Fish Sticks

But how to cook fish? How to get past Mrs. Gorton’s Fish Sticks? Many, many ways.

Let’s look at what people around the world do to get fish from the seas, rivers, and lakes from their pots and pans to their mouths, starting with Africa:*

Nigeria

Senegal

Accra, Ghana

Sierra Leone

Madagascar

Morocco

Agadir, Morocco

South Africa

*For more on African food, see Fran Osseo-Asare’s magnificent blog about cooking in Africa, chiefly Ghana. See also my series of articles on flavor principles found in African cuisine, including “Out of Africa: A Fish Tale.”

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Dan Murphy of Dunville, Newfoundland created a folk art protest of this state of affairs.

But just to show you how prevalent fish eating was in the U.S., here’s some commentary from a Good Housekeeping magazine article by Mrs. Sherman Bonney* from 1888:

By personal inquiry at the Boston market, I find the following fish will be in season during Lent ; cod, haddock, halibut, shad, smelts, white fish, bass, pickerel, eels, sheep’s head, red snapper, salmon, lobster, oysters, clams, scallops, shrimps and smoked fish. In marketing great care should be exercised that the fish be perfectly fresh, as no food deteriorates so rapidly. If the fish is good and fresh the flesh will be firm and hard and will rise at once, if pressed with the finger. The skins and scales will be bright, the eyes full and clear, and the fins stiff. The oily fish keeps better as the oil tends to preserve it. In lobsters select a firm shell of a dark color. The tail, if straightened, should always spring back into position. The medium sized are tenderest and sweetest.

And Mrs. Bonney goes on to provide forty recipes for Lenten fish dishes, one for each day of Lent as it were, including several utilizing salt fish:

Salt Fish Balls.

Let the fish stand in water a little while ; then, pick in small pieces, a cupful of fish. Pare and cut in quarters a pint of raw potatoes. Boil the fish and potatoes together until the potatoes are soft. Drain and mash lightly. Add one teaspoonful of butter, no more, and a little pepper and when slightly cool add an egg, shape with a fork like small croquettes and fry in deep fat as fish above. Drain on brown paper. This can be prepared the day before. In the morning heat and add the egg.

*Mrs. Bonney won what was essentially a food-writing contest and Good Housekeeping published her article.

Medieval Woodcut

The price of fish is something nice — for fishmongers through the centuries, that is. And over the years, observers noted the rise and fall in the cost of fish according to the liturgical season and changes in the rules of the Roman Catholic Church.*

Because of the price of fish, or even the mere existence of fish in an otherwise protein-scarce environment, people utilized every bit of the fish in the same way they used the carcasses of pigs — even the blood became part of dishes, many served with blood-thickened sauces.

The Forme of Cury, a cookbook compiled in 1390 by the cooks of English king Richard II and put in book form by Samuel Pegge in 1791, is now available as page images as well as transcribed. The manuscript contains several recipes specifically associated with the Lenten fast.

For to make noumbles in Lent. — 114.

Take the blode of pykes other (or) of conger, and nyme (take) the panches (paunches) of pykes, of congers, and of grete cod lyng and boile hem tendre and mynce hem smale, and do hem in that blode. Take crustes of white brede, and styne (strain) it thrugh a cloth. Thenne take oynons iboiled and mynced. Take peper, and safron, wyne, vynegar aysell other alegar, and do thereto, and serve it forth.

For to make chawdon [a sauce) for Lent. — 115.

Page Images, The Forme of Cury, "For to Make Noumbles in Lent"

Take blode of gurnardes and congar, and the panches of gurnardes, and boile hem tendre, and mynce hem smale; and make a lyre of white crustes, and oynons ymynced, bray it in a mortar, and thanne boile it togyder til it be stondyng (thick). Thenne take vynegar, other (or) aysell, and safron, and put it thereto, and serve it forth.

Now one thing that should be clear here is that “chawdon,” “chaudron,” or “chawdron,” a black sauce made with blood and browned breadcrumbs, came to table with roasted swan, definitely not a dish for the poor. But what’s interesting, to me anyway, is the use of breadcrumbs and blood to thicken the sauce, the attempt to make a fish into a bird, to speak.

These faux techniques, to trompe l’oeil and the tongue both, testify both to the ingenuity of the cooks and the need to make use of everything that could be eaten.

Blood.

Dry old bread.

Things we might casually pitch into the garbage without a second thought today.

*An example is “The Pope and the Price of Fish,” by Frederick W. Bell (1968).

More to come …

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

Photo credit: Amy Wilson," Shelf Life" *

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

*I usually don’t write anything for these “picture-only” posts, but I encourage readers to check out the “Shelf Life” Web site, because of the clever commentary on packaged foods and retro food-product ads. A column, “Shelf Life,” appears monthly in the National Toronto Post as well.

Photo credit: Matt LeBlanc

Lent can be a really interesting time of the year.

For some of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, a mere glimpse outside our windows forces the introspection and reflection behind the whole idea of Lent. Who wants to walk around out there in that howling wind and blowing snow? Better to stay inside and contemplate life’s meaning. (Or whatever.)

And, as we’ve talked about before, Lent comes at a time where food used to be rather scarce and so fasting made good sense.

Anyway, just in case you’re curious about it, the English word for Lent comes from the German word lenz (or long, as in days getting longer) for “spring.”

The concept of Lent first appeared in Catholic literature after the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., referred to as quadragesima (a translation of the original Greek tessarakoste, meaning “fortieth day before Easter”).  Like so many practices, those associated with Lent evolved over the centuries, and different areas practiced different customs, including some interesting food-related ones.

Pope Gregory I

For example, Pope St. Gregory (d. 604), in a letter to St. Augustine of Canterbury, said, “We abstain from flesh, meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese and eggs.”

No matter, Lent took deep root and even after the Reformation (began in 1517 with Luther’s 95 theses hammered onto the church door in Wittenburg) , some Protestant groups continued to observe Lent.

Fannie Merritt Farmer

And so entrenched was the idea of meatless eating that even in the United States, for both religious and economic reasons (think commercial fishing), in the early twentieth century Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking School magazine featured Lenten menus and recipes in its pages.

Later called American Cookery, this magazine first appeared in print in 1896 and foretold the myriad cooking and housekeeping magazines that later took hold in American culture. Gourmet magazine, which began in 1941 (now defunct), probably did more to elbow out American Cookery than anything else, as a matter of fact. American Cookery ceased publishing in 1947.

In the March 1915 issue, Jessamine Chapman Williams shares ways for women to brighten the Lenten period with entertaining friends for breakfast:

A yellow color-scheme, using daffodils, yellow crocuses or hyacinths, will accent the brightness of spring and Lent, which should not mean sadness and gloom but the opposite. A yellow color-scheme is easily carried out both in table decorations and in the food served. Use the bare table with Cluny lace doilies, or an inexpensive, yet equally attractive, plan is to use paper sets with a yellow decoration.

A soufflé looking like this one might be OK. (Photo credit: Sharon Mollerus)

Her menu for this yellow breakfast?

Rings of pineapple and sections of orange, arranged around a mold of powdered sugar
Cornmeal mush (cooked in milk and beaten very light)
Grated Maple Sugar and Cream
Fish Soufflé in chafing dish
Hollandaise Sauce
French-fried Potatoes
Golden Wheat Muffins
Orange Marmalade Coffee

The astonishing thing about this article, and the whole magazine, lies in the following excerpt:

While the guests are enjoying the cereal, the maid will bring in the fish soufflé, which has been cooked in the chafing dish and is steaming hot. This is deposited on a small stand placed at the left of the host, the burner remaining lighted to keep the contents hot when ready to serve. The maid will bring in the warm breakfast plates, also, and place them on the side table, and the coffee pot she places at the right of the hostess.

That one word, maid, speaks volumes about the changes that have occurred in American society. It’s not for nothing that Julia Child aimed her work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, at the “servantless American housewife.”

One Lenten recipe that Fannie and Jessamine would not likely have recognized is the following spinach stew from Africa. And yet it falls right into the stringent rules that Pope Gregory laid down, with nary a drop of anything remotely fleshy.

Perfect. A bit of sun, as it were.

SPINACH STEW FROM AFRICA
Serves 6

3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 T. peanut oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
1 green bell pepper, roughly chopped
2 medium tomatoes, peeled and sliced
1 lb. fresh spinach, chopped
1 t. salt
2 serrano peppers, seeded and sliced
¼ cup (4 T.) peanut butter
6 cups rice, cooked

Cook the sweet potatoes in lightly salted water until just tender. Set aside.

In heavy skillet or stew pot over medium-high heat, sauté onion and green pepper in oil until onion is translucent and slightly golden. Stir in garlic, cook for 30 seconds, stirring constantly. Add the tomatoes and cook about 2 minutes. Add spinach, salt, and chili peppers. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 5 minutes.

Stir several tablespoons warm water into the peanut butter to create a smooth paste. Add peanut butter and sweet potatoes to the ingredients in the pot and cook covered for 10 to 15 minutes. Stir frequently, adding small amounts of water, if necessary, to prevent sticking. Serve with fufu or rice, fried plantains, and fish.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

But, to paraphrase what Forrest Gump said about a box of chocolate in the eponymous film, “You never know what you’re going to get.” And that adage holds true with books, too.

In the case of Food Studies, I have to confess, what I found both heartened and disappointed me.

First, the heartening part.

To give it credit, Food Studies marks a milestone. It’s the first whole book to really address methodology vis-à-vis the study of food in academia apart from the laboratory or population-based nutritional surveys. Contrary to the publisher’s claim of aiming the book at students and independent scholars, the book should benefit anyone in or out of academia with an iota of interest in food and contemplating how humans feed themselves. The descriptions of the different approaches to research provide a good introduction and a refresher course in research methods regardless of the academic discipline and experience of the reader. Literature reviews, historical research, quantitative methods, observational methods, material objects in food studies, and technological tools — the authors cover all this in a relatively slim 218-page volume interspersed with interviews of scholars working in the field of food studies, like Ken Albala, Jeffrey Sobal, Carol Counihan, and Psyche Williams-Forson.

Now the disappointing part. Or parts, actually.*

I hate to say it, but the words “dry as dust” apply to this book. The flat, nay, academic, writing style in Food Studies invites ennui, not energy. Reading it calls up the experience of walking through four feet of snow without snowshoes. Hard, exhausting work, in other words.

The authors, neither of whom are historians, devote only twelve pages of text to discussing methodology related to food in history. Following that is a thought-provoking eight-page interview with Ken Albala,** a well-respected historian whose expertise lies primarily in the Renaissance era. In that interview rests the kernel of what makes food history interesting and vital: Albala tells a story. He talks about a recipe, One Egg Made as Big as Twenty,*** and — by doing so — he does more to illustrate what well-done food history is about than anything else in Food Studies.

But more than the lack of stories and illustrative case studies, the omission of certain references and the inclusion of others in the bibliography perplexed me.

Some examples ought to suffice.

Miller and Deutsch never mention Oscar Lewis, whose narrative ethnographic work on Mexico in the 1960s essentially turned academia on its ear. Likewise, Andrew F. Smith’s chapter — “Culinary History: Toward a Conceptualisation” — in A. Lynn Martin and Barbara Santich’s Culinary History (2004). Another missing piece, and one of the best works on culinary/food history methodology:  Maryellen Spencer’s doctoral dissertation, on seventeenth-century Virginia foodways, provides detailed guidelines for anyone remotely interested in how to apply food studies methodology related to the past, or even the present.****

But I reserve the coup de grace for the table of food studies research sources on page 69, where the authors list cookbooks as secondary sources.

No, no, no, no!

Under “Primary Sources,” Miller and Deutsch list “Original recipes.” That in itself is a contradiction, because how can we really know if the recipes are “original”? But the principal reason I disagree with them on this point is this: even if an author published a cookbook, and only five copies or even thousands exist, that cookbook records recipes peculiar to that author’s time period, social milieu, and aspirations. And maybe even that author’s kitchen. In many ways that cookbook reveals information every bit as useful as that from so-called “Original recipes” or even diaries or letters.

Food Studies fails to completely plug the gaping hole of methodology for food scholars. It’s a beginning, but we still need more.  The soufflé has, as it were, fallen.

So it’s back to the kitchen, to finish the mixing and cooking and writing, so to speak.

*The index is spotty and sparse, as well. And in the text itself, several glaring editorial errors stop the reader in his or her tracks: examples include “kids” instead of “kinds” on page 97 and “wailing” instead of “whaling” [in the sense of pounding] on page 98.

** 

Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he teaches courses on the Renaissance and Reformation, Food History and the History of Medicine. He is the author of 9 books on food history including Eating Right in the Renaissance (University of California Press, 2002), Food in Early Modern Europe (Greenwood Press, 2003), Cooking in Europe 1250-1650 (Greenwood Press, 2005), The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2007), Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 International Society of Culinary Professionals Jane Grigson Award and the Cordon D’Or award for Food History/Literature), Pancake (Reaktion Press, 2008), and the forthcoming World Cuisines written with the Culinary Institute of America (Wiley Publishers).

***

To make an egg as big as twenty.

PART the yolks from the whites, strain them both separate through a sieve, tie the yolks up in a bladder in the form of a ball. Boil them hard, then put this ball into another bladder, and the whites round it; tie it up oval fashion, and boil ¡t. These are used for grand sallads. This is very pretty for a ragoo, boil five or six yolks together, and lay in the middle of the ragoo of eggs ; and so you may make them of any size you please. (p. 201, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy)

****Spencer, Maryellen. “Food in Seventeenth-Century Tidewater Virginia: A Method for Studying Historical Cuisines.” Ph.D. dissertation. Virginia Polytechnic and State University, 1982.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

[A picture, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Except for Martha Stewart, she may be the only cookery book writer who did hard time for financial woes. Author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, this eighteenth-century woman lived a life that her contemporary Jane Austen could have invented in one of her novels.

You know, young illegitimate daughter of a moneyed gentleman marries n’er-do-well rogue, bears eight children, and ends up on the scrap heap, faced with the need to make money to survive. So, instead of turning to prostitution, she wrote a cookbook that sold and sold and sold, even in the New World where her words seasoned the pots of squirrel or venison bubbling away on remote Virginia plantations.

But no matter. Human nature being what it is, the lure of lucre soon landed her in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison. Afterward, the authorities transferred her to Fleet Prison, where she spent months, longing no doubt for a steaming bowl of eel soup or a piece of eel pie. Altogether she included twelve recipes for eel in her book.

Hannah called one of the sections of the cookbook, “Variety of Dishes for Lent,” in which eel figured prominently.

To make an Eel-Soup.

TAKE eels according to the quantity of soup you would make;  a pound of eels will make a pint of good soup : so to every pound of eels put a quart of water, a crust of bread, two or three blades of mace, a little whole pepper, an onion, and a bundle of sweet herbs ; cover them close, and let them boil till half the liquor is wasted ; then strain it, and toast some bread, cut it small, lay the bread into the dish, and pour in your soup. If you have a stew-hole, set the dish over it for a minute, and send it to table. If you find your soup not rich enough, you must let it boil till it is as strong as you would have it. You may make this soup as rich and good as if it was meat. You may add a piece of carrot to brown it.

To make an Eel-Pie.

MAKE a good crust ; clean, gut, and wash your eels very well, then cut them in pieces half as long as your finger ; season them with pepper, salt, and a little beaten mace to your palate, either high or low. Fill your dish with eels, and put as much water as the dish will hold ; put on your cover, and bake them well.

To collar Eels.

TAKE your eel and scour it well with salt, wipe it clean ; then cut it down the back, take out the bone, cut the head and tail off; put the yolk of an egg over it, and then take four cloves, two blades of mace, half a nutmeg beat fine, a little pepper and salt, some chopped parsley, and sweet herbs chopped very fine; mix them all together, and sprinkle over it, roll the eel up very tight, and tie it in a cloth; put on water enough to boil it, and put in an onion, some cloves and mace, four bay-leaves; boil it up with the bones, head, and tail for half an hour, with a little vinegar and salt; then take out the bones, &c. and put in your eels, boil them, if large, two hours, lesser in proportion; when done, put them away to cool; then take them out of the liquor and cloth, and cut them in slices, or send them whole, with raw parsley under and over.

N. B. You must take them out of the cloth, and put them in the liquor, and tie them close down to keep.

To be continued … with an examination of Hannah’s plagiarism. Sometime.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen