Behind the Recipe -- Jeri Quinzio

Fish Tales, Food Frauds, and Peddlers' Ploys

 

 Silver or Coho salmon, adult male. In: "The Fishes of Alaska." Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XXVI, 1906.

I've been hearing a lot about food frauds and fakery lately. It seems we do not always get what we
pay for.

For example, farmed salmon is being passed off as wild. Wild salmon gets its red color from the plankton it eats. Farmed salmon has color added to its feed so it looks more like wild. Some unscrupulous dealers label dyed farmed salmon as wild, and charge accordingly.

Another scam involves olive oil. You may be paying high prices for cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil from Italy but actually getting cheap industrially produced soybean oil.

Maple syrup may be sugar syrup with flavoring added. If the price seems too good to be true, be suspicious.

Food fraud is a terrible thing, but it’s not exactly new. In the 17th century, French confectioner M. Emy warned that dealers soaked old, dried-up vanilla beans in oil to sell them as fresh ones. The old beans didn’t pass the sniff test, according to Emy.

Street vendors in mid-19th-century London were accused, often rightly so, of all sorts of bad behavior. In their own defense, the vendors claimed that it was such a difficult way to make a living that they had to cheat to survive. 

One common ploy was using containers with false or extra thick bottoms. What seemed to be a quart container held a pint and a half. A pint container held three-quarters of a pint. The price, of course, was for the full amount.

“Topping off” meant arranging lovely fresh apples or cherries or strawberries atop a basket full of overripe fruits and lots of leaves. The practice was so typical, it was taken for granted.

Some scams were quite ingenious. Eel, which was sold either already cooked or while it was still alive, was very popular in London at the time. Unscrupulous eel sellers were known for their practice of dumping as many as 20 pounds of dead eels amid five pounds of squirming live ones, and selling them all as “large live eels.” Since they got the dead eels free from wholesalers, the profit was excellent. 

Spices were subject to all sorts of fakery. It was safer to buy whole spices than ground ones, but it was no guarantee. Some dealers made false nutmegs from clay and scrapings of real nutmeg. They also mixed clay with oil and cayenne to make realistic-looking peppercorns.

They “sophisticated” or, less euphemistically, adulterated expensive ground spices with all sorts of cheap fillers. Ginger was cut with pea flour, turmeric, wheat flour, potato flour, or mustard husks.

Coffee was extended with roasted wheat, scorched peas, beans, roasted carrots, rye, roots, acorns, or even mahogany sawdust. New tea leaves were often mixed with other leaves to make them go further. Used tea leaves were dried out and resold as fresh.

The list goes on and now, as then, buyers must always beware. So, if you think something’s fishy, it very likely is.

 

Potted Salmon

Leftover salmon, wild or farmed, makes a wonderful, 18th century British dish. If you want it to be very smooth, use a blender or food processor instead of a mortar and pestle. Serve it as an appetizer with crackers or melba toast.

When you have any cold salmon left, take the skin off and bone it, then put it in a marble mortar with a good deal of clarified butter. Season it pretty high with pepper, mace and salt, shred a little fennel very small. Beat them all together exceeding fine, then put it close down into a pot and cover with clarified butter. –The Experienced English Housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald, 1769.

Little Women and a Short Tale of Blancmange

 
 

I saw the word blancmange for the first time when I read Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s novel about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March.

In the story, Jo went to visit her neighbor Laurie, who was ill. Since her own cooking left a lot to be desired, she brought him blancmange made by Meg. Laurie declared it “too pretty to eat,” surrounded as it was by “a garland of green leaves and the scarlet flowers of Amy’s pet geranium.” But Jo insisted, saying it was so soft it would “slip down without hurting your sore throat.”

I had no idea what blancmange meant, so I looked it up in a dictionary. It was pudding. Pudding. That was a letdown. I promptly forgot about blancmange.

Years later, when I began studying food history, I learned that there was much more to blancmange.

For one thing, the word is sometimes used metaphorically. Trembling like blancmange has much the same meaning as quaking like Jell-O^TM. A speech like blancmange is bland and possibly cloying.  But it was the dish, not the imagery, that interested me.

I learned that blancmange dates back to at least the 14th century, when Chaucer mentioned it. As its name suggests, it is a white dish. (Blanc is French for white and manger means to eat.) Originally it was made with finely minced chicken or capon flesh combined with cream, milk, or almond milk along with rice and sugar. Dried haddock or other fish or veal sometimes took the place of the chicken. Blancmange was often served decorated with colored seeds or blanched almonds or sprinkled with sugar.

In the 17th century, the French began making it with calves’ feet or hartshorn (the antler of a hart or stag), so it would jell and could be molded. Subsequently, cooks used isinglass (an early form of gelatin), seaweed or sea moss, gelatin, arrowroot or cornstarch. 

Blancmange was making its way to the dessert course.

Hannah Glasse wrote in the 18th century that it “makes a fine side dish. You may eat it with cream, wine, or what you please. Lay round it baked pears. It both looks very pretty, and eats fine.”

By the 19th century, when Alcott wrote Little Women, the capons and haddocks were long gone.    Blancmange had become a sweet molded dessert and was often associated with the sickroom.

Louisa May Alcott’s mother, Abigail, had a recipe for blancmange in her collection. She’d clipped it from a newspaper but, unfortunately, the clipping did not include the paper’s name. The recipe doesn’t specify an amount of sugar. I used half a cup, which is not overly sweet. If you like a truly sweet dish, add more.

To pay homage to Little Women, serve it garlanded with greens and, if you have them, scarlet geraniums.

Arrowroot blancmange

Take two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot to one quart of milk and a pinch of salt. Scald the milk, sweeten it and then stir in the arrowroot, which must first be wet with some milk. Let it boil once. Orange water, rose water, or lemon peel can be used to flavor it. Pour it into molds to cool. – From Abigail Alcott’s “Receipts and simple remedies,” 1854.

Of Sugar and Snow

 
Latest review

From Booklist, the magazine the New York Times calls "an acquisitions bible for public and school librarians nationwide," the review journal of the American Library Association. It recommends works of fiction, nonfiction, children's books, reference books, and media to its 30,000 institutional and personal subscribers. In-house editors and contributing reviewers from around the country review more than 7,500 books each year, most before publication.

"Before Quinzio can authoritatively address ice cream’s history, she must first debunk a number of widespread myths. Neither Nero nor Marco Polo nor Catherine de Medici nor England’s Charles I had anything to do with introducing ice cream to Europe. Ice cream’s history began when sixteenth-century Europeans discovered the freezing effects of mixing ice with salt and applied it first to wine. Although medical opinion of the time disapproved, the technique caught on and spread across the continent. By the seventeenth century, recipes for “icy creams” appeared in England. Americans took to ice cream with a vengeance, and the invention of mechanical refrigeration made the treat available to everyone at any time. Quinzio masterfully documents ice cream’s modern evolution from junket tablets for the home icebox through the vast array of flavors offered by industrial ice-cream production. Another excellent contribution to the California Studies in Food and Culture series."

Chop Suey and Other Saturday Night Sundaes

 

Saturday Night

It’s Saturday night and I like your new hat;
I’m ready to pop with emotion and that;
I’m fizzy and fiery and fruity and tense,
So let’s have a sundae and hang the expense!

Strawberry sundae image from wikipedia.org. USDA photo by: Ken Hammond

When Alan Patrick Herbert wrote those lines in 1932, soda fountains reigned and sundaes ruled.  At the time, the sundae, also known as the sundi, college ice, college soda, or throwover (so called because syrups, fruits, and sauces were thrown over scoops of ice cream) cost 15 to 20 cents. So, on a Saturday night, some could hang the expense and splurge on a sundae despite the Depression.

Soda jerks made sundaes with ice creams, fruits, whipped cream, marshmallow, nuts, and all sorts of syrups and sauces –  coffee, butterscotch, strawberry, pineapple, cherry, raspberry. Both cold and hot fudge sauces were popular. But hot fudge was generally reserved for winter. 

Sundaes were flavored with imagination and named with flair. There was a “Bachelor” sundae, a “Boston Club,” a “Delmonico,” a “Merry Widow,” a  “Bees Knees,” a “Lucky Lindy,” a “Tutti Frutti Temptation,” an “Easter Sundae,” and more.

The “Princess Pat” celebrated St. Patrick’s day with vanilla and strawberry ice creams, orange ice, crème de menthe syrup, almonds, whipped cream, and a cherry. 

The “Washington Sundae” commemorated the birthday of America’s first president with French vanilla ice cream, maraschino cherries, whipped cream, and pecans. It was topped with a mini-hatchet.

A tiny American flag decorated the “Betsy Ross” sundae. It featured three scoops of vanilla ice cream with crushed strawberries poured over one, crushed pineapple atop another and, over the third, a ladleful of blue-tinted marshmallow.

Yellow-tinted marshmallow topped a “Setting Sun Tulip” sundae. Its colorful ingredients included raspberry and orange ices, raspberries, and orange slices.

A “Coney Island” sundae paid tribute to New York’s famed amusement park with ice creams and ices piled up like a roller-coaster. They were topped with crushed raspberries, whipped cream, and a cherry.

A “Reducing Diet” sundae, made with unsweetened fresh fruit and just a taste of ice cream, was neither a splurge nor a success.

But the “Aviation Glide” was both. Banana halves flanked a scoop each of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice creams. Nabisco wafers represented the wings and tail of the plane. A cherry atop the chocolate scoop played the role of the pilot. Crushed cherries, pineapple, pecans, and whipped cream completed the creation. A big hit with university students, it was definitely a 20 cent sundae.

The “Peach Melba” sundae may have been a tribute to Escoffier’s “Pêche Melba.”  But instead of his ice cream, poached peach, and raspberry syrup combination, it consisted of a peach half topped with ice cream, strawberry syrup, coconut, whipped cream, and a cherry. It wasn’t served in a swan carved from ice either.  (For more on Escoffier, go to: http://www.travellady.com/Articles/article-visitingescoffier.html .)

The “Chop Suey” sundae was an odd one. Like chop suey itself, it had no connection to Chinese cuisine or culture. I think the name simply indicated a mishmash.

When I made it, it was lumpy. So after cooking the dates and figs, I let the mixture cool a bit, then pureed it in a food processor. I folded in the walnuts after that. Not only is it tasty on ice cream, but it’s good with goat cheese.

It’s worth the splurge – in calories.

Chop Suey Sundae

Take one-half pound of chopped figs and one-half pound of dates. Remove the stem of the figs and the seed from the dates. Put these into two quarts of water and cook into a jelly. While this is cooking chop or pulverize in a mortar one pound of English walnut meat. Add this to the above and cook until a good syrup is formed. Thin this to suit taste. Keep a small amount in a bowl for dispensing, putting the balance in a jar and keeping on the ice.  – The  Spatula Soda Water Guide and Book of Formulas for Soda Water Dispensers, 1901.