made from OATS (in the form of oatmeal), salt, and water, sometimes with a little fat added, were the staple food of the inhabitants of the Pennines and the Lake District in England and of the Scottish Highlands for centuries. In these upland regions oats are the only cereal which will ripen in the cold wet climate. Oatcakes, together with BARLEY BREAD, were also of some importance in Wales and Ireland. They remain popular, and are now generally regarded as a Scottish speciality.
Scottish oatcakes include a little fat and are raised with baking soda. The old way to make them required the dough to be rolled out; one side was baked on the girdle (see GRIDDLE) and the other toasted before the fire (nowadays oatcakes are more likely to be baked in the oven). Cut in quarters, they were called FARLS. For storage they were buried among the dry oatmeal in the meal chest. Oatcakes had some importance as festive foods, especially at Beltane (1 May, an ancient Celtic festival) and Christmas.
Irish oatcakes were of a similar type, but cereals of all kinds declined in importance in Ireland when the potato became popular. Bara ceirch, Welsh oatcakes, were pressed out into flat sheets by hand, and baked on heavy cast iron griddles.
Clapbread (which could be made from either barley or oatmeal) was the staple food of Cumberland. Meal and water were mixed to a stiff dough, rolled into a ball, and then ‘clapped’ or pressed out into a paper-thin sheet by hand on a board dusted with meal, then baked to make a stiff cake. This method, as well as conventional rolling, was also used to make havercake (from Old Norse hafri, oats), in the C. and N. Pennines, to a recipe not unlike the Scottish one. Bakestones, thin slabs of fine-grained sandstone which could resist heat, were used for cooking them; oatcakes were so important that many houses had a fixed bakestone, with its own separate hearth, to one side of the main fireplace.
Oatcake-baking developed into a distinct skill in W. Yorkshire, where the cakes were thin, soft, and moist. A batter made from fine oatmeal was used. This was lightly fermented, either by leaving it overnight to sour naturally, or with yeast. In its simplest form, the batter was poured onto a bakestone to make a rather thick oatcake. A finer type was called riddle bread, because a pool of batter was shaken or ‘riddled’ on a special board to make it spread thinly. The thinnest, finest type was thrown oatcake, which developed during the 19th century. The batter was transferred from the riddle board on to a sheet of paper or cloth and then thrown on to a hot bakestone to make a very thin, slender oval sheet which cooked in seconds. These were often made by commercial bakers, and late in the century an ingenious device consisting of a cloth belt mounted on a little trolley was used to deposit a long thin sheet of batter on the hot bakestone. Soft and very pale brown, they resembled lengths of wash leather when fresh. They were hung on a wooden rack or ‘flake’ to dry and harden.
Broken or crushed oatcake was mixed with broth, gravy or hot water, and butter to make browiss, a sort of savoury porridge, in Yorkshire. A similar gruel was made in Wales, either mixed with buttermilk to make shot (siot), or with breadcrumbs and bacon fat or DRIPPING and boiling water to make BREWIS (brŵes).
Staffordshire oatcakes are thicker and round, more like a thin CRUMPET or modern PIKELET, and are fried with bacon for breakfast.
Laura Mason
Avena sativa, a CEREAL which grows well in moist, temperate to cool climates, and will thrive in conditions which wheat or barley would not tolerate. Oats are therefore important as human food mainly in northern regions.
However, oats were a comparative latecomer to agriculture. Wild oats (just like those proverbially sown by young people) seemed unpromising. The small grains, borne singly on straggly seed heads, dropped off as soon as ripe; a useful feature for a weed trying to spread itself, but not for a cereal crop.
The first traces of cultivation, selecting from wild strains which kept their seeds long enough to be harvested, date from about 1000 BC in C. Europe. However, the Greeks and Romans of classical times were unimpressed, regarding oats as coarse, barbarian fare; and the Romans used them mainly as animal fodder, but did foster the growing of oats in Britain, where they were to become important as a food for human beings. Indeed, they became the principal cereal in Wales and, even more markedly, in Scotland.
This pattern lasted for a long time. In the early 19th century a survey showed that the Welsh ate more oats than all other cereals combined and that in Scotland the ordinary people ate almost no other grains. Thus Dr Johnson’s dictionary definition of oats as ‘a grain which in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’, although unkindly meant (Johnson later confessed to Boswell, ‘I meant to vex them’, i.e. the Scots), was accurate. There seems to be an affinity between oats and people of Celtic origin. Elsewhere in Europe, oats are less important. The main regions where they have served as human food are Russia, and to some extent Scandinavia and parts of Germany and neighbouring N. European regions. Findlay (1956), having devoted his professional life in Scotland to the subject, gives a good survey of the varieties available and the conditions which suited them.
To make Pinhead oatmeal the whole kernel is cut in half with any floury meal sifted out. Medium Rough is also known as Coarse Medium. Medium and fine grades are the most popular. There is also Oat flour which is distinct from Super-fine, which still has a granule.
Rolled oats or Oatflakes were developed in America by the Quaker Oat Company in 1877 and are made by steaming and rolling pinhead oatmeal. While they have the obvious advantage of cooking more quickly than regular meal they have been specially heat treated with some loss of flavour and nutrients and this also applies to the other ‘instant’ oat porridges now on the market. Jumbo Oatflakes are made by steaming and rolling the whole oat.
(adapted from Catherine Brown, 1985)
In the New World, oats did well, thanks to Scottish emigrants who took their tastes with them. They were first grown in Massachusetts in 1602. A number of local American recipes for oats are recognizably derived from old Scottish ones. And Quaker Oats, a means of making porridge quickly, are an American invention of the mid-19th century.
Oats are processed to produce oatmeal of various grades. These and ‘rolled oats’ are explained in the box. Oatmeal is generally unsuitable for making bread of the conventional kind, owing to an almost complete lack of GLUTEN, the substance which holds bread together. However, as Elizabeth David (1977) points out, a very fine brown bread, with ‘a wonderfully rich flavour’, can be made with a mixture of three to four parts wheat flour and one of oatmeal. Catherine Brown (1985) has reported some successful experiments on similar lines in Scotland. But the characteristics of oatmeal are such that it is used much more for OATCAKES, a separate subject.
Oats are among the most nutritious of cereals, containing as much protein (16%) as the finest bread wheat, and higher levels of fat than any other common cereal. They make the best PORRIDGE of all, and it is commonly held that the disproportionately large measure of success and fame achieved by Scottish people on the world stage is partly or even primarily the result of a diet including oatmeal, especially porridge. Lockhart (1997) has neatly drawn together much information about The Scots and their Oats.
Besides its primary uses in porridge and oatcakes, oatmeal features in HAGGIS, in certain types of SAUSAGE, as a coating for HERRING, also for POTATOES, and sometimes for DUMPLINGS. There is also a range of semi-sweet oatmeal puddings which could be eaten either as part of a meat course or separately as a sweet dish. FLUMMERY was originally made with oatmeal.
For other traditional uses of oatmeal see BREWIS; BROSE; CRANACHAN; CROWDIE; GROATS AND GRITS; GRUEL; SOWANS.
Oxalis tuberosa, an important food plant in S. America, especially in the region of the Andes, where it is second only to the POTATO as a root crop. The name comes from the Quechoa o’qa or okka. The plant is easy to propagate, and tolerates poor soil, high altitudes, and harsh climates.
The oca differs from other members of its genus, such as WOOD SORREL, in being grown mainly for its root tubers, although its spinach-like leaves and young shoots may also be eaten as a green vegetable. According to the National Research Council (of the USA, 1989), the tubers look like
stubby, wrinkled carrots. They have firm, white flesh and shiny skins in colors from white to red. Most varieties have a slightly acid taste—they have been called ‘potatoes that don’t need sour cream.’ Others, however, give no perception of acidity. Indeed, some are so sweet that they are sometimes sold as fruits.
When freshly dug, some tubers have too strong an acid taste, but this disappears if they are left in the sun for a few days, when they become much richer in glucose and taste sweet.
Oca and some other Oxalis spp with edible tubers were introduced to Europe in the 1830s as a rival to the potato, but never became popular, partly because (as was originally true of the potato) there is a dearth of varieties with ‘daylength requirements’ which are compatible with any but equatorial latitudes. Oca has, however, been successfully introduced to New Zealand, where the tubers—sold under the misleading name ‘New Zealand yam’—are commercially cultivated. The varieties which flourish in New Zealand could presumably flourish also in northern temperate regions.
Oca can be boiled, baked, or fried. In the Andes, the tubers are usually added to stews and soups, boiled or baked like potatoes, or served as a sweet, either plain or candied. In Mexico fresh oca is often sprinkled with salt, lemon, and hot pepper and eaten raw.
Arctica islandica, a large edible bivalve of the N. Atlantic. It does not belong to the same family as the QUAHOG, but bears enough resemblance to it to justify the purloining of the name; and it earns the adjective ‘ocean’ by living only in relatively deep waters, from the latitude of Newfoundland down to that of N. Carolina. Until recently it was left undisturbed on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the decline in the stocks of the SURF CLAM caused American processors to look elsewhere for clam meat, and large quantities of the ocean quahog are now being landed on the American side, mainly for use in minced-clam products and stews.
The shells are almost circular and may measure 11 cm (over 4″) in diameter. They have a periostracum (outer covering) which is brown or blackish; whence the alternative names of mahogany or black clam. The meat is also dark, so does not suit a New England-style clam CHOWDER, which is white, as well as it does the Manhattan version, which is not. And it seems to vary in quality according to the fishing ground. Specimens consumed in Orkney have been described as gristly, and those taken from certain beds have too strong a flavour of iodine or seaweed. But those from good beds in the W. Atlantic are excellent.
In Orkney and Norway respectively the ocean quahog is coo shell and kuskjell, ku being Norwegian for cow and the shells having formerly been used as ‘the cow’ in children’s games.
Octopus vulgaris and its relations, an edible MOLLUSC whose consumption has been inhibited, except in the Mediterranean countries and the Orient, by what is considered to be its alarming or repugnant appearance (a view not shared by the Japanese, who regard it as an amiable creature, as explained under CEPHALOPODS); by its largely undeserved reputation as a peril to divers—it is known as devil-fish in the USA; by the need (notorious but in fact not always applicable) to tenderize the flesh before cooking; and perhaps also by the unresolved difficulty of deciding what its plural form should be (a difficulty which must have caused at least some people who would otherwise have bought two to ask for only one).
O. vulgaris belongs to the Mediterranean, where it thrives to such an extent that it has greater commercial importance than squid or cuttlefish, and warm waters on both sides of the Atlantic (up to, for example, the English Channel and Bermuda, but not normally beyond). This is the octopus depicted on some ancient (Mycenaean, Minoan, Greek) vases, testifying to the appreciation with which it was eaten in antiquity. Modern Greeks continue to eat it with enthusiasm, and import dried octopus from N. Africa, but their consumption per capita is less than that of the Spaniards, who rank first, as both consumers and producers, in Europe. Yet only a small proportion of the world catch is European, and the Spanish in turn are outdistanced by the Japanese who account for about half the world catch. The oriental and other relations of O. vulgaris are listed towards the end of this entry.
The octopus passes the winter in deep water but approaches the coast in early spring and spends the summer in inshore waters. It is a solitary creature, living in a crevice in the rocks or in a house fashioned for itself from an old pot or tyre or other piece of debris on the sea floor.
The housing policy of the octopus makes it vulnerable to fishermen who are willing to lend it suitable material. In the region of Naples, for example, the true octopus, which is reputed to have a special liking for the colour white, can be fished for by lowering to the seabed a white pottery amphora (mummarella) containing white pebbles. Once he sees this, an octopus will empty the pebbles out and install himself within; and the fisherman, seeing the pebbles scattered outside the amphora, will know that he can now haul this up with an octopus inside it.
The Japanese have also used this method. Akashi in Hyogo prefecture—a port on the sheltered sea between two of Japan’s main islands, Honshu and Shikoku—is famous for its octopuses. There is a local legend that once upon a time a monster octopus living off the coast of Akashi stretched its tentacles onto the land and harassed a princess resting in a palace nearby. This prompted the people to devise the tako-tsubo (octopus-pot) method for catching octopuses. Long, narrow earthenware pots tied with ropes are lowered to the seabed and later, when octopuses are comfortably settled in them, lifted out of the water. The seabed along the coast of Hyogo prefecture is divided neatly into plots, and each octopus-fisher of the area is allowed to sink his octopus-pots only into his plot—an ancient right, jealously guarded.
The principal species of octopus, apart from O. vulgaris, are the following. For comparison, the usual market length, including tentacles, of O. vulgaris is from 50 cm to 1 m (say, 20–40″); and the maximum length three times greater.
A baby octopus needs no special preparation, but can simply be deep fried or cooked briefly in boiling water.
Various methods of tenderizing a larger octopus are proposed. Some give an impression of folklore, for example the advice to add a cork to the cooking water. Others are known to be effective, but are tedious, such as beating the octopus on rocks. A Japanese method is to put the cleaned octopus in a bath of finely grated daikon (see RADISH) and to knead it with the fingers.
However, in Japan octopus is as often as not cooked without preliminary tenderizing. The two main ways of cooking octopus are boiling and nimono (see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS). For the former technique, a live octopus is chosen, cleaned, boiled just lightly in order to prevent it from getting tough, and then sliced thin and eaten with a dip sauce made variously with SOY SAUCE, citrus juice, or mustard; or used for sunonomo (again, see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS). When used for nimono, on the other hand, octopus is cooked for a long time—a few hours—to make it tender; it is often cooked with vegetables, yaki-dofu (see TOFU), KONNYAKU, etc.
those parts of a meat animal which are used as food but which are not skeletal muscle. The term literally means ‘off fall’, or the pieces which fall from a carcase when it is butchered. Originally the word applied principally to the entrails. It now covers insides including the HEART, LIVER, and LUNGS (collectively known as the pluck), all abdominal organs and extremities: TAILS, FEET, and HEAD including BRAINS and TONGUE. In the USA the expressions ‘organ meats’ or ‘variety meats’ are used instead.
Offal from birds is usually referred to as GIBLETS.
Another, archaic, English word for insides, especially those of deer, was ‘umbles’, a term which survives in the expression ‘to eat humble pie’, meaning to be apologetic or submissive.
The taste and texture of offal depends on the particular organ, and on the species and age of animal from which it came. Generally speaking, offal from calves is held to be the best, providing large organs of fine flavour and texture. Lamb offal is also good, but sheep, pig, and ox offal tends to be coarse in flavour and texture.
Offal does not keep well so must either be prepared and cooked quite soon after slaughter or turned into a product which does keep (BRAWN, HASLET, PÂTÉ, some kinds of SAUSAGE). That relationship of offal to the time of slaughter is seen best in the various customs surrounding the processing of the household PIG, and in dishes such as the Belgian Chousels au Madère mentioned under SPLEEN.
The type of offal used in any given culture depends on the favoured meat animal, which may in turn depend on religious dietary laws. Muslim countries use much lamb offal. The Chinese have numerous ways of dealing with organs from pigs.
Offal is a good source of protein, and some organs, notably the liver and kidneys, are very valuable nutritionally. In most parts of the world, it is valued accordingly. In the English-speaking world, however, the pattern is different. In N. America there has been and still exists a squeamish attitude which prompted the title Unmentionable Cuisine for the book by Schwabe (1979). In Britain, where there used to be no, or anyway few, qualms about eating offal, overt consumption has declined in the last half of the 20th century, although the offal is in fact still eaten in processed foods where it is not ‘visible’.
Squeamish attitudes may be explained on various grounds. Heads and feet remind consumers too directly that the food is of animal origin. Ambivalence about eating certain bits of an animal’s anatomy, such as TESTICLES, is expressed through the use of euphemistic names. Some internal offal has surreal shapes and strong flavours, which are not to everyone’s taste. The meat of feet and ears is characterized by textures which are gelatinous and crunchy at the same time, a combination which is generally disliked in the western world, although appreciated in the Orient. Refrigeration and the development of the butchery trade, together with an increase in disposable income, have meant that people can pick and choose which part of the animal to eat, leading to a preference for prime cuts.
See also BONE MARROW; BRAINS; CAUL; CHITTERLING(S); CRÉPINETTE; FEET; HEAD; HEART; KIDNEYS; LIVER; OXTAIL; SPLEEN; STOMACH; SWEETBREADS; TAILS; TESTICLES; TONGUE; TRIPE; UDDER.
READING:
the name in Japan, where use is common, of one of the more important red SEAWEEDS, Gracilaria verrucosa. The plants are bushy, relatively small (to 30 cm/12″), and purplish-red or greyish or brownish in colour.
This is widely used in the Indo-Pacific area, either fresh (young tender plants only) in salads; blanched as a garnish; or processed to yield a kind of AGAR-AGAR.
the collective name for those palm trees which are a source of edible oils. The most important of these, Elaeis guineensis, is considered under PALM OIL.
The oil palms seem to have originated in widely separated parts of the world. E. guineensis is W. African. The American oil palm, Corozo (formerly Elaeis) oleifera, grows in southern C. and northern S. America and in the Amazon basin.
Other palms which yield edible oils include the COCONUT. In addition, the raffia palms, of which there are various species in the African tropics and a few in S. America, yield oil. The most important is the Madagascar raffia palm, Raphia farinifera (better known as a source of the raffia used by gardeners for tying up plants, and for having the largest leaves in the world—up to 20 m/65′ long). The pointed, oval fruits, which may be sweet or bitter, yield an oil known as raffia butter.
The Babassú palm, Orbignya barbosiana, is common in C. and S. America, especially in the Amazon region. Its fruits resemble coconuts but are only the size of a large apple. They yield plenty of oil, but the shells are so hard that until recently (when new machinery was developed) it was impossible to exploit them commercially.
READING:
a purely Canadian cheese made by Trappist monks in the province of Quebec. It bears some resemblance to BEL PAESE or PORT SALUT.
the product of a tree, Terminalia kaernbachii, which grows principally in Papua New Guinea, can be almost as large as a tennis ball, and have large kernels which, because of the way in which the cotyledons (embryonic leaves) are wrapped round each other, look something like miniature cabbages.
The nuts, which have a mild flavour like that of almonds, are eaten both raw and cooked. ‘Devilled in the fry-pan by the camp cook, these nuts go very well with the sundowner, when one is camped in the rain forests of Papua.’ Thus wrote a correspondent to Menninger (1977), who collected a number of interesting comments on the species, all agreeing on the good quality of the nuts.
The related species T. catappa bears fruits with white kernels which also taste like almonds, so are called ‘sea almonds’. According to Low (1989) the purple pulp of the fruits is also edible, and both fruit and nut are popular snack foods on the Torres Strait Islands.
The uniqueness of Ryukyu cuisine (Ryukyu is the ancient name of Okinawa, still often used, especially in a cultural context) must be attributable, first, to the historical fact that Ryukyu was once a tiny island kingdom maintaining precarious independence between China and Japan, and, secondly, to its geographical distance from the Japanese mainland and its position in the subtropics.
The influence of both China and Japan is clearly recognizable in the cuisine of Ryukyu as, indeed, in many other branches of its traditional culture. The great popularity of PORK is one of the salient points of Ryukyu cuisine and must be a Chinese influence. The people of Okinawa eat not only the meat but also various other parts of pigs, and this forms a striking contrast to the mainland Japanese, who started to eat meat as part of their normal diet only a little more than 100 years ago and are still rather squeamish about OFFAL.
A typical and well-known pork dish of Okinawa is Rafutei; shoulder and belly of pork are slowly stewed in SOY SAUCE, sugar, and awamori (the local spirit made from MILLET and used instead of saké). Other typical pork dishes include Nakami-no-suimono (soup of intestines and shredded stomach), Mimikawa-sashimi (sunomono of pig’s ear), and Ashitebichi (stewed pig’s trotters). Pork is used for making stock, whereas mainland Chinese use DASHI.
The people of Okinawa do not eat as much fish as the rest of the Japanese, but they make an extensive use of KELP. For example, Konbu-irichii is a regional dish in which shredded kelp and pork are stir-fried.
A seafood that is peculiar to Okinawa is the sea snake caught in the neighbouring subtropical waters. The Ryukyu name for it is irabu. It is sold smoked and comes in two forms—straight like a walking stick or coiled for easy portability. This is cooked slowly for as long as half a day with kelp and a pig’s trotter and eaten with the soup.
Katsue Aizawa
Hibiscus esculentus (formerly Abelmoschus esculentus), an annual plant of tropical and subtropical regions which bears pods which are eaten as a vegetable. It is the only member of the MALLOW family, Malvaceae, to be used in this way. The pods, which are typically ridged and tapering, but may be almost round, contain many small seeds and a gummy substance which gives okra its special character. The general appearance of the pods has resulted in their having the name ‘ladies’ fingers’.
Okra is generally regarded as native to Africa, and may have been first cultivated either in the vicinity of Ethiopia or in W. Africa. It is not known when it spread from Ethiopia to N. Africa, the E. Mediterranean, Arabia, and India. There is no trace of it in early Egyptian tombs, but it was recorded as growing beside the Nile in the 13th century.
Its westward migration to the New World seems to have been a result of the traffic in slaves. Okra had reached Brazil by 1658 and Dutch Guiana by 1686. It may also have arrived in the south of the USA during the 17th century, and was being grown as far north as Virginia and Philadelphia in the 18th century.
The spread of okra eastwards from India was slow. Its appearance in SE Asia may be assigned to the 19th century, and it arrived in China soon thereafter.
Okra is itself an African name, as is the alternative name ‘gumbo’. The local name in Angola was ‘ki ngombo’. This was rendered by Portuguese slave traders as ‘quingombo’, and then shortened by slaves in the W. Indies to ‘gombo’ or ‘gumbo’. This last is the name still used in the southern USA.
There are many cultivars of okra. Pods range from under 5 cm (2″) to 20 cm (8″) long. They may be dark or light green, or (less common) bright red; the pods of some of the red-skinned cultivars remain red even after being cooked. The pods may be ridged or smooth. Their gumminess also varies. There is a general preference in the USA for the gummier kind and for ridged pods of about 16–18 cm (7″) long.
In America the use of okra is one of the characteristics of CREOLE cookery and CAJUN FOOD. Sliced pods give a thick, glutinous texture to the famous ‘gumbo soups’, often referred to as simply ‘gumbos’. FILÉ, a powder made from SASSAFRAS, may be used to add more gumminess. Okra itself can be dried and powdered to serve as a thickening agent.
Okra is only moderately popular in Europe, although it is eaten in the south of France and in Spain, and in other regions where it grows well and where N. African culinary influences appear. It is used much more extensively in the Middle East and India, as a vegetable. The gummy texture, which those who dislike it regard as slimy, was mitigated in Egypt in medieval times by cooking okra with meal. Modern methods include steeping the pods in acidulated water before cooking, and frying them even if they are later to be cooked in water. Care is taken not to break the pods and thus release the mucilaginous substance within. However, whatever one does, okra remains slippery, unless the pods have first been thoroughly dried. In India the dried, shrunken pods are cut into short sections and these are then fried and drained, after which they have the appearance of small CROUTONS and taste quite different from okra in its usual forms.
Elaeagnus angustifolia, bears fruits which are eaten in Turkey and other Mediterranean countries.
The fruits are about the size of an olive (hence an alternative name ‘Russian olive’) and are usually marketed after being dried, when they are a pale brown and look something like small dates. Iddison (1994) writes:
The skin is thin and papery and peels off easily to reveal the buff-coloured, soft, mealy flesh which induces thirst. It is sweet with a flavour reminiscent of medlar and the flesh clings to the stone which is ribbed and striped brown. They are not used in cooking these days but their flesh was used in bread and also fermented to make a drink.
A variety which grows further to the east, e.g. in Afghanistan, bears red fruits, and there is now a cultivar of this. There are also other species in the genus which bear fruits in the Orient, Alaska, etc.
One such is the silverberry, Elaeagnus argentea, a shrub of northern N. America, especially the Hudson’s Bay region, which bears edible fruits. These are too dry and mealy to be of gastronomic interest, but are consumed locally.
Two others are grown commercially in the Far East, especially Japan: E. multiflora (known as ‘gumi’ or ‘goumi’) and E. umbellata (known as ‘autumn olive’). Both these fruits are reddish-orange or bright red, juicy, and have a pleasant, acidic taste. They are usually made into pies, tarts, jellies, or sauces.
an interesting culinary term which enjoyed wide currency in English in the 17th and 18th centuries, and indeed for much of the 19th century too. It comes from the Spanish olla and Portuguese olha, both of which derive ultimately from the Latin word olla, meaning a pot. The English language also adopted, as far back as the 16th century, the Spanish term olla podrida, which literally means ‘a rotten pot’ (i.e. exactly the same as the French pot pourri) and in practice refers to a stew whose liquid element may be served as a soup separately from the meat and vegetables which it contains.
The English meaning of olio in its culinary sense is now given by the NSOED as: ‘A highly spiced stew of various meats and vegetable, of Spanish and Portuguese origin; generally any dish containing a great variety of ingredients.’ The olio, together with the TERRINE and the PUPTON, were elaborate markers of the baroque, courtly style of cookery first defined in France by LA VARENNE and Massialot, which was adopted by English cooks after the restoration of Charles II.
The latter part of the above definition opens the gates very wide indeed, and it is true that the various sorts of olio which occur in old cookery books differ greatly in many respects but do have in common a large range of ingredients. Some have a remarkably large range, such as the ‘Olio of Sturgeon with other Fishes’ given by Robert MAY (1685). This called for sturgeon, eel, various herbs, bread, eggs, salt and pepper, nutmeg, gooseberries, potatoes, SKIRRETS, artichokes, chestnuts, BARBERRIES, grapes, butter, bay leaves, cloves, pistachios, orange juice, and sliced lemons. But even this was eclipsed by his Olio Royal or ‘extraordinary Olio’, which seems to require not only a complex list of ingredients for making marrow pies (which themselves appear to constitute the olio) but a garnish consisting of two collars of pig BRAWN, twelve roast turtle doves (see PIGEON) in a pie, eighteen QUAILS in a pie, ten more pies, two salads, two jellies each of two colours, two forced meats, and two tarts.
By the time of Meg Dods (1826) the emphasis seemed to be on a variety of meats. Her recipe for an olio required ‘a fowl, a couple of partridges, a piece of a leg of mutton, a knuckle of veal, and a few rump steaks; also a piece of good streaked bacon or ham’. This author adds that ‘Spain as a nation is not eminent in cookery, though the olio, and a few more of its omne-gatherum stews of meat, pulse, and roots, are worthy of attention’. Her term omne-gatherum seems to be just right for this subject, although no one would now agree with her low estimate of Spanish cuisine.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, OLIVES are the most extensively cultivated temperate fruit crop in the world; the area of olive groves exceeds that of vineyards. Around 90% of the harvest is destined for oil, with Spain, Italy, and Greece between them responsible for over 75% of world production and Syria, Turkey, and Tunisia contributing an additional 15%. Newer producers such as California, Australia, and Argentina are virtually insignificant on a global scale. World production of olive oil has expanded by about 60% over the ten years to 2004, with consumption increasing at approximately the same rate.
Andalusia in Spain is the principal olive oil-producing region in the world. Numerous varieties of the olive tree are used, but one, Picual, is by far the leader (although this fact can be obscured by the use of different names for it in some parts of the region), and accounts by itself for something like half of Spanish olive production. It takes its main name from the shape of the fruits, which have a somewhat pointed tip (pico in Spanish). The chemical composition of its oil is admirably balanced. Of the other leading varieties for oil, Hojiblanca takes its name from the whitish underside of its leaves; and is used to some extent as a table olive. Lechin de Sevilla is grown mainly in the province of Seville. Picudo, another olive with a pointy tip, yields a delicate oil with flowery and fruity attributes, unmatched for certain purposes (GAZPACHO, warm salads, cake-making, etc.), and has excellent aroma and flavour.
The other main producing countries have their own favourite varieties, attuned to local conditions; Koroneiko, for example, is the major one in Greece. The olive oil of Nyons in S. France, which was the first to be awarded AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) recognition, is made from the Tanche variety. In Italy, Leccino and Frantoio are relatively common, though a range of cultivars contributes to the distinctive qualities of oil from each region. In California the Mission variety (as it is now called), was established at Spanish missions in California before 1800; it is popular both for table olives and for oil.
The olive fruit, a drupe with fleshy pulp and a high fat content (12–35%, depending on variety and degree of ripeness), contains a glucoside which makes olives, especially unripe ones, very bitter. This has to be removed from table olives in the first stage of the preserving process, but it separates naturally from the oil when olives are pressed to produce olive oil.
Olives for oil must be gathered quite ripe. In the Mediterranean the harvest comes in late autumn and winter: in Provence, for example, it begins around 15 November, well after the grape harvest. Traditional harvesting methods of hand-picking and beating still compete with mechanical tree-shakers; mechanical harvesting is more common in newer olive-growing countries. The fruit must be gathered undamaged and crushed with a minimum delay to avoid oxidation and loss of quality.
Traditional practice is to clean the olives, removing stems, twigs, and leaves, then to crush the fruit without breaking the stones, spread the resultant paste on fibrous mats, stack these on top of one another, and press. The fluid that is extracted, when allowed to settle, separates into oil and a bitter watery substance, amurca to Romans, which found numerous uses on old-fashioned olive farms.
Stone crushing mills, trapeti, powerful enough to crush the flesh effectively but sufficiently accurate in gauge not to break the olive stones, are among the most impressive examples of 2,200-year-old Roman farm technology—and some such mills are still used.
Stone mills, however, are very labour intensive and considerable care is necessary at all stages of the process. It is difficult to keep the mats (once made of esparto grass) scrupulously clean, a necessary step to avoid the possibility of off flavours. Nevertheless, this practice yields the highest percentage of oil, and traditionalists believe oil produced by this method to be the highest quality.
The modern alternative is continuous extraction, which involves the same basic steps of milling, mixing, and separating the oil from the solids but using centrifuge technology instead of pressing. A hammer mill crushes the olives to a paste which undergoes malaxation, a process of slowly mixing, usually at a slightly higher temperature (no more than 28 °C), in order to free the oil for easy extraction. Centrifugal decanters then separate the oil from the fruit/water residue (the pomace). The new oil is allowed to settle for a few months before bottling. This continuous process produces oils with different flavour characteristics; they might be more bitter and pungent because of a higher content of phenols, tocopherols, and other aroma components. On the other hand, they are more resistant to oxidation.
It is not necessary to filter olive oil before bottling, and unfiltered oil has more and better flavour than filtered oil. But it is turbid and has vegetable residue. This fondo is characteristic of the best oil and is quite harmless. It can easily be used up just by shaking the bottle a little when using the oil.
The pomace or residue left after the first, cold pressing is a dryish pulp which can subsequently be treated with heat and water or solvents to extract oil of a much lower quality which can then be blended with virgin oils to produce commercial brands which have little (if any) flavour but do have a uniform quality which, together with a lower price, is attractive to many consumers.
Olive oil is variously classified for marketing. The International Olive Oil Council, with headquarters in Madrid, has ruled that ‘Virgin’ olive oil is ‘obtained from the fruit of the olive tree solely by mechanical or other physical means, under conditions, particularly thermal conditions, that do not lead to alterations in the oil, and which has not undergone any treatment other than washing, decantation, centrifugation and filtration’. The corresponding US regulation, of 1982, defines ‘Virgin’ oil as ‘resulting from the first pressing of the olives and … suitable for human consumption without further processing’.
For European olive oils the additional classification ‘Extra Virgin’ simply indicates a low acidity, expressed as oleic acid (less than 1%), a feature which is usually desirable for flavour.
Olive oils vary in flavour according to the varieties from which they are extracted, the degree of ripeness when they are picked, and, like wine, from season to season. In general, early-picked fruit yields a more pungent and peppery oil, a result of the relatively high levels of polyphenols. As the fruit matures the concentration of polyphenols rapidly decreases, and riper olives give mellow, soft, fruity oils. Varieties like Verdale produce soft fruity oils, while Frantoio yields oils that are bitter, pungent, and fragrant.
The uses of olive oil need no explanation. Most of it is used in cooking, where it is important both for its contribution to flavour and also for its nutritional properties. It is recommended for frying because of its high smoking point and because, unless overheated, it keeps its nutritional value better than other oils. To preserve these properties, olive oil should be stored away from light and excess heat.
Olive oil has one special virtue, unique among the commonly available FATS AND OILS. It is a predominantly monounsaturated oil, containing around 75% monounsaturated fatty acids. As a plant product, it contains no CHOLESTEROL. Virgin olive oil contains high levels of antioxidants (phenols, vitamin E), and it therefore has a beneficial effect on blood pressure and on cardiovascular disease. A diet rich in olive oil is reported to be associated with a reduced risk of certain cancers. Indeed, olive oil is considered one of the main constituents of the ‘Mediterranean diet’ whose effects on health are so widely praised.
Barbara Santich/Andrew Dalby
The fruit of the olive tree, Olea europaea, and the oil which it yields (see OLIVE OIL), foods which originated in the Mediterranean region, are often thought of as symbolizing it.
The importance of the olive tree and the veneration which it has aroused since prehistoric times are widely attested, for example by the use of the olive branch as a symbol for peace. Biblical, classical, and other literary references abound. Lawrence Durrell wrote in Prospero’s Cell that the whole Mediterranean ‘seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine.’
It is not only in literature that the trees and their fruits have been memorably portrayed. Maggie Blyth Klein (1994) remarks on the manner in which the Impressionist painters captured their spirit, and in how many different ways.
Olives from wild trees (oleasters) were sporadically gathered, in the Near East, by neolithic peoples about 10,000 years ago. The small, bitter fruit of the oleaster contains more stone than flesh. The tree began to be cultivated, perhaps in Palestine or Syria, well before 3000 BC, and in the following three millennia olive farming gradually spread to Anatolia, Crete, Greece, Italy, S. France, and Spain—and also eastwards to C. Asia. Archaeologists find not only the discarded stones of the fruit but also the remains of olive mills and presses. Oil storage jars are found in large quantities: these often travelled long distances by sea.
To both Greeks and Romans the olive was a crop of the first importance. Athenians claimed the first olive tree, given to mankind by the goddess Athena and growing on the Acropolis. To destroy an enemy’s olive trees was a sacrilegious act and a demonstration of ruthlessness in war. Cato’s manual On Farming, the first Roman prose text (c.175 BC), devotes more space to olive-growing and oil-making than to any other topic.
The olive is an evergreen with foliage of a distinctive silvery-green. Deep rooted, it is slow to mature and very long-lived: olive-growing regions can show gnarled old trees reputed to be many hundreds of years old and still fruiting reliably. It is susceptible to severe cold: the frosts of 1870 and 1956 are blamed (along with foreign competition and cheap vegetable oils) for the steep decline of the olive industry of Provence. Olive trees are grown in valley meadows and on hillside terraces, an unmistakable feature of the Mediterranean landscape.
The northern limit of olive cultivation remains a major landmark across Europe and W. Asia. However, in recent centuries olive-growing has spread far beyond these traditional regions.
Only a small proportion of the olive harvest is processed as table olives, and around 70% of these are consumed by those living around the Mediterranean Sea and in Middle Eastern countries.
Olives intended for preserving and table use (or use in cookery) are harvested at various stages of ripeness with very different results in texture and flavour.
Unripe olives are green, very bitter, and with firm flesh. Their flesh is often cracked, by a gentle blow with a mallet, to allow water and marinades to penetrate. As the olives ripen they become oilier, and their colour changes from green to purple. Fully ripe, black olives are oilier still, soft in texture, and relatively free of bitterness.
Methods of curing olives for table use vary considerably according to the degree of ripeness and from country to country. Lourdes March and Alicia Rios (1988), in a remarkable essay with a considerable historical as well as technical content, have made the point that the various preparation and preservation processes have been carried out for a very long time in Spain by people who have no technical knowledge of the chemical phenomena which take place during them.
Nevertheless, the know-how acquired from their parents enables the country folk to recognize when the olive has reached the appropriate stage at any point in the proceedings, whether the process to remove the bitterness, the fermentation period, or the seasoning procedure. They can also calculate the proportions of the ingredients without having to measure them, ending up with top-quality olives which taste absolutely exquisite.
The complexity of this inherited wisdom is obvious from even a bare list of the techniques which may, separately or in combination, be applied:
Green olives must be first treated in lye (2–3.5% solutions) to eliminate the bitter component, oleuropein, and then thoroughly rinsed. Spanish or Sevillian-style olives, typically Manzanillo and Gordal varieties, undergo fermentation in brine solution for 2–3 months. This fermentation, besides having a preservative function, breaks down the sugar that olives contain into lactic acid, thus contributing to their flavour. These olives are often stoned and stuffed with strips of red pepper, almonds, onions, anchovies, or garlic.
The Picholine olives which are particular to S. France are not fermented, spending only 10–12 days in brine. In this way they retain their firm flesh, vivid green colour, and intense flavour. The varieties processed in this way are Picholine and the slightly larger Lucques, sometimes considered the best green table olive in the world. Semi-ripe olives, picked when their colour is starting to change, are treated in a similar way with a weak lye solution followed by brine.
Black olives, being fully ripe, need only to be brined or, for the purplish-black Greek Kalamata olives, slit laterally and treated with vinegar and brine. If overripe, they can be dry cured by packing in alternating layers with salt; the resultant olives are shrivelled, wrinkled, and salty. The Italian Gaeta olives and French Nyons olives are commonly prepared in this way.
The California black ripe table olive, which is unique to California, is produced in a different way from those from the Mediterranean. Picked green and immature, the olives are soaked in an aerated lye solution to eliminate the bitterness and turn the fruit black; if air is not added, the olives remain green. After rinsing, ferrous gluconate is added to promote uniformity and stability of colour.
The flavour of olives can be greatly improved by the use of herbs and spices which are usually added to the brine to form marinades of almost infinite variety. Out of the brine, they can be further enhanced with dressings of olive oil plus herbs, garlic, orange peel, fennel, and other seeds.
Stuffed olives are popular, and have a fairly long history. As early as the 18th century, producers of some of the olives of Aix-en-Provence, such as the famous Picholine variety, were stoning their olives and replacing the stone with capers, anchovies, tuna, pimiento (see CAPSICUM), etc.
Industrial methods of preparation result in olives that will keep longer, typically marketed in jars or tins. Olives in glass jars were first sold in 1898 in Oroville, California; Frederic Bioletti, also in California, developed olive-canning in the early 1900s. However, it was not until 1933 that a Californian mechanic, Herbert Kagley, built the prototype of the first mechanical olive pitter which could be used successfully to pit green olives for use in martini cocktails.
a French word which came into currency in the mid-16th century but had been preceded by other forms, e.g. alumelle, which are littered along a trail leading all the way from the Latin lamella, ‘small thin plate’, suggesting something thin and round. Cotgrave, in his dictionary of 1611, recorded its arrival in England in this entry: ‘Haumelotte: f. An Omelet, or Pancake of egges.’ He thus preferred the spelling which is used in N. America as opposed to the French spelling ending in -ette which is generally used in Britain. It is safe to assume that the word had been around for a while before 1611. It is anyway safe to assume that omelettes had been around in recognizable form in both France and England and elsewhere too from early medieval times, since the concept of frying beaten eggs in butter in a pan is as simple as it is brilliant.
Indeed, since so many dishes are now being found to have their origin in ancient Persia (see IRAN) or in early ARAB CUISINE, it is tempting to suppose that something like an omelette may originally have arrived from that region. If so, the Persian kookoo (or kuku) could be the best representation in the modern world of the original. A kookoo of the plainer sort involves mixing a generous amount of chopped herbs into beaten eggs, frying it in a round pan until it is firm and then (usually) cutting it into wedges for serving. Many versions have a very substantial filling. The same is true of the Middle Eastern eggah, to which Claudia Roden (1985) devotes eight pages, remarking that:
An eggah is firm and sound, rather like an egg cake. It is usually 2 cm (1 inch) or more thick, and generally bursting with a filling of vegetables, or meat, or chicken and noodles, suspended like currants in a cake. The egg is used as a binding for the filling, rather than the filling being an adornment of the egg. For serving, the eggah is turned out on to a serving dish and cut into slices, as one would cut a cake.
The Spanish tortilla (not to be confused with the TORTILLA of Mexican cookery) resembles these ancestors in being relatively thick, cooked until firm, and often equipped with a generous filling, e.g. of potato. In this connection it is interesting that Sephardi Jews in a number of countries have made a speciality of potato omelettes. Claudia Roden (1996) states that this is referred to in N. Africa as an omelette juive. It could represent a milestone on the long trail from Persia to Spain. The trail could also have had a branch into Sicily leading to the Italian frittata, which again resembles the types already described.
Seen against this background, the light fluffy French omelette, with its runny interior and its non-existent or relatively scant filling, would be a diversion from the mainstream, a diversion which has of course gained wide currency in countries where French cuisine has enjoyed a period of ascendancy: e.g. Britain. It is perhaps not altogether fanciful to suppose that the remarkably large collection of omelettes brought together by the author of Le Pastissier françois (1653) and largely reproduced in translation by Robert MAY (1660, also 1685, reprinted 1994) contains within itself evidence of an evolution from a Middle Eastern past to a French classical future. It includes some omelettes to be fried well on both sides (the ancestral ones?) besides one which sounds perfectly suitable for a 20th-century French cook; this last reads as follows in May’s translation:
Break six, eight, or ten eggs more or less, beat them together in a dish, and put salt to them; then put some butter a melting in a frying pan, and fry it more or less, according to your discretion, only on one side or bottom.
Whatever their history and connections may have been, it is certain that omelettes of both basic kinds, when properly made, score remarkably high marks for being delicious, easy and quick to prepare, and nutritious.
It is also to be noted that in most of its manifestations the omelette may be sweet instead of savoury.
an Indonesian fermented food which resembles TEMPE in many respects. However, while tempe is usually made from SOYA BEANS, oncom (in the usual sense of the term—see below for another) is made from the presscake left over after oil has been extracted from GROUNDNUTS, or from okara (the residue from the production of TOFU or SOY MILK). The MOULD used to ferment it is Neurospora sitophila, whose spores give it a distinctive orange colour, whereas Rhizopus oligosporus is used for tempe. Another difference is that tempe, like Roquefort cheese, is inoculated throughout its mass, while oncom is inoculated on the outside only and is akin to Camembert in this respect.
Oncom is almost exclusive to W. Java, where a thousand or more shops purvey it fresh daily. The orange cakes, arranged on glossy green banana leaf, make a colourful display in the markets. Some of the vendors deal also in tempe, and a local linguistic confusion has arisen: tempe prepared from either groundnut presscake or okara, using R. oligosporus, may be termed oncom. Those who follow this usage are taking the substrate as the defining factor, whereas the general and more convenient practice is to go by the mould used and to reserve the name oncom for what has been fermented by N. sitophila. (This mould can, incidentally, be used to make a soya bean oncom. This is not done in Indonesia, but its feasibility has been demonstrated in the USA.)
To make oncom, the presscakes are first broken up, soaked and washed, then steamed and put in small moulds in a bamboo frame covered with banana leaf. The cakes in the moulds are inoculated with orange spores from a previous batch and left in a shady place until the fungus has penetrated them, after which they are cut into pieces and marketed.
Oncom is prepared in various ways for eating. It is usual to salt it and deep-fry it, with or without a batter. Krupuk oncom are a deep-fried snack with some resemblance to potato crisps (see KRUPUK). Oncom goreng is another snack food, in thin triangles. Buras is a steamed preparation, wrapped in banana leaf, with the oncom inside a ball of soaked white rice.
Peanut presscake oncom is a speciality of Bandung, so much so that it is often called oncom Bandung.
Oncom has a shorter life than tempe. When it is a few days old it can be further fermented to make a kind of DAGÉ.
a vast subject, of particular interest to many groups: people with limited food-heating facilities (e.g. only one burner); those who have to cope with a shortage of fuel; anyone who has to produce a lot of hot food several hours hence with no supervision in the meanwhile; and also (perhaps on a trivial plane, yet not to be dismissed as an entirely negligible interest) those who seek to minimize WASHING UP.
A remarkable survey of the whole subject and its iconography by Bertram Gordon and Lisa Jacobs-McCusker (1989) begins with a list which includes the following items: the Eintopf, Romertopf, crockpot, stew pot, CHOWDER, CASSEROLE, olla podrida, hutspot or hutspot, Lancashire HOTPOT and IRISH STEW, POT-AU-FEU, hochepot, CASSOULET, puchero, and COCIDO. Besides examples such as these, where various ingredients which might otherwise have been cooked separately all go into the one pot, there are of course innumerable other instances of a single ingredient being cooked in a single pot, e.g. porridge and its relations. But it is the former category which is interesting; and the expression ‘one pot’ is normally taken to include in its meaning ‘rather than the several which might have been used’. Gordon and Jacobs-McCusker devote special attention to the political and social importance with which the Eintopf was invested in Germany in the period between the World Wars, especially the 1930s. Hitler and the Nazi party in effect hijacked one-pot cookery for their own ends—fortunately with no lasting effects; no political stigma adheres to the practice, either in Germany or elsewhere.
Japanese culinary terms include one, nabemono, which refers simply to the category of one-pot dishes (nabe means a pot or pan), many of which are cooked at the table by the diners. A popular example is SHABU-SHABU, a Japanese adaptation of the Mongolian hotpot. In this connection it is interesting to note that in the English language the word ‘pot’ in ‘one-pot cookery’ has considerable force and cannot be replaced by ‘pan’. Thus, a dish of meat and various vegetables stir fried in a wok is not one-pot cookery, because a wok is not a pot.
Moving to America, one finds that the category of food known as CHUCK to cowboys is rich in examples of one-pot dishes. One taken almost at random from Adams (1952) is ‘Colorado stew with dumplings’, made thus by the cook on the chuck wagon:
For this he cut bacon into pieces, covered it with water, and boiled until done. Diced potatoes and onions were then added and cooked some more. The dumplings were made the same way as baking powder biscuits, pinched off into small pieces, then placed on top of the stew and cooked until done. Here was a whole meal in one kettle.
One could also count CHILI CON CARNE as a one-pot dish.
The pot in one-pot cookery is normally covered, although a dish of numerous ingredients cooked in ancient times in an open cauldron would not be disqualified for its lack of a lid. Nonetheless, a lidded pot is normal. The dish called ‘pot pie’ or ‘sea pie’ not only has a lid but is sealed inside with a pastry top. (The history of SEA PIE, which had some puzzling aspects, was recently elucidated by food historians.)
There is an engaging description in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), a rich source of information about rural foodways in Oxfordshire in the 1880s–1890s, of how the hot meal of the day was cooked in an English village a century ago:
Here, then, were the three chief ingredients of the one hot meal a day, bacon from the flitch, vegetables from the garden, and flour for the roly-poly. This meal, called ‘tea’, was taken in the evening, when the men were home from the fields and the children from school, for neither could get home at midday.
About four o’clock, smoke would go up from the chimneys, as the fire was made up and the big iron boiler, or the three-legged pot, was slung on the hook of the chimney-chain. Everything was cooked in the one utensil; the square of bacon, amounting to little more than a taste each; cabbage, or other green vegetables, in one net, potatoes in another, and the roly-poly swathed in a cloth. It sounds a haphazard method in these days of gas and electric cookers; but it answered its purpose, for, by carefully timing the putting in of each item and keeping the simmering of the pot well regulated, each item was kept intact and an appetising meal was produced.
used both as a general term, applying to many members of the extensive genus Allium, and as a specific one referring to regular round (globe) onions of the species Allium cepa. The box shows what other entries there are, and how the botanical species relate to common names. Of the names shown in the box, the ones which constantly cause confusion are spring onions and scallions. Usage varies to such an extent that no generally valid definitions can be given.
A. cepa includes all the common western round (globe) ONIONS with single bulbs, which in their immature state are used as SPRING ONIONS in Britain; the ‘aggregate’ onions with multiple (underground) bulbs such as the SHALLOT, the ‘ever ready’, and ‘potato’ onions; and also the TREE ONIONS (also known as Egyptian or ‘top-set’ onions), which reproduce by forming miniature self-planting bulbs on top of the stem, e.g. the variety Catawissa. Both the last two groups can be referred to as ‘multiplier’ onions.
A. fistulosum is the most important in oriental countries; see ORIENTAL ONIONS. It is, however, known as the welsh onion (although nothing to do with Wales) in Britain and some other places. In N. America it is often called scallion, a name which is however used differently in the south where it is likely to mean green shallots.
Hybrids of A. cepa and A. fistulosum account for some of the hundreds of onion varieties/cultivars.
A. chinense, the Chinese jiao tou or Japanese rakkyo, is an oriental pickling onion.
A. porrum is best known as the LEEK, but includes a variety which is the bunching pearl onion.
A. kurrat is a species which fills the role of leek in the Near and Middle East.
A. schoenoprasum, chives and the smallest and most delicate member of the onion family.
A. scorodoprasum is the species usually called ROCAMBOLE; but that common name is of erratic application.
A. sativum is cultivated GARLIC.
A. ampeloprasum, the wild ancestor of the leek, is a species which exists in many forms. One of these is ELEPHANT GARLIC.
A. ursinum is the WILD GARLIC or ramsons.
The present entry is concerned with mature onions of the species A. cepa. The original wild ancestor of this, the common onion, has long since disappeared; but related wild species still grow in C. Asia. The whole diverse onion family evidently arose in this area, although it is now disseminated throughout the world.
Onions have been eaten and cultivated since prehistoric times. They were mentioned in records of the 1st dynasty of ancient Egypt (3200 BC), and constantly appeared in Egyptian tomb paintings, inscriptions, and documents from this time on. The even older civilization of Ur has left accounts (c.2100 BC) of onions being grown in gardens.
Attitudes to the onion in Egypt, as Darby et al. (1977) remark, had a dual quality; it seemed to be simultaneously the object of appreciation and reverence on the one hand and of taboos on the other. Priests were forbidden to eat onions. (Taboos on the eating of onions are not confined to Egypt; in India, some Brahmins, strict Buddhists, and Jains also abstain from them.)
What is certain is that in ancient Egypt as in ancient Greece and Rome the common people ate onions in large quantities, often raw. Ancient Egyptian onions were said to be large, white, and mild, ideal for the purpose. However, they would still have imparted a smell to the breath, which may have been the reason why the upper classes did not care to eat them. It is probably significant that recipes of APICIUS gave them little importance; they are mentioned only as subordinate flavourings in mixed dishes and dressings.
Just as now, onions in the classical period varied in pungency, and there were recognized varieties. It seems to have been one variety of white onion which, in late Latin, bore the name unio, meaning a single white pearl, and leading to the French word oignon as well as the English ‘onion’. The complicated etymology of words for onion in other languages has been deftly summarized by Ayto (1993).
Once the Romans had introduced the onion to Britain, it stayed put and has ever afterwards been an important part of the diet. Anglo-Saxon verse riddles often concern onions, including the following one (as cited by Lovelock, 1972), which sustains a double meaning with remarkable persistence:
I am a wonderful thing, a joy to women …
I stand up high and steep over the bed;
Beneath I am shaggy. Sometimes comes nigh
A young maiden and handsome peasant’s daughter,
A maiden proud, to lay hold on me,
She raises my redness, plunders my head,
Fixes on me fast, feels straightaway
What meeting me means when she thus approaches,
A curly haired woman. Wet is the eye.
The cultivated onion was introduced to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage to Haiti (1493–4), and thereafter by the early colonists. Although some minor wild onions are native to the Americas there was nothing to compare with the new kind, and American Indians took to it (and even more so to garlic) with enthusiasm.
The ‘bite’ of raw onions, and the typical onion and garlic odours, are due to a complex of sulphur compounds. When an onion is cut, the crushing of the cells and the admission of air allows an enzyme to work on these substances. One effect is to develop pungency. Another is to release the volatile substance allicin, which irritates the eyes.
If onions are peeled and chopped under running cold water this washes away the allicin; but it may be inconvenient. A simpler method is to chill the onion in the refrigerator before working on it. The cold reduces the volatility of the substance.
Cooking onions transforms their ‘bite’ into the pleasing, slightly sweet flavour which is an asset to so many dishes. Some of the starch in the onion is transformed by heat into sweet-tasting dextrin and free sugar. The process is accompanied by the formation of brown compounds. Brown colours also come from reactions between proteins and sugars.
The keeping properties of onions vary inversely with the amount of moisture in them. Hard, dry, round onions keep for months. This property has had a considerable effect on commerce in onions, making possible, for example, the traditional practice of French onion-sellers from Roscoff and Saint-Pol in Brittany bicycling around English towns selling their wares. Alexander Dumas père relates one of his most charming (albeit improbable) anecdotes in explaining how this practice first arose. It was still flourishing in the 1970s, but Lindsay Bareham (1995) cites a press interview of 1994 with Jean Leroux, described as the last onion-man.
Over the millennia since onion cultivation began, many different types of round onion have been bred. Size varies, from small pickling onions about 1 cm (0.5″) in diameter to huge specimens weighing more than 500 g (1 lb), sometimes more. (In 1980, for example, a new record was established by a Mr Rodger with an onion bulb grown in his council house garden in Scotland, weighing almost exactly 6.5 lbs). Colours may be white, brown, yellow, or red. Flavour ranges from very mild to strong, whether harshly biting or simply with a pronounced flavour.
Nomenclature among growers and in commerce is not internationally standardized, and the only advice which can be given is to ‘know your onions’ (a phrase from the 1920s) by the names used where you live. With this proviso, the categories or varieties most commonly on sale in western countries are as follows:
The above notes merely scratch the surface of a huge subject, which is continually evolving as growers and agricultural research stations develop new varieties.
The number of dishes in which onions play a supporting role, whether to add flavour or serve as a garnish, is vast. Those in which it is the principal ingredient are relatively few and are mostly European. Stuffed onion (popular in Britain), onion soup (whether French or not), and Alsatian onion tart are three examples. An example for Asia is onion bhaji.
The French term soubise (for an 18th-century prince of the family of that name) indicates the presence of onion, either in a sauce or in the form of a purée (often thickened with rice). Eliza Acton (1845) noted that the sauce was usually served with lamb or mutton cutlets; and while mutton was available in England there was certainly a preference for serving onion sauce with it.
Dorothy Hartley (1954) supplies an admirable coda to the subject:
The papery golden skins of onions should not be thrown away. They are good natural colouring for soups and stews. Broth should always be made golden and delectable by cooking the skins in it.
Lampris guttatus (formerly regius), is a large and beautiful fish which is met, very rarely, in the Mediterranean, and rarely in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific. It is a fish of the deep seas, swimming in the midwaters; and since these have not been fully explored there is still something to be learned of its distribution. It has also been called moonfish and mariposa.
The opah, despite being toothless, and of majestic build, pursues and eats other fish and squid. On this diet it may grow very large, for example over 1.5 m (60″) in length and over 1 m (40″) in depth; the largest recorded weight is close on 75 kg (160 lb). Jane Grigson (1973) described its beauty well:
The aspect of its rounded eyes and rounded head is mild, almost dolphin-like. The huge, plump body, a taut oval up to 6 feet long, is softly spotted with white. The main blue-grey and green of its skin reflects an iridescence of rose, purple and gold. The fins are a brilliant red. The sickle tail has reminded people of the moon’s shape; the ribs of its fins have seemed like the scarlet rays of the sun.
Relatively few people have eaten opah, but those who have agree that it is outstandingly good. The flesh is pink and firm, with an attractive flavour which has hints of salmon, tuna, RAY’S BREAM, and veal. It can be sliced very thin and eaten raw, Japanese style; or sliced more thickly and fried; or cut into steaks and grilled, or a whole ‘shoulder’ can be roasted.
specifically the American opossum, Didelphis virginiana, a favourite game animal of the southern states of the USA, which figures prominently in the folklore of the region. A marsupial mammal (i.e. one whose young, when newly born, are carried in an external pouch), the opossum has a head-plus-body length of up to 50 cm (20″) and may weigh 6 kg (13 lb). It has been compared for size with a cat or a sucking pig.
Although it is famed for what an Irishman would call its lifelike manner of feigning death (playing ’possum), recent studies suggest that this tactic is not now often used. However, opossums continue to be nocturnal animals and to display omnivorous tendencies, devouring not only fruits but also insects, small vertebrates, and, it is said, carrion. Despite this last item, its flesh is tasty and wholesome. The liver may be eaten. A favourite southern dish is ’possum and taters: the opossum is parboiled, then salted and peppered and roasted in a pan with peeled, roasted sweet potatoes.
Known as the manicou in the W. Indies (or sarigue on French-speaking islands) it can be found smoked and stewed on Dominica or subject to several treatments on Guadeloupe (Nègre, 1970).
Atriplex hortensis, a plant of the GOOSEFOOT family which grows wild throughout Europe as far east as Siberia and all around the Mediterranean coast, is also called mountain spinach. It is a tall, spindly plant with small, generally arrowhead-shaped leaves, which grows well in sandy or poor soil. Several of its closest relations, known as saltbushes because of the salty taste of the leaves, display similar characteristics in various parts of the world, but are rarely used for human food.
From the time of the rise of the Mediterranean civilizations orach was cultivated as a green vegetable, to be used as SPINACH now is. Its taste is like that of spinach but the leaves are less succulent.
There are varieties with red, white, and green leaves. Green orach was used in Italy to colour pasta. Another use was to mix orach and SORREL, thus alleviating sorrel’s acid flavour.
Orach was used in England in the 16th century, but its popularity declined with the increasing use of spinach throughout Europe and it is now seldom grown.
The most popular of the CITRUS FRUITS exists in two species: Citrus aurantium and C. sinensis. The former is the bitter (or Seville) orange and the latter comprises the vast range of sweet oranges, for eating out of hand or turning into juice. Their wild ancestors are thought to have grown in the region of SW China and NW India, but the growing of cultivated varieties has in modern times become concentrated in the Americas, where Brazil and the USA between them account for over two-thirds of world production.
Oranges seem to have been first used for the fragrance of their rind. They were valued as perfume or flavouring, and early Chinese documents mention them being held in the hand so that the warmth released their scent. Although the earliest oranges eaten in China seem to have been MANDARIN oranges, it does seem clear that some cultivation of ordinary sweet oranges began in the south several millennia ago.
During the first centuries of the Christian era the orange began to spread beyond China, as the CITRON had done earlier. It reached Japan well before the earliest surviving Japanese literature was written (the 8th century), but it has always been less important there than fruits of the mandarin type. It also reached India in early times: a medical treatise of about AD 100, the Charaka Samhita, mentions it for the first time by what was to become its modern name, ‘naranga’. This word is said to be derived from an older Sanskrit term narunga (fruit like elephants). ‘Naranga’ became naranj in Persian and Arabic, narantsion in late classical Greek, and aurantium (influenced by aurum, ‘gold’) in Late Latin, from which it is only a short step to the Italian arancia and French and English ‘orange’.
However, the various questions which attend the etymology and the westward movement of the orange are complicated by the fact that it was the sour orange which first travelled westwards, with the sweet orange only following about 500 years later. The sour orange was apparently being grown in Sicily at the beginning of the 11th century and around Seville in Spain at the end of the 12th century, no doubt because the Arabs had introduced the fruit to these places. The sweet orange turns up in the Mediterranean area in the latter part of the 15th century. However, it is not always easy to know, from the common names then in use, which sort of orange was meant.
The earliest surviving description of the bitter orange in Europe was by the 13th-century writer Albertus Magnus, who called it ‘arangus’. (Another name was ‘bigarade’, derived from Arabic. Bitter orange juice was used as a flavouring.)
The first mention of the sweet orange in Europe is sometimes said to be that in the archives of the Italian city of Savona, in 1471. Probably the seeds had come through the Genoese trade route, which had extensive connections with the Near East. However, PLATINA (1475, but having prepared his work in manuscript in the preceding decade) provides a better starting point. He says that sweet oranges ‘are almost always suitable for the stomach as a first course and the tart ones may be sweetened with sugar’; which shows clearly that he knew both kinds.
Shortly after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama returned from India after his discovery of the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, in 1498, the Portuguese began to grow a superior kind of sweet orange which was said to be a direct import from ‘China’—a vague designation which however came to be adopted as meaning the sweet orange. Thus the ‘China’ oranges which were an expensive delicacy in Britain from the late 16th century on were in fact from Portugal. And this Portuguese orange spread through S. Europe. The modern Greek for orange is still portokáli.
The orange arrived in the New World with Columbus, who took seeds of both kinds of orange (and of lemon, citron, and lime) to Haiti on his second voyage in 1493. The climate of the Caribbean proved ideal, as did that of the adjacent mainland. It is possible that in 1509 an early Spanish settlement in Darien (Panama) had oranges. More certainly, at some time before 1565 (when the first permanent Spanish colony in Florida, San Agostino, was established), early settlers planted oranges and started what was to be the enormous Florida citrus industry. The rival California industry did not begin until 1739, when missionaries began to grow oranges in lower California (the part now in Mexico). The first oranges in the northern (now USA) part arrived 28 years later.
Orange cultivation was subsequently established in many other parts of the world, e.g. southern Africa (1654), Australia (first seeds planted in New South Wales in 1788), and Israel (where the industry became really important after the emergence of the Jaffa orange in the latter part of the 19th century and the introduction of the late Valencia from the USA in the 20th century).
There are now six main categories of orange in cultivation.
Common sweet oranges exist in numerous varieties. Saunt (1990) explains that Valencia, the most important variety of all, is not an old Spanish one, as might be supposed, but ‘first became of interest in the Azores and is almost certainly of old Portuguese origin’. It seems that it was sent from the Azores in the early 1860s to Thomas Rivers at Sawbridgeworth in England, who first named it Excelsior and sent it to the USA where it was renamed several times, finishing up as Valencia Late—this because a Spanish citrus expert visiting California thought it closely similar to a late-maturing variety grown in Valencia in Spain. This variety leads production in both California and Florida and in many of the main orange-growing countries, but not in Spain itself. Oranges of this variety have a thin rind, not difficult to peel at maturity, plenty of juice of a good colour, and usually two to four seeds.
Other varieties include Pera (important in Brazil) and Jaffa or Shamouti. The latter originated near Jaffa (then in Palestine, now in Israel) in the mid-19th century as a bud mutation on a local Beladi tree. Jaffa oranges have a very fine flavour and are almost seedless. Picked at full maturity, they keep very well. Jaffas are grown also in Cyprus and Turkey, but production declined somewhat towards the end of the 20th century.
Blood oranges are grown mostly in Mediterranean countries, especially Italy. The original mutation which produced the colour probably arose in the 17th century in Sicily. The earliest blood oranges were small and seedy but the better varieties which followed, notably Sanguinello, attracted international esteem. The best modern varieties include the round early-season Moro and the mid-season Tarocco (named for its resemblance to a child’s toy top and renowned for its delicate flesh and well-balanced flavour). Sicily, especially the area around Catania, remains the best place for these oranges. A combination of cold winter nights and mild days favours the development of anthocyanins, the red pigments which give blood oranges their distinctive deep red colour. Connoisseurs of citrus fruits consider these oranges to be among the world’s finest dessert oranges.
Navel oranges are unmistakable. Each has a rudimentary ‘baby’ fruit embedded in its apex. These oranges mature early, are typically large and seedless and easy to peel, and have a rich flavour which places them in the first ranks of dessert oranges. They thrive especially in subtropical climates such as the Mediterranean and are grown extensively in Spain, Morocco, Turkey, S. Africa, and Australia as well as California in N. America and Uruguay and Argentina in S. America.
As for the origin of navel oranges, Saunt (1990) explains that:
For some time it was widely believed that the navel orange originated as a limb sport near Bahia (now Salvador), Brazil, some time prior to 1822. There is now much evidence to disprove this theory, for navel oranges are known to have grown in Spain and Portugal for many years prior to 1822, and it seems more likely that they were first brought to Portugal from China and thence to Brazil much earlier than this.
It was certainly a Brazilian navel orange, called Bahia, which was introduced to the USA in 1870 to fill the need for a good early variety. Navels are seedless and can be propagated only by cuttings, so twelve young Brazilian trees were imported in tubs by the US Department of Agriculture in Washington. From here they were distributed among leading growers in California and Florida, thus acquiring the name ‘Washington Navel’. The variety is now called either Bahia or Washington.
Acidless oranges, or sugar oranges, are another freak variety which enjoys a small popularity in Brazil, N. America, and Italy. They are almost without acid and therefore insipid in flavour.
Bitter oranges, C. aurantia, have declined in importance. They are grown mainly in Spain (hence ‘Seville’ oranges), and the bulk of the crop is exported to Britain where it is made into MARMALADE. Only bitter oranges can be used to make proper marmalade, which depends not only on their bitterness but also on the aromatic rind, which is quite different from that of the sweet orange.
There are also several citrus fruits called ‘oranges’ which are really hybrids between oranges and other citrus fruits. The popular Temple ‘orange’ is a tangor or mandarin × orange hybrid, as are the King ‘orange’ and the Ortanique (see MANDARIN). The Poorman ‘orange’ or ‘New Zealand grapefruit’ is an orangelo or orange × grapefruit hybrid (see UGLI). The miniature calamondin ‘orange’ grown as a decorative house plant is sometimes considered to be a mandarin × kumquat hybrid, and sometimes assigned to a species of its own.
One more orange needs to be mentioned here, since it may have originated as a hybrid of a bitter orange and the Palestine sweet lime. This is the bergamot orange, now classified as C. bergamia. Saunt (1990) points out that it would have been more appropriate to call it bergamot lemon. It is grown for making fragrant bergamot oil; see BERGAMOT.
These oranges have some uses as an acid element in cookery, especially in those areas where they are cultivated, including the Mediterranean. The dried rind is used to give its aroma to various savoury dishes.
As with nearly all fruits, the flavour of a freshly picked orange is far better than that of a commercial grower’s product. Modern oranges are robust and do not spoil quickly, a fact which unfortunately is exploited. An orange may undergo cleaning with detergent; ‘degreening’ with ethylene gas—which removes green but leaves the orange pale yellow, so that it has to be coated with orange dye; wax polishing to reduce moisture loss; and a long time in refrigerated storage before it reaches its eventual buyer.
The wax polish which nearly all oranges have on their skin has been described as harmful to health by several authorities, who recommend that orange rind should not be eaten, even after scrubbing. (Seville oranges, fortunately for domestic marmalade-makers, are left unpolished.)
The uses of bitter oranges have already been mentioned. Sweet oranges can be used to advantage in salads and sweet dishes, and generally for imparting a sweet orange flavour.
sometimes called orange blossom water, is produced by the distillation of ORANGE flowers of the bitter orange, i.e. the bigarade or Seville oranges. This produces an essential oil called Neroli (used in perfumery). The oil, rising to the surface, is drawn off, while the aqueous portion is used as orange flower water.
Orange flower water originated in the Middle East where it is still used to lend a delicate perfume to syrups, pastries, and puddings. It is often added with rosewater, or on its own, to atr, the sugar syrup of the Middle East, and used to soak or sprinkle over pastries and sweets. In Morocco, where it is known as zhaar, it flavours salads and certain TAGINES. The ‘white coffee’ of the Lebanon is made by adding a teaspoon of orange flower water to a coffee cup of boiling water with or without the addition of sugar. It is often added to flavour Turkish coffee. A drop or two added to water with sugar is a popular soothing drink at bedtime for children.
As for Europe, there is evidence that in Sicily in the 14th century orange flower water was used, but as a perfume for bed linen etc. rather than in food. By the 17th century, however, it was widely used in Europe as a food flavouring. C. Anne Wilson (1973) says that:
the scented water was usually imported ready-made from France or Portugal. It became an alternative to rosewater, particularly in rich seed cakes, almond cakes and biscuits, and dessert creams. There is even a recipe of 1727 for orangeflower brandy. Both rosewater and orangeflower water continued as food flavorants all through the eighteenth century, though neither was in such constant use as rosewater had been during the century before.
In the south of France, from the 16th century onwards, there was a flourishing cultivation of the bitter orange for producing orange flower water—first for use in perfumery, later for flavouring. Its use was most widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries.
a name applied in one place or another, but especially in N. America, to many of the aromatic herbs of the group treated at length under MARJORAM, and certain other plants. However, it is questionable whether the term oregano (or origano, as it is sometimes spelled) should be treated as a plant name. Tucker (1994) has argued persuasively that oregano is best considered as the name of a flavour. He points out that:
vast confusion exists in popular and scientific texts on the correct identity of oregano. This is partly because a multitude of plant species have been called oregano or oreganum, and often these plants are substituted for each other. Most of these plants bear a unifying chemical signature: carvacrol and, to a lesser extent, thymol.
In Tucker’s view it is this chemical signature which is intended when the term oregano is used.
Nonetheless, it is convenient to have a list of the numerous plant species involved in this nomenclatural tangle (see box).
The oregano flavour is widely used in the cuisines of Mediterranean countries and Latin America. So far as N. Americans (and many Europeans) are concerned oregano is an essential element in many kinds of PIZZA and has various other flavouring uses. See, however, MARJORAM.
The term oregano has also been used for species in no fewer than four other genera of the mint family and also for about half a dozen species in the family Verbenaceae. Some of these have only marginal qualifications for the name since their carvacrol content is relatively low. Tucker also notes certain anomalies. One example is Satureja montana, SAVOURY, which is high in carvacrol but is not called oregano. Another is Eryngium foetidum (culantro, see SHADO BÉNI), which is not scented of carvacrol but ‘has earned the dubious name of orégano de Cartagena’.
a concept which has come more and more into prominence towards the end of the 20th century, is easier to define in general terms than in detail. The principle is that food should be produced by practising agriculture without the use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers, and (where livestock are concerned) by breeding and rearing animals and birds with due regard to their welfare and by methods which can be described as ‘natural and traditional’.
Since the use of the term ‘organic’ in labelling foodstuffs is increasingly controlled (whether by governments or by organizations or producers), and since there is a general trend in the direction of buying such produce, there has been considerable debate about how exactly to define the term. In practice, in many places, it may not be possible to exclude small traces of pesticide that have been used in the past. Most systems of organic farming allow for inconsequential departures from the ideal. However, the question often arises: what allowances can properly be made to deal with this sort of problem, without prejudicing the integrity of the operation? For some foods, the scope for debate is greater than for others. Eggs are an example.
The production of organic foods and the degree of public support for the concept vary considerably from country to country. Denmark, for example, is much further advanced than Britain. A brief survey of the situation in the European Union and in other parts of the world is given by Lynda Brown (1998) in a book which is intended mainly as guidance for British consumers. The development of organic food production also varies according to the category of product. One area of particularly rapid growth is that of organic baby foods, notably in Germany.
a beverage which was originally made from BARLEY (Latin hordium, whence Provençal ordi for the cereal and orji for the drink) and later from ALMONDS.
C. Anne Wilson (1973) has described the sequence of drinks thus, starting with the thin drink of barley with pure warm water which Anthimus, in the 6th century AD, recommended for fever patients.
The later medieval version in France had the name tisane, was sweetened with sugar and seasoned with licorice and sometimes also figs. Adapted for English use it more often comprised barley boiled in water with licorice, herbs and raisins. It was still a licorice-flavoured drink in the first part of the seventeenth century, but soon afterwards was brought up to date by the substitution of lemon juice for licorice.
Another variant of barley water in France, called orgemonde, was flavoured with ground almonds. This too reached England during the seventeenth century, its name softening to ‘orgeat’ or ‘ozyat’. Subsequently the barley dropped out, and English ozyat was made from ground almonds and sugar with orange-flower water or the juice of citrus fruits boiled with spring water. It was a cold drink similar to lemonade. Milk ozyat was boiled, spiced milk, cooled and mixed with ground almonds; and special ozyat glasses with handles were designed to serve it in.
used in China, Japan, and to some extent in SE Asia, are mostly varieties of Allium fistulosum: the species name means ‘tubular’. These onions never form bulbs; instead, there is a cluster of thickened stem bases like a closely packed bunch of spring onions, which they resemble when young in both appearance and flavour. As they grow older, they keep the same shape, simply becoming larger and coarser.
A. fistulosum, as the senior member of the ONION family in China, has a name of a single character, cong (chung in Cantonese). These are general names for all onions, modified as suitable for other kinds: for example, the round European onion is called in Cantonese yeung chung tau, meaning foreign onion head. The Japanese name for the species is negi.
These oriental bunching onions are everywhere visible in the Orient. As Joy Larkcom (1991) puts it:
If the long loaf epitomizes the French shopper, the long white-stemmed onion epitomizes the Chinese. Tied to bicycles, peering out of panniers, it is the most ubiquitous of Chinese vegetables.
A. fistulosum spread westwards in early times, reaching Europe during the Middle Ages and England in 1629. It was called the ‘welsh’ onion: nothing to do with Wales, but from an old word, welise in Anglo-Saxon, Welsch in German, meaning ‘foreign’. The French name ciboule comes from the same Latin source as the Italian and German names for the round onion. Although it has the advantages of being perennial and very hardy, it has never been very popular in Europe; but it is sometimes used to provide spring onions.
Another onion species of Chinese origin, A. chinense, is known in China as jiao tou (in Cantonese chung tao) and in Japan as rakkyo. There is no western name other than the puzzling ‘bakers’ garlic’ or the vague ‘Chinese onion’, so it is convenient to use the Japanese name. This species is grown in Japan, S. China, SE Asia, and to some extent in India. Rakkyo is another bunching type with clusters of very small bulbs, which are used mainly for pickling. In English, misleadingly, these may be called ‘pickled scallions’ or ‘pickled leeks’; see also PICKLING ONIONS.
are often bracketed together as two distinctively different parts of SCOTLAND, lying to the north of the mainland; Orkney very close to it but Shetland closer to Bergen in NORWAY than to Aberdeen in Scotland. They do have some important features in common, notably the fact that they were both colonized by Scandinavians from the 9th to the 15th centuries (hence many culinary terms of Norse origin) and their strongly insular characteristics, but there are equally important differences between them, as the following comments by Catherine Brown (1981) show:
The gentle, undulating, green and fertile land of the Orkneys has more in common with the North-East Lowlands of Morayshire, Easter Ross and Caithness than with Shetland. This is fine farming country for rearing cattle, sheep and pigs as well as growing oats, barley and turnips. In Shetland, acid soils, a cool summer and frequent salt-laden gales restrict farming so that the people have turned much more towards the sea for a living than in Orkney. In this respect they belong more with the Hebrides and the West Coast. They were originally described as fishermen who had a croft, compared with the Orcadians who were farmers who kept a fishing boat. There are nearly four times as many fishermen in Shetland as there are in Orkney, but on the other hand Orkney farms are four times the size of those in Shetland.
So far as staples are concerned, it is noteworthy that a particular variety of BARLEY, from which BERE MEAL is produced (to make BANNOCKS, PORRIDGE, etc.), retains a prominent place, as do OATS. Likewise, KALE (the member of the cabbage family which has thrived in these northern parts for many centuries) continues to be important; it has traditionally been preserved in barrels with fat and oatmeal. Kale is often teamed with pork, another Orkney staple. Other popular vegetables are turnip/swede, potato, leek.
Fish which has been preserved in one or another of numerous ways, many of them shared with the Nordic countries, is certainly a staple, but, in the past at least, prime fresh fish has been gutted and dispatched to the mainland for sale there, leaving Orcadians and Shetlanders to make their range of distinctive dishes based on the heads, livers, and other innards which had been removed. Davidson (1988b) provides a survey of such dishes (e.g. muggies, krappin, stap) based on practical research in the kitchens of Lerwick (capital of Shetland).
Annette Hope (1987) gives an impressive description of the hardships endured by Shetlanders when engaged in the ‘haaf’ (deep sea) fishery in the summer; and Shetland publications give vivid details of this and other traditional practices.
Meat may be beef, mutton, or pork. Wind-dried meat is known as vivda. A special kind of preserved beef mince, spiced and salted, is known as sassermaet and is the basis for making the patties which are called brïnies. However, the champion meat for Shetlanders comes from the Shetland sheep, which, as Catherine Brown (1981) explains,
are different from other breeds in Britain and have more in common with Norwegian, Swedish and Russian breeds which resemble the wild sheep of Siberia. It is a small, hardy, self-reliant sheep which lives mostly on exposed hills, feeding on coarse hill grass and heather but in severe times it also feeds on seaweed from the shore. All this combines to produce a mutton with a unique flavour which is stronger and faintly gamey compared with lowland mutton.
This mutton on Shetland is often cured: named reestit mutton after the rafter (reestit) from which it is hung to dry over the peat fire after brining.
Returning to Orkney, one finds a fine range of griddle-baked goods, for example the Orkney pancakes made with oatmeal and BUTTERMILK, and the distinctive ‘sour skons’, flavoured with caraway seeds. ‘Fatty cutties’ are another griddle-baked speciality which resemble the Northumbrian ‘singin’ hinnies’ (see SCONE) which ‘sing’ on the griddle because of their high fat content. Orkney is also famed for its SOUR MILK products and cheeses.
A sweet note at the end of this short survey is provided by whipkull, the ancient Shetland drink of egg yolks, sugar, and rum with which Yule (rather than Christmas) has traditionally been celebrated. This is one of many items which arrived from Norway, and bears an interesting resemblance to the Italian ZABAGLIONE (which is made with marsala rather than rum).
the French name for a large, delicious and famous mushroom, Amanita caesarea, is also used in English. An alternative name is Caesar’s mushroom.
The oronge, which grows in open woodland in many parts of Europe and N. America, and in China, prefers a warm climate. In France, for example, it is common in the south, but rare north of the Loire. It is the largest of the genus Amanita, sometimes reaching 25 cm (10″) high and 20 cm (8″) across the cap. The cap is a clear red or orange, becoming yellower with age, and all other parts are yellow.
The delicate and subtle taste has been highly esteemed since antiquity. It was into a dish of oronges, to be consumed by the Emperor Claudius, that the poisoner employed by his consort Agrippina introduced the juices of the deadly Amanita phalloides to bring about his death in AD 54. (Wasson and Wasson, 1957, have shown that there was more to the Emperor’s death than that, for Agrippina’s fell purpose required that death should ensue more rapidly than this poison alone would have ensured. But the tale may be taken as broadly correct.)
A. ovoidea, the white oronge (French amanite ovoïde or oronge blanche), is a southerly species which may be even larger: up to 30 cm (12″) across the cap, which is completely white. It has a floury exterior. Most authorities praise its quality, while drawing attention to the risk explained below.
A close relation in NW America is A. calyptroderma, the coccora. Its cap may be pale yellow instead of orange or red, and its gills are paler than those of A. caesarea, but the resemblance is very close and Italians in California, who recall the oronge in Italy, hunt it with great fervour. The name coccora (or cocoli or coconi) comes from the Italian word for cocoon, referring to the appearance of the young cap with its white, cottony patch of volval tissue still adhering to it.
Warning The oronge should be positively identified before being eaten. The common FLY AGARIC, which is poisonous, can look like a rather dark oronge if rain has washed the distinctive veil fragments off its cap.
the French and gastronomic name for the little bird which the French fancy most in the genus Emberiza, whose members are known as buntings in non-gastronomic English. From beak to tip of tail they measure 12 to 15 cm (5 to 6″), and there is not much of them to be eaten; but they have aroused great enthusiasm among the likes of Alexandre DUMAS père (1873), who gave a lengthy account of a dialogue between a Pythagorean philosopher and a hunter on the propriety of killing ‘one of these charming birds which after all does no harm to anyone and whose looks and whose song bring joy to our eyes and ears’. The hunter’s arguments are presented as more compelling than the philosopher’s and Dumas concludes with a reference to Ortolans à la toulousaine. He explains that ‘in Toulouse they have a special way of fattening ortolans which is better than anywhere else; when they want to eat them, they asphyxiate them by immersing their heads in very strong vinegar, a violent death which has a beneficial effect on the flesh.’
Most British people, and many in other countries too, would shrink from this notion. However, little more than a century ago Dallas in Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877) said that the wheatears (Dallas insists on the final ‘s’, which may be correct if the name was originally whitearse, but wheatear is now the ‘correct’ spelling) has been honoured with the name of the ‘English ortolan’. The wheatear, Oenanthe oenanthe, used to be spit roasted, basted with good butter, and strewn with breadcrumbs. One of the erudite authors who contributed to the impressive survey of birds as food in Simon (1983) quotes the author of a history of birds in Sussex as confirming the comparison with ortolans and saying that wheatears ‘are so fat that they almost dissolve in the mouth like jelly’. The Sussex shepherds who could earn up to £50 a year by supplying wheatears to poulterers in Brighton used to attend an annual celebration dinner, until about 1880.
is the diffusion of liquids in one direction through a semipermeable membrane—that is, one which will allow small molecules through but not large ones. An example is a container of sugar solution divided in two by a sheet of cellophane. On one side the solution is strong, on the other it is weak. Water can get through the cellophane but sugar cannot. The result is that water flows through the membrane from the weak side to the strong side. This movement can generate considerable pressure, which is known as osmotic pressure.
Osmosis is important in food preparation because the cell walls of living organisms are semipermeable membranes. This is why bacteria cannot grow in strong sugar or salt solutions. Osmotic pressure removes water from their cells and prevents them from taking in nutrients from the solution. Osmosis is also at work when sliced cucumbers or aubergines are wilted by sprinkling salt on them, which draws water out of their cells so that they collapse. The opposite process is seen when blanched vegetables are ‘refreshed’ by putting them in plain water. In this case the solution is stronger inside the plant cells, thanks to the dissolved substances naturally present. Water flows into the cells and plumps them out, making the texture of the vegetable firmer.
Struthio camelus, the largest of birds, belongs to Africa, where its flesh and eggs have been eaten from early times. Now it has begun to be farmed elsewhere, and its meat is no longer as exotic an item as it used to be.
Its reputation had already had a boost in the 19th century by no less an authority than Charles Darwin. Voyaging round the world in the Beagle and pausing in S. America, he assured his womenfolk at home that he did not have to live on salt beef and biscuit, as they might have imagined, but enjoyed delicacies such as ostrich dumpling. He was, of course referring to the RHEA, known by some as the S. American ostrich.
As for the eggs, to judge by the comments of the poet and food writer Leipoldt (1976) they are disappointing except in dried form for cake-making and the like. Leipoldt counsels against even trying to make an ostrich egg omelette, describes how to make the best of a difficult job in preparing scrambled ostrich egg, and gives in outline an enticing recipe for ‘Imitation Ostrich Egg’, which sounds like something from early Arabic cookery, and is probably better than the real thing. Raising ostrich for its meat (as well as its feathers) has become big business worldwide. As with so many ‘new’ farm varieties, the most profit attaches to breeding for live trade rather than slaughter.
Cicca acida, one of the few useful fruits in a large genus whose botanical name means ‘leaf-flower’. This refers to the curious manner in which flowers grow along the edges of the leaf like branches; and, since the flowers develop into fruits, the fruits too occupy this odd position.
The origin of the plants is obscure but they are indigenous to Madagascar and have been cultivated for centuries in S. India and N. Malaysia and Indonesia, notably Sumatra. The fruit was introduced into Jamaica from Timor in 1793, and has been casually spread throughout the Caribbean islands. It has long been naturalized in S. Mexico and the lowlands of C. America, and is occasionally grown in S. America.
The tree is an abundant bearer, its branches being festooned with clusters of fruit, and it usually provides two crops a year, so the total quantity of fruit which it produces is very large. The fruits are grape-sized, green at first, and light yellow when ripe. They have a tart flavour which recalls that of the ordinary GOOSEBERRY (not a close relation). When cooked with sugar they become bright red and make excellent jams and filling for fruit pies. They can also be made into pickles and preserves, as is done in India. In Indonesia they are used to make a syrup.
the fanciful name of a sweet tartlet filled with chocolate cream custard. The name was given because Othello was a Moor and supposedly chocolate coloured. The conceit was then carried further; Desdemona is the same thing with white vanilla custard, and Iago with coffee custard.
BIVALVES of the genus Lutraria, have minor importance as food in Europe and SE Asia. L. lutraria, the largest of several European species, is light in colour, may measure up to 12 cm (nearly 5″), and used to be called clumps or horseshoes in the Channel Islands. It can be steamed open and then fried.
A SE Asian species which is liked in Thailand for its tender meat is almost as large and has a purple shell which turns white when dry.
HOOC-COOH, is naturally present in various foodstuffs, including SORREL, RHUBARB, SPINACH, and chocolate. It is toxic in large doses, at levels which are not reached in normal eating patterns; but rhubarb leaves, if they were eaten, could deliver a harmful dose.
There is a persistent belief that the oxalic acid in sorrel is capable of softening the small bones of fish to such an extent that they ‘melt away’ or at least can be eaten without discomfort. Jaine (1986b) tested the hypothesis, using both sorrel leaves (which are traditionally used in cooking bony fish like shad) and various dilutions of oxalic acid, and established that any effect is insignificant. However, sorrel remains an excellent accompaniment to fish in the dishes where tradition calls for its use. The softening of fish bones can be and is achieved to some extent by prolonged cooking, whether with or without sorrel.
normally sold after being skinned and cut into chunks, has been a familiar sight in butchers’ shops for centuries, but its sale was discontinued, at least in Britain, in 1997, in connection with BSE (see box under BEEF).
The dishes commonly made are oxtail soup, a long-standing favourite in Britain, but not only there; examples from other parts of the world include the oxtail soup of Sichuan which Yan-Kit So (1992) describes as a sophisticated rustic dish with chicken in it as well as oxtail, and including ingredients such as ginger, SICHUAN PEPPER, and dried CHINESE WOLFBERRIES. Apart from the soup there are various stews, e.g. the Queue de bœuf en hochepot of Flanders. These are rich but inexpensive dishes. The same applies to braised oxtail, and various forms of boned, stuffed oxtail. Generally speaking, wherever beef has been eaten there will be oxtail dishes, and they are likely to need lengthy cooking.
of all marine MOLLUSCS the most prized and, until it was overtaken by the MUSSEL, the most cultivated. Almost alone among the molluscs, it has been the subject of a book at once scientific and poetic, Eleanor Clark’s The Oysters of Locmariaquer. There is no better source from which to imbibe information about the manner in which oysters are reared and about their history in Brittany in particular.
All oysters begin their lives as ‘spat’, minuscule creatures which emerge by the million from the parent oyster and then look for something to which they can attach themselves. In nature this might be a rock, upon which the tiny oysters would grow (if not eaten by one of their numerous predators such as starfish, whelks, and slipper limpets) and eventually expire, after eight years or so spent filtering the sea-water and extracting nourishment from it. However, when man takes a hand, their lives are less sedentary, for they will be moved several times. First, if all goes according to plan, they will alight on specially prepared and positioned tiles (or other contrivances), on which they will spend eight months or so. These tiles will then be gathered up, so that the tiny oysters can be removed and redistributed in ‘parks’ or basins, incorporating some degree of shelter from predators, for what the French call the élevage stage. This lasts several years. Finally, the adult oysters are likely to be removed to five-star accommodation (the best of everything) for affinage (finishing).
Of the numerous species, the most important as food are described below.
The European oyster, Ostrea edulis, looks pretty, besides being delicious. Its shells are rounded and more regular in appearance than those of its larger cousin, the Portuguese oyster. There are many localities which have been famed for their oysters of this species, known as ‘natives’ in England and plates or armoricaines or belons in France. Although the Portuguese rival has taken over many breeding grounds, O. edulis continues to flourish in some, and has also been introduced to some places in New England and tried out elsewhere.
Colchester in Essex, where London clay underlies the estuaries, was the home of the renowned Pyfleet oysters. Whitstable in Kent had equal fame, and thanks to Charles Dickens (in his capacity as editor of All the Year Round, in 1859) we have a charming and detailed description of the Whitstable oyster fishery in the mid-19th century (quoted at length by Bolitho, 1960; and see also [Murray], 1861). The English fishery suffered greatly from disease in the Victorian era, with supplies being supplemented from deeper in the Channel. But the English harvest has never fully recovered, indeed has experienced many more attacks from imported predators (limpets) and man-made pollution (see Neild, 1995).
The Atlantic coast of France, and of Belgium and the Netherlands, is home to a number of other famous breeds; and the southern coast of Ireland is one of the most productive areas of all. In France, the European oysters now claim only a tenth or so of the market, but this fraction includes the famous belons of Brittany and some of the produce of famous bassins at Arcachon and Marennes-Oléron.
The Portuguese oyster, Crassostrea gigas (formerly angulata), is, as its name indicates, a native of Portugal (and Spain and Morocco), although now considered to be the same as the giant Pacific oyster (see below). In Europe it has a maximum length of about 17 cm (6–7″), is usually whitish or dirty brown on the outside, and has one shell which is very noticeably concave. It is more robust than the European oyster, and has been introduced extensively into, for example, France and Britain. A story is told that a ship called the Morlaisien, carrying a cargo of these oysters from Portugal in the 1860s, took shelter from stormy weather in the Gironde estuary and there jettisoned its cargo, which was deemed to have spoiled; but that a number of the oysters were still alive, found conditions in the estuary to their liking, and multiplied.
In France these oysters are called huîtres creuses, and dominate the market. Those from certain localities, for example the fine de clair from Marennes-Oléron, are especially esteemed, not because of their heredity (the spat often comes from elsewhere) but because of the qualities with which their environment during élevage and affinage endows them.
The American oyster, Crassostrea virginica, is larger than the European oyster, and about the same size (up to 17 cm/7″) as the Portuguese oyster. The shell is rough and heavy, and usually of a greyish colour. The range of the species is the Atlantic seaboard from New Brunswick in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Early settlers in N. America were astonished by its abundance, and European visitors may still be surprised to find how relatively common and inexpensive the American oyster is. Its abundance has, however, decreased since the 19th century, which was for American oyster-lovers the period of supreme happiness. About 170 million pounds’ weight were harvested in 1895. In the late 1920s the figure sank below the 100 million mark, and in the latter part of the 20th century to something like 50 million.
American oysters are marketed under a variety of names, mostly indicating whence they come. Among the most famous are the Cape oysters (from Cape Cod, especially Wellfleet, Chatham, and Wareham); those from Long Island (Blue Point, Gardiners Bay, Robbins Island); and those from the Chesapeake Bay area (e.g. Chincoteague Bay). It is not unusual for oysters to be transplanted to spend the last few months of their lives in these favoured habitats, where they are thought to acquire special flavours characteristic of them.
If those who rate the Cape oysters best are correct, the reason may be this. In the colder northerly waters the oyster grows more slowly, taking five years to reach maturity compared with three in the Chesapeake region, and has a higher salt content. The slower growth rate results in the oysters forming smaller clusters and being more likely to have a pleasing shape for what is called ‘the half-shell trade’.
There are several other American oysters, belonging to the Gulf States and the Pacific coast. The finest is probably the Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida expansa, a subspecies of the California oyster, O. lurida. This is a small (rarely up to 5 cm/2″) and pretty oyster with an especially fine flavour.
Of Asian oysters the largest has already been mentioned above; it is the giant Pacific or oriental oyster, a form of Crassostrea gigas, formerly classified as C. gigas, which may be as much as 25 cm (10″) long and (in normal growing conditions) has a markedly elongated form. The very large specimens, which would make an impossibly daunting mouthful, are not eaten raw, but cooked, or sun dried, or turned into ‘oyster sauce’. Culture of this species is mainly for this last purpose. If, however, these oysters are harvested before they grow too big, they can be treated just like their other form, the Portuguese oysters familiar in Europe.
There are other smaller representatives of the genus in the region, but more interest attaches to Saccostrea cucullata, a species with one shell dimpled round the rim and the other equipped with corresponding protuberances, thus ensuring a very tight fit when the two close. This oyster is well known in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Australasian oysters include the Sydney rock oyster, Crassostrea commercialis, which is probably the most esteemed of all seafoods for Australians. This has a counterpart in the North Island of New Zealand, C. glomerata.
Oyster cookery flourished on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century, when oysters were plentiful and cheap in both Britain and N. America. Dishes such as oyster stews and soups, fried oysters, oysters on skewers with bits of bacon, and oyster fritters were common. But supplies began to dwindle in the 20th century and, as they became less common and more expensive, oysters were more likely to be eaten raw on the half-shell. Nonetheless, some luxury oyster dishes have survived, for example Oysters Bienville and Oysters Rockefeller, both with origins in New Orleans. Mariani (1994) has examined evidence about how these were originally prepared (the latter in particular supposedly having a secret recipe, dating from early in the 20th century), and he prefaces his account of these gastronomic peaks with illuminating general remarks on the earlier history of oysters (and oyster saloons and oyster houses) in the USA.
See also PEARL OYSTER; PROTEIN AND HUMAN HISTORY.
Pinnotheres ostreum, and P. pisum, pea crab, are remarkably small crabs (about 1.5 cm/0.6″ or less) which live out their lives inside the shells of OYSTERS or MUSSELS. The female just stays there, but the male sallies out in search of a female, gets into the same shell as the female, copulates, and expires.
The pea crab is not normally eaten, but the oyster crab used to be regarded as a delicacy in the USA. Davidson (1979) records the following:
The Washington Evening Star of 21 September 1900 stated that there had even been a proposal to call it the Washington crab, since the first President of the United States had liked it so well, and said that ‘we often see it floating upon the surface of an oyster stew’. It was usual to eat the little creatures whole, carapace and all, sautéed or deep-fried, with or without the oysters. They were also pickled. I am told, however, by a scientist at the Smithsonian that they ought to be eaten alive, that they provide a welcome change of texture between oysters, and that they taste a little like celery. Few books contain a recipe for the oyster crab. An exception is 300 Ways to Cook and Serve Shell Fish by H. Franklyn Hall, which was published at Philadelphia in 1901 and contains no fewer than sixteen.
(or oyster fungus) Pleurotus ostreatus, is so named because it looks something like an oyster, and has a slippery texture. It grows abundantly on the trunks of dead or dying deciduous trees, and sometimes fence posts (or even, as a 19th-century observer called Plowright discovered, on the dry skull of a dead, stranded whale), in temperate regions throughout the world, from autumn to winter. It withstands cold, and even snow.
In shape it is like a distorted mushroom with a very short stem offset to the side and attached to the tree. Its gills are off-white, under a cap which is usually greyish-blue, turning pale brown with age. The fungus reaches 13 cm (5″) in width. It is cultivated in China and Japan; also, on a smaller scale, in some European countries, of which Hungary was the pioneer.
The related species P. cystidiosus is cultivated in Taiwan and exported as the abalone mushroom. The name marks its resemblance to the large adductor muscle of the ABALONE.
There is also a white species, P. porrigens, sometimes called angel wings or ‘savoury oyster’, which is much smaller, and thinner, but otherwise similar. And some authors have distinguished as a separate species P. evosmus, the ‘Tarragon oyster’, of superior flavour and aroma. P. cornucopioides and P. eryngii are two more, both funnel shaped, and edible. The former may become one of the cultivated species in France (where it is known as pleurote corne d’abondance), and is found wild in Britain too. The latter, growing on the roots of certain flowering plants, is appreciated in the south of France, where it has many popular names, and esteemed in Spain as seta de cardo, but not found in Britain.
These fungi should be gathered only when young and tender, and the tough stems discarded. They can be fried, like oysters, with results commended by McIlvaine (1902) as outstanding and by other authors as good enough to deceive an oyster-loving cat. They are juicy, may have an attractive peppery tang, and make a good addition to stews. Production and sales of commercially cultivated specimens are increasing, since growing them is easy.
the common name for the seed of either of two tropical African gourds borne by large vines, Telfairia pedata and T. occidentalis. The gourds themselves are inedible and are cultivated only for their seeds, which are large, numerous, and nutritious. A T. pedata gourd typically weighs 11 kg (25 lb) and has about 100 seeds, but it may be several times that size. The seeds are roughly circular and flattish (hence the name ‘oyster nuts’), about 4 cm (1″) in diameter and 1 cm (0.5″) thick. T. occidentalis gourds, though not so large, have similar seeds. An E. African name for this species is krobonko. The seeds of both species are commonly called telfairia nuts. Other names for the plants are fluted pumpkin and Zanzibar oil vine.
The vines clamber up tall trees, and reach a great height. When the gourds ripen, they burst and the seeds are scattered, to be gathered, dried, and prised open (with difficulty, oyster fashion), revealing kernels with an olive-green skin and a soft but firm texture. The oil and protein content of these nuts is high (over 60% and around 27% respectively), they keep well, and their pleasant flavour makes them a good dessert nut.
Oyster nuts are eaten raw or boiled or roasted. Howes (1948) remarks that Africans will ‘roast the nuts first, then extract the kernels and pound them to a paste by means of a mortar and the addition of a little water. This paste is then mixed with fish and cooked and wrapped in a banana leaf, affording a nourishing and toothsome dish.’
The kernels can also be pressed to yield a good cooking oil. The nuts are becoming increasingly important in international trade both for their oil and for use in confectionery; they are sometimes used as a substitute for Brazil nuts.