Agouti paca, an American animal with a range from Mexico to N. Argentina, which is regarded by some authorities as the tastiest of all rodents. The scientific name may lead the unwary to confusion with the AGOUTI. In Venezuela, they are known as lapa. McGovern (c.1927) declared: ‘I would trade all the beefsteaks and roast chickens in the world in order to banquet off one once more.’ An observer among the Indians of Guiana in the 1880s had already declared that both the Indians and the colonists esteemed the flesh more highly than that of any other animal.
Adult pacas weigh from 6–14 kg (13–30 lb) and are approximately 60 cm (24″) long with dark brown fur and four lines of white spots. In spite of being very fat animals they are astonishingly fast and agile and excellent swimmers. Their habits are nocturnal and they mostly feed on fruit, seeds, leaves, and roots.
Research is under way on breeding and raising them commercially but they do not seem to breed well in captivity.
a Quechua word used in Spanish to refer to a plant, Inga feuillei, which belongs to the upland areas of the Andean region of S. America and bears large pods, up to 70 cm (27″) long, containing edible white pulp. Some of the other plants of the genus with similar pods may be called guamá/guamo or ingá. Any of them, especially I. edulis and I. paterno, may also be called ‘ice-cream bean’; the resemblance between the sweet, perfumed, white pulp and ice cream is striking.
The popularity of pacay pods, which offer a sweet snack food in a natural ‘package’, dates back to the times of the Incas, and persists among rural populations in the Andes. However, most of the numerous species in the genus are grown in lowland areas as shade plants, or for fuel. The nutritional value of the pulp in the pods is small.
the name used in C. America and Mexico for plants of the genus Chamaedorea, especially C. costaricana and C. tepejilote, which supply inflorescences which can be boiled as a vegetable, made into fritters, or used in salads.
are so numerous, especially if one includes uninhabited atolls, that a first glance at the map would suggest that it would be impossible to organize them for the purposes of this book. However, for reasons involving geography, history, politics, and climate, they fall into three recognized groups; Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The best-known islands in each group are shown in the box.
For various reasons there are separate entries for HAWAII, NEW ZEALAND, OKINAWA, and PAPUA NEW GUINEA.
Migrants from SE Asia began to move south into the islands of the W. Pacific and Australia about 30,000–40,000 years ago, and thereafter, over thousands of years, migrated into islands further east. Some of them eventually populated the huge area of what is now Polynesia. These peoples remained invisible to European eyes until the 16th century. Magellan, sailing round the southernmost point of S. America towards the end of 1519, was the first to sail into and across the Pacific Ocean and it was he who gave it its name.
The land area of the islands, compared to the vast area of ocean, is tiny. Indeed air travellers will perceive the islands as tiny specks in endless expanses of blue nothingness. But the world of the inhabitants of the small societies below is much larger than mere terrestrial boundaries would suggest. A beach is for them the gateway to a different yet contiguous and familiar environment, a hunting ground which has been a perpetual source of sustenance. The fishing prowess of the islanders, acquired by culture, customs, and environment, is so great and so universal that it might seem to be a genetic trait.
It would certainly have been desirable for the early migrants to be good at fishing, since they would have found progressively less vegetation and fauna as they moved eastward and further into the Pacific. To be sure, they were able to take some of their own domestic animals with them, and to introduce some of their own crops. Even so, the range of edibles was limited, and the impact of the ‘discovery’ of the islands by Europeans was correspondingly great, since they brought new food plants and began depositing stocks of animals like the pig here and there for the benefit of future voyagers. (Tahiti, a prime example of this kind of implantation, has remained French throughout the era of ‘decolonization’ and shows many signs of French influence in its cuisine as well as in other respects. One benefit for food historians is that documentation of its food plants has been well carried out by French botanists.)
If seafood was the main staple and the main source of protein, one would certainly give second place to roots and tubers: notably TARO and SWEET POTATO, providing carbohydrate and forming in terms of volume the foundation of the diet. However, fruits and nuts were also important, especially the COCONUT; the liquid cooking medium throughout the area is coconut milk, providing a common denominator for all the diverse local cuisines.
Other points of interest which apply to the whole region or to much of it include these:
Melanesia
Papua New Guinea, The Solomons, Vanuatu (New Hebrides), New Caledonia, Fiji
Micronesia
Northern Marianas, Guam, Western Carolines, Eastern Carolines, Marshalls, Nauru, Kiribati (Gilberts)
Polynesia
Tuvalu (Ellis), Wallis and Futuna, Western Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Niue, Cook Islands, Tahiti (Society Islands), Tuamotus, Marquesas, Australs, Hawaii (Sandwich Islands), New Zealand-Maori
The sonorous echoes of a blown conch or the penetrating pounding of a wooden slit drum (the latter in Melanesia) cut into the evening air, alerting the participants and guests to the start of the festivities. With an air of subdued excitement and anticipation, clusters of people converge toward the feast site, drawn by lights hanging from the trees leading to a grassy clearing amid coconut palms by the sea. As the sun slips beneath the water on the horizon, a trio of musicians, heads crowned with wreaths of green ferns, softly beat on drums and pluck the strings of coconut ukuleles. All day long men and women have been moving to and fro, carrying bundles of food, baskets of fruit, sucking pigs slung by their feet from bamboo poles. Much laughter has been heard, with the staccato of chopping and the thud of pestles meeting mortars.
A long train of large, finely woven pandanus mats has been laid down the centre of the clearing. A four-foot-wide swathe of banana and TI leaves forms the ‘table’ surface down the centre of the mats. On the seemingly endless green expanse wooden platters jostle woven palm serving dishes, bamboo baskets, coconut bowls, and containers fashioned from banana leaves. Chunks of purple taro contrast with the bone-white sweet potato. Yellow yam slices punctuate green leaf cradles filled with young taro tops, steamed in coconut milk. Scarlet coconut crabs loom over dishes of the little, brown reef crabs; humble but no less delicious.
Whole, cooked reef fish, mouths agape, lie supine on banana leaves. Bowls display chunks of larger, white game fish, marinated until ‘cooked’ in lime juice, speckled with a confetti of green onions and scarlet chilli peppers, and dressed with coconut cream. Platters of chicken pieces lie alongside curved ribs of barbecued pork. Bound bundles of heat-browned banana leaves contain young taro leaves wrapped around a steamed filling of coconut cream, lemon, onions, shredded beef. Other leaf-wrapped ‘puddings’ feature taro, sweet potato, yams, plantains, all mixed in a melange of coconut cream and seasonings and steamed in the earth oven.
Jennifer Brennan
a speciality of Laos, belonging to the family of FISH SAUCES but distinguished from most of them by the presence of chunks of fish in the liquid.
Padek has a very strong smell, and is usually kept in a special pot hanging outside the house. It is an ingredient in numerous Lao dishes. Sometimes the liquid element in it is used alone; this is called nam padek.
to be precise the Valencian paella, universally known as a traditional dish in Spanish cooking, takes its name from the utensil in which it is cooked and from the Spanish region on the shores of the Mediterranean where it had its origin. This dish symbolizes the union and heritage of two important cultures, the Roman which gave us the utensil and the Arab which brought us the basic food of humanity for centuries: RICE.
The etymological roots of the word are of interest. Going back a long way one finds in the Sanskrit language the word pá, which means to drink, from which were derived the Latin terms patera, patina, patella, meaning a chalice or culinary utensil to be used for various purposes including frying. In Castilian there existed a primitive form of denomination paela and also patella, so in an ancient dictionary we can read that ‘patella is a pan or paella for frying’. There also existed old adapted forms of padiella, so we can read paella in the Duties from Santander of the 13th century and paellon in an inventory from Toledo in 1434. The name payla was also used and in the 16th century many classical authors mention these utensils in their works, among them Fray Luis of Granada who states in one of his works, ‘the idols came to be unappreciated and were smelted down—as they deserved—to be made into paylas and caldrons’. This word, while it is not normally used in Spanish, can still be heard in Andalusia and Latin America. The etymological form paele or payele existed in French up until the 15th century and then became poêle which means pan.
The patina and patella which were used in Roman times were in principle of a concave base and, according to size, had one or two handles. This concave base gradually reduced its curvature until it became a flat, circular base of different diameters, taking full advantage of the heat from the fire, converting itself into the utensil called paella.
The types of cooking fires vary and depend on the natural environment. In the Mediterranean zone, the lack of forests, therefore of firewood, obliged the inhabitants to find some other form of combustion.
Along the coast where rice was first grown, the only firewood available was a branch or an odd log, vine shoots, or branches from the pruning of trees, etc. This firewood, because of its acid composition, has the advantage of contributing more calories and maintaining the embers at a regular heat.
The utensils began to adapt to the types of fires and from the different pans in the south of Europe sprang the art of frying. When this type of big pan or paella was used in the cooking of rice it was only natural that its diameter had to be in proportion to the quantities of the ingredients and that its sides and circumference should be slight to make the evaporation easier, to cook the rice, and to absorb the aroma of the firewood.
The size of paella pans is from 10 to 90 cm (4″ to 35″), without any big difference in the depth which is approximately from 4 to 7 cm (1.5″ to 2.5″).
In Islamic Andalusia there were dishes based on rice with definite traditional and symbolic character, casseroles of rice and fish with spices which were eaten at family and religious feasts.
Later on, when rice began to take on the characteristics of an everyday dish, it was combined with vegetables, pulses, and also some dry cod, in this way forming a part of the menu during Lent. Along the coast fish always predominates with rice.
Perhaps as a hangover of these Islamic customs, in the orchards of Valencia, and as a special celebration, rice was cooked in the open air in a paella pan with vegetables of the season, chicken, rabbit, or duck. With the sociological changes of the 19th century, social life became more active, giving rise to reunions and outings to the countryside. There also came into being the tradition, still very much alive, that men did the cooking of paella.
This rice for special days evolved into the Valencian paella. In 1840 in a local newspaper it was in fact given the name of Valencian paella. By natural process the tradition had already come into being.
The ingredients for the authentic dish are as follows: rice, chicken, rabbit, or lean pork, green beans, fresh butter beans, tomato, olive oil, paprika, saffron, snails (or, a curious alternative, fresh green rosemary), water, and salt.
The ancient tradition was to eat the paella directly from its pan, so the round pan, surrounded by chairs, was converted into an admirable ‘Round Table’.
The companions, with their spoons made of box wood with a fine finish, began to eat, each one drawing out his triangle and limit, then meeting in the geometrical centre of the paella. The respect and courtesy was worthy of the Knights of the Round Table.
This form of eating from the same dish is commented on in the Book of Sent Soví when he mentions medieval habits which existed and still exist in the Arab world. It is probable that for this reason we hold on to these memories.
Lourdes March
(literally, ‘lost bread’) a French method for using leftover bread or BRIOCHE. The sliced bread is coated in beaten egg and then fried in clarified butter and sprinkled with sugar. Pain perdu has also been known in England since medieval times, and there are traces of something not very different in the recipes of APICIUS (1st century AD with later additions). Indeed it occurs in various forms and under different names in many countries, although it is convenient to treat the French version as the archetype (cf. N. American usage—a name current there is ‘French toast’).
This sort of thing may often have represented a strategy for making the most of stale bread, but the use of expensive ingredients in many versions suggests that pain perdu was more frequently regarded as a delicacy. The Anglo-Norman versions of pain perdu sometimes used wine for soaking the bread, and almond milk for serving. Sugar or honey and spices were also poured over the bread before it was dished up.
In 17th-century England, pain perdu developed into a particularly rich dish known as ‘cream toasts’ or POOR KNIGHTS. In Spain, stale bread is soaked in milk, dipped in beaten egg, fried, and served with syrup or honey and spices, to form the basis of a popular dessert known as torrijas or tostadas (in Portugal, rabanadas).
Laura Mason
a relatively new nation, created when India was partitioned in 1947. Until the secession of its eastern wing (now BANGLADESH) in 1971, it covered those areas of the Indian subcontinent where the population was predominantly Muslim.
Although Pakistan is a new nation its cuisine has developed over centuries, and it is closely related to the cuisines of its neighbours, AFGHANISTAN to the west and INDIA to the east. Pakistan also shares a border with IRAN.
Pakistan is a land of contrasts. The Hindu Kush mountains lie to the north. In the south there is desert. In between there are areas of green valleys and fertile plains watered by the Indus and its four tributaries. The climate ranges from extreme heat to cold.
The staple grain is WHEAT and Pakistan is a predominantly bread-eating country. There is the flat leavened NAN, traditionally baked in a TANDOOR, and there is the unleavened wholemeal CHAPATI. Bread is used for scooping up food as it is the custom, as it is in most Muslim countries, to eat food with the right hand and not with cutlery. PARATA is a fried bread which is sometimes stuffed with DAL, or with vegetable or meat mixtures. PULSES are important and are widely used. BESAN FLOUR is used making PAKORA, which is a favourite snack food.
MAIZE is grown in Pakistan and a bread called makai ki roti is made from this. Pakistan also produces some of the finest RICE in the world, basmati, which is the preferred rice for preparing their special rice dishes such as BIRIANI and PILAF.
Pakistanis eat a great deal of meat (except for pork, forbidden to Muslims). Lamb is the preferred meat but chicken and beef are also consumed. The meat is prepared in three basic ways—as a KORMA, as KEBAB, or ground and made into KOFTA. These dishes are often highly spiced. A cooling minty yoghurt sauce called burani (see BURAN) is a common accompaniment to this spicy food.
Pakistanis have a sweet tooth and make a number of puddings, pastries, and sweets. As in other Muslim countries they are usually made with flour or mealy products such as semolina. HALVA, which means ‘sweet’ in Pakistan, is very popular; it can be made with flour or semolina but is sometimes made with nuts or even vegetables such as carrot or pumpkin. Zarda pilau is a sweet pilau (see PILAF) which is flavoured and coloured with saffron and cooked with pistachio, almond, and raisins. Rosewater (see ROSES) and kewra essence (see SCREWPINE) are common flavourings for sweets.
LASSI is a refreshing and cooling yoghurt drink especially welcome in the long, hot summer months. In winter, kanji, a semi-fermented drink, is made from black carrots.
The regions of Pakistan vary considerably. In the south there is Sind covering the area where the huge Indus River comes down to the sea—the area which was the cradle of the ancient Indus Valley civilizations. This is the one part of Pakistan where fish and other seafood are plentiful. To the west lies Baluchistan, largely pastoral, reflecting to some extent the influence of neighbouring Iran, for example in a KORMA (Alu bokhara gosht) which features PLUMS (of the species Prunus bokhariensis) and almonds as well as onion, green chilli, and meat.
To the north lies Pakistan’s share of Punjab (the name means ‘five waters’, referring to five famous rivers), including the legendary city of Lahore and fertile land where exceptionally fine blood oranges, grapes, and sweet melons are grown. SUGAR CANE is also grown there and the whole region is known as ‘the granary of the sub continent’. Westwards, towards Afghanistan, comes the North-West Frontier, a rugged area with famously warlike inhabitants. In terms of food, the emphasis is on meat and this is the home of one special kebab, chappli kebab, a minced meat KEBAB which has been formed into the shape of a sandal (hence its name), and which is exceptionally hot.
Further to the north comes Swat, presided over in former times by the Akond made famous by Edward Lear’s poem. The first illustrated edition of this (ed. Jackson) was published in 1997. The illustrations by Ann Arnold include several food scenes, depicted in a manner both authentic and witty.
Further north still lies Baltistan, the improbable source of much of the restaurant cooking done in the British city of Birmingam; see BALTI.
Helen Saberi
(pakaura) are batter-fried vegetables or fish, usually eaten as an appetizer or snack in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. They are a popular street food. The batter is usually made of BESAN FLOUR and water. They are flavoured with spices such as turmeric, coriander, and cayenne. Pakora are particularly popular with vegetarians.
A variety of vegetables can be used such as onion rings, cauliflower, cabbage, sliced aubergines, potatoes, carrots, cucumber, celery, and spinach. Pakora can also be made with cooked rice or semolina and also panir (cheese) and meat. They are usually served with a spicy chutney for dipping.
They are also known as bhajis or bhajias.
Helen Saberi
a culinary term of the Philippines, refers to the process of cooking in vinegar, and also to the dishes so cooked. It is often fish, covered with vinegar, ginger, salt, and pepper and allowed to boil. Water and some pork lard may be added, and the dish then removed from the fire after a second boiling. It may be eaten hot or cold, and keeps without refrigeration.
Meats cooked in vinegar and spices are also called paksiw. Pork paksiw has soy sauce, a bit of sugar, garlic, and a bay leaf. When pork hock is used, BANANA FLOWERS and whole cooking bananas are often added. The most luxurious dish of the genre is Paksiw na lechon, made with what is left over after a feast of the whole, spit-roasted pig called lechon. This is cooked in vinegar, a sauce made from the liver, garlic, soy sauce, and other aromatic ingredients which sometimes include cinnamon and thyme. Many claim to prefer this to the original feast; and it is even said that roast pigs are sometimes bought for the sole purpose of making paksiw—an idea which stands on its head the—traditional use of paksiw as a means of preserving food, including leftovers, in the days before refrigeration.
Lechon-makers prepare their own paksiw, or sell heads, feet, and other less popular cuts for home-made paksiw.
Doreen Fernandez
the roof of the mouth of a vertebrate. In human beings, this is regarded as the organ of taste; hence expressions such as ‘she has a fine palate’. In certain other vertebrates, the palate is food for human beings. Beef palate (palais de bœuf in France, where it used to be popular—cooked in a white COURT BOUILLON and dressed like calf’s head) is nowadays almost unknown as a menu item.
Dried palate of WATER-BUFFALO is an ingredient in the kitchens of Laos (Phia Sing, 1981), but even there it is not always an ingredient of choice, being in some dishes a surprising substitute for the more expensive prawns which have to be imported from Thailand and would otherwise be preferred.
also called plassas (Sierra Leone), ban flo (Ghana), and palm oil chop, a dish which is widespread in W. Africa. It is based on large quantities of green leaves (‘spinach’), including BITTERLEAF, and usually contains small amounts of meat and/or offal together with dried fish and shellfish. Often the thickening is of egusi seeds (see WATERMELON). It also contains what seems to the uninitiated like a very large amount of PALM OIL.
The name is thought to derive from the Portuguese palavra (‘word’).
Jenny Macarthur
Escobedia scabrifolia, a herb of the family Scrophulariaceae which is found in various countries of Latin America, sometimes also called raiz de color (colouring root) or (misleadingly, since it only resembles saffron in its colouring effect) azafrán. Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (1984) writes:
Palillo is a Peruvian herb [of which the root is] used dried and ground to give a yellow colour to food. Since so many Peruvian foods are yellow or white, I’m sure it is a reflection of pre-Conquest Inca sun (and moon) worship …. I have found that using half the amount of turmeric gives much the same result.
This subject has been given, by Corner (1966), a remarkably felicitous introduction:
Of all land plants, the palm is the most distinguished. A columnar stem crowned with giant leaves is the perfect idea, popular or philosophic, of what a plant should be. It suffers no attrition through ramification. In all the warmer parts of the earth this form stamps itself in grand simplicity on the landscape. It manifests itself in more than two thousand species and several hundred genera, every one restricted more or less by climate, terrain, and geographical history. The present distribution of palms resembles an immense chessboard on which we see the last moves of a great game of life. Kings and queens are Malaysian and Amazonian. The major pieces have moved into America, Africa, and Asia, and the pawns have reached the islands. There are fragments of the early moves in the Cretaceous rocks, dating back 120 million years. A fan-palm has been reported from the Triassic of Colorado, and we do not know when the game began or whence it was derived. All we can say is that the palms are as old, if not older, than any other form of flowering plant and that they have endured while the rest have pressed forward into modern trees, climbers, herbs, and grasses, ramified, extended, twisted, and simplified.
Palm is now the general name for these trees, of the family Arecaceae, which have such an interesting history. It is a large family, belonging to the tropics and subtropics, and many of its members furnish important foodstuffs: the COCONUT, DATE, SAGO, PALM SUGAR, etc. See also OIL PALMS; PALMYRA PALM.
In addition, many palms provide edible leaves or shoots which are eaten as vegetables. In some, the whole central terminal shoot at the top of the stem is taken, giving a palm cabbage or heart of palm. This excision kills the tree, so it is normally a wasteful process and the product is expensive. Trees exploited in this way include the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, and royal palms, Roystonea spp, which, if left alone, would produce coconuts and sago respectively. There are, however, palms which produce multiple shoots, from which some terminal shoots can be harvested without damage to the plant as a whole. Among these are Bactris gasipaes, the peach palm or PEJIBAYE; Sabal spp, known as palmetto or in one instance ‘swamp cabbage’.
Palm hearts (or hearts of palm, or palm cabbage) are available in cans, in stick-shaped pieces. These make a delicious salad, commonly served with a pinkish mayonnaise-type sauce and well liked in Belgium and France.
There is one other palm, Euterpe oleracea, which yields not only palm cabbages but also edible fruits, sometimes called acaí. It is cultivated in tropical America. Facciola (1990) observes that:
The pulp of the fruit is added to water to make a violet-colored beverage or juice. It is then consumed with tapioca and sugar, with cassava meal and grilled fish …, as a porridge cooked with cassava meal, or as an ice cream or popsickle flavoring.
This is not the only example of a palm producing edible fruit of this sort; there is also SALAK.
The rattan palm, Calamus latifolius, also bears edible fruits, brownish-yellow, imbricate, and apiculate (i.e. with a sharp little point projecting from the end and with overlapping ‘scales’, like the LYCHEE). The inner part of the shoots can also be eaten. In fact, other members of the extensive rattan family have edible parts including in some instances the ‘cabbage’.
The pulp of the fruit of Oenocarpus distichus, bacaba de azeite, yields an oil comparable to olive oil; and Orbignya martiana, babassú, shows great culinary versatility, producing palm hearts, an edible oil, a flour which is mixed with milk and sugar to make a drink supposed to resemble chocolate, besides ‘meat’ which can be eaten as a snack or used to produce something like coconut milk; etc.
sometimes called palm kernel oil, an edible oil of great commercial importance and many uses. It is made from the nutlike fruit kernel of Elaeis guineensis, the most important of the OIL PALMS (under which head others are described) and the most productive of all plants supplying edible oil.
This is usually referred to as the oil palm. Originally it was only of importance in its native W. Africa, where it grows in the hot, moist region inland from the Bight of Benin and up the Congo Valley. The most common African name for its nut, from which the oil is taken, is dende (often written as dendé or dendê); and it is under this name that the oil is known in Brazil; where it has been described (by Sokolov, 1991) as ‘the heart and soul of one of the hemisphere’s great postcolonial food cultures’. It had arrived there, in the region of Bahia, with slaves brought from W. Africa by the Portuguese, and enabled these Yoruba or Hausa slaves to recreate the essential smell and taste of their homeland in the New World. Even where dende oil is not available, people of African heritage have found ways of colouring their cooking oils red to resemble it, so that outside Brazil and Caribbean Colombia, annato is used as a dye to produce a visual analogue.
This oil palm is now grown in tropical regions around the world and the production of palm oil (sometimes also called palm kernel oil) has become a major industry. Malaysia has become the main producer.
The tree is tall (up to 30 m/100′) and long-lived (150 years or more). The fruit, the size of a small plum, is borne in large clusters of about 200, rather in the manner of dates. The outer skin is usually orange or yellow, in some kinds black at its pointed tip or all over. The fibrous pulp is very oily and unpalatable. The stone is the size of a nutmeg and has a hard, black case, sometimes thick, sometimes thin. Inside is a white, oily kernel.
Thus both the outer and inner parts of the fruit yield oils, which are different in character. Both are highly saturated, which means that they have a high melting point and are semi-solid in temperate conditions. Oil from the pulp is yellow and higher in free fatty acids, so that it has a pronounced flavour and easily becomes rancid. Kernel oil is paler, cleaner, and more stable.
The traditional method of extracting oil, practised by Africans for their domestic purposes, was to take a small amount of fresh fruit and to boil, pound, wash, strain, and reboil it, then to skim off the oil from the water. This yielded a good oil with a pleasant flavour. It did not keep long, but that did not matter, for only a little was made at a time. Kernels were cracked, and the oil extracted in a similar way.
It was not until the 19th century that there was any commercial interest in the palm as a source of saleable oil. At first European traders chose to leave extraction to the Africans, in order to save shipping costs on the fruit. However, the oil so produced was inferior; and around 1870 Europeans began to buy kernels separately so that they could extract the better kernel oil themselves, and apply new techniques to the pulp oil, making it edible. During the 20th century the growth of the MARGARINE industry magnified demand. Conventional hard margarine needs a semi-solid, highly saturated fat. Ordinary liquid vegetable oils, if used, have to be ‘hardened’ chemically. Palm oil needs less treatment, and has therefore been much used in margarine, with the result that during most of the 20th century world production of palm oil has been doubling every decade.
In 1848 four oil palms were taken from Mauritius to the botanical garden at Bogor in Java. Seeds from them were distributed around Indonesia and, by luck, a superior, high-yielding strain arose at Deli in Sumatra. It was short stemmed, which made harvesting easier. The cultivation of this variety expanded rapidly in Indonesia, and later in Malaysia. Malaysia is now the world’s largest producer; Indonesia has also outstripped the largest African growers, the Congo and the Ivory Coast.
New varieties, mostly bearing fruits with thin-shelled kernels, are gradually replacing older strains including the Deli. The average output in the world as a whole is 1,000 kg of oil per hectare (890 1b/acre), much more than that of any other oil plant.
commonly referred to as jaggery (or gur) in S. and SE Asia, where it is widely used, is obtained from the sap of various palm trees, notably Arenga pinnata and Borassus flabellifer, the PALMYRA PALM.
The sap is produced when the tree converts its starch reserves into sugar in preparation for the growth of inflorescences at the top of the stem. The procedure for obtaining the sap often involves maltreating the young inflorescence, e.g. by pummelling it with a wooden mallet over a period of several days, to bruise the tissue inside and set the sap flowing. The sap is collected in containers set to catch it as it flows out of incisions in the trunk. The flow may continue for two or three months.
The actual sugar content of the sap varies from 10% to over 15%. The product sold in the markets, often in a neat ‘parcel’ formed by a folded leaf, is brown and crumbly. In Malaysia it is called gula melaka (after Malacca, a centre for its manufacture), and in Indonesia gula jawa (for Java).
Palm honey (miel de palma) is a sweet product which sounds similar but is made by boiling down the sap of yet another palm, Jubaea chilensis, the Chilean wine palm (or coco de Chile or honey palm). The fruits of this palm have edible kernels which resemble small coconuts and are called coquitos or cokernuts or pygmy coconuts, occasionally available as an exported delicacy.
Borassus flabellifer, a common palm of S. Asia, cultivated in India and Sri Lanka, mainly as a source of PALM SUGAR, but also for the extraction of SAGO and for its fruits and nuts. The palm, like the COCONUT and the NIPA PALM, also serves numerous other purposes. Indeed, if Watt (1889–96) is correct in referring to a Tamil poem which records ‘some 800 uses to which the various parts are put’, it may outdo its rivals in versatility. The leaves are used for writing material, thatching, etc., and are also a source of salt; the inflorescence provides juice, drunk fresh or boiled down to yield jaggery (sugar), or fermented to wine and vinegar. See also Blatter (1926).
The fruits grow in clusters like the coconut but are smaller (about 10–12.5 cm/4.5″ in diameter), rounder, and slightly flattened at both ends. They have a dark purple skin, with green bracts at the base. Each fruit has three seeds, the fleshy part of which resembles the meat of the coconut and is eaten fresh. There is also a small quantity of liquid, which is taken as a drink.
This palm grows in most parts of the Sudan, where it is known as doleib, and is important as a famine food, besides providing palm sprouts.
a strange marine delicacy of the South Sea islands, well described by Hornell (1950):
On the occurrence of one particular phase of the moon towards the close of the year, incredible numbers of a sea-worm, known as palolo in Samoa and Tonga and as mbololo in Fiji, rise to the surface of the sea from the submerged coral reefs which encircle these islands. This swarming is limited to two particular days, one usually in October, the other in November. The natives know from experience exactly when to expect them … When the signs are recognized, every available canoe is manned and paddled out to the reef shortly after midnight; here they eagerly await the coming of the worms. If their calculation is correct, as it generally is, the swarm begins to appear on the surface about 2 hours before sunrise. Work is carried on with feverish haste. All are armed with hand-nets of some sort or other. Almost anything will serve, so dense are the writhing, wriggling masses of worms. Every canoe and receptacle must be filled before sunrise, for the moment the flaming rays of the sun strike the water, the worms, which are mere delicate-walled tubes filled with eggs or with sperm, burst and shed their contents into the water. Within a few minutes the swarms have vanished like smoke before the wind; no sign remains except a thin whitish scum floating on the surface.
Gwen Skinner (1983), giving the name as balolo, identifies the worm as Eunice viridis, the specific name being given because its colour is ‘spinach-green’, and states that balolo are eaten raw or fried in butter, sometimes with onion. She believes that, to be precise, what come to the surface are the detachable egg- and sperm-sacs of the worms, brownish and greenish respectively.
It has proved possible to freeze palolo, despite the delicate structure of the sacs.
a type of sweet dessert or drink which dates back to Zoroastrian times, is still made in Iran and also in Afghanistan and India where it is called faluda. The Middle Eastern baluza, balusa (and Turkish palta, for that matter) are all descendants of Persian paludeh in name, so that the geographical range of this item covers a very large area. The Persian word itself simply means ‘sieved, refined’. But the meaning has been extended in various directions. Thus, to take just two examples, the word can mean cornstarch pudding or a kind of rosewater granita (see WATER ICES) containing a sort of vermicelli (described below) and sprinkled with lime juice.
To make the ‘vermicelli’, cornflour or wheat starch and water are blended together into a thick, white paste which is then cooked over heat until the mixture becomes almost translucent. The mixture is forced through a type of colander or pasta machine (in India called a sev machine, see SEV, SEVIYAN) into iced water (or snow, as in ancient times). The result is that tiny rice-like grains or small vermicelli are formed in the ice. (Nowadays the mixture is often piped into iced water which results in longer vermicelli.) The paloodeh is then served topped with one of a variety of toppings including fruit SHERBET; fruit syrup; FIRNI; or a kind of milk custard which is flavoured with SALEP or as a topping for ice cream (kulfi in India).
In Afghanistan these ricelike or vermicelli-like grains are often called jhala, which means hailstones, because of the resemblance to hail.
Mountstuart Elphinstone (1839) said that in the summer, when ice was to be had in Caubul (Kabul), fulodeh (faluda) was a favourite food, a ‘jelly … eaten with the expressed juice of fruits and ice, to which cream is also sometimes added’.
The balouza of the Middle East is made from cornflour, water, and sugar which is cooked until thick and then flavoured with orange blossom or rosewater. Chopped almonds and pistachio nuts are stirred in. Claudia Roden (1985) says:
This pudding is like opaline encrusted with little stones. When it is served it trembles like a jelly. It is customary for an admiring audience to compliment a belly dancer by comparing her tummy to a ‘balouza’.
Helen Saberi
is an English loan word from Romance languages (panade, French; panada, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), first used in the 16th century. The dictionaries say it derived specifically from the Spanish—witness perhaps that at that period we British deferred to Spanish culinary taste (see OLIO for example) more than we have done latterly. Ultimately, the root of course is the Latin panis (bread).
One meaning is a sort of bread gruel or soup, typically made by boiling some bread in water and then adding flavouring. With the addition of lemon, wine, and sugar, it was considered in the 17th century to be highly nourishing for invalids. Hannah GLASSE (1747) thought so too but disallowed the wine in her version. Such a plain soup was an important fast-day dish for Catholic countries. The second meaning of the term is a paste made with breadcrumbs or any of various flours and water, milk, or stock, to be used for thickening sauces or for binding mixtures, perhaps for quenelles, gnocchi, the panada of Catalonia, or meatballs.
Panada is also a Sardinian stuffed bread (Wright, 1999), and a savoury stuffed pastry from northern Sulawesi in Indonesia. The pastry is filled with smoked tuna, a speciality of the area. The inspiration is probably Portuguese (Owen, 1994).
means, to a western European or an American, a flat cake made from a BATTER of flour, eggs, and milk, and fried in a shallow pan or cooked on a greased GRIDDLE. It may be eaten flat, sprinkled with sugar; or rolled around a sweet or savoury filling, for example in many French crêpe dishes. Some pancakes of other regions fall neatly into this category, such as the Russian BLINI and Hungarian palacsinta. With others the distinction between a pancake and a griddle bread is not so clear.
Most pancakes or crêpes are thin. However, the excellent Scots pancakes and their counterparts in other Celtic areas (all treated under DROP SCONE) are thicker, and so are Schmarren (mentioned below).
The griddle method of cooking is older than oven baking, and pancakes are an ancient form. The first pancakes clearly distinguishable from plain griddle breads are sweet ones mentioned by APICIUS; these were made from a batter of egg, mixed milk and water, and a little flour, fried and served with pepper and honey.
An English culinary manuscript of about 1430 refers to pancakes in a way which implies that the term was already familiar, but it does not occur often in the early printed cookery books. It seems to have been only in the 17th century that pancakes came to the fore in Britain. They were made from a flour and egg batter mixed with milk, cream, or water. Gervase Markham (1615) favoured a batter made with water, because milk or cream made pancakes ‘tough, cloying, and not crisp’. But cream had its advocates. Wine or brandy was also often added. By the next century the milk and cream faction had won. In 1737 The Whole Duty of a Woman gave four pancake recipes (all subsequently copied without acknowledgement by the more famous Hannah GLASSE). One of these called for an extra rich batter with eighteen egg yolks and ½ pint (250 ml) each of cream and sack. Another was a recipe for what was called ‘A Quire of Paper’, very thin pancakes fried on both sides, sprinkled with sugar, and piled in a flat stack; the name was given because in the 18th century a quire of paper consisted of 24 sheets folded in half.
Throughout Europe pancakes had a place among EASTER FOODS, especially on Shrove Tuesday (or Mardi Gras), the last day before Lent. Customs varied from country to country. Thus in the Netherlands WAFFLES as well as pancakes were eaten on Shrove Tuesday; in medieval Germany doughnuts were the Shrove Tuesday speciality, and pancakes were reserved for Easter days after Lent; while in Russia blini were sold by street vendors during the Maslyanitsa or ‘butter festival’ before Lent.
This emphasis on a particular season should not disguise that the pancake has always been an important food for the working population—nourishing, filling, and quickly cooked. William Ellis (1750) is eloquent in its praise as a food for the country labourer.
One peculiarly English institution is the pancake race. The oldest of these has been held at Olney in Buckinghamshire, in most years since 1445. Only local housewives can take part and they must make the pancakes themselves. The church bells warn when to make them and when to assemble for the start. Contestants, who must wear an apron and a hat or scarf, race over a course of 380 m/415 yards with the pancake in a pan, during which it must be tossed and caught three times. The winner and runner-up are presented with prayer books.
In the latter part of the 20th century the outstanding development in the world of pancakes has been the growth in the number of crêperies, not only in France but also elsewhere.
A small selection of interesting pancakes follows:
Bao bing (thin pancake), a Chinese pancake made simply of fine wheat flour and very hot water. The dough is kneaded and rolled thin; two layers at once, oiled to keep them separate, are rolled, cooked in this joined state on a dry griddle, and then peeled apart and stacked under a cloth. These are the pancakes which accompany the well-known PEKING DUCK, but they are also served with other dishes.
Crêpes Suzette, sweet pancakes rolled or folded with an orange sauce and flambéed (see FLAME) with curaçao or the like. The story that a French chef, Charpentier (1935), invented the dish (by accident, in some versions) at Monte Carlo in 1896 for the then Prince of Wales, ‘Suzette’ being of the Prince’s company at the time, is CULINARY MYTHOLOGY. The Anglo-French restaurateur X. Marcel Boulestin (1948) established, by talking to people who were around at the time, that it was developed by a maître d’hôtel at Restaurant Paillard in Paris in 1889 and named for an actress in the Comédie-Française who played the part of a chambermaid serving pancakes. The original contained no liquor and was not flamed at table. The earliest reference in print is ESCOFFIER (1903).
Dadar gutung, an Indonesian sweet pancake. Plain batter similar to the western type is used. The pancake is wrapped around a filling of fresh coconut meat cooked in water with brown sugar, and flavoured with cinnamon and lemon juice, with a little salt.
Matefaim or matafan is a thick pancake made in the Jura, Loire, and Franche-Comté regions of France; it means literally ‘kill hunger’. The batter may contain potato, a purée of pumpkin, or buckwheat.
Palacsinta (in German-speaking areas Palatschinken—the word is derived from the Latin placenta; see CAKE), a thin Hungarian pancake similar to and used like a French crêpe; also popular in Austria as an alternative to the more solid Schmarren. There are plain and sweet versions, and also a light kind made with separated eggs, the beaten whites folded in just before cooking. The pancakes may be served flat with sugar, or rolled up around a filling.
Pannequet, a French term used for a crêpe rolled around a filling, savoury or sweet.
Potato pancakes are made in several countries. Irish BOXTY is a potato pancake. Latke is a potato pancake (sometimes described as a FRITTER) of Jewish cuisine, made from a mixture of raw grated and cooked mashed potatoes. The Polish ratzelach is a pancake based on grated raw potato but with several other ingredients, popular among Polish communities in N. America.
Schmarren, items which are popular in Germany and Austria, may qualify to be called pancakes although they are usually torn apart with forks before being served. The basic Schmarren are, or at least were, made of stale bread or sometimes buckwheat, soaked in water or milk, with no other addition than salt. They can be eaten on their own with a simple dressing of butter and sugar. Only the luxury recipes, for example Kaiserschmarren, have enrichments such as eggs.
Scots pancakes, see DROP SCONE.
See also POORI for an Indian item and QATAʾIF for a Middle Eastern one.
salted belly of pork, an important ingredient in Italian cookery which is fairly closely related to BACON, and also to the Spanish tocino. It exists in many regional variations, with different periods of maturing, different aromatics, etc. The type called guanciale, which is taken from the ‘cheek’, in front of the belly, is very popular in C. Italy, especially Lazio.
Pancetta occurs in several famous pasta dressings, e.g. Spaghetti alla carbonara (see SPAGHETTI).
is a combination of five spices (panch in Hindi and in Persian means five). The most popular quintet is: MUSTARD seed, CUMIN SEED, FENUGREEK seeds, nigella seeds (see BLACK CUMIN), and FENNEL seeds. However, alternatives include aniseed (see ANISE), CASSIA leaves, and red CHILLIES.
This spice mixture comes from the eastern coastal state of Bengal and gives a distinctive aroma and flavour to pulse and vegetable dishes. The spices, which are usually left whole, are fried in hot oil or GHEE, to which they impart their perfume, before the other ingredients are added.
Helen Saberi
an old-fashioned deep-dish New England fruit dessert related to COBBLER, grunt, and SLUMP. Sliced or cut apples or other fruits are tossed with spices and butter, sweetened with molasses (see SUGAR), MAPLE SYRUP, or brown sugar, topped with a biscuit-like dough, and baked. Partway through the baking time, the crust is broken up and pressed down into the fruit so it can absorb the juices. This technique is called ‘dowdying’. After the crust is baked, it becomes crispy. Pandowdies are served warm with heavy (double) cream, hard sauce (see SAUCE), or a cream sauce flavoured with nutmeg.
Carole Bloom
an Italian yeast cake which is a speciality of Milan, is eaten throughout Italy on festive occasions such as Christmas and Easter. It is usually cylindrical and, like BRIOCHE, may range in size from an individual portion to a large cake to serve a number of people.
Panettone is made from a rich yeast dough containing flour, butter, eggs, sugar, and milk with raisins and candied peel.
Another similar celebration cake, more golden-yellow in colour and without fruit or nuts, is the pandoro of Verona.
and peynir, the Farsi (Persian) and Turkish words for ‘cheese’, which also occur in other related languages such as Urdu, sometimes appear as part of the names of cheeses made in the Near East and the Indian subcontinent. Examples are Turkish cheeses such as Beynaz and Kasar, which are often called Beynaz peynir and Kasar peynir; panir kusei, the ‘pot’ cheese of Iran; and panir, a popular Indian ‘pickled’ cheese.
also crema cotta, an Italian dessert made with CREAM (panna) and sugar mixed together and brought to a simmer with some added milk and a little gelatin, then moulded and chilled. If a flavouring is used, it should be delicate.
This preparation is particularly associated with Piedmont. Doglio (1995) states in his dictionary of Piedmontese gastronomy that the flavouring can be of rum (not delicate), and that the mould into which the mixture is poured is lined with caramelized sugar. He refers also, without endorsing it, to a story that this dessert originated with a Hungarian woman living in the Langhe district of Piedmont in the early part of the 19th century. Her version apparently included egg, coffee, and vanilla.
or pantoah, Bengali sweets made from dough based on flour and sugar mixed with other ingredients (milk powder, BESAN FLOUR, fresh curd cheese, coconut, sweet potato, green banana) and flavoured with cardamoms. The mixture is shaped into crescents or logs and deep fried in GHEE, then soaked in a rose-flavoured syrup. A sweet of this type, shaped into balls, each one containing a sugared cardamom seed or other candy, is known as a LADIKANEE or ‘Lady Canning’, apparently in honour of the wife of the 19th-century Viceroy of India Lord Canning.
Laura Mason
Asimina triloba, the fruit of a small N. American tree related to the CHERIMOYA, but with a distribution extending further north, into New York state. It has for long been cultivated by Indians and whites alike.
Papaw is among the fruits which are referred to by the general name CUSTARD APPLE; and is sometimes spelled ‘pawpaw’, a corrupted name which is, confusingly, often also given to the completely different PAPAYA.
The fruit has a smooth, yellowish skin without the knobs or reticulations which are characteristic of its tropical relatives such as the CHERIMOYA, SUGAR-APPLE, and SOUR-SOP. The shape is slightly elongated and curved, and the average fruit is 10 cm (4″) long. The pulp, like that of other annonaceous fruits, is yellow, soft, and smooth. It has a rich, sweet, creamy flavour evocative of both banana and pear, overlaid with a heavy fragrance, so that some find the whole effect cloying. Papaw is usually eaten raw, but can be baked or made into desserts of various kinds.
Carica papaya, one of the best tropical fruits, looks rather like a pear-shaped melon.
It is native to the lowlands of eastern C. America, but even before the arrival of Europeans it was already being cultivated well beyond this area. The Spanish and the Portuguese invaders took to it and quickly spread it to their other settlements. It was being grown in the W. Indies by 1513 and by 1583 had been taken from there to the E. Indies via the Philippines, taking with it its Carib Indian name ababai, altered to ‘papaya’. It also reached Africa at an early date.
It was spread through the Pacific islands as Europeans discovered them, and by 1800 was being grown in all tropical regions. Hawaii and S. Africa are now the main exporters.
The papaya plant is a very large, semi-woody herb shaped like a palm tree but with huge fingered leaves. It grows quickly from seed and bears fruit within a year. The fruits hang from the top down the central stem in large clusters. The plant continues to fruit well for another two years, after which it is cut down.
Its sexual habits are peculiar. Some strains, such as the South African Hortus Gold, have separate male and female trees. Seedlings are planted in threes and the males, which bear no fruit and are useful only for pollination, are thinned out when they flower and their sex becomes apparent. Others, such as the Hawaiian Solo, have fruiting hermaphrodites and females, of which the former are preferred and the latter thinned out. These two strains produce the majority of papayas in the West.
In regions where planting is less organized, different strains of papaya interbreed naturally and produce variable fruits, some pear shaped, some round, and ranging in size from smaller than an apple to a length of 30 cm (1′) and a weight of 9 kg (20 lb). Very large papayas are inferior in flavour.
The preferred type of commercial papaya is generally up to 500 g (1 lb) in weight, occasionally twice as large. It is pear shaped, pale green when unripe and becoming blotchy yellow or orange when ripe. A fruit is ripe when it is mostly yellow and just beginning to soften to the touch. The pulp inside is of a creamy orange colour, soft, delicately scented, and sweet. The taste is slightly lacking in acidity, and is usually complemented by a squeeze of lime juice. At the centre is a mass of black seeds encased in a gelatinous coating. These are edible, although often discarded. They are crunchy and have a slightly peppery taste, like mustard and cress. Occasionally they are used, crushed, as a mildly spicy condiment.
Unripe papayas, especially of the larger kinds, are cooked as a vegetable, or made into pickles. Papaya fruits, especially unripe ones, and also the leaves of the plant contain an enzyme of a digestive character, papain, which has a powerful tenderizing effect on meat. This has been realized since early times and, wherever papayas are grown, tough meat is cooked in a wrapping of papaya leaves, or it may be left under a papaya plant whose unripe fruits have been cut, so that they drip a milky latex onto the meat, or is mixed with papaya in some other way. Commercial meat tenderizer, available in powder form, is made from papayas. Papaya is also a great healer of upset stomachs, and the bitter leaves are often believed to prevent malaria, as the mosquito avoids people whose blood is not ‘sweet’.
Papaya jam and canned papayas are produced on a small scale.
At least eight other species of the genus Carica bear edible fruits, including the BABACO, C. beilbornii. C. candamarcensis is the ‘mountain papaya’ of the Andes, best eaten cooked, because of its high papain content. C. quercifolia is known in several S. American countries as higuera de monte.
Papaya is sometimes called pawpaw, a confusing name which is also used for the quite different fruit PAPAW.
was an early British food fashion, an answer to all those WRAPPED FOODS of the Far East and S. America. Food (together with any necessary liquid) was put in a greaseproof-paper bag brushed out with fat, sealed with clips, placed on a trivet, then baked in the oven. Some dishes, for example a tapioca or a steak-and-kidney pudding, would first be potted up before bagging, but the majority—roasts, made dishes, stews and vegetables, even soufflés—had no other container than the paper. It was a development of the French method of cooking en papillote, favoured particularly for fish such as red mullet, veal chops (perhaps the classic), and small birds. These would be wrapped in foolscap paper first brushed with fat. Usually meat had been first browned, though fish would not be, and the point of the wrapping was to steam the main item with aromatics and vegetables without loss of the juices. Paper bag cookery was more ambitious. Meat did not need preliminary browning: holes were punched in the bag to give colour to ‘roast’ beef or the bag enclosing a chicken was rent asunder at the end to impart a nice finish. It was claimed that cooking was more rapid and the oven need not be so hot; that there was no loss of nutrients; that it saved on washing-up and kitchen equipment; that the cooker was never soiled and servants were less necessary. It was only viable once wood pulp papers could be made greaseproof and square-bottomed or gussetted grocery bags could be produced: all developments of the 1870s and 1880s. It was a fashion driven at once by manufacturers (the ‘Papakuk’ and the ‘Dreycoul’ are two brand names) and by the press (the Daily Express at the forefront). In 1911–12 five books were published on the subject. The fad may reflect broader social conditions, particularly the lack of servants and the first necessary steps in reducing the domestic workload of women left to fend for themselves. Since the general adoption of aluminium foil in the 1950s, the principle of en papillote has been broadened and deepened.
Tom Jaine
READING:
the familiar red spice, consists of the dried ground fruits of Capsicum annuum, the mild CAPSICUM fruit, often called PIMENTO. Although this and all the other Capsicum species originated in the New World, the particular varieties used to make paprika were developed in Europe, especially in Hungary. The first paprika peppers to reach Hungary are thought to have been introduced from the east by Bulgarians, who had them from Turkey. The earliest reference to them in a Hungarian dictionary, according to Lang (1971), was in 1604, when the name used was ‘Turkish pepper’. The name ‘paprika’, which is derived from the Latin piper (pepper) through Slavic diminutive forms (pepperke, piperka), did not come into currency until 1775.
Paprika has for long been an important ingredient in many Hungarian dishes, including what the Hungarians themselves call paprikás; see GOULASH. It has also acquired worldwide popularity as a mild spice whose bright red colour (for which the pigment capsanthin is largely responsible) enables it to enliven white or pale dishes.
Paprika peppers are now grown, to produce paprika, in a number of countries, including many in E. Europe but also Spain. Spanish paprika, known as pimentón, is made from round peppers about the size of a peach, of several varieties. It is a paler shade of red than Hungarian paprika, and differs slightly in flavour.
Although it exists in many varieties, some of which are very hot, paprika is normally mild and sweet and can be used more generously than most peppers. This has not always been so. It was only in 1859 that a process was invented which allowed for discarding the cores and seeds (which contain most of the pungent principle, capsaicin) thus reducing the pungency considerably. The commercial grades of paprika are given by Lang, best first, as exquisite delicate (külïnleges), delicate, noble sweet (édelnemes), semi-sweet (félédes), rose (rózsa), and hot (erïs). The two principal growing areas in Hungary are in the south of the country, one centred on the city of Szeged, the other on the neighbourhood of Kaloska, on the Danube.
Pimentón is a spice produced in Spain from the small round fruits of several varieties of C. annuum. It may reasonably be regarded as a Spanish version of paprika. It is almost sweet in taste and it is used both as a colouring agent and as a spice in itself. It is added to seafood, sausages, rice, and many other savoury dishes.
a country about whose foods and foodways little had been written until recently, is the subject of one admirable book by May (1984). He observes that there is evidence of human settlements about 50,000 years ago, and also that some 9,000 years ago people in the highlands had established gardens, thus becoming some of the earliest known agriculturists. By 4000 BC, under the influence of successive migrations of people from S. Asia, agriculture had largely replaced hunting and gathering as a means of sustenance. Besides the indigenous food crops (SAGO, SUGAR CANE, some sorts of BANANA and YAM, BREADFRUIT, etc.), there were introduced species which the immigrants brought: TARO, more kinds of banana and yam, and perhaps COCONUT. The PIG and perhaps fowl also came with them, but the SWEET POTATO, now the staple crop in most of the highlands, was a later arrival.
The arrival of the sweet potato is of particular interest, since May asserts that recent archaeological discoveries show that it was being cultivated 1,200 years ago, and must therefore have arrived via Polynesia from tropical America. He says that the same seems to be true of MAIZE (which see for further comment on the question of how and when it travelled from the New World to the Old World).
Foods introduced since European contact include TAPIOCA, GROUNDNUTS, and a wide array of vegetables and fruits, plus cattle for beef, and deer.
Of the numerous aspects of food in Papua New Guinea which are of special interest, the following items represent no more than a small sample:
an inland republic of S. America which communicates with the world beyond by the rivers Paraguay and Parana which drain into the Rio de la Plata. Straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, it contains both jungle and more temperate grassland, including fertile alluvial plain that supports the growth and processing of MATÉ, Paraguay’s most distinctive product and favourite beverage, from Ilex paraguayensis. Visitors used also to liken the colony to an orange grove, for that introduced fruit was grown all through the temperate zone, maintaining a tree being a legal obligation on householders.
Colonization by the Spanish was beset by problems, at one time solved by making the whole area over to the Jesuits, who were then expelled in 1768, and the Guaraní Indians have thus never lost their identity nor their language, which remains an official language in the republic.
Settlement by other European races, principally the Italians and Germans, has been relatively more important than in some Latin American countries and this has had its effect on national food preferences, for example for PASTA and dishes such as Osso bucco (see VEAL).
The chief staple is CASSAVA root or manioc which is a common accompaniment to rough stews (locros) of meat and corn. Cassava may also be made into chipá, or the more elaborate chipá-guazu (Guaraní), a cake of cassava, eggs, cheese, or meat. MAIZE is often part of a dish already involving cassava, or it can substitute for it. Cornmeal itself is the main ingredient of sopa Paraguaya, a corn bread with cheese and onions.
The grass plains have long been home to the RHEA (Rhea americana), whose eggs are thought a delicacy, as well as the flesh, which is either jerked (see JERKY) or eaten fresh.
Tom Jaine
Macrolepiota (or Lepiota) procera, a large, shaggy fungus, among the finest of edible mushrooms. The specific name procera means tall; a really large specimen may stand up to 30 cm (1′) high and measure 25 cm (10″) across the cap, which is shaped like a Chinese umbrella with a projecting boss in the middle. The gills are white or off-white. The stem bears a large, double ring but has no volva (torn sheath) at its base. It has a feltlike grey-brown covering which splits into vertical streaks as the stem expands. The cap is buff or grey-brown and scaly.
Lepiota rhacodes, the smaller shaggy parasol, is even shaggier and has flesh which stains red when cut. It is edible, but some people avoid it since there is a variety (L. rhacodes var hortensis) which can cause gastric upsets. It should always be cooked.
Both these species are common in Europe, growing on grass or on seaside cliffs and dunes in autumn, and are also found in N. America and Australia.
L. excoriata (in France petite coulemelle) is smaller still, with a whitish cap about 8 cm (3″) across. It does not occur in N. America and is uncommon in Europe, but very good. L. naucina, esteemed in France as the lépiote pudique and in Italy as bubbolina, is reputed to make some people ill in N. America, perhaps because some forms of it found there are toxic. According to Arora (1979), one of its names there is ‘woman on motorcycle’, because of the shape and poise of its cap when it is young. This white or greyish cap may later measure 8–12 cm (3–4″) across, with cream gills underneath which blush at maturity (hence pudique).
In the eastern USA, and as far west as Michigan, there is a common woodland variety, L. americana, up to 15 cm (6″) tall and white except for the scales near the centre of the cap and the boss itself, which are brown. It makes good eating.
L. zeyheri is the S. African parasol mushroom.
Some small species of parasol mushroom are reputedly harmful, so it is best not to gather any which measure less than 8 cm (3″) across the cap unless they have been positively identified.
Parasol mushrooms should be picked when they have just become adult, not so young that the cap is still closed and looks like a tambour stick. The stem below the ring is tough and is usually discarded. The ring itself and the cap may be eaten raw (save for L. rhacodes), or fried, or otherwise cooked. Large caps are suitable for stuffing. The flavour is good and reminiscent of hazelnut.
(or paratha) an Indian flaky bread prepared by smearing the dough, which is unleavened and is also enriched with oil, with GHEE or oil and folding the dough three times. More ghee or oil is brushed over and the process repeated. The resulting packet of dough is then rolled out to the required size and fried in oil or dry cooked on a tava or GRIDDLE. The layers of pastry separate and flake while frying.
Paratas are often stuffed with spicy mixtures of meat or vegetables before frying. A similar bread is made in Afghanistan and Nepal.
is a verb with an odd history. Derived from Latin words meaning ‘through’ and ‘boil’, it originally meant ‘to boil thoroughly’. This usage disappeared in the 17th century, ousted by the rival meaning ‘to part-cook in boiling water’, which also dates back to the Middle Ages and seems to have been based on a confusion between ‘par-’ and ‘part’.
Parboiling is normally carried out in preparation for a continuation of cooking by some other means such as frying. Stobart (1980) explains why this familiar sequence is followed. ‘Food is parboiled either because the higher temperature of the fat would dry it out or brown it too much before it was cooked through, or because it prepares the surface for the penetration of fat and flavour, as, for instance, when potatoes are roasted in meat juices.’
Parboiled rice (soaked and briefly steamed before milling) offers certain advantages over rice which has been milled without this treatment; see RICE AS FOOD.
a name properly used of a rich frozen dessert, similar to a BOMBE and often made in a bombe mould. A typical parfait is composed of two or several elements (a lining for the mould and a filling, which may itself be layered) and is flavoured with a liqueur, or with coffee, chocolate, PRALINE, etc.
In N. America, the term has come to mean something different, namely a combination of fruit and ice cream, served in a tall narrow glass which exposes to view the various layers of the confection. This sort of parfait is not a frozen dessert. However, the frozen dessert version can be frozen in individual parfait glasses, rather than in a single mould, so there is a relationship between the two different things.
is peculiar to the north of Britain. It refers to two related types of GINGERBREAD, containing oatmeal (a traditional staple grain in this area—see OATS). Made by the melting method, with butter, beef DRIPPING or LARD, sugar, and TREACLE or molasses (see SUGAR), both were originally hearth or griddle cakes, and could be thin or thick. North of Yorkshire, the thin, biscuit, variety predominates, the Scottish term being perkins. The rarer, Scottish, thick variety is called broonie. The soft, thick, cakelike variety with a shiny, sticky surface is preferred in Yorkshire, where it seems to have become popular in the early 19th century, and from where it spread to most of its contiguous counties. In Lancashire, S. Yorkshire, and N. Derbyshire parkin was called tharf, thar, or thor cake.
Parkin may be derived from an older, honey-sweetened oatbread. Parkin was eaten especially at Celtic and Christian festivals from 31 October to 11 November. From the 19th century both types of parkin have been part of 5 November (Bonfire Night) celebrations, for which the biscuit type is often rolled thick and cut into parkin men or parkin pigs.
Jennifer Stead
READING:
prosciutto di Parma, is the most famous of Italy’s raw HAMS, produced in the province of Parma in the Emilia Romagna region.
The ham is made from the rear legs of Landrace or Duroc pigs that have spent at least four months within the borders of the zone of production, and which are fed on grain and whey (a by-product of making Parmesan cheese). The pigs are killed at a minimum of 9 months, weighing at least 160 kg. After trimming, the hams are put through a complex, slow salting process where the exposed flesh is dry salted and the parts that still retain skin are treated with a brine. The curing is completed by slow air-drying, closely monitored, when the cut surfaces are brushed in lard mixed with pepper, salt, and, sometimes, ground rice to slow desiccation and protect the meat from infestation. A ham which qualifies for grading by the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma must have aged at least twelve months if it weighs above 9 kg. Hams are sold bone-in, though much is boned before export. The finest hams come from the village of Langhirano, 20 km south of Parma, where there is the greatest concentration of drying houses.
Parma hams have a rosy-pink flesh that is sweet and tender and with a firm and dense texture. They are usually thinly sliced and eaten raw as an appetizer (often with melon or figs) or as part of an ANTIPASTO. Parma ham can also be used in cooking. Italians sometimes use the rind to flavour soups.
Helen Saberi
a C. American tree, Parmentiera aculeata, which produces cucumber-shaped fruit, yellow-green and fluted. It is also known as the food candle tree and as guachilote (from an Aztec name), and has been cultivated in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The fruit is sweet and can be eaten fresh, cooked, or pickled.
the English name of a hard Italian cheese which is properly called Parmigiano Reggiano, or just Parmigiano. It received DOP status in 1996. The cities of Parma and Reggio Emilia used to have their own separate cheeses, but these were combined into the present joint name by a governmental decree of 1955 which established and defined the controlled appellations for grana cheeses. The Consorzio itself was founded in 1934. The characteristics and manufacture of the group of cheeses to which it belongs are described under GRANA. Although the appellation Parmigiano Reggiano is protected in Italy, the name Parmesan has become almost synonymous in other parts of the world with the whole grana group, meaning ‘Italian grating cheese’.
Production is concentrated in 512 dairies in the provinces of Modena, Reggio Emilia, Parma, and parts of Bologna and Mantua, though the greater number is in the vicinity of Reggio Emilia. The wheels weigh upwards of 24 kg (53 lb) and usually 35 kg (80 lb). They must be aged for at least twelve months; the average is 24 months. Output was more than 3 million cheeses in 2004. The feeding regime of the dairy herds is strictly controlled and must include no silage. Parmigiano Reggiano differs from generic Parmesan by being finer grained and less salty.
Presciutto, in his Gastronomia parmense (1963), has collected an impressive series of tributes to ‘Parmigiano’, ranging from classical authors (a little vagueness here) through medieval times to more recent eulogies. He cites evidence that Parmesan was among Napoleon’s favourite foods; and that Molière, suddenly stricken by what proved to be a fatal illness, waved aside the conventional bowl of broth, called for Parmesan, and devoured it with such enthusiasm that it spilled over his deathbed. Although it failed to revive Molière, Parmesan has for long had, and retains, a reputation as good fare for invalids.
But the finest piece of publicity for Parmigiano was surely furnished by Boccaccio (The Decameron, novella 3, day 8), when he wrote of the imaginary country of Berlinzone and its village Bengodi (meaning enjoyment) where there was a mountain consisting entirely of grated Parmesan, on which there were people who did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli to be cooked in capon broth (and dressed with Parmesan). This tale developed into the familiar story of the Land of COCKAIGNE where everything is food ready to eat, and the mountain of Parmesan remained a central feature of the story.
Andrea del Sarto, the famous artist, is said by Vasari (Lives of the Painters) to have made a model temple with sausages as pillars, and Parmesan cheese providing their bases and capitals.
is an Italian dish demonstrating the continuity of culinary traditions in the Mediterranean basin. The Italian scholar Anna Martellotti (1998) has shown how a descent from a grandiose Babylonian confection of around 1700 BC (see BABYLONIAN COOKERY) may be established using recipes drawn from medieval Egypt, southern Italy, and the Veneto and ending in an evocation by the novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa in his great novel The Leopard. The Babylonian avatar is a pie filled with birds and their entrails, together with pastry rolls, all cooked in a single sauce. The principle, therefore, is both of elaboration and dough outside and dough inside the pie: a wheaten double-whammy. Passing quickly by classical references, Martellotti produces her Egyptian evidence: a highly spiced pie of lamb, game, and birds, topped off with small pastry rolls stuffed with meat, sugar, and other sweetmeats. Again, elaboration and a dough within a dough, adding in the sweet flavours so beloved of Persian cookery, a strong influence on that of the Arabs. The culinary exchanges between East and West reflected in early Italian recipe manuscripts are endorsed by the appearance there of another amazing pie, this time under the name of torta parmesana. In six layers, each separated by a sprinkling of stuffed dates, the cooks assembled chicken, cheese ravioli, sausages of two sorts, minced pork, and sweet almond ravioli. This model can then be further pursued through the thickets of printed Italian cookbooks of the early modern era, the major change in its make-up being the substitution of macaroni (and sometimes other shapes, depending on the region) for the ravioli. The final act is Lampedusa’s description of an emblematic Sicilian dish, served to an audience expecting his Prince to offer French haute cuisine, a ‘tower-shaped macaroni timbale … The brownish-gold of the pastry covering, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon, … the chicken livers, the small hard-boiled eggs, the tiny strips of ham, chicken and truffles all mixed up with the … macaroni.’ This pie is still today one of the festive dishes of the island of Malta (always strongly influenced by Italian culture). Maltese Timpana differs only in no longer mixing savoury and sweet. Martellotti further suggests that the Neapolitan dish Parmigiana di melanzane, where fried aubergine slices are layered with meatballs, tomato sauce, and Parmesan cheese, although eschewing pastry, takes its name from and is a relic of this tradition of rich, multi-layered pasta pies: the pasta merely having been replaced by a vegetable. Of course, that complex embraces the whole world of the Italian pasticcio (which is a word that means ‘mess’ as well as pie) and the Greek pastitsio, deriving in the long term, like the more elaborate Parmesan pie, from Arab inspiration.
Tom Jaine
the common name of fish of the family Scaridae, which are found in tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate waters around the world. Their teeth are configured somewhat like a parrot’s beak, to facilitate their crunching of coral, from which they filter out the algae which they eat, excreting the sand. Their activity is thought to be a principal factor in the wearing down of coral reefs.
Parrotfish are related to the WRASSE family, and resemble them both in having bright coloration which varies with age and sex and in their habit of sleeping at night; but some of them grow to a larger size than any wrasse and they can be distinguished by the fusing of their front teeth into a ‘beak’.
The one parrotfish present in the Mediterranean, Sparisoma (formerly Euscarus) cretensis, occurs throughout the eastern basin and all along the southern parts, but is rarely marketed except in Morocco, Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece; its range also includes the E. Atlantic from Portugal and the Azores south to Senegal. It is esteemed as a table fish, but not as much as in classical times, when Roman epicures thought so much of it that the Roman admiral Optatus transplanted some to the west coast of Italy in the hope of establishing a breeding population there. Roman taste in fish was influenced by colour, and it may be that the reddish colour of the females was thought to be especially attractive (males are usually grey-brown or purplish-brown).
The largest parrotfish are found in the W. Atlantic. Both Scarus coeruleus, the blue parrotfish, and S. guacamaia, the rainbow parrotfish, may reach a length of 1.2 m (4′). These species apparently envelop themselves in a mucous ‘envelope’, like a sleeping blanket, at night before falling asleep.
In Asian waters S. ghobban is one of the larger species (maximum length 90 cm/3′) and is sought after by restaurateurs at Hong Kong.
belonging respectively to the families Psittacidae and Cacatuidae, a large range of birds among which there are some species which have been eaten, for example in Papua New Guinea, and also in past times in Australia and New Zealand. One can find traces of dishes such as parrot pie in early Australasian cookery books, but they attracted only lukewarm praise and were often the subject of jokes (cook a cockatoo with an old boot in plenty of boiling water until the boot is tender, then throw away the bird and eat the boot—that sort of thing).
The Parsis (Parsees) of W. INDIA are descendants of pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian, migrants from the region of AFGHANISTAN and IRAN. The main migration took place after the forces of Islam conquered Iran in the 7th century, and one of the most pleasing of all food-related legends explains how they arrived in India. Bhicoo Manekshaw (1996) describes what happened when a storm drove the refugees to Sanjan in Gujarat, and three Parsi dasturs (priests) approached the Rana (ruler) of Sanjan:
When he saw these tall, fair, well built men, the Rana tried to turn them away. Using typical inborn Indian politeness, he did not do so directly, but showed them a bowl full to the brim with milk, to indicate there was no space in the land. The senior dastur is said to have sprinkled some sugar into the milk and replied that the milk had been sweetened, but it had not overflowed. Thus the Parsis were allowed to land.
Thus began what was to be a fruitful interchange between Iranian and Indian foodways, later incorporating elements from ANGLO-INDIAN COOKERY, and culminating in the present delightfully varied Parsi cuisine. Parsis have few food prohibitions, indeed none of importance, and their periods of abstinence from animal meat are short. The Zoroastrian religion favours enjoyment of life.
Parsis like meat, and a Parsi meal normally includes a meat, fish, or chicken dish. Spicing is often complex, but moderate. The most famous Parsi meat dish is DHANSAK, for which the meat is cooked with lentils, other legumes, and vegetables such as spinach, aubergine, and pumpkin. This, according to Bhicoo Manekshaw, probably evolved from the Iranian Khoreshte esfannaj, and the same may be true of other meat and vegetable dishes. Fish, from the coast of Gujarat (including POMFRET, GREY MULLET, and BUMMALOW, otherwise known as Bombay duck), is much eaten and is regarded, along with the COCONUT and RICE, as a symbol of plenty. A group of CURRY-type sweet-and-sour fish dishes are known as patias. Other fish dishes show the influence of the cooks from GOA who worked for well-to-do Parsis in the early and mid-20th century.
Egg dishes are numerous. There are some special Parsi pickles, and the vinegars from Navsari and Valsad, made from SUGAR CANE, DATES, or toddy (see COCONUT), are famous. Sweet dishes and beverages reflect Iranian influence in, for example, the use of rosewater (see ROSES); but the same is true of India in general.
Petroselinum crispum, the most popular herb in European cookery. In the Middle East it is added so abundantly to various dishes that it takes on the role of a vegetable. Further east, it loses its pre-eminent place to the related plant CORIANDER (sometimes called Chinese or Japanese parsley, and similar in appearance although not flavour).
Parsley is an umbelliferous plant native to the E. Mediterranean area (Linnaeus believed that its origin was in Sardinia) and related to CELERY, with which it has occasionally formed hybrids. The ancient Greeks used the name selinon for both parsley and celery, and only occasionally bothered to distinguish parsley as petroselinon, meaning ‘rock’ celery or parsley. Later the Romans used the word apium in a similarly ambiguous way. Thus it is difficult to tell which is meant. However, the Greek writer Theophrastus, writing before 300 BC, describes curly-leafed and flat-leafed varieties of parsley similar to the two main modern types.
According to Pliny the Elder (1st century AD), the Romans held parsley fronds in particular esteem among seasonings. (Roman recipes often called for parsley seeds as well as the leaves, but the seeds are not now used.)
Parsley is more difficult to grow than other culinary herbs, because the seeds take so long to germinate—70 to 90 days. In medieval times there were superstitious beliefs about the seeds having to pay a series of visits to the devil before germination, and so forth. Eleanor Sinclair Rohde (1936) gives an especially interesting collection of quaint beliefs about parsley. Many of these were taken from a correspondence in The Times, in which connections between parsley and women, and with Good Friday, recur often.
The numerous cultivars of parsley fall into two main categories: curly (or curly-leaf), and flat leafed. The former is preferred in English-speaking countries, partly because it is often used as a garnish rather than a flavouring, and has a more decorative appearance than the flat-leafed type. Champion Moss Curled and Forest Green are two favourite cultivars in this group.
If sprigs of curly-leafed parsley are quickly deep fried they emerge with their shape intact and a very pleasing dark green colour.
Flat-leafed parsley is dominant on the mainland of Europe, and universal in the Middle East. It is chopped and added to dishes as a flavouring, so there is no need for it to have a decorative appearance. The best flavour resides in the stems, and some recipes call for these alone to be used. In Middle Eastern salads such as TABBOULEH (whose other main ingredient is BURGHUL), chopped parsley is added by the cupful. Flat-leafed parsley looks like coriander but can easily be distinguished by smell.
Neapolitan parsley, much used in S. Italy, is in fact a group of cultivars (Gigante d’Italia, Celery-leafed, etc.) which are generally larger (almost 1 m/3′ in height) than other parsley plants, with proportionately bigger leaves and thicker stems; indeed these plants can be grown and eaten like celery. The strong flavour of the leaves is prized by Italians.
Plain-leafed parsley constitutes the other group of flat-leafed parsleys, in which cultivars such as French and Italian Dark Green are found.
Many people think the flavour of curly-leaf parsley is always inferior to that of flat-leafed parsley. Certainly it is different; but variations in soil and climate affect the flavour of both kinds.
Parsley sauce has for long been a favourite in Britain. Rohde records that King Henry VIII liked it in the still customary form of a simple white sauce flavoured with parsley. In French cuisine a persillade (a mixture of parsley and garlic) is often used to flavour dishes.
Hamburg parsley, also called turnip-rooted parsley, originated in Germany in the 16th century. It is still popular in NW Europe. Although there was a vogue for it in Britain in the 18th century, it is now scarcely known there or in the USA, where it also penetrated briefly. It has an enlarged root resembling a small parsnip or a large, whitish carrot (although varieties with a round turnip shape are known). It is always eaten cooked, and is often used in soups. The flavour is between that of parsley and of celeriac (see CELERY).
Pastinaca sativa, an umbelliferous plant which grows wild in Europe and W. Asia and has been cultivated to produce an edible root. (The root of the wild parsnip is small, woody, and inedible, but sweet and with a distinct parsnip aroma; so it could originally have been used as a flavouring. Cultivation for this purpose would have improved its size and led to edible forms.)
The earlier ancient writers did not distinguish between parsnips and CARROTS. The first name for ‘parsnip’ was the Latin pastinaca; but even as late as the 1st century AD Pliny the Elder was using this to mean ‘carrot’ as well. Later writings such as those of Apicius suggest that the Romans cultivated parsnips, and held them in some esteem. The English name ‘parsnip’ comes, through French, from pastinaca with the ending ‘nip’ to indicate that it was like a turnip.
In medieval Europe there was a dearth of sweeteners; sugar was a rare, imported luxury, and honey expensive. Moreover the potato, prolific source of starch, had not yet arrived from America. So the sweet, starchy parsnip was doubly useful and became a staple food. Besides being eaten as a vegetable it could be used as an ingredient in sweet dishes. Dorothy Hartley (1954) observes that parsnip has ‘the type of sweetness that mingles with honey and spice, so that some boiled plum and marrowfat puddings, flavoured with spice and sweetened with honey, were made with a parsnip base’.
As sugar became more readily available and with the gradual introduction of the potato, the standing of the parsnip in Europe waned. It is now eaten mainly in N. Europe, to only a moderate extent in Britain, and hardly at all in S. Europe. Nor has it gained much importance in other regions. Consumption in the USA is small. One of the reasons for such a generally half-hearted attitude is that the parsnip has a taste which, although not strong, is peculiar and not to everyone’s liking. Its oddly semi-sweet quality makes it an awkward partner to other foods, although it goes very well with salt cod, for example. Large, old parsnips can be woody; even young ones tend to have a tough core which may be better discarded.
The parsnip is grown in colder climates, and is one of the few vegetables which is positively improved by frost. The effect of freezing the living root is to convert some of the starch into sugar. The plant can thus be left in the ground until needed.
Parsnips of modern varieties grow to 20–40 cm (8–15″) long, and need lengthy cooking, although less than carrots. Most of the flavour lies directly under the skin, so peeling is to be avoided. They may be cut into large chunks, parboiled, and finished by baking or braising; or steamed and mashed. Baking produces a crisp, brown, slightly caramelized outside which is agreeable; and parsnip ‘chips’ (US: French fries) are good.
‘Wild parsnip’ is a name sometimes used for an unrelated root, Cymopterus montanus, eaten by the Indians of the south-west of the USA and Mexico, where it is called ‘gamote’. The roots are peeled, baked, and ground into meal.
has been described with her usual lucidity by Theodora FitzGibbon (1976):
a colloquial English expression for the small fatty joint which holds the tail feathers of poultry. When well crisped after roasting, it is considered a tasty morsel by some people. When the bird concerned is a cooked goose or duck rather than a turkey or a chicken, the joint is called ‘the pope’s nose,’ although, in a general way, Protestant communities are said to use the latter expression and Catholic communities the former!
The French term sot-l’y-laisse, meaning ‘only a fool would leave it’, refers to a morsel of meat positioned just above the parson’s nose and also considered to be a delicacy. To the English, it is the oyster and was prized by some as much as others fancied the cod’s cheek when fowl or fish was divided at the dinner table.
Perdrix perdrix in the family Phasianidae, an important game bird of Europe and C. Asia, often called grey partridge (to distinguish it from other partridges, of the genus Alectoris, described further on in this entry). The range of the species is from N. Spain up to the British Isles, Sweden, and Russia; and eastwards to Turkey and parts of W. and C. Asia. Thus it is known in most European countries, but in numbers which fluctuate and are in steady decline in regions, such as England, where modern agricultural methods are reducing the amount of suitable habitat.
The average total length of a partridge is only 30 cm (12″), but it has a plump, chicken-like shape and carries a fair weight—350 g (12–13 oz) for a good young bird. Coloration varies, generally brown above; males have a brown horseshoe mark on their undersides.
Young birds are best when hung for only a short time and then plainly roasted or grilled and served with their gravy (no strong sauce, such as would mask the birds’ own flavour). Older birds respond better to being stewed or braised.
George Saintsbury, in his fine essay about partridge cookery in the Fur, Feathers and Fin volume on that bird (Saintsbury and Macpherson, 1896), observed that to his knowledge there were but two secondary methods of cooking partridge which deserve to be practised. One was the English partridge pudding (now rarely made—like steak and kidney pudding, but combining partridge with steak); the other was Perdrix aux choux (still in favour in France—partridge is braised with savoy cabbage and a little bacon, with spicing at discretion).
Other birds which may properly be called partridges include Alectoris rufa, the red-legged partridge, a bird best known in SW France, Spain and Portugal. As an introduced species, it is also common enough in SE England. In France, this bird is perdrix rouge (a name echoed in other languages) or bartravelle. It is larger than the grey partridge, and has lighter meat, tasting like chicken. A. barbara (the Barbary partridge, of Sardinia and N. Africa) and A. graeca (the rock partridge, of Italy and the Balkans) also have red legs.
In Asia, there are yet more species, including P. hodgsoniae, the Tibetan partridge. Partridges are appreciated as food in many Asian countries, from Iran and Afghanistan eastwards.
Besides this imposing array of what might be called true partridges there are in the same family, Phasianinae, many closely related birds which, naturally enough, tend to have English names consisting of ‘partridge’ plus an epithet. The largest such genus, which also has a very wide distribution around the world, is Francolinus, in which the best-known species, F. francolinus, may be known either as francolin or (especially in India) as black partridge. Eating quality varies considerably within this vast family.
a rich, sweet type of CHEESECAKE/pudding, traditionally made at Easter in Russia (Paskha means Easter) to celebrate the end of Lent. It is made from cheese (curd, cream, or cottage), eggs, sugar, and dried fruits and is flavoured with vanilla. The sides of the paskha may be decorated with slivers of almonds, glacé cherries, and angelica, or left plain.
Paskha is traditionally marked with the orthodox cross. A special pyramid-shaped, perforated wooden mould called a pasochnitsa, lined with muslin, is used and it is this which leaves an imprint of the cross on the surface and often other decorations too.
The paskha are often taken to church to be blessed before being eaten on Easter Sunday and are traditionally served with another Russian Easter speciality, kulich (see EASTER FOODS).
Helen Saberi
the best known of the fruits of various species of the genus Passiflora. This is a large group of climbing herbs and shrubs native to tropical America, SE Asia, and Australia. The names granadilla (or grenadilla) and water lemon are also used of the fruits of this group, overlapping with the name passion-fruit in a way which necessitates treating them all together. Granadilla is derived from granada, Spanish for pomegranate, and means ‘small pomegranate’. Maracuya is the name generally used in Brazil.
In S. America, the passion-flower became known as Flor de las cinco lagas (flower of the five wounds) because Jesuit missionaries used it in their teachings to illustrate the crucifixion of Christ. Each part corresponds to a particular emblem of the passion. Thus the three styles represent the three nails; the five stamens the five wounds (hands, feet, and side); the ovary, which is oval and set on a stalk, is taken to be either the sponge soaked in vinegar and offered on a stick, or the hammer used to drive in the nails; the spiky corona, prominently visible above the petals, is the crown of thorns; and the equal petals and sepals signify the ten apostles (Peter and Judas are not included).
Hence the name ‘passion-fruit’, most usually applied to Passiflora edulis, a plant native to Brazil. Since the 19th century it has been grown in Australia, New Zealand, S. Africa, and Hawaii; and now also in some other countries such as Israel. An alternative name is ‘purple granadilla’, referring to the deep purple rind of the main variety. There is also a yellow type, var. flavicarpa, which is the basis of the passion-fruit industry in Hawaii and Fiji.
The fruit, about the size of an egg, has a brittle outer shell which becomes slightly wrinkled when it is ripe. The soft, orange pulp is full of tiny seeds. These are edible, and liked by many, but others avoid them and prefer their passion-fruit in the form of jelly or juice. (Over a hundred fruits are needed to make one litre of juice, so it is a costly delicacy; but the juice has exceptional viscosity, because of its high starch content, and calls for considerable dilution.) Passion-fruit is also used in sherbets and confectionery, ice cream and yoghurt.
The flavour is of subtle composition and delicious. It is also very strong. Elizabeth Schneider (1986), writing in New York, rightly observes that many recipes from the countries where these fruits grow bid one take what would be impossibly expensive elsewhere, e.g. ‘one cup of strained fruit pulp’; but that, ‘fortunately, passion fruit works best as a flavoring. There is so much perfume and so little pulp that you can think of it as you would vanilla, or Cognac, or a spoon of dense raspberry purée—something to aromatize a dish.’ In Australia passion-fruit icing is popular for cakes, especially for sponge sandwich, and passion-fruit is used in the most traditional of various recipes for PAVLOVA.
The giant granadilla (or granadilla real), P. quadrangularis, is native to the hotter regions of tropical America. The fruit is larger, up to 20 cm (8″) long, and greenish-yellow shading to brownish when ripe. It is popular in many tropical regions, including the hotter parts of India and SE Asia. In Indonesia it is made into a drink called Markeesa which is available in bottles. The flavour of the ripe fruit is inferior to that of P. edulis, but is eaten raw or used for juice or jelly. Unripe fruits are cooked as a vegetable in the same way as marrows.
The sweet granadilla, P. ligularis, is another tropical American species extensively cultivated in mountainous areas of Mexico and grown also in Hawaii, where it may be called water lemon, being very juicy. It has an orange shell when ripe.
The water lemon, P. laurifolia, sometimes called passion fruit, or Jamaica honeysuckle, is another tropical American species with yellow or orange fruits. The flesh is sweet, scented, and as good as that of P. edulis.
Curuba is the name in Colombia, where it is especially appreciated, of a yellow-fruited species, P. maliformis. It grows in other countries of the region, and the W. Indies, and has many other names: sweet calabash, sweet cup or conch apple (Jamaica), banana passion-fruit (New Zealand), and banana poka (Hawaii). The aromatic fruit, apple shaped with a thin yellowish-brown rind, is of high quality.
(Pesach) one of the most important religious holidays of the Jewish year, is the occasion for special foods. Its origin is explained in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Bringing pressure to bear on the Pharaoh to let the Hebrews depart from Egypt, Moses cursed the Egyptians with ten plagues, of which the last and most horrific was that all the first-born males in Egyptian families were to die. To ensure that the deity invoked by Moses would not inadvertently cause the death of the first-born of Hebrew families on the night of carnage, Moses required all these families to place a sign of blood on their door posts. The blood was to come from a sacrificial lamb which had to be roasted and eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Schwartz (1992) points out that the origin of the paschal lamb tradition lay in the pagan habits of a nomadic past:
Past ceremonies are resuscitated every few generations and given a more contemporary meaning which answers the demands of a new understanding. Pesach was a spring thanksgiving festival when nomadic people settled down for a few months to enable the ewes to give birth and suckle their young. It was the only time of the year when they had the opportunity to gather in fertile green enclaves, to tend their flocks, to meet friends and relatives, arrange marriages and conduct business. These gatherings were celebrated with joy and involved mysterious ancient blood rituals to ensure a prosperous year ahead.
Indeed the original meaning of ‘pesach’ is to skip or gambol, as young lambs and kids will do, while its other meaning is ‘to pass over, to exclude’, which is what had to be done for their dwellings on the night of the slaughter of the first-born.
The requirement to eat unleavened bread came from a different source, as also explained by Schwartz:
The holiday of the unleavened bread has its origins in the fallahim (settled cropgrowers’) celebration of the beginning of the barley harvest when it was the custom to destroy all old leaven stocks. We do not know if grain was also destroyed, but the symbolic sale before Pesach of all Jewish grain stores, still practised now, indicates that symbolic destruction was practised in the past. This kind of practice is related to a global folk tradition of symbolically sacrificing leftovers of the previous year to guarantee a prosperous new year; a tradition which in modern times is probably echoed in ‘spring cleaning’.
The requirement to make sure that there is no leaven or leavened goods or grains on the forbidden list (wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt—all considered to be potentially liable to fermentation) in the house and to do without leaven during Passover is essentially negative, but can be viewed as having positive results. The following two passages from Claudia Roden (1996) show how the search for stray or hidden leaven can be an occasion of fun for the family, and that the challenge of baking without leaven produces some fine results.
In Orthodox homes, only after total cleansing can the special Passover silverware, dishes, and utensils be taken out of storage and the ‘kosher for Pesah’ provisions, including matzos, be brought into the home. Part of my father’s happy childhood memories was the ‘search for hametz’ the night before Pesah, when, armed with a candle, a feather, a wooden spoon, and a paper bag, he looked with his older sisters for pieces of bread hidden by his father, and the whole thing was burned.
As for the results of baking without leaven:
The demands of cooking without grain or leaven have produced a whole range of distinctive Jewish variants of dishes making use of ground almonds, potato flour, ground rice, matzo meal, and sheets of matzos to make all kinds of cakes, pancakes, pies, dumplings, and fritters. For instance, in the Arab world, kibbeh, usually made with cracked wheat and lamb, was prepared with ground rice. In Eastern Europe, matzo-ball or egg-drop soup replaced vermicelli. Stuffed neck was filled with mashed potato instead of the flour-based filling; sponge cake was made with ground almonds or potato starch. One of the gastronomic highlights was the splendid cakes made with ground almonds, hazelnuts, or walnuts. One of the most affectionately remembered is matzo-meal fritters.
The name Seder (meaning order) is given to the ritual Passover meal and the tray on which it is served. Claudia Roden kindly agrees to continue the story at this point:
The large Seder tray was one of the few things my parents brought with them to England. Every year we placed it in front of my father on a pile of telephone books and covered it with a small embroidered tablecloth. On it were placed six little dishes, containing three matzos under a napkin, to remind us of the Jews who had no time to let their dough rise when they fled, and five symbolic foods.
In Europe, a decorative ceramic Seder plate, which is divided into sections, carries the ritual foods: karpas, a green vegetable such as parsley or little Bibb lettuce, representing new growth, which is dipped in salt water, symbolising the tears of the slaves; maror, bitter herbs, which can be chicory, cress, or grated horseradish, to remind us of the bitter times of slavery; betza, a roasted egg, representing the sacrificial offering of a roasted animal to God in the Temple on each holiday (in my family we had one hamine egg for every member of the family); zeroah, a lamb-shank bone, representing the lamb sacrificed by the slaves on the eve of the Exodus and the sacrificial paschal offering in the Temple (in my family we had a boiled shoulder, which we ate); haroset, a fruit-and-nut paste recalling the color of the mortar made with Nile silt that the Jews used when they built the pyramids for the Pharaohs.
A highly important and satisfying category of food which presents two paradoxical aspects. One is that it overlaps very extensively with the category of NOODLES. The other is that until very recently there was no adequate name for it. In Italy, where pasta had previously just meant ‘dough’, it was necessary to say paste alimentari to indicate what everyone now knows as pasta. In the English language it had been necessary to use the word ‘noodles’ or adopt circumlocutions such as ‘macaroni products’ (or even the offputting ‘alimentary pastes’, in direct translation from the Italian). It was only after the Second World War that ‘pasta’ started to establish itself in its present wide meaning. However, although the name in its present sense has but a short history, the range of products to which it refers has a long one.
In fact, no one knows how long a history pasta has. The origins of pasta (and equally those of noodles) are hard to establish, for two principal reasons. First, pasta is a product of such simple ingredients—essentially flour and water—that it is difficult to distinguish it from primitive, unleavened, flat griddle cakes which are made from the same ingredients. Second, pasta is largely a food of the common people of any nation where it is used, and is therefore less well documented than more luxurious foods.
Uncertainties and difficulties persist, but they have been greatly diminished by the recent publication of Les Pâtes by Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban (2000), a work which covers both NOODLES of the Orient and pasta and kindred products in the western world, and sheds much light on the history of both. It contains a wealth of information about the evidence for production of and trade in pasta in the early medieval period, as well as comprehensive coverage of developments since then.
There were, in the classical world, products which can be viewed as forerunners, e.g. the Greek laganon and itria, both of them terms which subsequently developed into pasta terms. But it is not clear that in Greece they were anything more than flat cakes. And although the Romans had lagani (plural, apparently laganon cut into strips) there is nothing to show that these were prepared like pasta.
An early piece of pictorial evidence, much debated, comes from an Etruscan relief of about the 4th century BC at Caere. This shows a set of tradesman’s equipment which would be so well fitted for making hand-cut pasta that it is tempting to assume that it was for that. There is a rolling board with a raised edge to retain the ingredients, and a slim rolling pin to fit it. Both closely resemble types used today. There is also a small bag which might be a flour sprinkler; a jug; a ladle, perhaps for water; and an unmistakable wavy-rimmed pastry cutting wheel such as is used for making deckle-edged LASAGNE. Elsewhere, ancient slim metal rods have been found which closely resemble the ‘ferri’ around which medieval macaroni was moulded (see below), but these might have had a different use.
However, the question remains: what was done with the products of this equipment? There is no evidence that it was boiled, like pasta. The same question can be asked about classical lagani and itria in strip form.
The first hint that lagani or itria were being boiled comes from further east. The Jerusalem Talmud, a work of the late 5th century AD, contains a discussion on whether boiled dough can be allowed as unleavened bread under Jewish food law. Whether or not this reference bears directly on the pasta question, it is certainly probable that the boiling of pasta was an innovation made well to the east of Rome. In old Persian literature there are several references to lakhshah (see LAKSA). Details are not given, but from a 10th-century Arab recipe we know that at that time it meant a product like tagliatelle; strips cut from a thin sheet of dough. These were certainly boiled. Lakhshah means ‘slippery’. The word entered medieval Hebrew and has emerged from it in Yiddish as lokshen. It also turned up as laksa in the Indonesian language in about the 13th century.
There was also a kind of stuffed pasta like RAVIOLI (more precisely, tortellini, for the packages were made as triangles with two of their corners curled around and joined). The name was JOSHPARAH, meaning ‘boiled ? piece’, a word which on linguistic evidence seems to date from the 9th century or before. Arabic texts of the 10th century mention itriyah (Greek itria), which was by now a strip-shaped, dried pasta bought from shops. (From the 13th century, the name RESHTEH, meaning ‘string’, was used for fresh tagliatelle, as it still is. Reshteh were made by rolling up the flat sheet of dough and cutting it into slices. From that time on, the name lakhshah was reserved for one dish only, wild ass meat broth with pasta.)
Evidence of the use of pasta in Europe during this period is almost totally lacking. The 9th-century Emir Abdurrahman II of Arab-occupied Spain employed a minstrel, Ziryab, some of whose songs mention foods which might be pasta. The first definite sighting in Europe is also by an Arab, the geographer al-Idrisi, who reported in the early 12th century that in Palermo, Sicily, people made strings of dough which they called trii. Al-Idrisi assumed that the name was from the Arabic itriyah, but it may equally well have come direct from the Greek itria. Sicily had been occupied by both Greeks and Arabs.
On the mainland of Europe, the first reference comes from the city archives of Genoa, and is dated 1279. It is a list of the estate of a dead man, Ponzio Bastone, including a ‘bariscella piena de macaronis’ (a basket full of macaroni). Clearly this was a durable item, or it would not have been listed. This means that it must have been dry pasta, professionally made, indicating in turn that macaroni was well established as a food.
Even if there were no earlier evidence for European pasta, this document would dispose of the theory that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy, having brought it back from China. See CULINARY MYTHOLOGY. Marco Polo did not arrive back in Venice until 1298.
The name ‘macaroni’, used in the Genoa document, was a general one, not indicating merely the tubular kind of pasta. Tubes were a S. Italian speciality, and were called macaroni siciliani to distinguish them. (The modern Italian spelling maccheroni is a later N. Italian idea.) Thus macaroni could then be any of the sheet or strip forms of pasta made in the early Middle Ages. In the later Middle Ages the general term vermicelli (‘little worms’) was introduced for strip forms alone. It was only in the 18th century that this came to mean the very thin strands now so described.
So when, in 1351, Boccaccio was writing in the Decameron of a fantastic, mythical land, Bengodi, whose inhabitants rolled macaroni down a mountain of grated cheese, he may well have been referring to a form of pasta which would not nowadays be called macaroni; it has been suggested that he actually meant GNOCCHI, which would have rolled better.
RAVIOLI are mentioned in some of the 140,000 preserved letters of Francesco di Marco, a merchant of Prato in the 14th century. They were stuffed with pounded pork, eggs, cheese, parsley, and sugar. In Lent a filling of herbs, cheese, and spices was used.
PLATINA’s De Honesta Voluptate (1475) gives various pasta recipes, including the instruction that a type of pasta should be cooked for the time it takes to say three Paternosters. This is a remarkably short time, even for fresh pasta, and shows how early the Italians came to appreciate the al dente (chewy) texture still considered correct.
When in 1533 Catherine de’ Medici went to France to marry the future King Henri II, and took her cooks with her, the wedding banquet included one dish of pasta dressed with the juice from roast meat and cheese, and one with butter, sugar, honey, saffron, and cinnamon; one savoury and one sweet.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance the commercial making of pasta was controlled by guilds, and standards and prices fixed by law. The largest producers were Sicily, Sardinia, and Genoa. For an account of the successive devices which the Italians invented for processing the dough and shaping the pasta, see PASTA MANUFACTURE.
As the pasta industry grew, increasing amounts were exported to other European countries. Home-grown durum wheat was no longer sufficient and in the 19th century much was imported from the Ukraine. This was shipped through Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov which communicates through a narrow strait with the Black Sea. For years the best pasta was often marked pasta di Taganrog to show that it was not made from inferior types of wheat.
Russia continued to be the chief supplier well into the 20th century. However, in 1898, an American agronomist had brought back seeds of a superior Russian variety, which he began to grow in N. Dakota. The interruption of pasta exports from Italy to the USA during the First World War meant that pasta had to be made on a large scale in America. Because of this and of the collapse of Russian wheat-growing in the Revolution, America took the lead in durum wheat production; and even Italian pasta is now mostly made from wheat grown in N. and S. Dakota.
During Mussolini’s rise to power between the World Wars, rumours circulated that he proposed to ban consumption of pasta and that he considered pasta responsible for the low state of the Italian people at the time. In fact, these were scare stories put about by his opponents. The only real opposition to pasta came from the Futurists, who denounced it as ‘a symbol of oppressive dullness, plodding deliberation, and fat bellied conceit’, but this was ineffective; see FUTURIST MEALS. Rather than oppose the food, Mussolini actually tried to make Italy self-sufficient in wheat by a grandiose agricultural programme, which was none too successful. Nevertheless, a large acreage of wheat was and still is grown in N. Italy, especially on the Lombardy plain. The chief sufferer was the Naples pasta industry. Pasta manufacture shifted north.
It seems safe to predict that Italians will continue to be the leading consumers of pasta. Elsewhere in Europe the Swiss (partly due to the Italian element in their population) and French have, per capita, the highest consumption.
This is a technical but interesting subject which includes both the choice of ingredients and the equipment needed in order to shape the results (see also the section on PASTA SHAPES below).
An English recipe for RAVIOLI appeared in the 14th century, while ‘macaroni’ with cheese appeared in cookery books from the Middle Ages onwards. At the end of the 16th century Sir Hugh Platt (1594, 1596) was recommending pasta as a food for the British navy and even showing a diagram (hard to interpret) of a piece of machinery for making it; see Thick (1992) for an excellent account of this and other matters to do with the early history of pasta in England.
From the late 17th century, ‘vermicelli’ (with a wider meaning than now) was often added to British soups. SPAGHETTI was introduced to the English language by Eliza Acton (1849 edn of Modern Cookery for Private Families). In general, however, pasta was an imported food of only minor importance in Britain until the second half of the 20th century. Towards the end of the century pasta had become a true staple in Britain, especially for the younger generation who appreciated its convenience and relatively low cost.
Pasta came to America with early Spanish settlers. In the USA the first notable introduction was due to Thomas Jefferson. During his stay in Paris in 1784–9 he ate macaroni and was much taken with it. (‘Macaroni’ is his own term, reflecting common French and English usage; it may have been pasta of any shape.) On his return, two crates of macaroni were among his effects. When his supply ran out, he had a friend send him an extruder from Naples.
However, it was really the massive late 19th-century immigration from Italy, and especially from Naples, which made pasta popular in the USA. Consequently, N. American ways of preparing pasta are essentially derived from Italian ones, although displaying variations such as spaghetti with meatballs. C. European and Jewish immigrants have brought their own (noodle) recipes.
Pasta at its simplest is made from durum wheat and water. This special type of wheat is suitable only for pasta and SEMOLINA products, not for bread. Conversely, ‘hard’ bread wheat and ‘soft’ cake flour wheat do not make good ordinary pasta (although they are used for home-made fresh pasta, reinforced and enriched with egg, which overcomes what would otherwise be a weak, fragile texture).
Commercial egg pasta is made with durum wheat and about half the proportion of eggs to wheat of the richest home-made pasta (which can have ten eggs to a kilo of flour, i.e. four to a pound). Other possible additions are a little spinach for green pasta and, less commonly, tomato paste or beetroot juice for red pasta.
As for the instruments used to shape pasta, the oldest of these, scarcely a labour-saving device for it was very slow to operate, was the ferro, or iron rod, of Sicily, Calabria, and Apulia, used for making tubular macaroni. A flat strip of pasta was simply wrapped around the rod, pressed to seal it, and slid off. Sometimes a straight birch twig was used instead. In the Abruzzi a chitarra (‘guitar’) was and is still used to cut narrow strips (maccheroni alla chitarra). The device has many closely spaced wires, more like a zither than a guitar. A flat sheet of dough is placed on these and pressed through with a roller. In Romagna, a sharp comblike device is used to cut the sheet; the result is called garganelli. In Genoa a combined mould and cutter is stamped down on to a sheet of dough to form small, embossed corzetti.
The most important device of all is the extrusion press, without which it would have been impossible for round SPAGHETTI to be made, while tubular MACARONI would have remained a minor southern curiosity. This machine at its simplest is a piston and cylinder with holes at the far end of the cylinder. The piston pushes dough out through the holes. Enormous pressure is required, for the dough must be stiff enough to hold its shape when it emerges. The piston must therefore be moved by a screw.
Early machines had clumsy wooden screws, for the technical difficulties of making long metal threaded rods accurately made these uneconomically expensive until the 18th century. Extruded pasta was therefore rather a slow starter on the market. A small, primitive extruder, the torchio (‘screw press’), which has a barrel about 30 cm (12.5″) long and 7 cm (3″) wide, survives in the Veneto region, where it is used for making bigoli, a thick (and therefore easy to extrude) kind of spaghetti made from wholemeal flour; it now has a mass-produced metal screw. The most recently introduced hand-operated device is the combined roller and cutter for homemade tagliatelle, now commonly available and quite unlike any traditional machine. Small, electrically powered extruders are also made for home use.
During the 18th century Naples gained the lead in the commercial manufacture of pasta. In 1700 it had 60 pasta shops; in 1785 there were 280. Part of this success came from the large-scale adoption of an improved screw press, which was known as L’ingegno (‘the gadget’). The perforated die plate through which the pasta emerged could be changed to make spaghetti—at first a novelty—or macaroni, or any other simple shape. L’ingegno had a screw travel of almost 1.5 m (62″) and could thus make spaghetti of that length, which was draped and folded in half on long racks in the street. It was broken at the bend when removed, giving the traditional long spaghetti with curved tips. Kneading was still done with the simplest of machinery, as was rolling. Fancy types of pasta continued to be hand made for many years. Cooked pasta was sold in the streets from mobile cookers, and eaten at its full length by hand, which involved raising the strands at arm’s length and gradually lowering it into one’s mouth.
In 1878 in Naples, production began to be mechanized. The first machinery—merely a set of semolina sieves—caused riots, but the trend was unstoppable. In 1882 British-made kneaders, extruders, and cutters were installed. In Toulouse in 1917, Féreol Sandragné invented the first extruder which worked continuously, due to an Archimedean screw feed like that of a modern mincing machine. It became very hot in operation, and required a cooling system. The device was adopted in one factory after another. The continuously emerging pasta was cut to length with a rotating knife whose speed could be varied. Thus, for example, macaroni could be made full length with a slow knife speed; short with a fast speed; and with a very fast speed the result was little rings.
In 1933, the firm of Braibanti installed the first completely mechanized continuous production line; it was during this same decade that Mussolini’s agricultural policies caused the main spaghetti manufacturing industry to be transferred to the north of the country.
Manufacture of pasta is by no means confined to Italy. It was begun in the USA during the First World War, when supplies from Italy were interrupted. And it is practised in a number of other countries, including Spain, Greece, and Israel.
Pasta shapes, very numerous and still proliferating, include:
A general point which aids comprehension of the diversity of forms of pasta has been well brought out by Stobart (1980), who explains that the ‘surface-to-volume ratio is important’, i.e. ‘it takes less sauce to cover a piece of dough shaped into a ball than to cover the same piece rolled out into a large sheet, which has the same volume, but a bigger surface area. Even more sauce would be necessary if the sheet were cut into strips. Ribbed forms of pasta (rigati) trap more sauce than smooth ones (lisci).’ Marrying a particular form of pasta to a particular sauce is indeed an art, instinctively acquired by Italians from an early age but needing to be learned by others.
See also FARFEL.
When pasta is served in soup or broth, it is pasta in brodo. Served as a separate dish with a dressing, it is pasta asciutta. A third category, pasta al forno, comprises various baked dishes, using plain or stuffed pasta.
One of the simplest and best dressings for pasta is of oil, garlic, and grated cheese. However, there are legions of others, for some of which see RAGÚ; tomato sauce for pasta appears in Ippolito Cavalcanti’s Cucina teorico pratica of 1839. This book also includes dressings based on fish and one with clams resembling present-day Spaghetti alle vongole. (For other popular dressings, see SPAGHETTI and MACARONI.)
a small savoury pastry, a speciality of Sephardic Jews. The shape is that of a little, round raised pie. The pastry dough is a modified shortcrust, the same as that used for sanbusak (see SAMOSA) and the filling is either a minced meat mixture, often with pine nuts, or khandrajo, a mixture of aubergines, onions, and tomatoes, similar to RATATOUILLE.
a small confection of sugar syrup set with GELATIN or STARCH, and flavoured with fruit essences or medicinal ingredients. The composition of modern pastilles is closely related to that of GUMS and JELLIES. The name is derived from the Latin pastilla (little cake), and has been applied to several kinds of small sweets. This includes, in the 16th century, fruit paste confections, much reduced by boiling, and in the 18th century little round LOZENGES made with powdered sugar and gum, similar to sugar paste; they often contained medicines, or were flavoured with aromatics.
Laura Mason
is a recent arrival in the English language; Mariani (1994) gives 1936 as the first appearance in print. However, the product has a long history. The name probably derives through Yiddish from Romanian or Armenian pastrama, a type of wind-dried beef. Lesley Chamberlain (1989) says that:
Wind-dried beef, Pastrama, Of Armenian Origin, was observed to be a much-loved food among the poor [of Romania]. A nineteenth century traveller described it as ‘thin, black, leather-like pieces of meat dried and browned in the sun, and with salt and squashed flies’.
Such products were widespread in the Levant and the Balkans. Pastirma, dried meat often seasoned with garlic and cumin, is the Turkish version, and it is under numerous variations of the Turkish name, e.g. pasturma in Bulgaria, that it is known in the Balkan countries. Maria Kaneva-Johnson (1995) explains that the meat can come ‘from lamb, goat, calf or young water buffalo, cut into the thinnest possible slices and eaten uncooked or lightly grilled as meze’. She remarks that a version coated with a paste of paprika, fenugreek or cumin, and salt (to protect and add piquancy to the meat) is a speciality of the Anatolian town of Kayseri (Caesarea in Roman times).
The version which has become a feature of New York Jewish cuisine and is used for the famous pastrami on rye sandwich is adapted from these origins, but prepared in a somewhat different manner, which includes steaming the meat.
a collective name for items produced by the skill of the pastry-cook or pâtissier, usually based on short, puff, or choux PASTRY (hence the name), GÉNOISE sponge, or rich, yeast-leavened mixtures of the BRIOCHE type.
Exactly what is counted among pastries depends on the country concerned. In Britain, various yeast-leavened buns are included. In continental Europe, numerous STRUDELS and nut confections fall in this category. MERINGUES are considered pastries, and DANISH PASTRIES form a special group. Many sweet pastries may be used for dessert, but most people think of them in connection with mid-morning coffee or afternoon tea, when a selection might be made from a range of different pastries offered in a café.
Pastries are not necessarily sweet, although those falling in the savoury category are fewer. Most important are items such as VOL-AU-VENT, BOUCHÉE, and an English example, the sausage roll.
In making sweet pastries, a sound knowledge of baking and sugar confectionery is required. Authorities on pastry work lay emphasis on high-quality ingredients, delicate handling, and cleanliness. The French, the Swiss, and the Austrians have a highly developed tradition of pastry-making, followed throughout much of the developed world. In this, sweet pastries are built up from several elements. The pastry or cake forms the basis; contrast in texture and flavour is provided by fillings of jam, cream, crème pâtissière (see crème), or CUSTARD, and embellishments of FONDANT, chocolate, or icing are frequently added. Attention is paid to uniformity of shape, colour, and decoration, as pastries are expected to make a fine display as well as being delicious.
S. Europe, pastries rely less on dairy produce and more on nut mixtures. In several countries, nuns are recognized as making excellent pastries; many convents produce sought-after specialities. The Spanish and the Portuguese have donated a sweet tooth and skill in pastry-making to areas formerly under their control. Iberian-inspired pastries are often particularly rich in eggs. In E. Europe and the Middle East, a quite different, but very rich tradition of pastries based on FILO has developed: the best-known example is BAKLAVA. Here, too, the craft of the pastry-cook is a special skill. The Indian subcontinent has a wide repertoire of sweet items, some of which could be reckoned as pastries, although few are as complex as those from traditions further west. The Chinese have traditionally taken little interest in this area of culinary expertise; see MOONCAKES for an exception.
Laura Mason
A term with two main meanings:
(1) is dealt with here, (2) under PASTRIES.
In this entry there are three interlocking and overlapping sections. The first gives a classification of the main types of pastry now in use. The second explains in a summary way the physics and chemistry of pastry-making. The third recapitulates briefly what is known about the history of the development of certain kinds of pastry.
The classification of these, if it is to be helpful, must embody the terms actually in use. If these terms corresponded to a logical categorization, whether by ingredients, technique of preparation, or purpose, that would be convenient; all the more so if the same categorization prevailed in different countries and languages. However, this is not the situation. The terms in use reflect various methods of categorization, and vary from place to place, including differences between British and American usage.
The first step is to distinguish five broad categories:
Shortcrust pastry (sometimes known as medium flake pastry in the USA) is made from flour; fat, usually lard or butter; water; and salt. The process is quick. The chilled butter or lard is cut into cubes and rubbed into the flour (already sifted and salted) to produce a mixture looking like coarse breadcrumbs. A well is made in this and iced water added little by little and stirred in until the dough coheres and can be formed into a ball. This is wrapped in foil or greaseproof paper and chilled for a short time before being rolled out and used.
Suet crust is the same, but made with suet as the fat. It has a very light texture.
Hot water crust (sometimes called short flake in the USA) has the same ingredients, but the water added is boiling. This causes the fat to melt. The result is a pastry which is strong in both the raw and cooked state, and therefore suitable for use in raised pies (see PIE).
Rich shortcrust involves a change in the ingredients. There is more fat in relation to the flour. Egg may be added, and sometimes sugar. The result is relatively soft, crumbly, and tender—and sweet, if sugar has been added. The French pâte brisée (meaning broken-textured pastry) is of this type. It is the classic pastry for flans and often has a little sugar, even when used for savoury dishes, but rarely egg. Pâte sucrée (sweet pastry) does include egg, and a larger dose of sugar; and it may also be called pâte sèche (dry pastry). The Austrian mürbe Teig (tender pastry) is a rich shortcrust with egg and sour cream or cream cheese; the latter ingredient gives it a special flavour. The same applies to the rich shortcrust used for Linzertorte (see TORTE AND KUCHEN) which includes ground almond as an ingredient. A further variation is found in the rich shortcrust used for the Russian COULIBIAC, which differs in being made with yeast, which makes it light and puffy. Indeed, it could be held that it really belongs in the next group.
