also called sugarberry or honeyberry, is the fruit of the nettle tree, of the genus Celtis. The trees are quite large, but belong to the same family as the ordinary nettle. C. australis is native to N. Africa, but has been grown in Europe from ancient times, mainly for shade or to provide fodder for cows. Where it grows, the fruit is often eaten, raw, but it is not seen in many markets.
The fruit, which is sweet, resembles a small cherry: it may be yellow, brown, purple, or black. It has been suggested that it was the lotus eaten by the indolent lotus-eaters of Homer’s Odyssey; but a more plausible candidate is the JUJUBE.
C. occidentalis, a similar tree, native to the south and west of the USA, bears fruits which have a better reputation than those of the Mediterranean species.
C. sinensis is the Chinese hackberry, also with edible fruits (and leaves).
Melanogrammus aeglefinus, a fish of the cod family which is of commercial importance on both sides of the N. Atlantic. Its range descends as far as the Bay of Biscay in the east and New England in the west, but it may venture a little further south in the summer. Specimens over a metre (40″) in length have been recorded, but the normal maximum is 80 cm (32″) and the market length 40–60 cm (16–24″).
This fish has a dark greenish-brown or purplish-grey back, with a black lateral line and a ‘thumbprint’ on each side. In this last particular it resembles the JOHN DORY, and there are traces in popular names and traditions of its being thought to be the fish which St Peter picked up; which it could not be as it is not found in the Mediterranean, still less in the Sea of Galilee.
For culinary purposes, the haddock and the COD are close competitors. Some prefer one, some the other. Icelanders, who are in a particularly good position to judge, rate haddock above cod. In the north of England there is an odd dividing line between Lancashire, where people prefer cod for their fish and chips, and Yorkshire, where they choose haddock (although a few places in Yorkshire, like Huddersfield, are in a grey area, where a tendency to favour cod may be noted).
Haddock does not take salt as well as cod, so the traditional ways of curing it are by drying and smoking. ‘Rizzared’ haddock in Scotland were simply sundried. ‘Finnan haddies’ (from the fishing village of Finnan, near Aberdeen) used to be smoked over a peat-reek, but achieved such renown that they are now prepared by less traditional methods elsewhere, including the USA (where the eminent ichthyologist Goode, in a moment of aberration, referred to them as ‘Finland haddocks’).
Smoked haddock has become popular in France. When the French refer to ‘haddock’, which has become a French word, they mean smoked haddock.
In practice, smoking is preceded by cleaning, splitting, and brining. What are called ‘Glasgow pales’ are small haddock which have been given this treatment but removed from the smoke when they have acquired no more than a pale straw colour. ‘Arbroath smokies’ are haddock (or, sometimes, WHITING) which have been beheaded, cleaned, dry salted, tied by their tails in pairs, and then hot smoked. The fish are then coppery-brown on the outside, creamy white inside, and of a mellow salty-smoky flavour. They are best eaten ‘hot off the barrel’, but the cure permits keeping them for a while.
The history of Arbroath smokies includes several points of particular interest. The process was originally carried out in the cliff-top fishing village of Auchmithie, which was largely populated by families of Norse origin. The fish—originally any surplus fish, but latterly haddock almost exclusively—used to be smoked above the domestic fires, but the need for more facilities led to the construction of numerous ‘smoke-pits’ set up with half whisky barrels on ledges in the cliff face. These would be covered with layers of hessian sacking. Early in the 19th century, some Auchmithie families settled in Arbroath and took their habits with them, building smoke-pits in their back gardens to continue their way of curing. By 1900, output from Arbroath exceeded that from Auchmithie, and the smokies began to be called Arbroath smokies rather than by their original names (Auchmithie ‘lucken’ or ‘close’ fish or ‘pinwiddies’). Much of the production is now effected by modern plants; but it does not produce quite the same results.
Although salting is unsuitable as a long-term method of preserving haddock, very light salting is carried out in some places, producing for example the ‘green-salted haddock’ of DENMARK and the ‘night-salted haddock’ of ICELAND: both being products intended for early consumption.
often regarded as the national dish and exclusive property of Scotland, is the archetype of a group of dishes which have an ancient history and a wide distribution. All of them are relatively large parcels of OFFAL mixed with cereal and enclosed in some suitable wrapping from an animal’s entrails, usually the stomach.
The concept of haggis is based on preservation. When an animal was slaughtered, the perishable offal had to be eaten at once or preserved in some way. Salted, packed into a stomach, and boiled, its keeping time was extended to a couple of weeks. Similar considerations produced blood puddings, some of which include offal as well as blood.
The first people known to have made products of the haggis type were the Romans, who were notably interested in foods of the SAUSAGE family. They made theirs of pig offal, enclosed in the cleaned CAUL of a pig (the caul is a membrane surrounding the intestines). Less often, sheep and goat were used.
The Scottish haggis may be an entirely indigenous invention, but in the absence of written records there is no way of knowing; it could be an adaptation of a Roman recipe to the local MUTTON and OATS. The classic recipe, which has remained almost unaltered since a very early date, uses the large stomach of a sheep filled with the minced lungs, liver, and heart, plus fat, oatmeal, stock, salt, and pepper. Modern haggis generally has beef suet rather than mutton fat, and cayenne pepper or nutmeg are usual additions. The original way of fastening the stomach around the filling was with wooden skewers, but now it is generally sewn. The haggis is boiled for three hours. It swells considerably and has to be pricked with a needle to release the internal pressure and avoid bursting.
Since Robert Burns praised the haggis as the ‘great chieftain o’ the pudding race’, this humble food has been served on Burns Night (25 January) with bashed neeps (mashed SWEDES), whisky, a piper, and an admixture of ceremony.
There are other types of haggis with a Scottish pedigree. Meg Dods’s The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1826) has one made with leg of mutton, suet and marrow, breadcrumbs, egg yolks, anchovies, red wine, and cayenne pepper, wrapped in a veal caul and baked, not boiled. There is also a history of meatless haggis, sometimes called sweet haggis.
Although some English people are apt to treat the Scottish haggis as a joke, preparations of the haggis category have long been made in England, e.g. the West Country ‘hog puddings’, also made in Wales and Ireland. Conventional sausage casings rather than stomach were often used for the wrapping; but the filling of liver, heart, and lungs, mixed with cereal (oats, barley, or rusk), was like that of the haggis.
The traditional cooking of Russia includes dishes of the haggis variety. Sal’nik is a large parcel of sheep’s caul enclosing liver, BUCKWHEAT, dried mushrooms, and sour cream. Nyanya is made in a sheep’s stomach with meat from the head and feet, and buckwheat.
or hairweed, also sometimes called ‘cowhair’, freshwater algae of NW China and Inner Mongolia, identified by Dr Yan-Kit So (1984) as Borgia fuscopurpurea. The product is sold in dried form, looking like a mass of fine tangled black hair. It has to be reconstituted by adding water, when it turns dark greenish-brown. It has no taste of its own, but is prized for the slippery and bouncy texture which it possesses. Chinese refer to it as the ‘treasure of the Gobi [desert]’.
is the name originally given to Merluccius merluccius, a member of the cod family which ranges from the Mediterranean to Norway.
The N. American species M. bilinearis is silver hake. Two members of the genus Urophycis in N. America also bear the name hake: U. tenuis, the white hake (or Boston ling), and U. chuss, the squirrel hake. They resemble the true hakes in having two dorsal fins and one anal fin and no barbel.
The mouth of the European hake is grey-black inside; that of the silver hake dark blue. The silver hake, in accordance with its name, has a silvery iridescent sheen when freshly caught.
Enthusiasm for the consumption of hake runs highest in Spain (where it is merluza, but legatz in Basque) and Portugal (where it is pescada).
(or halim) an important and unusual dish which is known under that name in Iran, Afghanistan, and India and as harisa in Turkey and the eastern Arab world. (Harisa means ‘pounded’, and in N. Africa it refers instead to a paste of pounded spices; see HARISSA.) Haleem features either BARLEY or WHEAT with meat in a porridge-like soup. Margaret Shaida (1992) says the following about it:
It is said that this dish, like many others, was invented by the sixth century Persian King Khosrow and that when the Moslems conquered Persia a century later, it became a firm favourite of the Prophet. Its fame and popularity were thus assured and it spread all over the Middle East.
In many Arab countries today it is known as harriseh, and is indeed still sometimes called that in the southern regions of Persia, where it has long been regarded as the finest winter breakfast dish. The specialist restaurants that make barley porridge start their preparations in the evening and stir the porridge through the night to ensure the right consistency. Their first customers arrive well before dawn.
Claudia Roden (1985) describes it as an ‘ancestral soup’ symbolizing the diet of the mountain Kurds, and says that it is traditionally served on Assumption Day in Syria and Lebanon and as a breakfast dish in northern Iraq. Anissa Helou (1994), spelling the name h’reesseh, observes that in the Lebanon this is an alms dish, traditionally made in large quantity and distributed to the poor in churchyards.
Haleem, which is also made in Afghanistan and parts of India, is usually made with wheat and lamb, but in the past and to some extent nowadays with barley. Chicken is sometimes used instead of lamb. Each country has its own variations, especially with regard to accompaniments: in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan people sprinkle sugar and cinnamon (to which Lebanese are likely to add a pinch of cumin and one of ground cloves) on the porridge; in India the porridge is cooked with the addition of various ‘hot’ spices. It is usual to provide some sort of fat to serve with the haleem, which could be oil or melted butter.
Helen Saberi
the English name for a whole tribe of Indo-Pacific fish in the genus Hemiramphus. They are closely related to the GARFISH, but instead of having two long pointed jaws they have only a long lower jaw. This is not, strictly speaking, a jaw, but a bony projection from the jaw, and it is equipped with a sensitive fringe of tissue which serves for the detection of food. This tissue at the end of the half-beak is either red or green, and there are separate names in the Philippines for the two kinds.
The half-beaks, like the garfish, are capable of sustained gliding above the surface of the water, which accounts for the Thai name, pla kathung heo, meaning water-beetle. The largest species is H. far, the Black-barred half-beak, which attains a maximum length of 45 cm (18″). H. far is a spotted species with a range from the Red Sea to the Pacific. The flesh is delicate but bony, and can be baked, fried, or poached. H. marginatus, the Yellow-tip half-beak, is smaller. That of H. sajori, a Japanese species, is considered to be good enough for use as SASHIMI (or sunemono, see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS).
Hippoglossus hippoglossus, the largest of the flatfish, has been known to reach a length of 2.5 m (8′) and a weight over 300 kg (650 lb). It is a fish of the N. Atlantic, ranging from the cold waters of the Arctic down to New Jersey and Scotland. The colour of the eyed side is greenish-brown or dark brown.
The Pacific halibut, H. stenolepis, does not attain quite the size of the Atlantic species, but may still be huge. It ranges from C. California through Alaska to N. Asian waters.
The name used to be spelled ‘holibut’, and ‘holy’ forms part of its name in several languages. The reason for this is not clear. The flesh of the halibut tends to be dry, and in large specimens coarse.
In the N. and NE Atlantic region, especially Norway and Greenland, halibut (including dried strips of the flesh) has consistently been an important element in the diet. In contrast, the reputation of the halibut in W. Europe has fluctuated. Nineteenth-century authors generally describe it as a fish which could only be sold when nothing better was available. However, a Mr Rowell, writing in Land and Water (16 July 1881), said that at Newcastle upon Tyne the halibut was prized, and that it cost more than twice as much as COD and LING. As if to defend this unusual preference, he continued: ‘Let any one get a piece of halibut from a small one, season it with nutmeg, pepper, and salt, and bake it in the oven, and I know nothing so fine.’ This comment anticipated a change in the fortunes of the halibut, for which demand increased during the 20th century.
some anyway, are eaten by some people. They include the well-known FLY AGARIC and certain species in such genera as Psilocybe and Stropharia. Research by the Wassons (1855, 1967, 1969) and a review of the subject by Gray (1973) have given some clarity to the vague ideas previously entertained about the antiquity and extent of this practice.
So far as Europe is concerned, Wasson (1969) effectively dismisses any idea that hallucinogenic mushroom cults existed in the past. Supposed evidence of ancient mushroom cults in Egypt and the Middle East has likewise been scouted. Nor are there any surviving traces of a mushroom cult in the Indian subcontinent, although some believe that the plant ‘soma’, deified by the Aryans in the Indus Valley in times BC, was fly agaric.
Mexico and C. America is the region where the evidence of mushroom cults is clear. The ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms there is recorded since the time of the Spanish Conquest. Although the fly agaric exists there, it does not seem to have been used. The species concerned, which were regarded as sacred, seem to have numbered just over a dozen, all belonging to the genera Psilocybe, Stropharia, and Panaeolus. The representation of mushrooms in stone, especially in Guatemala, was at its zenith between about 200 BC and AD 300. Gray (1973) lists the factors which point to these images having a ritual significance. (At the same time, he observes that in the 20th century there has been a marked tendency, for example in N. America, to produce such things as ceramic versions of the fly agaric, for use as salt shakers or simply as decorations, and that remains of these could mislead future archaeologists, who would seek to read into their existence something more than a passing fad in the gift shop business.) The same author cites evidence of a mushroom cult in Mexico in the 16th century, and of its persistence to the present time in conjunction with Christian practices, and refers to the first recorded occasions when white people took part in the ‘sacred mushroom’ rites. These experiences are of great interest, as the following quotation shows:
On June 29, 1955 Wasson and Richardson, along with about 18 Indians participated in the mushroom-eating ritual at Huautla in Mexico. The ceremony began about 8:00 p.m., the atmosphere was friendly but solemn, and it was conducted by a woman, the curandera or shaman. In some ways it resembled a communion, with chocolate first being served ceremonially. At about 10:30 p.m. the curandera cleaned the mushrooms and with prayers passed them through the smoke of resin incense. While doing this she sat before a table with Christian images. She then gave the participants mushrooms in pairs, keeping thirteen pairs for herself (the sacred mushrooms are small ones and do not compare in size to Amanita muscaria). Wasson was given six pairs which he chewed over a period of half an hour. He described their taste as acrid and their odor as rancid.
Before mid-night the curandera extinguished the light and about 30 minutes later both Wasson and Richardson started having visions which became quite intense late in the night and remained so until about 4:00 a.m. Wasson stated that the visions emerged from the center of the field of vision, were vivid in color, and always harmonious. They began with art motifs and evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, and gardens. Later he saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot, camel caravans, and mountains. The visions were not blurred but were sharply focused. In the meantime the curandera was singing and waving her arms rhythmically and at one time began a rhythmic dance. Both white participants fell asleep about 4:00 a.m. but woke at 6:00 a.m., rested and with clear heads but considerably shaken by their experience.
This account does not include any reference to the unpleasant side effects, such as vomiting, which often accompany the hallucinations, and which may be severe and dangerous.
Two compounds responsible for the hallucinogenic effect have been identified as psilocin and psilocybin. It seems possible that they will eventually have a beneficial application in the study and treatment of schizophrenia; but it seems unlikely that any mushrooms containing them will ever have any normal use as food.
(literally ‘mix-mix’) is a speciality of the Philippines: a cooling snack of mixed fruit and beans, topped with finely crushed ice and milk or ice cream, which sometimes is taken for dessert. The mixture (from three to twelve items) may include: banana, JACKFRUIT, coconut, sweet potato, red MUNG BEANS, chickpeas, sugar palm fruit (see PALM SUGAR), purple YAM jam, leche flan (CRÈME CARAMEL), gelatin, and in recent times sweet corn or corn crisps.
Halo-halo used to be sold by Japanese vendors in halo-halo parlours or from street stalls before the occupation of the Philippines in the 1940s. It is the fanciest of a range of popular refreshments with crushed ice which have their counterparts in other SE Asian countries, e.g. the Malaysian ice kachang and the Vietnamese xung sa hot Luu as well as the extensive array of Indonesian ‘ijs’ drinks. It is reasonable to suppose that they grew up spontaneously as a reaction to hot weather and the availability of ice. It has been suggested, however, that the Japanese summer drink, a shaved-ice cooler called anmitsu, may have been the model for some or all of them, including halo-halo itself.
A particularly lyrical and exuberant account of halo-halo was given by Luning Bonifacio Ira in Cordero-Fernando (ed, 1976).
Doreen Fernandez
a hard, salty, sheep’s milk cheese, variable in character, which is well known in Cyprus and used as a cooking cheese in many Middle Eastern countries. It melts well, and is sometimes grilled on skewers with pieces of vegetable.
The name (which occurs in many variant forms and transliterations) is one of the few words of the ancient Egyptian language which have survived; in Coptic, it was written ialom; the modern pronunciation is hâlûm. Egyptians eat the cheese either fresh, under that name, or in conserved form, when it is known as mishsh; the latter has been flavoured with red pepper, brined, and stored in a sealed container with salted milk. Mishsh often becomes infested with tiny worms, which can be eaten without harm but are considered a nuisance. The Egyptian proverb ‘Dûd il-mishsh minnu fi’ (the mishsh worm arises from it; namely from the cheese) means, roughly, ‘The problem is inherent in the situation.’
Charles Perry
name of a hugely varied range of confections made in the Middle East, C. Asia, and India, derived from the Arabic root hulw, sweet.
In 7th-century Arabia, the word meant a paste of dates kneaded with milk. By the 9th century, possibly by assimilating the ancient Persian sweetmeat afroshag, it had acquired the meaning of wheat flour or semolina, cooked by frying or toasting and worked into a more or less stiff paste with a sweetening agent such as sugar syrup, date syrup, grape syrup, or honey by stirring the mass together over a gentle heat. Usually a flavouring was added such as nuts, rosewater, or puréed cooked carrots (still a popular flavouring). The finished sweetmeat could be cut into bars or moulded into fanciful shapes such as fish.
Halva spread both eastwards and westwards, with the result that it is made with a wide variety of ingredients, methods, and flavourings.
Halva has struck deep roots in India, and in the northern part of the country it has given its name to the caste of confectioners (the halvais). Semolina provides the base for many easily made Indian versions of halva. The simplest recipe requires semolina to be fried in GHEE, mixed with spiced syrup and raisins, and cooked until fluffy. Ghee is added spoonful by spoonful until the mixture will not absorb any more, and the mixture is often served still warm from cooking. ‘Bombay’ halva uses this base with addition of spices (saffron, cardamom) and nuts (almonds, pistachios). ‘Madras’ halva is similar, but substitutes poppy-seeds and coconut for the flavourings.
Indian halvas may be made without grain, using other basic ingredients. Thus sathi (ZEDOARY flour) may be used instead of semolina; or vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, beetroots, winter melons, yams, and squashes may be cooked in cream to a dense, pasty consistency and used as snacks or desserts. Fruit halvas are heavily sweetened purées, made from such fruits as bananas, unripe papayas, or oranges, and served with fried biscuits or breads. Puréed lentils, mung beans, and peanuts are also used as halva bases, as is curd or thick egg custard stiffened with coconut. Nuts, dried fruits, coconut, rosewater, and spices such as saffron, cardamom, cinnamon, and nutmeg are freely used for flavoring these sweets.
In Nepal, where the carrot and flour types of halva are usual, there is an unsweetened dish made of pounded barley, ghee, water, and salt only. This is no more than a consolidated porridge, but though unsweet is locally considered a type of halva.
Semolina halva is the usual type in the Middle East, where it is diversified by the addition of nuts, dried fruits, coconut, yoghurt, honey, and spices and other flavourings.
Some Turkish and Greek halvas, however, are made without grain and derive their texture from the combination of cooked egg (yolk or white) and solidified syrup. Nuts are always included, whether whole, chopped, or ground, and sometimes dried or candied fruit.
The halva best known in Europe and N. America is another non-grain type, sesame halva. This is a by-product of sesame oil production, made by grinding the solid remains of the sesame seeds finely, sweetening them with sugar syrup or honey, and pressing the mixture into a solid cake. Sometimes it is embellished with whole almonds or pistachios.
Between the Levantine sesame confections and the Indian vegetable pastes lie a rich variety of halva recipes from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and C. Asia. Halawat tamr, an Iraqi sweetmeat, is a mixture of dates, almonds, and walnuts, chopped and kneaded together. A Syrian version of semolina halva, called MAʾMOUNIA, is a speciality of Aleppo, where it is a popular breakfast dish. Basbousa is the name given to a similar dish made in Egypt. Karachi halva, made from sugar syrup, cornflour, and ghee, produces a result a little like TURKISH DELIGHT. To western palates, almond versions of halva such as halawah bil loz, made in Iraq, are reminiscent of MARZIPAN.
In addition to the usual semolina paste, there are in C. Asia such varieties as halwa-i tar, a liquid variety served in bowls; badråk halwa, made from maize flour, honey, and walnuts; and maghiz halwa, a sort of BRITTLE made by pouring hot syrup over nuts.
the hind leg of a PIG above the hock joint, cut from the carcass and cured by salting and drying, and sometimes smoking, so that it will keep for months at room temperature. GAMMON is the same joint as ham, but is left attached to the side during BACON curing, and cut from it afterwards. It is milder in flavour. ‘Ham’, in its more general meaning of the hind leg, is applied to cured meat made from other animals, including WILD BOAR, MUTTON, GOAT, VENISON, and even BADGER.
The first records of hams come from the classical world. The Romans knew hams made by the Gauls in the last few centuries BC, cured by brining and smoking. Cato described how, in the 2nd century BC, the inhabitants of N. Italy made hams by layering legs of pork with dry salt, followed by drying and smoking.
In medieval times, hams were made all over Europe. Every cottager kept a pig, which was killed in autumn and preserved to provide food through winter.
Europeans took pigs and the art of curing meat to the Americas, where several types of ham developed. Another area of expertise in the curing of pork meat is China, especially the region of Yunnan.
Combinations of factors such as pig breed, feeding, curing recipe, and storage method gave rise to many varieties of ham. The process of curing all hams begins with SALTING. This may be done with dry salt or brine, or a combination of the two. Wet cures penetrate the meat more quickly. Saltpetre or nitrite (see SALT) is added in small quantities to improve penetration and give a pink colour. After curing, which may take from a few days to several months, the ham is removed from the salt and dried. This operation may consist of hanging the ham in cool air, or may be aided by smoking. Some woods are particularly favoured; oak and hickory have a high tannin content which helps to preserve the meat, and aromatic woods can be used for a special flavour. Peat was used in Ireland. Certain European hams are finished over pinewood smoke, which forms a black, flyproof, resinous layer and flavours the ham slightly. During smoking, the hams lose about 25% of their weight.
Some of the most important types of hams are listed below, first those intended for eating raw, and then those which have been or will be cooked:
Hams which are meant to be eaten raw (see above) are cut in very fine slices, and served, depending on the region, with curls of unsalted butter, fresh figs, or melon.
The usual method of cooking a whole ham is gentle simmering in a large container. An old practice is to add hay to the cooking water, which is supposed to help reduce saltiness and certainly imparts a delicate flavour. Alternatively, a ham can be partially simmered, then baked; or, exceptionally, baked from the start.
The English method for dealing with hot boiled ham is to glaze it with brown sugar and mustard or fruit juice, and decorate by scoring the fat in a lozenge pattern and studding it with whole cloves. Sweet glazes are also popular in N. America, and fruit such as pineapple or peaches are used as a garnish. Creamy sauces flavoured with wine or mustard are favoured in continental Europe.
English boiled ham to be eaten cold has toasted breadcrumbs pressed over the fat to make a coating.
Ham goes well with eggs and pulses, as in the English combinations of fried ham and eggs, and pea and ham soup. Variations on these themes are to be found in most European countries. A little ham goes a long way; thus some stock, bones, or a little meat are sufficient to flavour hefty amounts of dried peas or lentils. Small pieces of ham are also added to some potato dishes. In Italy, it is used in sauces and garnishes for pasta, and numerous S. European recipes begin with chopped onions and ham lightly fried together.
Laura Mason
meaning ‘beach chestnut’, is the Japanese for CLAM, but is used in a much more limited way than the English word, being applied only to one particular BIVALVE, Meretrix lusoria (which has a shape like that of a chestnut), and to a close relation, M. petechialis, which is known as shinahamaguri.
Hamaguri have been prized and eaten in large quantities by the Japanese from time immemorial. In the numerous prehistoric ‘shell mounds’ discovered all over the country, hamaguri shells occur most frequently (followed by oyster shells).
It is said that each pair of hamaguri shells has a slightly different shape from any other and that, therefore, a single shell fits only its original partner. For this reason, hamaguri is considered to symbolize marital harmony and is often served at a wedding feast.
Hamaguri are thought to be at their best from late autumn to early spring, and are traditionally associated with the Dolls’ Festival, which is celebrated on 3 March. Among the dishes in which they figure are: Ushio-jiru, a clear soup made by boiling clams and a piece of kelp in water; Sakamushi, steamed clams, sprinkled with SAKÉ; Yaki-hamaguri, clams grilled over a charcoal fire.
Although the Japanese do not apply their clam-word to other bivalves, they do eat with appreciation several species which would be called clams in English-speaking countries. Prominent among these are:
Katsue Aizawa
one of the principal forms in which BEEF is consumed in the western world, has but a short history as a name (it first turned up in print towards 1890), although it is obvious that consumption of things like hamburgers, i.e. cooked round patties or rissoles of meat, dates back a very long way, and not only in Europe.
Jones (1981) and Levenstein (1993) offer accounts of the entry of the hamburger to the USA. It accompanied the great wave of German immigration in the early 19th century so that Delmonico’s restaurant in New York was offering a Hamburg Steak of ground beef on its menu of 1834. It figured often on menus (sometimes as Beefsteak à la Hamburg) and in cookbooks (for instance Mrs Lincoln’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook of 1884). It seems that ‘the St Louis World Fair of 1904 was a significant launching pad for the hamburger in a bun as we know it (known at first as the hamburger sandwich) although the suspicion of the American public towards the meat industry (thanks in part to the exposés of Upton Sinclair) delayed its wholehearted acceptance until the White Castle chain of restaurants convinced its customers of their proper attention to health and hygiene in the 1920s (Hogan, 1997). It also involved intense competition between the competing hamburger ‘giants’ in the USA, well described by McDonald (1997).
Ayto (1993). points out that the many other terms (such as cheeseburger) which followed hamburger were based on a misapprehension that a burger was a thing in itself which could be made of ham or of something else. See also FAST FOOD.
Sphyrna zygaena, a remarkable member of the SHARK family whose most noticeable characteristic is the T-shaped head, with eyes at the extremities. This is a very large fish (maximum length 4 m/160″) and a viviparous one; the mother may give birth to two or three dozen infant hammerheads, each already about 50 cm (20″) long. The species has a circumglobal distribution, including the Mediterranean, the E. Atlantic from Senegal to the English Channel, western parts of the Indian Ocean, and temperate waters in the Pacific.
The existence of several other species of hammerhead, mostly also occurring right round the world and one even larger, the great hammerhead, S. mokarran (maximum length just over 6 m/240″), testifies to the efficacy, in evolutionary terms, of the special position of the eyes, which is unique to this genus.
Hammerheads are good to eat. The present author once had the experience of cooking a whole small hammerhead in a COURT BOUILLON, and noted that the English ladies who ate it were unanimous in declaring it to be delicious.
so called because they were originally moulded to shape by hand. They appear to be of German origin and the German name Handkäse has the same meaning, as does the Spanish name used in S. America, queso de mano.
Hand cheeses come in lots of different shapes, with a wide range of flavours from delicate to strong, and variously coloured rinds. Generally, they are made from sour milk curds (hence the German term for them, Sauermilchkäse) and are low in fat.
Among the scores of different types in Germany is Bauernhandkäse, meaning ‘farmers’ hand cheese’. Many are named after a place. The most fitting examples are probably Mainzer Handkäse and Harzer Käse and Olmützer Quargel.
Hand cheeses have, unsurprisingly, been made in many parts of N. America where communities of German origin are established, e.g. Pennsylvania.
Polyprion oxygeneios, a huge fish of New Zealand and (formerly, at least) Australian waters. It belongs to the GROUPER family and is a relation of the WRECKFISH. Its maximum length is 2 m (80″) and it can weigh over 100 kg (220 lb).
Ayling and Cox (1982) have written well of this remarkable and trusting (too trusting, alas) creature:
Hapuku normally swim slowly, but if they are disturbed they accelerate so rapidly using powerful beats of their large tail that cavitation around the fin makes an audible boom with each beat. When alive these fishes are a beautiful blue tinged grey on the back with a whitish belly, but this colour fades to a dull dark grey after death.
Hapuku live in loose herds containing anything from less than ten to over a hundred individuals that usually stay around a single rock reef for some time. They seem to prefer pinnacles of rock that are home for abundant populations of smaller fishes, and that have some suitable shelter site such as a large cave or crevice …. They are often seen by divers … around offshore islands … The huge fish show little fear and mill curiously around the intruders, sometimes coming so close that the diver can run a hand along their flanks as they glide slowly past. There is no sight more impressive for a diver than a group of hapuku moving against the blue-black backdrop of deepwater and steep rock pinnacles.
The flesh of hapuku is delicious and therefore in strong demand. Stocks of the fish have declined, and, since they seem to grow slowly and live to a great age, there is no quick means of reversing this trend.
the common English name for Megalaspis cordyla, a fish of Indo-Pacific waters. Like many other members of its family (Carangidae) it has a streamlined body, adapted to swift swimming; and the resemblance to the shape of a torpedo is so marked that the name ‘torpedo trevally’ is sometimes used. The tail is thin and stiff.
This is not a very large fish (maximum length 40 cm/16″), nor an outstandingly good one. But it is widely available in SE Asian markets and makes palatable fare when fried, steamed, poached, or grilled.
indicates, in English, various species in the family Leporidae, which is also the family of the RABBIT. As far as the cook is concerned, they differ from the latter by having dark, strongly flavoured flesh. In appearance, they are larger than rabbits, have longer ears, a notched (‘hare’) lip, and powerful hind legs. Young hares are called leverets in English until one year old.
Hares are a widespread and successful group. The brown, or European hare, Lepus europaeus, is native to and common in the British Isles, and the varying hare (L. timidus scotius) whose coat changes to white in winter, is found in Scotland. Hare of various species also range through Europe, China, and India, and across the African grasslands. In the New World, animals which would be considered hares in Europe are commonly called rabbits, e.g. the Californian jack rabbit (L. californicus) and the snowshoe rabbit (L. americanus). The European hare has been introduced in N. America, Chile, and Australasia.
Hares have never been domesticated. As small, common game animals, they must have played a role in the diet of man since remote antiquity. Dalby (1996) mentions that bones were found among the discards of the inhabitants of a cave in the Argolid in Greece, dated at 20,000–15,000 BC; and observes that the hare became the best-known game animal in the settled parts of Greece in historical times. The Romans also ate hare.
In medieval England hare dishes included ‘hare in worts’ (cooked with leaf vegetables), and hare cooked in sauces thickened with blood and bread, seasoned with pepper and ale. Roast hare stuffed with bread, suet, and herb forcemeat had evolved by the 17th century; and CIVET of hare, a highly seasoned wine-based stew, came into fashion, probably under French influence. Jugged hare appeared in recipe books in the early 18th century, the meat and blood placed in a jug and cooked within a larger kettle of water. (When a hare is ‘drawn’, the blood is usually reserved, and added to the liquid in which the meat is cooked, as a thickener.) Nowadays this dish is usually cooked in a casserole, the sauce incorporating port or claret, redcurrant jelly, and the blood. Hare meat is also the basis for an old-fashioned English hare soup. The Scottish Bawd bree (bawd meaning hare and bree meaning gravy or cooking liquid) is a cross between a soup and a stew; Catherine Brown (1985) notes that Lady Grisell Baillie aptly described it as ‘Hare soup with Hares in it’.
Hares are relatively large and one will feed six to eight people adequately. The flesh is lean and dry (sometimes tough), the flavour strong and rich, especially in older animals; these benefit from being marinated and/or cooked in a casserole, slowly with plenty of liquid. Hare should always be well cooked.
Roasting is used for young animals. In France, there are several recipes for roasting the saddle with marc and grapes or cream, juniper berries, and mushrooms; noodles are served with the latter version in Alsace. France also has a number of complex DAUBE and civet recipes for hare. Civet de lievre à la royale is the grandest version.
The German Hansenpfeffer is a highly seasoned casserole dish similar in conception to English jugged hare and French civets. Belgians use beer and chestnuts or prunes in their hare stews. S. Europe has a number of interesting hare dishes; there are both Italian and Spanish recipes which use chocolate in hare stews, e.g. the sweet-sour Lepre in agrodolce of Italy.
In N. America, most recipes for hare are based on dishes of European origin. Applejack may be an ingredient (instead of marc) in New England; civets appear in the French-influenced CREOLE cookery of the south.
Laura Mason
Phaseolus vulgaris, is a native of C. America, where several varieties with small, black seeds (beans) still grow wild, but has become the most important LEGUME cultivated in Europe and N. America. It is also grown in other temperate and subtropical regions of the world.
The plant was first domesticated more than 5,000 years ago. By the time the Europeans arrived in America numerous varieties of different sizes and colours were being cultivated in both S. and N. America. The first samples of the new beans to reach Europe, in the 16th century, were of a dark red, kidney-shaped variety, so giving rise to the common English name kidney beans.
In France their Aztec name, ayecotl, was soon corrupted to haricot, a name which already had another meaning (a meat RAGOUT) and another derivation (from harigoter, to cut up). This usage spread to England, with curious consequences; in the 18th century a dish might be called ‘arrico of kidney beans’, an apparent tautology but legitimate. The French still use haricot as the general name for a bean; whereas in English it signifies the small white beans of P. vulgaris, usually dried.
Haricot bean plants show two distinct patterns of growth: pole beans which develop into vines and need support, and bush or dwarf beans which are low growers. There are many varieties of both, adapted to various climates, countries, market requirements, etc. There are four main ways of consuming beans: either they can be picked early and the tender pods eaten; or the beans can be ‘popped’; or the fresh green beans can be eaten without the pods; or the beans can be dried before consumption. Generally speaking, any given variety is best used in one of these four ways; and the simplest method of categorizing varieties is by end use. However, the dividing lines are not clear-cut; it must be remembered that many beans in the third group are also available in dried form and many in the fourth group are eaten fresh in season.
1. French (or snap) beans are the usual names for the varieties classed as ‘edible podded’ and grown mainly with the intention that the immature or mature green pods be used as a vegetable. Depending on the variety, they may also be green (or wax or slicing) beans. The strings and other elements of toughness have largely been bred out of these beans, so the pods break or snap easily; hence the term ‘snap’. (However, in the USA these snap beans may be called ‘string’ beans; unjustly because the really stringy green bean is the RUNNER BEAN, which is of a different species.)
The haricots Beurre are a subgroup of varieties with pale yellow pods; the beans inside are of various colorations.
2. The so-called popping beans, known in the Andes as nuñas, are a type of P. vulgaris which burst out of their seed coats when heated with a little oil: ‘they open like small butterflies spreading their wings. The resulting product is soft and tastes somewhat like roasted peanuts.’ The authors of Lost Crops of the Incas (National Research Council 1989) further explain that nuñas were developed for use at high altitudes where water boils at too low a temperature to permit cooking ordinary dry beans.
3. Of the varieties which are grown for the mature beans, which are extracted from the fully grown but not dry pods, many are likely to be called shell beans (or shelly beans), haricots à écosser in French, meaning simply that they are shelled before consumption. They include:
4. The fourth category is that of varieties grown to produce fully mature beans which are found in dried form in the markets. Here we have:
Consideration in detail of all these numerous sorts of beans is greatly aided by the informative lists of varieties and cultivars provided by Facciola (1998).
Black, pinto, and red kidney beans are canned successfully (see CANNING).
BAKED BEANS are produced commercially from navy and pea beans grown in the USA. The dish which inspired the canning of this product was Boston baked beans.
Although a preliminary soaking is a common procedure when cooking haricot beans, it is not universal. Mexicans often omit this step and start the cooking in hot water. Soaking and cooking times vary widely, depending on the age and size of the beans.
Some cooks add a pinch of BICARBONATE OF SODA to the soaking water to render dried beans more digestible and to shorten cooking times. The latter aim is met, since the bicarbonate helps to dissolve the cell walls, a process which also speeds the exit of ‘the flatulating oligosaccharides’ (as the substances causing flatulence are known) from the beans. Unfortunately, however, loss of desirable nutrients also occurs.
It is possible to suffer gastric upset from eating dried beans, particularly red kidney beans, that have not been sufficiently cooked (vigorously boiled for at least ten minutes). The boiling, which of course is much less than is usually required to cook them to an acceptable tenderness, is necessary to degrade the lectin phytohæmagglutinin. It has been found that people using electric slow cookers have apparently tenderized the beans without reaching the required temperature.
Most agree that haricot beans should be cooked without salt, which tends to harden them, or that salt should only be added after cooking has made the beans tender. Earthenware pots are used wherever these beans are widely eaten and it is claimed that this enhances their flavour. The use of aromatics during cooking may also have a beneficial effect.
The greatest variety of bean dishes is found in S. America. In C. and S. Mexico, black beans are always seasoned with EPAZOTE. They are traditionally served after the main course in small bowls. Black beans play an eponymous role in Feijoada completa, national dish of BRAZIL, but they are supported by numerous meats and other important ingredients; see Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (1979). See also REFRIED BEANS.
There are numerous regional dishes using haricot beans in France, and it is noticeable that when they are cooked as main dishes this is usually in areas where pork or goosefat is the preferred medium, e.g. Languedoc, Périgord, Alsace-Lorraine. See also CASSOULET.
a word with three meanings in the kitchen. First, it is a red paste of CHILLI pepper used in Tunisia, Morocco, and throughout N. Africa as a fiery hot ingredient. A common brand in cans bears a picture of an erupting volcano. This harissa, as traditionally made at home, consists of chilli peppers which are soaked and then pounded (harissa means pounded) with coriander, caraway, garlic, and salt, and moistened with olive oil. As Gobert (1940) remarks, this is ‘always present and ready’ in a Tunisian household.
Secondly the name is applied to a Tunisian dish consisting of seared green peppers, tomatoes, and onions, which are peeled, pounded, and flavoured with coriander, caraway, and garlic.
Thirdly, harissa is the name used in some Arab countries, notably Syria, the Lebanon, and Iraq, for a porridge-like soup of wheat and lamb which is described under HALEEM, which is the name used in the countries where the dish probably originated.
Dorothy (1893–1985) widely seen as the writer who has made the greatest single contribution to the history of popular food in England. The phrase ‘popular food’ is chosen deliberately because the foodways which she recorded were those of the populace, not of court circles or the aristocratic and wealthy classes. She wrote other books about rural England, including Water in England (1964) and Made in England (1939), but it seems likely that Food in England (1954) will be her most enduring achievement. She illustrated it herself (her normal practice) and furnished it with many apt quotations and anecdotes, often from obscure sources, as well as from her own lifetime of experience in the kitchen and as an insatiable, curious researcher. Looking back at her earlier life, one can see the significance for Food in England of several experiences, in particular: that she started cooking for her family when she was only 12 years old; that she became an art student in 1919, and was a prize pupil (and, later, a teacher of art); that she spent much time during the 1920s in the British Museum Reading Room; that in the 1930s she spent years travelling by bicycle or on foot around the UK with pen and camera, producing weekly articles on rural life for a national newspaper; and that after a spell with one of the women’s service organizations in the Second World War she was involved in teaching and lecturing on the history of food in various colleges. It can thus be seen that she was almost ideally equipped to take on her unique and pioneering role.
Miss Hartley made clear in the introduction to her book that it was written for cooks, not for historians, and that it was to the numerous cooks all over the country who were happy to talk to her that she owed much of her material. Perhaps thinking of these good ladies, she chose to reproduce on her title page a quotation from Gervase Markham (1615):
Your English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untyred, watchful, diligent, witty and pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighbourhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secrete in her affairs, comfortable in her consailes, and skilful in all the working knowledges that belong to her vocation.
Many of the numerous readers who have become acquainted with her charming and vigorous personality through Food in England will have reflected that Markham’s words could well have been applied to herself.
READING:
Hart and stag both refer to an adult male deer, which has antlers, yielding horn. Hartshorn was formerly the main source of ammonia, and its principal use was in the production of smelling salts. But hartshorn shavings were used to produce a special, edible JELLY used in English cookery in the 17th and 18th centuries. In her recipe for ‘Hedge-Hog’, Hannah Glasse (1747) assumes that her readers will know how to make this jelly, and suggests taking wine and sugar with it.
a Japanese term meaning ‘spring rain’, referring to the appearance of a vermicelli-like product made from various kinds of starch: MUNG BEAN (this kind, the best, is imported from China), SOYA BEAN, SWEET POTATO, cornflour (Japanese style). Although they may be found under names such as ‘cellophane noodles’ or ‘bean thread noodles’ or ‘bean vermicelli’, the Japanese do not count these as real NOODLES and never eat them on their own (as they do proper noodles). Harusame are commonly chopped and used as an alternative to batter for coating TEMPURA.
Helen Saberi
a term which has greater use in N. America than in Britain. It comes from the French hacher, meaning ‘to chop’, and entered the English language in the 17th century. Mariani (1994) remarks that it was found in America soon thereafter as a ‘form of shepherd’s pie or other melange of meat and vegetables’. This remains its general meaning. It has often had a derogatory sense, thus explained by Mariani:
By the middle of the nineteenth century hash became associated with cheap restaurants called ‘hash houses’ or ‘hasheries’ (an 1850 menu from the Eldorado Hotel in Hangtown, California, lists ‘Low Grade Hash’ for seventy-five cents and ‘18 Carets Hash’ for a dollar) and the workers in such places were called ‘hash slingers’. By the turn of the century ‘corned beef hash’ was being ordered, sometimes called ‘cornbeef Willie.’
Although a hash was thus perceived as a dish of low quality, it has not lacked supporters who give generous praise to well-prepared hash, counting it as a dish which is outstanding for its tastiness as well as economy. John Thorne (1996) is one such and his book is the best resource for a historical conspectus of hash in the USA, for lyrical prose on the topic, and for a highly detailed recipe for ‘Maine boiled beef hash’, unrivalled in his view.
‘Hash browns’, a relatively recent abbreviation of fuller phrases such as ‘hashed brown potatoes’, refers to small rissole-like fried cakes of cooked and finely chopped potato.
(or harslet) was defined by Dr Johnson in 1755 as ‘heart, liver, and lights of a hog, with the windpipe and part of the throat to it’. Nowadays, the term refers to a dish which is associated with the Midlands and north of England. This usually takes the form of a meat loaf made from OFFAL, usually from a pig, which has been chopped finely, placed in an oven dish of loaf form, preferably covered with a piece of flead (kidney fat) or CAUL fat, and baked.
the simplest of all PUDDINGS, if it can be called a pudding at all, for it is no more than a PORRIDGE of flour and milk. Such a pudding could be made in little more time than it took to boil the milk, and it has no doubt been a popular emergency dish since the Middle Ages, if not earlier. Sweetened, flavoured with spice or rosewater, and dotted with butter, hasty pudding can be quite palatable; and in fact in the 18th and 19th centuries in England it was esteemed as a delicacy. Before 1800, an egg was often added to the mixture, though after this time mixtures with egg were given other names.
A hasty pudding hybrid is Malvern pudding, made of alternate layers of hasty pudding with egg and of sweetened cooked apple; it is baked.
In the far north of England, and in Scotland, at least as early as the 18th century, the name came to be applied to a plain porridge of oats and barley, made with water as often as milk. In Victorian England, too, hasty pudding was sometimes made with oatmeal, or with SAGO or with TAPIOCA. Milk was always used. This pudding evolved into what are called ‘nursery milk puddings’ in Britain; the name ‘hasty pudding’ is no longer used, but it is agreeable to reread what May Byron (1923) had to say about it while it still bore its old name:
There are certain traditional puddings which have never lost their high repute. Of such is the celebrated hasty pudding with which Jack the Giant-killer filled, not his mouth, but the bag beneath his doublet. ‘Ods bobs!’ cried his Welsh antagonist, ‘hur can do that hurself,’ and, unwarily swallowing an immense bowlful of the dainty, he was rent as by some high-explosive. Now, hasty pudding is the very meekest and mildest of all its tribe: butter (literally) won’t melt in its mouth, unless it be scalding hot out of the saucepan. It is a tame, colourless, flavourless affair per se; yet, look you (as the Giant would have said), it has proudly survived, on this one noble achievement, the wear and tear of centuries. Still puddings run deep.
the brown or black tuber of Solenostemon (formerly Coleus) rotundifolius, a plant indigenous to tropical Africa, possibly Ethiopia. It was probably taken to India by the Arabs and onwards to the E. Indies by the Portuguese. (It is also found in Madagascar and Mauritius.) It may also be called the Sudan potato and has many scientific botanical synonyms.
The Hausa potato is eaten both raw and cooked; and the plant has edible leaves.
Two close relations, of which the first belongs to Asia, the second to tropical Africa, and which are also eaten like potatoes, are: C. blumei, sayabana or Jacob’s coat; and Plectranthus esculentus (syn Coleus dazo), Livingstone or Kaffir potato, daju, or rizuka. However one calls them, these vegetables are of some importance regionally as cultivated crops, capable of playing understudy to the true potato in climates where the latter would not thrive.
might be presumed cookery for the high-ups, or perhaps cookery with haut goût, a term much used in the 17th century (in England as well as in France) to describe seasoning in a modern, courtly manner. But prosaically, it just means higher cookery, much as some mathematics is higher or more complex, or haute couture (and even coiffure) is up a notch on common or garden dressmaking. And the term is of recent coinage, mainly dating (as does its couture cousin) from the turn of the 20th century, though the phrase is used by GRIMOD DE LA REYNIÈRE. Usually, fancy French cooking was la grande cuisine, or was described in terms of social hierarchy as in Massialot’s Le Cuisinier roial et bourgeois of 1691, translated into English (and redefined by location) as The Court and Country Cook (1702). The phrase, however, is the concrete expression of a distinction in kind between styles and methods of cookery within a single larger, perhaps national, entity. While in simpler societies all groups may eat according to the same rules, even if sometimes distinguished by greater or lesser wealth and extravagance, increasing social complexity will be reflected in cookery as much as in any other civil characteristic. This has been well explored by Goody (1982). The critical moment in western Europe was the 17th century, and the chief field of action France: here arose a self-consciously new and different style of cookery in royal and aristocratic circles best expressed in the work of LA VARENNE. It rid itself of medieval high flavours, drawing on more delicate seasonings such as mushrooms, truffles, and artichokes, and native herbs; it separated the sweet from the salt and acid; and it based itself on a regular kitchen system founded on stocks and refined sauces. There was a method to the new cookery, much as Descartes had adopted a method to his new philosophy. Furthermore, it was socially exclusive, demanding great resources and organization. Cuisine bourgeoise (for which see FRANCE and FRENCH COOK BOOKS) might borrow some of its precepts in simplified form but made use of what was available locally with fewer layers of culinary construction: a regional or bourgeois dish, if it climbed the scale to grande cuisine, would shed its vulgar ingredients (garlic, for instance) and gain many garnishes (truffles perhaps) and building blocks (stock or essences). What was laid out by La Varenne would be refined through the 18th century, culminating with CARÊME’s great distillation of the system. Where one might perceive a step-change from grande cuisine to haute cuisine came with the shift of the most extravagant cookery away from the private kitchens of the court and aristocracy to the giant hotels and restaurants of the new plutocracy. ESCOFFIER contributed a new method of production to the mix: single dishes were composed by accumulation as they passed through the several parties of a commercial kitchen. His work was really the foundation for international haute cuisine, a deracinated method of cookery that could be executed anywhere in the world and which has had much impact, though at present declining, on global tastes. The individuals manning the stoves in Hong Kong or New Orleans may be more likely German, Austrian, or Swiss, though deferring to the French origins of their craft. As Goody rightly stressed, higher cooking (a more neutral phrase than haute cuisine) exists wherever social hierarchies give it room: in China, India, the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere. But the French model is a significant one and has had the widest consequences.
Tom Jaine
food today is a confusing mixture, a palimpsest of the foods of a dozen different ethnic groups. But one can make sense of it by taking note of two salient facts: first, that before the arrival of the first humans, probably around the 3rd century AD, Hawaii, one of the most isolated sets of islands in the world, contained essentially nothing edible on land. Very few species had managed to cross those staggering distances; those that did had speciated to provide a fine natural laboratory for evolutionary biologists. But apart from a few birds and a few ferns, there was nothing to eat; most important, there were no edible carbohydrates. Second, since the arrival of the first humans, Hawaii has been the terminal point of three diasporas: the great marine diaspora of the Pacific islanders; the great voyages of discovery of the Europeans and the Americans; and the end of the road for Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and, lately, SE Asians. From these diverse influences, a CREOLE food is now being created, known in the islands as Local Food.
When the Hawaiians arrived in the islands, they brought with them some 27 or so edible plants, as well as pigs, dogs, and, as stowaways, rats. The most important plants were TARO and SWEET POTATO. The terrain and the climate in Hawaii proved particularly suitable for growing wetland taro and the Hawaiians constructed massive systems of ditches and patches (paddies) for this purpose, quite the most extensive in Polynesia. In dry areas where taro would not grow, sweet potatoes were the staple. Also important were BREADFRUIT, various YAMS, SUGAR CANE, and COCONUT, though, perhaps because this is at the limit of its range, the coconut played less part in Hawaiian culture than in other parts of SE Asia and the Pacific.
The staple of the diet was POI. This was usually made with taro, but sweet potato or other starches were used when necessary. The taro was baked in an earth oven (an imu), then pounded with a stone pounder on a large wooden poi board. It was then mixed with sufficient water to make a paste that would adhere to the fingers. Vegetables and fruits were in short supply, being largely confined to the leaves and stems of the taro plant and to the mountain apple.
The major protein was fish. Both pigs and dogs were eaten but they were largely reserved for the nobility. So too were the fish that were cultivated in the large salt and freshwater ponds that the Hawaiians constructed. For the bulk of the population, protein was provided by wild fish and shellfish from the streams, the reef, and the ocean. The fish was eaten both raw (often living) and cooked. It was preserved against the periods of stormy weather that, particularly in winter, can make fishing impossible for days or weeks, by drying and by salting. This adequate, if bland, diet was spiced up by the salt that was collected from shorelines around the island, by an extensive array of seaweed, and by the roasted and ground nuts of the kukui (CANDLENUT) tree.
In 1778, Captain James Cook sighted the Hawaiian Islands. Within a matter of years they had become part of the world trade. A succession of European and American drifters fetched up on the shores, followed in the 1810s and 1820s by forceful Congregational missionaries from New England. From the start, new animals and plants were introduced; cows, horses, and goats, and a bewildering variety of plants. The Hawaiian monarchy and subsequently the descendants of the missionaries quickly realized that apart from salt the islands had no exportable mineral resources and apart from sandalwood, which was quickly exhausted, no exportable vegetable ones either. Hawaiian food and haole food (the latter being the food of the white incomers) continued side by side with occasional input from the Chinese who also ended up in the islands. The Hawaiians added salt meat and salt salmon from the north-east to their diet; the haoles clung to the food of New England so far as they could, substituting taro for potatoes and bread, and mangoes for apples. On ceremonial occasions, there would be luaus at which largely Hawaiian food was served: poi, of course, and dried fish and shrimp, kalua pig baked in the imu, seaweed, sweet potatoes, chicken baked with coconut and taro leaves, and a dessert made of coconut milk thickened with Polynesian arrowroot. Given the mountains, many haole foods could be grown—Irish potatoes were sold to the forty-niners in California, for example—but even so the demand for European/American foods meant that the factors flourished.
The food landscape of Hawaii began changing dramatically once the sugar plantations began to flourish following the signing of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States in 1876. The Hawaiian population (like so many after contact) had declined precipitously and the planters turned to wherever they could find labour. Depending on the condition of the United States immigration laws and on the attitudes of foreign governments they hired contract workers from elsewhere as best they could. In order, substantial numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Okinawans, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese from the Atlantic Islands, and Filipinos arrived in the islands between the 1880s and the 1930s. By that time, the population was dominated by the Japanese. Each of these groups demanded their own food on the plantations and the plantation stores went quite some way to accommodate them. In addition, flourishing small farms, market gardening, and fishing operations sprang up as well as enterprises to make SAKÉ, TOFU, NOODLES, and other essentials. In the early years of the 20th century, rice was Hawaii’s third largest crop. The Japanese had largely taken over fishing from the Hawaiians.
All these ethnic groups are still to be found in Hawaii and most (not the Puerto Ricans) have their own array of grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants, and spiral-bound cookbooks. Considerable back influence has resulted from the multicultural movements of the last ten years and from the pride many groups have taken in the 100th anniversary of their first arrival in the islands. Even so there are notable differences from food in the home country; almost all groups eat more beef, everyone eats white rice, and there is a certain irony in the sequences of fund-raising cookbooks from Buddhist temples with their lengthy sections on meat of all kinds.
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, certain forces began to produce a creole food, Local Food. (It is worth setting this in the context of other sugar islands in the Caribbean, also Mauritius and Fiji.) One was the arrival of home economists at the university, in the electric and gas companies, and in the extension services. Trained largely at the Columbia Teachers College in New York, these women recorded the diet of the Japanese, established the food values of Hawaiian foods and a range of tropical fruits, and trained large numbers of home economics teachers and school cafeteria managers. Surprisingly sympathetic to the different ethnic foods of the islands, they urged brown rice (a complete failure), milk (successful though at the expense of the digestive systems of the Asian adults who do not tolerate lactose), and ensured that the food in the public school system was an all-American diet of hamburger, meat loaf, Salisbury steak, and mashed potatoes. This exposure to American food was reinforced for the many who joined up following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the Second World War. Although their quartermasters in Italy tried valiantly to find substitutes for rice (vermicelli), the Japanese, for example, had no option but to eat standard army K-rations. Back in the islands, the necessity to show allegiance to America meant that many ethnic customs—costume, religious observances, language schools, and food—were dropped.
Now, at least in public, most of the population of Hawaii eats Local Food much of the time (as well as retaining some ethnic food and American food). The centrepiece of Local Food is the Plate Lunch available from lunch wagons and from numerous small restaurants and restaurant chains. It consists of ‘two scoop’ (scoop from the ice cream scoop used to dish it out, and in the singular to accord with the pidgin/creole that everyone speaks) sticky rice (Japanese japonica rice, that is), a large helping of meat, usually cooked in an Asian style, a portion of macaroni salad or potato salads, and perhaps a lettuce leaf or dab of KIMCH’I on the side. The rice is Asian; the style of cooking the meat (katsu, teriyaki, kau yuk, Korean barbecue) is Asian; the quantity of meat is haole; the heapings on the plate are haole. And it is eaten with chopsticks (Asian).
Certain other foods have made it into the Local category. Rice is without doubt the staple in the islands. Poke (pronounced pokey) is the Local fish dish, raw fish cut in small chunks dressed simply with salt and seaweed, or more ambitiously with chilli peppers, sesame oil, or SOY SAUCE. Teriyaki (see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS) is the most popular way of treating all meats, including SPAM which is an island favourite. Soy sauce (called shoyu) is the universal condiment. Hard tack (see SHIP’S BISCUIT; here called saloon pilots) is popular. Among ethnic foods which have come to be considered Local are: Hawaiian laulau, Okinawan and Portuguese donuts (andagi and malasadas—see DOUGHNUT), Chinese preserved plum (CRACK SEEDS), Asian noodle soup (saimin), Chinese char sui bao (manapua), and Filipino LUMPIA.
Local Food functions as a language. Locals in Hawaii regard mainland food as dull and boring and look on those who do not regard raw fish with relish with amused scorn. They cart rice cookers and rice when they go to the mainland. They are amazed that McDonald’s on the mainland has neither rice nor saimin. Politicians distribute cookbooks with carefully chosen cross-cultural recipes as campaign gifts; they offer lavish public ‘bashes’ at the opening of the Legislature with heavy pupus (snacks) from all ethnic groups.
Creole languages typically de-creolize as the people become more integrated into mainstream society. Whether that will happen with Local Food or whether it will continue transmuting into something characteristic is unclear. But at the moment, Hawaii offers a fascinating example of the dynamics of food change.
Rachel Laudan
or may or whitethorn, Crataegus oxyacantha, symbol of spring; the best-known member of a group of small, thorny trees of the rose family. Species of the genus grow throughout Europe, Asia, and N. America. ‘Haw’ comes from an Old English word which can mean both hedge and berry.
The common hawthorns, whitethorns, or may trees of Europe, Crataegus oxyacantha and C. monogyna, have small, red berries which are very sour and have not been much used as food except in times of famine. They are sometimes made into a sharp jelly for serving with meat. The flower buds are, or were, eaten by country children under the popular name ‘bread and cheese’ (or, in Welsh, ‘burra cause’) and make an interesting addition to salads.
The flowers were much used in English medieval cookery; there was even a special term, spinée, for dishes made with them, and the FORME OF CURY, compiled by the cooks of King Richard II, has a recipe for such a dish. The flowers, when open, have a strong almond scent.
The species with the best fruit is the AZAROLE (or azerole), C. azarolus (sometimes called Naples medlar but no relation to the ordinary medlar).
The Chinese thornapple, C. pentagyna, another fruiting species which has been esteemed since early times, is cultivated in China. The fruits are eaten stewed, candied, in sweetmeats, and in a jelly.
N. American haws and hawthorns of the genus Crataegus exist in a bewilderingly large range of species; hundreds, according to one recent authority, who declined to identify any of them on the ground that the whole subject was incomprehensible even to professional botanists. Some of these were acknowledged by early European settlers to have better fruit than European species. Wood, in his New England’s Prospect (1634), declared that the ‘white thorne’ bore fruit as big as English cherries, ‘esteemed above a Cherrie for goodnesse and pleasantnesse to the taste’.
Delicious jellies and marmalades can be made from these American haws. The flowers used to be a flavouring for mead and still are in Canada.
The numerous literary references to the hawthorn or May tree attest its many associations. It is everywhere taken as the first sure sign of spring, and in England it is used to decorate the traditional maypole. In traditional English beliefs, it was unlucky to bring into the house; to do so meant imminent death in the household.
Bonasa bonasia, a bird of the GROUSE family, Tetraonidae. Its range extends from C. and N. Europe to Japan and its preferred habitat is mountainous and wooded. Of moderate size (average total length 36 cm/14″) and grouselike shape, it feeds on berries and has white flesh which is highly esteemed.
The hazel-hen is best roasted or prepared in other ways usual for grouse.
the fruit of hazel trees, of the genus Corylus, called noisette in French and nocciola in Italian. British and American nomenclature differ here. In Britain the term hazelnut can be applied whether the tree is wild or cultivated, while the names cob and filbert indicate two sorts of cultivated hazelnut. Americans, in general, reserve the name hazelnut for their wild species, and call their cultivated nuts, which are almost all descended from European species, filberts.
The common wild hazel of Britain, most of Europe, and SW Asia is Corylus avellana. It is a low, shrubby tree, up to 6 m (20′) tall, which often forms part of a hedgerow. Its small nuts with their hard, brown shells are borne in clusters of one to four, within a husk whose fancied resemblance to a helmet accounts for the name Corylus, from the Greek korys (helmet). ‘Hazel’ itself comes from the Anglo-Saxon haesil (headdress).
Towards the south of its range in Europe, the common hazel is joined by, and hybridizes with, the giant hazel (C. maxima), a more robust tree. From these wild species (and others such as C. colurna, of Asia Minor) have come numerous varieties and cultivars, many of which are hybrids. Indeed there has been so much hybridization that ‘pure’ examples of the original species would be hard to find in commercial orchards.
Cultivation of hazels probably began in classical times in Europe. Theophrastus (late 4th century BC) and Pliny (1st century AD) refer to trees having been brought from Asia Minor, and Pliny derives the Latin name avellana from Abellina (possibly Damascus in Syria). Since wild hazels were common in Greece and Italy, these imported trees were presumably of superior quality and intended for cultivation.
Cultivation ended for a while with the fall of the Roman Empire, but had restarted by the early 17th century in Italy. A centre of cultivation was Avellino in the Campagna, from which some suppose that the name ‘avellana’ was derived; but in view of Pliny’s earlier attribution of the name this must be a coincidence.
Cultivation also began in England, mostly in the vicinity of Maidstone in Kent, where conditions are ideal. There were already two main alternative English names for hazelnuts, and these began to be used for cultivated varieties. One was ‘cobnut’ or ‘cob’, from the Old English ‘cop’ (head), which was applied to round nuts with short husks leaving the end of the nut visible. The other, ‘filbert’, was used for longer nuts completely covered by their husks. (This has led some to suppose ‘filbert’ to be a corruption of ‘full beard’: in German there is a comparable name, Bartsnuss, meaning ‘beard nut’. However, it may refer to St Philibert, the 7th-century monk who founded the Norman abbey of Jumièges, which had many English daughter-houses in the Middle Ages. It is around his day, 22 August, that hazelnuts ripen.)
There are now in England numerous named varieties of both cob and filbert. It is a source of confusion that the variety of filbert most commonly displayed by English greengrocers bears the name Kentish Cob; it should correctly be styled Lambert’s filbert.
Early American settlers were unimpressed by the small native hazelnuts which were eaten by Indians. In 1629 the Massachusetts Company sent to England for better English nuts for planting, so that organized hazelnut growing began more or less simultaneously in both countries. Although most American cultivated nuts are of European origin, there are some hybrids with the American wild hazel, C. americana, which are hardier than pure strains.
The most important commercial variety in the USA has been Barcelona, although Ennis bears larger nuts and has been gaining in popularity. The best variety in Italy is probably Tonda Gentile delle Langhe, from the part of Piedmont whose hazelnuts are famous. Whiteskin is another popular variety.
Turkey is now the largest producer of hazelnuts.
Hazelnuts are not difficult to process. The husk splits and falls off by itself a few days after picking. Both unshelled and shelled nuts are sold. The latter keep better than most other shelled nuts. The brown skin around the kernel need not be removed but if the nuts are lightly toasted, which often improves their flavour, the skins begin to peel away and can be removed by rubbing. Similarly, if the nuts are blanched by pouring boiling water over them and leaving them for a few minutes, the skin is easily rubbed off.
In most countries, hazelnuts have traditionally been eaten fresh (‘green’). Their flavour varies from the milky, juicy, almost sharp taste of the nuts in autumn to the extreme sweetness which they attain after several months of ripeness.
The nuts are also used in cooking, generally in cakes and confectionery; there are many German and C. European recipes for hazelnut cakes. In Turkey they go into lokum (TURKISH DELIGHT) and in Italy into some kinds of torrone (the equivalent of NOUGAT). In Spain hazelnuts are also often used in savoury dishes, and are an ingredient of the famous sauce of Tarragona, salsa ROMESCO. In French cuisine beurre noisette is butter heated until it is the colour of hazelnuts.
Hazelnut oil is a delicate product, whose profile in terms of composition and flavour is generally like that of walnut oil and which is similarly expensive. Jane Grigson (1981) visited a French nut oil factory and found that it was using hazelnuts imported ‘from Avellino behind Vesuvius where Europe’s best hazelnuts grow’. She recommends the oil for various purposes, e.g. in cake-making.
a part of animals which provides a range of foodstuffs which vary considerably in the uses to which they are put and the ways in which they are prepared. There is a great difference between delicate brains, for example, and strong cheek muscles. Individual parts of heads are treated under BRAINS, CHEEKS (including BATH CHAP), EARS, MUZZLE (snout), PALATE (with lips and noses/muzzles), TONGUE. This article deals with whole heads, but see also BRAWN, as well as COD.
Symbolically, heads, carrying much of an animal’s identity, may represent more than simply meat, and have some deeper, cultural significance. Despite a sharp decline in the use of whole, undisguised heads on British tables, a few symbolic dishes survive. A pig’s head, cooked and suitably adorned, can be a centrepiece ‘boar’s head’ for a feast (although if this is intended to be purely ornamental, it may just be a raw head under a decorative aspic glaze piped with lard curlicues).
The most basic way of cooking a head, common in all European and many Asian cuisines and probably of ancient origin, is to boil it until the meat falls off the bones. This becomes either a soup or a jellied concoction of highly seasoned chopped meat sometimes called ‘head cheese’ (French fromage de tête). And there have been other uses; thus calf’s head used to be, in England, a standard source of meat for MOCK TURTLE SOUP. In Scotland potted head (heid), from calf or cow’s head, was a regular butchers’ product, though Mason and Brown (1999) reckon it more likely nowadays to be in fact potted HOUGH.
Sheep’s head broth is a well-known Scottish dish, known there as Powsowdie. Meg Dods (1826) gives a remarkably explicit recipe for it (‘Take out only the glassy part of the eyes …’), and has an anecdote about a Scottish professor who had been away from his native land for many years and on his return made haste to procure a sheep’s head and send it to the blacksmith’s to be singed. At the hour of dinner, ‘the chops of the learned professor watered with expectation when, lo! to his disappointment and horror, the fleshless skull was presented’. The labour involved in polishing the skull cost the professor sixteen shillings. This was an extraordinary misunderstanding in a country where sheep’s head broth was a national institution and there were indeed sheep’s head clubs dedicated to its consumption. The cookery book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie (Frere, 1909) has five ways of dealing with sheep’s head as well as the well-loved broth.
In many countries of the Middle East, including Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, a dish of broth and meat of slowly simmered sheep’s head and trotters is made. In Iran and Afghanistan it is called Kallah pacheh (kallah meaning head and pacheh trotters). In Iran and Turkey it is eaten mainly as a breakfast dish. The version in Turkey is called Kelle-paça (head-trotter). Nevin Halıcı (1989) has the following to say about sheep’s heads in Turkey:
If a sheep’s head is served whole, the meat is eaten, then the brain is extracted and offered first to a guest or to the head of the household, and then passed round for others to help themselves.
Cold sheep’s head has become so popular that you will find it being sold on street corners and at railway stations in every Anatolian town. In Diyarbakir in south-eastern Anatolia the menfolk usually have a dish of sheep’s head and trotters for breakfast at the market before starting work.
Leipoldt (1976) vividly describes the impact made by a baked ox head in South Africa:
One’s first emotion, on seeing this immense and horrific roast—in which, if the head happens to be that of an Afrikaner ox, the horns appear to stretch the whole length of the dining table, while the baked eyes stare with an expression that is ludicrous as well as baleful, and the lips are drawn back to show the teeth in a sort of snarl that no living ox ever shows—is one of profound shock. Indeed, on the first occasion when I assisted, as General Botha’s guest, at a party where this gruesome dish was the main and only item on the bill of fare, two of my fellow gourmets were so overcome that they had to leave the table.
see BRAWN.
an organ which is in almost all instances an edible part of an animal. Among the various sorts of OFFAL, it is unusual in that it consists almost entirely of muscle. Moreover, the nature of the organ is such that the muscles are in constant use, pumping blood around the body, while the animal is alive; and hearts of older animals are therefore likely to be tough and to need marinating before being cooked. Hearts also have to be trimmed of fat and ‘pipes’ beforehand.
Large ox hearts may be sliced and then grilled (broiled) if they are sufficiently tender; or, as more commonly happens, subjected to slow moist cooking, e.g. braising or stewing. Smaller ones are suitable for stuffing and then being baked. In PERU, ox heart is marinaded in vinegar, skewered, grilled over charcoal and brushed with a hot sauce of chilli and ground annatto. There are innumerable composite dishes relying on mixed offal including the heart such HAGGIS, HASLET, SONOFABITCH STEW, or the Filipino blood stew DINUGUAN. The smallest hearts of all, such as rabbits’, are apt to turn up with the edible meat in a casserole dish or the like.
Hearts of poultry and game birds count as GIBLETS.
Glossus (Isocardia) humanus, a bivalve which has the shape of a human heart. Linnaeus, observing this, called it Cardium humanum, and its common names in most languages reflect the resemblance. However, the Dutch are out of line with zots-kappen, meaning fool’s cap, and English fishermen are recorded as having used the names Torbay nose and oxhorn cockle.
The heart shell is akin to a cockle, and is sometimes called heart cockle, but it is not a true cockle. Its size can be as much as 10 cm (4″); and its range is from Iceland and Norway to the Mediterranean.
Although Lovell (1884) recorded enthusiasm for this bivalve on the part of English fishermen, and above all the wife of a coastguard at Brixham, who had ‘often luxuriated in a dish of these delicious shellfish’, the heart shell is not much sought after now. The same applies to related species in the Indo-Pacific region.
are fundamental to cookery. In the most substantial, and most readable, modern treatise on the scientific aspects of cookery, McGee (1984) puts the point thus:
Cooking can be defined in a general way as the transfer of energy from a heat source to the food. Our various cooking methods—boiling, broiling, baking, frying and so on—achieve their various effects by employing very different materials—water, air, oil—and by drawing on different principles of heat transfer.
An assumption that the cook will have access to fuel, devices for generating and controlling heat, and supports or containers for the food during cooking is implicit in the concept of a recipe. Geography and technology dictate availability of fuels; in turn, these have intrinsic characteristics which have influenced the development of cuisines. They may burn fast (dead wood) or slowly (dried cow dung); hot (charcoal) or cooler (peat); be easily controlled (a gas flame) or require skill in their management (coal and other solid fuels). Electricity is one step removed from fuel, but is also important for generating heat for cooking. Fireplaces, ovens, and stoves have evolved in different traditions to deliver optimum heat using available fuels.
There are three basic ways in which heat can be transmitted:
Radiant heat is a form of pure energy known as the infrared to physicists, and found on the electromagnetic spectrum at wavelengths between microwaves and visible light; atoms in a substance absorb microwave energy and then release it in the form of increased motion, which we sense as heat. To cooks it means a naked flame, glowing coals, or a hot electrical element. Food is cooked by being close enough to the source to absorb energy across the intervening space. Fire, the most basic source of radiant heat, has been known to man for many thousands of years, and was probably used to roast meat spitted on green wood far back into prehistory. Although an inefficient method of transmission, radiant heat is still utilized for grilling (broiling) and barbecuing. This is partly because it is very intense (coals and electric elements heat up to about 1090 °C/1994 °F; gas flames to 1650 °C/3002 °F), catalysing browning reactions which give attractive flavours on the surface of the food. This method is also utilized in a TANDOOR and in old-fashioned bread ovens, whose linings take up heat from fires lit inside, and radiate it back to the food being cooked.
Radiant heat is energy travelling at a wavelength which makes all molecules vibrate and so heat up. Microwave ovens (see MICROWAVE COOKING) also use radiation, but at a longer wavelength, and make only polar molecules (carrying a strong positive/negative charge), such as water, vibrate, heating it up. Since water only heats up to boiling before becoming a vapour, the food is cooked at less intense temperatures than those from conventional radiant sources, without the browning reactions and the flavours produced by them. This is why some microwaved foods have a soft, pallid appearance. But microwaves penetrate much further into the food, cooking it on the surface and to a depth of 2–3 cm (1″) simultaneously.
In conduction the item to be heated is placed in contact with a heat source and heat moves directly from one atom to another. An example is an electric griddle heated by an integral element to give a hot surface, which in turn heats the molecules of, say, oatcakes placed upon it. The hotplates of electric or ‘Aga’-type stoves heat pans placed upon them by conducting heat from one surface to the other. Conduction is also exploited by cooks who skewer potatoes before baking them; the skewer heats along its length and helps to cook the potato from inside. In practice, conduction is most important when considering cooking utensils, as some of the various materials involved (e.g. copper) are much better conductors than others (e.g. ceramics). In cookery, transmission by conduction is mostly used in combination with convection, the third way of delivering heat to food.
Convection requires a fluid medium and can be divided according to this into moist heat (using water, stock, milk, wine, or other liquid) and dry heat (relying on air or oil). As molecules in the medium heat up they become less dense and rise, lose energy as they cool, then fall again. The same principle applies to hot air in an oven (where a fan may be used to force the air to circulate and to even out the temperature) and hot fat in a frying pan or deep-fat fryer.
When moist heat is used, the temperature achieved can be no higher than boiling point (100 °C/212 °F, or slightly less at high altitude), so browning reactions do not occur, and boiled foods lack the intense flavour of grills; but it is an efficient method of heating, as liquids provide a dense medium directly in contact with the food. Thin liquids heat faster than thick ones, so consommé heats more quickly than thick soup. Poaching is a gentler version of boiling, using water at just below 100 °C.
To STEAM food, it is held over boiling liquid and the heat is transmitted by water vapour surrounding the food, and condensing on it. The temperature is effectively no higher than that of boiling water, although a tightly lidded pan has the effect of raising the pressure inside very slightly. Only a specially designed pressure cooker can take the temperature of water vapour much higher, say up to 120 °C (248 °F), when it will cook food much faster than conventional boiling.
Baking using the conventional (western) ovens relies on transmission of dry heat by convection, the air inside the oven heating up from elements in the oven walls and circulating around the food. It is an inefficient method of transmission, and fans are sometimes added to force the movement of air around the oven and even out cold spots. A relatively high temperature can be achieved, giving a pleasant brownness and flavour to many foods cooked this way.
In practice, all methods of cooking involve combinations of heat transmission methods: for instance the base of a pan of water over a low gas flame is heated by a combination of convection (through the air) and radiant heat; the heat is transmitted by conduction through the fabric of the pan itself, with an efficiency depending on the material of which the pan is made; and the water it contains heats by convection.
There is a final point. One could say that the objective of most acts of cooking is to raise the temperature of the innermost part of the food being cooked to a certain level. The question then arises: what is the relationship between distance to the innermost part and time required for cooking? The answer is that the time required does not vary in correct proportion to the distance but in proportion to the square of the distance. This is explained at greater length under FISH COOKERY since that is a subject where it is particularly relevant and where it has attracted recent discussion.
Laura Mason
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also known as Jack-by-the-hedge, Alliaria petiolata, an upstanding plant of European hedgerows, also known as garlic mustard. The leaves do smell slightly of GARLIC if chopped or bruised. Grigson (1955) gives a characteristically fine description:
In a brilliant sunshine, in May, one is always freshly struck by platoons of this familiar plant, at starched attention, the starch-white flowers above the new green leaves and against the green bank.
Some of the local names show that kitchen use of the leaves has a long history. Turner (1538) mentions it with the name ‘sauce alone’, since it was used by country people as a condiment, especially in the spring. Gerard (1633) observed that some people ate it, pounded, as a sauce for salt fish, in the same way that they would use ramsons (see WILD GARLIC). In the 19th century it was recommended as a boiled accompaniment to boiled mutton or as an addition to salads.
a small insectivorous animal, Erinaceus europaeus, found throughout W. and C. Europe. It is best known for a defence mechanism which consists of rolling up and exposing a spiny back to the world, a method which fails against the threat of road traffic. It is nocturnal in habit, and hibernates from October to April.
There are related species in other parts of Europe, and in Asia; but the PORCUPINE, although similarly protected by spines, is an animal of a different genus.
Hedgehogs are not normally sold or hunted for food, except by gypsies, whose traditional method for dealing with them is to encase the animals in clay and roast them, after which the baked clay is broken off, taking the spines with it. The meat is said to be tender and well flavoured, resembling chicken or sucking pig. Fernie (1905) provides alternative methods of cooking, and cites the Tramp’s Handbook (1905) as evidence that hedgehogs are nice and fat at Michaelmas, when they have been feeding on windfall crabapples. He adds, but without giving a source, that in France the foresters of the marquis de Cherville were given to concoct a delicious stew of hedgehog with MORELS.
The ‘hedgehog pudding’ which formerly enjoyed some popularity in England, notably in the 18th century but also in the 19th, was so called because of the slivered almonds which were stuck into its upper surface, where they resembled spines. (See TIPSY CAKE.)
Henry J (1844–1919) Heinz started work at the age of 8 in his father’s brickyard in Pennsylvania. He also helped cultivate the family garden and sell its produce. When he was 12 he had 3.5 acres (1.5 hectares) and a horse and cart and began to learn bookkeeping. The family horseradish patch provided his first convenience food; his horseradish was offered for sale, scrubbed and scraped or grated in vinegar, in clear glass bottles which revealed the purity of the product. He remembered this when evolving his eight ‘Important Ideas’, one of which was that housewives would pay someone to take over tedious kitchen work, while another held that a pure article of superior quality, properly packaged and promoted, would find a ready market on its merit.
In 1868, the year before his marriage to Sarah Sloan Young, Henry joined L. C. Noble in brick-making and food production. However, after initial success the under-capitalized business failed and Henry, as an undischarged bankrupt, could no longer own a business. So his brother John and cousin Frederick set up the F. and J. Heinz Company, in 1876, with Henry as their manager.
In 1882 a new site in Pittsburgh (still the site of the US complex) was bought, and two years later Henry had paid off all his creditors. In 1886 he travelled to Europe to meet his German relations, went also to England, and sold seven varieties of his goods to the famous British food store Fortnum & Mason. A new ‘important idea’ emerged: ‘Our market is the world.’
Henry bought out John and Frederick in 1888 and launched the H. J. Heinz company. He was a master of publicity and promotion; he had the largest outdoor electric sign in New York, 200 black matched horses for deliveries, and, although he had over 60 products at the time, he found the number ‘57’ to have a magical quality and advertised ‘57 Varieties’. The Heinz pickle symbol was made into a souvenir pin and over one million given away at one exhibition.
Another ‘important idea’ was that good food, well processed, did not need preservatives or colouring matter; Henry campaigned for the Pure Food and Drug Act, to the dismay of many of his competitors in the food industry. In the cognate field of food hygiene, the Heinz company internal manual on the subject became the standard work for the entire food industry. Nor were these the only good causes which he promoted ahead of his time. His factory complex was organized so successfully on paternalistic lines, with a previously unimaginable range of facilities and benefits for employees, that he was hailed in some quarters as the man who had finally found the solution to the conflict between capital and labour.
The fine biography by Alberts (1973) conveys a vivid picture of this energetic and engaging man:
His blue eyes sparkled, his reddish muttonchop whiskers bristled, and he seemed always to move along at a half trot …. He had overpowering enthusiasm: for work and success, for travels, for his family, for religious pursuits and kind deeds, for good horses and bad paintings.
He was one of five famous Pittsburgh millionaires (the ‘Lords of Pittsburgh’, in Edith Wharton’s phrase). Three of the other four—Carnegie, Frick, Mellon—showed greater flair in choosing paintings, but in other respects Heinz was surely as good as any.
Roy Shipperbottom
a CARBOHYDRATE which occurs in the cell walls of plants. In composition it is intermediate between STARCH (used by plants as an energy store) and CELLULOSE (which plays a structural role). It is, however, difficult to define satisfactorily. In general, it differs from cellulose in being non-fibrous; in being more readily soluble in alkali and more readily hydrolysed by dilute acids; and in having fewer monosaccharide units per molecule.
Hemicellulose in wood has been studied more than hemicellulose in edible plants. Some is present in such things as fruits and wheat flour. It is indigestible by humans and of use only as roughage.
Cannabis sativa, is cultivated mostly as a source of fibre for rope-making and illegally for various narcotic products; but it also has edible seeds which are not narcotic and from which an oil can be pressed. Its leaves are occasionally grown as a vegetable.
Hemp grows wild in C. Asia, and was first cultivated in China from 3000 BC for its fibre and seeds. The plant has males and females. The males are taller and provide better fibres from their stems, while the females are stronger in narcotic substances; these are concentrated in a gummy resin which exudes from the flowers and are present in smaller amounts in the top leaves.
The narcotic and hallucinogenic element is referred to as cannabis and by numerous other (including slang) terms: ganja or bhang (crushed dried leaves of Indian wild hemp), grass, marijuana, pot, etc.
The ancient Greeks used to eat fried hempseed, and it has continued to be used as food until the present day in Poland and the Volga region of Russia, where oil pressed from the seeds was also used for cooking. The seeds (asanomi) are eaten in Japan in fried TOFU burgers. The leaves are used as a green vegetable and added to soups in parts of SE Asia, including Laos and the province of Aceh in N. Sumatra.
Cannabis is also made into narcotic foods such as the ‘hash brownies’ in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, where she spells it ‘canibus’. Another example is the Moroccan candy called majoun which has been entertainingly described by Paula Wolfert (1973); she takes care to distinguish this from a different majoun, which belongs to Tetuán and is a marmalade with AGAR WOOD and AMBERGRIS.
The effect of the drug is similar to that of alcohol but it is probably less toxic. The main after-effect is a sharp hunger.
domesticated versions of the species Gallus domesticus. Their wild ancestors are thought to be several species of jungle fowl, of the same genus, native to the Indian subcontinent and SE Asia. Remains from Chinese sites indicate that the birds could have been domesticated as early as the 2nd millennium BC. However, their diffusion westwards was a long process. They probably reached Britain, for example, with Celtic tribes during the 1st century BC. They had arrived in Greece, probably from Persia, about 500 years before that, and there are numerous references in classical literature, for example to their being served as food at symposia.
The Romans bred hens for their meat, selecting docile, heavy birds. Columella (AD 47) described a heavy type of hen with five toes (most breeds have four); similar hens still exist in N. Italy. An old English breed, the Dorking, also shares these characteristics, leading to speculation that ancestors of these birds flourished in Roman Britain. They may be the only birds in Britain with such a long history, because in the last 200 or so years, in Britain as well as in other countries, the situation has changed greatly.
In 1815 Bonington Moubray was able to specify 12 hen breeds (in his Practical Treatise on Breeding, Rearing and Fattening all Kinds of Domestic Poultry, a book which formalized the husbandry of poultry in Britain). Poultry breeding in N. England had now become a hobby of the industrial working class. Judy Urquhart (1983) says that by the beginning of the 19th century ‘there were three distinct divisions of poultry. The south produced fat fowl for the London market, the north their fancy varieties, and everywhere else there were dung-hill fowls picking a living around the farmyard.’
At this time, as now, Londoners preferred fowl with fine-grained white flesh. Hens which fulfilled this requirement were raised mainly in Sussex and Surrey, a point illustrated by early breed names such as the Dorking, Kent, Surrey, and Old Sussex. Other areas had their own types, such as the Scots Grey, a good layer developed in the early 19th century by Scottish ‘egglers’ (egg-merchants), and the Cornish ‘Indian Game Fowl’.
The arrival in Britain of various Asian breeds of poultry during the mid-19th century revolutionized attitudes to hens. Queen Victoria’s Cochin fowl, which she placed on exhibition, made poultry breeding a fashionable pursuit. The decorative appearance of Asian breeds, their egg-laying capacity (winter as well as summer), and the eggs themselves (large and brown, practically unknown in Europe until then) stimulated interest in poultry generally, and led to the establishment of standards. Numerous fowl of Asiatic origin came into Britain, often acquiring names which had little to do with their origins: Cochins may actually have come from Shanghai; and Brahmas came to England via N. America, possibly from China. Birds of Mediterranean origin, such as the Minorca, a noted egg-layer, were also imported and developed.
In the mid-19th century, many developments in breeds took place in N. America, which has no indigenous hens. Here, the Indian Game Fowl was further developed and renamed the Cornish Game. The Leghorn (an important egg-producer) was developed from Mediterranean stock. Crossed with Asiatic breeds, it gave rise to a utility bird which eventually evolved into the Rhode Island Red, a commercial breed of great importance. The latter is an example of a ‘composite breed’, one of the strains of commercial poultry which were the foundation of the industry for the next 80 years. Imported birds were crossed to see what happened. The Plymouth Rock was developed from Cochin, Dorking, and Malay stock; the Wyandotte, a utility bird, had Cochin, Hamburgh, and Sebright bantam genes.
Composite breeds were brought to Britain and joined the Orpington (developed by breeder William Cook from regional breeds in the south-east) and the Light Sussex. The black strain of Orpington developed further in the southern hemisphere to become the Australorp. Meanwhile, continental European breeders produced breeds such as Barnvelder, Maran, and Welsummer; all of these, which were of N. European origin and arrived in Britain between the wars, were valued for their dark brown eggs. The French Faverolle is also a composite breed.
By the early 20th century, fowl for the table in England had to fulfil several requirements: most of their flesh was to be tender white breast meat; the bones should be fine and light; legs should be white rather than yellow; and the birds should be early maturing. All these points were met by Sussex breeds. In SE England, these birds were hand crammed with oatmeal to supply luxury table poultry for the London market until the time of the Second World War.
Most table fowl and eggs in Britain now come from the intensive systems of the poultry industry. The bird which populates broiler farms is known as a Cobb. Developed in N. America using stock from Plymouth Rocks, New Hampshire Reds, and Cornish Game, it is specifically bred to grow fast and early, and to have the maximum amount of white meat.
The aristocrat of modern table poultry is the French poulet de Bresse. These birds are from Gauloise stock, a blue-legged breed found elsewhere in France. Chickens raised in the Bresse region are identified with leg rings at an early age, and retailed with the ring in place to show their status.
‘Bantams’ are not a separate breed but dwarf hens or miniature strains of conventional breeds (the name may derive from the port of Bantam in Java).
See also CAPON, CHICKEN (DISHES).
READING:
Grifola frondosa, is probably the best of the edible fungi which belong to the group of POLYPORES. It has numerous caps, which cluster and overlap in a manner reminiscent of a hen’s feathers. The underside of the caps is white, and its pores are plainly visible. These fungi, known both in Europe and in N. America, usually form on the ground, attached to the roots and lower stems of hardwood trees, in which they are apt to cause rot. They may grow to a very large size. Ramsbottom (1953) cites a record from Hungary of a specimen which filled a two-horse cart. The common size is about 30 cm (1′) across.
The Japanese name, mai-take, means ‘dancing mushroom’ and is given because this fungus is thought to resemble the waving hands and kimono sleeves of dancing girls.
Polyporus umbellata, a close relation which fruits earlier and has smaller, round caps, is of equally fine quality; see POLYPORES.
One hen of the woods will provide more than enough for a meal for a family. All the parts through which a knife will pass as though through butter are tender enough to be eaten. Any surplus can be pickled or frozen. The species is unusual among mushrooms in that it can be frozen without prior cooking, and will retain its pleasant flavour when thawed. Although its name is given because of its appearance rather than its taste, its meat is recommended as a chicken substitute.
a word which has its origin in the Latin herba meaning a grass or other green plant. Botanists use the term to refer to a plant with a stem which is not woody (as that of a tree or shrub is); but the general use of the word is now in its culinary sense, indicating a plant whose green parts (usually leaves, sometimes stalks) are used to flavour food. However, it is still also used to indicate a plant of medicinal importance.
Until the 19th century the word was pronounced with a silent ‘h’ on both sides of the Atlantic; but this usage now survives only on the American side.
Although a plant which is a herb may yield a spice (e.g. coriander, whose leaves are a herb and whose seeds are a spice), the definition offered for SPICE shows that there is a clear enough distinction in practice, largely based on the part of the plant to be used. Most herbs can be used in dried form, although there is a general preference for using them fresh. Spices, on the other hand, are almost always, although not invariably, used in dried form.
The noun ‘herbal’ usually reflects the botanical or medicinal senses of the word and is applied to books which catalogue and illustrate herbs. Some herbals are referred to very frequently in food history contexts: e.g. that of Gerard (1597, rev edn 1633).
The term pot-herb is defined by the NSOED as ‘a herb grown or suitable for growing in a kitchen garden’ (which rather invites the question how one determines whether a herb is suitable for a kitchen garden and the potential answer ‘if it is a pot-herb’). Ayto (1993) does better in remarking that the term ‘denoted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries any plant whose leaves and stalks could be boiled as greens’.
For herbal teas, see TISANE.
Eupagurus bernhardus and others, an eccentric creature which is edible although rarely eaten outside France. Alexandre DUMAS, in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873), wrote a felicitous entry:
A species of crab whose meat is regarded as a delicious morsel. It is usually grilled in its shell before being eaten.
There is nothing more comical than this little crustacean. Nature has furnished him with armour as far as the waist—cuirass, gauntlets and visor of iron, this half of him has everything. But from the waist to the other end there is nothing, not even a nightshirt. The result of this is that the hermit crab stuffs this extremity of himself into whatever refuge he can find.
The Creator, who had begun to dress the creature as a lobster, was disturbed or distracted in the middle of the operation and finished him off as a slug. This part of the hermit crab, so poorly defended and so tempting to an enemy, is his great preoccupation; a preoccupation which can at times make him fierce. If he sees a shell which suits him, he eats the owner and takes his place while it is still warm—the history of the world in microscopic form. But since, when all is said and done, the house was not made for him, he staggers about like a drunkard instead of having the serious air of a snail.
any one of several stork-like wading birds in the family Ardeidae, but especially the grey heron, Ardea cinerea.
A large bird (average total length just under 1 m/3′), the heron used to be bred for the table in special heronries, recorded in the Netherlands as far back as the 13th century. Young ones, as soon as they were fully developed, would be shaken out of their nests, a spectacle much commented upon by travellers. Herons were eaten in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, often (along with other ‘great birds’ such as the STORK, CRANE, and PEACOCK) as items at important banquets, when they might be presented in dramatic fashion, with their bodies gilt.
Falcons could be trained to ‘hawk’ for herons, and sport of this kind was a feature of the age of chivalry. The glamour of this activity doubtless made herons taste better. The grey heron was anyway considered to be the best of a group of birds with similar lifestyles, to wit other herons and night herons, egrets, BITTERNS, and cormorants. All these counted as edible, although the cormorant was only suitable for the lower classes.
Witteveen (1986–7), in the only survey of the subject available in English, points out that in the Netherlands herons were eaten from late May to early July, being the earliest of the game birds to be available for the table. They could be roasted and served with a sauce. Maestro Martino, the 15th-century Italian cook who provided most of the recipes for PLATINA (1475), gives the earliest known recipe. He stuffed his herons with garlic or onions before roasting them entire.
The heron figured in books offering dietary advice up to the 17th century, but thereafter lost popularity. However, some were still on sale in English markets in the 19th century and there is at least one 20th-century recipe—that given by May Byron (1914) for a Heron pudding.
Clupea harengus, of all fish probably the one which has had most influence on the economic and political history of Europe. (For C. pallasii pallasii, the important Pacific herring, see the end of this entry.)
C. harengus is distributed right across the N. Atlantic, down to the north of France on one side and Chesapeake Bay on the other. Within the species it is possible to distinguish certain ‘races’ which have their own special characteristics. Thus the Baltic herring is smaller than the Atlantic and has a lower fat content. The maximum length of Atlantic specimens is 40 cm (16″), but the common adult length is 20–5 cm (5–7″).
Herring typically swim in enormous shoals, but the size and abundance of these shoals have been difficult to predict for as far back as records go. Fluctuations which were attributable to biological reasons have been worsened in recent times by overfishing. The North Sea stock, for example, declined by 50% from the 1950s to the 1960s. Efforts have been made by governments, unilaterally or by international agreement, to restrict the herring fishery in a manner which would permit stocks to grow again, but the intrinsic unpredictability of the species makes it difficult to discern results with certainty.
Herring are relatively oily fish, but not so oily as to preclude frying them. In this case, the best plan is to coat them with oatmeal first, as in Scotland; and they should be served with boiled, not fried, potatoes. Grilling or baking are suitable techniques, whereas poaching or steaming are inadvisable.
What is most striking about the use of herring as food is the very large number of herring cures, mostly traditional and often dating back to medieval times, which are practised. Of this multitude the KIPPER, the supreme example of curing herring by cold-smoking, has its own entry. Cures which use hot-smoking (when the temperature of the smoke rises above 29 °C (85 °F) and the fish begins to cook) and various methods of pickling herring are briefly described below.
Red herring are fish which have been first soaked in brine with saltpetre added, then hung up to dry before being subjected to a heavy smoking—for several days and ideally over oak, beech, and turf. The history of the ‘puissant red herring, the golden Hesperides red herring’ (as Thomas Nashe referred to it in his book Lenten Stuffe, or the Praise of the Red Herring, 1567) dates back to the 14th century and has attracted much interesting writing. Samuel (1918) commented:
This fish is not gutted until it reaches the kitchen. The Yarmouth red herring may be eaten, uncooked, during the months of October, November and December. The skin should be peeled off, the head removed, and the fish gutted and cut across into four pieces, dusted with pepper, and eaten with bread and butter. The Yarmouth red herring is locally sometimes called a ‘militiaman’; per contra, the vulgar Norfolk term for a militiaman in his red tunic … was a ‘red herring’, much as the red herring sold in the south of Scotland are sometimes known as ‘Glasgow magistrates’.
An echo of the colloquial names is found in France where a corresponding product known as hareng saur has been made since the 12th century or earlier; it has gendarme as one of its names.
Bloaters also have a long history. The name may derive from a Scandinavian term, but may equally well just refer to the fact that fish cured in this way are relatively plump, so look ‘bloated’. The similar French product, a speciality of ports in the north of Normandy, is called bouffi, also meaning swollen or bloated. The earliest references were to ‘bloat fish’. Bloaters are made from whole fish, slightly salted, washed and dried, and briefly smoked. They end up with only a faint flavour of smoke and almost no colour change, i.e. they remain silver. They can be eaten raw, in the same fashion as the red herring; or grilled and served with butter, or made into bloater paste. They have a slightly gamy flavour, due to the enzymes or ferments from the gut.
Buckling (Bucklinge in German) are hot-smoked herring which may or may not have had head and gut removed before treatment. In Germany they are usually eaten with a dark rye bread, or something similar, and butter, or served with scrambled egg and fried potatoes.
Rollmopse (which are called rollmops in English, although this name is the singular of the German name) are herring which have been beheaded, gutted, split open, deboned, and left in the form of double fillets, which are rolled up round pickled cucumber and kept in vinegar or wine and vinegar solution.
Bismarck herring are herring fillets which have been marinated in vinegar with onion rings and seasoning.
Sweet pickled herrings, with additions such as mustard sauce, are common in Denmark and are exported from there.
Surströmming, a speciality of Sweden, are whole herring fermented by the action of salt and (in past times) natural summer heat. They develop a notorious smell, even in the canned form. Davidson (1979), recounting the lore which attends this remarkable product, writes:
Cans of surströmming bulge slightly, to accommodate the fermentation. A Swedish naval officer told me that when they ate surströmming on board his ship the cans were always opened on deck, because of the smell. The procedure thereafter is to drain and rinse the fish; to sprinkle some chopped, small red onion over them, to reduce the smell; and to lift off the fillets. These are then served with the small oval potatoes which the Swedes call almond potatoes; thin slices of a special bread, tunnbröd, which the northerners carry about in their wellington boots; and butter.
Apart from cooked herring dishes and cured herring, there is also the attractive possibility of eating nieuwe haring, the first herring of the season, as the Dutch do. Many stalls in the Netherlands offer fillets which can be lowered straight into the mouth with or without any accompaniments. This was formerly a ritual which took place during a few weeks only, at the start of the season; but the presence of some tiny nematodes in the fish has made it necessary to freeze all nieuwe haring (thus killing the nematodes), and a benefit from this requirement is the availability, from frozen stocks, of the delicacy at all times of the year.
The Pacific herring, C. pallasii pallasii, is generally similar in appearance and size to its Atlantic relation. It has a wide distribution, including both the western and eastern N. Pacific, and parts of the Arctic Sea (including the White Sea). Populations have suffered from overfishing, but this species continues to represent a major food resource. In Japan it is called nishin, and is prepared in various ways; the salted roe of the female is an outstanding delicacy, known as kazunoko and an important item in the New Year menu.
from trees of the genus Carya in the walnut family, include the outstandingly good PECAN. Although none of the other species has commercial importance, there are several whose nuts are edible. Three are listed below, all N. American; the hickories of Europe did not outlive the last Ice Age.
Hickory nuts are still in demand in parts of the USA, but are now little cultivated. In earlier times they were more esteemed. White settlers found that they were a good food and would keep in the shell for a year or two in a cool store. The Algonquin Indians, whose name for the nut, powcohicora, was adapted by the settlers to pohickory and then hickory, had produced from ground kernels and water a strained ‘hickory milk’, which made a rich, creamy addition to soups, cornmeal cakes, and HOMINY, as well as a favourite beverage, POHICKORY.
is a substantial late afternoon or early evening meal. The term has been in use since the mid-19th century and distinguishes it from the lighter, more elegant AFTERNOON TEA; and yet, to those who take either, they are simply tea. This is shown in the way Arnold Bennett manipulates the word in this quotation from Anna of the Five Towns (1902), a novel set in the Potteries district of Staffordshire:
The tea, made specially magnificent in honour of the betrothal, was such a meal as could only have been compassed in Staffordshire or Yorkshire—a high tea of the last richness and excellence, exquisitely gracious to the palate, but ruthless in its demands on the stomach. At one end of the table, which glittered with silver, glass, and Longshaw china, was a fowl which had been boiled for four hours; at the other, a hot pork pie, islanded in liquor, which might have satisfied a regiment. Between these two dishes were all the delicacies which differentiate high tea from tea, and on the quality of which the success of the meal really depends; hot pikelets, hot crumpets, hot toast, sardines with tomatoes, raisin bread, currant bread, seed-cake, lettuce, home-made marmalade, and home-made hams. The repast occupied over an hour, and even then not a quarter of the food was consumed.
‘Teas’ similar to the one described above crop up over and over again in English fiction and diaries from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries; the constants are abundance and variety of food, the presence of ham or pie, salad, the choice of baked goods, preserves, and a fine display of table ware. Tea also became strongly linked in popular culture with abundant Yorkshire hospitality. Brears (1987) gives an account of a substantial Yorkshire tea which actually took place. It was
held by Miss Maffin in her small Wharfedale cottage about the 1860s. The round cricket table in the centre of the room, although barely a yard across, had been laid with her best china, a seed cake, bread and butter, ham sandwiches, and a salad of lettuce, cress, radishes and onions. Tea cakes regularly replaced the lid of the kettle, to become hot and moist in its steam, while muffins were toasted on a toasting-dog before the fire.
When her friends arrived, they arranged themselves around the table. It was de rigueur on state occasions like this for the ladies to sit fair and square to the table in the ordinary manner; but the gentlemen were allowed more latitude. Indeed, among the older generation, the correct claim to dignity seems to have been to sit with your chair sideways to the table, and your back to your hostess, your bread and salad or your ham sandwiches on your red spotted handkerchief spread across your knees, and your cup and saucer on the edge of the table. Seated in this manner, the company then proceeded to do full justice to the fare set out before them, the conversation flowing just as freely as the hot tea laced with rum.
The eating of tea, and the existence of two forms, afternoon tea and high tea, provides a lesson in British social history. Habitual consumption of either (it is not the custom to take both in any given day) says much about an individual’s background and daily life. Afternoon tea, eaten after a light lunch and before a larger mid-evening dinner, is considered an indicator of a leisured, comfortable existence. High tea, eaten on arrival home from work, is popularly associated with old-fashioned households, rural or urban working-class backgrounds; although not invariably so, as Michael Smith (1989) points out, quoting from an unnamed earlier author:
High Tea. In some houses this is a permanent institution, quite taking the place of late dinner, and to many it is a most enjoyable meal, young people preferring it to dinner, it being a movable feast that can be partaken of at hours which will not interfere with tennis, boating or other amusements.
At high tea, the means and desires of the household and demands of the occasion dictate exactly what goes on the table. Cold cuts, meat pies, salads, pickles, crumpets, muffins, teacakes, preserves, honey, fruit loaves, cakes and sponges are all considered suitable foods, participants selecting according to tastes and appetite. Tea (Indian) is drunk throughout the meal, although coffee or cocoa may be served if preferred.
The origins of high tea are uncertain, but evidence indicates they are different from those of afternoon tea, and that meals of the high tea type were well established by the mid-19th century. ‘High’ seems to have been added to the name by people less familiar with it—those from a wealthy urban background, who adopted it as a novelty, or because it was conveniently timed for children, or as a cheaper, less formal alternative to dinner—from which the meal may actually have descended.
Laura Mason
Hizikia fusiforme, one of the brown SEAWEEDS, may be used fresh, but is more commonly dried and then rehydrated before use. The flavour is described as nutlike, and the texture is crisp.
(or hulba or halba), an Arabic word which always indicates FENUGREEK but can mean anything from just that (the spice) through a foamy preparation made from the soaked and ground seeds to a thick soup-like dish based on this foamy preparation but including other ingredients. Of these other ingredients the most important in the YEMEN, where hilbeh/hulba counts as a national dish, would be the spicy chilli-hot paste called zhug.
Hilbeh is known throughout the Gulf region, but seems to be more important and better known in the Yemen than anywhere else.
In the north of the Yemen hilbeh is called hulba; not always just a difference of pronunciation, since methods of preparation and use also vary.
Helen Saberi
Hinduism is not a single faith but a vast complex of beliefs and practices that have developed over some 4,000 years and an extensive land area, a highly complex system of interacting elements. Therefore, generalities about it are likely to be unsatisfactory. However, it has a certain geographic unity, being more or less confined to the subcontinent of INDIA, and its fundamental principles are common to all its followers. Several of these principles have deeply affected its attitudes to food: the underlying unity of all being; the high value placed on non-violence; belief in reincarnation leading ultimately to release from the illusion of individual existence; the extreme respect shown to cows; and the division of human society into varna or castes. Closely linked with the caste system is the concept of physical and ritual purification, by water or fire, and the need to maintain barriers between the self and anything that might contaminate it. Hinduism has a place for everything, and also a time.
At the root of Hindu foodways is the concept of sacrifice. Staple foods, especially grains, have always been offered to or shared with the gods before they are eaten. What the gods leave, prasad, is the purest food for man’s spirit. Many plants, including food plants, are sacred to particular gods: for example, tulasi (holy BASIL) to Vishnu. GHEE (clarified butter) is used for anointing images and for purifying ritual items as well as being a medium for the most esteemed method of cooking. Traditionally, a Hindu eats twice a day, after morning and evening worship. Fasting is not encouraged for non-ascetics, except on the eleventh day of each (lunar) fortnight, but many sects forbid certain foods at certain times.
Hindu sacred texts emphasize that a man is what he eats, and rules are given for right foods, right ways of cooking, and right times to eat for every stage in life. The concept of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ foods which in China reflects the contrast of YIN-YANG, and which is found in many cultures (see also SARDI/GARMI), can be traced back to early times in India. ‘Hot’, exciting food (including honey) is to be avoided by those who need to avoid lustful thoughts—students, widows, and ascetics. The ‘twice-born’—initiated members of the three upper castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas—should avoid garlic, onions, turnips, and mushrooms. Camel’s milk, and milk from a cow that has recently calved, are forbidden.
The Bhagavadgita (17.8) defines three types of people and the foods they like. The sattvika type, being wise and pure, enjoy healthy but rather bland food (milk, yoghurt, ghee, green vegetables, rice, wheat, beansprouts, pulses): these lead to long and, supposedly, zestful life. The rajasika are passionate and demand strong flavours, sourness, and pungency (spices, dal, pickles, chutneys, wine). At the bottom of the heap are the tamasika, lazy and ignorant, and given to eating potatoes, meat, aubergines, tomatoes, and putrid or stale foods, not to mention other people’s leftovers. Foods, likewise, have personality. Those in which rajas (energy) or tamas (inertia) predominate make it hard to achieve the mental tranquillity necessary to worship effectively or achieve enlightenment. Even foods ideal for these purposes should be eaten in moderation. Alcohol is tolerated, but one should avoid it if possible.
The caste system started to fragment almost as soon as the four main castes established themselves, and there are now over 3,000 castes and subcastes, many of them limited to small areas or particular occupations. Every caste has its own council, which makes the rules for all its members’ activities, including their diet; it is said that the lower the caste the better organized is its conciliar government. To give food is more blessed than to receive it. The oldest Vedic text, the Rig-veda, says that one should always eat with a guest. In practice, although guests at a feast are regarded as privileged and their caste can to some extent be ignored, the general rule is that hosts outrank guests. Therefore, if you refuse to accept food when it is offered, you claim in effect to be of a higher caste than your host; and low-caste villagers are said to use great ingenuity to persuade neighbours of slightly higher caste to accept food from them. If one person of the higher caste accepts, the lower caste has then leapfrogged over all members of its former superiors.
The higher one’s caste, the more careful one has to be with one’s diet. One can safely accept food only from members of one’s own or a higher caste, so a top-ranking Brahman can only accept food cooked and served by persons of his own group, while the food itself (though vegetarian) is so easily polluted that he must eat at a safe distance from everyone else. Cooked foods themselves have a caste system. Pakka food is fried in ghee, kacca food is boiled in water. The act of cooking, the use of fire, makes food sacred and puts it at risk, by moving it from the natural world to the human; as a rule, uncooked food may be handled by anyone, and cow’s milk is by definition pure and undefiled, so pakka food enjoys a certain protection from pollution and is more easily transferred between members of different castes than kacca food. A Brahmin, however, will not accept milk from a low-caste person in case it has been polluted with water. Water itself cannot be ritually defiled if it is in a reservoir or a flowing stream, but it is at risk in a well or a small container. Because saliva pollutes, a water-drinker should pour the water into the mouth without letting the rim of the glass touch the lips. A cook must never taste what is being cooked. Always, what is impure will overcome what is pure; only the sacred can cleanse it.
The veneration of the cow dates from the earliest days of the Vedas, c.1800 BC—long before the evolution of Hinduism in anything like its modern form. In those days, herdsmen regarded all their beasts as more or less sacred, but the cow or bull was the preferred animal for sacrifice. Attitudes towards animal sacrifice fluctuated, but seem to have finished up in ambivalent fashion; such sacrifices were good in principle but impractical because of popular sentiment against them.
Modern writers link these changes to the rise (from the 5th century BC) of Buddhism (see BUDDHISM AND FOOD) and Jains (see JAINS AND FOOD) as creeds which offered freedom from the shackles of caste and a fast route to nirvana, escape from the cycle of rebirth. Although there are now few Jains and almost no Buddhists in India, the high status of VEGETARIANISM has remained, helped no doubt by the urge towards purity. The career of the Emperor Ashoka (reigned 268–231 BC) may also reflect a popular movement towards non-violence. However, when large numbers of people are seen to be making a virtue of a meatless diet, one may speculate that economic causes are partly responsible.
The Indian farmer does indeed have good reasons for not investing heavily in animals for slaughter, and for keeping but not slaughtering cows. In densely populated countries, it makes more sense to use the available land for growing crops, especially food grains, vegetables, and pulses, than for pasture—unless the pasture is for cows. Dairy cows transform fodder into calories and proteins in the form of milk much more efficiently than beef cattle (or any other animals) transform it into meat. They also provide dung for manure and fuel, and they pull ploughs and carts. There is roughly one cow for every four people in India, but by and large they do not compete with humans for food resources or space, except when they stand in the middle of a main road. Overall, they give far more than they take, and for that alone they qualify as sacred.
Roger Owen
READING:
of Cos, universally venerated as the father of medicine, was apparently an older contemporary of Plato (thus c.400 BC) but absolutely nothing is known of his life from contemporary Greek sources. Much later writings suggest that he was the founder of the medical school of Cos, which had a distinctive philosophy opposed to that of neighbouring Cnidos, and was the author of an uncertain number of authoritative works on anatomy, surgery, medicine, dietetics, and medical philosophy. However, the substantial collection of medical writings of all kinds that goes under Hippocrates’ name was really written by many different authors (some of whom followed Cnidian rather than Coan teachings) at different dates. It is a kind of library. Clearly, from a very early date, the tradition was to collect medical writings under the honourable name of Hippocrates, and there is no way of knowing whether any were really written by a person of that name.
Hippocratic writings were later translated into Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, and were the subject of commentaries in these languages and in Greek. Bolstered by the later authority of GALEN (see also FOUR HUMOURS), they have exerted an almost timeless influence over medicine and its practitioners, and even beyond. The Hippocratic collection includes the famous Oath, which enshrines medical confidentiality—and the separation between medicine and surgery. A sequence of Aphorisms begins with the well-known ‘Life is short, the Art is long’. The medical notebook Epidemics 6 advises: ‘Work, food, drink, sleep, sex: in moderation,’ a more explicit phrasing of the familiar adage ‘All things in moderation’.
The Hippocratic collection often refers to food and the importance of diet. The subject is central to the treatises known as Regimen in Acute Diseases, Nutriment and Regimen in Health, but the most interesting is Regimen (or On Diet), a work probably of the 4th century BC which is a useful early source for the food and drink of Greece and for early ideas of nutrition. The anonymous author claims to have discovered a principle for prescribing diets that are suited to individuals’ constitutions. Book 1 explains the philosophy and theory; book 2 sets out the characteristics of each food item and of various forms of exercise; book 3 applies the theory and gives a range of examples of diets and regimes of daily life intended for given human types and to combat given health problems. Book 4 advises on the use of dreams in diagnosing illnesses and dietary requirements.
Andrew Dalby
Hippopotamus amphibius, an African animal which is distantly related to the pig but very much larger (up to 4.2 m/14′, and weighing up to 4 tons). As its name (meaning river horse) indicates, the hippopotamus lives in and out of water. It counts as being basically an aquatic species, but it comes on land to feed, usually during the night.
As with other large African mammals, the numbers of this species and the extent of its range have been seriously depleted; but it has been eaten in the past and it has been said that the breast and back muscles, pot roasted with spices and herbs, were regarded as ‘the greatest delicacies that the hunter can provide’ (Leipoldt, 1976). The same author comments that hippopotamus meat, which was formerly on sale at the Cape Town market, always tends to be greasy and needs the addition of wine or vinegar.
traditionally the most important holiday of the year in Scotland, celebrates New Year’s Eve. As a marker between the years, the celebration dates back to antiquity, but the name Hogmanay was not in use until the early 17th century. It seems to be derived from the Norman form (hoguinané) of the Old French aguillanneuf, meaning the last day of the year and also being a cry for a gift on that day. The gift which prudent householders kept available for the occasion used to be OATCAKES. Gillian Edwards (1970) has a fascinating discussion of the etymology and of the connections with earlier New Year rites. She explains among many other points that the name ‘noor cake’, sometimes used for the kind of oatcake or biscuit baked for this day, is simply a contraction of ‘New Year’s cake’, and that some of the girls and boys who would go round soliciting these from bakers would wear aprons with numerous large pockets to accommodate them.
Catherine Brown (1996), who gives good descriptions of Hogmanay celebrations from her own experience, points out that up to the time of the Second World War the Scots did not observe Christmas Day as a holiday; its observance had been banned by the Church authorities in 1649, and Hogmanay had evolved into an occasion which did duty for it and for Yule and for Twelfth Night, as well as for the New Year.
Heracleum sphondylium, a biennial/perennial herb of Europe, Asia, and N. America, also called cow parsnip.
Mrs Phoebe Lankester, ‘the English student of plant-lore’, is cited by Fernald and Kinsey (1943) as having observed that pigs were fattened on hogweed, as the name suggests, and having further stated:
In Siberia and Russia the stalks are dried in the sun, when a sweet substance exudes from them, which resembles sugar, and is eaten as a great delicacy. A spirit is distilled from the stalks thus prepared, by first fermenting them with water and either mingling bilberries with them or not …. The young shoots and leaves may be boiled and eaten as a green vegetable, and when just sprouting from the ground resemble asparagus in flavour. The experiment is, however, seldom tried, owing to the ignorance of those to whom such an addition to the table would be a benefit and luxury.
Efforts to dispel the ignorance have not made much headway in the 20th century, although Phillips (1984) followed Mrs Lankester’s advice, and pronounced hogweed shoots to be ‘unequivocally one of the best vegetables I have eaten’.
(also hierba santa and many other versions), Piper sanctum, a plant whose large leaves are described as having an ANISE flavour (or resembling SASSAFRAS) and are used in the cuisines of various parts of MEXICO and CENTRAL AMERICA, e.g. to provide a wrapping for fish, or in soups.
Macruronus novaezelandiae, a fish which belongs to the family Macrouridae, close to the HAKE family, but has a much more tapering body than do regular hake of either the northern or southern hemispheres. Ayling and Cox (1982) make the interesting observation that, since the hoki is a fish of deep waters, where darkness prevails, the tapering body may serve to provide it with a longer lateral line, the instrument by which it and other fish detect the low frequency sounds produced by other fish (whether prey or predators). The maximum length of the hoki is indeed considerable: 1 m (40″). Its flesh is palatable, and distinguished by having large flakes.
A similar species, M. magellanicus, is found round the southern parts of S. America.
an island in the far north of JAPAN, has only been part of the country for about 100 years; colonization did not start until late in the 19th century. The original inhabitants were the Ainu. Because their foodways survived into recent times almost untouched by ‘civilization’, these have been zealously studied by anthropologists, with the result that the Ainu are mentioned more often in the literature than the relatively small population would seem to warrant. One remarkable feature of the indigenous culture is that there are striking and inexplicable resemblances between the language and that of the Basques in Europe.
Unlike the rest of Japan, which is mountainous, Hokkaido is flat, with much scope for dairy production, so consumption of butter and cheese is more common here than in the rest of the country.
one of the most prominent sauces in the group of those which are thickened by the use of egg yolk. The fact that such a sauce will curdle if heated beyond a certain point is largely responsible for their reputation of being ‘difficult’.
McGee (1990) has investigated both the history and the chemistry of the sauce. He reports that one of the earliest versions which he found, ‘sauce à la hollandoise, in the 1758 edition of Marin’s Dons de Comus, calls only for butter, flour, bouillon, and herbs; no yolks at all’. On the chemistry, he observes that the use of egg yolk in hollandaise is not essential in order to produce the desired emulsification; this could be achieved by the butter, unaided, surprising though this may seem. He also explains that if egg yolks are used, it is by no means necessary to use the quantities found in most recipes; that there are disadvantages in using the traditional technique of cooking the yolks as a first step; and that on balance it is better to leave the cooking stage until after the butter has been added to (merely warmed) yolks. His findings and recommendations are best studied in his own book, where they are accompanied by much relevant detail.
Sauces which are derived from, or can be regarded as variations of, hollandaise include:
dried and hulled MAIZE kernels, coarsely ground and prepared for consumption in various ways, including puddings and breads. The term is most commonly met in ‘hominy grits’, for which a finer grinding or a double grinding is used; see GROATS AND GRITS. Mariani (1994) says of hominy that:
It was one of the first foods European settlers readily accepted from the Native Americans, and the word, from one or another Algonquian words, such as rockahominie (‘parched corn’) or tackbummin (‘hulled corn’), was used as early as 1629. Different terms describe hominy that has been treated or ground in different ways. ‘Great hominy,’ also called ‘whole hominy,’ ‘pearl hominy’ (from its pearly appearance), and ‘samp’ (from the Narraganset nasàump, ‘corn mush’), is coarsely ground and prepared by scalding shelled corn in water and wood ash to separate the hulls, called the ‘eyes’.
is the sugary nectar of flowers gathered, modified, and stored in a honeycomb by honey bees (Apis melifica and A. dorsata). From the plant’s point of view the purpose of nectar is to attract insects which pick up pollen and transfer it from flower to flower. As the bee swallows the nectar, its saliva hydrolyses (splits) the sucrose (ordinary sugar) in the nectar into the two simple sugars, dextrose (GLUCOSE) and fructose. The bee takes a little nectar for its own nourishment but gives up most of it when it returns to the hive, regurgitating it into one of the hexagonal wax cells of the honeycomb which has been built by the bees with other substances gathered from the plants. Each cell is an incubator for a young bee, which feeds on the honey as it grows.
Nectar turns into honey by evaporation. The finished product consists of 35–40% fructose, 30–5% dextrose, lesser amounts of other sugars and gums, 17–20% water, and traces of pollen, wax, acids, proteins, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and pigments. Most of these substances come from the original nectar, and the composition of the honey depends on the type of flowers visited by the bees in the area. Bees visit flowers several hundred yards from the hive. As each bee returns it performs a wriggling ‘dance’ at the entrance to the hive. The angle at which it moves shows the direction of flight to the flower, in relation to the current position of the sun; the enthusiasm with which the bee wriggles shows how good a source of nectar the plant is.
The flavour and colour of honey are highly variable. Much of the honey on sale in most countries is from clover and similar field crops. Its flavour is mild and its taste sweet. Although honey can be nearly one and a quarter times as sweet as the same quantity of sucrose, owing to its high fructose content, it tastes less sweet to the palate because of the other flavouring substances it contains. This applies particularly to honeys made from scented flowers which include heather, citrus blossom, raspberry, gooseberry, and other fruits, wild flowering herbs such as sage, thyme, and fireweed, scented trees such as acacia, lime (basswood in the USA), eucalyptus, and numerous other plants. Each has a distinctive flavour thanks to aromatic substances from the flowers. Colour is due to plant pigments, and ranges from white through red and green to black. Texture also varies with the relative amounts of dextrose and fructose. Dextrose crystallizes more rapidly than fructose, making for a more granular honey, such as that from clover, alfalfa, and buckwheat.
Honey may be eaten straight from the comb. The wax is not nutritious. It imparts a pleasant texture but little flavour. Usually the honey is extracted by crushing the comb and letting the honey drain out, often helped by extra pressure from a centrifuge. It may also be strained to remove particles of wax. The resulting honey is usually a moderately viscous, cloudy liquid. Some honey, such as that made from heather (Calluna vulgaris), has so much gum in it that it is almost a jelly and will not pour. When stored, honey gradually crystallizes and solidifies. It may be liquefied by gentle heating, which also makes cloudy honey clear. Heat ‘inverts’ the small amount of remaining sucrose, splitting it into dextrose and fructose.
Honey has always been a prized food in all parts of the world, not only for humans but for many animals. Bears and badgers, which are thick skinned and not troubled by stings, raid wild bees’ nests in hollow trees. These animals can be a problem for commercial beekeepers, and in some places hives have had to be hung in the tops of trees to keep them out of reach of bears. A neolithic rock painting in the Araña cave at Bicorp near Valencia in Spain shows a man collecting wild honey. The oldest written reference to the use of honey is thought to be Egyptian, of about 5500 BC. At that time Lower Egypt was called Bee Land while Upper Egypt was Reed Land. By the 5th dynasty (c.2600 BC) apiculture was well established and is shown in several reliefs in the temple of the Sun at Abusir. Honey was a valuable commodity used widely in trade—in the accounts of Seti I (1314–1292 BC) 110 pots of honey were equivalent in value to an ass or an ox. In 1450 BC Thutmoses III is recorded as receiving tribute from Syria of 539 lb (244 kg) of honey.
The use of honey was taken to India by its Aryan invaders and became associated with religious rites. The ancient Indian Laws of Manu, dating from 1000 BC, set the ‘tax rate’ at one-sixth of the beekeeper’s production.
Honey is also mentioned on ancient Sumerian clay tablets, possibly even older than the Egyptian reference. Later Babylonian tablets give recipes for ‘electuaries’—medicines based on honey. An electuary mentioned in the 1st century AD by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder included powdered bees. It was said to be a cure for dropsy and bladder stones.
The earliest hives were hollowed out of tree trunks, and this practice still survives in some societies. If a colony of bees can be found while it is swarming—that is, gathering in a dense clump as a preparation for establishing a new nest—the whole swarm may be picked up and transferred to an artificial hive, where the bees will settle. The original method of gathering honey, whether from the wild or from a hive, is still employed. Smoke is used to drive out the bees so that the honey can be taken. They return to the depleted hive and stoically set about making more honey.
Extravagant claims are made to this day for the healthful properties of honey, and recently also for royal jelly, a refined food made by worker bees in small amounts to feed the queen bee and which, it is said, preserves the youth of those who eat it. Before dismissing such beliefs as superstition it should be appreciated that honey is a highly complex substance, and contains compounds about which there is still much to be found out.
Fermented drinks have traditionally been made from honey, such as the old English mead, which is still available as a curiosity. Mead was also an important drink in medieval Russia. The word derives from the Sanskrit word for honey, madhu. A similar drink popular in Ethiopia is called t’ej.
The flavour of honey is volatile and easily destroyed by heating. There is little point in using an expensive fragrant honey in cooking. Honey used in place of sugar in a recipe darkens the food because the single sugars in it caramelize readily. These sugars are also strongly hygroscopic (moisture absorbing), and make the finished product keep well.
a general term for cakes, biscuits, and breads using HONEY in the recipe.
The category of ‘honey cakes’ overlaps considerably with GINGERBREAD, since a gingerbread made with honey (e.g. French pain d’épices), could also be called a honey cake. The same would apply to the LEBKUCHEN of German-speaking countries, which are sweetened with honey and may be regarded either as soft biscuits or as thin cakes. Thus the familiar problem of distinguishing between CAKE and BISCUIT afflicts discussion of honey cakes.
If for these and similar reasons the usefulness of the category ‘honey cakes’ is questioned, the answer may come down to this, that the subject of what are called ‘honey cake moulds’ is an interesting one and that it does depend on this category. As Piroska Weiner (1981) points out, ordinary cake doughs prepared with a raising agent and having a light texture do not lend themselves to shaping; whereas a flour and honey dough is capable of retaining a sculptured form. The same author provides a detailed history of honey cake moulds, explaining that examples have been recovered from numerous archaeological sites (Egypt, the Middle East, classical Greece and Rome), but that the relatively crude effects achieved in ancient times with clay moulds were eclipsed in C. Europe in recent centuries, after carved wooden moulds came into use in the 16th century.
Mould patterns were highly traditional as a genre, carrying symbolic or seasonal meanings of the kinds one would expect. Popular engravings and lithographs often provided models. However, the patterns did change, in accordance with both popular interest and artistic fashions (Gothic, Baroque and Rococo). Thus Renaissance rose, tulip, and pomegranate motifs, coaches and horses, the Adoration of the Magi, ladies in fashionable 18th-century dress, storks bringing babies, and hussars on horseback were all popular. Portraits of saints were produced for religious holidays (St Nicholas is still produced for Christmas), and heart shapes were made for lovers’ gifts. In the 19th century the shapes were enhanced with piped sugar lines, names, and proverbs; paper pictures of angels, doves, or roses were stuck on, and mirrors embellished the hearts.
The art of carving honey cake moulds went into decline in the 20th century, and production ceased by the Second World War. Items for which honey cake moulds would have been used in the past are now likely to be decorated with icing, pictures, and mirrors.
READING:
a sticky, sugary liquid exuded by some insects, especially aphids such as the common greenfly, which suck plant sap. Wherever these insects infest a plant thickly, there may be enough honeydew produced to drip onto the ground. This is one explanation given for the mysterious arrival of the MANNA on which the biblical Israelites fed in the desert. A car parked under a lime tree (Tilia, not Citrus) in summer will soon become covered with honeydew.
A few insects produce so much of the substance that it can be gathered and used as a sweetener. One such is the sugar-cane leaf-hopper, a pest of the sugar-cane crop in Hawaii.
There is no connection between this honeydew and the Honeydew MELON.
Armillariella mellea (and other Armillariella spp), an edible fungus named for the colour of its cap, usually grows on or around the trunks or stumps of trees. It is a harmful parasite, capable of killing trees. Its long, thin black rhizomorphs enable it to spread underground from tree to tree. Their appearance is responsible for the alternative common name ‘boot-lace’ fungus and (in the USA) ‘shoestring mushroom’.
The honey fungus, which is also found in India and the Orient, is an autumn growth, and is closely related to the MATSUTAKE.
Honey fungus has an acid smell when fresh, but this disappears when it is cooked. The flavour can vary from mild to strong, even spicy. Jordan (1995a) expresses maximum enthusiasm for the species, and suggests that the best treatment is to pan-fry it gently in butter with a little chopped shallot. (Jaccottet, 1973, remarking that it is sold in Swiss markets, strikes a less positive note by stating emphatically that the fungus should be well boiled before its final cooking and the water discarded out of reach of pigs, who may be fatally poisoned by it.)
Another fungus which grows in clusters on tree trunks has the promising name of poached egg fungus (or porcelain fungus) because of its glistening translucent white cap, which may have a hint of yellow in the centre. It used to be assigned to the same genus as the honey fungus, but is now classified as Oudemansiella mucida. It is one of the few mushrooms which has to be washed, to rid it of gluten, after which it is edible.
a curious English word formed from the Tamil word appam (also aapa, appa, appe), itself thought to be derived from the Sanskrit apupa, meaning fried dainty. The name hopper, one of a number of Anglo-Indian adaptations of Indian words, refers to a pancake-like speciality of both S. India and Sri Lanka, but was particularly prevalent in the latter country.
Madhur Jaffrey (1985) gives the following vivid description:
I have often said that if a French crêpe were to marry a crumpet or an English muffin, they would probably become the proud parents of appams. Appams are a special kind of pancake made out of a leavened rice batter. They are thick, soft, white and spongy in the centre and crisp and lace-like along their golden edges.
Hoppers are cooked in a pan resembling a Chinese wok known as a cheena chatti (literally ‘Chinese pan’) which gives them their characteristic bowl-like shape.
Hoppers are often eaten for breakfast, but Jaffrey emphasizes their versatility, and also their pleasing ability to sop up all sorts of juices and savoury or sweet flavours.
Another similar pancake served on festive occasions is known as the string hopper. The dough is extruded by a special implement into fine ‘strings’ and steamed. The result can be served with hard-boiled eggs, nuts, peas, chilli sauce, etc.
Helen Saberi
a dish of COWPEAS (black-eyed peas), cooked with fat pork (for example pig’s jowl) and rice with some seasoning. It is often served with collard greens and cornbread. It is a customary dish for New Year’s Day in Charleston and the American south. Craigie and Hulbert (1938–44) spell it ‘hopping John’, the form used by their two earliest citations (1838 and 1856). They define it as: ‘a highly seasoned stew of bacon, peas, and sometimes rice’. Everyone seems to agree that the indisputable basis of the dish is cowpeas, which the slaves brought to N. America (or which were brought for them, for food during the voyage, along with the other new plants brought from Africa, okra, yam, and water melon). John Thorne (1996) gives a generous amount of space to the subject, in the course of a chapter about the various forms which ‘Rice and Beans’ have taken in the Americas and especially in the southern states of the USA.
The origin of the name is uncertain. Thorne cites several theories which have been advanced by etymologists and cookery writers, none of which is irresistibly plausible.
from the hop vine, Humulus lupulus, are a popular food in Belgium and the north of France around late March. The shoots are picked off the youngish plants as they start to grow up the hop poles. They are cooked in water, just long enough to make them tender, and then often served with scrambled eggs, or incorporated in a salad. Their sweet and aromatic flavour is set off by a slight touch of bitterness.
Hop shoots have been eaten in England also. Dorothy Hartley (1954) gives them as a Kentish dish—‘boiled in broth and eaten like asparagus with butter toast’—and in N. England they are boiled and served with melted butter.
often called white horehound, Marrubium vulgare, a plant native to Mediterranean Europe and C. Asia, and naturalized in N. America. Its leaves make a tea, described by Grieve (1931) as ‘an appetizing and healthful drink, popular in Norfolk and other country districts’. It is also used in candies.
taken here to mean the strip of coastal land which extends round the north-eastern tip of Africa from the Somali Republic through Djibouti to Eritrea.
The traditional food in the Somali Republic is RICE (brees) with meat (hibbib) and CHILLI. Anan geil is a dish of MILLET gruel with CAMEL milk and HONEY, which sounds like something which must have been there since the year dot. There are other dishes which reflect Arab—or even, in some instances, Italian—influence.
Paice (1994) ingeniously introduces Eritrea (a modern state since 1890, independent in its present form since 1993) with a poetic quotation from a classical Greek tragedian:
One of the earliest known references to the name Eritrea, derived from the Greek word for red, is in Fragment 67 of Aeschylus: ‘There the sacred waters of the Erythrean Sea break upon a bright red strand, and at no great distance from the Ocean lies a copper-tinted lake—the lake that is the jewel of Ethiopia—where the all-pervading Sun returns again and again to plunge his immortal form, and finds solace for his weary round in gentle ripples that are but a warm caress.’
The foodways and dishes of Eritrea have been charmingly described by Olivia Warren (2000). Staples include INJERA (as in neighbouring ETHIOPIA) and berbere, the red pepper SPICE MIXTURE which is used in numerous dishes such as a sauce for spaghetti, filling for pizza, ful (bean stew) and the interesting dish of lentils called tum ’tumo (popular during the fasting periods required by the Eritrean Orthodox Church). A menu might include frittata, an egg dish with peppers etc., again reflecting Italian influence.
READING:
Craterellus cornucopioides, an edible fungus related to the CHANTERELLE but brown, grey, or bluish in colour, and almost black when wet. The stem and cap form a continuous structure which may be 12 cm (5″) high. The fungus grows in the late summer and autumn, typically in the midst of hazel or beech trees. It is found in China as well as Europe and N. America.
The reputation of the horn of plenty varies from country to country. Most British authorities are unenthusiastic about it, except perhaps for use as a condiment after being dried and powdered, a procedure also recommended in France. In Scandinavia, however, it is given a higher rating; and in the USA McIlvaine (1902) described it as first class and said that several other species of the genus found there were equally good.
These ambivalent attitudes seem to be reflected in the common names in Romance languages. The French call it both corne d’abondance and trompette des morts, and there are corresponding pairs of names in Italian and Spanish.
Cerithium vulgatum, an edible mollusc inhabiting a single shell which is shaped like an ice cream cone with its open end bent over sideways. Size up to 7 cm (2.5″); colour of the shell usually brownish or greenish; distribution, the Mediterranean and E. Atlantic coasts.
The name is also applied to some Indo-Pacific species belonging to different families, notably Cerithidea obtusa and Telescopium telescopium.
The Mediterranean horn-shell is eaten in a number of countries, and provides the basis for a special Italian soup, Zuppa di garagoli, in the Romagna.
a French term which has been current in a food context since the 17th century (in England, only from the 18th), indicating minor, usually cold, items of food served at the beginning of a meal. In the 20th century, until quite recent times the hors d’œuvres trolley was a familiar sight in restaurants, incorporating up to several dozen little recipients containing the various delicacies on offer. Typical items would be ANCHOVIES, SARDINES, slices of smoked fish, olives, radishes, sliced tomato (or other salad vegetable), various sorts of SAUSAGE and other CHARCUTERIE, etc. Hot hors d’œuvres could be, for example, miniature savoury pastries or tiny fritters; but these do not belong to the mainstream hors d’œuvres tradition.
See also SERVICE À LA FRANÇAISE; TAPAS; MEZZE; SMÖRGÅSBORD; ZAKUSKI.
Macrotyloma uniflorum (formerly Dolichos biflorus), is also known as Madras gram, and as kulthi in India. The plant is widely cultivated in tropical Asia and Africa as a fodder and cover crop. The beans are smaller and flatter than peas and are usually kept whole rather than split. They are among the cheapest of the LEGUMES.
fish of the genus Trachurus, found in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the E. Atlantic from Iceland and Norway down to S. Africa. Their maximum length is around 50 cm (20″) and they have greenish-blue backs and prominent ‘stepped’ lateral lines, marked by a set of lozenge-shaped scutes (bony plates like especially large scales). In this respect they resemble many other members of the family Carangidae, to which they belong. The family, which is more important in the Indo-Pacific than in the Atlantic, is notorious for the confusion in English vernacular names (see JACK); horse mackerel may also be called SCAD, a name more often used for carangid species in the Indo-Pacific.
The three main species are Trachurus mediterraneus, T. picturatus, and T. trachurus. There is little to choose between them, and none enjoys a high reputation as food. The first two belong mainly to the Mediterranean. The third is the one with the more extensive range, down to S. Africa, where it is called maasbanker because of its supposed resemblance to a freshwater fish of the River Maas in the Netherlands.
the flesh of the horse, Equus caballus, is similar to BEEF, and eaten in many countries. In continental Europe, both horse and donkey, Equus asinus, are sold as ‘horsemeat’; the flesh of the mule, a hybrid of the two, can also be sold under this title.
All these animals are, however, considered unsuitable for human consumption in English-speaking cultures, and the idea of eating them often arouses distaste. As animals which do not have cloven hooves or chew cud, horses and donkeys are prohibited for both Jews and Muslims.
In continental Europe, horsemeat is eaten with varying degrees of acceptance; the Italians, French, Belgians, Dutch, Germans, Swedish, and Icelanders appear to be the most enthusiastic consumers. Italy has by far the highest per capita consumption, mainly in the north, and particularly in the Veneto. The meat is also consumed in parts of C. Asia, China, and Japan, and by some lower-caste groups in India, and generally seems to be acceptable in S. America. In N. America, the Anglo-Saxon prohibition against it is strong, although it has been eaten (for example during both the Civil War and when there were some shortages in the Second World War). Canada (mostly Quebec) also consumes a certain quantity. Both USA and Canada slaughter for export.
Theories advanced to explain the English aversion to horsemeat include the perception of horses as noble creatures, their role as pets, their value as draught animals, and dislike of the flavour. It is generally accepted that at the root is a religious prohibition inspired by the spread of Christianity.
There is a particularly good discussion in Simoons (1994), who surveys the subject on a global basis. In Europe, he believes, the Roman Catholic Church, inheriting from classical Rome a distaste for eating horsemeat, was the principal force of opposition to the practice, striving to suppress pagan rituals which involved sacrificing and eating a horse; but this was not easy and they even had to give a dispensation to Icelanders in 999 to continue. Simoons’s study dispels any idea that attitudes to horsemeat have been consistent either geographically or temporally, except for a markedly consistent strength of feeling, on one side or the other.
Evidence indicates that prehistoric Europeans had few inhibitions about using horses for food. Horse bones, sometimes cracked open for extraction of marrow, are recorded at archaeological sites in England and elsewhere. At Soultré (Burgundy) there is evidence for hunting horses by deliberately stampeding them over a cliff—the first evidence of a long-standing relationship between the inhabitants of France and horsemeat.
The French attitude towards horsemeat was made more positive by the support it gained from the military during the Napoleonic wars. In 1811, any prohibition of its consumption was lifted. Further encouragement was received by a mid-century campaign in its favour culminating in a spectacular banquet hippophagique in Paris in 1865, the menu for which included horse consommé, horse sausages, horse à la mode, and several other presentations. Reception was mixed: Edmond de Goncourt described the meat as ‘watery and blackish-red’; and Alexandre DUMAS doubted if it would ever become an article of daily consumption. Since much horsemeat was derived from horses too old to work, it is not surprising that it was tough. Special horse butchers’ shops were established so that the cheap meat would not be passed off as more expensive beef. Ordinary butchers are not allowed to sell horsemeat.
In 20th-century France horsemeat is still principally consumed by the urban working classes, among whom it has a reputation for healthiness. Some specialist breeding of horses for meat is now undertaken, using Ardennes and Postier Breton horses, so meat from younger animals of more reliable quality is available. Consumption, both in France and in Japan, has declined in recent years.
Horsemeat is lower in calories than beef, and has a higher content of glycogen. It is considered good for dishes such as Steak TARTARE, which require raw meat, as the animal carries neither tuberculosis nor tapeworms. However, the meat spoils faster than beef, and poor handling of horsemeat was the cause of a serious outbreak of salmonella poisoning in France during the 1960s, which adversely affected the business of horse butchers. Root (1980) remarks that horsemeat shops were already an increasingly rare sight, although of striking aspect: ‘with a gilded horsehead over the door and splendid fat carcasses displayed within, artificial roses running like buttons down their spines and bright ribbons fluttering along their flanks.’
Horsemeat is lean and similar to beef, but closer in texture with an underlying sweetness of taste. To balance this, some authorities recommend the use of garlic or herbs. While much cookery of horsemeat mirrors that of beef, it does lend itself to curing and drying and to eating raw. Hence the enjoyment of the Belgians in its use in steak tartare, of the Dutch in paardenrookvlees (smoked horsemeat), and of the Japanese in basashi (horse) SASHIMI, and even basashi ice cream. See also MONGOLIA; KOUMISS.
Laura Mason
Agaricus arvensis, a large edible mushroom which is found in pastures or thickets in the autumn. Its distribution is wide: Europe, N. America, Japan, China, Australia, S. Africa.
The convex cap may measure 20 cm (8″) across, twice the size of the common FIELD MUSHROOM. The gills are white at first, then pink, and finally brown. Like many other mushrooms in the genus Agaricus, this one smells of aniseed. It is good to eat, and may be cooked in any of the usual ways. The size and shape of the cap are suitable for stuffing.
Armoracia rusticana, a potent condiment. It is not a kind of RADISH; both plants, however, belong to the crucifer family which also includes turnip, cabbage, and mustard. The pungent odour and ‘hot’ taste of horseradish are due to a substance called sinigrin which, when it is decomposed by the action of enzymes, liberates a volatile oil, similar to mustard oil, containing sulphur. The release of these properties only occurs when the root is cut or bruised; an unbroken root has no smell.
Horseradish is a native wild plant of E. and SE Europe and W. Asia. Once established, it is an ineradicable weed and it is now naturalized all over Europe and in the USA. But its westward movement seems to have been relatively recent. There is no certain reference to it in classical literature.
Much later, the 13th-century writer Albertus Magnus describes a ‘raphanus’ (radish) used for medical purposes in terms which fit horseradish well. But the German Fuchsius, in his Historia Stirpium (1542), gave the first unmistakable description of horseradish root used as a condiment, and this was repeated soon afterwards by Italian and English authors. An early English name was ‘red cole’; this cannot have referred to the colour of the root, which is yellowish-brown outside and white within; but may have been given because the fiery taste was like red-hot coals. The name ‘horseradish’, which is also old, means a radish which is ‘hoarse’, or coarse and strong. The French name ‘raifort’ also means ‘strong root’.
Horseradish is most popular in N. and E. Europe and Russia; in Britain; to some extent in France; and also in the USA thanks to European immigrants. The appearance of the Russian and Slavonic name khren in several W. European languages (in variant forms) shows that its use is at least partly adopted from E. Europe.
Horseradish is most often used in sharp relishes served with roast beef in Britain and with meat, fish, or eggs in other countries. For the strongest and most biting taste, fresh, grated horseradish may be used undiluted, as it is in some N. European countries with fish; but normally the bite is toned down in some way. Fresh horseradish may be mixed with apple or made into a sauce with emollient ingredients such as cream and egg. The French prefer to include horseradish in delicate cream mixtures, often with lemon juice. Elsewhere, vinegar has been and remains a common ingredient in horseradish preparations. Coles (1657) said that horseradish was served ‘thinly sliced and wittily mixed with vinegar’.
Horseradish sauces are usually uncooked or only gently warmed. Heat destroys the pungency, and when whole horseradish roots are cooked as a vegetable, which they are occasionally in E. Europe, the flavour is quite mild.
In Norway the grated root is mixed in with whipped sweet-and-sour cream, vinegar, and sugar; this sauce is called pepperrotsaus and is served with cold boiled fish, in particular salmon.
A whole horseradish root is large, about 45 cm (18″) long. Not all of it is usable; the outside has an unpleasant flavour and is scraped off, and the tasteless core is usually discarded. Even so, a whole root usually provides much more horseradish than anyone would want at one time, and the usual practice is to buy it in a prepared, preserved form. Preservation is important, because once horseradish has been sliced or grated and the flavour has developed, it quickly deteriorates. The traditional horseradish vinegar and pickled horseradish are two solutions.
Related plants in different genera have roots resembling horseradish and are similarly used. The most important is the Japanese WASABI. In India and E. Asia horseradish is almost unknown, but it has an understudy in the roots of the so-called HORSERADISH TREE.
Moringa oleifera, a small tree of India now grown also in the W. Indies and other tropical regions. Europeans in India discovered that its root ‘so exactly resembles horse-radish as scarcely to be distinguished from it by the nicest palate’, and used it with their roast beef. However, the main reason for its cultivation is that its seeds are the source of ben oil, used in perfumery and for lubrication; and the next most important reason is that the pods and leaves are edible.
The long, narrow pods or fruits contain a whitish mass in which three-winged seeds are embedded. These pods, when still young, are cut into short lengths and used in Indian curry dishes. The outside of the pod remains inedible and is discarded, but the mucilaginous inside and the immature seeds have a pleasant, slightly hot taste. As Ochse (1980) remarks: ‘The stewed fruits cannot be eaten whole, but one sucks their contents and throws the tough valves away.’
The leaves are also cooked as a green vegetable or used as a pickle or flavouring agent. Malini Bisen (1970) gives a whole range of recipes for ‘drumsticks’, as the fruits are known in India. She states that in Maharashtrian and Gujerati houses drumsticks are often used in a DAL, in a kadhi (buttermilk soup, chaach in Hindi, that is flavoured chiefly with turmeric), and as a vegetable.
The Wealth of India sums up uses thus:
The tender pods are esteemed as a vegetable. They are cut into slices and used in culinary preparations: they are also pickled. Flowers and tender leaves are eaten as pot herbs. Seeds are consumed after frying: they are reported to taste like peanuts. The roots of the tree are used as a condiment or garnish in the same way as those of true horseradish.
The same source might have added that the fruits have a reputation as an aphrodisiac (no doubt because of their shape) and are for this reason fed to bridegrooms in S. India.
creatures of great antiquity, in the family Xiphosuridae. They bear a large and rounded outer shell, and have a formidable spike projecting behind, as means of protection. An alternative name for them is ‘beetle crabs’. They are caught—in regions where people bother to catch them—in special nets or bamboo traps set in shallow inshore waters.
These crabs have small black eyes, but the males are reputedly blind and depend on the females, to whom they cling while moving around. Dozens of males may be ‘in tow’ from a single female. The Thai name for this crab means ‘pimp’ and was presumably bestowed because of this habit.
In SE Asia there is one species, Tachypleus gigas, which achieves a great size (even 40 cm/16″ across the outer shell) and has correspondingly large eggs. The eggs are regarded as the delicacy and, mixed with the light blue blood which can be collected from the crab’s body, are fried in Thailand.
to judge by what one reads or experiences about the folkways and foodways of all the innumerable ethnic and other groups in the world, is everywhere ‘traditional’, ‘unstinted’, ‘unrivalled’, and often ‘legendary’.
It would be good to think that all this is so; and it is certainly true that there is a very general disposition among the peoples of the world to give and to enjoy giving hospitality. The matter could well be the subject of a large book of global scope.
However, there has been a downside, brought to attention in a very reasonable manner by Mrs G. M. Culwick (1955):
A very real difficulty in safeguarding the shares of the women and children is the paramount obligation of hospitality. It is unthinkable that food should be withheld if any food is there, and in a community which does not live at the ends of telephone lines or have three postal deliveries a day, the majority of guests arrive unheralded. It is a matter which cannot be forced, it must take its time, but it is to be hoped that once they become alive to its importance some of the men will give a lead in devising some way of safeguarding their families without outraging local feeling.
No doubt the problem will tend to go away, in the Sudan (about which Mrs Culwick was writing and where she had been working) and other countries with similar traditions. No doubt also the gradual disappearance of the problem will involve the loss of some things of value. One must hope that the impulse to give hospitality is indeed almost universal and that it will continue to find expression, but with fewer untoward results for women.
sometimes hodgepodge, a term which in its culinary meaning, a mixed stew, dates back to the 16th century and has an obvious connection with HOTPOT. It also occurred in earlier forms in medieval times, for example, the recipes ‘Gees in hoggepot’ and ‘Goos in hochepot’ reproduced in Warner (1791).
A dish of this sort, which is almost infinitely variable, naturally occurs in many places. As Marian McNeill (1929) explains, the same thing is known in Scotland as Hairst Bree (harvest broth), and ‘is made only when the kail-yard is in its prime, and the soup is fragrant with the juices of young growing things’.
However, the term hotchpotch was also well known in Scotland and Meg Dods (1826) has recipes for both Scottish and Winter hotchpotch. For the former, she too emphasizes the importance of having young vegetables, ‘full of sweet juices’. She recommends sweet white turnips or ‘the small, round, smooth-grained yellow kind peculiar to Scotland, which is almost equal to the genuine Navet of France’.
have for centuries provided travellers with food as well as shelter. For this, they deserve mention alongside RESTAURANTS, CAFÉS, and those entries relating to eating out. Reasons for travel are manifold, but among the most important are religious observance and trade. It is not surprising that these activities are at the heart of the early life of the inn. A medieval pilgrim might seek shelter in a hospice or convent; a visitor to a shrine in Japan would take rooms in a lodging house run by oshi or pilgrim-guides; Roman visitors to oracles would be fed and watered by the temples themselves; and alongside these priestly or monastic services, there grew up a network of secular inns. Chaucer’s pilgrims foregathered at the Tabard in Southwark. Similarly with trade, merchants needed safe havens, as well as entrepôts. The caravanserais that throng the trade routes of the Near East and C. Asia are witness to that. In Georgian English inns, too, samples would be displayed and sales held by merchants from out of town. As well as commerce, the inn acted as the articulating joint to the travel network’s skeleton: the staging post, reservoir of horses, refuelling stop, and the like. When horse transport was superseded by the railway, inns fell on hard times, only to be revitalized by motor travel half a century later. Many inns offered shelter but no food. In Japan, this arrangement was called ki-chin-yado, or ‘wood-fee’, the guest paying for fuel and use of the kitchen. The artist Edward Lear travelling in Albania in 1848 found he too had to hunt up a chicken. Inns, however, became an important site of public eating throughout Europe and N. America, often offering a table d’hôte or no-choice meal, or fashioning the repast according to what was in the kitchen and the traveller’s preference. The cooks of inns in London in the 18th century were as celebrated as would be the famous restaurant chefs of post-revolutionary Paris.
The hotel, however, is not an inn. In earlier French usage, the word meant a noble’s town house. ‘The bourgeoisie live in maisons; nobles in towns have hôtels; kings, princes and bishops have a palais; and lords live in châteaux on their domains,’ is how Féraud’s dictionary had it in 1787. The jump from inns to hotels in that country may have everything to do with the Revolution. Mary Berry, Horace Walpole’s young friend, was travelling in France either side of 1789. During her earlier trip, she stayed only in inns and auberges. In 1790, she was able to find several hotels in Paris, often offering suites or apartments rather than mere rooms. The earliest so-called hotels in England (Bath 1765, Exeter 1769, and many other spa resorts thereafter) were indeed modelled on mansions rather than the courtyard inn, and they aimed at an upper-class private clientele. It was a new sort of institution attracting a better class of custom, indulging in a new form of activity, namely travel for pleasure. As the form spread (the first New York hotel, the City Hotel, was opened in 1794) it followed, or even created, the touring public. Cookery, of course, was central to its being and the hotel restaurant (offering à la carte rather than table d’hôte) was the chief element in the growth of international HAUTE CUISINE.
Tom Jaine
READING:
a word having different applications in the western and eastern hemispheres.
In the Orient, there is a cluster of dishes centred on the Mongolian hotpot, which may or may not have originated in MONGOLIA. A contrivance intended to sit in the middle of the table, within reach of the diners, embraces a heating apparatus and a circular ‘moat’ of simmering broth, into which the diners briefly dip thin slices of meat or morsels of vegetable. The Japanese SHABU-SHABU is a close relation.
In the west it is usually Lancashire hotpot, a dish of NW England and in particular of Lancashire. The main ingredients are lamb or mutton chops and potatoes, and the cooking is done slowly in a covered pot or casserole. A Lancashire hotpot dish is tall, round, straight sided, and has a lid. The dish is filled with layers of browned lamb or mutton chops and layers of onions and thickly sliced potatoes. Other ingredients sometimes added are kidneys and black puddings; oysters, when cheap, were also included.
The top layer is always an arrangement of overlapping potato slices, sometimes surrounding small circles made from the rounded ends of the potatoes. Stock is added and the dish slowly cooked in the oven. The lid is removed towards the end of the cooking to brown the edges of the potato slices. A Hot Pot Supper is a community event in Lancashire. The dish is invariably accompanied by pickled red cabbage.
Very large earthenware hotpots survive which some claim were necessary to fit the long chop bones of Pennine sheep ignoring the fact that the bones can be chopped or snapped and bent back. It may be that local cheap coal (used in locally made kitchen ranges) and the fact that the potato came early into use in Lancashire combined to make this dish popular. Also, it was a great advantage that hotpot could be left to cook while the family were at work. A variation using beef instead of mutton was recorded in a newspaper on Boxing Day (26 December) 1889:
Yesterday over 30,000 poor people in Liverpool were provided with ‘hot pot’ dinners. Each hot pot weighed ten pounds. There were used 13,000 lbs of beef, 15 tons of potatoes and a ton and a half of onions.
Ayto (1993) remarks that in the 18th century the term ‘hot-pot’ referred to a sort of hot punch and that the first writer to use it in print in the sense of a meat stew was Mrs Gaskell, who (in North and South, 1854) had a northern mill-owner enjoying a share of his mill-hands’ hotpot. However, the term HOTCHPOTCH, now largely obsolete, had been used in a similar sense in earlier times. It meant a mixed dish, typically a meat and vegetable stew, and was derived via the form hotchpot from the medieval French hochepot (a term which survives, referring in modern times to a stew of N. France and S. Belgium, in which oxtail and often other meat ingredients figure). The Dutch hutspot belongs to the same family of dishes.
Roy Shipperbottom
(also hoch, haugh) a term used mainly in the north of England and Scotland for that part of an animal which corresponds to the human ankle; i.e. the hock, or to another hind-leg joint of meat such as shin. Potted hough is a Scottish delicacy which remains highly popular. Dorothy Hartley (1954) quotes a recipe which was clearly given to her orally by a Scotswoman and has an arresting start and finish. ‘Take a hough and bash it well with an axe. No’ just break it, but have at it, till the pieces are no bigger than a wee hen’s egg.’ She then describes how the pieces are stewed for at least four hours with the brown papery skins of onions, peppercorns, and a blade of mace. The meat comes away from the bone, and the strained liquid is allowed to ‘gallop’ while the meat is picked off the broken bones and pressed into a basin which, when full, is topped up with the liquid. ‘It should set stiff. If it n’ sets stiff, you must reduce again for it should be as stiff as glue.’ The woman who provided the recipe is revealed as ‘the mother of four champion blacksmiths’, i.e. someone who knew about strengthening foods. If only for this reason it is worth recording her comments on the reception by her family of the dish.
All o’mine want no more than twa-three slices of potted hough, and a well of baked taties, and a fresh lettuce and mustard—maybe twa-three pickles would go wi’it well—and a tankard of ale—’twill fill them fine—’tis all guid meat.
Another word for hough or hock is skink; see CULLEN SKINK.
Gaylussacia baccata, a name made familiar by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, is as American as the hero of that book. The plant is related to the CRANBERRY and BLUEBERRY (or bilberry). Its name is a corruption of ‘hurtleberry’, an old name for the blueberry; and the two plants are broadly alike, growing in the same regions, and being used in the same ways. However, the fruit of the huckleberry is different in structure; it contains ten hard ‘seeds’ rather than numerous soft ones.
The black huckleberry, G. baccata, is the most popular, but Fernald and Kinsey (1943) aver that the dangleberry, G. frondosa, is just as good and will ‘make one of the most luscious of desserts, being remarkably juicy and with a rich, spicy and sweet flavor’. The stones, however, make both species less attractive than the blueberry and they are not commercially gathered or cultivated. Berries gathered from the wild may be used in pies and conserves with or as a substitute for many other berries.
Other berries in N. America which may misleadingly be called ‘huckleberries’ are the ‘red huckleberry’, Vaccinium parvifolium, of the north-west, and the ‘California huckleberry’, V. ovatum. What is sometimes called the ‘squaw huckleberry’, V. stamineum, of the north is better called ‘deerberry’ and is evidently worth gathering; Facciola (1990) remarks that when cooked and served cold their flavour is like ‘a combination of gooseberry and cranberry sauce, with the slight bitter taste of grapefruit marmalade’.
a speciality of Kent in England, are small yeast-leavened cakes/rolls, shaped into ovals, each with a hole in the middle. They have been known since the late 18th century but are rarely made now. Annie Hood (1993) records various forms of the tradition; she says that the dough was often enriched with butter, egg, or fruit; that the hole in the middle would take jam; and that huffkins were latterly associated with the end of the hop-picking season. The origin of the name is unknown, and some of the various recipes suggest an affinity with TEA BREADS.
a small sweet made of a pulled sugar mixture, typically with a mint flavour. It has a traditional shape like a twisted cushion, made by chopping the rope of soft mixture into short sections and turning it through 90 degrees between cuts.
are tiny DRAGÉES, made by coating individual sugar crystals with sugar syrup. (If the coating process is carried on to build up large sweets, the result is a GOBSTOPPER.) A characteristic of hundreds and thousands is the bright mixture of colours—red, orange, pink, yellow—in which they are produced. These little sweets are scattered over icing to decorate cakes, or sprinkled over ice creams.
The corresponding French term, nonpareille, sometimes occurs in the Anglicized and archaic form ‘non pareil’.
Laura Mason
as a nation and a culinary entity, may be said to have begun at the end of the 9th century, when the Hungarian tribes, which had been moving west and south-west for centuries from Asia, accomplished the conquest of what is now their country. (Their linguistic brethren, the Finns, had chosen to move north-west and take up a position distant from them, thus separating the two surviving examples of the Finno-Ugric language group. Whatever culinary links there may have been between the two seem to have disappeared as a result of this divergence.)
Medieval Hungary rose to its zenith of wealth and power during the long reign of King Matthias I (1458–90), and the extant records of royal feasts reveal many aspects of modern Hungarian cuisine already in being. The association of gypsy music with meals, perhaps too inevitable and intrusive in 19th- and 20th-century Hungarian restaurants, was apparent at the wedding feast of the young King with Princess Beatrice of Naples. The influence of Italy, for example in the use of pasta; the love of game; highly embellished dishes of freshwater fish; the use of sauces made with the food’s own juices; the supremacy among vegetables of the newly arrived onion—all these can be clearly seen at a distance of five centuries.
The death of King Matthias brought on a period of decline and then defeat by the invading Turks. For the greater part of the 16th and 17th centuries, Turkey ruled the central region of Hungary (while the western and northern parts were under Habsburg domination, and Transylvania was an independent principality). The long period of Turkish presence had fundamental effects on food and cookery. It was the Turks who introduced PAPRIKA, FILO pastry (which evolved into the STRUDEL), rice PILAFS, PITTA bread (to become langós, a sort of forerunner of PIZZA), the practice of stuffing peppers and aubergines (previously the Hungarians had only stuffed cabbage), the tomato, cherries and sour cherries, and corn. Although these benefits may seem slight by comparison with the serious disadvantages of being under Turkish rule, these disadvantages themselves, insofar as they impoverished ordinary people, helped to maintain in a pure state the simple food traditions which existed. By contrast, the prosperous people of Transylvania became more sophisticated in their commerce and their cuisine and showed the effects of, for example, French influences.
The next major period in Hungarian history, that of the Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary, was less inspiring for Hungarian cooks. The imported influences were now Germanic, although some of the aristocratic families managed to hang on to their French chefs. However, by 1867, when the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, giving Hungary much more independence, was established, various beneficial developments were already well under way. The famous pastry shops of Budapest were there, the foundations of the city’s reputation for fine hotels had been laid, and a small but steady stream of Hungarian cookery books had begun to appear (the first had been published in 1695).
From the 1870s onwards the stream of cookery books accelerated (with the result that Hungarian cuisine is the best documented of any C. European country) and the activities of the Gundel family (especially Károly, 1883–1956) and others gave new glory to the restaurant and hotel business. From this era date some of the famous creations such as Dobostorte (see TORTE AND KUCHEN).
The cuisines of Hungary continued to flourish during the first half of the 20th century, suffered severely from the inhibiting influence of the communist regime after the Second World War, and have rebounded vigorously since then. This applies to all the regions: the area ‘beyond the Danube’, in the centre of which is Lake Balaton (the largest in C. Europe); N. Hungary, where live the Palóc, descendants of hunting tribes which were established there before the Middle Ages; the Great Hungarian Plain, containing the area known as the ‘orchard’ of Hungary. As always, the outstanding Hungarian dishes for foreigners are those known as GOULASH (gulyás). However, the entry for this last item explains in detail that the name is only used in Hungary for a soup, and that the dishes which go under the name outside Hungary correspond to various Hungarian stews with names such as pörkölt and paprikás and tókany. Other Hungarian specialities include the fish soups and other fish dishes of Lake Balaton, especially those involving fogas (ZANDER).
Some ingredients which have particular importance in Hungary are onions (carefully fried), cabbage, caraway seeds, and potatoes. DUMPLINGS and some forms of PASTA and NOODLES figure in various dishes. HONEY is important for the famous Hungarian honey breads and honey cakes.
However, by common consent the greatest glories of the Hungarian table are the pastries. Lang (1971) combined in his masterly survey the whole history of Hungarian cuisine with heartfelt praise for all its various glories, but reserved his greatest paeans for the pastries. He points out that, as a result of a beneficent piece of bureaucracy: ‘The only places you won’t be able to order pastries in Hungary are the restaurants.’ It is to the pastry shops and espresso bars that one must go for the pleasures thus described by Lang:
There are few delights more enchanting than sitting down at a charming little lace-covered table and drinking espresso or hot chocolate with whipped cream, accompanied by a delicately decorated slice of torta or an endless variety of dainty mignons which make the Western petits fours seem like five-and-ten-cent gewgaws next to Tiffany’s diamonds and precious stones.
a small sausage-shaped FRITTER made from white cornmeal, milk, water, and chopped onion, fried in fat which has been used for frying fish (usually catfish). Its origins are obscure, but it seems to have originated in Florida before 1920. The name first appeared in print in 1918. According to legend it was devised by hunters, who would throw an occasional fritter to their hunting dogs to keep them quiet. However, public outdoor fish-frying sessions were common in Florida, and it is plausible to suppose that the hush puppy came into being at these, whether or not it owes its name to an ability to quieten hungry dogs. It is also, perhaps, the northernmost manifestation (though using cornmeal rather than black-eyed pea flour) of the fritters beloved of BRAZIL, acarajé.
Ralph Hancock
a vernacular name for some DOGFISH which has been a source of puzzlement. Dawn and Douglas Nelson (1980) may have been the first to work out just how the name came into being.
The English common names of the small sharks known as dogfish are confusing. Living in Kent and having the opportunity to talk with old French fishermen, we think that we have a little light to shed on the matter, so far as the mysterious name ‘huss’ is concerned. In … North Atlantic Seafood (1979) … Davidson links it with the larger-spotted dogfish, Scyliorhinus stellaris. In our examination of Kent catches over the years we have concluded that both S. Stellaris and S. canicula (the lesser-spotted dogfish) were simply called ‘dogs’, but that the ‘spur-dog’, Squalus acanthius, was known because of its viviparous habits as a ‘nurse dog’. This was shorted to ‘a Nurse’, which was pronounced in the markets as ‘a Nuss’, which the fishmongers thought was ‘an Uss’, with the result that they labelled the fish simply ‘Uss’. When these fish got to London the highly educated Billingsgate porters assumed that the ignorant Kentish men had dropped an ‘h’, which they restored by changing ‘Uss’ to ‘Huss’. We think that this is the origin of the name. In the last 20 years or so, however, we have noted that, while most of the dogfish sold in the market at Folkestone are still labelled ‘Uss’, and later, when sold in the shops, ‘Huss’, these are often lesser-spotted dogs (S. canicula) and not spur-dogs. So the name may have been moving from one species to another as their abundance in the catch changes.
or ‘hardening’ of fats, a process in which liquid oils are turned into solid fats, so that hard margarine can be made from vegetable or fish oils. The oils are heated in a container with hydrogen and a nickel catalyst, converting some of the unsaturated fatty acids to saturated ones, which are more solid (see FATS AND OILS). Any possible health benefits from the original unsaturated fatty acids are lost.
The oils used to make soft margarine are not hydrogenated; instead, the spread is stiffened with emulsifiers (see EMULSION).
Ralph Hancock
literally ‘splitting by water’, a chemical reaction in which the large, complex molecules of PROTEINS and CARBOHYDRATES are broken into smaller molecules. This is one of the fundamental processes of both cooking and digestion.
The single SUGAR molecules of which carbohydrates are composed, and the AMINO ACIDS which make up proteins, are linked end to end by a comparatively weak bond involving just one atom on each side. The linking force is electric: one of the atoms has a positive charge, the other a negative one. Opposite charges attract each other, holding the bond together.
Charged atoms or groups of atoms are known as ions. A molecule of water, which consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, can be split into two ions: a hydrogen ion, which has a positive charge; and a hydroxyl ion, which consists of one hydrogen and one oxygen atom and carries a negative charge. In hydrolysis these two ions are forced into the bond between the large molecules. The positive hydrogen ion links to the negative end of one molecule, cancelling out its negative charge. Similarly, the negative hydroxyl ion links to the positive end of the other molecule, cancelling its positive charge. There is now no difference in charge between the two larger molecules, so they no longer attract each other and can move apart.
Hydrolysis does not happen by itself; it needs some input of energy. It can be brought about rather slowly by putting proteins or carbohydrates in water and heating them. The reaction can be speeded up by adding an acid or alkali, whose built-in chemical energy helps to break the bonds. The strongly acid conditions in the stomachs of animals are an aid to hydrolysis; other examples are the use of acids such as lemon juice in marinades to tenderize tough meat, and the disreputable practice of adding BICARBONATE OF SODA (a mild ALKALI) to the cooking water of vegetables, which breaks down the cell walls and gives the food an unpleasingly mushy texture.
In digestion, most of the work of hydrolysis is carried out by ENZYMES, which can perform it without the aid of acids, alkalis, or heat.
When a living creature makes carbohydrates or proteins it performs the opposite of hydrolysis. Two sugar molecules of amino acids are linked by removing a hydroxyl ion from one and a hydrogen ion from the other. These ions combine to form a molecule of water.
Ralph Hancock
Hyssopus officinalis, originally from Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, is a small shrub which has been used for culinary and medicinal purposes since pre-Christian times. The plant has woody stems, whorls of lance-shaped leaves, and long dense spikes of tubular-shaped light blue, purple, pink, or white flowers from which bees make wonderful HONEY.
The flavour of the leaves is similar to THYME, and they can be eaten, fresh, with meat, fish, in salads (as can the young shoots), in soups, stews, and in fruit dishes; or ground up as an ingredient in stuffings, pies, and sausages. Hyssop aids the digestion of fat and so makes a particularly good accompaniment to greasy meat dishes. The aromatic qualities of hyssop show to good advantage if a syrup is made using water in which sprigs of hyssop have been boiled and if this syrup is then poured over slices of fresh fruit or used in a fruit salad; Pamela Michael (1980) points out that the combination is particularly effective with plums, apricots, or peaches.
The flavour is strong so the plant should be used sparingly.
The names anise hyssop and Mexican (giant) hyssop have often been applied to Agastache foeniculum and A. mexicana, from the north central USA and N. Mexico respectively. As Julia Morton (1976) remarks, these large and highly aromatic hyssops ‘are extremely attractive to honey bees and are often grown by bee keepers’, besides being used for infusions of tea and occasional culinary purposes.