a disease caused by lack of vitamin C. It affects connective tissue: symptoms include sore gums and loose teeth, ulcers on the legs, and lethargy. It takes several months without the vitamin for the first signs to appear. The disease can be quickly cured by eating foods containing the vitamin.
Scurvy was a sailor’s disease, brought on by months at sea without fresh food. In the time of the great European explorers at the end of the 15th century it was the greatest single cause of death in sailors, even in wartime. Often ships would arrive after a long voyage with only a quarter of the crew alive, and they on the brink of death. On land, much of the population of Europe was at risk from scurvy every winter, thanks to a diet largely of preserved foods and a prevailing prejudice against fruit and vegetables. The disease often appeared among people in besieged towns.
The Chinese had discovered much earlier, around the 5th century AD, that scurvy at sea could be avoided by carrying live ginger plants on board junks. But it took Europeans until the early 17th century to discover that green plants and fresh fruits cured scurvy. Nobody had any idea why, and the discovery brought little benefit to sailors. On long, stormy ocean voyages in small, cramped ships, no plant would survive. During their rare landfalls sailors would gather any edible green plants, of which several species became known as ‘scurvy grass’ (see CRESS; HORSERADISH; SEAKALE; SORREL).
One of the few preserved foods to contain any vitamin C is SAUERKRAUT. This was often carried in barrels on Dutch ships. By the 18th century its effect against scurvy had been noticed. Captain James Cook carried sauerkraut on his voyages specifically to prevent scurvy. However, he had great difficulty making his men eat it.
In 1747 the British naval surgeon James Lind conducted experiments on antiscorbutic substances—that is, those able to prevent scurvy. It had been noticed that citrus fruits were highly effective, but the Royal Navy considered them too expensive to dispense to sailors. One theory was that the acid in these fruits was the active substance. Lind selected six groups of two sailors already suffering from scurvy, and gave each group a daily dose of one of six reputed antiscorbutics: vinegar; a small amount of dilute sulphuric acid; a quart of cider; a pint of sea water; a medicine made from nutmeg, garlic, and mustard; and two oranges and a lemon. The sailors drinking cider showed a slight improvement, but those eating the citrus fruits got better quickly. In 1753 Lind published his results in A Treatise of the Scurvy.
By the end of the 18th century the Royal Navy had reluctantly agreed to give lemon juice to sailors, and the disease vanished at once from HM ships. In the mid-19th century lime juice, which was cheaper because limes were grown in the British W. Indies, was issued instead. This contains much less vitamin C than lemon juice. The disease returned briefly until the dose was increased. British sailors became known as ‘Limeys’, a word still in use.
Vitamin C was still undiscovered, and the dangers of scurvy were still not generally recognized. Captain Scott would probably have returned safely from the South Pole in 1912 if he and his men had not been crippled by scurvy. Ironically, he died just as researchers in Europe were making real progress in the discovery of the vitamin (see VITAMINS).
Scurvy is still seen, very occasionally, among old people living alone who neglect their diet.
the name for a group of marine creatures which resemble flower heads anchored to rocks and of which a few are edible. The snake-locks anemone, Anemonia sulcata, the best known, appears in Mediterranean markets. After being cleaned and (optionally) marinated, they can be made into a soup or used in an omelette or fried.
A related creature, Actinia equina, lacks a real English name but is tomate de mer in French, being the size of a tomato and red in colour. It is less edible, but can play a minor supporting role in fish stews or soups.
Dicentrarchus labrax and D. punctatus, remains one of the most prized fishes of Europe as it was in the times of classical Rome. Pliny (1st century AD) stated that specimens taken in rivers, which these fish penetrate some way upstream, were preferred; but nowadays those taken from the sea are counted best.
A silvery fish, with a maximum length of 1 m (40″), the sea bass has a range which extends from the Black Sea through the Mediterranean and in the E. Atlantic from Senegal up to the south coast of England (D. punctatus) or as far as Norway (D. labrax). It is a favourite fish for anglers, especially on the south coast of Ireland.
The flesh of sea bass is of a fine flavour. It is also relatively free of small bones, and firm; it holds its shape well after cooking. Thus a large specimen is an ideal fish to serve at a cold buffet, and the consequent demand from restaurants is a factor in the high price it fetches. So is the fact that the fishery for it has been on an artisanal scale, or conducted for sport. However, sea bass enter rivers and are prepared to live in saltwater lagoons, so are susceptible to fish farming, despite their slow growth rate, and this has made it easier to provide a controlled supply of ‘portion-sized’ fish.
mostly of the large family Sparidae, include numerous species which make fine eating. They are particularly abundant in the Mediterranean, where the DENTEX and GILT-HEAD BREAM are especially good; and in the W. Atlantic and Caribbean regions (see PORGY); and have many relations in the warm waters of the Indo-Pacific, where the name bream is applied not only to the family Sparidae but also to members of the families Lethrinidae (some are described under EMPERORS), and Nemipteridae (THREADFIN BREAM) and occasionally to a SNAPPER (thus ‘government bream’ for Lutjanus sebae). The present entry describes them generally and describes the species which seems to be the best qualified to bear the name ‘sea bream’ as its own.
The sea bream are generally oval in shape when viewed from the side and narrow bodied, with a single long dorsal fin. Most have a large mouth and canine-type teeth; but some species are equipped with other sorts of teeth, designed to deal with their chosen sorts of food.
Common names for these fish are confusing, and many have no real English name, if only because they dwell in non-English-speaking regions. The one species for which sea bream is the accepted common name is Pagrus pagrus, of particular interest because it occurs both in the Mediterranean (and E. Atlantic) and in the Caribbean region. The explanation is that its eggs are carried westwards across the Atlantic by ocean currents, and their incubation period, of about 60 days, corresponds to the time which this voyage takes. So, after floating across deep waters in which the newly hatched fish would have no chance of survival they arrive at just the right moment among inshore waters of the Caribbean, where they emerge and can survive. This sea bream (pagre in French, pargo in Spanish, pagro in Italian) is a sizeable fish (maximum length 75 cm/30″).
Hippophäe rhamnoides, a small tree which grows wild in Britain close to the sea, in the Alps, and in Russia and China. It bears clusters of orange berries, insipid in taste, but capable of being stewed and sweetened or made into jams, jellies, etc. Jane Grigson, writing in the Observer in 1988, found that with the addition of cream the berries would make an attractive pinkish-orange ice cream.
The spineless cultivar Novost Altaya, developed in Russia, and experiments elsewhere, including Scotland, suggest that these berries may become more important.
a mysterious creature which belongs to the class Holothurians. These creatures are quite distinct from fish, crustaceans, and molluscs. There are a lot of them (over 600 species) and they occur all round the world, but only a few species are used as food and only in some regions, notably the Orient (where the principal markets are at Hong Kong, which is by far the most important, and in Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia) but in recent times also in Barcelona and its environs, and to a small extent in Provence and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, e.g. Istanbul.
A sea cucumber does resemble a cucumber in shape. It is distinctly phallic in appearance, a feature which is underlined by its habit of ejecting sticky threads (Cuvierian tubules) when squeezed. It does not swim around, but moves sluggishly about on the sea bottom extracting modest nourishment from the sediment. This quiet life is sometimes punctuated by a melodramatic piece of behaviour; if severely disturbed, the sea cucumber will eviscerate itself (i.e. eject its entire apparatus of stomach etc.) and then regrow the missing organs within the space of a few weeks.
One end of the sea cucumber is its mouth, recognizable by a fringe of tentacles. The other end houses the anus, and also, quite often, an unwanted guest in the form of a small fish which backs into the hole and lives there, feeding itself by nibbling at the host’s gonads.
Sea cucumbers have a great appeal to the Chinese because of the interesting slippery texture which they acquire after being suitably prepared, and also for their flavour. The method followed in preparing them, often done in the Pacific islands where they are collected and processed as a cottage industry, is first to boil them in water until they swell; then to slit them open along the underside, wash them, and boil them again, to the point at which they are rubbery but not too hard; next, to remove the guts and then smoke and dry the creatures over a fire of mangrove wood or coconut husks; and finally to cure them in the sun for a few days. When the time comes to use them, they are soaked to soften them and make them swell in readiness for being cooked.
The species most prized by the Chinese is Holothuria (Microthele) nobilis, which comes in two forms, white and black, depending on habitat. It is often called teatfish or mammy fish, the latter name being apparently derived from the native name mama in the Gilbert Islands. The white teatfish lives in moderately deep water, on clean sand and in or near turtlegrass; the black version likes shallower water and to be near living coral. Next in order of estimation come two somewhat smaller species, both of the genus Actinopyga: the blackfish and the deep-water redfish. The prickly redfish, Thelenota ananas, is of less value, although still considered to be worth exploiting and of generous size. Its ‘prickles’ are large teats which occur in groups of two or three all over the body.
In the 1970s an enterprising restaurateur in Barcelona noticed that fishermen on the Catalan coast had for long had the habit of collecting these creatures, of the species Stichopus regalis, and eating them themselves. He went into the matter and put them on his menu, since when they have graduated to being the most expensive seafood in Barcelona.
Apart from Barcelona, Japan seems to be the one place where sea cucumbers are marketed fresh. There, and also in Taiwan, it is Stichopus japonicus, a relation of the Barcelona species, which is most favoured. Everywhere else, and especially in places where there are ethnic Chinese communities, it is the dried product which is available.
Caulerpa racemosa, one of the green SEAWEEDS, with ‘plastic-looking grapelike nodes borne on branches’. The green is not just green, but vibrant green. This seaweed is always eaten fresh, and should be consumed within hours of being harvested (although Patricia Arroyo Staub, 1982, comments that sea grapes can be kept successfully in a refrigerator for a few days, provided that they are not washed until taken out for consumption). In the Philippines it is usual to eat them with fresh onions and tomatoes. In Indonesia they may be coated with sugar; in China, added to noodle soup; in Taiwan, quick fried or boiled.
Crambe maritima, is a member of the CABBAGE family, Cruciferae, as its generic name suggests (krambe being Greek for cabbage), but it is not a type of KALE. Nor is it a relative of seakale beet (a kind of CHARD).
Seakale grows wild around the shores of Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. If it grows normally it is bitter and inedible. If, however, the wind covers a young plant with sand, it is cut off from the light and develops a thick, blanched leaf stalk with a tiny, under-developed leaf at the tip. The result is a tender, mild stem vegetable which can be eaten like asparagus, although it takes longer to cook.
It is a traditional sailor’s specific against SCURVY, and is one of the various plants called ‘scurvy grass’. Lovelock (1972) suggests that Pliny (1st century AD) was referring to seakale when he wrote of a kind of cabbage called ‘halmyrides’, which grew on the coast, always stayed green, and was taken as a provision for long sea journeys.
Seakale was forced under cover in Italy during the Middle Ages, and its use gradually spread. It reached England in the 17th century. Forced seakale was considered a great delicacy and enjoyed a vogue until the 18th century.
An Asian relative of seakale with large, edible roots, C. tatarica, is used in Siberia and as far west as Hungary as the ‘Tartar (i.e. Tatar) bread plant’. The roots, which may be grated raw in salads or cooked like potatoes, taste mild and sweet. The plant also has an edible stem.
Ulva lactuca, has a worldwide distribution and is possibly the most widespread of the edible green SEAWEEDS. Its thin, crinkled, lettuce-like leaves pass from pale to bright to dark green as they grow and age. They may be used raw in salads or cooked in various dishes and combinations, including soups.
excluding air from food, is a method of PRESERVATION used since early times. The Romans covered apples in clay to make them keep through the winter. The first systematic use of sealing was in medieval Europe, where it was discovered by trial and error that perishable foods would keep better if enclosed in a PIE. After the pie was cooked, hot fat was poured in through a hole in the crust. This solidified and sealed the contents from the air in the space under the crust. As long as the melted fat and the pie were more or less at boiling point when this was done, the contents would remain sterile and might last for several weeks.
Usually the pie crust, made of hard, dry ‘huff paste’, was thrown away or given to servants. It was realized that this waste could be avoided if the food was cooked in an earthenware pot rather than a crust—the origin of POTTING. As before, the top was sealed with hot fat; then the pot would be covered with a piece of parchment which would help prevent the seal from being broken. No one then knew of the existence of the micro-organisms that cause spoilage, or how they could be killed by heating, so mistakes were often made, such as allowing the food to cool before pouring on the fat.
Things like jars of pickles would also be ‘sealed’, often by covering them with a piece of bladder tied firmly into place. A leather top fastened over such a covering gave greater protection against possible assaults by mice and insects. However, this was still not a true seal. A layer of oil on the top of the pickling liquid would be a better solution.
Progress came at the beginning of the 19th century with the invention of what was later called CANNING—though originally glass jars sealed with a cork were used. For the first time the process of heating and sealing was so effective that perishables could be made to keep for years. In the 1860s the French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered how micro-organisms spoil food, so that it was possible to design really effective methods of destroying and excluding them.
Sealing is not restricted to completely sterile packages. Foods that keep reasonably well but develop off flavours when exposed to oxygen in the air, for example nuts and coffee beans, are now sealed in airtight packs. It is helpful to remove as much air as possible from the pack. Sometimes this is done by sucking out air through a small one-way valve to create a partial vacuum, a technique sometimes called by its French name of fermeture sous vide. Another method is to fill the container with nitrogen, a cheap and tasteless gas.
being marine mammals, attract sympathy from many people and there would be wide support for the proposition that they should not be killed for food except in those sparsely populated areas where they have traditionally been an important part of the diet of the indigenous peoples. Among such people are the Inuit (formerly called Eskimos) in the far north; see INUIT COOKERY. The same applies in the Antarctic, except that in the absence of indigenous populations, the privilege is reserved for explorers and research personnel; see ANTARCTICA for a few details about eating seals there.
(also known as pot pie) seems to have acquired its principal name because it was essentially shipboard food. It was a complete meal in a pan, cooked economically on top of a galley stove. It consisted of a good rich meat stew, with plenty of gravy. The boiled suet pudding which would have accompanied it on land, on shipboard became a suet paste layer laid on top of the stew to steam gently under a tightly fitting lid. Because of this top paste, it was called a ‘pie’ (sailing vessels did not generally have ovens until the 18th century, when navy ships carried ovens for officers’ fare). Sea pie was made by Yorkshire keelmen’s families who carried goods from the Humber Estuary onto the Yorkshire canal network, up to the mid-20th century. The keels were barges with huge square sails, which only occasionally ventured to sea. They had a little coal stove in their tiny cabins but no oven, so everything had to be fried or boiled. Harry Fletcher described sea pie in A Life on the Humber (1975):
Dad liked to make a sea-pie himself. We had a big oval iron pan into which he would put a rabbit, stewing beef and all the vegetables we had. It was cooked slowly on the fire, and then Dad made a suet dumpling the size of the pan, and we really gorged ourselves.
For the history of sea pie in N. America see Gary Gillman (1991) and Karen Hess (1991).
Sesuvium portulacastrum, a reddish plant found in hot coastal areas around the world, which belongs to the family Aizoaceae. Its fleshy, succulent leaves may be rinsed to diminish the saltiness and eaten raw as a salad; or cooked; or pickled like SAMPHIRE (to which it has often been compared). American writers about wild food plants have remarked on its presence in the southern states of the USA, and on its usefulness both as a minor vegetable for human use and as animal feed. It is prized in its pickled version in the Philippines.
the process of cooking the surfaces of a piece of meat briefly at a high temperature until well browned, before reducing the heat and allowing cooking to finish more gently. There is one good reason for searing meat, which is that high temperatures concentrate the juices that do leak, and encourage a process known as the ‘Maillard reaction’ (see BROWNING, section on sugar-amine browning) which gives a good flavour in the finished dish.
CULINARY MYTHOLOGY tells a different tale, and states that searing ‘seals the juice’ into the meat, thus producing a moister end result and avoiding the loss of flavourful and nutritious matter. There is, however, no truth in this plausible theory. As McGee (1990) has demonstrated by a series of simple and elegant experiments, juice (water, water-soluble proteins and other substances, and melted fat) leaks from meat during cooking whether it has been seared or not, and experiments in the 20th century have shown that seared meat loses rather more weight (through fluid drip) than that cooked at a moderate temperature from beginning to end.
Searing, as a culinary process, originated in the 19th century when German chemist Justus von Liebig postulated, but never demonstrated, that high temperatures coagulated proteins on the surface of meat and formed a juice-trapping ‘shell’. Since 18th-century researchers thought they had isolated a water-soluble substance, which they called osmazome, held to be responsible for flavour and nutritive qualities of meat, preserving the juices was considered of prime importance (and played a large part in the development of MEAT EXTRACTS). Harold McGee remarks that Liebig’s theory probably became popular because it offered a pseudo-scientific rationale for a new method of cooking, and thinks that the searing myth lives on because it offers a vivid and commonsensical picture of what happens to meat during cooking. Some of its persuasiveness may come from searing’s resemblance to cautery, the time-honoured surgical technique of using boiling liquid, a red-hot piece of metal, a burning lens, or an electrical current to stop bleeding.
He notes that the myth has even seduced well-known experts in the field of meat science, but that cauterizing is not, in fact, a good analogy; the slow leaching of fluid from the surface of meat is very different from a steady flow of blood from a defined point. Meat proteins are arranged in bundles of long thin cells, contained in collagen sheaths; conventional methods for slicing meat usually run at right angles to these, allowing fluid to leak from the ends of innumerable cut cells. Under the influence of heat, meat proteins do coagulate from the surface inwards, but instead of welding into a watertight surface, they become shrivelled and disorganized, allowing juice to seep around the ends. After some experiments, McGee concluded that it is the thickness of the meat, and the degree to which it is done, that dictates final moisture content, and observed that fat content also influences the apparent juiciness of the meat when it is eaten.
or salmon trout, Salmo trutta trutta, is the sea-going form of a species which also includes the brown trout of rivers and the bull or lake trout of larger inland waters. These other, freshwater, forms are described under TROUT. The sea trout, like the salmon, is a migratory fish, most often caught in rivers, which it ascends in order to spawn; but its middle life is spent at sea. Its natural range is from Portugal to Norway and Iceland. It is particularly esteemed in Wales, as sewin.
The maximum length of sea-run trout seems to be over 1 m (40″), but this is exceptional. The fish are usually grey or silvery with black or reddish spots. The flesh, like that of the salmon, is pink; this is because the diet includes crustaceans which contain a carotenoid pigment.
creatures which when adult are relatively immune to predators (apart from certain large sharks, whales, and human beings) but whose pattern of reproduction renders them vulnerable to extinction, belong to the order Chelonia (or Testudines) and have a very long history, stretching back to the time of the dinosaurs, 90 million years or so ago.
There are seven surviving species of sea turtle, of which six have a global distribution in tropical or subtropical waters. Many have well-defined feeding areas, such as shallow waters with a plentiful supply of marine grasses, and all have a limited number of ‘rookeries’ for reproduction. If only these creatures had been able to develop a viviparous capability, so that they could give birth to their babies at sea, they would have an assured future. Unfortunately, however, they stayed with the technique of laying eggs on land, specifically on beaches with certain characteristics, and this may spell their eventual doom. Where the beaches used by the various species have been identified, efforts may be made to prevent at least human predators from digging up the eggs; but in the case of mainland beaches it seems all but impossible to protect the eggs from raccoons and foxes. (It should not be thought that the turtles are careless about depositing their eggs. On the contrary, they go to great lengths to excavate deep holes in the sand— Bustard (1972) records finding dead turtles, stricken by a heart attack brought on by the intense physical effort, poised over the holes they were making—and to cover their traces afterwards. But several predators can detect the eggs by smell, even though they are buried deep.)
Early navigators who carried out the great voyages of exploration soon discovered the advantages of capturing live turtles and keeping them on board as a source of food when needed. As Carr (1967) wrote:
The vitamin hunger of sailors, which came from nowhere and made men’s gums grow over their teeth, and could send a corpse a day sliding over the rail, practically disappeared in the Caribbean after the discovery of Chelonia, the green turtle. No other edible creature could be carried away and kept so long alive. Only the turtle could take the place of spoiled kegs of beef and send a ship on for a second year of wandering or marauding. All early activity in the new world tropics—exploration, colonisation, buccaneering and the manœuvrings of naval squadrons—was in some way dependent on the turtle.
Although the number who perished in this way in the Caribbean was great, what happened there only affected a small proportion of the world population. The same was, broadly speaking, true of the depredations which followed when, in the 18th century, the fashion for turtle soup began.
The English connoisseur and letter-writer Horace Walpole once remarked (in 1789, late in his life) that he thought turtle was first served in London in 1711. The earliest printed recipes for dressing sea turtle were given by Richard Bradley (1732), and ascribed by him to a Barbados lady. Bradley said that the sea turtle ‘is a fine Animal, partaking of the Land and Water. Its Flesh between that of Veal, and that of a Lobster, and is extremely pleasant, either roasted or baked. There are some of these Creatures that weigh near two hundred Weight. They are frequently brought to England in Tubs, of Sea Water, and will keep alive a long time.’ He did not mention turtle soup, but this soon became a standard feature of English cookery books; it appeared, for example, in the 4th edition (1751) of Hannah Glasse’s famous book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
Turtle soup, prepared from the calipee (flipper meat) was elevated in the 19th century to become a ‘must’ for civic banquets and suchlike occasions; and, since it was difficult and expensive to make, recipes for MOCK TURTLE SOUP, of which the first seems to have been in Hannah Glasse’s 6th edition (1758), became increasingly frequent.
Calipee, incidentally, is adjacent to the lower shell of the turtle and contains yellowish gelatinous matter. Calipash is the meat adjoining the upper shell and it has green gelatinous matter. Calipash is sometimes used as the name of a dish prepared from this upper meat. When it has been dried (which is easy) it is very light and easily portable and almost indestructible.
Although developments of this sort contributed to endangering the survival of the sea turtles, it seems likely that the greatest threat has come from the consumption of and traffic in their eggs. These are not hard shelled, like hen’s eggs, but enclosed in a flexible white membrane. It is usual to boil them, but they do not set hard; the white will remain quite liquid.
The species which have been exploited as food are as follows:
• Chelonia mydas, the green turtle, varies in colour from pale olive green through greenish-brown to almost black. The maximum length of its carapace, measured over the curve, is 1.5 m (between 4.5 and 5′) and the maximum weight is something like 200 kg (240 lb), but most specimens are far smaller. The flesh of this species is the best for making turtle soup and for eating generally.
• Eretmochelys imbricata, the hawksbill turtle, has as its name indicates hooked jaws which enable it to feast on crabs and prawns. It is smaller than the green turtle (length of carapace unlikely to be more than 75 cm/30″) and less sought after as food than as the source of tortoiseshell. It is, however, eaten, and its eggs are prized as a delicacy.
• Caretta caretta, the common or loggerhead turtle, may be 1 m (40″) long, is brown in colour, and provides good meat which has been made into turtle stew in Malta, for example.
• Dermochelys coriacea, the leathery or leatherback turtle, is by far the largest, sometimes measuring almost 2 m (7′) long. Its back is covered with a thick, leathery skin, rather than a true carapace, and has seven golden ridges running from front to rear. It is a truly pelagic species, given to wandering over the oceans (as opposed to making periodic migrations to reach rookeries). Its meat is not prized, but its eggs are; these may be as large as tennis balls and have a reputation—shared with the smaller eggs of the other species—as an aphrodisiac.
It is to be hoped that measures of conservation and the nascent industry of turtle farming will be successful in maintaining the sea turtles as a renewable food resource.
the common name for a sea creature (of the class Echinoidea) which provides the least amount of edible material for its volume; but that small part is a great delicacy.
The sea urchin looks like a small hedgehog, with spines sticking out in all directions from its ‘shell’ (correctly, ‘test’). These spines break off easily and are very difficult to extract from, for example, the foot of an incautious bather. Their purpose is to make their owner an unattractive mouthful for predators.
Inside the more or less spherical test there is little edible matter: in fact nothing but the five orange or rose-coloured ovaries, also known as corals. These are revealed by cutting the sea urchin open horizontally, preferably using the French implement designed for the purpose and called coupe-oursin, the French name for sea urchin being oursin. The corals, which need no cooking, make a delicious mouthful, with no accompaniment save a drop of lemon juice. They can, however, be incorporated in certain cooked dishes, for example an omelette or scrambled eggs, and can also be used to make an excellent sauce.
The sea urchin of the Mediterranean, Paracentrotus lividus, is the best known in Europe, and the Mediterranean region is where these delicacies, marketed where they are landed, are most appreciated. This species may be found as far north as the south coast of Ireland. It measures up to 8 cm (4″) in diameter.
In the N. Atlantic, all the way round from the English Channel to New Jersey, the species is Strongylocentrus droebachiensis. Indeed, it has a circumpolar distribution. However, it has not been not marketed in many places. In N. Europe, for example, it is largely ignored. A clergyman called Wallace, writing about Orkney in the 1680s, said: ‘The common people reckon the meat of the Sea Urchin or Ivegars, as they call them, a great Rarity, and use it oft instead of butter.’ This practice has died out and Orcadians now call the sea urchin ‘scarriman’s heid’, scarriman meaning a tramp or street child with unruly, spiky hair. It is abundant on the coast of Maine but is there called ‘whore’s eggs’ and regarded with abhorrence. Some are fished in the Bay of Fundy. Many are now exported to Japan, and the spread of Japanese restaurants in N. America has given rise to a local reappraisal of the urchin.
Further south in the W. Atlantic there are smaller species, little eaten except for Cidaris tribuloides in the W. Indies.
The giant sea urchin of California, Strongylocentrus franciscanus, has been declared by Euell Gibbons (1964) to be the best of all, and to be greatly appreciated by Californians of Italian descent. It is sometimes as much as 10 cm (5″) in diameter. S. purpuratus is smaller but more abundant, and its corals also have a fine flavour.
In CHILE there is one edible species, Loxechinus albus, which Chileans prefer to eat raw, perhaps with a little lemon juice.
The Japanese name for sea urchin is uni. The species Hemicentrotus pulcherrimus and Heliocidaris crassispina, fished in Japanese waters, are highly prized, eaten fresh, perhaps as a costly element in SUSHI.
marine algae which, insofar as they are used as food, might better be termed ‘sea vegetables’; but this new term has yet to achieve wide currency, perhaps because the ways of preparing and serving seaweeds, and the quantities eaten, seem far removed from vegetable cookery. Japan is undoubtedly the country in which consumption of seaweeds and knowledge about them is highest.
The main edible species, and indeed all seaweeds, fall into three groups, distinguished by their basic coloration (although this can vary according to several factors).
Green and blue-green seaweeds include:
• Enteromorpha spp (Japanese
aonori/
AWO-NORI);
Brown seaweeds include:
• Laminaria spp (Japanese
KONBU);
• Undaria pinnatifida (Japanese
WAKAME).
Red seaweeds include:
• Porphyra tenera and other
Porphyra spp,
NORI in Japan, laver in English;
• Palmaria palmata (
DULSE);
• Gelidium amansii (Japanese
TENGUSA).
Although numerous seaweeds are edible in one form or another, only a limited number are consumed on a large scale. In Japan, production of wakame has been by far the greatest, konbu and nori in second and third places.
Many seaweeds are processed, e.g. by drying, compressing into sheets, after being harvested. Some are available in powdered form, as a kind of seasoning.
Besides being consumed fresh or after being processed as described above, seaweeds also yield substances which are of great importance to the food industry and are consumed ‘invisibly’ in foods as diverse as biscuits and confectionery, ice cream, syrups, jams, and salad dressings. These are the so-called phytocolloids, naturally occurring in seaweeds and capable of stabilizing and emulsifying. The most important are algin (or alginic acid), agar, and carrageenan. These are all derived from red or brown seaweeds.
The nutritional qualities of seaweeds are impressive. They typically provide useful protein, easily assimilable carbohydrate, virtually no fat, generous helpings of minerals and other trace elements, plus vitamins.
similar to MADEIRA CAKE, flavoured with CARAWAY seeds. Now considered an old-fashioned curiosity and rarely made, seed cake formerly enjoyed great popularity in Britain. Early versions contained caraway COMFITS; seeds alone came into use in the 18th century.
Seed cake probably had another meaning, as given in an account by Morris (1892):
Fifty years ago seed-time had also its festival, though on a lesser scale, as well as harvest. At the backend, when the early sowing had been completed, the farmer made a sort of feast for his men, the principal feature of which was ‘seed-cake’, which was given to each of them. The cake did not get its name from anything that it contained, for it was in fact an ordinary sort of currant or plum cake, but from the occasion. On these minor festivals the men had as much ale to drink as they liked, and right well they enjoyed themselves. This old custom has, I believe, now quite died out.
This may be the sense Thomas Tusser (1557) intended, speaking of seed cake to which the village was treated when wheat-seed was put in the ground.
is usually made from the very hard durum WHEAT, a variety of Mediterranean origin which is now grown mostly in the USA and Canada. When coarsely milled, the brittle grains fracture into sharp chips, and it is these which constitute ordinary semolina.
The word ‘semolina’ is Italian, derived from the Latin simila, denoting fine flour. The use of the term in English for coarse chips therefore represents a departure from the original meaning. In fact, however, a finer semolina flour is available; this is used for making PASTA, so durum wheat is sometimes called macaroni wheat.
The main characteristic of semolina is that it is tough and will not turn into a starchy paste when cooked. Paradoxically, this causes it to produce a light texture, of an interestingly granular nature. Semolina is therefore used in making GNOCCHI and CROQUETTES, both of which can otherwise be heavy and stodgy.
British semolina pudding, being essentially just semolina cooked in milk (and therefore lacking the flavour which is developed when wheat products are cooked at higher temperatures, e.g. by frying), does not show off the product to advantage. However, properly used, semolina can be as delicate as any starch, tending to form a paste rather than a jelly. In this role it is a thickener in Middle Eastern dishes of the MAʾMOUNIA type, and also, fried golden brown and then mixed with large amounts of sugar, gives solidity to most of the many kinds of HALVA.
Semolina continues to be used interchangeably with cornflour in some puddings of the general BLANCMANGE type. The German rote Grütze and Scandinavian rødgrøt (‘red groats’ in the sense of a fine grained PORRIDGE), which are thickened fruit purées, often use semolina. See also KISEL. So do the Italian budino di ricotta and the Russian gurievskaya kasha: see RICOTTA and KASHA.
Semolina cakes are made in some countries. The Greek ravaní calls for flour and semolina in equal amounts. After baking, the hot cake is cut into squares while still in the tin and soaked with a thin syrup.
Maize and rice ‘semolinas’ are also made, but are starchier than the genuine article.
or ‘mountain ham’ in Spanish jamón serrano, was the generic name for all cured Spanish HAM, but it now refers only to hams from white pigs. Curing traditions go back to the 1st century BC (Strabo mentions them in his Geography) and artisanal dry-salted ham-making still flourishes in chilly, dry mountain areas. They include Teruel (now a Denomination of Origin, in Aragon) and Trévelez (Spain’s highest village, in Granada). Occasionally, as in the Rioja, hams may be rubbed with ground red pepper and spices; in damp Galicia they may be lightly smoked. Generally serrano is eaten raw, sliced into very thin slices, but for cooking it may be cut into chips (tacos), as in baby broad beans sautéed in olive oil with jamón, while a hambone lifts many classic pulse stews. Sold off-the-bone or pre-packed, modern factory-cured ham tends to be eaten in thicker slices, alone or with bread, as in Catalan pa amb tomàquet (bread with tomato). These hams have long had widespread celebrity. In 1752 the Earl of Chesterfield, whose letters to an errant son were a touchstone of good parenting (as well as elegant English prose), gave effusive thanks to his cousin for sending over a ham from Granada.
Jamon Ibérico is cured ham made from the slim native Spanish black pig (cerdo iberico). Enjoyed by Charles V, but excluded from aristocratic tables till the late 18th century, Iberico’s production is rising after a 30-year crisis provoked by African swine fever and cross-breeding. Its making is stringently regulated in four denominated areas: Guijelo, in Salamanca, Huelva in western Andalusia (which includes Jabugo, legendary for its hams), the Valle de Pedroches in northern Cordoba, and the region-wide Dehesa de Extremadura (which includes Montánchez, Charles V’s source of ham). Researchers at Móstoles University, Madrid, have shown that the ham’s intense flavour and creamy, aromatic fat derive from breed and diet. Acorns (bellotas) foraged in hilly winter pastures give the pigs an easily liquefied fat rich in oleic oil (up to 56%). During curing and ageing, which lasts at least two years, it filters through the meat’s finely veined intramuscular fat. Hence Iberico’s prices, which are astronomical, are fixed by breed and the percentage of hill-foraging in their diet. Iberico is generally served shaved into wafer-thin slices with a long flexibly bladed knife (jamonero). The ham’s nickname, pata negra, or ‘black hoof’, is a synonym for anything Spanish of superb quality.
See also SERVICE À LA RUSSE. The whole question of service à la this or that is of limited interest and, at the time when people were exercised about the matter, only affected a minuscule proportion of the human species. However, some understanding of the matter, especially the so-called service à la française which persisted in the aristocratic upper end of French and other European cuisines from medieval times until the mid-19th century, is essential for understanding many early cookery books, and in particular those which had to do with court cookery.
In former times the structure of a formal meal was not by ‘courses’ (as the term is now understood) but by services. Each service could comprise a choice of dishes from which each guest could select what appealed to him or her most.
• The first service could include soups,
HORS D’ŒUVRES (somewhat different from what now bear that name), things to replace the soups (e.g. meat dishes), and things in the category of
ENTRÉE (e.g. more meat dishes).
• The second service would include roast game and meats and any particularly impressive savoury dishes, e.g. a whole roast sturgeon.
• The third service called entremets (see
ENTRÉE) would include a wide-ranging mixture of vegetable and other dishes (different from entremets in the more recent sense of sweet dishes).
• The fourth service would be
DESSERT: fruits, compotes, pastries, and finally ices and cheeses (if served).
Except for the business of relevés (‘removes’), which meant substituting one lot of dishes for another lot of dishes within a single service, the procedure for a meal of this kind would be to put all the items belonging to one service on the table together, for display. Then either the diners would help themselves as best they could from whatever was within reach or the dishes would temporarily be taken away to be carved up in portions and offered to the diners.
This system was, obviously, cumbrous and not at all conducive to the enjoyment of the foods. One has the impression that some of the ramifications of the system may have been invented for the greater glory of the masters of ceremony and chefs and cookery book authors, who were probably the only people to understand them. In short, the system may have been appropriate for state banquets and other formal occasions, when making an impression of wealth and power was the purpose, but it was inappropriate for other purposes.
Peter Brears (1994) has given a fine and well-illustrated account of the waning of this kind of service in Britain.
is what replaced SERVICE À LA FRANÇAISE, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe (France, Germany), in the course of the 19th century. This new style of table service provided for dishes being served to guests at their seats by servants who handed them round. It therefore required more servants. There was also the need for table decorations to take up the spaces which the dishes themselves would have occupied under the old system.
Valerie Mars (1994) has drawn attention to the difficulty in discerning when the new system was first introduced and to the considerable controversy which it brought about in aristocratic or plutocratic circles in England, where some opposition and incomprehension persisted until almost the end of the century. She observes that Mrs Beeton (1861) ‘advised against dinners à la Russe in households without sufficient resources’, i.e. the sort of household for whose mistresses she was writing. A cartoon in Punch in 1863 shows a couple of baffled Englishmen dining à la russe in France. Says one: ‘this is what they call à la russe, isn’t it?’ Responds the other: ‘“Allerouse” is it? Well there, I could a’ sworn it warn’t Beef or Mutton.’
Most commentators agree that, however closely the earliest W. European dinners à la russe may have been modelled on some (unidentified) paradigm, the relationship had become attenuated by the beginning of the 20th century. Comments by Russian visitors to Paris or London must have been recorded and would make interesting reading, but have not come to light in a food history context.
fruits of N. American trees of the genus Amelanchier in the rose family. There are a dozen or so species and several hybrids. The purplish ‘berries’ (not true berries but pomes, i.e. fruits structured like apples or pears, with a core) have a general resemblance to blueberries and vary in edibility from very good to passable. Other names for some of them include sarvisberry, shadbush or shadbloom (because blooming when the shad are running in eastern rivers), juneberry, and (in Canada) saskatoon. This last name usually applies to A. alnifolia, which is evidently the best, since it has far more cultivars than the others. A. canadensis ranks second.
The Indians in N. America used service-berries as fresh food and also beat them into a paste as an ingredient for PEMMICAN.
Where they are plentiful and good, or cultivated, they are well worth eating. ‘To the European taste the berries are best when made into puddings or pies, the thoroughly cooked seeds giving a flavor suggesting sweet cherry pie. The berries, especially if cooked first, are splendid for berry-muffins, yielding a rich almond flavor.’ In addition to this enthusiastic verdict, Fernald and Kinsey (1943) remark that some early travellers in the north of America, such as Sir John Richardson, considered that the dried berries, used in puddings, were almost as good as the finest currants.
For the use of the term ‘service tree’ see ROWAN AND SORB.
Sesamum indicum, one of the first oil-yielding plants to be taken into cultivation, in Egypt or the Near East. Wild species, with one exception, are African; but there is a secondary ‘source of diversity’ in India, where sesame was introduced in very early times. The name sesame is one of the few words to have passed into modern languages from ancient Egyptian, in which it was sesemt.
Sesame is an upright annual herb, up to 2 m (6′) tall and bearing its seeds inside small, sausage-shaped pods about 3 cm (1.25″) long. The pods of primitive strains have a tendency to split abruptly open when ripe, allowing the seeds to scatter. This may account for the command ‘Open sesame’ in the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
The seeds are numerous, pear shaped, and no more than 3 mm (0.1″) in length. They may be white, yellow, brown, or black, according to variety, with a white inside which is revealed when they are hulled. They have a pleasantly nutty flavour, which is developed by roasting. The oil produced from them, in the unrefined state, also tastes slightly nutty. Thus both the seeds and oil have a role in flavouring, besides providing a simple food or cooking medium.
Sesame is often mentioned by classical writers. The Greek authors Herodotus (5th century BC) and Strabo (1st century BC) both mention its being cultivated for oil in Babylonia, and this is confirmed by an entry for sesame oil on a clay tablet forming part of the accounts of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace (6th century BC). Theophrastus (4th century BC) described sesame as being grown in Egypt. In the 1st century AD Dioscorides mentioned the sprinkling of sesame seed on bread in Sicily, a practice which has continued to the present day, e.g. on hamburger buns.
Further east, sesame had long been grown in Persia and India. It was probably introduced from Persia into China early in the Christian era, but the first firm evidence of it in China dates from the end of the 5th century AD; see Laufer (1978).
In Africa the cultivation of sesame dates back to early times not only in Egypt and Ethiopia but also further to the south and west. Other species of the genus, e.g. S. alatum (tacoutta), were also gathered from the wild by tribes in the regions of the Sudan and former Tanganyika. It was from W. Africa that slave traders took seeds to America. Substantial quantities are now grown in Guatemala, Venezuela, Mexico, and the south of the USA (where the W. African name ‘benni’ survives as ‘benniseed’), although the main producing countries are China and India.
Considered simply as a source of oil, sesame has a low yield, on average 150 kg per hectare (135 lb an acre). Even the olive, whose yield is notoriously low, averages 200 kg a hectare, and the prolific oil palm more than 1,000 kg. However, sesame oil is of high value, free of unwanted odours, with good keeping qualities, and high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (oleic, linoleic); and sesame seeds are in strong demand for flavouring.
Sesame oil is important as a cooking oil in S. India. In Japan it is said to have been the only cooking oil used in the distant past, and is still the most highly esteemed (although nowadays frequently mixed with a less expensive and more neutral-tasting oil). The Chinese prize it highly; their name for it means ‘fragrant oil’. In some regions it is used for general frying purposes; in others it will be added to dishes, both sweet and savoury, in small amounts just before serving, so that its fragrance is not lost.
In W. and C. Europe sesame seeds are not much used except for sprinkling on bread and cakes, but at the eastern end of the Mediterranean it becomes more common. Notable uses there are for TAHINI, a ground sesame paste, and in sweets such as HALVA.
In India, where the name gingili (Anglicized to gingelly) is used, the seeds have many roles in cookery: sprinkled on breads, pastries, and biscuits; used as an ingredient in a sweet called tilkuta; also in PILAFS, sauces, stuffings, and sometimes fried and sweetened. In China the seeds are used as a coating for small, deep-fried titbits, and in confectionery, practices now common elsewhere too.
However, it is probably in Japan that the use of sesame seeds has been most highly developed especially in shojin-ryori, i.e. the vegetarian cooking traditionally developed and practised in Buddhist monasteries and temples, whose influence on Japanese home cooking is considerable. Although sesame is cultivated in Japan, the demand for sesame seeds far outstrips the domestic production, and much is imported.
All three types of seeds are sold in Japan—black, white, and brown (or golden). There seems to be little or no difference in taste, and which type is chosen for a particular dish is largely a matter of habit based on aesthetics. However they are to be used, they are always lightly roasted in the first place. Roasting such tiny seeds evenly and without burning requires care. Traditionally this is done in a horoku (a shallow, oval, unglazed earthenware dish used for slow cooking) over a charcoal fire, but nowadays it is common to use a small frying pan.
The roasted seeds are often sprinkled over rice or other cooked foods as an added flavour. They are sometimes mixed with salt and placed on the table as a condiment (goma-shio, i.e. sesame-salt). Also, sesame seeds are one of the main components of various dressings, for aemono (see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS) and dipping sauces.
It is rare for sesame seeds to become the chief ingredient of a dish, but one notable exception is goma-dofu (sesame TOFU). For this seeds of the white type are roasted, ground to a smooth paste, mixed with water and arrowroot, cooked slowly, and set in a rectangular mould. The result is eaten by itself or used as a garnish in a clear soup.
Indian noodle terms. The Sanskrit name for noodles is sevika, which may derive from an unrecorded word meaning ‘thread’ connected with the root siv, which refers to sewing.
Sev are crisp, fried ‘noodles’ prepared from BESAN FLOUR. To make them a special press, a sev-maker, is used. They are a popular Indian snack food.
Seviyan (also seviya/sivayya/shavayi) usually refers to a sweet dish of vermicelli noodles.
an archipelago of more than 100 islands north of the Malagasy Republic in the Indian Ocean, was apparently described by General Gordon as the biblical Garden of Eden. Modern tourists, whose numbers are wisely limited by the government to 4,000 or so at any one time, might well agree so far as scenery and fauna are concerned, but the paucity of information about the diet of Adam and Eve (only the apple?) precludes any comparison between their cuisine and that of the Seychelles. However, there was no sea accessible to Adam and Eve. So, since the Seychelles diet is based on seafood (plus the COCONUT, RICE, BREADFRUIT, and numerous not-mentioned-in-the-Bible tropical fruits), there must be great differences.
Fish which are popular locally include various species which were almost unknown to Europeans 50 years ago but are now imported from the Indian Ocean to W. Europe—including, for example, several species of SNAPPER (such as Lutjanus sebae, called bourgeois, and JOBFISH), and of the huge family Carangidae (mostly called JACK in English), besides large fish such as TUNA, MARLIN, and SAILFISH. Fish dishes tend to incorporate a sauce or to be of the curry type, using coconut cream.
Coconut cream also appears with fried banana as a dessert. The many varieties of banana include tiny ones (mignons) and a giant red PLANTAIN. There are almost as many varieties of MANGO as of banana and when these are in season (October to January) they play a leading role in fresh fruit salads, usually dusted with cinnamon. Other fruits which are popular include PAPAYA, JACKFRUIT, and CUSTARD APPLE (locally zat).
Some of these fruits are popular also with the fruit-eating bats, which may themselves figure on a Seychelles menu as one of a number of exotic items. Seychelles menus do contain surprises, and unexpected combinations of ingredients or techniques from the various influences (African, French, English, Indian, Malay, and Chinese) which have played upon the islands since they first became inhabited in the 18th century.
a Japanese one-pot dish inspired by the Mongolian hotpot. The name is supposed to indicate the swishing noise made by the morsels of meat as they are moved in the boiling broth. In Japanese restaurants, Shabu-shabu is often made in a shining brass recipient resembling a samovar in shape; it has a central funnel which contains live charcoal. The dish is always prepared at table, but a waitress may relieve the diner of the task of cooking the morsels.
The main ingredients are thinly sliced beef and an assortment of vegetables. These could include Chinese leaves (see CHINESE CABBAGE), welsh onion (see ORIENTAL ONIONS), and shiitake, possibly with the addition of TOFU or shirataki (see KONNYAKU). Everything is cut into bite-sized pieces which the diners, using chopsticks can swish back and forth in the boiling broth until cooked to their liking. The morsels are eaten with dipping sauces. This dish is a fairly recent introduction to Japanese cookery.
fish of the genus Alosa in the HERRING family, normally live in the sea but ascend rivers in the spring to spawn; and that is when they are caught and are at their best for eating.
The most famous species is the American shad, A. sapidissima. This abundant species was originally a poor people’s food on the eastern seaboard but later achieved the status of a delicacy, as did its roe. Weaver (1982) has described the change in Philadelphia, where it was most noticeable. During the 19th century this shad was introduced to the Pacific coast. Its close relations in America include Pomolobus mediocris, the hickory shad.
In Europe, the principal species are Alosa alosa, the allis (or allice) shad, and A. fallax, the twaite shad. The former may reach a length of 60 cm (24″) and has a range from the Mediterranean (where it is rare) to S. Ireland; the latter is slightly smaller and is more common in the Mediterranean, besides being found as far north as the Baltic.
Dallas in Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877) observed that the best shad were at that time to be found in the rivers of Germany and France; and that these fish demonstrated their love of salt by following salt barges up the Seine to Paris.
There are also species in the Black Sea and its region, notably A. pontica. The Soviet cookery book which was published under Stalin’s auspices in the 1930s, The Book of Tasty and Healthful Foods, refers to it as the Kerch herring (the Kerch Strait being what connects the Black and Azov seas) and asserts that it has a worldwide reputation as the best fish of its kind; an assertion in which some have detected the hand of Stalin himself.
Various fish in Indo-Pacific waters are referred to as shad, including the famous Indian hilsa, Tenualosa ilisha, and a couple of species called ‘gizzard shad’ because they have thick muscular stomachs like the gizzard of a fowl.
Caught in their prime, shad are good to eat; but there is a notorious difficulty over their numerous small bones. A legend of the Micmac Indians explains that the shad was originally a porcupine which, discontented with its lot, asked the Great Spirit Manitou to change it into something else. The spirit responded by turning the creature inside out and tossing it into a river, where it had to begin a new existence as a shad.
There are various theories about how to ‘melt’ the bones before eating the fish. One is that very long cooking achieves this. Others believe that the oxalic acid in sorrel will do the trick; hence the numerous traditional recipes which call for cooking shad with sorrel, including Alose à l’oseille in France. There is some experimental evidence to support this practice. No doubt other experiments would show that a more expensive ingredient, cognac, is also efficacious; this was asserted by M. Francis Marre, a chimiste-expert at the Court of Appeals in Paris, who came from Tressan, where shad fished in the Hérault have been given this treatment.
Well-known American recipes include Planked shad. An interesting one from Morocco calls for stuffing the shad with dates which have themselves been stuffed with a mixture of almonds, semolina, etc.
the mysterious and highly variable name given in the W. Indies to Eryngium foetidum, a plant native to tropical America which is used as a flavouring herb. Other spellings which may be met include: shadon bené, shadow beynay, shado benni, and chadron beni. All seem to be descended from a French vernacular name, chardon béni, meaning blessed thistle. The plant is not a thistle, but has thistle-like leaves. Among the places where it is much used are Trinidad, where it is commonly found growing wild in drainage ditches etc. It is a favourite herb for use in fish dishes.
Fit weed is a Jamaican name given in a W. Indian book, apparently because the herb is thought to cure people of fits. In this connection, see the separate and complementary entry under the headword FITWEED. Anyone supposing that the existence of two entries for a single plant, and a smelly one at that, must be due to some sort of accident will be absolutely right.
Allium cepa, Aggregatum Group, differs from the regular ONION in that instead of having a single bulb it divides into a cluster of small bulbs. These are smaller, more delicate in flavour, and less powerful in smell than ordinary round onions.
The subdivision into little bulbs is a characteristic which the shallot shares with some other species, all of which are known as aggregate or bunching onions. Unlike round onions, these aggregate onions are perennials, spreading themselves by means of the division process. Some sorts, milder than shallots, are usually called ‘multiplier’ or ‘ever ready’ onions. One, grown mainly in Ireland, is the ‘potato onion’, so called because its bulbs are broader than they are high, and resemble a potato in shape.
Amongst the several kinds of shallot, most have elongated brown bulbs. One variety is known in France as the cuisse de poulet on account of its golden skin. Other types have grey-brown or pink or (in SE Asia, for example) red skins.
The shallot was described before 300 BC by the Greek writer Theophrastus, who called it askolonion. In the 1st century AD Pliny concluded that it was so named because it came from Askalon (now Ashkelon, in S. Israel), and the attribution has remained. In truth it originated much further east, probably in C. Asia, and reached India before it came to the Mediterranean.
The original Greek name has spawned all the modern names, as well as the term ‘scallion’, which has been used to mean a shallot, a spring onion (especially in the USA), or one of the small bulbs of any bunching variety of onion.
Shallots can be eaten raw in salads, but their special qualities are best revealed when they are cooked. Their contribution to French cuisine, and especially to certain sauces, e.g. BÉARNAISE, is well known; but they are of no less importance in the Orient. They also make excellent pickles, and are much used for this purpose in SE Asia.
Julie Sahni (1980) says that ‘shallot is particularly savored by those vegetarians who are forbidden to eat garlic. The southern vegetable-and-lentil stew called SAMBAR, made with shallots as the only vegetable, is considered a delicacy around the entire country of India.’
the usual term in the Arab world for vermicelli (see PASTA SHAPES). It is pronounced shaʾriyya, as if from the word for ‘hair’. This is a logical derivation, and the Turkish world şehriye reflects this pronunciation, but since its first appearance in the 15th century, the word has regularly been spelled shaʾîriyya, as if from the word for ‘barley’.
Menus written in a learned style of Arabic sometimes call vermicelli by an antique Greek name, itriya, and itriya is the modern Hebrew generic term for pasta. In the Middle Eastern region vermicelli is most often toasted light brown and cooked in a PILAF (rizz bi-shaʾriyya).
N. Africans also make shaʾriyya noodles, using the method described in the 13th-century Arabic recipes from Spain of rolling pellets of dough between the fingers until they become short strings. The noodles are sometimes steamed like COUSCOUS.
For the usual Arab home-made noodle, see RESHTEH.
include many edible species, of which the best known are treated under ANGEL SHARK, DOGFISH, HAMMERHEAD SHARK, and PORBEAGLE. This entry deals with them in a general way, briefly describing some of their characteristics.
Sharks are not necessarily large; nor are they all dangerous. Some of the dogfish are quite small, and some big sharks are inoffensive. But in general they are large and voracious fish. Like the RAY AND SKATE and the STURGEON, they differ from the majority of fish in having no true bones. Instead they have a cartilaginous skeleton. In this respect they are a survival from the very distant past and count as ‘primitive’ fish; the fish with proper bones are a more recent development. Despite being primitive creatures in this sense, sharks have proved to be highly successful survivors. There are a lot of them. The FAO survey Sharks of the World (Compagno, 1984) is in two large volumes. The author states that approximately 350 species of living sharks are currently known. He adds that about 48% of these are to his knowledge of no use to fisheries; 25% are of limited use; 20% are of considerable importance; and 7% are major fisheries species.
an ingredient greatly valued in China, comes—obviously—from a SHARK, but not just any shark and not just any fin. Of the numerous species in the Indo-Pacific only a few are especially sought because they yield fins with the qualities required; and distinctions are also made between e.g. the dorsal fin and the ventral fins and others.
Kreuzer (1974) listed what he thought were the most valuable fins, explaining that those of sharks shorter than 1.5 m (5′) are preferred, and mentioning the pectoral fins of the sawfish shark (Pristis pectinata) and, more generally, the upper lobe of the tail of all sharks. He additionally listed fins of one of the nurse sharks; and the more recent publication by Compagno (1984) draws attention to the use of one such shark, Nebrius ferrugineus.
The value of fins, which are always sold dried, depends also upon their condition and on the length of unbroken cartilaginous ‘strands’ which they will yield after the very elaborate processing which they undergo in professional kitchens. Some idea of the care which is lavished on them is afforded by the reflections of Cheng (1962) on the technique to be followed in keeping a fin in perfect shape during both the cooking processes which it will undergo. He explains that Cantonese cooks will use a ‘net’ made of bamboo to fasten the fin in its shape, and that this device is not used by cooks of other schools. But this device is not really ideal; for the bamboo net, however clean it may be, might, in the long process of cooking at the semi-final stage, leave, at least psychologically, a trace (however infinitesimal it may be) of the taste of the bamboo. Anyhow, such a net might hinder the juices of the ingredients cooked with the fin from permeating the fin thoroughly. Therefore a net made of fine silver wire should be used.
Shark’s fin soup has a base of (usually) a rich chicken broth. The gelatinous quality of the fin gives the soup its remarkable texture. The Chinese appreciate the soup not only for this but also because shark’s fin counts as one of the pu foods. These are foods with a reputation for strengthening and repairing the human body. Typically, they are rich in protein and easily digestible. Many are also ‘exotic’ in the eyes of foreigners and expensive.
Shark’s fin can also be braised and served as a dish on its own; or, more economically, used in small quantities to give a ‘special’ character to dishes such as scrambled egg, stuffing for duck, filling for DIM SUM, etc.
the famous cabbage soup of Russia. Pokhlebkin (1984) claims that it has been the basic hot soup of Russia since 1,000 years ago, and that over these many centuries ‘an ever-present smell of shchi prevailed in every Russian peasant hut’. He points out that there are many different versions, but gives the following clear guidance on ingredients for the most traditional one.
In its most complete form shchi contains six ingredients: cabbage, meat (or in rare instances fish or dried or salted mushrooms), root vegetables (carrots, parsnips), spicy seasoning (onion, celery, garlic, dill, pepper, bay leaf) and tart or sour flavouring (sour cream, apples, sauerkraut brine). The first and last are the indispensable ingredients.
Jean Redwood writes (1989):
cabbage soup or shchi is to the Russians what minestrone is to the Italians. It is eaten by rich and poor and spoken of and longed for by exiles, referred to often in Russian literature and even evoked in poetry.
sometimes called galam butter, is a solid vegetable fat prepared from the seeds of an African tree, Vitellaria paradoxa (syn Butyrospermum paradoxum ssp parkii), found in many of the drier parts of tropical Africa. The fat can be refined until tasteless and odourless, and is sold as baking fat under various trade names. It is an important article of local diet.
The trees produce oval fruits which enclose in their sweet but scanty pulp a single, oval, shiny brown seed almost 4 cm (1.5″) long. The pulp is edible but is not usually eaten, since part of the traditional preparation process involves allowing it to rot away. In some districts the fruits are exposed in the sun, in others kept moist in jars. The kernels are then roasted and pounded to make the butter. Some peoples, such as the Hausa, prefer butter from unroasted nuts. This is pale yellow, while that from roasted nuts is greyish-brown. Both have a strong, somewhat rank smell. The butter is sold in large loaves or balls from which a piece is cut off for the buyer. If properly made and not adulterated it keeps well.
For western consumption, the butter is extracted from unfermented nuts by boiling in water, either in the country of origin or in the importing country. Shea butter in refined form has been used for margarine and as a substitute for cocoa butter.
animals of the genus Ovis. The meat of the domestic sheep, Ovis aries, is important in cookery as LAMB (when young) and MUTTON (when over a year old). Sheep are widely farmed, not only as providers of meat, but also for their MILK, which is made into yoghurt and various cheeses; their wool and hides are also important. Youatt (1877) declared: ‘Among the various animals given by the benevolent hand of Providence for the benefit of mankind, there is none of greater utility than the sheep.’
The GOAT is closely related and in some parts of the world the two animals are herded together and their meat used more or less interchangeably in the kitchen.
Many species of wild sheep are dotted around the world. They include several mouflons (e.g. O. musimon of Sardinia and Corsica and O. orientalis of W. Asia) as well as the American bighorn or mountain sheep, O. canadensis. Of other Asian species, the Argali, O. ammon, lives in mountainous areas from Bokhara to Tibet and Mongolia and has remarkably massive curling horns (of which the longest are borne by what is called Marco Polo’s Argali). The only wild sheep of Africa is the Barbary sheep or aoudad, Ammotragus lervia, which belongs to the mountainous parts of the Saharan region and is appropriately coloured pale brown.
Sheep can thrive on rough pasture in cold, wet, mountainous regions, and hot, dry climates. They can graze shorter grass than cattle. With goats, they have long been the principal meat animals of N. Africa, the Balkans, and a vast area stretching from the E. Mediterranean through the mountains and desert lands of C. Asia to the Mongolian steppes. In W. Europe their importance for meat has fluctuated over the centuries; their wool and milk were sometimes more valuable products.
The social system of and habits of wild sheep made for easy domestication. They did not wander far and had a predisposition to follow a dominant leader. By about 9000 BC sheep had been domesticated in N. Iraq, and in subsequent millennia they spread with early pastoralists into Europe and also eastwards, while retaining the Middle East as their base, so to speak, and also—for some time at least—as the centre of diversity for breeds. The importance of sheep to the people of the Middle East from early times can be gauged from the Bible, in which there are frequent references to them. Among the many breeds of sheep which are native to the area is one of particular importance and interest; the FAT-TAILED SHEEP which are now found in many parts of the world are thought to have originated in the Middle East, perhaps around 3000 BC.
Sheep and goats were probably introduced to Britain during the neolithic period with other domestic livestock. The geographical isolation of parts of the British Isles has meant that some breeds have survived little changed from when they were first introduced. The Soay breed, of the St Kilda group of islands in the Outer Hebrides, is probably a relic of breeds introduced between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. Primitive breeds are also found on the Shetland and Orkney Islands (where one breed, kept on the foreshore for centuries, shows physiological adaptations to a diet of seaweed). It is possible that Romney Marsh sheep are descended from Roman imports.
It was in comparatively recent times, following the start of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent increase in the demand for meat, that the breeding of sheep for meat made important advances in Britain. In the late 18th and throughout the 19th centuries, improved Leicester and Southdown breeds were popular. The new Leicester was a small-boned animal which fattened quickly and carried a relatively high proportion of meat. Mrs Beeton (1861) considered that Southdowns had a better flavour, and noted that, for these, demand exceeded supply. Blackfaces were widespread in the Highlands of Scotland by 1800, and the various breeds of Welsh Mountain sheep were improved in the 19th century. Cheviots were developed from local Northumberland sheep, with the introduction of Lincoln and Leicester blood to improve meat quality. The Dorset Horn, which has an extended breeding season, was used to produce lamb for the London Christmas market until the mid-19th century. This was known as ‘house lamb’, born at Michaelmas and reared indoors, often by hand.
The coming of railways led to movement of sheep over long distances to urban markets, and began to erode strong regional preferences in the size and conformation of mutton carcasses. The 19th century also saw the beginning of a lively export trade of sheep for breeding from Britain (and elsewhere in Europe). New Leicesters went to Australia and the Americas; Romney Marsh sheep to New Zealand, Australia, and S. America; Cotswolds to N. America and Australia; and the improved Shropshire to many destinations.
Sheep in modern Britain: the stratification technique
The breeding of sheep for meat in modern Britain aims to produce lamb carcasses with a minimum of fat and bone. It is a complex business which maximizes land use in the wet, cold uplands of the west and the north. It depends on a system of ‘stratification’, a close interplay between the hill and lowland farms, which developed in the second half of the 19th century. The ‘improved’ breeds from the 19th century and a handful of imported exotic breeds are used.
The process starts on mountain farms. First, flocks of pure mountain breeds—Swaledale and Dales bred in the Pennines, Herdwicks in the Lake District, Cheviots on the Scottish Borders, and Blackfaces in the Highlands—are maintained on moorland. A proportion of ewes (females) produced by these flocks are mated with rams from lowland breeds such as Leicester, Wensleydale, or Teeswater to produce a generation of cross-bred lambs. These combine the hardiness and good mothering qualities of their dams and the rapid growth of their sires. The female lambs are sold to lowland farms, where they are mated with rams from breeds bred especially for meat, such as Suffolk, Downland breeds, Texels, and French breeds. The progeny of this crossing form the bulk of the lamb sold in butchers’ shops up and down the country. At all levels, flocks of pure-bred animals must be maintained to provide breeding stock for the future, and the excess lambs from these, plus all the cross-bred males, also enter the market as meat animals.
‘Any animal living in water whose outer cover is a shell, whether testaceous, as an oyster, or crustaceous, as a crab’ (OED).
On this basis it is correct to use the term for all single shells, BIVALVES (except the SHIPWORM, once it has passed the juvenile stage), and CRUSTACEANS; and also for the SEA URCHIN, for one CEPHALOPOD (the pearly NAUTILUS), and for SEA TURTLES. In practice the term is applied in a general way to the single shells, bivalves, and crustaceans. It is less satisfactory than the French fruits de mer (edible sea animals other than fish) but more convenient than the Italian frutti di mare (if lexicographers are correct in restricting the meaning of this to edible MOLLUSCS and sea urchins).
a savoury dish of minced meat with a topping of mashed potato (now almost universal) or pastry (in Scotland in former times). In keeping with the name, the meat should be mutton or lamb; and it is usually cooked meat left over from a roast.
The name of the dish conjures up visions of shepherds of long ago eating this simple fare, but the name does not seem to have been used until the 1870s, when mincing machines were developed. The dish itself doubtless dates back much further, and it is generally agreed that it originated in the north of England and Scotland where there are large numbers of sheep. So the common idea that shepherds ate the dish back in, say, the 18th century is probably right.
The term cottage pie, often confused with shepherd’s pie but properly denoting a similar dish made with minced beef, has a somewhat longer history and is similarly effective in evoking a rural and traditional context.
Shepherd’s pie, well made from good ingredients, is delicious, easy, and inexpensive. But sometimes a dreadful travesty of it is served. Jane Grigson (1974) exhumed for her readers a report from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885, to the effect that the Eastbourne Board of Guardians had ordered a mincing machine for the use of ‘aged and toothless paupers’ in their care. Commenting on this, she writes:
with the first mincing-machines, prison, school and seaside boarding house cooks acquired a new weapon to depress their victims, with water, mince, shepherd’s pie with rubbery granules of left-over meat, rissoles capable of being fired from a gun.
The dish also crops up in ANGLO-INDIAN COOKERY. Jennifer Brennan (1990) says that shepherd’s pie was considered a great standby by Indian cooks and was often served for TIFFIN.
The equivalent dish in France is called hachis Parmentier in honour of the man who persuaded the French to eat potatoes.
Capsella bursa-pastoris, a small plant of the crucifer family, related to MUSTARD. It grows abundantly in temperate regions of Europe and Asia, and has also become common in N. America since the arrival of Europeans. The name refers to the heart-shaped seed capsule.
Shepherd’s purse leaves, which have a mild mustard flavour, have been used as a green vegetable in many regions. They are sold in S. Chinese markets, sometimes wild and sometimes cultivated; but they do not seem to have been cultivated anywhere else. The wild plants are, however, of some importance in Korea, where they are sold complete with the long white tap-root. Koreans boil the leaf stems and dress them with a sauce including onion, garlic, and red pepper threads.
In China during the Sung dynasty (10th to 13th centuries AD) there was a movement in favour of natural food. Shepherd’s purse and other wild crucifers figured in a famous vegetable soup, Tung Po’s soup, about which the poet Su Shih wrote an essay and a poem, explaining that ‘the recipe does not use condiments but has a natural taste’.
Both in Europe and America the seeds have been ground to make bread, and the hot tasting root used as a spice.
A sherbet, basically and historically, is a cold, sweetened, non-alcoholic drink, usually based on a fruit juice. The earliest recorded word for it seems to be sharâb, the classical Arab term for a sweetened drink. However, in the late Middle Ages this word developed its current Arabic sense (a sense prevailing in both Turkish and Syrian Arabic) of an alcoholic drink. A different word was therefore needed for a non-alcoholic sweetened drink, and this emerged as sharbât. The Turkish term s(h)erbet comes from this newer word.
The old word sharâb, before it changed its meaning and apparently at a very early date, passed into Spanish and Italian and thence became current in most of the European languages; obvious examples are the English word syrup and the French sirop.
The later Arabic word sharbât also entered European languages. In the late 16th century it appeared in Italian as the name of a beverage drunk in Turkey. Then the beverage itself entered Italian cuisine, under the name sorbetto. It took this form because the Italians assimilated it to their verb sorbire, meaning to sip. The Italian sorbetto gave rise to the French sorbet, the Spanish sorbete, etc. All these words begin with ‘s’ not with ‘sh’. English seems to be the only language which took the word sherbet directly from the Turkish, complete with its ‘h’.
Recipes for the traditional Middle Eastern sherbets have not changed much over the centuries. There are two main categories of ingredient: a fruit (or vegetable) juice; and a sweetening agent (originally honey, although even in medieval times the then more expensive sugar occurs in some recipes). An optional third category would be spices. The sherbets were cooled by ice or, more romantically, snow.
In Turkey and the Middle East generally, sweetness is auspicious, so sherbet is served on auspicious occasions: at meals during RAMADAN, in place of water; at engagement parties; when someone enters a religious order. And, because of its auspicious nature, it is a standard offering to guests. It seems to have been the custom in Turkey to serve sherbets as refreshments between the courses of banquets or important dinners; but sherbets did not owe their existence to any such requirement—they were a part of daily life there, and in Egypt too.
The sherbet is served in coloured glass cups, generally called ‘kullehs’, containing about three quarters of a pint; some of which [the more common kind] are ornamented with gilt flowers, etc. The sherbet-cups are placed on a round tray, and covered with a round piece of embroidered silk, or cloth of gold. On the right arm of the person who presents the sherbet is hung a large oblong napkin with a wide embroidered border of gold and coloured silks at each end. This is ostensibly offered for the purpose of wiping the lips after drinking the sherbet, but it is really not so much for use as for display.
Commenting on this description, which is taken from the 1860 edition of Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Claudia Roden (1985) says that the same traditions have continued to be observed, as she remembers from her own childhood. These traditions, of course, only applied in well-to-do households. She does not neglect to explain how the ordinary people would obtain their sherbets from street vendors.
As the vendor went by, people would rush down from their flats to drink several glasses … The vendors carried a selection of sherbets in gigantic glass flasks, two at a time, held together by wide straps and balanced on their shoulders. The flasks glowed with brilliantly seductive colours: soft, pale, sugary-pink for rose water; pale green for violet juice; warm, rich, dark tamarind; and the purple-black of mulberry juice. As they went through the street, the vendors chanted their traditional, irresistible calls of ‘Arasous!’ and ‘Tamarhindi!’, accompanied by the tinkling of little bells and the clanking of the metal cups which they carried with them.
According to the dictionary compiled by Foretière in the late 17th century, a sorbet in France at that time was also a drink, of sugar and lemon pulp. Diderot’s great encyclopaedia of the 1750s suggests that it remained so during the 18th century. During the 19th century, however, a sorbet could be either a drink or a sort of ice more suitable for drinking than eating, and in the latter case had an alcoholic content. The distinction between an iced drink and a drinkable ice is a fine one, but it clearly existed for the French, and it was the drinkable ice which developed into the eatable sorbet (see WATER ICES) now found in French restaurants.
For English and American sorbets of the 19th century, the book on Victorian Ices and Ice Cream (1976) by Barbara Wheaton is a fine source. Part of this reproduces recipes from a famous English book, Mrs Marshall’s The Book of Ices (1885). Wheaton explains how a protracted Victorian dinner—she is speaking of the upper classes— would be punctuated halfway through by a refreshing sorbet, usually a lemon water ice with spirits added and fruit for garnish.
The word sherbet did not pass into general use in America until the middle of the 19th century. Later on in that century, it and sorbet were used as synonyms. And a charming conceit had been devised whereby the cup in which the sherbet/ sorbet was served was itself composed of ice. When Charles Dickens was in New York in 1867, he was honoured by a banquet at Delmonico’s, at which ice cups (made by freezing water between two cup-shaped moulds) were used to serve a lemon and orange sorbet strengthened by American sparkling wine, kirsch, and prunelle. Mrs Marshall approved strongly.
In the 20th century the custom of serving a sorbet as a refresher in the middle of a large meal, normally a luxury meal in a restaurant, has been revived. And a sorbet, or a selection of sorbets of different flavours, is a standard low-calorie item on the dessert menu. Such sorbets are eaten, not drunk.
But in England there was a surprising development. It is not unusual to find that something appreciated by the upper classes either travels downwards, socially, if its nature is such that poorer people can afford it; or, in the contrary case, is imitated by some cheaper product. In England, the sorbet had the latter fate. A sherbet powder was produced which could either be made into a fizzy drink, or sucked into the mouth, where it would likewise fizz. The powder was composed of BICARBONATE OF SODA and tartaric acid (see CREAM OF TARTAR), plus sugar, and was cheap. Anyone could afford it.
This product had already appeared in the 19th century; an edition of Law’s Grocer’s Manual of about 1895 describes in detail how it can be made, and compares it to another powdered product, now less prominent but still surviving, lemon kali. Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (also about 1895) gave a more refined recipe for use in the home.
But it was in the 20th century that this sort of sherbet really spread its wings. Three favourite kinds were: a tube containing the powder and furnished with a liquorice stick or ‘straw’, which was used to convey the powder to the mouth and was itself eaten in the process; a ‘sherbet lemon’— a lemon sweet for sucking, with sherbet powder inside; and a ‘sherbet bomb’, shaped like a UFO, covered with RICE PAPER, and again containing the sherbet powder.
As for developments in the USA in the 20th century, it must be said that no two Americans will give exactly the same answer to the question: what is a sherbet? Differing laws in the various states have to be taken into account, as well as different local traditions and differing individual opinions. California is the state where the largest quantities of sherbet are made, and Californians will typically state that a sherbet certainly does not contain milk or milk products. In New York state, on the other hand, it seems to be a legal requirement that it should. An outsider can only rejoice in the thought that this Old World confection has proved to be so polymorphous in the New World.
(togarashi), a Japanese SPICE MIXTURE. The name means ‘seven flavours’ but is often translated as seven spices. The mixture is composed of: red CHILLI pepper flakes; SANSHO pods, roughly ground; black HEMP seeds or white POPPY seeds; white SESAME seeds; RAPE seed; mikan (MANDARIN orange) or YUZU peel in tiny fragments; and NORI (green seaweed) in small bits. The mixture is available in various strengths (i.e. degrees of hotness), and its main use is to be sprinkled on bowls of noodles, soups, or grilled meats.
the Japanese and also the usual western name for a forest mushroom of Asia, Lentinus edodes, which grows on rotting wood. A crude sort of cultivation of this species dates back for many centuries in China and Japan. Scientific cultivation, which has developed into a major agricultural activity for a huge number of people in Japan, and for many in China and Korea, is a recent development. Shiitake are now so readily available in the Orient as to be the counterpart there of the common cultivated mushrooms in the western world; but they have the advantage of a better flavour. Cultivation of the shiitake has begun on a limited scale in parts of the USA and some European countries.
In the name shiitake, take means mushroom and shii is the name of one of the various Japanese trees whose dead wood serves as host to the mushrooms. However, other deciduous trees such as certain oaks are better, and preferred by the shiitake, whose name is therefore not wholly appropriate.
A full-sized shiitake has a cap up to 10 cm (4″) wide and occasionally larger, brown but fissured with a network of white cracks. The off-white gills are also split and torn, and run part of the way down the stem like fan vaulting. The stem, which is set eccentrically, allowing the mushroom to grow from a vertical trunk, is pale brown and has no ring.
In Japanese markets, shiitake are graded into two main qualities: donko, the preferred one, with thick, roundish, and only partly opened caps; and koshin, when the cap is fully opened and thinner. A similar distinction is made in China, where the donko type is known as ‘floral’, because the white patterns show more distinctly on it, or as ‘winter mushrooms’ (they are usually grown in the winter, when the cold slows down growth and the mushrooms can absorb more nutrients.
Several species of Lentinus grow wild in Europe and the USA. They are similar in appearance but tend to be smaller than the shiitake. Most are edible, even the one known in the USA as ‘railroad wrecker’ from its ability to destroy the wooden ties or sleepers on railroads.
A white species, L. polychrous, is common throughout SE Asia and S. India.
Shiitake have for long enjoyed a reputation for being health giving as well as delicious, and are sometimes called ‘the elixir of life’. Recent research suggests that they contain substances which may ward off flu and lower cholesterol levels in the blood.
The flavour of fresh shiitake is strong, and a few are enough in most dishes. They are used for appearance and texture as well as for flavour, and the velvety caps are normally kept whole unless very large. The stems, which are tougher than the caps, can be used for soup. Dried shiitake, which are exported on a large scale from Japan, retain much of the original flavour.
or hard tack or sea biscuit a type of unleavened bread which was baked, sliced, and oven dried. Thus it was ‘twice-cooked bread’, the meaning of the medieval Latin term panis biscoctus, from which comes the word BISCUIT.
This product was used for centuries as rations for sailors. In good conditions it would keep for a year or more in sealed barrels, but at sea it was often difficult to keep it dry, and it could become infested by weevils.
A special bakery at the royal docks at Chatham was devoted entirely to baking ship’s biscuit for the Royal Navy. The method was unchanged for several centuries. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1773 gave the following description:
Sea-bisket is a sort of bread much dried by passing the oven twice to make it keep for sea service. For long voyages they bake it four times and prepare it six months before embarkation. It will hold good for a whole year.
Sailors had various methods for making hard tack palatable, e.g. crumbling it into the dish called LOBSCOUSE.
Similar breads were made by other seafaring nations; for instance a pain bateau was made on the Atlantic coast of France for the fishermen going to Newfoundland.
Lyrodus pedicellatus (formerly Teredo siamensis), sometimes called teredo worm, is a strange MOLLUSC which starts life as a BIVALVE, in a double shell, but then, having established itself in a suitable piece of wood—often a floating log or the trunk of a ‘sam’ tree in a mangrove swamp—becomes long and wormlike, with the original two shells transformed into mere appendages at each end. All that one normally sees of the shipworm is the snail-like head peeping out of the bark.
As its name implies, the shipworm can do considerable damage to the timbers of boats, and it is usually thought of in this connection rather than as a foodstuff. Yet it is edible, although not often marketed, and may even have been the subject of some of the earliest experiments in ‘sea farming’. Coastal dwellers in Thailand and elsewhere in SE Asia have for long cultivated the shipworm in logs anchored in the sea. They may be pickled in vinegar or nam pla (Thai FISH SAUCE), or fried and eaten with eggs. However, there is no need to cook them. Doreen Fernandez (1994) comments that the shipworm (known as tamilok) is picked from old wood, especially driftwood, in parts of the Philippines.
The wood is chopped up so that the worms, pink, six to eight inches long, may be extracted, washed a little, and deposited wriggling on one’s tongue. The tamilok, its fans swear, has a fresh clean taste that sends shivers of pleasure down one’s alimentary canal.
the Japanese name for a herb, Perilla frutescens (formerly nankinensis), whose cultivation and use is most prominent in Japan although also observable in China, Burma, the foothills of the Himalayas, and more recently in California too. ‘Perilla’ is sometimes used as an English name.
The half-dozen or so cultivars of this herb include both green-leaved and red- or purple-leaved forms. The former are used by the Japanese for garnishing and in salads. The cultivar Red, sometimes called beefsteak plant from the colour of the leaves, is best known as the colouring agent for their pickled ‘plums’ (see UMEBOSHI), ginger, etc., and as a beautiful wrapping for certain items of confectionery. The cultivar Curled is of an even darker purple colour and has an aroma described as ‘peppermint-like’; other cultivars have aromas more like lemon or cinnamon or cumin.
The seeds are roasted and crushed to produce perilla oil; this was formerly put to local use only for culinary purposes, but has now attracted wider interest since of all edible oils it is said to have the highest level of polyunsaturates.
(or sholleh) is the name given to a number of dishes all over the Middle East, Iran, and Afghanistan in which short-grain rice is cooked until soft and thick, with other ingredients chosen according to whether the shola is to be savoury or sweet.
Margaret Shaida (1992) says: ‘According to the culinary historian Charles Perry, sholleh was brought to Persia by the Mongolians in the 13th century. Three hundred years later, some 15 sholleh dishes, mostly savoury, were listed in the Safavid cookery book.’ She goes on to say that nowadays ‘sholleh has all but disappeared from the cuisine of Persia, except for 2 or 3 soup dishes (sholleh ghalamkar) and one very celebrated dessert, sholleh zard’.
Shola-e-zard is a sweet saffron and rosewater (or orange flower water) flavoured rice dish cooked not only in Iran, but all over the Middle East and in Afghanistan. It has a religious significance, being made on the 10th day of Muharram (the Muslim month of mourning). Shola-e-zard is also made as a nazr, which is a custom of thanksgiving or pledge practised in Iran and Afghanistan. The shola is cooked and then distributed to the poor and to neighbours and relatives. In Afghanistan, at least, shola-e-zard is traditionally served with sharbat-e-rihan (SHERBET with basil seeds).
Similarly a savoury shola of Iran called ash-e sholleh ghalamkar, literally scribe’s soup, which dates back to medieval times, was traditionally prepared to heal the sick. Claudia Roden (1968) remarks on the old belief that for the cure to be effective, the ingredients (mainly lentils and spinach, without rice in this instance, in the recipe which she gives) had to be bought with money begged in the streets. This dish is often chosen to serve at prayer meetings for the recovery of a sick child or the safe return of a loved one.
a very sweet PIE (in the American sense—it would be a TART in Britain) with a filling of molasses and/or brown sugar. Mariani (1994) states that this was not recorded in print in the USA until 1926, and that it is believed to be of PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH origin. Some have thought that the name is a corruption of some German word, but the more likely explanation is simply that the exposed surface of the pie is so sweet that flies have to be shooed away from it.
The equivalent confection in Britain is TREACLE tart, which has a much longer history.
In most Islamic countries, the word for ‘soup’ is shorba. This is not, as one might expect, a word related to ‘sherbet’ or ‘sorbet’. It is a Persian rather than an Arabic word, compounded of shor (salty, brackish) and ba (stew, dish cooked with water).
The word ba is also found (in forms reflecting its pre-9th-century pronounciation bag) in the names of various medieval dishes such as zirabaj (cumin stew) and sikbaj (vinegar stew, the ancestor of ESCABECHE). It is perhaps unsurprising that the dictionaries have assumed that shorba was distinguished by a salt flavouring. But there is a more reasonable meaning than ‘brackish stew’ for a dish that has spread so widely. It is suggested by a recipe in a 10th-century Arabic cookbook which in turn purports to describe a dish prepared for the 6th-century Persian king Chosroes.
The instructions call for meat to be ‘boiled lightly and taken out of the water. The water is thrown away and the meat is returned to the pot and water is poured upon it and salt and a stick of cinnamon and a stick of galangal are thrown in.’ (The first step is clearly a way of getting rid of the scum that rises when meat is boiled, which would now be done by skimming the broth.) When meat is boiled in plain water, the results are boiled meat and nearly flavourless water; when it is boiled in salted water, it makes broth. This is no doubt how shorba got its name, from salt’s chemical properties, its ability to change the ionic balance in the cooking pot, rather than from its use as a flavouring.
The awareness of the distinction salted/unsalted would have been strong in the Middle Ages because meat was regularly parboiled to tenderize it before roasting or frying.
Shorba is the spelling in both Arabic and Persian, but Turkish has çorba. In Moldova it is chorba, and in Romanian ciorb
, the version which has become familiar in N. America. In C. Asia forms such as shorpo and sorpa occur, also shulpa (Tatar). In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and bits of China and India, forms such as shorva are found. The wide distribution of the same name in these different versions testifies to the basic nature of this range of dishes.
the English name commonly used for the small edible crab of European shores, Carcinus aestuarii and C. maenas. The first of the pair belongs mainly to the Mediterranean, and the second to the Atlantic; but they overlap in range. The back is greenish and the maximum width of the carapace 7 cm (3″).
This is the crab which is the subject of the softshell crab operations which have been carried on in the Lagoon of Venice since the 18th century. Just after they have shed their old carapace, and while the new one is still soft, these crabs are known as moleche. They are in this desirable state for less than half a day, so timing is crucial; as the time for ‘moulting’ approaches the crabs are kept in special hatcheries where they can be inspected several times a day. The main season for moulting is the spring.
The shore crab is not alone on and in the vicinity of European shores. Apart from the SWIMMING CRABS, there are many other small or medium-sized crabs scuttling to and fro, and some of them are edible. Three notable ones are:
• the furry crab, Eriphia verrucosa— French ériphie, Italian favollo, Spanish cangrejo moruno—furry in appearance, with a fine flavour, perhaps the most sought after crab on the Mediterranean coast of France;
• the shamefaced crab, Calappa granulata—French crabe honteux, Spanish cangrejo real, Catalan cranquet dormidor;
• Pachygrapsus marmoratus— French crabe marbré, Spanish cangrejo de roca—brown with grey-green marbling on its back.
a biscuit whose origin lies in the ‘short cakes’ made in the 16th century (see BISCUIT). In Britain it is regarded as a particular speciality of Scotland, although similar biscuits, such as SHREWSBURY CAKES, are made elsewhere. The original Scottish shortbread is simply a thick layer of rich, sweetened shortcrust pastry, without any extra flavourings. The texture is delicately crumbly. It relies on the quality of the ingredients for its mild but satisfying flavour. The classic proportions of ingredients for a shortbread recipe are one part sugar to two of butter and three of flour. It may be slightly adjusted by varying the type of flour used; usually soft cake flour is chosen, which is further softened in some Scottish recipes by adding some rice flour.
There are many variations. The thick Pitcaithly bannock has peel and almonds in the mixture. Queen Victoria’s Balmoral recipe for shortbread was seasoned with a little salt; egg yolk and a little cream are added for extra richness in Ayrshire shortbread; and demerara sugar in Dorset shortbread. Goosnargh cakes, named for the village in Lancashire where they achieved great popularity in the 19th century, contain ground coriander and whole caraway seeds.
Petticoat tails are Scottish shortbread biscuits, baked in a round, with a characteristic shape resembling that of an outspread bell-hoop crinoline petticoat. The shortbread is made of flour, butter, and sugar, bound with milk or an egg, and optionally flavoured with almond or caraway seeds. The centre circle should be marked and removed before slicing the main round.
Dorothy Hartley (1954) says:
These simple biscuits … date at least from the twelfth century. They were called ‘petty cotes tallis’; that is, little cases, or ‘cotes’ (we have the word in sheep-cotes—small enclosures), made of pastry and cut into triangular pieces. ‘Tallis’ or ‘tallys’ were cuts made on sticks to count or measure by, so the word tally came to mean any sort of cut-out pattern … Every cook knows how the pointed ends of cut cakes and biscuits break off—so, after several centuries of broken tips, someone evolved the cure: they cut a circle out of the centre before baking. By then the filling had come out of the ‘cotes’ and they were biscuits only—‘pettycotes tallys’.
Another theory claims that the name is a corruption of petites gatelles, small French cakes popular with Mary Queen of Scots, who brought them to Scotland in 1650. Marion McNeill (1929), quoting the Annals of the Cleikum Club, says, ‘In Scottish culinary terms there are many corruptions, though we rather think the name petticoat tails has its origin in the shape of the cakes, which is exactly that of the bell-hoop petticoats of our ancient Court ladies.’
as Ayto (1993) observes, is ‘a term of dismaying diversity. Its application varies widely from place to place and over time, and the only common factor is the use of shortening—butter or lard—to make it soft or crumbly.’ In England the word was already in use in Shakespeare’s time (he had a reference in The Merry Wives of Windsor to a character called Alice Shortcake, and a recipe book of 1594 had already included ‘To make short Cakes’), but it was not always in the past—nor is it now—properly distinguished from SHORTBREAD.
In N. America, on the other hand, shortcake has become prominent as a dessert, traditionally consisting of a crumbly cake made of biscuit dough, split, filled with strawberries (and often whipped cream too), topped with more whipped cream and decorated with more strawberries. Sometimes a different fruit is used and some cooks may substitute SPONGE CAKE for shortcake; but no alternative version can match the excellence of the original. Harpers Magazine in 1893 remarked, ‘They give you good eating—strawberries and short-cake—oh my!’—an exclamation which has been echoed many times since.
a N. American expression for any fat or oil used in baking to make the finished item short (tender) in texture. The type of fat used as shortening depends on individual recipes, and the term has the advantage of being neutral and non-specific. In the past butter and lard were the most important; oils were of less use to the home cook, as they tend to give greasy, mealy textures in baked goods. In the 20th century, margarine, and various compounds of lipids (often vegetable derived and partly hydrogenated), combined with emulsifiers and pre-creamed for easier mixing, have been designed for shortening particular bakery products in industry.
Although the word shortening is rarely used on the east side of the Atlantic, the concept exists, in the terms SHORTBREAD, SHORTCAKE, and short PASTRY, all of which require a high proportion of fat blended into flour giving a friable result. The common rationalization of the function of shortening is that the added fat breaks up gluten masses created when flour is made into dough. However, Harold McGee (1984) remarks that ‘the role of added fats and lipids in doughs and batters is not so straightforward’ and provides for scientifically minded bakers a much more complex explanation of what happens, insofar as it is understood.
are a kind of BISCUIT (indeed occasionally known as Shrewsbury biscuits) of the SHORTBREAD type, made from flour, sugar, and butter, circular, fairly thin, and with scalloped edges. They are flavoured with spices, and sometimes rosewater. The earliest recorded recipe, given by Murrell (1621) uses nutmeg and rosewater.
A monograph on Shrewsbury cakes written by a Shrewsbury historian (Lloyd and Lloyd, 1931) throws light on their early history. Since the 17th century Shrewsbury cakes always appear to have been known for their crisp, brittle texture, which is referred to by one Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who sent his guardian in 1602 ‘a kind of cake which our countrey people use and made in no place in England but in Shrewsbury … Measure not my love by substance of it, which is brittle, but by the form of it which is circular.’
By the end of the 17th century, the cakes were sufficiently well known for the playwright Congreve, in The Way of the World (1700), to use the expression ‘as short as a Shrewsbury cake’, and for poets and musicians born in the W. Midlands to use them as motifs in their work. The recipe given by Eliza Smith (1734) calls for cinnamon as well as nutmeg.
A reference to the biscuits in the popular 19th-century series of poems The Ingoldsby Legends ensured their further fame. One of the poems therein mentions a maker of Shrewsbury cakes named Pailin; and a trade mark ‘Pailin’s Original Shrewsbury Cakes’ was in use by the late 19th century.
Similar ‘short cakes’, of a crisp, friable texture, variously flavoured, were known in other parts of Britain.
(sometimes srikand) a sweet Indian dish, particularly of the Maharashtra-Gujarat, made with strained YOGHURT (or CURDS), beaten until light, sweetened with sugar, enhanced with spices such as SAFFRON and CARDAMOM, and garnished with slivers of, e.g., PISTACHIO or charoli seeds (called CALUMPANG NUTS in English). It often incorporates fruit such as mango. This dish, a particularly attractive example of Indian uses of yoghurt, may be served throughout a meal in India, although for western palates its place is the dessert course.
a term which always refers to certain CRUSTACEANS, to wit those in the sub-order Natantia (swimmers) in the order Decapoda Crustacea (ten-footed crustaceans), but which, with the associated term ‘prawn’, is used in different ways on the two sides of the Atlantic— and in other parts of the world, depending on whether use of the English language has been influenced by the British or by Americans. Since the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) has taken the trouble to produce a comprehensive Catalogue of Shrimps and Prawns of the World (Holthuis, 1980), they may be allowed to explain:
we may say that in Great Britain the term ‘shrimp’ is the more general of the two, and is the only term used for Crangonidae and most smaller species. ‘Prawn’ is the more special of the two names, being used solely for Palaemonidae and larger forms, never for the very small ones.
In North America the name ‘prawn’ is practically obsolete and is almost entirely replaced by the word ‘shrimp’ (used for even the largest species, which may be called ‘jumbo shrimp’). If the word ‘prawn’ is used at all in America it is attached to small species.
This entry deals with shrimp in the British sense. The first thing to be said is that there are unmanageably large numbers of species and that it is often both difficult and pointless to distinguish between them. The main use of these small shrimps in SE Asia is in the production of shrimp paste, a fermented product which goes under names such as blachan (Malaysia and Indonesia); see BLACANG. The fishermen who harvest and process the shrimps for this purpose are not likely to pause in their work to check the specific identity of each tiny creature.
There are, however, some species which deserve particular mention. In Europe Crangon crangon is the most common small shrimp, often called brown shrimp, and the one which is the object of important traditional fisheries in England (especially Morecambe Bay), the Netherlands, Belgium (where a traditional fishery at Oostduinkerke by men mounted on large horses may provide the absolute extreme in ratio of size between hunter and hunted), Denmark, and elsewhere, including the Mediterranean. C. franciscorum represents the same genus in the NE Pacific; it is known as California, bay, or grey shrimp.
These little shrimps are translucent (grey) when alive, but take colour (brown) when briefly boiled, which is all the cooking they need. This is one reason why they may be called either grey or brown shrimp, the other being that they can adapt their translucent colouring to their environment, matching the sand on or in which they live.
In the Indo-Pacific species described as having ‘commercial importance’, i.e. sought by fishermen and regularly sold in the markets, are found in a few genera such as Acetes and Caridina, but the identification of all those which disappear into shrimp paste would be, as indicated above, an impossible task.
Potted shrimp is a delicacy in England, especially the north-west. It was well described by Dorothy Hartley (1954). Shrimp paste is also an English favourite; quite different from the fermented shrimp paste of SE Asia.
Zanthoxylum simulans, is a pepper which, as the name indicates, belongs to the province of Sichuan in China and does much to give the cuisine of Sichuan its special character. The small fruits of the plant are dried to become reddish-brown ‘peppercorns’, and are subsequently sold either whole, or whole but seeded (best), or as a powder for use as a spice. It is one of the ingredients of the Chinese spice mixture FIVE SPICES.
Sichuan pepper has a pleasing aroma and a numbing rather than burning effect on the mouth.
Classification of Sichuan pepper in the genus Fagara and any use of the common name ‘fagara’ for it are respectively obsolete and inappropriate. See also SANSHO.
the name given to a network or web of important trading and caravan routes which weave across the mountains and deserts linking China and the Far East, C. Asia, India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. These routes may have existed for as long as four thousand years. They were used not only by traders, but also by pilgrims, adventurers, invading armies, nomads, and wandering players. So, not only commodities were being exchanged but also ideas, literature, religion, and technologies.
The name was first used by the German explorer Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen in the 19th century. As the name suggests, it was silk, the luxury so coveted by the Romans, which had captured everyone’s imagination. It was one of the most important commodities traded from the 1st century BC until the 2nd century AD (when it began to arrive in Rome by sea routes). But many other precious and rare items were transported too, such as gold, jade, and lapis lazuli.
Other important ‘exchanges’ were animals, including the horses of Ferghana and the two-humped Bactrian camel which was vital for the transportation of people and goods, as well as flowers, vegetables, fruits, and spices. Trade was a two-way traffic: from Persia and beyond came DATES, PISTACHIO nuts, PEARS, GRAPES, and WALNUTS; from C. Asia came ALMONDS, CUCUMBERS, ONIONS, QUINCES, APPLES, and PEACHES; from India came SPINACH, cotton, PEPPER, and other spices; and from China came MULBERRY trees (essential for the production of silk), MILLET, ANISE, green GINGER, CASSIA, RHUBARB, and TEA. Other vegetables, fruits, and spices traded included CARROTS, CHIVES, RADISHES, LIQUORICE, SAFFRON, MELONS, APRICOTS, FIGS, POMEGRANATES (said to have been introduced to China by General Zhang Qian (Chang Chien), the first recorded traveller along the Silk Road, in the 2nd century BC).
Culinary traditions also travelled. This is shown by the similarities of many of the foods and dishes prepared and the numerous variations found along the Silk Road.
Much debate has taken place about the origin and history of noodles and pasta. What is certain is that these have both been made for a very long time at both ends of the Silk Road, from China to the Mediterranean. One example is MANTOU. This steamed, noodle-like dumpling is found in one form or another all along the lines of exchange. In China it is a sort of steamed bread; in C. Asia, Afghanistan, and Turkey (where it is called manti) it is a steamed stuffed dumpling.
Other stuffed noodles/dumplings of the region include the ashak of AFGHANISTAN, the JOSHPARA of Iran, and the PEL’MENI of Russia. See dumplings of Asia under DUMPLING. Flat noodles include RESHTEH and LAKSA.
PILAF and SHOLA are two of the rice dishes which abound in many variations throughout the region. Flat baked breads, especially NAN, are the staple of C. Asia. Other examples of foods travelling widely along the length of the Silk Road are SAMOSAS, KEBABS, and a wide range of soups, see SHORBA.
The importance of the Silk Road declined in the 14th and 15th centuries as merchants found new, safer, and more lucrative trade routes with the opening up of sea routes to India and the Far East.
As is well known, the silkworm, Bombyx mori, is reared for the production of silk and its diet consists solely of mulberry leaves. It is less well known that the pupae (or cocoons) of the silkworm are edible and have a composition similar to that of shrimps.
The pupae are prepared for the unreeling of the silk thread by being placed in boiling water in what are known as reeling basins. The silk thread is then reeled out of them. The pupae are at this stage already cooked and edible after their boiling, but are usually further cooked by frying in fat and are then salted or seasoned with lemon leaves; or made into a soup; or pounded and then cooked with green leaves. Sometimes the cooked pupae are dried in the sun and then preserved.
a spice which was greatly appreciated in classical Greece, and also in Rome, where it was called laserpitium or laser. It came at first only from the hinterland of Cyrene in Libya: it was resin or sap, tapped from the root and stem of a plant. The stem itself was also a delicacy, but probably little known outside the region of production.
The supply of silphium gave out in the 1st century AD: but meanwhile an alternative source had been found in Media (now Iran), where Alexander’s soldiers had learnt to use ‘silphium’ to tenderize tough old meat. This supply (which, nearly all authors were to agree, was inferior) was called silphion Medikon, Median silphium, by Greeks and appears as silfi in the Roman recipes of APICIUS. It is certainly identical with what we now know as ASAFOETIDA, the sap of Ferula assa-foetida and related species, as was first pointed out in modern times by Garcia da Orta (1563).
First mentioned in the poems of Solon, Athenian lawgiver, in the early 6th century BC, silphium, as a seasoning or as the dominant flavour of sauces, was to be present in almost every banquet narrated in the literature of the centuries that followed. It was also of great importance in medicine: doctors recommended its use in the diet, and it was prescribed as a constituent of many compound drugs in the Hippocratic texts of the 5th and 4th centuries BC.
The best description of the plant and the harvest is given in slightly inconsistent reports conscientiously summarized by Theophrastus, the Greek scientist and successor to Aristotle, writing his History of Plants in 310 BC.
Silphium has a big thick root, a stem as long as ferula and just about as thick, and a leaf (which they call maspeton) similar to celery; it has a flat fruit, rather leaf-like, called phyllon ‘leaf’. Its stalk is annual, like ferula. In spring it puts out this maspeton, which purges sheep and fattens them greatly and makes their meat amazingly tasty; after that the stem, which they say is eaten all ways, boiled, baked. There are two kinds of sap, one from the stem, one from the root. The root has a black skin which they strip off. The harvesters cut in accordance with a sort of mining-concession, a ration that they may take based on what has been cut and what remains, and it is not permitted to cut at random; nor indeed to cut more than the ration, because the resin spoils and decays with age. Exporting it to Piraeus [for Athens] they prepare it as follows: after putting it in jars and mixing flour with it they shake it for a long time—this is where its colour comes from; and thus treated it remains stable. That, then, is how silphium is collected and treated. It is found over a large region of Libya: more than five hundred miles, they say. Its oddity is to avoid cultivated land, and to retreat as the land is gradually brought under cultivation and farmed— obviously as if, far from requiring husbandry, it is essentially wild. The Cyrenaeans say that silphium appeared seven years before they settled their city, and they have been there about three hundred years now.
That was what the Cyrenaeans say about it. We can add from others that ‘the root grows to about eighteen inches or a little more, and has a head about the middle of its length, which comes higher, almost above ground, and is called “milk”: from this in due course grows the stem, and from that the magydaris and the so-called phyllon, its seeds; in the first strong south wind after Sirius it detaches, and silphium grows from it. The ground must be dug annually: if it is left it does still seed, and the stems do appear, but both stem and root are inferior, while if dug they are better because the soil was turned over.’ This conflicts with the report as to its retreating from cultivated land. ‘The root is eaten fresh, chopped, with vinegar. The leaf is golden in colour. In spring and winter sheep are driven into the hills and pastured on this and on another plant like southernwood.’ We shall have to find out which of these reports is true.
In another passage Theophrastus says that ‘the root sap is better: it is pure and translucent and more solid. The stem sap is more liquid, which is why they mix flour with it to set it. The Libyans know the time to tap it—it is they who are the silphium collectors.’
Dioscorides (1st century AD), writing his Materia Medica, treated Libyan and Median silphium under one heading but attempted to define the difference between them:
Silphium grows in the Syria and Armenia and Media region and in Libya … The juice is collected by making an incision in the root and the stem. High quality is shown in its being reddish and translucent, myrrh-like and powerfully scented, not greenish, not rough in taste, not readily turning white. The Cyrenaic, even if one just tastes it, at once arouses a humour throughout the body and has a very healthy aroma, so that it is not noticed on the breath, or only a little; but the Median and Syrian are weaker in power and have a nastier smell.
The Libyan harvesters were apparently contracted to sell all their silphium to the Greek-speaking kingdom of Cyrene, which grew rich in the trade. Some of the harvest was, however, smuggled to Carthage. The silphium plant, a sturdy umbellifer (though with some untypical features), was a regular Cyrenaic coin type for hundreds of years. A well-known 6th-century BC painting on a Greek vase in the Louvre is generally thought to show Battus, the King of Cyrene, supervising the weighing and packing of what are apparently sacks of silphium (but others have thought that it is wool).
Profiteering may have led to the final decline. The geographer Strabo (1st century AD) wrote: ‘it came close to dying out when the natives, in the course of some dispute, erupted and destroyed the roots of the plant. They are nomads.’ Two generations later, Pliny in his Natural History seems to tell the end of the story. In his time silphium was ‘worth its weight in silver … For many years now it has not been seen in the [Libyan] region, although, sensing the chance of higher profit, countrymen who keep beasts there deprive their flocks of pasture. The single stem found within living memory was sent to the emperor Nero.’
After this Libyan silphium disappears from the record, with one exception. Lovers of mystery may turn to the 5th-century AD letter from Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, to his brother on the Libyan coast, complimenting the latter on a stem of silphium received from his garden!
No plant now known from Libya or N. Africa produces a resin that resembles asafoetida. Whether the last stem was consumed by Nero, by Bishop Synesius, or by some less-known gourmet, there can be little doubt that Libyan silphium, already vanishing in early Roman times, has now vanished. But the possibility of identifying silphium with Laserpitium gummiferum has recently been taken up again: this plant, not currently used for food, grows in Spain and the Maghreb and experiments are going on in Spain and France to see if its properties match up with silphium.
Cooks who currently recreate the Roman recipes of APICIUS use ‘Median silphium’, asafoetida, confident in the knowledge that this is exactly what the makers of those recipes must have used and that Strabo, at least, had judged asafoetida ‘sometimes better’ than silphium.
the American and most suitable name for the small fish of the family Atherinidae. These shoaling fish, found in temperate and tropical waters around the world, willingly enter brackish waters, caring little how salty these are. They include several species for which there is a commercial fishery, notably Menidia menidia, on the east coasts of N. America. This fish reaches a maximum length of 14 cm (6″). Its back and upper sides are transparent green and there is a silver band, marked above by a dark line, running along the side. They are delicious. Larger specimens should be fried, while smaller ones may be treated like WHITEBAIT. Indeed, whitebait is one of the numerous alternative common names which are used of this fish, others being green smelt, shiner, spearing, and sperling (mostly names which belong to the true SMELT).
These are fecund creatures. They have been described, when spawning in hedge grass at the head of a bay, as rolling about and jumping out of the water in such numbers that the water was ‘whitened with the milt, and the grass so full of eggs that they could be taken out by the handful’.
Silversides of the Mediterranean and the E. Atlantic coasts are often referred to as sand-smelts, but they are not smelts. The chief species is Atherina presbyter, with a maximum length of 21 cm (8.5″), so appreciably larger than the American silverside. How to classify its close relations in the Mediterranean, already a confusing question, has been further confused by the arrival of an Indo-Pacific silverside, Atherinomorus lacunosus; it has immigrated through the Suez Canal and is now established in the E. Mediterranean where it has acquired local names such as zoubara and cachcouch.
Mediterranean silversides are prepared as American ones. Small specimens are called melet in the south of France; while very small ones are called muccu at Syracuse and formed into small round cakes, with parsley and garlic, to be fried.
a verb which means to cook something in a liquid which is just below boiling point, i.e. (at sea level) about 90–96 °C (194–205 °F). Such a temperature is more than sufficient to achieve the coagulation of PROTEIN, which is commonly the result desired in cookery, and is often preferable to boiling something, since it avoids undue agitation of the liquid and may be slightly more economical in the use of fuel. The surface of a liquid which is simmering shows occasional bubbles and some movement, but not much.
The term may also be applied to the liquid itself, as in an instruction to bring milk or broth to simmering point.
Peter Lund (1814–97), author of The Curiosities of Food; or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom (1859). This is in all probability the first attempt to write a general worldwide survey of animal products.
Simmonds was born in Aarhus, Denmark. He became a writer on ‘applied sciences’, with a series of books on agriculture, food preservation, commercial foods, and beverages around the world. He was in charge of the British exhibit at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, and the exhibitions at Amsterdam in 1869 and 1883, and seems to have been the director of some type of food and agriculture ‘museum’ in London. For a more detailed account of his life, see Davidson’s introduction to a facsimile edition of the book mentioned above.
Amelia author of American Cookery (1796), which is regarded as the first American cookbook. American housewives had previously been dependent on English cookbooks or American versions of English books. Although many of Simmons’s recipes were based on English practice, she broke new ground by giving some recipes which used indigenous American vegetables like pumpkin, squash, corn, and Jerusalem artichokes. Her recipes for corn (maize) are thought to be the first printed recipes in English for that highly important foodstuff.
Her recipes include a traditional pumpkin pie; cranberry sauce to be served with turkey; and a cakelike gingerbread. Reflecting the transatlantic idiom she refers to emptins, slapjack, shortnin, cookies, and slaw (the last two terms both borrowed from the Dutch). The 1800 edition has a recipe for chowder, and such patriotic confections as Independence Cake, Election Cake, and Federal Pan Cake.
Another innovation in American Cookery is the first recorded use of an artificial raising agent in baking. This was pearlash, a precursor of modern baking powder.
Amelia Simmons’s stated intention was to write recipes for all grades of life—a basic manual for American cooks. She was first published in Hartford, Connecticut, and refers to herself as an orphan. Apart from these clues, hardly anything is known about her. Her book has been reprinted in several modern editions. The Applewood Books reprint (1996) of the 2nd edition benefits from an editorial introduction by Karen Hess.
READING:
Mary Tolford Wilson (
1957); Jan Longone (
1996b).
made for Easter, is a type of FRUIT CAKE, similar to Christmas cake. It is distinguished by the use of MARZIPAN or almond paste. Usually, half the raw cake mixture is put in the tin, covered with a sheet of marzipan, and the remaining mixture added. Towards the end of baking the top of the cake is covered with more marzipan, decorated with little marzipan balls, and browned lightly. Some omit the central layer of marzipan, and there is debate over the number of balls. Since they are said to represent the 12 apostles, some contend there should be 11 (thus excluding Judas); others say there should be 13 (to include Christ).
The marzipan is a late 19th-century embellishment of a food with a very long tradition, according to C. Anne Wilson (1973). Medieval simnels appeared to be a type of light bread boiled and then baked. Spices and fruit probably become features of the recipes during the 17th century. From then on, there is evidence for several regional simnels, mostly using fruited, spiced yeast dough. Sometimes this was encased in a rich crust of pastry or dough similar to SAFFRON BREAD, a form reminiscent of the Scottish BLACK BUN. The exception was on the island of Jersey, where the word ‘simnel’ meant a kind of biscuit until at least the mid-19th century.
Simnel cakes are particularly associated with the towns of Shrewsbury, which seems responsible for the cake as understood today; Devizes, which produced a star-shaped version without marzipan; and Bury, where a rubbed-in mixture, giving a result rather like a very rich scone, was baked in a long oval.
Originally simnel cakes belonged to Mothering Sunday (the fourth Sunday in Lent). Formerly marked by the population making pilgrimages to the mother church of their parishes, this became a day on which children working as servants and apprentices were given leave to visit their parents. Simnel cakes were taken as presents. Mothering Sunday has been eclipsed by the unrelated N. American custom of Mother’s Day, and simnel cakes are now simply associated with Easter. There is, however, an isolated British survivor of a Mothering Sunday speciality, the ‘mothering buns’ made in the city of Bristol: these are rather plain yeast-leavened buns, iced, and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands, eaten for breakfast on that day.
a phenomenon peculiar to the Philippines, explained by Gilda Cordero-Fernando (1976):
Sinarapan, the smallest fish in the world, measuring one-half centimeter, are found swimming in Lake Buhi, Camarines Sur, in large thick schools. When dried, the fish stick together and look like patties of ukoy [a fried patty made of mung bean sprouts and shrimps], with only the heads visible. Sinarapan are wrapped in banana leaves and cooked with tomatoes in a clay pot, fried in cakes, or made into an omelet with slices of hot peppers.
a curious practice by which a professional sin-eater was supposed to consume the sins of a person recently dead by consuming food before or at the funeral. Hone (1832) assembled evidence of this, largely pertaining to England but no doubt echoing similar customs elsewhere. His main English source, quoted both indirectly and directly, was John Aubrey (1626–97), from whom the two descriptions which follow derive.
Within the memory of our fathers, in Shropshire, in those villages adjoining to Wales, when a person died, there was notice given to an old ‘sire’ (for so they called him), who presently repaired to the place where the deceased lay, and stood before the door of the house, when some of the family came out and furnished him with a cricket (or stool), on which he sat down facing the door. Then they gave him a groat, which he put in his pocket; a crust of bread, which he ate; and a full bowl of ale, which he drank off at a draught. After this, he got up from the cricket, and pronounced, with a composed gesture, ‘the ease and rest of the soul departed, for which he would pawn his own soul.’
In the county of Hereford was an old custom at funerals to hire poor people, who were to take upon them sins of the party deceased. One of them (he was a long, lean, ugly, lamentable poor rascal), I remember, lived in a cottage on Rosse highway. The manner was, that when the corpse was brought out of the house, and laid on the bier, a loaf of bread was brought out, and delivered to the sin-eater, over the corpse, as also a mazard bowl, of maple, full of beer (which he was to drink up), and sixpence in money: in consideration whereof he took upon him, ipso facto, all the sins of the defunct, and freed him or her from walking after they were dead.
There does not seem to be any record of what happened when a sin-eater, with his great accumulation of other people’s sins, himself died. Perhaps the whole load was taken over by a younger member of the profession.
is a sour stew of the Philippines that is sister to other SE Asian sour stews (soups like the Thai Tom yam). It can be made of almost any fish (silver sea bass, grouper, etc.), crustacean, meat, or chicken; and the names of the dishes vary accordingly—thus Sinampalukang manok is the chicken version. It is always accompanied by vegetables—eggplant, string beans, WATER SPINACH (kangkong, swamp cabbage); and it is always soured with one or some of the many sour fruits and leaves of the country: green mango, TAMARIND (or young tamarind leaves and sprouts, specific to chicken), kamias (see BELIMBING ASAM), sour pineapple, the tropical Asian vegetable known in the Philippines as alibangbang (Bauhinia malabarica), tomatoes, and sometimes CALAMANSI.
The perfect degree of sourness is called by Tagalogs katamtaman (sour with an edge). The people of Cebu, who call their sour soup tinola or tinowa, prefer it only mildly soured with tomatoes.
Sinigang is flexible, adjusting to all budgets and to seasonal flexibility, accommodating fish large or small, or just the head, or, luxuriously, just milk fish bellies; different meat cuts, although a mixture of fat with lean and some bone is preferred; and almost any vegetables in season.
It is served at breakfast, lunch, or dinner—the broth as soup, the meat/fish/shrimp and vegetables with rice. The sourness makes it a cooling dish in the tropical heat.
a honey and cheese pie which is a Greek Easter-time speciality. It is made on most of the Greek islands but as the name implies it is renowned on the island of Siphnos. A soft, fresh, unsalted sheep’s cheese called mizithra is used in the making of this pie and the honey is thyme scented. It is sometimes called melopitta Siphnou.
Katsuwonus pelamis, a cosmopolitan fish of the TUNA family, common in the warm waters of the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic, but less so in the Mediterranean. It accounts for over a third of the world catch of tuna.
Normal length around 60 cm (24″), maximum just over 1 m (40″). The distinctive parallel dark blue stripes running along the sides of its belly account for many vernacular names, including the Australian striped tuna and, more picturesquely, watermelon (a name used also in the USA).
Skipjack swim in schools, which are often associated with floating driftwood, whales, and flocks of birds; and this behaviour has made possible some specialized fishing techniques for them including the use of man-made aggregations of flotsam.
Skipjack (katsuwo) is caught and eaten in huge quantities in Japan. Back in the Edo period (1603–1868) there was a fashion for eating the first skipjack of the season. In Tokyo (called Edo then) citizens of all classes vied in eating skipjack before anybody else in spring. As a result, early skipjack often fetched a prodigious price.
Skipjack is eaten in Japan in various ways including SASHIMI, or as tataki—the fish is filleted, grilled for a few moments only over (ideally) a straw fire, sliced like sashimi, and served with a special dip. It is among the fish which appear in the form of shiokara, a salt-cured preserve of the flesh and gut. Skipjack is also made into KATSUOBUSHI, and sometimes into namaribushi (‘halfway katsuobushi’, still sliceable).
a Scottish speciality, is a fried mixture of oatmeal, onion, and suet, with seasoning. It can be used as a stuffing or served as an accompaniment to roast meat or game.
The name, which does not seem to have been used before the 20th century, is thought to be derived from ‘skirl’, to cry out or make a noise like bagpipes; this because of the noise made by skirlie as it is fried in the pan.
Sium sisarum, also called water parsnip, an umbelliferous and perennial plant whose root used to be eaten until the spreading popularity of the potato ousted it. The root is branched, like that of scolymus (see under SALSIFY), but unlike the other root vegetables in the family (carrot, parsnip, salsify, etc.). Each branch is about as thick as an early, forced carrot, grey outside and white inside, with a flavour resembling that of celeriac (see CELERY), but sweeter. Old roots have an inedible, woody core.
The plant is native to E. Asia, and has been eaten in China and Japan since early times. During the 16th and 17th centuries it also became popular in Europe. De Candolle (1886) surmised that cultivation of the plant spread westwards from Siberia to Russia and to Germany, where it was first described by Fuchsius in 1542. It arrived in England later in the same decade from Holland: the name skirret, originally skywort, is a corruption of the Dutch zuikerwortel, sugar root.
Skirret is cooked and eaten in the same ways as salsify and scorzonera. Commenting on this, Richard Bradley (1736) recommended boiling, peeling, and serving with a sauce of melted butter and sack. ‘In this manner are they serv’d at the Table, and eaten with the Juice of [bitter] Orange, and some likewise use Sugar with them, but the Root is very sweet of itself.’ The anonymous authors of Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery (1744) echoed Bradley’s advice but also gave an interesting recipe for Skirret Fritters, made with ‘Pulp of Skirrets’. However, mention of skirrets had largely disappeared from the recipe books by the end of the 18th century.
There have been signs of renewed interest in this vegetable in France in the 1990s.
A close relation of the skirret, S. suave (syn S. cicutaefolium), occurs in N. America, where it is known as ‘water parsnip’. It was described by the Arctic explorer Richardson in the mid-19th century as ‘a small white root about the thickness of a goose quill, which had an agreeable nutty flavor’. One species name indicates that its leaves resemble those of the deadly beaver-poison (Cicuta spp), prompting Fernald and Kinsey (1943) to recommend that even those familiar with both plants should invite a rabbit or guinea pig to taste this root before doing so themselves.
a Greek GARLIC sauce which is made with almonds or walnuts, olive oil, salt, soaked and squeezed white bread, and of course garlic. It is one of those recipes where the olive oil has to be added drop by drop to the pounded mixture of other ingredients; a little wine vinegar is added at the end. As with many Greek recipes, there are regional variations. In Cephalonia for example mashed potato is used instead of the bread.
an animal notorious for the horrible smell which it can emit, exists in a number of species, of which Mephitis mephitis, the striped skunk, is the best known. This animal has a range in N. America from Canada down to N. Mexico. Head and body length may be 45 cm (18″) and weight up to 5 kg (11 lb).
The awful smell is a measure of self-protection. The jet of fluid emitted from the anus may travel nearly 4 m (12′) and be smelled half a mile away. The glands responsible for this must of course be removed if the animal is to be eaten. However, if this and other preparations are carried out properly, it makes good food.
Berlandier (1980) described an interesting meal:
At supper time we ate a small digitigrade carnivore known in the country as the zorillo, which is a species of skunk … they remove the anal glands and, having burned the hair, they cook it over coals. Despite the repugnance which I then had for that food, I was very soon convinced to the contrary, and I believed myself to be eating sucking pig.
a cultured milk preparation which has been made in Iceland since the first settlers arrived there in the 9th century. It seems likely that it was being produced elsewhere, e.g. in Denmark and Britain, at that time, but it was only in Iceland that production continued into and beyond medieval times. For Icelanders, skyr is a major element in their culinary heritage and is thought to be unique to their country. Nonetheless, Sigríður Thorlacius (1980) observes that ‘a Dane, who had worked in a dairy in Iceland, brought the formula with him to Denmark and started making skyr in a dairy in Jutland with great success’. She also remarks that when her husband was given dinner by Prime Minister Nehru in India he discovered that the SHRIKHAND of that country was astonishingly similar to skyr.
Skyr is made using skimmed sheep’s or cow’s milk with bacterial cultures and rennet added. These curdle the milk. The curds become the skyr and the whey is put to other uses, including preservation of foods. It is served as a dessert with cream, sugar, and sometimes fruit.
sometimes called slipcoat, is an antique and opaque term used with reference to English soft cheeses. The exact nature of the cheese is unknown but Val Cheke (1959) considered the name self-explanatory: ‘The name Slip-coat described the typical manner in which the cheese coat, formed by surface evaporation, tended to later slip off, especially if the cheese were kept to ripen’. She remarks that in the 20th century a slip coating, sometimes accompanied by off flavours, was considered a defect.
The phenomenon was probably difficult to avoid under poorly controlled conditions. However, recipes recorded by SIR KENELM DIGBY (1669) suggest slipcotes were considered positively desirable. They were evidently rich, thin, round cheeses. Light handling of the curd was important. They needed much turning and short ripening in a cloth, or between nettles, rushes, or grass. Slipcote cheese was mentioned in Simmond’s Trade Directory (1858) as a small, rich variety of Yorkshire cheese, ‘not unlike butter, but white’. By then, several regional soft cheeses (YORK, Cambridge, Bath, Colwick) had also evolved. How any of these cheeses related to the slipcotes of the 17th century is unclear. Colwick, named after a village near Nottingham, was made in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire into the 20th century. Most observers imply whole milk was used to make it, and although Rance (1982) considered it a skimmed milk cheese, he states that versions made with whole milk may have resembled slipcote. Colwick cheeses were shaped in circular tin moulds, perforated to allow drainage of whey. A whole cheese weighed about 700 g (1.5 kg) and had a ‘dished’ (concave) top. This effect was produced by lining the mould with cheesecloth and pulling this upwards and inwards from time to time as the cheese drained, providing an ideal edible container for raspberries, grapes, or other small fruit.
Crepidula fornicata, a small N. American MOLLUSC which inhabits a single shell but does not otherwise resemble a LIMPET. It has a ‘half-deck’ inside its shell, and is sometimes called boat shell.
The slipper limpet preys on oysters. It was accidentally introduced to S. England along with some American oysters in 1890, and is now established there. The pestilential character of the species would be mitigated if it was more widely realized that it is good to eat, raw or cooked. Some were harvested and eaten in Britain and the Netherlands during the Second World War; but in normal times the difficulty of securing an acceptably high yield of meat from the creatures precludes their commercial exploitation, helpful though this would be to the oyster population.
or blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, a common wild hedgerow bush throughout Europe and W. Asia, is probably the only plum species native to Britain. Its small, black fruits are a byword for mouth-puckering astringency. Yet they make excellent jam, are infused to produce sloe gin, and are fermented to make other kinds of alcoholic drinks. Couplan (1983) writes that preserved in vinegar they are a good imitation of UMEBOSHI.
which was for the most part of the 20th century perceived as a single country with the CZECH REPUBLIC, adjoins HUNGARY. In the past it was exposed to culinary influences from that country and, at one remove, from TURKEY. Some of the ingredients and dishes which arrived from the south became, naturally enough, part of the culinary heritage of the Czech people also; examples are dishes of the GOULASH family.
Dumplings, as in the Czech Republic, feature prominently in the cuisine and bryndzové halušky are mini potato dumplings covered with special sheep’s cheese called bryndza and topped with fried smoked bacon). Bryndza is a produce made only in Slovakia. Halušky are an entirely original dish belonging to the Slovak people. In general, Slovak foods are heavier and potato and flour based. This is due to the hard outside physical labour historically endured by the people living in the Tatra mountain region.
Other Slovak dishes include fried cheese and fried cauliflower. Slovaks also eat and produce a variety of original cheese items such as the traditional oštiepky, which is a formed oval-shaped sheep’s cheese, which is in most cases smoked. Another variety of this type of cheese is parenica, a spiral-rolled shaped cheese that can be unravelled in delicious strings. Another string cheese which is braided is called korbáčiky.
formerly the northernmost and richest republic of YUGOSLAVIA, but independent since 1992, is a neighbour of ITALY, AUSTRIA, and HUNGARY. It is predominantly Alpine country, with less than 20 per cent arable land, best suited to the cultivation of barley, rye, buckwheat, oats, maize, millet, and potatoes.
The Slovenes came early in their history under Latin and Roman Catholic influence, which was followed, on and off, by a millennium of Austrian domination. An astonishing fact is the determination which the Slovenes have shown in preserving their language, customs, and cuisine irrespective of alien rule. Many dishes, such as kaša (see KASHA), drawn from the ancient pan-Slavonic pool and typical of the food of the Slovenes from the 6th century onwards, have survived into the present. Other examples are žganci and močnik, types of PORRIDGE made from buckwheat, rye, maize, or wheaten flour, which run the gamut from almost solid to liquid mixtures.
The Slovenian kolač is the oldest Slavonic ritual leavened bread; it can be round, ring shaped, and often elaborately decorated (see kulich under EASTER FOODS). Juha, another ancient Slavic dish, is a meat and vegetable soup and an intrinsic part of the Slovenian meal. Ded and vratnik are conserves of chopped pork, packed into a pig’s stomach, bladder, or large casing, poached or smoked or just air dried. Ded means ‘grandfather’ in Slovenian—the dried product has lots of wrinkles on its surface.
Štruklji, the pride of the Slovenian national kitchen, was derived from the Austrian STRUDEL, but through the centuries the Slovenes have developed, modified, and transformed the original into a series of new and disparate dishes. Štruklji can be made with stretched or rolled-out sheets of pastry, with yeast-raised dough, or with a lightly enriched dough of wheaten or buckwheat flour and mashed potatoes. The fillings are usually based on cheese, rice, potatoes, haricot beans, kaša, cracklings, fresh or smoked meat or pork, combined with eggs and pig’s blood. Sweet fillings can be equally varied and may include apples, plums, cherries, pumpkin, bilberries, walnuts, poppyseed, or millet. The filled and rolled-up pastries are either baked, steamed, or boiled like an English pudding.
The Slovenes appear to be the only European people who still use MILLET in their traditional cookery; and, like the Russians and the Poles, they have a liking for BUCKWHEAT. The raw materials available to them are now far less limited than in the past, but people still cling to the old traditional ingredients and dishes which, for many, are a metaphor for national identity.
is an idea, a movement, and an international non-profit organization with its roots and headquarters in Bra, Italy. The idea itself was formed in the 1980s by a group of people connected with the left-wing ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana). At first, they took the name Arcigola after ARCI and the magazine La Gola, a name that can also mean ‘arch appetite’. A protest against the opening of the second McDonald’s restaurant in Italy, in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986, inspired the name Slow Food and its symbol, the snail. Three years later delegates from fifteen countries met in Paris to sign the Slow Food Manifesto and the international movement was born.
What started out as a gastronomical association, in favour of the pleasures of the table and a slow life, soon evolved and now describes itself as an eco-gastronomic movement. The quality of the food and drink on our tables is seen as closely linked to the work of farmers and producers, to the environment, and to the preservation of biodiversity. Its mission, therefore, complements the many initiatives by individuals and other groups to promote better food and the preservation of technologies and communities involved in its production. It may be distinguished from them by greater political drive and a recognition of the value of concerted action.
Slow Food has 80,000 members in 104 countries around the world. Italy has the largest number (38,000), with USA second (14,000) and Germany third (8,000). Most members belong to one of the 750 local chapters known as convivia. Carlo Petrini is the international president of the organization.
Agricultural biodiversity, or the genetic resources for food and agriculture, is disappearing at an alarming rate. In an attempt to counter this loss, the Ark of Taste was established in 1996. Named after Noah’s Ark, the goal of this project is to rediscover and catalogue rare and unique varieties of cultured plants, breeds of domesticated animals, and artisanal food products. This idea was taken one step further in 1999 with the creation of the first Presidium. The Presidia are small projects where Slow Food works with groups of artisan producers to ensure the quality of their products and promote them. Since 2003 the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, established in partnership with the region of Tuscany, oversees and supports the Ark and Presidia projects, especially in the developing countries.
One of the major events organized by Slow Food is the Salone del Gusto (Hall of Taste) held in Turin every other year. It gives visitors an opportunity to meet producers, in particular the producers of the Slow Food Presidia, to taste their products, and attend taste workshops. Other events include Cheese in Bra, Slow Fish in Genoa, Aux Origines du Goût in Montpellier, France, and Westward Slow in Denver, USA.
The University of Gastronomic Sciences was founded in 2003 by Slow Food and the regional authorities of Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont. The university offers a three-year undergraduate degree, and two postgraduate master programmes.
Terra Madre (Mother Earth) is a conference of food communities where nearly 5,000 farmers and food producers from more than 120 countries convened in Turin, for the first time in 2004. A food community in this context is a group of people who work together on the production and sale or marketing of one product, for example the wheat grower, the miller, and the baker. The next Terra Madre will be expanded to include chefs and researchers in the food communities’ networks.
a culinary term immortalized by Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, who gave to her home in Concord, Massachusetts, the name Apple Slump and recorded a recipe for the dish. This is a dish of cooked fruit with pieces of raised dough dropped on top, the whole being then further cooked. The reason for the name is thought to be that the preparation has no recognizable form and ‘slumps’ on the plate. It is served with cream.
For related items, see PANDOWDY; COBBLER.
Persicaria (formerly Polygonum) hydropiper, an annual herb of Europe and Asia which owes its alternative name water pepper to its pungency and the fact that it grows in wet conditions. In Europe it has had only medicinal uses, but in Japan (where it is known as tade) it is consumed on a large scale as a garnish and accompaniment for many dishes.
The plants are usually marketed at the seedling stage, only a few days after the seeds have germinated. The leaves, which may be purplish or green, broad or narrow, according to the variety, are very pungent.
Hamada (in Yashiroda et al., 1968) remarks that the pungency of tade differs from that of WASABI and pepper, and that the fresh leaves are used as a garnish for such favourite Japanese dishes as SASHIMI, TEMPURA, and SUSHI. ‘After a mouthful of a particular dish, one savours a tade leaf. Tade is a favourite herb in summer cooking. My father would often ask for some tade leaves to garnish any summer dish.’
Hosking (1996) explains that the green variety, yanagitade, an annual herb growing to a fair height and bearing willow-like leaves, is mainly used in fish cookery to remove the fishy smell. Benitade has small purple leaves, which have a peppery flavour and which are used as an accompaniment to sashimi and parched as an ingredient of soup.
The species P. odorata is well known as RAU RAM in Vietnam.
the name for several species of fish in the family Osmeridae (and the less important family Retrospinnidae in the southern hemisphere). Osmerus eperlanus, which has a maximum length of 35 cm (14″), is found from the far north of the N. Atlantic (plus the Baltic Sea and many lakes in N. Europe) down to the Bay of Biscay (including the lower reaches of some rivers, such as the Seine in France and the Tay in Scotland). It has a silvery stripe along its sides, like the SILVERSIDE, and has a modest reputation as a food fish in some parts of its range.
The smelt of N. America, also called rainbow smelt, is O. mordax, which exists in several forms over a very wide area of the Arctic, stretching down to the N. Pacific and the NW Atlantic and as far south as, for example, New York. In the 19th century, New Yorkers used to enthuse over the ‘green smelt’ from Raritan Bay; ‘green’ because they were caught swimming, whereas a high proportion of the smelt brought to market had been naturally frozen in the winter ice.
Smelt have an unusual flavour, signalled in advance by the smell of cucumber (or violets, an alternative analogy) which they give off. They are to be eaten very fresh.
The capelin (capelan in francophone Canada), Mallotus villosus, belongs to the same family and also smells of cucumber. It is appreciated in Greenland. Generally, however, its importance in the scheme of things is as food for cod or other larger fish.
Another species, Spirinchus lanceolatus, sometimes referred to as the ‘Japanese capelin’ or ‘shishamo smelt’ but simply as shishamo in Japan, is greatly appreciated there. The fish are caught in Hokkaido in the autumn, when carrying roe, and are delicious after being mildly salt-dried and then grilled. Much of what is consumed by the Japanese is nowadays imported.
E. (c.1675–c.1732) one of the most important cookery writers of the first half of the 18th century. Her Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion appeared in 1727 and new editions followed until 1773. It was also the first cookery book printed in America: William Parks used the 5th edition as the basis for his 1742 publication at Williamsburg, and further editions appeared at Williamsburg in 1752 and in New York in 1751 and 1764. What little is known of the author comes from the various editions of her book: she states in her 1727 preface that she has been employed by ‘fashionable and noble Families’ for more than thirty years. Assuming that she went into service aged about 15, this gives a probable birth-date in the 1670s. The title pages of the 5th and 6th editions (1732/3 and 1734) announce nearly 50 new receipts, ‘communicated just before the Author’s Death’.
Uncertainty also prevails over her full name: early editions are by ‘E—S—’; after her death, the name becomes ‘E. Smith’. The name Eliza has often been attributed to her, apparently on the basis of a letter from A. W. Oxford (the bibliographer) to Genevieve Yost, the author of a bibliographical study of the book: she asked him about the full name, and he said he thought the name Eliza might appear in one of the editions held by the British Library, but the present holdings of the library do not confirm Oxford’s supposition.
E. Smith’s book contains bills of fare (borrowed from Patrick Lamb), receipts for cookery, confectionery, and remedies, and plates illustrating table-settings. The culinary receipts belong to the tradition of 17th-century manuscripts: the flavours lean towards the wine-gravy-anchovy combinations of the late Restoration period; there are also a few receipts for scaled-down versions of the grand dishes of the French court style. The author states that her medical receipts come from family manuscript sources. The book was used as the main source for the culinary and confectionery receipts in a popular compilation, The Complete Family-Piece (1736), thus ensuring an even wider diffusion of Mrs Smith’s work.
helps to preserve them and also gives an attractive flavour. In the past it was important as an adjunct to SALTING and DRYING in the PRESERVATION of fish and meat; but even then it was used for other foods where it was not necessary to preserve them. Now that techniques of preservation have advanced, smoking remains in use for flavouring.
Wood smoke contains tarry substances which are deposited on the food, and whose flavour penetrates it to some extent. These substances contribute to preservation by killing BACTERIA. They form an impervious layer on the surface of the food, sealing it from the air. This averts rancidity of fat caused by exposure to the air; so smoking is especially useful for fatty foods such as HERRING or BACON. Smoking also helps preservation through the heat of the process, which dries the food. However, smoking is not generally used on its own as the only preservation method for a food, since it has a limited effect.
Cheese, fruits, and even nuts and hard-boiled eggs are smoked, but the method is associated particularly with fish and meat, and was probably first used for these. It is practised in many regions of the world, perhaps originating independently in several of them in prehistoric times. The discovery would have come when a fire was lit under fish or meat which was being dried, either to speed up drying or to keep away flies. The pleasant flavour and improved keeping quality would have been noticeable as an effect of the smoke. As early as 3500 BC the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia was smoking fish; and the Chinese may well have been practising it equally early, though there is no evidence of this until later, when smoked foods are mentioned as normal items. An unusual delicacy of China in the T’ang dynasty (AD 618–907) was black smoked APRICOTS, made in Hubei province.
The simplest method of smoking food, by hanging it over an open wood fire, is effective, but better results can be achieved by using an enclosure to concentrate the smoke. A mud kiln with a small hole in the top to let the smoke out slowly, another at the side for maintenance of the fire, and a few sticks across the inside for suspending the food works well. In modern Africa large oil drums are often adapted for the purpose.
The Romans had smoked CHEESE, both locally made and imported. The modern cheese CACIOCAVALLO, originally made in pairs tied together for hanging up and smoking, is of very ancient origin and may be a descendant of a Roman type.
Smoking fish in Europe goes a long way back. The remains of what seems to be a fish drying and smoking station have been discovered by the River Bann in Ireland. They are dated to about 2000 BC, almost 1,500 years before salting was introduced into W. Europe.
In classical times the fish of the Mediterranean and Black Sea were often preserved by smoking, and the Greeks were adept at the art. The Romans paid large sums for special products such as salsamentum, smoked Black Sea TUNA packed in jars. Tuna are oily fish for which, as noted above, smoking is especially suitable.
In medieval Europe smoked herrings were a common food, as important as dried white fish in the diet of the poor. An English document of 1349 mentions specially built smokehouses for herrings, showing that the business was carried on on a large scale. A smokehouse was simply a high, narrow building crossed by small beams between which sticks were laid from which the fish were hung. The roof was covered with tiles which were not cemented, and the smoke escaped through the gaps between them. The fire at the bottom was of oak if possible, ash being a second choice. The whole process took several days, with intermissions to allow the fish to ‘rest’. Such smokehouses continued to be built with little alteration until recently: the first continuous kiln, with the fish carried through on chains, was not patented until 1883. In fishing districts fishermen’s wives smoked their own fish in the chimney. This practice was very common in Scotland until the mid-19th century: the use of peat as a fuel made the process easy and successful.
HADDOCK, not an oily fish, was often smoked. SALMON, from early times and until the 19th century a common fish, especially in Scotland, was also smoked. Again, this was a salty, hard product, not like modern smoked salmon, which has a tender and slightly moist texture and in most instances a mild flavour (which will, however, be influenced by the kind of wood burned to produce the smoke, and can sometimes be strong). There is a marked difference today between a lighter London cure and the Scottish cure.
The practice in English smokehouses was to treat fish at a reasonably low temperature, not normally above 29 °C (85 °F); this is termed cold-smoking.
In N. Europe a different process was developed in the Hanseatic ports: hot-smoking, in which the smoke temperature may be well above boiling point and the fish is wholly or partly cooked. Herring treated by such a method are known as Bücklinge, Anglicized to ‘buckling’. The same process has also been used for other fish, such as mackerel, eels, salmon, and sturgeon.
Hot-smoking does not prolong the keeping time of the fish; it is used for its effect on the flavour and texture only. The combination of smoking and cooking is found in the Orient and elsewhere. For example, the Japanese cook mackerel, bonito, and tuna by steaming them before smoking, after which they are dried.
In Africa hot-smoking of fish is common. In Ghana a kind of shad called bonga is smoked and cooked (indeed, often burnt black) in simple kilns made from oil drums.
Smoking is also used for many kinds of preserved meat. The primitive dried meat strips of the charqui (see JERKY) or BILTONG type, which have been prepared by hunters since prehistoric times, would often have been hung over a fire to make them dry more quickly. In medieval Europe BACON and HAM were always smoked as part of the preservation process needed to make them last through the winter. Unsmoked gammon (see BACON) preserved only by brining has a relatively short keeping time. As in any smoking process, the benefits were drying, coating, and flavouring; but the coating was often taken a step further. The peculiar black hams which are still made in several European countries are smoked over a fire of coniferous wood which gives them this thick, tarry coating. The purpose is to make them flyproof; another result is a strangely resinous flavour.
Pork was not the only meat that was smoked, and preserved meats similar to ham or bacon have been prepared from beef, mutton (especially popular in Iceland), goat, and wild boar. Turkey and duck are also smoked, as are some kinds of SAUSAGE, for example FRANKFURTER.
MODERN METHODS
During the 19th century improvements in transport, notably the building of railways, allowed less drastic methods of preservation to be used. When the use of REFRIGERATION became general, the tendency was reinforced. Smoked fish was one of the first types of food to benefit from this. Around 1835 a new type of lightly salted, lightly smoked bloater (see HERRING) was first made at Yarmouth.
In 1843 or shortly before, John Woodger of Northumberland invented a new kind of smoked herring which he called the ‘Newcastle kipper’, a name deliberately taken from the older ‘kippered salmon’. Thus was born the famous British KIPPER, prepared by splitting and gutting, lightly salting, and smoking them overnight. In the next few decades these kippers almost completely took over the market from the old salty red herrings. At the same time the Scottish smoking of haddock became lighter, to produce the ‘Finnan haddie’, a golden-yellow split fish. (For this and similar products see HADDOCK.)
In continental Europe the trend towards lighter smoking, noticeable in the treatment of buckling (mentioned above), was slower to affect bacon and ham, which were often stored for a long time and needed greater protection. Now, however, ‘smoked’ bacon is barely smoked at all, and needs to be refrigerated.
The choice of wood for smoking has an important influence on the flavour. Hardwoods are best. Oak is preferred in Britain, hickory in the USA. Beech and birch are also good. Softwoods give a resinous, bitter taste which is generally unwanted. However, a small proportion may be added to give a dark colour. A small amount of an aromatic wood, for example apple, rosemary, or juniper, may be added toward the end of smoking for a special flavour.
Wood smoke contains some carcinogenic substances, and frequent consumption of heavily smoked food is thought to be a health risk. However, the trend in the 20th century has been towards lighter smoking.