Lablab purpureus ssp purpureus, a LEGUME of African or Asian origin which has been grown in India since very early times. It is now cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide for human food and also as animal fodder. It has many merits: a high protein content; a high yield; the ability to stay green during droughts; and easy harvesting.
Other common names for the lablab bean include bonavist(a) bean, Egyptian bean, and hyacinth bean.
In modern Arabic, the general word for a bean, lubia, is taken to mean the lablab bean unless otherwise indicated.
Lablab comes in two main forms: a bushy plant, or one which grows like a vine. Pods vary from 5 to 20 cm (2 to 8″) long and may be straight or curved. The beans are usually black or nearly so, but white in some varieties. The fresh mature seeds (especially dark-coloured ones) must be boiled to become edible; they contain a trypsin inhibitor that is broken down by heat and a toxic cyanogenetic glucoside that is soluble in the cooking water. The hardness of the seed coat necessitates a long cooking time.
Young pods make an excellent table vegetable. Dried seeds are a wholesome, palatable food, either cooked and eaten directly, or processed into bean cakes or fermented to produce a sort of TEMPE. Leaves and flowers are cooked and eaten like spinach. The sprouts are comparable to soya bean or mung bean sprouts.
(salmon ham), a German product, not actually a HAM, for it is made from PORK loin. This is lightly salted, smoked, rolled, and encased in bacon fat. It has a pink colour, as its name suggests, and is eaten raw. Similar products are made in Poland, and in France, where it is called filet de Saxe (Saxon fillet).
produced by many kinds of BACTERIA in the fermentation of MILK and of some vegetable products, is mainly responsible for the sour taste of most milk products, and of other products, including SAUERKRAUT, GHERKINS, OLIVES, and cocoa.
Lactic acid-producing bacteria, often more simply called lactic acid bacteria, change the degree of acidity in (to take the main example) milk. When this process reaches the point at which the proteins are precipitated, the first step in CHEESE-MAKING has been accomplished; the CURD which will eventually become the finished cheese has been formed. The differing characteristics of the various lactic acid bacteria are one important factor in bringing about the wide variety of characteristics in cheeses.
an inability to digest lactose (milk sugar), so that drinking milk causes a digestive upset. Among white Europeans and a few other groups it is an unusual disability. But in the rest of the world, especially Africa and Asia, it is usual for the ability to digest milk to be lost as a person grows up. It seems likely that human beings originally had the capability to produce lactase in infancy and for as long as they needed mother’s milk, but not thereafter, when the capability would have been superfluous. However, at some time after human beings in C. and N. Europe had begun to use the milk of domesticated animals and were in a position to benefit considerably from a prolongation of their ability to produce lactase, a new gene which provided for such prolongation would have been favoured by natural selection, so that this portion of the human race became able to digest lactose in adulthood and even into old age.
Lactose is the main and almost the sole sugar in milk. It is a disaccharide (double sugar) composed of the simple sugars dextrose and galactose. Splitting lactose into these two sugars is the first stage in digesting it, and is done with the aid of the enzyme lactase. A supply of lactase is therefore essential for digesting milk or milk products, unless they have been treated, before they are ingested, by some process which anticipates the requirement. Just about all Indians, for example, eat lots of yoghurt because the changes effected in milk by turning it into yoghurt make it digestible without the aid of lactase.
Most statements about lactose intolerance require qualification, since it is not an absolute condition. Those who are affected by it are usually able to digest small amounts of milk—say, a small glass of milk, taken with other food, as opposed to a large glass taken by itself. In many milk products, including YOGHURT and cheeses (especially hard types), much of the lactose is consumed during fermentation and changed into lactic acid, so that the result is more digestible.
(sometimes ladoo) the Hindi word for ‘a spherical sweetmeat’, a category of Indian confectionery defined by shape rather than ingredients, which vary to an almost infinite extent.
These confections are typically based on a cereal or pulse flour or meal (e.g. semolina, rice flour, soya or MUNG BEAN or BESAN FLOUR). These basic ingredients may be fried in GHEE; may be enhanced with small pieces of dried fruit, nuts, CARDAMOM seeds, or grated coconut; and are usually mixed with sugar or syrup and formed into balls while still warm. Some laddu are made from a mixture of khoya (see MILK REDUCTION) and sugar formed into balls without cooking. Laddu are often quite large, with a diameter of 3–4 cm (1.5″), but others are relatively small. A yellow colour is popular. Some laddu have special significance as festive sweets, e.g. at weddings.
READING:
is Lady Canning, transformed into an Indian term by the moira (professional sweet-maker in Bengal) who created it. Chitrita Banerji (1997) explains that Lady Canning, who was ‘Vicereine of India’ at that time (shortly after 1858 when Lord Canning became the first Viceroy of India), challenged Bhim Chandra Nag, a prominent moira, to create a new sweet for her birthday. He did, and ‘this new product, large, spherical, succulent and fragrant, became known as the ladikanee’. It remains very popular. See PANTUA.
Lady Canning was one of a very small number of titled British personages whose names passed into the culinary vernacular of other cultures. Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton (see POLAND) are two others.
a surprising name for Elops machnata, a silvery fish of tropical waters which has poor flesh, full of small bones. It is sometimes called ‘giant herring’, since it has a superficial resemblance to a herring, but is larger (up to 90 cm/35″ in length); and sometimes ‘ten-pounder’, in allusion to the weight which anglers expect it to have. It is related to the TARPON and MILKFISH.
In many places the ladyfish is better known to anglers than to commercial fishermen, but it does appear in the markets in SE Asia, for example. An author in Hawaii (Rizzuto, 1977) observes optimistically that the awa’aua (its local name) can be used in fish cakes if the bones are first ‘kneaded out’, a laborious process.
a name given in various parts of the world to crabs inhabiting lagoons or living a mainly terrestrial life on the banks of lagoons. Generally, these are of little importance as food. However, one W. African species, Cardiosoma armata, especially plentiful in the Nzima country of Ghana, is accounted the best crab to eat in that country. The carapace, which is dark blue above, may measure 15 cm (6″) across. The legs are bright red and covered with stiff black bristles.
usually refers to a Chinese-Malay and SE Asian spiced soup containing thick rice noodles with meat, vegetables, or seafood. There are many variations: in the type of noodle (a Sarawak laksa is made with thin vermicelli and a Johor laksa uses wheaten spaghetti); the flavour (many laksas are made with coconut milk); the seasonings (Penang uses tamarind, Johor is more akin to a curry flavour); and the main ingredient (mackerel in Penang, chicken and prawns in Sarawak). Laksa leaf, which is the herb RAU RAM, is often added as a final seasoning.
Many modern Malays consider the word derived from the Sanskrit laksha, meaning ‘many’ (i.e. many-flavourings), but in fact it comes from the original Persian word for NOODLE, lakhsha (meaning ‘slippery’). Although Iran has not been a heavy consumer of noodles, it has an ancient history of noodle-making; indeed, there has been speculation that the Chinese learned the idea of noodle-making from the same Persian merchants who introduced the flour mill to them during the Han dynasty (206BC – AD220). The term lakhsha was certainly used in medieval Arabic and has shown considerable powers of survival. It is still used in E. Europe (Hungarian laska, Russian lapsha, Ukrainian lokshina, Lithuanian lakstiniai) and in Afghanistan (lakhchak).
Also, it is known that Arab traders or Indian Muslims had spread the use of pasta to Indonesia in perhaps the 13th century. The old Indonesian and Malaysian name laksa shows that this pasta originated in Persia, not from a Chinese source (as in the case of the modern Indonesian name mie).
Charles Perry
is the meat of the young domestic SHEEP, Ovis aries. The age at which a lamb ceases to be ‘lamb’ and becomes a young sheep, technically yielding MUTTON, is not entirely clear. Biologically, this happens when the animal grows its first pair of permanent teeth. In culinary practice, two types of lamb are recognized.
First, there is the sucking lamb, fed only on its mother’s milk. Formerly this was popular in England, and, known as house lamb, was bred especially for the Christmas market. It is now unusual to see very young lamb for sale in Britain, but it is still a delicacy in other countries. In France it is known as agneau de lait, or agneau de Pauillac (Pauillac is a town near Bordeaux); the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese also hold such meat in high esteem, and young lambs are eaten in the Middle East. The flesh of a sucking lamb is very pale and tender, but lacks flavour.
Secondly, the meat of the weaned animal, between four months and one year old, is also called lamb, and forms the bulk of the sheep meat now sold in Britain. Older animals (from about one year) are properly called ‘hogg’ or ‘hoggett’, and their meat has to count as mutton, but it will not have developed a good mutton flavour until quite a bit older.
French pré-salé (salt meadow) lamb is that grazed on salt marshes. It has a distinctive and highly valued flavour, as has Welsh lamb similarly grazed.
In haute cuisine, lamb does not have the primary importance of beef. Although the meat is the foundation of a number of classic dishes, it is little used for stock, and the fat has a distinctive flavour which is not liked in the western world. (Traditionally, it was used for making tallow candles.) Further east, both lamb stock and fat are used, and the fat from FAT-TAILED SHEEP was of great importance in medieval Persian cookery, and continues to be used in the Near and Middle East and C. Asia.
Lamb is a fatty meat, and most cuisines recognize the need for some kind of acid ingredient or sauce to ‘cut’ this. In England, mint sauce, composed of chopped fresh mint, sugar, and vinegar, has been the accepted accompaniment for roast lamb since the mid-19th century. In Spain, wine or wine vinegar is frequently used as a cooking or basting liquid. Around the N. Mediterranean, including Spain, the Balkans, and Greece, sauces for lamb are thickened with egg yolks beaten up with lemon juice. In N. African and Persian cookery, fruit such as apricots or quinces are often combined in stews with lamb or mutton.
Another approach to lamb cookery is to use strongly flavoured seasonings. Garlic and aromatic herbs such as thyme, rosemary, and oregano are used to flavour French roasts of lamb; paprika is favoured in Spain and Portugal, rosemary or anchovy and garlic in Italy, and tarragon flavours lamb stews in Romania and Hungary. (The combination of mint with lamb also occurs in the Middle East and India; either chopped fresh mint is used as an ingredient, especially in minced lamb dishes, or it is served alongside in a yoghurt sauce.) Vegetables which have some sweetness, such as turnips, are used as ingredients of French lamb stews. Alternatively, the lamb may be cooked with potatoes or rice, the fat cooking out to enrich and flavour the starchy accompaniment.
The importance of lamb in the cookery of western Europe (it has never had the same status in the Americas) is of recent date. It has ever been a seasonal food, and the economic importance of the sheep (for wool) encouraged farmers to conserve their flocks until past infancy. It was only with the advent of refrigerated transport from Australia and New Zealand that lamb became plentiful as well as cheap and displaced mutton from our tables.
For some other European lamb dishes, see EASTER FOODS; HOTPOT; IRISH STEW; LOBSCOUSE; NAVARIN; SCOTCH BROTH.
It is in the Arab world, and in areas influenced by it, such as N. Africa, that mutton and lamb are most exploited in cookery. They are also much used in the cuisine of Pakistan, C. Asian countries, and N. Indian MOGHUL CUISINE.
Over much of this area, a whole roast lamb (or sheep) is the principal festive dish. Claudia Roden (1968) comments on one important Islamic tradition:
Although the poor can rarely afford meat, there is one day at least when all are assured of eating it. This is at the Eid-el-Kurban [the tenth day of the last month of the Muhammadan year, a festival in commemoration of Abraham’s sacrifice]. … By ancient custom, well-to-do families sacrifice a sheep or lamb on this day … It is then roasted on a spit, and the meat is distributed to the poor. These offerings are also made after a death, a birth, and on other important occasions such as moving house, the start or end of a long journey, or the arrival of an important guest.
Fat-tailed sheep (of lamb age or older) are highly valued, and are often roasted with the tail intact, curved over the body to display it and to help baste the meat. KEBABS are a popular way of using smaller pieces of lamb and mutton. Kofta kebabs are made from minced meat, mixed with onion, egg, and spices, made into sausage shapes threaded on skewers and grilled (in Morocco, these are called brochettes). Indian moist dishes of lamb are usually quite highly spiced in combinations which depend on the region and the tastes of the cook. Root ginger, fresh chillies, and garlic are all used as the basis for sauces; ASAFOETIDA replaces garlic in Kashmir. Cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander seeds, and numerous other spices are used to flavour stews of lamb and potatoes or turnips, or dupiazas (which are dishes characterized by a garnish of onions fried until very crisp), or put into mild almond, cream, or yoghurt sauces.
Complex dishes of spiced rice in the category of PILAF, which may include lamb, are also found throughout the Middle East and C. Asia. Recipes which originated in the area of Iran are particularly fine. The meat is often combined with fruit to give SWEET-AND-SOUR combinations, such as a polo (pilaf) of lamb and dried apricots. Plov (the Russian version of pilaf, their recipes deriving from the Caucasus and C. Asia) is flavoured with saffron and onion, incorporating fruit such as raisins, pomegranate, or sour plums, or, in the Uzbek version, dried barberries. BIRIANIS may also be based on lamb.
Instead of rice, COUSCOUS is the usual N. African base for lamb and mutton dishes.
See also: HEAD; KIBBEH; KOFTA; TAILS; MEATBALLS; MINCE; MOUSSAKA.
Laura Mason
Sucking lambs are often cooked whole, or cut into quarters, a leg of baby lamb providing two servings. Older lambs are still relatively small creatures, and there are none of the complex patterns of jointing associated with beef; similar cuts are found in Britain, the USA, and France. The animal is split down the backbone and cut into fore and hind quarters. The former yields the shoulder joint, containing the blade bone; the rest of the quarter is split into the breast; the ‘scrag end’ (the neck closest to the head); and the ‘best end’, which lies further back. This last cut, which contains an ‘eye’ of good meat, is much exploited. It can be separated into individual ribs to give cutlets or left in one piece and roasted as a ‘rack’; this is what is called carré d’agneau in French, a famous dish. Two racks, with the ends of the ribs exposed and arranged to intersect, make a ‘guard of honour’; sewn together to make a circle with the meat on the inside and the curved bones radiating outwards, they make a ‘crown’. If the two racks are cut from the carcass without splitting the backbone, they equal a ‘chine’.
A hindquarter, of course, provides a leg. In France the lower part of this is known as a gigot, a word also used in Scotland, where it is pronounced jiggot. Further forward in the animal lies the loin, which can be cut into chops, or left whole; two loins with the backbone intact equal a ‘saddle’. In England, a chop cut from a saddle is called a ‘Barnsley chop’. The ‘chump’ is the rear end of the loin, above the leg; it contains a high proportion of bone. A leg and loin together comprise a ‘haunch’.
a small cake covered with chocolate icing and rolled in coconut. They are an Australian speciality believed to be named after Baron Lamington, governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901, or his wife. It cannot be proved that they were invented in the kitchens of Government House, although the interest Lady Lamington appears to have taken in household matters may support the claim. A letter she wrote to thank the cookery writer Hannah MacLurcan for her most recent book in 1898 expresses an awareness of the advantage of clear practical instructions in the writing of recipes. However, the book contains no reference to the cake.
Some sources credit Amy Schauer, instructress in cookery at Brisbane’s Central College from 1897 to 1938 and a renowned authority on culinary matters who was reputedly very fond of rich cakes and puddings. She wrote a cookery book, The Schauer Cookery Book (1909), which by the time of its 1935 edition had almost 200 cake recipes. However, the first known printed recipe for lamingtons appeared earlier, in 1902 in the cookery section of the Queenslander, a weekly newspaper, credited simply to ‘A Subscriber’. From this time onwards recipes for the cake proliferated.
Fund-raising Lamington Drives are a thriving institution in Australia and attest to the enduring popularity of the lamington.
Petromyzon marinus, a very primitive fish, of the family Petromyzonidae. It is adapted to living as a parasite on larger fish, to the undersides of which it attaches itself by means of a suctorial toothed pad, through which it can suck the blood of its victim. This unattractive lifestyle is matched by an unappetizing appearance: slimy, jawless, a single nostril on top, and seven little gill openings on each side.
Although it counts as a sea fish, the lamprey goes up rivers to spawn and is indeed most often met in estuaries or the lower reaches of rivers. It reaches a maximum length of 120 cm (48″), but is commonly half that size. The river lamprey or lampern, Lampetra fluviatilis, is a smaller fish, and so is the Arctic lamprey, L. japonica.
Despite their striking lack of visual appeal, lampreys are edible and are greatly appreciated in some regions, for example Galicia and the north of Portugal. Galicians usually eat them in a pie (EMPANADA) or cooked in their own blood and served on a bed of rice. The latter dish, Lampreia a la cazuela, is more or less the same as the Portuguese Lampreia à moda do Minho. The Bordeaux region of France offers Lamproie à la bordelaise. Smoked lamprey is a delicacy in Finland, especially at Pori and Rauma, and is also eaten in Japan (L. japonica).
In England, lampreys have suffered a decline. Cookery books of the 17th and 18th centuries featured various ways of cooking them, but the recipes almost disappeared during the 19th century and little has been heard of them since—although Davidson (1979) gives particulars of the Queen’s Jubilee lamprey pie of 1977 from the city of Gloucester.
In N. America, the sea lamprey population of the Great Lakes increased dramatically from 1921 (with the construction of the Welland Canal) until a method of control was discovered in the 1950s, after which their number declined by approximately 90%. They had a profound effect on the fisheries, especially of the native WHITEFISH and lake TROUT.
An unusual book in French (Lise Chapuis et al., 1994) is devoted entirely to the lamprey, its natural history, lore, and recipes from an interesting range of sources.
a mild English cheese which used to be a farmhouse cheese made only in or around the county whose name it bears. Much of it is still consumed there. Its character derives from a technique known as the ‘two-day curd’ process, in which a portion of curd is retained from the previous day and added to freshly made curd (some fresh curd first being kept back to add to the next day’s cheese). This gives a special flavour.
Lancashire melts well and is one of the best cheeses for making WELSH RABBIT.
less well known than marine CRABS, are nonetheless a moderately important food resource in certain tropical and subtropical regions, notably the Caribbean.
The largest, and one which is greatly prized as food, is the so-called robber crab (or coconut crab), Birgus latro, measuring up to 15 cm (6″) across the carapace and with a front leg span of as much as 90 cm (3′). This crab is common in islands of the Indo-Pacific. Early writers gave currency to the idea that it clambers up coconut palms to gather coconuts, then cracks them open and feeds on the contents; but Street (1966) casts doubt on this:
In recent years, however, several naturalists have investigated the habits of the robber crabs, and their findings do not substantiate the earlier reports. The occasional individual has been observed to remove a little of the husk, but none has stripped a nut completely, while the majority show no interest whatsoever in the complete nut. Even when provided with husked nuts, none of them proved able to open them … As to their tree-climbing habits, they are capable of ascending the trunk of a tree if disturbed, but there is no evidence that they do so for the purpose of gathering food.
In the W. Indies, the land crabs most commonly eaten are Gecarcinus ruricola and G. lateralis. Chace and Hobbs (1969) state that in Dominica no distinction seems to be made between them, although the former (carapace width up to 9 cm/nearly 4″) is almost twice as large as the other. Either will gladly be used for ‘crab-back’ or other local dishes based on crabmeat. Although they are terrestrial creatures, these crabs descend to the sea to spawn, and their larvae live in salt water for a time.
is the country, Laotians are the inhabitants, Lao are the principal ethnic group; so Lao cookery is not the same as the cookery of Laos, something which is shared with 56 other ethnic groups, some of them very small hill tribes. Most Lao live outside Laos, in China or N. Thailand.
The Lao are almost omnivorous and have many unconventional sources of protein, such as insects, which do not find a place in the statistics compiled by international authorities. So they are apt to be described as less well nourished than they really are. What is certain is that they are among the most beautiful people in the world, that their disposition is of great amiability, and their habits agreeably relaxed. At its best, life in Laos must have been almost paradisiacal.
The country is of breathtaking beauty, and, given the small number of inhabitants and its large size, food supplies adequate to support the population in good health could be produced with comparatively little effort. This suits the Lao, who like to have time to spare for festivals and whose natural tendency is to be unworried and relaxed about time, relating their activities only to the natural rhythm of the dry season and the rainy season and to the movements of the sun and the moon and the revolutions of the Buddhist calendar.
The Lao are also relaxed about their meals. If some official, notebook in hand, asks how many meals a family eats daily, the question will be greeted with surprise. Naturally, the number varies. It depends on what people are doing and how hungry they are. Sometimes one meal is enough; sometimes two; or three may be eaten.
The meals too are relaxed. What normally happens is that all the prepared foods (or fresh ones—the Lao eat a lot of fresh fruit) are laid out at once and people help themselves. Cutlery, chopsticks, and even plates are usually unnecessary, for morsels of meat, fish, or chicken can be wrapped up in edible leaves, along with any accompanying vegetables; and a ball of sticky rice (of which each person has a little basket) is used instead of bread as a ‘pusher’ or to mop up juices. However, some Lao dishes which are really soups—and there is always a pot of soup ready in a Lao house—call for soup spoons, which until recently would have been of the Chinese type, or made of wood.
The Lao are not bread-eaters, and do not normally use dairy products. Their staple foods are RICE (especially sticky or glutinous rice), fish (of which they have a very abundant supply in their rivers, ponds, and irrigated fields), PADEK (a kind of fermented fish sauce with chunks of fish in it), meat of all kinds (including, for example, that of water-monitors), ducks, chicken, vegetables, and fresh fruits. They enjoy feasts, but generally eat in moderation. In the countryside they can garner almost everything they need, and need only to cultivate rice. For many Lao, such items as meat, ducks, and chicken are luxuries. But nutritional requirements which would be satisfied by these foods are partly met by their use of padek, an important supplementary source of protein.
The relaxed atmosphere of a Lao meal even invests procedures which are surprisingly formal. These have been described by Doré (1980), who explains that in Lao life the concept of piep (which may be loosely translated as ‘prestige’) is of importance. Similarly, the concept of lieng (feeding, giving nourishment) is a basic one which includes what might be called contractual obligations. Whenever a Lao eats a meal he must do so in a manner which respects the first of these concepts; and whenever he eats outside his own home he must respect them both. This means, in practice, that at a family meal the father and mother (being the persons of highest rank in the family unit) take the first mouthfuls, followed by the other family members in descending order of age. Once this ‘first tasting’ has been accomplished, the meal appears to be free for all, but in fact is still subject to rules; for example, that no one should help himself at the same time as anyone else or go in front of a person of higher rank, which would cause that person to lose piep.
READING:
is PIG fat, obtained by rendering down the deposits which exist between the flesh and the skin and around the internal organs of pig carcasses. It is bland and white, and its ubiquity in an age when pigs were kept by all those who could afford them made it very important in the traditional cookery of Europe, the Americas, and China. The fat of the pig was an article of almost as much value as the meat. Lard contains much saturated fat, and this, combined with an image as poverty food and the increased availability of butter and oils, means that it is less important than formerly in the developed world.
There are several fat deposits in pig carcasses. The flare is found inside the loin and around the kidneys; it produces the finest lard, sometimes called leaf lard. The back fat is a hard layer between the flesh and the skin, which also yields good-quality lard. Softer lard is extracted from the fat around the internal organs, and fat belly pork contains layers of both types. These fats can also be used before rendering; the hard back fat is cut into cubes and preserved by salting for addition to stews in much of S. Europe. In French cuisine it is employed for LARDING lean meat and wrapping PÂTÉS; the CAUL, which contains some of the soft fat, is also used for wrapping.
Because of differences in quality, and the rate at which it melts, the fat from different parts of the carcass was prepared separately and used for different purposes. However, the general principle of rendering lard is simple: the fat is freed from flesh and membrane as far as possible, minced, soaked, and heated gently until it can be strained off the residue. The old-fashioned method for storing the best lard was to pour it into the well-cleaned pig’s bladder and hang it in a cool place; the poor-quality lard from around the internal organs was always used quickly. Lard is sometimes seasoned; paprika is used for this in Spain, and chopped parsley in Italy. Modern packaged lard is produced by heating the fat with steam; it may be treated with bleaching and deodorizing agents, emulsifiers and antioxidants, or modified to improve creaming properties.
In keeping with the tradition of not wasting any part of the pig, the bits of membrane left in the pan, cooked by the action of heat on the fat, are used as salty snacks or eaten on bread; see CRACKLING.
Lard has many uses, especially in areas where plant oils and dairy fats are scarce. It acts as a spread, a preservative, a shortener, and a cooking medium. In both Europe and N. America, it was formerly much used on bread or toast. William Cobbett wrote in Cottage Economy (1823) that country children were badly brought up if they did not like sweet lard spread upon bread, and recorded that he had eaten it for luncheon at ‘the houses of good and substantial farmers in France and Flanders’, whilst lamenting that the habit was declining as ‘now-a-days, the labourers, and especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of niceness in food’. It is now uncommon to find lard as a spread in Europe and the USA, but, salted and flavoured with paprika, it is still used on toasted bread in country areas in Spain.
The use of lard as a preservative is best illustrated by the CONFITS of pork or goose made in SW France. These rely on cooking pieces of meat gently in large amounts of fat and then leaving the whole to cool so that the lard sets, covering the food. As this has been sterilized by the heat and the lard forms an airtight seal, the meat keeps for several months, and pieces can be removed at intervals provided the rest remains well covered. Although such methods are no longer necessary with modern storage techniques, they are still a part of the cuisine of this region, and the meat is used alone or as an ingredient for CASSOULET.
Like all fats, lard is composed of crystals. These are relatively large (compared to those found, for instance, in butter) and make it a poor creaming fat but an effective shortener for PASTRY. Thus there are few cakes which use lard, but many pastries. Even the English LARDY CAKE is really a bread dough enriched with lard by rolling and folding the dough around the fat. In the past, lard was the favoured fat for shortcrust pastry in the English kitchen, but modern shorteners are slowly replacing it. A mixture of lard for good shortening and butter for fine flavour were mostly used. It is also used for hot water pastry, setting as the paste cools, allowing for the traditional method of shaping the dough for raised pies by hand and baking them without the support of a mould. A little lard is often included in bread and pastry recipes both in Britain and continental Europe, and it is used to shorten many traditional Spanish biscuits, such as the fragile Christmas polverones. Lard is also used in the Latin American kitchen for enriching breads, pastries, and dough for fritters; and in China for making pastries and biscuits.
The use of lard for frying has been in decline in western countries, eroded by vegetable oils with their healthier image. It is still the preferred fat in some English regions for FISH AND CHIPS. As a cooking medium, it had been popular because readily available, and also because it has a relatively high smoke point (205 °C, 400 °F). Thus it was much used for traditional fritter recipes in Europe and America, and the collective German name for these is still Schmalzgebackenes, meaning ‘something fried in lard’. According to Chang (1977) lard is still a preferred cooking fat in parts of China, notably the Fukien coast and the far west; in these areas, pigs are specially bred to be fat and display maximal separation of lean meat and fat in the carcass, allowing for easy separation of the two.
Laura Mason
the process of introducing thin strips of pork fat (lardoons) into meat which lacks fat and would otherwise cook dry (e.g. venison, veal, pigeons). Fat, usually back fat, is cut into strips, pinched into the clip of a larding needle, and gently inserted into the meat.
Stobart (1980) comments that the popularity of the technique in France had the result that: ‘In French cookery books of the last century almost every joint looked like a hedgehog.’ He adds, on a modern note, that a gadget is available, on the lines of a surgeon’s trocar (a tube cut diagonally and sharpened at one end), which permits ‘larding’ with frozen butter; and that cooks wishing to do something similar with polyunsaturated oils can manage with a large hypodermic syringe.
a traditional English tea bread popular in country areas. It is made from bread dough enriched with lard and sugar and, usually, spices and dried fruit. The dough is rolled and folded several times to give a layered texture.
Lardy cakes were originally intended as special celebration cakes, made only at harvest time or for family festivals. Elizabeth David (1977) remarks that ‘It was only when sugar became cheap, and when the English taste for sweet things—particularly in the Midlands and the North—became more pronounced, that such rich breads or cakes were made or could be bought from the bakery every week.’
In the days when ovens were fired only once a week, and in some households only once a fortnight, for the baking of a very large batch of bread and dough products, any dough not used for making the daily bread was transformed into richer products such as lardy cakes, which thus earned the alternative name ‘scrap cakes’. They might also be called ‘flead cakes’—flead is a light kind of lard scraped off a pig’s internal membranes. The high fat content in such cakes would prevent them drying out as much as ordinary bread.
any of many species of songbirds in the family Alaudidae, but especially the skylark (to which Shelley addressed his famous ode), Alauda arvensis, and the somewhat plumper crested lark, Galerina cristata. The former is familiar in Britain, but the latter only appears there as a vagrant.
Larks are now protected species in the countries of the European Community, and the practice of eating them, roasted on lark-spits or made into PÂTÉS (such as the famous ones of Pithiviers in France) or with POLENTA, is dying away elsewhere too. In former times they were eaten on a large scale and their delicate flavour was appreciated, especially in France—although it was a Frenchman who said that the tiny carcase, stripped of wings, feet, and gizzard, resembled nothing more than a bundle of toothpicks. Another French writer, Favre (1883–92), anticipated the feelings of a century later by remarking on the usefulness to farmers of the larks’ feeding habits and the charm of their songs, and by deciding that in his great dictionary the entry for larks should begin with quotations from poets and only then proceed to describe the range of French recipes for preparing them.
the larval forms of insects, but also of certain other creatures which undergo the process of metamorphosis in reaching the adult form. Thus there are larvae of certain fish and crustaceans. However, it is the larvae of insects which are important as human food (where insects are acceptable in the diet—see INSECTS AS FOOD). Of the innumerable examples which could be cited, the most striking is perhaps that quoted by Bodenheimer (1951) from Bristowe (1932). The latter relates how a certain tribe in Thailand, near the Burmese border, would shoot a long-tailed monkey, gut it, stuff it with makrut lime leaves and other herbs, sew it up, smear it with a paste from the inside of a termite heap, and hang it up from a tree. After a supposedly delicious ‘monkey sauce’ has slowly dripped from the corpse into a bowl below, accompanied by some small ‘maggots’, the corpse is opened and a few large larvae (belonging to some species of beetle) are found within. Each of these is placed inside a specially treated coconut, and the hole made for this purpose is stopped up with termite paste once the larva is inside. Three weeks later the coconut is split open and a white grub (i.e. larva), ‘the size of a tangerine, is found practically filling the interior of the coconut’.
For other, less startling, examples, see GRUBS.
probably one of the earliest forms of PASTA, is listed with other forms of the same sort in PASTA SHAPES. It consists of fairly thin flat sheets of pasta, typically interleaved with a savoury mixture and baked in the oven (al forno).
Some believe that its remote ancestor was the classical Greek laganon; this was a flat cake, not pasta as we know it now, but capable of developing in that direction. In classical Rome laganon became lagamum and this this was cut into strips and became known as lagana (plural). Cicero (1st century AD) was known to have been particularly fond of lagani. So was the Roman poet Horace, of the same century. He cited them as an example of simple peasant’s food while boasting of his simple way of life. ‘Then I go home to a dish of leeks, chickpeas and lagani,’ said he (Satires 1. 6).
At this stage, it would be unwise to assume that they had become a product used like modern lasagne. More generally, as Perry (1981) has pointed out, it is an error to suppose that ancestors in classical times of modern forms of pasta were used then in the ways now familiar. It seems likely that they were usually treated as ‘extenders’ of savoury dishes, pieces of fried dough which could be added to dishes in the same sort of way as dumplings in recent times.
So, Horace’s simple dish would have been a vegetable stew or pottage, and it is most likely that the lagani added to it were small squares or strips of fried dough.
However, something which could be called lasagne in the modern sense had appeared in Italy by the 13th century, since Marco Polo, recounting his travels in the Orient, said that he ate in Fanfur ‘lasagne’ made with flour of the breadfruit, implying clearly that he was already familiar with lasagne made of ordinary flour.
Since medieval times, lasagne have been a popular feature in the range of pasta products. Recipes have changed over the centuries, but the advantages of a pasta which comes in sheet form, for certain dishes which cannot otherwise be made, have been a constant in the kitchen. Lasagne verdi are coloured green with spinach.
an Indian YOGHURT drink of which there are two versions: salted and sweet. In both versions, it is a popular street food as well as being made in homes.
The quality of the yoghurt is very important for a good lassi. It should be slightly sour so that when diluted with water it still retains a strong yoghurt flavour. It should also be creamy otherwise the lassi will taste watery.
The sweet version is known as metha lassi. It often just has sugar added, but is sometimes flavoured with rose-water; and in Bengal a squirt of gondo lebu (scented lime) may be added. The salted version often contains spices such as roasted cumin seeds or black pepper. In S. India the spices added may be a paste of ground green chilli, ginger, coriander leaves, and garlic.
The diluted yoghurt with its flavourings is whisked until frothy and usually served with ice cubes.
See also AYRAN.
Helen Saberi
lathyrus, or grass pea or chickling vetch, the usual names for a leguminous plant, Lathyrus sativus, related to the PEA, BROAD BEAN, etc. It survives in dry, poor soil where better plants would die; and is now grown mainly in India as a source of cheap and inferior PULSE, known as khesari dal.
The plant is of W. Asian origin and was cultivated in S. Europe in the classical period (when lathyros was its Greek name). It is still grown there on a small scale for fodder.
Lath has one mysterious and dangerous feature. From time to time there is an outbreak of a paralysing disease, lathyrism, among people and animals that consume it. The sufferer’s legs become suddenly and permanently paralysed. HIPPOCRATES, the Greek physician of the 6th century BC, mentioned lathyrism, as did many writers after him. However, the poor of Europe continued to eat chickling vetch and other vetches, often mixed with cereal flour, and there were occasional epidemics. Lathyrism still occurs sporadically in India; and there was an outbreak in Spain in 1940–1.
central of the three Baltic states, resembles ESTONIA to the north and LITHUANIA to the south in having an unusual language. But, whereas Estonian belongs to the Finno-Ugric group, Latvian and Lithuanian are rarities, sole survivors of an ancient group, closely related to Sanskrit within the Indo-European family of languages.
A favourite dish, perhaps the national dish, is putr(a), described as a kind of vegetable/cereal porridge with suet or pork fat to which fish or smoked meat or whatever may be added. This can be made with barley, a popular cereal in this region, along with rye for the dark bread which goes with many of the numerous Latvian cold dishes, which are often assembled on the ‘cold table’.
A taste for sour and salty produce is noticeable; and there is slightly more spicing evident than in Estonia. Dairy products, including some simple indigenous cheeses, are prominent, as are bacon, smoked fish, and pickles.
Fish dishes, such as may be enjoyed in Riga (the capital city), include a kind of Latvian fish soup (Zivju supa) which incorporates whole pieces of cooked fish with plenty of potato as well as the broth, and also—a distinctive touch—onion rings and grated carrot, both fried. Another is Cepts lasis ar plumju kompotu, which is fried Baltic salmon with plum compote.
Besides some desserts introduced or adapted from Germany, there is Kisels, a sour-sweet dish of fruit juices (red, white, black currants and various berries) thickened with potato flour; see KISEL.
François Pierre de (c.1615–1678). La Varenne was the founder of French classical cooking. Ever since it appeared in 1651, critics have both acclaimed and belittled his book Le Cuisinier françois, but no one has questioned its importance. It was the first French cookbook of any substance since Le Viandier almost 300 years before; and it ran to 30 editions in 75 years. The reason for its success was simple; it was the first book to record and embody the immense advances which French cooking had made, largely under the influence of Italy and the Renaissance, since the 15th century. Its impact outside France was also profound. The first English translation was published in 1653 and there were German and Italian works that purported to be translations (so great was his reputation) soon afterwards.
Some characteristics of medieval cookery are still visible in La Varenne’s book, but many have disappeared. New World ingredients make their entrance. A surprising number of recipes for dishes still made in modern times (Bœuf à la mode, Œufs à la neige, omelettes, beignets, even pumpkin pie) are given. The watershed from medieval to modern times is being crossed under our eyes in La Varenne’s pages.
As Anne Willan (1992) observes in her illuminating commentary on his career:
La Varenne was scarcely 35 when Le Cuisinier françois first appeared. At that point he had already been a master cook for ten years to the Marquis d’Uxelles. Beyond that, little is known about La Varenne himself, except that his name was a pseudonym, taken for some reason from a disreputable cook of an earlier generation who did a little pimping business for his master, Henri IV, and ‘gained more by carrying the poulets (love letters) of the king than by larding them in the kitchen’. La Varenne died in relative obscurity, having benefited little from his success as a best-selling author.
The relationship (or not) of the mushroom and shallot mixture DUXELLES to La Varenne and his employer is discussed in that entry.
Philip and Mary Hyman
a thin crisp bread usually made with wheat flour made in a variety of shapes all over the the regions of the Caucasus, Iran (where it is often so thin as to be like tissue and can be almost seen through), and Afghanistan. It is leavened and baked in a TANDOOR. Lavash is served with kebabs and is used to scoop up food or wrap round food before being eaten.
