Cynoscion regalis, otherwise known as weakfish (because of the tender mouth, easily torn by a hook), a fish of the western N. Atlantic. It belongs to the family Sciaenidae and is thus a close relation of the CROAKERS and DRUMS; the males of the species share with their brother drums the capability to make loud noises in the water.
An impressive fish, which may attain a length of 1 m (40″) and has a complex and attractive coloration. It ranges as far north as Massachusetts (in the summer only) and as far south as Florida, and counts as the most important sciaenid fish in N. American waters. Its quality is good, but that of its less common relation, C. nebulosus, the spotted squeteague, is considered to be even better. Both fish are liable to be called by such misnomers as ‘trout’, ‘sea trout’, etc. in the southern states.
One more relation, and a very good one, is Atractoscion nobilis, which belongs to California. It attended a different christening ceremony, since it came away with the name ‘white sea bass’ (see BASS).
one of the major food resources of the sea and probably the most important of those which are not yet fully exploited. Like other CEPHALOPODS, squid are eaten less than they might be because some people are repelled by their aspect and ignorant of how to prepare and cook them.
Squid occur in all oceans and seas, except the Black Sea. The world catch is huge. The Japanese market absorbs about half of it.
The architecture of squid is simple. The tubular body has two swimming fins projecting at the rear. At the front is the head, with two long tentacles and eight ‘arms’ projecting from it. Because squid swim near the surface and are vulnerable to attack from predators below, they are almost colourless.
There are numerous species, in a dozen families, two of which accommodate all the edible species. Members of the family Loliginidae are inshore creatures. Those of the family Ommastrephidae, on the other hand, are oceanic. They constitute about three-quarters of the world catch and comprise the so-called ‘flying squid’ (which do not really fly, but can propel themselves out of the water and glide for some distance).
The most important Loliginid squid are as follows:
• Loligo vulgaris is the principal squid of the Mediterranean and of the E. Atlantic as far north as the English Channel. Calamar in Spanish, calamaro in Italian—names which often figure in restaurant menus.
• L. forbesi belongs to the NE Atlantic and is the most common edible squid as far south as the British Isles.
• L. pealei, an American species common from Cape Cod to Venezuela, is known in the USA as long-finned or bone or winter squid. The market for it in the USA remains limited, although Americans of Mediterranean descent buy it and others are gradually taking to it.
Ommastrephid squid of commercial importance include:
• Todarodes pacificus is the most important. Its range is from W. Canada to Japan and China.
• Nototodarus sloani is a species whose range in the Indo-Pacific is largely in the southern hemisphere.
• Illex illecebrosus, short-finned squid in the USA, occurs in slightly different forms on both sides of the N. Atlantic.
• Todarodes sagittatus is a species of the eastern N. Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It is this to which the French name calmar correctly applies.
All squid are remarkable in one respect. The processes of natural selection have operated on them in a manner which suggests that fitness for being stuffed by cooks in kitchens was a criterion for their survival. It is so easy to empty out the innards from the body, leaving a convenient receptacle. The head (minus eyes) and tentacles and arms can be chopped to form part of the stuffing, the rest of which can be rice, vegetables, sometimes meat (chopped ham is good) or whatever. Alternatively, the body can be sliced across to form rings, which, with tentacles and arms, can be deep-fried to form an element in the traditional Italian Frittura mista.
Squid Dishes in Japan
The Japanese name for squid is ika; cuttlefish, regarded as being in the same category, are koika.
The most lavish way of eating ika is probably ika-somen, said to have been started by ika fishermen and now popular in Hokkaido, the northernmost of the main islands of Japan, where large quantities of squid are caught. For ika-somen the flesh of squid is cut into long thin strips resembling SOMEN (thin vermicelli-like noodles eaten cold in summer), to be served raw in a deep bowl, and eaten with grated ginger and soy sauce, as if they were noodles.
Squid may be eaten as SASHIMI, but the thicker flesh of cuttlefish is generally preferred for this. Squid is also eaten in the preparations known as yakimono, nimono, sunomono, and aemono (see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS), and as TEMPURA.
Dried squid is called surume and is eaten grilled, or cooked with other ingredients.
a tree-dwelling rodent of the family Sciuridae, to which the WOODCHUCK and PRAIRIE DOG also belong. Squirrels have a global distribution. All species have a long bushy tail and strong hind legs; and eat nuts and seeds.
Squirrels can be cooked like rabbit or even chicken. In the United States, where wild squirrels are classified as game, their flesh is esteemed. Ashbrook and Sater (1945) offer an extensive collection of recipes (including two versions of the famous Brunswick stew) and declare:
Squirrel meat if properly prepared is truly delicious. The flesh is light red or pink in color and has a pleasing flavor. The slight gamy taste present in most game meats is not so pronounced in the squirrel. The young ones can be fried or broiled the same as rabbits.
In Britain squirrels are not considered as game nor eaten to any significant extent.
once known as Ceylon, a very large island situated off the southern tip of INDIA and close to the tropics, exhibits in its food most of the features which its situation would lead one to expect: RICE the staple (with BREADFRUIT, JACKFRUIT, and YAM as secondary staples), frequent use of COCONUT in curry-type dishes, with some emphasis on seafood (and relatively little meat-eating, as the population is predominantly Buddhist.) There is discriminating use of many spices, use of jaggery (see PALM SUGAR) and toddy (see COCONUT), skill in making Indian-type breads and S. Indian specialities such as IDLI and DOSA (here thosai), heavy consumption of mango, banana, plantain, etc. But there are interesting differences and some surprises:
• Maldive fish, dried and grated
TUNA fish from the
MALDIVES, is used freely as an ingredient and a sort of condiment.
• Sri Lanka has its own versions of
CURRY POWDER, often comprising cumin, black cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, coriander, and fenugreek.
• The
HOPPER (a sort of pancake made out of leavened rice batter, which also comes in the noodle-like string hopper version) is so prominent (along with idli and dosa) as to constitute a distinctive feature of the cuisine.
• An item which is used extensively for weddings and festivals is kiri bath, which is rice cooked in coconut milk to form a sticky cake. It is served with curries, sambals or jaggery. Pittu is a kind of compressed steamed cake of rice or wheat flour and freshly grated coconut, eaten with coconut milk and other accompaniments as for kiri bath.
• The wide range of acidulating agents—the various fruits and acids used in the preparation of curries— includes
GORAKA, mango, billing (see
BELIMBING ASAM), besides limes, tomatoes, and vinegar.
• Mallums are distinctive vegetable dishes thus described by
Chandra Dissanayake (
1976): ‘a preparation in which a fruit, edible root, leaf, vegetable or coconut may be finely shredded or grated and cooked until done with coconut.’
• The Sri Lankan range of
CHUTNEYS and relishes shows some influence from further east, for example the use of
blachan (a shrimp paste; see
BLACANG) and
sambol (see
SAMBAL).
At first sight, it might seem that there is little sign in the kitchens of Sri Lanka of the period when the island was a Dutch possession, or of Portuguese or British influences. There is, however, an interesting survival, which might be called the ‘Burgher’ culture, Burghers being the descendants of intermarriages between colonists and local women. In this culture there are features (dishes and ways of serving meals) which can be traced back to European influences from the past. It could be said, also, that the British presence is mainly commemorated by the tea plantations which are so important for the economy, and that the Dutch were partly responsible for the great sophistication in the use of spices (besides leaving behind them a few Dutch terms such as frikkadel—surviving as fricadell).
by which are meant meals consumed or apparently consumed on the stage in the course of a dramatic performance, have received little attention in the literature, but have a locus classicus in the form of an essay by Osbert Sitwell (1963).
This makes the point that actors have sometimes counted upon receiving actual nourishment from stage meals. Sitwell cites some legal proceeding in France in the summer of 1841, when an actor called M. Clary was accused in court by his manager of impossible obstinacy and non-cooperation. His defence was that when he was playing the part of a prince or a marquis or other person of distinction on the stage he expected treatment in the matter of food and drink conformable to his temporary rank and the spirit of the part he was playing. Yet the manager starved the actors. They had to drink seltzer water instead of champagne and had even been given a pasteboard turkey which they were expected to pretend to consume.
It was this sort of situation which caused Sitwell to entitle his essay ‘The Banquets of Tantalus’. He remarks that ‘these cruel feasts where bread turns inevitably to a stone and every—or almost every—chicken to a property fowl could, no doubt, assume a dream-like quality of horror to those compelled every night to partake of them’.
Sitwell also points to the awkwardness caused by the fact that even make-believe food is apt to start saliva flowing and create appetites which might cause actors to fluff their lines. However, he does refer to some stage meals which went well. Sir Herbert Tree, playing the role of a penniless poet at the French court, had a meal suddenly bestowed on him, and had to react as a starving poet would have done. He believed in realism, so it was necessary for him to tackle a whole chicken, with his hands. Potential difficulties were solved when he caused
to be constructed for himself a fine, plump, hollow pullet out of papier mâché, the breast being composed of two lids. He then filled it every night with real slices of excellent cold chicken and was thus able, when the moment came, to fling himself on the bird, tackle it with his fingers and eat it with a proper relish and abandon in front of an enthusiastic audience. In addition, he concluded this banquet with a whole bunch of genuine grapes.
Tree thus achieved realism without a degree of mess which would have been awkward on a London stage, although perhaps acceptable in a Sicilian setting. Sitwell interposes a recollection from 1909 of one of the famous Grasso family of actors playing in a disused church, under a shadowy roof and in the midst of plaster angels, his role being that of a worker in the sulphur mines, a part to which he added
a touch of sullen melancholy, alternating with a farouche and flaring gaiety, by eating macaroni, picking it out of an enormous bowl with his fingers, which he made to seem thick and swollen, and cramming the strands clumsily into his mouth. He would sit down, get up, walk about, still munching, still talking. Every word was audible.
However, apart from such exceptional feats, it is probably true that there is only one kind of stage meal which keeps clear of the problems described above, namely tea. The practical difficulties here are minuscule. A real tea can be served without great difficulty. Little sandwiches and cakes can be passed, even eaten, without disturbing the actors’ lines. Indeed—as Sitwell suggests—the main influence of food on late 19th- and 20th-century English drama may be apparent in the tendency for playwrights, when faced by the need to make a social encounter on stage fully plausible by introducing the element of food which would be there in real life, to opt for tea.
are terms which carry various possible meanings, depending on the cultural and geographic contexts.
At the simplest level, in Britain in the 21st century, staples are what a family thinks necessary to have in their store cupboards; and these could range in importance from really basic items such as flour, sugar, and salt to less essential desirables such as HP Sauce or tomato ketchup.
Another meaning, which comes into play in discussions of the diet of given groups (local, ethnic, regional, national), is ‘the fundamental items of the diet’, which in one instance might be rice and fish; in another plantains, peanut oil, and coconut; and in yet another bread, root vegetables, and meat.
Further nuances emerge if one considers equivalent terms in other languages. Among those which Botsford (1990) cited in a paper delivered to an international symposium on ‘Staple Foods’ were:
• French, un aliment de base, a basic food;
• German, Hauptnährungsmittel, indicating ‘the most important’ item in a diet;
• Italian, principali generi di consumo, the principal articles of consumption;
• Czech, hlavni plodiny, main fruits (Slavic languages tie the concept of a staple to the idea of fruitfulness).
Returning to the English word ‘staple’, Botsford explained that it reached English from the Old and Middle French estaple, which came from the Low German Stapel, meaning a prop or support. From this meaning it came to indicate a heap or a stand for laying things on; then heaped wares or a storehouse; and then a market or entrepôt. A 17th-century dictionary stated clearly that: ‘Staple signifieth this or that towne or citie, w[h]ither the Merchants of England, by common order or commandment, did carrie their woolles, wool-fals, cloathes, leade and tinne.’ This meaning survived in the names of some English market towns such as Barnstaple and Whitstable.
From market the further meaning of goods (foods) in a market or in storage emerged naturally enough.
a spice consisting of the small, star-shaped, dried fruits of Illicium verum, a slender evergreen tree of the family Illicaceae related to Magnoliacea. This is not known in the wild state, but is assumed to be indigenous to China. It is not a relation of ANISE, but shares with it the same essential oil, anethole, which is used for flavouring some drinks and confectionery; star anise is the principal commercial source of anethole.
The appearance of the fruit is remarkable. Eight (rarely, 9 or 10) carpels attached to a central column produce the starlike shape. These carpels, which can be over 15 mm (0.25″) long and are often irregularly developed, are dark reddish-brown in colour; each normally contains one hard light brown seed.
Cultivation, which is not easy, is almost entirely confined to S. China and parts of SE Asia.
Star anise is one of the ingredients of (Chinese) FIVE SPICE. Jill Norman (1990) observes that it occurs in some western recipes for syrups and jams in the 17th century; and that some western chefs now use it in, for example, fish stews. In China it has been associated with pork and poultry.
Chrysophyllum cainito, a tropical fruit popular in the W. Indies and C. America. It was being cultivated long before the arrival of Europeans, and has always been prized for its ornamental value as well as for its fruits. The author Charles Kingsley once described it as being ‘like an evergreen peach, shedding from the under-side of every leaf a golden light’.
The tree is cultivated in tropical America as far south as Peru and north to Florida, but attempts to introduce it into Asia have had disappointing results, although it is appreciated, and fairly common, in the Philippines.
The fruit is the size of a small apple, white (cainito blanco) or purple (cainito morado), with a soft pulp containing a central ‘star’ of flat, brown seeds set in translucent jelly. The flavour is sweet. To be good, the fruit must be ripened on the tree. It is usually eaten fresh, but can be made into preserves, and is also used in a drink called ‘matrimony’, the pulp being mixed with bitter orange juice, in Jamaica.
Several other Chrysophyllum species, in Africa and Asia as well as America and the Caribbean region, have edible fruits.
a constituent of plants, is the most important form of CARBOHYDRATE in our food, and supplies most of the energy in the diet of most peoples. Pure starch, when cooked, is easily and almost completely digestible, turning to SUGAR. Actual plant starches contain a certain amount of CELLULOSE, another CARBOHYDRATE which is not digested by humans but supplies essential dietary fibre.
In plants starch acts as a food reserve. It is stored in various places: seeds, as in cereals; tubers, as in potatoes and yams; or stems, as in sago.
Even those vegetable foods which are rich in protein may contain large amounts of starch. Thus, if the water present is ignored, about 70% of wheat and 80% of rice is starch. Very starchy foods such as cassava contain virtually nothing but carbohydrates and water.
From the cook’s point of view starch is important both as a constituent of starchy vegetables and flours, and as a relatively pure, refined product in powder form which is used as a thickener for liquids and as a stabilizer and emulsifier for various mixtures. Powdered starch is made by washing other substances out of various flours (wheat, maize, rice, sorghum), roots (tapioca, arrowroot, potato), and fruits (chestnut, banana). The same general chemical and physical considerations apply to starch in any form.
STRUCTURE AND BREAKDOWN OF STARCH
In chemical terms starch is a polysaccharide, i.e. it has large molecules composed of long chains of smaller sugar molecules joined end to end. About three-quarters of the total, depending on the source of the starch, is in the form of amylopectin; this consists of short, interconnected chains making up a many-branched mass comprising thousands of sugar units. The rest is amylose, consisting of single chains from 70 to 350 units long. The length of the chains, and the proportion of amylose present, both affect the performance of the starch.
Raw starch is more or less insoluble in water because the granules are tightly packed together inside the shielding cell walls. Even when a plant is ground into a powdered starch, breaking up the cells, the dense, compact surface of the granules themselves resists the penetration of water. For the same reason raw starch is highly indigestible.
Heating dry starch breaks up its structure, producing fragmented molecules called pyrodextrins (Greek pyr, meaning ‘fire’, and dextrin, the general term for what is produced when starch is broken down). Some pyrodextrins have brown colours and pleasant flavours; sweetness also comes from individual sugar molecules released by the disintegration of the starch. Pyrodextrins account for some of the colour and flavour in bread crust and toast. (They are also produced in starched clothing when it is ironed. Dextrin is slightly sticky, so the fabric stiffens with too much heat, and the brown colour of scorching appears.)
Dextrin and sugar are also produced by the action of ENZYMES on starch. This occurs in grain when it is malted, and in flour when it is made into bread. It also happens when starch is digested. Digestive enzymes break off more and more of the nutritious sugar until the layout of the molecule prevents them from going further, leaving an undigested ‘limit dextrin’.
When starch is heated in water something quite different happens. Heat loosens the structure of the granules and they become porous, absorbing a very large amount of water. Swelling starts at about 60 °C (140 °F), and by the time the mixture has reached 85 °C (185 °F) the granules are up to five times their original size. These figures vary according to the source of the starch and other substances present. Starches from roots, such as potato and arrowroot, generally need less heating to start the process than do starches from cereals, including cornflour and sorghum starch. There are also differences in whole vegetables. Varieties of potato which are mealy when cooked have larger starch granules and a higher starch content than those which become waxy.
EFFECT OF COOKING
Cooking affects starch because in dry starch the molecular chains are folded tightly together. When water penetrates the starch the chains unfold and disperse, causing expansion of the granules. The molecules, forced into rapid movement by the hot liquid, collide and make the mixture viscous. This is noticeable when a white sauce thickens. There has to be enough starch in the mixture to bring the molecules close enough together for thickening to take place. Stirring is necessary to prevent a sauce from sticking, which is what happens when it dries and burns on the bottom of the pan. But excessive stirring, especially after a sauce has thickened, tears the molecular chains away from each other and reduces viscosity. Certain starches are particularly badly affected by stirring, for example tapioca.
If the mixture is allowed to cool, the movement of the molecules slackens. When the straight amylose molecules collide with each other they will now lock together firmly. Eventually they may connect into a rigid network throughout the liquid, and the starch paste sets into a gel. The effect is termed ‘gelatinization’, but has nothing to do with gelatin, which gels similarly but is a protein.
Lumps in a starch paste are caused by clumps of granules gelatinizing on their outsides and becoming impervious. A common cause is too rapid heating. The granules should be well separated by liquid, sugar, or fat before their temperature reaches 60 °C (140 °F).
Not all types of starch set to a gel. Potato starch has very long amylose chains in its large granules, and these do not readily lock. It makes a very viscous starch paste which remains a paste when cool. Since the gelatinization of starch is an important factor in the baking of bread and cakes (the starch swells and gels between the gluten strands and helps to support the structure), potato starch is not a good ingredient for breads and cakes, although some, such as certain brands of MATZO, are successfully made with a proportion of potato starch.
Other types of starch perform according to the length of their amylose chains and the relative amounts of each of the two types of molecule; the branched, amylopectin molecules have little tendency to lock together. Cornflour has an unusually high viscosity and gelling capacity. Sorghum, a common commercial starch, also performs well. Wheat starch is about average. Rice starch produces a rather frail gel. All these cereal gels are opaque. Root starches do not gel, and generally the cold paste remains comparatively clear.
If a setting paste is stirred while it cools, it may fail to gel. In the food industry, specially prepared ‘thin boiling’ starches are often used. These do not thicken when hot and remain easy to stir, but still set to a gel when cool.
Knowledge of the behaviour of different types of starch allows the cook to choose the right one for any desired result. Wheat flour used as a starch thickener needs relatively long cooking to remove its raw taste; and even after cooking it has a noticeable flavour. Thus it is unsuitable for dishes where the other ingredients would suffer from long cooking or have a delicate flavour. CORNFLOUR is more suitable in both respects, but if even more delicacy is needed the choice should fall on ARROWROOT, which has the shortest cooking time and the mildest flavour of all. It thickens liquids without making them opaque.
For thickening soups and sauces in European recipes where delicacy of flavour is important, RICE starch (‘ground rice’ in Britain, crème de riz in France) is a good choice. If short cooking time is the main concern, POTATO starch (fécule in French recipes) is preferable.
(Of course, the various forms of starch are not the only thickeners available for use in the western world; egg yolk and cream are two familiar examples of other agents which can be used.)
In Chinese and other oriental cooking the usual requirement is for a translucent soup or sauce with a rather glutinous texture. The Chinese themselves tend to use tapioca when glutinousness is required, and arrowroot or sometimes cornflour when it is not.
Recipes calling for CASSAVA starch (manioc) cause no problem, since ordinary TAPIOCA is simply a refined form of this. SAGO is also widely available. BANANA starches such as pisang starch (a Malay name) and PLANTAIN meal are less common; but, as banana starch is very light and delicate, arrowroot is a suitable substitute.
a traditional British PIE made with small, oily fish, whose heads are left poking up round the edge of the pie. Pilchards (see SARDINE) were the species originally used by the Cornish and Devon fisherfolk who invented the pie, but it was later made elsewhere with herring.
The standard explanation of this odd pie is that the heads of pilchards are uneatable, but full of rich oil which it would be a shame to waste. If the fish are arranged with their heads resting on the rim of a circular pie dish and projecting out of the crust (their tails clustered at the centre), the slope causes the oil to run down into the body of the fish; and when the pie is cut up the now useless heads can be discarded. However, experiments have shown that the amount of oil thus ‘saved’ is close to zero, which suggests that the only valid rationale for the pie is an aesthetic one.
The pie had a thin bottom crust and a thicker top one, both of shortcrust pastry. The fish were gutted and stuffed with a spoonful of herbs, or mustard, apple, or SAMPHIRE.
The name ‘stargazey’ describes the star-shaped ring of fish heads peering out of the circumference of the pie, possibly gazing at the stars with the uppermost eye. In some versions the heads were grouped at the centre, dislocated to gaze upwards in a cluster, and the tails were set around the edge. As Dorothy HARTLEY (1954) explains (with illustrations), the stargazey idea was also adapted into a straight form with the fish sandwiched between two strips of pastry. This could be sold by the yard, or divided up into individual fish pasties, from market stalls.
Sturnus vulgaris, and numerous relations in Europe, Asia, and N. America, a small and somewhat impudent bird which is occasionally eaten. In the past, starlings have been available in London food shops, but the almost complete absence of recipes for them in cookery books suggests that they have never really been regarded as delicacies or eaten on a large scale.
a piece of meat (beef, unless otherwise indicated) or fish cut to be a convenient portion, usually a small slice about 2 cm (0.75″) thick, for grilling (US broiling), frying, or cooking over charcoal.
The word itself comes from an Old Norse word steikjo which meant to roast on a spit, a method of cookery which was always popular in England. In the 15th century, beef steak ‘griddled up brown’ was sprinkled with cinnamon and served with sharp sauce. An alternative name for grilled steak, ‘carbonado’ (see CARBONADE, CARBONADO), enjoyed a vogue in the 16th century, but lost ground thereafter.
Cuts of steak vary from country to country, according to the various ways of jointing BEEF. In all cases, however, meat from the area where the ribs join the backbone, between the shoulders and the hip of the animal, is most important.
In Britain steaks are named according to the basic joints from which they are cut. These are the fillet (also known as tenderloin, or undercut), a long muscle located underneath the bones of the sirloin. This provides the leanest and tenderest meat. The sirloin itself, removed from the bone and cut into slices, also becomes steaks, less tender than fillet, but with more flavour. Finally, the rump, or aitch bone, a big piece of very lean meat, is usually sliced to give large steaks which have good flavour but are less tender than sirloin.
Steak terminology in the USA, where there has been a strong tradition of eating large steaks (a practice which carried associations of virility), varies to some extent from region to region and anyone looking for detailed information will do best to consult American sources.
In France, two cuts are particularly important. First, the fillet is divided to give, from the thick end, CHATEAUBRIAND (a large cut used for several people); tournedos, small compact round steaks cut from the centre or ‘eye’ of the fillet; and, from closer to the narrow end, filet mignon. The other cut used for steaks is the entrecôte (literally, ‘between the ribs’). They are cut from just behind the shoulder. The French system of dissecting out muscles from a carcass yields other pieces of lean tender meat suitable for steaks. The contrefilet or faux filet, the lean eye of meat which runs along the top of the sirloin, is used in Britain and the USA as well.
Steak cookery, at its simplest, involves no more than grilling them under a fierce heat to a specified degree of ‘doneness’. The terms used to indicate this are: blue (bleu), in which the outside of the meat is seared and brown but the inside remains red; rare, in which the inside of the meat has heated up, but the fibres are soft and still very pink; medium (à point), where much of the pinkness has disappeared, and the fibres have started to congeal; or well done (bien cuit), at which stage the inside of the meat is uniformly brown-grey and has lost much of its juiciness.
In Britain, steaks are usually plainly grilled or fried. Less tender cuts of steak are braised with root vegetables, or made into stews, pies, or STEAK AND KIDNEY PUDDING OR PIE.
In N. America grilling, especially over charcoal, is the favoured method, but others are popular.
• A ‘planked steak’ is one which has been placed in a depression in a specially prepared wooden board, with butter or dripping and herbs, and put in a very hot oven.
• ‘Swiss steak’ is round (rump) steak, with flour and seasoning rubbed into it, fried with onions, and cooked by braising.
• A carpetbag steak (also popular in Australia) is a boneless steak stuffed with fresh raw oysters (possibly a development of old English dishes of steak and oyster sauce, or a pie).
In French cookery, steak-frites (steak and chips) is a standard dish, but higher up the gastronomic scale steaks are used as vehicles for various fancy sauces and garnishes. Some ways of serving tournedos are:
• chasseur, with shallots, mushrooms, and white wine;
Entrecôte steaks also have their classic garnishes such as béarnaise sauce, and many other items (e.g. à la bordelaise: see À LA).
Steak au poivre is a steak coated with crushed peppercorns and fried, or one served with a sauce containing peppercorns.
In Tuscany, large tender steaks from the local Chianina cattle are made into Bistecca alla fiorentina, charcoal grilled with olive oil, and served with lemon wedges.
In Japan, a country which had little tradition of meat-eating until the 19th century, there is now a well-developed taste for high-quality steaks and a repertoire of Japanese methods for cooking and serving them.
When steak is minced and eaten raw, with various accompaniments, it is steak TARTARE. In Italy this has a parallel in carpaccio. In Belgium a similar dish is known as filet américain.
which counts as a British national dish, does not have a long history.
Beefsteak puddings (but without kidney) were known in the 18th century, if not before; Hannah GLASSE (1747) gives a recipe, making clear that this was a SUET PUDDING. A hundred years later, Eliza ACTON (1845) gave a recipe for ‘Ruth Pinch’s Beefsteak Pudding’, named for a character in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and rather more extravagant than what she called ‘Small Beef-Steak Pudding’. Neither had kidney. Shortly afterwards, however, Mrs BEETON (1861) did give a recipe for steak and kidney pudding, and this has kept a foothold in the British repertoire ever since. It was, however, overtaken in popularity by steak and kidney pie, which was easier to make. The filling for the pie is cooked separately, so that one can tell when the meat is tender, impossible in a sealed pudding. Only then is the meat put into a pie dish and the crust set over it. Then the pie is briefly baked to brown the PASTRY.
For both pudding and pie, the filling includes onion, and often mushrooms or oysters. Dorothy HARTLEY (1954) offers compelling advice on the choice and use of mushrooms and some words of warning about oysters (which may become too hard— indeed she suggests that it might be better to use cockles and rather implies that omitting any such molluscs would perhaps be better still). Besides this advice she provides one of her characteristic sets of drawings to show exactly how the pudding version would be organized.
The crust of the pie is usually made from flaky pastry, though other kinds are quite common. For a large pie, the top crust is attached to a band of pastry stuck around the inner rim of the dish, to keep the crust from shrinking off the rim.
Cockneys call steak and kidney pudding ‘Kate and Sydney Pud’.
is what water turns into at a temperature of 100 °C (212 °F), as explained under BOIL, and to steam foods is to cook them in this steam at that temperature in (necessarily) a lidded recipient.
This method of cooking has certain advantages. The food will not be bumped about by the agitation of boiling, or even simmering, water; and loss of water-soluble vitamins is less than when the food is immersed in boiling water. For this last reason, steaming vegetables is recommended. However, there are many other uses for the technique, for example steaming COUSCOUS in the upper part of a couscous steamer, while other ingredients (meat, vegetables) which will go into the finished dish are boiled in the lower part. Also, several dishes can be steamed at once, stacked in tiers above a pan of boiling water, a technique which has been exploited by the Chinese, of whose cookery steaming is a fundamental feature.
Steaming usually involves direct contact between the steam and the food; but the steam can be used indirectly, to heat the outside of a sealed vessel, which then conducts heat through its walls to cook food inside, as when English steamed PUDDINGS are cooked.
Cooking food en papillote (e.g. tightly enclosed in a wrapping of foil in the oven) is also a form of steaming; the moisture in the food is turned into steam as the food heats, and cannot escape through the wrapping. A similar technique comes into play, on a larger scale, in the EARTH OVENS of the PACIFIC ISLANDS and the slightly different ones used by the Maori in NEW ZEALAND, and in the N. American CLAMBAKE.
or stepnoj is a cheese first made in Russia by German immigrants, which is now manufactured also in Denmark, Germany, and Austria. It resembles a whole-milk TILSITER but is made at a slightly lower temperature, so that it is softer and milder. It is coloured yellow with a pigment such as ANNATTO. Unlike Tilsiter, Steppe is never given additional flavourings such as CARAWAY.
as a verb, to SIMMER in a closed vessel; as a noun, the resulting dish.
The cuisines of most countries include some well-known stews, e.g. IRISH STEW and the Spanish COCIDO, since these dishes have many practical advantages. Meat (of fish or poultry or game) can be combined in one dish (see ONE-POT COOKERY) with vegetables; so there is no wastage of fuel and less WASHING UP. The mixture of ingredients in a thick and opaque sauce casts a veil of uncertainty over the proportions of expensive ingredients to cheap ones. The slow steady cooking enables the cook to be away from the kitchen before a meal.
an English cheese of international fame and the only British cheese to have legal protection, is officially described as follows:
Stilton is a blue or white cheese made from full-cream milk with no applied pressure, forming its own crust or coat and made in cylindrical form, the milk coming from English dairy herds in the district of Melton Mowbray and surrounding areas falling within the counties of Leicestershire (now including Rutland), Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
The Bell Inn, a coaching-house inn on the Great North Road, in the village of Stilton, seems to have become in the first quarter of the 18th century the main outlet for what was known locally as Quenby cheese. Quenby was 30 miles away, but as travellers became accustomed to buying the cheese at the Bell Inn it took on the name of Stilton. So much seems clear, but it is much more difficult to unravel the actual origin of the cheese. Rance (1982) assembled the evidence and described the possibilities in a masterly way. He also provides the best account of the subsequent history of Stilton, of its manufacture, and of its characteristics.
Among the writers who took notice of Stilton at an early stage was Daniel Defoe, who passed through Stilton in 1722 in the course of his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–7), and Richard Bradley (see ENGLISH COOKERY BOOKS OF THE 18TH CENTURY), who in the early 1720s was the first to publish a full recipe (which he claimed to have received from the Bell Inn) for making the cheese. It is interesting that he included mace in the recipe, and that the cheese continued to engage his attention, for in a later book (1729) he made some additions to the recipe.
Few farmhouses maintained the tradition of making Stilton in the rest of the 18th century and the 19th century, and there have not been many producers in the 20th century, although in the year 1980 total production amounted to 8,000 tons, which is a lot.
One occasionally reads about the practice of pouring some port wine into a Stilton through an aperture at the top. This is a foolish idea (which may have had its origin in a misplaced adaptation of an old custom—legitimate but no longer relevant—of letting wine drip on to the outside of the cheeses to assist crust formation). Mrs Beeton (1861) mentioned it, adding that sherry, Madeira, or old ale could also be used, but then seemed to drop the idea, asserting that ‘that cheese is the finest which is ripened without any artificial aid’.
The use of a traditional silver scoop for lifting out servings of the cheese can be followed in restaurants or institutions where consumption is rapid. In domestic situations it is better to cut it across, removing a whole round for immediate consumption and then fitting the upper part back on to the lower part to ensure that what is left will keep well and not dry out.
White Stilton is an unblued cheese, with pleasant characteristics.
the common name for FUNGI of the order Phallales. These are fungi whose reproduction is ensured by animals eating and dispersing their spores. The service is performed for stinkhorns by flies, which are attracted by the smell of rotting carrion which they emit and which accounts for ‘stink’ in their name. The scientific name Phallales was bestowed because of the strikingly phallic shape of these fungi. One of the most common, and one which shows this resemblance most obviously, is called Phallus impudicus (shameless phallus).
There seems to be no authoritative survey of the edibility of stinkhorns, nor any reason to suppose that many of them can be eaten by humans with pleasure and safety (except, perhaps, in the ‘egg’ stage, before they have burst out and the evil-smelling slime has formed). However, one at least, Dictyophora sp, is marketed in dried form in China and Hong Kong. The Chinese name for it means ‘bamboo fungus’.
Arora (1979), with characteristic thoroughness, devotes several pages to these fungi. From McIlvaine (1902), whom he affectionately terms the ‘mycophilic madman’ and plenipotentiary of ‘toadstool-testers’, he gleans the information that in the ‘egg’ stage, when they are elastic, like bubbles of some thick substance, ‘they demand to be eaten … Cut in slices and fried or stewed, they make a most tender, agreeable food.’ He also quotes the following from Gwen Raverat’s Victorian reminiscences, about how ‘Aunt Etty’ (who was related to Charles Darwin) would go hunting for stinkhorns and why:
armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and then poke his putrid carcass into her basket. At the end of the day’s sport, the catch was brought back and burned in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked, because of the morals of the maids.
an almost self-explanatory verb which came into general use in English only in the second half of the 20th century, in line with a growing interest in oriental cookery techniques. To stir-fry is not much different from the French sauter (see SAUTÉ) but it is done in a WOK, not a sauté pan, and using a frying medium such as peanut oil, which is characteristic of oriental cookery, rather than butter or olive oil. Also, it lays greater emphasis on speed, which depends on having the ingredients cut up into small pieces or strips ahead of time.
The advantages of stir-frying, especially for a mixture including lots of vegetables, lie in this speed and the consequent minimizing of the loss of vitamins, colour, etc. Typical stir-fry dishes use just a small amount of meat or seafood with relatively large quantities of vegetable and noodles.
Theodora FitzGibbon (1976) gives a characteristically clear account of stock: ‘The word covers many culinary preparations, but generally speaking a stock is the liquid extracted from fish, meat, poultry or vegetables by slow cooking with water, or wine and water.’ In classic French cookery, stock is one of the fonds de cuisine, an essential foundation. Among the others are brine (see SALTING), MARINADE, MIREPOIX, FUMET, and COURT BOUILLON. The French well describes its importance to the whole culinary superstructure of today. With meat stocks, there are the white and the brown. The second has had its ingredients browned in fat before the addition of water. Beyond Europe, Japanese cookery also depends on stocks: see DASHI. Modern stocks are often lighter than they were, more quickly cooked. Indeed some chefs prefer water as a foundation to many sauces. The invention of the bottled essence or the stock cube transformed the relationship of many domestic cooks to the stockpot. See also GLACE (DE VIANDE); GRAVY.
the name for COD and related fish which have been simply dried (as opposed to being salted and dried) until their moisture content has been reduced to around 15%, when they are stiff as a board and will keep well. Some say that ‘stockfish’ means ‘stick-like fish’—though others say that the name was given because it is necessary to beat the product with a stick to help soften it up, and yet others think that the name refers to the poles or sticks on which the fish were hung to dry.
Stockfish was an important article of commerce in Europe in the 10th century and early medieval times. Later, when the salting of cod on a large scale became feasible (see SALT COD), that method became more popular, but stockfish has continued to be preferred in parts of Africa and of Italy. Some names for it in other languages are: stockfisch (French), Stockfisch (German), stoccafísso (Italian), and stokkfisk or tørrfisk (Norwegian).
Stockfish, it need hardly be said, has to be soaked to prepare it for cooking.
a rich fruit bread/cake from C. Germany, especially the city of Dresden. According to Ayto (1993) the name is derived from an Old High German word, stollo, meaning a support or post. The characteristic shape of Stollen—oblong, tapered at each end with a ridge down the centre—is said to represent the Christ Child in swaddling clothes, whence the name Christstollen sometimes given to it.
The Dresden Stollen, now known internationally as a Christmas speciality, is made from a rich, sweet yeast dough, mixed with milk, eggs, sugar, and butter, sometimes flavoured with lemon. Raisins, sultanas, currants, rum or brandy, candied peel, and almonds are worked into the dough. After baking, the Stollen is painted with melted butter and dusted with sugar. It may then be further decorated with candied fruits. There is some affinity between the Stollen and Scottish BLACK BUN.
Stollen may include a filling such as MARZIPAN.
the organ or organs in which an animal’s digestion of food begins. Ruminants (notably cows, sheep) have several. For the best-known uses of their stomachs as human food, see HAGGIS and TRIPE.
A pig’s stomach, also known as hog’s maw, is convenient for stuffing and was used thus in classical Rome. Such dishes are still to be found in various parts of the world, with other parts of the pig often providing elements for the stuffing. A speciality of the Palatinate in Germany is stuffed pig’s stomach (Saumagen). Some say it is even better the second day when fried in slices. The Chinese also use pig’s stomach as meat, in stir-fries, and soups.
Menippe mercenaria, a brownish-red crab, mottled with grey, whose range extends from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Texas to the Carolinas, but which is especially associated with Florida. In Mexico it is called el moro. It may measure 12 cm (5″) across and has relatively large claws, one bigger than the other, which are tipped with black. It lives in burrows in shallow water. Although the backfin meat of this crab is edible, the accepted view is that everything is ‘waste’ except for the claw meat; and it is only the claws which are sold. Fishermen remove the larger claw and toss the crab back into the water, since it will survive this amputation and grow a new claw within eighteen months. The season runs from October to May, but since the meat’s flavour seems almost improved by freezing (it loses thereby the taste of iodine), trade in claws is year-round.
This crab is pre-eminently associated with Florida, doubtless because it was hardly eaten until the 1920s when the proprietor of a Miami Beach restaurant, now Joe’s Stone Crab, had pointed out to him its merits (and local ubiquity) by a visiting biologist from Harvard.
the general name for the numerous plants of the genus Sedum, common in temperate and northern regions of Europe and Asia. They have hot, bitter leaves. The milder kinds are eaten as vegetables; the medium ones used as condiments; and the strongest are inedible but have been used as emetics.
The common English names of the stonecrops are interesting but confusing. Grigson (1955) lists them in an illuminating way and explains how the French name trique-madame turned into the English ‘prick-madam’ and was used in the form ‘trip-madame’ by John Evelyn in a list which he drew up between 1688 and 1706 of plants for the kitchen garden. He was referring to S. reflexum (syn. S. rupestre), the yellow stonecrop, which in some places shares the name ‘creeping Jenny’ with S. acre, more commonly known as wall-pepper or golden stonecrop. S. acre has the distinction of possessing the longest vernacular name in the English language: ‘welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk’. However, Sempervivum tectorum, the so-called houseleek or sengreen, is a close runner-up with the name ‘welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-late’.
Stonecrops are now largely forgotten as a vegetable, although roseroot, Rhodiola rosea, a northern species, has continued to be a salad vegetable of value in the regions where it grows.
Orpine is also called ‘livelong’ because of its long lasting flowers. In N. America the names ‘stonecrop’ and ‘live-forever’ are applied to various species including S. triphyllum, on which Fernald and Kinsey (1943) comment:
Live-forever or Frog-plant is familiar to most children in regions where it occurs on account of the readily loosened epidermis of the leaf, loosened by holding the leaf between the tongue and the roof of the mouth; after which, by blowing into the opening, the loosened epidermis may be distended like a frog’s throat. It is, therefore, surprising how few people are familiar with the delicious quality of the tender, young leaves and stems as a salad. If the plant is to be used as salad, it should be gathered very young, but as a potherb (of indifferent quality) it may be used until July. The rounded or finger-like tuberous roots are crisp and succulent and after some days pickling in a salted vinegar, best put on the tubers while boiling hot, they form a tasty relish. After midsummer the tubers become stringy and tough, but again in late autumn crisp tubers may be found. They often occur in enormous masses and then furnish an abundant and easily obtained food.
Polyporus tuberaster, an especially interesting species among the POLYPORES, is the pietra fungaia of (mainly) the central and southern parts of Italy. It occurs elsewhere in Europe but has been less noticed in other countries. Ramsbottom (1932) elucidated the mystery of its nature thus:
Since the earliest times there are references to a stone which, on being watered, gives rise to a mushroom. There are hints of it in many writers, and it is said to be mentioned by Strabo in 50 BC. It appears to have had some connection with the mysteries of the Lynx, and was regarded as the coagulated urine of wolves to be found on the summits of high mountains. The idea was seriously argued in the writings of the Renaissance period.
The stone, as a matter of fact, is a mixture of rock, earth, and pebbles bound together by the mycelium of the fungus Polyporus tuberaster… The stone may be of different sizes and composition, occasionally weighing as much as fifty pounds.
The same author explains that the stone is, technically, a pseudo-sclerotium. A true sclerotium is a compact mass of fungus mycelium. This may be edible. If, however, the sclerotium is interspersed with earth etc. (in this instance, usually earth and pebbles of tufa), it falls into the pseudo category and it is only the fruit-bodies, i.e. the mushrooms which sprout up from the structure, which are potentially edible.
The stone mushrooms were at one time prized delicacies for the tables of popes, kings, and dukes. They seem to have been found mainly in the vicinity of Naples, and were remarked upon by numerous writers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Micheli (1729) was the first scientist to describe the phenomenon correctly. It has become rare in modern times, and was already uncommon at the beginning of the 18th century, when Samuel Pepys tried in vain to obtain a specimen from Naples. Rymsdyk (1791) later described one at the British Museum as ‘a kind of Fossil, extremely curious, for laying it in the earth, and a little earth on the top, then wetting it with water, mushrooms will shoot up in a short time’. (It is not clear whether the British Museum had allowed him to perform the experiment.)
It has now become possible to create the ‘stones’ artificially, to procure a continuous supply of mushrooms.
any of a number of species of bird in the family Ciconiidae, which is represented in most parts of the world: in Europe by C. ciconia, the white stork, and C. nigra, the black stork. The long legs of storks are famous, as are their nesting habits.
Storks are protected species, at least in those parts of Europe where they nest (NW France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium). They were, however, sometimes eaten in medieval times, although they do not appear regularly on the menus for banquets, as do the CRANE, HERON, PEACOCK, and SWAN.
(known in full as stoved tatties), a Scottish dish of potatoes, onions, etc., often with mutton, stewed with very little added liquid.
Stovies make a delicious dish, but their main interest lies perhaps in the etymology of the term. Given the large number of French culinary terms which have been in use in Scotland for centuries, it is tempting to derive stovie from étuvé, a French word with just about the same meaning, i.e. something cooked in a closed recipient with very little liquid; cf. BRAISE. This was the view taken by Marian McNeill (1929). However, Catherine Brown (1985) prefers the theory that the use of the English word ‘stove’ as a verb meaning to stew has a history quite independent of the French term. She points out that Gervase Markham (1631) referred to ‘letting a bird stove and sweate till evening’, and suggests that the particular value of the verb to stove lay in its having a meaning between sweating and stewing ‘since often, as in stovies, very little water is used’. She also remarks, as is generally accepted, that this use of the word ‘stove’ is particularly Scottish; but adds that it is not exclusively Scottish, since it has also remained in use in the north of England.
the family name for a group of Italian cheeses which have been made in Lombardy since the 12th century.
The dialect word stracco, of which stracchino is a diminutive, means ‘tired’. The cheeses were originally made in autumn from the milk of cows migrating south to avoid the winter cold; and the exertion of the journey made their milk thin, suggestive of tiredness.
Most of these cheeses are made from whole cow’s milk, mixed with milk from the previous evening, but they vary considerably in other respects. The green-veined GORGONZOLA is quite different from the mould-ripened TALEGGIO. A distinguished member of the family is robiola, considered by some authorities to be one of the most ancient of all cheeses and to owe its name to the Latin word for red, referring to the reddish rind. Fresh stracchino is known as crescenza.
the fruit of plants of the genus Fragaria, is a symbol of the Virgin Mary and also of summer and of the delights of summer fruit. As Andrew Boorde (1542, also ed. Furnivall, 1870) put it: ‘Rawe crayme undecocted, eaten with strawberys or hurtes [whortleberry, bilberry, etc.] is a rural mannes banket.’
However, Boorde’s strawberries were far removed from the fruits grown today (and still eaten with cream). In fact, the kinds of strawberry cultivated now date back only to the 17th century, as explained below.
The Latin name fraga refers to the fruit’s fragrance. The English word ‘strawberry’ is due to the ‘straying’ erratic habit of the plant, which it shares with many other members of the rose family, such as the blackberry.
Wild strawberries are indigenous to both the Old and the New World. The small, wild strawberry of temperate zones in Europe and Asia is Fragaria vesca, of which an Alpine variety is recognized, and also an American one. F. moschata, the hautbois or musky strawberry, belongs to C. Europe. F. virginiana is native to N. America and known as scarlet or Virginia strawberry; and F. chiloensis, pine or beach strawberry, to S. America.
Wild strawberry varieties are little cultivated commercially because of their small fruits and low yield, but some of them are among the most delicious of all strawberries, and are much sought in the wild and sold for high prices.
Strawberry cultivation, using the European wild species, had begun by the 14th century, but progressed slowly until the colonization of the Americas and the discovery of F. virginiana, enjoyed both fresh and dried by American Indians. This species was introduced into Europe in the early 17th century, and was followed later by F. chiloensis, a larger and juicier species with a pineapple flavour, found on the west coast of N. and S. America but associated particularly with Chile; its specific name comes from the large island Chiloé in that country. It was brought into France by a French officer, Frézier, who had found the plants growing at the foot of the Andes.
Eventually the two American species began to hybridize naturally, and the result was F. × ananassa, the modern cultivated strawberry. A major role was played here by the botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne, who published his Histoire naturelle des fraisiers in 1766, when he was only 19. However, the innovators of the 19th century were British. Thomas Andrew Knight pioneered large-scale, systematic strawberry-breeding, producing two famous varieties, the Downton and the Elton. On the crest of this wave, a market gardener called Michael Keens produced the ‘Keens’ Seedling’, remarkable for size and flavour. It caused a sensation when it came into cultivation in 1821 and quickly spread to the Continent and to America. Virtually all modern varieties are derived from it.
In recent times, one of the most productive sources of new varieties has been the ‘Universities program’ in California. Commercial cultivation of strawberries in the USA had begun on the eastern seaboard, in the region from Boston to Baltimore. It then shifted southwards and inland, in tune with the development of railroads and refrigeration, and had reached the Pacific north-west before 1900. Later, within five years of the introduction of the ‘University varieties’ in 1945, California came to dominate the American strawberry industry in quantity of production and in length of season.
There is great and increasing diversity of flavour and other characteristics, including season, amongst the new varieties; and the general effect, worldwide, is to make fresh strawberries available for longer than in the past. Despite the excellence of well-made strawberry jam and such confections as strawberry SHORTCAKE, no one would deny that this fruit is most delicious when eaten fresh. Cream is the traditional accompaniment in England; elsewhere in Europe, sour cream is preferred. In France and Italy, red wine may be used instead (as also happened in England, for Thomas Hyall, writing in 1593, said that strawberries were ‘much eaten at all men’s tables in the summer with wine and sugar’).
The Structure of the Strawberry
An odd feature of the strawberry is its peculiar and unique structure. It is technically known as a ‘false’ or ‘accessory fruit’. The seeds which, unlike those of any other fruit, are on the outside, are the true fruits of the plant. The fleshy ‘berry’ to which they are attached is an enlarged, softened receptacle, corresponding to the small, white cone which remains on the stem of a raspberry when the fruit is picked. (Both fruits belong to the rose family and have the same fundamental form; but the strawberry’s cluster of dry fruit seeds is described as an ‘etaerio of achenes’, while the raspberry’s cluster of juicy grains is an ‘etaerio of druplets’.)
or arbutus, Arbutus unedo, originated in the Mediterranean region. It is an attractive tree which in favourable conditions grows up to 10 m (30′) high. It is cultivated chiefly for ornament, since it has attractive white flowers, shiny leaves, and orange-red, strawberry-sized fruit.
These are edible, but somewhat acid and lacking in flavour. They are used for making jams and jellies; and in Turkey a kind of vinegar.
A couple of other species native to the E. Mediterranean region and the Canary Islands have similar fruits which can be eaten fresh or candied. The madrona, A. menziesii, of the Pacific coast of N. America has scarlet fruit which were eaten, fresh or dried, by local Indian tribes and early settlers.
Volvariella volvacea, sometimes called paddy straw mushrooms, have been cultivated for centuries in China and SE Asia. They are grown outdoors on bundles of wetted rice straw and are usually gathered while still young and small. A full-sized mushroom is up to 8 cm (3″) across the cap, which is conical, white, and has a darker top. The stem may reach 12 cm (5″) long and 2 cm (0.75″) thick, and is a streaky off-white. There is no ring, but there is a large volva (cup-shaped sheath) at the base. The gills, at first white, become pink when older.
Dried or canned straw mushrooms are available from Chinese food stores anywhere. Dried straw mushrooms soften quickly when soaked in warm water. The flavour blends well with chicken and other mild-tasting dishes.
in a given place, is often far more interesting than RESTAURANT food. Generally speaking, wherever it is found it will be likely to represent well-established local traditions; and in some places a tour of hawkers’ stalls may be the quickest and most agreeable method of getting the feel of local foods.
Among the factors which seem to determine how numerous and diverse street foods are in this or that country, one is clearly climate—a temperate or warm climate makes these operations much easier and also produces a larger number of passers-by who are not intent on getting to somewhere out of the cold. Another factor is the degree of economic development. Broadly speaking, developed countries have fewer street foods. However, there are many exceptions or anomalies. Singapore is highly developed yet rich in street foods. And in a developed country such as the USA the previous abundance of street foods may have been reduced or eliminated by new forms of competition (fast food restaurants, for example) in most parts, but may retain a toehold in some places where there are numerous immigrants from countries which have rich traditions of street food.
There are indeed few generalizations which can safely be made on the subject. Nor is there much literature available for study. Conventional recipe books often ignore street foods, especially if they are items which the local population would always buy ready prepared rather than cook at home. However, there are several useful sources listed under ‘Reading’ below. The work done by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) in surveying street foods in some African countries reflect concern for hygiene and consumer protection but at the same time yield valuable information about local traditions. Some international meetings, e.g. the 1991 Oxford Symposium on ‘Public Eating’ (with essays describing street foods in Afghanistan, Hawaii, Hungary, Nigeria, the Philippines, etc., and an account of the American hot dog stand), contain useful surveys. And there are a number of specialized local publications which describe hawkers’ food in places such as Penang and Bangkok.
A list of the most famous and widespread street foods would certainly include ICE CREAM, DOUGHNUT, HAMBURGER, and hot dog (see FRANKFURTER).
Morone saxatilis, a valuable inshore fish of the eastern seaboard of the USA, ranging from the Gulf of St Lawrence down to the Gulf of Mexico (and often called rockfish or just ‘rock’ in the southern part of its range). The species was introduced also to the Pacific coast in the 19th century. Its maximum length is more than a metre (over 40″) but the market length is less than half that.
Cole (1978), in Striper, a book which takes its title from the most common of the vernacular names for the fish, has celebrated both it and the fishermen who pursue it. He explains vividly how voracious these fish are, and what carnage ensues when they descend on their prey:
When a school of three hundred or four hundred stripers receives its simultaneous feeding message from impulses not yet fully deciphered by humankind, the creatures detonate a group frenzy that shatters the water’s surface with the violence of an erupting undersea geyser.
Everywhere the bait fish fly, as if some soundless, invisible tornado were sucking them up from beneath the sea. Broad bass tails smash the surface in white welts of foam; the turnings of the feeding fish start scores of swirling whirlpools, each a mark of the consummate energy a fish needs to reverse its course and swerve open-mouthed through the very center of the mass of panic the bait fish school has become… Sea birds scream of the carnage; their coarse signals carry for miles, attracting hundreds, sometimes thousands of their kin.
Anglers, as well as professional fishermen, seek the stripers, which make fine eating. Early settlers were quick to appreciate this. Wood (New England’s Prospect, 1634) wrote:
The basse is one of the best fishes in the country, and though men are soon wearied with other fish, yet are they never with basse. It is a delicate, fine, fat, fast fish, having a bone in his head which contains a saucerfull of marrow sweet and good, pleasant to the pallat and wholesome to the stomach.
A close relation, Morone americanus, is much smaller, and is usually referred to as white perch or sea perch. An excellent pan fish.
a soft, sticky Dutch sweet made from a TREACLE, sugar, and butter mixture similar to that for TOFFEE but cooked to a much lower temperature, the soft ball stage (see SUGAR BOILING). The mixture is poured on to a slab, left to cool until it starts to set, and divided into balls.
is the German name for a PASTRY composed of thin sheets of dough around a soft filling (the word literally means ‘eddy’ or ‘whirlpool’). German strudel is relatively dry, a long roll, holding raisins and chopped apples, bent in a horseshoe, baked, and cut across in slices. Similar pastries are popular in much of C. and E. Europe, and are closely related to various Balkan and Middle Eastern confections also based on the same type of thin dough. This is known in English either as strudel pastry, or by its Greek name, FILO.
This pastry is very important to strudel and related dishes. All countries in which it is known take great pride in it, and several claim to have invented it, the Hungarians citing flour from hard Hungarian wheat as a contributory factor in support of their claim. It is true that high-protein flour is required for strudel pastry; but the method is widely known, not only in C. Europe, but throughout the Middle East, where it is used in BAKLAVA, and notably in Turkey, which may well be the place of origin. Made from flour, egg, and a little butter mixed to a dough with water, it is kneaded until silky and rested. The dough is then placed on a floured cloth on a large table, rolled a little, and stretched by placing the hands underneath and pulling it gently towards the edge of the table until it forms a huge, thin sheet. When properly pulled out, it is said that one should be able to read a newspaper through it.
To make the pastry into a long roll, it is brushed with melted butter, scattered with breadcrumbs, and the chosen filling placed at one end of the sheet of dough. The cloth is lifted so the pastry rolls up to the other end of the table; it is curved round, brushed with more melted butter and baked.
Strudels may be eaten hot or cold. Apple strudel, the best known to W. Europeans, is a special favourite in Germany and Austria. However, Lesley Chamberlain (1989) gives a sense of how much more widespread and varied strudels actually are:
From Germany in the north, through Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and Lebanon, half the world has a passion for dishes of intricately folded pastry. The strudels of thin pastry enriched with fat are sweet in Central Europe, and sweet or savoury by the time they reach the Balkans.
Many other fillings are possible, based on different fruits, for example the cinnamon-flavoured cherry strudel, which is a Balkan favourite. Other mixtures use ground walnuts, or boiled poppyseeds, or sweetened, spiced curd cheese.
its diminutive, are Italian terms for a STEW or BRAISE of meat cooked with wine in a tightly closed recipient. This passed into the French language and produced a family of French terms such as estouffade and étouffe, all with much the same meaning. Étuvée is a term with a different derivation but it too has this meaning. The cooking method indicated by all the terms means, in effect, that the meat (or fish, or fowl, or vegetable) is cooked by STEAM.
the process of filling cavities in meat, fish, vegetables and fruit, and the substances used for this purpose.
In English, the use of the term ‘stuff’ in cookery emerged from a mass of generalized meanings to do with victuals (preserved in the expression ‘foodstuff’) and non-edible possessions, to become, sometime in the 16th century, attached to mixtures for filling pies. It developed, a little later, into the idea of ‘stuffing’ the cavity left by the removal of a bone before meat is cooked. The French word farce (still in use as their word for stuffing) also carries other meanings, including that of padding out. It is recorded in English from the late 14th century onwards and eventually gave English the term ‘forcemeat’, applied to fine-textured, elaborate mixtures used especially with meat and fish.
There are many practical reasons for stuffing food. These include using a rich mixture which contributes fat to dry meats, such as roast hare. Conversely, a plain starch-based substance can be used to absorb dripping and juice from rich meat, such as mashed potatoes inside roast goose. A small quantity of meat stretches further if used in stuffing, e.g. in vegetable marrow stuffed with minced meat.
Besides being of practical advantage, the use of stuffings and forcemeats sometimes carries the idea of a conceit, a hidden surprise in an apparently plain dish. This sort of practice has a long history. An example from the classical Roman world is the roast pig served at Trimalchio’s feast, which was stuffed with sausages and black puddings. Medieval recipes, including many early Arabic ones, often called for some kind of stuffing, even if it was only an almond inside a meatball.
In 17th- and 18th-century English recipes, mixtures for stuffings and forcemeats of many types are recorded. Some were combinations of seasoned cereal and fat, such as the pudding used in the recipe ‘to bake a Tench with a Pudding in her belly’ by Murrell (1638). Others required veal, pork, or chicken meat with spices and herbs.
As with most culinary practices, the use of stuffings and forcemeats has varied according to current fashion and has sometimes gone over the top. Dallas in Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877) remarked scathingly of late 19th-century French practice:
The French name for it [stuffing] is farce, and their use of it tends to farce … They swell out their viands, and surround them with farce, quenelles of whiting, quenelles of chicken … forcemeat shaped into balls, shaped into eggs, shaped into corks, farce inside the meat, farce coating it and masking it, farce swimming around it; so that often a solid dish professing to be solid meat proves to be mainly farce.
The use of flavoured stuffings has survived up to the present in most cuisines. In England a bread-based mixture flavoured with sage and onion is traditional for goose or pork, and chestnut stuffing is used with turkey in many countries. Generally, poultry provide natural homes for stuffings, as do squid and various species of fish which have large stomach cavities. Rice or rice and meat mixtures are used in these ways, and also for stuffing vine leaves and vegetables, in Mediterranean countries (see DOLMA). Many Middle Eastern dishes such as KIBBEH are based on the idea of using stuffing.
The principle is not confined to savoury dishes. To take one example, MARZIPAN is often used to replace the stones removed from dates, and apricots are treated in a similar way.
of the family Acipenseridae, are primitive fish. They have shovel-like snouts, equipped with barbels, for rooting about in search of food (the German name, from which many others are derived, is from the verb stïrer, to root about). On their sides they have rows of bony scutes.
The species—about two dozen, all in the northern hemisphere—vary markedly in their habitats. Some live at sea and spawn in freshwater, while others are purely freshwater species. They are a resource of considerable value, especially for their CAVIAR. The fact that culture of some species, at least to the extent of rearing young sturgeon in a protected environment, has proved possible increases their importance.
The most important species are:
• Acipenser sturio, the sturgeon of the Mediterranean and NE Atlantic, now relatively rare, although populations have lingered on in the rivers Gironde and Guadalquivir (until the 1980s, returning to the Gironde in the 1990s). This sturgeon has been known to reach a length of 4 m (13′) although the usual adult length is about half that.
• A. ruthenus, the sterlet, which is essentially a freshwater species, although it does venture out to sea in the Black and Azov seas. It is known also in Siberia. Its common names are
çiga or
çuka (Turkish),
chiga (Bulgarian),
ceg
(Romanian), and
sterlyad’ (Russian). Normal adult length only about 50 cm (20″).
• A. gueldenstaedti, a larger sturgeon (adult length up to 1.7 m/5.5′) of the Black, Azov, and Caspian seas. It has a short, blunt snout. Its common names are koraca (Turkish), Ruska esetra (Bulgarian), nisetru (Romanian), and Chernomorsko-azovskayi osëtr (Russian). It is the source of osciotr caviar.
• Acipenser stellatus, the sevruga sturgeon, which is the main source of caviar in the Caspian, but also abundant in the Azov Sea and an occasional stray visitor to the Adriatic. Its common names are mersin balıgı (Turkish), pustruga (Bulgarian), pastruga (Romanian), and sevryuga (Russian).
• Huso huso, the ‘great sturgeon’ of the Caspian and Black seas, largest in that region. It provides beluga caviar.
• Acipenser mikadoi, of N. Japan. Maximum length 1.5 m (nearly 5′).
• A transmontanus, the white sturgeon of rivers in NW America, a very large fish indeed— it may reach 4.5 m (15′).
• A. oxyrhinchus (which some authorities equate with A. sturio above), a sturgeon of the eastern seaboard of N. America.
The merits of the caviar obtained from these various species are discussed under CAVIAR. As fish to be eaten, they are all good. The quality of sturgeon meat has often been compared to that of veal, and the comparison offers a useful guide to cooking methods, e.g. frying thin escalopes, grilling thicker slices, and roasting ‘joints’.
is here taken to comprise W. Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad.
Much of this area, mostly former French colonies, is sparsely populated. Most of the people live in the less arid southern areas around the few rivers and lakes, notably the Niger and Lake Chad. The terrain is fairly flat with the exception of N. Chad. The Sahel, the strip between desert and savannah, which makes up most of the western countries, is mostly scrub.
The cooking is most influenced by that of N. Africa. Mauritania, for example, has a dish, michoui, stuffed leg of lamb with dates and raisins, which is very similar to Moroccan dishes. The staple foods are RICE and MILLET with fonio or hungry rice, Digitaria exilis or D. iburua, and wild grains being commonly eaten in some areas, often with a meatball and peanut (see GROUNDNUT) sauce. YAMS and PLANTAINS are also eaten, and BEANS and LENTILS are important. MAIZE porridge is widely eaten in the E. Sahel. Millet grains may be made into COUSCOUS or boiled with CASSAVA to a mush called le tô. For festive occasions this is served with two sauces, one made of minced meat, dried fish, and dried OKRA powder and the other of diced meat and tomatoes. These are usually combined before serving.
Combinations of meat and fish to make relishes or sauces are as common as they are in W. Africa. Noodles, called kata in Mali, are popular in the western countries. A baguette-type bread is common in the towns.
The herder peoples, such as the Fula, tend to live in the more northern parts. Red meat is a luxury for most but beef, goat, lamb, often cooked with okra, and CAMEL (there is a dish of stuffed camel stomach reminiscent of haggis) are all eaten as well as game such as antelope, ROCK-RABBIT, and CANE RAT, confusingly known as AGOUTI in French-speaking countries. Near the Niger and Lake Chad, fish are an important part of the diet; they include Nile perch, Lates niloticus, and TILAPIA. Meat and fish are often dried, sometimes by choice rather than necessity. Many of the peoples are Muslim and pork is seldom seen. Chicken, GUINEA-FOWL, and PIGEONS are all popular. Maafe, a chicken and groundnut stew with sweet potatoes and tomatoes, is claimed as their invention by the Bambarra tribe of Mali, who also gave their name to the Bambarra groundnut (see GROUNDNUT).
SHEA BUTTER, PALM OIL, and groundnut oil are all used, though less liberally than in southern W. Africa. Chillies and tomatoes feature in many dishes. Riz gras is a common dish of rice with a thin stew of beef and tomato. JOLLOF RICE is a festival dish. Stews of cassava leaves with dried fish and palm oil or with okra are also served with COUSCOUS or rice. The Senegalese chicken dish yassa is popular as is atik, a dish of dried cassava porridge with smoked fish, tomatoes, and as many other vegetables as are available. Burkina Faso has a dish called maan nezim nzedo made with freshwater fish, okra, greens, and tomatoes. There is a special celebration pastry made in Mali, consisting of rice flour and honey, called tsnein-achra.
The traditional wood-burning hearth, made of three stones on which the pot sits, is still to be found in country areas throughout this area. Meat may be grilled on open fires but the oven is uncommon outside towns.
As almost everywhere in Africa, STREET FOOD is an important part of the culture. Chichingas, like kebabs, and chawarma, similar to a doner kebab, are popular street foods. Bean fritters, sweet pastries, and grilled sweetcorn are also common.
While medieval diners ate, at formal meals, they observed the spectacle that was performed between courses. The course was called a met; the activities between courses were therefore the entremets (see ENTRÉE AND ENTREMETS). The contemporary English term was ‘soteltie’. (The subjects, however, were not always subtle, as when a woman in childbirth was depicted as a soteltie for a wedding.)
There were two basic types: the plainer was a setpiece, made of anything from pastry or butter to wood and canvas; the more elaborate ones (entremets mouvants) included automatons or live participants. They were amalgams of song, theatre, mechanics, and carpentry, combined to convey an allegorical fantasy or even a political message.
The execution of a series of entremets for important festivities occupied large numbers of people. The preparations for the entertainments at the wedding of Charles the Bold brought craftsmen to Bruges for weeks at a time—painters, sculptors, carpenters, and wax modellers by the dozens. The banquet entremets displayed the ducal wealth; their imaginativeness revealed the mentality of a culture. At the Feast of the Pheasant, for example, Philip the Fair was trying, at least ostensibly, to induce his guests to join him on a crusade to rescue Constantinople from the infidel. Assuming leadership of a crusade, traditionally the role of the Holy Roman emperor, would have enhanced Burgundy’s claims to higher political status. A programmatic entremet was enacted to stimulate enthusiasm. A giant Saracen entered, leading an elephant (the chronicle unfortunately does not tell how it was contrived). Seated on the elephant was that excellent knight, co-organizer, and later chronicler of the feast Olivier de La Marche, playing the role of the captive Eastern Church. He wore a long white gown and sang, in a falsetto voice, a moving plea to Duke Philip.
The line between entremets made to be eaten and for allegorical purposes was not strictly observed. At Charles the Bold’s festivities a course at one meal consisted of some 30 pies, each enclosed in a silk pavilion and each bearing the name of a walled town under Charles’s rule. The visual effect was that of a military encampment; the message was clearly a statement of Charles’s military strength. A more pastoral, poetic conception appeared at the last of these wedding feasts. Thirty platters were made up to look like gardens, each with a golden hedge surrounding a different kind of fruit tree; each tree bore the name of a ducal abbey. Around the trees were figures of peasants harvesting the fruit while others held baskets with candied spices and fruit for the guests to eat. Other entremets at these festivities were more fantastic: a court dwarf rode in on the back of a lion and was given to the bride, Margaret of York, to whom he sang a song and presented a daisy (in French marguerite); they were followed by a dromedary ridden by Indians who released live birds to fly around the hall. There were also automatons and a whale containing musicians.
How are we to understand these festivities? Johann Huizinga, usually sensitive to the nuances of late medieval expression, wrote that it is ‘difficult to regard these entertainments as something more than exhibitions of almost incredible bad taste’, and he describes the feast as a ‘barbarous manifestation’. I would suggest instead that the medieval banquet be regarded as would an illuminated manuscript page of the same period. The manuscript page is composed of several elements. The written text, the content of which gives rise to the illuminations, is likely to be plain or only moderately embellished; an elaborate initial letter is followed by legible, uniform script. The framed illustration puts the significance vividly before the reader, who, in the 14th century, may well have given more attention to the picture than to the written word. Smaller images elsewhere on the page may represent other ideas associated more or less appropriately with the principal subject. Further fantastic ornaments and drolleries seem to reflect free—often very free—associations in the illuminator’s mind.
The medieval feast contains similar components. Food is analogous to the manuscript text: eating the meal was the occasion for the events that went on around it. As the lettering of the text was of subsidiary importance on the page to the beholder, so the dishes on the tables were only a modest part of the elaborate spectacle. The major entremets mouvants, such as the allegorical conquest of Jerusalem, are comparable to the formal framed scene on the vellum page. The lesser entremets—the fantastic creatures, the singing lions, the griffons spewing forth live birds—are similar to the more loosely related ornaments on the manuscript page. The plausibility of this analogy is supported by the fact that the same artists who were called upon to produce paintings and manuscripts also worked on the feasts. Among the artists who helped create the spectacles for Charles the Bold’s wedding were Jacques Daret, who had been a student of Robert Campin, and Hugo van der Goes. Medieval manuscripts are a feast for the eye; medieval banquets addressed the other senses as well.
an American dish which requires cooking fresh corn kernels (see MAIZE) and LIMA BEANS, separately, in boiling water until tender, after which these ingredients are mixed with each other and with a little butter (or salt pork, say some) and cooked until ready. This description is broadly true, but glosses over the fact that, as Evan Jones (1981) puts it: ‘there may be a dozen “authentic” ways to make succotash.’ He states, for example, that the oldest recorded recipe for succotash requires boiling two fowls as the first step and includes as ingredients turnip, potato, and corned beef and pork. Craigie and Hulbert (1938–44) give 1751 as the first reference in print (‘Mo[the]r dined with us upon Suckatash and Ham’); and their next reference from 1778 is to Succatosh, being corn and beans boiled together with bear’s flesh. The use of salt pork in early versions is well attested.
Jones explains too that views about the correct cultivar of the lima bean to use vary, unsurprisingly, from one part of the country to the other; thus some New England cooks prefer a kind with ‘cranberry-sauce colored splashes on the pods’. However, what seems to be universally agreed is that the name succotash was formed from some Narragansett Indian words (notably misickquatash, sukquttahash).
There is a place called Succotash Point in Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay; but succotash has come to be more popular in the south than in its region of origin.
The name sucket has been used for various confections. It is derived from now extinct French and Italian terms, succade and succata, meaning ‘juicy’ (modern French sucette means ‘lollipop’ and Italian succo, ‘juice’). It was first used in English for an imported sweet, candied orange or lemon peel. From the mid-16th century suckets were made in Britain from local fruits, vegetables, and roots of many kinds. At this time no one understood what caused things to decay, and there was no attempt to sterilize containers. Only a severe treatment, involving prolonged boiling in syrup to concentrate it, had any chance of success. Sometimes things which were made into suckets were salted before they were put into the syrup. Unripe fruits were used—a convenient way of saving fruits such as apricots or peaches which failed to ripen in a bad summer. Other things included citrus peel from fresh imported fruits, and later, as skill grew, pieces of citrus fruit; green walnuts; some vegetables such as ANGELICA stalks; and various roots including those of ALEXANDERS, BORAGE, ELECAMPANE, ERINGO ROOT (popular well into the 19th century), FENNEL, and PARSLEY. Many of these were credited with medicinal properties.
Wet suckets were kept in jars, covered with the cooking syrup, and lifted out with special forks when required. They were heavily sugared, quite unlike later types of bottled fruit in syrup. This tradition has almost completely vanished, apart from preserved ginger, and a handful of old-fashioned products made in the Philippines. Dry suckets became the forerunners of modern CANDIED FRUIT.
as the name implies, are young pigs fed only on their mothers’ milk. They are killed at ages from two to six weeks old (best at three to four weeks), and are often roasted whole. The meat, as with all young animals, is pale, tender, and on the gelatinous side. The true delicacy is the skin, which, correctly roasted, becomes wonderfully good CRACKLING. Seasonings are added according to local tastes, but are generally kept to a minimum, for it is the textures that are important in this dish. The body cavity of the pig is sometimes stuffed, or the OFFAL made into a stew to accompany it. Sucking pigs are items for special occasions, and have been or are served at feasts in many parts of the world. In modern Europe, its strongest admirers are the Portuguese and Spanish; it is almost an obsession in the Coimbra area of Portugal, and a speciality of Segovia in Spain (well described in van Hensbergen, 1992).
Sucking pigs are sometimes referred to as suckling pigs; this is incorrect, since it is the mothers who suckle and the young who suck.
Esteem for sucking pigs goes back to classical Greece and Rome. Later, they were widely used in medieval cookery. Later still, when pigs became animals farmed in enclosed sties (as opposed to the free-ranging medieval woodland pig), the numbers of piglets raised for pork or bacon was limited by available food, so a larger proportion would be killed and sold as sucking pigs. Eighteenth-century recipes for whole pigs detailed by Hannah Glasse (1747) included several which were clearly intended for sucking pigs, although not so named. Mrs Beeton (1861) still had one recipe for roast sucking pig (always the most favoured way of cooking them). While not a common meat at the domestic table, given the problems of scale, the commercial use of sucking pig has been increasing.
the 12th largest country in the world, exhibits a wide range of climates (from the south with its nine months of rainy season to the arid north), of food crops, and of diets.
A good survey of the food crops is given by Ferguson (1955). The main staple crop is dura, great or Indian MILLET (Sorghum bicolor), but other millets are grown, notably bulrush millet (dukhn, a staple for rural communities in the west of the country) and finger millet (telebun, the main staple cereal in the south-west). Other major food crops are simsim (SESAME, grown for its oil, which is the cooking oil preferred by the Sudanese), CASSAVA, SWEET POTATOES, and GROUNDNUTS. Others of considerable importance include COWPEA, OKRA (bamia), and MELOKHIA, the last two of which are typical ingredients in Sudanese cookery. A lot of ROCKET is grown in the north.
AMARANTH plants, whether wild or cultivated, provide a popular leafy vegetable, especially in the south, where they are known by a tribal name, bedi bedi.
The DATE is by far the most important fruit, but BANANAS and MANGOES flourish in the south, as do some other tropical fruits. The PALMYRA PALM grows in most regions and can play an important role as a famine food. The ROSELLE fruit (kerkade) provides the Sudanese with a distinctive and delicious drink, deep rose red in colour.
For animal foods, sheep and goats are most important. Mutton is the preferred meat, except in the south, where it is beef. The desert sheep is an interesting breed, well adapted to local conditions. In the southern areas, among non-Muslim tribes, pigs form part of the indigenous food resources. The form of dried meat which is most commonly eaten, although never preferred to fresh meat, is sharmut, made by salting and drying.
A substantial part of the Sudan is called ‘the meatless region’, because the prevalence of the tsetse fly prevents the inhabitants from keeping domestic animals. In those parts, any wild animal that can be caught is likely to be eaten, so into the cooking pot go snakes, bush rats, tortoises, etc.
The influence of traditions of hospitality and customs whereby men have priority for food over women are by no means unique to the Sudanese. However, a lucid essay by Mrs G. M. Culwick (1955) has drawn attention with great cogency to how these factors affect them:
The household does not eat until the men have finished, except that if the meal is much delayed small children may be given something to keep them quiet. The duty of hospitality is paramount and no one knows what guests may come before the men have finished eating. In accordance with custom, they must be invited to partake. So the men, whether at the ‘diwan’ or eating at home, often call for more food than originally sent to them and the family has to manage as best it can.
Though there are, of course, many individual exceptions, I cannot escape pointing out that in general the women are not as well fed as the men. Naturally I do not mean that all men are well fed and only the women underfed. They vary, but at any standard of living the scales are tipped in their favour. Except in the heyday of youthful married life, the women go short first and get the good things last of anyone.
the hard fat from around the kidneys and loins in beef and mutton, which yields tallow and is used in cooking. It is used in SUET PUDDINGS and for the mincemeat in MINCE PIES.
a speciality of Britain, especially England, are traditionally based on beef SUET (see above). Its high melting point gives to suet puddings (and to suet crust and suet dumplings) a lightness not readily attainable with other fats. Among the oldest puddings in which suet was used were the ancient sausage-like WHITE PUDDINGS. Suet paste appeared in the Middle Ages in small dumplings of the COLLEGE PUDDING type; but it did not become really important until the introduction of the pudding-cloth at the beginning of the 17th century, which made large boiled puddings feasible.
Suet puddings (or DUMPLINGS—the terms are often interchangeable) might be absolutely plain, made only of suet and breadcrumbs and flour. Until the end of the 18th century, indeed until the early 20th century in some regions, it was customary in simple households to begin a meat meal with broth from the meat, followed by a plain suet pudding (boiled with the meat if appropriate), and only then, when appetite was largely satisfied by this filling combination, to serve the meat. Sheila Hutchins (1967), in introducing an admirable chapter on suet puddings, has a fine quotation from Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford embodying the slogan ‘No broth, no [suet] ball; no ball no beef’. She describes how in farmhouse kitchens in Essex and Suffolk, her part of England, a suet pudding was usually boiled in a cloth in a long roly-poly shape and cut into slices a short while before the roasted meat was ready. The slices would be laid in the dripping-pan for a minute or two and browned. However, people who could not afford a joint for roasting could still have their dumplings:
Boiled currant dumpling or meat dumplings cooked in cotton bags in large copper pans used to be sold in the streets of London till about 1860 at a halfpenny each. Plum duff too, either round or roly poly shape, was popular in the London streets in the early nineteenth century and was sold together with a batter pudding made with raisins.
Well-known savoury suet puddings include STEAK AND KIDNEY PUDDING, bacon pudding (see BACON), and Suffolk onion pudding, to which Sheila Hutchins would add a good dozen more including partridge or pigeon puddings from the Ashdown Forest where special pudding basins used to be sold for making them; a formidable item called pork plugger; Shropshire herb roll; and Kentish rabbit pudding.
Turning to sweet suet puddings, the same author comments:
The heavy boiled sweet puddings thought to be typical of English cooking were rare in polite homes before the second quarter of the nineteenth century and reached the height of their popularity in the Victorian era, very probably under the influence of the rather Germanic court, on the arrival of the Prince Consort. Those in Victorian cookery books have a surprising number of German names—Kassel Pudding, Kaiser Pudding, Royal Coburg Pudding, Pudding à la Gotha, and of course Albert Pudding among others.
It is true that George I was known as Pudding George, but it can be maintained that the Hanover monarchy did not so much impose suet puddings on England as adopt what they thought to be a good thing when they arrived. The tradition goes back to the aforementioned (Oxford and Cambridge) college puddings, and of course includes the ancestors of CHRISTMAS PUDDING (which does include suet although this is very heavily outweighed by the other ingredients).
Efforts have for long been made, by one means or another, to prevent suet puddings becoming too soggy. Thus, Eliza Acton’s ‘The Welcome Guest’s Own Pudding’ of 1855 was enriched and lightened by the use of eggs and a complicated blend of fresh and dried crumbs and crushed RATAFIAS.
Some English regional sweet suet puddings are baked, for example Tadcaster pudding, with mixed dried fruit and golden syrup, turned out after baking and covered with a spiced hot treacle sauce; and Cheltenham pudding, with fruit and crystallized ginger, served with brandy sauce. See Dorothy Hartley (1954).
As explained under PUDDING, the popularity of suet puddings and steamed puddings waned during the 20th century in Britain, but was having a well-deserved revival towards the end of the century.
Suet Pudding Shapes
Suet puddings come in two shapes: spherical and cylindrical. The spherical type is made by laying a pudding-cloth inside a basin, lining it with suet paste, filling it, and then adding a lid of more paste and knotting the cloth over the top— loosely, to avoid the rising paste bursting the cloth. The cylindrical type is made from a flat sheet of paste usually spread with filling and rolled up (see ROLY-POLY PUDDING), but it is less easy to tie the cloth around a pudding of this shape. Now that the pudding-cloth is obsolescent, spherical puddings are made in a basin covered with foil and greaseproof paper; and cylindrical rolls are often baked (a treatment which is anyway traditional for some).
Sugar is fundamental to the nutrition of plants and animals, and exists in one form or another in all living creatures. Sugars are CARBOHYDRATES, i.e. their molecules consist of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. (These molecules are relatively small. The more complex carbohydrates such as starch and cellulose are mainly composed of many sugar molecules joined together.) There are many different chemical forms of sugar.
The simplest sugars are termed monosaccharides, ‘single sugars’. Of these, the fundamental one is dextrose (commonly called glucose), which occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables, and also in the blood of animals, where it provides a short-term store of energy. The digestion of all carbohydrates is essentially a process of reducing them to dextrose. That is why powdered glucose and glucose syrup, which consist mainly of dextrose, give quick energy. They need no digestion, but go straight into the blood.
Another common monosaccharide is fructose (sometimes called laevulose), also naturally present in plants, and abundant in HONEY. A third is galactose, one of the constituents of the sugar in milk.
All these monosaccharides have the same chemical formula. The difference between them is in the way the atoms are arranged. They have six atoms of carbon in each molecule and are therefore called hexoses. (Pentoses, with only five carbon atoms, also exist. Common ones are arabinose and xylose. They are widely found in plants, for example in pectin and other constituents of cell walls.)
Ordinary white sugar is a disaccharide, or ‘double sugar’. Each of its molecules consists of two single sugar molecules joined together: one of dextrose and one of fructose. The chemical name is sucrose. Refined white sugar is 99% pure sucrose. Other disaccharides are maltose, found in malt extract and consisting of two molecules of dextrose; and lactose or milk sugar, found in milk and made up of one dextrose and one galactose molecule.
Not all sugars taste equally sweet. Pure fructose is almost one and three-quarters times as sweet as ordinary sucrose; dextrose only three-quarters as sweet as sucrose; maltose one-third; and lactose one-sixth. Other sugars may be even less sweet and some actually taste bitter. But all the common sugars have the same food value. An ounce of any pure sugar yields 112 calories.
Differences in sweeteners result from the differences in arrangements of atoms, from which other consequences can flow. The atoms of natural sugars are all laid out in an asymmetrical manner, having a right-handed spiral twist. They are known as D or dextro (right) sugars as opposed to L or laevo (left) sugars. L sugars do not commonly occur in nature, since their shape makes them useless to plants and animals, and they pass straight through the digestive system unchanged, with a food value of nil. They can, however, be made in the laboratory by a difficult, expensive chemical process. This could turn out to be more than an academic exercise, since researchers have discovered that some L sugars taste sweet. If the new skills of genetic engineering can be used to breed bacteria or produce enzymes that will manufacture L sugars in quantity, the ideal sweetener is in prospect: something which is just like normal sugar but has no calories.
Incidentally, although dextrose is a D or dextro sugar, this is not the reason for its name. It was called dextrose to contrast it with laevulose (the alternative name for fructose). Nor should it be supposed that laevulose is an L or laevo sugar. It too is a D sugar. The explanation is that, quite apart from the L and D classification described above, sugars have been classified as ‘right’ and ‘left’ according to the direction in which a beam of polarized light is twisted when it is passed through a solution of each. This helps in the chemical analysis of sugar.
NATURAL SOURCES OF SUGAR
A wide variety of plants have been exploited for the sugar they contain. These may be present in stems or tubers where they function as a food store for the plant. Sugar is also formed in seeds when they germinate, to provide food for the young plant. Seeds are deliberately germinated to make MALT.
One of the first sources of sugar to be exploited was HONEY. This comes indirectly from plants, by courtesy of the bees. Having extracted the sugary nectar from flowers, bees use enzymes in their saliva to split the sucrose into dextrose and fructose. Fructose is the most abundant sugar in honey, which is therefore considerably sweeter than a sucrose syrup of the same concentration. However, because it is an impure and variable food containing other flavourings, subjective assessment of its sweetness varies greatly. Some of the best and most flavourful honeys seem less sweet than plain sucrose.
Various kinds of MANNA containing sugars have been used since ancient times for sweetening purposes.
Another ancient sweetener which is still prepared in the Levant is DIBS, a syrup made by boiling down raisins, sweet grapes, or locust beans.
In the Indian subcontinent and in SE Asia a crude, dark PALM SUGAR called jaggery or gur is used.
However, sugar cane has become much more important than any of the ancient sources of sugar. A plant native to E. or S. Asia, it too has been exploited for millennia. At first it was used whole or only partly refined into a crude product, practices which still survive in Asia. But methods of refining have been developed which now make it possible to extract 99 per cent pure sucrose from sugar cane. The many forms which it takes in commerce are described below, while the botany and economic and technological history are in the section headed Sugar cane.
CANE SUGAR
There are many kinds of cane sugar and syrup, differing in their purity and degree of refinement. The least pure is blackstrap molasses (from the Dutch word ‘stroop’, meaning syrup) or black TREACLE, which is a residue from cane refining. Next is ‘raw’ dark brown sugar. The darkest of ordinary western sugars is Barbados or muscovado. (This was originally made in Barbados but may now come from elsewhere. The name muscovado comes from the Spanish más acabado (more finished), because it has been separated from the molasses with which it was originally mixed.) The crudest sugar of all brown sugars is known as foot sugar or foots because in early processes it settled at the bottom of the barrel.
There are various partly refined, lighter brown sugars. Demerara, originally made in Demerara (Guyana), has relatively hard crystals. However, much modern brown sugar, including ‘London Demerara’, is made not by partial refining but by adding a little molasses to white sugar. As a result, the taste is relatively feeble. Pieces, yellows, sand, or scotch is a pale, soft, sticky sugar which is a by-product of a late stage of refining.
Light cane-sugar syrups are used for cooking in Britain (much as CORN SYRUPS and MAPLE SYRUPS are used in the USA). One such is a medium brown treacle made by partial refining of black treacle. However, the pale yellow GOLDEN SYRUP which emerges from another stage of white sugar production is now more popular. This is technically known as an invert sugar syrup. Inversion is a process by which sugar is heated or treated with acid (or both), to split some or all of the sucrose into dextrose and fructose. These single sugars are much less willing to crystallize than is sucrose, and the syrup will remain liquid for years. The inversion process incidentally gives golden syrup a mild but distinctive flavour.
All partly refined sugar products have special flavours due to residual plant substances from the original cane, or created by the manufacturing process. They are not interchangeable in the kitchen; substituting one for another in a recipe is likely to alter the flavour of the dish.
Fully refined white sugars have virtually no flavour apart from a sweet taste. The difference between them is one of crystal size.
Preserving sugar is the coarsest. The big crystals do not stick together when stirred into a liquid, so they actually dissolve faster than granulated sugar. This reduces the risk of caramelization and burning. Otherwise preserving sugar is exactly the same as any other white sugar.
Granulated sugar has medium-sized crystals, as does lump sugar, which is simply granulated sugar moistened with syrup and pressed into blocks. An American term for this, ‘loaf sugar’, is a misnomer, since real loaf sugar is the cone-shaped product of an obsolete refining process. It is seldom seen in the West, but occasionally encountered in oriental countries. There is also a Colombian type of loaf sugar called panela.
Caster sugar is so named because it is of the right fineness for use in a sugar caster or sprinkler. (The spelling ‘castor’ is now quite common.) This is the same as ‘superfine sugar’ in N. America.
Icing sugar or confectioner’s or ‘powdered’ sugar is the finest of all, made by mechanically crushing crystals. A little starch may be added to keep it dry.
Candy sugar is a special type made by growing large crystals in a strong sugar solution which is allowed to evaporate. The crystals are often grown on strings. Coffee sugar, which is naturally white but sometimes artificially coloured, is a candy sugar.
Barley sugar is not made from barley, but from ordinary white sugar. (The name was originally applied to a sweet flavoured with barley water.) To make barley sugar, white sugar is melted without water. At 170 °C (320 °F) it liquefies. It is then allowed to cool and harden, which happens so quickly that it does not manage to form crystals. Instead it sets to a hard substance for which the scientific term is supercooled liquid. (Other common supercooled liquids are ordinary glass and asphalt.) Barley sugar is slightly brown as a result of the formation of CARAMEL.
OTHER SOURCES OF SUGAR
Sugar beet (see below) yields a white sugar which is (to scientists although not to marmalade-makers) indistinguishable from white cane sugar. However, the partly refined products which occur during the refining process have a foul smell, as anyone who has been downwind of a beet sugar refinery will know, and a correspondingly bad taste. Consequently there is no brown beet sugar or beet molasses. The waste products are used for animal feed.
In the USA CORN SYRUP is an important sweetener. This is made by breaking down the long molecules of maize starch into individual sugar molecules.
The N. American maple also produces a syrup (see MAPLE SYRUP), with a delicious flavour. See also BIRCH SUGAR.
The sugar palms are a source of PALM SUGAR, such as the jaggery already mentioned, in regions where they grow. Sugar is made by boiling down the sap. Sweet varieties of sorghum, an important grain, are used to make SORGHUM syrup.
SUGAR AS A FOOD
As a foodstuff, sugar has attracted much criticism. This applies particularly to refined white sugar. Unrefined brown sugar is sometimes portrayed, in contrast, as healthful because of the nutrients which it retains. It is true that people who eat a lot of white sugar tend to have an unhealthy diet, may be obese, and are exposed to the risk of heart disease. This, however, is not the fault of the sugar, which contains no harmful substances; it is the fault of people who eat too much of it. Since sugar provides energy but nothing else (no vitamins, no protein, no essential fatty acids, virtually no minerals) it follows that a diet which is high in sugar will risk being short of necessary nutrients.
Brown sugar contains small traces of protein and common minerals which in a normal diet are freely supplied by other foods. There seems to be no good ground for regarding it as a ‘health food’. There is, however, a reason for preferring it to white sugar; it has a more interesting flavour.
Sugar Beet
The second most important source of SUGAR in the world, sugar beets, are certain cultivars of the plant now classified as Beta vulgaris, Crassa group. This group also contains the far more numerous cultivars of BEETROOT, the familiar crimson vegetable.
The root of the plant was originally small and disagreeable in flavour, but with a noticeably sweet taste. As early as 1590 the French botanist Olivier de Serres managed to extract a sugar syrup from it. In those days cane sugar was still very expensive, so his discovery might have been exploited, but nothing came of it at the time.
In 1747 the German chemist Marggraf extracted sugar from beet, and observed that the root contained up to 6.3 per cent sugar in dry matter. Again, interest was slight. Later, however, one of Marggraf’s students, Karl Franz Achard, was backed by Frederick the Great of Prussia in research which eventually led to the setting up of a small beet sugar refinery in Silesia in 1800.
The Napoleonic wars cut off supplies of cane sugar to France. In 1812, under direct orders from Napoleon, beet was cultivated and refined on a large scale for the first time. After the war, renewed imports of cane caused the industry to collapse, but it was revived and, after various vicissitudes, established itself and grew in France, Germany, and Britain. Much of the sugar eaten in northern countries now comes from beet.
Selective breeding has increased the sugar content of beet to 20 per cent of which almost all is extractable. The modern sugar beet has a large, white root of a broad cone shape.
Only fully refined white sugar can be made from beet. Unlike sugar cane, which yields a range of agreeable semi-refined brown sugars and syrups, beet gives a malodorous crude extract. The smell which emanates from a beet refinery is notoriously disagreeable. Residue from the process is fed to uncomplaining farm animals.
To extract sugar from beets, they are washed, sliced, and boiled in successive changes of water, each stage yielding progressively less sugar. The sugary liquid is then treated successively with lime and carbon dioxide gas. The latter causes the lime to precipitate (solidify) as chalk, physically entangling much of the impurities as it falls out of solution. The chalk is then filtered out, after which the later stages of refining are exactly as for white cane sugar.
It is sometimes said that beet sugar ‘is not the same’ as cane sugar, for example in making jams and marmalades. Scientists retort that it is precisely the same, meaning that the chemist can detect no difference. However, the fact remains that the two sugars have different origins, and have undergone different initial refining processes. If, then, a difference in their performance is perceptible to ladies with expertise in making jam and marmalade, this should surely not occasion surprise, still less result in the ladies being denounced as ignorant; it should cause the chemists to reflect, humbly, that they are not omniscient in these matters.
Sugar Cane
Saccharum officinarum, the source of most of the world’s sugar, is the descendant of a now extinct wild plant which probably grew in New Guinea. (A reference is made under PAPUA NEW GUINEA to the consumption there of not only sugar cane but also the enclosed inflorescences of S. edule, locally called pitpit.)
The sugar cane is a giant grass looking rather like bamboo; but its stems, instead of being hollow, are filled with a sappy pulp. Nearly 90 per cent of the weight of cane is juice, and this juice contains up to 17 per cent sucrose (common sugar) and small amounts of two other sugars, dextrose and fructose. Sugar-cane juice is pleasantly sweet, although lacking in flavour. It is used as a soft drink in sugar-growing countries, and raw cane is chewed as a sweet.
Not surprisingly, cane was cultivated from an early date in many parts of Asia including India and China. The earliest known reference to it is in a love poem in an Indian sacred work, the Atharra-veda, where sugar cane is used as a symbol of sweetness and attractiveness. Herodotus, the Greek historian (5th century BC), knew of the plant, and in 327 BC Alexander the Great sent some back to Europe from India.
The fact that the juice could be boiled down to make solid sugar was discovered in early times. The first surviving account of solid sugar comes from a Persian tablet of 510 BC, which describes it as coming from the Indus Valley. This early product would have resembled the modern Indian raw, dark brown sugar called gur or jaggery.
During the 7th century AD the Persians improved the refining process, introducing the use of lime (see below) and other refining agents. Their product, an almost white loaf sugar, was soon being exported to the West, where hitherto the only sweeteners had been HONEY and occasionally MANNA. The exotic delicacy fetched high prices. Soon sugar cane was being cultivated in many regions to the east and south of the Mediterranean. For a while it was even grown in Spain, and Sicily, too far north for it to thrive. The Venetians set up an import and export trade supplying N. Europe.
Cane cultivation spread westwards to the Canaries and Madeira, and in 1493 Columbus took some plants to the Caribbean. It grew so well in that climate that it soon became the chief crop of the whole region. Mintz (1985), an anthropologist with much Caribbean experience, has written on the production of sugar in the region and, more generally, on the whole ramified process by which sugar was transformed from being a costly spice or condiment into a major foodstuff of the western world.
As cultivation spread and sugar became more plentiful, the price fell. By the beginning of the 19th century white cane sugar was no longer a luxury. During the Napoleonic wars the blockade of France stimulated the introduction of a rival plant, the sugar beet. Throughout the century refining methods for both became more advanced. Cane and beet sugar are now among the cheapest of foods.
A primitive and ancient process is still used to produce ‘raw’ sugar such as Indian gur or jaggery and Mexican piloncillo. The crop is burnt to remove the leaves, and then cut down close to the ground since the bottoms of the stems are richest in sugar. The stems are shredded and crushed in simple ox-driven machinery to press out the juice, which is then concentrated by being boiled in shallow pans. Lime is added to make the proteins in the juice coagulate and collect on their surface other impurities. These form a dirty scum which is skimmed off. Further boiling removes so much water that the sugar begins to crystallize. As it does so it is scooped out and set to drain. The solid crystals are moist, dark brown sugar, tasting strongly of molasses.
The earliest white sugar was made by boiling raw sugar with lime water and bullock’s blood. The blood coagulated, absorbing more impurities and in doing so removing most of the brown colour. The scum was repeatedly skimmed off and the partly purified liquid filtered, boiled to concentrate it, and poured into conical moulds to crystallize and solidify. The conical loaves were then broken up, redissolved and repurified, this time with egg white. Finally, the ‘double refined’ sugar was reformed into conical loaves, and sold thus. Before use, the loaf sugar had to be smashed up with hammers, an exhausting process. The first kinds of lump sugar (which is still called loaf sugar in the USA) were made by sawing up loaves.
Modern sugar production is in its early stages a mechanized version of the primitive process. The cane may be harvested mechanically. The stems are smashed in hammer mills and the juice washed out in a diffuser, where hot juice is constantly circulated through the shredded cane. Heating with lime follows, and the partly purified liquid is evaporated in a series of vacuum pans. (The use of a partial vacuum makes it boil at a lower temperature, saving energy.) The concentrated juice is encouraged to crystallize by ‘seeding’ it with ‘magma’, a mixture of crystal and syrup. The result, known as ‘massecuite’, is a thick sludge of sugar and syrup. It is centrifuged to extract the syrup, which is dark blackstrap molasses and useful in its own right as a foodstuff, and for making rum, industrial alcohol, and citric acid.
The raw sugar is then purged of the last traces of molasses by washing it with clean syrup and centrifuging it again. It is mixed with hot water and partly decolorized with phosphoric acid, then neutralized with lime and further heated to coagulate a few remaining impurities. The liquid is again filtered, then run through beds of charcoal which absorb the last traces of colour. After a final filtration it is vacuum evaporated, ‘seeded’ with fondant sugar (whose tiny crystals make effective starters for crystal growth), centrifuged, and dried with hot air.
Other Sweet-Tasting Substances
In addition to the true sugars, such as those mentioned above, there are many sugar-like and sweet-tasting substances. Some, although closely resembling sugars, are technically alcohols, such as mannitol (present in some kinds of MANNA); glycerol, the source of the sweet taste of glycerine; and sorbitol, used to sweeten diabetic confectionery. Any sweet taste in a natural food is almost invariably due to a sugar or sugar-like substance, apart from a few oddities such as the miracle berry (see SWEETENERS, both for this and for artificial sweeteners, which are quite a different matter).
almonds coated with a layer of fine sugar, as for DRAGÉES. The sugar is often coloured, traditionally with pastels such as pink, blue, yellow, and mauve. Sometimes metallic coatings are applied, e.g. in the form of leaf silver. Sugar almonds with marbled exteriors are local specialities in several parts of France; they are called cailloux de gave or ‘river pebbles’.
Sugar almonds play an important part in rites of passage, particularly christenings and weddings, at which they are offered as symbols of good fortune. This custom is strong in France, Greece, Italy, other Mediterranean countries, and as far east as Iran and Afghanistan where they are known as noql. Margaret Shaida (1992) explains that in Iran it is usual to coat slivers of almond with sugar, flavoured with rosewater, and that these are served at all festive occasions. As a New Year offering they are supposed to ensure that the mouths and lives of the recipients will remain sweet for the whole of the coming year.
In the USA they go under the name Jordan almonds and are used as wedding favours.
Less sophisticated versions of almond dragées are sometimes made at home by cooking almonds, or other nuts, such as hazel, in sugar syrup and then stirring the mixture till it ‘grains’. The almonds, with some of the sugar clinging to them, are separated and dried. Many 17th- and 18th-century PRALINE recipes are of this type. Such confections are still sold by street vendors in southern Spain as almendras garrapiñadas.
the English name used in the W. Indies and America for the fruit of Annona squamosa, a small tree native to tropical America but now distributed in tropical regions around the world. It is also called sweet sop (in contrast to the SOURSOP). The British in India called it CUSTARD APPLE, and it is also known more precisely as the ‘scaly custard apple’ (the scales which cover the greenish-yellow skin, under a whitish bloom, are also indicated by the specific name squamosa). The sugar-apple is grown elsewhere (e.g. SE Asia, Queensland, Réunion), but enjoys greatest popularity in Latin America, the W. Indies, and India. Its range in America extends from Mexico and the W. Indies down to parts of Brazil.
At Bahia in Brazil, where it is said to have been first introduced by the Conde de Miranda, it is called fruta do conde do mato (fruit of the woodland Count—but the related BIRIBA has a superior name, being called ‘fruit of the Countess’). A Spanish author of the 17th century wrote of it:
The pulp is very white, tender, delicate, and so delicious that it unites to agreeable sweetness a most delightful fragrance like rose water and if presented to one unacquainted with it he would certainly take it for a blanc-mange.
The pulp may indeed be white, but is commonly creamy-white or yellowish, which helps to account for the first part of the name ‘custard apple’ (the latter part is only explicable on the assumption that the use of a single word in ancient times to mean both ‘fruit’ and ‘apple’ lingered on until recent times). The pulp is divided into numerous distinct segments, many of which may contain a black seed; this is poisonous and is spat out when the fruit is being eaten out of hand.
This is a delicate fruit, liable to come apart when ripe, unless carefully handled. Besides being eaten fresh for dessert, it is used to make SHERBETS and to flavour ICE CREAMS. The pulp ferments easily, so if a purée is made for these purposes (by sieving and thus separating out the seeds) it has to be used without much delay.
is a multi-stage process by which many familiar types of sugar CONFECTIONERY are produced.
The principles of sugar boiling are simple. They depend on the chemical properties of common SUGAR (sucrose), when it is dissolved in water, to produce a syrup, and heated. Heating drives off some of the water, thus increasing the concentration and the temperature of the solution. Arresting this process at different temperatures and then cooling the mixture produces different textures. Texture and appearance can be further altered by the use of additional ingredients, and by the treatment of the mixture during cooling.
Since the late 19th century, specially designed THERMOMETERS have been used for measuring the temperatures of boiling sugar solutions, allowing accurate results. Modern sugar boilers and confectionery manufacturers also have the benefit of chemically pure ingredients. An older system for recognizing different sugar concentrations, relying on skill, observation, and experience, is still frequently quoted in manuals of home confectionery recipes. This gives the temperatures and terms for the stages of sugar boiling shown in the table; the associated confections are given in the third column.
For each stage there is a method of determining the state of the solution by observation. Before testing, the pan of hot sugar solution is taken from the heat and cooled by dipping the base in cold water. This prevents the mixture from boiling to a higher stage.
At the thread stage, a little syrup dropped from a spoon, or stretched between finger and thumb, will form a short, fine thread. The next five stages are all tested for by dropping a little syrup into iced water. At the soft ball stage, the syrup will form a ball under water, but lose shape immediately in the air. At the firm ball stage the syrup will be firm but pliable; it will still lose shape fairly quickly at room temperature. When the syrup has reached the hard ball stage, it will mould easily into a ball; when removed from the water it will hold its shape and feel resistant to pressure. At each of these three stages, the syrup will feel quite sticky.
|
| 106–13 °C (223–36 °F) | thread | |
| 112–16 °C (234–40 °F) | soft ball | FONDANT, FUDGE |
| 118–21 °C (244–50 °F) | firm ball | soft CARAMELS, TOFFEE |
| 121–30 °C (250–66 °F) | hard ball | hard CARAMELS, TOFFEE, MARSHMALLOW, Edinburgh ROCK |
| 132–43 °C (270–90 °F) | soft crack | BUTTERSCOTCH, NOUGAT, HUMBUGS, BULLSEYES, seaside ROCK |
| 149–54 °C (300–10 °F) | hard crack | BARLEY SUGAR, acid DROPS |
| 160–77 °C (320–50 °F) | caramel | nut BRITTLE, PRALINE |
The next stage is known as soft crack. Some syrup is dropped into iced water, and then stretched gently between the hands. It should separate into hard but elastic strands, and only feel slightly sticky. At the hard crack stage, the syrup is removed from the water and bent. It should snap easily, have a yellowish tinge, and no longer feel sticky.
The final stage is caramel. This is determined by dropping a little syrup onto a white plate and observing the colour. A light caramel is a gold, honey colour; a dark caramel is a reddish amber. If the solution cooks beyond this point, it burns, turns black, and is useless.
Cooks and confectioners have known for centuries that sugar solutions boiled to ‘heights’ or ‘degrees’ or ‘stages’ have variable properties. It is possible that some of this knowledge arrived in Europe with sugar itself, during the Arab invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries AD. How much was known at that time about the properties of sugar is not clear; but the word CANDY derives from Sanskrit khanda via Arabic qand. By the late 14th century references to penides, a barley-sugar type confection, show that some knowledge of sugar boiling existed in England. By the early 17th century, some of this specialized knowledge was given in cookery books and confectionery manuals.
Common terms from English 17th-century books are thin syrup; thick syrup; MANUS CHRISTI height; sugar boiled to sugar again; candy height, and casting height.
Manus Christi, as a sugar boiling term, seems to have meant an approximation to the thread stage; and is only used in this sense in books from early in the century. The other ‘heights’ of boiling sugar continued in use in cookery books well into the 18th century, by which time it had been joined by a system of French origin.
The French author Massialot gave six terms which, in the 1702 English translation of his Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois, appeared as: smooth, pearled, blown, feathered, cracked, and caramel. As Nott (1726) observed, each of the six degrees could be divided into the lesser and the greater, making twelve in all.
These terms, subject to minor variations, gradually came into general use and remained current through the 19th century. They look as though they more or less match modern terms, but the apparent resemblance conceals differences in practice. ‘Caramel’ in 18th- and 19th-century usage corresponded to what would now be considered the hard crack stage; it was then thought that sugar which was cooked until the colour changed to gold or amber was burnt and spoilt. Generally, confectioners of the past seem to have favoured caution, and sugar was not usually boiled to high temperatures. Most of the degrees formerly recognized appear to have been temperatures which would now be classified as thread or ball. Cooking beyond this stage would have been tricky when using heat sources such as open fires, controlled with difficulty. The soft ball stage is also the concentration at which a poorly managed sugar solution will show signs of recrystallizing whilst hot. This must have been a problem when the scientific principles behind sugar boiling were unknown, and may be the origin of the 17th-century expression ‘sugar boiled to sugar again’.
Confectionery was expensive in the 17th and 18th centuries not only because sugar cost a lot but also because of the experience and skill which sugar boilers needed. Many sweetmeats which seem different in appearance and texture begin with the same process of concentrating sugar solutions over heat; but thereafter techniques for adding to and manipulating the sugar become crucial. Recipes which evolved by trial and error can now be shown to have embodied subtle control over the sugar as it cools. This retrospective understanding calls for modern knowledge of the physics and chemistry of sugar.
In chemical terms, common sugar (sucrose) is a substance which is crystalline, with an orderly structure of molecules forming a characteristic shape. This can clearly be seen in granulated sugar; each ‘granule’ takes the form of a cube.
Provided the proportion of sugar to water is suitable, sugar will dissolve completely in water at room temperature; once in solution, the sugar molecules move about freely (as do the molecules in sugar which has been rendered liquid by the application of heat). A solution which holds as much dissolved sugar as it can is said to be saturated.
Applying energy in the form of heat to a sugar solution allows more sugar to be dissolved in it; such a syrup, which is saturated at the higher temperature, is said, when cooled quickly, to be a ‘supersaturated’ solution. The amount of sugar in a solution also affects the boiling point. The more sugar there is in a solution, the higher the boiling point will be.
If a hot saturated sugar solution is allowed to cool slowly, the sugar comes out of solution and crystallizes on the bottom of the container. (This is how ordinary crystalline sugar is solidified at the end of the hot refining process.) If the solution is cooled so quickly that it has no chance to crystallize, it forms a supercooled liquid. There is no fixed proportion of water in such a liquid. If there is only a slight excess of sugar over the normal saturation level, the supercooled liquid is a thin syrup. With increasing sugar concentration the syrup becomes thicker, then a sticky, flexible semi-solid, then a hard glass. Because cooling is fast, the sugar retains the disorderly molecular structure of a liquid.
The formation of a supercooled liquid sugar is encouraged by a process known as ‘inversion’ which takes place when sucrose is heated. As it boils, sugar syrup loses water; it gradually departs from the nature of a sugar in water solution and approaches that of melted sugar. Pure sucrose has a melting point between 160 °C and 186 °C (320 °–368 °F); but, due to the phenomenon of inversion, it is impossible to have pure molten sucrose. This is because during the heating process the sucrose breaks down (‘inverts’) to simple sugars: dextrose (melting point 146 °C, 293 °F) and fructose (melting point 102–104 °C, 216–219 °F). No matter how fast syrup is heated there will be some degree of breakdown. This phenomenon helps to prevent the boiled sugar recrystallizing. This is because the molecules of sucrose, fructose, and dextrose are different sizes, thereby ‘interfering’ with the formation of an orderly crystalline structure.
To encourage the breakdown of sucrose, a proportion of dextrose (glucose) is often included in modern commercial confectionery recipes. Acids, either in the form of tartaric acid (in CREAM OF TARTAR), or those naturally occurring in fruit are also used to aid inversion. (The interaction between sugar and fruit acids is also integral to the process of JAM- and JELLY-making).
In their simplest forms, boiled sugar sweets consist of sugar syrup boiled to the hard crack stage with the addition of substances to give flavour and colour, and to encourage inversion. The result is poured onto a cold surface and shaped. BARLEY SUGAR and acid DROPS are examples of this type of sweet.
Similar mixtures are used to make PULLED CANDY. The syrup is boiled to the soft crack stage and poured onto a cold surface. It is worked intensively, first with a scraper whilst still hot, and then by twisting and stretching it by hand or machine as it cools. Pulling is a process which requires some care to prevent the syrup recrystallizing; adding dextrose to the recipe is one precaution. As the syrup is worked, some air is incorporated into the mixture, giving it a distinctive satiny sheen Two colours of mixture may be worked together to give a striped or marbled effect. Favourite sweets of past times, such as HUMBUGS and BULLSEYES, are produced this way.
A syrup boiled to the hard ball stage, pulled, and left to mature uncovered will start to recrystallize: this phenomenon is exploited in the making of Edinburgh ROCK, which has a distinctive, friable texture.
Various sweets are made by adding dairy products such as milk, cream, or butter to syrups. These form emulsions with the sugar and help to prevent recrystallization of the mixture when this is not desired. The hardness of the result is dictated by the stage to which the sugar is boiled; this ranges from firm ball to soft crack, giving progressively harder results. BUTTERSCOTCH is one type; others are known as different forms of TOFFEE. Also in this group are a type of toffee known as CARAMELS. These should not be confused with sugar boiled to 160 °C/320 °F; they gain their distinctive flavour from long cooking, and reactions between proteins and sugars in the mixture.
In some sweets, controlled crystallization is encouraged. The simplest example is FONDANT: this is a sugar and dextrose syrup boiled to the soft ball stage and poured onto a cold surface. Then the mixture is worked, gently at first, and then more vigorously. The object of this process is to allow the formation of small, even, sugar crystals in a supersaturated syrup. FUDGE is based on the same principle; the syrup is enriched with dairy products and flavourings, and beaten either hot or cool depending on the desired texture.
sugar in crystalline lumps deposited from a sugar solution. Formerly, when sugar was an expensive rarity, this was of great importance in the European kitchen and was regarded as a sweetmeat in its own right. A shortened version of the term has given the word CANDY, used in N. America to indicate sweets in general.
Both the etymology of the term ‘sugar candy’ and the methods given in early recipes for making it indicate an ancient origin. ‘Sugar candy’ can be traced back through Persian qand to Sanskrit khanda, meaning sugar in pieces. The fact that the word has such an ancient derivation shows just what a desirable and uncommon item sugar candy was as it travelled from culture to culture.
The method for making sugar candy given in early confectionery manuals required sugar syrup of a specified strength to be poured into earthenware jars with an arrangement of sticks or strings inside. Sometimes the syrup was coloured, or flowers were added. The jars were kept hot for some days, then drained of excess syrup and broken to extract the lumps of candy, which had crystallized around the sticks. This process seems arcane to the modern reader, but demonstrated an instinctive grasp of sugar chemistry, based on practical knowledge gained from centuries of trial and error. In Britain, this basic method was used into the 19th century.
The verb ‘to candy’ today indicates a method of preservation using sugar syrup; CANDIED FRUIT, MARRONS GLACÉS, candied GINGER, and candied ANGELICA all use this process.
a mixture of icing SUGAR, water, and GUM TRAGACANTH made into a malleable paste. Glycerine, GELATIN, and liquid glucose are sometimes added as well, for a more robust mixture. The paste can be rolled, shaped, coloured, and painted as the user’s imagination dictates, and then allowed to set and dry, giving edible ornaments that will keep indefinitely, provided they do not get damp. Paste-type mixtures are also used for making sweets, especially mints. Variations on sugar paste, more or less inedible, include starch or plaster of Paris amongst their ingredients, and are intended purely for decoration.
In the modern kitchen, sugar paste has been reduced to a minor role as a medium for decorating celebration cakes. It is rolled into a sheet to cover the cake itself, and made into flowers and figures. Modern cake decorators value sugar paste for its clothlike qualities, and the way it can be draped, frilled, and worked to resemble embroidery. The relative ease with which sugar paste can be worked has made it a rival to royal ICING, which requires more practice and technical skill if it is to produce good effects.
This usage gives little clue to the historical importance of sugar paste as a sculptural medium for executing elaborate culinary fantasies. Sugar paste has long been valued by confectioners for the plastic qualities it displays, and the hard porcelain-like manner in which it sets. However, the date at which sugar paste first made an appearance in the repertoire of the confectioner is unknown. Primitive versions may have been employed in making medieval SUBTLETIES, elaborate and partially edible sculptures used in feasts. Recipes for pastillage, made from sugar and water-softened gum tragacanth, appear in the earliest French confectionery manuals, published by the quack doctors and alchemists Alexis of Piedmont and Michel de Nostradamus in 1555.
From then on, through the 16th and 17th centuries, sugar paste was a favourite device of confectioners for decorating the banquet table. It could be pressed into dishes and allowed to dry, and then unmoulded to give edible crockery, thinner and whiter than any products of the 17th-century European potters. It could be modelled and moulded to imitate fruits, or shaped into birds and animals. Sheets of paste were pressed into two halves of moulds, filled with COMFITS, and stuck together, to provide a surprise for the diners. Little scraps of paste were perfumed to make ‘kissing comfits’ to sweeten the breath, or cut into LOZENGES.
Throughout the 18th century, sugar paste enjoyed a vogue as a medium for making decorations from simple flowers to magnificent and costly sculptures for the dining tables of the rich. These were often designed to make flattering references to the abilities or interests of the guests. Jarrin (1827) described how, whilst working in Paris, he had made a group, 2′ (60 cm) in height, of Napoleon ‘led by Victory, attended by several allegorical figures, which were intended to express the various high qualities so liberally attributed to Napoleon by the French so long as success attended him’.
Sculpting in sugar paste was evidently a declining art in the early 19th century, for Jarrin complained that the technique had fallen into disuse and that residual fragments of the art had been transferred to the pastry-cooks. This state of affairs was shortly to be remedied by the great Antonin CARÊME, a chef whose influence extended far beyond his native France, and who is said to have remarked that ‘The fine arts are five in number: music, painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture—whereof the principal branch is confectionery.’ His interest in the ‘architectural’ possibilities offered by sugar paste established a lasting fashion for immense sculptural table decorations, ranging from a simple cornucopia to models of famous cathedrals. ‘To the artistic confectioner Gum Paste has much the same meaning as clay and marble combined have to the sculptor,’ gushed Garrett (c.1895). Sugar paste was augmented with pulled boiled sugar; ice, lard, and butter also provided materials for the cook-sculptor. This fashion for elaborate table decorations lasted until the demise of haute cuisine in the 1930s.
Confectioners continued to make paste sweets, initially using paste rolled into sheets and cut, later developing machinery for making ‘compressed tablets’ using paste mixtures. Some of these, such as medicinal lozenges and scented CACHOUS, have declined in popularity in the 20th century; but others, such as MINTS and SHERBET, are still consumed enthusiastically.
and chicken of the woods are the oddly contrasting popular names of a ‘bracket fungus’, Laetiporus sulphureus, which is found in Europe and N. America. It is a large, amorphous growth, yellow or orange, fluted on the upper side and with yellow pores underneath. It grows on dead stumps or logs, and sometimes on living trees (which it affects with a kind of heart rot) in late summer and autumn. Favoured hosts are eucalyptus and Douglas fir.
This fungus is popular in N. America but only in some European countries, notably Germany and to a limited extent France. Only the tender outer portions (soft to the touch) of young specimens should be harvested (they grow back, so further harvesting is possible). The taste is faintly acid. Texture has often been compared to that of chicken breast, but Arora (1979) draws a comparison between cooked sulphur shelf and tofu, and especially recommends sulphur shelf for use in omelettes. He judges specimens from eucalyptus to be the best.
the name of certain shrubs in the genus Rhus, of which various species grow wild in the warmer regions of the northern hemisphere. The species used in Middle Eastern cookery is Rhus coriaria, Sicilian or elm-leafed sumac. Its hairy ‘berries’ (so called, but not true berries) are dark red to purple when ripe. The spice sumac is made from the dried, powdered berries.
The acid fruits are used as a sour flavouring. They were so used in classical Rome, before the introduction of the lemon; and their modern use in the Middle East is most noticeable in areas where lemons are rare, for instance the remoter parts of Syria and N. Iraq.
In medieval Arabic cookbooks, sumac entered into cooked dishes such as Fakhtiyyah (which gets its name from the Persian word for ring-dove, presumably because of the pale purple shade produced by the combination of sumac and yoghurt).
As a spice, sumac is sprinkled on KEBAB and PILAF in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. In Iran, for example, a bowl of it is always served with Chelo kebab, to be sprinkled on the meat and/or the rice. See ZAATAR for the mixture of sumac and wild THYME which is sprinkled on fried eggs in the Middle East.
Sumac berries are also used in N. Africa, India, and the Orient. They are sold in dried form, either whole or powdered. Whole dried berries can be soaked in water to produce a sour refreshing drink.
Species of sumac in N. America include several which were used by Indians, and then by white settlers, to make drinks with a resemblance to lemonade; hence names like lemonade berry or lemonade sumac.
a favourite English dessert which combines a mixture of summer fruits with bread. Redcurrants (see CURRANTS) and RASPBERRIES are the best fruits to use, but some varieties of GOOSEBERRY are suitable, and a small quantity of blackcurrants and a very few STRAWBERRIES may be included. In autumn, BLACKBERRIES can be substituted. In other countries, corresponding kinds of berry will do very well. In any case the fruit is lightly cooked with sugar.
The pudding is made by lining a buttered basin with fairly thin slices of good bread cut to fit exactly. The fruit and juice are then spooned in, and more bread placed over the top. The assemblage is then pressed down by a weight and left to stand overnight or longer. To serve, it is turned out, upside down. It is usually accompanied by cream.
In the 19th century this pudding seems to have been known as ‘hydropathic pudding’ because it was served at health resorts where pastry was forbidden. This name must have begun to seem unattractive or inappropriate early in the 20th century, when the new name summer pudding, which is now universally used, began to appear in print. Until recently it was thought that the earliest recorded use was by Florence Petty (1917) who, on the title page of her attractive book, styled herself ‘The Pudding Lady’ (and drew attention also to her qualifications as a Sanitary Inspector and a Horticulturist). However, it has now been established that a missionary in India, Miss E. S. Poynter (1904), had used the term much earlier, in her book; and that soon afterwards Miss L. Sykes (c.1912) used it as the title of a recipe which was even closer than Miss Poynter’s to those now in use.
a name used for those kinds of SQUASH, mostly of the species Cucurbita pepo, which are eaten fresh in season, when they are immature and the skin is still soft, as opposed to WINTER SQUASH (mostly of the species C. maxima) which can be stored and whose skin hardens during storage.
The distinction is not always useful, since some C. pepo varieties, e.g. the Crookneck group, store well, while winter squash can be good eaten fresh. Nor is there a clear botanical distinction; there are some varieties of C. pepo, e.g. Acorn, which are mostly used as winter squashes, although if harvested when young they can be eaten as summer squashes.
Summer squashes tend to be watery, and care must be taken not to overcook them.
Some of the prettier varieties of summer squash, such as the Yellow Custard Squash, with its flat, scalloped shape, are among the numerous cultivars which can be dried and used for decoration. Sunburst, the first hybrid yellow scallop squash, is very attractive with creamy flesh of delicate flavour, and looks especially good when picked at the ‘baby’ stage with blossom still attached.
Helianthus annuus, an annual plant of the daisy (Asteraceae) family, grown mainly for the valuable oil obtained from the seeds. These typically contain 35–45 per cent by weight of oil; they are also a popular and nutritious snack food, raw or roasted and salted.
The sunflower is remarkable for its height (up to 3.5 m/12′) and the size of its flower heads (the record is a diameter of 75 cm/30″). A flower head may contain several hundred (or even up to 2,000) seeds. The name sunflower (and the generic name Helianthus, which means the same) is probably derived from the resemblance of the yellow flower head to the sun; but it may have to do with the plant’s habit of keeping its maturing flower head turned towards the sun, so that it faces east at dawn and west at dusk. The French name tournesol suggests this, as do the Italian, Spanish, and Chinese names.
The plant thrives in a sunny temperate climate, and withstands a wide range of temperatures. It is native to N. America, where several species are still common in the wild. H. annuus had been taken into cultivation, and the higher-yielding type with a single flower had been developed, long before Europeans arrived. The native Indians dried or roasted the seeds, then milled them into a meal which could be made into cakes or added to soup. They also extracted oil from the seeds by boiling them.
When the sunflower was introduced to Europe in the 16th century, at first to Spain, it was treated as an ornamental plant. However, in the early 18th century Peter the Great took it to Russia, where a chance circumstance caused it to become an important food plant. The Church banned the eating of oily plants on fast days, but the sunflower, being a recent introduction, was not on the list drawn up by the clerics. The laity, who were sharper eyed, took to chewing the seeds—raw, roasted, or salted—and, later, to extracting oil from them (a practice first essayed in Bavaria in the 1720s). Russia subsequently became the largest grower of sunflowers. In Europe, Romania and Poland also grow large amounts, as do Yugoslavia and Turkey.
Cultivation was started in Argentina in 1870, and greatly increased in the 1930s, when the Spanish Civil War made Spanish olive oil unobtainable. Argentina later became the second largest producer, overtaking the USA.
Most cultivation in N. America is carried out in the north of the Great Plains region, e.g. in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and neighbouring Manitoba in Canada. Since sunflower oil is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (linoleic, oleic), the American sunflower industry received a boost in the 1970s when the movement towards polyunsaturated cooking oils gathered momentum. ‘Sunoil’, as it is known, also benefits from having no cholesterol.
Special varieties of sunflower have been bred to produce maximum yields of oil. It is the principal cooking oil in Russia; much used in E. Europe; and ranks about sixth as a cooking oil in India.
The seeds have a pleasant, slightly sweet taste. Besides constituting a snack food, highly nutritious and particularly well liked by Russians, they are used extensively in confectionery.
(or sunset clams) are edible BIVALVES of the genera Gari, Macoma, and Soletellina, whose shells are tinged or rayed with sunset colours. They occur around the world, and are gathered for food in many places, but it seems to be only in the Philippines that they arouse real enthusiasm. Soletellina spp are there known as paros or parosparosan, and are highly valued, being steamed or parboiled in the shell to produce an excellent broth.
as in suprême de volaille, a French culinary term applied especially to the breast, often with wing attached but boned, of a chicken (or game bird such as partridge); and, by extension, to a choice fillet of meat or fish. A suprême can be breadcrumbed and fried, but is most commonly met in ‘white’ form, poached and covered with a white sauce.
A vast range of French menu terminology (see À LA) may be used to indicate precisely how a suprême is prepared and served.
Amorphophallus paeoniifolius (formerly campanulatus), also known as elephant’s foot yam (because the large rhizome is thought to resemble an elephant’s foot) or telinga potato, is a root crop related to TARO in the arum lily family. Of the numerous species in the genus only two are cultivated: suram itself, mainly in India, but also in SE Asia; and konjak, A. rivieri (see KONNYAKU), mainly in Japan.
A curious feature of the scores of species in this genus is the highly disagreeable smell of the inflorescence, like that of rotting meat. This attracts flies, which pollinate it. The ‘amorphous phallus’ of the generic name, a horrifying concept, is justified by the crumpled, shapeless form of the spadix which projects from the inflorescence. (The spadix can be of awesome size; one inedible species found in Sumatra has a spadix 2 m/6′ long.)
Suram tubers, which have the advantage of keeping well, are eaten in India. Achaya (1994), who gives the name as suran rather than suram, mentions that one of these huge tubers can weigh as much as 10 kg (22 lb). Those found growing wild are acrid in flavour, containing needle-crystals of calcium oxalate, and are only edible (if at all) after tedious treatment. Cultivated varieties, whose flesh may be white or pink, are free of this problem and may be sliced and boiled or baked without special prior processing. They are, however, often pickled. Uses are also found for young shoots and leaves, e.g. in curry-type dishes in Thailand.
Spisula solida, an edible species of great commercial importance in the USA, where it accounts for almost three-quarters of the CLAM harvest. It is a large clam, measuring up to 16 cm (6″) across. It may also be called bar/hen/sea clam. It takes the names surf and bar clam from the circumstance that early settlers found it in the surf or on bars; but its habitat is in deeper waters, whence the apter name sea clam. It is especially abundant off the coast of New Jersey. South of Cape Hatteras, it is replaced by the smaller S. raveneli; and in Canadian waters by S. polynyma, which has a purplish foot which turns red in cooking and is accounted superior.
Surf clams are usually shucked raw and minced for use in clam CHOWDERS. The large foot is tough, but the twin adductor muscles, which are white and cylindrical, located just below the apex of the shell, are delicious morsels.
The name surf clam has also been used, in works written in English, for some Asian species which are found in the surf. The name has been happily applied to Mactra mera, which belongs to the same family as Spisula and is esteemed in the Philippines. This species has also been called trough-shell, and there is a Chinese tradition that intoxicated persons will revive if they eat them.
a term current in 18th-century recipe books, often meant a tureen; but it could also mean ‘covered all over’, as in ‘Pigeons surtout’ which were PIGEONS covered with slices of veal and breadcrumbs.
perhaps the best known internationally of all Japanese specialities, consists essentially of ‘fingers’ of vinegared RICE with pieces of very fresh fish or other seafood laid along them, served with thin slices of vinegared GINGER (gari) and hot green tea. However, in this, the best-known form and the one which belongs to Tokyo, sushi is really an abbreviation for nigiri-zushi, the full name. There are other sorts of sushi, with names indicating whether the product is, for example, pressed in a mould (oshizushi, from Osaka), wrapped in a piece of toasted NORI seaweed (makizushi), or even just a formless bed of vinegared rice with pieces of seafood scattered on top (chirashizushi). This last item calls for no special skill, but the art of making nigiri-zushi is deceptively difficult and calls for a long apprenticeship.
Most of the popular seafoods may be used, provided that they are exquisitely fresh, but there are some, such as oysters, which do not ‘work’ in this combination.
The original of modern sushi is known as narezushi, a way of preserving fish by salting and fermenting between layers of rice (a method found elsewhere in SE Asia). First the fermentation, then the salting were done away with and the rice (which once was thrown away) was converted to the sublime vinegared rice of today. Something approaching nigiri-zushi was available in a multitude of Edo (Tokyo) restaurants by the middle of the 19th century. The modern forms were not fixed, however, until the advent of refrigeration. Both Hosking (1996) and Tsuji (1980) have details.
The spread of Japanese cuisine, largely through restaurants, has been a phenomenon of the last quarter of the 20th century. In part, these followed Japanese capital and personnel. In England, at least, there were few outside London unless catering for Japanese workers. But the popularity of Japanese food, like that of Thailand, was less bound up in diaspora and more in the globalization of taste—although the most important locale of Japanese restaurants was California, where there was a large ethnic-Japanese population.
As Americans became more accepting of raw fish, during the 1970s, so sushi restaurants increased in number. However, new forms were developed to encourage the squeamish. Hence the California roll, a large sushi roll with avocado, cucumber, and crabsticks.
is so named because it has a large amount of butter in the middle which melts when the pudding is boiled, and soaks into the mixture. The original form of the pudding, as described in Ellis (1750), was made from flour, milk, eggs, and a little butter, so that it was a predecessor of the 19th-century SPONGE PUDDING. More butter entered the mixture as the ‘pond’ melted. It was not sweetened, and was eaten either with meat or by itself.
Later, a sweetened SUET PUDDING mixture lightened with baking powder became usual, and there was a further curious innovation. A thin-skinned lemon was placed, whole, in the centre of the ‘pond’. It could be pricked all over so that the juice seeped out to flavour the mixture; but sometimes it was left unpierced, and exploded when boiled. This type of pudding was called ‘lemon bomb’.
A variant made over the county border, Kentish well pudding, contains dried fruit instead.
Solanum torvum, a tropical bush which is related to the AUBERGINE, but bears only small fruits the size of peas, sometimes known as ‘pea eggplants’ (eggplant being another name for aubergine). There is some cultivation in the W. Indies and in SE Asia, and the fruits have started to appear in N. American oriental markets.
The fruits are bitter. They are used in Jamaica, when unripe, to give a puckery flavour to salt dried codfish (akee) or freshwater crayfish, or in soups and stews.
They are eaten in curry-type dishes in Malaysia, for example, again being preferred unripe. They can be added raw to chilli sauces such as the NAM PRIK of Thailand; and they are also pickled.
a bird which exists in three species in Europe, the most important for present purposes being Cygnus olor, the mute swan, which is relatively easy to domesticate. Its size, coloration and graceful appearance when it is swimming are familiar. Less familiar is the idea of eating swans. However, evidence marshalled by Witteveen (1986–7) shows that the practice was widespread in Europe from the 8th century AD until the 17th (and in some places even the 18th) century.
The French naturalist Belon (1555) summarized the general opinion: ‘the swan is an exquisite bird and a French delicacy, eaten at public feasts and in the houses of lords.’ Young cygnets were apparently the best to eat, especially if fattened with oats, so as to lose their fishy taste. C. Anne Wilson (1973) remarks that they were the costliest of all fowl in the London poultry market of the 14th and 15th centuries. In common with the other ‘great birds’ (CRANE, HERON, PEACOCK) swans were usually roasted; often served with a well-spiced medieval sauce; and sometimes served in full display, with feathers arrayed and body gilded. Scully (1995), commenting on the fashion in the latter part of the 14th century for court cooks to present cooked animals in a lifelike pose, looking as though they had not been cooked, explains how the swan, for example, underwent an elaborate skinning procedure before being cooked, and would then be ‘re-dressed’ in its skin and feathers just before being served. This fashion included having the animals (e.g. a boar) breathe fire in front of the guests. ‘By soaking cotton in aqua ardens and igniting it at the right moment, the animal could continue for some time to do the impossible while it was paraded on a platter around the dining hall.’ Scully rightly comments that it was rather bizarre to apply this technique to a swan, but that this was done by Chiquart, the chief cook at the Savoy court in the early part of the 15th century (whose treatise ‘On Cookery’ has been edited and translated by Scully, 1986).
One main factor which brought an end to serving swans at banquets was the arrival of the TURKEY, a formidable competitor from the New World which could be reared with less trouble.
two names for a root vegetable, Brassica napus ssp rapifera, which is closely related to but botanically and commercially distinguished from the TURNIP. Swedes differ from turnips in having ridged scars forming concentric rings around their tops. The ‘root’ is not a true root but the swollen base of the stem, and these marks are leaf scars.
The swede probably originated in C. Europe and reached France and then England in the 17th century. By the late 18th century it had become an important European vegetable crop; and by the beginning of the 19th century it had reached the USA.
Varieties with white flesh exist but the yellow-fleshed sort is the one which is usually marketed. Some kinds have purple outsides. ‘Swede’ is a general British term for all, whatever the outside colour.
Rutabagas, the name used in the USA, are always yellow, pale inside and darker outside. Yellow varieties become a deeper yellow or orange when cooked, in contrast to most vegetables which lose colour. The word ‘rutabaga’ is a corruption of the Swedish dialect term rota bagge—‘red bags’, referring to the bulbous shape. Swedes were grown in Sweden very early after their appearance, which explains their name.
In Scotland, swedes prevail over turnips, and are called ‘neeps’ (a contraction of ‘turn-neeps’, an early form of ‘turnips’).
Swedes have a milder taste than turnips. Some people find the taste of young swedes too mild, preferring old, large swedes which are more strongly flavoured. In this condition they are often served mashed. The texture is drier, which again is preferred by those who find turnips watery. Swedes have a good capacity for absorbing fat. One well-known dish in which they have a prominent part is the Scottish neep purry or bashed neeps which are traditionally served with HAGGIS.
the largest of the Nordic countries, has an interesting culinary history, in which native traditions have been overlaid, at least to some extent, by German and French influences. Swedish culinary literature includes one mammoth work, the great Kok-konsten (Arts of Cookery) by Hagdahl (1896), which serves as a monument to the French influence. But the charming work of Margareta Nylander (1822) had struck a less pretentious note with great charm, and there is no lack of interesting books in the 20th century; one might instance the Prinsessornas Kokbok (1945, the first edition of which was published in 1929), so endearing in its homage to the young princesses (three sisters, who were born Swedish but married to become Princess Margaretha of Denmark, Crown Princess Märtha of Norway, and Crown Princess Astrid of Belgium); and what is probably the most scientific of all works on fish cookery, Att koka fisk, by Gyllensköld (1963).
Among the marine delicacies for which Sweden is famous are surströmming (see HERRING) and the dish known as Jansson’s temptation, based on what many books call anchovy, but which in Sweden (unless recourse is had to canned anchovy) must be SPRAT. Having tasted this in Stockholm’s beautiful Saluhall (covered market), and then gone on to Gothenburg, Davidson (1979) wrote:
Fine though it is, the array of seafood in a Baltic city such as Stockholm would hardly satisfy a Swede from the west coast, accustomed to the greater variety of Atlantic species; and least of all someone from Göteborg (Gothenburg), Sweden’s greatest fishing port. This is a sober and delightful city, in which the gentian and calico livery of the trams matches the blue overalls of the porters on the fish quays and the bleached wooden boxes in which they carry the fish; fish so revered that the retail market in which they are purveyed to Göteborgers is built like a church and is indeed called, in the local dialect, the Feskekörka or fish church. The atmosphere within, where a gallery overlooks the nave along which shoppers may process, and the merchants stand in stalls like box-pews, is suitably ecclesiastical. Nothing is lacking except organ music and perhaps a few votive candles flickering before whichever is the finest of the day’s turbots, turbot being the particular predilection of Göteborgers.
Like the other Nordic countries, Sweden is a great place for CRAYFISH, in season; for the use of the numerous northern berries in preserves, cakes, etc.; for special Christmas dishes (here including julgröt, the traditional Christmas rice porridge); for LUTEFISK (especially on Christmas Eve); and of course for the SMÖRGÅSBORD.
When Jane Grigson (1983) visited Stockholm she had a characteristically vivid recollection when faced by the ubiquitous rye crispbread, knäckebröd:
I remembered a portrait I had seen of the great Gustav Vasa, the 16th century King of Sweden, dressed all in black with yellow slashes, like a regal insect, who encouraged his subjects to grow rye and make crisp bread. He is the Rye King of the packaged crisp breads sold in Britain.
She would also have enjoyed typically Swedish biscuits, pepparkakor, spiced in the Scandinavian way (not necessarily with pepper—see GINGER BISCUITS). Besides cinnamon and ginger, CARDAMOM is much used and the simple cardamom biscuits are among the best.
In the north, like neighbouring FINLAND, Sweden has a Lapp region, known for its REINDEER meat.
The Swedish word husmanskost means homely (literally, smallholder’s or crofter’s) fare and strikes one of the keynotes of Swedish food. Pytt i panna (bits and pieces) is one of the best European ways of dealing with leftovers: cooked meat and potato diced and turned into a piquant savoury dish with the addition of good salty bacon and onion, topped with fried egg. The popular yellow pea soup (shared with Denmark) is another example. It should not be thought, however, that corresponding keynotes of elegance and sophistication are missing. Nor is the fine balance displayed by Swedish cuisine confined to the capital or expensive restaurants; on the contrary, as a study of various Swedish books on their regional specialities will demonstrate, it is a nationwide phenomenon.
(or acid), aigre-doux in French and agrodolce in Italian, a juxtaposition or blending of tastes which has been a feature of many cuisines. Sweetness and sourness are two of what are usually counted as the four primary tastes sensed through the mouth (see TASTE), and therefore operate at a basic level in helping to determine the FLAVOUR of foods. (Of the two other primary tastes: one, saltiness, is used in some cultures in preference to sweetness; the other, bitterness, although sometimes appreciated, is generally disliked and serves as a warning of inedibility.)
The sweet-sour combination has affinities with certain foods: sweet-sour ingredients enhance rich meats, some fish, and vegetables; and relishes based on the combination go well with cheese and pork products. This last marriage is well explained in the context of 20th-century Pennsylvania Dutch cookery (where it was very popular but had developed along new lines after encountering cheap sugar, vinegar, and British sweet chutneys) by Weaver (1983).
People everywhere enjoy the naturally occurring sweet-acid balance of ripe fruit, but deliberate production of sweet and sour by combining specific ingredients is more limited. A well-known modern use of sweet and sour is in meat and fish dishes from the Guangdong region of China. SE Asian dishes and Indian food have some sweet-sour items but generally tend towards the sour and salty. Further west, however, the use of sweet-sour combinations reappears in subtle forms in W. Asia, the Middle East, and N. Africa. Here the sharp-sweet qualities of fruits such as apricots, pomegranates, and quinces are exploited in meat dishes. Across the Mediterranean, in Sicily, agrodolce dishes employ vinegar and raisins with vegetables (sprinkled with pine nuts for texture), while in mainland Italy sauces based on similar principles are used with game. These may be of very ancient origin: a honey and vinegar sauce, with pine nuts, sultanas, herbs, and spices, was described by APICIUS. Sugar, redcurrant jelly, and sometimes chocolate are now used as sweetening agents in agrodolce sauces for meat.
In Scandinavia and C. Europe, sweet-sour combinations are basic to the cookery. To take a few examples: HERRING cures use sugar and vinegar; sweet-sour marinades are used in preparing meat for certain dishes; and red cabbage is cooked with sugar (or apples) and vinegar.
In the field of preserves, sweet (from sugar and fruit, especially dates) and acid (vinegar, lemon, green mango, or tamarind) appear in the chutneys and brown sauces popular in Britain. These are descendants of 17th- and 18th-century attempts to copy Indian sweet-sour preserves of ripe mangoes and other fruit. An earlier British taste for sweet-sour combinations can be glimpsed in sugar, fruit, and VERJUICE mixtures used in meat dishes in medieval times, a use which was then widespread in Europe.
One of the important tendencies in the history of European cookery since the Renaissance has been the separation of flavours so that each dish, or each course of a meal, represented one only, rather than the apparently haphazard mingling displayed at the medieval table.
In the recent past, tastes in Britain, and perhaps elsewhere in the western world, seem to have tended towards sweet or salt dimensions in food, with less emphasis on sour, but this could be just one phase in the swings of a pendulum.
a butchers’ term which covers both the thymus gland and the pancreas of a young animal, usually a calf (the best) or lamb, although pig’s can also be used. The roundish pancreas, located by the stomach, is larger than the elongated thymus (or throat) gland, and preferred by many. The name thymus comes from a supposed resemblance to the bud of the herb thyme.
All sweetbreads have to be prepared and cooked soon after purchase, since the soft gland tissue deteriorates quickly. Their white colour and delicate texture have conspired to give them a reputation as a food for invalids or convalescents.
Eliza ACTON (1855) points out that preparation should always include a good soaking, and blanching them ‘to render them firm. If lifted out after they have boiled from five to ten minutes according to their size, and laid immediately into fresh spring water to cool, their colour will be the better preserved.’ She goes on to give characteristically precise instructions for stewing them, or slicing them into cutlets which can be egged, breadcrumbed, and fried and (a nice touch, this) served with a sauce poured under them. However, she makes clear that to her, along with brains, gristle (tendons), and ears, sweetbreads are a foodstuff of the second rank and require suitable added flavours if they are not to seem insipid. See also OFFAL.
A classic way of preparing sweetbreads in France is to cook them in butter and serve with SORREL purée.
the perennial herb Myrrhis odorata, is native to Europe and is widely cultivated there and in Asia. Both the generic and specific names (from Greek and Latin respectively) refer to the plant’s fragrance.
The leaves of sweet cicely, like lacy ferns, are often flecked with white and have slightly downy undersides. They are light green turning purple in the autumn and taste of ANISEED. They can be used in spring salads; and their sweetness can be used to remove sourness from food, particularly fruit, so it is useful to add some when stewing rhubarb or gooseberries.
Fresh leaves can be added to soups, stews, omelettes or salads. Thomas (1992) remarks that the roots were formerly boiled as a vegetable and could be candied like angelica. Drinks and liqueurs, for example Chartreuse, can be flavoured with sweet cicely.
Although sweet cicely is used in many countries for particular purposes, its general use is most apparent in Germany, and in French cuisine where it is often partnered with tarragon.
used respectively to make sweet cream butter and sweet curd cheese, differ from the more usual type in that they have not been pre-ripened by LACTIC ACID-producing BACTERIA to develop a sour flavour.
Sweet cream butter, rather tasteless compared with the normal kind, is used in preparing some very delicately flavoured baked goods. It is not the same as unsalted butter although it may be unsalted.
Sweet curd cheeses include BRICK, EDAM, GOUDA, MUNSTER, and (in the USA) a variant of Cheddar, rather soft and mild.
other than SUGAR and substances containing sugar, have become important in the 20th century, especially in the western world, where an addiction to sugar and sweet foods often conflicts with a desire to avoid becoming fat.
Some natural substances have a powerful sweetening effect when present in small amounts. One of these is glycyrrhizin in LIQUORICE. In the actual root, or the black sweetmeat made from it, its sweetness is partly masked by other, bitter compounds.
Several tropical plants contain substances which, when eaten, have the bizarre effect of making everything else taste sweet for some time. The most notable of these is the ‘miracle berry’, Synsepalum dulcificum. Food scientists have not yet succeeded in bringing its active substance, miraculin, under control so that it bestows sweetness in a more selective or restrained way. If they do, it could become important.
The only non-sugar sweetener at present licensed for use in most countries is saccharin, a synthetic substance made from coal tar. It was accidentally discovered in 1879 at Johns Hopkins University by chemists working on the coal tar derivative toluene, one of whom licked his finger and noticed that it tasted sweet. A commercial manufacturing process was developed in 1894. Saccharin is now widely used not only as a sweetener for coffee and tea and for dieters’ foods but also in many conventional processed foods and drinks. It is a cheaper means of sweetening these than sugar. Saccharin in pure form is 300 to 500 times as sweet as common white sugar. (This is not a record. Some substances taste up to ten times sweeter still.) It has an unpleasant, bitter aftertaste, although the principal kind used today, sodium saccharin, is better than older kinds in this respect.
The so-called ‘sweet herb of Paraguay’ is Stevia rebaudiana, an annual herb native to the mountains of Paraguay and part of Brazil. It is said to be 300 times sweeter than sugar, and that the dried leaves, ground or soaked are used locally as a sugar substitute.
Another sweetener which is powerfully effective in small concentrations is aspartame, made by chemical treatment of natural AMINO ACIDS.
Other artificial sweeteners were formerly used, especially cyclamates. These are only thirty times as sweet as sugar, which make them more controllable; have less of an aftertaste; and are resistant to cooking, which saccharin is not. However, they are thought to be potentially carcinogenic, so have been banned since 1969/70 in the USA and many other countries including Britain.
the general name used in Scotland for BOILED SWEETS, TOFFEES, and the like. Scottish people have indulged themselves with sweeties ever since the 15th century, when sugar began to be imported in quantity, and have acquired an international reputation for the quality of their products and also for the interesting names which many of them have. See also TABLET and some of the items described under TOFFEE.
According to Jenny Carter and Janet Rae (1989), the first manufacturing confectioner to set up trade in Edinburgh was an Italian who was given a licence in 1665 to make ‘confeits’. When, later, Glasgow became an important centre for sugar-refining, the number of confectioners in that city multiplied. The same two authors continue:
the Sweetie Wives, who made their own confections, were a familiar sight in both the streets and the markets. The Border towns also had women who liked making sweets and some of the most familiar confections originated in that locality in the nineteenth century.
For some reason the Border towns (in Scotland the term ‘border’ refers to the region north of the border with England) showed particular prowess in making sweeties. One of their most famous products is Hawick balls, which are dark brown peppermint-flavoured boilings, with a hint of cinnamon, once called taffy rock bools. Some of the historical comments by Carter and Rae appear below; while the two following items are furnished with descriptions by Catherine Brown (1981).
• Hawick balls. ‘Original recipes for the bools have been lost but it is known that two women, Jessie McVittie and Aggie Lamb, introduced the sweet for the first time in their shops in Hawick. Little did they imagine that the bools would become so famous; not only do Hawick Balls allegedly inspire prowess at rugby, a tin of the sweets has also been buried at the South Pole during an Antarctic expedition… Jessie made the Rock Bools in her shop at Drumlanrig Square, Hawick, in the 1850s as well as Black Sticky Taffy and White Peppermint Taffy. It is said she stretched her Rock Bool mixture and hung it on a nail stuck in the wall, where she could keep an eye on it from her shop counter. As the mixture slowly slid to the ground, Jessie carried on with her housework and tended to customers, until such time as the mixture fell close to the floor when she would suddenly get hold of it, give it a twist and a stretch and hang it over the nail again. The method of “pulling” was repeated over and over.’
• Soor plooms ‘are round, green balls with, as their name suggests, an acid, astringent tang. The plooms are said to commemorate an incident in local history when a band of English marauders were surprised and overcome while eating unripe plums.’
• Berwick cockles ‘were originally home-made peppermint flavoured, white with pink stripes and shaped like the cockle-shells fished up near Tweedmouth harbour. They are now a commercial product as popular north of the Border as they are south of it. (Berwick-upon-Tweed, in the course of its lively history, has found itself both north and south of the border.)’
Border sweeties include some special kinds of toffee.
• Jeddart snails belong to Jedburgh. These are dark brown toffees, mildly peppermint flavoured. The name and shape were given to them by a French prisoner-of-war in Napoleon’s day when he is said to have made them for a Jedburgh baker.
• Moffat toffee is a unique toffee, hard, amber and gold striped, with an intriguing tang, made in Moffat by a local family who have been making it for generations. Originally a sweetie shop product, it is now factory made with a wide distribution.
Other parts of Scotland have also contributed famous sweeties, for example the following three from the Glasgow region.
• Cheugh jeans. In the latter half of the 19th century a local character, known as Ball Allan—The Candy King of Glasgow, made a variety of sweetie known as cheugh jeans. Cheugh means ‘chewey’ and they were of many different flavours: clove, cinnamon, peppermint, ginger. The chocolate variety was very popular, and it is certainly cheugh.
• Glasgow toffee is made with
GOLDEN SYRUP, plain chocolate, and vanilla essence.
• Helensburgh toffee is a more sophisticated and delicate confection, as befits the pretensions of this leisured and wealthy haven sited at a convenient distance from the industrial centres. More like a fudge than a toffee, it has a rich, creamy flavour and is now one of the most popular home-made sweeties.
Yet other traditional sweeties include:
• curly-doddies or curley-murlies, mixed sweets formed on a seed or other foundation such as caraway, clove, or almond, which have a gnarled exterior;
• curly andra, a white, coral-like sweet with a coriander seed in the centre. The name is a corruption of curryander, a Scots form of coriander;
• black man, the subject of a charming quotation attributed to ‘a native of Kilmarnock’ by
Marian McNeill (
1929): ‘In the pan, in the little shop where we bought it, it looked like gingerbread, but when it was broken up, it was a crispy crunch, like a petrified sponge, but once it was in the mouth, it melted into the most soul-satisfying, delectable sweet. (It was about an inch thick.) Even after sixty years, I can still taste it in my memory.’
For Edinburgh rock, see ROCK.
Ipomoea batatas, the most important of the tropical root crops, is the starchy tuber of a vine of the convolvulus and morning glory family. It is not related to the ordinary POTATO, although both plants are of American origin.
The sweet potato is the cultivated descendant of a wild plant, remains of whose tubers have been found in a cave in Peru inhabited before 8000 BC. It was taken into cultivation during the last centuries BC, well before the time of the Incas, and became a staple food all over tropical America as far north as Mexico and on the Caribbean islands.
It is likely that it was during the 13th century AD that the sweet potato was taken westward to Easter Island and Hawaii, and in the next century to New Zealand. These dates have been calculated from Hawaiian and Maori records. It could be that Peruvians aboard a raft were blown out into the ocean and made a lucky landfall on the sparse islands to the west. However, the voyage may have been deliberate; Thor Heyerdahl repeated it in his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, using a similar raft, to prove that it was possible. It had previously been supposed that the sweet potato must have been carried to the Pacific islands by Europeans, at a later time. However, the validity of Heyerdahl’s demonstration is supported by the fact that the ancient Peruvian name for the sweet potato, kumar, is found with only minor variations (kumala, gumala, umala) in several Pacific island languages.
The first Europeans to taste sweet potatoes were members of Columbus’ expedition to Haiti, in 1492. Later explorers found many varieties as they extended the range of their expeditions. Early accounts give various local names, aji, camote, apichu, and others; but the name which stuck was the first known Haitian one, batata. Later this name was accidentally transferred to the ordinary potato after its discovery by Europeans in 1537, causing a confusion which still persists.
Native American sweet potatoes in use at the time were not all sweet. Some were plainly starchy and others markedly fibrous, as were those which had been taken to the Pacific islands. But the European explorers were interested only in the sweet kinds, and it is these which have been spread by European influence while the others have largely died out.
The sweet potato was cultivated in the south of Spain from the early 16th century, and proved a popular novelty. Attempts to grow it further to the north were only partly successful. The plant is easily grown from roots or cuttings in hot countries; but in cooler regions it has to be started in a hothouse. Although for this reason it could never become a major food crop in Europe, it enjoyed two brief vogues in France during the 18th and early 19th centuries, since both Louis XV and the Empress Josephine, who was a Creole, were partial to it.
Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers took the sweet potato to the Philippines; and from there Portuguese traders spread it to the E. Indies and India. It is generally accepted that the sweet potato reached China at the end of the 16th century. There was a famine in Fujian province in 1593 and the governor sent an expedition to the Philippines to search for food plants. Next year the ships returned with sweet potatoes, which soon became a staple of that part of China. Early in the 18th century the sweet potato passed into Japan. The fact that it is called karaimo (i.e. Chinese potato) in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), ryukyu-imo in Satsuma, and satsumaimo in the rest of the country is said to indicate the route by which it arrived.
It was probably slave traders who introduced the sweet potato to Africa, where it was called igname or nyam, which simply means ‘yam’. Since that time the sweet potato has been steadily displacing the true YAM as a major carbohydrate food in tropical Africa.
On the N. American mainland sweet potatoes had long been grown by the Indians in Louisiana, where de Soto found them in 1540, and as far north as Georgia. By 1648 the colonists in Virginia were cultivating them. The sweet potato was especially valued during the war against the British and the Civil War, for it grows quickly and its underground habit makes it less vulnerable than surface crops to deliberate destruction.
There are numerous varieties. Most have tubers which are about the size of medium ordinary potatoes, and generally of an elongated, slightly pointed shape, though there are also round kinds. The skin may be white, yellow, red, purple, or brown, and the flesh white, yellow, orange, or even orange-red. The two main categories of sweet potato now grown are best distinguished as ‘soft’ and ‘firm’; one becomes soft and moist when cooked, while the other remains mealy and relatively firm. The flesh of the soft ones is apt to be orange, and that of the firm ones white or yellow. In the USA the soft kind is sometimes called ‘yam’; a misnomer, as the true YAM is a different plant.
The boniato, often regarded as a vegetable in its own right although correctly known as a cultivar of the sweet potato, is of the firm kind, with a brown or red skin and white flesh. It is outstandingly mealy when cooked, and has found its way from Cuba and the Antilles, where it has long been popular, to the USA.
Yellow flesh indicates the presence of carotene, a source of vitamin A. Sweet potatoes provide only half as much protein as ordinary potatoes, but contain much starch and a little sugar. The tubers do not store well. Traditional methods of preserving them have included partial drying of whole roots by the Maori, slicing and sun-drying in China, and candying in many countries. They can also be made into a starchy meal. Around 1766 such a product was being exported from Savannah, Georgia, to England. It never became popular, but sweet potato meal or starch is used by the food-processing industry. The tubers are sometimes canned.
Most sweet potatoes are used fresh: baked or boiled in their skins (after which they can be slipped out of their skins and mashed), or fried. They can also be used in baking breads or cakes; and chips (US French fries) can be made of them. In China and Japan, roasted sweet potatoes are sold by street vendors. Many find the flavour of sweet potato more attractive if it is further sweetened and spiced with cinnamon or nutmeg. It is often made into desserts in the USA, on the lines of pumpkin pie.
The most remarkable root in the genus Ipomoea is the manroot or man of the earth, I. leptophylla, which grows in the western USA. This huge tuber, the size and shape of a fully grown man, is not very good to eat, and remarkably difficult to dig up; but Indians have reluctantly turned to it in hungry times. Other species with edible roots are of minor importance. See also JICAMA, a plant which was formerly classed in the same genus.
in these sense being considered here, is a word which English children recognize as a collective term for diverse items of sugar CONFECTIONERY. Sometimes reduced to the diminutive ‘SWEETIES’ (especially in Scottish usage), it is roughly equivalent to the French term bonbons and N. American ‘candy’. (In another sense, ‘sweets’ can be more or less equivalent to desserts, sweet courses at the end of meals.)
It is difficult to provide a satisfactory definition of sweets in the sense that children use the word. That they should have a high sugar content seems a logical assertion—but low-sugar sweets are made. Sweets should be sweet, but there are some very sour varieties (acid DROPS) and bitter types (LIQUORICE and cough sweets). Sweets are generally small—but there are also some very large ones, such as GOBSTOPPERS. Designed mostly to appeal to children, some find a ready sale amongst adults, who yet consider many sweets to be rubbish.
One qualification for a sweet to be truly appreciated by children seems to be that it should resemble anything but food. Ever since the price of sugar began to fall, nearly 200 years ago, and possibly before, confectioners have modelled childhood fantasies and fashions in sugar. Examples include ‘Nelson’s Buttons’ in pink peppermint-flavoured sugar paste, hard sugar ‘toys’ shaped like horses or steam engines, boiled sweets striped like Victorian dresses, and moulded chocolate pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, packed in boxes as ‘smoker’s outfits’. Many items appear to be shaped and named to represent particularly unappetizing substances: bull’s eyes, rifle shot (a type of DRAGÉE), false teeth (in boiled sugar or MARSHMALLOW), liquorice bootlaces, rats (in coloured gum), traffic light lollies, and SHERBET flying saucers are a few of the items which have been marketed.
Some sweets are equipped with surprising visual and flavour effects: gobstoppers change colour when sucked, sherbet fizzes in the mouth, and bubble gum is as much about bubbles as sweetness. Certain TOFFEES are enjoyed for their chewy or stretchy texture, and rituals develop around other sweets—such as biting the heads off jelly babies. The basic confections have a long history, and many were originally held in high regard as medicines or luxury goods. In the 21st century, these curiously flavoured, brilliantly coloured, and outlandishly named tooth-rotters are more likely to provide a lesson in observation of the physical world and a rite of passage for most British children.
a large category of crabs which swim in the water as opposed to just scuttling about on the sand or the seabed, and which include such important edible species as the BLUE CRAB of N. America. Swimming crabs can easily be recognized by the fact that their hindmost legs have developed into ‘swimmerets’, paddle shaped at the ends so that they can be used for propulsion.
The chief family of swimming crabs, Portunidae, is well represented around the world. In Europe it includes a number of small species, notably Necora puber, Spanish nécora, French étrille, Italian grancia d’arena. The largest crab of a small tribe whose members are usually consigned to the soup pot, this one may measure 7 cm (2.5″) across the body.
In the Indo-Pacific there are larger swimming crabs, such as:
• Charybdis feriatus, the mask crab, so called because the markings on its back, which may measure over 15 cm (6″) across, are thought to resemble a mask.
• Scylla serrata, the mangrove crab (but it shares this name with some other crabs which live in mangrove swamps). This crab is slightly larger and a full-grown specimen may weigh as much as 1 kg (2.25 lb). Typically dark red or nearly black in colour. Similar crabs with somewhat different characteristics, especially colour, are regarded by many experts as varieties of the same species; but fishermen certainly have different names for them and it may be that there are other valid species such as S. paramamosain, the Green mud crab.
• Portunus pelagicus, another large swimming crab (carapace up to 20 cm/8″ across), light blue with white spots (male) or brown with white spots (female). Makes good eating, also in the softshell state. The Thai name, pu ma, means horse crab; whereas the Thai call P. sanguinolentus, a close relation with three distinctive purple spots on a greenish-yellow carapace, pu dao, meaning star crab.
a confection made by rolling up a thin oblong sheet of SPONGE CAKE spread with jam to make a roll. When sliced the cake reveals a spiral of thick yellow sponge cake with a thin stripe of jam.
There are many variations on this idea. Some are rich confections, often using chocolate-flavoured sponge rolled up with whipped cream. A special variety is the French bûche de Noël. (See CHRISTMAS FOODS.)
In the USA they are called jelly roll. See also ROULADE.
a country whose gastronomic map has no capital, as Eva Maria Borer (1965) pointed out. Swiss cookery traditions are preserved in five different languages (French, German, Italian, and Switzerdeutsch, plus Romansch) and the 23 cantons of this mountainous and pastoral country. Many of the dishes commonly encountered correspond very closely to ones found in France, Germany, and Italy. However, the cuisines of Switzerland do have their own individual characters and are collectively distinguished by a certain emphasis on cheese cookery and an interesting range of baked goods.
In the realm of cheese cookery FONDUE and RACLETTE are well known internationally. The home of the former in Switzerland is the western part of the country. The best-known fondue is that of Neuchâtel, but the fondues of Waadtland and Geneva are also famous, as is the fonduta of the mountain valleys of the canton of Tessin (Ticino) near Italy.
Raclette has its home in the canton Valais. Borer (1965) has an evocative passage on this:
Johanna Spyri described the prototype of all Swiss national dishes made from melted cheese in Heidi, in a famous scene when the old grandfather fries the cheese at an open fire. Basically, Raclette is just that—cheese fried in the fire; and in Wallis, and many restaurants all over Switzerland, this speciality is prepared at an open wood fire. A mature Gomser cheese is halved and the cut side held in the flames till the surface begins to melt. The melting cheese is scraped on to a warm plate—racler means to scrape—and eaten with small potatoes, salt cucumbers and onions pickled in vinegar.
One author, Sue Style (1992), has given an exceptionally clear account of Swiss history as the backdrop to the emergence and characteristics of the 23 cantonal cuisines. Among the perceptive observations which she makes are those applying to the people of Ticino (by the Italian frontier) and the francophone cantons:
• ‘The Ticinese are proud of being Swiss, which is completely compatible in their view with having many favourite Italian dishes (mostly from Lombardy or Piedmont) and retaining the endearing Italian characteristic of being relaxed about food.’
• ‘The French speakers of Switzerland, known by themselves as les Suisses romands and by the Swiss-Germans as die Welschen (meaning, literally, celtic—non-alemannic—and therefore foreign), are inevitably more influenced by the French culture of the table, not only from their proximity to France, but also for historical reasons— not for nothing are they descended from the Burgundians. Some of Switzerland’s largest lakes are in the French-speaking part, and lake fish is frequently served.’ Apparently filets de perches (fried fillets of perch) are the most popular dish of the region, ahead of the more famous fondue.
• ‘The Swiss Germans in general have a less developed “culture of the table” than the French- or Italian-speakers… Powerful soups precede pork dishes with cabbage (fresh and salted)… Sausages are legion, potatoes are practically de rigueur. Probably most representative of all is the wonderful Rösti, a sort of grated potato pancake seen as the quintessential Swiss-German dish by the French speakers. (The dish has even given its name to the river Sarine, otherwise jokingly referred to as the Rïsti-graben, the deep dividing “ditch” between French- and German-speaking Switzerland.)’
Switzerland has been the home of many famous hotel schools, where chefs and hotel managers are trained, mainly on conservative lines so far as food is concerned; classical French restaurant cuisine has had a long shelf life in the Alpine climate.
READING:
Kelly (
1985, for baked goods).
Xiphias gladius, a fish which ranges right round the world. Most of its common names refer to its ‘sword’. This is not for driving holes through the bottoms of wooden boats (although there are many tales of this happening), but to be flailed around among banks of smaller fish, which are thus killed or stunned. Maximum length (including the sword) is 4 m (13′).
Although so large, and so formidably equipped, the swordfish often lazes on the surface of the water and can be harpooned. In classical times, as now, this was a common method of capture. Swordfish are also taken in tuna traps.
A traveller in Sicily in the 18th century recorded that the Sicilian fishermen used a Greek sentence as a charm to lure the fish towards their boats; if the fish overheard a word of Italian he would plunge under water at once and make off. A possible explanation of this phenomenon is that the Sicilians, in whose waters swordfish abound, are notoriously skilful at catching them, much more so than Greeks.
The flesh of the swordfish is very compact, and is excellent grilled. It is consumed on a large scale in N. America. Smoked swordfish, which is prepared in Turkey and elsewhere, is a delicacy.
(or sillabub) a sweet, frothy confection which was popular in Britain from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and has since been revived in a small way as a dessert.
The origin of the word ‘syllabub’ is a mystery. Lexicographers find no compelling reason to accept any of the explanations offered so far.
Originally syllabub was a drink with a foamy head, but the foamy part was the object of chief interest and later became the main element. It has often been said that the primitive method of making syllabub, ensuring a good foam, was to partly fill a jug with sweetened, spiced white wine or cider, and to milk a cow directly into it. When this technique was critically examined, and subjected to experiments, by Vicky Williams (1996), it was found to be unsatisfactory; and it began to seem doubtful whether it had ever been a common practice. Ivan Day (1996b) crowned the debate on this particular question by a historical and technical survey of the whole subject of syllabubs, now the locus classicus. He acknowledges at the end of his essay help received (presumably on the particular question of direct milking) from cow 53 at Thrimby Manor Farm, Cumbria, as well as the illumination provided by the numerous 17th- and 18th-century authors whose recipes he cites.
are respectively the Russian and Serbo-Croat words for ‘cheese’, and form part of the names of some cheeses made in Russia, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. For example, the Russians consume quantities of Edam-type Gollandsky syr (‘Dutch cheese’—Russian has no letter H).
More genuinely Russian or Soviet cheese names are usually place names. Well-known types are Moskovsky syr (from Moscow) and Altajsky syr (from the Altai)—both hard; Latvysky syr (from Latvia) and Volzhsky syr (from the Volga)—both surface ripened; Desertny syr, which is mould-ripened; Jerevansky syr and Cecîl—both ‘PICKLED’ CHEESES. These are only a handful from a vast collection including many regional cheeses made on a small scale by herdsmen or on collective farms.
Serbo-Croat cheese names frequently use a place name and sir, as in Mjesinski sir, a cheese made from ewe’s milk and usually cured for a year in a sack or sheepskin bag. Somborski sir is made from sheep’s and cow’s milk mixed with water and fermented in a vat to give a curious bitter taste. Again, there are numerous other varieties, many of them hard ‘pickled’ types made, as FETA is, in conjunction with WHEY CHEESES to avoid waste.
are solutions of SUGAR dissolved in water, or solutions of fruit juice and sugar. A knowledge of the properties of syrups at different concentrations and temperatures is basic to SUGAR BOILING and CONFECTIONERY, and they are also important in fruit PRESERVATION and in making soft drinks and cordials. Some substances which carry the name syrup, with qualification—GOLDEN SYRUP, glucose syrup, CORN SYRUP—are products of the sugar and starch industries and are bought from refiners or specialist producers.
Plain syrup of sugar and water is sometimes called ‘stock syrup’; quantities are made up and stored for use in large kitchens, where it has many applications in dessert-making, especially as the basis for sorbets (see WATER ICES). It can be made up to whatever strength the cook requires, the optimum being somewhere around the proportions of 1650 g (60 oz) sugar dissolved in 1 litre (1.75 pints) water just at boiling point, and then cooled; this is strong enough to keep well, but not so heavily saturated that the sugar will begin to crystallize out again. Whilst the domestic cook can generally rely on using measured quantities of sugar and water to produce syrup for a given recipe, it is important for chefs and those in the food industry to know the precise strength, which is ascertained by measuring the density at a specific temperature using a hydrometer. Originally, this was expressed in degrees on the Baumé scale; now a decimal system is used.
The word syrup derives from the same Arabic root as the word SHERBET. They were known both in the kitchen and in medicine in Britain by the 14th century. Ever since then, syrups have been found useful as a vehicle for flavours, for cooking fruit or for preserving it by bottling or as candied fruit, for making up cooling drinks when diluted with water, and as a means of easing the passage of medicaments down a patient’s throat; this follows a general European pattern of usage. Further east, syrups have an additional culinary role in the making of pastries such as BAKLAVA.