it, choosing a wheel shape for the obvious reason. It became popular and is now visible at Brest also.
Pithiviers, a pastry confection which is a speciality of Pithiviers, a town south of Paris. It is composed of two rounds of puff pastry enclosing a filling of ground almonds, sugar, butter, and egg yolks, flavoured with rum.
Saint-Honoré, a confection of two kinds of pastry with a cream filling. Shortcrust pastry provides a firm base for the soft and flexible choux pastry piped round it on top. Glazed PROFITEROLES are stuck to the ring of choux. The centre of the ring is filled with a creamy mixture (crème chiboust) stiffened with GELATIN and lightened with stiffly beaten egg whites. This cake is sometimes said to have been named after St Honoré, the patron saint of bakers, but others say that it owes its name to the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, where it was created (possibly as a development of some existing product) in 1846 by a pâtissier, Chiboust. The learned authors of the Île-de-France volume listed under IPCF (1993) explain why they regard the matter as an unsolved ‘mystery’.
a Spanish term whose meaning has evolved over the centuries. It is now most familiar in the form of Andalusian gazpacho, which is typically a cold soup with various vegetable ingredients, notably garlic, tomato, and cucumber. However, a gazpacho may be served hot during the winter; and in its original form, derived from the Arabs who occupied much of Spain from the 8th to the 13th centuries, the essential ingredients were bread, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, salt, and water. These ingredients were pounded in a mortar, and the result was very similar to Ajo blanco (ajo meaning GARLIC and blanco meaning white) or Sopa de ajo (garlic soup), two other ancient dishes which still survive.
Garlic was and remains the dominating flavour element. Bread is used to provide thickness and heartiness. (In some very early gazpachos the bread is left in small pieces and not blended in with the other ingredients. If the bread is pounded in the mortar, it blends with the water and oil.) Vinegar is important for the refreshing qualities of those gazpachos that are particularly associated with warm weather; and it provides a link to Roman culture, as it was the Romans who popularized throughout their empire the use of vinegar for refreshment purposes.
Gazpachos can thus range in consistency from very liquid to almost solid. The internationally famous Andalusian gazpacho, which is said to have been introduced to France by Eugenia de Montijo of Granada, the wife of the Emperor Napoleon III, is of the liquid kind, and kitchens in the south of Spain always have a supply on hand, ready to pour into glasses as a refreshing summer drink, or to serve as a cold soup with various finely chopped ingredients as garnish.
Ingredients from the New World, notably tomato, were not incorporated into gazpachos until comparatively recent times. Thus the recipe for gazpacho given by Juan de la Mata (Arte de reposteria, 1747) had none of these ‘new’ ingredients.
Less common types of gazpacho may include ingredients such as little pieces of fish or ham, hard-boiled (US hard-cooked) egg, green grapes, raisins, etc. Blanched almonds figure in the gazpacho of Antequera; red peppers and cumin seeds in that of Granada; and so on. The name gazpachuelo refers to an interestingly different gazpacho from Malaga; it may incorporate both angler-fish and small clams, potato, and mayonnaise, and is commonly served hot in winter.
an item of Jewish food which has changed considerably from the original version, which involved taking a fish such as pike or carp, gutting it, carefully extracting everything from inside the skin, mincing the flesh (freed from bones), and stuffing it back into the skin. This made it suitable for use on the sabbath, when Jews are not supposed to pick over their food, as they would have to do if the fish still contained bones.
Nowadays gefilte have become something like fish balls or the French quenelles de brochet. To make them, the fish (which could still be carp or pike but are now, at least in many Jewish communities, more often sea fish) are cleaned, then freed of skin and bone, chopped, mixed with other ingredients (e.g. onion, and always including MATZO meal), formed into balls or torpedo-shaped patties, and poached. The chilled cooking liquid is used to coat the balls, like aspic. The dish is usually served cold with the accompaniment chrain, a beetroot and horseradish sauce.
Schwartz (1992) describes varying preferences among Jewish communities as regards choice of fish, flavour (sweetened in Poland, peppery in Russia), colour (yellow with carrots and saffron, brown with onion skins, white in Britain, pink when salmon is used, etc).
If one thing is certain it is that there is no fish whose name is ‘gefilte’ (which means ‘stuffed’ and refers to the traditional version). This assurance may seem otiose; but there could still be people who were deceived by the famous spoof television programme in which the disappearance of gefilte fish from New York state waters was lamented, for example by fishermen who declared that they hadn’t seen even one in a long while—a worthy counterpart of a notorious British programme which showed the spaghetti harvest taking place in Italy.
(sometimes gelatine) is derived from collagen (present in skin, CONNECTIVE TISSUE in meat, and in BONES, particularly those of young animals) when it is heated. It is extracted commercially with hot water and acids or alkalis. Transparent and almost colourless, gelatin is sold in dehydrated form, as a powder or in thin fragile sheets. These are used as required, mixed with liquids and flavourings, to ‘set’ savoury ASPIC, desserts such as JELLY and MOUSSE, and stabilize commercially made ICE CREAM and other foods.
Gelatin is important in cookery and the food industry because of this ability to transform large amounts of liquid into an apparently solid substance or gel. The molecules of which it is composed have special properties that make this possible. They are hydrophilic (i.e. attractive to water), and have a long, threadlike structure. When liquid is added to gelatin and the mixture heated, the gelatin first swells, as the water is absorbed, and then dissolves. At this stage the mixture is known as a sol, and contains sufficient energy for the molecules to move freely in the mixture. On cooling, the molecules lose energy and form a mesh in which water is held both by chemical bonds on their surface, and physically in the three-dimensional network. In this form the mixture is known as a gel. If the mixture is beaten whilst viscous but before it is fully set, the gelatin is sufficiently elastic to stretch around and hold air bubbles; the result is then a foam (such as a mousse). Frozen, the mixture becomes ice cream, in which the gelatin also interferes with the formation of large ice crystals, allowing a smoother texture.
in American usage, a small ‘muffin’ popular in the 19th century. Gems were cooked in a gem pan. They bear little resemblance to an English MUFFIN. The same applies to New Zealand gems, claimed by Burton (1982) to be an invention of that country; they are made in gem irons, which typically hold a dozen.
In Britain the term is used for various small items of commercially produced flour or sugar confectionery; thus ‘iced gems’ are small biscuits with rosettes of coloured icing piped on top.
not just one topic but many, often treated by those numerous anthropologists and sociologists whose professional as well as personal interests include food. The overlapping of the two terms, ‘gender’ and ‘sex’, already means that the topics fall into two overlapping groups.
So far as gender is concerned, it may be sufficient to observe that men and women do differ physiologically, and that on these differences depend some differences in dietary requirements. It is therefore not surprising that in most cultures in most parts of the world, although most foods or dishes are perceived as suitable for both genders, some are seen to be more appropriate for men and some for women.
This principle may be unobjectionable, but the ways in which it has been put into practice do evoke criticism and protest, and not only from women, or from feminists. Generally speaking, practice has put men first and women second in the allocation of nourishment or of particularly appetizing titbits—or of temporal priority, who eats first and who takes what’s left? On this last point see the entry on SUDAN (not that that country is any worse than many others in this respect, it is just an example).
There is a different aspect, that of food preferences. In an ideal world, perhaps, Jack Sprat would eat no fat and his wife would eat no lean, so there would not be a problem. For this kind of reason, there often isn’t a problem. But, it may be asked, how come that Jack Sprat would eat no fat, that his wife would eat no lean, etc.? Were these truly personal preferences, or may there have been discriminatory factors at work in the culture of which the Sprats were part? Perhaps. Once one begins to unravel the influences which shape food preferences one is indeed being borne rapidly towards ‘white waters’. Hence no more on these matters in this book.
Sex (meaning sexual activity) and food have often been linked. Each is the subject of appetites. Each represents a fundamental urge, transcending ethnic and gender boundaries. Each can give great pleasure (or dissatisfaction). Etcetera. So linkages in thought and in writing (and occasionally in deed, as when sexual partners anoint each other with edibles such as whipped cream) are not surprising. Whether they are approved or disapproved is another matter. Male gastronomic writers of what might be termed the ‘old school’ (e.g. GRIMOD DE LA REYNIÈRE and BRILLAT-SAVARIN) were apt to compare an early strawberry to ‘a timid virgin’ and to make assertions such as: ‘A dessert without cheese is like a lovely lady who lacks an eye.’ Persons seeking to defend these writers may say that they were the prisoners of the then prevailing culture; but the more serious gastronomic writer RUMOHR, their contemporary, managed very well without saying anything like this.
The deliberate fabrication of foods which resemble male or female sexual organs is a practice which probably goes a long way back into prehistoric times (cf. BABA), but which has been on the wane in the 20th century. June di Schino (1995), in her remarkable essay ‘The Waning of Sexually Allusive Monastic Confectionery in Southern Italy’, puts a spotlight on one small area of such activity, but in doing so illuminates the whole subject and provides a bibliography which serves well as a basis for further studies. The instances which she lists of sexually allusive confectionery include several belonging to the category of virgin’s breast cakes (honouring the martyrdom of St Agatha) such as minni chini, described by a Sicilian ethnologist as ‘a kind of breast shape filled with cassata with sugar icing topped with a cherry’, and the smaller minnuzza di Sant’Agata from Catania, which were small pastries shaped like an immature girl’s breasts. On the male side, phallic breads used to be commonplace and some survive. In this domain, it often seems that great antiquity, and the presence of specimens in museums of popular art, confers respectability.
The nomenclature of food and dishes is more of a problem area. However, some Levantine titles for dishes, such as those which evoke ladies’ thighs or breasts, no longer sound right (except, no doubt, in the countries where they have been used, unchallenged, for a century or more); and a question mark may be gradually forming over ‘lady’s fingers’ (for biscuits or for okra).
People who wish to avoid both the Scylla of being labelled priggish or hypersensitive and the Charybdis of being perceived to endorse sexist language in connection with food are advised to choose their own words carefully but to abstain from criticizing those of others who have a more lewd disposition. In the company of persons who remark on, say, the phallic appearance of an asparagus spear, they may give an amiable (but faint) smile, to show that they take the point and are friendly towards the speaker; but they should not match guffaw with guffaw.
These sparse comments do not attempt to encroach on the topics covered under APHRODISIACS.
Genipa americana, also known as ‘marmalade box’ in some formerly British W. Indian islands, the fruit of a tall tree native to tropical America.
The fruit is 9–15 cm (3–6″) long, oval shaped, but with a rounded middle. It has a thin, brown, leathery skin, within which there is a thin layer of grainy flesh, which turns yellow on exposure; and below this are many flat, round seeds encased in a brownish-yellow pulp. The fruit is only edible when overripe, and the flavour, likened by Popenoe (1932) to that of dried apples, is very pronounced. Its main use is for soft drinks, in the Philippines as well as in C. America, but it can also be made into preserves or pickles.
a type of SPONGE CAKE (which may be called Genoese, in Britain, but is not to be confused with Genoa cake, which is really a type of light FRUIT CAKE). Whole eggs are beaten with sugar until thick, and the flour then folded in. This type of sponge may be simply dusted with icing sugar and eaten plain; or split and filled with jam and cream, or butter ICING. The top may also be iced. Sheets of génoise are used to make SWISS ROLLS.
Génoise-type mixtures are also made into sponge fingers (see BISCUIT VARIETIES and BOUDOIR BISCUITS) and French MADELEINES.
See also SAVOY.
Panope generosa, the largest burrowing clam in the world, is found on the Pacific coast of N. America from Vancouver Island to California. Its common name, thought to be of Indian origin, may appear as gweduc or goeduck or even gooeyduck, the last version being closest to the usual pronunciation of the name. According to another story, aired in the correspondence columns of the Tacoma Daily Ledger in July 1917, the Indians in the neighbourhood of Puget Sound knew the creature by a name which was pronounced ‘hyas squish-squish’; and it was a certain John F. Gowey whose own name supplanted the original one. Mr Gowey was an ardent duck-hunter. On one occasion, when no ducks were to be seen, the volatile marksman fired at the jets of water emitted by these huge clams and ‘bagged’ several of them. Hence Gowey’s ducks, later corrupted to gooeyducks. This story is not supported by Webster’s dictionary.
The hinged shells of the geoduck are relatively small and quite incapable of meeting over the plump, orange-red body; still less of accommodating the lengthy neck or siphon, which is ivory in colour. A large geoduck may weigh 5 kg (11 lb). A mature adult, perhaps 15 years old, will hang down for a length of 60 or 70 cm (over 2′) when held up by the end of its siphon; and its body will resemble that of a trussed hen in size and shape.
Geoduck meat is delicious. That of the siphon is best used in a CHOWDER, after it has been scalded and peeled and the horny tip discarded. The enlarged mantle of the clam, known as the ‘breast meat’, can be sliced into thin escalopes and prepared in a variety of ways.
Baby geoducks can and do swim; but they settle in the mud at an early age and stay put thereafter. Their favoured habitat is around the line of the very lowest tides, so that it is only on certain days of the year that fishermen on foot can get to them. Even so, it has been found necessary, since the 1920s, to accord them protection by regulating the methods and scale of the catch.
Efforts were made in the 19th century to establish geoducks on the Atlantic coast, but they failed. No one seems to have tried to transfer them to another continent.
means eating earth, especially certain kinds of clay. It is a widespread practice, often but not always connected with the special dietary needs of pregnant women. This in particular is called ‘pica’ (from the Latin for magpie), defined as ‘a perverted craving for substances unfit for food’.
In recent times geophagy has most often been referred to in the context of the black population in the southern states of the USA. Attention has been drawn to imports of special clay from Africa for the benefit of black women descended from the slaves who originally came from Africa. However, Laufer (1930), in the masterly survey which he published while Curator of the Department of Anthropology in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, recorded examples from many parts of the world and drew instructive parallels between practices in the various continents. The following quotation serves both to illustrate his main point, that geophagy has been widespread, and to exhibit the pleasant style in which he wrote.
The clay consumed by the women of Bengal is a fine, light ochreous-colored specimen fashioned into thin cups with a perforation in the center and then baked in a kiln. In other words, it is ready-made pottery which they consume and which emits a curious smoky odor. It is this particular odor which makes it such a favourite with delicate women. The cups are strung on a cord and sold by the potters at so many pieces for one price. Formerly these cups were hawked about in the streets of Calcutta, but this is no longer customary. Such a street vendor of baked clay cups once figured in a Bengali play staged in a Calcutta theatre; she recommended her ware in a song, pointing out that her cups are well baked, crisp to eat and yet cheap, and that delicate ladies about to become mothers should buy them without delay, as eating them would bless them with sons.
The animal kingdom can offer many instances of geophagy, whether for the salts and minerals contained therein or for some correction to plant toxicity will depend on the species, just as it does among humans. Pitirim Sorokin (1975) offers many harrowing examples of earth entering the diet of starving peoples, for instance, ‘in Nizhegorodskaya province in 1922 they ate bread made from clay, bulrushes and pigweeds’. Timothy Johns (1996) explains the importance of the activity for neutralizing the toxic effects of plants, be they the wild potato of the Bolivian uplands or acorn breads where the tannins of bitter acorns are negated by the addition of clay by both Native Americans in California and peasants in Sardinia; and cites instances of clays being used as spices or condiments in locales as far apart as the Philippines, Costa Rica, Senegambia, and the Amazon basin.
the northernmost country of the Caucasus, shares with its neighbours (TURKEY, ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN) a Mediterranean-type climate. Geographically, it can be divided into W. and E. Georgia, with the Suram Gorge marking the division. So far as food is concerned, Turkish influence prevails to the west and Persian to the east. Pokhlebkin (1984) points out that maize flour bread is eaten in W. Georgia, whereas wheaten bread is preferred in E. Georgia; and there are other differences, e.g. in the choice of animal foods. Taken as a whole, Georgia is perceived as having had a significant and beneficial influence on the food and cookery in RUSSIA. It was for long part of the Russian Empire, and then of the Soviet Union.
Georgian soups are typically thick, often thanks to the addition of a mixture of eggs or egg yolks with something acidic such as fruit juice. Fruit juices are also important in many of the distinctive and famous Georgian sauces, which also often incorporate crushed nuts. Satsivi sauce, probably the best known, uses WALNUTS and is usually served with cold chicken or other poultry, although suitable for fish etc. Tkemali is a sauce made from tart wild plums. Others feature one or several of tomatoes, garlic, BARBERRIES, grapes, POMEGRANATES, and yoghurt. Similar preparations are found elsewhere in the Caucasus, but incorporated in dishes rather than served as a sauce.
Walnuts are liberally used. Georgia is almost the only country in the world where this rich, oily nut is used as an integral part of daily cooking and not just as a garnish.
Meat is often cooked in chunks on skewers, i.e. as the shashlyk or shish kebab (see KEBAB) which is ubiquitous in the region; or in the stew called Chankhi where a little meat is cooked with a lot of vegetables and often with rice too; or cooked by frying to go into the sort of stew called chakhokhbili (often made with chicken).
Among vegetables, there is a noticeable enthusiasm for beans, especially lubia (LABLAB BEANS). These are prepared with plenty of spices and herbs, e.g. the following collection: cardamom, parsley, celery, leek, mint, basil or dill, coriander, cinnamon, cloves or saffron, and black pepper. Liberal use of such flavourings is characteristic of Georgian cuisine generally.
The numerous rice dishes called plov are patently related to PILAF, and equally variegated. However, although rice is important, there is no doubt about what is the real staple for Georgians, and that is bread. It has been said that for all Caucasians a meal without bread is unthinkable. The oldest bread is the thin, crisp, cracker-like bread known as LAVASH baked in a TANDOOR (known as toné to Georgians). The numerous other breads include peda (like PITTA bread), and Georgian specialities such as mchadi (a round flat corn bread), kachapuri (bread stuffed with cheese before being baked), and deda’s puri (meaning mother’s bread).
Cheeses in great variety constitute another strength of the Georgian kitchen. Brynza, a brine cheese, is popular and may be fried and served with the corn bread mentioned above and herbs. However, most cheese is probably eaten in the form of ZAKUSKI.
the common and familiar name of popular garden plants of the genus Pelargonium (there is a genus Geranium, to which some small-flowered plants like the cranesbill geranium belong, but most garden geraniums are Pelargonium spp).
Geraniums, which are native to southern or tropical Africa, were introduced to Europe in 1690. The leaves (not the flowers) of a number of species, especially Pelargonium capitatum and P. odoratissimum, have a roselike scent. This is because they contain the same essential oils, geraniol and citronellol, as attar of roses (see ROSES). The proportions of these vary with the strain of the plant, soil conditions, and degree of maturity; and other essential oils are often present. So the scent of geraniums may be lemony, or like orange, apple, or nutmeg, besides resembling rose. Since the mid-19th century the rose-scented geranium has been cultivated for the production of ‘rose geranium oil’, which is used in perfumes but also for flavouring and scenting food, in the manner of rosewater. In Tunisian confectionery geranium water largely replaces rosewater.
The addition of geranium leaves, in small quantity, to fruit desserts or to confections such as creams and sorbets is effective.
viewed collectively, are a disappointment. Before the reunification of the country, W. Germany alone ranked fourth of the countries of the world in cheese production; but the originality and variety of German cheeses does not match this lofty position.
Many German cheeses have external inspiration, like the EMMENTAL which has been made with success ever since Swiss experts were summoned in the 1840s to give advice on it to the cheese-makers of the Allgäu region. The same applies to LIMBURGER, the best known of the strong-smelling cheeses for which Germans seem to have a special liking; it had its origin in Belgium (although ROMADUR, its odoriferous partner, came from Bavaria). And the German Münster is a version of the French MUNSTER. The origins of TILSITER are more confusing. It was first made at Tilsit, when that city was in E. Prussia, but by Dutchmen.
Other points of interest in the German cheese list include the innovative Camboloza (resembling but not to be confused with Bavarian blue); the range of HAND CHEESES; and, most popular of all, the multiple forms of QUARK.
One way in which German cheeses have been important is in their influence on American cheeses, which has been greater than one might expect; this is mainly due to the large numbers of farmers of German descent who have played a prominent part in the American dairy industry of the Mid-western States.
have a distinguished history. From the late 15th to the 17th centuries they were more numerous and impressive than French ones, and rivalled those of Italy. The earliest and possibly the most famous is the Küchenmeisterei. This was first published in 1485 and, amazingly, had appeared in more than a dozen editions by 1500. No other printed cookery book of the 15th century had such an impressive record. And this book continued to sell well for more than a century afterwards. Uta Schumacher-Voelker (1980), in her admirable essay on printed German cookery books up to 1800, relates it to the political and economic context in which it was compiled, and explains why it seems almost certain that the compilation was first made in a S. German monastery, citing the importance placed on Lenten food and other relevant features:
the complete lack of hare despite other game recipes (hare was regarded as unchaste); the lack of almost all saltwater fish (as monasteries mainly used their own products); the lack of sugar, which was very much in fashion at the time for the rich, and its substitution by honey (for whose production monasteries were famous); and the use of home-grown herbs rather than an abundance of expensive spices.
About a century later came Max Rumpoldt’s Ein neues Kochbuch (1581), a finely produced and extensive work which contained something like 2,000 recipes, intended mainly for the upper class. Only one other cookery book of the century (Frantz de Rontzier’s Kochbuch, 1598) displayed a comparable wealth of ingredients.
In the 17th century there was a period, corresponding to the Thirty Years War, when book production almost ceased. However, even before the end of the war some translations of foreign cookery books began to appear, including several from France and works by Sir Kenelm DIGBY and Hannah WOLLEY from England. The especially important work by Massialot appeared in German translation in 1739, and Menon followed in 1766. By this time many foreign culinary terms were being used in German works. Also, the first books with a regional emphasis had begun to appear. Maria Schellhammer (1692) was from N. Germany, while Conrad Hagger’s book of Saltzburg cookery embodied recipes from what is now Austria. And there were many others in the 18th century; Schumacher-Voelker lists a selection of fifteen, in which Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Leipzig, and Magdeburg were among the cities represented.
Regional cookery books have continued to be important up to the present time. During the 19th and 20th centuries the appearance of cookery books in new genres matched what was going on in other European countries rather than, as in this instance, anticipating. A tribute must, however, be paid to the pioneering aspects of the gastronomic work by RUMOHR (1822).
is, as the succeeding entry makes clear, the essence of the national kitchen. Germany unified late and its food remains intensely regional: there is no national food. Certain elements, however, create the Teutonic nuance: rye bread, sour and skimmed milk cheeses, sausages and ham from the ubiquitous pig. Certain prejudices are as good as myths: you will see more SAUERKRAUT in France.
Germans observe the seasons. They consume asparagus from 1 May to 24 June; strawberries in May, followed by ceps and chanterelles. In the autumn come game and geese. They are not generally eaten before or after.
The country was condensed after the Second World War and regional cooking was shuffled when refugees settled in the west. Königsberg is now Russian Kaliningrad, but you can now buy deep-frozen Königsberger Klopse (meatballs) and eat them in Prussia-hating Munich. East Prussia was also famous for its TILSITER cheese. After the war, production shifted to Schleswig-Holstein.
Silesia was famous for its Himmelreich (heaven) DUMPLINGS (and see Schlesisches Himmelreich in the following entry); Pomerania for a great many cheeses including the ‘Jungchen’ (lad) that had brought fame to the town of Stolp. The cheese is now made on the Baltic island of Rügen and called the ‘Badejunge’ (bathing boy). Another Pomeranian refugee cheese is Steinbuscher. Steppenkäse was originally made by the Volga Germans. See also GERMAN CHEESES above.
The former East Germany has a few specialities: on the outskirts of Berlin, Teltow is famous for turnips loved by Goethe. In the Spreewald Slavic Wends produced brined gherkins. In Saxony a rather chewy Pulsnitzer is made: a local alternative to the Christmas Pfefferkuchen like Aachener Printen and Nuremberg LEBKUCHEN. From Leipzig comes Leipziger Allerlei, a mixed vegetable dish served with white sauce.
Berlin has its own culinary traditions. The Bulette (meatball) is supposed to have been introduced by the Huguenots; there are pea soup and red lentil stew (with sausage). Eels from the lakes are smoked or cooked with dill. Berliners are also traditionally fond of Eisbein: braised pork knuckles with pease pudding and fried potatoes (caramelized with a little brown sugar). The roast version from the south is called Schweinshaxe. The Rhineland is the home of Sauerbraten—marinated roast beef.
Bavarian food resembles Austrian: Zwiebelrostbraten (beef with onions), Beuscherl (chopped lungs), and Leberkäs (meatloaf). The beer garden offers Obatzder (mashed Camembert with onions etc.), and Bierkäse, salty cheese to provoke thirst. Swillers equip themselves with a Radi (great white radish) and a Bretzel too. The plum flan that is found all over Germany was first made in Augsburg and the small, dumpy Regensburger sausage is also Bavarian.
The most famous Bavarian SAUSAGE is the Munich Weisswurst created in imitation of the French boudin blanc in the 1850s and which should be sucked from its skin as a mid-morning snack with a glass of wheat beer. It is considered endangered and the mayor has launched a campaign to preserve it.
Bratwurst come in many different versions throughout Thuringia. They are small in Coburg and Nuremberg—where they are scented with marjoram—and big elsewhere. In Berlin they revel in Currywurst—not a curry sausage but a sausage dished up in a mixture of tomato ketchup and curry powder.
In the Pfalz there is a German pork HAGGIS called a Saumagen. Among regional sausages the Frankfurter was originally made of beef. It was more palatable to the city’s Jewish bankers that way who ate it with Ebbelwoi or cider. Franconia is famous for its earthy food, particularly the Handkäse, a sour milk cheese served with chopped onions and cider vinegar.
Mecklenburg is one of the few places in Germany with a tradition of roasting lamb, and is the probable place of origin of Rote Grütze, a German summer pudding. Lübeck is the centre of marzipan production, and the ports of Hamburg and Bremen prepare Labskaus, an extraordinary sailor’s dish (see LOBSCOUSE) made from mashed corned beef, potatoes and beetroot dressed with a fried egg and a gherkin. In spring they revel in fresh HERRINGS (Matjes) and PLAICE (Maischolle).
Frederick the Great encouraged the use of POTATOES, often eaten in their skins with QUARK. The Prussian Kartoffelpuffer is the Reibekuchen of the Rhineland; in Thuringia each town boasts a recipe for the best DUMPLINGS, which are usually made with varying proportions of grated raw potato.
ASPARAGUS comes from Prussian Beeskow and from the sandy plains around Magdeburg. It is also famous from Ortenau in Baden and from Bamberg in Franconia. The Germans take their asparagus seriously and eat it white.
Swabia’s BLACK FOREST cake was invented in Berlin. The region is also is famous for its Spätzle NOODLES, smoked ham, and mountain cheese. You eat best in Baden, which borders on French Alsace, where German food is reworked with French savoir faire. Certain Alsatian staples are common to both sides of the Rhine: MUNSTER cheese is just one.
notoriously divided into two states for most of the second half of the 20th century, had only been a single entity since 1871 when the first unified Germany was formed by Prince Otto von Bismarck. Previously the region was a collection of small independent states, with the separate German-speaking kingdoms of Prussia in the north and east, Saxony in the centre, and Württemberg and Bavaria in the south.
In a rough sort of way, these ancient divisions are reflected in what may be termed the three culinary regions of Germany today. There is the north, where food preferences and customs reflect the proximity to Scandinavia and to the seas (North and Baltic). The central region, an area of rolling hills with wide expanses of forest and numerous spas (dear to German hearts), has a rich and filling cuisine. In contrast, the south offers lighter food, with a strong Italian influence in the Alpine region.
Given this variety, reflecting the wide range of climates and geographical features in this large country, and the various historical influences which have been at work on the different regions, it is hard to generalize about German cookery. However, it would be fair to say that it is perceived as being hearty, and based on wholesome family-type dishes, albeit with baroque decorations in the form of pastries. Features which are seen as typical of Germany include:
See also BLACK FOREST GATEAU (for an item of international fame but doubtful ancestry) and GERMAN CHEESES.
READING:
clarified and evaporated BUTTER, made from cow or WATER-BUFFALO milk, used for cooking in India, especially the north. (The full name is usli ghee, and the spelling ghi is sometimes used.) The butter is melted and then simmered long enough to boil off all the water, during which time it takes on a nutty taste. It is used especially, but not exclusively, for cooking meat, and it is essential for many Indian dishes.
Ghee has considerable religious importance, being so pure that the addition of a bit of it is often enough to upgrade the status of food.
The original reason for making ghee, a name derived from the Sanskrit ghrta, was to make butter keep in the Indian climate. Ghee remains good for several weeks at room temperature, and for months in the refrigerator.
Vanaspati ghee is a vegetable shortening, made from highly saturated oils (e.g. coconut, cottonseed, rapeseed, palm), hydrogenized, and processed to look, smell, and taste like usli ghee.
Samneh (samn, samna) is the name given to clarified butter in the Middle East and the Arab world generally. Anissa Helou (1994) describes how it is made in the Lebanon:
Samneh is made from butter that has been boiled until the fat in the pan is as transparent as a tear (dam’at el-eyn). It is then taken off the heat and left to settle before being carefully strained through a fine sieve into sealed containers where it will keep for a year or more.
It turns up in N. Africa as smen, sometimes flavoured with herbs, or spiced, and/or aged. Ethiopia also has a spiced version, nit’r k’ibe.
a word derived from a diminutive form of the Dutch name for CUCUMBER, has two meanings. The first, which is the more general, indicates a small variety of cucumber (or an immature specimen of a larger variety), suitable for pickling. The second meaning refers to a separate species, Cucumis anguria, a small vegetable related to and resembling a cucumber, which belongs to the Caribbean; this is much used for PICKLE and is often referred to as ‘West Indian gherkin’.
Those who are most enthusiastic about gherkins (mainly Russians, E. Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews, including the large populations of these groups in N. America) would insist that both texture and flavour differ significantly between these various possibilities, and display connoisseurship in selecting their gherkins. They like ‘dill pickles’, i.e. gherkins etc. pickled with DILL, to go with many sorts of cured meat such as PASTRAMI. Paul Levy (1986) gives a precise and eloquent recipe for what he regards as the ideal dill pickle.
In W. Europe gherkins are a traditional accompaniment to a plate of PÂTÉ or a French, Swiss, or Belgian assiette anglaise (mixed cold meats). The French for gherkin is cornichon.
a Middle Eastern BISCUIT made from a pastry dough of flour, butter, and sugar. There are two traditional shapes: discs, with a blanched almond on each, or ‘bracelets’ (made from long sausages of dough) decorated with chopped almonds or pistachios. Moroccan ghoriba are made from a similar mixture, but with semolina replacing the flour. The traditional shape for these is a flattened sphere, and they are dredged with sugar after baking.
Much the same product occurs in Greece, as kourabiethes, half-moons or round, sprinkled with icing sugar. They used to be special to the Christmas season, for which their snowy aspect was suitable, but now are made the year round. Blanched almonds, cloves, and rosewater may enhance their appearance and flavour; and their texture is like SHORTBREAD (or SHORTCAKE in N. America).
Tridacna gigas, the largest bivalve in the world, found in tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific region. It can measure well over 1 m (the record is 1.4 m/4′ 6″) across, weigh several hundred kg (more than 500 lb), and is reputedly capable of living for centuries. Half-shells of this huge creature have been imported to Europe to serve as decorations, fountains, or washbasins.
T. gigas has a small relation, T. maxima. The Thai name for the former means tiger’s claw clam; for the latter, cat’s claw clam. Tales are told of divers being trapped between the shells of the true giant, and drowned. This has no doubt happened, but by accident. The giant clam is not anthropophagous, nor indeed carnivorous. On the contrary it is a kind of marine ‘farmer’, obtaining most of its food from minuscule marine plants which grow along its mantle edges and are exposed to light and water whenever the shells are open.
The meat on the border of the shells is good to eat, especially if its rather strong fishy taste is partly masked by the use of curry paste and chilli peppers, as in Thailand. The huge adductor muscle may be boiled and dried and then used in soups.
a word derived from the OF gibelet, meaning a stew of game birds, now refers to the edible internal organs of a fowl, notably heart, liver, gizzard. The term has been in use in this sense since the mid-16th century, and sometimes had particular application to the goose.
Giblet pies are made, but the main use of giblets in modern times is probably to produce a good stock for giblet soup or GRAVY. Dorothy Hartley (1954) provides characteristically knowledgeable and detailed guidance on how best to make this broth. Giblet stew, often but not invariably of goose, is still encountered in south-west France, sometimes using the head, neck, feet, and wings as well as innards. It goes under the name of alicot (Strang 1991).
In the economic downturn of the 1970s, Filipino street-food vendors made use of every part of the chicken, offering combs, feet, intestines, and necks skewered and grilled over charcoal. They gave each part modern ‘pop’ names such as ‘adidas’ for the feet and ‘IUD’ for the intestines.
Sparus aurata, generally regarded as the finest SEA BREAM in the Mediterranean (where the family of sea bream, Sparidae, is most strongly represented) or indeed anywhere else. Maximum length 70 cm (28″), average market length half of that. This beautiful silvery fish has a golden spot on each cheek and a crescent-shaped golden mark on its brow. In classical times it was sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, either because it is itself hermaphrodite or because of its beauty.
The excellence of this species and its ability to thrive in waters less salty than the open sea have made it a strong candidate for fish ‘farming’, and this is now being practised in, for example, Greece. Fish bred in this way sometimes exhibit small deviations from the norm in things like scale counts, and are held by some to have a flavour and texture which compare unfavourably with those taken from the wild. However, there would seem to be no reason why, in ‘farms’ where space is ample and general conditions optimal, fish of the highest quality should not be produced.
The flesh of a gilt-head makes fine neat fillets, but the fish are often cooked whole, after being cleaned, since their size and relatively narrow bodies lend themselves to this very well. Dorada a la sal (the cleaned but otherwise whole fish is cooked in a thick ‘jacket’ of sea salt—and when the jacket is broken the skin peels off with it, leaving the succulent flesh exposed) is a well-known dish of Andalusia in Spain.
the name of the plant Zingiber officinale, and of its rhizomes. These are mainly consumed in the fresh (‘green’) state in the countries where they grow, but are also dried to provide an important spice; preserved with sugar to constitute a sweetmeat; and processed to yield an oil used for flavouring.
The ginger plant is unknown in the wild state, but is thought to have originated in SE Asia. It has been cultivated since ancient times, and was among the most highly prized of the eastern imports to the Roman Empire. However, Romans used it relatively little in cookery, prizing it rather for medicinal purposes.
The fall of the Roman Empire did not stop the trade of ginger to Europe. It was in use in England in Anglo-Saxon times; and in later medieval times it was almost as common in England as pepper. By that time it was also being imported in preserved form for use as a sweetmeat. The history of GINGERBREAD goes back to the same period.
India produces about half the world output of ginger. Other important producers include Jamaica (whose dried ginger, pale and of delicate flavour, is highly esteemed), China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Nigeria. In recent times Australia too has developed production, specializing in preserved ginger.
The degree of pungency (caused by certain non-volatile compounds called gingerols) and the aroma and flavour of ginger vary according to many factors (region of origin, cultivar, conditions in which grown, stage at which harvested).
Fresh ginger and dried ginger differ noticeably in their flavouring effects. Both are used in Asian kitchens, but with the emphasis on fresh (sliced to the thickness of a coin), whereas in western countries it is more usual to find the dried, commonly in powdered form. European cookery in medieval times, at least in well-to-do households, made free use of ginger in all sorts of dishes, but by the 18th century use had become more narrowly focused, on baked goods such as biscuits and cakes; it has stayed there ever since, although the growing influence of oriental cuisines in Europe has brought about a certain revival of use in savoury dishes.
In Burma, where freshwater fish are preferred to sea fish, ginger has been used to mask the marine tang of the latter; used in a fair quantity, it will mask just about anything.
Fresh young ginger is used to make a delicious and subtle ginger drink called khing sot in Thailand. The ginger tea of Kashmir is famous. Ginger oil is used to flavour ginger beer (alcoholic to a varying degree) and ginger ale (non-alcoholic).
Shoga, Zingiber mioga, is a Japanese ginger, a milder species grown in Japan, and used fresh or pickled; see MIOGA GINGER.
Another relation of ginger, but in a different genus, is Etlingera elatior, sometimes called torch ginger, which is used for food purposes in, e.g., Malaysia and Indonesia. These uses are summed up by Facciola (2000):
Inflorescences are eaten raw, steamed, roasted, or used in curries. The heart of the stems is cooked and served with rice. Half-ripe fruits are eaten in soups and stews. Ripe fruits are eaten as delicacies or made into sweetmeats.
There is some cultivation of this plant in Malaysia, where the name bunga kantan is used of the inflorescence. The plant is known as ondje in Java.
including ‘ginger snaps’ and gingernuts, are the British representatives of a much wider group of European spiced biscuits, and are closely related to, indeed sometimes overlap with, GINGERBREAD.
Most recipes rely on the old method of melting TREACLE, GOLDEN SYRUP, and brown sugar with quantities of butter, before adding flour. Originally the biscuits would have been based on melted HONEY (a substance which still gives a special flavour and texture to some spiced biscuits such as LEBKUCHEN), mixed with flour and spices.
The German name for a biscuit of the same general nature is Pfeffernüsse; while in Scandinavia, ginger or similarly spiced biscuits, often cut into heart or star shapes and decorated with icing, have names like pepparkaka or peppernött. All such names apply generally to any of the numerous spiced sweet cakes and biscuits made in C. Europe and Scandinavia. Although a literal translation is ‘pepper cake’, the names do not refer directly to pepper, but rather to the ‘Pfefferländer’, the eastern countries from which spices came. The selection of spices used in continental Europe is much wider than in Britain, and includes cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, nutmeg, and, in Scandinavia, cardamom, as well as ginger.
See also the Dutch speciality speculaas under BANKETBAKKERIJ.
a product which is always spiced, and normally with GINGER, but which varies considerably in shape and texture. Some modern British gingerbreads are so crisp that they might qualify to be called GINGER BISCUITS. Others are definitely cake-like.
In the recent past many British towns had their gingerbread specialities whose recipes are still known. Examples are Ashbourne (a ‘white’ gingerbread) and Ormskirk (a ‘dark’ one). Some Scottish gingerbreads resemble SHORTBREAD, e.g. the Edinburgh speciality which was known as parliament cake (or ‘parlies’) in the 19th century. A thin crisp gingerbread, it is made with treacle and brown sugar, cut into squares after baking; it is thought to be so called because it was eaten by the members of the Scottish Parliament.
Grasmere gingerbread, from the Lake District, also has a shortbread texture. Originally it was based on oatmeal, as were broonie, an Orkney gingerbread recorded by F. Marian McNeill, and PARKIN.
Late medieval gingerbread in England had been made from a thick mixture of honey and breadcrumbs, sometimes coloured with saffron or sanders (powdered SANDALWOOD, a spice still called for in Zurich Leckerli—see NUT BISCUITS). Cinnamon and pepper were added for flavour. Made into a square, the confection was decorated with box leaves nailed down with gilded cloves.
Gingerbread was also ornamented by impressing designs within wooden moulds. The moulds were sometimes very large and elaborate and beautifully carved. In England, such confections were bought at fairs and, together with other sweet treats, were known under the collective name of ‘fairings’. The habit of shaping gingerbread figures of men and pigs, especially for Bonfire Night (5 November), survives in Britain.
In the 17th century white gingerbread became fashionable. This was an almond paste confection resembling spiced MARZIPAN. Its surface was ornamented with real or imitation gold leaf, from which comes the expression ‘gilt on the gingerbread’.
Generally, during the 16th and 17th centuries, gingerbread became lighter; breadcrumbs were replaced by flour. Treacle was used instead of honey from the mid-17th century on. Butter and eggs became popular additions, enriching the mixture; and raising agents were added to lighten it further.
In France the closest equivalent to the English gingerbread is probably pain d’épices, associated especially with the city of Dijon. It continued to be made with honey after English gingerbread switched to treacle.
Ginkgo biloba, the sole survivor of a group of primitive trees. Such trees grew all around the world in the very distant past; the ‘petrified ginkgo forest’ near Ellenberg in the state of Washington is estimated to be 15 million years old. This single species was saved by cultivation in N. China and has been reintroduced to Europe and Asia as a garden tree. (Western plant nurseries usually sell only the non-fruiting male ginkgo plants, because of the highly disagreeable smell from the fallen fruits of the females.)
The fruit is round, plum sized, and brown, with scanty flesh. The nut, freed of its putrid-smelling flesh, has a smooth buff-coloured shell and a thin brownish inner skin (both to be removed) enclosing a soft pale-yellow kernel, which becomes pale green on being cooked. The traditional practice in China was to leave the nuts until all the flesh had rotted away, and then roast them.
The Chinese like to eat the cooked kernels, which have a pleasant and mild flavour, as nuts. They also paint them red, the colour of happiness, and string them in festoons for wedding decorations. The nuts, after being roasted, boiled, or steamed, often appear in combination with other foods, and in sweet soups.
The Japanese, besides roasting or boiling the nuts, deep-fry them on pine-needle skewers. The nuts are also customarily added to certain dishes such as Chawan-mushi (savoury custards) and Sazae-no-tsuboyaki (turban shells, Turbo cornutus, baked in their own shells).
Ginkgo trees are common in Japan. Fresh nuts appear in the markets in the autumn. Canned ones, according to Tsuji (1980), are a poor substitute.
Panax ginseng and other species, more a medicine than a food, grown extensively in Korea, N. China, and Japan. Its white branching roots, which sometimes resemble the trunk of a man, have to grow for five years before they are marketable, which makes it an expensive commodity. However, its reputation as an invigorating agent is such that very high prices are willingly paid for ginseng of the best quality, in various forms including a powder. Ginseng tea is drunk both for invigoration and as a pleasant beverage.
P. quinquefolius is American ginseng, less esteemed.
Giraffa camelopardalis, an animal of Africa whose appearance is familiar to all and which is now protected by game laws, since it had been wiped out in parts of its range (by hunters who wanted giraffe hides rather than giraffe meat). Even if it would be permissible to eat giraffe, there would be little that is palatable to be had from its carcass. However, Leipoldt (1976) says that ‘the long succulent tongue, properly cooked, is not only eatable but delectable’. He also anticipates any speculation that the remarkable well-developed bones of the animal would yield good marrow; they do not.
two French culinary terms which are less closely connected than might be supposed but which can conveniently be treated together.
Glace de viande is meat glaze, a greatly reduced meat stock which has a syrupy consistency and can be used to impart its flavour and a shiny surface to appropriate savoury dishes, and to give additional flavour and body to sauces. References to this meat glaze at the beginning of the 19th century include Viard (1806), who describes how a veal stock which has been reduced to the consistency of a sauce can be used as a seasoning, and Beauvilliers (1814), who uses a little brush of chicken feathers to brush his meat glaze (glace, ou consommé réduit) over foods which will benefit from a ‘glazed’ appearance. Meat glazes are now rarely used, since their preparation is expensive and arduous.
Demi-glace is not a glaze of lesser or greater concentration, as one might suppose, but a sauce. To be precise, it is an ESPAGNOLE sauce which has been reduced by boiling before further dilution with a clear meat stock. The distinction is made quite clear by ESCOFFIER (1921), who has glace in his chapter on ‘Basic Preparations’ and demi-glace in his chapter on ‘Basic Sauces’.
In the course of the 20th century certain French chefs ‘revised’ the classic demi-glace, making it in simpler fashion. However, like the espagnole, it has now virtually disappeared from French restaurant kitchens, where ‘NOUVELLE CUISINE’ chefs have abandoned the range of ‘all-purpose sauces’ in favour of a simple jus or buttery emulsion. However, even so ‘nouvelle’ a work as Guérard’s Cuisine minceur (1976) has instructions for glace and demi-glace and one is familiar with the puddle of intense reduction serving for a sauce that often accompanies chefs’ meaty confections in the modern manner.
Philip and Mary Hyman
Hannah (1708–70), probably the best-known English cookery writer of the 18th century, owed the fame which she and her principal work (The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, 1747) acquired to a strange concatenation of factors: in part, to chance; in great part, unscrupulous plagiarism; in almost no part, to innovations in the style and organization of recipes, for which she claimed credit; and, to a small but significant extent, to her marketing abilities.
As for chance, who could have foreseen that England’s greatest lexicographer, straying unwisely into a field with which he was unfamiliar and pontificating on the matter after the lapse of a quarter of a century, would have denied her authorship of her book? (It was Dr Johnson who thus erred.) And who would have supposed that the catchphrase ‘First catch your hare’ would have become firmly attached to her book, although the words do not occur in it?
The plagiarism was first revealed in this instance by Jennifer Stead (1983) in a pioneering essay which was the fruit of many months of patient research, and was later supplemented by further labours on the part of Priscilla Bain (1986). It emerged that 263 recipes (out of a total of 972) had been taken virtually word for word from one single earlier source, The Whole Duty of a Woman (1737, republished in 1740 as The Ladies Companion), while a further 90 or so were taken from other sources. It is commonly supposed that plagiarism in this field was near universal in the 18th century, and Jennifer Stead herself points out that the first Copyright Act of 1709 had no effect on cookery books and the like and that recipes were repeatedly copied by one author to another. However, this was not the universal pattern by any means. Some authors wrote in their own words, for example Richard Bradley (see ENGLISH COOKERY BOOKS) and William VERRAL; others did not pretend to be doing anything more than repeating recipes already published (for example the compilation of John Nott, 1726); and there is one shining example (Mrs Mary COLE) of an author who did copy from other works but who acknowledged the source at the end of her recipes—sometimes going so far as to acknowledge two or three sources for a single recipe. Outright copying, accompanied by protestations that all the material was new and ‘never before published’, was not so widespread. Nor was Hannah Glasse the most culpable author, that dishonour being held by John Farley—and the female detective who exposed him, to the tune of 797 (out of 798) recipes stolen from other authors, was Fiona Lucraft (1992/3).
The innovations which Mrs Glasse claimed to be making in her book were mostly illusory. Some commentators have pointed to certain recipes in her book as examples of a new, vigorous, and direct style such as would enable the author to communicate effectively with the common herd of cooks and housewives; but most of these recipes turn out to be ones which had been composed a decade previously by the (presumably male) author of The Whole Duty of a Woman. Mrs Glasse professes to banish French extravagances and kitchen tricks, but then includes some recipes which exemplify the very faults she denounces.
Despite all this, there is something about her book which does represent a sort of hesitant advance in the direction of producing a popular cookery book which would be more accessible than earlier works. Certainly, some part of its success must have been due to a generally favourable reaction on the part of the public. But her vigorous marketing may have been just as important in this respect; it seems to have been a real innovation that she arranged for her book to be sold at Mrs Ashburn’s china-shop at the corner of Fleet-Ditch (in London).
Hannah Glasse’s life seems to have been largely an unhappy one; she was born illegitimate, married the wrong man, was declared bankrupt only seven years after her main book was published (and thus lost all control over it), and tragically lost six children in infancy out of 11 live births and one other (lost at sea) later on. But one thing stands out and that is a certain indomitable spirit which caused her to try a series of commercial ventures to prop up her financial position (one of these was her book, another was the production and marketing of patent medicine, and the last was setting up a ‘habit warehouse’ or clothes shop in fashionable Tavistock Street). Also, she wrote two later books, The Compleat Confectioner and The Servant’s Directory. The former, as Fiona Lucraft (1997–8) has demonstrated, showed her pursuing her practice of plagiarism. On this occasion the principal victim was Edward Lambert, whose modest book on the same subject, published in 1744, was purloined almost in its entirety.
as a verb and in the kitchen, means to give food a smooth, shiny, often transparent finish.
This can be achieved in various ways, one of which is to apply a coating of something which has these qualities, for example ASPIC, often used over fish.
Other examples of cold glazes are coating a cake with a suitable jam such as apricot; or applying a fruit syrup glaze (made by reducing the syrup in which fruit has been poached and then thickening with arrowroot) to, say, a cooked pastry shell.
Many kinds of glaze require heat to be effective. Thus, if vegetables are cooked with butter and sugar they will emerge with a shiny finish. Loaves of bread or buns may be coated with beaten egg or milk, or the like, before being baked; and the process of baking turns the coating into a glaze (using white of egg alone gives a clear glaze, whole egg gives medium brown, and yolk alone a rich brown). Similarly, if a dessert has sugar sprinkled on it and is then put briefly under a hot grill, it will acquire a shiny glaze, which will be brown underneath a transparent surface.
In the Orient, some other forms of glaze are used. When the Japanese cook things in teriyaki style (teri meaning gloss, see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS) they use a sweet glaze based on SOY SAUCE. See PEKING DUCK for an example of Chinese glazing, using maltose.
Meat glaze is a special case. It is made by prolonged reduction of a meat stock, resulting in a syrupy liquid. See GLACE (DE VIANDE).
or glyko, the Greek name for a preserve of fruit in syrup, to be served with a spoon. In Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, and the Balkan region this is the standard offering to a newly arrived guest or to a traveller needing refreshment. Patience Gray (1986) evokes a typical scene:
[Gliko] often greets the traveller after a laborious journey on foot across the mountains, served with ice-cold water from the village fountain and sometimes followed by a dose of rakí, a powerful spirit distilled from pressed grapeskins, akin to marc or grappa.
The glikó is presented on a saucer with a spoon and is consumed under a fig tree in the courtyard. The lady of the house provides you with a rush-seated chair to sit on, and another on which to rest your legs. She sprinkles the courtyard floor with water from a water jar to lay the dust and cool the air, and presents you with a sprig of basil and a glass of spring water while you despatch the glikó.
There are many different kinds of gliko, for example made with muscat grapes, immature green walnuts, bitter oranges (or any citrus fruits picked when they are still small and green), small unripe figs, and sour or sweet cherries. Perhaps the best of all is made with, not fruits, but lemon blossom or acacia—just the petals, shaken from the tree. Rosemary Barron (1991) recommends also the blossoms of grapefruit, jasmine, honeysuckle, and rose; and suggests as well the prickly pear fruits which are so common in the E. Mediterranean region.
A gliko may also be prepared with almonds, and small vegetables like cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, and tiny aubergines (eggplants).
Terms such as slatko (Macedonian, Serbo-Croat) and sladko (Bulgarian) refer to the same sort of preserve.
is a term of many attributes, almost all of which have had an impact on the way we eat, covering the spread across national boundaries of economic processes and products, political influences, social habits, and people themselves, contributing to a reordering of the old world which saw itself as an accumulation of discrete nations each with its own way of speaking, thinking, and, most important to us, eating. Although politics can provoke a globalizing tendency—Alexander’s conquests, or Europe’s expansion in the early modern period—economic versions are the most potent today. By means of free trade and international exchange, barriers between nations seem to tumble, homogenization sets in, not least in food habits, merely because the same commodities are made available through identical agencies, often a multinational corporation.
This form of globalization is set to endure, but is perhaps even less important than the arrival of global means of communication through the INTERNET and international mass media. Information is no longer nation-bound. It takes no longer to telephone abroad than next door. As the length of the day ceases to relate to the rising and setting of the sun, so the meaning of locality has been subverted by its infinite extension.
Not that many aspects of globalization are in any way novel. The spread of foods and food habits beyond their original locales has been going on for centuries (see COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE). Equally, the early modern plantation system of agriculture developed by European colonial powers in America, Africa, and SE Asia had consequences on food production and local habits with many analogies to modern experience of global agribusiness. Mere mention of the historical trajectories of TEA, COFFEE, and CHOCOLATE is sufficient to emphasize the early emergence of globalizing tendencies, just as the spread of chopsticks through E. Asia from their Chinese homeland underlines how habits as well as ingredients may also be trafficked and Hattox (1985) shows how the social constructs surrounding coffee consumption, i.e. the coffee house or CAFÉ, were exported along with the drink itself.
A modern confusion is of globalization for Americanization, when the USA is as much victim as perpetrator of the process. The economic success of America, the apparently global reach of US political strength, the unchecked rise of English as a world lingua franca, and the performance of such talisman corporations as Coca Cola and McDonald’s have much to answer for. The spread of fast-food restaurants is both a commercial (the ‘McDonaldization’ of the world) and gustatory phenomenon. McDonald’s have more than 15,000 restaurants in 120 countries, each offering a broadly similar menu impacting on the taste and habits of the host nation: in Japan, for example, it weakened the social taboo against eating whilst standing. In the wake of such businesses, offering foods with no local history, come the supply chains necessary to maintain them. Thus McDonald’s supports farms growing Iceberg lettuce in India and companies producing frozen french fries in Turkey, China, and India.
One of globalization’s most obvious consequences has been the commodification of agriculture. In its first cycle, this meant the turning over of newly colonized territories to beef, lamb, wheat, maize, or dairy exporting. Today, it means the global reach of retailers seeking suppliers to create the illusion of a perpetual summer for their frost-bound customers. Hence European supermarkets commission growers in Africa to send them French beans, provoking change in local agricultural practice, diversion of energies away from necessary local food production in pursuit of cash income, as well as a distortion of the consuming country’s perception of the seasonal cycle to the detriment of traditional cooking. Freidberg (2004) points up how western commercial intrusion, for example English companies’ insistence on African producers complying with English health and safety standards, results in controls little different from old-style colonial government.
There have always been two or three models for the spread of food and food habits. There is the commercial imperative, where merchant adventurers seek out commodities for exchange and trade (the colonial model); there is the political, where a nation’s military and economic power causes the adoption of its civil attributes by client, or even rival, states (the adoption of French cooking and French manners by European nations); and there is the diaspora of peoples, by conquest or migration, bringing in their wake their own customs, ingredients, and recipes (rice cultivation in Carolina by African slaves; Chinese restaurants in English port cities such as Liverpool and London). Modern globalization has broadened the scale of this traffic and decoupled it from physical immediacy. The cumulative effect of all those diasporas has now a momentum of its own, a virtual existence, so that the borrowing of foods and food habits takes on an à la carte (a bit of this and a dash of that) rather than a table d’hôte (just Chinese today) character. Hence modern commercial French cookery may draw from its own peasant tradition, haute cuisine, Thai spicing and seasoning, Japanese technique, and Californian style, all in one dish.
Homogenization is the bad side of globalization: the destruction of the local. However, a new international creole cuisine need not invariably be unpleasant and the widening of culinary horizons that has come in its wake is as refreshing as would be a similar broadening of intellectual appetites. Reasonably enough, as mercantile globalization has provoked much opposition among NGOs and similar bodies, so the globalization of food and cookery has seen the parallel rise of SLOW FOOD.
Tom Jaine
READING:
named after the English county where it has been made for three centuries or more, is made in two forms, single Gloucester and double Gloucester. The difference between them is mainly one of thickness. Both are 41 cm (16″) in diameter, but while double is 10 to 12 cm (4 to 5″) thick, Single is just over half as thick. A double Gloucester weighs around 11 kg (24 lb). It is always coloured red with ANNATTO; Single is usually uncoloured. The process by which either kind of Gloucester is made is similar to that for CHEDDAR, but with less severe pressing, so that it remains lighter, moister, and crumblier. It keeps well and after six months maturing has a mild, nutty flavour.
as a scientific term, is a synonym of dextrose, the name of a simple sugar or monosaccharide which forms part of other, complex sugars and also of starch; see SUGAR. Glucose is the form in which the human body uses sugar; and the digestion of other, more complex, sugars, and of starch and other carbohydrates, is a process of reducing them to glucose. The sugar in the bloodstream, which forms a store of quickly available energy, is glucose.
A Russian chemist, Kirchoff, published a paper in 1811 which described his discovery that starch, treated with mineral acid, yields a sugary substance. A few years later a French chemist, de Saussure, showed that the reaction was hydrolytic and that the end result was glucose. This happened at a time when, because of the English blockade of France during the Napoleonic wars, rich rewards were available to anyone who could produce sugar in Europe from indigenous plant resources. The factories which produced ‘starch sugar’ in France ceased work when the blockade was lifted and cane sugar became available again; but production of glucose continued in Germany and was established in the USA later in the century. The glucose industry has become a substantial one.
However, most of the ‘glucose’ produced industrially does not correspond to the scientific use of the term. As explained under CORN SYRUP, the name ‘glucose’ is commonly applied to a syrup (produced from maize starch) which is by no means pure glucose, but contains an appreciable amount of dextrin.
Refined ‘glucose powder’, close to being pure glucose, is sold as a dietary supplement. It is useful for invalids because glucose requires no digestion, but goes straight into the bloodstream; and it is also less sweet than ordinary sugar. Pure glucose drinks may be used as a source of instant energy.
a substance found in WHEAT, which gives BREAD its texture. It consists of two PROTEINS, glutenin and gliadin. Wheat also contains two other proteins, albumin and globulin, which are soluble in water and dissolve when the flour is wetted.
The molecules of glutenin are in the form of long chains, those of gliadin shorter. When dough is kneaded, the long glutenin molecules are pulled out straight. The shorter gliadin molecules make links across the strands, so that the gluten forms an elastic network. The change in texture as this happens can be felt. When the bread is baked the gluten coagulates and becomes firm, giving the distinctive fibrous structure of bread.
Several minutes’ kneading are required to ‘develop’ or draw out the strands of gluten; but excessive kneading must be avoided because it would overstretch and break the strands, so that the dough would lose its springiness. Adding fat to dough lubricates the strands of gluten so that they slip and do not become fully stretched. This gives a softer, ‘cakey’ texture. In making pastry it is important to knead as little as possible, to avoid developing the gluten. Leaving raw pastry to ‘relax’ allows any stretched strands to return to their original shape.
Different types of wheat contain differing amounts of gluten. The largest amounts are found in the durum wheat used to make PASTA; it requires long kneading to achieve the required springy texture. The ‘hard’ wheat used for bread flour contains smaller but still substantial amounts. ‘Soft’ wheat contains the least, and is therefore used for cake flour.
Other cereals do not contain gluten, though they do have other proteins. That is why RYE, BARLEY or MAIZE bread never has the texture characteristic of wheaten bread.
Ralph Hancock
an Asian genus of tropical trees, none of which has an English name. The trees are elegant, usually small, and they bear bunches of small fruits; these are dark red when ripe, with seeds whose edible kernels constitute nuts and which have local importance as food in various parts of SE Asia. Other parts eaten include the leaves and flowers.
The most prominent species is G. gnemon, grown and used to some extent in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In Java, the nuts are ‘abundantly sold either fresh or prepared by boiling, or better still by removing the outer coat, roasting in an iron pan, husking, moulding into cakes by beating and subsequently drying’ (Burkill, 1965–6). The dried cakes, known as emping, are fried in coconut oil before being eaten.
essentially a kind of DUMPLING, are distinguished from other dumplings by being Italian and having a close link with PASTA. They are made either from a pasta dough or from a mixture of POTATO flour and WHEAT flour, or from SEMOLINA or MAIZE (POLENTA). In form they are about the size of a thimble and are usually given a special shape by rolling the dough against a fork or the back of a grater, or forcing it through a wicker sieve, or in other ways. An illustration to the 16th-century macaronic poem ‘Baldus’ shows the Muses eating gnocchi the size of northern dumplings; but this may be a joke. Some of the numerous local varieties of gnocchi are described below.
The origin of gnocchi is inescapably tied up with that of pasta, partly because at first a similar mixture was used to make both, and partly because many old works called both ‘m’caroni’. (The confusion persists in modern Padua.) It has been suggested that the macaroni mentioned in the Decameron (1351) as being rolled down a mountain of grated Parmesan by the inhabitants of the mythical land of Bengodi were actually gnocchi or they would not have rolled. The original flour and water mixture for gnocchi is still used in some parts of Italy, but mostly they are now made of potato flour with a little wheat flour. This usage dates only from about 1860, but the curious Mantuan gnocchi made from PUMPKIN are two or three centuries older than that.
Gnocchi are boiled and served with a sauce in more or less the same manner as pasta. They may be bought ready made, or made at home. The dough is formed into small balls and given a special shape or pattern in one of the ways referred to above. Miniature gnocchi for putting into soup can be made by pressing the dough through a coarse sieve or a perforated spoon. Since potato gnocchi were introduced in the 1860s they have become the dominant type; but in Genoa trofie (made by rolling a strip of dough around a stick) and corzetti (moulded by hand into a figure of eight shape) are made from pasta dough. Trofie are an alternative to trenette (thick pasta of a roughly square cross-section) for serving with the famous PESTO sauce.
Also made from pasta dough are the strangulapreti (‘priest chokers’) of Lucano. The idea of priests choking on gnocchi seems to be a favoured one: there are also strozzapreti, made with spinach dough, in Tuscany; and strangulaprievete, made from a conventional potato mixture, in Naples. In Mantua gnocchi di zucca are made from pumpkin with a little wheat flour to help the dough to bind. They are of an attractive golden colour, and are usually served plain with a little butter and cheese.
Other gnocchi include the Roman home-made kind, made from a boiled potato farina and egg mixture and cut into flat rounds with a glass; and the Sardinian malloreddus, made from a very plain flour and water dough and pressed with the thumb against a textured surface so that when cooked they curl up into the form of giant woodlice.
although now part of INDIA, was a Portuguese possession—and the gateway to Portugal’s empire in the East—for 450 years. During this long period its culture was an interesting mixture of Latin influences with those of the Hindus and Muslims who represented the indigenous population. This whole mixture was overlaid for a long time by the importance of the East–West trade conducted through Goa, an importance quite disproportionate to the small size of the territory.
All this was reflected in Goan foodways, which presented an interesting blend of Portuguese and Indian cookery. The best-known example is probably VINDALOO, originally a pork stew imported from Portugal but ‘Indianized’ by the addition of various spices. However, there are many other hybrid dishes. The local sausages are chouricos. Fish dishes (of which there are many (Goa being essentially a strip of coastline)) include Quisade de peixe. This is another name modelled on the Portuguese, but the fish (probably POMFRET, unknown in Portugal) is dressed with an oriental spice paste before being fried. Small coconut cakes are called Bolinhos de coco (after the Portuguese bolo, a cake). Coconut, which is almost ubiquitous in the Goan kitchen, appears again, with cashew, jaggery, and cardamom, in special Goan pancakes, alebele. And all accounts of Goan food mention bebinca, an extraordinary cake made for Christmas, consisting of five or more layers of coconut-milk pancakes, although without attempting to explain what relationship, if any, they have with the bibingka which is one of the RICE CAKES OF THE PHILIPPINES.
meat is taken from the adults of the species Capra hircus, closely related to sheep. Adapted to mountain habitats, goats are sure-footed, able to climb steep cliffs to find food, surviving on tree bark and thorny scrub—browsing habits which often destroy shrubs and trees. They complement SHEEP, which prefer grass, and the two animals are often herded together in lands around the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East and C. Asia. In this area, goat meat and MUTTON are used interchangeably in cookery, as available.
The term ‘wild goat’ may refer either to a feral specimen of C. hircus (protected in many places) or to members of several other related species. These include the ibex (C. ibex), ranging from the Iberian peninsula to N. Africa, the Caucasus and C. Asia); the chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), ranging from the Pyrenees through the Alps and Apennines to Asia Minor; and the mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus) of W. Canada and the western USA. All these have been hunted for food, but have a strong gamy taste.
Whilst goats are farmed in Europe (including Britain) they are of minority interest, and are principally used for milk, and milk products such as cheese and yoghurt, in this area. They are not native to the Americas, but have been imported by European settlers, and are farmed in Latin America, where they are well adapted to poor land in Mexico and the Andes.
Kid is the English name for the young of the species, which is more commonly eaten, and has tender, mildly flavoured flesh. (As with mutton, our ancestors would probably have preferred an older animal. The author of MENAGIER DE PARIS (14th century) said, ‘the meat of a spayed goat of six or seven years is reckoned the best; being generally very sweet and fat. This makes an excellent pasty.’)
Goats were probably domesticated at about the same time, and in the same region, as sheep; that is, in SW Asia during the 8th millennium BC. Studies of the relative importance of goat and sheep bones at various sites indicate that the goat may initially have been more important as a meat animal. Their remains have been found at neolithic sites in China, and both goat and mutton were eaten in the ancient kingdom of Sumer (Iraq). In India, the Rig-veda mentions goat and sheep as food, and there is also evidence of these animals being eaten by Indus Valley civilizations. JEWISH DIETARY LAWS refer to them: ‘thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’
Goats probably came to Britain in the neolithic, and have been present ever since, but were never as important as cattle, sheep, and pigs. In medieval and early modern Britain, goats were kept on steep, scrubby land and used for meat, which was roasted, stewed, or made into pasties and pies up until the start of the 17th century, when it went out of fashion. Another use for goat was to make ‘hams’ of the haunches by salting and drying. Such hams came to be known in Wales as ‘hung venison’. In the 18th century, goats were either looked on as ‘the poor man’s cow’ or viewed, like deer, as game; feral goats (still to be found in most upland areas of Britain) were hunted and cooked like venison.
In contemporary Britain, goat meat finds favour with immigrants from Jamaica, where curried goat, cooked with onions, curry powder, and chillies, is a national festive dish. Two separate cultures are probably responsible for the presence of this exotic item on the Jamaican menu. These are the Spanish who were responsible for introducing goats to the New World in the first place; and secondly, influence from E. Asian indentured workers, present on the island from 1842 onwards. Apart from this, goat is little used in Jamaica, although other Caribbean islands, notably the French Antilles, have developed several recipes.
Roast kid is a festive dish in Mediterranean countries, spit-roast kid being found throughout the Balkans and the Middle East. In this region and in C. Asia goat or kid meat can be used in any recipe for lamb or mutton, although there are relatively few specific recipes for cooking it. Portugal is something of an exception; Cabrito assado (roast kid, preferably an animal about one month old) is popular over much of the country, and there are other favourite recipes including Chanfana, a goat stew prepared for festive occasions.
Among Asian countries the Philippines stand out as the home of many interesting goat dishes. There are many goat restaurants in Manila, mostly offering Caldereta (derived from a Spanish stew for lamb or kid), a tamarind-flavoured soup similar to SINIGANG, and other specialities such as the various forms of KINILAW which incorporate goat meat and are often known as kilawen or kilawin. These last items are especially interesting in their Ilocano (of the Ilocos Islands) versions, flavoured with a fresh bitterness provided by bile or partly digested grass from the innards of ruminant animals.
are made in every country where there are significant numbers of goats; but they are almost always made on a small, local scale and few are exported.
The most diverse selection is that to be found in France, whence a few varieties are sent abroad. A plateau de fromages de chèvre (tray of goat’s milk cheeses) may offer types ranging in size from barely larger than a walnut, as with broccio from Corsica or rigottes from the Rhône valley, to the weight of a Camembert or more.
Flavour ranges from mild and fresh, as in Saint-Claude from the Jura and numerous minor local varieties, to exceedingly pungent and perhaps even blue, as in the ancient and probably extinct Tignard from Savoie. Shapes may be round, as in the small crottin (‘dropping’) de Chavignol; pyramidal, as in Livroux and Valencay from the Indre; or long and cylindrical, as in Chabichou from Poitou or Saint-Maure from the Indre-et-Loire, which is stiffened by a straw passed through it from end to end. Nearly all are soft varieties. Some are covered in leaves or grape marc (debris from wine-making); most are ripened by surface moulds.
Local goat cheeses may be spotted in Italy by the generic name caprino; in Germany Ziegenkäse; and in Switzerland Gaiskäsli. Goat cheese is always dead white, with none of the yellow tinge that comes from the carotene pigments in cow’s and sheep’s milk.
the vulgar British term for a huge, spherical, hard-boiled sugar sweet, impossible to crunch up so that it has to be sucked. It is often made with concentric layers of different colours, so that it changes colour as it dissolves. It is really a giant COMFIT or DRAGÉE.
any of numerous small fish of the family Gobiidae, whose diminutive representatives are found all round the world, in inshore waters, tidal pools, estuaries, etc. They are mostly of blotchy coloration and can change patterns and shades to accord with their surroundings, a factor which has helped to make them in terms of survival a highly successful family.
In the Mediterranean and adjacent waters of the Atlantic there are about 50 species, of which a few attain a size which makes them worth eating. An example is Gobius niger, the black goby, which may be 15 cm (6″) long and which is not uncommon in the markets of Italy and Turkey; and another is G. cobitis, larger still. Discrimination among and appreciation of gobies is greater in Turkey than in any other European country.
The Indo-Pacific species include one which is, by goby standards, a giant: Glossogobius giuris, maximum length 50 cm (20″), known in Malaysia as ikan ubi (meaning ‘potato fish’) and of interest as food to Filipinos (who in this respect may be counted as the Turks of the Pacific) and others.
However, a relatively large size is not a necessary condition for edibility in this family. The French name nonnat applies to the tiny ‘transparent goby’, which even in adult life does not exceed 5 cm (2″) in length. ‘Transparent’ is not quite the right word (‘colourless’ would be better), but gives the right idea. These little fish are often associated with POUTINE, and are used in similar ways by people in Provence. Although their range extends from the Black Sea to Norway, they seem to be unmolested by human beings in most of the countries in whose waters they lurk.
are both used to decorate foods, and have been so used for many centuries. Surprisingly, both are harmless as long as they are consumed as pure metals, though many silver compounds are poisonous. They are on the EC list of approved colourings, having the numbers E175 and E174. Usually they are applied in the form of very thin sheets known as gold or silver leaf. Narrow ribbons and powder are also sold. All are tasteless and odourless.
Gold leaf is made by rolling the gold into a foil, placing it between skins of vellum or intestines until a multi-layered sandwich is formed, and then hammering it until the gold is seen to exude from the edges. The gold is then quartered and the process is repeated until the leaf has attained the desired thinness, which is very very thin indeed. It is often sold in books of 25 leaves, separated by thin tissue. Released from the book it is a most wayward material and the handling of small pieces demands care. In An Ordinance of Pottage, an edition of the 15th-century culinary recipes in the Beinecke MS 163, there is a recipe (138) in which a sweet pie is ornamented with blanched walnuts, wetted with saffron water, and impaled on a pin or needle for ease in handling. The needle is held in one hand and gold foil is laid on
with that othir hond with a thyng made therfore, & blow theron esyly with thy mouth, & that shall make thy gold to abyde. & and so thu may gylt them over, and florich thy bakyn meat therewith.
This is a precise description of how to use gold leaf, for if it is touched before it is fixed it will cling to the fingers and cannot be re-moved intact. The ‘thyng made therfore’ was possibly a fine brush made of a single line of hairs—a gilder’s tip. The gentle breath upon the gold flattens it into place. One way of gilding gingerbread was to paint it with egg white when hot and dab on the gold.
Axioms and quotations warn us that appearances can be deceptive and all that glisters or shyneth is not gold, and the enticing gold of gingerbread on sale at fairs could not have been genuine for the high price would have ensured a restricted sale. It would often have been Dutch metal, an alloy of copper and zinc in proportions of about 80:20.
Elizabeth RAFFALD (1782) describes her Gilded Fish in Jelly. She used clear ‘Blomange’ to fill two fish moulds, turned them out and gilded them with gold leaf, laid them in a soup dish and filled it with clear thin calf’s foot jelly; ‘it must be so thin as they will swim in it’. (See drawing on p. 386.)
An easy way of applying gold is to use Danziger Goldwasser, a brandy-based liqueur which contains small flakes of gold leaf. A receipt for a similar drink is given by E. Smith (1734) where it is called ‘The Golden Cordial’ and is a blend of brandy, alkermes, oil of cloves, sugar, spirit of saffron, and leaf gold—two leaves to every bottle. Soyer (1847) used Goldwasser in the form of jelly cubes to add sparkle to his ‘Peacock à la Louis Quatorze’.
Silver leaf is used in India (under the name vark or varaq) to decorate various foods, especially in MOGHUL CUISINE. It is made by heating and beating silver until it resembles a sort of floss, of which a very thin layer is then compressed between two sheets of paper. Scraps of silver (or gold) leaf may sometimes be seen at Indian and Pakistani weddings, tossed casually on heaps of rice or wrapped around cakes. The brightly coloured condensed milk confections in Indian sweet shops are not usually covered with real silver, which would be too costly; aluminium is used to give the effect.
Roy Shipperbottom
the long, thin, dried buds or withered blooms of Hemerocallis fulva, a lily which grows abundantly in N. China and has become naturalized (indeed grows as a weed) in N. America, where it is known as the tawny day-lily. The flower blooms only for one day. It develops from a long thin bud, and withers to a long thin shape again.
The buds (fresh or dried) and flowers, as well as the withered blooms, are used in cookery, especially in Chinese stir-fried and steamed dishes, and are appreciated for their delicate flavour and interesting texture. The flowers can be incorporated in omelettes.
The dried products are soaked before use. Knotting them in the middle prevents them from unfurling when cooked.
Other lilies furnish buds which can be similarly used, e.g. those of H. aurantiaca in Korea.
best known in Britain but also a standard item of the larder in some other countries which have been under British rule or influence, is a pale syrup which is a by-product of SUGAR refining. The term first appeared in the mid-19th century, when it applied to the thick sticky liquid obtained as a by-product of boiling down sugar-cane syrup to produce sugar; see also TREACLE, but bearing in mind the observation by Stobart (1980) that ‘the world of treacles and syrups is one where there is almost total confusion in older books’. The same author states that the colour and taste of the product are provided by impurities deliberately left in it. He gives the basic analysis as 24% glucose, 23% fructose and 33% sucrose, with ‘small amounts of inorganic compounds of calcium, iron, and phosphoric acid. The high sugar content makes it impossible for any spoilage organisms to grow.’
Golden syrup is used as a sweetening ingredient in, for example, biscuits and cakes, but its most popular use may be as a topping for pancakes, porridge, and various puddings (for example suet or sponge pudding) and desserts.
Comparable products in N. America are CORN SYRUP and MAPLE SYRUP.
Chenopodium bonus-henricus, otherwise known as allgood, a plant of the family Chenopodiaceae, whose members include also QUINOA, EPAZOTE, and several kinds of GOOSEFOOT. It is found widely in the temperate zones of Eurasia and serves mainly as a potherb, although the flower clusters are eaten and young shoots can be prepared like ASPARAGUS.
The English name comes from the German one, which had a complicated origin involving another, related but toxic, plant which was called bïser Heinrich (bad Henry) and from which the good plant had to be distinguished. The ‘King’ in the English name is an interpolation made in England. Names such as Allgut come from the Latin tota bona of the early herbalists, but it is not clear why they gave such a flattering name to a plant which is of no great culinary or medical distinction.
Colonies of the plant, sometimes referred to as wild spinach, may be found on medieval sites in England and Wales. Its cultivation was still being carried on in some parts of Europe in the 19th century. Couplan (1983) records that it was traditionally eaten in spring and at the beginning of the sum-mer in the Haut-Pays Niçois (inland from Nice), where its local name was sangarrigous and it was used in green GNOCCHI.
a female bird whose male is a gander and whose young are goslings. In its wild form the goose (or rather geese, since the birds of several genera answer to this name) belongs to Europe, N. Africa, N. America, and C. Asia. The species to which the common domesticated goose belongs, by descent, is Anser anser, the greylag goose, still common in Europe as a wild bird.
Domestication took place late, since geese take 30 days to hatch their young and more to rear them, and that was too long for nomads. However, there are records of domesticated geese in ancient Egypt, and wall-paintings show them being crammed to enlarge their livers. They were well established by classical times, witness the well-known story of how their cackling saved the Capitol at Rome from a surprise attack in the 4th century BC. Despite this good turn, and the fact that the goose was already sacred to the goddess Juno, the Romans ate them; Pliny observed in the 2nd century AD that the goose was chiefly prized for its liver, alluded to the practice of cramming, and remarked that soaking the liver in honey and milk made it even larger. Roman breeding of geese produced a relatively small, white bird; and the Romans exported this to the areas which they conquered. Such geese are still to be seen in the Balkans and C. Europe. In France, however, the Gauls needed no encouragement from the Romans; they were already producing plump geese, fed on barley or millet gruel. It may well be that it is the French who can claim the longest and most faithful devotion to the goose; and it is they who have become the acknowledged (although not the only) experts in producing FOIE GRAS.
As one would expect, the famous gastronomic raconteur DUMAS (1873) relates the Roman anecdote mentioned above. But he also gives less familiar, and even more remarkable, tales to illustrate the bird’s prudence and intelligence. Dumas quotes the 16th-century Italian-born French scholar Jules César Scaliger as saying that: ‘Geese lower their heads in order to pass under a bridge, no matter how high its arches are.’ Also, and even stranger:
They have so much foresight that when they pass over Mount Taurus, which abounds in eagles, each goose will take a stone in its beak. Knowing what chatterboxes they are, they ensure, by thus constraining themselves, that they will not emit the sounds which would cause their enemies to discover them.
The goose had a special importance in the Middle Ages because its feathers were needed for arrows. It also provided other useful things, including quills for pens; and its fat was especially prized. Dorothy Hartley (1954) points out that it has always been called goose grease in the countryside because it is the softest fat in its category, liquid at 44 °C/111 °F (compared with duck fat, melting at 52 °C/126 °F—which explains why a roast duck ‘needs a quick strong heat “to start it”, compared with goose’). By way of preface to a list of its numerous roles in a farmhouse, she observes that:
Goose grease is always treasured by country people as very useful. Well beaten to a cream, with vinegar, lemon juice, finely chopped onion and chopped parsley, it is used as a filling for sandwiches. It is more appetising than it sounds, having the creamy white consistency of thick mayonnaise. Where the more sturdy Teuton element has remained in Britain, it is eaten on bread, seasoned only with salt and pepper.
These tales are capped by the observation of a French chemist, who, according to Dumas, ‘saw a goose turning a spit on which a turkey was roasting. She was holding the end of the spit in her beak; and by sticking out and pulling back her neck, produced the same effect as the use of an arm. All she needed was to be given a drink from time to time.’
There used to be in England an established pattern whereby geese were fattened and eaten twice a year, at Michaelmas when they were plump from eating stubble, and as ‘green’ geese around Whitsuntide. The goose has also been a favourite bird for the Christmas table, whether roasted whole or prepared in pies in advance.
The goose has a special place in the gastronomic calendars of other European countries, where the traditions associated with it as a table bird are numerous. Geese also provide some famous oriental dishes, e.g. the marinated and roasted goose of Shantou in the north-east of Guangdong province in China.
the fruit of bushes of several species of the genus Ribes, of which R. grossularia, the European gooseberry, is the principal cultivated species. Gooseberry bushes grow wild in most of the northern temperate zone, flourishing in cool, moist, or high regions where many other fruiting plants do not thrive.
Most wild species are thorny. The berries are 12 mm (0.5″) or more in diameter, dark or pale green (the latter often called ‘white’), yellow, or red, with firm skins which may be either hairy or smooth. The flavour is often sour.
Gooseberries were late to be taken into cultivation. The earliest record is said to be a fruiterer’s bill from the court of the English King Edward I, dated 1276, for gooseberry bushes imported from France. However, the fruit has never been widely popular in France. It is traditionally used in northern parts of the country to make a sauce for fish, which explains its French name groseille à maquereau (mackerel currant). As for the English name, Johnson (1847) has a theory:
Dr Martyun considers the name was applied to this fruit, in consequence of its being employed as sauce for that bird. It is somewhat unfortunate for this derivation that it has never been so used. It seems to me most probably to be a corruption of the Dutch name Kruisbes, or Gruisbes, derived from Kruis, the Cross, and Bes, as Berry, because the fruit was ready for use just after the Festival of the Invention of the Holy Cross; just as Kruis-haring, in Dutch, is a herring, caught after the same festival.
The OED, however, adheres to the derivation from goose, in favour of which it may be said that the sharpness of the gooseberry goes well with a fatty or oily meat (e.g. goose or mackerel). Dallas (1877) in Kettner’s Book of the Table observes that the older herbalists always insisted that gooseberry was so called because it was used as a sauce for goose. He concedes however that there could be an alternative derivation linked with the Scottish name for the berry, groset or grosart, and continues:
The Scotch, it must be remembered are great in gooseberries. It is a northern fruit. When there was not a tree nor a shrub to be found in the Shetland islands and the Orkneys, there were goosberry bushes in abundance; and it was an old joke against the Shetlanders, that when they read their Bibles and tried to picture to themselves Adam hiding among the trees of the garden, they could only call up in vision a naked man cowering under a grosart bush. The gooseberries of Scotland are the perfection of their race, and for flavour and variety far beyond those of the south—just as English gooseberries are better than those of the Continent. On the Continent they are little prized, and not very well known. The French have no name for them, distinct from that of red currants.
It was in England that the popularity of the gooseberry led to improved, larger, and sweeter varieties being bred. A distinction was made between dessert gooseberries, for eating raw, and cooking gooseberries, which are sour but have a superior flavour when cooked. From the late 18th century and throughout the 19th amateur ‘gooseberry clubs’ were set up in the Midlands and the north of England. These held competitions for the best-flavoured and, more particularly, for the largest fruit. Johnson (1847) points out that extraordinary results were achieved, especially in the vicinity of Manchester, by ‘the lowest and most illiterate members of society, [who] by continual experience and perseverance in growing and raising new sorts, have brought the fruit to weigh three times as much as before and that, too, under the greatest disadvantages, not having the privilege of soil, manure, situation, &c. like the gardeners of their more wealthy neighbours’.
A few similar clubs existed in N. America. In England, in the 1980s, fewer than ten such clubs survived, mostly in Cheshire. But the best known is the Egton Bridge Old Gooseberry Society, in Yorkshire. This was founded around 1800, and has held annual competitions (except for one or two years in the First World War) ever since. The sole criterion is weight. A new Egton Bridge record was established in 1985 when the champion berry, of the yellow variety Woodpecker, weighed 30 drams 22 grains (1.925 oz); but the world record (58 g/2.06 oz) was still held at that time by a Woodpecker shown at Marton in Cheshire in 1978. Giant gooseberries are produced by removing all the growing berries but one from a plant.
‘Gooseberry’ is a long-standing British slang term for an unwanted third person at a lovers’ meeting; and of disparagement generally. But a good, ripe gooseberry can stand comparison with most other soft fruits. Gooseberry FOOL, a frothy purée with whipped cream, and gooseberry TANSY, a rich, firm dessert with eggs and butter, are renowned.
The eating quality of gooseberries cannot be predicted from their colour or hairiness. Some thornless varieties of the plant have been developed, for ease of picking.
In N. America gooseberries were eaten by Indian tribes throughout the wide area where they grew. There are many species, much like those of the Old World. One of the best is Ribes divaricatum, a cultivar of which is known as the Worcesterberry; with small, very dark, almost black berries. Another wild species, which is now also cultivated, is R. cynosbati, which produces berries suitable for pies, jellies, and preserves. European gooseberries were once quite popular in N. America but, in the early 20th century, Ribes spp were implicated as a vector for white pine blister rust and federal law restricted their planting. During the Depression, armies of the unemployed were sent into forests to destroy the plants. There are still regions of N. America where Ribes cannot be grown commercially and where importation of plants is illegal.
In Asia, especially Siberia and the Himalayas, wild gooseberries are gathered for local consumption, but not cultivated.
The ‘Chinese gooseberry’, described under KIWI FRUIT, and CAPE GOOSEBERRY are fruits of different kinds.
the common name of plants of the genus Chenopodium. Both the English and the generic name were bestowed because the plants have leaves shaped like a goose’s foot. These plants resemble and are related to SPINACH, and were in common use in Europe as green vegetables before spinach, which arrived from the east during the Middle Ages, superseded them. They are now little used, and rarely cultivated. One exception is QUINOA, a S. American species grown for its seeds. Common goosefoots whose leaves are eaten are described under GOOD KING HENRY, FAT HEN, and ORACH.
Most goosefoots are available all the year round, and their somewhat bitter taste can be dispelled by cooking the leaves in one or two changes of water, after which the flavour is mild and spinach-like.
Mitella pollicipes (formerly Pollicipes cornucopia), best known under its Spanish name, percebes, is a marine delicacy which is unknown in many countries but appreciated with enormous enthusiasm in others. It is a CRUSTACEAN (not a MOLLUSC, as one might think at first glance), but very different from creatures like crabs and prawns. Its classification as a crustacean was belated, since its internal structure was for long not understood. It is indeed puzzling; Huxley (1877) described the barnacle (not just this one but any) as ‘lying on its back, holding on by its head, and kicking its food into its mouth with its heels’.
This barnacle consists of what might be called a tube, as thick as a finger, with a dark parchment-like skin bearing tiny scales. On this is mounted a sort of hoof—a pair of white bony pads, from between which emerge the creature’s feet.
What one eats is, so to speak, the ‘inner tube’. If the outer skin is pinched near the hoofs, it can be prised off, revealing a stalklike protuberance which is bitten off entire. Percebes may be eaten raw, but are usually boiled briefly before being offered in Portuguese and Spanish bars. They are particularly appreciated in the summer when they carry eggs.
The distribution of this creature extends on the coasts of the eastern central Atlantic from the Bay of Gascony down to Dakar, plus the N. African coast as far east as Algeria, but it is mainly known in Portugal and Spain.
Gathering these barnacles is a difficult and sometimes dangerous task, since they are typically attached to rocks at the foot of cliffs on rocky coasts.
More or less similar barnacles exist on other coasts, but are rarely gathered for food. The outstanding exception is Megabalanus psittacus, the giant barnacle of the west coast of S. America, known as picorico or balanido gigante in Chile and as balanus in Peru. This is a bigger creature, usually about 10 cm (4″) long, but not infrequently twice that size. It is highly esteemed in Chile.
READING:
the fruit of a small tree, Garcinia cambogia, is used as a flavouring, thickening, and souring agent in Sri Lanka. It is related to the Malay asam glugur (see CARAMBOLA).
The fruits are about the size of an orange, yellow or orange in colour, and fluted on the outside. The interior is divided into segments, and it is these which are sun dried and stored. They turn black as they dry.
Chandra Dissanayake (1976) has interesting comments:
It is interesting to note that in rural homes the goraka is stored away above the open hearth with the result that it becomes quite soft and the acid improves with keeping. In the maritime provinces of Ceylon goraka is seldom ground but is soaked in salt water, crushed and added to curries. In modern homes where the open hearth is not available the tendency is to use the ground goraka as freshly dried goraka cannot be crushed. Goraka is also a thickening agent and as an acid can be used in the preparation of some meat curries. Goraka is also used in the washing of fish to remove the strong fish odour.
which it is reasonable to count as one of the three great blue cheeses of the world (the others being STILTON and ROQUEFORT), takes its name from the village of Gorgonzola near Milan, where it was first made.
It belongs to the STRACCHINO family of cheeses, which is to say that it is a whole milk, white, ‘uncooked’ cheese. It may properly be called stracchino di Gorgonzola or stracchino verde (green stracchino). The blue (or greenish) veins which distinguish it are produced by a Penicillium mould. The cheeses were traditionally ripened in cold, draughty caves near Gorgonzola for a full year. Modern methods of manufacture are quicker, but Gorgonzola remains an expensive product.
A distinction is made between young cheeses (dolce or nuovo) and older ones (piccante or vecchio). A white Gorgonzola is also available in Italy; it may be sold under the name panerone.
Because the veins in Gorgonzola are so often green, London’s old green-marbled Stock Exchange was known as Gorgonzola Hall.
called after the city of that name in S. Holland, is the principal Dutch cheese, accounting for over half the total production of cheese in the Netherlands. It is made from whole milk, and produced in a wheel shape with a markedly convex edge. Size and weight vary considerably; the weight is usually between 4 and 10 kg (9–22 lb).
The city of Gouda retains its Kaaswaag, the weigh-house for cheese, and wagon-loads of cheeses are still sold there every Thursday.
A Gouda cheese has a higher fat content than EDAM, but is made in much the same way and has a similar flavour. Like Edam, it is pale yellow inside, has a smooth and elastic texture, and a mild, salty flavour which is sometimes varied by the addition of CUMIN. The manufacture of Gouda is now widespread, but the best cheeses are still those made by farmers in the vicinity of Gouda. These may be distinguished by appellations such as Boeren Gouda or plain boerenkaas (which just means farmer’s cheese, but is usually Gouda).
A special excellence is also attained by Gouda cheeses which are allowed to mature. Some matured cheeses are encased in black wax, but others are left in their natural pale brown. The effect of ageing is to make the rind very hard and to sharpen the flavour. Gouda which has been kept for several years has a highly distinguished flavour, but is not commonly available outside the Netherlands. Young Gouda can be used in cooking, when a melting cheese is needed. Old Gouda is suitable for grating.
Stolwijksekaas is a related cheese, from Stolwijk, which has a fine reputation.
Jules (1807–77) one of the most famous French chefs of the 19th century, wrote one of the finest French cookery books.
His father Louis Gouffé was a pastry chef in Paris, whose three sons all entered the profession. At the age of 16, Jules was sufficiently accomplished to be making the presentation pieces for the window of his father’s shop. One day, his constructions caught the eye of a passer-by, the famous CARÊME, who at once recruited Jules for his brigade de cuisine. Gouffé spent the next seven years working under Carême, learning the general art of cookery as well as that of preparing pastries. He later wrote: ‘A good pastry chef can become an excellent cook, but one rarely hears of a man trained as a cook who goes on to master pastry.’ He was fortunate in mastering both arts himself while so young, thus paving the way for a distinguished career as chef in important households.
Towards the end of his life Gouffé wrote a number of cookery books which were an attempt to sum up all of his own experience and make it available not only to other chefs but also to housewives. His first and most successful book was Le Livre de cuisine (1867), a comprehensive work which ran to nearly 900 pages and was distinguished by a number of innovations. The typographical design was clear and spacious, and the book was beautifully illustrated with nearly 200 engravings by Laplante and with colour lithographs by Ronjat. (Mrs Beeton’s great Book of Household Management had included such lithographs seven years previously, but Gouffé’s was the first French cookery book to have them.) The content matched the presentation. Gouffé wrote in a limpid style, comprehensible by all and exhibiting a standard of literary craftsmanship which equalled the author’s skill in the kitchen. This was, moreover, the first French cookery book to give metric measurements and cooking times in a systematic way. Gouffé wrote that the book was composed ‘with a clock before my eyes and a scale always at hand’.
Le Livre de cuisine was divided into two parts: one on ‘Grande Cuisine’ and the other for more everyday preparations. It was a great success, not only in France, where many later editions were printed, but also in other countries. It was translated into several languages.
In 1869 Gouffé published Le Livre des conserves, followed in 1873 by Le Livre de pâtisserie. The three volumes together represented one large opus, treating all aspects of French cookery. All of them, and also his last publication, a small volume on soups (1875), have been reprinted in facsimile in the 20th century.
probably the best known, outside Hungary, of Hungarian dishes, calls for a precise account. We must ask: ‘What is goulash?’ In Hungary, the word ‘goulash’ today refers to the cattle driver, the ‘cowboy’. The only place on a Hungarian menu where you would find goulash (gulyás, as it is written in Hungarian) would be among the soups, and it would be called gulyás leves, meaning ‘the soup of the cowboy’. What is known all over the world as ‘Hungarian goulash’ is called in Hungary pörkölt or paprikás. Pörkölt contains no sour cream. It is called paprikás if sour cream has been added to the pörkölt. Incidentally the pörk in pörkölt has nothing to do with the meat of a hog.
The dish of goulash is in fact relatively new under either of its names. Hungarian cattlemen, shepherds, and pigherders cooked cubed meat with onion and spices (with a ‘short sauce’, meaning a very small amount of liquid) for at least 300 to 500 years. But the dish could not be called pörkölt or paprikás because this spice, PAPRIKA, today considered the most Hungarian of all spices, is relatively new to the Hungarian cuisine. It was not known in Hungary until the 1820s when it became extremely popular and practically eliminated black PEPPER and GINGER from the average Hungarian kitchen.
Black pepper was used not only to give flavour and aroma to the food, but also as a preservative. Raw meat was rubbed and practically covered with ground pepper to keep it fresh longer. The pepper was used with salt, with sugar, or alone. When people in Hungary were experimenting with the new spice, they attempted to use paprika as a preservative and rubbed it on the raw meat. When this raw meat rubbed with paprika came in contact with the heat from the frying kettle, the paprika-covered meat formed a brown crusty surface with a pleasantly different taste resembling that of meat roasted over an open fire to the point of almost burning.
To get a piece of meat to this point is described by the Hungarian verb pörköl, which means to slightly burn the surface. The meat treated with paprika reaches this taste without the actual burning. That’s why the new dish—the meat fried in small cubes with fat and onion—was called pörkölt. After beef, the same process was applied to pork, rabbit, veal, and poultry. Each one of these dishes can be called pörkölt.
The characteristic behaviour of the ground, dried red pepper (called paprika) during heating in high smoke-point fats (such as lard or rendered bacon fat) provided a new taste and required a new technology. Meat cubes and strips have been cooked with onions over a high heat over open fires for ages all over the world, e.g. in a Chinese wok. But the addition of paprika at the beginning of the searing of the meat, and a second time just before the dish was finished, gave an extremely appealing fragrance, a desirable deep red colour, and a taste which was pleasing to most.
In the middle of the 19th century, the new dish, pörkölt, became as popular as chicken, veal, or pork similarly prepared with paprika. Because these had been holiday dishes served on special occasions to guests, they spread much faster than more commonplace dishes. Because visitors from Austria, Bohemia, Poland, and Switzerland were treated as honoured guests and had been fêted with pörkölt or paprikás, those dishes found their way quickly into the cookbooks and the restaurants of the neighbouring countries.
What does all this have to do with ‘goulash’? The difference between the Hungarian pörkölt, known all over the world except in Hungary as ‘goulash’, and goulash soup, is in the amount of liquid added to the meat, and whether potatoes and pasta are included. In the real Hungarian pörkölt or paprikás (in English ‘goulash’) there are no other ingredients except beef, pork, veal, or chicken, shortening (almost always from pork), paprika, onions, and once in a while selected herbs, spices, or condiments.
‘Goulash’ became so popular in N. America that many American cookery books list as an integral part of American cuisine such items as ‘Hungarian goulash’, ‘beef goulash’, ‘pork goulash’, and ‘szekely goulash’.
Louis Szathmary
a name applied loosely to some or all CUCURBIT plants, especially in Asia and Africa. In N. America the term is applied particularly to varieties with hard-shelled fruits which are grown for ornament or to provide utensils. British use of the word is less exclusive, matching the French courge and the German Kürbis, which can refer to all cucurbits. Edible species belong to a number of different genera and are used in a variety of ways. See BITTER GOURD; BOTTLE GOURD; IVY GOURD; RIDGED GOURD (also called luffa); SNAKE GOURDS; WAX GOURD (also called winter melon).
Round gourd is a name sometimes applied to the tinda, a very small kind of WATERMELON.
Gourds present an interesting field of study for historians and anthropologists as well as for botanists. They are the plants which raise in the most acute form the controversy over pre-Columbian contacts between Africa and S. America (see BOTTLE GOURD). And the uses to which the hollow shells have been put are innumerable and often surprising. Many such uses are related to the storage of drink or food. The rounded bottoms are no impediment to this. Gourds can be induced to acquire a neck by the simple means of tying a cord round the young, still soft fruit. They can then be suspended on cords. Or a three-legged stand can be provided, as by the Maori for their gourd pots of birds preserved in their own fat (see CONFIT). Gourds are lighter than clay pots.
Gourds also provide a wide range of dippers, cups, and spoons. The outstanding examples are the decorated matés of S. America, described under MATÉ.
It is beyond the scope of this article to consider gourds as components of musical instruments, as supports for rafts, as homes for Chinese cricket champions, or as articles of clothing. The last category includes the extraordinary penis sheaths of New Guinea and other parts of the world, often fashioned from exceptionally long and thin gourds. Heiser (1979) has provided an excellent survey of the mysteries surrounding these ‘phallocrypts’ and of the uses and decorations of gourds in general. Organ (1963) also has good material on uses, besides a thoughtful passage on the possible transoceanic dissemination of gourds in ancient times.
A curious sidelight on gourd-growing emerges from the reminiscences of Kinau Wilder (1978), the niece of the botanist Gerrit Parmile Wilder. She records that
At the bottom of his large garden he once grew some gourds. Without explaining to the outstanding socialites just why he wanted one stocking from each, he raised a lovely crop of most unusually shaped gourds, all labelled in large letters easily read from the street. There was the Agnes Galt, the Molly Wilder, the Sarah Wilder, the Ida von Holt, the Helen Carter, and many others. The stockings had been used to train the growing gourds and the results were extraordinary! My mother had awfully skinny legs but some of the others did not, and the display caused a near riot.
a term of French origin which usually indicates a person who is overfond of eating; greedy, a glutton. However, it is sometimes used in a milder sense, simply designating someone who loves good food (like GOURMET, see next entry).
In France the term has parallel meanings, but generally with fewer censorious overtones.
a word which came into the English language from French as a noun, meaning somebody who takes a discriminating and informed interest in food. Since then, especially in N. America, it has become an adjective; a ‘gourmet food’ is one which will supposedly appeal to such a person. This development has probably had the result that fewer of the people who might have been glad to be called ‘gourmets’ 50 years ago are now willing to be so described. The word may eventually cease to have any real significance, except in a historical context.
In the French language, the word originally designated an accomplished wine-taster. For a long time now it has acquired a much more general meaning—like the English one, but retaining more respectability and significance. It is however met less often than the all-encompassing GOURMAND, see above.
(also known as kimba pepper), the seeds of a shrubby tree, Xylopia aethiopica, found in Africa. The seeds have a pleasant musky flavour and are used as a pepper substitute. The pods are crushed and added whole to soups or stews, then removed before serving. The spice may be called Guinea pepper, African pepper, and Ethiopian pepper, thus potentially confusing it with Piper guineense (see ASHANTI PEPPER) and MELEGUETA PEPPER.
Jenny Macarthur
an Indian term which refers to PULSES which are whole rather than split; the latter are called DAL.
The word is of Portuguese origin, from grão (grain, from the Latin granum), but is not, as one might expect, applied to cereal grains.
The term gram by itself, without an epithet, is taken to mean CHICKPEA (channa). Similarly, ‘gram flour’ means BESAN FLOUR, which is made from chickpeas. Other kinds of gram are listed below, with references to the articles in which they are described.
the generic name of the group of hard, grating cheeses made in Italy. The most famous of these, grana Parmigiano Reggiano, is treated separately under PARMESAN, since it is so well known outside Italy under that name.
Grana cheeses take their name from the grainy texture which they all exhibit, even before maturity. They are all made by much the same process, using partly skimmed cow’s milk and involving the usual sequence of a starter, curdling with RENNET, heating, pressing, and brining, followed by a lengthy maturing. They are produced in the form of large wheels, typically weighing from 20 to 50 kg (45 to 110 lb).
Besides the geographical classification, explained below, grana cheeses may be distinguished by the season of manufacture. Those made between April and June, called di testa, are considered the best. They may also be classified by age. All are matured initially for a period of 6–12 months, after which they are distributed to dealers for further maturing: a process which may continue for up to three years. Cheeses which are more than a year old are vecchio (old). Later they graduate to being stravecchio (extra old) and stravecchione (super extra old). As they grow older, grana cheeses acquire an ever sharper taste and become progressively more expensive. They keep for a long time, because of their low moisture content, but eventually turn powdery.
The history of grana cheeses can be traced back at least as far as AD 1000, which seems to have been roughly when monks in the Po Valley succeeded, by a system of irrigation, in starting the intensive farming of dairy herds and the production on a large scale of milk for cheese. During medieval times grana cheese acquired great importance because it kept so well and was easy to transport.
The principal varieties, defined by their districts of origin, are as follows:
Grana Bagozzo, known also simply as Bagoss, a minor variety from Bagolino in the province of Brescia. It is made by a process which differs in some respects from the standard one, and was the favourite cheese of Garibaldi. It used to be called grana Bresciano, but that name now applies generally to cheeses from the province of Brescia.
Grana Lodigiano, a type with a larger grain than the others, a sharper taste, and a stronger yellow colour which turns green after the cheese has been cut open. Cutting it also produces characteristic ‘tears’, small drops of moisture which are exuded. Once the rival of Parmesan in European fame, this variety is now rare and may risk becoming extinct. It is handicapped by the fact that it takes longer to mature than do its rivals.
Grana Padano, the product of a large area in the Po Valley and the Trentino, but excluding the inner region of Parmigiano Reggiano. A subvariety is grana Mantovano, from the district of Mantua.
Grana Piacentino, the pride of Piacenza and a cheese which was already being praised in the 15th century, and by Montaigne in the 16th, is now classified as a grana Padano, but formerly bore its own specific name. The people of Piacenza and those of Parma both claimed that their grana was the original one.
These appellations, excepting those which have been superseded, are all protected.
The correct method of cutting up grana cheeses is interesting. The wheel is first divided into 16 portions by vertical cuts of which each passes through the centre point. These portions are then sliced into two horizontally, yielding a total of 32, all of which should be equal in weight.
The use of grana cheese outside Italy is almost entirely confined to grating, usually in connection with Italian PASTA dishes, POLENTA, and MINESTRONE. Within Italy, this familiar use is augmented by consumption of young grana cheeses at table, but is still dominant. Di Corato (1977) attributes to the eminent gastronome Massimo Alberini the following succinct and eloquent statement:
It is, without doubt, the most typical Italian cheese, not only for its intrinsic value but, more important, for the contribution which it makes to the flavour and nutritive value of many dishes, from minestrone to pasta, from polenta to certain vegetables. [It] enriches without suffocating, gives vigour without overwhelming, and, in particular, confers an Italian character to [each such dish].
the fruit of vines of the genus Vitis, has been celebrated as both food and the source of wine since antiquity. Wine, as such, is not within the scope of this book, although there is an entry for WINE as an ingredient in cookery. The present entry deals principally with the history of the grape and the use of table grapes.
The outstanding grapevine is V. vinifera. In its original form it was indigenous to the area stretching from the south-east coast of the Black Sea around the south of the Caspian Sea to Afghanistan, and is still found there. Like its cultivated successors, the wild vine is a climbing plant which needs to grow up some support.
Various cultures have left clues to the early cultivation of the vine. Paintings on the walls of Egyptian tombs of the 4th dynasty, around 2440 BC, show the growing of grapes, including obviously improved, large-fruited varieties as well as smaller ones like the Zante grapes from which currants (see RAISINS, SULTANAS, AND CURRANTS) are made. The Bible mentions vineyards from the time of Noah (Genesis 9: 20). From Asia, the Phoenicians, a trading and seafaring people, brought the vine to Greece not long after 1000 BC. It flourished in the Mediterranean climate and spread throughout the classical world.
The Greeks and Romans grew grapes not only for making wine and for eating fresh, but also for grape products.
Sugar syrups, made by boiling down must (fresh unfermented grape juice), were an important ingredient in Roman food. The difference between the various syrups is not fully known but, according to Pliny, sapa was more concentrated than defrutum, being boiled down to one-third of the original volume. Defrutum, used in savoury sauces, was reduced to only half the original volume. Another kind, passum, made from raisins and must or wine, was used as a sweetener. Grape syrup is still made in the Levant (where it is called DIBS), and in Turkey and the Balkans, where it is PEKMEZ as well as in France (RAISINÉ) and Italy (vincotto).
VERJUICE, the juice of unripe grapes (or sometimes of other fruit such as CRABAPPLES), is another grape product of ancient origin. It was much used as a souring agent in cooking in Europe until it was ousted by cheap vinegar. (Good VINEGAR, of course, may itself be a grape product.) In the Balkans, pickled green grapes are popular and used as an ingredient in stews.
Grape cultivation spread through the Roman Empire as its frontiers advanced and did not stop when the Empire fell. The grape was already known beyond the boundaries of the Empire, in regions with a cool enough winter for the vines. Indeed it had reached N. India from Persia as far back as the 7th century BC, and China around 100 BC.
In Asia and America, and in S. Africa too, other Vitis species existed, some producing grapes of reasonable eating quality and potentially suitable for cultivation. The Vikings who were exploring the eastern seaboard of N. America long before 1492 evidently met at least one American species, probably V. labrusca, the fox grape (the other good one, V. rotundifolia, the muscadine or scuppernong grape, belongs to the south-east). After European colonization of the Americas began in earnest, following the voyages of Columbus, numerous expeditions of settlers took seeds of V. vinifera across the Atlantic. Some plantings were successful, but the plants failed to prosper in the cold winters of Massachusetts, and all over the north-east settlers were obliged to turn to native species, which they cultivated and improved. For example the black Concord grapes popular in the USA are a variety of V. labrusca. (There are also many V. vinifera × labrusca and other hybrids.)
While the European grape was becoming established in the climatically suitable parts of the Americas, the Dutch took it to S. Africa (where also a native grape of fair quality, V. capensis, existed) in 1655. Australia had no native grape, but provided suitable environments (New South Wales, Victoria, S. Australia) for the European grape when it arrived there.
Thus the empire of V. vinifera had spread round the globe by the mid-19th century. Then, in 1860, came a disaster which came close to wiping it out in its home base, Europe. An aphid, Phylloxera vastatrix, lives on the roots of some native American vines without harming them particularly. But once it gets onto the roots of V. vinifera, it soon kills the plant. Somehow Phylloxera was accidentally introduced into France and within a few years had ravaged all European vineyards.
Fortunately, it was noticed that American vines, a few of which were grown in Europe as exotics, were not affected. V. vinifera was saved by grafting it onto American rootstocks. Now all V. vinifera vines are grafted, save in a few places where it has been possible to maintain plots of ungrafted vines.
Towards the end of the 20th century the leading producers of table grapes were Italy, Turkey, Bulgaria, the USA, Greece, Portugal, and S. Africa. The main varieties are listed below.
More than 8,000 varieties of grape have been named and described, but only 40 or 50 are commercially important and most of these are purely wine grapes. A few varieties are grown to produce RAISINS, SULTANAS, AND CURRANTS. The most important hybrids and varieties of table grape (all belonging to V. vinifera, unless otherwise indicated) are the following:
Alicante, a black grape of French origin also grown in California, and elsewhere.
Almeria, a medium-large white grape of mild flavour, grown in Spain and the USA. A useful export variety, since it keeps well.
Baresana, an amber-coloured Italian eating grape, not very sweet but well flavoured.
Cardinal, an American cross between Tokay and Ribier, which has very large, red fruits of neutral flavour.
Catawba, an American hybrid of the native fox grape, V. labrusca, which has been cultivated in Kentucky since 1802. The large, purplish red fruits have a distinctive flavour, and are sometimes eaten as table grapes, but the variety is grown mainly for wine and juice.
Chasselas (or Golden Chasselas), a yellow French table grape of superior quality. It exists in several forms and may be the oldest known cultivated variety, to judge by Egyptian tomb paintings at Luxor.
Concord, a V. labrusca hybrid. It is the principal bluish-black grape of the north-eastern USA simply because it will grow there, being resistant to cold. The large fruits, which have a rather coarse flavour, often described as ‘foxy’, are sometimes eaten as dessert grapes, but most of them go for juice, wine, and jelly. The curiously bright purple American grape juice whose colour and flavour leads Europeans to suppose it to be synthetic is in fact a natural product of this variety. Some varieties are seedless. The manufacture of grape jam or jelly, first called Grapelade, then Concord Grape Jelly, was started by Paul Welch after patenting a system of puréeing the grapes in 1917. Its popularity was assured by the Defence Department which supplied the jam to American troops in Europe.
Delaware, another native American variety (a V. aestivalis × vinifera × V. labrusca cross). It is small, dark pink, soft skinned, and has a sweet flavour. It is used both as a table grape and for making wine. It is popular in Japan and grown in Brazil.
Emperor, the second most widely sold table grape in the USA (more because of durability in transport and storage than for eating quality). It is red and thick skinned.
Gamay, the black grape from which Beaujolais is made. It is unusual for a wine grape in being of excellent eating quality.
Hanepoot (‘honey pot’), the very sweet, meaty Muscat of Alexandria grape grown in S. Africa and often exported. It is an ancient variety and known as a table or raisin grape rather than a wine grape. It is also popular for jam-making (korrelkonfyt).
Italia, another Muscat variety, highly popular in Italy, whence it is exported to other European countries. It is also grown in the USA. A large, white grape with a thick skin and a heavy, sweet flavour.
Kishmish(i), see Thompson seedless.
Malaga, originally a vaguely used American term for large, white Spanish grapes of the same type as Almeria, which were imported from Malaga. However, there is also an American-grown Red Malaga with large pink or red grapes, crisp but lacking in acidity.
Muscat, a general term for a group of varieties. They are all large, ranging in colour from pale yellow to deep, black with thick skins, sweet, and aromatic. Muscat grapes are among the best for eating fresh. They are also made into the large, flat ‘muscatel’ raisins (and sweet dessert wines such as Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise).
Niagara (Concord × Cassady), a large, pale, yellowish-green grape of native American V. labrusca stock, is the principal white American table grape of that type, though less popular than V. vinifera white grapes. It has a tangy, slightly ‘foxy’ flavour.
Perlette, a very early white, seedless table grape, firm, crisp, juicy, and thin skinned, which has a mild but pleasing flavour. It is grown in California.
Regina, a variety with elongated, amber, sweet, crisp grapes, deservedly popular for table use in Italy. There are similar varieties in Greece (Rozaki) and Bulgaria (Bolgar).
Ribier, a European variety grown in the United States, which comes on the market very late in winter. The grapes are large, round, and purple-black, neutral in flavour and lacking acidity.
Thompson seedless, also called Sultanina or Kishmish(i), and widely grown. It is the leading American table grape, being firm, tender, and sweet, though without strong flavour. It is also grown, both in the USA and in Australia, for making sultanas, light-coloured, seedless raisins.
Tokay or Pinot Gris, grown both as a table grape and for making white wine. In California, where it is called ‘Flame Tokay’, it is grown for eating fresh and is second in popularity to Thompson seedless. The large, oval red fruit has a firm texture, tough skin, and a mild flavour.
Zinfandel, a reddish-black grape, grown in California both for eating fresh and for making wine.
The use of fresh grapes in cookery is limited, but essential to a few well-known dishes such as Sole Véronique.
READING:
Citrus × paradisi, the refined descendant of a bigger and rougher fruit, the POMELO or shaddock. It has the distinction of being the largest CITRUS FRUIT commonly available, although a newcomer on the fruiterer’s shelves.
The first mention of the grapefruit is in 1750, by an author who called it ‘forbidden fruit’ and said that it grew in Barbados. Around 1820 a French botanist, the Chevalier de Tussac, wrote in his Flore des Antilles:
I have had the occasion to observe, at Jamaica, in the botanical garden of the Government, a variety of shaddock whose fruits, which are not bigger than a fair orange, are disposed in clusters [French ‘grappes’]; the English in Jamaica call this the ‘forbidden fruit’ or ‘smaller shaddock’.
It may be the clustering habit which gave the new fruit the name ‘grapefruit’; certainly this explanation is more plausible than the suggestion that it tastes like grapes.
The grapefruit was introduced to Florida in 1823 by a French count with the ambiguous name of Odette Phillippe. It was slow to achieve popularity despite its beautiful appearance. The rather bitter flavour is an acquired taste and the fruit is difficult to peel in the way that one might peel an orange. However, trial consignments sent to Philadelphia and New York in 1885 sold well, and within a few years the industry had grown to a large size. Later, cultivation spread to California, Arizona, Texas, and then abroad. Israel, Argentina, and S. Africa are now major producers.
There are two main varieties of grapefruit: Duncan, which has a lot of seeds but a good flavour, and Marsh, which is seedless but has less flavour. Duncan is a direct descendant from a seed planted by Phillippe. Marsh originated as a chance seedling in about 1860, but was not used for propagation until 1886. The variety universally used for canning is Duncan.
In 1907 a pink variety of Duncan was found, and in 1913 a pink Marsh appeared. The latter is the ancestor of all the pink grapefruits grown today. Pink grapefruit cannot be canned, since they discolour.
About half of the world grapefruit crop is made into juice. The flavour of grapefruit juice is less impaired by processing than that of the other citrus fruits. Frozen concentrated juice is the best. Of the remainder of the crop most is eaten fresh, and the rest canned.
Grapefruit is more suitable for use as a dessert fruit than in cooking, since its flavour is assertive and tends to swamp anything else. However, grapefruits make good marmalade.
Fruits which are a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine (mandarin) are called tangelos. See UGLI for a description of two such fruits, whose resemblance to a grapefruit is clear. Several other tangelos, which take after the other parent, are described under MANDARIN. Orangelos (orange × grapefruit) also exist. These are of minor commercial importance except in Japan, where the highly acid Natsudaidai is popular.
the name used for insects of the families Acrididae and Tettigoniidae, with legs adapted for jumping and an ability on the part of the males to make chirping sounds. The first of these families is that in which the species bearing the name LOCUST occur; this name applies to those grasshoppers which are capable of swarming in immense numbers, and is used of them while they are so swarming. The second family includes some but by no means all of the insects which bear the name CRICKET.
