December 2005

The guga harvest: Saturday's food quotation

The occupants of Lewis rowed over to Sula Sgeir (sula is a Hebridean name for gannet and is also the generic name for many of the gannet's relatives) each autumn to take the fat young gugas, a right that they still maintain today, although the traditional guga harvests at other colonies have ceased.

2005 Christopher Perrins, review of Birds Britannica in the Times Literary Supplement (9 December 2005) p. 27.

In Europe, order from alapage.com

How did Southeast Asian food plants reach West Africa?

The theory that mariners from insular south east Asia rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached tropical west Africa by sea in early medieval times was argued by the ethnomusicologist A. M. Jones in the 1960s. It is now championed in Robert Dick-Read's new book The phantom voyagers: evidence of Indonesian settlement (Winchester: Thurlton, 2005) ...

As Roland Oliver points out in his review in the Times literary supplement (9 December 2005) the theory can explain how 'the coconut, the banana plantain, the taro and other Asian yams considered by botanists to have originated in South-East Asia' reached west Africa. It could also explain a fact that puzzled European mariners when they reached Benin in the early 16th century, as I mentioned in Dangerous Tastes -- the fact that they found pepper on sale there. The pepper is, however, now said to be a different species from any of those of southern Asia. As for the other food plants, it seems at least equally likely that these were brought to the east African coast by 'Indonesian' mariners (there can be no doubt that they crossed the Indian Ocean, since they settled Madagascar). If so, the plants might have gradually spread westwards from there in cultivation.

Find the grammatical error

Johnny Depp, whom women friends tell me is the handsomest man on the screen today, does Rochester a service in this messy film biography by embodying the quality which insinuates itself into literary discussion of him -- his palpable physical attraction.

Peter Porter, reviewing The Libertine in the Times Literary Supplement (9 December 2005) p. 16

Market in colonial Malaya: Friday's food quotation

There was loud leisurely chaffering in the market over rambutans, aubergines, red and green peppers, Chinese oranges, white cabbages, dried fish-strips and red-raw buffalo-meat. The smells rose into the high blue coastal air.

1958 Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket chapter 2

In Europe, order from alapage.com

Beer: an article from Food in the Ancient World from A to Z

Click here for the article on Beer in the ancient world and here for more about Food in the Ancient World from A to Z

Was alcohol first developed by Muslims? Was it always forbidden to them?

I wrote this note in response to questions on soc.humanities.classics.

Muslims used spirits medicinally. This is not to claim that all Muslims have taken this view, only that many have done and surely some do now. (Certain non-Muslim friends of mine claim to use whisky the same way.) If you use spirits as a vehicle for herbs/spices such as aniseed, gentian, mastic, etc., as in several popular Mediterranean liquors, these essences really do have digestive and other medicinal effects and are quite properly regarded as medicinal. Whether you think the benefits outweigh the possible ill-effects of the alcohol is up to you ...

Muslim chemists or alchemists certainly appear to have been the first to distil alcohol. Romans, so far as anyone knows, never achieved this. Yet there are a couple of reports in ancient sources of wine that would 'catch fire'. Wine never will, but spirits will. So did the Romans manage it after all?

Chiscakes for Christmas: Thursday's food quotation

There was hardly any snow in the valley — all green with the yew-berries still sprinkling the causeway. At Ambergate my sister had sent a motor car for us — so we were at Ripley in time for turkey and Christmas pudding. — My God, what masses of food here, turkey, large tongues, long wall of roast loin of pork, pork-pies, sausages, mince pies, dark cakes covered with almonds, chiscakes, lemon-tarts, jellies, endless masses of food, with whiskey, gin, port-wine, burgundy, muscatel. It seems incredible. We played charades — the old people of 67 playing away harder than the young ones —and lit the christmas tree, and drank healths, and sang, and roared — Lord above. If only one hadn’t all the while a sense that next week would be the same dreariness as before. — What a good party we might have had, had we felt really free of the world.

1918 D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Katherine Mansfield, 27 December (Letters of D. H. Lawrence vol. 3 p. 313)

Note: Lawrence and Frieda were staying with his sister, Ada Clarke, at Ripley near Derby, from where this was written. According to the editors, the "chiscakes" were a Nottingham version of "cheesecakes" or "chiskets".

Quotations for Christmas week

Daily quotations for 21 to 28 December are on this page

Medlars of the second kind: Tuesday's food quotation

It is very dry here — all the roses out, and drying up, all the grass cut, the earth brown. There is a lot of land, peasant land, to this house. I have just been down in the valley by the cisterns, in a lemon grove that smells very sweet, getting summer nespoli. Nespoli look like apricots, and taste a bit like them — but they’re pear-shaped. They’re a sort of medlar. Wish you had some, they are delicious, and we’ve got treefuls. The sea is pale and shimmery today, the prickly pears are in yellow blossom.

