Saanen
is the oldest cheese in the world, not in the sense of being the longest established variety (its manufacture dates back only to the 16th century) but because an individual Saanen cheese may be as much as 200 years old.
It is a hard cheese similar to SBRINZ, and is made in the Swiss cantons of Bern and Valais. It is always matured for at least three years, and sometimes seven. By this time it is very dry and keeps indefinitely. Ordinary Saanen is used for grating. It is made in flat wheels up to 40 cm (16″) across and weighing up to 11 kg (25 lb).
When a child is born in a household, a special Saanen cheese is traditionally commissioned. That is his or her personal cheese, and small portions of it are eaten by all the family to commemorate his or her name day and other special occasions. The cheese may outlive its proprietor: the personal cheeses of notable people are ceremonially eaten—very sparingly— for decades after their death, until they are finally consumed.
Sachertorte
a famous Austrian cake served on festive occasions in German-speaking countries. It is a rich chocolate sponge cake glazed in apricot, and iced with bittersweet chocolate.
It was first produced in 1832 by Franz Sacher, chef to Prince von Metternich, and is reputedly the only cake in the world that was ever the subject of a court case. Sarah Kelly (1985) describes how the dispute arose:
when Demel’s, Vienna’s most famous pastry shop, and the Sacher Hotel, owned by a branch of the same Sacher family, contested who had the right to call their product the ‘genuine’ Sachertorte. Demel’s case was based on the fact that the shop had bought the right to produce the ‘genuine’ Sachertorte, stamped with an official seal of bittersweet chocolate, from Edouard Sacher, the grandson of the creator… The Hotel Sacher based their case on the family connection with the cake’s creator. The most discernible difference between the versions from the two establishments was in the placing of the apricot jam… Seven years later, the courts decided in favour of the Hotel Sacher. Demel’s, however, … announced that they would simply market their Torte as the ‘Ur-Sachertorte’, the very first version.
In Demel’s version the cake is glazed on top then covered with icing, while in the Hotel Sacher’s version it is split in half and the jam spread between the layers. Spread on top of the cake, the apricot glaze provides a glassy, smooth surface over which the warm icing, worked to exactly the right temperature and consistency, can flow smoothly and rapidly to give the cake its characteristically smooth coating. Viennese bakers’ manuals recommend using a specially shaped cake tin to produce a smooth cake with rounded edges over which the icing can flow.
Sachertorte is properly inscribed on top with the word ‘Sacher’ in chocolate. In Vienna it is generally served with unsweetened whipped cream, which Sarah Kelly says ‘cuts the sweetness and marries wonderfully with the rich chocolate cake’.
Laura Mason
saddle
in the culinary sense (French selle, râble), is a joint of meat from lamb, mutton, or any species of deer. It is taken from the back, between the last rib and the hind legs. This gives a cut which consists of two loins and the vertebrae in between, plus the fillets (tenderloins) underneath; the ‘skirt’ (the thin flaps of muscle attached to the outer edges of the loins) can either be cut away or partially trimmed and folded underneath. A saddle of hare is a similar cut, but extends to the tail.
Saddles are usually roasted; those from game animals are often larded first (see LARDING). To carve, the meat is cut in long narrow slices parallel to the backbone.
An equivalent joint of beef is known as a baron.
Laura Mason
safflower
Carthamus tinctorius, a plant of W. Asia which is a member of the SUNFLOWER and THISTLE family, and resembles a thistle with deep orange flowers. These flowers yield orange and red dyes which were in use from very early times (witness a mention in an Egyptian inscription of 3000 BC).
Even in early times safflower was also used in cookery as an adulterant of, or substitute for, the much more expensive SAFFRON; hence many common names such as ‘bastard saffron’.
In the second half of the 20th century safflower oil, extracted from the seeds, began to attract considerable attention. This was partly for health reasons (it has a higher proportion of polyunsaturates than any other commonly available oil), but it is in any case an excellent light cooking oil.
Safflower cultivation is now carried out in the drier regions of N. Africa, China, India, and the USA.
saffron
Crocus sativus, the most expensive of all spices. True saffron is contained in the orange-red stigmas of the crocus flower. The stigmas are dried and stored in sealed containers to avoid bleaching. The final product is an aromatic, matted mass of narrow, threadlike, dark orange to reddish-brown strands about 2 cm (1″) long.
Originally from W. Asia, and particularly from Persia, the saffron crocus has also been widely cultivated in S. Europe since ancient times, to be used for its medicinal properties, in food, and as a dye.
The Moghuls brought the use of saffron, along with many other culinary practices, to India from Persia. The cultivation of saffron in KASHMIR, where some of the finest crops in the world are gathered, dates back to the 3rd century or beyond.
In the westward direction, the Arabs were cultivating saffron in Spain by AD 960, though it was not until the 13th century, when the Crusaders returned with corms from Asia Minor, that cultivation spread to Italy, France, and Germany. Throughout medieval times, saffron occupied a position of great commercial importance in Europe.
The plant is said to have been introduced into England in the 14th century by a pilgrim who hid a corm in his hollow staff. Certainly, by the 16th century the saffron crocus was being cultivated on a significant scale in England, particularly in Essex where the town of Walden was renamed Saffron Walden. Use of saffron was especially noticeable in the west of England, and some believe that it had arrived there long before the 14th century via the Phoenicians and their tin trade with Cornwall.
Saffron has been known to the Chinese since ancient times. Laufer (1978), who went into the matter thoroughly and took pains to demolish the myth that saffron ever grew in China, stated that as long ago as the 3rd century AD a Chinese writer referred to saffron-growing in Kashmir; and that it was from Kashmir that saffron was exported to China. It arrived via Tibet, so was called ‘red flower of Tibet’.
The stigmas can only be picked by hand, and it requires 70,000 flowers to obtain one pound avoirdupois of saffron; or 0.5 hectares (1 acre) to yield about 4.5 kg (10 lb) of dried saffron. The cost of production is therefore high. A painting from Knossos in Crete of about 1500 BC is thought to represent a monkey, trained for the purpose, picking saffron flowers; but if this was the practice it has not been continued. Traditional practice in Spain has been described by Johnson (1992), who also draws attention in prose which itself has an amazingly graphic quality to a quintet of 19th-century paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts at Valencia, all on the theme of saffron (harvesting, processing, and the ‘Saffron Exchange’).
The maximum yield occurs in the third year after planting. In France (Gâtinais) saffron beds are uprooted and replanted after three years; in Spain every four years; in Italy (Piana di Navelli near Acquilia) every year; and in Kashmir every 10 to 15 years. The majority view among connoisseurs seems to be that the finest-quality saffron is that produced in SE Spain, but at least one eminent authority awards the palm to Iran.
Saffron has a spicy, pungent, bitter taste and a tenacious odour, so only a very small amount is needed to give flavour and colour.
In England, one of its uses was to flavour and colour cakes (see SAFFRON CAKE), particularly in Cornwall; and it is used for certain baked goods in various regions of N. Europe.
Saffron is an essential ingredient in the BOUILLABAISSE of Provence. It is used to flavour and colour many, but not all, rice dishes (for example, PAELLA) in Spain, and it is an essential ingredient of Milanese RISOTTO. The Portuguese also use it in rice dishes, and in various desserts.
Saffron is of great importance in Persian cuisine. It is used in many of their rice dishes including PILAF and SHOLA. The Moghuls, again, were responsible for introducing many of the dishes using saffron to India. These include Indian pilaf and BIRIANI dishes; meat and poultry preparations such as Shahi raan (royal roast leg of lamb with saffron raisin sauce); and desserts such as KHEER.
Since saffron is such a valuable commodity, less expensive substitutes are sold, either openly as substitutes or in some instances by deception. Two of the most common are TURMERIC, which provides a yellow colour but has nothing of the saffron flavour (and should never be used in sweet dishes), and SAFFLOWER.
READING:
saffron cake
or saffron bread (as some would call it) has a long history. In earlier centuries, as Laura Mason (1999) points out, saffron buns and cakes were made in various parts of England, although they are now regarded as a Cornish speciality. Sir Kenelm Digby (1669) gives an early recipe. It is for a rich yeast bread with butter, milk, sugar, sultanas, currants, and other spices as well as saffron.
Saffron breads are also made in Sweden, especially on 13 December, the feast of Santa Lucia. Enriched and mixed with fruit, candied peel, and almonds, the dough is shaped into plaits, crosses, and buns called Lussekatter, St Lucia’s cats. Traditionally, they are served by one of the daughters of the house, who dresses in a long white robe and a crown of lingonberry twigs and candles for the occasion.
sage
Salvia officinalis, a perennial and evergreen herb of the MINT family. It belongs to S. Europe and Asia Minor, but is now cultivated for culinary use in most temperate regions of the world. That grown in Dalmatia, on the Adriatic coast, is considered to be among the best.
In the classical world and medieval times the uses of sage were medicinal. However, although it retains to this day a reputation for restorative powers, sage gradually lost its importance in medicine and acquired instead, by the 16th century, a number of uses in European kitchens.
Sage is commonly used in Italy, e.g. in Fegato alla salvia (liver with sage) and also with eel at Venice (a practice echoed in Germany), besides many other dishes. In England the combination of sage and onion to make a savoury STUFFING (for pork or goose or in sausages) is common. In N. America, according to Rosengarten (1969), sage was for a time the most favoured culinary herb of all.
Generally, the robust flavour of sage is better suited to hearty dishes than to subtle ones. But what is called (for the obvious reason) Greek sage, S. fruticosa, is milder than S. officinalis and can be used with greater freedom.
Of the many other species in the genus, S. rutilans, called pineapple sage because of its pineapple scent, is one of those used as a flavouring for food, especially desserts. Another is S. lavandulifolia, which has a lavender scent. S. clevelandii, the blue sage of western N. America, is a third.
sage cheese
is moderately well known in England; sage DERBY is marbled green as a result of adding juice obtained from SAGE leaves to the curds when the cheese is being made, while sage LANCASHIRE has chopped sage leaves added to the curds, producing a stronger flavour. These sage cheeses were formerly associated with festivals. See also GREEN CHEESE.
In the USA, there is more to be said about techniques for making sage cheese, and it has been well and amusingly said by Bob Brown (1955). His search for the ‘real thing’ was eventually successful and he noted his reactions on tasting ‘genuine Vermont sage’:
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow! My taste buds come to full flower with the Sage. There’s a slight burned savor recalling smoked cheese, although not related in any way. Mildly resinous like that Near East one packed in pine, suggesting the well-saged dressing of a turkey. A round mouthful of luscious mellowness, with a bouquet—a snapping reminder to the nose. And there’s just a soupçon of new-mown hay above the green freckles of herb to delight the eye and set the fancy free.
sago
a light, almost pure STARCH obtained from the stems of various PALMS, especially the sago palms, Metroxylon sagu and M. rumphii.
Sago is used to a minor extent in western cooking, e.g. to thicken soups or sauces. The only dishes in which it has played a leading role are the sago puddings referred to at the end of this article.
In S. India, SE Asia, parts of Africa, tropical America, and among the Australian Aborigines, sago is made into a thick but translucent paste which is nutritious but whose texture and taste, unembellished, lack interest. Methods of brightening up this food include making it into a kind of ravioli stuffed with pork, groundnuts, and onion, as in Thailand.
The naturalist Alfred Wallace (1869) observed the sago production and cooking process in the eastern islands of Indonesia in the mid-19th century, and described its use:
[the] starch … which has a slightly reddish tinge, is made into cylinders of about 30 lb weight, and neatly covered with sago leaves, and in this state is sold as raw sago. Boiled with water this forms a thick glutinous mass, with a rather astringent taste, and is eaten with salt, limes, and chilies. Sago-bread is made in large quantities … The hot cakes are very nice with butter, and when made with the addition of a little sugar and grated cocoa-nut [sic] are quite a delicacy … Soaked and boiled they made a very good pudding or vegetable, and served well to economize our rice, which is sometimes difficult to get so far east.
The sago palms, which grow in the wetter parts of SE Asia, are the chief source of sago. But sago is also made from other palms whose main use is to produce such items as sugar, toddy (an alcoholic drink), dates, and ‘palm cabbage’. The CYCADS (archaic plants intermediate in form between a giant fern and a palm) include one species, Cycas revoluta, which is called the Japanese sago-palm since used for this purpose. For so-called ‘wild sago’ in the USA, see Florida arrowroot under ARROWROOT.
Whatever the kind of plant used, sago is extracted from the stem in the same way. The plant is first allowed to grow almost to maturity (about 15 years for a sago palm). Just before it flowers, when it has built up in a large store of starch in its stem, it is felled. The stem is split, the pith scraped out, ground, and repeatedly washed and strained to purify the starch. One sago palm may yield up to 400 kg (900 lb) of starch.
When sago is exported to western countries it is mixed to a paste with water and rubbed through a coarse sieve to make small pellets, thus giving it the familiar ‘frogspawn’ texture which is visible in a sago pudding. This texture delights a few cognoscenti in Britain but is repellent to the majority and has no doubt contributed to the virtual disappearance of the pudding from British tables. Its decline in favour has been a steep one. When sago was first imported around the beginning of the 18th century it was considered a superior substance, fine, delicate, and digestible. It was added to soups as well as made into puddings, and was also made into special dishes for invalids. Sago pudding may be baked or boiled, and its plainness relieved by adding fruit to it.
sailfish
Istiophorus platypterus, one of the great game fishes of the world, is closely related to the BILLFISH, like which it has a bill, but is distinguished by its lofty, sail-like dorsal fin. It used to be thought that there were various species, but these have been reduced to one with a worldwide range: the whole of the tropical Atlantic; Arabia to southern Africa; E. Africa across to the Pacific coast of America; Japan down to Australia.
Sailfish are relatively light in weight for their length (up to 3.5 m/12′). They are good edible fish, but generally less esteemed than the related MARLIN.
St George’s mushroom
Calocybe gambosa, used to be Tricholoma (or Lyophyllum) georgii, a name given because it often appears as early as St George’s Day, 23 April. It is not unlike the common FIELD MUSHROOM in appearance, but the edge of the cap is wavier and less tidy, and there is no ring on the stem. The cap may measure up to 15 cm (6″) across, but is commonly about two-thirds of this size. Both gills and cap are cream in colour. This mushroom grows in rings like the FAIRY RING MUSHROOM. It is an excellent edible. Dr Badham, the Victorian authority on edible fungi, declared it to be ‘the most savoury fungus with which I am acquainted’. His high opinion is echoed in continental Europe. It is not found later than July; but a close relation, the BLEWIT, appears in the autumn and is almost as good.
A related species, whose very different coloration is indicated by the English name ‘plums and custard’, is Tricholomopsis rutilans, common around conifer stumps in Europe and the east of the USA. McIlvaine (1902) opined: ‘The flesh when cooked is gummy, like the marshmallow confection. It is excellent.’
Another close relation, esteemed in many countries including Sweden and France (as clitocybe en touffe, referring to its habit of growth in clumps), is Lyophyllum connatum, a white mushroom of excellent quality which has an aroma of clover.
Saint-Nectaire
is a surface-ripened, semi-soft, French cheese made from whole milk. It resembles a rich and superior MUNSTER, but is produced in the Mont Doré district of the Auvergne. Its shape is a flat disc, and its typical weight is from 1.75 kg (3.5 to 4 lb). The rind is brightly patched with white, yellow, and red mould which it acquires through ripening in cool, damp cellars in Clermont-Ferrand. Its taste should be faintly acid but no more.
saithe
Pollachius virens, a member of the COD family which goes by various other names: coalfish or coley in Britain, and pollock (not the same as POLLACK) or Boston bluefish in the USA. With a maximum length of 120 cm (48″), this is a substantial fish. However, it is often caught much smaller and in places where it is especially appreciated there are special names for the juvenile sizes; for example, Shetlanders call the smallest sillack or sillock, while the larger year-old specimens are piltock. The species spans the N. Atlantic, descending to New Jersey on the west and the English Channel on the east. The catch on the east side is by far the greater.
For most people, fillets of the adult fish will be all that is available. These can be cooked like cod or haddock. However, the flesh is slightly grey in colour and less fine than cod, so cooks who are intent on a good presentation often use saithe, as in Norway, for fried fish balls or the like. Young saithe, where available, are highly esteemed, e.g. ‘breaded’ with oatmeal and fried, as in Shetland. In Orkney, where one-year-old fish are ‘cuithes’, these are traditionally split, salted, and dried over a peat hearth. Once fully dried, they are like wood and slightly phosphorescent. In some houses, so many would be hanging from the rafters that people could read by their light.
One of the German names for saithe is Seelachs, meaning ‘sea salmon’. Germans salt and smoke slices of it, so that they finish up with a salmon-like colour.
saké
a well-known Japanese alcoholic drink, usually referred to in English as ‘rice wine’ (although this is something of a misnomer, given that it is brewed), is familiar wherever Japanese restaurants exist as something to be served, often warm, in small decorated china cups. In Japan, however, it has another role, as a major ingredient in the kitchen, ranked by Tsuji (1980) with SOY SAUCE, MISO, and DASHI as one of what he terms the Big Four. He comments that the effects of saké are to tenderize; to suppress unwanted strong smells; to tone down saltiness; to remove or tame fishy flavours; and (an intriguing property, not explained in terms of chemistry) to preserve in a state of animation certain delicate flavours which might otherwise disappear. Japanese cooks also make use of saké as a pickling medium.
Saké, which is slightly stronger than MIRIN, is used sparingly, even when the practice of some cooks, who burn off the alcohol before use, is followed.
salad
a term derived from the Latin sal (salt), which yielded the form salata, ‘salted things’ such as the raw vegetables eaten in classical times with a dressing of oil, vinegar, or salt. The word turns up in Old French as salade and then in late 14th-century English as salad or sallet. At that time, in the medieval period, salads were composed of green leaves, sometimes with flowers. The 14th-century English recipe manuscript the Forme of Cury is quite clear on the specifics of a ‘salat’: several sorts of herbs, chives, green garlic, and onions, all washed and dressed with oil, vinegar, and salt. Later, at least in England, fruits such as orange and lemon were added (at least in a decorative role), and the 17th century was the era of what was called the grand sallet, which could have a multitude of ingredients. Thus Robert MAY (1685), in the first of no fewer than fourteen grand sallet recipes, instructs as follows:
Take a cold roast capon and cut it into thin slices square and small (or any other roast meat …), mingle with it a little minced taragon and an onion, then mince littice as small as the capon, mingle all together, and lay it in the middle of a clean scoured dish. Then lay capers by themselves, olives by themselves, samphire by it self, broom buds, pickled mushrooms, pickled oysters, lemon, orange, raisins, almonds, blue-fits, Virginia Potato, caperons, crucifix pease, and the like, more or less, as occasion serves, lay them by themselves in the dish round the meat in partitions. Then garnish the dish sides with quarters of oranges, or lemons, or in slices, oyl and vinegar beaten together, poured on it over all.
Of the others, the ‘grand Sallet of Alexander-buds’ is relatively simple—just the named buds ‘laid round about upright’ with capers and currants, carved lemon, sugar scraped over all, oil and vinegar.
The 17th century was evidently ripe for a single-subject book devoted to salads and in 1699, with just a year to spare before the 18th, it came: John Evelyn’s Acetaria, the first such book in the English language. Evelyn has evidently given much thought to definitions and categories. He announces that: ‘we are by Sallet to understand a particular Composition of certain Crude and fresh Herbs, such as usually are, or may safely be eaten with some Acetous Juice, Oyl, Salt, &c. to give them a grateful Gust and Vehicle.’ Roots, stalks, leaves, buds, flowers are what he is writing about; fruits, he says, belong to another class. Following him on these lines would deprive us moderns of having the anomalous tomato in our salad, but is yet in line with the clear distinction we make between ‘salads’ and ‘fruit salads’. To compare him with May: the catalogue which he gives of salad ingredients does not include fruits as such, although the grated rind of oranges and lemons is welcome among the herbs; and there is no sign of any meat, unless one counts the small red worm which, he warns his readers, often lurks in the midst of celery stalks, but which is of course to be discarded not eaten.
Evelyn considers the question whether to begin or end the meal with salad. He seems to think that the French begin with it and that this is a good plan (the salad slips down through the system and does not create obstructions for what follows), but creates an atmosphere of puzzlement by quoting the Roman poet Martial:
The Sallet, which of old came in at last,
Why now with it begin we our Repast?
Evelyn also gives his attention to salad dressings, but only after giving precise instructions for picking, cleansing, washing, putting in the strainer, swinging, and shaking gently the herbs. These, ‘spread on a clean Napkin before you, are to be mingl’d together in one of the Earthen glaz’d Dishes: Then, for the Oxoleon [his rather precious term for the dressing]; Take of clear, and perfectly good Oyl-Olive, three Parts; of sharpest Vinegar … Limon, or Juice of Orange, one Part; and therein let steep some Slices of Horse-Radish, with a little Salt.’ He has more to say, but this is enough to show that little has changed in the three centuries since he wrote, except that adding horseradish to what we now call a VINAIGRETTE is no longer a common practice, and international hotel cuisine, under American influence, now offers alternative dressings: typically two, Thousand Island and Blue Cheese.
Evelyn’s trailblazing was important for the English-speaking world, but he had been anticipated in Italy by Salvatore Massonio’s Archidipno, overe dell’insalata (1627). What both these works, and others, underline is the new status of salad in the 17th-century meal. Cooks and theorists viewed it as a linchpin dish in their attempts to separate the sweet from the sour in cookery, and central to their classicizing tendencies (Peterson, 1994).
In the 19th century there is evidence enough in Eliza ACTON (1855) and various gastronomic writers in the latter half of the century that salads and their dressing were taken seriously in England. Acton’s recipe for ‘French salad dressing’ is a model of its kind:
Stir a saltspoonful of salt and half as much pepper into a large spoonful of oil, and when the salt is dissolved, mix with them four additional spoonsful of oil, and pour the whole over the salad; let it be well turned, and add a couple of spoonsful of tarragon vinegar, mix the whole thoroughly, and serve it without delay. The salad should not be dressed in this way until the instant before it is wanted for table.
However, the liveliest writing on the subject came from the pen of Alexandre Dumas (1873), who quotes at length the diverting anecdote in Brillat-Savarin (1826) about the Chevalier d’Albignac, who made his fortune in London by dressing salads as his profession, but also expressed his own views, with obsessive detail to match that of Evelyn, on the choice of ingredients and describes his own (complex) method—a description which culminates with the lofty words: ‘Finally, I put the salad back into the salad bowl and let my servant toss it. And I let fall on it, from a height, a pinch of paprika.’
The 20th century has seen innovations in the treatment of salads in the western world, including the introduction of ‘warm salads’, an item of NOUVELLE CUISINE, but more lasting significance probably attaches to spreading awareness, for example in Britain, of salads from other countries, continents, and cultures. So-called ‘Russian salad’ (not really Russian—see Lesley Chamberlain, 1983, for a full account of this and of the different Russian perception of salads generally) was already familiar in the 19th century, but it is only more recently that the Middle Eastern salad TABBOULEH has begun to verge on ubiquity, while Salade niçoise (an infinitely refreshing and delicious mixture of, usually, lettuce, tomatoes, French beans, anchovy, tuna, olives, hard-boiled eggs with a vinaigrette dressing) is now a standard item hundreds and even thousands of miles away from Nice. American contributions such as Waldorf salad (apple, celery, and mayonnaise from 1896, and with walnuts from the 1920s) and Caesar salad had already become internationally popular in the first half of the century. Mariani (1994) has an exceptionally full entry on Caesar salad, invented at Tijuana in 1924 by Caesar Cardini. He explains among other things that Cardini did not approve adding anchovy to his original list of six ingredients: romaine lettuce, garlic, olive oil, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and Worcestershire sauce; he thought that any faint aroma of anchovy emanating from the Worcestershire sauce would be quite enough.
Later, Asian dishes which have to be counted as salads although they may not bear the name have received a welcome in other continents. Examples are Japanese aemono and sunomono (terms meaning ‘dressed things’—see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS); yam (yum) from Thailand; and items such as Indonesian vegetable salads of great flexibility such as urap, which has a coconut dressing, and karedok, which has a peanut dressing.
See also FRUIT SALAD.
READING:
salak
the Malay name for the fruit of several kinds of small, stemless palms which grow in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Burma. The best is Salacca edulis. The fruit is shaped like but smaller than a pear, and has a shiny brown scaly skin. The yellowish flesh is described as being slightly crisp in texture, with a pleasant blend of sugar and acid in the flavour. These palm fruits are cultivated in Bali, where at least two cultivars are especially prized.
The young fruit may be pickled. According to Uphof (1968) fruits preserved in cans, with salt water and sugar, are eaten by Muhammadan pilgrims during their journeys to Mecca.
The fruits of S. conferta are exceedingly sour, and are used in cooking in the same way as TAMARIND. The Chinese make them into a candied sweetmeat.
salamander
a noun but also as a verb, indicating the use of a salamander to brown the top of a dish, often giving it at the same time a crisp crust. The equipment consists of an iron disc mounted on the end of an iron rod, which is furnished with a wooden handle. The disc is heated red-hot, then passed to and fro over and close to the dish to be ‘salamandered’. Susan Campbell (1985), discussing this technique, points out that it is particularly appropriate in making a CRÈME BRÛLÉE, although used in the past for many GRATIN dishes.
Use of the term in a culinary context derives from the mythical lizard-like animal of the same name which was supposed to be able to survive or even live in the flames of a fire.
salep
a starchy powder made by drying and pulverizing the root tubers of certain plants of the orchid family, notably Dactylorhiza latifolia, Orchis mascula, O. militaris, and O. morio. The powder makes a beverage, either a cool and refreshing one in summer or a hot one for cold weather. Since it is an effective thickening agent, it has various food and medicinal uses; e.g. to thicken milk drinks and ice creams especially in the Middle East and parts of Asia.
The roots of the orchid have a testicle-like form, as the name orchid (Greek orchis, meaning testicle) suggests. Common English names include cullions, bollocks, dog’s cods, etc. The name ‘salep’ itself is Turkish from the Arabic thalab, meaning fox; and one step further back leads to the Arabic khusya th-thalab, meaning ‘fox’s testicles’. Not surprisingly, the roots have a reputation as a powerful APHRODISIAC. (Yet, paradoxically, salep is also thought to be wholesome and beneficial fare for children.)
The drink enjoyed a vogue in England under the name salop or saloop in the late 17th century. C. Anne Wilson (1973) records that the powder was stirred into water until it thickened, then sweetened and seasoned with rosewater or orange flower water. ‘At the height of its popularity salop was served in the coffee-houses as an alternative to coffee or chocolate; and salop-vendors peddled the drink in the streets, or sold it from booths.’ This beverage was supposed to have great nutritional qualities, and a certain mystery surrounded it; witness the incorrect statement by Hannah Glasse (1747) that it was made from a hard stone ground to powder. (When imported, the roots had been baked until semi-transparent and dried in the form of oval pieces, always hard and horny, yellowish-white, and sometimes clear. So it was easy to suppose that they were some sort of mineral or animal horn.)
However, the true home of salep is in SE Europe, Asia Minor, and the temperate parts of India, where the plants from which it is made grow. The Turks like it as a drink, and used to import the powder in large quantities from Armenia for its preparation. They usually make it by adding a little of the powder and some sugar to milk, bringing to and keeping at a boil until somewhat thickened, and then serving hot with cinnamon or cinnamon and ginger sprinkled on it. It is sold thus from great brass or copper urns by street vendors.
In parts of the Middle East, Iran, and Afghanistan salep is used in the making of ICE CREAM, giving it an elastic consistency. The Persian (Iranian) version is the best known of all ice creams in that country and, according to Margaret Shaida (1992), is known as Akbar Mashdi after the man who first produced it commercially in Tehran in the 1950s. The corresponding ice cream in Syria is called buza (not to be confused with the Turkish boza, which is a fermented drink made from grains such as millet or BURGHUL and rice).
The Turkish version of this ice cream is hakiki Maraş dondurması of which Holly Chase (1994) writes:
consumption of … genuine Marash ice cream made with salep remains one of [Turkey’s] more sensual gastronomic pleasures. Throughout Turkey in summer, Marash ice cream is widely sold by street vendors who stir their tubs of cool enticement with long wooden paddles. So strong is the association with Marash, which is both a province and a town in south-eastern Anatolia, that its vendors, even in Aegean resorts, are almost always folklorically dressed in costumes of the distant south-east—passementerie vests, baggy trousers and striped cummerbunds.
The same author makes four other interesting points about salep. First, the elastic quality of these ‘stretchy’ ice creams is not, as some writers state, due to the presence of MASTIC. It is true that mastic has elastic qualities and that it is often an ingredient of these ice creams. But it is there for flavouring purposes; the stretchiness of the ice cream is due to the salep which it contains.
Secondly, salep itself is almost tasteless and its thickening qualities are not readily distinguishable from those of arrowroot, potato starch, and cornflour. Indeed packets of ‘instant salep’ list cornflour as an ingredient, along with salep and sugar. The questions implicit in these observations leap to the mind; all the more so when one reflects that Claudia Roden (1985) considers that the substitution of cornflour for expensive salep is legitimate (and adds, incidentally, that Egyptians now commonly add grated coconut to the confection).
Thirdly, there are native purple orchids in England, whose roots were known in the past as ‘dogstones’, and the 1771 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which gives a good description of the selection and preparation of salep, suggests that British orchid roots are a reasonable substitute for the Middle Eastern ones.
Fourthly, there is a puzzle over the relationship between salep and the Egyptian drink called sahlab (sometimes given as sahleb or even shahlab). The orientalist Lane (1860), a meticulous observer, said that the vendors of sahlab would proffer ‘a thin jelly, made of water, wheat-starch, and sugar, boiled with a little cinnamon or ginger sprinkled upon it; or made as a drink, without starch’. Emerson (1908) follows Lane. In modern times, however, Claudia Roden (1985) gives salep (=sahlab) as the most important and indeed eponymous ingredient of this drink. This is as one would expect; but a question is left in the air—has the drink changed, or did the earlier authorities misunderstand its composition, or have there been two different drinks of the same name?
saliva
a secretion from three pairs of salivary glands in the mouth, has various components, including some sodium chloride (common salt) and sodium bicarbonate. The two which help most to prepare food for its passage to the stomach are a protein, mucin; and the enzyme ptyalin, a type of amylase. The former lubricates the food; the latter hydrolyses starch to maltose. A human adult normally generates 1–1.5 litres (1.75–3.5 pints) of saliva daily.
The BIRDS’ NESTS that are made into soup consist of dried saliva of birds.
Sally Lunn
a major enigma for food historians. It is not that there is doubt about what it actually is. It can be described as a round tea bread (or tea cake, the term some would prefer to use) made from a rich yeast dough containing flour, milk or cream, eggs, a little sugar, and sometimes a little grated lemon peel or mixed sweet spice. This may be made as one large or several small buns, and can be baked in a mould, or shaped by hand and baked on a sheet. A Sally Lunn is traditionally served very fresh, split into two or even three layers, with butter or clotted cream.
However, the derivation of the name is a subject which has excited many pages of prose. Ayto (1993) cites two references in print from the late 18th century. The earlier (from Philip Thicknesse’s Valetudinarian’s Bath Guide, 1780) tells of a fiddler who dropped dead after ‘a hearty breakfast of spungy hot rolls, or Sally Luns’. The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1798 also referred to them as hot rolls, ‘gratefully and emphatically styled “Sally Lunns”’. The name Sally Lunn (Lunn is more usual than Lun) is said to commemorate a woman baker of that name who had a pastry-cook’s shop and cried her wares in the street. Why not? A pleasant and plausible tale.
However, there is a complication. Eliza ACTON (1845) has a recipe for a ‘rich French breakfast cake’ called solimemne. This name appears in various forms, including solilem, and is thought to come from soleil et lune (sun and moon [cake]), since the product is golden on top (being glazed with egg) and pale underneath (or, say others, because it is golden outside and white inside). Dorothy Hartley (1954) ingeniously combines this derivation with the existence of the woman baker, declaring that what the latter cried ‘in her good west-country French was “Sol et Lune! Soleilune!”’ (On this theory, the woman baker would not have been called Sally Lunn.)
Many authors remark that the French solilem is of Alsatian origin. It has, however, proved difficult to find corroboration of this in French books about Alsatian cuisine or French reference works generally. Favre (c.1905) does give a recipe for Solilème, which is indeed not unlike standard recipes for a Sally Lunn, and says that it is of Alsatian origin (adding however that it is likewise known in Germany). He provides for making a large one (to be sliced horizontally into two or three layers, with lightly salted butter added between) or a number of small ones, all to be served hot. There must have been something to prompt this item in his encyclopedia, and indeed to prompt the meticulous Eliza Acton to give her recipe half a century earlier; but what? The earliest French reference which has come to light is in CARÊME (1815). This is long after the Sally Lunn was being cried in the streets of Bath, but just before Carême was in England (1816, working at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton). So the hypothesis that Carême ‘discovered’ the Sally Lunn when he was in England and decided to make what was doubtless a slightly adapted version of it, giving it a French name, does not work. Kettner’s Book of the Table by Dallas (1877) includes, however, a memorable salvo fired against Carême on the basis of that hypothesis:
The greatest cook of modern times, Carême, came over to England to minister to the palate of the Prince Regent. He did not stay long, but he stayed long enough to appreciate the charms of Sally Lunn and her ever memorable cake. He was a great cook, but a fearful coxcomb—an immeasurable egotist. If ever he made the slightest change in a dish, he vaunted the variation as an original idea, and thenceforward set up as the sovereign creator of the dainty. So it was that he dressed up Sally Lunn a little, and presented her to the Parisian world as his own— his Solilemne. The fact might well be forgotten, but there are stupid asses who will not let us forget it. They come over to England; they send up, among the sweets of a dinner, Sally and her teacake, rigged out in the height of the French fashion; and like an English dancer or singer who insists on Mademoiselle to her name, the good honest Sally that we know is announced as the incomparable Solilemne.
The persuasiveness of this prose is undimmed after more than 100 years. In default of further evidence, such as researchers in Alsace have recently searched for in vain, it is tempting to assume that Kettner had it more or less right, although a mystery remains: how did Carême learn about the Sally Lunn before he set foot in England?
salmagundi
(or salmagundy), a term dating from the 17th century, has been defined in the NSOED as ‘a cold dish made from chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions etc.’
In writing about salads of the 17th century, C. Anne Wilson (1973) explains the term thus:
Sometimes an egg and herb salad was further enhanced by the addition of cold roast capon, anchovies and other meat or fish delicacies. Late in the 17th century the name of salamagundi was applied to mixtures of this type, and was subsequently corrupted to ‘Solomon Gundy’.
The latter name has survived in N. America. The earlier name was derived from the old French salmigondis, of unknown origin according to the OED.
Hannah GLASSE (1747) has three recipes for Salamongundy, but sums up the essence of this dish at the end of the third recipe: ‘but you may always make a Salamongundy of such things as you have, according to your Fancy.’ She also says: ‘if it is neatly set out it will make a pretty figure in the middle of the table, or you may lay them in heaps in a dish; if you have not all these ingredients, set out your plates or saucers with just what you fancy.’ The reference to ‘heaps’ probably indicates a usual way of presenting this sort of salad; a series of overlapping layers based around a basin or deep saucer upside down in the dish.
The extreme permissiveness displayed by Hannah Glasse has also been at work in the field of spelling. ‘Sallid magundi’ is but one of numerous variants.
Helen Saberi
salmon
of which there are six well-known species, in the family Salmonidae, all belong to the northern waters of the northern hemisphere. The fish which have been called ‘salmon’ in Australia and S. Africa are not salmon at all.
The most famous salmon is Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon, whose range extended in times past from Portugal up to Norway and across by Greenland to N. America, probably down to the Hudson River. However, the life-cycle of this fish is such that it has increasingly come up against man-made obstacles in the last two centuries and is now not found at all in some places where it formerly abounded. The modern solution is to farm the fish (see AQUACULTURE), described below.
Every salmon starts life as a tiny blob in the deep gravel of a cold stream where the parent fish deposit their eggs. Out of the eggs come tiny alevins which soon emerge from the gravel and are called fry. As they gain in size, they become parr, a stage which lasts until they make their way down to the sea, undergo various changes designed to fit them for life in salt water, and acquire a new name, smolts.
Some salmon come back to their native rivers to spawn after only one year at sea. They are called grilse. Most, however, spend two to four years at sea, growing into fully adult salmon of 80–100 cm (32–40″) before they make the return journey. Arriving full of food and vigour at their home rivers, they then make what is often an arduous journey up to a suitable gravel bed, and deposit their eggs. They are ‘spent’ by the effort and no longer a valuable prize for anglers; indeed many just die.
It is on this return journey from the sea, as they enter the estuaries and then make their way first upriver and then upstream, that the traditional methods of catching them (nets at the river mouths, rod and line from the river banks) are used. The salmon were not in the past caught at sea because no one knew where they were. Now that they have been ‘found’, for example off the coast of Greenland, they can be caught there, and this has caused controversy. However, the depredations caused by sea fishing are of little importance by comparison with the harm done to salmon by the pollution or blocking of rivers. Similar problems have afflicted, to varying degrees, the five species of Pacific salmon which are listed in the box.
The mechanisms which enable salmon to return to the rivers from which they set out are complex and perhaps not yet fully understood, but amazingly effective. This ‘magic’ feature may help to account for the prominence of salmon in mythology.
Towards the end of the 20th century the ‘farming’ of salmon developed into a big business, with various results, some good and some undesirable. Farmed salmon can be marketed cheaply, and the supply has become so plentiful that there seems to be a risk of repetition of the situation which existed in some places in medieval times, when (to take one well-worn example) apprentices in the north of England stipulated that their free meals should not include salmon more than three times a week. There are also problems of pollution (caused by having huge numbers of fish in a confined space) and problems of quality (fish farmed in inferior operations tend to be fatty and less flavourful, and may have problems with parasites and other health hazards).
Cooking salmon is never a problem. Its firm meaty flesh is suitable for any of the standard methods, including the ancient ‘barbecue’ method of American Indians in the Pacific north-west, who would split a fish open, impale it on strong green twigs and set these at an angle in the ground beside an open fire. Salmon poached in a COURT BOUILLON and served cold with mayonnaise and a garnish of cucumber is a traditional treat in Britain.
Salmon also lends itself to various interesting cures. The most widespread is smoked salmon, a product made in many countries but perhaps at its best when prepared in Scotland or Ireland with wild salmon (note, incidentally, that ‘wild smoked salmon’ is an inappropriate description—it should be ‘smoked wild salmon’). See also, for the next most famous example, GRAVLAKS; and see CANNED FOODS; SMOKED FOODS.
The five species of salmon in the Pacific
These are the marine species. In addition, as Wheeler (1979) explains:
In several Canadian lakes there are landlocked salmon, which migrate from river to lake as if the latter was the sea. This is the ouananiche, a name borrowed from the local Indian dialect, and a famous game fish. Another landlocked salmon is the N. American sebago salmon, found in Sebago and other lakes and their associated rivers.
READING:
salmonberry
Rubus spectabilis, a relation of the BLACKBERRY and RASPBERRY, has a structure which resembles the latter more than the former, since the fruit, which is red or yellow-orange when ripe, pulls away from its conical receptacle.
The salmonberry is found in N. America, for example in SE Alaska and at suitable altitudes in the Pacific north-west. It is one of the numerous berries eaten by American Indians and used by them in making PEMMICAN. The name salmonberry is said by Charlotte Clarke (1978) to reflect the practice of eating the berries with half-dried salmon roe.
salmonella
BACTERIA which are one of the commonest causes of FOOD POISONING. There are many species, most of which cause vomiting, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain, and often a fever that may last for a couple of days. Usually the symptoms, although unpleasant, are not very serious in healthy people; but in the very young and old, and people with impaired immune systems, salmonella infection may be fatal.
Salmonella often infect poultry. They are killed by proper cooking and, since they do not produce toxins, the poultry is then safe to eat. If, however, frozen birds have not been properly thawed before cooking, the inside may not reach a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria and trouble results.
The infection can also affect eggs. Usually the contamination is restricted to the outside of the shell, but sometimes the organism gets into the bird’s oviduct and so affects the inside of the egg. Poisoning will then result if the egg is eaten raw or lightly cooked. A particularly troublesome species which achieved notoriety in the early 1990s is known as Salmonella enteridis phage type 4. This is often associated with infection from the contents of eggs.
The risks of salmonella poisoning from poultry or eggs seem to vary from virtual zero in some countries to quite substantial.
Ralph Hancock
ṣalṣ
an interesting Arabic culinary term which seems not to have been used since the 13th century, but which, by its use in that period, raises interesting questions about the culinary interchanges which took place between the Crusaders and their Arab adversaries.
Historians who study these interchanges look principally to Muslim Spain where Christians and Moors knew each other over a longer period and more peaceably than in the conflicts brought about by the Crusades. It is also commonly held, and correctly, that culinary influences passed from the Arab world to Europe, rather than in the other direction. However, Maxime Rodinson (1949) drew attention to a recipe in the 13th-century Arabic cookbook The Link to the Beloved for ‘a bread which the Franks and Armenians make, which is called aflāghūn’, and remarked that despite its Armenian name it resembled pain d’épices (see GINGERBREAD). In the same book there is a recipe called ‘Frankish roast’ (al-shiwāʾ al faranji). In this dish lamb is basted with the usual Saracen combination of sesame oil and rosewater, and the Frankishness of it seems to reside in the idea of spitting the animal whole, rather than cut up into small pieces in the Near Eastern fashion.
The most interesting of the western influences Rodinson found in The Link to the Beloved was ṣalṣ. In addition to the recipe in The Link there are several more: in both manuscripts of another 13th-century work, The Description of Familiar Foods, and one manuscript of a text related to it, The Book of Dishes. Although none of the manuscripts describes ṣalṣ as Frankish, the word is undoubtedly the same as salsa or sauce, evidently treated by Arabic as a collective noun. No other etymology is remotely likely, and there is more evidence in the fact that all the ṣalṣ recipes in The Description are either in a section on fish dishes or explicitly associated with fish. Because of the religious requirements of fasting, the Europeans may have had a more developed repertoire of fish dishes than the Syrians.
Charles Perry
READING:
salsify, scolymus, and scorzonera
a trio of European or Eurasian plants which it is convenient to treat together as they are closely related to each other within the family Compositae and are all used in similar ways as root vegetables.
None of the three is widely popular, but salsify, Tragopogon porrifolius, is the best known. It is a larger relative of the common wild plant goat’s beard, T. pratensis. Indeed Tragopogon means ‘goat’s beard’, a reference to the hairy seed ‘clocks’ of these plants. The meaning of porrifolium is ‘leek-leafed’, which is a fair description.
Wild salsify is native to the lands around the E. Mediterranean. It was probably eaten in classical times, but the earliest surviving mention of it is by Albertus Magnus in the 13th century. Cultivation began in Italy and France in the 16th century. In Britain the plant was grown first for its purple flower, attained a modest popularity as food in the 18th century, but relapsed into obscurity in the next. It has never been popular in the USA. Russia, France, and Italy are now the countries in which salsify is most grown and eaten.
The root of salsify, which resembles a long, white carrot, is not easily removed from the soil without damage. If it is broken it must be used at once, for it discolours and spoils quickly. Even when cutting up the plant for cooking it is advisable to drop the pieces into acidulated water to preserve their colour; a precaution which applies equally to scolymus and scorzonera.
Salsify root is usually baked or boiled, or made into a cream soup. To prepare it as a vegetable it is best to cook it unpeeled, but cut into large pieces, after which it is easy to remove the skin. Young salsify leaves are good in salads. Some gardeners grow the plant for its young shoot alone, earthing it up like Belgian ‘Witloof’ chicory to whiten it. In these circumstances the root will not develop, and is wasted. The smaller wild goat’s beard is like a miniature version of salsify in every respect except that its flowers are yellow. The roots have been gathered and eaten like those of salsify. In Italy the young shoots are picked for salads.
Scolymus, Scolymus hispanicus, is also known as Spanish salsify or Spanish oyster plant, names which it shares with scorzonera (see below). Another name, golden thistle, indicates correctly that it is a kind of THISTLE. The root resembles that of salsify in flavour; but, unlike salsify, it is branched. It is usual to boil it, peel it, scrape the flesh off the woody and inedible core, and mash it or make it into croquettes. Some people prefer it to salsify, especially in Spain, where it is a popular vegetable; others dismiss it as tasteless.
Scorzonera, Scorzonera hispanica, is sometimes called ‘black’ or ‘Spanish salsify’ or even, in earlier times, viper’s-grass. This latter because it was deemed an antidote to snake-bite and its name derives from the Italian scorzone or Spanish escorzon, venomous snakes, toads, or lizards respectively. The plant is native to a wider area than the previous two, and grows wild as far east as Siberia. Early uses were medical, but scorzonera gradually came to be accepted as a food rather than a medicine. In 1699 Evelyn wrote:
It is a very sweete and pleasant Sallet, being laid to soak out the Bitterness, then peel’d may be eaten raw or condited: but best of all, stew’d with Marrow, Spice, Wine. They likewise may bake, fry or boil them; a more excellent Root there is hardly growing.
Cultivation of the plant began in Spain and spread to the rest of Europe. It was usually cooked, though the leaves were eaten raw in salads like those of salsify.
The roots of modern varieties can be eaten raw without having to be ‘laid’, since they are not bitter, but on the contrary slightly sweet. The flavour of scorzonera is generally considered superior to that of salsify, but the thin root is even more easily damaged. A very sweet variety of scorzonera, formerly classified as S. mollis, is grown in Sicily and used to make sweetmeats. Indeed, de Candolle (1886, English edn) said that in Naples he had tasted ‘Scorzonera ices’; but he found them ‘detestable’.
salt
sodium chloride (NaCl), is commonly said to be essential to life, and this is broadly correct although strictly speaking what is essential is the SODIUM which is present in some foodstuffs in one form or another.
Salty is a basic TASTE, which we are equipped to detect by some of the taste receptors in our mouths. Salt is also important in the PRESERVATION of food, especially by SALTING in PICKLES.
Since prehistoric times much effort has been devoted to obtaining salt for use with food. Its characteristic as an essential culinary and dietary building block has made it central of trade and exchange from earliest times (salt roads) as well as critical to many episodes of political interaction, whether of taxation and social control or revolt and rebellion.
One main source of salt is the existence of underground deposits, from which it can be mined. Examples are the famous salt quarries at Nantwich in Cheshire, those at Lüneburg in Germany, and many others in various parts of the world. The other great source, which is inexhaustible, is the sea (or other naturally occurring briny waters), which is made to yield salt by a process of evaporation.
Rock salt is what the salt mined from underground is called, whether it is literally mined in solid form (a practice now rare) or pumped up to the surface and then evaporated, to be crystallized to the desired degree of fineness. In some countries rock salt is used only in crude form for preservation purposes and for use in ice cream machines etc. However, rock salt which has been processed to the extent necessary to make it edible is sold for use in the kitchen and in small salt grinders at table. Its flavour will depend on any impurities left in it, and these in turn depend on the source.
Sea salt is the category to which belong many of the kinds of salt specially prized by connoisseurs. These salts are presented in attractive flakes or crystals. Some of the finest are French, e.g. from Guérande in Brittany and Noirmoutier, and some places on the Mediterranean coast; from Trapani in Sicily; from the coastal salt pans in Tunisia; from the salinas of Majorca; and from numerous sites in other continents. That of Maldon in England is also renowned.
Much sea salt is evaporated by artificial means. However, there are many places, especially in the Mediterranean region, where traditional techniques are used, the sea water being drawn into large shallow ‘basins’ and left to evaporate by the heat of the sun. As this process takes place, the salt formed on the bottom of the pans will be affected, often in colouring, by the nature of the clay or other substrate forming the bottom. Higher up in the layer of salt will be crystals which have not come into contact with the bottom and remain pure white; and it is these which constitute in France the more expensive fleur de sel.
The writer Jeffrey Steingarten (2002) has surveyed with enlightened irony the tremendous variety of salts now available, from the most expensive Oshima Island Blue Label of Japan to roasted salt from Korea. His experiments to determine whether the best salts were also the dearest or most exclusive did not wholly confirm the need to follow fashion.
What is usually called table salt is most used in kitchens (but see the next paragraph) or at table. This is a mass-produced, refined product which comes in very small grains, has been treated to ensure that it pours easily even in slightly damp conditions (‘when it rains, it pours’ was a slogan for one brand), and is sometimes iodized (i.e. iodine, a trace element lacking in some diets, has been added).
Salt in the kitchen may be of various kinds, often the same as table salt but in large or professional kitchens likely to be something of coarser texture—or indeed a small selection of different salts, since the various purposes for which salt is used in the kitchen do not all call for the same kind. One overriding rule, especially important at a time when people are advised to lower their intake of salt, is not to use too much at any stage in the preparation of a dish; and to remember that what is prescribed in older recipe books may be too much by more recent standards. Otherwise cooks have to profit from the numerous explanations and tips given in cookery books and from their own experience. Examples of specific points to bear in mind are:
Although salt is now readily available and inexpensive, it was formerly in some places a costly commodity which loomed large in the economic and political fabric of many cultures. Ayto (1993), having explained that the word for salt in most European languages (French sel, Spanish sal, German Salz, Russian sol’) comes from a single Indo-European root, points out that:
Its cultural centrality is hinted at by such linguistic relatives as English salary, which originated as a Latin term for an allowance given to soldiers to pay for salt, Russian khleb-sol’, ‘hospitality’, which means literally ‘bread-salt’, and of course the English expressions salt of the earth, ‘admired person’ (a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’ Matthew, 5: 13).
There is a considerable literature on these aspects, and much has also been written on the technology from prehistoric times to the present, and on salt in religion and folklore. Multhauf (1978), who, following in the footsteps of a 19th-century German author whom he admired, devoted an entire book to the subject, especially the scientific and technological aspects, while disarmingly stating that his ‘attempt to cover the subject in all times and places must be taken with a grain of salt’, probably did more than any previous author towards this laudable aim. However, the world history of salt by Kurlansky (2002) is now the best survey of the whole subject.
Other salt terms
Bay salt, a term now little used, meant sea salt (which in practice does usually come from a bay) produced by natural means, i.e. salt produced by the heat of the sun playing on sea-water in shallow basins or reservoirs. See Webster (1861). The bay originally intended by the term was Bourgneuf Bay, south of the mouth of the Loire River, where salt production dates back to the 14th century.
Black salt (kala namak) is a salt used in India which is brownish-black in lump form but pinkish-brown when powdered. It is liked for its special taste and what has been called a ‘smoky aroma’ but more accurately might be described as sulphurous.
Block salt, now rarely made, was made by pouring freshly evaporated and still hot crystalline salt into moulds, where the crystals stuck together to make blocks. For use, salt was grated off the blocks.
Gros sel is a French term for bay salt/sea salt.
Korean bamboo salt is sea salt roasted in lengths of bamboo plugged with mud. The salt is rid of impurities and absorbs extra minerals from the container. It is extremely salty and usually thought medicinal.
Kosher salt, so called because it meets Jewish requirements, comes in large irregular crystals and has no additives. Readily available in N. America.
Pickling salt is designed for the purpose, dissolving quickly.
‘Salt upon salt’, in England in the 18th century, was an interesting curiosity. Rock salt mined in Cheshire was sent to the coast to be heated and dissolved in brine and then recrystallized.
READING:
salt cod
is COD which has been salted, usually dry salted (as opposed to being steeped in liquid brine), and then partially dried. After the salting, the water content of the fish will be just under 60%; after the drying, around 40%. (STOCKFISH is cod which has simply been dried, to the point where water content is around 15% and it is hard like a stick.) Depending on the degree of treatment, salt cod may have a white ‘frost’ of salt on it, or be creamy in colour.
| Fresh cod | Salt cod | |
| French | cabillaud, morue fraîche | morue |
| Portuguese | bacalhau | bacalhau |
| Spanish | bacalao | bacalao |
| Italian | merluzzo | baccalà |
One point which stands out from the table is that in some languages the same word is used for ‘cod’ and ‘salt cod’. These are languages of people who do not have fresh cod swimming in their waters and who have a long tradition of eating salt cod. So far as they are concerned, cod is salt cod! That goes for the Portuguese and the Spaniards. The French are in a different position, since they have a N. Atlantic coast as well as a Mediterranean one, and it is in French that the greatest possibilities of confusion exist. They use the word morue for salt cod, but also speak of morue fraîche, which is fresh cod, and in the north they have a completely separate and different name for fresh cod, ‘cabillaud’. The French also possess one of the best known of all salt cod dishes, Brandade de morue (see BRANDADE).
The Portuguese are the greatest enthusiasts for salt cod. They call it fiel amigo (faithful friend) and display great connoisseurship when visiting their special salt cod shops (e.g. in the rua do Arsenal in Lisbon, near the waterfront). Each such establishment will offer about a dozen different grades, and each has a fearsome guillotine-like contraption built into the serving counter, so that the merchant can slice off exactly the amount of the stiff unyielding stuff that the customer (of any class—salt cod knows no social barriers in Portugal) might want.
The Portuguese are not without competitors, such as Italians and Spaniards, and people in various parts of France, and the Caribbean islands and parts of S. America and Africa. But in many parts of the world salt cod arouses no emotion whatsoever and no one eats it (except for any immigrants of Portuguese or Spanish or Italian descent).
There are interesting historical reasons for all this. To set them out in full would involve the history of international and trade relations in the N. Atlantic over several centuries, the history of the Roman Catholic Church and its fast days, that of the slave trade and colonialism, that of shipbuilding and fishing gear, and also to some extent that of food conservation and cookery. Kurlansky (1997) offers guidance through these shoals.
To be brief, both salt cod and stockfish have their origins in early medieval times. Europeans, belonging to the Catholic faith and observing meatless days, needed a lot of fish, and stockfish from Norway was a valuable commodity as far back as the 10th century. Really large supplies of cod off the N. American coast, especially on the Newfoundland Banks, had possibly been located even at that time by intrepid fishermen from Iceland and Norway, but it was only after Cabot ‘discovered’ Newfoundland in 1497 that Europeans—with Portuguese, Spanish, French, and, ultimately, English fishermen in the lead—began to exploit this resource seriously.
This plenitude of American cod represented great wealth for anyone who could get it back to Europe. Methods of conserving fish at that time were (1) dry-salting and drying; (2) salting in brine; (3) just drying; or (4) smoking. Method (2) suited fatty fish, but not cod. Method (3), used for producing stockfish in Norway, would not work on the damp and misty shores of Newfoundland. Method (4), by itself, has only a marginal effect on keeping qualities. So method (1) was adopted. The cod were beheaded, split along the belly, cleaned, and rid of their backbones (except for a small piece by the tail). Then they were stacked with layers of salt between them, and the salt began to extract the water from them and replace it. Later, they would be dried and would become the salt cod of commerce.
The impact of this N. Atlantic trade was felt everywhere: from the small workshops manufacturing boots and shoes in S. Devon to afford ballast on the fishing vessels’ outward journey, to the merchants who benefited from the triangular trade between Newfoundland, S. England, and Portugal to develop fortified port wine to tickle the fancy of the 18th-century gentleman.
Technological advances in curing cod have been made since the 16th century; but the basics are still the same, and so are the procedures by which the product is prepared for consumption. There are many different views about how much soaking in fresh water is needed for this purpose; but a middle-of-the-road position would be that it should soak for eighteen hours, with three changes of water. The pieces are then scaled and cooked in any of several hundred ways. (An examination of books pertaining to salt cod in the National Library in Lisbon brought to light a remarkable compilation, already including over 100 recipes, by Febrósia Mimoso; but she was outdone by an anonymous work of 1927 which declared ‘more than three hundred’.)
salting
as a means of preserving food (see also PRESERVATION), has been practised since antiquity. The salt most used is common SALT, sodium chloride, but saltpetre (see NITRATES AND NITRITES), which consists of potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate, has similar effects. For some purposes ‘dry-salting’ is appropriate, for others the use of brine, which is salt in solution.
In its role in PRESERVATION of foods, salt operates mainly by its effect on osmosis, which is the passage of water through ‘semipermeable membranes’ such as the cell walls of plant or animal tissue, living or dead. A semipermeable membrane lets water through but blocks the passage of the bigger molecules of substances dissolved in it. When such a membrane has a strong solution on one side and a weak one on the other, water is drawn through it in one direction only, from the weak solution to the strong one, which it dilutes. This pull is called ‘osmotic pressure’.
Plant and animal cells contain relatively weak solutions of natural salts, sugars, and other dissolved substances. BACTERIA and other micro-organisms live comfortably in weak solutions of this sort, drawing in nutrients through the cell walls. If, however, these micro-organisms are exposed to a strong solution, such as one containing a lot of salt, the outward osmotic pressure created by the strong solution prevents them from feeding, and thus from reproducing. They may remain alive, and can return to normal functioning if the outside solution is diluted; but while the strong salt solution is present their activity is inhibited and the decay which they would otherwise cause is thus arrested.
However, decay is caused by ENZYMES naturally present in foodstuffs as well as by living micro-organisms. Salt also stops the working of enzymes by upsetting the electrical balance of the liquid in which they act. So a salt solution, if strong enough, will also prevent decay due to enzymes, and this can be observed when sliced apple is put in brine to stop it from browning.
The strength of the salt solution is important. Some micro-organisms can tolerate quite strong solutions. Among these are certain LACTIC ACID-producing bacteria which, rather than causing decay, bring about beneficial fermentations. For this reason, only a moderate amount of salt is used in some preparations, allowing these bacteria to grow while inhibiting others which would cause decay and which are less tolerant of salt. Examples are SAUERKRAUT, the KIMCH’I of Korea, SOY SAUCE, and other similar condiments. The lactic acid produced by the ‘good’ bacteria will itself be a safeguard against the growth of the ‘bad’ ones. Eventually the acid becomes so concentrated that even the ‘good’ bacteria are inhibited: fermentation stops and the food keeps.
Osmosis caused by salt is also exploited in the preparation of dry-salted foods such as dry salt fish and meat. The applied salt draws water out of the cells of the tissue, so that salt both speeds drying and suspends decay while the food is still sufficiently moist to be at risk. (See also DRYING.) The same effect is used when fresh cucumber is salted to make it a less watery salad ingredient; and to collapse the cells of aubergines before cooking them in oil, so that they will not absorb an excessive amount of oil.
TYPES OF SALT USED FOR PRESERVING
Purity is important. For example, extra pure pickling salt is sold, so that impurities will not cause discoloration in the pickles.
From the Middle Ages until well into the 19th century, the only fully satisfactory salt for curing meat and fish was considered to be bay salt, made by solar evaporation from sea water on the coasts of France and the Iberian peninsula, and valued for its good flavour as well as for its purity. The preference for bay salt, which would now be called sea salt, had another reason. Because the process of solar evaporation is slow, large crystals tend to be formed. These dissolve relatively slowly in any curing process, avoiding the risk of what is called ‘salt burn’, an unwelcome phenomenon which occurs when fine salt is used; this dissolves quickly and produces a sudden high concentration, which at once dehydrates the outer layers of the food, making them relatively impervious and denying the benefit of salting to the inner layers.
salt pork
which is simply raw PORK preserved either with dry SALT or in brine, is sometimes called pickled pork. It was formerly an important staple of European and N. American kitchens.
Canning, freezing, and chilling have made brine unnecessary for preserving pork; when it is now prepared, it is because people have acquired a taste for it. This is not surprising, as salt meat has been prepared in Europe for at least 2,000 years and was known to both the civilized Romans and the supposedly barbarian Celts.
A major use of salt pork in the recent past was for provisioning ships. Thomas Bewick (1807) observed that pork ‘takes salt better than any other kind [of meat], and consequently is capable of being preserved longer: it is therefore of great use in ships, and makes a principal part of the provisions of the British navy.’
Any part of the pig can be preserved with salt, and some products are so altered by the process and sought after for their own sake that they are known under specific names, such as BACON or HAM. Pork fat, too, is salted and kept for adding to stews and soups, especially in S. Europe, a practice which was also followed in Britain in the last century.
When fresh pork was commonly salted for PRESERVATION, either brine or dry salt was used according to the preference of the curer, and the meat was treated as soon as it was properly cooled after killing. The meat was cut into pieces weighing about 1 kg (2.25 lb). As is common with cured meat, saltpetre was added to the cure, giving the meat a pink colour; spices were also used to taste. Bay leaves, onions, cloves, and allspice were called for in a recipe from the southern USA. After a few days dry-salted pork produced brine simply by the action of salt drawing fluid out of the meat. The pork was kept submerged in the brine, usually packed in barrels, and large quantities were generally prepared, to provide a supply of meat to last some time. It was considered ready to use after about 12 days, and would keep for one to two years, depending on climate and the skill with which it was prepared. To cook it, the meat was simply simmered gently in water. Saltiness was reduced by soaking the meat before cooking and changing it during simmering if necessary.
Even now, lightly salted pork is still used for its good flavour in European peasant cookery. The cooked meat is served with mashed potatoes, cabbage, purées made from dried pulses or other vegetables, or put into composite dishes such as CASSOULET or POT-AU-FEU.
Laura Mason
salts
a wide range of chemical compounds including common SALT. The scientific definition of a salt is a compound formed when the hydrogen of an ACID has been replaced by a metal; a rule is that when an acid reacts with an ALKALI the product is a salt plus water. For example, the formula of hydrochloric acid is HCl—one atom of hydrogen and one of chlorine. The acid reacts with sodium, Na, to make common salt or sodium chloride, NaCl. The hydrogen has been replaced by sodium. In this case the hydrogen is released as a gas. For an example of a reaction between an acid and a base, one may again take hydrochloric acid, this time reacting with caustic soda or sodium hydroxide, NaOH—one atom each of sodium, oxygen, and hydrogen. The reaction is:
Again, common salt is formed, leaving two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, which form water, H2O.
Things are not always that simple. Often only some of the hydrogen of the acid is replaced. The result is an ‘acid salt’ with some available hydrogen which has an acid effect when the salt is dissolved in water. An example is CREAM OF TARTAR (potassium hydrogen tartrate), whose formula is C4O6H5K. K is the symbol for potassium.
Salts are conventionally named after the metal and the acid that could be used to make them; for example the hard mineral in bone, calcium phosphate, could be made by a reaction between calcium and phosphoric acid. The ending ‘-ide’ denotes a compound of two elements only (such as sodium chloride); ‘-ate’ means that some oxygen is present; ‘-ite’ means that there is a smaller amount of oxygen. Any other extras are added to the name (as in potassium hydrogen tartrate). Making this scheme uniform has involved changing some of the traditional names of salts.
Other salts used in the kitchen include saltpetre (sodium or potassium NITRATE), BICARBONATE OF SODA, alum (aluminium potassium sulphate, a ‘double salt’ containing two metals), and waterglass (sodium silicate), formerly used to seal the shells of eggs to make them keep longer. Sea salt is mostly sodium chloride but also contains magnesium chloride, magnesium sulphate (better known as Epsom salts), potassium sulphate, calcium carbonate (dissolved limestone), potassium bromide, and sodium bromide, among many other salts.
Ralph Hancock
sambal
the Indonesian/Malaysian word for a wide range of side dishes and CONDIMENTS, mostly hot and spicy. Some are uncooked, others are cooked.
The term can mean, specifically, a hot CHILLI condiment or sauce. Or it can mean (as in the phrase sambal goreng, fried sambal) the mixture of chillies and other spices fried together as the basis of a highly spiced savoury dish. In the broadest sense it can indicate any side dish (of meat, fish or vegetables) to accompany rice.
Finally, it sometimes refers to a main dish, for example sambal goreng cumi-cumi, which is squid in a sauce of the fried sambal referred to above.
The basic Indonesian sambal, in the first specific sense listed above, is sambal ulek, an uncooked mixture made by crushing chillies, with a little salt and some lime or lemon juice or vinegar, in a mortar with a pestle. Sambal udang contains in addition prawns or shrimps, sambal terasi (see BLACANG) includes a pungent shrimp paste, sambal bajak a combination of spices and other flavourings, etc.
The sambols of Sri Lanka are parallel preparations, thus defined by Chandra Dissanayake (1976): ‘Any type of uncooked mixture containing vegetable, coconut or fruits with seasoning added. Other condiments may be used. Usually onions, chillies and some form of acid is used.’ The name crops up elsewhere too with slightly different spellings but always recognizable. The Cape Malays were responsible for introducing their sambals into S. Africa, where they are an important part of Cape Malay cuisine and have evolved into some new forms suited to the different range of produce available there.
sambar
the name of the soupy dish or stew which (with many variations) is eaten all over the south of India, using sambar podi/masala as the spice mixture, see MASALA. It is usually fiery hot, because of the presence of red CHILLI pepper in this. It also contains black PEPPER, TURMERIC, CORIANDER seeds, FENUGREEK, CUMIN SEEDS, and also—an unexpected touch in a spice mixture—small amounts of DAL (split pea), e.g. chana, urd, and arhar dal.
samosa
(samoosa) are small, crisp, flaky pastries made in India, usually fried but sometimes baked. They are stuffed with a variety of fillings such as cheese, cheese and egg, minced meat with herbs and spices, vegetables such as potatoes, etc. Sweet fillings are also popular. Samosas are usually eaten as a snack, often as a street food.
The Indian version is merely the best known of an entire family of stuffed PASTRIES or DUMPLINGS popular from Egypt and Zanzibar to C. Asia and W. China. Arab cookery books of the 10th and 13th centuries refer to these pastries as sanbusak (the pronunciation still current in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon), sanbusaq, or sanbusaj, all reflecting the early medieval form of this Persian word: sanbosag. Claudia Roden (1968) quotes a poem by Ishaq ibn Ibrahim al-Mausili (9th century) praising sanbusaj. An ancient and widespread recipe for the dough in both India and the Near East is: ‘1 coffee cup of oil, 1 coffee cup of melted butter, 1 coffee cup of warm water, 1 teaspoon of salt. Add and work in as much flour as it takes.’
In the Middle East the traditional shape of sanbusak is a half-moon, usually with edges crimped or marked with the fingernails; but triangular shapes are also used. In India triangular and cone-shaped samosas are popular. In Afghanistan, where the name is sambosa, and in the Turkish-speaking nations, where it is called samsa (and variants), it is made both in half-moon shapes and triangles.
Sedentary Turkish peoples such as the Uzbeks and the people of Turkey itself usually bake their samsas, but nomads such as the Kazakhs fry them. Occasionally samsas will be steamed, particularly in Turkmenistan.
These pastries were still made in Iran as late as the 16th century, but they have disappeared from most of the country today, surviving only in certain provinces; e.g. the triangular walnut-filled sambüsas made in Larestan. However, the Iranians of C. Asia, the Tajiks, still make a wide range of sanbusas, including round, rectangular, and small almond-shaped ones.
In India, savoury samosas are usually served with a chutney of some sort. Sweet samosas are also popular, as in the Middle East. The usual Arab sanbusak is filled with meat, onions, and perhaps nuts or raisins, but sanbusak bil loz is stuffed with a mixture of ground almonds, sugar, and rose or orange blossom water. In Iraq and Arabia dates are a common filling; while in Afghanistan HALVA or raisins are often used.
In C. Asia, the versions made with rough puff pastry (waraqi såmsa, sambusai varaqi) are filled with meat. Those made with plain dough (leavened or unleavened) may be filled either with meat or other fillings such as diced pumpkin, chickpeas, herbs, wild greens, fried onions, mushrooms, or dried tomatoes.
The ‘patties’ of Sri Lanka and ‘curry puffs’ of Malaysia also derive from samosa and are variations on the same theme.
Charles Perry/Helen Saberi
samphire
the name of two species of plant which are often confused although not closely related. They have, however, characteristics in common, especially in appearance, and both are pickled for table use. Rock samphire, Crithmum maritimum, is the important one. It belongs to the Umbelliferae family along with celery, fennel, etc. Marsh samphire, Salicornia europaea, is a chenopodium (of the beet family) and is more available but less prized. If one comes across a reference to ‘samphire’ in an old cookery book (or indeed a modern one), it is sometimes difficult to tell which sort is meant. As Jane Grigson (1978) observed, it would have been a great convenience if everyone had agreed long ago to call marsh samphire by its alternative name glasswort (given because it used to be burned to provide alkali for glass-makers).
Rock samphire, also known as sea or true samphire, originated in the Mediterranean. The name ‘samphire’ (and its earlier versions, sampere and sampier) came from a French name herbe de Saint-Pierre. The French called it thus because it grows among the rocks and shingle of sea coasts and on cliffs, and therefore seemed to belong to the fisherman saint called Peter (Petros in Greek, meaning rock).
Rock samphire is a small woody shrub with long, thin, fleshy leaves which have a powerful resinous aroma, variously described as being reminiscent of varnish or sulphurous, but are nonetheless wholesome and appetizing. (Any undesirable smell or taste disappears when samphire is pickled and it then makes a tasty relish for cold meats or salads.)
Both the Greeks and Romans used it in salads and also lightly steamed it to be eaten as a vegetable. Pliny (1st century AD) wrote that Theseus had a meal with samphire before leaving to fight the Minotaur.
Pickled samphire was once so popular and saleable in England that men risked their necks to collect it from the cliffs. Robert Turner wrote of samphire gathering on the cliffs of the Isle of Wight, in 1664, that it was ‘incredibly dangerous … yet many adventure it, though they buy their sauce with the price of their lives’. Pamela Michael (1980) cites a 17th-century eulogy: ‘of all the sawces (which are very many) there is none so pleasant, none so familiar and agreeable to Man’s body as samphire.’
Rock samphire’s popularity declined by the end of the 19th century due to its scarcity. Very often the inferior marsh samphire (see below) or perhaps golden samphire, Inula crithmoides (syn Limbarda crithmoides), would be substituted.
Samphire leaves are best in spring, until early summer, before the plant flowers and when it is bright green and fresh. The raw plant’s strange aroma is too strong for salads so it is best boiled briefly in water, drained, and butter added. Prepared in this way samphire marries well with fish. Davidson (1979) describes a simply made purée of samphire with butter as a fish sauce of good green colour.
Marsh samphire, as noted above, is also known as glasswort from its former use in soda glass manufacture. It and some close relations (hard to tell apart) are found near the sea, particularly around estuaries where all the mineral and trace elements are washed down from the highlands above. They are abundant in soda and were harvested, dried, and then burnt. Their ash (sometimes called barilla, the common name for one of them, Salsola soda) was used in the production of glass; hence the name ‘glasswort’. In N. America the colloquial name ‘chicken claws’ is used for these plants.
Jane Grigson (1978) tells us that in Norfolk and Suffolk marsh samphire is boiled and eaten as a vegetable and regarded as a summer delicacy. She goes on to suggest: ‘Boil it until just tender—better still, steam it—and serve it with melted butter or an hollandaise sauce.’
Marsh samphire is more salty than rock samphire and does not have the same powerful aroma.
The current French name for marsh samphire is salicorne, while rock samphire is criste marine. But there seems to have been confusion in France (as well as in Britain—and no doubt elsewhere) between the two samphires. Indeed, as Philip and Mary Hyman point out in Le Patrimoine culinaire de la France: Pays de la Loire (1993), both of these plants may also be designated by the name percepierre (literally ‘pierce rock’) which logically should refer to rock samphire, and at least one 18th-century French author describes criste marine as growing on the edge of marshes! In recent times marsh samphire has been sold by fishmongers as a vegetable (confusingly presented as a kind of ‘seaweed’), but traditionally both samphires are pickled; as long ago as the beginning of the 17th century the author of the Trésor de santé (1607) described how criste marine (percepierre) was to be preserved in vinegar, in much the same way as nowadays.
Helen Saberi
READING:
Samsoe
(exported as Samsoe but the name written as Samsø in Danish), the best known of Danish cheeses, has changed much since the islanders of Samsï won a reputation for cheese-making in the early Middle Ages. Denmark has long been a major producer and exporter of cheese, and has had an eye on world markets. In 1800 a landowner, Constantin Bruun, invited Swiss cheese-makers to his estate to make an Emmental-type cheese, which they did; and this was the origin of modern Samsoe. Over the years it has become much more like a Danish cheese than a Swiss one—softer and milder than its original, although a properly matured Samsoe can have quite a well-rounded flavour. It is made in broad wheels weighing about 14 kg (30 lb), and has largish holes or ‘eyes’ like those of the original Emmental.
sandalwood
a name of Indian origin, refers to various small trees and shrubs native to E. Indonesia, the Pacific islands, and N. Australia. Most are of the genus Santalum, but the Australian genus Eucarya furnishes wood with a similar fragrance.
The trees are best known as the source of aromatic wood and roots, used as incense and for religious and medicinal purposes. They have fruits which are edible, but mostly without merit, although in some species the seed kernels constitute excellent nuts. These have a normal flavour, without the heavy fragrance of sandalwood, which would be unwelcome in a food.
In medieval and early modern Europe, there were red, yellow, and white ‘sanders’ or ‘saunders’ (from the Old French sandre) sometimes called sandalwood. They were used mainly for their colour, but figured too in the pharmacopoeia. They were extracted from the wood of different trees. The red came from Pterocarpus santolina, while the yellow and the white are both products of Santalum freycinetianum. The practice continues in C. Europe, for example in the red Christmas biscuits (Wygützli) of Switzerland, and also the type of marzipan known as Züri Leckerli. See also NUT BISCUITS.
The S. Australian sandalwood tree, Eucarya acuminata, bears the QUANDONG or Australian peach, a fruit of some importance.
sand-bug
also known as sea cicada, Hippa asiatica, an engaging little creature which looks something like a crab, a prawn, a beetle.
The sand-bugs, considered a delicacy in Thailand, are whitish-yellow in colour and measure from 3 to 6 cm (about 1–2″). They are best sought after high tide, when the waters have swept them up onto the beach; but they must be sought quickly, for their habit is to dig themselves holes in the wet sand and it is difficult to extract them from these. The island of Phuket is famous for them and people there proudly tell visitors that the royal family of Thailand order them for state banquets, even 20,000 at a time.
The head is cut off and the carapace removed, then the bodies are deep fried and served as crunchy little morsels with a sauce or with ‘jungle honey’ (i.e. honey gathered from the wild).
sand crab
a name which can be applied to any of the numerous species of CRAB which in any part of the world have a sandy beach as their habitat, but particularly applied in W. Africa to Ocypoda africana. This crab, whose carapace may measure 5 cm (2″) across, lives in burrows in the sand, chiefly around the high-water mark. It excavates the burrow by moving sideways in the desired direction, pausing every now and then to whisk the excavated sand out of the opening, and sometimes to flatten the mound of sand thus produced outside. It emerges at night to forage for food. It is a very alert creature and a rapid runner, so not easily caught, but is in demand, especially for the red eggs which females may have on the underside of their carapace.
sand-eels
small silvery fish of the genera Ammodytes and Gymnammodytes, are widely distributed and numerous in the northern hemisphere, but commonly destined to furnish food for other fish, or to be turned into fish meal, rather than for human consumption.
In the N. Atlantic, Ammodytes tobianus is the common inshore species, while A. marinus is its offshore counterpart. Most authorities distinguish A. americanus as the N. American sand-eel. It belongs to the eastern seaboard; the corresponding species of the Pacific north-west is A. hexapterus, with a range extending as far as Japan.
The main species in the Mediterranean, where it seems to be confined to the northern coasts only, is Gymnammodytes cicerelus.
It used to be the practice to call the smaller ones sand-lances. Whatever their size, these fish have one habit in common, which is to bury themselves in the sand for protection. Their lancelike form enables them to burrow rapidly downwards for a foot or more, often in the intertidal zone, and there they will stay for hours on end.
At one time there was a vogue for ‘fishing’ for them with special rakes at Portobello near Edinburgh and in SW England, where they abounded. Certainly, they were more often cooked in the 19th century than now. Eliza Acton (1855) observed that:
The common mode of dressing the fish, which is considered by many a great delicacy, is to divest them of their heads, and to remove the insides with the gills, to dry them well in a cloth with flour, and to fry them until crisp. They are sometimes also dipped in batter like smelts.
sandesh
a Bengali speciality, esteemed as the finest of INDIAN SWEETS. The name originally meant ‘news’, referring to the custom of sending sweets by messenger to one’s friends and relatives when enquiring for their news, with which the messenger would return. The Bengali word tattura also means ‘presents of sweets’.
There are innumerable types of sandesh, but all are made from the same basic mixture of pressed curd and sugar or syrup cooked together, sugar being preferred as giving a better flavour. The more curd in the mixture the finer the quality, so that the best sandesh, with four times as much curd as sugar, are less sweet than cheaper types with up to twice that proportion of sugar. The mixture takes on a texture like that of fudge. It may be stuffed, for example with a mixture of khoya (condensed milk, see MILK REDUCTION) and nuts. Often it is pressed into decorative shapes in small wooden moulds; otherwise simply cut into pieces. Some kinds of sandesh are named for their shape: gutke (flat ended) or badam takti (takti means lozenge shaped; badam, the ‘Indian almond’—see MYROBALAN—used in the mixture). They may be pressed in the shape of fruits, with which they are flavoured and whose name they bear: for example, am sandesh is flavoured with preserved mango and shaped like a mango, and there are also ata (custard apple) and kamranga (sour plum) sandesh. Other sandesh are stamped with, and named for, mottoes, proverbs, and the like: sukhe theko (‘God bless you’), pati param guru (‘the husband is the wife’s guru’) are examples. In British India English mottoes were common: ‘forget me not’ and even ‘God save the King’.
sandwich
a term, and indeed an object, whose origin is generally attributed to John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who according to the NSOED is ‘said to have eaten food in this form so as to avoid having to leave the gaming table’. Ayto (1993) cites a work of 1770, Londres, by the author Grosley in support of this view, and remarks that the first use of the word in print occurs in the journal of Edward Gibbon for 24 November 1762, when he had dinner at an establishment which he regarded as ‘truly English’ and was able to observe numerous important contemporaries supping off cold meat ‘or a Sandwich’.
Sandwiches take so many forms in the modern world that a catalogue would be a book. A complicating factor is that the classic formulation of two pieces of bread either side of a filling has been extended to innumerable variations such as the Scandinavian open sandwich (the Danish smørrebrød—another 19th century innovation, see also SMÖRGÅSBORD), filled flatbreads as served in DONER KEBAB shops, or the soft tortilla wraps that have spread beyond Mexico; and even sometimes to encompass the French tartine (bread buttered and topped by preserves, meat, or cheese) or the Italian bruschetta. These, like the CANAPÉ, should not qualify as sandwiches at all. Nor, in truth, should the English ‘butty’, which at the start meant the same as tartine or smørrebrød. However, the bacon and the chip butty (cf. the Belge of francophone countries) have brought it into the fold.
The importance of the sandwich to western habits of eating is incalculable. It appears perfectly moulded to the currents of social change that have encompassed personal mobility, work habits, and the multiplication of households. In the USA, the Subway chain has more stores than McDonald’s. In Britain, expenditure on sandwiches constitutes 38% of all spending on FAST FOOD, nearly double that on hamburgers. And the sandwich has penetrated cultures that might have seemed proof against it. Italian panini are filled rolls of many shapes and sizes (often grilled), now experiencing a surge of popularity beyond Italy itself. The Spanish bocadilla likewise— reserving the word sándwich for American- or English-style offerings between slices of white bread. The French as well have embraced the filled baguette.
Sandwiches lent themselves to commercial exploitation through specialist outlets as well as being simply made supplements to a restaurant or tavern menu and an easy packed lunch for worker or schoolchild. In Mayhew’s London of 1850 there were already 70 street vendors selling ham sandwiches. In western Holland, sandwich bars, serving liver and salt beef sandwiches, were commercially important from the 1850s. Perhaps the richest sandwich culture is that of America where cities have been quick to claim a particular form as their own, and where a habit of excess seemed well suited to sandwich-makers’ creative invention. Some of the more remarkable types are:
Butties (see above) and sarnies are English slang terms for sandwiches, the former north country and long established, the latter more recent. In terms of gentility a Liverpool chip butty is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the decorous and delicate little cucumber sandwiches which appear on British afternoon tea tables.
Fernie (1905) had a remarkable knack for picking up amusing and arresting anecdotes or quotations to enliven what he wrote about foods. Here are three examples from his entry on Sandwich.
Finally, Giacomo Casanova recorded an early instance of the abiding urban myth of a prostitute consuming her earnings in a sandwich or, in this case, a butty. He tells of meeting the notorious courtesan Kitty Fisher (d. 1767) who ‘had eaten a bank-note for a thousand guineas, on a slice of bread and butter, that very day. The note was a present from Sir Akins, brother of the fair Mrs. Pitt. I do not know whether the bank thanked Kitty for the present she had made it.’
READING:
sansho
(or Japanese prickly ash) Zanthoxylum piperitum, a deciduous spiny shrub, grows wild throughout Japan and in N. Korea and parts of China. The Japanese also cultivate it at home for culinary purposes, especially the preparation of the spice called sansho. The orange-coloured berries are harvested and dried in the sun and ground to make this. The bitter, black seeds inside are better discarded before the grinding. Sometimes the powder is combined with ordinary black pepper.
The spice has been called ‘Japanese pepper’ but its flavour is tangy rather than hot, and it has a slightly numbing effect in the mouth. Sansho is used in Japanese cooking to add a sharp note to fatty foods, eels for example. Other uses include the preparation of kiri-sansho, the cake which is a speciality of Tsuruoka. The sansho powder is blended with flour and kneaded into a cake.
Pestles made of prickly ash are highly valued because the extreme hardness of the wood gives them a long life and does not impart any flavour to what is being ground.
In spring the young leaf shoots are used to garnish all kinds of food. The leaves may also be boiled with meat or fish to suppress strong smells; added fresh to various dishes as a flavouring; or preserved by boiling down with sugar, soy sauce, and water.
Two minor related species are also used as spices. Z. armatum (=Z. alatum) is winged prickly ash, whose seeds may be met in various parts of Asia, sometimes as ‘Chinese pepper’, and are used in Nepal as timur to impart a minty flavour to dishes. Z. planispinum has peel which is used as a spice. But the important relation is Z. simulans, which is SICHUAN PEPPER.
If only to forestall confusion, mention should also be made here of Z. rhetsa, often called Indian pepper, or lemon pepper, or, in Nepal, timur, whose bark and unripe fruits are used as a sharp flavouring which has citrus overtones. It is also necessary to note that this species and both Japanese prickly ash and the Sichuan pepper plant were formerly classified in the genus Fagara, and that this obsolete classification seems to have given rise to the use of a vernacular name ‘fagara’ for sansho or its relations. Such usage is now seen to be inappropriate but survives in some older books.
santol
Sandoricum koetjape (formerly S. indicum), a fruit tree of Malaysia and elsewhere in SE Asia, which also grows in Mauritius.
It grows fast and produces an abundance of round fruits which have a tough, yellowish-brown rind enclosing five segments of white pulp. This is eaten fresh, dried, or candied, or (as in Thailand) pickled. Filipinos seem to be the greatest enthusiasts for santol, and are breeding trees of superior quality.
sapodilla
sapotilla, sapodilla plum, sopota, zapote, chico sapote, chiku/ciku, naseberry, and even tree potato, are all names for the fruit of Manilkara zapota, a medium-sized evergreen tree native to Mexico and C. America. The Aztec name zapotl gave rise to the whole group of names such as zapote and sapodilla, the wide use of which can be confusing: see SAPOTA.
The tree, which also produces the gum chicle, from which CHEWING GUM is made, was cultivated in the region long before the arrival of the Spaniards. Lintels made from its timber have been found in Mayan ruins dating from about AD 470. The Spaniards liked the fruit and introduced it to the Philippines, whence it spread gradually through SE Asia, reaching India in the 19th century. Cultivation began in Australia more recently.
The fruit is a round or oval berry between 5 and 10 cm (2–4″) in diameter, with a rough brown skin. It must be eaten ripe, since latex and tannin present in the unripe fruit give it an unpleasantly astringent taste. As the fruit ripens, on or off the tree, its skin becomes less rough and hard, and reveals a yellow colour when scratched, instead of the green which unripe fruit would show. The flesh is also yellow-brown, or pinkish-brown, with a soft, translucent juicy pulp containing large, flat, black seeds which are easy to remove. The aspect of the interior resembles that of a pear, except for the seeds seeming bigger. The French botanist Descourtilz described it as having ‘the sweet perfumes of honey, jasmine, and lily of the valley’. Another comparison is with brown sugar. The ripe fruit may also have a slightly granular texture, reminiscent of half-dissolved sugar.
The sapodilla is usually eaten raw, though in the W. Indies it may be boiled down to make a syrup. Some prefer to eat it when thoroughly overripe, like a MEDLAR. This is reflected in the name ‘naseberry’ from the Spanish níspola (medlar) and in the French nèfle d’Amérique (American medlar).
sapota
or sapote is the Anglicized form of the Latin American name zapote. These names are applied to numerous American tropical fruits, of which some but not all are related to each other within the family Sapotaceae. The word was taken up by the Spanish in Mexico from the local term tzicozapotl or tzapotl.
The best-known fruit in the group, SAPODILLA (see above), is sometimes called just ‘sapote’. It belongs to the genus Manilkara.
Some other sapotes belong to the related genus Pouteria. P. sapota bears large fruit: generally oval in shape, from 8 to over 20 cm (3 to 8″) long, with a rough, russet-coloured rind, and a soft, sweet, salmon-coloured pulp which is generally made into jam. The species is found in the wild from S. Mexico to northern Nicaragua, but has been brought under cultivation in a much wider area, including parts of SE Asia. There are a number of named cultivars.
This fruit is sometimes called ‘mamey/ mammee sapote’, ‘mamey colorado’, ‘chicomamey’, or plain ‘mamey’, but is not to be confused with the unrelated MAMEE.
The names ‘white sapota’, ‘zapota blanco’, and ‘Mexican apple’, are applied to Casimiroa edulis, not a member of the family Sapotaceae but distantly related to the citrus fruits. It is grown in C. America and Mexico. The small, pale yellow fruit has the flavour of a ripe pear.
Quararibea cordata, called ‘sapote’ or ‘chupa chupa’, is another unrelated fruit grown in Peru and Colombia. It is oval, about 13 cm (5″) long, with a flavour between that of an apricot and a mango.
‘Black sapote’ is a name sometimes given to what is really a black PERSIMMON.
sappaen
an interesting cornmeal ‘mush and milk dish’ prepared for the evening meal by Dutch settlers in New York state, as vividly described in a manuscript notebook by Rufus A. Grider, a teacher and artist of the Mohawk Valley, quoted in Peter Rose’s The Sensible Cook (1989) and here given in a slightly edited form:
Until about 1830 to 1840 the inhabitants of the rural districts of Schoharie—which were settled by the Dutch and Germans—ate their meals from a large pewter dish placed by the housewife in the center of a round top table [an example of such a ‘top table’ measured 20.5″ in diameter] … Mush was prepared in the fall and winter of the year. It was boiled in the afternoon and about one hour before mealtime poured from the iron pot into the pewter dish and set in a cold place; cooling stiffens it. Near meal time the house wife made as many excavations as there were guests—piling or heaping up the centre, and filling the hollows with cold milk …—as many pewter table spoons as milk ponds were supplied. After Grace was said by the head of the family, everyone began to diminish the bank and increase the size of his white lake by feeding on its banks and centre—but there were limits, and beyond those no one could go—if for instance any one tapped his neighbors milk pond it was ill manners—if children did so, the penalty was finger clips.
Rose quotes other sources to show how sappaen was an integral part of the Dutch/American diet, along with CRULLERS, Dutch pickled meats, TRIPE dishes and ‘Kool Slaa Heet en Koud’ (COLESLAW, hot or cold).
saps
defined by the NSOED as ‘the fluid, chiefly water with dissolved sugars and mineral salts, which circulates in the vascular system of a plant and is essential to its growth’. As one would expect, the sap of many trees and smaller plants can provide nutritious food for animals, birds, and humans. This is mainly in the form of sugar syrups, several of which may be made into beverages, non-alcoholic or fermented to become alcoholic (e.g. palm toddy).
MAPLE SYRUP is perhaps the most prominent example; this is obtained from at least half a dozen maple species. The black birch, Petula lenta, is a source of BIRCH SUGAR.
Many palm trees (see PALM; PALMYRA PALM; PALM SUGAR) are frequently tapped, using complex techniques which have evolved over many centuries, to yield their sap and the valuable products which are obtained from it. Corner (1966) comments that the Chilean wine palm, Jubaea spectabilis, has been so heavily exploited to satisfy the thirst for its miel de palma that stocks have been greatly depleted. (The same author provides a fascinating and detailed account of the mechanics of the sap flow in palm trees.)
sapucaya nut
sometimes spelled ‘sapucaia’ and also called paradise nut, is among the best nuts in the world, but available only in Brazil and Guyana. It comes from trees of the genus Lecythis. The main species is L. zabucajo, but there are scores of others, all natives of the same region and generally known as monkey pot nuts (see below).
The genus is closely related to that of the BRAZIL NUT, and the largest trees are almost as tall as the huge Brazil nut tree. However, a significant difference in their containers has made it impossible to market sapucaya nuts commercially, despite their excellence. Like Brazil nuts they are encased in a big, round, woody container, but that of the sapucaya has a detachable base or ‘lid’. Whereas the whole container of the Brazil nut falls bodily off the tree, only the lid of the sapucaya comes away, allowing the nuts within to fall out singly or to be picked out by monkeys and parrots, who also compete, indeed fight, for those which fall to the ground. Since monkeys can run faster than people, and parrots can fly, human collectors get only a few nuts. These are eaten locally, either as dessert nuts or in chocolate and confectionery.
Sapucaya nuts are almond shaped, and measure up to 5 cm (2″) long. The frail, brown shell is marked with longitudinal ridges, sometimes having a whitish aril (seed coat) fixed to one end. The oil content is high, giving them a soft texture. The flavour is delicate and distinctive.
The nuts must be eaten soon after they fall from the tree, since otherwise they would turn rancid. The empty container will itself drop off the tree after a time. It is called a ‘monkey pot’, hence the name ‘monkey pot trees’. The pots are used as monkey traps, having been baited with some grains of maize and then fixed to e.g. fence posts. The idea is that a monkey inserts its hand, clenches it around the maize, and then cannot withdraw its clenched fist. Rather than let go of the maize it panics and remains stuck until the farmer finds it and kills it.
Although there is no trade in sapucaya nuts, Brazilians with gardens often grow trees for their own use, or for that of bees; the flowers of the tree make good honey.
sardi/garmi
literally cold/hot, refers to the Persian system (dating back at least to pre-medieval times and still current in Iran and Afghanistan) of classifying foods and human temperaments for the purpose of optimizing diet. This may be seen as a simplified version of the FOUR HUMOURS, the system associated with the Greek writer GALEN. It certainly seems to have reached Persians through Arabic translations of Galen in the 9th century AD.
Although sardi/garmi does not match the system of the four humours in all particulars, it has shown greater powers of survival. This may be partly because it is less complicated. Jill Tilsley-Benham (1986b), whose lively essay on sardi/garmi is the best exposition of the subject in English, looked outside Iran to see how the same tradition, transmitted from Arabic sources, had faired elsewhere. She writes:
How then, has the humoral system fared in Arab lands? The only concrete evidence that I could find was in Iraq and Morocco—two countries whose antique cuisines closely identify with pre-Islamic Persia. Many Iraqis still talk of certain foods in terms of harr (Hot), and bared (Cold), but it is folk memory rather than serious practical application, that keeps the tradition alive. In Morocco, on the other hand, es-sxun (Hot) and el-berd (Cold), remain an integral part of daily life, and it was through Moorish-influenced Spanish and Portuguese physicians that humoral theory reached South America, where caliente/frio is still popular today. Spanish explorers are credited with having taken it to the Philippines as well, but it would seem more likely that Muslim missionaries, who converted the island people some three hundred years before, were those responsible.
To determine whether survivals of the humoral doctrine around the world represent the quaternary Galenic tradition or the binary Persian derivative may not always be clear, and is anyway a subject which awaits study. But it would be a reasonable hypothesis to suppose that it is normally the binary system which has survived, at least for practical purposes. If this is correct, it would give added significance to sardi/garmi, which would be seen to be the earliest and original binary system.
Jill Tilsley-Benham’s paper is embellished by numerous real-life examples of how the sardi/garmi doctrine is followed in Iran and she also explains that although not everyone agrees on the division of certain foods into ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ there was a definite pattern:
Garmi foods appeared to be distinguished mainly by their sweetness, richness, warmth of aroma and high calorie content—qualities which can be present singly or in combination. Sugar, honey, fats and oils were top of our ‘hot list’, followed (but in no particular order) by dried fruits such as raisins, dates and white mulberries… Then came nuts, and some of the sweeter fruits and vegetables—especially those from tropical lands, like bananas, yams and coconuts. This agrees, of course, with Hippocrates’ theory that hot countries generate hot foods, hot people and hot diseases. After this we listed garlic and onions (but not the spring variety), spices (again the product of sultry climes) and such sweetly aromatic herbs as mint, tarragon, basil and fenugreek. (The only cold herbs mentioned were parsley and green coriander …) Meat, from the ultra-rich camel’s hump to rabbit … is garmi too; with veal as the possible exception …
… Sardi … is characterised by sourness (vinegar and acidic fruits), blandness and, to some extent, pallor (milk, yoghurt, rice, white fish), high water-content (cucumber, water-melon, lettuce) and a low-to-moderate calorie count.
sardine
a group of fish found all round the world, all belonging to one subfamily in the highly complex group of clupeoid fish (in which there are over 300 species altogether). As so often happens, the common name does not exactly match scientific classifications; but in this instance it is not far out. Most fish in the genera Amblygaster, Sardina, Sardinops, and Sardinella are called sardine (that is, if they are called by any English name); and the name is rarely used of any other fish.
There is sometimes confusion between sardine and pilchard. The short answer is that a sardine is a young pilchard and a pilchard a grown-up sardine. However, it is necessary to add that pilchard refers to a fully grown specimen of only one species, Sardina pilchardus, which has a range extending further north than other sardines, indeed not only to the south of England (where the pilchard fishery is important) but far beyond, even to Norway. However, as noted below, the name pilchard is also used of a Japanese species.
Sardines of the Mediterranean and Atlantic are:
The sardines of the Indo-Pacific are numerous and some of them have remarkably limited ranges, for example S. hualiensis, which is more or less confined to Taiwan and a small section of the coast of China. The strangest of all is S. tawilis, a freshwater species occurring only in Lake Bombon in the Philippines. The commercially important species include:
The name poutine in the south of France refers to larval sardines or anchovies.
Fresh sardines are excellent when grilled. They may also be fried, but possess plenty of oil themselves; so deep-frying is preferable to pan-frying. For a remarkable west of England dish which was originally made with pilchards, see STARGAZEY PIE.
Canned sardines are among the few canned products which have their own retinue of connoisseurs (and vintage years). Competition is intense between e.g. French, Spanish, and Portuguese producers. Elizabeth David (1984) has a fine essay on the subject, focused on the sardine-canning industry of Nantes in France. The book by Bonnadier (1994) provides a wider survey, covering both fresh and canned sardines and including almost 100 pages of history, lore, poetry, and so on; one of the most extensive treatments of its kind of any fish.
sarsaparilla
an extract from the roots of various C. American plants of the genus Smilax, especially S. officinalis and S. rotundifolia, used as a bitter ingredient in soft drinks. The plants are prickly, creeping shrubs.
The name comes from the Spanish words zarza (bramble) and parilla (little vine). It was bestowed by the Spaniards when they arrived in C. America, found the product already in use, and took it up themselves, mainly for medicinal use. During the rise of the soft drinks industry in the USA in the second half of the 19th century, it was customary to claim health-giving properties for the drinks, and many of them were based on or named for sarsaparilla, which was thought to be beneficial. Research in the 20th century has established that sarsaparilla contains certain saponins, a group of substances of which some have medical significance, but that those present in sarsaparilla are responsible for the bitter flavour and do not promote health.
The related S. china, China root, provides a sarsaparilla in Asia; and other plants in the genus fill a similar role elsewhere or have other minor uses as food.
sashimi
a Japanese term for a dish of sliced raw fish. The word is derived from sashi (to pierce) and mi (flesh), with no element specifying fish or seafood; and similar techniques can be used to produce dishes called sashimi chicken or beef, but these are rarities by comparison with the ubiquitous fish sashimi. Tsuji (1980) has declared sashimi to be ‘the crowning glory of the formal meal’ in Japan (by which he does not mean that it comes at the end, for it is usually served at an early stage), and emphasizes that its preparation is not just a matter of choosing supremely fresh fish but also of taking into account the seasons at which the various species are at their best.
Sashimi is presented with great elegance in an arrangement which often incorporates a bed of shredded white RADISH (daikon) and a mound of finely grated WASABI, plus a dipping sauce (SOY SAUCE with added flavours) and further garnishes such as SHISO leaves, sprigs of prickly ash (the SANSHO plant), or thin curled strips of the red stems of CORKWING (bofu).
The slices of fish are normally around 1 cm (0.25–0.5″) thick, but for certain species or presentations paper-thin slices are preferred. Factors such as the thickness of the slices affect other features such as the composition of the dipping sauce; a citrus fruit and soy sauce called ponzu is a favourite with very thin slices.
sassafras
Sassafras albidum, a common tree of the eastern USA, from Maine down to Florida, which yields a fragrant volatile oil, safrol, used as a flavouring and perfume. All parts of the tree have been used for flavouring, but the bark of the root contains the highest concentration of oil.
Before the arrival of European settlers in America, the Indians chewed the root. Spanish colonists arriving in Florida in 1512 attributed restorative virtues to sassafras and British colonists in Virginia (then including New England) also raved about its virtues. Sir Walter Ralegh had the monopoly of the sassafras trade and made a fortune from it. It was a large export crop from the new colonies until superseded by sugar.
Sassafras tea, a brew of a deep red colour, was enjoyed in the southern states. Fernald and Kinsey (1943) cited from the American Botanist (1907) a powerful rebuttal of the idea which had evidently been aired by someone that during the Civil War sassafras tea was drunk in the south because ordinary tea was not available. Not so, declared the Alabama doctor who administered the correction:
it was used from choice and a taste long cultivated. Long before the war, both whites and Indians made sassafras tea during the spring when the sap of the sugar maples was running. They boiled the sap a while then added the sassafras roots and boiled them a while longer and the tea was finished and a drink fit for the gods was the result.
Sassafras jelly, made from the tea, is sometimes served with meat. Sassafras tea was also drunk in Britain in the 19th century. It was an important component of American root beer and used as flavouring in many soft drinks and other foods.
Safrol was found in the early 1960s to be toxic to the liver and a cause of liver cancer. Sassafras bark was therefore excluded from processed foods in the USA and sassafras tea was banned in 1976. Today’s sassafras tea is the extract of root bark with the safrol removed.
Sassafras leaves contain small (and considered safe) amounts of safrol, thus the sassafras flavour, as well as a gummy mucilage. They are dried and powdered to make FILÉ.
satay
or saté a dish of SE Asia, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, which consists of small strips of meat, chicken, or fish threaded on to thin skewers (usually bamboo) and grilled (US broiled). The loaded skewers are often marinated before being grilled. Marinades vary from place to place but typically include dark SOY SAUCE with lime juice, sugar, garlic, and other seasoning. The common accompaniment for satay is a dipping sauce based on peanuts, pale brown in colour. But other sauces may be used.
Balls of minced meat, appropriately spiced, can be used on satay skewers instead of the more common strips of meat.
Satay has achieved wide popularity in other parts of the world, which adds interest to the question of its origin. Jennifer Brennan (1988) says that:
Although both Thailand and Malaysia claim it as their own, its Southeast Asian origin was in Java, Indonesia. There satay was developed from the Indian kebab brought by the Muslim traders. Even India cannot claim its origin, for there it was a legacy of Middle Eastern influence.
In the 19th century the term migrated, presumably with Malay immigrants, to S. Africa, where it appears as sosatie.
sauces
fall into various categories. What might be called ‘composed sauces’, i.e. composed in the kitchen and served with a dish, are essential to classical French cuisine and, more generally, are important in adding palatability to numerous dishes throughout the western world. But these sauces have few counterparts in the rest of the world; thus in Asia it is more usual to find that what fills the role of a sauce is part of the dish itself (e.g. curries), or that it is a condiment such as the SE Asian fish sauces.
Even within the category of composed sauces there are vast differences. Some are simple mixtures of ingredients (e.g. PESTO, ROMESCO, SKORTHALIA). Others require cooking, sometimes in two stages. Basics (STOCK, FUMET, GLACE DE VIANDE, ESPAGNOLE) are prepared first, and always on hand in professional kitchens on the French model. These lead to ‘mother’ sauces such as BÉCHAMEL and HOLLANDAISE; mothers because in a third stage they have offspring such as sauce mornay (cheese sauce) from béchamel and MOUSSELINE from hollandaise. Family trees can be constructed, into which all recorded composed sauces will fit, but contemplation of them is tedious.
English cookery of the traditional and simple sort is not strong on sauces. The Frenchman who alleged that there was only one, ‘drawn butter’, by which he meant melted butter with a dusting of flour in it, was exaggerating, but in a venial way. A tour of England in the mid-20th century would have revealed that bread sauce (for chicken), parsley sauce (for fish), and cheese sauce (for macaroni) were quite common. These are all delicious when well made; see for example Fernie (1905) on bread sauce. All are essentially versions of the WHITE SAUCE which had been an economical alternative for the more expensive drawn butter. On the sweet side, the British are partial to CUSTARD sauce. There is also the solid ‘sauce’ known as ‘hard sauce’ and associated particularly with Cumbria and with CHRISTMAS PUDDING. It is made with butter, sugar and (usually) brandy or rum, and has been adopted in the USA since the 1880s.
See also AÏOLI; AVGOLÉMONO; BÉARNAISE SAUCE; BORDELAISE; BROWN SAUCE; BROWN SAUCES; CHOCOLATE SAUCE; CUMBERLAND SAUCE; GRAVY; MAYONNAISE; MOLE; RAGÚ; RAVIGOTE; ROUILLE; TARATOR; TRAVELLING SAUCE; VELOUTÉ, VINAIGRETTE; WHITE SAUCE.
sauerkraut
because the name is German (although now adopted into English too), is usually supposed to be a German invention of considerable antiquity. In fact, it appears to have evolved gradually from earlier forms of pickled cabbage, and not to have attained its present style until the 17th century. The historian Joyce Toomre (1992), however, sees sauerkraut as originating in China and being brought west by the Tartars who introduced it to Russia and E. Europe.
In the West, the history of PICKLES goes back to the 3rd century BC, but all early pickles were ‘wet’ types made with brine or other liquids. The distinguishing features of sauerkraut are that it is dry salted, all the liquid in the resulting product being drawn out of the cabbage itself by the salt, and that it is preserved and flavoured by fermentation. The Romans had introduced dry vegetable fermentation with their development of silage as cattle feed, but the process was not extended beyond this for many centuries.
So, although the Romans ate quantities of cabbage and liked pickles, they did not combine these two predilections into sauerkraut, but instead preserved cabbage in sour wine, vinegar, and VERJUICE, with the addition of salt, sometimes in very large amounts.
This continued into the Middle Ages. Medieval pickled cabbage often had to be rinsed to remove the salt to make it edible. In the highly acid and salty liquid, the cabbage was preserved but did not ferment. However, the German name Sauerkraut and the French choucroute (a corruption of the German) were already in use, and stuck when the technique changed.
The first description of a naturally acidified product is in Le Trésor de santé (1607), which describes it as German. The cabbage was shredded and packed in layers with salt, JUNIPER and BARBERRIES, PEPPER, and spices. The layers were pressed down firmly and the crock topped up with brine.
In 1772 the third edition of James Lind’s famous Treatise of the Scurvy describes a Dutch method for producing zoorkool. Essentially it is the same as the German method, but no brine is added. The cabbage instead is kept under constant pressure by means of a weight so that its juice is squeezed out, and the salt also helps to extract it.
It is by this method that sauerkraut is made now. Berries and spices are usually omitted. However, there are some unusual Russian and Balkan sauerkrauts tinted amber with QUINCE and pink with BEETROOT. (Beets for making BORSHCH are also preserved on their own by a similar process.)
Since the classical period, cabbage had been credited with health-giving properties, and sauerkraut was no exception. It was, quite rightly, supposed to prevent scurvy, and we now know that acidity preserves much of the vitamin C originally in the fresh cabbage. At the same time as Lind was writing of zoorkool, Captain Cook was persuading his sailors to eat ‘sour crout’, though not without difficulty. He ate in their own mess, making a pointed show of appreciating the food, for he knew their instinctive dislike for anything ‘out of the Common way, altho it be ever so much for their good’, but that when ‘their Superiors set a Value on it, it becomes the finest stuff in the World’.
At its simplest, sauerkraut is made with just two ingredients, hard white cabbage and salt. The dirty and damaged outer leaves are removed and the cabbage washed and sliced. The slices are then packed into a crock, which may first be lined with whole clean leaves. The shreds are packed in layers which are salted (other flavourings being added if desired) before the next layer is applied. Even distribution of salt is vital. There must be between 1.5% and 4% salt by weight in the mixture, 2.25% being ideal. When the crock is about two-thirds full a cloth is laid over the surface and covered with a wooden disc which is weighted to press it down. This arrangement presses the cabbage to help squeeze out the juice, which is also extracted by the salt, and the cloth also excludes air, for the fermentation is anaerobic (airless) and contamination by aerobic (air-breathing) organisms must be avoided. The crock is then set in a cool place to allow fermentation.
In a day or so, the extracted liquid covers the lid. Lactic bacteria naturally present in the cabbage begin to ferment the sugars in the extracted liquid: first Leuconostoc mesenteroides then, as the acidity rises, other species such as Lactobacillus brevis and L. plantarum. Full fermentation takes two months or more, depending on temperature. A low temperature favours the growth of bacteria which create a good flavour. At 7 °C (45 °F) as much as a year may be needed but the results are excellent.
During fermentation in a crock or barrel the liquid which rises over the disc becomes covered by a layer of slimy dextran, a bacterial waste product which has to be skimmed off from time to time lest it become infected with unwanted organisms. (This problem is avoided by the equipment used in large-scale industrial processes.)
It is still possible to buy old-fashioned sauerkraut from the barrel in some shops. The bacteria are still at work and it must be used soon before it spoils. It may be too sour for some tastes, in which case it can be rinsed with cold water. Still completely raw and crisp, it needs half an hour’s simmering or more to cook it. Canned or bottled sauerkraut has been pasteurized to kill the bacteria and make the product keep. The process partly cooks, so less cooking time is needed.
The most famous sauerkraut dish is the choucroute garnie of Alsace, which is sauerkraut with lard fumé (see BACON), SALT PORK, and pork sausages of Colmar or Strasbourg accompanied by potatoes. There are several other sorts of choucroute garnie, notably the German-style version using both Nuremberg and Frankfurter sausages, some different cuts of pork, and apple. However, the extent of possible variations is almost infinite. An Alsatian journal once published a statement by Julien Freund, director of the Institute of Sociology in Strasbourg, which constitutes a particularly endearing example of the kind of gastrobabble associated with French gastronomy:
Sauerkraut is tolerant, for it seems to be a well of contradictions. Not that it would preach a gastronomic neutrality that would put up with all heresies. It rejects dogmatism and approves of individual tastes. It forms a marvellous combination with numerous spices, odours, or spirits: juniper berries, coriander seeds, peppercorns, cranberries, Reinette apples, stock, and wine; it even welcomes flakes of yeast or leftover Gruyère since it accepts being prepared au gratin. Its flavour sustains various potato dishes: boiled in their skins, crisps (potato chips), braised, sautéed, grilled, or simply cooked in water. It adopts many sorts of fat, including lard, butter, goose fat, or roast dripping. The variety of meats to which it consents is infinite: sausages of all kinds, such as knackwurst, white sausage, Lorraine, Montbéliard, chipolata, black pudding, hams, smoked or salted bacon, quenelles, pickled and smoked pork, goose, pheasant, etc. It makes excuses for red wine, although it has a weakness for beer and lets itself be spoilt by white wine. Each stomach may find its own happiness in it.
saury
Scomberesox saurus, a pelagic, shoaling, fish of the Mediterranean and N. Atlantic, which also has a circumglobal distribution in temperate waters of the southern hemisphere. Its other common names include needlefish and skipper, the first because its jaws project in the form of a thin beak, the second because of its habit of ‘skipping’ out of the water when escaping from predators. It reaches a length of about 45 cm (18″).
The saury has edible qualities similar to those of the GARFISH, but is mainly important because it provides food for tuna and other valuable large fish.
sausage
typically a chopped meat mixture stuffed into a tubular casing. The concept no doubt originated in antiquity, when it was desirable to find some way of preserving the blood and minor bits and pieces of a pig, rather than have to eat them immediately after the annual killing; see HAGGIS; BLOOD SAUSAGES. But the method has proved to be so adaptable and successful that sausages have come to take many forms, and questions of definition and classification are complex.
To take definition first, meat is not a defining characteristic. Fish sausages have been known since antiquity. Glamorgan sausages contain neither flesh nor fish nor fowl, but cheese and leeks. Nor is the familiar tubular shape essential; sausages may be spherical or ovoid or flattish; and tubular sausages may be straight or curved or even circular. Finally sausage casings, or ‘skins’ (see below), are unnecessary. If sausage mixtures are shaped into cohesive rolls, for example, these count as sausages because of their shape and composition. To exemplify two areas of flexibility in one product, Scotland has Lorne sausages, which are square (Glaswegian, ‘squerr’) in section and without a casing.
As for classification, we must give thanks that sausages are not in the realm of natural history; for, if they were, the arguments conducted by rival taxonomists would be endless. The evolution of species and subspecies and hybrids of sausages proceeds so fast, and they proliferate around the world with so little control over their nomenclature, that they must always outstrip classification.
However, one can discern three major categories. First, fresh sausages (such as dominate the market in Britain) which are intended for cooking; second, cured sausages, containing raw meat and intended for keeping and slicing (e.g. most forms of salami); and third, cooked or part-cooked sausages which are meant to be sliced and eaten cold (MORTADELLA) or heated and eaten hot (FRANKFURTER).
The first two categories had already emerged in classical times. In Aristophanes’ satirical play The Knights (424 BC) the real Athenian demagogue Cleon is seen off by an imaginary sausage-seller, ‘born and bred in the market, a brazen-faced rogue’ but a comic hero and an ideal politician, since he was prepared to ‘mince all policies, stuff (adding grease), dress up with butcher’s sauce’. The playwright of Greek Sicily, Epicharmus (early 5th century BC), had even entitled a play The Sausage, but nothing else is known of it.
The ancient Greek sausage-seller represented a trade that made use of all that was left after prime meat (dealt in by butchers) had been eaten or sacrificed. Writing in the 2nd century AD, ATHENAEUS refers to the cooked-meat shops of Alexandria, which likewise specialized in sausages and all kinds of offal. There is little other evidence on how Greek sausages (allantes) were made, but we know that some, called khordai, were served sliced: perhaps these resembled salami.
In the Roman Empire two terms came into prominence that still survive. APICIUS gives a recipe for the first, lucanica, a spicy, smoked, beef or pork sausage named after a region of S. Italy from which Roman troops had brought the recipe back to the capital. Lucanica (it is a moot point whether the term is singular or plural) are referred to by the 1st-century Roman poet Martial and are frequently mentioned in documents from the 4th century onwards. Modern descendants of the term lucanica include linguiça, longaniza, and luganega; most such descendants seem to be long, undivided smoked sausages. The second term is salsicia, from which many modern names are derived. This occurs in word lists from the later Empire, but there is no early recipe.
Both words originated in Latin but were also borrowed into Greek, replacing the terms mentioned earlier: this suggests that Roman sausage-making skills swept the board. Certainly there were several other Roman kinds: PETRONIUS talks of tomacula sold hot at street stalls, but nothing is known of how they were prepared. An early Byzantine text, The Miracles of SS Cosmas and Damian, provides the first textual record of a string of sausages (seira salsikion).
The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity posed problems for some sausages. Not only did many of them contain blood, whose consumption was forbidden by the Bible, but they were associated with pagan phallic rites. Nevertheless, sausages survived and were a common feature of the diet of medieval Europe. In contrast, little use was made of them in the Arab world. This was no doubt due to their links with the pig, which neither Muslims nor Jews were permitted to eat. They could have been made from other meats but in practice were not, and even in the modern Arab world there are still only a few kinds (notably the N. African MERGUEZ), whereas there are countless varieties of RISSOLE and MEATBALL.
In medieval Europe pork was certainly the meat most used in sausages, and pepper was the most common spice. But national and regional divergences were already apparent, some depending on the range of ingredients readily available, others on climate.
Broadly speaking, sausages for cooking and eating hot were found in northerly countries more than in the warmer Mediterranean region. And traditions of cured sausages were strongest in areas where a dry wind could be counted on to help with the cure. This factor gave an advantage to mountainous regions, for example in Spain, or countries where prevailing winds blew from the north and were not damp. Here damp countries like England were at a disadvantage. This may account for the failure of the English to produce a range of cured sausages to rival those of the Continent, and for the preference they have shown for fresh sausages.
Sausages which are cooked before sale are spread fairly evenly through the different climates of Europe, and indeed other parts of the world.
The divergences in the making and consumption of sausages were extended to the New World after Columbus. Spanish and Portuguese sausages invaded Latin America and the Philippines. In N. America the great sausage incursions took place later, with the arrival of German, Polish, Italian, and other immigrants in the 19th century. It would probably be true to say that in the latter part of the 19th century there was a wider diversity of sausages in the USA than anywhere else in the world, although for sheer number of types Germany would have been in the lead.
The 19th century also saw the rise of the mass production of sausages. A notable result of this was the introduction of bread into British sausages, a unique development (though a Roman recipe of Apicius also includes cereal).
THE SCIENCE OF SAUSAGE-MAKING
Little need be said about fresh sausages, except that an unexpected ingredient in many recipes is ice. This is added to the meat used for sausages before the mixture is placed in a ‘bowl chopper’, a bowl which has a set of revolving blades at the bottom. It prevents overheating during the intense mechanical chopping and, in British sausages containing cereal, provides water which moistens the product. Chopping devices are favoured over mincers because the latter tend to crush the meat, squeezing out the juices.
It is in the preparation of cured sausages, preserved by salting, drying, smoking, and often some degree of fermentation, that science comes more into the picture.
Dried sausages intended for long keeping rely on good hygiene and traditional methods of preservation, which are finely adjusted to encourage the growth of a particular microflora in the product. Raw meat is generally used; it is diced, minced, or reduced to a paste as the recipe requires; mixed with salt, saltpetre, spices, and sometimes alcohol in the form of beer, wine, or brandy; and stuffed into the casings which are tied to make links of an appropriate size. A period of drying, usually in cool moving air, but sometimes over heat, follows; the sausage may lose up to 50 per cent in weight during this time. Most cured sausages are larger in diameter than fresh ones, since a very narrow sausage would dry excessively in storage. Some salami are bound with string, which may be tightened several times as the sausage dries and shrinks.
After several weeks of drying, the interior of a cured sausage will have undergone fermentation by lactic acid-producing bacteria present in the mixture; this gives the pleasantly acid flavour of many such products. The increased acidity, combined with the process of dehydration, and a fairly high salt content further raised by loss of water, take the sausage through a ‘preservation barrier’, from being a fresh, perishable product to a stable and durable one. A white ‘bloom’ of yeast cells is visible on the skin of certain varieties; they are harmless, and play a part in the maturing process. The sausage may also be smoked, introducing further preservatives in the form of phenols, which inhibit microbial growth. Hot-smoking also cooks the product to some extent.
Saltpetre, potassium nitrate, used originally because it contains as an impurity potassium nitrite which reacts with myoglobin in the meat to give a stable pink colour, has an important role in sausage-making, inhibiting the growth of many bacteria. In the past, when preservation was less well understood, toxic organisms sometimes infected sausages. The long keeping time, absence of oxygen, and inadequate acidity of a badly prepared sausage made it ideal for the growth of Clostridium botulinum, an organism now more commonly associated with CANNED FOODS, but which was first identified in sausages in Germany in the early 19th century: hence its name, from botulus, a form of the Latin word botellus, sausage. Modern mass-produced sausages, especially fresh types, often contain extra preservatives such as sodium metabisulphite and ascorbyl palmitate.
See also the sections below on SAUSAGES OF BRITAIN/FRANCE/GERMANY/ITALY/SPAIN and PORTUGAL. There are of course many sorts of sausage in other parts of the world, but most of these are variations on themes displayed in these five sections.
Sausages of Britain
These are normally fresh types for cooking; they differ from the general run of such sausages in having a significant cereal content. This difference has only been visible since the latter part of the 19th century, when industrial production of sausages began and manufacturers, anxious to have a mass market, sought to keep costs down. The idea of combining meat with cereal in a sausage-like casing was by no means a new one. HAGGIS is an antique and excellent example of the combination. But up to this time English sausages had been like continental ones in being made more or less entirely of meat of some kind.
British pure pork sausages, similar to the French or Italian ones, are still made on a small scale, but the great majority of British sausages are made with RUSK crumb or special ‘sausage meal’ (rather than the traditional breadcrumbs). The meat content of commercial sausages ranges from below 50 per cent to 95 per cent or more in the most expensive. Pork, or pork and beef, are considered best. Pure beef sausages are cheaper and are preferred in Scotland, where pork has been a less popular meat.
Traditional British sausages, all seasoned with pepper, usually black, and often with mace, include:
Sausages of France
As one would expect in a country which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast, these are diverse.
A French fresh sausage is simply called saucisse, a term which often implies also a relatively small size. The commonest fresh types are saucisse de Toulouse, quite large, with an unusually high proportion of lean meat, and intended for grilling; and saucisse de Strasbourg, for poaching.
The general French term for large sausages, whether fresh, smoked, or cured, is saucisson. They are almost exclusively boiled. Indeed, the most common boiling sausage is simply called saucisson à cuire, although specific regional names exist in different parts of the country.
Small dried sausages (saucisses sèches) are less common than the larger ones (saucissons secs). Both are simply dried—never smoked—and eaten sliced without cooking. These, like the cooking sausages, are almost exclusively pure pork and are made throughout the country. Those from Lyons, and the neighbouring Beaujolais region, are particularly sought after. Several have surprising names. Rosette designates a saucisson sec made with the part of the intestine that terminates at the rectum (and is named because of its pinkish coloration). People in Lyons are also fond of Jésus, a fattish, banana-shaped saucisson sec which apparently derives its name from its resemblance to a baby in swaddling clothes.
Saucissons are rarely smoked, although fat saucisses sometimes are. The most famous smoked sausages in France are from the Franche-Comté, where numerous pork products are traditionally smoked. This is the saucisse de Morteau, a short but plump sausage which is to be poached and served hot with cabbage, lentils, or potatoes. It provides something of an exception to the general rule that a saucisse is smaller than a saucisson. It is roughly the size of a saucisson à cuire from Lyons.
See also ANDOUILLE AND ANDOUILLETTE; CERVELAS.
Sausages of Germany
Reputed to number 1,000 or more, these deserve a book to themselves, and indeed have one famous one: Erich Lissner’s Wurstologia (1939). In this and other works elaborate classifications are given, but in practice there are just three major categories.
BRÜHWURST
This term means a parboiled sausage, made from finely chopped raw meat, not intended for keeping, usually scalded by the manufacturer, sometimes smoked, to be heated before serving, always sliceable, often red in colour. Examples are:
ROHWURST
Raw sausage, for keeping, made from meat which has been cured, air dried, and sometimes smoked. A speciality of N. Germany. There are two types, spreadable and sliceable. The most common spreadable ones are:
Common sliceable ones include:
KOCHWURST
Fully cooked sausages, not necessarily intended for keeping, constitute the third main category. Here the most important type by far is:
The category also includes some sorts of BLOOD SAUSAGE:
Sausages of Italy
These include one outstandingly large and important family, the salami. This name (the plural of the Italian word salame) applies to matured raw meat slicing sausages made to recipes of Italian origin, either in that country or elsewhere. Within Italy there are scores of types.
Salami are mostly medium to large in size, and those made in Italy are usually dried without smoking. Characteristically, when cut across, they display a section which is pink or red with many small to medium-sized flecks of white fat. Pork, or mixtures of pork and beef or pork and vitellone (young beef), form the basis; seasonings and fineness or coarseness of cut vary to regional taste. Names denote style, a principal ingredient, or place of origin. These include:
Salami made in S. Italy and Sardinia are distinguished by their spiciness. They include:
All these belong to the class of salame crudo, raw salame. Salame cotto, cooked salame, is made from highly seasoned pork, or a mixture of meats not suitable for raw salame. It is cheaper than and generally inferior to raw salame. But the category includes MORTADELLA, famous for being the largest of all sausages.
Of salami produced in other countries the most notable are those of Hungary; indeed the Italians themselves copy it as salame ungherese. It is a fine, hard, pork salame, lightly smoked and subtly spiced.
The Italian term for a small fresh sausage is salsiccia. This category includes Luganega, a famous fresh pork sausage of Lombardy, flavoured with cloves and cinnamon. This is usually unlinked and sold by the length rather than by weight. Anna del Conte (1989) traces it all the way back to a recipe of APICIUS in classical Rome; but his recipe used different flavourings.
Sausages of Spain and Portugal
These two groups are treated together, because the sausages of the whole Iberian peninsula, and of the Balearics, can be regarded as constituting one family—and an important one, for representatives of it have become established in C. and S. America, parts of the USA where Spanish or Portuguese influences are felt, and the Philippines.
Sausage casings
These are generally lengths of intestine from various animals. The small intestines of sheep provide the narrowest, and also some wider ones. Pig casings are wider. Wider still are ox ‘runners’ (small intestines), and the widest of all are ox ‘bungs’ (large intestines), which may be over 10 cm (4″) wide and are used for mortadella and the largest salami. The stomachs of sheep and pigs provide round casings for HAGGIS and hog puddings, and for their equivalents in other countries. In the past bladders and even wombs have been used. The CAUL or mesentery of a calf is a sheet of fatty tissue from around the intestines. With the fat left on, it can be used as a filling for ANDOUILLES, or it can be scraped to make a convenient flat sheet of casing which can be made into parcels around a FAGGOT or other items. Weasand (oesophagus or gullet) was used for POLONY (dyed red outside).
Fish guts provide casings for fish sausages. Only rather large fishes have wide enough guts.
The preparation of casings is a laborious business (soaking, turning inside out, scraping clean) but there are machines which do the job quickly. Natural casings are generally salted, and keep for several years in a refrigerator.
Natural casings are still extensively used, and always for high-class sausages. However, there are artificial casings. The earliest of these, made in the 1930s, resembled cellophane. Most are now made from COLLAGEN, obtained by boiling down hide, or from cellulose, a plant material. Fully synthetic plastic casings, which are not edible, are also in use, but only for cheap, large slicing sausages.
Natural casings are always slightly porous, allowing sausages to dry easily and to cook well without bursting. They can usually be distinguished by their curved form, except in large salami, which are straightened by their own weight and sometimes by a network of strings around the outside.
Artificial casings are apt to be non-porous, which hinders the blending of flavours in dishes where sausages are cooked with other ingredients. In addition, they are often tough, and tend to stick to the pan when sausages are fried.
sauté
the past participle of the French verb sauter (to jump, hence to fry in shallow fat, while tossing, i.e. making to jump). The word is also a noun in French (meaning a dish thus prepared), and has succeeded in migrating into English in both forms, with the same meanings, and complete with accent. This causes a slight problem, since the infinitive (sauter) has not migrated. Thus in English, when the imperative is required, as often happens in recipes, only the past participle is available. The result looks odd (‘Sauté the mushrooms …’), but works.
Originally, in France, a sauté was a dish of meat or poultry cut into pieces and cooked only in fat, but the French now also use the term for dishes which simply involve browning foods before adding a liquid. Hence a sauté d’agneau is not simply pieces of lamb quickly browned but a lamb stew. On the other hand, a sauté de champignons (sautéed mushrooms) may indeed be mushrooms cooked only in fat and served ‘dry’ with a few herbs or garlic.
A sauté pan resembles a frying pan, but is usually a little deeper and has straight sides, so that there is less risk of the food ‘jumping’ right out.
savarin
a dessert, is essentially an enriched yeast dough baked in a ring mould. A syrup laced with kirsch or rum is used to soak it when cool; and the central hole may be filled with fruit or cream. There is also a solid, holeless form, mazarin, which is split and filled with cream.
The savarin derived from the E. European BABA, as naturalized in Alsace in the 18th century. What happened was that in the mid- or late 1840s one of the brothers Julien, Parisian pâtissiers, experimented with the baba in a slightly different form. He used the same dough, but removed the dried fruits and soaked the savarin with his own ‘secret’ syrup. He named his new confection in honour of the famous gastronomic writer BRILLAT-SAVARIN, although this name for it does not seem to have been recorded until the 1860s.
savory
herbs of the genus Satureja, in the MINT family, indigenous to S. Europe and the Mediterranean region. Summer savory (S. hortensis) and winter savory (S. montana) are the best-known species.
Classical Greeks, who knew it as thymbra, and Romans both made much use of savory in medicine and cookery. The several species known in Greece, including S. thymbra, were recognized by Roman writers on farming as being distinct from the Italian kind, which they called cunila or, colloquially, satureia; it is this that we now know as summer savory. It was used as a condiment and to flavour pickles and sauces. Virgil recommended it, along with thyme, for planting near beehives.
Savory remained important in medieval Europe. It occurs, as saetherie, in an Anglo-Saxon medical text of about AD 1000. By the 16th century its English name had become savourie, and it was an important ingredient in stuffings.
Summer savory has narrow dark green leaves, which are highly aromatic with a peppery flavour. It is a good flavouring for poultry, meat, soups, eggs, salads, or sauces and can be used, like parsley, as a garnish. In continental Europe it is often known as the ‘bean herb’ (cf. Bohnenkraut, the German name) as it brings out the taste of beans, peas, and lentils. The leaves also yield a spicy essential oil which has a sharp bitter flavour and is used in the food industry as a flavouring.
Summer savory was one of the first plants introduced to N. America by the colonists. It is now grown commercially in California.
Winter savory, S. montana, is sharper and spicier than S. hortensis. It is also used in stuffings, marinades, and pickles.
savouries
constituted during the 19th century and much of the 20th century a course at the end of an English dinner. Small items, often with fanciful names like ‘angels on horseback’, they were thought to provide a suitable closing note to the meal and to aid digestion.
The term goes back to the 17th century, when it could also refer to a savoury appetizer served at the start of a meal, but this usage dropped out of sight. Savouries made with anchovy were popular. VERRAL (1759) had anchovy fillets on fried fingers of bread, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, placed under the grill and then given a squeeze of Seville orange juice— ‘a trifling thing, but I never saw it come whole from table’. Mrs RAFFALD (1782) had a similar savoury, but using plenty of Cheddar cheese and parsley. In the mid-19th century Eliza ACTON (1855) proposed what she called ‘savoury toasts’, small squares of toast buttered and spread with mustard and then covered with plenty of grated cheese and seasoned ham before being fried and then being placed in a Dutch oven to dissolve the cheese. Her ‘observations’ illuminate the role of such things in her time:
These toasts, … may be served in the cheese-course of a dinner. Such ‘mere relishes’ as they are called, do not seem to us to demand much of our space, or many of them which are very easy of preparation might be inserted here.
Recipes could incorporate various ingredients such as the caviar, conserved lamprey, and ‘potted birds made high’ offered by Mrs Rundell. They gained prominence towards the middle of the 19th century and remained popular until Edwardian days. Their literary apogee was perhaps Mrs de Salis’s Savouries à la mode (1886). In the menu book composed by Charles Dickens’s wife Catherine in 1851 (Wilcox, 2005), very many meals are rounded off by toasted cheese, macaroni, bloaters, or some other savoury dish.
Savouries still exist in time warps such as London clubs, or in nostalgia restaurants, but their heyday was the era of formal upper-class dinner parties such as flourished in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Apart from those mentioned above, the best known of them included:
See also WELSH RABBIT.
Savoy
(French Savoie, biscuit de Savoie), a type of SPONGE CAKE. This differs from the other main type, GÉNOISE, in having egg yolks and whites beaten separately rather than together. The yolks are beaten with sugar; then flour (in modern recipes, half wheat and half potato) is folded in, and the stiffly beaten egg whites. Vanilla and lemon rind may be added as flavourings. The result is a light and delicate cake, eaten without further adornment. The Italian pan di Spagna is similar but contains less sugar.
The same sort of mixture can be used to produce small biscuits. There can be confusion here, since the word biscuit has two senses in French. As noted above it can mean a cake. But in the plural it can mean much the same as English ‘biscuits’.
The Savoy biscuit arrived in England early in the 18th century. However, it did not arrive alone. Other similar ‘biscuits’, named according to their supposed origins—Naples, Lisbon, or Spanish biscuit—also became popular in England at that time, and the differences between them, if differences there were, no doubt perplexed people then as they do now.
When Mrs Mary Eales gave a recipe for ‘spunge biscuits’ in her Receipts (1718), the situation became clearer, since this phrase conveys to British ears the correct impression, whereas terms such as ‘Savoy biscuit’ suggest something different. Moreover, Mrs Eales specified that the biscuits should be baked ‘in little long Pans’, which corresponds to the shape of modern sponge fingers (or BOUDOIR BISCUITS).
sawfish
large fish of the family Pristidae, especially Pristis pectinata, which has a maximum length of 7.5 m (25′) or even more. The ‘saw’ with which it is equipped for killing its prey is also capable of inflicting great damage on, for example, fishing nets. Indeed, since these fish are viviparous, the saws of baby specimens would lacerate the insides of their mothers if they were not provided with little sheaths which they wear until after birth.
The principal sawfish belong to the Indo-Pacific. Despite the obvious problems of catching them, they are sought after and highly regarded as food in certain countries of the region, notably Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and China.
Saxon pudding
a steamed brown BREAD PUDDING made with milk and eggs, sometimes with chocolate, or with almonds and crystallized fruit. The name is the English and the French one (pouding à la saxonne) for a pudding which is genuinely German in inspiration. Its name in German-speaking areas is Bettelmann (‘beggar’), and it is similarly made with dark rye breadcrumbs and eggs; but there are innumerable versions with different additions, rather than one kind specific to Saxony.
Sbrinz
a cheese of Swiss origin, was named for Brienz, the lake and region where it was first made. Spalen, an alternative name, is the word for the wooden tubs in which it was dispatched. Strictly speaking the name Spalen refers to the young cheese, which has the texture of GRUYÈRE, while Sbrinz is used for the mature version, which is aged for two or three years, during which it acquires a strong, full flavour and becomes very hard. It is not unlike the GRANA group of cheeses in Italy.
Sbrinz was probably being made much as it is now in the 1st century AD, when the Roman writer Columella mentioned a hard cheese made in Helvetia. Besides being especially hard, Sbrinz is almost without holes or ‘eyes’, and excellent for grating. It also melts well; and is eaten as a table cheese— thin slivers shaved off it make a good appetizer.
A whole Sbrinz is a flat wheel up to 69 cm (27″) across and weighing up to 45 kg (100 lb). Kindred cheeses are manufactured in Italy and Argentina under the same name or as Sbrinza.
scabbard fish
long, thin, and usually silvery fish of the family Trichiuridae, are found in many parts of the world. The English names which have been used for them include hairtail (for those species whose tail ends in a point, rather than being forked), cutlass fish and sabre fish, ribbon fish, and (in the southern hemisphere) frostfish. An interesting variation on these themes is provided by an alternative name in the Philippines: bolungonas, meaning sugar cane leaf. Trichiurus lepturus is a common species; but there are also Eupleurogrammus muticus (tin white in colour, accounting for the emphatic Malay name timah-timah, meaning tin-tin) and Lepturacanthus savala, whose range extends to Australia. The frostfish of New Zealand, so called because often found washed ashore in large numbers on frosty nights, is Lepidopus caudatus. This is also the largest, and occurs globally. The maximum length of the various species varies from about 1 to 2 m (3–6′). Another Atlantic species, Aphanopus carbo, is the dominant fish in the catch at Madeira, besides being taken frequently off the Portuguese coast; it likes deep water and is of a blackish colour.
From the cook’s point of view, the rear end of one of these fish offers little, but sections cut further forward yield excellent flesh, which can be fried, baked, or grilled. In the western hemisphere there are signs of appreciation at Madeira (above all), in Portugal, and in certain Mediterranean countries. Interest in the Indo-Pacific is more widespread. These fish have occupied fourth place in importance in the marine fisheries of India, where they are mostly sun dried before being marketed.
scad
one of several general names applied to fish of the family Carangidae. See also JACK and TREVALLY. The origin of the name scad is unknown, and it seems unlikely that anyone could ever establish why some species of the Indo-Pacific, which is where the name is most commonly in use, came to be scad while others took the name jack and yet others trevally. It is usual to attribute confusion in the naming of fish in distant waters to the vagaries of English-speaking colonists, whose naming of the species they met in other continents was often misguided by imagined resemblances between these ‘new’ fish and the ones with which they had been familiar at home; cf. AUSTRALASIAN SALMON and MURRAY COD. But, in the present case, one is left wondering where the names scad, jack, and trevally came from.
Be these matters as they may, the Indo-Pacific species commonly called scad include:
scald
As a culinary term, this verb has two meanings: to pour boiling water over; or, in the case of milk or cream, to heat to just below boiling point.
scaldfish
small FLATFISH of the genus Arnoglossus in the family Bothidae. Their scales come off very easily, so that captured specimens have a ‘scalded’ appearance. A. laterna, which has a maximum length of just under 20 cm (8″), is found in the Mediterranean and E. Atlantic. A. thori and A. imperialis are slightly larger relations. None is important but all are acceptable fare.
scallop
an edible MOLLUSC which exists in many species around the world and is highly esteemed in almost all regions, although not in SE Asia. Scallops belong to the family Pectinidae, in which the principal genera are Pecten and Chlamys.
Scallops do not crawl or burrow, so do not have a large ‘foot’. Instead, they have a highly developed adductor muscle, by means of which they can open and close their shells and so propel themselves through the water. The Japanese name for scallop means, literally, ‘full-sail fish’, from the manner of its movement with one shell raised. Not all scallops exercise this ability. Some remain anchored by a byssus to some solid object. Others start life thus and then become free rangers, swimming or resting on the sea bottom.
Most but not all scallops are hermaphrodites, equipped with both an orange roe (or coral) and a whitish testis. Europeans eat these as well as the adductor muscle, but in N. America they are usually discarded. Scallops are usually cleaned at sea, and only the adductor muscles (or muscles and roes) brought to market. But other parts, such as the mantle, are edible, and Canadian processors have canned scallop ‘rims and roes’, for use in CHOWDERS.
Some of the principal species are as follows:
A large and common species of the Indo-Pacific, Amusium pleuronectes, is known in Thailand as hoy phat (the traditional name) or hoy shell, a new name which has a curious explanation. The Shell Company, which is active in Thailand as in so many other countries, displays its scallop shell emblem there. Noticing the likeness, Thai people have taken to naming the scallop after the company.
scampi
see NORWAY LOBSTER
Schabziger
known as Sapsago in the United States, is a Swiss cheese quite unlike any other. It is a hard, strong, almost fatless skimmed-milk cheese, coloured green with the aromatic clover Melilotus cærulea and pressed into small blunt cones weighing almost 100 g (4 oz). Schabziger is made in the Swiss canton of Glarus, and is sometimes called Glarner. It is usually eaten grated and diluted with butter, and is known as ‘the poor man’s cheese’ because a little goes a long way.
The manufacture of Schabziger is also highly individual. Skimmed milk, sometimes mixed with buttermilk, is soured and heated almost to boiling. This causes the lactalbumin proteins in the milk, as well as the usual casein, to coagulate. The curd is pressed into large blocks and left to ferment. This process produces butyric acid (a characteristic flavour of rancid butter) in addition to the lactic acid from the original souring. After a few weeks the cheese is dried, ground to powder, mixed with clover, and pressed to shape. Sometimes pressing is omitted and the green powder sold in packets as a condiment or sandwich filling.
There is a mistaken belief that Schabziger is a goat’s milk cheese. This is caused by confusion with the German word Ziege (‘goat’). It is always made of cow’s milk. It has a pronounced spicy flavour.
scone
defined by the OED as ‘A soft flat cake of barley meal, oatmeal or flour, baked quickly and eaten buttered’. The dictionary explains that it is originally a Scots word and may be derived from ‘schoonbrot’ or ‘sconbrot’, fine white bread. The pronunciation of the word shows a distinct regional divide, being ‘skon’ in Scotland and northern England, and ‘skoan’ in the south.
What is certain is that the term is mainly a British one, and covers a wide range of small, fairly plain cakes. Leavened with baking powder, or bicarbonate of soda and an acid ingredient such as sour milk, they are quickly made and best eaten hot with butter. Scone recipes are found in great variety up and down the British Isles but, together with the closely related BANNOCK, are particularly a Scottish speciality.
Scones may be sweet or savoury. Depending on the recipe and cooking method, they may be seen to be related to SODA BREAD, cake, or PANCAKES. Traditionally, scones are cooked on a girdle or GRIDDLE but nowadays they are usually baked in an oven.
Sweet scones served with jam and whipped or clotted cream have been a feature of AFTERNOON TEA served in British teashops throughout the country in recent times. Such scones are made from wheat flour sifted with baking powder, mixed with a small proportion of sugar. A little fat (usually butter or margarine) is rubbed in; eggs and milk are added to make a firm dough. Dried fruits such as currants or sultanas are frequently added to this basic mix. This is rolled into a thick sheet, cut into rounds and baked in the oven.
This recipe, so simple and excellent, should not be messed around with. However, some variations are permissible. Unsweetened mixtures can be flavoured with grated cheese or chopped herbs. Wholemeal or white flour can be used as the cook pleases. Bicarbonate of soda combined with buttermilk, yoghurt, or sour milk, will leaven the mixture effectively to give soda scones.
Instead of making small individual scones, the dough can be baked as one large flat cake and split into wedges afterwards. These large scones were probably the norm in previous centuries. A surviving example is a regional speciality of Northumberland, the singin’ hinnie, a large unsweetened scone with currants, which has been celebrated by Maria Kaneva-Johnson (1979), with an explanation of the ‘singing’. A similar but richer confection, more like a tea cake, is the Yorkshire fat rascal (see TEA BREADS AND TEA CAKES).
Singin’ hinnies are correctly cooked on a girdle. Another type of scone which calls for a girdle is the DROP SCONE (often called Scots pancake or by Welsh or Irish names).
Scottish housewives in particular were skilled at making scones and bannocks on the girdle. In the wetter Scottish climate oatmeal or barley flour usually took the place of wheat, and scones were sometimes flavoured with caraway. Vestiges of a tradition of yeast-raised scones and recipes using sourdough fermentation can be detected in recipes given by F. Marian McNeill (1929).
Mashed potatoes can be mixed with a little flour and milk to make potato scones, popular in both Scotland and Ireland; these were also made in parts of England such as the West Country, but are now seldom seen.
Scone-type mixtures are used, especially in N. America, as a thick dumpling-cum-pastry topping on a dish of stewed fruit; see COBBLER.
In the USA the term ‘BISCUIT’ may denote more or less what in Britain would be called a scone—though the term ‘scone’ has also come into limited use in N. America.
Laura Mason
score
a verb meaning to make cuts in something which is to be cooked. The cuts may be shallow or deeper and may form a grid pattern or be a series of diagonal incisions. In any case the purpose is usually either to facilitate the penetration of heat, thus shortening the cooking time, or to permit the penetration of added flavours. The rationale underlying the first of these two purposes is discussed in detail under HEAT.
Scoring is often applied to fish, especially when it is to be grilled (US broiled). Leaving a sizeable fish whole and grilling it risks having the outside overcooked by the time sufficient heat has penetrated the interior. The CRIMPING of fish is done for a different purpose.
scorpion fish
mainly of the genus Scorpaena, occur all round the world, but it is in the Mediterranean and especially in Provence that they have achieved fame, mainly as an essential ingredient for BOUILLABAISSE. One of their number, S. scrofa, the largest (maximum length 55 cm/22″), is the rascasse rouge or (in the Midi) chapon; ideal for this purpose when small. It presents the formidable aspect which is characteristic of scorpion fish, mitigated perhaps by its cheerful red colour. Although it is considered to be an archetypal Mediterranean species, its range extends into the Atlantic, as far north as Brittany.
A large rascasse rouge (usually known by its French name outside as well as inside France) makes a fine dish on its own, baked with wine and aromatics and basted often enough to counter any tendency of the firm white flesh to dry out. A few smaller species of rascasse are also found in the Mediterranean; but their role is usually to disappear into the bouillabaisse, or similar dish, rather than make a solo appearance.
These fish belong to the family Scorpaenidae in the order Scorpaeniformes, the maily-cheeked fish, which include also REDFISH and GURNARD. They all have large heads and conspicuously spiny dorsal fins, and are well camouflaged by a combination of colour, markings and protuberances.
Leaving the Mediterranean and surveying scorpion fish in other parts of the world (where they have achieved less fame), one is soon lost among the host of species. In the western N. Atlantic, for example, there are over a dozen. One good one, S. cardinalis, turns up in Australia, where it was given the inappropriate name of red rock cod. In California, a solitary member of the genus, S. guttata, keeps company with over 50 species of the closely related genus Sebastes (which are often, along with various other fish, called ‘rock cod’).
A. J. Liebling once proposed in the New Yorker that efforts be made to compare N. American fish of this family with the rascasses of the Mediterranean. What he wanted to know was whether an authentic bouillabaisse could be made in N. America. No one seems to have responded to his challenge, nor does anyone seem to have surveyed the scorpion fish in other parts of the world from this point of view.
Scotch broth
or barley broth, probably the best-known member of the BROTH clan, and one of the most famous Scottish dishes, is typically prepared by boiling beef and barley, adding vegetables (carrot, swede, onion or white of leek, parsley) and a very little sugar. When cooking is completed, the broth is served with more chopped parsley and chopped green of leek and seasoning; the meat may be still in it, or may be served separately.
There are, as is natural with a dish of this kind, many variations. One of the earliest recipes, that of Mrs Cleland (1755), used as vegetables just some heads of celery, with some marigolds; and the meat was provided by a boiling fowl or cock, not beef. Some recipes include potatoes, cooked with or separately, and according to Catherine Brown (1985) the broth ‘is often eaten with a large mealy potato making an island in the centre of the soup plate’.
Marian McNeill (1929) provides a rich anthology of notes and quotations to exemplify the minor variations in this broth and the praise which has consistently been given to it. She chose the following from the account by Boswell (1786) of Dr Johnson’s visit to Aberdeen:
At dinner, Dr Johnson ate several plates of Scotch broth, with barley and peas in it, and seemed very fond of the dish. I said, ‘You never ate it before?’—Johnson, ‘No, sir; but I don’t care how soon I eat it again.’
Scotch egg
a hard-boiled egg enveloped in sausage meat and then fried. It is a popular cold snack, often eaten in pubs, or on picnics. Its origin is unclear although it could possible be a descendant of a form of Indian KOFTA, as suggested by Annette Hope (1987). Ayto (1993) states that the first printed recipe was in Mrs Rundell (edn of 1809), and suggests that the Scottish origin of the item was pointed up by its appearance in Meg Dods (1826), where it is described as being eaten hot with gravy, a practice also recorded by Mrs Beeton (1861).
Scotch pie
a small savoury PIE to be bought from bakers throughout Scotland. These small mutton pies, with their crust standing up round them about 1 cm (0.5″) above the filling, were always a very popular fast food for working people in Glasgow. They are still to be found in all bakers’ shops there, though they are not so easy to find now in some other parts of Scotland. The rim above the meat was often filled with hot gravy, peas or beans, and a spoonful of potato to make a complete meal. They are always served piping hot. Bakers keep them in a hot cupboard—they are not good cold.
Catherine Brown
scoter
Melanitta nigra, a European and N. American diving duck which used to be thought, at least in Normandy and parts of Britain, to be permissible fare during LENT. Their fishy taste seemed to absolve them from counting as ‘flesh’. However, they have rarely been considered a delicacy, either in Europe or in N. America, although Phillips (1922–6 quoted in Simon, 1983) said that in New England they were ‘still very much appreciated by those who have the patience and the courage to stew them in the proper way’. Phillips also took the trouble to pass on a camp cookery method of cooking them in a ‘backwards oven’, after which they were said to be ‘invariably tender, juicy and deliciously flavoured’.
Scotland
to venture an understatement, is not at all difficult to distinguish from England; the differences leap to the eye in many different aspects of the two cultures, including notably food and cookery. In these and other respects the people of Scotland have closer links with Scandinavia and France (as explained below), than do the English. Geographical differences have tended to give them different staple foods, especially in the northern part of the country; a lower level of prosperity in the past has imprinted a certain frugality on their kitchens; and the same genius which resulted in a quite disproportionate number of Scots being responsible for British achievements in medicine, engineering, philosophy, and the construction and administration of the British Empire flowered in a different way to produce some of the finest (and in the instance of Meg Dods most astonishing, even surreal) writing on food.
The best starting point from which to explore this fine writing is the classic work entitled The Scots Kitchen by F. Marian McNeill (1929). England acquired later a broadly comparable work, that by Dorothy Hartley (1954), but there are few countries in the world which possess an equally charming and scholarly account of their culinary history. Marian McNeill paid due attention to Gaelic terminology and to the underlying Celtic culture, and embellished her book with a truly remarkable wealth of quotations. She was perfectly prepared to quote English authors, not least Boswell (1786) recording the famous trip which he and Dr Johnson made to the Hebrides. Although Johnson, notoriously, defined oats as ‘a grain which in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’ (see, however, a gloss on this in OATS), he had many perceptive and complimentary remarks to make about the hospitality he received and the food he ate on this journey. See SCOTCH BROTH for his enthusiastic reaction to that dish. And, in a passage which is immediately comprehensible to any modern reader who has enjoyed a similar experience, he gave unstinted praise to the Scottish breakfast:
In the breakfast the Scots, whether of the Lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish in quest of sensual gratification, wherever he had supped, he would breakfast in Scotland.
One might add that Johnson’s hypothetical epicure would be equally successful in his search for sensual gratification if he or she were to enjoy a proper Scottish HIGH TEA.
The Scottish connection with France is known as the Auld Alliance. Marian McNeill, who provides an appendix of almost 150 Scots culinary terms which are of French derivation, takes care to explain that, despite the belief that Charlemagne (8/9th centuries) was at the origin of the Alliance:
Its authentic beginnings, however, go no farther back than the twelfth century. Later, when England, led by her Norman conquerors into a series of wars of aggression, had subdued Wales and partially subdued Ireland, she turned to Scotland and France, who were thus drawn to make common cause against a powerful enemy, and it was by this means that Scotland was able to maintain the national independence asserted at Bannockburn in the fourteenth century. The Scottish archers fought with distinction during the Hundred Years’ War, one of their leaders, the Earl of Buchan, being created Constable of France. In recognition of their services Charles VII appointed as Royal bodyguard the famous Scots Guard of France, which consisted of a hundred gendarmes and two hundred archers… After the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, the native element in the Scots Guard was gradually thinned, but the Guard persisted as part of the pageantry of the French court, until the latter went down, with all its pomps and vanities, in the maelstrom of the French Revolution.
The above-mentioned Meg Dods (‘Mistress Margaret Dods of the Cleikum Inn’, 1826) affords various glimpses of the French connection, remarking for example that the Scots howtowdie is a version of the Old French hétoudeau, both meaning young hen. The book, purporting to be by a character in Sir Walter Scott’s novel St Ronan’s Well, is prefaced by a diverting and often incomprehensible introduction in which another character from the novel, Peregrine Touchwood, Esquire, commonly styled the ‘Cleikum Nabob’, descends on Mistress Dods and becomes involved with the ‘celebrated Dr Redgill’ in a curious blend of horseplay (as when the doctor is charged by a porker and turns a ‘somerset’) and gastronomic philosophy, punctuated by dour Scottish comments from Mistress Dods. In this zany framework sit hundreds of beautifully precise recipes, many of them equipped with weird footnotes to remind us to take any solemn expression off our faces.
Incidentally, the first Scottish cookbook, by Mrs McClintock (1736), had been a sober affair, short and practical; it was, surprisingly, unknown to bibliographers and food writers until Virginia Maclean (1973 and 1981) brought it to light.
The Scottish links with Scandinavia are most visible in Orkney and Shetland, but continue to be evident down to the Border Country (and indeed into the north of England, which has much in common with the Lowlands of Scotland). The contrast is heightened the further north one goes, partly because of changing geographical features. Annette Hope (1987) has an illuminating chapter about the wild parts of the Highlands and the enormous changes made by deforestation (starting already in medieval times) and other factors, leading to changes in mean annual temperature, patterns of rainfall, habitats for wild animals such as DEER, plus changes in the laws about GAME, the growth of poaching (she cites Alexander Davidson as the supreme poacher, emphasizing his reputation as a devout reader of the Bible, the generosity with which he disbursed his spoils to those in need, and his unusual diet of ‘oatmeal saturated with whisky and rolled into sausage-shaped patties’). As for the Scots diet in more general and less eccentric manifestations, another writer, Maisie Steven (1985), has been responsible for a major study of the changes in this from medieval to modern times, and the consequences for health of the Scottish people. In this context the chapter on ‘Glasgow Good and Bad 1940s and 50s’ by Catherine Brown (1990) is highly illuminating and refers, as part of the ‘good’ side, to the famous Glasgow tearooms (especially that of Mrs Cranston) which distinguished the city in the first half of the 20th century and provided an excellent outlet for the innovative art nouveau architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The same author has described in the same book the work done recently to revitalize traditional Scottish cookery (with horror stories of the occasional blunders committed by over-zealous and historically ignorant publicists). All these books testify to the importance which Scottish writers attach to Scottish food, and make a good introduction to any reflections about what is likely to happen to it in the 3rd millennium.
For other features of Scottish cookery, see BANNOCK; BAP; BLACK BUN; BROSE; CLAPSHOT; CULLEN SKINK; DUNDEE CAKE; HOGMANAY; KALE; STOVIES; HADDOCK (for Arbroath smokies and Finnan haddies); HAGGIS (not, as sometimes supposed, a purely Scottish item); MARMALADE; PORRIDGE; SWEETIES. See also ORKNEY AND SHETLAND, whose distinctive foodways called for separate treatment.
screwbean
a bean from the plant Prosopis juliflora, which is a shrub related to MESQUITE and which grows in the south-western USA. It is also called tornillo, screws, and screw pod mesquite, all its names having reference to the spiral seed pods. The pods are rich in sugar. The beans may be ground and then combined with water to produce a nourishing gruel. The Mojave Indians thought that the taste of young screwbeans was unsatisfactory and used to leave them to decay in a pit lined with arrow weeds for about four weeks, after which they would dry and grind the beans and then make the gruel.
Leaves and roots have also provided food for American Indians of the region, for example the Papago as well as the Mojave, but the plant has only been cultivated on a small scale.
screwpine
also often called pandanus, the common English name of many plants of the genus Pandanus, refers to the twisted stems which they usually exhibit. These plants, of which there are hundreds of species, grow in the tropics from India through SE Asia to N. Australia and Oceania.
Classification of the species is still uncertain. A principal species is P. tectorius (including what was formerly P. odoratissimus), the ‘fragrant screwpine’. Its flowers are the source of keora/kewra essence, used in parts of India and in Sri Lanka as a flavouring. In Australia the fruit pulp was baked and eaten by Aborigines.
However, the most important use of screwpine for flavouring purposes is that of the young leaves of P. amaryllifolius in Malay and Indonesian dishes. Daun pandan (pandan leaf) is an important ingredient, whose use extends also to Thailand and other SE Asian countries including Vietnam. It is prized not only for its delicate fragrance but also for the natural green colour which can be obtained from the leaves by boiling them and which is then used to colour various sweet foods.
Many of the species have fruits which count as edible although their appeal is limited. One such is P. spiralis in tropical Australia, which, according to Tim Low (1991):
bears enormous fruits the size of human heads, which crumble when ripe into wedge-shaped segments, the inner bases of which may be sucked, but only after roasting in the fire.
This sounds like hard work, but the reward is said to be pulp tasting like apricot or custard apple. The seeds, extracted from a woody matrix inside the fruits, were once an important Aboriginal food and probably more important than the fruits because they were more nutritious.
In New Zealand a plant of the same family, Freycinettia banksii, called kie kie or tawahara by the Maori, provides two edible items: small fruits and large sugary white flower bracts.