one of the foods which is doing a slow disappearing act, at least in western countries. Cow’s udder, boiled to prepare it for consumption, counts as a form of TRIPE; it is called elder in Britain and tétine de veau in French triperies.
The term elder appears to be Middle Dutch, and was probably first recorded in Ray’s North Country Words (1674). It was used mainly in the north and north-west of Britain, but appeared also in Scotland and Ireland.
Not surprisingly, little is known of its history. Though udder appears to be first mentioned as a food in 1474 (OED), its finest hour came on 11 October 1660, when Samuel Pepys in the company of his wife and Mr Creed, dining at the Leg in King Street, thought sufficiently of their ‘good udder to dinner’ to record it in his diary. That at least assured a place for it in posterity and the OED.
Since then, for the most part, it has been downhill all the way. Though La Varenne (1654) and Charles Carter (1730), for example, give recipes, and Hannah Glasse (1747) recommends both a roast and forced (stuffed) udder, udder is more often conspicuous by its absence. Dallas in Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877) notes that udder is no longer abundant in the market though it formerly had a recognized position in French cookery. Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (1899) gives it, but of more recent authors only Escoffier and Prosper Montagné seem to include an entry of any significance.
Long gone from the daily diet of most people, udder is thus a vanishing food. It seems to survive, towards the close of the 20th century, almost exclusively in a small cluster of towns in industrial W. Yorkshire (Keighley, Halifax, Huddersfield, Dewsbury) and in E. Lancashire, especially in the market halls of places like Accrington, Bacup, Wigan, Burnley, and Colne.
A traditional tripe dresser in such places would be preparing dark and light tripe, cow heel, neat’s foot oil, black pudding, and elder. Nothing was wasted; the copious quantities of fat produced as a by-product would be sold to the fish and chip trade.
Devoid of teats and skin, raw elder looks like a large, pink, amorphous blob. It has to be drained of any remaining milk which would otherwise taint the flavour, after which it has to be simmered for six hours or so until tender. The final step is to ‘dress’ it so that it looks good. The finished product smells faintly of tongue and has something of the same softness, but is chewier. Many early recipes grouped the two together.
Elder is not an exclusively British phenomenon. The French connection has already been mentioned. In Belgium one may be offered smoked pis de vache. In days when the entirety of an animal was amenable to ingenious cookery and we did not restrict ourselves to prime cuts alone, udders and the like were integrated into the repertoire. One only has to think of the Ligurian rolled stuffed breast of veal (with whole eggs running through it) called cima, which used many butchers’ leavings such as udder in the stuffing, to see the principle at work. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1987) has also drawn attention to a recipe for udder from the Jews of the Yemen.
The Roman emperor Hadrian was said to be very partial to a dish of pheasant, sows’ udders, peacock, and ham, introduced to him by his adopted son Aelius Verus who reputedly kept a copy of the recipes of Apicius by his bedside.
Lynda Brown
Aralia cordata, a plant in the family Araliaceae whose young stalks are eaten as a vegetable in Japan, especially in the spring. The flavour has a hint of fennel, and the texture is pleasantly crisp.
Udo stalks are usually peeled and steeped in cold water and then eaten almost raw. For example, they may be parboiled briefly, then cut into slices or strips and added to sunomono or aemono salads (see JAPANESE CULINARY TERMS); or slices may be added to soups just a minute or two before they are taken off the fire.
Udo is rarely available outside Japan, since it does not keep well.
Japanese noodles (see NOODLES OF JAPAN) made from wheat flour. They are similar to spaghetti but softer in texture.
Udon are said to be of Chinese origin, introduced to Japan during the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907). Contemporary documents suggest that the original udon was not noodles but pieces of rolled-out dough wrapped around fillings, like Chinese WONTON. (The words ‘udon’ and ‘wonton’ have a common root.) It is not clear when udon came to mean noodles as it does today. Udon as noodles seems to make its first appearance in the first half of the 14th century. According to some sources, it was eaten mainly by Buddhist monks and gradually spread amongst ordinary people. This is not unlikely, since there were close links between Buddhism and Chinese culture at the time.
Udon is made by mixing wheat flour with water (with or without salt, sometimes with vinegar to make the resulting noodles look whiter), kneading it into a fairly stiff dough, rolling it out, folding it, and cutting it somewhat thicker than SOBA. Much of udon consumed today is machine made.
Originally udon was eaten as nikomi-udon (stewed udon). For this, freshly made udon is added to MISO-based soup without preliminary boiling, and cooked with various vegetables. This is essentially a home-made dish to be eaten as a supplement to or substitute for gohan (cooked rice). There are endless local variations, and in a few areas the dough is not cut into noodles but into small squares—possibly reminiscent of the original form of udon.
It was probably as a result of the rising popularity of commercially prepared soba in the 17th century that udon, too, came to be served in specialist restaurants and stalls, in the same way as, and alongside, soba. In contrast to soba, which tastes distinctly of BUCKWHEAT, the flavour of udon is neutral, allowing any number of variations in the additional ingredients, such as vegetables, seaweeds, eggs, fish, shellfish, poultry. There is even udon with curry sauce.
a fruit of Jamaican origin, unkindly so named. It belongs to the category of citrus fruits called tangelos (see MANDARIN), which are hybrids of mandarin and GRAPEFRUIT, but markedly different from either parent. An ugli may be almost as big as a POMELO, over 15 cm (6″) in diameter and 1 kg (more than 2 lb) in weight, but much of it consists in a thick, baggy rind. The rind has a pulled-up appearance at the top, like a kitten picked up by the scruff of the neck. Despite its thickness, it is easily peelable and has a fine fragrance of CITRON (unlike any other mandarin, tangelo, or pomelo). The segments of flesh separate freely like those of the pomelo, but have a different flavour, more like that of a mandarin, barely bitter and with a faint overtone of honey or pineapple.
Another large citrus fruit which is usually classified as a tangelo, the New Zealand grapefruit or poorman orange, has the shape and size of a grapefruit, but is more orange in colour and slightly less acid. It is said to have been imported from Shanghai early in the 19th century, and may really be a mandarin × pomelo hybrid. Whatever the truth about its origin, it is used like the grapefruit in New Zealand, where it is the leading citrus fruit on the market. As this suggests, it can tolerate a cooler climate than the true grapefruit, and also ripens much earlier. For these reasons it is now being grown in N. California.
a vast country which used to be called the ‘bread basket’ of the Soviet Union. Its capability as a source of bread certainly impressed the French novelist Balzac, who had a Ukrainian wife and who referred to the Ukraine in a letter as ‘this terrestrial paradise, where I marked 77 ways of preparing bread’. Savella Stechishin (1979), whose book on Traditional Ukrainian Cookery is of exceptional merit, writes:
To the Ukrainians, bread is one of the holiest of all foods. The older people consider it most disrespectful when leftover pieces of bread are thrown about carelessly. They pick up such pieces reverently, kiss them in apology, and then feed the bread to the birds or burn it on the hearth.
Besides conventional forms of wheaten bread, there are numerous rich and festival breads (and indeed cakes and the like). In this connection see PASKHA and BABA. There is also the ring-shaped plaited bread called kalach or kolach.
The national dish is said to be VARENIKI, a stuffed pasta, and vushka, miniature versions thereof. DUMPLINGS, for example galushki, also feature often, to be eaten on their own or in soups.
If bread is the main staple, then pork (especially fat bacon) and beetroot are not far behind in importance (and are in fact combined in a pork and beetroot casserole called Vereshchaka). Beetroot is not only a frequent choice as a vegetable but appears in the Ukrainian versions of BORSHCH, the national soup. Stechishin devotes much space to this, explaining how to make the beet KVASS which ‘imparts a pleasant mellow flavour … unattainable with any other acid’ and describing various finishing touches:
To finish borsch in a truly traditional way, most old country cooks mash together a little salt pork with some raw onion to a smooth paste. They claim that, without this final touch, borsch lacks character. Those who have a violent passion for dill, use it liberally in borsch. Some feel that a discreet use of garlic essence is just the thing to blend the borsch flavors together for a richly finished product. Unless the borsch is meatless for Lent days, a few tablespoons of sour cream are always added to it just before serving.
Since the Ukraine is so huge, it is not surprising to find some subcuisines within it. One such is that of the Hutsul highlanders in the Carpathian mountains. MAIZE is their staple cereal and they have a range of dishes such as cornmeal mush (kulesha) and a corn bread called malay. Cornmeal is also the basis of several kinds of spoon bread (see CORN BREADS). In some other regions MILLET continues to be important as a cereal.
It is sometimes said that a distinctive Ukrainian cuisine did not emerge clearly until the end of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th. If this is so, it may have been in part because of a superabundance of neighbours (the list now reads: BELORUSSIA, POLAND, Slovakia (see CZECH AND SLOVAK REPUBLICS), HUNGARY, ROMANIA, MOLDOVA, RUSSIA) and other influences (German, Tatar, Turkish). The influence of Christianity has also been considerable.
Ullucus tuberosus, a minor root crop cultivated in the high Andes region of S. America, ranging from Colombia to N. Argentina. Although hardy and unaffected by high altitudes, it is not suitable for the far south or north, being sensitive to the length of the day; but it may be possible to develop cultivars which do not have this handicap. Where ulluco is cultivated it is an important part of the diet, sometimes second only to the potato, sometimes third after OCA.
The excellent description in Lost Crops of the Incas (National Research Council, 1989) reads thus:
One of the most striking foods in the markets, its tubers are so brightly colored—yellow, pink, red, purple, even candy striped—and their waxy skins are so shiny that they seem like botanical jewels or plastic fakes. Many are shaped like small potatoes but others are curiously long and curved like crooked sausages. (One of the bent types, splashed with maroon streaks, is known as ‘Christ’s knee’. A small, pink, curled variety is called ‘shrimp of the earth’.) Their skin is thin and soft and needs no peeling before eating. The white to lemon-yellow flesh has a smooth, silky texture with a nutty taste. Some types are gummy when raw, but in cooking, this characteristic is reduced or lost. Indeed, a major appeal of ulluco is its crisp texture, which remains even when cooked.
Among the numerous varieties, some have tubers as large as normal potatoes, but most tubers are smaller and the smaller ones are most prized. Among the many different shapes and colours, the most common combination is roughly spherical and yellow.
Ulluco may be freeze dried to make llingli, a long-keeping product like the CHUÑO made with the potato. Ulluco are also canned for export; they keep their texture and flavour well.
Because of their high water content, ulluco are not suitable for frying or baking, but they can be cooked in many other ways—boiled (whole, or sliced and then served with vinegar), boiled and mashed, or added to stews and soups. They are preferred to the potato for thickening soups, because of their silky texture. In pickled form, they can be added to hot sauces.
The green leaves can also be eaten, in ways similar to the plant’s relation BASELLA.
Prunus mume. This is a deciduous tree of the rose family, 5–10 m (16–30′) high. Its original home is in China, though some wild specimens have been reported in parts of Kyushu as well as Taiwan.
Because of its highly fragrant, white or pink blossoms, which come out in February and March before any other blossoms, ume has been a popular garden tree in Japan since the earliest times. Its fruit are similar to apricots in shape; they are green at first and greenish-yellow when fully ripened, which is normally in June.
The ume fruits have a strongly acid and bitter taste, due to the high content of citric and malic acids, and are not suitable for eating raw. Moreover, when unripe, they contain amygdalin, which is also present in bitter almonds, and are toxic.
Most ume produced in Japan are made into UMEBOSHI (see below), but they are also used to make an interesting liqueur, umeshu.
Japanese salted and dried ‘plums’. Umeboshi literally means ‘dried ume’. This fruit, as explained above, is more correctly described as a sort of apricot; but the salted and dried version is plum coloured, the flavour is like that of a tart plum rather than an apricot, and the rendering ‘plum’ has stuck. The typical purple or red colour of umeboshi is produced by red SHISO leaves. Umeboshi have a wrinkled and shrivelled appearance with a sour and salty taste. Hosking (1996) explains that:
These apricots come large and small, soft and hard, and are an item of daily consumption. Usually colored red with red shiso leaves, they are mostly eaten as a pickle with rice, but the large soft ones, desalted by soaking in water, make very good tempura. A cup of [green] bancha tea containing an umeboshi makes a good start to the morning. A bento with an umeboshi on top of the rice is called hinomaru bento, after the Japanese flag. Rice gruel (kayu), a breakfast food, is usually served with umeboshi.
This is one of the oldest and most important preserved foods in Japan. Many Japanese housewives still make their own umeboshi every year. Some families are proud owners of vintage umeboshi, which can be more than 100 years old, handed down from generation to generation.
It is generally believed that umeboshi has medicinal, antiseptic, and preservative properties. It is said, for example, that rice cooked with an umeboshi in it does not go bad in hot weather, or that an upset stomach can be cured by the juice obtained from ume in the process of salting. Umeboshi and plain rice porridge, referred to above, is valued as an invalid food as well as a breakfast dish.
A purée of umeboshi, called bainiku, is available in bottles or jars, for use in certain sauces which require its tartness.
or upside down pudding, as it is sometimes called, is a creamed cake (see CAKE-MAKING) which is turned out after baking so that the base becomes the top, displaying a decorative pattern composed of fruit; pineapple rings and glacé cherries are popular choices. It is usually eaten warm, with custard.
The name may also be used for finished cakes which are pressed with syrup and fruit in a mould and then turned out for serving, and a similar principle is employed in some ice cream desserts and TARTE TATIN.
Generally, the concept of upsidedownness has had only limited applications in the kitchen, but it is used quite often for savoury moulds, where the artificer desires a pleasing pattern of vegetables or prawns or whatever to appear on top of the item when it has been unmoulded.
(or urad, or black gram) Vigna mungo, the most important PULSE in India. It has ceremonial significance for Hindus, e.g. at birth and death rites. It is not known in the wild but is presumably a descendant of wild Vigna spp. It has now been widely introduced to other tropical areas.
Urd is closely related to V. radiata, the MUNG BEAN. Nomenclature adds to the possibilities of confusion. Thus it is urd which has the specific name mungo, which might be expected to belong to the mung bean. Moreover urd beans are not all black (as their alternative name ‘black gram’ would suggest), but may be green (the green ones are smaller and ripen later than the black ones); and green gram is one of the alternative names for mung bean. However, any possible confusion is dispelled when the two small pulses are peeled and split, thus becoming DAL instead of GRAM, for the urd is then seen to be white inside while the mung is yellow.
Urd has a good flavour, but is a notably solid foodstuff, needing longer cooking than most other small pulses, and difficult for some people to digest. It is not soaked before being cooked. Ground urd makes the best POPPADOMS and is used in IDLI and DOSA.
Whole young pods may be cooked as a vegetable, but the principal use is of the mature beans.
The urd bean, or seed, is the reputed origin of the very small Indian weight known as masha.
Situated between the rivers Plate and Uruguay, with a short sea coast, this is a small country. It was colonized from ARGENTINA, whose governor sent 100 head of cattle to initiate development in the 17th century, and shares with that large neighbour culinary ingredients, likes and dislikes.
The last Indians had been swept away by the mid-19th century and modern Uruguay seems marked only by the pastoral agriculture of the pampas—sheep in the south and west, cattle everywhere else—and by the predominantly Spanish and Italian backgrounds of its European colonists, whose influence is manifest in the capital, Montevideo.
The pampas were where the gauchos, nomadic half-Indian herdsmen, roamed and worked. Darwin, in his account of the voyage of HMS Beagle (first published in 1839 as part of another work), described a gaucho supper which ‘consisted of two huge piles, one of roast beef, the other of boiled, with some pieces of pumpkin; besides this latter there was no other vegetable, not even a morsel of bread.’ The gauchos preferred beef to what was apparently rather dry mutton. Another British visitor, the Revd J. H. Murray, chaplain in Colonia and author of Travels in Uruguay (1871), explained how meat was always consumed fresh, due to the climate and lack of refrigeration, and that breakfast might be sheep killed then cooked, all in half an hour. ‘Mutton thus killed is so excessively tough that it leaves us nothing to do for some time but to chew it in silence, which is anything but convivial.’
However, even if the mutton was unpalatable, the general diet at that stage of development was ‘mutton and biscuits, and potatoes and vegetables where there is a garden’. The naturalist W. H. Hudson was of Argentine extraction. In The Purple Land (1885) he wrote of supping in Montevideo on a stew of mutton scrag, with pumpkin, sweet potatoes, and milky maize, ‘not at all a bad dish for a hungry man’. On the other hand, he recorded in the same book having meat from a fat, freshly killed heifer, which was the best roast meat he ever ate. Leonard (1970) refers to this meal, and to the setting:
the enormous kitchen of a Uruguayan ranch house, with a fire smouldering on a clay platform fenced with cow bones stuck in the earthen floor. Meat was boiling in a great iron pot hung by a chain from the roof, and more meat was roasting on a spit six feet long. Nothing was served except meat, which the diners carved from the roast with their knives.
Old ways have changed in some respects, and the wild gauchos are now but a memory. But many traditions remain, including the emphasis on meat. On the banks of the River Uruguay is the town of Fray Bentos, the home of the Liebig Company’s meat-processing factories, described by one impressionable visitor as ‘the kitchen of the world’ and the source of much of the CORNED BEEF sold elsewhere in the world.
The River Plate is a source of fish, and of large frogs. The Browns (1971) noticed that Uruguay was addicted to frogs and used the whole body to make a soup.
Tom Jaine
a subject which is not amenable, in the area of food and cookery, to description in a short essay. It is a fine subject for a whole book, as Jones (1981) and Hooker (1981) and others have demonstrated. A broad canvas of the size which, say, Tintoretto liked to use and a fistful of broad brushes are suitable equipment, whereas a miniaturist’s panel the size of a small postage stamp is not. The trouble is that there are so many climates and ethnic elements to be dealt with. It is like a jigsaw puzzle which has too many pieces, so that there is no way you can put it together. Three pieces of the jigsaw, as it happens, are described under CREOLE FOOD, CAJUN FOOD, and PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH; but there are many others which could equally well claim a share of the spotlight.
Drive-in chains were more successful if they had a theme, and if both their architecture and the costumes of the car hops were immediately recognizable. It seems that none of them chose to have middle-aged males dressed like penguins and looking shifty, the European style of that period. Most had youthful females, and vied with each other for originality and daring in their costumes. Girl Robin Hoods, with feathers in their green caps, would be the lure at one place, while another would offer cowgirls with fringed skirts, and the hops at another establishment were costumed ‘like the dandies of the Old Dominion—long tailed coats of blue material with gray collars and white bow ties; gray pants, white dickeys with standing collars; low crowned gray top hat worn at a rakish angle and a gold fob with a ribbon’.
California had no monopoly of new fashions. ‘Deep in the heart of Texas, Sivils Drive-In dressed their hops in what would become the epitome of car-hop fashion. Mrs. Sivil introduced to the drive-in world an abbreviated costume of satin shorts and bare midriff top crowned with a foot-high plumed [drum] majorette hat that caused a sensation across America.’ There is a photograph of 52 of the majorettes lined up on the roof of and in front of the Dallas branch, the flags of the USA, of Texas, and of Sivils flying above.
The one item which was mandatory for all hops was a smile on the face. For, when women took over the profession of hop, as they swiftly did, ‘a smiling feminine face became the drive-in’s preeminent icon’.
The spotlight would certainly have to play on the foodways of the indigenous N. American Indians, since they were there first and initiated many ways of utilizing the plant and animal foods of the continent. Many of their food terms and practices are mentioned in other entries (see, for examples, CAMAS; PEMMICAN; SUCCOTASH; WILD RICE).
However, what is more rewarding than listing the other ethnic or religious groups whose arrival and establishment in the USA have left lasting marks on the foodways (one thinks in the first place of the slaves from Africa and of SOUL FOOD, but also of the huge Jewish community in New York City, of the Scandinavians in the Midwest, of the Spanish and French in the south, and on a lesser scale of the Ethiopian and Afghan communities centred on the District of Columbia) is to step back, as it were, and consider what role the USA has played and is playing in the global gastronomic scene (taking gastronomic in its widest sense, and not as referring to the food of expensive restaurants and connoisseurs). In this perspective, several points stand out.
One role which N. Americans played, but only in part, was that of pioneer in exploring the uses of the new food resources which were available in the New World. TURKEY, yes; MAIZE, not much in the early days (Europeans were quicker off the mark); POTATO, slowly as in Europe; TOMATO, the same.
Another role which only N. Americans could have played (who else ever had the resources of land for raising CATTLE on the epic scale which they achieved?—not even Australians) lay in establishing a pattern of meat consumption whose scale dwarfed anything in earlier history and is unlikely ever to be rivalled. (In some other cultures wealthy people had eaten a lot of meat; but there had never previously been a large population in which virtually everyone expected to do so.)
A different sort of role was the one they played in adapting foodways to the advent of the motor car. It can be maintained that the motor car, whose mass production began in the USA, and the aeroplane have done more than any other new feature of life in the 20th century to transform human society. Americans have a gift for seeing opportunities where others might see only problems. Thus it was in the USA—with its numerous automobiles and enormous network of roads—that the whole subculture of roadside diners and drive-in eating places came into being and flourished on a scale unthinkable elsewhere. The Sterns (1984, 1986a) have chronicled the sorts of food which diners would offer, differing noticeably from one region to another although with common elements. Heimann (1996), in a work entitled Car Hops and Curb Service, has told the story of the drive-ins with the panache which it deserves. Studying his pictures of the buildings and the imaginatively costumed hops (see box), and recalling that the heartland of the drive-in included Hollywood, who can resist a frisson on hearing the tale of one hop who served Jean Harlow? Clad in a white costume, her platinum hair ‘a dream’, driving a white convertible, the star ordered a small orange juice and left the hop not only an indelible memory but also a big tip.
All this was part of the transformation of street foods, made necessary in America by the transition from a world of pedestrians to a world where everyone moved by automobile. Street foods had to be transformed into FAST FOODS, obtainable from or in buildings which were surrounded by ample parking space. The repercussions have been worldwide.
One major effect was the emergence of HAMBURGER chains. McDonald (1997) has described their early history and the commercial wars waged between them—White Tower, Burger King, Jack-in-the-Box, Wendy’s, and McDonalds. These were major battles and—whatever view one takes of the hamburger—important ones. The scale of the McDonalds enterprise at the close of the 20th century is astounding and, together with Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, it has become a principal standard-bearer of American culture around the world. Many Americans would rather that this were not the case. But it must be said that it was on American soil that these phenomena flourished initially, grew at dazzling speed, and poised themselves for a global role. The Sterns (again, this time 1992, in their brilliant survey of pop culture) have provided what is probably the best short history of McDonalds, analysing the factors which led to success and throwing into dramatic relief the crucial nature of decisions which they, or their successors, must make: crucial for them, and to some extent for others too.
The lesson which emerges from a study of all this is that the arts of salesmanship and advertising have acquired, in America and in recent times, a previously unimaginable importance for the present and future history of food. This importance stretches far beyond the frontiers of the USA. But it grew within them, and the ferment which keeps it alive and growing is unmistakably American.
No one would deny that there are highly talented chefs at work in the USA; that there are some restaurants of world class; that there is much excellent produce to be had and many delightful subcuisines to be sampled across the huge breadth of the country. But much the same can be said of other countries. What distinguishes the USA is not a collection of merit badges like these, which others too have deserved, but the uniquely exuberant, restless, and irreverent disposition which has made Americans hungry for novelty and experiment, coupled with the wealth (natural resources, money) which permits translating hankerings into actuality.
The 20th-century developments in the American food scene have not lacked chroniclers. See, for outstanding examples, Harvey Levenstein (1988, 1993) for the social history of food and its fashions; Sokolov (1981) for a nostalgic backwards look; J. and K. Hess (1977) for pungent criticism of the naïveté and inaccuracy displayed in some American writing about food; Schwartz (1986) for the American infatuation with diets; Laura Shapiro (1986) for turn-of-the-century activities; Anne Mendelson (1996) for the background to The Joy of Cooking (see Rombauer, 1931, Rombauer and Rombauer Becker, 1951); and many besides.
READING: