Category: Cooking

ISINGLASS AND OTHER FOODSTUFFS

The local recycling station as well as the local food coop both have shelves dedicated for books people can drop off or pick up if they want. It’s a good way to acquire a book free of charge to add to your collection or return to the discard shelf if it doesn’t pass muster. I have gotten a pretty good number of free books to add to my collection in this way. The latest one I picked up is titled The Curiosities Of Food or The Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom by Peter Lund Simmonds. As can probably be surmised from the long title, this was a reprint of a book originally published in 1850.

The book makes for surprisingly droll reading. The author compiles an exhaustive list of all the different types of food; birds, reptiles, mammals, fish, mollusks and even insects from all over the world (as it was in his time) along with how they are cooked (or not). With a certain amount of dry humor he describes the preparation of certain dishes by locals and leaves it to you to decide if it’s actually something you want to try or not.

One anecdote he collected from someone who had gone to China described the unusual presentation of a covered dish, unusual because dishes were usually served uncovered at Chinese meals. The dish, when the lid was quickly removed, proved to contain dozens and dozens of live baby crabs which proceeded to make their escape while guests snatched them up and devoured them. The visiting gentleman was game enough to grab a few, pronouncing them ‘soft and gelatinous’ (but didn’t indicate if they tasted any good) but stopped when he got a painful claw pinch on his lip from the third. I’ll pass.

Baby crab

After coming across such disconcerting entries as how delicious Passenger Pigeons are and that South Africans occasionally dined on quagga steaks, I moved onto the section covering fish and came across a reference to isinglass. While I had heard the word before, I had just assumed it was some sort of glassware. Turns out, it’s actually a product made from fish.

Isinglass

Isinglass is a substance created from the dried swim bladders of fish. A form of collagen, it can be used as glue, but also as a clarifying agent in wine and beer. Once processed, it has no fishy flavor (which is why your beer doesn’t taste fishy) and has been used for thousands of years. In Roman times, it was used as an ingredient in patching up head wounds and street magicians would coat their feet with it before doing their fire-walking tricks. In the Middle Ages, it was used to help gold dust adhere to manuscripts being illuminated.

Vegans may wail about dried swim bladders from fish in their beer but there are alternatives, of course. Whether they are a tasty substitute or not, I’m not able to judge as I don’t drink. But that’s just a personal choice which has nothing to do with obsessing about possible animal bits in any of my food. In fact, if you read some of the information online, there’s actually not much of anything that’s totally free of insect contamination, especially with the vast amount of food processing done by agribusinesses. Read too much of this stuff and you’re likely to wind up not eating much of anything. Ignorance really is bliss in this case.

Still after reading Mr. Simmonds book, it’s apparent humans will eat pretty much anything that doesn’t eat them first. No matter what we pop into our mouths, adding extra flavor to our cuisine is important. Salt, herbs, spices, sauces, gravies get added in varying amounts to perk up a meal. In ancient Rome and around the Mediterranean, the flavoring of choice was something called garum. This is a fermented sauce made from fish parts. The production of the sauce was a reeky process, causing its makers to be banished to the edges of cities but once the sauce finished its fermentation process, its flavor became subtle and mild (and presumably not as reeky). Enthusiatically embraced by most Romans, it occupied much the same place in cookery that garlic does today.

garum sauce

Frankly I think I’ll pass on both but I’m probably just being fussy.

A condiment that my mother’s father was fond of was horseradish. He grew it himself and ground it up to serve as a little side dish for himself at dinnertime (no one else was willing to touch the stuff apparently). This turned out to be a recipe for disaster (of a minor sort). My grandmother was in the habit of serving mashed potatoes in a side dish as well instead of directly on the plate. One fine day my grandfather was lecturing the kids about something and eating mashed potato while he did so. My mother says at one point he mistakenly took a heaping spoonful of horseradish instead of potato. The kids all watched in fascination while he did this, no one shouting a warning to poor old Granddad. Of course, there was the inevitable explosion (*@#&, Why didn’t somebody say something?). I smell payback here somewhere, I think.

Horseradish root

That’s all for this month. Bon Appetit!

Return of the Space Bats and Random Thoughts about Storytelling

For those who like to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, the Space Bats contest has become nearly a yearly ritual. The challenge that John gave his readers was to come up with plausible stories placed in the near or far future showing what life after Peak Oil might look like. Many (including myself) took up the gauntlet. As the readers of his blog tend to be well educated and thoughtful, the submissions have been coming fast and furious, leaving an embarrassment of riches in terms of literary efforts. The rules dictate that there must be no magic or deus ex machina ( which is what the term Space Bats refers to) that would save generations in the future from the consequences of our mistakes. Characters in the stories must deal each in his or her own way with what the world we left them can or cannot provide.

Last December the Archdruid once again issued his space bats challenge, this time asking for stories which don’t obsess over the process of collapse or cling to the cultural myth about the onward march of ‘progress’ which allegedly will lead us to our destiny somewhere out in the stars. Instead he wants stories that show neither progress nor collapse but simply life as it is likely to be; just people going about their lives under the constraints of the legacy we have left them, building homes, having families, quarrelling with their neighbors, etc.

I had already been in the process of writing a story when John laid out his latest guidelines and began tweaking it accordingly. The future world the new story is set in is basically the same future I portrayed in my original submission to the last Space Bats contest. I borrowed elements from the first story and reworked them, hopefully creating a more dynamic tale as the first was in the form of a letter being written to a friend. After I had the new story pretty much fleshed out, I found myself writing a second tale that’s a spinoff though the events in An Even Trade actually take place prior to the events of The Doctor Who Went Over the Mountain.

One element I created and was dying to put into the original story but couldn’t find a place for is Saint Appleseed. How an eccentric pioneer nurseryman, a practitioner of Swedenborgian , later a familiar American folktale figure, becomes transformed into a Santeria Saint is something I leave to the imaginations of my readers. Over the years there have been many American folktale characters; Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, John Henry; some fictitious, others real people with myths accreted to them. They often reflect something about their times. Davy Crockett embodied the efforts of settlers to ‘tame’ the wilderness that they saw. Another, the character Mike Fink, was a brawling, boasting river man who, as a product of the Ohio and Mississippi steamboat commerce of the nineteenth century, flourished briefly but as times changed eventually became largely forgotten except by folklorists. Others like George Washington, our first President, are better known to modern readers. As a significant historical figure Washington attracted any number of apocryphal stories such as the chopping of the cherry tree and tossing a dollar coin across the Potomac. Oddly enough Abraham Lincoln doesn’t seem to have attracted the kind of improbable stories one sees attached to Washington or Crockett. The tales attached to him are more mundane, even homespun. Time may well be a factor here. Leo Tolstoy wrote a moving assessment of the President’s character and gave an account of how Lincoln’s reputation had arrived at a remote location in the Caucasus Mountains and was already undergoing a mythologizing by the local people.

Much of the older tales are outgrowths of the European cultures that set root here over the past four centuries. The growing Latino population has brought their own folklore. La Llorona or El Chupacabra are legends both of ancient and recent origins working their way into American culture. Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Native Americans all have their own tales which have been added to the mix.

Many of the colorful figures we are familiar with, will probably vanish into the past as current cultures wither away or fragment to be replaced by new ones. Others will persist perhaps in a form no one today would recognize. Some of our beloved tales may endure into the future, others likely won’t. Commercial success is no guarantee of durability. The Lord Of The Rings is too large and complex a tale to enter into the pantheon of North American folklore. Harry Potter in spite of his current popularity will certainly be forgotten. But I do think future story tellers will entertain their audiences with the magical tale of how a young girl and her little dog were swept into a mysterious land over the rainbow by a tornado, where they had adventures, made friends with strange beings and battled a wicked witch. Dorothy resonates with us as Harry does not.

Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison, while not folkloric characters for Americans today may well become so in the future as people look back in nostalgia at times they perceive as somehow more noble or inventive than their own. As people struggle with environmental degradation, John Muir, the naturalist and advocate of preserving wilderness, might become a legendary character with a suite of folktales for listeners’ use to guide their own efforts in preserving what’s left. Johnny Appleseed may get refurbished as an agricultural figure representing a more sustainable way of farming. Paul Bunyan, a relatively modern folklore figure, may be reworked into a preserver of woodlands rather than a chopper of them.

On a darker note, figures such as Satan and the AntiChrist may get commingled with more recent evildoers such as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot by future oral tale tellers becoming transformed into frightening beings people use to represent the darker side of themselves. Corporations might become bogeyman fabrications for threatening obstreperous children with to make them mind. Tales of nuclear weapons and their use will become tales of dreadful sorcery gone badly wrong.

Writers can speculate and write tales about what stories people of the future will consider important parts of their culture. Any future folklore will reflect the times and current concerns, as folklore has always done. The characters populating such tales will likely be famous people whose lives are recalled and embroidered on (Think King Arthur who started out as a minor warlord). They may be people we are familiar with, or people not yet born (depending on how far in the future your tale is set). Since there’s just no telling what stories and characters people will cling to in order to give their lives meaning and order as the downhill slide of current civilization speeds up, the only limiting factor is your imagination.

JohnnyAppleseed_A

Soup – Plain and Simple

The weather has been unusually mild here in northern New Hampshire this month with temperatures in the forties and fifties instead of the low thirties. One can certainly welcome Old Man Winter holding off for a brief spell, though now and then he has sent a reminder he is not far off. Last week, several nights had heavy fog coupled with temperatures just below freezing. This triggered the formation of what is known as hoarfrost. The following mornings as I went walking, I was treated to the sight of branches, leaves, berries and other objects suddenly having what appeared to look like crystal thorns growing out of them.

SumacBerriesWithHoarfrost
It was quite a striking sight, not one you see very often. They melted quickly once the sun rose high enough to shine on them. On some mornings puddles that had collected during the day froze on their surfaces overnight and since the ground underneath was not frozen, the water would drain away leaving a shell of ice supported only at its edges. For years (starting when I was a child) I called this ‘krickle ice’ because that’s the noise it would make when I put my foot slowly down on top of it. I have since found out this type of ice formation is called cat ice. Personally I like krickle ice better.

With the onset (or not) of cold weather, thoughts turn to the making of soup to warm you on chilly winter days. Both cook books and the Internet abound with countless recipes of varying complexity. I avoid those with a long list of ingredients. The making of soup is not rocket science and shouldn’t require a dictionary to decipher what some of the items are. Soup can be hot or cold. It can be clear or thick. Meat and/or vegetables can be used to create the broth. Every region on the globe has its own variation of this ancient comfort food which some evidence suggests dates back to the Stone Age.

The latest food fad is the making of bone broth soup which advocates are touting as a cure-all for what ails us. While much of the claims for bone broth and its health benefits are fairly over-blown, broth made from animal bones or vegetables does deliver a nutritious boost to any diet. Elderly people who have difficulty chewing, sick people who don’t feel much like eating or even just picky kids all benefit from this easy-to-make food.

I don’t waste a moment of my time with the prepared or condensed soups sold in the grocery store. Their heavy load of sodium and overcooked ingredients makes a pretty feeble excuse for soup. They simply can’t compare with home-made soup using fresh ingredients. The easiest method is to collect left-over beef, chicken or turkey bones after dinner. If you aren’t going to use them right away, you can put them in the freezer to keep until you are ready.

StockPotB

Then using a stock pot, toss in the bones, fill with water, bring to a boil then turn immediately down to a simmer and leave for about an hour. Pull out the bones, clean off any meat (which should drop right off) and put the meat back into the broth. Chop up whatever vegetables you desire (I use carrots, celery and onions and occasionally add a chopped zucchini or summer squash). For turkey and chicken soups I add parsley and thyme. You can use whatever herbs or spices you prefer. I often toss in pasta. Then cook for an additional twenty minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Add salt and pepper to taste in the last five minutes or so of cooking. That’s it!

The nice thing about soup made this way, is that you can add leftovers, like peas or beans or rice, which you don’t quite have enough of to make a meal with, so they don’t go to waste. You can also freeze the soup to thaw out as needed for a meal or a side dish. I like to use mason jars, filling them about two thirds full to allow for expansion so the jars won’t crack. Plastic freezer containers tend to get a greasy feel to them if you use them to store soup and then want to reuse them afterwards.

Once your soup is ready, add a few crackers and enjoy!