1920 D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 7 May [The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1984) vol. 3 p.517].

Modest sustenance: Monday's food quotation

I love no rost but a nut-browne toste
And a crab laid in the fyre;
A little breade shall do me stead,
Much breade I not desyre.

c. 1560 Gammer Gurton's Needle

Byzantium in 1200

What did Constantinople look like in 1200, just before the Crusaders sacked it? Like this, probably, but with some untidy people around and altogether dirtier.

Sunday dinner for D. H. Lawrence: Sunday's food quotation

Did I tell you we’ve got such a good oven in our kitchen. Being Sunday, roast beef, baked potatoes, spinach, apple pie. Also I made heavenly chocolate cakes and dropped them, burning my finger — also exquisite rock cakes, and forgot to put the fat in!! And we are in for 3 tea-parties this week. But I shall call the pseudo-rock-cakes currant bread — quite good, oppure.

1920 D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Mary Cannon [Letters, vol. 3 p. 637]

Truffles and how to prepare them: Saturday's food quotation

A trufle-hunter called on us, having in his pocket several large trufles found in this neighbourhood. He says these roots are not to be found in deep woods, but in narrow hedge rows & skirts of coppices. Some trufles, he informed us, lie two feet within the earth; & some quite on the surface: the latter, he added, have little or no smell, & are not so easily discovered by the dogs as those that lie deeper. Half a crown a pound was the price which he asked for this commodity.

1789 Gilbert White, Diary, October 11 [Gilbert White's year (OUP, 1982)]

Stewed some trufles: the flavour of their juice very fine, but the roots hard, & gritty. They were boiled in water, then sliced, & stewed in gravy.

1790 ib., November 4

Silphium: the evidence for an extinct spice

The story of silphium, from its heyday to its extinction and replacement by asafoetida, told in extracts from Greek and Roman texts. A paper by Andrew Dalby first published in 1993

James Bond's gastronomy: Friday's food quotation

Later, as Bond was finishing his first straight whisky 'on the rocks' and was contemplating the paté de foie gras and cold langouste which the waiter had just laid out for him, the telephone rang.

1953 Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

The power of malt whisky: Thursday's food quotation

She brought a hand from behind her back, showing a bottle of Macallan. 'Peace offering,' she said.

1997 Ian Rankin, Black and Blue chapter 10

Lunch for Julian Maclaren-Ross (serving suggestion): Wednesday's food quotation

... a late lunch at the Scala in Charlotte Street, roast beef with as much fat as possible and lashings of horse-radish sauce.

1968 London Magazine (December 1968) p. 32.

Don't try this at home: punch as made in colonial Malaya. Tuesday's food quotation

He had emptied most of the bottled beer, a quart of stout, a flask of Beehive Brandy, half a bottle of Wincarnis, and the remains of the whisky into a kitchen pail. He had seasoned this foaming broth with red peppers.

1958 Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket chapter 4

John Banville's gastronomic sins: Monday's food quotation

I have a glass or two of red wine with dinner. I love big Italian red wines and New Zealand whites. Brandy is my tipple: I can't keep the stuff in the house, because I would drink it by the gallon. My biggest sin is chocolates from L'Artisan du Chocolat, in London. You have to get a second mortgage in order to buy a small box of chocolates. I don't worry about my health. In response to a scare about butter I remember John Mortimer saying, 'Am I really going to give this up for an extra two weeks in the old folk's home in Lyme Regis?' That is the rule I live by.

John Banville (this year's Booker Prize winner) interviewed by John Briffa for The Observer [London], 13 November 2005. Full article

When did American strawberries engulf Europe? Sunday's food quotation

1st July: Large American straw-berries are hawked about which the sellers call pine-strawberries. But these are oblong, & of a pale red; where as the true pine or Drayton strawberries are flat, & green: yet the flavour is very quick, & truly delicate. The American new sorts of strawberries prevail so much, that the old scarlet, & hautboys are laid aside, & out of use.

1791 Gilbert White (from Gilbert White's year [OUP, 1982])

Dharma Bums: Saturday's food quotation

"Now as for food, I went down to Market Street to the Crystal Palace market and bought my favorite dry cereal, bulgur, which is a kind of Bulgarian cracked rough wheat and I'm going to stick pieces of bacon in it, little square chunks, that'll make a fine supper for all three of us, Morley and us. And I'm bringing tea, you always want a good cup of hot tea under those cold stars. And I'm bringing real chocolate pudding, not that instant phony stuff but good chocolate pudding that I'll bring to a boil and stir over the fire and then let cool ice cold in the snow."
"Oh boy!"
"So insteada rice this time, which I usually bring, I thought I'd make a nice delicacy for you, R-a-a-y, and in the bulgur too I'm going to throw in all kinds of dried diced vegetables I bought at the Ski Shop. We'll have our supper and breakfast outa this, and for energy food this big bag of peanuts and raisins and another bag with dried apricot and dried prunes oughta fix us for the rest."
And he showed me the very tiny bag in which all this important food for three grown men for twenty-four hours or more climbing at high altitudes was stored.

1976 Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (Penguin ed. p. 36)

Clabber and cornbread: Friday's food quotation

What you got to eat, Miss Celie? he say, going straight to the warmer and a piece of fried chicken, then on to the safe for a slice of blackberry pie. He stand by the table and munch, munch. You got any sweet milk? he ast.
Got clabber, I say.
He say, Well, I love clabber. And dip him out some ...
He rummage through the drawer for a spoon to eat the clabber with. He see a slice of cornbread on the shelf back of the stove, he grab it and crumble it into the glass.
Us go back out on the porch and he put his foots up on the railing. Eat his clabber and cornbread with the glass near bout to his nose. Remind me of a hog at the troth.

2004 Alice Walker, The color purple (Phoenix ed., p. 58)

Carrington in Vienna: Saturday's food quotation

Life here is just as expensive as England and the food is horrible. Everything has an overcoat of batter. The meat often wears two waistcoats and 2 mackintoshes to conceal its identity. The very cakes wear masks. The butter is ashy pale and tasteless. I had chicken last night that tasted of fried mongoose.

Carrington, letter to Lytton Strachey, 28 February 1922 [from Carrington: letters and extracts from her diaries (1970)]

I'm off to New York. The next quotation on the FOOD WORD site will appear on Friday 9 December

What is squichanary pie?

Victoria Solt Dennis, writing in The Times [London], has the answer to this. Also 'stoughton drops'. Just click here.

Cupata, cubbaita, cumpitto: is the name of these Italian sweets originally Arabic?

Italian cupate is defined thus by Fanfani: 'Sorta di pasta dolce di forma piuttosto sciacciata, fatta con miele o zucchero e mandorle e noci per lo piu pestate, a distesa fra due ostie; usata piu particolarmente a Siena'. Similar sweets, made with almonds, walnuts, sugar and/or honey, and lying somewhere in the conceptual region between nougat and peanut brittle, are made in other parts of Italy under such names as 'cubata', 'cupada', 'copeta', 'cupeta', 'cupaita', 'cubbaita' (Sicilian) and 'cumpitto' (Calabrian).

Do these names come from Arabic 'qubbaita', as is often claimed? I haven't been able to confirm that such an Arabic word exists. Do they come from Latin (e.g.) compistare 'to pound together', as is claimed for the Calabrian word? Do they have different origins, or are they all connected? The question is Gillian Riley's.

What's the English for Feldbeifuss and Engelsüss? or, the problem with common names of plants

When I first put up my page of ancient Dacian plant names I had already got English equivalents for all but two of the plants. The remaining two had been identified by a German scholar but he had supplied only the German names, and my German dictionary gave me no help with these.

I posted a message on the subject on alphadictionary and on yourdictionary. The result was interesting. On both sites, someone kindly answered my question about these two German plant names and gave me (a) botanical Latin names and (b) English names. Thanks to M. Henri Day and to Spiff for their answers!

There was no disagreement about the botanical Latin. The two German names belong to (1) Polypodium vulgare, (2) Artemisia campestris.

From this point, I myself could have gone ahead and found equivalent English names. My two informants did the work for me, however. Henri, replying on alphadictionary, told me that (1) 'doesn't seem to possess an English common name' and (2) is twiggy mugwort. Spiff, on yourdictionary, gave me (1) polypody, (2) field sagewort. I had meanwhile looked in Oleg Polunin's /Flowers of Greece and the Balkans/ and found that Polunin calls (2) field southernwood; then I looked in W. Keble Martin's /Concise British flora in colour/ and found that Keble Martin calls (2) Breckland wormwood. Polypody is a fern, not a flowering plant, and is therefore not mentioned in these books.

So, for item (2), that's four English common names, all quite different from one another and all perfectly credible. Common names, in other words, are all too common. Which just shows how much we need unambiguous botanical names.

One to avoid: Friday's food quotation

The New Scientist cites a case of three campers in Scotland who mistook Cortinarius speciosissimus for chanterelle. Two victims had to get a kidney transplant.

From www.ibiblio.org