Why is it worth having another English-language Mexican cookbook given the ones I already cherish by Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, Marilyn Tausend, