the best-known feature of the cuisine of SWEDEN, is related to the Russian ZAKUSKI and also to HORS D’ŒUVRES and MEZZE, but less closely to TAPAS. It assumed something like its present form in the course of the 19th century, following old traditions of placing all foods on the table at once and of guests bringing their own contributions (see POTLUCK). Nowadays it is usually prepared by the hostess, without contributions, and consists in an assortment of cold dishes, sometimes supplemented by hot ones, served either as the preliminary to a meal (like zakuski) or as a full buffet meal.
The literal meaning of the term is ‘buttered-bread table’, which might lead one to expect an array of open SANDWICHES. In practice the various savoury items (cured HERRING in various forms, other seafood delicacies, cold meats, various salads, and cheeses) are presented with various Swedish crispbreads or the like, and only a few items, if any, would appear as miniature open sandwiches.
When smörgåsbord is a full buffet meal, a typical sequence of ‘courses’ would be herring (always first); other seafood items such as GRAVLAKS; what are called ‘small warm dishes’ (småvarmt); cold meats and the like; cheese/fruit/light dessert.
The smørbrød of Norway and smøörrebrød in Denmark sound as though they would be similar to smörgåsbord, but both terms refer to open sandwiches, as the names (buttered-bread) suggest. In Finland, where two languages prevail, smörgåsbord is the name used by Swedish-speakers, while Finnish-speakers use voileipäpöyta.
gastropod MOLLUSCS which have an external enclosing spiral shell, especially the land snails in the genus Helix. (There are both land and marine snails, but the name snail by itself is usually taken to indicate the former.) The many different edible varieties of these include some which have been cultivated since earliest times. H. salomonica was eaten in ancient Mesopotamia. Ucko and Dimbleby (1969) believe that the Romans domesticated a species of large snail, probably H. pomata, keeping them in special vivaria and breeding for such characters as size, colour, and fecundity.
The best-known snails for the table are the above-mentioned H. pomata, which is escargot de Bourgogne in France, also known as vineyard or Roman snail, and H. aspera, the common or garden snail, petit gris in France. Though the former is larger, the latter is considered tastier by some connoisseurs, and both share a chequered history on French tables where their status has passed from favoured delicacy to outcast and back again over the centuries.
The first French snail recipe was given around 1390 (by the author of the MENAGIER DE PARIS), but was not echoed in other medieval French cookery texts such as the Viandier of TAILLEVENT. The only reference to snail-eating in the 15th century seems to imply that it was practised in Lombardy rather than in France.
In the 16th century there are numerous signs of a more positive attitude and it is clear that they were served at banquets. Of particular note is their inclusion in a little booklet published in 1530, whose title translates as A Noteworthy Treatise Concerning the Properties of Turtles, Snails, Frogs, and Artichokes by Estienne Laigue. The author criticized four foods that he felt were all equally bizarre but popular with his contemporaries. Of the four, he was kindest to the snail.
I know snails are ugly, but not so hideous as turtles, nor so vile, and nothing like as poisonous; I also know that the ancients ate them, but I can’t accept people’s eating them daily, since other foods are more nourishing and of better substance.
The association of the three animals named by Laigue was no novelty or accident, and is of some importance. Already in the Menagier de Paris, snail recipes appear immediately after one for frogs; and, in the 16th-century cookbook mentioned above, the snail preparation, as well as one for frogs, was appended to a recipe for turtles. This association was to be a constant in French cookbooks virtually from then on, no doubt partly because there have always been people, like Laigue, who consider these foods unconventional, but also because all three were, oddly enough, considered ‘fish’ by the Catholic Church and therefore permitted on meatless days.
After 1560 snails went into a decline for about 90 years, culminating in a virtual banishment from refined tables for almost 200 years thereafter. The evidence for this is abundant. If a cookery book gave a recipe for snails, it would be with an apology for introducing such a distasteful foodstuff. The complete silence on the subject of GRIMOD DE LA REYNIÈRE is indicative, as is the fact that not a single one of the best restaurants in Paris in 1815 had snails on the menu.
There is, however, evidence that, although snails were absent from Parisian tables at the beginning of the 19th century, they were being eaten in the eastern provinces. A cookbook of 1811 from Metz in Lorraine included the following statement:
We imitate the Romans and fatten snails for the table, raising them in special enclaves that we call ‘escargotières’. We feed them with herbs and bran until winter comes and they seal themselves up in their shells; in this way we can eat them all winter long, when there’s too much snow to go hunting for them in the hedgerows.
Since there are various references to snails in the same context as oysters, which suggest that in French provinces far from the sea snails were a natural substitute for oysters, an enthusiasm for snails in Alsace and Lorraine is not surprising.
When the great comeback began, in the 1840s, and turned into what, despite the slow locomotive habits of snails, might be called a flood in the 1850s and 1860s, it could be seen to be linked to the spread of brasseries in Paris; and these were typically opened by Alsatians, neighbours who doubtless shared the taste of the snail-eaters in Lorraine. This was probably no coincidence. Certainly, the comeback was very noticeable and achieved so complete a reinstatement of the snail that it has stayed in place ever since.
The penetration of snails into the smartest restaurants of Paris prompted an English author, Hackwood (1911), to express vividly his prejudice against both the French and snail eating, thus:
It has been argued that the national food forms the national character; in proof of which have often been put forward the contrast between the smooth, slippery, volatile character of the soup-, snail- and frog-eating Frenchman and the heavy, stolid, and imperturbable character of our own beef- and pudding-eating countryman.
It is reasonable to hope, indeed suppose, that such confrontational attitudes have been going into decline in the course of the 20th century just as clearly as the snail went into decline in earlier centuries, but that there will be no ensuing comeback.
Philip and Mary Hyman
Trichosanthes cucumerina, an Asian CUCURBIT of typical vinelike growth, native to India (where it is known by names such as parval and padwal) but now also grown in other tropical regions. Of the various species in this genus, the snake gourd is the only one which has any importance as a food; others may be too bitter or even toxic. The fruits would be curved like snakes if they were not induced to grow straight by hanging small weights from their ends. They are elongated and can measure well over 1 m (4′) in length, corresponding to a diameter of only 5 cm (2″).
It is the young fruits which are eaten. Although the whole plant has an unpleasant smell, the prepared fruits do not, and those from cultivated plants should be free of the bitterness found in some wild strains. The peeled fruits are sliced or chopped into pieces and boiled for use as a vegetable, being suitable for incorporation in curry-type dishes or a stew or a SAMBAL.
of just about every sort have been eaten in most parts of the world where they occur. Snake venom is in the head area only, and the flesh may safely be consumed. Australian Aborigines would bake snakes in the coals of a camp fire; and the Cribbs (1975) cite an Australian version of an old popular song based on this practice: ‘If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a snake.’
In parts of SE Asia snakes are regularly seen in the markets, but they do not constitute an important food resource. The same applies in China and Japan. But ways of preparing snake meat are better known in those countries. The Chinese make a snake soup, and serve marinated snake meat with rice. The Japanese have a way of grilling marinated strips of meat which is reminiscent of their way of treating EELS. Generally, the obvious resemblance between eels and snakes makes recipes for the one suited to the other; but snakes are leaner.
SIMMONDS, in his comprehensive Curiosities of Food (1859), has nothing to say about snakes being eaten in Asia. He gives an extensive quotation from an author who had eaten snake in Australia and found it palatable, but rather fibrous and stringy, ‘like ling-fish’. But he gives pride of place to an account in the Penny Magazine of a meal of ‘Musical Jack’ served to a traveller in Kaskaskia, Mississippi. The traveller thought that he was eating fried eels, but …
‘Stop,’ said the individual that occupied the bottom of the table, before I had swallowed two mouthfuls. ‘You, Sir, I presume, have no idea what you are eating; and since you are our guest for the time being, I think it but right that you should have no cause hereafter to think yourself imposed upon. The dish before you, which we familiarly call “Musical Jack”, is composed of rattlesnakes, which the hunter who accompanies us in our tour of exploration was so fortunate as to procure for us this afternoon.’
Arnold (1996) deals knowledgeably and thoroughly with the cooking of rattlesnakes in Colorado, which he has practised in his restaurant and on which he comments:
Truth is, the meat is rather like chicken, and after being braised for 90 minutes, it comes away from the bones in flakes, not unlike lump crab. I guess it’s the thought of it that turns people off, but surprisingly, it’s number one of all the appetizers at my restaurant, The Fort, near Denver. We serve some 200 snake portions a week, and 1200 pounds of rattlesnake meat a year.
Arnold deals also with some surprising minutiae of the complex economics involved; for example, ‘one enterprising dishwasher collects the rib bones, cleans and bleaches them, then packs one to a glassine envelope, and staples these to a large card advertising “mountain man toothpicks”.’
Gilda Cordero-Fernando (1976) has written in encouraging terms about eating a python such as one might meet in the jungles of Mindoro in the Philippines. She advises that, having overpowered the python, one should turn it into SINIGANG; and states that the ‘delicious taste of snake-meat is a cross between chicken and tunafish’. These comparisons crop up frequently in connection with the meat of snakes and lizards and other such creatures (see also LIZARD, MONITOR, ALLIGATOR).
Snakes have been eaten on a small scale in various parts of Europe. The French refer to grass snakes as anguilles de haie (hedge eels). In Britain there is a tradition of eating viper soup, on which Jennifer Stead (1995b), taking her cue from Simon Varey (also 1995), provides an essay which is now the locus classicus.
a name generally applied to numerous species of marine fish in the family Lutjanidae (although by no means all members of that family have the name). They are tropical fish, mostly of medium size, distributed around the world but sparsely represented in the E. Pacific. Their heads are usually long and pointed, and their jaws, the upper of which are equipped with canine-like teeth, can snap vigorously. Most of them are good edible fish, some outstandingly so.
If the use of the name snapper were consistent, and applied to all species in the family Lutjanidae, there would be a very large number of important species to list. In practice the species in certain genera within the family usually have other names and can be found under FUSILIER and JOBFISH. The name snapper is mainly applied to species in the genera Lutjanus, Macolor, Ocyurus, and Rhomboplites; and it is these which are dealt with here. Among them are numerous species; many of commercial importance; see the full catalogue edited for the FAO by Allen (1985). The short lists below simply provide some examples, grouped by region. (The Mediterranean and NE Atlantic have none; the SE Atlantic hardly any.)
Most Indo-Pacific snappers have a range which includes SE Asia, and usually extends west to the Red Sea and E. Africa. In many instances the range includes N. Australia, and parts of Oceania.
The name ‘red snapper’ is legitimately applied to several species in the family whose coloration is vermilion or red or rosy red, and which are particularly good to eat. Since the name has considerable appeal to customers, some fishmongers and restaurateurs have become overly generous in applying it, including some snappers whose hue may at best be described as tinged with red and which are of less good quality.
Gallinago gallinago, a brownish bird with an unusually long bill, which accounts for very nearly a quarter of the average total length (just over 25 cm/10″). This enables it to probe for food in the mud of marshes and other watery haunts. The range of the species extends right round the globe in the northern hemisphere. Many but by no means all snipe migrate southwards for the winter.
There is not much of a snipe, since its average weight is only 120 g (4 oz), and shooting it for table use has declined, at least in Britain. It is often taken at the same time as woodcock. It is good to eat.
There are two close relations, of which the jack snipe is smaller and the great snipe very slightly larger.
as it is called in S. Africa, or barracouta (the Australian name, not to be confused with barracuda, a different fish), Thyrsites atun, is a fish which exists in abundance in the southern hemisphere—Australasia, S. America (e.g. Chile where it is highly valued as sierra), and S. Africa. Maximum length 135 cm (54″). The coloration, steel blue over silver, is typical of pelagic fish.
Snoek is an important food resource, and its flesh is of good quality. During and after the Second World War it acquired an undesirable reputation in Britain, whither large quantities of it in cans were imported from S. Africa, largely because the British public were tired of being exhorted to eat things they did not really like, and especially things handicapped by quaint names like ‘snoek’, the offputting character of which had not been perceived by the civil servants charged with the task of promoting it.
Smoked snoek is a successful product.
The similar name snook applies to several species of American tropical waters, especially the Caribbean, in the family Centropomidae. The largest, Centropomus undecilamis, is an important game fish. The maximum length is something like 1.5 m (4′ 9″). It occurs not only in coastal waters and estuaries but also in some inland waters, and has well-flavoured white flesh.
the natural substance, occasionally occurs in recipes, e.g. as an ingredient in a certain type of PANCAKE, but when the term is met in cookery books it is more likely to mean a kind of dessert which became popular in England in the 16th century. This was simply a confection of egg whites and cream, flavoured with rosewater and a little sugar and whipped until stiff; or any of a number of variations on this theme. It could be served as a novelty at banquets, mounded over an apple and spread on the twigs of a branch of rosemary to look like real snow. Sometimes gold leaf was added for extra effect. This dish remained popular for a long time.
Karen Hess (1981) comments:
Snow cream is the English version of crêmets d’Anjou, those delightful heart-shaped desserts that one finds down river from Tours. Instead of being sweetened, they are served with sugar and fresh cream on serving. It seems likely that the Plantagenets brought the sweet to England.
In the 18th century cooked, whipped apple pulp was added to make apple snow. This dish, still current, is now a light egg white and apple purée mixture eaten cold. Elsewhere, hot versions exist; Lesley Chamberlain (1983) explains that a Russian dish whose name translates intriguingly as ‘air pie’ is made with fruit purée, sugar, and egg whites only, and served hot.
Also still current, in various European countries, are cakes based on whipped egg white, often called ‘snow cake’ or a similar name.
Chionoecetes tanneri in the N. Pacific and C. opilio in the N. Atlantic, crabs of polar waters which have become important commercially, indeed an important and valuable food resource. An alternative name for them is queen crab and, as one would expect, there is a king crab to match, in the form of Paralithodes camtschatica.
The most obvious characteristic of these crabs is that they have enormously long legs; so their meat is usually marketed frozen or in cans, since the great length of these relatively thin legs and the distance of the fishing grounds from the markets make any other procedure uneconomic.
As one moves up towards the North Pole, it is not only the species of crab found on the seabed which change, but also the methods of fishing for them. Whereas the more compact edible crabs of temperate waters are caught in pots, the only method which works on rocky or irregular bottoms, or by trawling, the specialized Russian and Japanese fishing boats which seek out snow crabs in the icy Arctic waters use tangle-nets. These are of considerable size, and constructed so as to form ‘walls’ on the seabed. The snow crabs become entangled in them as they try to move past; and the best catches are made at the time when the crabs are moving into deeper waters for breeding purposes. This has become a really big operation, with one lot of boats for laying the nets and another for picking them up and a factory ship equipped for freezing and canning attending each fleet.
In waters less far north there are other long-legged crabs which live in deep water and are at present under-exploited, but have commercial possibilities. The RED CRAB, Geryon quinquedens, is one such. Since the king crab is sometimes known as ‘red king crab’, there is a possibility of confusion here; the more so since another interesting red crab, the centolla or southern king crab, Lithodes antarcticus, is being fished in large quantities off the coast of Chile.
The meat in the legs of all these crabs, which is succulent and has a sweetish taste, may be used for any of the standard crab preparations.
the Japanese word for BUCKWHEAT, and for NOODLES made from buckwheat, which are traditionally preferred in the eastern half of Japan, especially in Tokyo.
Buckwheat has been eaten in Japan from early antiquity, but it was in the 17th century that soba became common, though it must have been known earlier. The increased popularity of soba at this time was encouraged by a rise in the production of buckwheat, in the wake of the period of peace and prosperity that followed the setting up of centralized government in Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1603 after decades of civil strife.
Soba has always had a dual identity. In rural areas, where buckwheat was an important element in the daily diet, it tends to be made specially for festive occasions. On the other hand, it has always been readily available to city dwellers as a street food.
Soba is made by mixing buckwheat flour with water, kneading it vigorously (often treading it), rolling it out, folding it, and cutting it into thin strips. As buckwheat dough is inclined to be dry and crumbly, 20 to 30 per cent of wheat flour is usually added.
In the Edo period (1603–1868), when buckwheat noodles first became popular, coloured noodles were often made by incorporating various ingredients (e.g. mugwort, Artemisia indica; green tea (to make cha soba, green, subtly flavoured, a rarity); shrimps; eggs; chrysanthemum petals; sesame seeds; seaweeds) into the basic dough—in the same way that spinach is sometimes added to pasta dough. But these coloured varieties have almost completely disappeared.
There are numerous ways of serving soba, but the most basic are mori, with a dipping sauce, or kake, as a soup. (These words come from moru, to pile up, and kakeru, to pour.) There are a number of variations on these two themes. One of the most popular is tempura soba, which is a kake soba with prawn TEMPURA placed on top.
Yamaimo soba, lighter in colour and chewier in texture than the plain kind, are made by adding Japanese mountain yam (Dioscorea japonica) flour to the basic dough.
Most soba is commercially manufactured and sold dried, although soba restaurants in the cities make their own on the premises. The traditional techniques survive in rural areas.
any bread raised with BICARBONATE OF SODA and an acid, often supplied by soured milk or buttermilk. Unlike yeast-raised breads, it is quickly made, and does not require strong flour.
The bread has been a particular speciality of Ireland since the late 19th century. In Ireland the use of bicarbonate of soda or bread soda in bread-making was commonplace by the 1840s and certainly by the second half of the 19th century soda bread had become an established feature of the Irish diet. Its popularity can in part be attributed to the fact that rural Ireland did not have a strong tradition of yeast bread manufacture. Until the late 19th century bread-making was considered an entirely domestic procedure and executed with a limited range of utensils; the pot oven or ‘bastible’ and the flat iron GRIDDLE. These utensils were ideally suited to soda bread preparation and the soda itself provided a convenient, storable, and predictable leaven regardless of the strength or weakness of the flour. In comparison to the more traditional oaten bread, soda bread was easily prepared and decidedly more palatable especially with hot melting country butter.
Soda bread or cakes were baked in the pot oven over the dying embers of the fire and covered with a few sods of burning turf. Traditionally a cross was cut into the dough, which helped in the even baking of the bread and assisted in the quartering of the loaf afterwards. The custom was emphasized especially on Good Friday in honour of the Crucifixion, but the everyday elucidation for the practice was ‘to let the devil out’.
In Ireland soda bread is prepared with either white or wholewheat flour. Brown soda bread is popularly served with smoked salmon. A sweet version of the bread can also be prepared with the addition of sugar and currants, raisins, or sultanas; this is known by a variety of names including SPOTTED DICK, spotted dog, and railway cake.
a chemical element essential to life. Communications between nerve cells depend on letting sodium ions (electrically charged atoms) in through the cell membrane, and cells contain a mechanism called the ‘sodium pump’ which constantly removes the excess. Up to a third of the energy used by the cell goes to keeping this ‘pump’ running.
Sodium in its pure state is an inflammable metal and it is always found in compounds or, in cells, as ions (charged atoms). The most abundant sodium compound, and the form in which most sodium is consumed, is common SALT, sodium chloride. Other compounds used in foods include BICARBONATE OF SODA (sodium hydrogen carbonate) and Chile saltpetre (sodium NITRATE). Caustic soda (sodium carbonate), the most powerful of all alkalis, is used to clean and disinfect kitchen surfaces.
In the body, it is essential to keep levels of sodium and POTASSIUM in balance. Almost always, any imbalance is an excess of sodium due to eating too much salt. The body’s attempts to correct this can damage the heart. Doctors prescribe a low sodium diet, which in practice means not adding salt to food; ordinary foodstuffs provide enough sodium to maintain normal levels in the body.
Ralph Hancock
the Italian and Spanish forms of a word which means much the same in both languages, always indicating a preliminary aromatic preparation which is basic to a very wide range of savoury dishes. For Italians it is a mixture of chopped onion, garlic, parsley, and probably tomato and other ingredients too, lightly cooked in olive oil. In Spain, cooks are likely to use paprika, and garlic is not always present; while in Catalan cookery the sofregit is closer to the Italian soffritto (see SPANISH REGIONAL COOKING). But these are general indications; all cooks have their own formulae, which may in any case vary slightly according to the use to which the soffritto will be put.
Oddly, there is no corresponding French term, although cooks in the south of France constantly do something very similar. The relevant instruction in their recipes is standardized, and reads almost like an incantation: ‘Faites revenir à l’huile un oignon haché, des tomates épluchées, épépinées et concassées, deux gousses d’ail écrasées.’
The term is much used in Sephardic Jewish cookery, where it can often mean a whole dish incorporating meat or chicken braised with oil and a little water, and coloured and flavoured with saffron.
The soffritto emigrated with Spanish colonists to the New World and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (1973) remarks that it took a new form in Puerto Rico where salt pork, ham, and peppers are used. There and in other Caribbean islands it has the same function as in Europe and something like the same importance. Much the same applies in various Latin American countries, where, as one would expect, tomatoes and peppers are regularly used.
Mya arenaria, an edible BIVALVE found on both sides of the N. Atlantic, is greatly appreciated in Canada and the USA but less popular in Europe, where its range extends only as far south as the English Channel. It is large (up to 15 cm/6″) and has a brittle shell which gapes permanently at each end. Even so, it can survive for a long time out of water, and even without oxygen, so can be marketed in good condition. Its double siphon is long, accounting for an alternative common name, long-neck. (A third name, steamer, is bestowed because it is judged to be particularly suitable for steaming. There is no obvious explanation for the Irish names maninose, nannynose, and brallion; nor is it clear why it has been called old maid in England.)
The species was accidentally introduced to the Pacific coast of N. America in the 1870s, established itself there, and is the object of a sport and commercial fishery. It was at one time cultivated in the San Francisco Bay area.
Because they gape, these clams tend to be sandy and gritty. The first step is therefore to purge them by keeping them alive for a day or two in clean water, preferably with a little cornmeal. They are then ready for a CLAMBAKE, to become steamed softshell clams, or for use in certain clam CHOWDERS and clam pies. The reputation of this clam rests also on its excellence when battered and fried. It was the first clam to be so treated, an event said to have taken place in Essex, Massachusetts, in the early part of the 20th century. However, nearby Ipswich became the headquarters of the clam processors and soft-shelled clams therefore became known also as Ipswich clams. They remain the most popular clams for battering and frying in New England.
These include:
Solea solea, a FLATFISH of superb quality which ranges from the Mediterranean to the north of Scotland and the south of Norway. The best fishing grounds for it are the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay. In Britain it is often distinguished from its less good relations (on which see below) by being called Dover sole. This is not because it congregates round Dover, but simply the result of Dover having in the past been the best source of supply to the London market of freshly caught specimens.
The name sole may also be correctly applied, but usually with a qualifying epithet (e.g. French sole), to other species of the family Soleidae. These all belong to the group of dextral flatfish (i.e. flatfish with both eyes on the right-hand side of their heads—see FLATFISH). The other true soles are dealt with at the end of this entry, where information will also be found about the occasional misuse of the name sole for fish which are not true soles.
The name solea is from the Greek, ‘as the Greeks considered it would form a fit sandal for an ocean nymph’ (Day, 1880–4).
The maximum length of this fish is 50 cm (20″). The colour of the eyed side is sepia, marked in life by darker blotches.
Wheeler (1979) has described the habits of the sole thus:
The sole is found on sand, mud, and even fine gravel. During daylight it lies buried with only the eyes and gill cover exposed. At night-time, or during very dull days it is active, and large specimens are not infrequently seen swimming at the surface of the sea. The best catches of soles are usually made at night.
The same author explains that the sole is to some extent migratory, moving into shallow water in spring and summer, and offshore when the sea cools during winter. The North Sea being at the northern end of its range, it may be driven during winter to seek refuge in the few deeps which this sea offers. The Silver Pits in the centre of the North Sea may have earned this name because of the concentration of soles there during really cold weather.
The sole keeps relatively well, and many authorities hold that it is at its best a day or two after death, when its excellent flavour has developed fully.
A whole sole, grilled and served with nothing more than lemon wedges, is as good a dish as one could have. However, it is a fish which is well adapted to being filleted, yielding cohesive, firm fillets of a good thickness, and many of the classic sole recipes are for fillets. These are sometimes masked by over-elaborate sauces and garnishes which could well be done without, but there are certain preparations, e.g. Sole Véronique (with green grapes), which enhance rather than obscure their intrinsic fine flavour and texture.
There are a number of true soles, of which examples are given in the box, but there are also a number of species which are popularly known as ‘soles’ but are not. One example is the LEMON SOLE of Europe. In N. America the name sole is applied to several species of FLOUNDER, including both left-eyed and right-eyed ones, but no true soles of the family Soleidae occur in American waters.
Japanese NOODLES made from wheat flour and resembling vermicelli (see SPAGHETTI). The difference between somen and other types of Japanese noodles lies in the way it is made. Whereas all the other types of noodles are made by rolling out dough and cutting it into thin strips, somen is made by pulling dough. It is said to have been introduced from China at two separate periods—first during the Nara period (710–94) and second during the Kamakura period (1192–1333). It was not until the Edo period (1603–1868) with an increase in the production of wheat, that it came to be eaten widely.
Since making somen requires a high degree of skill, it is always made professionally and usually sold dried. To make somen, wheat flour is mixed with salt and water (the amount of salt varies according to the weather) and the dough kneaded first by hand and then by treading it. It is then flattened into a large disc, cut spirally into a long, flat belt, and pulled gradually at intervals, to give the dough time to rest and to ‘mature’. When the dough has attained a certain length, it is hung on a horizontal rod and continues to be pulled to a greater thinness. Finally, when it is as thin as vermicelli, it is dried and cut to an even length and sold in neat bunches.
Connoisseurs say that the best somen is that which is made at the coldest time of the year (early February), and that it is at its best when it has passed at least two rainy seasons (June). In other words, somen made in February this year will reach its peak in the summer next year. This is because while the dough is being pulled, it is repeatedly painted with vegetable (usually cottonseed) oil so as to prevent it from drying up and becoming brittle. As somen seasons, the smell of the oil gradually disappears.
Somen, like hiyamugi (see NOODLES OF JAPAN), is a summer food. It is eaten cold, often served floating in iced water in a large glass bowl, with a soy sauce-based dipping sauce. In every bunch of somen one or two coloured strands are included for visual effect. Dried hiyamugi and somen packed neatly in boxes are often used as gifts in the summer.
Special types of somen include: cha somen, which has green tea powder added to the dough; tamago somen, with egg yolk added to the dough, giving the noodles a warm yellow colour; and ume somen, noodles which are pink because SHISO (beefsteak plant) is used to colour the dough.
Somen is occasionally eaten hot in winter, cooked in a soup with vegetables, fish, etc. Cooked thus, it is called nyumen.
a cowboy dish of unusual character. It contained various ingredients from a newly killed fat calf: heart, liver, tongue, pieces of tenderloin, sweetbreads, brain, and ‘marrow gut’. This last item is explained by Adams (1952):
Marrow gut is not a gut at all, but a tube connecting the two stomachs of cud-chewing animals. It is good only when the calf is young and living upon milk, as it is then filled with a substance resembling marrow through which the partially digested milk passes. This is why only young calves were selected for a good stew. The marrow-like contents were left in, and they were what gave the stew such a delicious flavor.
For clarification of the stomachs of a calf, see TRIPE. What is being referred to here is evidently the passage leading to the abomasum (in fact, the fourth stomach) and the abomasum itself with its distinctive flavour of rennin-curdled milk.
The pieces of calf were added in order, the toughest first and the brain last. The dish was seasoned, and a ‘skunk egg’ (onion) might be added.
The name of the stew could be adapted to refer to anyone who was currently unpopular: thus, ‘Cleveland stew’ because the President of that name ‘ran the cattlemen out of the Cherokee Strip’. Other names were Rascal stew and SOB stew.
Sorghum bicolor (formerly vulgare), a cereal related and similar to and sometimes confused with MILLET, is an important staple food of the upland, drier parts of Africa and India. In other parts of the world it is chiefly grown as animal fodder. It is native to Africa, and was probably first cultivated in Ethiopia between 4000 and 3000 BC. It spread thence to W. Africa, the Near East, India, and China, and later to the New World.
In appearance sorghum is a typical grass with long, flat leaves and large, feathery seed heads. The main cultivated varieties vary considerably in the colour of the seeds and in the size of the plant. The tallest may reach a height of 6 m (20′); but dwarf varieties, low enough to be harvested by machinery, have also been developed.
Among the numerous cultivars, it is generally true that those with white grains (especially Black African and White Pearl, the latter being the most highly esteemed in India) are used for food, while the red-seeded kinds are for making beer.
The flavour of the better grain sorghums is robust and resembles that of buckwheat. The grains may be eaten whole or as a flour. Such flour is coarse and lacks gluten, so is more suited to making PORRIDGE than bread; but Indians make sorghum meal into CHAPATIS and similar unleavened breads.
The saccharatum group of cultivars are not grown for grain, but for the sap in their thick stems, the source of sorghum syrup. These sweet sorghums are sometimes called ‘sorgo’ or ‘Chinese sugar cane’. The syrup is produced from them by methods akin to those used in the processing of sugar cane.
Sorghum is only suitable for making syrup, not for the production of solid sugar. The reason is that only a third of its sugar content is sucrose (common sugar), which crystallizes easily. The major part consists of dextrose and fructose, which do not readily crystallize, and some gummy dextrin.
In its usual form, sorghum syrup is a sticky, dark brown product which has only been partly refined and which has a flavour like that of sugar-cane molasses, see SUGAR. The dextrin can, however, cause it to set solid. And in China a technique of evaporation is used to turn it into dried strips, yellow-brown in colour.
In the USA, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sorghum syrup was popular as a cheap alternative to maple syrup. Production, mainly in the southern states, was as much as 20 million gallons or more annually. It is still produced and used, but to a lesser extent.
the name of a number of plants of the genus Rumex. The sour taste of their edible leaves is responsible for the name ‘sorrel’, and all other European names for the plants also mean ‘sour’. WOOD SORREL is not closely related, though its leaves have a similar flavour.
Sorrels grow wild throughout Europe and Asia. There are a few native American kinds, but the common species from the Old World are now naturalized. The main European wild species are common sorrel, Rumex acetosa; and round-leafed or French sorrel, R. scutatus. These have been eaten as green vegetables since ancient times. Even in the 20th century English schoolchildren would eat ‘sour dabs’, sorrel picked from the wild.
At first common sorrel was the most used, and it was often cultivated. During the Middle Ages improved varieties of round-leafed sorrel were bred in Italy and France, and these became more popular. The new ‘French’ or ‘Roman’ sorrel arrived in England at the end of the 16th century, and was ousting the older species in popularity by the end of the 17th. It is now the most widely cultivated kind, and is much eaten in France and Italy. French sorrel, although it is the mildest kind, retains the typical sour and bitter taste, which is due to the presence of OXALIC ACID.
When sorrel is eaten as a vegetable it may be blanched first and the water discarded to reduce the acidity. One old practice was to mix it with ORACH, a leafy vegetable of mild flavour. Sorrel is added to salads and used as an ingredient in soups, purées, and sauces, as an omelette filling, and as a stuffing for fish where its sharp flavour is especially good. It also has a reputation for dissolving, by means of the oxalic acid which it contains, the tiresome small bones found in certain fish, such as the shad. However, experiments reported by Jaine (1986) suggest that there is little basis for this and that it is prolonged cooking rather than sorrel which achieves the desired effect.
An old English accompaniment to meat and fish was GREENSAUCE made from sorrel pounded to a paste with vinegar or lemon juice and sugar; and this name was also applied to the plant itself.
product of the tree Caryocar nuciferum, native to northern S. America. The first syllable of souari is pronounced to rhyme with ‘how’.
Like its relation, the BRAZIL NUT, it is a large, wild tree whose fruits are gathered in the jungle and which has not proved amenable to cultivation. The fruits, about the size of a child’s head, contain three to five nuts with heavy, warty (sometimes spiny) shells.
The kernels are soft and white, with a mild flavour which has been compared to those of the HAZELNUT and ALMOND, and a high oil content (c. 60 per cent). They may be eaten raw, roasted, or cooked in salt water. Also, they yield a good cooking oil or, cold pressed, a semi-solid cooking fat like butter, which explains the alternative name ‘butter nut’.
C. villosum, the pequiá or arbre à beurre, also has fruits which yield edible seeds and oil.
a French word which literally means ‘puffed up’, is a culinary term in both French and English (and used in many other languages) for a light, frothy dish, just stiff enough to hold its shape, and which may be savoury or sweet, hot or cold. There is no mistaking a hot soufflé; but cold ones are difficult to distinguish from a MOUSSE.
The basic hot soufflé has as its starting point a ROUX—a cooked mixture of flour and butter. This is cooled slightly and blended with egg yolks and savoury or sweet flavouring ingredients which are either already cooked or do not require much cooking. The result resembles a thick rich sauce. Stiffly beaten egg whites are then folded in. The mixture is baked in a high-sided dish. It rises mainly through simple expansion of the air in the egg foam.
This type of soufflé was a French invention of the late 18th century. Beauvilliers was making soufflés possibly as early as 1782 (though he did not publish his L’Art du cuisinier until 1814). Recipes for various kinds appear in Louis Ude’s The French Cook of 1813, a work which promises a ‘new method of giving good and extremely cheap fashionable suppers at routs and soirées’. Later, in 1841, CARÊME’s Pâtissier royal parisien goes into great detail on the technique of making soufflés, from which it is clear that cooks had been having much trouble with soufflés that collapsed. The dish acquired a reputation for difficulty and proneness to accidents which it does not really deserve. Conversely, a successful soufflé has a certain glamour.
The unjustified reputation for frailty which hot soufflés have attracted may be partly due to nervous cooks who open the oven door while the soufflé is cooking to see how it is getting on. This lowers the temperature in the oven and disrupts rising. A soufflé has to be left undisturbed for the full cooking time and then served promptly. A soufflé will collapse if it is undercooked, or if it is kept waiting after cooking.
Most of the mixtures used in these dishes had been in existence for centuries under other names. Even the earliest CUSTARDS made with unbeaten eggs rose to some extent when cooked. However, beating as a method of lightening eggs or cream was not introduced until the 16th century (see MERINGUE).
There are some Ukrainian and Russian dishes of the hot soufflé type, independently evolved and slightly different in composition. The Ukrainian drachena is made from a mixture of egg yolks, cream or milk, flour, salt, and a little sugar into which the beaten whites of the eggs are folded. It is baked and served with melted butter and herbs.
The term is also applied, as an adjective, to other things, always indicating something puffed up. Thus an omelette soufflée is a light, usually sweet omelette given a foamy texture by beating the egg whites separately.
See also SNOW.
a phrase which came into use in the 1960s, describes the cuisine of African Americans. The expression comes out of the world of popular music but the adjective was widely applied as early as the 1930s to all things black (soul man, soulful). The first soul food cookbook was published in 1968. Typical items of soul food are hominy and grits (see GROATS); CORN BREADS; black-eyed peas (see COWPEA) and collard greens (see KALE); CHITTERLINGS, hog jowls, and pigs’ FEET. The appeal of soul food stretches out beyond ethnic boundaries, appealing to many Americans as part of the American tradition, but especially in the southern states. Harvey Levenstein (1993) describes how urbanized black families reconnected with their country roots by eating soul food. It is yet another instance of how food and group identity have become closely connected.
the most general of the terms which apply to liquid savoury dishes, embraces BROTH, CONSOMMÉ, BISQUE, POTAGE, etc. According to Ayto (1993), the word is derived from the same prehistoric German root which produced English sup and supper. From that root came a noun, suppa, which passed into Old French as soupe. This meant both ‘piece of bread soaked in liquid’ and, by extension, ‘broth poured onto bread’. The word, with the latter meaning, entered English in the 17th century, joining the term ‘sop’, which had already arrived separately and was well established as meaning the bit of bread that was soaked. (Ayto also points out that the arrival of the word ‘soup’ fell in the period when people began to serve the liquid soup without the hitherto always present sops.)
Similar terms in other languages include the Italian zuppa, the German Suppe, Danish suppe, etc.
Of the various categories of dish which may be eaten, soup can certainly be counted among the most basic. Its role (in that small fraction of the world’s population which eats western-style meals of several courses and is familiar with restaurant meals and ‘dinner parties’) as an appetizing first course should be viewed against the historical background, in which soups with solids in them were a meal in themselves for poorer people, especially in rural areas. Such soups can stray, over what is necessarily an imprecisely demarcated frontier, into the realm of stews. This tendency is noticeable among fish soups, for example; many of the best-known dishes which are referred to as fish soups, for example BOUILLABAISSE, display it.
The domain of soups is so vast that it includes several large categories. One is that of the FRUIT SOUPS which are popular in N. Europe and the northern parts of C. Europe. Another is the host of ‘sour soups’ which are important in N., E., and C. Europe. Lesley Chamberlain (1989) has interesting things to say about these, not only those with a fermented ‘beer’ base or using SAUERKRAUT but many with a subtler sour element, imparted by a dash of vinegar to finish, or pickled beet juice (see BORSHCH). She counts the Balkan sour soups, notably the many sorts of ciorba (see SHORBA), which are likely to use lemon or yoghurt as souring agents, as a subgenre, ‘part of a different gastronomic world, more centred on Istanbul than on Vienna’.
One might postulate another category, that of which it could be said, giving only a slightly different focus to the nursery rhyme about the little girl who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead, that ‘when they are good they are very very good, but when they are bad they’re simply horrid’. Tomato soup is a prime example, often concealing its identity when of the inferior kind under the name ‘soop doojoor’, which is a near-ubiquitous legacy to the restaurants of the world of French gastronomy. Pea soup is another. Brown Windsor, now almost extinct, was another, of which Ayto writes:
Brown Windsor was the music-hall joke amongst British soups, an undistinguished meat broth—often the thinly disguised offspring of a stock cube—trotted out in seaside boarding-houses, train restaurant-cars and the like. The origins of the name are, perhaps deservedly, lost in obscurity—Mrs Beeton, for instance, does not mention it—but it may have some connections with a sort of transparent brown soap popularly known in the nineteenth century as brown Windsor.
A joke it became, but Garrett, editing his twelve-volume encyclopedia of cookery in the 1890s, took it very seriously, bidding the cook begin by boiling three calf’s feet for an hour and finish—after adding Madeira wine along the way— by putting a dozen crayfish QUENELLES into what was evidently, for him, a luxury soup. This same author had a keen eye for the unusual (witness his Sanitary soup and Vocalist’s soup), and gave over 120 soup recipes altogether. The longest entry was that for mulligatawny soup (see ANGLO-INDIAN COOKERY).
A list of exotic or strange soups would have to include the ‘teakettle soup’ of Wales (see BREWIS), and its C. Asian counterpart, the ‘teapot soup’ of Afghanistan (see Helen Saberi, 1992), and two renowned specialities of China, BIRD’S NEST soup and SHARK’S FIN soup.
Finally, the role of certain soups as invalid food has to be acknowledged, together with the importance attached in the 19th and much of the 20th century in England to ‘soup kitchens’ as a means of giving food to the needy or homeless (in which connection see the discussion under RUMFORD).
See also BORSHCH; CHłODNIK; COCK-A-LEEKIE; CONSOMMÉ; CULLEN SKINK; SCOTCH BROTH; MINESTRONE; MOCK TURTLE SOUP (also TURTLE and SEA TURTLE); PORTABLE SOUP; POTAGE; SHCHI; VICHYSSOISE.
an example of a dairy product in motion; its use has been steadily spreading westwards. It is a traditional and important ingredient in Russian, E. European, German, and C. European cooking, both in savoury and in sweet dishes. In the second half of the 20th century, however, it has started to become a staple in the western parts of Europe, N. America, and elsewhere.
The attractive sour (perhaps better termed acid) taste offsets the richness of the cream which might otherwise be cloying. Sour cream is thicker than fresh cream of the same fat content. This is a result of partial coagulation brought about by the acid created during the souring process.
Russian smetana and Polish smietana are often taken by translators to be ‘sour cream’, although the dictionaries give the meaning of the words simply as ‘cream’. In fact smetana and smietana are mixtures of sour and fresh cream, and have a milder taste than sour cream alone.
Traditionally, sour cream was made by letting fresh cream sour naturally. Lactic (and to a small extent, acetic) acid-producing BACTERIA in the cream could normally be relied upon to give an acceptable taste. It was always a mixture of species that did the work: Streptococcus and Leuconostoc species producing a little acid and some diacetyl, a substance which gives a pleasant buttery flavour, while various species of Lactobacillus made a greater amount of acid. However, occasionally some unwanted micro-organism would grow and give an off flavour. Smetana had to be made immediately before use, since it took only a few hours for the bacteria in the sour cream to sour the fresh cream completely.
Modern cultured sour cream is made by pasteurizing and homogenizing light (English ‘single’) cream and inoculating it with a pure culture of selected bacteria. The cream is kept fairly warm to favour their growth until it is sour and thick enough, then repasteurized to stop the process. It is therefore ‘dead’ when sold, and cannot be used as a starter. Sour cream of whatever type must not be boiled in cooking, or its partly coagulated custard-like texture will be overtaken by complete coagulation and it will curdle. Nor can it be whipped. Otherwise, it has a wide variety of uses, amply demonstrated in the cuisines of E. and C. Europe.
Römme, a Norwegian sour cream, is made into römmegröt, a cream-enriched PORRIDGE.
is leaven BREAD (in French, pain au levain, see below), where the fermentation is secured by a combination of lactobacilli (see LACTIC ACID), i.e. acid-producing bacteria, and wild yeasts. Unlike yeasted bread dependent on the alcoholic fermentation of strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer’s or baker’s YEAST), sourdough undergoes a lactic FERMENTATION, thanks to the lactobacilli, while the wild yeasts step in as raising agents. The greater flavour of sourdoughs, currently much preferred by bread enthusiasts, over regular breads is thanks to the lactic fermentation. Satisfactory performance, however, requires that the activities of the yeasts and the lactobacilli be held in balance through skilful manipulation of the starter dough. Anyone can make a starter by leaving flour and water in the warm and allowing it to ferment over a period of days. During this time it will capture the yeasts and bacteria that are present everywhere and fermentation will commence. Each place has its own population of yeasts and bacteria, and this is a reason for the variation in flavour between breads of one region and another. It has been established that San Francisco sourdough, among the most celebrated types, is the product of the yeast Candida milleri and Lactobacillus sanfrancisco. By contrast, a German rye sourdough can be reconstituted on the basis of the yeast Candida krusei and Lactobacillus brevis var lindneri. These bacterial cultures can be freeze dried and marketed.
Wild yeasts are less intense or weaker than baker’s yeast. Therefore, introduction of baker’s yeast into sourdough manufacture often will result in the extinction of the local wild varieties in the dough. For a number of reasons, this is not conducive to the creation of flavourful bread: not least because baker’s yeast does not enjoy the acid environment resulting from lactic fermentation.
In the long term, most breads have been sourdoughs. Although some cultures, notably those which speak English, have embraced baker’s or brewer’s yeast as the principal raising agent since the early modern period, even now the bakers of France, N. and C. Europe, parts of America, the Middle East, and Russia work largely with natural leavens. The flavour of sourdough, and the chemical make-up of the grain itself, make RYE BREAD particularly suited to this method. Three methods of dough preparation that are sometimes confused with sourdough are first the sponge preferred by Scottish bakers, secondly what the French call poolish, in both of which a loose dough is left to ferment overnight before the final dough is brought together, and, thirdly, the biga of Italy which is a broadly similar approach. The fermentation here is not lactic but the alcoholic one prompted by S. cerevisiae. (Biga natural is the Italian term for leaven.)
Systems of management of these leavens are various indeed and are best studied in the detailed literature (see Calvel, 1962; Ortiz, 1993; Wood, 1996; Lepard, 2004). In brief, to make sourdough from scratch, there are three stages. First, a starter is mixed as a flour and water batter, providing food and moisture for the yeast spores and bacteria which the baker hopes to attract. Milk, sugar, apple, or mashed potato are sometimes added to the starter. Once this mixture has fermented, a portion of it is used to ferment a ‘sponge’ by adding it to more flour and water; this second stage is then used to leaven a batch of bread. In the past, the common habit of kneading dough in wooden vessels which were never washed, just scraped clean, would have aided the baking process by acting as a reservoir of yeasts and bacteria.
Once a batch of bread has been mixed with the leaven, there are two ways in which the system can be perpetuated. Either the reserved starter can be kept cool and fed periodically with more warm water and flour, to be used as needed; or a piece of dough is kept, uncooked, to add to the next day’s bread. The latter is the basis for the levain system traditionally used by French bakers. (Using levain in the old-fashioned French manner was an elaborate and time-consuming process, calling for the reserved dough to be mixed with flour and water in instalments until it was working sufficiently to raise a batch of bread.)
So-called ‘salt-rising bread’ is made with ‘salt rising’, ‘a leaven consisting of a salted batter of flour or meal used in bread-making’ (Craigie and Hulbert, 1930–44).
Laura Mason
an ambiguous term, which can mean either milk which has ‘turned’ by mischance or milk which has been deliberately soured in a controlled manner. Either can correctly be described as fermented milk; see FERMENTATION.
If raw, unpasteurized milk is left in a warm place, the LACTIC ACID-producing bacteria which are always naturally present in it will grow and will convert its lactose (milk sugar) into lactic acid. The process is a kind of fermentation. It produces a sour taste which may be pleasant if the fermentation is not allowed to go too far (when it would cause curdling).
In the days before pasteurization sour milk could be prepared simply by keeping milk in a warm place till it went sour. Now, however, pasteurized milk is almost universal, and this remains fresh until, finally, protein-destroying bacteria invade it and it goes bad rather than sour.
The natural souring of unpasteurized milk is a chancy business. Half a dozen or more kinds of bacteria are involved, but in varying degrees of dominance and with varying, unreliable results. So, in the controlled, commercial production of sour milk (and SOUR CREAM and other soured milk products, including CHEESE and YOGHURT) it is usual to wipe the slate clean by an initial pasteurization and then to add cultures of the desired bacteria.
Sour milk has various uses, notably in making SODA BREADS and SCONES. The lactic acid in the sour milk reacts with the soda to produce gas, which raises the bread. Sour milk will also add a pleasant taste to mashed potatoes, and to some soups; but it curdles more readily than ordinary milk, so such soups should not be allowed to boil after its addition. Stobart (1980) has a useful survey of soured milks in Scandinavia and elsewhere. He defines ‘clabber’: ‘thick, sour milk which has not separated into curds and whey. Clabbering is souring milk until it reaches this point.’
Acidophilus milk is a kind of soured milk which contains a culture of Lactobacillus acidophilus. The product was developed in the first half of the 20th century in response to the view then current that consuming live bacteria of the kinds used to ferment milk, and specifically to make yoghurt, reinforces the bacteria naturally present in the human intestine, with beneficial results. The bacteria associated with yoghurt, Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus, would have been favoured for this purpose but cannot survive in the human intestine, whereas L. acidophilus can although the flavour it imparts is inferior.
Douglas (1911) provided a serious and charming book about soured milk and its products, which still repays study. The frontispiece is a photograph of the oldest woman in the world (126) and her son (101), Bulgarian peasants. The title is: The Bacillus of Long Life: a manual of the preparation and souring of milk for dietary purposes together with an historical account of the use of fermented milks, from the earliest times to the present day, and their wonderful effect in the prolonging of human existence. The optimistic note struck here continues to be echoed more than 80 years later by many people, notably those who uphold the merits of yoghurt as a health-giving food, although some of Douglas’s scientific material has been overtaken.
Ralph Hancock
Annona muricata, a tropical fruit native to the W. Indies and northern S. America, and now cultivated also in Mexico, India, SE Asia, and Polynesia. It is the most tropical and largest-fruiting member of the family of annonaceous fruits, which also includes CHERIMOYA, ILAMA, BULLOCK’S HEART, etc.
The name may come originally from the Dutch zuurzak, which is also used in the Netherlands Antilles and Indonesia, but the derivation is uncertain. The Malay name, durian Belanda, is interesting. Betty Molesworth Allen (1965) has the following to say:
The word Belanda (meaning Hollander) was used to indicate something which was foreign and made known by the Dutch, and the spiny fruit of this plant must have suggested that of the native Durian. This interpretation, indicating that the object is foreign but resembles something already known, has resulted in some interesting etymology: thus halwa Belanda is chocolate, and kuching Belanda (foreign cat) is the rabbit, which has been introduced into Malaya.
The small tree bears its fruits indiscriminately on twigs, branches, or trunk. The fruits, which range from 10–30 cm (4–12″) in length and up to a maximum of nearly 5 kg (15 lb) in weight, are ellipsoid or irregularly ovoid, one side growing faster than the other. The thin leathery-looking skin is dark green to begin with, later yellowish-green (and yellow when overripe). Because of the soft spines on the skin, the soursop is sometimes called the ‘prickly custard apple’ (it is closely related to the other fruits called CUSTARD APPLE).
Fruits are picked while still firm, and are said to be at their best if eaten five or six days later, after softening enough to yield to the pressure of a finger.
The white flesh of the fruit consists of numerous segments, mostly seedless. Quality varies from poor (one unkind writer likened it to wet cotton wool) to very good. At its best, it is soft and juicy with a rich, almost fermented character; pleasantly aromatic with an aroma reminiscent of pineapple.
The soursop, as its name suggests, is more acid than its relations, but the acidity varies and the pulp of some fruits can be eaten raw. Others have to be dressed with sugar to make them palatable.
The fruits are often so very juicy that it would be appropriate to speak of drinking them rather than eating them; and good soursop drinks, such as the Brazilian champola and carato in Puerto Rico, can be made by combining the juice pressed from the pulp with milk or water and sweetening if needed, plus pink or green colouring in the Philippines. Soursop ice cream is popular in many places. Morton (1987) draws attention to many other sweet confections, such as soursop custards, and adds that it is possible to cook immature fruits as vegetables. ‘I have boiled the half-grown fruit whole, without peeling. In an hour, the fruit is tender, its flesh off-white and mealy, with the aroma and flavor of green corn (maize).’
This vast area, including S. Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, has some of the most beautiful and fertile country in the world, as well as two of its great deserts, the Kalahari and the Namib.
The great Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias was the first European to sail round the southern tip of Africa, driven by a storm and unaware of what exactly was happening. In fact, by rounding what is now the Cape of Good Hope he had opened the sea route to India, which then came into use; but it was not until the middle of the 17th century that a victualling settlement at the Cape was established by the Dutch East India Company and began trading with the indigenous population. To make this outpost viable, a limited number of farmers from Europe were allowed to immigrate and establish themselves there. It was these people and their successors, mainly Dutch and German and later known as Boers (or Afrikaaners—the terms are almost synonymous), who were authorized to import slave labour from SE Asia; and it was the arrival of their slaves which laid the foundation for the Cape Malay cuisine which is such a prominent feature of S. Africa.
The British seized control of S. Africa in 1814 and sent out thousands of British settlers. It was this which prompted the Great Trek into the hinterland of the Boers. Meanwhile a new element was being added to the ethnic mix by the arrival of Indians to work in the sugar plantations of Natal. (The Indian spice market in Durban is still important.)
The early settlers—Dutch and German—brought with them a sense of orderliness, frugality, and a love of jams and preserves, konfyt, and of baked goods which remains evident even now. They founded huge, self-sufficient estates, often a day’s wagon ride from any neighbours, and became cut off from developments in Europe. The French Huguenots who were also early arrivals were mainly responsible for founding the successful wine industry, whence comes some use by Europeans of wine in cooking.
However, most of the dishes thought of as particularly S. African have their origins in Indonesia, apart from the few that were developed during the Great Trek.
The early settlers apparently used both the fat of FAT-TAILED SHEEP and fish oil as cooking mediums.
One of the best-known Cape Malay dishes is bredie, a dish of spiced mutton ribs cooked with vegetables, which may originally have been greens (see BRÈDES for the likely connection of the names) but now vary over a wide range. Leipoldt (1976) cites a score of different bredies, including ones which use tomato, quince, parsnip, lentils, and cauliflower. Bredies are always eaten with rice.
Another dish is sosaties, related to SATAY; these are KEBABS of lamb or mutton, marinated with spices, barbecued then served with a curry sauce. Older recipes suggest that sosaties were also simmered in their marinade. Many sosatie dishes include fruit such as apricots. Yet another Malay dish is BOBOTIE which is made from minced meat, mixed with spices, sugar, milk, and raw eggs baked in the oven. Dishes such as breyani (BIRIANI) and kerrie (see CURRY), although the names are of Indian origin, are still regarded as part of the Cape Malay tradition.
Supplementary items of Malay origin include atjars (cf. ACHAR, but the meaning here is items preserved in oil with spices); SAMBALS (side dishes of grated raw fruit or vegetables with chillies); and blatjang. This last item is not the same as the Indonesian BLACANG (which is a dried shrimp condiment), but consists of fruit pickled in vinegar with chillies. Van der Post (1977) has a particularly good passage on how these and other items were modified, sometimes radically, when transplanted from Indonesia or Malaysia to S. Africa.
The Malays were expert fishermen with experience of preserving fish in warm climates. Ingelegte vis or spiced pickled fish was one introduction which, together with dried fish, came to provide important provisions for ships visiting the Cape. The most popular fish for this were SNOEK, dried then usually reconstituted as gesmoorde snoek, something like a brandade de morue (see BRANDADE) with chilli. CATFISH, porpoise, and seal were all popular with the Malays. Early settlers, unused to such large marine creatures, cut them into dice called mootjies and simmered them with onions. GREY MULLET (harder) and HERRING were also salted and dried, when they were known as bokkems, used like Bombay duck (see BUMMALOW).
Foods associated with the Great Trek are dried fish of these kinds; boerewors, farmer’s sausages, made from mixed meats, often including game; BILTONG, dried strips of salted meat, the best reputedly being made from kudu or other ANTELOPES or OSTRICH, which was important for its keeping qualities; and potjiekos, food such as VENISON, cooked in a potjie or drievoetpot, a three-legged cauldron suspended over the fire. The trekkers also planted MAIZE (which they called mielie, whence the African term ‘mealies’) wherever they settled, and this soon came into cultivation by the Africans.
A curious custom of the trekkers, possibly learnt from the Africans, was the use of old termite hills as bread ovens. The top would be cut off and a hole scooped in the side. A fire was lit in this and the potjie food cooked on the top. When this was finished the top would be plugged, the ashes raked out and sourdough bread baked inside after the opening was sealed with clay.
Another tradition is the braai (BARBECUE), which had been cooked on a wood fire, often including sosaties and boerewors as well as steak.
The traditional diet of the rural people remained similar to that of their E. African forefathers. However, there was one important change. Maize mostly replaced MILLET to make the staple PORRIDGE called putu in S. Africa or bogobe in Botswana. This was often enriched with dried pumpkin or melon and commonly fermented. Sour porridge in Botswana is called ting. Cattle were wealth and seldom eaten though much use was made of dairy products. Fat-tailed sheep were also raised. Pumpkin leaves and other greens were added to the relish. Beans were popular and might be cooked together with melon or pumpkin.
Insect-eating was and is popular with many S. Africans. Fried locusts were common before the advent of pesticides, and the brightly coloured mopane ‘worms’, which feed on the mopane tree, actually CATERPILLARS of the emperor moth, are much eaten in season. ANTS and their larvae, usually fried or roasted, have also been popular.
Desserts that have become ‘national’ dishes, mostly of Dutch or Cape Malay origin, include koeksisters or koesisters, which have nothing to do with sisters but are a sort of sweet, spiced DOUGHNUT based on an Indonesian original; melktert, a cinnamon-flavoured egg custard tart; and mosbolletjies, sweet buns, made in the wine-producing areas, leavened with grape must. Van der Post, again, has a wonderfully evocative passage about baked goods.
Jenny Macarthur
READING:
Artemisia abrotanum, also known as old man, maid’s ruin, lad’s love, or kiss-me-quick-and-go, is a native of S. Europe, where it grows wild in Italy and Spain. It is a relation of TARRAGON, WORMWOOD, and MUGWORT, and is a tall and attractive plant, with feathery silver-green leaves and small yellow flowers (though it rarely flowers in northern climes).
It was grown in Britain in Elizabethan times, mainly for its medicinal properties; and has been used in minor ways in the kitchen in various European countries, e.g. Italy, where the young shoots flavour certain sweet dishes and the leaves may be included in stuffings for pork or goose, or to flavour vinegar. After being introduced to N. America around 1600 it became an occasional culinary ingredient there.
Southernwood has a strong, bitter lemon smell and taste, which comes from the essential oil contained in its leaves; these can be dried, and are sometimes used to protect clothes from moths and other insects. Pamela Michael (1980) gives an impressive list of other uses (protecting a judge in court from jail fever, keeping ladies awake during lengthy sermons in church, removing pimples, and—this from Coles, 1656—provoking carnal copulation); and recommends the bitter-sweet flavour of southernwood for use in a plain Madeira cake, besides endorsing the suggestion by Sir John Hill in the 18th century that one should take southernwood tea three times a day.
Helen Saberi
the Scottish name for a type of GRUEL made from sids, the inner husks of the OAT grain. These are mixed with lukewarm water and left in a warm place until slightly fermented and sour, a process which takes, on average, a week. Then the liquid is strained, the sids being squeezed by hand to extract all the goodness before they are discarded. The liquid is allowed to stand for two days, at the end of which all solids it contains have sunk to the bottom. This sediment is the sowans. When required, the liquid is poured off. The sowans are prepared by heating them with salt and fresh water, and cooking gently for ten minutes until thick and creamy. They are served like PORRIDGE, sometimes accompanied by butter. Sowans were also thinned and used as a drink, sometimes laced with whisky.
A similar dish was made in Wales, where it was known as sucan in the south-west, but in the north was called llymru, a word which was Anglicized to FLUMMERY. This was popular in Cheshire and Lancashire, and also the West Country (where it was known as wash brew, according to Gervase Markham). Made by steeping oatmeal, or oat husks, until they soured, the liquid was strained and boiled until thick and creamy. According to Minwel Tibbott (1975) it would then be put in a bowl to cool and set, and subsequently: ‘A large tablespoonful of this jelly-like mixture was usually served in a bowl-full of cold milk, and tradition has it that it should be swallowed without chewing.’ The mixture could be sweetened and flavoured before setting.
These original oat-based concoctions were largely forgotten long ago in England, but lingered on in Scotland. Marian McNeill mentions that at Mafeking, during the Boer War, a Scottish soldier kept the garrison alive by making sowans with the contents of the horses’ feed box. And for the ultra-frugal, sowans could be conserved, either by changing the water on top regularly, or by allowing the sediment to dry and cutting it in cubes.
Laura Mason
Glycine max, one of the great staple foods of the world, ranks with wheat and rice in importance and outstrips both in the richness of nourishment it provides. The peoples of China, Japan, and all SE Asia, who generally have little or no meat in their diet, are sustained by the soya bean’s high content of PROTEIN: 35 per cent, far beyond that of any other plant. Furthermore, the protein is more ‘complete’ than other vegetable proteins, i.e. it supplies a full and well-balanced mixture of the essential AMINO ACIDS. The bean is also rich in oil (about 20 per cent in dried beans) and is the world’s main source of cooking oil.
The origin of the soya bean is shrouded in legend, but it may have been domesticated in China by the 3rd millennium BC. Cultivation of the bean soon spread from China to neighbouring countries, including Japan.
In 1692 Engelbert Kaenfer, a German botanist, brought seeds to Europe and various attempts were made to establish it as a crop plant in Europe and America. It achieved some success in India, where it is known as white gram. In the West, however, it aroused little interest until the Second World War, when American soya bean powder was used as a ‘meat extender’ in sausages and similar products.
Soya beans are now a major American farm product, grown for oil, for use in processed foods, and as animal fodder. Some of the numerous varieties are suitable for growing as far north as Canada. Seed sizes and colours vary from white through green, red, and brown, to black. The commonest kinds are smallish and pale brown.
There was a reason for the slow acceptance of soya beans in the West. Simply considered as beans, and cooked in the conventional way, they are extraordinarily tough, even after long boiling, and have a bitter, ‘beany’ flavour. They are also indigestible; and, if they are eaten whole, most of their protein passes straight through the digestive system and is lost.
In eastern countries, however, they do not eat soya beans in their natural state. Occasionally the immature pods are cooked as a vegetable, or raw beans crunched as a snack; but most of the crop is processed and transformed into greatly altered products. These include TOFU or bean curd in Japan, China (where it is called dou fu), and SE Asia; SOY SAUCE and KECAP of various kinds all over the region; Chinese fermented BLACK BEANS; Japanese MISO and NATTO and similar bean pastes; TEMPE in Indonesia; and a SOY MILK surprisingly similar to cow’s milk. In all these some extraction or fermentation process has made the taste and texture pleasant and the protein more digestible. Tofu, miso, and tempe form a major part of the diet of the peoples who use them.
The first of these products to become known in the West was SOY SAUCE, which was brought back by traders from the 17th century onwards and became popular as a condiment.
During the 19th century western scientists realized how phenomenally nutritious the beans were. Attempts were made to prepare an acceptable product from them by a mechanical extraction and powdering process yielding a meal resembling flour but much higher in protein. This meal was used to make all the early soya products, which were inferior and only acceptable in times of shortage. Soya bean meal is still used, e.g. as an addition to wheat flour in some baked goods. Research into soya bean production and the development of new varieties have been remarkably extensive.
In the 1960s manufacturers gained greater skill with soya products and the first reasonably realistic ‘meat analogues’ were introduced. Soya protein was forced through nozzles and stretched into fibres which were packed together to give a meatlike texture. The Japanese have brought the process to a peak of ingenuity, producing soya ‘steaks’ which are shaped, flavoured, and coloured with disconcerting realism.
However, the most striking development in western use of the soya bean has been the growing acceptance of the oriental fermented soya products. These are now made in western countries on a steadily increasing scale.
Soya beans are also used to make bean sprouts.
(soya bean milk) resembles cow’s milk in many respects but is produced entirely from the SOYA BEAN (see previous entry). In its simplest form it is made by soaking soya beans, grinding them with more water, bringing to the boil, and then filtering. The result is nutritious and digestible but has a taste and odour which is generally disliked by people who are accustomed to dairy milk. The Chinese, who are not so accustomed, have drunk soy milk with pleasure since ancient times. For western people, however, and for the Japanese market, soy milk has to be treated so as to remove its characteristic taste and odour. This process may be accompanied by adding new flavours, often based on fruits, as has happened with yoghurt.
Soy milk is useful to people suffering from LACTOSE INTOLERANCE, who cannot drink dairy milk, and also to people who for whatever reason wish to avoid animal fats. The fat in soy milk is unsaturated and there is only about one-third as much of it as there is fat in regular milk (the comparison would be different with semi-skimmed or skimmed milk). The protein content of soy milk is about the same as that of cow’s milk.
Soy milk can be used to make milkshakes, blancmange, custards, and sauces, but it would be wrong to assume that it can be used as a milk substitute in every situation, or that from the gastronomic point of view it is ever a completely satisfactory substitute. There are signs that calling it ‘milk’ (as opposed to something like ‘soy bean beverage’) will be ruled out as incorrect in at least some parts of the world.
the universal condiment of China and Japan, is also widely used throughout SE Asia. It is the main condiment in Indonesia, where SOYA BEANS are grown extensively. In Vietnam and the Philippines it competes with the FISH SAUCES of the region, which it resembles in composition. The ingredients are normally soya beans, WHEAT, and SALT.
Soy sauce is used in the Orient as freely as salt is in the West, and indeed often instead of salt, as it has a salty taste. This is but one element in its flavour, which is difficult to describe since it interacts with the flavours of the various foods to which it is applied. It can be described as having a sharp, tangy, almost meaty quality.
Although soya beans have been grown in China for at least 3,500 years, the sauce is a slightly more recent invention. It was developed during the Zhou dynasty (1134–246 BC), and probably evolved in conjunction with the fermented fish sauces, many of which involved both fish and rice. The moulds Aspergillus oryzae and A. soyae are the principal agents in producing soy sauce, and the enzymes which they provide are similar to those which ferment fish sauce. These organisms are common and could accidentally have got to work on soya beans, with results which would have been recognized as a ‘fishless fish sauce’.
Early soy sauce was a solid paste known as sho or mesho. This developed into two products, liquid shoyu and solid MISO. In China the liquid sauce is used more than the paste, while in Japan both are of equal importance.
The European name ‘soy’ (similar in all languages) originates with the 17th-century Dutch traders who brought the sauce back to Europe, where it became popular despite its high price. Old silver bottle labels marked ‘soy’ occasionally appear in antique shops. The beans are called soya or soy after the sauce, not the other way round.
The traditional process for making soy sauce is still used for sauce of high quality. In Japan it starts in April and continues for a whole year, making use of the changing temperatures in the different seasons. There are several stages, and fermentation is carried out by many different moulds, bacteria, and yeasts which successively predominate in the developing sauce as conditions change to suit them. In outline the process is this. Defatted, steamed soya beans and roasted, crushed wheat are mashed together. The mixture is inoculated with tane-koji, a starter culture of the two necessary Aspergillus moulds, and is allowed to ferment, then mixed with a strong salt solution and inoculated with another starter containing several kinds of bacteria and yeasts for a further fermentation which lasts from 8 to 12 months. The reactions in this last period create a complex blend of substances contributing to the final flavour. The chief elements are salt, amino acids, organic acids (lactic and acetic), alcohols, sugars, and numerous volatile aromatic substances including vanillin, the flavour principle of vanilla. When fermentation is complete, the mixture is filtered or racked to extract the sauce; and this is commonly pasteurized to kill the remaining organisms and arrest fermentation. (There are, however, some special sauces which have been allowed to go on fermenting for several years.) One tonne each of defatted soya beans, wheat, and salt produce 5,000 litres of soy sauce.
Soy sauce is available in both light and dark varieties. The most extreme of the dark types is the viscous Indonesian KECAP made from black soya beans. In Japan the standard kind is the light one favoured in the Osaka region, amber in colour and saltier than the dark types.
Tamari is a soy sauce made without any wheat, from whole or defatted soya beans only, and is darker in colour than the standard kind.
Something very much like soy sauce, which apparently originated in much the same way from ancient Middle Eastern fish sauces, was made in the Arab world during the Middle Ages under the name murri. It was not made from beans but from mouldy barley, sometimes extended with wheat flour or bread; see BARLEY.
Space travel has a severe impact on the human body: astronauts suffer from decreases in bone, red blood cell, and lean body mass; weight loss, shifts of fluid towards the head; a propensity to develop renal stones; and increased cataract and cancer risk due to radiation exposure. This means that good nutrition is essential to ensure both peak performance by astronauts whilst in space, as well as their health when back on earth. Developing appetizing meals for astronauts to eat, therefore, is an important focus for nutritionists. As space programmes attempt to extend their reach, the role of food in enabling missions to survive and thrive for longer durations becomes an even greater priority. It is therefore all the more surprising that the image of the food eaten during space travel is of bland pastes and powders, taken directly from tubes or sachets, and concocted with little thought for the unfortunate consumer. In fact, since German Titov became the first man to eat in space in 1961, developing the meals to be eaten during each trip has been an important and detailed part of the pre-flight planning, and there are as many types of canned and thermostabilized space food as there are countries with a space programme.
American cosmonauts eat branded foods like Kellogg’s and Quaker breakfast cereals, Kraft puddings, Del Monte canned fruits, and a variety of standard macaroni; tuna; and meat-based dishes spiced up with Tabasco, along with various sweet candy treats. Their Russian counterparts dine on more fish-based items, such as pickled or spiced perch, or borshch, with wild cranberry and buckwheat gruel for breakfast. Duck confit, squid in lobster sauce, toffee rice pudding, and even whole boned sliced quail packed into a tiny tin are available to tempt the palate of those fortunate enough to be part of the French space programme. Reflecting the importance of cutting techniques in Chinese cookery, the Chinese have developed an alimentary membrane which can enclose mouthfuls of food with sauce, ready to be heated and consumed whole: Sichuanese kung pao chicken, shredded pork with garlic, and the celebratory dish Eight Treasure Rice have all been made available for Chinese astronauts. When the first Malaysians orbit the earth they will be able to dine on coconut rice, fried noodles, roti canai, shrimp curry, and teh tarik (pulled tea).
Familiar foods and the ability to use mealtimes as a social event can increase morale and reduce the stress of prolonged space missions. However, despite the development of familiar and temptingly strong-flavoured dishes, and the provision of nutritionally correct quantities of food, most astronauts under-eat whilst travelling in space, and many meal packages return to earth uneaten. This may be in part due to the changes in the body affecting the sense of taste and smell, making food that seemed good on earth less appealing in space. But it could simply be that, despite the glamorous image of Tang and re-hydrated ice cream, most food for space travellers is, in the end, pretty unappetizing.
Jane Levi
commonly said to account for more than two-thirds of the whole annual consumption of PASTA, is certainly its most popular form (among many—see PASTA SHAPES), but by no means the oldest. Indeed, until the introduction of extrusion presses, and especially of the powerful machines which were introduced in the latter part of the 19th century (see PASTA MANUFACTURE), its production was a laborious business.
MACARONI, tubular and hollow, was easier to make without modern machinery, and its name was sometimes used in a generic way for pasta. Spaghetti is solid and thin (the name means ‘thin cords’), but not as thin as vermicelli, for example. The differences in diameter were what struck Mrs Beeton (1861), it would seem, since in one passage she implies that this is the only difference between macaroni and spaghetti. No doubt this was because spaghetti had only recently reached England. According to Ayto (1993), the first record of the word being used in print in English belongs to Eliza Acton (edition of 1849), who also showed a lack of familiarity with the product by spelling it ‘sparghetti’. Ayto goes on to point out that spaghetti only became a commonplace of the British diet after the Second World War, ‘either in the somewhat travestied form of tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce (often produced in rings or hoops, to get round the problem of how to pick up the long wayward strings on a fork—always an embarrassment to the British) or as the perennial bed-sitter standby spaghetti Bolognese, spaghetti in tomato and beef sauce (often abbreviated half-affectionately to spag bol or spag bog).’
Returning to Italy, it becomes clear that Eliza Acton and Mrs Beeton were pardonably unsure in this matter. The earliest record of the word spaghetti (in an Italian dialect dictionary for the region of Piacenza) has been dated by Piccinardi (1993) at 1836. And the term was not recorded in mainstream Italian until 1846; this by the author of a domestic dictionary, who more or less equated spaghetti with vermicelli. Piccinardi explains that this dual nomenclature persisted, reflecting the practice of certain manufacturers, and exists even now; in some parts of S. Italy vermicelli is the preferred term for either or both.
Anyway, for reasons thus made clear, the names of the Italian spaghetti dishes which are now known worldwide are of relatively recent birth. It might be thought that spaghetti and tomato sauce, perhaps the simplest combination, would go a long way back. However, the first author who could claim to record the combination of pasta and tomato is Francesco Leonardi in his Apicio moderno of 1790 (see ITALIAN COOKERY BOOKS, and see Willan, 1977, and Wright, 1999). Not so long afterwards, tomato sauce for pasta appears in Ippolito Cavalcanti’s Cucina teorico pratica of 1839. This book also includes dressings based on fish and one with clams resembling present-day Spaghetti alle vongole. Another of Cavalcanti’s dressings uses cheese and beaten raw egg. This is a precursor of the modern Spaghetti alla carbonara, one of the most popular pasta dishes, but of obscure origin.
Spaghetti alla carbonara is made with spaghetti which, when still as hot as possible from cooking, is liberally dressed with hot fried PANCETTA (the sort called guanciale), which resembles bacon, raw beaten egg, and grated cheese. The heat cooks the egg to some extent. Additions often made are a little wine, heated with the bacon, or cream. It has been suggested that this is a traditional dish of the carbonari, or charcoal burners, but that is implausible. A more credible explanation is that it was invented in 1944 as a result of the American occupation troops having their lavish rations of eggs and bacon prepared by local cooks. The name would then be from a Rome restaurant, the ‘Carbonara’, which makes a speciality of the dish.
The cuisines of Spain, oddly, took up more space in Alexandre Dumas’s Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873) than those of any other country except France. But, despite devoting so many pages to the subject, this illustrious writer did not try to convey the complexity and interrelationships of these cuisines; nor did he offer any analysis of their origins. Indeed, the task would have been difficult, if only because Spain includes within its frontiers two other cuisines, for all of which see SPANISH REGIONAL COOKERY.
Any notion that there is a shortage of published material about Spanish food and cookery will be at once dispelled by turning to SPANISH COOKERY BOOKS, where it will be seen that the Spaniards themselves have produced outstanding gastronomic literature and have been pioneers in food history studies.
However, foreign observers have also played a part. A quarter of a century before Dumas’s book was published, the English traveller Richard Ford had included in his book about travelling in Spain (best known in the version called Gatherings from Spain, 1846) a whole chapter and much besides about food. Much of what he wrote on the subject reads like commentaries on paintings by Velázquez, Murillo, and others (Spanish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries was extraordinarily rich in food scenes and still lifes of food). However, he offers many interesting historical insights, describing the enormously strong Spanish tradition of hospitality as ‘an Oriental trait’ inherited from the long centuries of Arab occupation, from the 8th to the 15th centuries. Scores of countries around the world lay claim to ‘legendary’ HOSPITALITY, but Spain is among those with a strong claim and Ford may have been right about its origin.
However, in looking for the roots of Spanish food traditions one must go back to the Phoenicians, who founded the city now called Cadiz in 1100 BC; the ancient Greeks, and the Carthaginians (who may have been responsible for starting wine production in Spain); and, more important, the Romans who used Spain as a major source of food, especially wheat and olive oil. Extensive planting of olive trees by the Romans laid the foundation for Spain’s present position as a leading producer of both OLIVES and OLIVE OIL.
Introductions by the Arabs were also of fundamental importance for Spain’s future. They are particularly associated with the use of ALMONDS (the essential ingredient for so many Spanish desserts, baked goods, and confectionery items); with the introduction of CITRUS FRUITS (including the lemon and the bitter (Seville) orange, without which British marmalade would never have been born); SUGAR CANE and the process of refining sugar from its juice; many vegetables, among which the AUBERGINE was outstanding; and numerous SPICES such as cinnamon, nutmeg, sesame, coriander, aniseed, etc.
The Arabs introduced RICE to the tidal flatlands in what is now Valencia. Although, when the Arabs were driven out in the 13th century, rice production petered out and was only resumed in the late 19th century, this area is now under very intensive cultivation. PAELLA, which set out from its own territory, Valencia, to become Spain’s most internationally famous dish, must be made with the local rice, which has special characteristics, if it is to be authentic. The use of SAFFRON in paella is also something which stems from an Arab introduction.
BREAKFAST happens twice in Spain. The worker, businessman, or schoolchild has a first breakfast early, before leaving in the morning: bread or toast served with coffee with lots of milk and sugar, or cocoa with milk. People who do hard physical work might start the day with something more substantial: a garlic soup or thick porridge …
Schoolchildren and workers alike set off with a bag containing a second desayuno, to eat between 10 and 11 o’clock in the morning. The businessman or office worker probably slips out to the corner café. This second breakfast may be café con leche, coffee with milk, with a sweet roll or biscuits, galletas, dunked in the coffee, or una tostada. A tostada is much more than a thin slice of toasted bread; it’s usually a small roll split lengthwise and toasted on a grill, sometimes rubbed with garlic and tomato, then served with a plate of olive oil for dipping ….
The worker probably carries in his bag a bocadillo, a sandwich consisting of bread roll split and filled perhaps with manteca, paprika-flavoured lard, or sausage, canned tuna, or maybe half a potato omelette. This repast is accompanied by coffee or a beer and may finish with a piece of fruit. Thus sustained, he can work until dinner at 2 o’clock.
Sunday breakfasts are more leisurely, with all the family at home. Papá might bring home churros, fritters, for the family to dunk in coffee or thick hot chocolate.
Janet Mendel (1996)
In the period of Arab rule, a large Jewish community prospered, enjoying a sort of ‘golden age’ for activity in philosophy, science, and medicine. They called their country Sepharad, so they were the Sephardi Jews who were dispersed elsewhere when expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 and who have been responsible wherever they have gone for maintaining and developing the most attractive branch of JEWISH COOKERY. The same year saw the famous voyage by Columbus to the New World, opening the way for the Spanish Conquest of much of C. and S. America and the extension of Spanish cookery traditions throughout that vast area (plus parts of N. America and the Philippines). Thus in the field of culinary exchanges Spain has been a major recipient and a major donor. All these matters have been treated in his monumental Historia de la gastronomía española by Manuel Martinez Llopis (1981).
Spain has two long coastlines and seafood, as one would expect, is prominent, in the coastal areas and the big cities. Like neighbouring PORTUGAL, Spain displays great enthusiasm for and expertise with SALT COD. Another speciality is percebes (GOOSE-NECKED BARNACLE), which appears often in TAPAS bars (but not normally in the proliferating tapas bars outside Spain, since these creatures are difficult to obtain elsewhere).
Another favourite tapas item is jamón serrano, mountain HAM. The best hams are made in mountain regions, where the salt-curing is aided by a combination of cold winters and hot summers, and are served raw, sliced very thin. If made from the wild black Iberian pig, they qualify to be called jamón Ibérico, or pata negra (black hoof). Prize hams come from Andalusia and Extremadura, where Montánches is the ham capital and people talk, as did Richard Ford long ago, of a certain Duke of Arcos who fattened his pigs by shutting them up in places where they could eat an abundance of vipers. This may have given the pigs a special flavour, but it is normally considered that feeding on acorns in oak forests produces unsurpassed results. See also SERRANO HAM.
The mountains and central plateau of Spain are an arid area, most of which is sparsely populated. Foods here are simple, hearty, and completely geared to the seasons. Jane Grigson (1983) may well have had in mind this part of Spain, among others, when she recorded her impression that Spanish foodways still had a medieval feel to them. This was a compliment. It reflects the high degree of continuity which has in fact persisted up to the present time from the Middle Ages. Changes are taking place, but against a background of stability and eating patterns which represent a natural evolution over long periods of time. Witness the description by Janet Mendel (1996) of the breakfasts eaten in contemporary Spain (see box).
If any one thing can serve as the symbol for the cuisines of Spain, it is probably the olla, the earthenware pot in which so many one-pot dishes, especially COCIDO and olla podrida (cf. OLIO), are made. Richard Ford put it nicely: ‘Into this olla it may be affirmed that the whole culinary genius of Spain is condensed, as the mighty Jinn was into a gallipot, according to the Arabian Night tales.’
See also BALEARIC ISLANDS; CANARY ISLANDS; ESCABECHE; GAZPACHO; OMELETTE (for tortilla); SAUSAGES OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL; SPANISH CHEESES.
a canned meat product that came to the fore in the Second World War, having been devised by the Hormel Company in the USA in 1937. As Rachel Laudan (1996) informs us, a competition was held for a catchy name, and the $100 prize was won by the entry ‘Spam’ indicating spiced ham. The product consisted of finely ground pork spiced with salt, sugar, and other flavourings.
Spam has retained some popularity in various parts of the world, although regarded with disfavour by those who eschew processed foods or have pretensions to gourmet status. Perhaps because such people are thin on the ground in the PACIFIC ISLANDS, spam is highly regarded there. Writing of the situation in HAWAII, Laudan observes that spam is the subject of a whole cookbook, only partially tongue-in-cheek, and that it is prepared in many ways: spam and eggs, spam and rice, spam sushi, spam musubi, spam lumpia, and spam wonton (all delicious, as is spam tempura, akin to the British invention of carefully sliced spam fried in batter). She completes the picture thus:
Locals … understandably regard Spam as thrifty and tasty, a food of childhood, a food of family meals and picnics at the beach, a food of convenience. A food of convenience, moreover, with a certain status, harking back to the time when buying something canned conveyed affluence and keeping up with the times. Even the fact that it can be carved is endearing because it makes Spam easy to shape for sushi and musubi. It is the motherhood-and-apple-pie of Hawaii, not specific to any ethnic group, and hence invoked by politicians to show just how deep their Local [the term has a special meaning when capitalized] roots go… Shudders or not, in Hawaii Spam continues to be something to be reckoned with.
READING:
exemplified to the outside world by MANCHEGO, one of the finest sheep’s cheeses to be found anywhere, exist in a bewildering number of forms. The Inventario español de productos tradicionales (1996) lists 93, while specialists usually reckon there are over a hundred. The reason is that in most parts of Spain and also, to some extent, in Portugal, there are very strong traditions of local artisanal cheese-making which continue to display great vitality. The Spanish for cheese is QUESO, and the full name of many cheeses begin with that word, e.g. queso Manchego. A high proportion of Spanish cheeses, especially those from the centre and south, are made with sheep’s milk or goat’s milk, or a mixture of two. Many have interesting shapes due to ingenious moulding.
The first cookery books in Spain appeared during the period of Arab rule, in the 13th and 14th centuries. However, isolated earlier documents give valuable culinary insights. In his treatise On Agriculture (AD 60–5) Columella, the Roman philosopher and astronomer, who was born and first farmed in Cadiz, gives various everyday recipes for preserving food. Moslem medical treatises, such as a 12th-century work Tratado de los alimentos (1992), translated by Expiración García Sánchez, also give extensive details about spicing, foods, and medicinal dishes.
However, the main sources for this period are two recipe manuscripts. The first, translated into Spanish by Miranda Huici (1966) under the title Manuscrito anónimo del siglo XIII sobre la cocina hispano-magrebi, gives some 500 recipes, and includes an annexe on medicinal syrups. The second, Fadalta-al-Jiwan, de Ibn Razin al Tuyibi al Andalusia (1243–1328), translated by Granja Santamaría, includes recipes for home preserves. Both feature in Lucie Bolen’s book on Al-Andalus’s cuisine from the 11th to the 13th centuries (1992) and in L. Benavides-Barajas’s colourful 1990s trilogy on the subject.
Two medieval cookery texts written in Catalan were to be hugely influential. Grewe did pioneering work (1979) on the first text, known as the Libre del sent soví, a collection of some 200 recipes which are thought to date from the early 14th century. He compared it to Italian 15th-century works such as those of Martino and Platina, and so showed its influence. This may be explained in large part by the importance of the Catalan language in the Aragonese empire (the county of Barcelona had been absorbed into it in the 12th century; in the 13th century the kingdom of Valencia, Sicily, and the Balearics had been conquered; in the 14th century Sardinia and Naples became spheres of influence).
The second great Catalan medieval text is the Libre del coch (Book of the Cook), ascribed to Mestre Robert, now usually known by the Castilian version of his name, Ruperto de Nola. It appears to date back to the late 15th century (Pérez, 1929; Martínez Llopis, 1981), although the first known edition was published in Barcelona in 1520. Five years later it was translated into Castilian and its influence then spread through the rest of Spain. The recipes are a mix of potajes and adobos, with more fowl than meat dishes, and complicated spiced salsas. Nola cites three dishes as supreme: turkey sauce, manjar blanco, and mirrauste, all involving stock sauces thickened with pounded almonds.
Another interesting medieval book, this time written in Castilian, is Enrique de Villena’s early Arte cisoria (1423), a carving manual with a long list of edible foods which include a range of vegetables and herbs as well as a mention of whalemeat.
Some authorities have pointed to a book published in Castilian in Madrid in 1599, the Libro del arte de cozina … a la usança española, italiana y tudesca, de nuestros tiempos, by Diego Granado Maldonado, as the next landmark. Until Jeanne Allard published her essay (1987), it was generally believed that his book was a true reflection of Spanish cookery of the time. Nobody had realized that 587 of his 762 recipes were simply translated from one of the most famous Italian cookery books, that of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), with a further batch from De Nola. Allard points out that ‘we are faced with an unusual phenomenon, not just the usual “borrowing”, but the borrowing of recipes from a foreign, though neighboring, cuisine, and from a different language’.
Various Spanish cookery books appeared in the 17th century. Arte de cozina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservera, by Francisco Martínez Montiño, King Philip III’s head cook, was first published in Madrid in 1611 and was still being reprinted over 200 years later. Montiño, possibly Portuguese in origin, was highly critical of Diego Granado (without actually naming him), on the ground that he was ignorant. In the 1630s the first monograph on chocolate appears; like others, it was more concerned with morality than preparation techniques.
The most prominent book of the 18th century, Nuevo arte de cocina (1745 and various editions, reprinted in 1994), was written by Juan Altamira, a friar who found himself running the kitchen of an Aragonese monastery. He explains, nervously, that he is sharing his humble experience in order to try and help novices who find themselves in the same position. Arte de repostería (1747) by Juan de la Mata was one of several 18th-century books on confectionery. It deals with confectionery, cakes, and other sweet things, including the preparation of chocolate as a drink.
Cookery books began to proliferate in the 19th century, particularly in the later decades, and included La cuynera catalana (1851), the first book written specifically for women.
The modern cookbook era was opened by La mesa moderna (1885), an exchange of letters between Thebussem, the pseudonym for writer Mariano Pardo de Figueroa, and ‘S.M.’, the pseudonym of royal chef José Serrano. They made a clarion call for writers to put their pens to work to defend Spanish cookery against the French influences which had swept through aristocratic and middle-class kitchens during the Bourbon monarchy. One of the best-known responses came from Galician journalist Don Manuel María Puga y Parga, who wrote under the name Picadillo. His book La cocina practica (1906) was so successful that it is still in print today. Ironically, while apparently offering popular Spanish dishes, French influences were woven through them (the Galician dishes are the most interesting). Another Galician author, the novelist Emilia, Countess of Pardo-Bazán, recorded some interesting disappearing dishes in her first book La cocina española antigua (1913).
However, the first real overview of Spanish regional cooking was Andalusian political journalist Dionisio Pérez’s Guía del buen comer español (1929). This colourful, impassioned, rabidly anti-French travelogue, without recipes, sparked off many other books by chefs and food writers. Among them is Ignacio Domènech’s outstanding book on Basque cooking, La cocina vasca—Laurak Bat (n.d.). After the Civil War (1936–9) and the ‘Years of Hunger’, the interest in provincial cooking was renewed, but now with wider geographic scope.
Alongside this, cookery consistently attracted the attention of distinguished 20th-century writers from other fields— nearly all of them male. Some of the most relevant names here are Galician humorist Julio Camba, Catalan essayist Josep Pla, novelist Manuel Marquez Montalbán, biologist Faustino Cordón, anthropologist Julio Carlo Baroja, and ethnographer José Miguel Barandiaran. Fuelled by the search for identity in the later years of Franco’s dictatorship, this body of work helped to provide an informed basis for pioneering food studies in the 1970s. María del Carmen Simón Palmer’s admirable bibliography (1977) was an essential tool.
A particularly important book was Manuel Martínez Llopis’s Historia de la gastronomia española (1981), an erudite bibliophile’s overview of Spanish cookery books and gastronomic history. When Llopis published a new edition shortly before his death (1995), he included new chapters on the foods from the New World.
In recent years recipe anthologies from one town or province, often supported by the local town halls, and this time written by women, have been a successful format. This may reflect growing concern, as at the end of the 19th century, that a particular generation of women home-cooks’ word-of-mouth knowledge needs to be recorded before it is lost. Alongside this cookbooks by nuns have become a publishing phenomenon. The first one, Cocina monacal (1995), a jaunty collection of the Poor Clares’ recipes, was a runaway bestseller. See also MONKS AND NUNS.
Among modern chefs’ books, which took off later in Spain than in many countries, the most important is El Bulli (4 vols, 2002–5). It is interesting not just for the recipes of Ferran Adrià and his kitchen team, but also for its format. The large-print volumes, laid out like art catalogues, are dedicated to a comprehensive chronological visual record of dishes, with photos and analytical notes. The recipes accompany the book in digital form.
Vicky Hayward
a name sometimes applied to the chub mackerel (see MACKEREL) but of more importance as the principal English name for fish of the genus Scomberomorus. These are large fish, found in various tropical and semi-tropical waters around the world, especially in SE Asia and the Caribbean (but not at all in the Mediterranean), and in the southern hemisphere. They are greatly appreciated for their compact flesh and fine flavour.
The main species in the Indo-Pacific are:
Mention should also be made of a Caribbean species, S. regalis, the cero.
Bidens pilosa, a herb of the daisy family which grows in warm regions worldwide; it is also known as cobbler’s pegs, because of the shape of the flower, or as margarita. The barbed projections on the fruits, which catch readily in clothing and constitute an efficient means of distribution, are the ‘needles’ of the most common name.
The young leaves are cooked like spinach in some places, especially Africa and parts of SE Asia (e.g. Java). Generally, however, it is regarded as a tiresome and stubborn weed.
Julia Morton in an essay about Spanish needles as a wild food resource published in the Journal of Economic Botany (1962) investigated the potential of the leaves as food, and recommended them as cooked greens with butter or salt and vinegar. Her findings were endorsed by Martin and Ruberté (1975), whose survey of Edible Leaves of the Tropics provides further information.
Until recent years foreign observers rarely spoke well of Spain’s cuisines. Echoing earlier travellers’ criticisms, Gerald Brenan described the villages’ ‘ruthless cuisine’, with its ‘potato omelettes, dried cod and unrefined olive oil’. Richard Ford, the 19th-century diarist, complained of garlic abuse, as did many others. Alexander Dumas was more appreciative. After a whistle-stop tour in 1846 he concluded, ‘he who eats badly does so because he does not know how to eat well’.
In the last thirty years, observers like Jean-François Revel and Raymond Carr have shifted the emphasis to the wealth of Spain’s regional cooking. Carr attributes this to the relative isolation of rural areas, which slowed the growth of a cash-based food culture, the years of poverty and hunger following the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), and the search for regional identity.
Four books have been influential on home ground. In 1929 political journalist Dionisio Pérez published the Guía del buen comer español, a jaunty bird’s-eye travelogue published by the Ministry of Tourism. Pérez stressed the culinary wealth of all areas, without promoting any single one, and he commented on the legacy of the Muslim centuries (see ARAB CUISINE) and the New World food exchange (see COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE). Significantly, when he turned to his homeland Andalusia, he abandoned trying to write about a ‘region’ and instead described the produce and cooking of cities, provinces, and terroirs. Since then scores of Spanish writers have used similar frameworks for writing about local cuisines.
Among recipe books, La cocina regional (1966), a recipe anthology published by the women’s wing of dictator General Franco’s single political party, remains a unique source. The recipes were collected by hospital doctor Manuel Martínez Llopis and his wife, who researched the subject on a motorbike. When Martínez Llopis turned back to the subject in Las cocinas de España (1989), after many more years of study, he discarded the ‘regional’ label as hopelessly inadequate and instead identified 234 chosen recipes by their point of origin. He grouped them within nine broad zones, such as the Ebro Valley or the eastern Mediterranean.
A more complex picture emerged from philosopher Eloy Terrón’s landmark study España, encrucijada de culturas alimentarias (1992). Stressing the lack of reliable historical data, he placed more importance on social than regional divides. He redrew the map into four types of agricultural zone and suggested that popular dishes could be defined as those rooted in smallholders’ untithed produce. Treating regional cuisine as a construct built from 19th-and 20th-century books and restaurant menus, he selected key dishes which had crossed social divides to become everyday eating in their area and had gone on to be known right around Spain. These included Don Quixote’s chickpea stewpot COCIDO (also called potaje or olla), pisto manchego, or braised vegetables, and sopas de ajo, or garlic soups, all identified with central Spain; arroz a la valenciana, often called PAELLA, from the eastern Mediterranean; bacalao a la vizcaína, SALT COD in a dried pepper and tomato sauce, from the Basque Country; and GAZPACHO soup from the south. From the north-east he picked caldo gallego, a pork-flavoured potato and turnip-green soup, EMPANADA, a fish, meat, or vegetable flat pie, and fabada, a bean stew usually flavoured with meats and sausages. To this list he added TORTILLA española, the Spanish potato omelette, without suggesting any point of origin. As Terrón himself says, some of these dishes have lent themselves to almost infinite variation.
Terrón also suggested that pig products could be used as an index of creative diversity. In the same way, Raymond Carr has compared the number of Spanish SAUSAGES with the number of different Virgin Marys around Spain. Two clear examples are chunky morcón from Extremadura and Galician androlla, a carnival sausage. Dishes with TRIPE, or callos, a favourite Gypsy ingredient, would be another good index of creativity.
But the question remains: how do Spain’s different cooking styles appear on the ground today? Along the long coastline, which is washed by three different seas (the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and, in the Bay of Biscay, the Cantabrian), cooking is generally quite different by the sea, on the coastal plain, and in the mountainous hinterland. Then the high central tableland breaks down into a jigsaw of unevenly sized provinces, mountain ranges, river valleys, and plains criss-crossed by shepherds’, pilgrims’, muleteers’, and harvesters’ routes along which dishes such as gazpachos (game stews with flatbread) have travelled. Finally, a sense of separateness and regional identity have been nurtured in certain regions, such as the Basque Country and Catalonia.
The Basque Country is home to Spain’s most renowned repertoire of home and restaurant cooking. Salt cod and fish cookery is especially original, and includes kokotxas, hake’s cheeks, and cogote, hake’s head, both served in an opaque sauce of cooking juices bound with the fish’s gelatine. These dishes originated at sea, as did some others. Inland cooking has grown around the produce of farmsteads (caseríos): there are excellent shepherds’ cheeses, bean stews, and beef. See also BASQUE GASTRONOMIC SOCIETIES.
Navarrese cookery is made distinct by its historic French influences and by the produce of the River Ebro’s plains, which cut a fertile corridor here between the Rioja and Aragon. Red peppers, fresh or dried, spicy-hot or sweet, are a defining ingredient in all three regions. Examples are patatas a la Riojana, a potato and pepper stew that French chef Paul Bocuse called a work of art, Navarrese wood-grilled peppers preserved in their roasting juices, and Aragonese pepper-flavoured chilindrón stews made with lamb, poultry, or game.
In the damp north-west, Galician and Asturian fishing ports share magnificent fishing catches and shellfish farming. Inland there are soupy vegetable and bean stews, such as caldo and fabada, still based on the produce of smallholdings, and wonderful cheeses. The Picos de Europa, a mountain range straddling Asturias, Cantabria, and Leon, is home to over 30 types of cheese, including three outstanding blues. Northern cooking flavours tend to be clean, although in Galicia they are laced with smoked pimentón red pepper, which runs right through Castile-León’s charcuterie. Roast baby milk-fed lamb and SUCKING PIG, which are treated as classic dishes on many menus throughout Castile, are modern restaurant additions to the repertoire. More interesting economical meat dishes have survived: westerly Extremadura’s caldereta, a lamb stew, and easterly Cuenca’s morteruelo, a pâté, are two examples.
Catalan cooking was summed up by Pérez as ‘complete, its own, secular, in constant progress’. Certainly it has its own culinary culture, but it shares many flavours and products with the Balearics. Five preparations stand out: samfaína, or sautéed Mediterranean vegetables, sofregit, a compôte-like tomato sauce (see SOFFRITTO AND SOFRITO), picada, a pounded nut thickening, allioli, a garlic and oil emulsion, and ROMESCO, an almond and dried red pepper sauce. Catalan chocolate-making and bakery are thriving traditions. Country bread or toast, rubbed with ripe tomato pulp or garlic, and drizzled with olive oil, is everyday eating here, but also right around the Mediterranean coast (see MERENDA; BALEARIC ISLANDS; CATALAN COOKERY).
Further south in Valencia and Murcia the cooking is still clean but also marked by the produce and cuisine brought here by the Muslims (their descendants stayed on here longer than anywhere else in Spain). There are over a hundred dry to wet rice dishes with subtle flavour combinations of meat, game, vegetables, or fish. Other specialities are turrón (halva or NOUGAT-like almond confectionery) and ice-cream and sherbets (granizadas), of which the most original is horchata, or tiger-nut milk.
Finally, in the south, there are the eight provinces of Andalusia. Many dishes here make ingenious use of humble ingredients, as in lentil stews, migas (fried breadcrumbs or flour, spiced up with bits of meat, fish, or fruit, garlic, and herbs), and pescaito frito (dry-fried fish). Last but not least, this is the birthplace of TAPAS, which travelled around Spain as Andalusians emigrated northwards, usually in search of work. Sampled here, in the south, tapas remain one of the great Spanish eating experiences.
Vicky Hayward
Plectranthus amboinicus (formerly Coleus aromaticus), a herb of uncertain origin which is used in Asia and the W. Indies as a flavouring for savoury dishes. In the W. Indies it may be known as either Spanish or French thyme, but it is not a true THYME. It also goes by the name ‘Cuban oregano’ and is one of several plants which are referred to as Mexican OREGANO.
Passer domesticus, criticized by Aristotle for being the most wanton of birds, i.e. taking every possible opportunity to breed. It was no doubt for this reason that sparrow’s eggs enjoyed some popularity as an APHRODISIAC. There are various references to sparrows being eaten of which one, as noted by Simon (1983), is in the English edition (1654) of La Varenne’s The French Cook: ‘The Tourte of Sparrows is served like that of young pidgeons with a white sauce.’
a culinary term, met in cookery books of the 18th and 19th centuries, and revived towards the end of the 20th century, which is said to be of Irish origin. The theory is that the word is an abbreviation of ‘dispatch cock’, a phrase used to indicate a summary way of grilling a bird after splitting it open down the back and spreading the two halves out flat. See also, however, SPITCHCOCK.
a kind of preserved beef which is a traditional festive dish in many countries. In Ireland, for example, heavily spiced beef is an important part of traditional Christmas fare. The beef is soaked in brine, brown sugar, juniper berries, and spices which can include black peppercorns, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg, and pimento for any time between three weeks and three months. Beef is sometimes cured in cider casks to impart additional flavour.
Elizabeth David (1970) remarks that beef prepared in such a way has also been called Hunting Beef or Beef à l’écarlate, and that various forms of the recipe have been known in England for at least 300 years. Her prescription involves brown sugar, saltpetre, sea or rock salt, black peppercorns, allspice, and juniper berries; she gives characteristically precise instructions for cooking the beef, commenting that it ‘will carve thinly and evenly, and has a rich, mellow, spicy flavour which does seem to convey to us some sort of idea of the food eaten by our forbears’.
See also PASTRAMI.
or ‘mixed spices’, are commonly thought of as, and here taken to be, dry powders; but they are sometimes taken to mean spicy pastes such as are described separately, for example SAMBAL (Indonesia) and MASALA (India).
A spice mixture, in the sense of a mixture of spices, may be peculiar to one village, or family, or individual. Here the term ‘spice mixtures’ is used to indicate established mixtures, well known in a country, region, or ethnic group. However, even established mixtures are variable, not only in the proportions of ingredients but also in the ingredients themselves; it is notorious that there may be five, six, or seven spices in Chinese FIVE SPICE mixture.
Variations of a local kind are particularly common in Arab countries, where the composition of ready-made spice mixtures is variable even within a single neighbourhood, and the names vary widely. In Bahrain, for instance, the mixture might be called bharat, in other places one might hear afawi, abazir, or other names.
Spice mixtures should not be kept for long before use. This is true of individual spices also, once they have been ground, but the principle applies more strongly to mixtures since the various components will stay viable for different lengths of time, with the result that some elements in a mixture will stale before others and the balance will be upset.
Important mixtures, which are the subjects of separate entries, are: ADVIEH, COLOMBO, CURRY POWDER, DUQQA, FIVE SPICES, HARISSA, MASALA, NAM PRIK, PANCH PHORON, RAS-EL-HANOUT, SHICHIMI, TABIL, ZAATAR.
Other noteworthy mixtures include:
Lesley Chamberlain (1983) mentions two interesting mixtures which she met in Russia:
are difficult to define. ‘One or other of various strongly flavoured or aromatic substances of vegetable origin obtained from tropical plants, commonly used as condiments, etc.’ (OED). This needs two corrections and one rider. Some of the plants which produce spices belong to temperate climates (e.g. caraway seeds); and spices are more often used in cooking, not as condiments (at table, when cooking has already been completed). The rider is that there are some substances of animal origin, e.g. ambergris, which are often included in lists of spices, if only for want of any other category into which to put them. Otherwise, the OED definition may be regarded as helpful.
Several authors have demonstrated the possibility of writing a book about spices, or about herbs and spices (a popular combination in books, as in the kitchen) without attempting to say what a spice is. Redgrove (1933) is not one of these. He addresses the question squarely, pronounces it insoluble, yet hints at a solution: ‘herbs’ are the herbaceous parts of aromatic plants; ‘spices’ are their dried other parts— rhizome, root, bark, flower, fruit, seed; and ‘condiments’ are spices or other flavourings added to food at the table. Thus MUSTARD greens would be a herb, and mustard seeds a spice, while mustard in a mustard pot, at table, would be a condiment. This would be a convenient set of definitions, and has the merit of being as close to common usage as any rational definitions could be expected to come.
That complete coincidence is unattainable is a fact explained to some extent by the history of spices, which also explains why the OED declares that they have to be from tropical plants. The history of the SPICE TRADE, of great importance from remote antiquity to medieval times as a stimulus to voyages of exploration, is treated separately. Here it is relevant to note that this trade was with the Orient, and resulted in the term ‘spice’ (which comes from the same root as ‘species’ and originally meant a kind of merchandise) being applied to oriental products rather than to European ones. The meaning of the term widened when American spices came into the picture, and widened still further when it became convenient to use the term as one of gastronomic use rather than geographical provenance and value. But it has not yet been extended to include certain flavouring substances common in Europe, such as garlic, although logically it should; and there are other anomalies such as the exclusion of HORSERADISH (although WASABI, ‘Japanese horseradish’, is included by some authors).
The most expensive spices are saffron, vanilla, and cardamom, in that order. Some spices have a preservative effect on foods, exercised by their essential oils. It is, generally, these same essential oils which provide the flavour. For an explanation of what they are, and their characteristics, see ESSENCES.
A separate survey is given of SPICE MIXTURES.
a subject of political and cultural, as well as economic, interest.
In commercial terms, PEPPER has always been the most important of the SPICES, followed usually by CLOVES and NUTMEG; but there are many others. Since their general characteristics are that they take up relatively little space, but are of considerable value, they have often been used as objects of barter against bulkier, less exciting but more necessary, goods such as rice and cloth.
In the early days of the trade, there was considerable mystery, fostered by those involved in the trade, about where some spices came from (usually S. or SE Asia). Their high value and this atmosphere of mystery combined to give these natural products something of the allure of precious metals. They were indeed sometimes used as currency.
Pepper from India was being traded in the Middle East before 2000 BC. It travelled along ways that were dictated by geography and have remained in use ever since, although shifts of power from time to time close some routes and developments in technology make others more attractive. Overland, the route went up the valley of the Indus, through the passes of the Hindu Kush, to join the great east–west Silk Roads. By sea, pepper was shipped from ports on the west coast of India to either the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. Indian and Arab merchants handled most of the trade as far as the Mediterranean; redistribution to markets further north and west was controlled by the Phoenicians until Alexander the Great destroyed Tyre and set up his new entrepôt at the mouth of the Nile. The Greeks in turn gave way to the Romans, whose seapower allowed them to send ships directly to India. This round trip took two years, until Hippalus, a Greek seaman, rumbled the Arabs’ ‘secret’ of the seasonally alternating monsoon winds, thereby cutting the return journey to only twelve months and precipitating an increase in Roman pepper consumption.
For the European importing countries, spices were very expensive, this because they came from afar, and changed hands so many times in the course of long and dangerous journeys. At their destination they could cost the western consumer at least 10 times and often 40 times as much as they had cost at source. But those Romans and Europeans of the later medieval period who could afford them willingly paid the high prices for various reasons. One was the obvious one; they liked their food spiced. Besides, spices were a good way to show off wealth and power. And they were thought to have valuable medicinal properties. (It used to be said that spices were needed to disguise the off flavour of spoiled meat; but this was a piece of CULINARY MYTHOLOGY.)
China, like the Mediterranean world, traded for centuries with S. and E. Asia, but without the long chain of middlemen. The key spices here were cloves and nutmeg, produced only on a few small islands in what is now the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku (the Moluccas). Cloves were being exported to China in the 3rd century BC, two centuries before they reached Alexandria. As Asian commercial empires developed, trade increased and Indian merchants, too, set up permanent bases in or near the spice islands, so that a network of trade routes brought these new communities and their products into the larger world. At the same time as the seaways were flourishing, the SILK ROADS across C. Asia were regulated and policed by the Han emperors, so that Rome and China were in continuous, if indirect, contact. Trade prospects must have looked good in, say, AD 350.
But the Chinese, to secure their own borders, had displaced Mongol and C. Asian pastoral tribes. The quest by these tribes for new territory (besides being responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century) severed overland trade routes and reduced the spice trade to a fraction of what it had once been.
However, the invaders were horsemen, not sailors, and the seaborne links of the network survived. Spices, now including the first nutmegs seen in the West, found their way back into Europe along with other oriental goods as Christendom grew slowly out of the ruins of Rome and economic life re-formed with Constantinople as its centre. Then came the sudden expansion of Islam and the consequent disruption of all trade relations with the Orient.
In the long term, Islam was to bring lasting benefits to the West, including the supply of a wider range of goods and materials than Europe had ever been able to obtain before. From about 1100 onwards overseas trade revived strongly in Europe, where the resources of capital, know-how, and trade goods were at last sufficient to give the merchants of the N. Italian cities a chance to do business with Islamic states on something like equal terms. Their profits, partly from spices, sufficed to make Venice, Genoa, Florence, and other city-states almost as rich and powerful as the caliphate of Egypt. ‘Arabic’ (actually Indian) numerals made proper management of goods and money possible, and were the basis of N. Italian banking and double-entry bookkeeping. These techniques, whether native to Italy or learned from Arab models, all assisted the growth of modern capitalism.
Muslims, who had at first been unwilling to do business with Christians, were happy to trade with Hindu India. Hindus had been very active in trade with the Far East. Although they were now becoming increasingly reluctant to travel, because they risked pollution or loss of caste if they mingled with strangers, Indian Buddhists and Jains travelled freely throughout the Far East to engage in trade by barter. So spices could flow from the Far East to the Arab world through India.
Eventually, as the Hindu presence in the Far East diminished, the Arabs were encouraged to extend their own voyages to Sumatra, Java, and the more distant spice islands, especially after they realized that Indian ‘nutmegs’ were inferior to those of Ambon and Banda.
This was, however, only one aspect of the long process by which Arab influence in Indonesia gradually replaced Buddhist and Hindu in all areas of life. There was no political conquest, but religion followed trade, local rulers were converted to Islam, and their subjects, of course, followed them. Because the change was slow and on the whole peaceful, it struck deep roots. Commercial continuity was largely unbroken, with inland villages of Java producing big rice surpluses for the sultans and merchants of the north coast, who then shipped it to Maluku, where rice and textiles were bartered for nutmegs, mace, and cloves. These spices then started their long journey, either north to China or west to India and eventually, perhaps, to Constantinople, or the Hansa ports, or England.
In Europe, the great days of the Italian cities were now ending and the future lay with nation states. As early as 1418 Prince Henry the Navigator set up a school of navigation and started sending Portuguese expeditions questing down the west coast of Africa. In the middle of the 15th century, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and in the course of the century pepper prices in Venice went up by a factor of 30. It was abundantly clear that maritime European powers now had good reason to look for a direct sea passage to the Indies. By the late 15th century, they also had the technology and the resources to do so with some hope of success. Following the voyage by Vasco da Gama in 1497–9, round the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut and safely back to Lisbon, the Portuguese set about their entry into the spice trade with a buccaneering zest from which other nations quickly learned. In only thirteen years after da Gama’s voyage, Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Europe, had not only annexed Brazil but also captured the three principal stations on the route to the East: Ormuz, controlling the Persian Gulf; Goa; and Malacca, the hub of SE Asian trade in spices and many other goods. A few years later, a Portuguese feitoria (factory) in Ceylon established a monopoly in cinnamon that it held for more than a century.
In fact, however, this small nation had overreached itself; its rather primitive administrative systems could not develop fast enough to replace aristocrats with meritocrats, and it never managed to get firm control of the Red Sea route, or of the clove and nutmeg producers of Maluku. Crown agents and private adventurers got rich but sent as little as they could back home to the royal treasury, so the country as a whole profited little. And Portuguese successes naturally inspired strong reactions from trade rivals, notably the Muslims of Indonesia, who attacked European settlements frequently. In N. Sumatra, the Achenese drove the Portuguese out and kept control of pepper production until the second half of the 19th century.
It was the Dutch and the English who, towards the end of the 16th century, emerged as the principal competitors of the Portuguese. (The struggle might have involved the Spaniards too, but the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 more or less ruled them out.) The British founded their East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch counterpart of this was set up only two years later.
The Dutch took the lead in the 17th century. By 1621 they had driven the Portuguese from Indonesia, created new monopolies in nutmeg and cloves, and set up a factory and port at what is now Jakarta. Dutch forces occupied Ceylon in 1636 and captured Malacca in 1641. By the 1680s the Dutch had established themselves unshakeably in Makassar, where their impressive Fort Rotterdam still stands. By 1700 they were fixing clove and nutmeg prices in almost every market place of the world.
The 18th century, however, brought serious problems for the Dutch. One was that they had to counter over-production of cloves and cinnamon. On a notorious occasion in 1760 they had to burn excess bales of spices in the streets of Amsterdam. A much more serious problem was the erosion of their stranglehold on production. As Rosengarten (1969) records:
Between 1770 and 1772 Pierre Poivre, the French administrator of the island of Mauritius [and perhaps a relation of the Peter Piper who picked a peck of pickled pepper], managed to smuggle clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon plants out of the Dutch-controlled Spice Islands. New spice plantings were established in Réunion, the Seychelles, and other French colonies. The blockage of Dutch East Indian ports by British ships in 1780 barred the export of spices to Holland.
In 1799 the Dutch East India Company, suffering from losses by piracy and the takeover by England of the Dutch ports on the Malabar Coast and many Dutch stations in the E. Indies, went bankrupt. This, perhaps, marked the end of what has been seen in retrospect, despite the ruthless and sometimes bloody struggles which took place, as the ‘romantic’ era of the spice trade.
Spices are now being traded in larger quantities than ever. The biggest importer is the USA, followed by Germany, Japan, and France. The greatest entrepôt is Singapore. The big exporters are India, Indonesia, Brazil, the Malagasy Republic, and Malaysia.
Much has changed, although much remains the same. The Banda Islands still export nutmeg and mace, but the mansions of former Dutch planters lie open to the rain or are converted into homestays for tourists, while the fine stone quay where the world’s merchant ships once jostled for space lies tranquil and decayed.
Roger Owen
READING:
Maia squinado, a crab of the Mediterranean and NE Atlantic which takes its English name from the spider-like arrangement of its legs. It is reputed to hibernate, emerging in May (hence Maia in the scientific name: squinado comes from the Provençal name). The carapace is reddish-orange to brown and may measure 20 cm (8″) across.
This crab’s remarkable ability to camouflage itself gives it a high degree of protection, for it often looks like a small rock encrusted with natural growths. The naturalist Edward Step, who studied it in Cornwall, described in detail how Gran’fer Jenkin (a Cornish name for it) uses his nippers to break off bits of seaweed or other suitable items, ‘kisses’ these to coat them with gummy saliva, and then ‘plants’ them among the prickles and hooked hairs on his back. An extraordinary feature of this operation is that the crab selects items which will not merely stick to its back but will grow there, so that a little ‘garden’ is created which in turn attracts minuscule marine creatures which find it a good habitat and contribute by their presence to the effect of camouflage.
One other odd piece of behaviour has been noticed. Spider crabs will sometimes form themselves into conical heaps, just below low tide mark. The heaps may be several feet high and may comprise a thousand or so individuals, which are apt to stay in this posture for weeks on end. The smaller crabs are observed to have the inside berths in this arrangement, and the whole procedure may be a defence against predators such as the octopus.
British fishermen used to disdain spider crabs, and were irritated by their presence in pots set for more valuable prey. However, despite the thinness of the legs this is an excellent edible crab, particularly appreciated in France and Spain, and at the northern end of the Adriatic, where Grancevola alla veneziana is a well-known dish. One very large spider crab serves two, but one per person is the norm. The female, slightly smaller than the male, is the better buy, especially in the early part of the year, when she is carrying eggs.
a common wild plant in tropical regions. Five-leafed spider herb, Cleome gynandra, is found in Asia and Africa.
The leaves contain an essential oil which resembles garlic or mustard oil, and have a strong taste, described as being between radishes and ASAFOETIDA. They are mainly used as a flavouring. In Malaysia, for example, they are salted, pickled, and eaten with rice. They are also cooked, which with other subsequent treatment makes the leaves less bitter, and eaten as a pot-herb in various places.
often thought of as insects but correctly considered to be part of the separate class Arachnida, are a remarkably successful group of creatures which exist in many forms, some of them large enough to be worth eating and regarded as delicacies in certain, mostly primitive, societies. Hillyard (1995) has provided the most recent summary survey, in which he observes that the people who relish spiders include ‘Indians in South America, the Bushmen of southern Africa, and the Aborigines or native Australians’. His own account draws on the detailed description by the English spider enthusiast Dr W. S. Bristowe (1924), who conducted some of his research in Laos, where he found that the giant orb-weavers (Nephila spp) were popular fare; the abdomen would often be bitten off and eaten raw, having a mild taste like that of raw potato mixed with lettuce. However, the favourite was a large blue-legged tarantula in the genus Melopoeus, which was described as being especially nutritious, with a 60% protein content.
The theme of tarantulas recurs in Hillyard’s description of how the Piaroa Indians of Venezuela capture, cook, and eat them. The goliath tarantula (Theraphosa leblondi) has a leg span of 25 cm (10″) and an abdomen the size of a tennis ball. The Piaroa twist off the abdomens using a leaf (to avoid touching the hairs which can cause urticaria), and squeeze the contents onto another leaf which is folded over and tied, then placed on the hot coals. When it is cooked the large fangs are detached and put beside the body (to be used as toothpicks). The white flesh which is found inside and the meat in the legs (also cooked) are said to taste like prawns. The eggs of the female are also consumed.
Hillyard also quotes a traveller in New Caledonia who observed two children feasting on spiders whose remarkably strong webs had already been remarked upon by his party because impeding their progress in the woods. The prepared spiders were broiled on the embers and the children ‘swallowed at least 100 of them in our presence’. The species is thought to be Nephila edulis.
the aromatic root of Nardostachys jatamansi, native to the western Himalayas (the mountain range described in a Buddhist text as ‘producer of many perfumes, rich with hundreds of magical drugs’). Traditionally spikenard has been floated down the Indus in bales and exported by way of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea to the Mediterranean. There, in classical and medieval times, it was prized in compound medicines, in perfumes, and even in food—so much prized that a certain King Seleucus, presumably Seleucus I of Syria in the early 3rd century BC, tried without success to transplant it to Arabia where he might have controlled the trade.
APICIUS, the Roman cookery book, calls for spikenard in two recipes, one a sauce for sliced cold meat, the other a glaze for roast venison, both of them heady, expensive, and (no doubt) salutary. In these recipes spikenard is neatly paired with malabathrum or tejpat leaf (see MASALA), which came from the eastern extremity of the Himalayas. In the dietary manual of the Byzantine physician Anthimus (c.AD 500), addressed to a Frankish monarch, spikenard and tejpat leaf are alternatives: ‘Hares, if they are quite young, can be taken with a sweet sauce including pepper, a little cloves and ginger, seasoned with costus and spikenard or tejpat leaf.’ During medieval times spikenard was used to flavour the spiced wines hippocras and clarey, but it was eventually recognized that European species of valerian (originally used as a handy substitute for spikenard) had greater medicinal powers. By the 16th century there was little demand for spikenard outside India.
Andrew Dalby
Spinacia oleracea, the ‘prince of vegetables’ according to the 12th-century Arab writer Ibn al-Awam, originated in Persia, where some inedible wild relations still grow, and where it was under cultivation in the 4th century AD or earlier. Its name in English and in many other languages derives, via Arabic, from an old Persian name, aspanākh.
The plant had travelled east to China via Nepal by the 7th century, but only reached Europe in the 11th century, when the Arabs who invaded Spain brought it with them.
Spinach was a better green vegetable than the GOOSE-FOOTS, SORRELS, ORACH, and leaf beets (see CHARD) which were widely used in medieval Europe, and gradually usurped their place. However, it was still a novelty in Italy in the 16th century (according to Matthiolus) and did not become established in Britain until the middle of that century. Before being accepted as a food plant, it was used for medicinal purposes; it has a mildly laxative effect, due to the oxalic acid which it contains.
The nutritional qualities of spinach have been much lauded, in part at least because of its high content of iron. However, the availability of the iron is reduced because the OXALIC ACID combines with it making it less easily absorbed, and the same is true of the calcium it contains.
Spinach is valued as a vegetable cooked on its own, but is also conspicuously versatile as an ingredient in other dishes, providing delicate fillings for pastry and pasta, combining well with eggs, etc. Part of its appeal comes from its subtle, faintly bitter-sweet taste, but part also from its attractive deep green colour. This spreads readily into any mixture in which spinach plays a part. Spinach or spinach juice have often been used purely for colour, for example in making certain kinds of pasta. No other common plant gives such a strong green.
Medieval recipes, both European and Asian, often called for spinach—or, in European examples, maybe for the more common leaf beet, which then was replaced by spinach as that plant became more accepted—as an ingredient for sweet dishes. For example, it could be combined with egg, honey, almonds, and spices, and used as a filling for a tart or flan. The habit of adding nutmeg to cooked spinach may be seen as a survival of these practices. Another such survival, as Jane Grigson (1978) pointed out in giving the recipe, is the Provençal tarte d’épinards au sucre, often eaten on Christmas Eve. The same author gives, for the benefit of those who like to go back to origins, a Persian recipe for spinach kuku (an OMELETTE with spinach, which may be likened to the Niçois trouchia, made with leaf beet); and gives a full account of the remarkable ability of spinach to absorb butter (cf. the aubergine’s absorption of olive oil). The French define egg and fish dishes made with spinach as à la Florentine.
Spinach is notorious for shrinking greatly when cooked. A large saucepan full of raw spinach soon reduces to about a tenth of the volume. This surprising reduction is of course avoided when fresh young spinach leaves are used in salads.
Spinach substitutes are numerous. The excellence of spinach has caused its name to be applied to many other leafy vegetables which reflect, even slightly, its characteristics and merits. That is why some unrelated plants have names such as NEW ZEALAND SPINACH, CHINESE SPINACH, vine spinach (see BASELLA), mountain spinach (see ORACH), and so forth.
the correct name for CRUSTACEANS of the family Palinuridae, is preferable to the name crawfish which is sometimes used but invites confusion with CRAYFISH. Needless to say, using the name crayfish or cray, as sometimes in Australia, is even more likely to cause confusion. On top of all this, it is also all too easy to be confused by the scientific nomenclature. The family Palinuridae contains two important genera of which one is Palinurus while the other is Panulirus. It is strange that the natural historians involved in this matter did not realise how confusing the similarity of the two names could be, except for specialists like themselves.
The spiny lobsters are indubitably lobsters, but they differ from the archetypal LOBSTER of the N. Atlantic in having no claws and in belonging to warmer waters. Indeed they are most abundant in the tropics, although their range extends into temperate waters, for example up to SW England, in some regions. Their size and the excellence of their meat ensures that they are in strong demand, although the question whether they are better than or inferior to the common lobster is and will no doubt for ever be debated. Such debate is complicated by the fact that the established recipes for the Atlantic lobster, generally speaking, have been those of classical French cuisine plus the more robust traditions evolved in N. America; whereas the spiny lobster, with its worldwide range in warmer waters, has attracted to itself a large number of recipes involving tropical or subtropical ingredients.
In the Mediterranean (mainly in the western basin and the central parts) and SW Europe the two species are Palinurus elephas and P. mauritanicus. They are brown or reddish in colour and have a maximum length of 50 cm (20″). There are certain places where they find a congenial habitat and are much more common than elsewhere, for example Minorca and the tiny (Tunisian) island of Galita.
In the Caribbean there are at least three species:
A larger number of species are found in the Indo-Pacific, especially in SE Asian waters, but also in Japan (P. japonicus), E. Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific islands. Among the best known are:
The most important species of the American Pacific coast is P. interruptus. In California it is generally known as ‘langosta’. It can (exceptionally) be huge: length to 90 cm (35″), weight over 13 kg (30 lb).
Finally, to illustrate yet further the extent to which different species of these beautiful creatures have evolved in response to different environments, there is P. echinatus, the ‘brown spiny lobster’, which is specialized for island habitats. It is found on one stretch of Brazilian coast, but otherwise inhabits Atlantic islands: Trinidad, Cape Verde Islands, Canary Islands, and even Ascension Island and St Helena.
READING:
an obsolete culinary term which applied to a method of grilling pieces of eel after dressing them with breadcrumbs and chopped herbs. But the matter is obscure (Hannah GLASSE, 1747, spells the word ‘pitchcock’ and omits the herbs) and there is a suspicious resemblance between this term and SPATCHCOCK.
(or melt or milt), a spongy organ found near the stomach or intestine of most vertebrates, which has the function of maintaining blood in good condition. Jane Grigson (1967) describes it thus:
In appearance it is a long flat oval of dark reddish meat, with a line of white fat running from end to end. It usually disappears—in England, as in France—with the rest of the pluck [heart, liver, lungs] into faggots, sausages and pâtés.
Although that sums it up well, the spleen may also appear in mixed OFFAL dishes and occasionally has a lead role, as in an interesting street food of Palermo in Sicily, guastelle (spleen sandwiches) of which Sokolov wrote in a 1994 issue of the Natural History Magazine:
Guastella is actually the name for a certain kind of soft roll with sesame seeds on top; it resembles a hamburger bun. You cut it in half and fill it with warmed ricotta, caciocavallo [a hard cheese made from cow’s milk], and beef spleen, an organ meat that is much appreciated in Sicily. The spleen is sliced and cooked literally swimming in lard.
This sandwich, called vastedde, can be bought in New York at one Italian lunch counter that has been serving it ‘for over a century’. In Brussels a dish called Chousels au Madère (spleen and pancreas with a Madeira sauce) has customarily been served on Thursdays, the day of the slaughtering of the cows.
a light CAKE made by the whisking method in which egg yolks are beaten with sugar, then flour and other ingredients added; see also CAKE-MAKING.
The term ‘sponge cake’ probably came into use during the 18th century, although the OED has no reference earlier than a letter Jane Austen wrote in 1808 (she evidently liked sponge cakes).
Two alternative methods of whisking are recognized. The first is usually called by its French name, GÉNOISE. The second method produces SAVOY cake/gateau/biscuit.
Sponge cake mixtures may also be used to produce what are often called ‘sponge fingers’; see BOUDOIR BISCUITS.
Towards the end of the 19th century something called a ‘sponge-cake pudding’ began to appear, but then became simply SPONGE PUDDING.
For a curiosity in this field see KASUTERA.
is made with a mixture like that for a SPONGE CAKE. A simple sort of sponge pudding, made from equal weights of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, and steamed in a basin, is known as canary pudding, perhaps because at some time it was served with a sauce made with sweet Canary wine.
A similar mixture may be baked in small tins shaped like a bucket, so that, when turned out, they look like little sandcastles; these are called castle puddings. They usually have a jam sauce or a sweet wine sauce poured over them.
are both popular British SUET PUDDINGS which are ‘spotted’ with raisins. Strictly speaking, spotted dick is of the ‘roly poly’ type (see ROLY POLY) with raisins and sugar spread on a flat sheet which is rolled up; and spotted dog is a plain cylinder with raisins or currants and sugar mixed with the suet paste, so that it has visible spots on the outside. Both, correctly, should be boiled in a cloth, but are often now baked.
See SODA BREAD for another meaning of spotted dick.
Sprattus sprattus sprattus, a small fish (maximum length 14 cm/5.5″) of the HERRING family which abounds in coastal waters of the Mediterranean and NE Atlantic. It can survive in waters of low salinity, such as those of the Baltic, where it exists in the form of a subspecies S. s. balticus.
The Caspian sprat, Clupeonella cultiventis, belongs to the Caspian and Black seas, where it evolved at a time when the Black Sea was not connected to the Mediterranean. It is slightly larger (to 17 cm/6″).
The American writer Artemas Ward (1923), ever alert to the desirability of judging foodstuffs by their intrinsic merit rather than by how common or costly they are, observed that:
In England the sprat’s prolific abundance socially offsets its fine eating qualities—it is a lowly fish under its own title (its participation in the comparative aristocracy of whitebait being of only recent knowledge)—but it has made its mark on the English language and English customs.
(Until late in the 19th century there was much debate about the identity of WHITEBAIT.) Lord Mayor’s Day in London, 9 November, was known as ‘Sprat Day’ because that was when the sprat season was considered officially open.
The sprat’s reputation is highest in Scandinavia and Germany. As Wheeler (1969) remarks:
In Norway conditions are ideal for a special sprat fishery where the fish are trapped in the long, narrow fjords by means of nets, then driven into keeping pens until required for the canning factories.
In Sweden sprats are known as skarpsill, and in Norway as brisling. In both countries, canned sprats are known as ‘sardines’. When preserved in a spicy brine, they are known as ansjovis (Swedish ‘anchovies’). The Swedish casserole dish Jansson’s temptation (Jansson’s frestelse) is made with these same ‘anchovies’, baked with potatoes, cream, and onions.
In Estonia, kilu are regarded as the most typical fish of that country and are exported in round tins, within which they are curled up in a circle.
In Germany, the sprats smoked at Kiel, known as Kieler Sprotten, are an established delicacy. They are hot smoked, whole, and consumed like buckling (see HERRING). In the Netherlands and Belgium, bundles of lightly smoked sprats are offered for sale, to be skinned before being eaten. Kinds of sprat PÂTÉ are prepared in Poland and the Baltic States.
There is no true sprat in Asian waters, although the name sprat is sometimes loosely applied to certain small fish of the herring family which do occur there. In the southern hemisphere, there is the blue sprat, Spratelloides robustus, a smaller fish (maximum length 10 cm/4″) common in the inshore waters of southern Australia. Sprattus antipodum, a sprat of New Zealand waters, is not fished for commercially.
pale, brittle BISCUITS, shaped in wooden moulds which are often quite elaborate, originated in the German province of Swabia as early as the 15th century. They were formerly baked to mark various holy days, but more recently became Christmas specialities.
Springerle are made from eggs beaten with sugar, with flour added to make a stiff dough, and flavoured with (usually) rum and aniseed. The dough is rolled out and the moulds pressed down on it to make the raised pattern (knights on horseback, lambs, rabbits, etc.). The moulds are removed and the shaped dough is allowed to rest and dry out for up to 24 hours, ensuring a smooth, unfissured surface when the biscuits are finally baked. After baking the biscuit has an underside which is slightly grainy, and a smooth white upper surface, which in former times was often painted in colour.
Recording all this, Sarah Kelly (1985) suggests that the name may be derived from the way the biscuits rise or ‘spring’ in the oven, or from a common mould shape which shows a leaping horse. She also explains that biscuits which are really the same thing under other names include the so-called Würzburger Marzipan (not, as one might think, a form of almond paste); Eierzucker, made in Nuremberg; and Anisbrötli in Switzerland.
are known as ‘green onions’ in the USA, and also as ‘salad onions’ or ‘scallions’. The last name is not exclusive, for it is also applied to the individual bulbs of aggregate onions such as SHALLOTS, and sometimes even to LEEKS. Most of the spring onions grown in the West are simply immature plants which, if left in the ground (and suitably thinned out) would develop into full-sized onions. Thus the same onion patch would produce spring onions, as thinnings, in spring, and large onions in the autumn.
Spring onions are now available all the year round, so the name has lost its original significance. Generally, white varieties of onion are chosen, purely for reasons of appearance. Spring onions from any variety of onion will, however, always be paler and milder flavoured than the fully developed bulb.
Spring onions can equally well be produced from the welsh onion, that is the oriental species (Allium fistulosum) which if allowed to develop further would simply become larger, rather than produce bulbs. See ORIENTAL ONIONS.
Spring onions are usually eaten raw in the West, in salads or on their own. There is no reason why they should not be cooked, except that they are more expensive than round onions. In Chinese cooking, where raw vegetables are rare, onions are normally cooked whatever their age.
(plus egg roll and LUMPIA, which are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not, but always closely related), a snack or item of finger-food, usually consisting of a wrapper of very thin pastry or pancake around a savoury filling.
In the full Chinese name, which transliterates as chun juan, the third and fourth written characters mean literally ‘spring roll’, because the original filling was of lightly cooked spring vegetables, wrapped in a skin that was then quickly deep fried so that the crisp textures of wrapper and filling contrasted with and complemented each other. During the Tang dynasty, such chun juan or spring cakes were eaten to celebrate the sowing of the new year’s corn in early February, though it was many centuries later that spring rolls adopted their modern sausage-like form and size—usually about 5 cm (2″) long.
This highly convenient food has spread widely outside China in one form or another and is particularly visible in the neighbouring countries of Indo-China. The Vietnamese often use a rice-based wrapper, extremely thin, like paper. A typical filling would include pork and shrimp and various herbs of the kind favoured by the Vietnamese (e.g. coriander, Chinese chives, and mint). They make miniature rolls as well as normal-sized ones. Accompaniments to these rolls include peanut sauce with shredded carrot and daikon.
(1886–1960), the first British food writer since Mesdames Beeton and Marshall to provide the nation with a comprehensive cookery book. Known as ‘the bible’, The Constance Spry Cookery Book (1956) was on the wedding list of every middle-class bride. This practical guide to everything from frying an egg to throwing a cocktail party was the result of a collaboration between Spry and Rosemary Hume. ‘I was the amateur with homely ideas,’ wrote Constance, ‘she was the professional.’ The recipes are a marriage of basic English ingredients and French methods devised with the novice in mind. The book presumes no prior knowledge of what goes on in the kitchen be it identifying a bain-marie, using a refrigerator, or doing the washing up.
Constance Spry was the daughter of a civil servant who had moved with his family to Ireland. There, she trained in preparation for a career teaching first aid and home nursing. She married in 1910 and had one son, and at the outbreak of the First World War was appointed secretary of the Dublin Red Cross. Her marriage proving unhappy, she moved to England in 1916. In 1921, she was appointed head teacher of the Homerton and South Hackney Day Continuation School educating girls on day-release from factory work in cookery, dressmaking, and other practical skills. In 1926 she was married again, to Henry Spry. It was while teaching that she began to appreciate the power of flowers to lighten leaden lives and that she put her mind to what was then a reckless expansion of the art of flower arrangement to encompass weeds, hedgerow plants, twigs, and wild flowers. Her motives were perhaps those of bringing beauty to the lower classes, but her success was such that she became a society fixture (opening a shop in Pimlico in 1928): her flowers, and her advice on decorating and home furnishing, directed in the main to the upper crust of London and beyond (she designed the wedding bouquet of the Duchess of Windsor in 1937). Her brilliance with flowers was so striking that an exhibition of her work was mounted at the Design Museum in London more than forty years after her death. While flower arrangement and decoration were her chief preoccupations, she was not ignorant of cookery. Her wartime book Come into the Garden, Cook (1942), composed when self-sufficiency was a matter of national importance, was a plea to women to grow their own vegetables and to treat them imaginatively. ‘We have better ingredients than almost any other country,’ she said, ‘and we frequently use them abominably.’
In the meantime, Rosemary Hume, the true cook of the partnership, had trained at the CORDON BLEU school in Paris. On returning to London she opened a small restaurant and cookery school ‘Au Petit Cordon Bleu’ in 1933. (Much later, this school would be incorporated into the larger Cordon Bleu organization.) However, her activities, as too Constance Spry’s, were put on hold for the duration of the war. In 1945, the friends proposed a joint venture, teaching housewifery, flower arranging, cookery, and interior deocration (while absorbing, of course, the social airs and graces dispensed by many such ‘finishing schools’), based at a new Cordon Bleu School in London and a country boarding establishment at Winkfield Place near Windsor. They enjoyed a certain eminence in the education of marriageable young women, challenged only by the racier places in Switzerland and abroad. The eminence was sufficiently establishment to be asked to do floral arrangements for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 as well as some of the catering—for which they created Coronation chicken, England’s gift to the buffet table.
The Constance Spry Cookery Book followed not long after, though Rosemary Hume would go on to write many other good manuals (often with Muriel Downes). The qualities of this work reside both in its comprehensiveness and in its light touch. It was not too depressingly prescriptive, though understanding that there were right and wrong ways of doing things. The wish to educate is pre-eminent, but the urge to preach is avoided. The style of cookery presented in the book could arguably be said to show English family cooking at its best; not adopting indecent shortcuts, nor adding excess flounce and frill to the food. French influence is by no means absent, but nor was it ever. In large part, practice is sound.
Constance Spry died after a fall at Winkfield Place in 1960.
Jean Holden
READING:
sugar boiled to CARAMEL (160 °C/320 °F), and then ‘spun’ by flicking it in a fine stream off the end of two forks tied together. The thin trail of sugar sets instantly into a hair-like filament. In the classic method for spinning sugar, the filaments are caught over a wooden bar (such as a broom handle), and removed in a bundle at the end of the process. It must be used soon after it is made, as it rapidly softens and becomes sticky, especially in humid weather. Spun sugar was much used in haute cuisine for decorating desserts and fruit. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was made into elaborate table decorations, spun into moulds shaped as vases, baskets, temples etc. This practice, largely discontinued, has been revived towards the end of the 20th century, e.g. by trailing thin streams of caramel over an inverted mould to form a ‘net’ which can be used to cover ice creams, etc.
Laura Mason
the American name which embraces numerous members of the genus Cucurbita in the CUCURBIT family (Cucurbitacae). The name is derived from the Massachusett Indian word askutasquash, meaning ‘eaten raw’. Cymling is also an American Indian word for a white, scalloped squash.
Because of their differing characteristics and uses, the squashes are best dealt with in several entries rather than one. These entries, which correspond more to popular names than to botanical classifications, are: SUMMER SQUASH, WINTER SQUASH, VEGETABLE MARROW, and ZUCCHINI (the last two of which are the same vegetable at different stages of growth). See also VEGETABLE SPAGHETTI.
Viburnum edule, a shrub of Canada and the northern USA, which bears juicy red ‘berries’ (not true berries, as each contains a large stone). The fruits bear some resemblance to those of the CRANBERRY TREE, V. trilobum, but are smaller and less acid. They are used raw or cooked, in jellies, etc. An alternative name is ‘mooseberry’.
a name applied by European colonists to various medicinal and edible roots which they found being used by the Indians in N. America. As Quinn (1938) observed, ‘There were countless “squawroots”, for the colonists bestowed this convenient name upon any root they saw a squaw digging.’
Some tubers of the western USA which were important to the Indians and bore this name were also called yampa, Indian potato, wild caraway, and ipo. They are of the genus Perideridia, and are related to the CARROT. Their foliage, like that of the carrot, is referred to as Queen Anne’s lace. S. and M. Thompson (1972) state that all have edible tubers, resembling carrots in texture and flavour, and that the most palatable is P. gairdneri; P. bolanderi has a spicier, radish-like taste. The whitish tubers measure up to 5 cm (2″) long and under 1 cm (0.3″) thick. They are best baked, and do not have to be peeled, as the skins are tender.
Yampa is now little known, but it was once an important food, as the naming of various western towns and valleys after it testifies.