ice
not a food but an important adjunct to food and constituent of certain dishes, has been occurring naturally on the planet ever since freezing temperatures were first reached. Its use for culinary purposes certainly dates very far back in China, in cold regions where foods can be frozen by simply leaving them out of doors. Such use in W. Europe can be traced back to medieval times; and in the tropics to the time when advances in maritime transport made it possible to transport ice for long distances by sea (e.g. in the 19th century when ice from New England lakes was taken to the Caribbean, and also to England).
Stobart (1980), who gives an admirable and succinct account of the physics of ice, describes one architectural phenomenon brought about by its use:
Before the invention of refrigerators, winter snow was stored in pits or ice-houses insulated with straw for use later in the year. There is even a huge ice-house in the middle of the great Persian salt desert, a building the size (and rather the shape) of a tennis stadium, where snow was once packed to help people survive the summer’s awful heat.
In the 20th century ice came to be taken for granted in most parts of the world as an available resource, and ICE CREAM has been added to the common currency of foods worldwide. The use of WATER ICES is less widespread but has an interesting history; see also SHERBET.
Although she did not live to complete the work which was eventually published under the title Harvest of the Cold Months, Elizabeth David had assembled for it a wealth of interesting information and the chapters which she had drafted invest the whole subject with the romantic spirit in which she approached it. See also FREEZING; REFRIGERATION; SNOW.
ice cream
one of the most spectacularly successful of all the foods based on dairy products, has a comparatively short history. The first ice creams, in the sense of an iced and flavoured confection made from full milk or cream, are thought to have been made in Italy and then in France in the 17th century, and to have been diffused from the French court to other European countries. However, although the French did make some ice creams from an early date, they were more interested in WATER ICES.
The first recorded English use of the term ice cream (also given as iced cream) was by Ashmole (1672), recording among dishes served at the Feast of St George at Windsor in May 1671 ‘One Plate of Ice Cream’. The first published English recipe was by Mrs Mary Eales (1718).
Stallings (1979) has described fully the extant evidence for the early history of ice cream, and has also drawn attention to some of the paradoxical features of this history. One such is that the English, although they were consistently influenced by the French in adopting iced desserts and the techniques for making them, stubbornly kept to their preference for ice cream over the water ices which were more in vogue on the Continent. Another is that, while they preferred ice creams, the English had remarkably few recipes for them. Mrs Eales was a pioneer with few followers; ice cream recipes remained something of a rarity in English-language cookery books (except for two which were translations from the French) until the end of the 18th century. Some authors gave no recipe; while others gave but one (e.g. Hannah GLASSE, in editions of her famous book from 1751 onwards, but with Mrs RAFFALD’s recipe of 1769 substituted from 1784). The one notable departure from this pattern was by the little-known Mary Smith (1772), who gave ten recipes for ices, including Brown Bread Ice (which was in fact an ice cream) and Peach Ice Cream (which was really a water ice), thus illustrating the imprecision with which these terms were then used.
As for America, Stallings observes that:
ice cream is recorded to have been served as early as 1744 (by the lady of Governor Blandon of Maryland, née Barbara Jannsen, daughter of Sir Theodore Jannsen, Bart and sister-in-law to Lord Baltimore), but it does not appear to have been generally adopted until much later in the century. Although its adoption then owed much to French contacts in the period following the American Revolution, Americans shared 18th century England’s tastes and the English preference for ice creams over water ices, and proceeded enthusiastically to make ice cream a national dish. In 1900, an Englishman, Charles Senn, would write: ‘Ices derive their present great popularity from America, where they are consumed during the summer months as well as the winter months in enormous quantities.’ The enormous quantities of which he wrote were of ice cream.
This phenomenon has had a curious side effect in Britain and on the Continent. In our own century the term ice cream came to mean, for many people on both sides of the Atlantic, a dish of American origin; to such a point as to reinforce the failure of antique dealers, and even of some museums, to identify their ice cream moulds for what they are.
This ‘phenomenon’ constitutes perhaps the greatest paradox of all in the history of ice cream in the English-speaking world. However, ice cream has acquired its own histories in many other regions, quite enough to fill a book but here exemplified by just a few paragraphs.
In the Indian subcontinent, where the art of MILK REDUCTION has been highly developed, ice cream is called kulfi and is made with khoya, i.e. greatly reduced milk. It is traditionally made in cone-shaped receptacles, to which Achaya (1994) refers in citing a 16th-century document about the preparation of ice cream in Emperor Akbar’s royal kitchens (with pistachio nuts and saffron). The same author suggests that the Moghuls had been responsible for introducing this frozen dessert to India, possibly bringing it from Kabul in Afghanistan, a country famous for being a crossroads between East and West. (This is perhaps the place to mention the theory that early iced dairy products developed in China before ad 1000 could have travelled westwards, although not by the hand of Marco Polo, who is associated with so much CULINARY MYTHOLOGY. The matter is discussed by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (1993), but without reaching any dogmatic conclusions.)
In SE Asia, the prize for interesting ice creams must be awarded to the Philippines. Ice cream must have arrived there from Spain, because the old-fashioned ice cream (helado) was made in a grinder called garapinera, with rock salt and ice packed round a central container of milk etc. In modern times American-style ice creams have been dominant, but often with ‘native’ flavours such as ube (purple YAM) and macapuno (see COCONUT), but also corn (MAIZE) and cheese—all these being sold by vendors from exceptionally colourful carts.
In the Near and Middle East there are a number of outstanding ice creams. In Iran an ice cream flavoured with SALEP, sprinkled with pistachios, and laced with rosewater is particularly popular although commercial production does not date back further than the 1950s. This may well have come from Turkey, where salepli dondurma (salep ice cream sometimes with MASTIC added) is a traditional delicacy. Salep and mastic turn up again in booza ala haleeb, the ‘milk ice cream’ of Lebanon, where another remarkable ice cream is made with apricot ‘leather’ (see APRICOT).
It might be thought that in the cold climate of N. Europe there would be less enthusiasm for ice cream, especially in the winter. However, the history of ice cream in Russia belies this idea. Lesley Chamberlain (1983) writes that:
Ice cream has been immensely popular in Russia since it was introduced in the eighteenth century as a delicacy for the aristocracy. By the end of the nineteenth century it was possible to buy as a piece of standard household equipment a morozhenitsa, consisting of a deep metal receptacle fitted inside a bucket filled with ice and salt. The receptacle contained the ice cream mixture and was fitted with a lid and a long stirring tool which dislodged mixture as it froze at the sides. But it probably remained something of a treat until in an immensely popular move in the 1920s Anastas Mikoyan set up the first Soviet Russian ice cream factory. That industry never looked back. Ice cream parlours are as popular in Russian cities as they are in the Mediterranean, and the product sold is of a purity and creaminess that constantly astounds Western visitors.
A world tour of ice creams could be continued indefinitely, but would probably lead always to the same conclusion, that Italy is the top country for this product. Certainly, the prevalence of ice cream parlours and vendors with Italian names, worldwide, is remarkable. However, a distinction must be drawn between the excellence of ice cream at good establishments in Italy and the quality of products sold with the benefit of Italian names outside Italy. The latter may be good, but has often been greatly inferior. The ‘hokey pokey’ which Italians sold to children in Glasgow (for example) at the turn of the century sounds fun and poses interesting etymological questions but, to judge by some contemporary descriptions, was of lamentable quality.
ICE CREAM CONES
Mariani (1994) writes as follows about the origins of the ice cream cone:
The ice cream cone is equally as confusing as to its origins. It seems clear that the cone (a wafer rolled to hold a scoop of ice cream) became popular at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, but there are several claims as to just who started hawking it there. Some authorities credit a Syrian immigrant named Ernest A. Hamwi with the invention, which was actually a Persian pastry, zalabia, that Hamwi rolled to hold ice cream when another concessionaire ran out of ice cream dishes.
For ‘zalabia’ see JALEBI, which may have been involved in the impromptu invention, as suggested. An alternative ‘inventor’ is Italo Marchiony, an Italian immigrant who filed a patent on an ice cream cone in 1893, claiming he had made them since 1896’. Robin Weir (2000), an indefagitable researcher, has proposed that hand-held glass cones were used by Neapolitan street vendors in the 1820s and that the first edible cone was created by the English cook and recipe writer Mrs A. B. Marshall in 1888.
ice cream soda
‘made with milk, a flavored syrup, and a scoop of ice cream’, is recorded by Mariani (1994) as making its first appearance at Philadelphia in 1874. Its importance became such that it was responsible for the name ‘ice cream soda fountain’, applied to an establishment where the whole range of ice creams and derived preparations could be had.
Mariani remarks that the small town soda fountain survived the Depression years better than the more opulent pharmacy fountains, and that in the 1940s ‘Hollywood movies pictured ice cream soda fountains as oases of innocent Americana’. They were then trysting places of choice for teenagers. Decades later, such fountains are rare, except as nostalgic re-creations.
ice cream sundae
a dish which celebrated its centenary in 1981. Hachten (1981), recapitulating previous studies of the origin of the dish and the term, attributes the former to Ed Berners, ‘owner of a modest ice cream parlor in Two Rivers [Michigan]’, and a customer called George Hallauer. One day in 1881, Hallauer invited Berners to pour some chocolate syrup, which was on hand for making sodas, over his ice cream. Berners demurred, then assented. ‘Chocolate-topped ice cream became the rage at Berners’ store, and Berners began experimenting with other flavors. His delicious concoctions carried fanciful names like Flora Dora, Mudscow, and Chocolate Peany, which contained peanuts. A generous slurp of apple cider was also a popular topping.’
However, the new genre had still to acquire its name. This was achieved in nearby Manitowoc, where another ice cream parlour, owned by George Giffy, began to serve the embellished ice creams on Sundays. ‘But one weekday, a little girl ordered a dish of ice cream “with stuff on it”. When told he only served it on Sunday, the child is supposed to have said: “Why, then, this must be Sunday, for it’s the kind of ice cream I want.” Giffy gave it to her, of course, and henceforth called the dish a Sunday.’
The transition to sundae is a minor mystery. Settlement of the major question was given concrete form when the State Historical Society of Wisconsin erected a marker at Two Rivers in 1973, recognizing it as the birthplace of the ice cream sundae.
The original ice cream sundae glass was canoe shaped, set on a pedestal. Glassware manufacturers are thought to have done much to spread the sundae in their enthusiasm for selling this new item. It is now usual to serve a sundae in a tall glass.
Iceland
a country which consists largely of lava fields and glaciers, and which has a long dark winter because of its northerly position, is not a great place for agricultural produce. However, LAMB and dairy products are excellent. One of the latter, SKYR, is considered by Icelanders to be unique to themselves, and another, WHEY, is used extensively in Iceland for preserving purposes.
As in other countries of the far north, the art of preserving food for the winter has had great importance. The tradition of a special ‘month of sour things’ in the winter, when people gathered to feast on preserved foods, was revived in the 20th century. Many of the whey-preserved items are offal—lamb’s hearts, testicles, feet, etc. Smoked items include lamb, sausages, tongues, and fish such as salmon and trout. There are also some methods of preservation which seem quite strange. The flesh of the huge Greenland SHARK, Somniosus microcephalus, is not edible when raw and untreated, but, if buried and allowed to ferment, it becomes safe to eat, although very smelly. It is perhaps not surprising that hákarl, as the product is known, is sold in fairly small pieces, with the crinkled black skin looking like a fragment from one of Iceland’s lava beds. Skate wings are also fermented, especially for St Thorlak’s Day (23 December), and the skate is sometimes boiled in the cooking liquid from the smoked lamb that is traditional Christmas food. Other fish, e.g. HALIBUT, are dried and eaten raw, with a little butter, indeed there is a tradition of using dried fish in place of bread. However, the truly great story about dried fish involves a controversy about drying CODs’ heads. In 1914 a banker called Gunnarsson boldly attacked this cherished tradition as being uneconomical if the full true cost of drying one head was considered. The nation was shocked but eleven years passed before the Director of the National Library, Guðmundur Finnbogason, was ready to deliver his massive and crushing response, deploying mathematical, social, political, moral, linguistic, historical, and hygienic arguments.
Sea birds, in a global perspective, do not rank high as favourite foods, but Icelanders are to the fore in this respect. Although traditions of eating birds such as PUFFIN and GUILLEMOT (made less fishy in taste by steeping them in milk overnight) are on the wane, they survive. The large cormorant, Phalacrocorax carbo, is considered best of all.
One method of cooking is virtually unique to Iceland. The hot geysers which abound, and which provide constant hot water and heating for houses in Reykjavik, heat the earth; so food can be buried in a patch of hot earth to cook there all by itself.
There is an interesting literature about food in Icelandic. The greatest Icelandic cookery writer, Helga Sigurðardóttir, was a woman in whom a romantic and classical beauty was united with unremitting industry. Her score of books constitute the best source material on traditional Icelandic cookery and its development from the 1920s to the 1950s. More recent work by Icelandic writers such as Hallgerður Gísladóttir (1999) and Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir (1999) has illuminated Icelandic food history from earliest times to the present. The cookery of Icelandic emigrants to Canada is lovingly described by Kristin Olafson-Jenkyns (2002).
See also LICHENS (for Iceland moss).
iceplant
Mesembryanthemum crystallinum, one of the better-known edible members of a group of succulent plants, with fleshy leaves, from the tropical regions of the southern hemisphere. The leaves of the iceplant are covered with silvery spots resembling frost, and have a pleasantly acid flavour. The plant was introduced to Europe and N. America in the 18th century as a substitute for SPINACH, capable of resisting very hot weather. It was not successful in that role, but flowering garden species of Mesembryanthemum remain popular.
In the same family, which bears the long name Mesembryanthemaceae, are Carpobrotus spp, including the Hottentot fig of S. Africa, C. edulis, which owes its common name to the resemblance between its fruits and figs. Several close relations occur in Australia, where they are generally known as ‘pigfaces’ (nothing to do with pigs or faces, it seems, but possibly a corruption of the Afrikaans name big-vys). Aborigines harvested the fruits of these. Low (1989) says that ‘The juicy pulp, sucked from the base of the fruit, tastes delightfully like salty strawberries’ and quotes a 19th-century clergyman on them:
The size of the fruit, is rather less than that of a walnut, and it has a thick skin of a pale reddish colour, by compressing which, the glutinous sweet substance inside slips into the mouth. When it is in season, which is from January to the end of summer, a comparatively glorious life begins for the Aborigines; hunger can never assail them as, this fruit is abundant all over the grassy part of the country, and they never tire of it; the men gather only as much as they want to eat at the time, but the women bring great quantities of it home to the camp, to be eaten at night.
icing
is the sugar-rich coating used to embellish cakes, buns, and pastries. The fondness of the British for this substance is illustrated by the fact that confectioner’s sugar, a fine white powder, is known as icing SUGAR in Britain.
The simplest mixture for the purpose is a syrup or glaze of sugar and water, or sugar and milk, boiled and then brushed over the tops of yeast-raised goods whilst they are still warm. It dries to an attractive shine.
Simple water icing is a paste made from water and powdered sugar. It is mostly used for the plainer and more homely cakes such as VICTORIA SANDWICH CAKES. A more complicated variation is glacé icing, which requires the icing sugar to be added to a boiled sugar syrup and beaten. The result is very glossy. These types of icing are often coloured and flavoured with orange, lemon, coffee, or chocolate.
Cakes topped with water or glacé icing are often cut in half and sandwiched with butter icing (sometimes called buttercream) made from one part butter to two parts icing sugar creamed together, with any desired flavouring, to a fluffy consistency.
Cakes covered with these relatively simple icings are often further decorated with the addition of glacé cherries, ANGELICA, silver DRAGÉES, HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS, etc.
FONDANT icing is literally fondant warmed with a little syrup, flavoured, and coloured. It is used principally for small fancy cakes, and is poured over to cover them entirely, setting to a soft, satiny sheen. Transparent icing is prepared from a boiled sugar syrup, mixed with liqueurs or fruit juices, and stirred to make it grain.
Sugar paste, home made or bought, is sometimes erroneously called fondant icing. It is prized by amateur and craft confectioners for the way in which it can be moulded and shaped. Since the 1970s it has become popular for decorating large celebration cakes made from sponge mixtures, or rich FRUIT CAKES. The icing can be rolled into a sheet to cover the cake, and coloured and modelled to make flowers, figures, and other ornaments.
Royal icing, the traditional covering for Christmas and wedding cakes in Britain, is made from icing sugar beaten with egg whites and a little lemon juice or ORANGE FLOWER WATER, to give a stiff, opaque white mixture. In the hands of a skilled confectioner, this can be used to produce perfectly flat, smooth surfaces, or piped into intricate borders, patterns, and trellis work, which are fragile but very hard when set. The confectioner may exhibit further skill by making ‘runouts’, flat shapes of icing which are allowed to dry and then mounted onto the cake as collars, plaques, or free-standing ornaments.
This icing is usually left white, although sometimes a colour appropriate to a specific event, such as a warm yellow tint for a golden wedding, may be used. It may also be silvered or gilded. It is always applied over a layer of MARZIPAN or almond paste. This is a pleasure to eat, but also serves to provide a smooth surface to work on. The combination acts as a seal; a cake covered in royal icing will keep in good condition for several months.
Another important category of icing, especially for those ornamental, sculpted creations of the Baroque and early modern periods, is pastillage. Derived from pastilles, i.e. sugary gums or sweetmeats, it is made of sugar and GUM TRAGACANTH and therefore suitable for moulding. More recently, it has been made with gelatine and starch as binders.
Davidson, in Henisch (1984), surveys the evolution of icing in England in the 18th and 19th centuries and identifies Mrs RAFFALD (1769) as the first author to provide for the combination of cake, marzipan, and royal icing. Her cake was a ‘bride cake’, which had also been known as a ‘great cake’ and only acquired the name ‘wedding cake’ in the 19th century.
However, until the late 19th century, icing was reserved for special cakes. An 18th-century icing was usually made by beating the ingredients together in a mortar, spreading the mixture over the cake, and drying it in a low heat. Mrs Glasse (1747) wrote: ‘with a Brush or Bundle of Feathers, spread it all over the cake, and put it in the oven to dry; but take Care the Oven does not discolour it.’
In N. America the term ‘frosting’ has a slightly longer history than ‘icing’, but the two terms became interchangeable and ‘icing’ has now become the preferred usage.
Laura Mason
idli
a speciality of S. India: these are small, round breakfast cakes/dumplings, greyish-white in colour, made from a dough of ground rice and URD dal and then fermented overnight. Idli are steamed in a special pan which has several smoothly rounded indentations. They are often eaten with coconut chutney or sometimes dipped into a spicy mixture called milagain podi which consists of coarsely ground toasted spices and DAL.
Idli may be flavoured with garlic, other flavourings such as COCONUT, or spices.
A sweet idli is made with urd dal, SEMOLINA, and jaggery (see SUGAR). Idli may also have a sweet stuffing—sugar, coconut, cashew nuts, almonds, raisins and so on, with flavourings such as cardamom and nutmeg.
Helen Saberi
iguana
any of several species of LIZARD. The arboreal lizard of C. and S. America, Iguana iguana, is the archetype but other members of the New World family Iguanidae bear the name. (The name is also applied to the Nile monitor, Varanus nilotica, a large aquatic lizard of Africa which is mentioned under MONITOR.)
Sophie Coe (1994) describes the importance of iguanas (both the green iguana, Iguana iguana, and the black iguana, Ctenosaurus pectinata) for the Maya people (see MAYA FOOD) and for the Spanish conquerors who took over C. America. The Maya had relatively little animal food available, so appreciated this resource. As for the Spaniards, they were delighted to find that these creatures could be designated as fish (given the fact that the green iguana spends much time in or around the water, although the generally preferred black iguana is much more terrestrial in habit); and that bishops of the Roman Catholic Church were prepared to endorse this and permit the eating of iguanas during Lent and on Fridays. Coe comments that these reptiles could be captured ‘and kept for long periods of time without feeding, a convenient way to have a supply of fresh meat on hand. They also produce delicious eggs, leathery-shelled oblong capsules consisting entirely of yolk.’ These eggs are about the size of table tennis balls.
Dr Nègre (1970), whose book about food in the French W. Indies deserves wider recognition as a classic, derives the name iguana from the Arawak word ‘Ioana’. He has what is probably the most eloquent passage anywhere about eating iguana:
[Iguanas] feed themselves only on young vegetal shoots (that is why they regularly spoil the unfrequent attempts at farming made by the inhabitants from ‘Saintes’) and on hibiscus flowers: no edible animal can boast of such a delicate food; man himself, if compared to this animal, eats filthy food, comparatively speaking.
I used to enjoy such animals when I was in Guiana, where people regularly and rightfully eat them; even in France, in Paris, I have been told that a ‘Banquet de l’Iguane’ (an iguana feast) takes place every year; and there, some gourmets, whose palates are thoroughly educated, and who do not worry about stupid prejudices, taste these delicious reptiles recommended by the Larousse dictionary.
But in the ‘Saintes’, in Guadeloupe and in Martinique, where people easily swallow some piglets that paddle all their life among the dirtiest, muddy places of the island, and where people really enjoy eating ducks that have been unceasingly floundering in stagnant pools or in noxious ponds, where people also taste those chickens that feed themselves on ‘ravets’ (that is to say enormous cockroaches), there is nevertheless an aversion to iguana and people pretend to be deeply offended when you speak of saddle of iguana prepared with a ‘chasseur’ sauce.
Nègre goes on to cite early 17th-century writers, one of whom wrote that the iguana’s flesh had the same whiteness, tenderness, exquisite taste, and delicacy as that of chicken, a comparison which others have often made. Thus Sir Osbert Sitwell, writing in Wine and Food, declared iguana to be ‘very good’ (his italics). He admitted that ‘it presents at first sight a somewhat case-hardened exterior, and that its saurian countenance bears an unpleasing expression, both sarcastic and ferocious’. But he declared that ‘The saddle is white and tender as the best capon, and the eggs, too, are a suitable, and even delicious, concomitant.’
In S. Africa the French term l’iguane has been corrupted to leguan, under which name iguanas were formerly sold to Chinese customers. Recording how the Chinese roasted them (cutting the white flesh into thick strips, using spices and soy sauce), Leipoldt (1976) described the meat thus cooked as excellent, ‘rather like chicken meat though of a more robust quality’.
ilama
the principal Mexican name (derived, via Spanish, from the native Mexican name illamatzapotl, which translates as ‘old woman’s sapote’) for the fruit of the tree Annona diversifolia. This is native to Mexico but found elsewhere in Latin America, in regions of low elevation. It resembles the CHERIMOYA, but the fruits are, according to some, even better.
The elongated fruits may be 15 cm (6″) long and weigh close to a kilo (just over 2 lb). The skin is commonly rough, but sometimes smooth; the colour may be anything from green to pink, with a white bloom. The flavour of the pink varieties has a pleasant acidity like that of the cherimoya, while that of the green varieties is sweeter and closer to the SUGAR-APPLE.
The ilama, despite its excellence, had not been identified as a separate species, or introduced to other parts of the world, until the 20th century.
The name ilama is also applied, in Mexico, to a related C. American fruit, A. purpurea, generally known as the soncoya or cabeza de negro. This is common in the region, and is cultivated, at least on a small scale, as an alternative to the cherimoya. It is about the same size as the ilama, grey-brown in colour, with hard protuberances on the skin. The orange flesh within tastes something like that of the PAPAW or MANGO.
illipe nut
a name of Tamil origin, is a commercial term for the oily seeds of a diverse collection of E. Indian and SE Asian trees. These trees belong to several genera and an indeterminate number of species; so the name is a vague one and the quality of the ‘illipe butter’ produced from the seeds varies.
However, Madhuca is certainly the most important genus. M. indica, a N. Indian tree, is the well-known mahua tree of Bengal, sometimes called ‘Indian butter tree’. M. longifolia is its counterpart in S. India and Sri Lanka, and the two species are used in similar ways.
Illipe butter can be used to adulterate GHEE and COCONUT oil, both of which it resembles in texture, being liquid at tropical temperatures and solid in temperate conditions. Some illipe butter, which may also be called ‘mowra butter’ (a corruption of mahua—see above), is exported to western countries. The better grades of this have sometimes been used in MARGARINE or as a substitute for cocoa butter (see CHOCOLATE).
In their lands of origin, these fats or oils are often used as cooking fats. In Malaysia and Indonesia the name tengkawang, or other names ending in -kawang, are used for the product.
The genus Madhuca belongs to the same family (Sapotaceae) as the SAPODILLA, and some species have edible, although poor, fruits. In India, their flowers (to be exact, the tubelike corollae) are more highly valued for food. These are dried, and may then be eaten raw as sweetmeats, or boiled with acid leaves, or turned into a sort of sugar. Keeping qualities are good. Watt (1889–96) quoted a former magistrate of Monghyr as saying: ‘Before leaving India, I had a ton [of the flowers] shovelled into sacks and put on board a vessel in Calcutta. They were gathered in April 1876, and, after being kept for nearly two years, are as good as when first dried.’ How the magistrate consumed his ton in England is not stated.
imbu
(or umbu) the fruit of the tree Spondias tuberosa, which grows wild in NE Brazil and is occasionally cultivated. It is described by Popenoe (1932) as the best of the genus (other members of which are the AMBARELLA and the MOMBIN).
Some trees are so productive that the fruit, when allowed to fall, forms a carpet of yellow upon the ground. In general appearance the imbu may be likened to a Green Gage plum. It is oval, about 1½ inches in length, and greenish yellow in colour. The skin is thicker than that of a plum, and quite tough. The flavor of the soft, melting, almost liquid flesh is suggestive of a sweet orange. If eaten before it is fully ripe, the fruit is slightly acid …. In its native home the imbu is eaten as a fresh fruit, and also furnishes a popular jelly. It is used besides to make imbuzada, a famous dessert of northern Brazil. This is prepared by adding the juice of the fruit to boiled sweet milk. The mixture is greenish white in color and when sweetened to taste is relished by nearly every one.
imitation foods
also referred to as pretend foods, surprise dishes, or (meat) impostors, are foodstuffs or dishes whose outward appearance disguises their true nature. The term imitation food is also used for visual representations of food made from inedible substances such as glass, papier maché, or plastic, to serve as decorations, children’s toys, or restaurant displays. The simplest ways of producing edible imitation foods are through deceptive packaging (e.g. soft drinks in beer bottles), or through carving. Raw fruits or vegetables have long been carved into simulacra of anything from flowers (radishes) to human heads (Halloween pumpkin). Imitation foods proliferate in societies that frequently process ingredients into batters and pastes. These can easily be enhanced further through colouring, moulding, and cooking. As early as antiquity minced meat, bread dough, and the contents of eggs were used to prepare imitation foods. In late medieval and early modern Europe sugar and its corollary marzipan quickly became the favourite substances for imitation foods on the dining tables of the rich. The combination of dough and sugar (icing) led to the creation of cakes whose popularity continues to this day and whose artistry knows no bounds, as evidenced in the wedding cake tradition. The discovery of the New World brought cocoa to Europe which in the form of chocolate eventually won out over all other substances used for imitation foods.
Although it is the product of culture, imitation food seeks to transgress boundaries and subvert the established order. As the most basic human need, food has been imbued with symbolic meaning for thousands of years, and as sacrifice has been used by humans to communicate with the supernatural world. Imitation foods have long played an important role in ritual and religion. The Celtic Yule log was over time transformed from an actual log into a Christmas dessert. With meat at the top of the food hierarchy in most world cultures, animals in particular were frequently presented to the gods as sacrifice. Imitations made from bread already existed in Graeco-Roman times. The taboo of eating fellow humans is almost universal, and so is the existence of ‘bread people’. They are found around the world as a form of guilt-free cannibalism. In Christianity the host, which at times also had the picture of the Saviour stamped on it, symbolizes the body and blood of Christ. With warm-blooded animals, dairy products, and eggs forbidden during Lent, imitation meat dishes were popular among upper-class Christians in medieval Europe. Fish-meat and roe, ground almonds, almond milk, peas, bread, and dried fruits were the most frequently used fast-day substitutes. Mincemeat was already simulated then with almonds and grapes, but the mincemeat pie, thought to have pagan roots like the Yule log, did not lose its meat content until the 17th century when in the wake of Oliver Cromwell’s prohibition of Christmas and mincemeat pies, a meatless version of the dish evolved.
Known as sotelties in England (see SUBTLETIES), and entremets in France (see ENTRÉE, ENTREMETS), imitation foods were an integral part of medieval banquets. They entertained but also challenged the civilizing process that Europeans were undergoing by blurring the line between raw and cooked (cooked birds returned to their plumage), and alive and dead (cooked animals to emit sound, breathe fire, or the famous 24 blackbirds in a pie). Other dishes had animals engage in human activities like riding into battle or going on pilgrimage. Wondrous creatures were invented like the Cokagrys (half cock, half piglet), and giant eggs. Some of these food tricks have survived as part of the repertoire of magicians like Penn and Teller. The idea of evoking disgust with foods that appear bloody, wormy, or dirty, or fall outside the norm of acceptability, has always had strong appeal to children subjected to their own civilizing process (gummi worms, mud cake). A more recent phenomenon is social criticism expressed through imitation food. The rise of vegetarianism has led to a plethora of imitation meat dishes (veggie burgers, veggie dogs, tofurkey) that parody the traditional food terminology and food rituals of a carnivorous society (e.g. BBQs and Thanksgiving dinners), and seek to convert meat eaters by easing the transition to vegetarianism. A more sinister form of imitation is the adulteration of food for financial gain.
Melitta Weis Adamson
Inca food
The Inca, inhabiting much of what is now PERU, had only recently established their empire when the Spaniards arrived in force in the 1530s and toppled them. In this respect and in their more southerly location they were different from the ancient Maya and the Aztecs, with whom it is natural to compare them (see AZTEC FOOD and MAYA FOOD). Among other differences, one of the most important was that, whereas the Aztecs had no large domesticated mammals, the Inca had two; the LLAMA and the alpaca; and they also had available for food the vicuña and the guanaco (relations of the llama), various deer, and the domesticated GUINEA PIG.
The geographical setting provided a further and fundamental contrast. The Andes as a whole are a tangled skein of mountain ranges, but in the north of C. Peru, the stronghold of the Inca, there are only two: the Black Cordillera overlooking the Pacific and the White Cordillera further inland (with slopes running down eastwards to the Amazon). A high plain lies between parts of them. This remarkable region provided an enormous number of ecological niches. Given that for every 1,000 feet one ascends the temperature drops three or four degrees Fahrenheit, and adding to this all the possible differences in soils, sunny slopes or shady ones, good or poor drainage of water and frost, and protection or exposure to damaging winds and hail, the number of available micro-climates is astronomical. It makes plausible the claim that it is here that the largest array of domesticated plants has been developed; and the Inca were well ahead in this process.
Their main food plant was MAIZE, but QUINOA was a close runner up. The POTATO, whose homeland this is, was also of great importance and, with its related tubers OCA and ULLUCO, provided crops which being underground were protected from the frost, hail, and storms typical of the mountain climate.
Greens were also available in wide variety. Indeed, one early Spanish observer said:
It is difficult to list all the greens, because there are so many of them and they are so small. It is enough to say that the Indians eat all of them, the sweet and the bitter alike. Some of them are eaten raw, as we eat lettuces and radishes, some of them cooked in soups and stews.
The same observer noticed that the Inca ate ‘even the algae and water worms’. He could have added that they also consumed mayfly LARVAE, CATERPILLARS, beetles, and ANTS.
The Inca were sophisticated in techniques for preserving food, and had a remarkable system of warehouses and a complex organization for distribution from them. Plenty of SALT was available in Peru, both from the sea and from salt springs in the highlands. It was certainly a highly valued condiment, because one of the simpler stages of fasting consisted in eating without salt or CHILLI. However, there is some doubt about the extent to which salt was used for preservation. Salt fish was certainly known, but drying, and especially freeze-drying, may have been the preferred technique for preservation. What does seem clear, at least according to Cobo (a Jesuit missionary in Peru between 1609 and 1629), is that the Inca had a strange way of dealing with salt as a condiment. Each person would have a lump of salt to hand and would lick this in the course of eating; and if there was only one lump available they would pass it around, taking turns to lick it. They would also use a dissolved mixture of salt and a special clay (pasa, ‘white with a few brown spots like soap’) as a sauce for their root foods, ‘moistening them in this mud as if it were mustard’.
Maize was the main staple, but NIXTAMALIZATION was unknown. Some maize was taken in a mildly alcoholic beverage called chicha, some was boiled, and some toasted, and maize products often went into stews. Maize and meat were the food of the gods.
In an Inca kitchen, the maize was ground by putting it on a flat stone slab and then rocking another stone shaped like a half-moon over it. A mortar and pestle took care of grinding lesser quantities of smaller things. Every house had a tiny clay stove with a little opening for stoking the fire and two or three holes where the pots could be put to heat.
According to one source (Bartolomé de las Casas—Dominican priest, later Bishop of Chiapas—defender of the Indians against the excesses of the Spanish conquistadores and settlers), the 9th Inca was responsible for a novel eating custom, whereby a plaza (with a large house beside it which could be used if it rained) was where everybody should eat, including himself:
After a brief time for chatting, and as the usual meal hour approached, the wives of all who were there came with their food in their little jars, already cooked, and a little container of wine on their backs, and if the lord was there they began with serving him, and then they served the rest. Each one was served and given to eat by his wife, and the lord the same, even if he was the Inca himself, who was served by the queen, his principal wife, with the first dishes and the first drinks, the rest of the serving was done by the male and female servants. Each woman sat back to back with her husband, she served him all the rest, and then starting with the first dish she ate of what she had brought in a separate place, being, as I have said, back to back.
Sophie Coe
READING:
Inca wheat
or quihuicha Amaranthus caudatus, a species of the large group of AMARANTH plants and one of the most notable of those which have been used to provide grain food. It was food for the Inca in ancient times, lapsed into oblivion after the Spanish Conquest, and is now experiencing a revival.
Inca wheat and its relations are not true cereals, a term which applies only to the cultivated grasses of the family Graminaceae; but, like other plants whose fruits and seeds can be ground into flour with uses like those of the cereals, they are accorded the status of ‘para-cereal’.
The characteristics of amaranths grown as grain crops are that they grow fast and produce high-protein grains in large, sorghum-like, seed heads. The protein includes lysine, usually deficient in plant protein. The grains (seeds) are contained in lidded capsules, one seed to one capsule, and arranged in dense spikes.
An excellent description is given by the authors of Lost Crops of the Incas (National Research Council 1989):
A staple grain of the Incas, Aztecs, and other pre-Columbian peoples, amaranth was once almost as widely dispersed throughout the Americas as corn. The most important Andean species is Amaranthus caudatus. In Quechua, the ancient Inca language that is still spoken in the Andes, it is called ‘kiwicha’.
Kiwicha is one of the prettiest crops on earth; the beautiful colors of its broad leaves, stems, and flowers—purple, red, gold—create fiery fields that blaze across the mountainsides. The plant grows vigorously, tolerates drought, heat, and pests, and adapts readily to new environments, including some that are inhospitable to conventional grain crops. Nonetheless, it is little known outside the highland regions of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northwestern Argentina.
Kiwicha’s grains are scarcely bigger than poppy seeds. However, they occur in huge numbers—sometimes more than 100,000 to a plant. Like other amaranth grains, they are flavorful and, when heated, they pop to produce a crunchy white product that tastes like a nutty popcorn. Light and crisp, it is delicious as a snack, as a cold cereal with milk and honey, as a ‘breading’ on chicken or fish, or in sweets with a whisper of honey. The grain is also ground into flour, rolled into flakes, puffed, or boiled for porridge.
These seeds are one of the most nutritious foods grown. Not only are they richer in protein than the major cereals, but the amino acid balance of their protein comes closer to nutritional perfection for the human diet than that in normal cereal grains.
Another amaranth, A. hypochondriacus, has been a staple grain food in Mexico since about 4000 BC. The Aztec emperors exacted an annual tribute of this grain from their subjects. The Spanish Church sought to eradicate amaranth cultivation because of the pagan Aztec ceremonies centred on it; and it anyway tended to be displaced by grains with larger seeds, such as MAIZE.
India
one of the largest and most populous countries in the world, has a great diversity of cuisines. Madhur Jaffrey (1985) put a dramatic spotlight on this diversity when she pointed out that India is larger than the whole of Europe (excepting Russia), that it embraces at least five major faiths, fifteen major languages, and over 1,500 minor languages and dialects; and that the seventeen states which were created within the country after it achieved independence were based on existing linguistic and cultural regions. What this means, she points out, is that the foods in these seventeen states differ from each other as much as the foods in the various countries of Europe. The simple facts of geography are of course responsible for many differences; India has a wide range of climates, from the snowy Himalayas to the coconut palms of the tropical south, and the indigenous foods in the regions vary accordingly.
‘India’ used to refer to the whole subcontinent, whereas now it refers to the country called India, occupying most, but by no means all, of the subcontinent. The most important early centres of agriculture and civilization generally were in the Indus Valley, now mainly in Pakistan. This does not mean that what happened in that valley many millennia ago cannot be regarded as ancestral to current Indian foodways. It can. But the ambiguity in the term ‘India’ has to be kept in mind when considering food history, among many other subjects.
Indian civilizations, like those of the Middle East and China, extend very far back in time. Thanks largely to Achaya (1994), who has brought together evidence from archaeology, etymology, ancient religious texts, and other literary sources, the study of Indian food history in the context of these successive civilizations, and also in relatively modern times, has recently become more rewarding.
The Harappan civilization flourished in the general area of the Indus Valley from about 3200 BC for 1,000 years or a little more. WHEAT and BARLEY were its staples and much archaeological evidence has recently come to light about the many other foods which were then in common use, the huge granaries built for storage, the ovens, and various cooking utensils. At a site in Rajasthan, dated to before 2800 BC, excavations have disclosed a ploughed and abandoned field, described by Achaya as being certainly ‘the earliest ploughed field to have been found anywhere in the world’.
The next phase involved the arrival from C. Asia of the Aryans and associated groups. Whereas the Harappan civilization had been largely urban, that of the Aryans was predominantly agricultural and pastoral; and it was the Aryans who were the main inspiration behind the formation of the Vedic culture (centred on the Vedas, religious texts of which the earliest example was the Rig-veda, written in old Sanskrit). The various Vedas yield a lot of information about foods, and study of the Sanskrit and other languages, both earlier and contemporary, yields more; for example the occurrence in Sanskrit of names which clearly come from the ‘aboriginal’ (Munda) language, such as vatingana (aubergine), indicates items which were already well established in pre-Aryan times. Sanskrit also, in due course, marked foods of Chinese origin by giving them the prefix chini; thus chinani, peach.
There are thus many windows through which glimpses may be had of food in ancient India. In more recent times, the historical record is writ large, especially for the legacies of successive intrusions by other cultures. It was mainly in the north that these intrusions occurred, as natural barriers and great distances impeded migration to the south. For the most important culinary immigration of all, see MOGHUL CUISINE. There is also the Portuguese influence (see GOA) to be taken into account, and the emergence of ANGLO-INDIAN COOKERY in the period of British rule, often referred to as the Raj. The British influence made its impact throughout the country, although more so in some regions than in others.
The effect of these intrusions was to increase considerably the diversity, referred to above, of foods and foodways within India (and its neighbours—see BANGLADESH; NEPAL; PAKISTAN; SRI LANKA).
However, there are common factors and ways of thinking which give a measure of underlying unity to Indian foodways. The main component of the meal is CEREAL, with savoury dishes added as accompaniments and to provide flavour. LENTILS and PULSES generally, and vegetables, will always be important. Spices—especially GINGER and GARLIC, but including many others—are used everywhere with great discrimination and care. The general liking for milk products such as GHEE, YOGHURT, and PANIR is a prominent feature.
There is also the conception of a meal, which has as its focus the platter (thali), with its central pile of rice or bread surrounded by small containers of savoury accompaniments. Those eating help themselves to the various items, mixing them with rice or folding them up in pieces of flat bread. Sweet dishes are an exception. They are usually taken at the end unaccompanied by rice or bread.
Perhaps, however, the most important feature of Indian cookery is the existence of several clearly distinguishable vegetarian cuisines. VEGETARIANISM, as a widely prevalent social practice, derives from the doctrine of ahimsa or non-violence first propounded in the Upanishads (c. 9th century BC) and further developed in the Buddhist and Jain religions (see BUDDHISM AND FOOD; JAINS AND FOOD). Jains and a large proportion of Hindus in S. India, Gujarat, and the Hindi-speaking heartland remain vegetarian. See also HINDUISM AND FOOD. However, even in non-vegetarian Kashmir, Punjab, Bengal, Orissa, Assam, and Kerala, ahimsa is observed in nutrition. Yamuna Devi (1987) has put together in a single enormous book a remarkably broad and detailed survey of Indian vegetarian dishes.
Although strict in matters of food prohibitions, Hindus take delight in food. Their spirituality and the objections which some have to worldly pursuits have never precluded culinary pleasures. Dandin, a 7th-century author, thus describes a homely meal:
She stirred the gruel in the two dishes, which she set before him on a green plantain leaf … He drank it and felt rested and happy. Next she gave him two ladlefuls of the boiled rice, served with a little ghee and condiments. She served the rest of the rice with curds, three spices, and fragrant and refreshing buttermilk and gruel. He enjoyed the meal to the last mouthful. When he asked for a drink, she poured him water in a steady stream from the spout of a new pitcher—it was fragrant with incense, the smell of fresh trumpet-flowers and the perfume of full-blown lotuses. He put the bowl to his lips, and his eyelashes sparkled with rosy drops as cool as snow; his ears delighted in the sound of trickling water; his rough cheeks thrilled and tingled at its pleasant contact; his nostrils opened wide at its sweet fragrance; and his tongue delighted in its lovely flavour, as he drank the pure water in great gulps.
This charming quotation, used by Hashi and Tapan Raychaudhuri (1981) to illuminate an important essay on food in India, strikes an agreeable and positive note. However, while Hindu enjoyment of food is unquestionable, it is also true that the existence of the caste system has imposed handicaps on them in this respect. Shanti Rangarao (1990), in her lively book on food in India, comments:
Orthodox Hindus have been known to starve on a long journey rather than eat unfamiliar food cooked by strangers, or carry food in the ‘polluted’ railway carriage. Polluted it certainly is for them, when occupied by lower castes and Untouchables …. The Brahmin was condemned to eternal damnation if he ate food cooked or touched (even water) by people of other castes. Nor must they even see him eating. Foreign travel and crossing the ocean meant complete loss of caste for him, and the life of the excommunicated Brahmin could be made hell even before he got to the next world!
The same author gives as her opinion that caste and religious restrictions have been largely responsible for preventing the emergence of anything like a national Indian diet. She would no doubt agree about the common features shared by most Indian kitchens (see above), but lays more emphasis on the differences which she had herself encountered:
In my own university, the college I went to had a ‘hostel’ which catered for ten eating ‘Sections’, each with its own separate kitchen and dining-room labelled:
1. European
2. Non-vegetarian Hindu
3. Non-vegetarian Malayaele-Hindu
4. Tamil-Telugu-Christian
5. Syrian Christian
6. Brahmin
7. Thiyya
8. Nayar
9. Non-Brahmin Vegetarian
10. Cosmopolitan
The second last being for those students who could only eat Brahmin-cooked food but could not eat it with Brahmin students in their dining-room. And all this was for the students of just one part of India!
Apart from such differences in kitchen practice as were brought about by the caste system and other such factors, there were differences across the country which had arisen in a more natural way. For example there is the prevalence of steaming in the south of India, and the absence of it in the north. On the other hand the dum technique is widespread in the north but not elsewhere; this is the procedure whereby a partly cooked dish of rice and meat with many aromatic flavourings is put in a lidded pot, sealed with dough, and left to cook with fire above and below for a long time.
However, so far as the outside world is concerned, the tremendous variety in Indian food, whether brought about by geographical and climatic differences (wheat and breads in the north, use of COCONUT in the south) or arising from religious dietary laws (no pork for Muslims, no onions for Jains) or from the caste system, or other causes, has been obscured to a very large extent by a coincidental factor. Most of the Indians who operate or cook in restaurants, inside or outside India, are from Punjab. (Bangladeshis are active in this business too but they are not ‘Indian’ in the sense used here.)
Madhur Jaffrey (1985) and Camellia Panjabi (1995) are among those who have explained the historical background to this Punjabi dominance. The prime factors were the lack of any restaurant tradition in India, and the inhibitions which prevented members of various castes and religious groups from becoming professional cooks. Thus, in the upheavals which followed the division of the subcontinent into India and the two Pakistans in 1947, it was displaced Punjabis (numerous, eager to work, and relatively free of inhibitions) who could most easily become entrepreneurs and operators in the restaurant business. They took on these roles, and it was natural that they should subsequently staff the catering colleges set up to ensure part of the necessary infrastructure for tourism. Moulds were thus established whose influence will necessarily continue far into the 3rd millennium. (The wide popularity of TANDOOR cookery is, incidentally, one of a number of things for which Punjabis have been responsible—the villages of Punjab had communal open-air tandoors where housewives would bring their dough to be rolled into ROTIS and baked by the tandooriya.)
If it is true of India, as of some other countries, that the finest food is in homes rather than public places, then few foreign visitors have the opportunity to enjoy authentic Indian dishes at their best. But the authentic ingredients are more and more widely available, so there is an alternative: to recreate the dishes in one’s own home, guided by the rapidly growing collection of really good books on the subject, of which a few are listed below.
See also three entries of a general nature: KASHMIR; PARSI FOOD; INDIAN SWEETS. In addition, see AMCHUR; BESAN FLOUR; BIRIANI; CHAPATI; CURRY; DAL; DOSA; GULAB JAMUN; HALEEM; HALVA; IDLI; JALEBI; KACHORI; KHEER; KHICHRI; KOFTA; KORMA; LADIKANEE; LASSI; LUCHI; MASALA; MILK REDUCTION; NAN; PAKORA; PARATA; PAYASAM; PILAF; POORI; POPPADOM; RASGULLA; SAMBAR; SAMOSA; SEV; SHRIKHAND; PANCH PHORON; TAMARIND; TIFFIN; VINDALOO.
READING:
Indian almond
(or tropical almond) the kernel of the fruit of Terminalia catappa, a tree which occurs in both wild and cultivated forms in S. and SE Asia, and has been widely planted in other tropical regions, mainly for ornament and shade. It is tall and handsome and has leaves which turn red in the autumn—unusual for a tropical tree. It is not related to the true ALMOND.
The fruits have a tender skin, beneath which is a thin layer of edible, subacid flesh. The nuts enclosed in this have thick, corky shells, which are difficult to crack; but the slim kernels, white inside a pale brown skin, have a good, delicate flavour and repay the effort of extraction. They are eaten raw or roasted. About half the kernel, by weight, consists of a pale oil similar to true almond oil; and this also has a pleasing flavour.
Besides the names cited above, the nut may be called Bengal, Singapore, or Fijian nut, and sea almond.
For other fruits and nuts of the same genus, which is an extensive one, see MYROBALAN and OKARI NUTS.
Indian sweets
are based on a different tradition from that of European confectioners. Sugar is an important ingredient, but the Indian confectioner, or halvai, also uses substantial quantities of cereals, pulses, and milk products in a manner completely alien to European CONFECTIONERY. Halvais have produced as many variations on their themes as European confectioners have on boiled sugar sweets. The results run from simple BRITTLE and TOFFEE-type sweets through HALVA, BARFI, and SANDESH, to the family of confections based on RASGULLAS. All these are found all over the subcontinent.
The distinction between ‘sweetie’ and ‘pudding’ is less marked than in Europe. The term mithai, meaning sweet, has various applications, including approximations to the English categories of puddings and sugar confectionery. Many sweets find a place in the Indian diet as snacks or offerings of hospitality, as well as playing a role in more formal meals.
Regional variations can be seen in the use of certain ingredients; for instance the wheat-growing north of India is rich in recipes for sweet breads and biscuits whilst the use of COCONUT is a distinctive feature of the confectionery of W. and S. India. Bangladesh (Bengal) is the part of the subcontinent acknowledged to produce the finest sweets, but many other places have their own specialities, such as pak, a fudgelike sweet made in the southern city of Mysore by adding toasted gram (see BESAN FLOUR) to a sugar syrup, giving a frothy mixture which has a crumbly texture when set.
Sweetmeats have a special significance in Hindu religion. They are considered as highly suitable offerings for the gods, and desirable spiritual states are described in terms of sweetness or NECTAR.
Mixtures of honey, milk, GHEE, sugar, and water, known as panchamrita (literally ‘five nectar’, i.e. the five foods which make nectar, food of the gods), are used for libations and in purification rituals. Sweets are an important part of the festival of Divali, which is celebrated in November according to the European calendar. This marks the beginning of the Hindu New Year, when sweets are sent to neighbours, friends, relations, and business acquaintances; they are also piled high in temples as religious offerings.
A distinguishing feature of the Indian tradition of confectionery is the use of milk products. Halvais reduce fresh milk by boiling to give a creamy substance called rabadi, used in Indian ice cream, kulfi. As explained under MILK REDUCTION, rabadi is further reduced to a pastelike semi-solid called khoya, which is used in barfi and many other sweets. It acts as a base and a binder and provides flavour and sweetness, derived from the slightly caramelized milk sugar, lactose, present in the reduced milk.
Milk is also used as a sweetmeat ingredient, especially for sandesh and rasgullas, in the form of fresh curd cheese (chhenna).
Sugar is used as a sweetener, measured by volume, usually in the order of one-quarter of the quantity of base ingredient. Poorer-quality confections use a higher proportion of sugar. Unless the sweetmeat is required to be white, refined sugar will not necessarily be used by the halvai. The Indian unrefined sugars, jaggery or gur (see SUGAR), which are brown and aromatic, may be employed to add their own distinctive flavour to barfi and toffee-type sweets. Boiled sugar syrup, important to the texture and appearance of much W. European confectionery, has a relatively minor role in Indian confectionery. It is used for cooking and soaking sweets of the rasgulla family, and plays an important part in making pak. Boiled sugar sweets such as gajjak, a type of brittle, are made and enjoyed throughout India, especially in winter as they are considered to be warming.
Nuts, particularly almonds and pistachios, add flavour and texture to Indian sweets. Together with edible GOLD OR SILVER LEAF, they are much used for decoration. Common spices such as cardamoms, nutmegs, cloves, and black pepper are used for flavouring sweets. Rosewater (see ROSES) and SANDALWOOD essence are also used. Less familiar to western palates are kewra (see SCREWPINE), and khus, obtained from the roots of vetiver (see KHUS KHUS), both used by Bengali halvais.
A final distinguishing feature of Indian confectionery is the frequent use of deep-frying: JALEBI, GULAB JAMUN, PANTUA, and the many kinds of little dumpling called pithe, a speciality of Bengal, are all deep fried before being soaked in syrup. Alternatively, sweets may be cooked by gently boiling them in sugar syrup.
To the European palate, many Indian confections taste like FUDGE, due to the flavour of ghee or khoya, and the use of flours which give a grainy texture. Included in this category are barfi, sandesh, mesu (an aerated gram flour sweet), vadi, beveca, pera, and many of the sweets known collectively as LADDU—a word which designates shape rather than recipe. Confections which include a high proportion of chopped nuts such as pistachio barfi represent eastern variations on the ancient theme of sweet nut pastes, known to Europeans as MARZIPAN.
Indian sweets lack the long-keeping qualities of western sugar confectionery. The milk-based ones provide a method of short-term storage for a perishable food in a hot country which has never developed a tradition of hard-cheese making, but the sweets are generally intended to be eaten within a few days of manufacture. They are highly nutritious, and specific items are used as invalid food, or offered to new mothers. The traditions of the halvai transplant successfully with Asian migrants, and many of the sweets are now on sale in e.g. British cities.
Laura Mason
Indonesia
the fourth most populous nation of the world, covers a vast area of SE Asia. Its people are unevenly distributed among more than 15,000 islands, many of which are too small or too barren to offer a settled living to anyone. The islands vary enormously in size, climate, soil, and population density. Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) is roughly the size of France, and has about as many inhabitants as Paris. Sumatra is comparable in size with Spain or Queensland. Sulawesi (Celebes) is rather less than half as big, Java scarcely as large as England—yet Java supports over 110 million people, nearly half the total population. Dozens of smaller islands are still big enough to contribute to the country’s food resources, and in E. Indonesia a few tiny islands for centuries supplied the Old World with its most treasured SPICES.
A map of Indonesia suggests the outlines of three of earth’s major tectonic plates that lie beneath it. These are all subduction zones, where one plate is being gradually drawn under the edge of its neighbour, creating lines of weakness through which the molten rocks and gases of the earth’s crust can burst to form volcanoes. A chain of active volcanoes follows the island arc through Sumatra, Java, and Nusatenggara, doubling back in a tight curve through Banda and then swinging north-east through Ternate, Tidore, and Halmahera. A little cluster of volcanoes occupies the NE tip of Sulawesi, but the rest of this island, along with all of Kalimantan and Irian Jaya, is free of volcanic activity (though subject to earthquakes). Although in the short term a volcanic eruption is highly destructive, and although even in the long term not everything that comes out of a volcano is good for the surrounding soil, many areas have been greatly enriched by minerals ejected from these unpredictable objects. The extraordinary fertility of W. Sumatra, SE Bali, or Java—whose population has been able to multiply roughly thirtyfold in the past two centuries—is in part due to volcanic soils. But these areas benefit equally from high rainfall, and a social system geared to the efficient production of staple crops, above all RICE.
Rice was probably brought to the islands at least 2,000 years ago by immigrants from the SE Asian mainland; the oldest surviving evidence of its cultivation is in Kalimantan, but it may have been grown earlier in Java, where intensive farming has long since obliterated all ancient traces of it. Rice has still not been accepted as the most-favoured staple in all the islands; TARO, CASSAVA, and SAGO still hold their own in E. Indonesia and are still popular even in prosperous W. Java. But the government’s transmigration policy, moving complete rural communities from Java and Bali to under-populated areas elsewhere, plus official encouragement for rice farmers, mean that rice is likely to become a standardized basic food for almost all Indonesians within the next generation, provided yields can keep up with population growth and erosion of soils suitable for rice-growing can be checked.
The real staple food of Indonesia is FISH: sea fish from the deep water of the Indian Ocean on the south and west or the warmer, shallower water of the S. China Sea; freshwater fish from the lakes, rivers, tanks, and flooded rice fields of inland areas. Indonesians have necessarily always been sailors, traders, and fishermen, and much, or most, of the protein they consume comes from tuna, milkfish, anchovies, squid, shellfish, catfish, carp, gurami, and a great number of other species. When fish could not be eaten fresh, they had to be dried in the sun and/or salted, and fish spread out to dry are still a common sight in Indonesia today. The basic diet of many Indonesians is plain boiled white rice, with a little fish, some lalab (raw or plainly cooked vegetables), and a few hot chillies. CHILLI peppers were of course introduced from the New World after the voyages of discovery in the 16th century; they are now so universally popular, not to say addictive, that it is hard to imagine how Indonesians got along without them.
Mere hotness, however, is not all that people demand in their food. Most Indonesian cooking gives evidence of a love of sourness delicately balanced by sweetness. The latter is derived largely from COCONUT milk, which is often used as a cooking medium, or raw sugar. In some areas, notably C. Java, sweetness dominates, but most outsiders will agree that the sour notes offer more subtlety and much greater range. TAMARIND, LEMON GRASS, various fruits, GALANGAL, TURMERIC, bitter cucumber (see BITTER GOURD) are among their sources. The other contrast to sweetness, saltiness, is provided not only by salt itself but by various fermented products, particularly SOY SAUCE, introduced by the Chinese, and a strongly pungent shrimp paste called terasi (or, in Malaysia, BLACANG). The paste, dark in colour and smelling a little like marmite, is used in very small quantities.
What the world at large understands by ‘Indonesian food’ is principally the food of Java and Sumatra, with the additions of a few well-known dishes from Banjarmasin (S. Kalimantan) and N. Sulawesi and other regions, and one or two dubious classics adapted from Chinese and Dutch models. Nasi goreng—fried rice—is perhaps the most widely known, though not the best loved, of all the products of an Indonesian kitchen, especially when it is served with a fried egg on top. The fried egg is Dutch, the fried rice Chinese. Dutch also is the unhallowed custom of serving up a huge range of dishes all at once in a rijsttafel. This is based on the lavish feasts that used to be, perhaps still are, communally cooked in a village to celebrate a good harvest. If every dish is well cooked and retains its individuality, the rijsttafel may justify its presence at a really big party; but served to two or four people in an average restaurant, with every dish tasting more or less the same and everything kept for hours in a hot cupboard, it is a parody of Indonesian cooking and should be avoided.
The usual family meal, in a reasonably well-off household, consists of rice with one or two meat or fish dishes, some vegetables, and some soup to wash everything down—many people will not drink even water with a meal. Many savoury dishes are variants on a few basic ideas; for example, there are innumerable versions of sambal goreng (see SAMBAL), in which a mixture of spices, onions, garlic, and chilli is fried in a little oil and then added to the main ingredient to flavour it while it cooks. There are many stuffings and marinades, and many recipes for meat or fish wrapped in leaves (usually banana leaves) or cooked in some other container to retain juices, food value, and flavour. Such containers include sections of a large bamboo, and the hard sheath of a coconut inflorescence.
Cooking times are often very short, because much time has been spent on preparing and cutting up the food; no one expects to have to cut up meat at table, and knives are hardly ever provided. Many Indonesians still prefer to eat with their fingers (of the right hand only); a whole chicken may be torn in pieces and shredded, but any chopping or carving must be done in the kitchen beforehand. Most dishes are boiled, steamed, fried, grilled, or barbecued over charcoal. In the past, the only way to bake food was to wrap it in leaves and put it for several hours in a trench lined with hot stones. Later, a kind of metal oven was developed, with trays of glowing charcoal slotted in above and below the food. This met the demand for sweet pastries, biscuits, and layer cakes, which were first introduced by the Dutch; but oven-baking did not really catch on until gas and electric ovens became available to middle-class city dwellers.
Dessert is usually fresh fruit. Sweets and cakes are eaten in the afternoon, especially when visitors call. Ninety per cent of the population are Muslim (making this the largest Islamic nation in the world), and the end of RAMADAN, the fasting month, is marked by at least two days of social visiting, when junior family members (or employees) visit senior ones (or bosses) to ask forgiveness of the past year’s trespasses, drink sweet black tea, and eat cakes of steamed glutinous rice flour and coconut.
Many regions of Indonesia have a colourful and reasonably well-documented history. For food, however, this history is largely a blank. This is the more surprising when one considers the extraordinary heights of sophistication reached by literature, music, painting, and metalworking in the courts of many rulers, above all those of central Java and Bali in the 18th and 19th centuries. Surely they must have cared for gastronomy as well? Yet there are no records of great feasts (except drinking bouts), no manuscript cookery books such as the Arabs and Chinese compiled so lovingly, no surviving traditions of a court cuisine. Nor is there a tradition of restaurant-going. The ‘classic’ dishes of Indonesia (for example, RENDANG) are all, as far as we know, of peasant and village origin.
In short, much research into Indonesian foodways remains to be done, and done soon, as food habits are changing swiftly, driven on by economic and industrial development and the rush of people from the countryside to the cities. Some changes are good, others may not be. Most people are far better nourished than in, say, the 1960s; some are even becoming obese, a condition formerly rare. Fast food is inevitably gaining ground over traditional dishes that took hours to prepare. US and Japanese food chains are taking over the custom that formerly belonged to street food stalls. (However, Indonesians have always taken for granted the availability everywhere of ready-cooked cheap food, so this is not really a change of habit, only of customer choice.) Despite Indonesia’s success in growing enough rice to feed itself and distributing it fairly, the fashionable trend is to eat less rice and more bread, meat, and dairy products. One of the world’s largest flour-milling complexes is located in E. Java. Great quantities of beef are flown in from Australia and the USA to supplement local produce. There appears to be little foundation here in Indonesia for the belief that Asians lack the enzymes needed to digest milk, and milk bars attract crowds of young sophisticates in the big towns.
Supermarkets—clean, bright, and with fixed prices—are replacing the sociable confusion and haggling of the local market place. Cookery books and cookery journalism, almost unknown a generation ago, flourish. Hotel and catering schools have an estimated total of 100,000 students, and a professional chefs’ association is doing much to raise the formerly low status of the cook in Indonesian society.
Sri Owen
injera
the staple food or bread of ETHIOPIA which is leavened with YEAST or SOURDOUGH. It can be made of TEF, BARLEY flour, cornflour (see MAIZE), RICE flour, SORGHUM, or WHEAT. It is central to the Ethiopian consciousness. ‘Have you eaten injera today?’ is a standard greeting. ‘He has no wat’ (sauce) on his injera’ means ‘He’s desperately poor’.
Ralph Hancock
ink cap
shaggy cap, shaggy mane, and lawyer’s wig are all names for Coprinus comatus, an edible mushroom common in Britain and generally in temperate zones of the northern and southern hemispheres. The distinctive cap is shaped like a tall bell or (some say, less plausibly) a British judge’s wig, and is notably scaly. The whole fungus grows up to 25 or even 30 cm (10–12″) tall, singly or in clumps on dung heaps, lawns, bonfire sites, and roadside verges. Its main season is in the autumn, but it appears from early spring onwards.
The ink cap, whose delicate flavour is said to go particularly well with fish, should be gathered when young and white, and while its gills are still white or pale pink. Older specimens turn brown and black, then disintegrate into an inky mass. As one authority puts it: ‘gills progressively white, pink, black and auto-digesting’. This progression can be very quick, occupying but half a day at normal temperatures (longer under refrigeration), so gathering and consumption must be accomplished rapidly.
It seems likely that Shelley had an ink cap in mind when he wrote his uncomplimentary description of fungi:
Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake,
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander by.
Warning Any ink cap which is of a greyish colour and is not shaggy is likely to be Coprinus atramentarius. This species contains a substance almost identical with the active agent in the drug ‘Antabuse’, given to alcoholics to make them violently sick if they drink the smallest amount of liquor. It is, however, an excellent mushroom, so good that some people in France are said to be willing to forgo their wine for a day in order to enjoy it.
insects as food
Historically in global terms, eating insects has been the norm for human beings. It is only in the western world, and in recent times, that it has been viewed as a strange or even revolting practice. However, even in the western world, people of almost all cultures eagerly eat insect secretions: HONEY.
Insects are ubiquitous in the world and exist in enormous numbers. They have been described as the most successful class of living organisms. Of the countless species, it is generally, and for obvious reasons, the larger ones which have been eaten by human beings. See ANTS; CATERPILLARS; CICADAS; COCKCHAFER; CRICKET; GRASSHOPPER; GRUBS; LARVAE; LOCUST; MANNA (in part); SILKWORM; SPIDERS; TERMITES; WASP; WATER BUGS; WITCHETTY GRUBS.
Any consideration of the use of insects as food requires knowledge of the various stages in the lives of insects, most species of which undergo a process of metamorphosis, commonly following the sequence egg > larva > pupa > adult. The consumption of insects as food includes examples of insects in each of these stages.
A larva is an insect in a state of development (displaying little or no similarity to the adult form) lasting from the time of its leaving the egg until its transformation into a pupa, e.g. a grub or a caterpillar. A caterpillar is the larva of a butterfly or moth (or, loosely, of various other insects). A grub is the larva of a beetle, but this term too is used loosely. A pupa is an insect in the intermediate stage between larva and adult; the term chrysalis is used of a butterfly or moth in this intermediate stage.
There are few categories of food of which it can truly be said that a single book provides the basic survey to which all other studies inevitably refer. However, Bodenheimer (1951) fulfils this role for insects. Although his book has done much to spread information about the worldwide consumption of insects, it remains true that this consumption is hardly ever reflected in official statistics. This is partly because a single insect, although it may provide useful protein, fat and carbohydrate, furnishes only trivial amounts; partly because there are no sophisticated marketing arrangements for insects, such as would bring them within the scope of data on imports and exports; and partly, perhaps, because the class of data-compilers hardly overlaps at all with the class of insect-eaters.
internet and food
The internet has revolutionized our relationship with food and ingredients. If we want lamb tagine for dinner, a hundred recipes are a search and milliseconds away; we can order the ingredients for delivery from our local supermarket via an online store and then seek advice, if we run into trouble cooking the dish, from amateur and professional cooks accessible through a plethora of internet communities. Instead of learning to cook at mother’s knee, we can tap into kitchens all over the world.
The internet provides us with a global store cupboard. Sourcing previously difficult-to-find ingredients is as easy as reaching for a bag of sugar from our own kitchen shelf; rare-breed pork and pigeon from Bresse as easy to obtain as a jar of marmalade. We now have so much flexibility, choice, and knowledge at our fingertips that identifiable local cuisines are in danger of being outmoded concepts.
In the professional kitchen, the internet has accelerated the exchange of ideas between chefs. The old idea of protecting recipes for commercial and professional advantage has surely been well and truly laid to rest. Chef Grant Achatz of Chicago allowed one website to document his experimental dishes and record every step of the process of opening his ultra-modern restaurant Alinea. Within hours of opening, one of the restaurant’s first customers had posted pictures and descriptions of every plate served him, making a virtual version of the restaurant accessible in seconds to a global audience of chefs, journalists, and keen amateurs that might otherwise have taken years to reach.
Although the internet is unquestionably hastening the homogenizing effects of GLOBALIZATION in the commercial world, elsewhere it is encouraging a resurgence of locally produced artisan food products. Farmers, cheese-makers, and other small producers can establish an electronic presence with low set-up and running costs and find a market without having to attract buyers to the farm door.
Food blogs (internet slang for web log) are fast multiplying and have changed the way we learn about food and whom we recognize as experts in the field. Dedicated amateur cooks are willing to share their often considerable expertise for free. Unrestricted by considerations of space, and with no advertisers to answer to, ‘bloggers’ are able to write in depth about their chosen subject.
However, a problem with much internet content is the lack of editorial control, either for the sake of accuracy, or as a check to the longer and less readable effusions. While admitting these drawbacks, the intelligent user can often assess the quality of the information from internal evidence while navigating the World Wide Web with the adage ‘Take nothing on trust’ an invariable guide.
The internet will not supersede the printed word as a vehicle for culinary information, but will certainly supplement it. The impact of a recipe book conceived in the round as the expression of a single voice is very different from, and often more persuasive than, the atomized structure of the internet. But no better instrument for the pursuit of individual facts and immediate reportage has yet been created and its potential seems infinite.
Andy Lynes
Inuit cookery
(Inuit being more or less equivalent to the old name Eskimo, and applying to peoples in the northernmost inhabited parts of the earth, e.g. Greenland) is, in its traditional form, subject to the limitations imposed by a very cold climate and a sparse range of fauna and flora. In this respect it is not unlike ANTARCTIC cookery. However, there is a big difference; the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic regions (e.g. in the southern parts of Greenland, Labrador, Alaska, the Northwest Territories of Canada, Labrador) are relatively numerous whereas the Antarctic, being basically an uninhabitable icecap, has none. The Alaskan writer Zona Spray has written an evocative portrait of Inupiat cuisine (in Walker, 2001), advancing cogent arguments for seeing it as an independent, self-contained style of cookery. (The Inupiat and Yupik peoples still prefer to describe themselves as Eskimo.)
The Inuit diet has attracted much attention because of its high proportion of meat and fat, as well as fish. The Inuit have subsisted mainly on:
Various studies of their diet and the extent to which they can thrive on it suggest that they can manage well. A classic and readable study is that of Stefansson (1946) quoted in the entry for CARIBOU. As the Inuit have been drawn into closer contact with societies to the south, so their diet has relied less on its traditional mainstays. It has been estimated that these now contribute only 16% of dietary energy. Diamond (2005) nicely contrasts the Inuit capacity to feast on what could be hunted while medieval Norse incomers starved through their unwillingness to shed their dietary inhibitions.
Iran
ancient Persia, deserves a geological introduction. In prehistoric times, the land mass that is now Iran forced itself up to divide the oceans, splitting the Caspian Sea off from the Indian Ocean. Since then, it has formed a natural land bridge across these two seas, separating the cold northern plains of Russia from the hot southern deserts of Arabia, and connecting the Middle East with the Far East. The ancient Silk Route from China to Syria went through N. Iran, while the Afro-Arab-Indian trade routes crossed its southern regions. The centrality of its location in the ancient world meant that the Persian Empire, more than 2,500 years ago, extended from Russia in the north to Egypt in the south, and from Greece in the west to India in the east.
At the time of the Persian Empire, the Iranians carried their own produce—particularly SPINACH, POMEGRANATES, SAFFRON, and rosewater (see ROSES)—as well as their culinary skills to the far corners of the known world. At the same time they adopted produce and ideas from their colonies. Iran has also served as a conduit for many other products. LEMONS, ORANGES, AUBERGINES, and RICE were brought from the East (India and China) to Iran and were then carried west first to Greece and Rome; and later, by the Arabs, to N. Africa and S. Europe. During the transit, names were changed and passed on leaving a clear etymological trail. Later still, Iran was the source of much of the produce (rosewater and spinach, for example) and ideas such as endoring (gilding, see KOFTA) and ALMOND milk that the Crusaders brought to western Europe. The most recent influence to be felt in Britain has been the arrival in the 20th century, via India and Pakistan, of much of the vocabulary of Persian food (for example, BIRIANI, garam masala, KEBAB, murgh, NAN, PILAF, tikka).
The mountains encircling Iran form a high, arid central plateau that is bitterly cold in winter and searingly hot in summer. Despite the aridity of the soil, it is fertile when watered, and the surrounding high altitudes serve it as both a water tank and an ice box. The Iranians developed a unique system of carrying water in underground channels from the mountains (which receive copious amounts of snow each winter) to the fields and orchards of villages scores of miles away in the central plateau. A simple system of mountainside natural or man-made caves, carefully fed by cool spring water and frozen in winter, resulted in ice being available throughout the summer months from ancient times.
The regions outside the mountain fringe as well as the mountain valleys to the north and west of the country are naturally fertile and productive, and it is here that viticulture has flourished for thousands of years. The Caspian littoral to the north has a temperate climate, warm and humid. There are also fertile oases in the southern regions where date trees and sweet oranges abound.
Thus the climate range, from the warm Persian Gulf to the high snowy mountains, is huge and results in a long growing season of great divergence. Fruits include the indigenous melons, grapes, MULBERRIES, peaches, apricots, nectarines, and POMEGRANATES, as well as MEDLARS, PERSIMMONS, oranges, melons, and sweet lemons.
As for fish, the Caspian provides marine fish which are suited to its relatively cold waters (from small SPRATS and HERRING up to the spectacular beluga STURGEON), while the warm waters of the Persian Gulf nurture SWORDFISH, TUNA, and SHRIMP. Fresh fish is mainly eaten on these coasts. Dried and salted fish is traditional for inhabitants of the central plateau, although the introduction of refrigeration has brought fresh fish there too, notably for the spring festival of No Ruz (New Year).
The food and cooking of Iran has much in common with that of the Muslim Middle East. The staple diet is WHEAT; much use is made of LAMB and poultry, and of YOGHURT and aubergines; there is a wide range of stuffed vegetables and of sweet pastries; and the diet is non-alcoholic. However, it can be distinguished from its neighbours by its fine rice dishes, and by its meat and fruit sauces. Most savoury dishes have a distinctive SWEET-AND-SOUR or sour flavour.
Of the numerous regional breads, six are acclaimed nationally: barbari, which is thick, crusty bread made in an oven (tanoor, see TANDOOR), is mostly consumed at breakfast; sangak, a thinner bread, baked over a bed of stones, is used as a sandwich bread (to wrap round kebab, or cheese and herbs, etc.); LAVASH, a pliable, thin bread cooked on the wall of a tandoor, keeps well and is used to eat food by hand (instead of cutlery); taftun, a medium soft bread, is a popular accompaniment, especially dropped in thin soups and broths; sheermal is a thick, crusty sweet bread; and nan-e qandi a sweet, crisp, biscuit bread. All the breads are flat but leavened; and all are made with wheat.
The rice dishes are particularly striking, many of them prepared in a unique three-step method, by first soaking, then boiling, and finally steaming to produce a mound of light, dry rice dressed with butter and saffron (and formerly with GOLD AND SILVER LEAF). They come in two forms: chelow is plain white rice, while polow (see PILAF) is rice mixed with various ingredients, ranging from herbs, pulses, vegetables, or nuts to meat or poultry which may be grilled, poached, or stuffed and roasted. Shireen polow, for example, is saffron rice mixed with carrot shreds, orange peel, almonds and pistachios, and dried fruit, the whole encased in caramelized sugar, garnished with BARBERRIES and toasted almonds, and served with saffron chicken. It is known as the ‘King of Persian Dishes’.
A third type of rice preparation, known as katteh, is cooked by the simple absorption method. This is very popular in the Caspian littoral which is the only region in Iran where rice is grown and where it is the staple diet. In this region, rice is eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Of the kinds of long-grain rice grown and eaten in Iran, Sadri (which resembles basmati) is the most popular. Round-grain rice, called gerdeh, also has its uses, e.g. in puddings.
Plain rice (chelow) is accompanied by a variety of meat or poultry sauce/stews (khoresht) combined with, for example, mixed herbs and LIMES; aubergines and tomatoes, split peas and limes, walnuts and pomegranates, oranges and carrots, QUINCE and split peas, parsley and mint with RHUBARB, and so on.
The use of herbs has always been prolific in Iran. Every meal is accompanied by fresh bread and a bowl of fresh herbs—tarkhun (TARRAGON), shahi (COSTMARY), marzeh (MARJORAM), rayhan (lemon BASIL), na’na (MINT), tarreh (garlic CHIVES), and torobcheh (radishes). Many dishes are cooked with herbs. One of the most popular meat sauce/stews referred to above is Qormeh sabzi, which is made with PARSLEY, CORIANDER, garlic chives and DILL. An interesting group of similar sauce/stews from the Caspian region is made with parsley and mint and one other single ingredient, such as rhubarb, sour green plums, or celery.
Many soups are herb based, and herbs figure in several kinds of polow, in all sorts of stuffing (see below), and in one or two kinds of mixed pickle.
Meat is scarce and expensive and is eaten sparingly. Sheep and goat meat are the most common. Beef is little eaten since the plateau is too dry to sustain herds of cows. Camel meat is also eaten, but it is poultry and game that offer most variety. Roast or grilled meat in large pieces is eaten only on festive occasions, although a wide variety of KEBABS, ranging from the thin, leaf-like Kabab-barg to the chunkier lamb tikkeh, appear on the table frequently. Both are marinated in finely chopped onion and lemon juice and basted with saffron and butter. All kebabs except Kabab-barg are eaten rolled in sangak or taftun bread and accompanied by herbs and/or torshi (pickles). Kabab-barg is served with plain white rice, flavoured with saffron, and mixed with butter, egg yolk, and SUMAC to result in what is generally accepted to be the ‘national dish’—Chellow kabab.
The traditional cooking medium was donbeh (the rendered fat of the FAT-TAILED SHEEP), or roghan (clarified butter), but rising population and political upheavals in the 20th century have led to an increasing use of vegetable, particularly SUNFLOWER, oils.
Iranian soups are mostly of the thick vegetable sort, based on pulses and herbs. Like most savoury Iranian dishes, they are given a distinctive sour flavour, which is achieved by adding the juice of lemons, limes, or sour oranges, or other sour ingredients such as barberries, rhubarb, pomegranates, or unripe plums and grapes. One or two thin, broth-like soups are thickened with pieces of dried bread. This category includes the most popular soups, Ab-goosht and Dizee, which are made with lamb bone, onions, chickpeas, and limes—the solid ingredients are beaten into a paste and served separately while the broth is served with dried bread.
There is a summer soup (Mast-o kheeyar) made with yoghurt, cucumber, and mint, which is found also in many neighbouring countries. However, in Iran, the addition of chopped chives and mint, raisins, and walnuts gives it an added dimension. Generally, yoghurt features prominently in the Iranian kitchen. Strained yoghurt mixed with various cooked ingredients (spinach, shallots, aubergines, or beetroot) or prepared ingredients (shallots or cucumber) form a light summer meal with the name of borani (see BURAN).
Noodles (RESHTEH) have given way to rice over the centuries, and only a few noodle dishes remain. Each dish retains much symbolism; the word reshteh also means the reins or threads of life in Persian. Ash-reshteh (noodle soup) is served at prayer meetings and also during the spring festival of No Rooz, as is Reshteh polow (rice with noodles)—significant items for an occasion when it is hoped that the tangled reins of life may be organized.
Stuffed meats and pastries were features of the cuisine of ancient Iran. In this century, stuffed meats and vegetables remain popular. Stuffed lamb and chicken are roasted in a tanoor or grilled over charcoal, while the stuffed vegetables are baked in sauces which can be sweet (grape syrup—see PEKMEZ and DIBS) or sour (lemon or sour grape juice) or savoury (TAMARIND). Only one stuffed (sweet) pastry (qotab) now remains popular. Its old Persian name, sambusak, has now passed to Britain as SAMOSA.
Various desserts are made with sugar (qand—the origin of candy), rice or rice flour, dates, wheat starch or chickpea flour, variously flavoured with rosewater, saffron, and/or cardamom and garnished with almonds and pistachios. Ice cream made with sa’lab (salep) and fruit sorbets are popular in the summer. However, the most popular dessert is fresh fruit followed by tea and sweetmeats. Traditional Iranian sweetmeats include nokhodchi (made with roasted chickpea flour and grape syrup); noql (almond slivers rolled in sugar syrup); nan-e berenji (rice shortbreads); qotab (almonds and pistachios encased in pastry); BAKLAVA (layers of filo pastry, ground almonds, pistachios, and syrup); etc. In the early years of the 20th century, these old favourites were augmented by many French-inspired pastries; thus the French mille feuilles was adopted, flavoured with rosewater and renamed ‘Napoleon’, while the French profiterole was adapted to become a tiny confection filled with rosewater-flavoured cream and sprinkled with cardamom sugar, to be called nan khame’i.
Drinks are non-alcoholic, although vine cultivation and wine production and consumption were common in pre-Islamic Iran. After the advent of Islam, sharbat (SHERBETS or iced fruit cordials) were developed and are still popular, particularly sharbat-e limoo (lime cordial), sharbat-e beh-limoo (quince and lime cordial), and sekanjebeen (mint and vinegar cordial). Yoghurt is also used to make a refreshing summer drink with mint, salt, and mineral water called doogh (see AYRAN).
COFFEE was introduced to Iran by the Arabs and remained popular for centuries. In modern times, however, coffee (‘Turkish’ style) is served only at memorial services. It was superseded in the 20th century by TEA, which is grown in the Caspian region. Tea is served in small glasses (without milk) throughout the day in all regions and at all social levels.
The ancient cuisine of Persia has had an influence, the full extent of which has still to be measured, on Ottoman cuisine (see TURKEY), ARAB CUISINE, the cuisines of W. Europe, and those of Russia, C. Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.
Margaret Shaida
READING:
Iraq
as it exists today, reflects the same natural division as ancient Mesopotamia, which consisted of Assyria in the arid northern uplands and Babylonia in the marshy south. Al-Jazirah (the ancient Assyria) grows WHEAT and crops requiring winter chill such as apples and stone fruits. The south, Al Iraq (Iraq proper, ancient Babylonia) grows RICE and is responsible for Iraq’s position as the world’s largest producer of DATES.
As one would expect, the north cooks rather like neighbouring Syria (see LEBANON AND SYRIA), while the south, even when it cooks dishes of the same basic type, produces quite original results because of its reliance on rice, fish, and dates. The difference goes beyond the ingredients, however. In Mosul, the cultural capital of the north, mutabbaqa (literally, ‘layered’) is a sort of flaky bun of puff paste, but in Basra in the far south the virtually identical word mutabbag means a dish of fish or meat smothered in rice.
The ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia subsisted largely on wheat and barley, and grain still dominates Iraqi cookery. Even more than Syria, Iraq tends to combine meat with grain in a single dish. There are far fewer of the small savoury pies beloved by the Syrians, but more varieties of meat porridge, meat and bread dishes, and the meat and grain paste called kubba (see KIBBEH). The porridges include the universal Muslim dish harissa (meat stewed with whole wheat, often overnight in a cool bread oven after the baking, see HALEEM). Another meat porridge, flavoured with dried lime and cumin and coloured with turmeric or tomato juice, is known as Kashki in Mosul, where it is the favourite food on the picnics—jovial occasions where by tradition respectable women could dispense with the veil in public—held near the tomb of the Sufi saint Qadib al-Ban. At times other than picnics, Qadib al-Ban’s tomb is mostly visited by women who have been treated harshly by their in-laws. As they circumambulate his tomb they sing a traditional refrain which coincidentally contains the words: ‘O Qadib al-Ban, bereave me of my mother-in-law and of the cooking of kashki.’
The dishes consisting of meat and broth or gravy mixed with bread are known as THARID or tashrib. In Baghdad, the distinction is that tharid is made with crumbled bread, while tashrib, a usual breakfast dish, is whole pieces of bread soaked in broth with meat on top, like the Syrian dish fatta. In Mosul the name is tashghiba and the dish is more elaborate, including such ingredients as lentils, noodles, and pomegranate as well as layers of meat and bread.
Iraqi kubba does not usually contain onions like its Syrian cousin KIBBEH, and in the north it is a more rugged product made with wheat groats (jshishi) pounded together with the meat and the BURGHUL wheat. Iraqi tradition claims that kubba originated in Mosul. The variety of kubba for which Mosul is famous today is quite distinct from the egg- or lozenge-shaped Syrian variety. It is a rather flat loaf the size of the hand or larger, stuffed with meat, almonds, raisins, and spices, and it can be either fried or poached. In the south, the kubba paste is made with boiled rice in place of wheat, and often with the tail fat (liya) of the FAT-TAILED SHEEP in place of meat.
Iraq also has a unique meat and grain speciality known according to dialect as ʿuruq or ʿghug, a name which is perhaps the same as a word meaning the texture or ‘grain’ of wood. Meat, cut small and often fried, is mixed with the leavened dough and flavourings such as green onion and celery leaf, and the resulting loaves are baked like ordinary bread. The Marsh Arabs of the south simply call it khubz lahm or ‘meat bread’.
Fermented wheat products are also known, such as 
arkhina (bulghur and yoghurt mixed together and dried—see TARHANA) and kushk (bulghur boiled with beetroot stems, leavened, and allowed to ferment for a week—see KASHK). Kushk is eaten raw or cooked, and the juice of macerated kushk is added to the meat stew as a flavouring along with ingredients like quinces, eggplant, and mint.
Despite this great repertoire of wheaten dishes, however, and the fact that some of them can be traced back to Assyrian times, the high-status grain of Iraq, even in the north, is rice.
In an old folk-tale of Mosul, a man asks: ‘O people of the Garden [Heaven], o people of the Fire [Hell], what do you eat?’ They respond respectively, ‘Apricots with rice’ and ‘Bulgar with tomatoes.’
The southern word for rice, timman, is a curious one, used nowhere else. Dates, the other great southern speciality, are used in a surprising number of ways, for example to coat broiled fish. Dates are also made into syrup and vinegar.
The cooking of Basra has had considerable influence on that of the Persian Gulf. A peculiarity common to Iraq and the Gulf is that meat on a skewer in chunks is called TIKKA rather than kabab (see KEBAB). Except among the non-Arab Kurds, the word kabab in Iraq always means skewers of ground meat which are elsewhere known as kofta kabab.
In both north and south, beef—from cattle or water-buffalo—is far more common than in most of the Arab world, often more common than mutton. The presence of year-round rivers also provides Iraq with freshwater fish such as catfish and members of the genus Barbus. The best known is shabbu (B. gripus) which is the preferred fish for the national dish Samak masquf (in the southern dialect, Simach mazguf). Six or seven of these large fish are split and gutted and suspended around a fire on stakes inserted into holes pierced in their backs. When the fire has died down and the fish are nearly done, they are laid on the coals on their backs to finish cooking, and flavourings such as spices, onions, tomatoes, lemon juice, and vinegar are sprinkled on them.
North and south are also united by a freer use of spices than prevails in Syria or TURKEY, and a tradition, perhaps Persian inspired (see IRAN), of cooking meat with fruit. A number of strictly Persian dishes are known, among them candies, pastries, and a few stews intended to be served over rice in the Persian manner, such as Fisinjan (fowl stewed with walnuts and pomegranate—see FESENJAN). Persian influence is also shown in the names of various herbs and spices and the habit of calling sesame paste rashi, as it was in medieval cookery books, rather than by its Arabic name a
ina. Herbs such as dill, tarragon, and peppergrass (see CRESS), relatively rare elsewhere in the Arab world, are as popular in Iraq as in Iran.
A number of Turkish dishes have been accepted, including the universal Turkish strudel pastries. Stuffed vegetables may be called by the usual Turkish name DOLMA, but they are more commonly known as yapraq, the Turkish word for leaf, whether they are leafy in nature or not. Turkish-style clotted cream, usually made from water-buffalo milk, is known as gaymar, a form of the Turkish word qaymagh (see KAYMAK). Some ingredients have been learned from the Turks in relatively recent times; thus, beside the ancient range of sour flavourings—VINEGAR (made from cider, wine, or dates, depending on the region), TAMARIND, and LIMES (fresh or dried)—the Iraqis use citric acid crystals under the Turkish name limon duzi.
Two great minority groups are found in the north-east: the Kurds, who speak a language related to Persian, and the Assyrians, a Christian (mostly Nestorian) group speaking a modern dialect of Aramaic. They both cook the usual northern dishes, particularly the heavy meat and vegetable stews suited to their cold winters. It is in Kurdish territory around Suleimania that MANNA is gathered. A rice and vegetable soup flavoured with dill and yoghurt is known throughout Iraq as ‘Assyrian soup’, and the Assyrian women of the villages around Mosul are famous for their skill at making strudel sheets and pastries such as baqlawa (see BAKLAVA).
Charles Perry
Ireland
unlike the rest of W. Europe, remained free of Roman influence in the early centuries of the 1st millennium AD, and thereby clung to vestiges of an earlier Iron Age Celtic culture for far longer than her European counterparts. With the arrival of Christianity in the early 5th century, aspects of Ireland’s unique tribal, rural, oral, and hierarchical society, with its peculiar foodstuffs, were committed to writing within the scriptoria of the great monastic foundations. From at least the 7th century onwards, Irish monks turned out an unrivalled body of secular texts, the oldest extant vernacular sources in W. Europe, and it is these sources that provide an invaluable insight into the range of native Irish foodstuffs. Literary traditions are especially strong in Ireland, and the Irish have an unrivalled wealth of written material about their foodways, often romantic/tragic/of extraordinary dramatic impact.
The staples of the early Irish diet were cereals and dairy produce. OATS, BARLEY, WHEAT, and RYE were used in the preparation of PORRIDGE, gruel, boiled and roasted grain dishes, meal pastes, and coarse flat breads. The palatable qualities of wheaten flour and its potential for producing raised loaves rendered it a luxury and the food of festivals and holy days. More commonplace were cakes of oats and barley, baked on a flag or griddle over the open fire and taken with a variety of condiments and relishes. These are alluded to in the 7th/8th-century legal tract Uraicecht Becc (Small Primer) which details the proper rules of hospitality, stating that, should the noble (aire desso) call at one’s door, he and four of his retinue are legally entitled to: ‘four cakes to each man with their condiment, and their seasoning … four stalks of fresh onions to each cake, or honey, or fish, or curds; or a salted joint with every twenty cakes’.
Dairy produce was prevalent in the diet between the two Celtic festivals of Beltane (1 May) and Samhain (1 November). Between these two festivals, the lush upland pastures were grazed by cattle which in turn supplied milk in abundance for use in the preparation of sour milk drinks (which were preferred to fresh milk), curds, soft and hard cheeses, and of course fresh and salted butter.
The indigenous CHEESE-MAKING tradition is everywhere apparent in the sources and CURD CHEESES and soft and hard ones are regularly mentioned. Unpressed curds was a summer subsistence dish that was enlivened with the flavours of HAZELNUTS, WILD GARLIC, WOOD SORREL, HONEY, or salted butter. The diversity of shape and texture of both pressed and unpressed cheeses was enthusiastically interwoven into the imagery of many of the medieval tales. Thus for example, in the 9th-century Togail Bruidne Da Derga (Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel), there is mention of a warrior whose buttocks were each the size of a large soft cheese (maothal).
Likewise the soft unpressed sweet curd cheese millsän is referred to in the 11th-century tale Aislinge meic Con Glinne (Vision of MacConglinne): ‘Each oar we plied in the new-milk lake would send its sea-sand of cheese curds to the surface.’ So is the hard ‘swollen’ cheese (tanach): ‘a bristling rubble dyke of stone, of swollen hard cheeses’.
As with most medieval societies, meat was a luxury, enjoyed only as an occasional indulgence. In Ireland this trend was complicated by the fact that wealth and social standing were calculated by the extent of one’s dairy herd. Thus, the socio-economic value of cattle militated against the emergence of a beef-based meat diet. Consequently, PORK, but more usually smoked, salted BACON and MUTTON, were the most popularly consumed meats, along with their associated offal products. In particular, fatty streaky bacon enjoyed notorious popularity, served with at least an inch or two of fat; indeed, the general consensus was the fattier, the better. This defined taste for fat is also apparent in the Irish love of salted butter. Indeed, regardless of era, salted bacon, especially rashers of bacon, and salted butter have endured as favourite foodstuffs. Butter, when available in the past, was and still is served at all mealtimes and is used to enrich anything from oatcakes to potatoes to sweet currant cake.
In medieval Ireland large expanses of deciduous woodland dominated the landscape and, together with the great inland waterways, made a valuable contribution to the diet. VENISON (fresh and salted), WILD BOAR, hazelnuts, berries, haws, CRABAPPLES, WATERCRESS, wood sorrel, and wild garlic are alluded to frequently as highly regarded wild foodstuffs. In addition, freshwater fish and salmon were savoured in fresh or pickled form.
Overall, oats and dairy produce and salted meats continued to dominate the diet of most of the Irish until the widespread adoption of the potato in the 18th century. However, from the 12th century onwards it is clear that the Irish diet was undergoing significant changes, under the impact of conquest and colonization. In 1169, the Anglo-Normans arrived and established a presence in the southern and eastern regions. Here, under their influence, the cultivation of wheat, PEAS, and BEANS increased substantially. Accordingly, somewhat of a regional diet based on maslin breads of wheat and rye, and pea and bean POTTAGES, became an established feature of Anglo-Norman districts. The popularity of wheat and maslin loaves was also facilitated by the introduction of the built-up oven by the Anglo-Normans and the new monastic orders who came to Ireland in the wake of the conquest.
Over time the process of colonization, consolidated during the Tudor and Stuart eras, saw the emergence of an Anglo-Irish gentry class with distinctively rich and varied cuisines. Expansive estate lands, kitchen gardens, and walled orchards offered up many novel ingredients, and, as Fynes Moryson (1617) comments: ‘some lords and knights and gentlemen of the English-Irish, and all the English there abiding, having competent means, use the English diet.’ The same author describes in contrast how the native Irish:
eat cakes of oats for bread … they feed most on white meats, and esteem for a great dainty sour curds, vulgarly called by them ‘bonaclabbe’. And for this cause they watchfully keep their caws [cows] and fight for them as for their religion and life; and when they are almost starved, yet they will not kill a cow, except it be old and yield no milk.
By the early 18th century the rich cream and cheese diet, alluded to by Moryson, was on the decline due to the development of the extensive export trade in Irish beef and salted butter. As the exportation of butter soared throughout the 18th century, cheese-making, once so widespread, now became the prerogative of those with dairy stocks extensive enough to support a surplus of milk and cream. These commercial developments also coincided with an upsurge in the cultivation and consumption of potatoes. Amongst the poorer classes increased reliance on a diet dominated by copious quantities of potatoes and milk, and to a lesser extent oats, discouraged culinary innovation and paved the way for the disastrous Great Famine of the 1840s (see the next entry, IRELAND AND THE POTATO).
In some ways the post-famine diet displayed a noticeable continuity with pre-famine food traditions. Self-sufficient rural communities relied on the old-time staples of oats, bacon, and of course the potato. Native Irish food traditions were and are still markedly ‘peasant’ in origin and character. One reason is that until well into the 19th century, and indeed beyond, standard kitchen utensils were limited, through economic necessity, to the open cooking pot, the bastible pot (cast iron pot oven), and the griddle. Cooking was therefore confined to the open fire, with boiling and baking the most usually employed cooking methods. By consequence, what are recognized as national dishes, such as Irish mutton stew (see IRISH STEW), bacon and cabbage, CORNED BEEF, BOXTY, CHAMP, COLCANNON, SODA BREAD, oatmeal PORRIDGE, and OATCAKES, are the products of this fundamental and unsophisticated approach to cooking. Both it and they have survived with great tenacity because their roots run so deep.
However, changes did come. In the late 19th century, the increased emphasis on grazing and dairy farming, facilitated by the post-famine reduction in population, enabled many farmers to take advantage of the sharp upward trend in the price of cattle and butter. This climate of general agricultural prosperity saw an upsurge in the consumption of animal fat, taken in the form of dairy produce and meats, particularly poor-quality imported bacon. These changes also coincided with improvements in the retailing and distribution of food. Thus, by the early 20th century, easy access to shop-bought goods diversified the range of the rural diet. In particular, tea, sugar, and white baker’s bread became indispensable household items. In addition, access to these goods became symbolic of economic comfort and tea and white bread were held in great esteem, gradually displacing home-made breads, buttermilk, and milk drinks. Furthermore, as commercially produced goods became ever more apparent, a sort of stigma of inferiority attached itself not only to home-made foods but also to food from the wild (which evoked memories of the Great Famine, when they had been exploited by the poor and destitute).
Against this background it is understandable that fish, including many coarse fishes and shellfish, were considered objectionable outside coastal communities. Shellfish were viewed with definite suspicion, since eating improperly prepared or poor-quality molluscs had caused severe illness and even deaths in the past. In general, fish-eating was further tainted by its association with the Roman Catholic philosophy of fast and abstinence. Until well into the 20th century fish appeared on most dinner plates on the fast days of Wednesday and Friday, and during Lent. Boiled salted fish, served with a rudimentary white sauce, was the invariable choice on such occasions, truly penitential fare!
As the 20th century progressed, a good square meal of plain food became increasingly symbolic of economic comfort and security. Until well into the 1960s the average Irish dinner was the immutable trio of meat, vegetables, and potatoes, bulked out with white buttered bread and washed down with lashings of strong sweet tea, which was always drunk with the meal and not after. Although, during the economic boom of the 1960s, various ethnic cuisines began to make inroads into the diet in urban areas, thereby introducing a more cosmopolitan air to Irish foodways of the late 20th century, these foodways still bore the hallmark of their peasant origins, and the ‘immutable trio’ still reigned over many tables.
It is important, however, not to overemphasize the peasant nature of Irish foodways at the cost of blurring other elements of the wider picture. Irish society, regardless of era, has always maintained a complex social hierarchy, further diversified by outside settlers bringing their own food patterns and providing influences which trickled both laterally and downwards. At the upper echelons of society, the refined food culture of the Anglo-Irish gentry not only represented the economic affluence of the ‘Big House’, but also was perceived to be that of a foreign and decidedly more sophisticated culture; it thereby stood as the model for an aspiring Irish middle class, who sought to transcend the simplicity of their indigenous cuisine instead of embracing and building on it. It is good news that by the late 20th century the Irish have developed a more mature and independent set of attitudes to food, and that they are now ready to exploit the full potential of the island’s natural resources.
Regina Sexton
READING:
Ireland and the potato
How and when the potato was first introduced to Ireland remains the subject of much conjecture and debate. Of the stories which have been current, the most plausible states that it was introduced to Ireland from Virginia by Sir Walter Raleigh, who owned estates in County Cork and was mayor of the town of Youghal in 1588 and 1589. In any case, the potato was certainly in Ireland by the late 16th century, and an established feature of the Irish diet by the end of the 17th. So successful was its assimilation into Irish food patterns that by the end of the 18th century it had displaced the older staples of cereals and dairy produce as the dominant item in the diet of the cottier (cottager) class and the landless agricultural labourers. Indeed, on the eve of the Great Famine in 1845, over one-third of the Irish population relied almost exclusively on the potato for their sustenance.
Potato cookery was ideally suited to the limited range of Irish cooking utensils. Even the most materially impoverished kitchen was equipped with a cauldron and a griddle, and these were used imaginatively to create a variety of potato dishes. Most often potatoes were simply boiled in a cauldron or a three-legged pot over the open fire. In coastal regions it was commonplace to boil potatoes in sea-water, which prevented the skins cracking and thus ensured little mineral loss; this according to Florence Irwin (1949). After boiling, the potatoes were strained in a shallow wicker basket and delivered to the table ungarnished. The faster the eater, then the more potatoes could be snatched from the basket in the centre of the table. Olive Sharkey in her book Old Days Old Ways (1994) recalls her father’s memories of his potato dinners:
the potato dinner was always the favourite meal in his home years ago, with everyone reaching hungrily for the spuds the moment my grandmother placed them in their basket on the table. It was essential that everyone learn to peel their potatoes quickly or they might miss out, the greedy, skilful peelers hoarding up little caches of spuds on their plates before actually tucking in.
Boiled potatoes were eaten mostly with salt and milk or buttermilk. For those who could afford it, a herring boiled in milk or water, or a piece of salted bacon, proved a tasty accompaniment. In lean times, a meal of ‘potatoes and point’ was popular. This humorous appellation refers to the practice of eating potatoes, whilst simultaneously pointing to the bacon smoking in the rafters overhead, which was enjoyed only as a treat on festive or holy days.
Potatoes roasted in hot ashes, bruthóga, were a relished dish. A Belfast man writing in the early 19th century who is quoted in Bourke (1993) highlights the association of roast potatoes with young children. He states that in every small cabin, children are to be seen engaged in the roasting of their own private stocks of potatoes: ‘As you ride by a cabin you frequently see a group of children run to the door, each holding in his hand a roasted potato.’
In pre-famine Ireland the average cottier consumed anything between 7 and 14 lb of potatoes per day. Arthur Young notes that ‘six people, a man, his wife and four children, will eat eighteen stone of potatoes a week or 252 lb’. These extraordinary consumption rates were accompanied by an explosive increase in the population; between 1780 and 1845, it rose from four and a half million to eight and a half. So the already high demand for potatoes was steadily growing.
These factors, and extreme poverty, forced many to concentrate potato cultivation on varieties that returned the most abundant yields. In the years leading up to the Great Famine the variety Lumper, a heavy yielder although of inferior cooking quality and taste, had become dominant except in the north. Unfortunately it proved to be highly susceptible to a potato blight which had appeared in Belgium in the late 1830s and arrived in Ireland, with devastating consequences, in the mid-1840s. This blight was caused by a fungus, Phytophthora infestans, and its effect, where it took hold, was to destroy crops almost completely, leaving farmers with nothing but stinking black rotten remains of the tubers. In a country which had become so heavily dependent on a single crop, and on a single variety of this crop, the result was havoc. By 1851 about a million Irish had died and about a million had had to emigrate.
The tragedy gave the world one of the clearest lessons it has ever had in the necessity to maintain diversity of crops and of genes.
Some of the distress was alleviated by the British government through financial aid and food relief, starting in 1845 with the delivery of ‘yellowmeal’ (MAIZE). However, a change of government in Britain in the following year, coupled with a failure to grasp what was happening and a belief that ‘market forces’ would set things right, resulted in direct aid of this sort being discontinued.
Recurrent bad harvests in 1847 and 1848 then accelerated the suffering. In the absence of food, the starving resorted to the wild foods of the countryside and seashore. More consumed carrion and rodents. Others tried to squeeze the pulp from dank and rotting tubers in vain attempts at making boxty bread. The description of the ongoing catastrophe by Cecil Woodham-Smith (1962) is famous; and Austin Bourke (1993) has more recently presented, in a brilliant work, the results of his lifelong study of the episode.
Death through starvation, disease, and weather exposure ravaged the peasant population. Voluntary humanitarian intervention, in particular from the Quakers, saw the establishment of soup kitchens. The government followed suit by implementing what was known as the ‘Soup Kitchen Act’ in the spring of 1847, and Alexis Soyer (see ENGLISH COOKERY BOOKS), the famous French chef of the Reform Club in London, was entrusted with the task of creating a sustaining soup for the starving Irish. His recipe No. 1 called for 4 oz (115 g) leg of beef to 2 gallons (7.5 litres) of water, 2 oz (56 g) of dripping, 2 onions and other vegetables, 8 oz (225 g) of second-rate flour, 8 oz (225 g) pearl barley, 3 oz (85 g) of salt, and 0.5 oz (14 g) of brown sugar.
Ireland lost over a fifth of its population and suffered severe social scarring, all as the result of a potato-dominated diet. Yet the potato continued to feature as an important item in the post-famine diet of the Irish. To some extent its place on Irish plates was safeguarded by the introduction of spraying against disease. In any case, the Irish remain (in 1995) the highest per capita consumers of potatoes in the European Union.
Regina Sexton
READING:
Irish stew
is a celebrated Irish dish, yet its composition is a matter of dispute. Purists maintain that the only acceptable and traditional ingredients are neck mutton chops or kid, potatoes, onions, and water. Others would add such items as carrots, turnips, and pearl barley; but the purists maintain that they spoil the true flavour of the dish. The ingredients are boiled and simmered slowly for up to two hours.
Mutton was the dominant ingredient because the economic importance of sheep lay in their wool and milk produce and this ensured that only old or economically non-viable animals ended up in the cooking pot, where they needed hours of slow boiling. Irish stew is the product of a culinary tradition that relied almost exclusively on cooking over the open fire.
It seems that Irish stew was recognized as a national dish as early as about 1800 since it is the subject of a contemporary English broadsheet ballad:
then hurrah for an Irish Stew
That will stick to your belly like glue.
Regina Sexton
Irn-Bru
a Scottish soft drink which is important for its symbolic value as well as for its refreshing qualities.
Under the less puzzling name ‘Iron Brew’, this was one of the patent bottled drinks developed in Scotland in the early part of the 20th century. The impetus towards commercial production of such drinks lay partly in the strength of the temperance movement, and derived some inspiration from the tradition of tonics and health drinks prepared by herbalists.
In the early days ‘iron brews’ were produced by several manufacturers, and often contained no iron. During the Second World War, they all disappeared (as a result of the rationalization of the soft drinks industry); and after it legislation was passed which made it compulsory to add 0.125 g of iron per fluid ounce to any beverage bearing the name ‘iron-brew’. There was also some doubt about the future legality of calling something a ‘brew’ if it was not brewed in the traditional manner.
A. G. Barr, one of the main producers (and now the only one), accordingly changed the name to Irn-Bru. Their product, heavily and wittily advertised (e.g. with images of iron girders which were supposedly dissolved into the brew), became so successful that it has now taken the title of ‘Scotland’s other drink’, carried around the world by nostalgic Scots, and particularly to football matches at home and abroad where Scotland’s number one drink is not allowed.
Irn-Bru does contain 0.002% of ammonium ferric citrate, besides caffeine, sugar, flavourings, and colouring. It is orangey-golden in colour and has a sweet-spicy flavour with a citrus tang.
Carole Bloom
irradiation
is subjecting an object to radiation; and a short, powerful blast of radiation will sterilize foodstuffs by killing bacteria and other micro-organisms, as well as any larger creatures infesting the food. It does not make the food radioactive. Various kinds of radiation can be used: in order of increasing energy, electrons, X-rays, and gamma rays. The last two will sterilize food inside packaging.
Irradiation is routinely used on foods for hospital patients in intensive care whose immune systems are damaged so that they constantly risk infection. It is also used on meals prepared for astronauts.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have approved the use of irradiation for foods sold commercially, but there has been noticeable hesitation to apply the technique in Britain.
Ralph Hancock
isinglass
consists of COLLAGEN, which, when heated with water, yields a pure form of GELATIN. Isinglass is obtained from the swimming bladder (also known as ‘sound’) of certain fish, especially the STURGEON (from which ‘Russian isinglass’ is obtained), but also a large CATFISH of S. America (yielding ‘Brazilian isinglass’), some species of Asian waters, and (in N. American waters) HAKE and COD.
The sounds, once removed from the fish and cleaned, are dried, and treated to acquire various shapes (e.g. ‘book’ when folded like the leaves of a book, ‘pipe’, ‘ribbon’).
A main use of isinglass has been for clarifying liquids, including wines and beers. Its fibrous structure apparently gives it this capability, which is not possessed by ordinary gelatin. Isinglass used to be equally important for culinary purposes, especially CONFECTIONERY and desserts such as FRUIT JELLY and BLANCMANGE; but its cost by comparison with competing products has virtually ended this practice.
Israel
a country whose foodways are diverse and in some respects perplexing. Schwartz (1992) has written with brilliance and sympathy about the diverse strands which have come together to form the present tangle. Underlying it is the simple fare which native inhabitants of the region have eaten for many centuries, even millennia: wheat products, lentils, broad beans, fruit and nuts, raw vegetables, flat breads, some lamb or kid, and—very prominent—dairy products. JORDAN offers a point of comparison for this stratum.
However, the earliest Israeli settlers, once the country had been established in 1948, tended to come from colder climates and to have established food preferences which were not suited to the warm Middle East. Schwartz explains that pioneering nutritionists and cookery writers in Israel, especially Lilian Cornfeld, had to work hard to familiarize incomers with such foods as the tomato and the aubergine and to lead them towards salads of raw fruit and vegetables and dairy foods. They succeeded, aided by the impact on the incomers of the outdoor life and hard physical work. For many of them this was quite novel, since the culture from which they came prized a thin, pale, scholarly appearance and all this stood for more than strength and robust looks. However, as Schwartz comments:
The physical image of the Israeli Jew was transformed. The weak, thin, small, bent Jewish immigrant managed to raise a new generation of people bearing similar physical characteristics to those born American or Australian.
Attitudes which are considered characteristic of the kibbutz movement were helpful in this respect. The kibbutzim who were already there before the Second World War had no problems in co-operating with Arabs in this and other respects, and even in the 1970s their food was very simple and reflected local resources. They had not had to grapple to any significant extent with JEWISH DIETARY LAWS.
However, the increasingly variegated flood of new settlers who were pouring into the country were bringing with them dishes and food customs from their lands of origin, and thus changing patterns of food consumption. One very marked influence has been that of the Jews from the YEMEN; but a survey of street foods in Israel now provides a mosaic of many other cuisines, sometimes adapted to conditions in Israel but often surviving in a pure state. Claudia Roden (1981) listed the numerous items which she found at snack bars and food stalls, explaining that foods of the Arab world were prominent, e.g. Ful medames, shawarma (see QAWARMA), TABBOULEH. There were also dishes brought from C. and E. Europe: schnitzel (see VEAL), GOULASH, GEFILTE FISH, and chopped LIVER. And that was not all. Roden continues:
It was exciting to find ‘hamine’ eggs sold in the street and that ‘bourekas’, the old ‘ladino’ Turkish savoury pies, are so popular a snack that their name has been given to the type of film where people shout and hiss at the villain. A grated carrot salad with orange juice, honey and raisins from Morocco was offered at a kibbutz for breakfast, and I found that Moroccan ‘cigars’ (meat-filled pastries) are the most popular items at Barmitzvahs. Stuffed vine leaves, cucumber and yoghourt salad, ‘hummus’, aubergine and spicy mixed salads are sold ready-made in supermarkets, and Iraqi ‘kubba’ and ‘sambusak’ are frozen convenience foods.
Chicken soup and ‘kneidlach’, ‘knishes’ and ‘kreplach’ and carrot ‘tzimmes’ are still made in the houses of those who came from Eastern Europe. ‘Latkas’ and ‘blintzes’, ‘pirochki’ and ‘kugel’, ‘lox’ and ‘beigels’ are served in tourist hotels, but for the young Israeli-born Sabras they are nostalgic ‘soul foods’. Picked up in Russia, Poland and Germany ‘Yiddish’ food once served to reaffirm a Jewish identity in later homelands.
(To learn more about some of these items, see JEWISH COOKERY, BÖREK, PIROG, BAGEL, BLINI, KIBBEH, KREPLACH, SAMOSA, TZIMMES. Kneidlach are a sort of DUMPLING, latkas are potato FRITTERS, lox is SALMON.)
The contrast between its Ashkenazi and Sephardi branches is explained under JEWISH COOKERY. One way of looking at the cuisines of Israel is to see the country as an arena in which now one and then the other has been to the fore. In approximate terms, Ashkenazi food was in the lead until the 1950s, but was subsequently overtaken by Sephardi food; in 1949 the Sephardi accounted for just over 20% of the population, but in the early 1960s the proportion had risen to almost 50%. Now, at the end of the 20th century, further changes in the pattern of immigration appear to be restoring leadership to the Ashkenazi. All this depends simply on the provenance of the majority of immigrants at any particular time.
The situation with regard to dietary laws in Israel is paradoxical. The proportion of the whole population which adheres strictly to the laws is small, but the influence of this minority on explosive questions such as the availability and marketing in Israel of forbidden foods is greater than their numbers would lead one to expect. It can, however, be said that hitherto just about any food (including pork, sometimes described as ‘white meat’) has been available in Israel for those who are willing to seek it out.
In this complex situation it would be understandable if it proved impossible to identify a national dish. However, FALAFEL is widely regarded as fulfilling this role.
Italian cookery books
in the early centuries, were of considerable importance for the history of European cookery. A separate account is given of the work of PLATINA (1475), the first printed cookery book, but the story should begin with the manuscripts which antedated that. Platina deserves praise for several reasons, one of which was that he set a good example for all subsequent cookery writers (and one which some of them have followed) in stating clearly the source of most of the recipes which constituted the latter part of his book. This source was ‘Maestro Martino, former cook to the Most Reverend Monsignor Chamberlain Patriarch of Aquileia’, as his 15th-century manuscript, only discovered in the 1930s, describes him.
In her essay about Martino, Anne Willan (1977) remarks on the extent of Martino’s kitchen skills, fully apparent in the manuscript, and the breadth of his knowledge:
Martino mentions the sausages of Bologna, the rice dishes of Lombardy, the crayfish of Venice and Rome, and the vegetables and fried dishes for which Florence was so famous. His easy familiarity with them all shows that by the 15th century a recognizably Italian style of cooking had already developed. Indeed, there are already signs of common methods and recipes in the few cookery manuscripts that antedate Martino, but none of them is nearly so well organized or complete as his work.
The same author describes the position of pasta in this early work and the role of feasts in Italian court life of the time, observing that although Martino by virtue of positions he held must have been entirely familiar with dishes of the utmost sophistication he chose in his manuscript to give relatively simple ones such as would suit the household of a well-to-do merchant. She praises Martino for discarding ‘outmoded purées and porridges’ and for being free of the old tendency to disguise foods: ‘On the contrary, Martino tries to bring out the flavor of a single ingredient by careful seasoning and moderate cooking.’
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Martino. Because Platina’s book was so successful and so widely disseminated (over 30 editions in its first 100 years and translations into several other languages), Martino’s recipes were everywhere. One should perhaps add ‘except, perhaps, in England’, since an English translation of Platina did not appear until the second half of the 20th century. However, Martino’s recipes were also embodied in another printed Italian cookery book, Epulario, which did appear in English at an early date and was often reprinted.
Another notable book in the same tradition, Banchetti by Cristoforo da Messisburgo (1548), was the work of a household steward who paid particular attention to the serving of dishes and to the credenza, which then meant an elaborate course of many cold dishes and only later came to mean a sideboard on which dishes were laid out.
The next landmark was publication in 1570 of the first edition of the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, a beautiful book which provided not only a full complement of recipes which marked many advances from those of Martino but also contained amazingly fine plates depicting all the equipment which a leading cook of the time would have in his kitchen. The plates have continued to be used right up to the present time, because there is no other resource available which gives such a clear visual impression of a major kitchen in Renaissance Europe.
There followed a lull in the production of important cookery books, although one or two interesting volumes on carving (especially Il trinciante, by Vincente CERVIO, 1581) were published.
Vincenzo Corrado (1738–1836), a lay monk in the region of Naples, who became a teacher after the suppression of the religious orders in 1809, wrote numerous cookery books. Two of these are outstanding and ran to many editions: Il cuoco galante (Naples, 1773) and Il credenziere di buon gusto (Naples, 1778). Many of the others were of limited scope (e.g. potato cookery) or of a routine character; but Del cibo pittagorico ovvero erbaceo (1781) remains of considerable interest as an early vegetarian cookbook.
Corrado’s recipes lacked the detail which anyone but a professional cook would need. Generally his ideas reflected the dominant French influence, but with material on the regional cookery of Lazio and Campania.
A more important work was the ambitious L’Apicio moderno (1790), a vast work in six volumes by the eminent cosmopolitan chef Francesco Leonardi, who worked at Naples when that city was at the height of its elegance, and also for Catherine the Great at St Petersburg. The book resembles an encyclopedia, with 3,000 recipes from five other countries in addition to Italy. However, despite its international flavour, the book is focused on Italy and there is some adaptation of foreign recipes to suit Italian tastes and ingredients. Leonardi was strong on pasta and could claim to be the first cookery author to record the combination of pasta and tomato which is so characteristic of Naples. His recipe for tomato sauce (sugo di pomodoro), as Anne Willan observes, is exactly the same as the recipe still in use. Naples and Neapolitan cookery, with dialect terms, were featured again by CAVALCANTI (1837), who can be regarded as the first regional cookery writer of Italy.
In the latter part of the 19th century there was one outstanding author, Pellegrino Artusi, whose book La scienza cucina e l’arte de mangiar bene (Science in Cookery and the Art of Eating Well) quickly became the best loved of all Italian cookery books, running to well over 100 editions by the end of the 20th century. The first edition (c.1890) was published by Artusi himself, because he could not find a commercial publisher for the book—perhaps because it was long and contained not just a large number of fine recipes but also guidance on diet and nutrition, background information, folklore, and anecdotes, i.e. all the elements which go to make a classic cookery book, but which were not perceived in this way in publishing circles in 19th-century Italy. Artusi was born in Romagna, but spent his life in Florence and Viareggio.
A 20th-century author who is a worthy successor to Artusi is the Roman Ada Boni, whose Il talismano della felicità (1929) is a remarkable collection of dishes from all over the country, expressed with slightly more precision than Artusi’s. Her La cucina romana (1947) is also recommended. More recently, there has been an explosion of interest in Italian cooking both within and beyond its borders. There have been notable interpretations of regional foods by English and American authors as well as important inventories and reference works, some of which are mentioned in the next entry.
Lord Westbury (1983) compiled a fine bibliography of earlier Italian cookery books, reflecting his own great enthusiasm for research in this field and for collecting.
Italy
a country which had been all of a piece in the Roman Empire, indeed the centrepiece thereof, led a fragmented existence from the early Middle Ages until the 19th century, when under the auspices of Garibaldi it took its present political form. This fragmentation did not prevent it from being the cradle of the Renaissance in the arts, including the culinary ones. While the civilizations of France and Spain were still in bud, those of Italy (plural because of the numerous city states which shared the credit) were already flowering.
The first printed cookery book was that of PLATINA (1475). It was preceded by many important manuscripts, especially that of Maestro Martino, and followed by many other books (see ITALIAN COOKERY BOOKS), a publishing cavalcade which was rivalled by those in Germany and England but ahead of what France produced. Indeed Italy was clearly in the vanguard, so far as the culinary arts were concerned, of the whole of Europe. Whatever view one takes of the contribution of Catherine de’ Medici (see CULINARY MYTHOLOGY) to the development of cookery in France, it is indisputable that Italy was leading the way during the Renaissance. By the end of the 16th century, however, the genius displayed by Italian artists working in many fields, including the kitchen, showed signs of fatigue, even exhaustion. As Anna del Conte (1987) observes, it was around then that ‘the leadership of European gastronomy moved over the Alps into France’.
One may speculate about the underlying reasons for this change. Were the city-states of Italy now too small to provide the base for even greater artistic advances than they had already achieved? Were questions of political and economic power involved? No doubt a full explanation would be highly complex. And it may be that this whole concept of gastronomic leadership does not represent the most fruitful way of looking at these matters. If the French went on to create their haute cuisine, which flourished so noticeably in the 19th century and tended to dominate the world of expensive hotels and high-class restaurants until quite recent times, are they to be envied and the Italians to be seen as losers in some sort of inter-cultural competition? The answer is surely not, for although they have not occupied the commanding heights of haute cuisine (a phrase for which they have no equivalent) they have succeeded better than any other European country in developing and spreading over most parts of the world a cuisine which has the enormous merits of being cheerful, tasty, varied, inexpensive, and unworrying (no need to worship international star chefs or quail in front of snooty head waiters or act as though the cost of some pretentious dish is no problem—on the contrary, all one has to do is enjoy the food, whether cooked at home or ordered in a restaurant). It will be for people in the 3rd millennium to decide which countries or cultures have made the greatest contribution, in terms of food, to human happiness, but it seems safe to predict that the Italians will be up there at or near the top of the list.
One other matter to be settled in the 3rd millennium concerns a speculative prediction advanced by Fortey (1998) in his excellent ‘unauthorised biography’ of Life (on earth), where he muses on the size of the pepper mills wielded by Italian waiters, suggesting that the evolutionary phenomenon of ‘larger and larger’, familiar from examples such as the giraffe’s neck and the peacock’s tail, could apply here. He has already noted that the mills have been growing in size with the passage of time, and has observed ‘tiny waiters struggling with vast black grinders, all the while trying to smile and keep up the banter’. What if there is an accelerating and runaway further increase? ‘In my scenario,’ he writes, ‘the process continues until the pepper-grinder becomes so large that the waiter staggers around on wobbly legs, unable to lift it.’ Such gigantism usually leads to some form of extinction. One must hope that in this instance it would apply to the grinders rather than to the restaurants or the waiters, whose tendency to bring elements of comic opera into the gastronomic scene is to be applauded.
Applause is due also to the writers of various kinds who have done much to record the wealth of Italian foodstuffs. The exceptionally numerate di Corato, whose 451 formaggi d’Italia (1977) and 928 condimenti d’Italia (1978) are but two of a series, is one example. The works sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture and bodies such as INSOR (the National Institute of Rural Sociology), producing works such as ‘atlases’ of typical food by category (cheeses, cured meats, and so on), are another. Thirdly, there are the books devoted to the wide range of different cuisines within the frontiers of Italy and the consequent wealth of different recipes which are a characteristic of Italian cookery as a whole. A compilation such as that of Anna Maria Gosetti della Salda (1967), with more than 2,000 regional recipes, is tangible evidence of this. It may be true that, once again, the political and economic history of Italy is the root cause of this astonishing array of local culinary traditions. It could have been the fragmentation of Italy up to the time of its unification which ensured that these local traditions were kept alive; and that a new overarching tradition came into being, namely the tradition of maintaining traditions.
Whatever the explanation, the traditions are strong and their maintenance is encouraged by the Italian authorities and also by the growing literature on the subject. Perhaps because it is such an attractive subject, it has evoked much good writing, in English as well as in Italian, during recent decades. The charming overview by Claudia Roden (1989) serves as a good introduction.
In Sicily, where the cuisine was renowned in the time of classical Greece and during the Roman Empire, there was a strong Arab influence in early medieval times and this is still highly visible. The market in Palermo, La Vuccirìa, displays many sweet items of Arab origin, using almonds and dried fruit; and on one view of the history of PASTA some of the kinds on display would have their origin in items introduced by the Arabs when they occupied the island from the 9th to the 11th centuries. Sicilian savoury dishes often include tell-tale ingredients such as raisins, almonds again, and so on.
Naples, one of the three most historically important ports of Italy (the others being Venice and Genoa), was in medieval times a gateway for the entry of CATALAN COOKERY into Italy, and has continued to play a lively and pioneering role (one thinks of the TOMATO and above all of PIZZA) in Italian foodways, helped by the extraordinary degree of animation—high even by Italian standards—with which Neapolitans conduct their lives.
A calmer spirit prevails in Tuscany, famed for its traditional breads and olive groves, and part of the region which the Etruscans dominated before their civilization succumbed to the Romans. Parenti (1972) has pieced together the tantalizingly sparse information which survives about Etruscan foodways; but how much may have been owed to these by the Romans, and by those who in turn were the heirs of the Roman kitchen, remains uncertain.
In the far north of Italy, in the provinces bordering on Austria and Switzerland (gateways to the north), the picture is strikingly different. NOODLES resembling those of C. and N. Europe, rather than the kinds of pasta familiar in the rest of Italy, are present, and in Lombardy the consumption of pasta was negligible until quite recent times, its place having been occupied by POLENTA and RISOTTO. There is a similar north–south difference over the use of fats and oils, OLIVE OIL having been used in the south, LARD (pork fat) in the centre, and BUTTER in the north.
The frontiers of Italy are by no means the frontiers of Italian foods. PASTA and PIZZA are world conquerors. Italian ICE CREAM vendors are found in all continents, trading on the reputation which Italy deservedly gained for making ice creams of unrivalled quality. Parma HAM and PARMESAN cheese are two other invaders of foreign territory. Italian culinary influence spreads far and wide and is particularly noticeable in the USA.
See also CLASSICAL ROME.
READING:
ivy gourd
Coccinia grandis, or scarlet-fruited gourd, a CUCURBIT vine which occurs from the Sudan through India to SE Asia and is occasionally cultivated. The leaves are cooked as a green vegetable, and the fruits, which look like small plump gherkins, are also edible. The green (unripe) fruits are used in curry dishes in India.