The Turkish yufka is similar, but is unleavened and cooked on a GRIDDLE, called a saj. Its origins are ancient and it is also known as lavaş depending on the region. As in the other countries of this region large batches of this bread are made and stored for long periods. In Turkey they are stored on a board suspended by all four corners from the ceiling. The bread becomes dry and is restored by sprinkling with water and reheated as and when needed.
Yufka is also used in the same way as FILO pastry to encase various fillings.
Lavandula angustifolia (English lavender) and L. latifolia (spike lavender), both native to the Mediterranean region, is mainly used in perfumery, but has culinary uses also. The essential oils can serve to flavour foods; and the leaves and flowers of L. angustifolia can be incorporated in salads, vinegars, jellies, ice creams, and soft drinks; also, less commonly, in savoury stews. Bees which have an opportunity to visit lavender flowers give a particularly good flavour to their honey.
Crystallized lavender flowers are used for decorating confectionery and cakes. The small bluish leaves are most often used in dried form.
or lavagnon the French name for an edible BIVALVE, Scrobicularia plana, which is a local speciality of the Charente-Maritime. The species has a distribution extending from Norway to the Mediterranean and beyond, and is abundant in British waters, but seems not to be generally eaten. An English name, mud-hen, used to be current, suggesting some consumption in the past in England. Now it is sometimes named ‘furrow shell’ in technical works.
The lavignon has a maximum width of 6–7 cm (2.5″). It has a slightly peppery taste and is good when eaten raw, especially as part of a seafood salad to which it contributes its own particular flavour.
a noun denoting a raising agent for BREAD or other baked goods, is also a verb meaning to use such an agent. The word is derived from the Latin levamen, something that lifts or lightens. Strictly speaking, it refers to any raising agent, for example YEAST or BAKING POWDER. But it is most commonly used to mean a SOURDOUGH culture, a piece reserved from a previous batch of dough and used to ‘infect’ the current batch with natural yeasts and other micro-organisms that will both raise and flavour it.
Leaven has important symbolic significance in the Bible. When the Israelites left Egypt they abandoned their old way of life entirely, not even taking a piece of old dough. At the festival of PASSOVER Jews eat unleavened MATZO to commemorate this fresh start (Exodus 12: 15, 18–20, 34; 13: 6–7). Leaven is mentioned in the New Testament as a symbol of the kingdom of Heaven spreading through humanity (Matthew 13: 33; Luke 13: 20–1), but also of the corrupting influence of the old religion (Matthew 16: 6; 1 Corinthians 5: 6).
Ralph Hancock
are neighbours on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Although both enjoy a favourable temperate climate, there are big geographical differences between them. Lebanon is small and mountainous with a long coastline while Syria has a relatively short coastline, but is vast, with huge areas of desert land.
The Phoenicians, who are thought to have reached this prize territory around 3000 BC, were among the first important settlers. They established a chain of city-states and safe anchorages along the coast and became the first great commercial mariners, trading in spices, grains, dried and preserved foodstuffs, and wines. Their position at the ancient crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, their bountiful land, and their prosperous trade made them prey to constant invasion. These invading powers included the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans (who merged all the states that lay between the Taurus mountains and the Sinai desert into one province they called Syria; it was not until 1942 that Lebanon became independent), the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and finally the French.
Lebanese and Syrian cuisines have evolved through the successive invasions, with each culture leaving its mark, even if it is now rather faint after the passage of many centuries. The clearest influence, as throughout the E. Mediterranean, is Ottoman. The French refining influence on the food of Lebanon also remains noticeable.
The basic ingredients are the same in both countries: fresh herbs, vegetables and fruit, dried pulses, BURGHUL (cracked wheat), rice, nuts, olives, yoghurt, TAHINI (sesame paste), spices, fish (often with TARATOR sauce), and meat in the form of lamb or chicken (boiled, grilled, or stewed); plus rose and orange blossom waters.
The most famous of the dishes which they jointly prize is KIBBEH (a paste of very finely minced lamb with burghul, onion, and basil or mint). The entry for this dish describes some of the ways in which it is prepared in the two countries. Especially notable are the geometrical designs incised on kibbeh bil-saniyeh, a form of kibbeh baked in a round shallow pan; the surface may be divided into quarters, each of which will display a different pattern.
Other typical savoury dishes are stuffed vegetables, meat and vegetable stews, as well as charcoal-grilled meats; all these, by the subtle use of herbs and other flavourings, are given the Lebanese/Syrian hallmark. Less subtle than some of the other practices is the very emphatic taste for hot pepper in Aleppo.
Lebanese and Syrian versions of MEZZE coincide to a large extent, although it is generally held that the Lebanese mezze table is the best. However this may be, it is certainly appropriate that it is two dishes which indisputably belong to Lebanon and Syria and always adorn the mezze table, namely hummus and TABBOULEH, which have conquered much of the world in recent decades—almost as thoroughly as pizza made its conquest earlier in the 20th century.
Both countries have a strong tradition of preserving seasonal produce. Vegetables are dried or pickled and fruits are also dried, candied, or made into jams. Mutton or lamb is cut into small pieces and preserved in the form of a CONFIT (QAWARMA) and burghul is left to ferment in yoghurt, then dried and ground by hand to produce kishk (see KASHK). Kishk is used with qawarma to make a thick soup, or is mixed with tomato paste and chopped onion to make a filling for savoury pastries or a topping for bread.
Although most of the mainstream dishes have the same names, their preparation may be distinctly different from one country to the other. The Lebanese, unlike the Syrians, use fat sparingly. They have a greater variety of vegetarian dishes mainly because of the Lenten restrictions of their large Christian community. They also use a great deal of artistry in garnishing dishes and in fine-tuning the balance of flavours among the ingredients of a dish.
A good example is the salad called fattoosh. This is composed of parsley, mint, tomatoes, cucumber, spring onions, and bread, all seasoned with sumac, salt, and olive oil. Here, the Lebanese version has toasted bread, whereas this is fried in the Syrian version. Also the Syrians add small pieces of white cheese which affect texture as well as taste. The Syrian lahm bi-ajine (flat bread topped with minced meat) is also different. The Lebanese topping of minced meat is Armenian in origin and is mixed with tomatoes, chopped onion, and lemon juice. The Syrian is a drier mixture and only chopped onion and pomegranate syrup are added to the meat. Examples could be multiplied.
It should not be thought that Syrian food is inferior. On the contrary Aleppo is considered the Near Eastern capital of haute cuisine. Nevertheless, Lebanese food is universally accepted to be more refined and more varied. One of the categories where the Syrians surpass the Lebanese is in their sweets. These are significantly superior and, oddly, much lighter. Their BAKLAVA are renowned throughout the Near East. Some (called kol wa shkor) are made with extremely thin layers of filo pastry and have different shapes. Others are made with a type of ‘bird’s nest’ pastry, shaped in cylinders, and called borma; cf. the description of kunafa/knafeh under QATAʾIF. All are filled with a mixture of nuts (pine nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios can all be used), sugar, and rose or orange blossom water, baked, and then coated with sugar syrup. Baraziq—small round biscuits dipped in pistachio nuts on one side and sesame seeds on the other—provide another example. The Syrian ones are thinner than others and have a lot more sesame and pistachios, which makes them lighter and more delicious.
A few dishes are particularly Syrian such as karabeege Halab, pistachio-filled semolina fingers, with accompanying natef, a sweet BOIS DE PANAMA mousse; see MAʾAMOUL. Candied green walnuts and fruits as well as qamar el-deen (dried sheets of sweetened apricot purée—cf. Turkish ‘apricot leather’ under APRICOT) are other Syrian specialities.
The Lebanese on the other hand can boast such dishes as kibbeh bil-saniyeh (mentioned above), burghul bi d’feeneh (a kind of ‘risotto’ of burghul, chickpeas, and meat), and hindbeh bil-zeyt (boiled wild chicory which is sautéed in olive oil and garnished with caramelized onion).
In fact, such specialities are often found in both countries and there are many over which both the Lebanese and the Syrians claim proprietary rights. More research is needed before such debates can be settled (if ever); and, as these two cuisines are the distillation of so many culinary influences over 5,000 years, the research will be arduous, although the fieldwork should be pure pleasure.
Anissa Helou
READING:
a famous German speciality, belong to two broad categories of baked goods (HONEY CAKE and GINGERBREAD) and have a history which stretches back to medieval times. They then had a religious aspect, being often prepared in monasteries (where bees to provide both wax and honey were kept), and including seven spices in memory of the seven days in which God created the world.
In the 16th century production developed rapidly in the area around Nuremberg, which lay at the meeting point of important European trade routes and was also a centre of the spice trade. A German recipe of this period calls for honey, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and pepper.
Closely related confections are also made in Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. The number of versions is thus considerable. Sarah Kelly (1985) gives a useful summary:
[There are] … Lebkuchenzelten (simple Lebkuchen); Honigkuchen (honey biscuits—which can be spiced or not); Pfefferkuchen (heavily spiced gingerbread); Leckerli (Swiss gingerbread with mixed peel and nuts), to name a few. All of these contain honey and are made according to a standard formula: the honey is heated with the sugar (if called for) and butter or lard (if called for), before being mixed with the dry ingredients and then the eggs.
The one exception is Nürnberger
Elisenlebkuchen—perhaps the most famous Lebkuchen—which are made by a different (‘whisked egg’) method, without flour and without honey.
Shapes and decoration also vary considerably. Lebkuchen-Herzen, heart-shaped honey cakes, are sold all over Germany in regional fairs, and at Christmas. The elaborate Hexenhäuschen—a gingerbread witch’s house, iced and decorated with sweets for Christmas—is made from Lebkuchen dough. So are Christmas pigs, Glücksschweinchen, made in Germany and also sold at the annual Christmas market of Strasbourg. (These shapes recur in Scandinavia, where spiced biscuit mixtures are made into tree decorations and iced houses; and gingerbread or parkin pigs are traditional English autumn specialities.)
Switzerland is perhaps second only to Germany in enthusiasm for Lebkuchen. Berner Honiglebkuchen are moulded or iced with figures of bears, the symbol of the city of Bern. Zuri-Tirggel, a Christmas speciality of Zurich, are thin, pale Lebkuchen with an embossed pattern which is lightly browned. Lebkuchen dough is also baked with marzipan fillings to make Biberli. The best-known types are the St Gallen and Appenzell Biber; these are baked in large slabs and embossed with figures or decorated with marzipan plaques.
Most Lebkuchen are glazed after baking.
a fatlike substance found in the membranes of cells, and particularly abundant in egg yolk. Its scientific name is phosphatidyl choline. Lecithin is a powerful emulsifier (see EMULSION), a fact exploited in the making of MAYONNAISE and other sauces containing egg yolk. In the food industry lecithin, usually extracted from SOYA BEANS, is widely used as a general purpose emulsifier.
Ralph Hancock
a member of the ONION family distinguished by its mild, sweet flavour, is beset by the problems of classification which seem to affect the whole family. A traditional and simple solution is to say that Allium ampeloprasum is the wild leek, ancestor of A. porrum, the cultivated leek of Europe. (Note, however, that there are also cultivars of A. ampeloprasum itself, such as the ELEPHANT GARLIC group and one which is important in Afghanistan, namely Gandana (local name gandana). This last may be identical with Tarreh Irani, important in Iran, where tarreh is the common name. These two resemble common CHIVES, although larger and flatter, so are often referred to as Chinese or Persian chives.)
European and Middle Eastern cultivated leeks differ from each other, and, although some authorities would disagree, it is convenient to classify the latter as A. kurrat; the Arabic name for leek is kurrat. The Middle Eastern leek has narrower leaves than the European kind and a distinct, often subdivided bulb. Nevertheless, it tastes like a leek and is used in the same way except that, because its green leaves are less coarse than those of a western leek, these too are eaten.
The leek, presumably the Middle Eastern species, was taken into cultivation by the ancient Egyptians, who bred improved varieties with thicker stems, represented in their tomb paintings. On the northern side of the Mediterranean, both the Greeks and the Romans of classical antiquity were partial to leeks, none more so than the Emperor Nero, who apparently believed that eating them would improve his singing voice, of which he was vain. He consumed such quantities that the people nicknamed him Porrophagus (leek-eater).
Whether because of or in spite of the Emperor’s foible, the Romans considered the leek a superior vegetable, unlike onions and garlic which were despised as coarse foods for the poor. This can be seen from the works of APICIUS, who gives four recipes for leeks as a vegetable in their own right, while onions are relegated to the role of a minor flavouring and garlic, in tiny quantities, is mentioned only twice. Green leek leaves were used in salads; the bulbous base was cooked; and the plant was also used as a flavouring. The classical leek, even the thicker kind, was thinner in the stem and more onion-like at the bottom than a typical modern leek.
Some have suggested that the Romans may have introduced the leek to Britain and therefore to the Welsh, who subsequently made it their own special vegetable. There is an unverified tradition that Welsh warriors wore leeks in their hats to show which side they were on in a victorious battle against the Saxons in the 7th century, and that that is why the leek is the symbol of Wales. However, all this is highly dubious. In Saxon times the word leac was the generic term for any kind of onion or garlic (gar-leac), and even the more particular name bradeleac (broad leek) was also applied to ramsons (WILD GARLIC). So, if 7th-century Welsh warriors were wearing something called leac it may well have been something different from and much thinner (and more practical as a hat adornment) than the modern leek. The doubt is compounded by statements in early botanical works that the (true) leek did not reach Britain until much later. Whatever the true date was, Gerard (1633) was able to say that the leek was then in common use in England. It was certainly popular all over continental Europe and the Middle East by that time.
The straight white stem of a cUltivated leek is produced by earthing it up, which compresses the leaf bases into a cylinder and keeps them white. It is possible to grow very large stems by this method, the limit being about 30 cm (1′) tall and 7 cm (nearly 3″) thick. Very large leeks are grown in Britain, especially in NE England, for competition purposes. For cooks, smaller, more tender leeks are preferable. Apart from their use as a vegetable, leeks are widely used as a base or essential ingredient for soups (such as VICHYSSOISE and the Scottish COCK-A-LEEKIE) and stews (for example the French POT-AU-FEU). Apart from its mild flavour the leek, being slightly mucilaginous, helps to thicken the liquid.
Although the leek will not grow in the hotter parts of Asia, it is grown and used in N. China. Karen Phillipps and Martha Dahlen (1985) remark that in Peking (Beijing) cuisine, the heart of the leek is served as a condiment for Peking pancakes; ‘it is chopped in thin strips 2–3″ long and rolled with filling and sauce in pancakes to make a meal’.
any plant which belongs to the family of Leguminosae, characterized by seed-bearing pods; or the seeds themselves, usually called BEANS or PEAS.
The word, which entered the English language in the 17th century, has tended to oust the older word PULSE, although the older term is still current.
Legumes grow throughout the world and were amongst the earliest food crops cultivated by man. The patterns established then have come down through history and it is striking that particular legumes have an overriding importance in individual countries. The HARICOT BEAN is associated with C. and S. America, the SOYA BEAN with E. Asia, LENTILS with India. See also the list of entries at the end.
As well as being of great importance as food plants, in their contribution to world supplies of protein (8%, according to FAO figures), legumes play a major role in agriculture through their nitrogen-fixing capability.
However, the protein in legumes is ‘incomplete’, and if it is to give full value it has to be complemented by foods, notably cereals, which supply the missing elements. Eating patterns evolved spontaneously along these lines in many parts of the world, and many of the most traditional and popular ways of preparing legumes, e.g. maize and beans in Mexico, show the principle at work. See also PROTEIN; AMINO ACIDS.
Despite their nutritional value, legumes have been the subject of many disparaging references in literature. Thus the ‘mess of pottage’ which Jacob offered Esau in exchange for his birthright was made of red lentils, and the point of the story is that Esau obtained something of little worth. Aristophanes (in his comedy Plutus, early 4th century BC) has a character remark of a nouveau riche: ‘Now he doesn’t like lentils any more’, and this seems to have been a proverb in classical Greece. The development of eating habits in modern Italy may show the tenacity of this attitude. The consumption of legumes has halved there since the Second World War, in the face of growing economic status and corresponding improvements in the standard of living. The situation is different in most of Asia and in C. and S. America. There, it is more usual for wealthy and poor alike to eat legumes regularly. The high esteem in which the soya bean and its products are held in China is well known.
Their fibrous seed coats may or may not be removed from dried legume seeds. Removal increases digestibility and improves keeping qualities, but may cause a nutritional loss, e.g. of thiamine content.
Ways of preparing legumes for consumption, with or without decortication, include boiling, roasting, fermentation, and germination. Individual entries deal with particular ways of preparing and cooking them, and in some instances with products obtained from them. See ACACIA AND WATTLE; ALFALFA; AZUKI BEAN; BEAN; BEAN SPROUTS; BROAD BEAN; CAROB; CHICKPEA; CLUSTER BEAN; COWPEA; DAL; FENUGREEK; FUL MEDAMES; GRAM; GROUNDNUT; HARICOT BEAN; HORSE GRAM; JACK BEAN; KUDZU; LABLAB BEAN; LATH; LENTIL; LIMA BEAN; LUPIN; LIQUORICE; MOTH BEAN; MUNG BEAN; PEA; PIGEON PEA; PULSES; RICE BEAN; RUNNER BEAN; SOYA BEAN; TAMARIND; TEPARY BEAN; TREE BEAN; TONKA BEAN; URD; VELVET BEAN; VETCH; WINGED BEAN; WINGED PEA; YAM BEAN.
See also PROTEIN AND HUMAN HISTORY.
also known as red Leicester, is the reddest of all English cheeses, simply because the vegetable dye ANNATTO is added liberally to it. Made from whole milk by a process like that of CHEDDAR but retaining some moisture, it is hard and crumbly but very mild in flavour. It matures faster than Cheddar and may be sold at any age from two months onwards. A whole cheese has a flattish drum shape and weighs about 18 kg (40 lb).
Leicester is regarded as one of the best cheeses with which to make WELSH RABBIT.
(or Leyden) cheese, sold as Leidse kaas or Komijne kaas in the Netherlands, is wheel shaped with a greyish-yellow rind. The sides may bulge or be straight, and the cheeses all bear a mark of the two crossed keys which are the symbol of the City of Leiden. The weight of a whole cheese varies from around 5 kg (11 lb) to 8 kg (18 lb) or more. Leiden cheese resembles GOUDA, but is made on a much smaller scale, has a lower fat content, and a sharper taste; often incorporates some BUTTERMILK; and is always spiced. Some handbooks on cheese say that CUMIN is used; others mention CARAWAY. The truth is that both are normally added. There is also a version with CLOVES, made in Friesland and called nagelkaas.
The spices impart a greenish tinge to the inside of a Leiden cheese, besides giving it an interesting flavour. This use of caraway and cumin is echoed in some Scandinavian cheeses, e.g. Swedish Riksost.
the fruit of Citrus limon, a fruit which may, as Harold McGee (2004) notes, be the consequence of a two-step hybrid, first between a citron and a lime (perhaps in NW India), and then between that cross and a pomelo in the Middle East. Evidence for the lemon being known to the Romans (as opposed to the CITRON) is inconclusive and most modern opinion veers towards ascribing its introduction throughout the Mediterranean to the Arabs from the 7th century AD (Zohary and Hopf, 1993). This is despite Tolkowsky’s (1938) references to frescos found at Pompeii (and therefore prior to AD 70) which show what he regards as indisputably lemons, as well as a mosaic pavement probably from Tusculum (now Frascati) of about 100 AD in which a lemon is shown with an orange and a citron.
Thus the fruit which can reasonably be regarded as the most important for European cookery was a comparatively late arrival. Nor was its use in cookery, as an acid element, appreciated at once. Nor, indeed, was there a Latin word for lemon. It seems likely that in classical Rome the fruit was treated as a curiosity and a decoration, and that lemon trees were not grown successfully in Italy until later.
There is a hybrid, C. × limetta, of which various cultivars exist with common names such as limetta and sweet lemon. These non-acid lemons are grown on a small scale mainly in India and around the Mediterranean.
The Meyer lemon, first imported into the USA from China by F. N. Meyer, in 1980, is described by Saunt (1990) as ‘probably a hybrid between the lemon and either an orange or a mandarin’. It has less acidity than true lemons, and indeed resembles a small orange more than a lemon. It provides excellent juice and is growing in popularity.
Lemon cultivation in the Mediterranean was certainly the consequence of Arab initiative. Soon after their conquest a fully indigenous orchard production had been established in S. Europe. It flourished in Sicily and Spain and parts of N. Africa, and the Mediterranean is still the source of many of the lemons consumed in Europe.
Arab traders also spread the lemon eastward to China. The Chinese name li mung is clearly an imported derivation. Lemons are first discussed in the texts of the Sung period (960–1279 AD) although it seems likely that some had been cultivated earlier.
During the Middle Ages lemons were rare and expensive in N. Europe, and available only to the rich. In the Near East, the lemon’s wide range of culinary uses was explored. The Treatise of the Lemon, which was written by Saladin’s physician Ibn Jamiya, gives recipes for lemon syrup and preserves. His work was translated into Latin and published in Venice in 1583. At this time in Italy lemons were becoming plentiful enough to be important in the kitchen. The use of lemon slices as a garnish for fish was widespread. The Archbishop of Milan’s chef Christoforo di Messisbugo (a name with many variations in spelling), whose important culinary treatise Libro Novo … came out in several editions in the middle of the 16th century, gave recipes for marinated brill with lemon slices and candied citron and orange peel.
The lemon reached the New World (where there are no native citrus species) in 1493, when Columbus, on his second voyage, established a settlement on Haiti. Within twenty years there were abundant crops of good quality. The Portuguese introduced the lemon to Brazil before 1540 (and it was from Rio de Janeiro that the captain of the ‘First Fleet’ of colonists bound for Australia obtained the first lemon trees to be planted in that continent in 1788). In 1565 the Spanish set up their first colony in Florida, San Agostino (now St Augustine), and almost certainly planted lemons among many other Old World varieties. While lemons had been grown in California since the time of the early Spanish missions of the 1730s, it was not until after their dissolution in 1833 and particularly during the sudden increase of population caused by the 1849 gold rush that they were cultivated on a larger scale. Since 1950 California has apparently produced more lemons than all of Europe combined.
There is irony in the reflection that the crews of the ships responsible for spreading the lemon would have been at risk from scurvy, without realizing that they were carrying the fruit which was to prove an effective cure for the disease. The finding was obscured by a mass of quack curers until the British naval surgeon James Lind endorsed it in his Treatise on the Scurvy, written in 1753. Even so, it was not until the end of the century that the Royal Navy began to issue lemon juice to its sailors.
However, in modern times it is the well-known culinary uses of the lemon which are important. It is the most common accompaniment for FISH and other seafood dishes. But it is equally important as a souring agent; its pleasant acidity is crucial to the taste of many dishes. It acts as a flavour enhancer for other fruit when it is cooked or used with other ingredients. Certain tropical fruits, such as papaya, guava, and avocado, need its sharpness.
It is perhaps in the cuisines of the Middle East that the lemon is used to the maximum extent. Not only fresh, but also dried or pickled/preserved lemons are common in Arab kitchens; see, for example, Perry (1995a).
Lemon is interchangeable with vinegar for many sauces and salad dressings and may give a more delicate result. The Greek AVGOLÉMONO sauce, which is embodied in several famous Greek soups, demonstrates the affinity between eggs and lemons, a theme which recurs in some versions of MAYONNAISE.
Stobart (1980) advocates a wider appreciation of the zest of the fruit, which contains the essential oil and thus acts not just to flavour but to perfume food. This can be important in many of the sweet dishes for which lemon is a vital ingredient. Lemon CHIFFON pie, lemon meringue pie, lemon MOUSSE, and lemon SOUFFLÉ are just a few of scores of examples.
Lemon, a valuable source of PECTIN as well as of flavour, is important in making many JAMS and JELLIES. And every cook knows that when something acidic is needed to prevent enzyme BROWNING (as with cut apples) a dash of lemon juice may be the best solution.
Home-made lemonade (lemon juice, water, sugar, ice) is as fine a beverage as any in the world, and particularly refreshing in hot weather; this is citron pressé in France. In the Middle East and India, lemon SHERBETS are essentially the same thing. The carbonated drinks sold as ‘fizzy lemonade’ or ‘lemon soda’ or the like may or may not have a true lemon flavour, but in any case constitute a different sort of drink.
Cymbopogon citratus, a perennial grass of tropical Asia and other warm climates, which grows abundantly in suitable conditions. It is valued for the lemony flavour which its stalks release when crushed or chopped, and is often used in fish cookery and curry dishes. Its alternative name is citronella.
Dried lemon grass stalks are available, as is lemon grass powder. These can be used but fresh stalks are much better. The fibrous leaves are used, fresh or dry, to brew a herbal lemon tea.
A popular dish in Thailand consists of crabs steamed in a special earthenware pot, with lots of lemon grass. Those who have become accustomed to using it lavishly in SE Asia find it hard to believe that it has not come into wider use in those parts of N. America and Australia, and elsewhere outside Asia, where it grows.
Microstomus kitt, a left-handed FLATFISH of the family Pleuronectidae, thus not a true SOLE (true soles being right-handed). It is nonetheless a fine fish of commercial importance. Maximum length 65 cm (26″), colour of the back generally dark brown but with varied and irregular markings of yellow, orange, etc. Widespread on the coastal banks of Europe from Iceland and Norway down to France.
Salted and dried lemon sole, prepared so as to yield strips of flesh which can be peeled off and eaten as they come, are (or used to be) known as Schotse schol (‘Scottish sole’) on the Belgian coast.
This lemon sole is not the same fish as the American winter FLOUNDER, although the name has occasionally been applied to the latter.
Lippia triphylla, a small deciduous shrub with yellow green leaves and pale lavender flowers, was introduced to Britain from Chile in the 18th century. It belongs to the same family as Mexican oregano, L. graveolens, see OREGANO.
It can be grown in Britain, France, and Spain where it is used to make health-giving lemon-flavoured teas. It has a lemon scent and flavour. The leaves can be used in drinks, salads, fruit dishes, and desserts and in sauce recipes which call for a lemon flavour.
one of the two most important periods in the Christian year, defined in the NSOED as ‘The period of 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Eve, devoted to fasting and penitence in commemoration of Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness.’ As such, it constitutes one of the major instances of FASTING (or abstinence) in the world. Details vary between the various Christian churches, but the following list of special pre-Lenten and Lenten days which have traditionally been observed in England may be taken as typical.
It comes from Constance Cruickshank (1959), a work of particular charm, and needs to be prefaced by the author’s own observation that the whole pre-Lenten period is almost universally known as carnival, but not in Britain where it is simply Shrovetide. The list shows how almost all of these special days have been marked in England by something special in the way of food.
The following day, the first after Lent, is of course Easter Sunday.
See also EASTER FOODS.
Lens culinaris, a legume which originated in the Near East. It has been cultivated since antiquity in Egypt and remains of it have been found in many prehistoric sites in Europe. India is the chief producer, followed closely by Canada (which is the largest exporter).
The plant is an annual, around 40 cm (16″) tall, whose edible seeds develop in short pods, each typically containing two seeds. The seeds come in various sizes, from tiny to small. They also vary in colour in both the husked and unhusked state. The two main types noticeable among lentils of the Near East and Asia are: first, those which are relatively large and light coloured or yellow; and second, the small ones, which are brown, pink, or grey. In India, it is the pink lentils which are mainly eaten by Muslims in the north, especially in Bengal; and the same applies in Pakistan.
The best-known cultivar is Red (also known as Egyptian or Masoor), salmon in colour when husked.
However, attempts to list lentils run up against a fundamental difficulty; the use of the word in an Indian context is much looser, spilling over from Lens culinaris into other species, as though lentil had much the same meaning as DAL (split PULSE). So, to take but one example, the seeds of Cajanus cajan, PIGEON PEA, may be called ‘yellow lentils’.
In Europe, some kinds of lentil have achieved the status of a delicacy, e.g. the French variety Verte du Puy, very small, green, and relatively expensive. But lentils, like other pulses, figure more often in hearty dishes than in delicate and costly ones. Lentil soup is filling, and so are various winter dishes which combine lentils with sausages or other pork products.
Next to SOYA BEANS, lentils have the highest protein content of all vegetables (just on 25%). They are valued for this reason in Asia, and it may also account in part for their being a favoured food during Lent in Roman Catholic countries. (This has led some to suppose that there is a connection between the names. Indeed, in parts of England ‘lentils’ was turned into ‘Lent tills’ and then shortened to ‘tills’. However, the true derivation is from the Latin lens, through the diminutive lenticula and the French lentille.)
Lentils have the distinction of being the subject of one of the most eccentric, and endearing, food books of the 19th century: Food for the People; or, Lentils and Other Vegetable Cookery, by Eleanor E. Orlebar (1879). The author, who had previously written a book on Sancta Christina, displays classical scholarship, a gift for rhetoric (evidenced by her letters to The Times), and an unerring eye for quaint details (for example in describing scenes in people’s cafés and the haunts of Danielites). The temptation to reproduce pieces of her prose can only be resisted on the assumption that the whole book will be reprinted before long.
Eliza (1787–1858) perhaps the most popular and prolific cookery writer of the 19th century. In her classic bibliography American Cookery Books 1742–1860 (Worcester, 1972), Eleanor Lowenstein lists more entries for Miss Leslie than for any other author. There are 72 listings for works in various editions by Miss Leslie compared to those for her nearest rivals in popularity, Sarah Josepha Hale and Lydia Maria Child, who have 27 and 26 entries respectively. This is a remarkable preponderance.
Typical of many of America’s most influential culinary writers, Miss Leslie was more than simply a cookbook author. She was involved with numerous other literary and social pursuits. She was, in fact, a bit ashamed of the fame and fortune she received from her cookbooks, considering them ‘unparnassian’, and assumed that her reputation would survive based upon her novels, children’s books, and stories. By and large, however, Miss Leslie’s prose writings have long been forgotten; her reputation rests on her culinary works.
Much of our information about Eliza Leslie’s early life is derived from a charming autobiographical letter which is included in J. S. Hart’s Female Prose Writers of America (1852). In this we hear of her Scottish descent, that her father was a friend of Franklin and Jefferson, that she had read an extraordinarily wide range of books by the age of 12, and that her father’s early death in 1803 left her mother, herself, and her four younger siblings in an awkward financial situation. They seem to have operated a boarding house, and Eliza attended at some point the cooking school in Philadelphia run by Mrs Goodfellow, for she mentions that her first book was compiled from a ‘tolerable collection of receipts, taken by myself’ while a pupil of that school. This first book, Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats (1828), does not repeat the acknowledgement of indebtedness to Mrs Goodfellow, but in his introduction to a recent reprint of the book culinary historian W. W. Weaver carefully traces the recipes therein to Mrs Goodfellow and indicates that the success of the book was probably based on a combination of two remarkable talents, ‘Miss Leslie’s as a writer and Mrs Goodfellow’s as a cook’.
In her preface, Miss Leslie stresses the fact that her recipes are ‘in every sense of the word, American’. Miss Leslie’s next cookbook was, however, decidedly not American. In 1832 she published Domestic French Cookery, Chiefly Translated from Sulpice Barué. This book went through at least six printings in 23 years. The mysterious Sulpice Barué turns out to have been editor of the 6th, 7th, and 8th editions of Louis-Eustache Audot’s gastronomic classic La Cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville, first published in Paris in 1818 and reprinted, under varying titles, until the appearance of an 87th edition in 1887.
Miss Leslie’s most influential cookery book appeared in 1837, Directions for Cookery. It was the most popular cook-book printed in America during the 19th century and was followed by several more recipe books. However, the autobiography (written in 1851) records that in terms of what she calls ‘pecuniary advantage’ her three books on domestic economy brought her the greatest benefit.
Janice Longone
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Lactuca sativa, is by far the most popular of the leafy salad vegetables. The lettuce belongs to the very large family Compositae, which includes cultivated species such as CHICORY AND ENDIVE, and various wild plants with edible leaves, all more or less tough and bitter, e.g. the DANDELION and some THISTLES. The original wild lettuce, L. serriola, is still common in Europe and temperate Asia, and is as harsh as any of these. It is also called ‘prickly’ or ‘wood’ lettuce, an unpromising plant for cultivation.
The original reason for cultivating lettuce was probably medicinal. Wild lettuce and, to a lesser extent, its cultivated descendant contain a latex with a mildly soporific effect. This resembles and smells like the latex of the opium poppy, but the plants are not related.
Lettuce has a long history in the kitchen, beginning in the Near East. Ancient Egyptian tombstones of about 4500 BC show a plant which appears to be lettuce. It is impossible to be sure because early varieties were tall, spindly plants with a lot of stem, comparatively small leaves, and no proper head; and there are other plants of the lettuce and chicory group which have much the same form. (For this reason wild chicory has sometimes been called ‘wild lettuce’ in England.) The Greeks themselves, who called it tridax, were certainly using it not long afterwards. About 400 BC its dietary qualities were assessed in the Hippocratic text Regimen, and since it is mentioned by the other Greek writers on food it is clear that it was widely cultivated and eaten.
The Romans ate a lot of lettuce. The Latin name lactuca is connected with lac, milk, because of the milky sap or latex which oozes out of the cut stem. In the early Roman period lettuce was eaten at the end of a dinner to calm the diner and induce sleep. Later it was eaten at the beginning to stimulate appetite. This change would have coincided with the development of improved varieties which, selected for lack of bitterness, would have contained less of the narcotic substances. In the 1st century AD Pliny describes nine varieties including a purple and a red one. All these were still loose, headless types. The usual Roman way of serving lettuce was as a salad with a dressing, but APICIUS also gives a recipe for a purée of lettuce and onions and Columella described how lettuce was pickled in vinegar and brine.
By the 5th century the plant was being cultivated in China, where it has always been treated as a vegetable to be cooked. Because of this different approach the lettuces which have been developed in China and the Far East have different characteristics.
Following the Dark Ages, lettuce does not appear again in European literature until the late 14th century, in the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where we read: ‘well loved he garlic, onions and lettuce.’ However, it seems that during the Middle Ages it was the wild L. perennis, perennial lettuce, which was eaten in salads by peasants; while the ancestral prickly lettuce continued to be used medicinally, and as a soporific. Later, in the 16th century, the cultivated plant began to take on the forms known today. Both the round-headed lettuce and the cos type were then described for the first time.
Seventeenth-century writers also mention minor varieties: cut leafed, oak leafed, and with multiple heads like BRUSSELS SPROUTS. Colours included light and dark green, red, and spotted. Some of these fancy plants have been revived.
Seeds of European lettuces were taken to the Americas as early as 1494 and importation continued thereafter. All American cultivated lettuces are of European ancestry, although there are wild American species, e.g. the Canada wild lettuce, L. canadensis. The wild plants are as harsh as their European relatives, and are not normally eaten.
By 1600 the narcotic effect of lettuce had been much reduced. It seems that the only known cases of lettuce having actually sent people into a stupor (unless one counts the Flopsy Bunnies, cited by Jane Grigson, 1978) are when, in times of shortage, they have been reduced to eating large amounts of the stems of lettuces which have ‘bolted’ or gone to seed.
These have been classified in various ways, mostly according to shape. The following main categories are recognized:
A special type of lettuce (L. sativa, Angustana Group) grown mainly in China is called ‘celtuce’ in English. The word is a combination of ‘celery’ and ‘lettuce’, given it because of its shape. Another, flattering, name is ‘asparagus lettuce’. The fleshy stem is the part eaten, usually cooked. The lower leaves, which are tough and unpalatable, are stripped off before the plant is sold, leaving only the tender leaves at the very top.
The Indian lettuce belongs to a different species, L. indica, and has been developed separately from L. sativa varieties. It is rather coarse, and has reddish leaves, or leaves with a red midrib.
In Japan a common type of lettuce, tsitsa, has been independently domesticated from a different wild lettuce. It is sometimes referred to by the botanical name L. tsitsa, although this has not been officially recognized.
So-called ‘miner’s lettuce’ is PURSLANE.
For the principal use of lettuce, see SALADS.
In the 17th century, as French works of the period testify, the cores of lettuces were candied to make a prized confection known as gorge d’ange (angel’s throat).
Cream of lettuce soup is popular, but cooked lettuce is not generally favoured in western countries, although it is common practice to cook peas with a little lettuce.
In China lettuce leaves are shredded and stir-fried. Celtuce stems are peeled and finely sliced crosswise before cooking; the tops are used like ordinary lettuce.
a country which became independent in 1951, had previously been ruled by Spain (in the 16th century), the Ottomans, and (for 40 years in the 20th century) Italy. This history has left some marks on the cookery and foodways of Libyans; but the effect of increased prosperity (from oil) and the consequent expansion of food imports, in the last part of the 20th century, has perhaps made a greater impact.
As Merdol (1992) has put it: ‘Libyan people eat three meals a day. But one may say that they set the table just for lunch. Other meals are light and not given too much consideration.’
The dishes commonly served for lunch, the main meal, are COUSCOUS and its accompaniments; macaroni with meat and vegetables in a tomato sauce; and bazin, which is distinctively Libyan. This last dish centres on a preparation of barley flour, boiled in water and then beaten with a special stick (magraf) into a hard dough. When the dough has been shaped into a pyramid, a thick meat and potato stew is poured round it and decorated with whole hard-boiled eggs.
Since most of Libya is desert and the climate is extremely hot, the scope for agriculture is limited. Potatoes, pumpkins, onions, have for long been grown; and are now being joined by aubergines, cucumbers, etc., which can be grown with the benefit of new technology. Legumes, of which the most popular are chickpeas, are imported, and so are most fruits except for dates.
The meat which is commonly used in cooking is gargush. This is meat which has been cut into long strips, salted, sun dried, chopped up, fried (usually in olive oil imported from other Mediterranean countries), cooled, and stored in its own fat.
Libyans like their food to be quite hot and spicy. Hot red pepper, black pepper, cinnamon, and cumin are much used.
Tea is drunk in large quantities, having been prepared in Libyan style. This involves boiling tea for some time in a large kettle, then straining it, sweetening it, and pouring it to and fro to achieve a fine foam. Finally, it is reheated and served in very small glasses with foam on top.
Although, as noted above, there are some interesting specialities, very little has been written about food and cookery in Libya.
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occasionally provide human and animal food. Some of these are popularly called ‘moss’, but lichens are different from mosses and only the former are edible.
Lichens are biological curiosities. What appears to be a single plant is two, a fungus and a green or blue green alga. The two plants co-operate with each other to cover bare rocks, often in hostile (for example Arctic) regions where nothing else can grow. The alga can use photosynthesis to gain food from the air with the energy of sunlight, something no fungus can do.
The two lichens of economic importance are Iceland moss, Cetraria islandica, and reindeer moss, Cladonia rangiferina. Both are used as animal food in Arctic regions, and the latter is of vital importance to the Lapps. Iceland moss is also made into bread, especially in Iceland; and its virtues were extolled by, for example, Norwegian writers on food and diet around the end of the 18th century. It was also a familiar produce in Britain, for example in the 19th century when authors such as Mrs Beeton (1861) gave recipes for using it. It is processed by a series of soakings, which remove the bitter taste, after which it can be boiled to make an edible jelly or dried and ground to a coarse flour for bread-making. In Iceland, the moss is made into a porridge or mixed into soups, bread pudding, and SKYR.
Iwatake, meaning ‘rock mushroom’, is the Japanese name of a lichen, Umbilicaria esculenta, which is an expensive delicacy in Japan and China. The high price is due to the difficulty of collecting it from the cliffs where it grows. According to Hosking (1996) collectors abseil down the cliffs in order to collect the lichen. After a thorough wash, it is soaked for two days and then made into TEMPURA or sunomono (see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS).
Manna lichen, Lecanora esculenta, has been thought by some to be the MANNA of the Bible; but there are better candidates for that role. Nevertheless, it has long been, and still is, used for making bread by the Tatars of W. Asia and by tribesmen in arid parts of Africa. It is torn up by desert winds, which carry it long distances to fall in a mysterious rain. Some other Lecanora spp also behave in this way, and are similarly used. Other European species furnish traditional fabric dyes, usually purple but including the edible red food colouring CUDBEAR (from Rocella tinctoria) and crottle which produces the ginger colour of Harris tweed.
A N. African (and European) lichen, staghorn oakmoss, Evernia prunastri, is edible and suitable for making into bread. Baskets of this were found in ancient Egyptian tombs; but it is not clear whether it was there as food or for some other purpose.
N. American lichens include a desert species which blows around as manna. This is dark crottle or puffed shield lichen, Parmelia physodes. Other kinds are horsehair lichen, Alectoria jujuba, which is traditionally cooked with CAMAS. All these also grow in the Old World, but are not used there. In very hard times Indian and white settlers alike have sometimes eaten the bitter Arctic lichens collectively called ‘rock tripe’ (Umbilicaria and Gyrophora spp).
an American cheese developed at the end of the 19th century by Emil Frey, a dairyman of Swiss origin working in New York State. Confronted by a strong demand for the German cheese Schlosskäse, which almost always spoiled while being shipped across the Atlantic, he spent some years experimenting and finally produced a cheese which was similar but better. The Liederkranz singing club in New York, whose members had been prominent in stimulating the invention, received packages of the new cheese as a gift and the name of the club, which means ‘garland of song’, was bestowed on the cheese. It has since gained wide popularity throughout the USA. The centre of production was long ago moved to Van Wert, Ohio, in more productive dairy-farming country.
Liederkranz is an orange-skinned, surface-ripened, soft cheese with a pronounced aroma, akin to but less strong than that of LIMBURGER. It is packed in small rectangles. It should be eaten promptly, at its peak, since it does not keep for long. The taste is mellow and the centre should be creamy in consistency. It is now much better known than the Schlosskäse (‘castle cheese’) of Germany and N. Austria which it originally emulated.
Phaseolus lunatus, a plant of Peruvian origin, dated back to 7000 BC by discoveries in archaeological sites. Cultivation spread slowly northwards to Mexico and the Caribbean. European slave traders took it thence to Africa, and eventually it reached Asia.
The lima bean is a popular vegetable in the USA. American varieties are often sold fresh or frozen. All these are light-coloured types, pale green when fresh, pale yellow when dried. The lima bean is also a staple food in many parts of tropical Africa and Asia, including Burma.
One of its varieties is the large, flat, white butter or Madagascar bean, sold dried or in cans, which is the kind familiar in Europe. Dried butter beans are usually very large, especially the fat sort sometimes called ‘potato beans’. They therefore need a preliminary soaking and lengthy cooking. The flavour is good.
No lima beans should be eaten raw. Certain varieties, especially those with a red or black testa, have been associated with high levels of cyanogenic glucosides, but there is no reliable correlation between seed colour and cyanide content. Environmental factors may also influence the degree of toxicity. These substances have been reduced to safe levels, by selection, in the USA and elsewhere. Proper preparation, including the changing of the soaking and cooking water, eliminates the poison.
a strongly flavoured cheese which originated in the Belgian town of Limbourg (east of Liège, close to the German frontier), was thus presented to the British public in Garrett’s Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (c.1895):
Limburger cheese is chiefly famous for its pungently offensive odour. It is made from skimmed milk, and allowed to partially decompose before pressing. It is very little known in this country, and might be less so with advantage to consumers.
Nonetheless, Limburger has demonstrated strong powers of attraction. It was, in effect, taken over by German cheese-makers in the 19th century, and is now generally perceived as a German cheese. It is also made elsewhere, notably in the USA.
It is a surface-ripened, semi-soft cheese, usually made from whole milk. It is drained by gravity, or only light pressure, and therefore remains very moist. Ripening is effected in a cool room by yeasts, moulds, and the characteristic micro-organism, Bacterium linens, which is chiefly responsible for the pungency. The cheeses, typically small and rectangular, are classified in Germany according to their fat content, which varies from 20% to over 50%.
The American cheese LIEDERKRANZ is of the same breed, but smaller and milder. The same applies to the German ROMADUR.
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an important CITRUS FRUIT which seems to have originated in the region of Malaysia. While lemons are the major acid citrus fruits in the subtropics, limes are the most prominent in tropical regions. This is true of the lime in its familiar, very acid form (it has one and a half times as much acid, weight for weight, as a lemon); but, as explained below, there are various kinds of lime, including sweet limes.
It is hard to judge when the lime was first taken into cultivation, since the oldest surviving documents do not distinguish it clearly from other citrus fruits. An Indian medical work of c.AD 100 refers to both lemon and lime as jambira. The later Arabic and Persian words, laimūn and līmūn seem also to have been used for both; and most modern names for either come from this root. The lime seems not to have been known in classical times.
Although the westward path of the lime in early medieval times is hard to trace, it seems safe to assume that it was carried to Europe by the Arabs; that it was cultivated to some extent in Italy and Spain; and that, because it is better suited by a hotter climate, such cultivation did not last for long. What is sure is that, soon after the discovery of the New World by Europeans, the lime was introduced there along with other citrus fruits, and that limes quickly became abundant in the W. Indies and C. America, especially Mexico. These were the ordinary, small, acid limes. Consideration of the further spread of the fruit requires a survey of the other kinds.
The species and varieties of lime have been well surveyed by Saunt (1990), who provides the following information and more besides:
The acid limes are thought of as green fruits (as the phrase ‘lime green’ testifies). This is because, although they would ripen to orange and then yellow if left on the tree, they are deliberately picked at the green stage, perhaps partly in order to ensure that they are not confused with lemons.
The use of fresh limes in beverages and to flavour sweet items such as a sorbet or a mousse, or in Key lime pie in the USA, is well known and becoming more familiar as the availability of fresh limes in temperate countries increases. Less familiar is the use of limes, sometimes fresh but more often dried, in savoury stews and the like in the Near/Middle East and S. Asia. In Iran, for example, dried limes are indispensable in stews (khoresht) to which they give a pleasantly musty, tangy, sour flavour. Sometimes they are split open, the pips removed, and the rest ground up into a fine powder to be sprinkled into stews and soups. They can be dried for a short time when they remain pale in appearance for light-coloured stews; or for a long time when they become very dark for use in dark-coloured stews. They are known as limoo amani (Omani limes), while the name in Oman itself, as mentioned under ARABIAN FOOD, is loomi.
For other limelike fruits, see CALAMANSI (=calamondin), and MANDARIN LIMES.
borne by the European lime or linden tree, Tilia platyphyllos, and other Tilia spp (including T. americana, the linden or basswood tree of N. America), are dried to make lime tea, popular in France, Spain, and elsewhere for its relaxing properties, but are also used sometimes to flavour dessert creams and similar confections.
A French chemist, Missa, discovered that a paste made from the fruits and flowers of the linden was a ‘perfect’ substitute in taste and texture for chocolate, except that it would not keep; an episode about which Fernald and Kinsey (1943) provide interesting details.
Lime flowers are liked by bees, and the excellence of the honey produced from them is the greatest benefit they offer, although an indirect one.
the familiar MOLLUSC of sea shores around the world. Its typical conical shell has earned it the name chapeau chinois in France.
Most limpets are edible, and Stone Age middens in such places as Orkney show that in the distant past they were consumed in huge quantities; but few are now marketed.
Lovell (1884), with his unquenchable enthusiasm for mollusc-eating, collected some interesting traditional ways of preparing Patella vulgata, the common European species. Thus at Herm, ‘limpets were placed on the ground, in their usual position, and cooked by being covered with a heap of straw, which had been set on fire, about twenty minutes before dinner’. And in more recent times the Scots used to mix limpet juice with their oatmeal. (Limpet juice is palatable, and can be used to make a limpet sauce which goes well with seafood; but it is hard work to prise a sufficient quantity of limpets off the rocks to which they cling with such tenacity.)
An Asian limpet, Cellana nigrolineata, has the reputation of being as good as ABALONE (which is itself a limpet, if the term is applied in its broadest sense). The giant owl limpet, Lottia gigantea, is praised even more highly by Ricketts and Steinbeck (1978). ‘The Mexicans justly prize the owl limpet as food. When properly prepared, it is delicious, having finer meat and a more delicate flavor than abalone. Each animal provides one steak the size of a silver dollar, which must be pounded between two blocks of wood before it is rolled in egg and flour and fried.’
the Hawaiian term for edible SEAWEEDS, merits its own entry because of the extraordinary concentration, in a relatively small population, of knowledge and skill in preparing seaweeds as food, and also because Hawaiians have used an appreciable number of species which are not consumed elsewhere, for example Grateloupia filicina, called huluhuluwaena, pubic hair limu, because of its hairlike branches. Rachel Laudan (1996) explains:
The Hawaiians had names for over 80 seaweeds, of which 32 can be equated with scientific names. Limu was one of the few vegetable foodstuffs that was available to the first arrivals in Hawaii and it played an important role as a seasoning, equivalent to the herbs and spices of Europe and Asia. It was especially important for women. Their diet consisted primarily of poi (pounded taro); pork, coconut, and all but three varieties of banana were denied them. The women picked limu, gossiping as they cleaned it, glad of the seasoning it brought to their foods. With the arrival of the Europeans and the changing of the Hawaiian diet, the number of species that were commonly eaten gradually declined. The reefs have been picked clean of many of the more popular forms of edible seaweed. Limu pickers have become rarer. No longer do women and children search for limu in the debris thrown up by storms on Waikiki Beach as once they did.
READING:
Mary(1844–1921) American cookery author and teacher. Born in Massachusetts, she graduated as a teacher from the Wheaton Female Seminary in 1864, and married David Lincoln the following year. Her teaching career did not really begin until 1879 when she was asked to replace Miss Sweeney, one of the original teachers with Maria Parloa at the fledgling Boston Cooking School. Mrs Lincoln taught there until 1885, and in 1884 published Mrs Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book, a text based on her courses at the school. According to the preface, the book was prepared ‘at the urgent request of the pupils of the Boston Cooking School who have desired that the receipts and lessons given during the last four years in that institution should be arranged in a permanent form’. The recipes themselves were drawn from a wide range of contemporary authorities in Europe and the USA, including Soyer, Mrs Beeton, Marion Harland, and Miss Corson; and Mrs Lincoln stressed the science of cooking and its relationship to sound nutrition.
In 1885 Mrs Lincoln began teaching at Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, Mass., and in 1887 published The Boston School Kitchen Textbook, a text for public schools. Her other books include The Peerless Cook Book (1886), Carving and Serving (1887), and What to Have for Luncheon (1904). In 1894 she began to contribute a column, ‘From Day to Day’, to the American Kitchen Magazine, becoming its culinary editor in 1895, and became an active member of the New England Women’s Press Association.
Mrs Lincoln’s talents were more organizational than creative. She helped put cooking on a secure scientific basis. One of her public lectures was entitled ‘Art and Science, versus Drudgery and Luck’. A popular speaker, she was invited by Sarah Tyson RORER to give a guest lecture at the annual Philadelphia Exposition in 1902. Mrs Rorer, an acknowledged leader in the domestic science movement, later referred to ‘the three pioneers Miss Corson, Mrs Lincoln, and I who started domestic science in this country’. See also AMERICAN COOKBOOKS.
Molva molva, a large fish of the COD family: maximum length 2 m (80″), market length about half of that. This is an Atlantic species, being taken mainly around Iceland and to the west of the British Isles; and only occasionally reported from the W. Mediterranean. It is considered to be close to fresh cod in merit; and in dried or salted and dried form it is almost as highly esteemed as the corresponding cod products. The dried and salted roe (huevas de maruca in Spain) is a delicacy.
The Mediterranean (or blue) ling, M. dipterygia, is somewhat smaller and less good.
Carolus, the Latinized name of the great Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707–78), who transformed the study of natural history by devising the binomial system of nomenclature. This provides for every species to have a name consisting of two Latinized words, the first indicating the genus to which the species belongs and the second being the specific or species name. The entry above on LING provides two examples, and there are hundreds of others elsewhere in the book.
This system is applicable to all living things, including all those members of the plant and animal kingdoms which provide food. Without them, and having to rely instead on the vernacular names in various languages, food studies (and many other kinds of study) would often fall into confusion.
The home of Linnaeus at Uppsala is a modest and charming place to visit, where one can combine saluting his memory and enjoying the simple and scholarly environment in which he lived and taught.
comes from the flax plant, Linum usitatissimum, which is cultivated chiefly for the production of linen. Most of the seed is made into linseed oil, largely used in connection with paints, and cattle cake. Nevertheless, linseed itself is sometimes used as a food grain in India, where the species originated and where flax has been cultivated since earliest times. Linseed was also eaten in classical Greece and Rome.
In more recent times there are various instances of the use of linseed for human food. Thus Smith and Christian (1984) note that linseed oil was one of the vegetable oils which was important during fasts in medieval and post-medieval Russia. ‘Hemp and flax seeds … were used in dishes with peas, for instance, or gave oil which was either an element in various dishes or the medium in which they were cooked.’ They quote a Russian source to show that linseed oil was among those used for making fish dishes for the table of the Tsar in the 17th century.
Lane (1860) mentions the use of linseed oil for dressing FUL MEDAMES.
The German Leinsamenbrot is a dense, black bread containing whole linseed which is intended mainly as a health food, to relieve constipation, but is quite agreeable to eat.
Panthera leo, the ‘king of beasts’, nowadays having difficulty in surviving and therefore not to be recommended as food, has nonetheless been eaten with pleasure by peoples of the regions in Africa and Asia where it flourished. Leipoldt (1976) states that he had been told by African hunters that lion meat was as good as venison and that he had verified this by preparing the meat in various ways. Fried steaks, previously marinated in wine and vinegar, scored top marks, and lion meat also produced excellent BILTONG. However, he indicates, there was a very strong prejudice on the part of everyone except black Africans against using lion meat.
the most widely used name for a mild, fresh, soft cheese popular in Hungary and other parts of Europe. It is made from whole sheep’s milk, sometimes with cow’s milk added, and was originally home-made by farmers.
Liptauer is distinctive not for its flavour, which is unremarkable, but for the way in which it is served: on a plate surrounded by little heaps of salt, paprika, mustard, butter, chopped chives, or caraway seeds, which are mixed with the cheese as desired.
(or licorice) Glycyrrhiza glabra, a small leguminous plant whose thick roots, up to about 1 m (40″) long, and underground runners contain a very sweet compound called glycyrrhizin. In its pure form this is 50 times sweeter than ordinary sugar; but the plant also contains bitter substances which partly mask the sweet taste. ‘Liquorice’ is a corruption of the original Greek name glycorrhiza, ‘sweet root’, which is also an old English name.
The plant, in one form or another, grows wild in parts of Asia and in S. Europe. Pieces of root or runner, cut into sticks and dried, provide a natural sweetmeat for chewing and are still widely sold in Asia, where liquorice has had a high reputation since ancient times for medicinal purposes.
Cultivation in W. Europe seems to have begun on a significant scale in the 16th century. An extract is prepared from the roots, for use in various ways. Liquorice was used as a flavouring and colouring in a number of sweet foods including GINGERBREAD; in stout and other dark beers.
However, it is probably in confectionery that liquorice has found its most extensive and attractive culinary use. For this purpose, the extract from the roots is combined with sugar, water, gelatin, and flour to give a malleable black or brown paste, which is tough and chewy. These attributes are used to great effect by manufacturers who mould it into pipes, cables, and long strips or ‘bootlaces’; or combine it with brightly coloured soft SUGAR PASTE to make liquorice allsorts. These sweets, very popular in Britain, are of diverse and striking appearance, mostly made of layers of black refined liquorice combined in various ways with brightly coloured paste imitating marzipan. Some are lumps of liquorice rolled in coloured sugar vermicelli. Thanks to the liquorice their flavour is more interesting than that of most cheap confectionery.
Another traditional British liquorice confection goes by the name of Pontefract cakes, or Yorkshire pennies, little shiny black liquorice sweets, about 2 cm (1″) in diameter, stamped with an impression of a castle and an owl. These small, round Pontefract cakes are still made in Pontefract, in Yorkshire, which has been the centre of liquorice-growing in England for many centuries. The origins of liquorice-growing in Pontefract, popularly attributed to the monks of a local monastery, are unknown. However, liquorice was being grown there on a large scale by the mid-17th century; and the available evidence has been effectively marshalled by the anonymous author of the essay published in PPC 39 (1990).
The essayist remarks that Pontefract cakes may have been made as early as 1614, this being the date on a die-stamp bearing the Pontefract ‘trade mark’ of a castle and an owl. These cakes would probably have been medicines rather than sweetmeats. In 1760 a local chemist, named George Dunhill, first had the idea of mixing liquorice extract with flour and sugar to give the familiar sweets. A number of small concerns processed locally grown liquorice in Pontefract throughout the 19th century. Eventually, towards the close of the 19th century, demand outstripped supply, and the British confectionery industry imported liquorice juice from Spain and Turkey, perhaps the origin of the Yorkshire dialect term ‘spanish’ for liquorice sticks. Another dialect term, this time Scottish, is ‘sugarallie’, a shortened version of the 16th-century term sugar alicreesh. Before the advent of mass-marketed soft drinks, children made ‘liquorice water’ by soaking a stick of liquorice until it dissolved in a bottle of water.
In other European countries, e.g. Denmark and the Netherlands, liquorice is a popular ingredient for sweets, children in each country having their favourites.
a bacterium which can occur in food and cause listeriosis, a serious illness. Its full name is Listeria monocytogenes, and it was named after the famous 19th-century surgeon and pioneer of hygiene, Lord Lister. Listeriosis was first found in a rabbit in 1926, and a few years later in a human adult. It was not until the 1980s that investigations and experiments led to the conclusion that most outbreaks of listeriosis have been due to contaminated food. These bacteria occur widely in the environment, for example in the soil of pastures. Much work was done in Scandinavia to improve methods of close-cutting grass for silage to reduce the level of uptake of the bacteria from the soil (Rance, 1989). They are destroyed by high heat and do not survive pasteurization, although normal reheating of foods will not kill them. But they have the unusual property of multiplying at low temperatures, even as low as 0 °C (32 °F), and for this reason pose a special problem.
Listeriosis hardly ever strikes healthy adults. Those most at risk from it are the unborn babies carried by pregnant mothers who have been infected; the elderly; and persons with an impaired immune system, such as transplant patients. Foods which have been known to cause listeriosis include prepared salads and processed meats kept under refrigeration for too long; soft cheeses, possibly contaminated after production; and so-called ‘cook-chill’ foods, which are sometimes contaminated by careless handling or storage. Prevention of listeriosis is at the heart of many official attempts to limit, if not altogether ban, the production of unpasteurized cheese.
have a long and complicated relationship. Historians, especially those dealing with ancient periods, have often used different genres of literature as a source of information on the foodways and diets of earlier times. For example, from Homer, information may be surmised on the Greek consumption of cheese and barley-meal (a meal given to Odysseus’s men by Circe in book 10 of The Odyssey); the Epic of Gilgamesh indicates the Mesopotamian love of beer and bread (Bottéro, 2002); the poet Horace tells us of the presence of partridge, boar, and lamprey on the Roman table. It is hard to say, however, precisely what kind of source literature is for food historians. Emily Gowers (1993) says that ‘It is perhaps a mistake … to use literary sources simply as evidence’ for what people ate. Using the case of ancient Rome, she argues that ‘food in Roman literature is always loaded with extra meaning’. Food in literature is often comic, ironic, or satirical, rather than straightforwardly descriptive. Gowers points out that in literature, food ‘can be mentioned both for its own sake and as a symbol of something else’. An apple in literature, for example, as well as being just an apple, ‘might suggest original sin, or the judgement of Paris. A pile of apples might suggest harvest-time abundance. An apple with a worm in it might be an intimation of mortality. The significance of food in its literary representations lies both in its simple existence and in a bundle of metaphorical associations, a capacity to evoke a whole world of wider experience.’
The range of roles that food can play in literature means that food has become a significant subgenre of literary scholarship, though much of it ‘has been plagued’, as Norman Kiell observes (Kiell, 1995), with ‘trite’ and punning titles such as Food for Thought, Just Desserts, and even ‘Alimentary, my Dear Watson’ (an article on food in the Sherlock Holmes stories). Equally, from the 1990s onwards, there has been an increasing vogue for entire novels constructed around food—Chocolat by Joanne Harris (1990); Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1996); The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester (1997); Liaisons culinaires by Andreas Staïkos (2001); and Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson (2004)—books which stand halfway between cookbooks and fiction, often writing about food in deliberately titillating terms. It is arguable, though, that the most interesting literary food comes not in these (often contrived) ‘foodie’ novels but in fiction where the food is incidental to other things.
In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster claimed that: ‘Food in fiction is mainly social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specifically required to do so.’ This may be true of Forster’s own novels—where characters fret that meat has been preboiled for soup (A Room with a View) or make disgusting coffee for visitors (The Longest Journey)—but it cannot hold as a general rule. There is plenty of gastronomic enjoyment as well as digestion in the novels of Balzac, Gogol, Thackeray, and Dickens, to take just four 19th-century examples. Literary food can fulfil many roles. It can be used as a plot device—as in the the Roald Dahl story (‘Lamb to the slaughter’) where a woman kills her husband using a frozen leg of lamb and then creates an alibi for herself by roasting the leg of lamb, thus disposing of the murder weapon. Meals in literature may be sacramental—what Margaret Atwood calls ‘a celebration of our unity with each other and with the divine principle in the universe’; or quasi-sacramental, such as the famous scene in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse in which Mrs Ramsay’s dinner of Bœuf en daube becomes ‘the culmination of a life’ (Bevan, 1988).
Not all great writers dwell on food, much. As Roland Barthes said, ‘With Proust, Zola, Flaubert, you always know what the characters eat; with Fromentin, Laclos or even Stendhal, no’ (though Stendhal does in fact mention some foods, such as Maltese oranges and sugared strawberries). The most universal purpose of food in literature is as a character device, to convey not just greed but all manner of traits, from social climbing to lasciviousness, from anorexia to anxiety. The neurotic Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s Emma is a good example of food as character, a man for whom the most innocuous dishes appear hazardous: ‘Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart—a very little bit … I do not advise the custard.’
Food in fiction can also play the role of social criticism, such as the drunken wedding scene in Zola’s L’Assommoir, which exposes the degradation of life among the Parisian poor. At the opposite end of the social scale, in Edith Wharton’s novels, highly ritualized dinners lay bare the ‘customs, rituals and taboos’ of the American upper classes (McGee, 2001). More recently, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) contains a scene in which a character shoplifts an extremely expensive wild salmon by hiding it in his trousers—a comic symbol of the excesses of the Clinton era. In at least one rare instance, fictitious food as social criticism has brought about real social change—Upton Sinclair’s account of the horrific working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry in The Jungle was one of the chief catalysts leading to the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 in the USA (Young, 1989).
A select band of writers have made excursions away from literature into food writing. Alexandre Dumas is the most notable with his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine. More recent examples are Laurie Colwin (1988) and Julian Barnes (2003). Equally, there are now countless books devoted to conjuring up recipes based on works of literature—Proust’s Madeleines; Anna Karenina’s Mushrooms; Captain Corelli’s Spanakopita. These culinary re-creations have varying success. There is no reason why what is delicious to the characters on the page will be delicious in real life. Indeed, literature is a realm in which we can enjoy foods vicariously which we have no real desire to eat.
Bee Wilson
southernmost of the Baltic states, had a relatively large territory in the Middle Ages, first by itself and later in a dynastic union with neighbouring Poland. The territory extended at one time to the Black Sea, and Lithuania had close trading links with the Mongol-Tatars, the Ottoman Empire, etc. (whence, probably, some traces of C. Asian influence on Lithuanian food and the presence of pomegranate in some dishes). These influences, however, affected the aristocracy more than the general population. The Polish-Lithuanian state declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and a continuing history of wars and other commotions in the 19th century and up to the Second World War led to Lithuania becoming a republic within the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991.
Thus Lithuanian cuisine has been exposed to numerous influences, especially those of POLAND, GERMANY, and RUSSIA. Yet indigenous traditions, many with medieval origins, survive. These reflect the agrarian nature of the country, and also its 96 km (60-mile) Baltic coastline, which yields the Baltic herring which are so well loved in all three Baltic states.
Other features which Lithuanians share with LATVIA and ESTONIA are excellent rye breads; a considerable emphasis on dairy products (including sour cream, buttermilk, cottage cheese, and hard cheeses which may be flavoured with caraway seeds); and a great liking for potatoes in many forms. Besides the ubiquitous plain boiled potatoes, Lithuanians enjoy a potato sausage, a potato pudding, potato pancakes, and dumplings made with grated potato, of which the most intriguing are called cepelinai (meaning zeppelins, referring to their shape) and are stuffed with meat, mushrooms, cheese, etc.
As in the other Baltic states, pork is the favoured meat, but among the most popular meat dishes are Lithuanian versions of the Polish zrazy, using beef. The bird most esteemed for the table is the goose. Among numerous items which have a Russian connection are beet soup (enjoyed cold in summer, see BORSHCH) and kiselius (a fruit dish—see KISEL).
a soft cheese made in and around the village of that name in the Calvados region of Normandy in France, may well be one of the most ancient French cheeses, although the first record of it under the name Livarot dates back to the end of the 17th century (Rance, 1989). Best made from the milk of Normande cows, in this instance partly skimmed, it is slightly larger than its relation CAMEMBERT, and differences in the ripening process give it a much more pungent aroma and flavour.
Brown (1955) notes that Livarot has been characterized as a ‘decadent’ among cheeses, ‘the very Verlaine of them all’. His free translation of a verse by the French poet Victor Meusy neatly evokes an image of an over-runny specimen:
In the dog days,
In its overflowing dish,
Livarot gesticulates,
Or weeps like a child.
a relatively large organ in most animals, birds, and fish, usually edible and in some cases delicious, although it has the unattractive function of secreting bile. Livers are appreciated in most parts of the world, although consumption is low in N. America.
Calf’s liver is generally accounted the best among animals, because of the smooth texture and delicate flavour. Lamb’s liver is smaller but also delicate. Both these mild types of liver are suitable for being quickly sautéed, sliced or in larger pieces. Fegato alla salvia, calf’s liver cooked with sage, is well known in Italy, as is Fegato alla veneziana, with onions.
Pig’s liver is widely eaten. It and ox liver tend to be coarse. The flesh of both is dark red and has a strong flavour which can be mellowed by long braising. Slices of either may be soaked in milk to soften the flavour before they are cooked.
Livers lend themselves well to the making of pastes, stuffings, sausages, and the like. Liver dumplings, made from calf’s liver according to any of several good C. European recipes, are a real delicacy. The German and Austrian ones, called Leberknödel, are the best known.
Many game animals yield good livers, which are usually among the first items to be consumed. Deer liver, generally speaking, is excellent.
Among the other ingredients which go well with animal livers are bacon, oatmeal, sour cream, sharp apples, onions, shallots, garlic, marjoram, and sage.
Chicken livers are the most widely eaten of poultry livers, but the most famous are the specially fattened livers of goose or duck (see FOIE GRAS). Various game birds provide good livers, which may be served as special titbits on toast.
Some fish livers are delicacies, e.g. those of red mullet; and there are some places, notably Shetland (see Davidson, 1988a), where the art of using fish livers has been developed by a fishing community to an extent which is unimaginable for persons in non-coastal urban environments. However, certain fish livers are too rich to be eaten in more than tiny amounts.
any of the reptiles which have four legs, a long tail, and a scaly or granulated skin, in the order Lacertilia.
For information about cooking and eating the larger lizards, see IGUANA and MONITOR. However, there are lots of smaller lizards in tropical and semi-tropical regions around the world, and many of these are eaten locally, although they yield relatively little meat. Sophie Coe (1994), recalling a storehouse full of dried lizards which was discovered by a Spaniard on an island off the Peruvian coast in 1532, draws attention to the careful description of such lizards and the techniques for catching, drying, and eating them, by Holmberg (1957). Her distillation of this description serves as a good indication of general practice in lizard-eating communities:
Dicrodon holmbergi, the lizard, lives in holes in the ground under guarango trees, and the fruit of these trees is the only thing that the lizard eats. The tree is also called algarroba, mesquite, or Prosopis juliflora, and human beings eat the pods as well. From April to November the lizards hibernate, and we presume that the tree has no ripe fruit. As the fruit matures, the lizards emerge from their holes and sometimes even climb the trees to get it. The lizards are trapped, and their front legs and backs are broken to paralyze them. They are then thrown on the embers of a fire and scorched until their scaly skins may be removed by hand. Once skinned, they are buried in a shallow depression in the heated sand and covered with hot ashes. Ten minutes of cooking, followed by cooling off and gutting, makes a product that may be stored for a year or consumed immediately. Holmberg said that it could be eaten in seviche [see CEVICHE], the dish of fish marinated in lime juice, as well as in soups, stews, and omelets.
Saurida tumbil and close relations, fish of Indo-Pacific waters which have lizard-like heads. Maximum length 45 cm (18″). These fish are moderately good to eat, but tend to be dry, so unsuited to grilling. In Thailand (where S. undosquamis is the preferred species) they are usually boiled, or made into fish balls, or conserved by canning or salting.
Lama glama, a S. American mammal, a member of the same family, Camelidae, as the Old World CAMEL. The llama, which was domesticated thousands of years ago, was one of two such species (the other being alpaca, L. pacos) which were of great importance to the Inca of Peru.
When the Spaniards arrived in S. America, they were impressed by the usefulness of the llamas as a source of clothing and transport and also food. Commenting on this third role, Sophie Coe (1988) cites an isolated mention of llama milk being used, but explains that, besides titbits such as the tongues and brains, it was the muscle meat which was important. Modern sources suggest that this has a resinous taste, in animals older than two years, because of their diet, but that the taste disappears if the meat is dried to make charqui (JERKY).
A third species, L. guanicoe, the guanaco, provided much fresh meat for Charles Darwin and the crew of HMS Beagle when they spent some months in Patagonia in 1833, before resuming their voyage round the world.
a fish of numerous genera and species in the family Cobitidae, occurring in rivers and lakes in Europe and Asia, especially SE Asia. Generally speaking, these are small fish, adept at concealing themselves by burrowing at high speed into a muddy or sandy bottom. Only a few of them are regarded as food fishes, notably Botia hymenophysa and Acanthopsis choirorhynchos.
These two species are eaten with some enthusiasm in Laos, for example; larger specimens of the former species may be grilled, while fish of the latter species are regarded as good for pickling or cooking in fish stews. (An unusual ‘no smoking’ rule accompanies the pickling process; the Lao believe that even a tiny shred of tobacco ash in the mixture will turn it bad and make it harmful.)
is not a variety: the term describes factory-made cheeses which, for convenience, are made in a rectangular shape rather than the traditional round one.
the English name for a dish, or rather group of dishes, which almost certainly has its origin in the Baltic ports, especially those of Germany. In all its forms, the name refers to a seaman’s dish; and in England it is particularly associated, in recent times, with the port of Liverpool, which is why Liverpudlians are often referred to as ‘scouses’ or ‘scousers’. The dish has, however, a long history in other nearby parts of England. Thus Hone (1826) relates that at what were called ‘Merrynights’ in N. Lancashire and Cumberland and Westmorland, lobscouse was served after the dancing.
As with many similar dishes, there are numerous and fiercely disputed variations. However, the following account may be taken as typical. Lobscouse is made in a single pot and begins by frying or ‘sweating’ in DRIPPING, sliced onions, carrots, and turnips. Stewing steak or mutton or corned beef is added; plus, when the meat is browned, salt, pepper, and water. Sometimes a cow-heel or pig’s trotter is put in to give a gelatinous body to the dish. Chopped potatoes are always included. At this stage it can be put in the oven to cook for a long time.
Some insist that SHIP’S BISCUIT should be crumbled into the dish, while others maintain that pearl BARLEY is an essential ingredient.
A Liverpool street chant parodies ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’:
Half a Leg, Half a Leg, Half a Leg of Mutton,
Into the Pan of Scouse rolled the six onions.
Labskaus, the German version, may be made with either fish (Fischlabskaus) or meat; in either case, preserved rather than fresh.
In Denmark the dish, traditionally made with salt beef, is known as skipperlabskovs and is supposed to be thick enough to eat with a fork but not so thick that the fork can stand up in it. (Some Liverpudlians agree and say that it should be firm enough for a mouse to be able to trot over it but mushy and capable of being spread on bread to make a ‘lobby butty’.)
This subject and other kindred ones have been brilliantly and entertainingly illuminated by Anne Grossman and Lisa Thomas (1997) in a work providing a gastronomic companion to the famous naval novels of Patrick O’Brian.
Roy hipperbottom
Homarus gammarus and H. americanus, the outstanding CRUSTACEANS of N. Atlantic waters (see illustration opposite). The two species are very similar; the situation is that what is essentially the same creature, the lobster, has developed in slightly different forms on the two sides of the N. Atlantic, and the differences have been judged great enough to warrant classifying them as two species, not one. One difference is that the American lobster grows slightly larger than its European brother. It is, however, difficult to give maximum dimensions. In the past, before the lobster fisheries became intensive, some lobsters lived to a great age and attained extraordinary sizes. For example, one which was taken off the coast of Virginia in the 1930s was well over a metre (39″) long and weighed about 20 kg (45 lb). Nowadays a lobster half that size would be considered a giant.
The colour of the live lobster varies according to its habitat, but is usually dark blue or greenish. After being cooked, when the red pigment in its carapace is, so to speak, ‘released’, it turns bright red; ‘like a cardinal’s hat’, as one French writer put it.
The range of the European lobster is from the far north down to the Mediterranean. The American lobster occurs as far south as S. Carolina. Their habits are such that they can only be caught in special lobster pots, and the fishery for them is relatively expensive and arduous. Partly for this reason, the lobster has become one of the most costly seafoods in the world. In N. America it is the Maine lobster which is most famous; but this fact seems merely to reflect the hard work put in by Maine publicists. The Canadian catch is more than twice the size of the United States one, and the southern part of the Gulf of St Lawrence is the richest lobster-breeding ground in the world.
Most sea creatures have worse enemies than man. Whales are an exception; so are adult lobsters. Baby and small lobsters fall prey to predators of their own element; but those which reach a respectable size are able to defend themselves very well. The stalked eyes give the lobster good warning of impending danger. The powerful abdomen, snapped down, will propel it backwards at an astonishing speed into a rocky crevice. The claws are formidable weapons in combat; and the shell (properly exoskeleton) is an effective armour. However, since the shell is rigid, it has to be shed periodically as the lobster grows. Immediately after moulting, the lobster is a sorry sight, and as defenceless as a medieval knight who has doffed his armour. The body is soft and the claws shrunken and shapeless. Although the lobster quickly swells to its new size and starts to develop a new exoskeleton, it is not good to eat at this time. The swelling up to the new size is largely accomplished by absorbing a lot of water; the meat is therefore watery and not at all like the firm flesh which lobster-eaters expect.
Lord (1867) tells a strange tale about canned lobster.
The popularity of the Lobster extends far beyond the limits of our island, and he travels about to all parts of the known world, like an imprisoned spirit soldered up in an air-tight box. It has been said that during the Indian war a box of regimental stores belonging to our forces fell into the hands of the enemy, who thinking that a great capture of some kind of deadly and destructive ammunition had been made, rammed the painted tin cases, with goodly charges of powder behind them, into their immense guns, laid them steadily on the devoted British troops, and then with a flash and a thundering roar, preserved lobster, from Fortnum and Mason’s, was scattered far and wide over the battlefield.
The NORWAY LOBSTER is a true lobster; but the SPINY LOBSTER, which exists in various species in tropical and subtropical waters around the world, is not.
a characteristic vegetable stew of S. America, sometimes enriched with pieces of beef, salt beef, pork, or fish, and always containing a cereal element, as explained in an interesting passage by the Brown family (1971):
Locro is one of those flexible dishes of everyday country life that can be made with almost any meat or combination of meats, depending on the momentary resources of the kitchen. It resembles Arabian couscous, from which it probably originated, traveling to the Spanish colonies by way of the mother land. Out on the wheat-growing plains of Argentina the main ingredient of locro is most often whole grains of wheat, but coarsely milled corn resembling our hominy is equally good. Yellow corn is preferred in many localities because it is supposed to be sweeter, and one asks in the country store for maiz para locro (corn for locro).
Locro is very well known in ECUADOR, where one of its variant forms includes coconut milk.
an insect which is proverbial for the ruthless manner in which it can devour crops, descending on and denuding huge tracts of agricultural land, but which is itself welcome food for human beings in many parts of Africa. The principal species, Schistocerca gregaria, known as the desert locust (in French, criquet pèlerin), ranges all over the continent, reproduces ten or more times a year, and may be encountered in flights of several billion individuals. The two contrasting aspects of the locust, by which people can ‘enjoy not only the agreeable flavour of the dish, but also take a pleasant revenge of the ravagers of their fields’ (Barth, 1857), are neatly expressed in the song attributed by Pringle (1851) to‘the wild Bushman’ of Australia:
Yea, even the wasting locust-swarm
Which mighty nations dread,
To me nor terror brings nor harm;
I made of them my bread.
Bodenheimer (1951), as so often where edible insects are under discussion, provides a remarkably full survey of locust-eating which includes details of a dozen or so ways of preparing them. One point which stands out is that the females are better than the males, especially just before their migratory flight, ‘at a time when their wings are short and their bodies are heavy and distended with eggs’. Legs and wings are discarded, either before or after roasting or boiling. Of the numerous personal accounts cited, this from an observer in S. Africa in 1782 is typical.
Joy showed itself suddenly on all faces when a cloud of advancing locusts was sighted, composed of millions of these insects. They passed not much above our heads on a front of almost 1000 m. continuing for over an hour in such a dense stream that they did fall like hail upon us. Those of my men who were accustomed to wild life, enjoyed them and boasted so much about the excellence of this manna, that I ceded to the temptation to eat them. My prejudices were certainly stronger than any real cause for aversion, as I could not detect any disagreable flavour, and they actually taste like the yellow of a boiled egg.
There are also accounts of drying the bodies of locusts and turning them into a paste or a flour which can be stored; and to a soup prepared with locust eggs. However, the last words should perhaps be allotted to the lively S. African author Leipoldt (1976):
Fried locusts. Nip off their wings, heads and legs, after you have plunged them into boiling water mercifully to kill them. What remains are the thorax and abdomen, which are the only parts that interest the epicure. You dust them with a mixture of pepper and salt (to which for some absurd reason that I have never been able to understand, some people add a little powdered cinnamon) and shallow-fry them in fat till they are crisp and brown. They taste not unlike whitebait that, somehow, have been stuffed with buttered toast.
See also GRASSHOPPER, a wider term which covers the family of bush-crickets as well as that of locusts.
Parkia biglobosa and P. filicoidea, are native to tropical W. Africa and bear pods which have some importance there and in the Sudan as a source of food.
The pods of P. biglobosa contain a sweet yellow pulp which is made into drinks and sweetmeats.
A traditional method of preparing the seeds in W. Africa requires the seeds to be repeatedly boiled, then husked and placed in leaf-lined baskets or similar containers to be fermented over a period of several days by a whole battery of micro-organisms which are naturally present. The fermented seeds may have wood ash mixed into them to reduce the smell. After fermentation they can be pounded into a paste or kept loose; and in either event may be formed into balls or pyramids and partially dried for storage. The product is used as a condiment, to flavour soups and stews, and is also a good source of protein.
The technique of production and the appearance of the product varies from place to place, as do its names. The principal name is perhaps dawadawa (in Nigeria), with variants such as daoudawa, but well over a dozen others are in common use, including soumbara (francophone W. Africa), kinda (Sierra Leone), and netetou (Senegal).
For a related tree of SE Asia, see PETÉ. The locust trees are also broadly similar to the CAROB.
a large, hard, boiled sweet mounted on a stick so that it can be sporadically sucked in a convenient way. The term ‘lolly’ is an 18th-century one for ‘mouth’, so a lollipop was something that one popped into one’s mouth. It did not necessarily mean a sweet with a stick, as became usual later. A few old-fashioned boiled sweets sold by British confectioners are still called ‘lollies’ though they are stickless. The diminutive name ‘lolly’ has become the usual one for ice lollies. In the USA the other end of the word has been used as the basis for the new term ‘popsicle’. ‘Icy pole’ is a term coined in Australia.
Dimocarpus longan, is a slightly smaller and less well-flavoured relative of the LYCHEE, native to the same region and also of long-standing cultivation. Its fruits ripen later than the lychee, it withstands lower temperatures, and is less exacting about growing conditions.
Like the lychee, the longan has a rough and brittle shell, easily removed. The flesh within is whitish and translucent, enclosing a shiny black seed; hence the name ‘dragon’s eye’.
In China much of the crop is canned. The Chinese also dry the pulp, which acquires a rich, smoky taste and can be used in cookery or added to tea for special occasions.
a spice which was much more widely used in classical and medieval times than now, comes from two species of plant in the pepper family. Piper longum, Indian long pepper, grows wild at the foot of the Himalayas and in S. India. P. retrofractum, Javanese long pepper, is found throughout Malaysia. The latter is the more pungent and generally held to be the better. It is certainly the longer; its fruit, a dark catkin-like spike made up of tiny seeds, may measure 6 cm (2.5″) long.
When Theophrastus wrote about pepper in the 3rd century BC, he listed only two kinds, black pepper (P. nigrum) and long pepper: ‘One is round [he describes the reddish fruit of P. nigrum] … The other is long, black, with poppy-like seeds. This is much stronger.’ Nearly 400 years later, Pliny described three sorts of pepper: black, white, and long. The last cost twice as much as white, which in turn cost much more than black.
Long pepper was still prominent in European recipes of the 16th century, and Bailey (1588) noted that ‘long pepper is to be seen in every shop’. But the price differential was reversed. In 1607 black pepper cost 12 times as much as long pepper in France. This change may have indicated a decreasing demand, for it was about then that long pepper started to disappear from European recipes. By 1702 a French writer could write: ‘I have nothing to say about long pepper since it is no longer used as food.’
Use of long pepper in India and other Asian countries has been more consistent. It even pre-dated the use of black pepper, and continues on a substantial scale, although much long pepper has to be imported. Linguistic evidence suggests that long pepper was also the first to be used in Europe. Its name in Sanskrit was pippali (corresponding to the Hindi pipli), and it is from this word that the classical names (Greek peperi and Latin piper) and modern terms for pepper have come.
P. and M. Hyman (1980) speculate that the decline of long pepper in Europe may have been caused by the introduction in the 16th century of CHILLI pepper. Gerard (1633) said of long pepper: ‘It is in taste sharper and hotter than black pepper, yet sweeter and of a better taste.’ If it had been prized for its hot quality, then it would have been natural for chilli to oust it, especially as the chilli was cheaper and, unlike long pepper, could be grown in the hotter European countries. Moreover, the chilli kept better. Long pepper, according to Bailey (1588), was ‘moister than any other kind and it will sooner mold and waxe mustie than any other’.
If the above is correct, it would remain to explain the continued use of long pepper in Asia. The answer may be that Asian cuisines, unlike European ones, have room for three hot peppers; and that long pepper was a local product for Asians and less apt to spoil. In India there is some cultivation of long pepper, but most is gathered wild in the north. It is used generally as a spice, and also in pickles and preserves.
The hotness of long pepper is partly due to the presence of piperine, as in black pepper, but also to other alkaloids with numbing properties.
Eriobotrya japonica, a medium-sized, evergreen tree of the rose family. Its yellow/orange/apricot-coloured fruit (a pome, i.e. a fruit of the same type as the related apple or pear) is oval or pear shaped and up to 8 cm (3″) long, with large, hard seeds. The flesh can be either apricot or, less often but more delicious, cream coloured. The fruit looks slightly like the related MEDLAR, and the two are often confused; indeed, the loquat is sometimes called ‘Japanese medlar’.
The species had its origins in China, where it has been cultivated for over 1,000 years. Tolerant of both tropical heat (although preferring hillsides in very hot regions) and of a certain degree of winter frost, it gradually spread through E. Asia and India, and reached Europe in the 18th century. It is now grown on a small scale all around the Mediterranean, and also in Australia, and S. and C. America.
There was a time when the loquat claimed attention by being the first soft fruit to mature, ahead of apricots and peaches, but new precocious varieties of these have done away with this advantage, leaving the loquat with the handicap of spoiling quickly after picking. It has never become important commercially. However, when fully ripe, the loquat is quite sweet and luscious. Good jams and jellies may be made from unripe loquats; and if the seeds are included these give an almond-like flavour.
Nelumbo nucifera of Asia and N. lutea of N. America, extraordinary plants of the family Nelumbaraceae which offer edible leaves, ‘roots’, seeds, and flowers.
Neither of them was the lotus of the fabled lotus-eaters of Libya; see JUJUBE. However, N. nucifera was certainly known in classical antiquity; there is an unmistakable illustration of it in a mosaic in the ‘House of the Faun’ at Pompeii.
The Asian lotus is much more important than the American one, and is prized mainly for its roots and seeds.
The lotus has special significance for Buddhists. It is for them a symbol of purity, undefiled despite its muddy origin. The Buddha is often depicted holding a lotus flower, or seated upon one. It is said that he compared his fellow men to lotus buds in a lake—springing from mud and striving to reach the surface in order to blossom. The lotus also has mystical significance for many non-Buddhists.
The root, properly described as a subaqueous rhizome (swollen stem), resembles huge sausage links, a large string of which may easily measure more than a metre (say, 4′). The ‘links’ are reddish-brown, and have internal tunnels, as shown in the drawing. They are sliced to provide the ingredient of crisp texture and lacy pattern which is familiar in Chinese stir-fry dishes. The Chinese also candy the slices, for use on special occasions.
Roots can be cut into chunks for use as a vegetable, after the ends and the thick outer skin have been removed. Whole sections of root can be cooked in soups; or stuffed, typically with mashed mung beans, and braised with pork.
The root is also ground into a starchy paste, for use as a thickener; but this is an expensive item, not commonly found outside China.
The seeds develop visibly in the top surface of the lotus pod as it ripens and are a pale buff colour when ripe. They split easily into two and are cylindrical, about 1 cm (0.4″) long. They can be mistaken for shelled peanuts, and also have a nutty flavour, which is why in Thailand their chief use is in sweets, and why they are candied for festival fare. They also have savoury uses; being sold dried and needing lengthy cooking they are then mainly used in dishes such as stews.
Ground, they produce a starchy meal. If first preserved in a sweetened soy sauce mixture, and then ground, they constitute lotus jam, described by Hawkes (1968) as a favourite filling for certain oriental pastries and desserts.
The leaves, when young, can be cooked as pot-herbs. Older and larger ones are used as wrapping for foods to be steamed, to which they impart some additional flavour.
Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese did not develop the habit of nibbling lotus seeds. The only part they eat is the rhizome, which they call renkon. As a food it is prized chiefly for its characteristic crisp texture and peculiar shape. When it is peeled, renkon easily turns brown, so it has to be soaked in vinegary water before being used. If pickled in sweetened vinegar it is called subasu.
N. lutea, known as water-chinquapin, water-nut, duck acorn, and nelumbo, is a native of the eastern parts of the USA (but rare in the north) and of the south from Florida to Texas. It was valued as a food by American Indians. The rhizomes were baked, when they become mealy and somewhat like sweet potatoes. The seeds, which are still sometimes available as a speciality food, and have a pleasant nutty flavour, were prepared in numerous ways, including being ground for use in bread-making.
Levisticum officinale, an umbelliferous plant which grows in S. Europe and as far north as England. It resembles wild CELERY in appearance, and was formerly used in the same way, but is milder and sweeter with a distinctively warm, spicy fragrance.
Lovage was popular as a flavouring herb in classical times, and is often mentioned in APICIUS. The Romans called it ligusticum because it grew abundantly in Liguria. The altered form levisticum, common in late Latin, was the origin of the English and other modern names, and was later adopted as the botanical name. The hardier and coarser-flavoured plant which is sometimes called ‘Scotch’ or ‘black’ lovage, but whose correct name is ALEXANDERS, was given Ligusticum as its generic name (but has since lost it in favour of Smyrnium).
Lovage continued to be grown in medieval kitchen gardens. The leaves were used as a flavouring and to make a cordial; the stems were cooked like celery; and the roots were made into a sweetmeat. The suggestion of ‘love’ in the name is also seen in German: the plant had a reputation as a love potion.
The eclipse of wild celery by the cultivated type also led to a decline in the use of lovage, which is now little known anywhere. This is a pity, because the flavour is distinctive and, used with discretion, very good in soups, salads, and meat dishes alike.
Flacourtia inermis, a low, fruit-bearing tree related to the RAMONTCHI and the RUKAM. It is cultivated in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka both for its fruit and for its decorative foliage.
The fruits are round, the size of small cherries, and dark red when ripe. Most are sour and astringent, and are normally reserved for purposes such as making jellies, preserves, and syrups.
a name commonly applied to small diamond-shaped pieces of sugar confectionery, particularly perfumed SUGAR PASTE; also, a tablet containing some kind of medicinal preparation (for instance, throat lozenges, for coughs). ‘Lozenge’ refers primarily to the shape, a square or diamond, into which a larger sheet of paste is cut. Thus other items such as biscuits, marzipan, and even preparations of meat may be cut into lozenges.
The word ‘lozenge’ has puzzled etymologists for years; one hypothesis, stated persuasively by Professor Maxime Rodinson in 1956, is that it derived from Arabic loz, almond, via lauzinaj, an almond cake known in the Levant from early medieval times. Recipes show this to have been a marzipan-like confection, which was cut into small pieces for serving. ‘Lozenge’ first appears in Europe in 14th-century cookery manuscripts as ‘losanges’, shapes cut from a spiced pasta-like dough, sometimes made with almond milk. By the 16th century it referred to medicinal sweetmeats, and has retained this meaning ever since.
Laura Mason
is a deep-fried bread made in Bengal, similar to the POORI of N. India. The main difference is that luchi are made with the finest plain white flour, while poori are made with coarser flour which retains a portion of the husk from the wheat.
In appearance a luchi is a round golden disc, 12.5–15 cm (5–6″) in diameter and puffed up, although there are many variations in size. The flour is mixed with water and some GHEE, and then kneaded. However, if a larger amount of ghee is added to the dough whilst kneading, the luchi when fried in the oil will become flaky instead of puffy as it also absorbs a lot of oil in the course of frying. It is then known as a khasta luchi.
the official name, derived from an Aboriginal name, of an Australasian fish, Girella tricuspidata, which is also called blackfish, black bream, and sweep in Australia, and parore in New Zealand. It is especially abundant in the estuaries of New South Wales. Anglers prize it as a game fish, and commercial fisheries for it have some importance.
Doak (1978) has described these fish as ‘swift and wary herbivores [which] more resemble deer than grazers such as sheep’. The three cusps (whence tricuspidata) on their close-set teeth enable them to crop the seaweeds which are their diet (but, it has been noted, always supplemented by the minuscule animal life found on the seaweed—fish fed with pure seaweed soon fall into a decline).
The name sweep is applied also to related species of Australasian waters, notably Scorpis aequipinnis; and the Maori name maomao is given in New Zealand to another relation, S. violacea, a small fish but one which makes good eating.
The opaleye of the S. Californian coast, Girella nigricans, is a close relation and another fish which attracts anglers. The small and incidental commercial catch is marketed as ‘perch’. The fish is generally perchlike in appearance, with bright blue eyes and an olive green body.
Cyclopterus lumpus, a species with many remarkable features. The flesh is prized much less than the roe, and is sometimes quite inedible. And the fish has a strange ‘lumpy’ appearance and is equipped with a ventral suctorial disc. The colour of the thick skin is highly variable; blue-grey, yellow-green, and yellow-brown are common, but spawning males are to a large extent red. For some reason it has names in French and German which mean ‘sea hare’.
However, the most remarkable and puzzling aspect of the lumpfish is its edibility (or inedibility), which varies by gender and season. Davidson (1979) wrote as follows:
The lumpfish, however, causes puzzlement, at least in countries where it is not familiar. An agreeable perplexity is induced by studying opinions of it expressed by British authors in the past. Sir Thomas Browne, in 1662, recorded it as ‘esteemed by some as a festival dish, though it affords but a glutinous jelly, and the skin is beset with stony knobs after no certain order’. Parnell said that: ‘The flesh, when cooked, is soft and very rich, and is considered by some of the inhabitants of Edinburgh as a luxury.’ The force of the word ‘some’ is revealed by the additional comment that ‘there are few stomachs with which it agrees, in consequence of its oily nature.’ Buckland is more critical: ‘I do not like the flesh at all myself; it is like a glue pudding.’
Festival dish or glue pudding? The answer is both. There is a considerable difference between the edibility of male and female; which is why there are separate names for them in countries where the lumpfish is well known, such as Sweden and Iceland. And the female is edible at certain seasons but not at others. An Icelander told me that when females with roe were taken and the roe had been extracted, to make lumpfish caviar, what was left was really no more than a glutinous mass, unsuitable even for making fish meal. It goes over the side. The male, on the other hand, provides good eating.
The same source provides detailed information about how people on the northern coast of Iceland, where lumpfish are plentiful, prepare both male (poached with vinegar to become soðinn rauðmagi) and female (head and tail off, gutted, hung in a cool place until yellowish in colour, when they become sigin grásleppa and can be poached before consumption).
The range of the lumpfish is from the Bay of Biscay up to Iceland and the Baltic in the E. Atlantic; and from waters of the far north down to New Jersey in the W. Atlantic. The collection of roe for processing to become ‘lumpfish caviar’ is practised mainly by Denmark. Although its flavour and feel in the mouth cannot be compared with those of real (sturgeon) CAVIAR, it presents a somewhat similar appearance when spread on small biscuits or little bits of toast.
a pervasive phenomenon of the SE Asian food scene, which has colonized some other parts of the world, e.g. the Netherlands. Whatever it is called—lumpia in Indonesia and the Philippines, popiah in Singapore, egg roll for Americans—it is patently part of the SPRING ROLL family based in China. Members of this family all consist of ground or chopped-up food in a very thin wrapper, usually made of flour and water, with or without egg.
Lumpia have their own entry because they have acquired a life of their own and from one of their power bases, in Indonesia, they have colonized the Netherlands.
In the Philippines—to take as an example the country where lumpia-making has been carried to a high pitch of excellence—lumpia can be served in their natural state, or fried; and they can either be part of a meal or eaten as a merienda (snack), see MERENDA.
The filling varies. In the Philippines it can be a mixture of vegetables, sometimes sprinkled with peanuts, and a sweetish sauce with chopped fresh garlic served on the side. This is called lumpiang sariwa (fresh lumpia), and may be lined with a leaf of fresh native lettuce. Sometimes the mixture is served unwrapped, and called lumpiang hubad (undressed lumpia).
If it is filled with the heart of palm (ubod, the pith of the coconut tree, sautéed with shrimps and pork), as it is in Silay City, it is called lumpiang ubod. In Silay, the coconut trees are cut down for ubod the morning of the making, so as to have the ubod at its sweetest. A fresh scallion (spring onion) is tucked in for accent.
If the filling is chopped pork, Chinese style, it is usually made in slender cylinders then cut into 1 cm (2″) portions, and called lumpia Shanghai. This usually comes with a sweet-sour dipping sauce. Lumpia may also be filled with fish, with cheese, with shrimps, with sautéed bean curd, with chicken, etc.
If filled with cooking bananas and jackfruit, it is called turron, not lumpia, and is a sweet snack.
In Indonesia a filling of meat and prawns is again used, but one of vegetables is more common. Bean sprouts are popular, again perhaps because of the crisp texture, and because they are cheap, though the original Chinese spring rolls never contained beansprouts. Lumpia are considered snacks, not part of a meal, and they are therefore quite small.
The Dutch picked up the idea and took it back to the Netherlands, where loempia became a popular one-dish meal. They also changed size, turning into giant loempia, many times the size of the originals. See DUTCH COOKERY.
an abbreviation of ‘luncheon’, is the current term in English for a light meal taken in the middle of the day; colloquially, it indicates anything from a quick SANDWICH to an elaborate, leisurely, and sociable meal. In many cultures, the early afternoon is still considered a suitable time to eat the main meal of the day, and there are few foreign equivalents to lunch.
It should be mentioned that in N. America the term ‘lunch’ has sometimes been used to indicate a light repast, regardless of the time at which it is eaten. This practice may have existed elsewhere, as the NSOED gives as one meaning of the word, dating back to the early 19th century: ‘in some places, a light meal at any time of the day’.
In its modern British form, lunch dates back to a period of social change in the early 19th century, as the time between BREAKFAST and dinner lengthened in the daily routines of the leisured and wealthy. Emerging to fill this gap, lunch was flexible in composition and often informal in nature, to cope with the ever-present possibility of guests—for these hours were also a time of day during which ladies were accustomed to call on their friends and acquaintances (French déjeuner, in contrast, began its career as a breakfast meal and moved through the day to occupy a noontime slot, allowing the evolution of the light petit déjeuner, now equivalent to breakfast).
In the 19th century and for part of the 20th, the word ‘luncheon’ was preferred, but in recent times it has come to seem pretentious and is indeed virtually obsolete, while ‘lunch’, considered vulgar in the 19th century, is now universal. The hybrid term ‘brunch’, indicating a breakfast and lunch and usually taken in the later part of the forenoon, first emerged at the very end of the 19th century (‘a university term’ states the OED), but did not gain wider currency until the 1930s when it started to be a feature of weekend parties, and became a feature of hotel menus in N. America. Sylvia Lovegren (1995) has excellent American recipes for brunch, taken from the 1970s which was, in her opinion, the decade par excellence of this meal.
Refreshment between breakfast and dinner was not a new idea, nor was it exclusive to those with time on their hands. C. Anne Wilson (1994) discussed various precedents which existed for light meals, showing that down the years these made confusing leaps in timing as they adjusted to alterations in the dinner hour. One such meal was ‘nuncheon’ or ‘bever’, ale or beer, accompanied by bread. Nuncheon, a word now confined to dialect usage, is derived from an Anglo-Saxon term meaning ‘noon drink’, while ‘bever’ came from the Latin bibere, to drink.
The word ‘luncheon’ itself is older than the meal to which it is now attached. In the 16th and 17th centuries it meant a lump or gobbet of food such as bread, cheese, or bacon. Wilson remarks that these were ‘in fact the materials for a light meal’ although the luncheon thus foreshadowed still lay in the future.
In the early 19th century, lunch in the modern sense was mostly partaken of by women, the men (especially those in business and the professions) eating large breakfasts and large dinners, and little in between. There was also a significant social and age distinction, in that poorer people and children continued to eat their main meal in the middle of the day, calling it ‘dinner’, a habit which has persisted (when a midday meal is provided for schoolchildren it is still referred to as ‘dinner’). This gave Geoffrey C. Warren (1958) a problem when defining terms. Considering the Mid-day Meal, ‘which practically everyone has in one form or another’, he remarks that:
Opinion is divided in an interesting way on what this meal should be called. Roughly, two-thirds call it ‘dinner’ and one-third ‘lunch’. There appear to be two factors that govern the choice of word—the weight of the meal and the degree of sophistication of the person.
He discovered that there were few rules; that some people called it lunch regardless of what was eaten, whereas others made a distinction between a light lunch on working days and a heavy Sunday dinner, despite the fact that both were eaten at midday.
Against this background, it is not surprising that a British lunch has generally lacked gastronomic interest. Many 19th-century lunches appear to have been collations of leftovers, often roast meat, served cold or hashed, supplemented with salad, poultry, or game, plus bread, cheese, and puddings, as the household could afford and required. There are few items specifically associated with the meal, the most notable being plain fruit cakes, recipes for which appear under the title ‘luncheon cake’ in late 19th-century cookery books. Perhaps these developed from recipes similar to those for the solid yeast-leavened cakes with a sprinkle of currants which, served with beer, composed a mid-morning and mid-afternoon ‘bever’ in British public schools until the end of the 19th century.
Lunches do, however, vary widely in nature. The concept of a ‘ploughman’s lunch’ of cheese, pickles, bread, and beer seems to have been the product of 1930s ideas about what was appropriate in a rustic context, rather than something based on a survey of what farm labourers actually eat at midday (or, one should add, a survey of classical literature, for that would have brought to light a description by Pseudovirgilius, in the poem called Moretum, of the earliest recorded ploughman’s lunch being prepared and would thus have legitimized the concept in an unexpected way). A ‘proper lunch’, i.e. a full meal eaten at leisure, may be viewed in different ways, e.g. as a means of ensuring that one’s loved ones absorb adequate nourishment during the day, or alternatively as a maddening interruption to the day’s activity, which would be far better punctuated by a light snack. The latter view was eloquently expressed by Elizabeth von Arnim in a passage quoted by Fernie (1905), with which all enthusiastic gardeners and diligent writers (she was both) must surely agree:
Luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would fain try to sail by it like Ulysses (tied to the mast) if I only had a biscuit to comfort me; but there are babies to be fed, and the man of wrath, my husband … So I stand by them, and am punished every day by that two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so much object … It is mortifying after the sunshiny morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet, and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy of love with life, to come back, and live through those dreary luncheon-ridden hours when the soul is crushed out of sight, and sense, to take up with cutlets, and asparagus, and revengeful sweet things.
Laura Mason
READING:
often called lights, are the pair of organs used to draw air into the body and bring it into contact with the blood in man and most vertebrates. They often form part of the PLUCK (an expression which covers heart, liver, lungs, and windpipe) and are cooked as part of this item in various dishes, mostly stews. It is rare for them to be prepared on their own for human consumption, although some cuisines have specialized dishes of this nature. Schwabe (1979) has a fine collection of lung dishes including fried calf lung from Provence, served in a paprika sauce from Hungary, a couple of stews from Germany as well as one for pig’s lung from the Philippines, and many others. Helou (2004) adds a very tasty dish from Hong Kong where pig’s lung is stewed with almond milk. It is more usual, however, for lungs to be eaten as an invisible ingredient of meat products such as sausages or pâtés, although they were always an important part of HAGGIS (sheep’s) and FAGGOTS (pigs’). In the USA lungs are not permitted to be sold for human consumption.
READING:
an annual or biennial leguminous plant of the genus Lupinus in the PEA family. Many lupins are grown for their flowers, but the seeds of certain species, although bitter and toxic when fresh, can be treated to make them edible and then roasted for eating or for use as a coffee substitute.
Anissa Helou (1994) has described the lengthy preparation needed to make the seeds into a snack food in the Lebanon. She believes that this food has been part of the diet there since several centuries BC.
Since the discovery in the 1920s of low-alkaloid, ‘sweet’ lupin plants, cultivars have been developed whose seeds can be used without preliminary preparation. The Saccharatus group of Lupinus albus are outstanding in this respect. The cultivar Ultra in this group has been used to produce flour for making lupin pasta.
Toasted and salted seeds, especially of L. albus and L. mutabilis (Andean lupin or tarwi) are served as a snack food or appetizer. Tarwi seeds are remarkable for their high protein content (almost 50%) and are also the source of an oil which has culinary uses.
a speciality of Norway and Sweden, also the Swedish-speaking part of Finland and the Norwegian and Swedish communities in N. America. It consists of STOCKFISH (dried COD, usually, but LING and POLLACK have been used) which has been soaked, steeped in a LYE solution, and then rinsed lengthily under running water before being boiled. This treatment gives the fish a jelly-like consistency. It is served with boiled potatoes and flatbread. Pepper and melted butter are necessary accompaniments. Regional variations of this standard service exist in both Norway and Sweden.
Whether the origin of lutefisk was in Norway or Sweden is debatable, and debated. What seems clear is that its history goes back to the early 16th century or earlier; and that speculations about how it first came into being (most of these postulate a series of accidents befalling medieval fish curers and/or housewives) lie far outside the boundaries of possible verification.
It is, however, possible to explain its limited geographical distribution. Lutefisk was, and is, eaten in winter, when it is very cold in the Nordic countries. If one postulates as necessary conditions for the emergence of lutefisk (a) a strong tradition of fishing and of drying the catch, (b) a climate so cold as to permit use of the technique in the days before refrigeration, and (c) forests or woods to supply wood ash to produce the lye; then the best candidates in Europe would be Norway and Sweden.
‘Lye’ is a term which has changed meaning over the centuries. It always indicates an alkaline product, and it is the action of ALKALI on the flesh of the fish which produces the distinctive result. But lye in late medieval times, when it was an all-purpose cleaner, would have been what is also called potash, K2CO3, easily prepared for kitchen use by boiling wood ash (ideally beech for lutefisk, but usually birch) in water and straining the result. More recently it would be caustic soda, NaOH, which is stronger; and this is what is currently meant by the term ‘lye’. Ordinary washing soda, Na2CO3, produced by boiling ash from burned seaweed, has also been used. The addition of lime helps to make the fish whiter and may help in other ways. Both the history and the chemistry of lutefisk have been ably explored by Astri Riddervold (1990a).
The same author provides interesting information about the importance of lutefisk as a cultural symbol, especially for Norwegian and Swedish immigrants in N. America. Historically, lutefisk was eaten for supper on Christmas Eve, usually in association with rice pudding, and on Good Friday and Easter Day, and more generally during the whole period from Advent to Easter. At the end of the 19th century, however, came change; roast rib of pork began to usurp the place of lutefisk as the main dish for Christmas Eve supper, while lutefisk moved to another day of the Christmas season and rice pudding, in this particular context, began to disappear.
There might have been further, and more drastic, changes in the last quarter of the 20th century, when statistics showed that both in the countries of origin and among the immigrant communities in N. America the consumption of lutefisk was declining steeply. However, a public relations campaign in the USA halted and reversed the trend there; and it was followed shortly afterwards by a similar campaign in the home countries. Riddervold reproduces samples of the bumper stickers which played an important role in the campaigns, and shows how some of the slogans tended incidentally to create a new myth, that lutefisk is an APHRODISIAC.
(or louvar) a remarkable and beautiful fish, the only species in its family, Luvaridae. A cosmopolitan species of tropical and subtropical waters, and a loner, it is rarely seen in any fish market, although making an occasional appearance in those of the W. Mediterranean and California, usually because it has been taken incidentally in the course of fishing for TUNA or has stranded itself on a beach. Its diet is unusual, consisting largely of jellyfish. The beauty of its coloration—a pale pink body, blue above, with scarlet fins—attracts immediate attention; and a fully grown adult may be as much as 1.75 m (70″) in length and 140 kg (310 lb) in weight. The flesh is reputedly excellent and not unlike that of tuna.
Covering a scant 1,000 square miles, and with a population of less than 400,000, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was created by the Congress of Vienna, and became an independent state in 1867. Landlocked by BELGIUM, FRANCE, and GERMANY, it is a green country, traversed by three rivers (and three languages), and ranging in terrain from the Ardennes at its northern border with Belgium to the flatter Gûtland in the south.
In common with many small countries, Luxembourg defends its nationhood fiercely. In spite of this the influence of its neighbours, particularly Belgium, can be clearly detected in its cuisine, with additional, more contemporary, influences coming from Italy and Portugal. Betraying its history of poverty (in stark contrast to its present status as an international banking centre) many traditional dishes reflect a focus on vegetables, especially potatoes and choucroute (see SAUERKRAUT), and preserved foods, particularly pulses and smoked hams. This is demonstrated in the typical Judd mat Gaardebounen, often cited as the Luxembourg national dish: boiled, sliced smoked pork served with a thick preparation of fresh or dried broad beans flavoured with sage, and boiled potatoes. According to Nosbusch (c.1990), Kermesse (Christmas) used to be a welcome excuse for more festive fare, with dishes such as the Kiirmeskuch (a plain yeast-raised cake with raisins, eaten spread with butter and often topped with a thin slice of smoked ham), and an interesting soup, Gehäck, made with pork offal, and finished with prunes soaked in local Elbling wine.
The suffix à la luxembourgeoise seems to be used, even by the Luxembourgeois themselves, to cover a multitude of sins. Often denoting a fried piece of meat served with a sauce made with any combination of gherkins, shallots, or capers, it can simply mean the addition of some Luxembourgeois wine such as Riesling to a stew or fish dish. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) characteristically caps all other contenders with Mashed Potatoes à la Luxembourgeoise: simply replace the milk or cream more usually added with a similar quantity of red wine.
Jane Levi
Litchi chinensis (formerly Nephelium litchi), is the best and best known of a group of tropical fruits native to China and SE Asia. The name is sometimes spelled ‘litchi’. Others in the same genus are the LONGAN, RAMBUTAN, and PULASAN.
Lychees are borne by a large, evergreen tree which has been cultivated in S. China since the 1st century BC, or even earlier. The tree will fruit only in a subtropical or tropical climate where there is a distinct dry season. So it has always been an exotic import for the N. Chinese. During the 1st century AD a special courier service with swift horses was set up to bring fresh lychees from Canton north to the imperial court. The fruit was considered the finest of southern delicacies, and Ts’ai Hsiang, in his Li chih pu (Treatise on Lychees), testified to the great demand for it during the Song (Sung) dynasty (AD 960–1279). Growing the fruit was at that time and later a large and ruthlessly competitive business. A lighter aspect is provided by the unusual nomenclature of what were considered to be the finest varieties, including ‘glutinous rice dumpling’ with its tiny ‘chicken-tongue’ seeds and ‘imperial concubine’s laugh’. This last, according to Karp (personal communication, 1997) drawing on Groff (1921), ‘commemorates the celebrated Lady Yang, whose passion for lychees, fetched at great cost by the imperial courier service, helped cause the downfall of her lover, the emperor Hsüan Tsung, in 756 AD’. The same author describes how ‘clubs of devotees met in temples and gardens to consume hundreds at a sitting’ during the later period of the Ming dynasty.
Lychee cultivation now spreads along a narrow belt of suitable climate through Thailand to Bangladesh and N. India (especially Bihar). The Bengal region is especially productive and its crop has become larger than that of China. S. Africa is another major producer, and lychees are also grown in Hawaii. The main N. American area of production is Florida. The fruit travels well if picked just before it is fully ripe, so fresh lychees are available in western countries.
The round fruit is about 3 cm (1″) in diameter with a tough, knobbly skin which is red in the ripe fruit but turns brown a few days after being harvested. Inside is a delicate, whitish pulp surrounding a single, large, shiny, dark brown seed (although some varieties contain tiny, abortive seeds). Only the pulp is eaten. It has a flavour reminiscent of the muscat grape.
There are more than a dozen important cultivars of lychee worldwide, with varying characteristics. Thus, of the two main US varieties, the Mauritius is much crisper and less sweet than the Brewster.
Lychees can be dried whole. The skin then becomes distorted and the contents rattle around when the fruit is shaken. The pulp takes on the character of a raisin. The term ‘lychee nut’ for the dried fruit is a misnomer. The hard nut (seed) within the dried pulp remains inedible.
Canned lychees are peeled and stoned. The industry is a large one, and the product pleasing, but the subtlety, texture, and exquisite perfume of the fresh fruit are largely lost in canning.
a term now used in N. America to denote a dilute solution of caustic soda. In earlier centuries it meant an impure solution mostly of caustic potash, made by boiling wood ash in water. This was of considerable importance, since it and lime were the only alkalis available for tasks such as making soap. The culinary uses of lye (of either kind) include removing the bitterness from green olives and preparing the remarkable preserved fish known in Scandinavia as LUTEFISK.