Discussions of the extent to which grasshoppers provide food for human beings overlaps, inevitably, with information about consumption of locusts and crickets. Indeed the terminology for the whole category of orthopterous insects is confusing; see also, for example, CICADA. However, it is not uncommon to find references to the eating of ‘grasshoppers’, such as the following from Bodenheimer (1951), quoting a missionary who was writing about the Shoshoco tribe in N. America:
The principal portion of the Shoshoco territory is covered with Artemisia, in which the grasshoppers swarm by the myriads, and these parts are consequently most frequented by the tribe. When they are sufficiently numerous they hunt together. They begin by digging a hole, 10 or 12 feet in diameter, by 4 or 5 feet deep; then, armed with long branches of Artemisia, they surround a field of 3 or 4 acres, according to the number of persons who are engaged in it. They stand about 20 feet apart and their whole work is to beat the ground, so as to frighten up the grasshoppers and make them bound forward. They chase them toward the centre by degrees—that is, into the hole prepared for their reception. Their number is so considerable that frequently 3 or 4 acres furnish grasshoppers sufficient to fill the hole. The Shoshocos stay in that place as long as this sort of provision lasts. Some eat the grasshoppers in soup, or boiled; others crush them, and make a kind of paste from them which they dry in the sun or before the fire; others eat them en appalas—that is, they make pointed rods and string the largest ones on them; afterwards these rods are fixed in the ground before the fire, and as they become roasted, the poor Shoshocos regale themselves until the whole are devoured.
two French terms, noun and verb respectively, which have entered the international culinary vocabulary, as has the expression au gratin.
Originally, back in the 16th century or beyond, the noun referred to that part of a cooked dish which stuck to the pot or pan and had to be scraped (gratté) off if it was not to be wasted. Since the 19th century the meaning has changed to the effect deliberately created by cooks when they cook a dish so that it has a crisply baked top. This is often achieved by strewing grated cheese or breadcrumbs on top, and the phrase ‘au gratin’ is often taken to mean ‘with grated cheese’, although the gratin effect can be produced without adding anything on top; as Ayto (1993) points out, the gratin dauphinois is correctly made of sliced potatoes baked in cream with no added topping. The gratin effect can be applied to a dish under the grill, or uncovered in a hot oven, or by using a SALAMANDER thereby giving it a crust. Either this crust or the dish as a whole may be called ‘gratin’.
very hard cheeses made primarily for grating rather than as table cheeses, include most notably the GRANA group, especially PARMESAN, and the more aged types of PECORINO and ASIAGO. That these are all Italian is no coincidence, for the Italians are the principal users of grated cheese in their cooking. Cheeses of other nations which are used for grating include the Swiss SCHABZIGER and SBRINZ; old, dry Jack in the USA (see AMERICAN CHEESES); CHEDDAR in Britain, the USA, and elsewhere; and KEFALOTYRI in Greece. Much grating cheese is sold in grated form.
or gravlax a Scandinavian preparation of SALMON (laks in Norwegian and in Danish—where you will usually meet it as gravadlaks, lax in Swedish) which differs greatly according to whether it is made in the traditional way, dating back to medieval times, or by modern methods. Astri Riddervold (1986, 1990a) has described both and pointed out the earliest mentions of the former.
The word gravlaks can be traced back in Scandinavian history to 1348, when a man from Jämtland, called Olafuer Gravlax, is mentioned. In 1509, another man, called Martin Surlax is mentioned in the annals of Stockholm. The words gravlax and surlax (buried fish and sour fish) are used as synonyms, buried fish describing the technique, sour fish the result—the fermented stinking fish. According to the old custom of giving people surnames in Scandinavia, both were probably professional producers of buried salmon.
Riddervold explains that the technique, which has been used in many circumpolar regions round the world, was not applied only to salmon, but also to HERRING and other oily fish, including some species of SHARK. Burial of the fish, whether in barrels or in holes in the ground which were covered with birch bark and stones, results in a fermentation which leads to a softening of the flesh and a sour taste. Short-term burial (4–6 days) makes salmon edible while still uncooked and is the precursor of modern gravlaks. Long-term burial (for months) was intended to preserve the fish for winter consumption (when ice and snow made fishing difficult) and yielded a product which was usually very smelly and which is now called RAKEFISK in Norway and surfisk in Sweden.
Making gravlaks in modern times does not involve burial. The salmon is cleaned, scaled, bisected lengthways, and deboned. A fillet is placed in a suitable recipient, skin side down, and strewn with fresh dill, crystallized salt, a little sugar, and white peppercorns. A matching piece, skin side up, is placed on it, followed by a board and a heavy weight. This whole arrangement is kept in a cool place for three days or so, the fish being turned every 12 hours and basted with the juices which exude. The preparation of gravlaks is customarily one of the household duties allocated to men.
Gravlaks is drained and brushed clean before being served. It is sliced very thin and eaten as a first course, usually with a special mild mustard sauce and perhaps some fresh dill, or with a potato salad.
Since the Second World War, it has escaped its Scandinavian homeland and is now a universal W. European delicacy. André Simon (1983) introduced a recipe in 1940 saying, ‘It may, or may not, appeal to the British palate, but no harm in trying it.’ In 1975, The Good Food Guide first included the term in its glossary of foreign food words, about the time it entered the London restaurant repertoire.
in the British Isles and areas culturally influenced by them, is … well, gravy, a term fully comprehensible to those who use it, but something of a mystery in the rest of the world.
Ideally, gravy as made in the British kitchen is composed of residues left in the tin after roasting meat, deglazed with good STOCK, and seasoned carefully. (Many cooks incorporate a spoonful of flour before adding the liquid but this practice is frowned on by purists.) Gravy varies in colour from pale gold-brown to burnt umber, and in thickness from something with little more body than water to a substantial sauce of coating consistency. In French meat cookery, jus is roughly equivalent to honestly made thin gravy in the British tradition.
Should gravy be classified as a kind of sauce? Simon (1983) thought not; gravy was distinguished from sauce by being ‘made in the same pan in which meat or fish has been cooked, and almost, if not entirely from the juices extracted during cooking’, but thickening with flour or egg yolks made it a sauce (and no longer a gravy). If this ruling is accepted, then the ‘red-eye gravy’ which is famous in the American south must qualify as gravy. Evan Jones (1981) describes how it is made:
To enhance ham with red-eye gravy, put the fried slices aside and add one-half cup of ice water to the drippings, letting it bubble until it turns red. Some cooks use strong black coffee; others stir in one teaspoon of brown sugar until it caramelizes, then add the ice water.
The etymology of the word gravy, which probably comes from an Old French culinary term, has puzzling aspects. However, it seems clear enough that in the 14th and 15th centuries ‘graue’ meant sauces of broth, almonds, and spices used for white meats, fish, and vegetables. Ayto (1993) suggests that it was only in the late 16th century that
the critical change between obtaining this [the gravy] in the form of broth, from boiling the meat, and in the form of juices, produced by roasting, seems to have taken place…. In the seventeenth century, the practice was to make cuts in a joint when it was part-roasted, to allow the juices to escape (a special press was invented to squeeze them out). Later, it became more usual to make gravy separately from a different, inferior cut of meat—typically from gravy beef, part of the leg used for that purpose (Hannah Glasse has a recipe which calls for laying ‘a pound of gravy beef over your chickens’, 1747).
From the 18th century onwards, however, there was something of a downhill trend. Dallas (1877) said gloomily that the gravy served with roast meat in England was often a mockery.
While the sirloin is turning before the fire, the cook takes a boatful of boiling water which she colours with caramel and seasons with salt. She pours this gradually over the sirloin, she catches it again in a dish below, takes off the fat; and this is what she calls ‘its own gravy’.
Kitchen tricks involving burnt onions, caramelized sugar, ‘gravy browning’, and stock cubes are modern descendants of this practice. Indeed, numerous ‘gravy mixes’ or ‘granules’ (dehydrated compounds of colourings, flavourings, and thickeners) are to be had, for use with the meat residue, or in its stead. Yet in many homes in Britain a true gravy is still made; and this remains the most delicious accompaniment for the meat from which it comes and an essential feature of a meat dish. Should it be lacking, and especially in the north of England, the voice of the chief male at table will be raised in that most terrible and touching of remonstrances: ‘Where’s t’gravy, then?’
Thymallus thymallus, a European freshwater fish of the SALMON family, Salmonidae. Its range extends from S. France up to Scandinavia and from England to the Ural and Volga rivers of Russia. It may be found in lakes, but prefers clean, cool, swift rivers. Maximum length is 45 cm (18″); weight can be over 2 kg (5 lb). The silvery sides bear delicate horizontal stripes, violet in colour. These and the characteristic long and high dorsal fin make it easy to identify.
This is a good fish, worthy of the distinguished family to which it belongs. There is also an Arctic grayling, T. arcticus, which grows somewhat bigger and is an important food fish for communities in the Arctic regions.
The so-called ‘Australian grayling’, of the genus Prototroctes, belongs to a different family, is smaller, and is a species in decline.
is a small country on the southern shores of Europe, exposed almost in entirety to the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Inevitably, this has been a major influence on its food and cookery.
However, it is also true that there is a large part of inland Greece traversed by often inhospitable mountain ranges which provide another important influence. The only notable plains are in Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessalia. Otherwise the terrain is rocky and steep, mostly terraced and planted with trees which will withstand the heat and aridity. One is the queen of the Mediterranean, the OLIVE, relied upon for nourishment and to add flavour to the cuisine. Vine cultivation has also been of great importance, for fruit, but even more for wine-making.
In general terms the food is frugal and relies on fresh ingredients and dexterity to transform them. The freshness of the fish even if it is tiny atherina or maritha—both of the PICAREL family—is of enormous gastronomic importance to the islanders. Dishes are mostly enhanced with lemons and fresh or dried mountain herbs such as thyme and oregano. Spices—cumin, allspice, cinnamon, and cloves—are used sparingly but more prominently in the south of the Aegean, where Arab influence has left its mark, particularly in Crete and the Dodecanese.
Greek food traditionally centres round vegetables, fish, seafood, olive oil, and a plethora of fruit. Meat is less a centrepiece, more often used to enrich primarily vegetable dishes such as MOUSSAKA, stuffed vegetables, and stuffed vine leaves—the thria of the ancient Greeks who might originally have used young fig leaves rather than vine.
There is an astonishing continuity in culinary matters from ancient Greece through to the modern era. (In this connection see also CLASSICAL GREECE.) The modern trahanas (see TARHANA)—cracked wheat boiled in milk, dried in the sun, and stored for soup-making in the winter—is the ancient tragos. SKORTHALIA, the garlic and bread sauce which often accompanies fried fish and vegetables, is the skorothalmi of ancient Athenians. And modern Fava—a purée of yellow split peas dressed with raw onion, olive oil, and lemon—sounds very similar to the ancient etnos which was sold in the streets of Athens. Bread- and pie-making have been a long tradition. Sweets centred round all kinds of nuts, sesame seeds, and honey abounded in ancient Greece as they do now. Although it is fruit that is offered at the end of a meal, cakes and puddings are consumed with coffee.
There are dishes that are common to the whole country despite differences of terrain and history: winter and Lenten soups of beans, lentils, and chickpeas, Fava, stuffed vegetables and vine leaves, as well as traditional relishes of olives—often home grown and home cured—and preserved salted fish. And for the important religious celebrations a capon was stuffed for Christmas; but that has been replaced by turkeys. For the New Year a sucking pig roasted was a delicacy worth waiting for and for Easter the paschal baby lamb or goat roasted whole on a spit is universally loved.
For Christmas and the New Year large quantities of traditional cakes are made. Melomarkarona or finikia are the traditional honey-dipped biscuits made with olive oil and orange juice and kourabiethes are the little shortbread cakes studded with almonds and dusted with icing sugar. For New Year’s Eve a large brioche-type cake is made which is called vasilopitta—St Basil’s cake.
For Easter large quantities of hard-boiled eggs are painted bright scarlet. Also small and large cakes are made, some of the shortbread variety—koulourakia—and others of the brioche type—tsourekia. These are often decorated with the scarlet-painted paschal eggs and matriarchs will often make individually shaped ones—hens, rabbits, or simply plaited ones—for each child in the family.
Small cups of freshly made Turkish-style coffee are the national drink, as are ouzo—the aniseed-flavoured alcoholic drink—and retsina, the resinated wine, which are kept mostly for the evening and always accompanied by food.
However, there are also major variations between regions. There is the Greece of the sea and that of the land, with a sprinkling of history to account for further variations here and there.
Folklore reflects this gastronomic dichotomy not least through celebrating at least one hero who chose explicitly to move from one world to another. The Prophet Elias—a sailor by profession—got so fed up with being shipwrecked that he decided to start a new life. He took one of his oars and started walking, swearing that where he met people who did not recognize this implement he would settle. Finally, up on a mountain, the locals said that what he was carrying was a shovel for removing loaves from the oven. The Prophet had arrived at his desired spot and ever since his churches have been built on hills and mountains. And it is often in the mountain regions that one finds the most delicious breads and cheeses, and the traditional paximathia (twice baked barley bread slices, quite often with aniseed seeds in them—see PAXIMADIA).
Coastal and island Greece has on the whole a lighter cuisine relying mainly on vegetables and seafood. There is a daintiness and playfulness about it, needed if sea urchins (ahini), sea anemones (galipes), or limpets (petalithes) are on the menu. There is a natural concern with colour and appearance. Think of the pretty picture of a round large roasting tin filled with stuffed tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, and courgettes. A light fish soup finished with the much loved AVGOLÉMONO—egg-and-lemon sauce—is a universal dish there even if it is only made with petropsara—rockfish which are the humblest and smallest of the catch.
Inland Greece—the interminable plains and the mountains—has more robust tendencies. Too arid or too cold for the olive tree, animal farming is the norm. Olymbos, Pindos, Roumeli, and Parnassos have a wealth of pies made with meat, cheese, and butter and delicious home-made FILO pastry. Of course pie-making has been traditional in Greece since ancient times. Artemidoros (2nd century AD) in his Dream Translations refers to plakountas tetyromenous and the medieval Greek Lexika to plakountas entyritas, all cheese pies.
However, the cheese pies in the Zagorohoria or in the village of Metsovo up on the Pindos mountains in NW Greece are different from the much lighter ones made on the islands, where the cheese used is mostly fresh white cheese, the tyrovolia of Mykonos or the fresh myzithra elsewhere. Mountain cheese pies are made with hard yellow (cow’s) cheese, quantities of butter and quite often trahana. This kind of pie might as well have come straight out of the Byzantine kitchen where it would have been known as trahanopitta. As for the celebratory or MEZZE dishes they are almost of Homeric proportions and some of them little known elsewhere in Greece. They come under obscure names such as tziyerosarmas, bohtsas, kolosafas which are all of an intestinal or CAUL variety stuffed with rice, liver, lights, heart, kidneys, parsley, and hefty spicing—primarily black pepper and allspice. Dishes made for cool weather and strong stomachs. Yiouvetsi—baked lamb or goat with pasta and tomatoes—is a more familiar dish elsewhere in Greece. Other mezze dishes under the more descriptive names of splinandero, kokoretsi, and garthoumba—which are made with coarsely chopped liver and lights, wrapped with lamb intestine, and spit roasted or baked in the oven—although originating in inland Greece, are now found everywhere, though perhaps not so readily on the islands.
To trace some of the elements in common between the cuisines of Greece and her Balkan neighbours and Turkey, see also, especially, TURKEY and BULGARIA. Links with Italy are only noticeable in the Ionian islands, Corfu, Cephalonia, etc.
Rena Salaman
of which the moon was thought to be composed until the contrary revelations of American spacemen in the 1970s, has never meant the same as blue cheese. In medieval England it seems to have meant ‘new’ cheese, for Andrew Boorde (1542) stated that ‘Grene chese is not called grene by ye reason of colour, but for ye newnes of it, for the whay is not half pressed out.’
However, in more recent times the term has referred to a cheese, of the COTTAGE CHEESE type or DERBY, coloured with sage (see SAGE CHEESE) and spinach juice.
The term has also been used for the Swiss green cheese SCHABZIGER, and for a cheese of Friesland in the Netherlands. An old Friesian saying is: ‘bûter, brea en griene tsiis, hwa dat net sizze kin is gijn oprjuchte fries.’ This means: ‘butter, bread and green cheese; who cannot pronounce that, is no genuine Friesian.’ The point is that only real Friesians can pronounce the first words correctly.