Rough puff, flaky. Here we have a difference of technique rather than of ingredients. If rich shortcrust pastry is folded and rolled three or four times it becomes what is known as rough puff pastry. The layers of this partly separate and rise during cooking, although not nearly as much as in puff pastry proper. Rough puff is used for quickly made pie crusts. So is flaky pastry (sometimes known as long flake in the USA). It is made from flour with a high proportion of butter, and a little water. A quarter of the butter is added to the flour in the initial stage, resulting in a normal shortcrust pastry. Then the pastry is rolled, dotted with a further quarter of the butter, folded, re-rolled and allowed to rest in a cool place. The procedure is repeated twice more until all the butter is used. This pastry is finely layered with irregular inclusions of butter, giving a light but short texture midway between that of rich shortcrust and puff pastry. French demi feuilleté (half-puff) pastry is similar, but the butter left from the original mixing is added in a flat sheet at the first stage, so that the three turns and rolls spread it out more evenly between the layers. Its texture is closer to that of true puff pastry.
For genuine puff pastry, only about one-eighth of the butter is incorporated in the original mixture. The pastry is rolled out. Then the rest of the butter is spread over two-thirds of the area of the sheet of pastry, which is then folded into three in such a way that there are three layers of pastry enclosing two of butter. Folding and rolling is carried out six times in all, with rests between turns. The resulting pastry has 729 layers each separated by a thin smear of butter. Older methods called for folding in two and for nine turns, giving 512 layers. Either way, the pastry rises to a very light, laminated texture, crisp and frail. Puff pastry is used in delicate sweet and savoury articles of many kinds.
Yeast puff pastry is a richer kind, originally a speciality of Vienna and now used to make CROISSANTS and similar articles. The dough is made with yeast, milk, and eggs as well as flour and a mixture of butter and lard. Depending on the particular recipe, the dough is given up to four rolls and turns. The combined effect of the rolling and turning and the rise produced by the yeast is to give a pastry as light as normal puff pastry, but with a softer, richer texture and a more interesting flavour.
Choux pastry is made by melting butter in hot water, adding flour, and cooking the mixture until it is smooth and no longer sticky. Then eggs are beaten in one by one. The raw pastry is very soft, and is usually piped through a forcing bag. When cooked, it rises greatly and has a delicate, spongy texture which finds application in ÉCLAIRS and similar light delicacies. Barbara Maher (1982), remarking on its versatility, asked: who could guess that this pastry is the basis of products as apparently dissimilar as: CREAM PUFFS, Herzogbrot (Bread of the Dukes), Carolines, Salammbos, Mecca rolls, Paris Brest and St Honoré (for both of which see GATEAU), Lucca eyes, and Religieuses (see ÉCLAIR)?
FILO pastry is treated separately.
The striking differences in texture between various kinds of pastry have simple causes which lie in the nature of wheat flour and certain kinds of fat. Wheat flour, when kneaded into a plain dough made with water, develops strands of gluten, which are what give an elastic, tough quality to bread. In ordinary pastry, such a texture is undesirable; so a fat or oil is added. This retards the development of the gluten, mainly by physically interposing itself between the grains of flour so that the strands cannot tangle and be drawn out. A hard, solid fat such as lard or suet is most effective here. Lard in particular has a coarse, crystalline structure which makes a highly effective barrier. Butter is less effective, and shortcrust pastry made with butter alone has an inferior texture. If the fat is melted with hot water, or if liquid oil is used, the thin oily layer between the grains offers less obstacle to gluten formation and the resulting pastry is tougher. This is the effect deliberately sought in hot water pastry.
The fact that pastry made with solid fat is stiffer, both when raw and in the early stages of baking, is due simply to the solidity of the fat, and is unconnected with the previous phenomenon.
In puff pastry a certain amount of gluten formation is desirable, but all the strands of gluten must lie in one plane to give strength to the horizontal sheets. Thus the process is one of repeatedly stretching a mixture with only a little fat in it, but whose layers are separated by a barrier of butter. A good deal of air also gets in between the layers and it is partly the expansion of this, and partly the steam formed in cooking, which force the layers apart and make puff pastry rise in such a striking way.
In choux pastry, another notable riser, the preliminary cooking of a flour and fat mixture creates a smooth paste into which air can be beaten during the later stage of adding the eggs, which are themselves even better vehicles for air bubbles. The eggs are added after the cooking stage, simply to avoid hardening them prematurely.
In filo pastry, the gluten is developed to its full extent. The dough used is a mixture of flour and water only, which is thoroughly kneaded and then stretched so that the gluten strands are all horizontal. In this way it resembles a single leaf of puff pastry. When several layers of filo are wrapped around a filling they are brushed with melted butter to separate them, so that the resemblance to puff pastry is increased.
In strudel pastry, the reduction of gluten formation resulting from adding fat and egg to the dough is compensated for by the use of strong, high-gluten bread flour, and by adding a little vinegar to the mixture, which chemically assists the gluten to form.
In flaky, puff, filo, and strudel doughs, where gluten is formed, the process is assisted by giving the dough one or more ‘rests’ in a cool place. Ideally two hours in a refrigerator is required for each rest. During this time the gluten strands, which have been greatly stressed by the rolling or whichever process is used, draw themselves out a little more as the result of this tension, and thus become not only longer but also slacker. Once the gluten has ‘relaxed’ in this way, it is easier to stretch it further next time.
Small, sweet cakes eaten by the ancient Egyptians may well have included types using pastry. With their fine flour, oil, and honey they had the materials, and with their professional bakers they had the skills.
In the plays of Aristophanes (5th century BC) there are mentions of sweetmeats including small pastries filled with fruit. Nothing is known of the actual pastry used, but the Greeks certainly recognized the trade of pastry-cook as distinct from that of baker.
The Romans made a plain pastry of flour, oil, and water to cover meats and fowls which were baked, thus keeping in the juices. (The covering was not meant to be eaten; it filled the role of what was later called ‘huff paste’—see below.) A richer pastry, intended to be eaten, was used to make small pasties containing eggs or little birds which were among the minor items served at banquets.
However, the Romans were not strong on pastry. Like the Greeks, they cooked with oil. Pastry made with oil is palatable enough, but lacks stiffness in the raw state, and tends to slump during the early stages of baking. Pastry goods made with oil have to be small or flat, or closely wrapped around their contents. These forms are still noticeable in Middle Eastern dishes using oil pastry.
In medieval N. Europe the usual cooking fats were lard and butter, which—especially lard—were conducive to making stiff pastry and permitted development of the solid, upright case of the raised pie. This was made from coarse flour, usually rye.
No medieval cookery books give detailed instructions on how to make pastry; they assume the necessary knowledge (although some give incomplete accounts of ingredients). From later works (notably Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife of 1615) it can be inferred that a stiff pie case or ‘coffyn’ (see COFFIN) for a tart was composed of coarse flour and a little suet amalgamated with boiling water, as hot water crust is made today. Raised pie cases were baked with their contents. The ‘coffyns’ for large open tarts were baked blind, that is, empty. The rough, grey pastry could be made to look quite pleasing by glazing the outside with egg yolk. But it was not intended to be eaten, except by servants after the meal. A similar coarse, stiff pastry was used to cover fowls and pieces of meat that were baked. A protective case of this kind was known as ‘huff paste’. It not only sealed in the juice and flavour of the meat during cooking, but also acted as a barrier against contamination if the meat was not to be eaten at once. It was therefore left on until the last moment. Although it was not intended to be eaten, the pastry became well flavoured with meat juice and, outside the formal surroundings of a banquet, people would often gnaw the tough but tasty fragments.
However, not all medieval pastry was coarse. Small tarts would be made with a rich pastry of fine white flour, butter, sugar, saffron, and other good things, certainly meant to be eaten.
From the middle of the 16th century on, actual recipes for pastry begin to appear. The coarse rye pastry for raised pies, already described, remained as it was. For raised pies which did not have to be quite so durable, but might have to last a few days, there was a thick hot water crust of fine wheat flour and some butter. Sometimes meat broth was used instead of water. This pastry would be hard but fully edible. Fine pastry was made with the best wheat flour, which might be dry baked before use to give a short texture. It was mixed with plenty of butter, eggs, and cold water: in fact, it was a true rich shortcrust pastry such as is still made. Sugar, saffron, and the like would be added for sweet pasties.
Karen Hess (1981), who provides several important notes on the early history of pastry, points out that there is a difficulty in identifying the earliest references to puff pastry, since the Italian and French terms for this (pasta sfoglia and pâte feuilletée) also carry the more general meaning of ‘leafed pastry’, which has been known in the Mediterranean region since antiquity. She remarks that the first recipe for something recognizable as puff pastry is in Dawson (1596, but she cites an edition of 1586). An Italian–English dictionary of 1598, by Florio, seems to have been the first to use the English term ‘puff pastry’.
nowadays a medium-sized or small PASTRY turnover, seldom larger than an individual serving.
The word pasty came into English, via old French, from the Latin pasta (dough). In the Middle Ages, pasties were often very large, and generally meant meat or fish, well seasoned, enclosed in pastry and baked (similar to modern en croûte dishes, see CROUTON). While pasties were made without a mould and contained a single type of filling, a pie contained a mixture and eventually became the name for the deeper, raised form. In both, the pastry was made to recipes and baked in a way that would make it too tough to be eaten.
Medieval pasties often contained joints of meat or whole birds; C. Anne Wilson (1973) quotes an ordinance of Richard II in 1378 for prices charged by cooks and pie bakers, including those for capons and hens baked in pasties. Beef, mutton, and game were also used; porpoise meat, which counted as fish, was made into pasties for fast days. Venison pasty was popular for many centuries, and was probably a status symbol, as beef was sometimes marinated in supposed imitation, a practice which appears to have gone on into the 17th century. Butter or beef marrow were often added to pasties generally, to help keep the meat moist.
Smaller, sweet pasties were also made; one medieval type was petyperneux (or pernollys), possibly meaning ‘little lost eggs’. Containing whole egg yolks, currants and raisins, bone marrow, and spices in paste made of fine flour with saffron, sugar, and salt, these were fried. Later forms included the ‘hat’ (with the addition of pounded meat or fish), and, by the 16th century, a turnover shape known as a peascod (pea pod), whose filling included chopped kidney. Moulds in that shape, or in the form of a dolphin, were evidently used for making these. Large pasties were decorated with elaborate patterns cut out of rolled pastry.
The best-known pasty of modern times is the Cornish pasty, made in a pointed oval shape, with a seam of crimped pastry running the full length of the upper side. In the recent past, fillings varied. Cubed beef with root vegetables is now considered standard, but other meats or fish, or vegetables alone, were used. A useful and personal account of pasties is given by the pasty-baker Hettie Merrick (1995). Theodora FitzGibbon (1976) recounts, ‘It is said in Cornwall that the Devil never crossed the River Tamar into that county for fear of the Cornish woman’s habit of putting anything and everything into a pasty.’ The corners of the pasties could be marked with initials to identify the recipient. Sometimes very large pasties for a whole family were made. Some pasties contained two courses, so to speak; a savoury filling at one end and a sweet one at the other. Sometimes a very large family-size pasty would be made and taken to the local baker’s shop to be baked.
Cornish miners who emigrated to the USA took their pasty tradition with them and Lockwood and Lockwood (1983) have described their subsequent evolution in Michigan, where they interbred, so to speak, with similar products brought by immigrants from Finland.
Other types of pasty are known in Britain. One which is still popular is the Scottish product, the Forfar bridie. Theodora FitzGibbon (1980) points out that Sir James Barrie, who was born at Kirriemuir in Forfarshire, mentions the bridies in his novel Sentimental Tommie. The ‘bridie’ part of the name is of unknown origin; one legend attributes it to the first seller of the pasties having been a certain Maggie Bridie of Glamis, while Catherine Brown (see Mason, 1999) postulates that the shape was a lucky symbol eaten at the ‘bride’s meal’ (i.e. the wedding feast). What is certain is that rump steak, cut into small strips or pieces, is the correct meat for the filling. Traditional recipes call for suet and chopped onions as well; the casing is of shortcrust pastry, and the bridie looks something like a Cornish pasty which has been put on its side.
Dorothy Hartley (1954) described a foot, a pasty traditionally eaten in Lancashire. The name comes from the form of the pasty crust. A piece of shortcrust pastry is rolled into an oval shape, then one end is rolled much thinner, so that it spreads out and the pastry assumes the form of the sole and heel of a shoe. Filling is put on the thick end, and the thin part wrapped over it and pressed down around the edge.
Something akin to the Cornish pasty is made in the county of Somerset; this is a priddy oggy (oggy is Cornish dialect for pasty) which appears to have been invented in the late 1960s. It is filled with pork, and the pastry contains cheese.
Other types of pasty include the BEDFORDSHIRE CLANGER (with suet crust enclosing a meat filling at one end and a sweet filling at the other), and the Yorkshire mint pasty, a large one with a sweet filling of raisins, currants, candied peel, brown sugar, and butter, liberally flavoured with fresh mint and lightly spiced.
a French term whose meaning and use have both enlarged since early medieval times. The original meaning is best conveyed in English by the word ‘pie’ (or perhaps ‘pasty’ where the connection is more obvious). What was meant was a pastry case filled with any of various mixtures (meat, fish, vegetables), baked in the oven and served either hot or cold. Such things are familiar in other European countries, but the French term and French practice have become dominant.
By a natural extension, the term came to mean not only the whole ‘pie’ but also what was in the pie, especially if it was something which could be served cold, in slices. At this point the meaning became much the same as that of TERRINE.
Once pâté had evolved in this direction, so that it was not thought of as being in a pastry case, there was a problem over what to call it when it was in a pastry case. The phrase pâté en croûte fills this gap.
The list of the various pâtés is almost endless. A few of the best known are:
the French word for a pastry-cook’s shop. In English this has come to mean, by extension, the goods in the shop, particularly fine and fancy small sweet cakes.
Laura Mason
a type of MERINGUE cake which has a soft marshmallowy centre, achieved by the addition of a little cornflour and a teaspoonful or so of vinegar or lemon juice to the meringue mixture after the sugar is folded in.
When cooked, the meringue case is filled with fresh cream and fruit such as strawberries, raspberries, kiwi fruit. A version filled with a mixture of passion-fruit pulp and fresh cream is regarded as the most traditional.
The pavlova has been described as Australia’s national dish, but it is also claimed by New Zealand. According to the Australian claim, it was invented in 1935 by Herbert Sachse, an Australian chef, and named by Harry Nairn of the Esplanade Hotel, Perth, after Anna Pavlova, the Russian ballerina who visited both countries in 1926. The built-up sides of the pavlova are said to suggest a tutu. The Australian author Symons (1982) concedes that the actual product had made a prior appearance in New Zealand, but suggests that its naming was an Australian act.
On the New Zealand side, however, Helen Leach (1997) has marshalled evidence to show that:
Helen Saberi
an exceptionally interesting Greek item in the frontier area between BREADS and BISCUITS. As Aglaia Kremezi (1997) explains in a fine essay on the subject, well equipped with historical references as well as contemporary observation, paximadia were originally barley biscuits, resembling RUSKS, which had to be soaked in broth to make them soft enough for eating. The fact that they were twice baked and very dry meant that they could be kept for long periods and were well adapted for use by travellers.
BARLEY had for many centuries been the staple food of the common people in Greece and neighbouring parts of the Mediterranean region. In more recent times a combination of barley and wheat flour has been used, producing lighter and crunchier biscuits. These appeal to Greeks who have met the traditional paximadia in the islands of the Aegean (and in Crete, supposedly the home of the best paximadia of all), and who wish to replicate the experience in a form adapted to modern requirements (i.e. no ritual of soaking before eating).
Paximadia do not belong only to Greece. Kremezi’s essay and Dalby (1996) between them illuminate their wider distribution and the likely derivation of their interesting name.
a pudding traditionally served at weddings and other special functions in S. India. Most versions are based on beans or lentils. For example, chirupayaru payasam is made with lentils which are cooked with unrefined brown sugar, then simmered with coconut milk, CARDAMOM, and GHEE. The finished dish may be like a cream soup. The possible ingredients are legion: vermicelli, raisins, CASHEW NUTS, SAGO, ground almonds, etc. A vermicelli version is a favourite of the large S. Indian community in MALAYSIA.
Another payasam is made with rice which is cooked with milk, sugar and aromatic spices. This is prepared for the beginning of the festival of Dasehra, a ten-day festival celebrated all over India to commemorate the victory of the good Prince Rama over the army of the demon Ravana.
Helen Saberi
a LEGUME which originated in W. Asia, has been a staple food since ancient times. There are three main kinds: the first of these, the familiar garden pea, Pisum sativum ssp sativum, is by far the most important. A secondary form, the field or grey pea, used to be distinguished as P. arvense, but is now classified as a variety (arvense) of the above ssp. Third is the small, wild Mediterranean pea, ssp elatius, sometimes called the oasis or maquis pea.
Other legumes of different genera are popularly called ‘peas’. See BUTTERFLY PEA; CHICKPEA; COWPEA; PIGEON PEA; WINGED PEA.
The earliest trace of the pea is in the relics of Bronze Age settlements in Switzerland, c.3000 BC. It was apparently grown by both Greeks and Romans in the classical period, spread quickly through India, where it is still a popular vegetable, and reached China in the 7th century AD. The Chinese gave it the name hu tou (foreign legume).
Field peas were eaten dried, and sometimes husked and split. Dried peas were one of the principal foods of poorer people throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, especially in winter. They were cheap, filling, and a useful source of protein.
The old English name ‘pease’ is singular. The ‘-se’ was dropped later under the wrong assumption that it was a plural form. (The modern Indian word paisa, meaning small coin, is from the same root.) Peas were made into thick broths and pease porridge; the old singular form survives in the name of the porridge and also in a related dish, PEASE PUDDING, which has its own entry. The old form also survives in the term PEASEMEAL.
Fernie (1905) records an interesting piece of history concerning the grey or field pea:
‘“Hot Grey Pease, and a suck of Bacon,” (tied to a string of which the stallkeeper held the other end,) was a popular street cry in the London of James the First.’
It was not until the 16th century, when Italian gardeners developed tender varieties for eating fresh and small, that garden peas were introduced and grown increasingly thereafter.
A sudden vogue for eating immature peas fresh, which was a novel procedure, reached a peak at the end of the 17th century. In 1696 Mme de Maintenon wrote from the court of Louis XIV: ‘Il y a des dames qui, après avoir soupé, et bien soupé, trouvent des pois chez elles avant de coucher, au risque d’une indigestion. C’est une mode, un fureur.’ (There are some ladies who, having supped, and supped well, take peas at home before going to bed, at the risk of an attack of indigestion. It’s a fashion, a craze.) French peas were very expensive. Some of this glamour still attaches to the French petits pois, which are not a separate variety but ordinary peas harvested very young. The regions from which these come are the north and west of France, and Paris, where the towns of Saint-Germain and Clamart were so famous for the quality of their petits pois that their names came to be used as culinary terms for dishes incorporating petits pois.
One variety popular in England at the time was the sugar pea, also called snap pea and mange-tout. The pods of ordinary garden peas have a tough inner lining which makes them inedible, though they can be made into soup. (In pea-growing areas ‘peascod’ soup has long been a traditional harvest-time dish.) Sugar peas have a tender pod and, when young, the whole pod and the tiny peas in it can be eaten. Hence the French name mange-tout.
At the end of the 19th century, when canned vegetables began to be sold widely, peas were one of the most popular types. When peas are canned they become a dull khaki colour as their original chlorophyll green is destroyed by heating. French canned petits pois are this colour. However, in many other countries the change is unacceptable, and the peas are restored to their ‘natural’ green by being treated with a bright green dye. Most kinds of canned peas bear little resemblance to the fresh vegetable and may be considered as a separate food item. They include giant ‘marrowfat’ peas (seldom sold fresh) and, in the north of England, special ‘mushy’ peas. ‘Processed’ peas are treated with alkali to make them soft and starchy. The term ‘garden peas’ is used to distinguish unprocessed canned peas.
Peas were also among the earliest frozen vegetables in the 1920s and 1930s, and here there is a real advantage. Fresh peas deteriorate noticeably in hours rather than days after picking. People without vegetable gardens or access to really fresh supplies will find that frozen peas, harvested at the ideal moment and frozen at once, are in effect the ‘freshest’ they can obtain.
Field peas are still grown extensively as a fodder crop or a ‘green manure’ ploughed back into the soil. For a special kind of dried field pea, whose use in the north of England for a Lenten dish survives, precariously, see CARLING.
Dried peas remain the main form in India, where they constitute several of the numerous types of DAL (split pulse). Size and colour vary greatly. All dried peas, especially field peas, are among the most difficult pulses to soften. They need soaking overnight, and even then cooking may take several hours. In contrast, fresh peas are easily spoiled by overcooking; indeed, they may be eaten raw.
Amygdalus persica, a fruit distinguished by its velvety skin, to which the Roman poet Virgil drew attention when he wrote of searching for ‘downy peaches and the glossy plum’.
Like the PLUM and the APRICOT, the peach belongs to the rose family and is classified as a drupe, i.e. a fruit with a hard stone. Of all the fruits in this family, with the possible exception of the CHERRY, the peach is the most celebrated in literature, in the Orient as well as the West. It is a fruit of temperate but warm climates, which will not endure either tropical heat or severe cold. The NECTARINE, which has a smooth skin, is treated separately, although of the same species.
Wild peach trees still grow in China, the original home of the peach. Like their cultivated descendants, they are medium-sized trees, with handsome, pointed leaves; but their fruits are small, sour, and very fuzzy. Well before the 10th century BC (some authorities suggest very much earlier) improved varieties were being cultivated.
Peaches are easily raised from seed, and cultivation spread westwards through areas with a suitable climate, such as Kashmir, to Persia. It flourished there so well that it came to be regarded as a native Persian fruit; hence the specific name persica.
In classical antiquity Theophrastus (c.370–c.288 BC) was the first writer to mention the peach. Despite the lack of clear evidence, it is widely assumed that it was Alexander the Great who brought it to Greece from Persia. Pliny (1st century AD) mentioned half a dozen types, e.g. the peaches of Gaul (France) and the Asiatic ones, and declared the fruit to be particularly wholesome.
Generally, it seems to have been the Romans who spread the peach further north and west. Much later, in the 16th century, it was the Spaniards who took it to America. The 16th century used also to be thought of as the time when the peach reached England. However, as Roach (1985) points out, there is much evidence, including the supply of two peach trees to the Tower of London in 1275 and a reference by Chaucer (1372), to show that it was being grown there much earlier (and eaten even earlier, perhaps by Roman legionaries, for peach stones have been found in a 2nd-century site near the old Billingsgate fish market). But it seems that peach-growing was discontinued for a time, and that it was in the 16th century that the fruit was reintroduced from France and the Netherlands. Phillips (1823) gave to Wolf, the gardener of King Henry VIII, credit for this.
There are two categories of peach, clingstone and freestone, distinguished by the ease with which the flesh comes away from the stone. Each includes fruits with both yellow and white flesh; and varieties of each were known from early times. Gerard (1633) described four varieties (white, red, yellow, and d’avant) and added: ‘I have them all in my garden, with many other sorts.’ Parkinson (1629) listed 21 varieties, and Rea (1676) 35. Many had names which indicated a French origin. Perhaps the most famous peaches of France have been those of Montreuil near Paris; but this was not an instance of a special variety, it was rather a special method of cultivation, using espaliers of a different design, to produce fruits of exceptional quality, packed by hand and internationally famed. The varieties used included l’Admirable tardive (=Téton de Vénus) and Gross Noire de Montreuil. Émile Zola admired their fine clear skin, like that of girls of the north of France, he thought, in contrast to the peaches from the Midi which were yellow and sunburned like the girls of that region. In 1993, however, there was only one lady orchardist selling genuine Montreuil peaches in the town.
Meanwhile, English nurserymen such as Rivers and Laxton in the 19th century were developing new, improved varieties. However, the English climate is not ideal for peaches, and English orchardists have to grow them in sheltered positions. The peach is much more at home in the Mediterranean region and in those parts of N. America which have a similar climate; and it is American growers, especially in California, who have done most in the 20th century to shape the pattern of world production.
Commercial cultivation in N. America had begun early in the 19th century, concentrated in the ‘Chesapeake peach-belt’ of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and S. New Jersey. Nowadays California produces about half of the American crop, with S. Carolina, Georgia, and New Jersey ranking next. The leading Californian varieties in 1996 were Elegant Lady and O’Henry. However, peach trees live only 10 to 20 years, and fashions change quickly, so—in N. America, and other regions too—each generation eats mostly new varieties.
One cultivar grown in S. Florida and the Caribbean, Red Ceylon, is of special interest. All peaches have a requirement for a certain number of hours at a ‘chill’ temperature while they are growing, and this requirement means that most varieties will not thrive in subtropical regions. The Red Ceylon is the big exception to this rule, because its ‘chill requirement’ is very low.
In the mid-1990s China was the world’s largest peach producer followed by Italy, the USA, and Greece in that order.
It seems to be widely recognized, writes a pomological correspondent in California, that the peach, of all fruits, most closely approaches the quality of human flesh, eventually reaching that state expressively described by William Morris as ‘pinch-ripe’. No fruit is more laden with erotic metaphor. The pear is its nearest rival, but its cool, smooth skin cannot compare with the warm knap of a peach. The contrasting names of two varieties, Poire Cuisse-Madam and Pêche Téton de Vénus, express the difference. When the fruit-stealing episode which figures in the childhood section of so many autobiographies concerns peaches, the reference may be to ‘kissing’ rather than ‘stealing’ the fruit; and male fruit connoisseurs have written of ‘stroking’ peaches off the tree.
To be at its best, a fresh peach has to ripen on the tree. Those which are exported over long distances are often picked long before they are ripe and make poor eating, may indeed be rubbery and tasteless or (worse still) have lost all their juiciness and become ‘mealy’ or ‘floury’ (usually because they have been refrigerated).
Fresh peaches are so good that it seems a shame to cook them, but they are good if poached in wine or made into pies. The most famous peach dessert, peach Melba, was created by ESCOFFIER in 1893 to honour Dame Nellie Melba. It is less well known that when Mme Récamier, the famous beauty of the early 19th century, was ill, refusing all food and at death’s door, she was tempted to eat and eventually recover by a dish of peaches in syrup and cream.
Peaches survive being canned better than most fruits. The flavour is altered, but still good. The canning industry, which started to grow towards the end of the 19th century, now accounts for nearly 30% of US peaches, and peaches are grown for canning in many other countries. Yellow clingstone peaches are the most popular for this purpose.
Dried peaches, in halves, are widely sold; and peach jam or marmalade is a delicacy.
In some Mediterranean countries the green or golden-green fruits (which never ripen fully) of so-called wild peaches are used in cookery and for preserves. These are not true wild peaches (only found in China), but escapes from cultivation. Patience Gray (1986) has written eloquently about la persicata, the wild peach jam made in S. Italy from these fruits.
the male of the PEAFOWL, Pavo cristatus, famous for its beautiful feathers, a bird which originated in India but was brought to Persia, and thence successively to Greece and Rome in times BC. It was so greatly prized in classical Rome as a bird to serve at banquets that Cicero (1st century BC) said that it was ‘daring’ to give a banquet without one. This statement provided a keynote which was echoed down the centuries until the 16th. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the Franks and Ostrogoths kept up the tradition. The Emperor Charlemagne (in about 800) put it at the head of the list of birds which were always to be available at the places where he might stay. Records continue through the 10th and 11th centuries; and the chansons de geste, from the 12th century onwards (to the 16th), regularly depict the peacock as top bird for the banquet table.
PLATINA (1475), author of the first printed cookbook, gave it similar status for Italy. Thirty peacocks were served at the banquet given for Catherine de’ Medici by the City of Paris in 1549. The French authors of a book known as La Maison rustique (1564) gave minutely detailed instructions on how they should be fed for the table. (Wild peacocks were known, and eaten, but those usually prepared for banquets were domesticated ones.)
Witteveen (1989, 1990), in an essay which is the best source of information on the subject, observes that peacocks seem not to have made good eating. He cites modern experiments which confirm the view expressed by some authorities in pre-medieval and medieval times that the flesh of a peacock is tough and needs to be hung and then given a prolonged cooking if it is to be edible. Implicit confirmation is provided by the fact that when the turkey arrived from the New World it rapidly displaced the peacock. The displacement was taking place in England before 1600. In Europe generally, peacocks were rarely on any menu after the late 17th century, nor did they continue to appear in cookery books, whereas there was abundant evidence of the growing popularity of their American rival.
The natural conclusion would be that the peacock had been used at banquets as a symbol, and for display, rather than because it was a pleasure to eat. (Indeed one recipe which called for stuffing the bird with a mixture in which pork predominated, thus sparing the assembled nobles from eating any peacock meat, rather gives the game away.) However, it may not have been quite as simple as that. It is true that there were occasions when peacocks made a wonderful display on the table, feathers fully fanned out, bodies gilded with real gold leaf, flames spitting from their mouths, a sight that would impress anyone. But there is plenty of evidence that peacocks were often presented in a much less showy way, cooked in a broth or made into a pie. A full explanation of its high status at banquets for 1,600 years and its subsequent eclipse within a century would have to take into account more factors than can be considered in this brief note.
is the common name of handsome Asian birds of the genus Polyplectron in the pheasant family. It correctly indicates that these birds occupy a position intermediate between PHEASANT and PEAFOWL. There are several species, all apparently well regarded as food although varying in quality. P. bicalcaratum, the Burmese peacock-pheasant, exists in a number of subspecies of which one has a range extending to Hainan in the S. China Sea. Birds of this species are reputedly very easy to catch.
Pavo cristatus and close relations, belong to the PHEASANT family and are found in the Indian subcontinent and (P. muticus) eastwards to Malaysia and Indonesia. In apparent contrast to the male of the species (see PEACOCK), these birds are considered to be fine fare when roasted, especially young specimens. Sala (1895) offers the mildly surprising advice that a roasted peafowl should be surrounded on the platter by roses or tulips.
Pyrus communis, P. sinensis, and other Pyrus spp; a fruit of which the connoisseur Edward Bunyard (1920) remarked that, while it is ‘the duty of an apple to be crisp and crunchable, a pear should have such a texture as leads to silent consumption’. He meant pears of the western world, ignoring the crunchy Asian pears which in his time were gritty and inferior although the fine new varieties of them are no longer gritty.
The pear originated in the general region of the Caucasus, as did its cousin the APPLE; and both fruits were spread by the Aryan tribes from that area as they migrated into Europe and N. India. Both belong to the rose family, Rosaceae.
The original wild pear has been developed into what are now nearly 1,000 varieties, after a certain amount of interbreeding with other native wild pears of Europe and Asia. Of these last the two which are important in their own right are P. pyrifolia (Asian/nashi/apple/salad pear) and P. ussuriensis (Chinese white pear, Harbin pear). The former tends to have apple-shaped fruits; while the latter has fruits of a more typical pear shape. But there are so many cultivars and hybrids (falling into two groups, the so-called ‘red pears’ which have a brownish skin, and the pale green or yellow ‘green pears’) that no general statements about them are completely valid.
In ancient times the pear was generally considered a better fruit than the apple. Thus in China only one variety of apple was known until the end of the Sung dynasty (AD 1279), but there were many varieties of pear. In classical Greece and Rome a similar preference was evident. Around 300 BC the Greek writer Theophrastus discussed the growing of pears, including advanced techniques such as grafting and cross-pollination. Two centuries later, in Rome, Pliny the Elder described 41 varieties, whereas his parallel list of apples was much shorter.
During the Middle Ages the pear was especially popular in France and Italy, and most pears grown in Britain were from French stock. However, the famous Warden pear was of British origin; it was raised by Cistercian monks at an abbey in Bedfordshire. So important did it become as a cooking pear that it was regarded as a fruit in its own right; one finds references to ‘wardens and pears’. Although pears for dessert were prized, it is noticeable that the balance between them and cooking pears was much more even in the past than it became in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The 16th century saw considerable activity by pear-breeders. At its end, two manuscripts detailing the fruits served at the table of the vegetarian Grand Duke Cosimo III of Florence listed 209 and 232 different varieties which had appeared there alone. In 1640 Britain had a mere 64; but by 1842 this had risen to over 700.
In the 17th century pear-growing in France was at its height and many new varieties were developed. Louis XIV was particularly interested in fruit and vegetables and the pear was one of his favourite fruits. The introduction of espaliered trees, whose fruit ripened more evenly and was not so blown about as in open orchards, helped to promote the growing of fine pears in the Paris region.
The most notable pear-growers of the 18th century were both Belgian. Nicholas Hardenpont of Mons (Bergen) bred the first of the juicy, soft pears called Beurre (butter), and these were later developed by another famous Belgian breeder, Dr van Mons. Beurre varieties remain among the best of pears.
There are no native American pears. The pear was introduced into N. America in 1629, when the Massachusetts Company ordered pear seeds from England. Because the first American pears were raised from seed which, like that of the apple, does not breed true to variety, American pears became even more diverse than their European ancestors and many good, purely American strains arose.
In New England, during the 19th century, an extraordinary degree of enthusiasm for pears developed, so extraordinary that it deserved the name ‘pearmania’. This phenomenon has been described, along with other remarkable features of the history of the pear, by Ian Jackson (1995).
Pears can be picked before they are fully ripe, though not too long before. They will ripen in a fairly cool place. Without this useful characteristic it would be impossible to market them, for a ripe pear is not only soft and easily damaged but also passes through its period of perfect ripeness in a matter of hours, and after that quickly spoils (a process which can be slightly slowed by refrigeration).
A traditional way of preserving pears is by halving and drying. Also, pears are commercially canned on a large scale. The processors take care to avoid the development of a pink colour when the pears are heated in the can, whereas domestic cooks and professional chefs are pleased to achieve this effect.
The flavour of cooked pears is often improved by the addition of, e.g., red wine, almonds, or vanilla. Pears also go well with chocolate. In the dish Poires belle Hélène, whose name celebrates Offenbach’s operetta about Helen of Troy, cooked pears are combined with chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream. Italians eat pears with parmesan or pecorino cheese, a good marriage of flavours.
Notable varieties of pear, past and present, include the following.
Abbé, a 19th century French variety, is a long, thin, greenish brown pear often with a red blush; a mid-autumn pear of good flavour and texture, used mainly for dessert.
Anjou; see Beurre, below.
Bartlett is the name used in the USA and Australia for Williams varieties (see below), after the American grower Enoch Bartlett who introduced them into the USA in 1817.
Beurre (which should really be spelled Beurré) varieties are particularly soft and juicy, with little of the gritty texture which some others exhibit. They include two good winter eating varieties: Beurre d’Anjou, broad, lopsided, and has a yellowish-green skin marked with russet; and Beurre Bosc, which is particularly aromatic in flavour, distinguished by a long, tapering neck, and coloured dark yellow with russet. Beurre Hardy is a harder kind often used for canning.
Clapp Favorite is an early ripening American dessert pear of fair quality, but rather granular. It is broad and dull greenish-yellow with some russeting.
Comice is short for Doyenné du Comice, which means ‘top of the show’. Many would agree with this boast. It is a broad, blunt pear, greenish-yellow marked with russet or a red blush. The texture is unequalled, juicy, and not even faintly gritty. The flavour is particularly sweet and aromatic. The Comice is a purely dessert pear—in season from late autumn to midwinter.
Conference, a widely sold English winter variety, is easily recognized by its long, thin shape and russet skin.
Glou Morceau, a pear which dates back to the 18th century, is also called Beurre d’Hardenpont, after the Belgian priest the Abbé Nicolas Hardenpont of Mons.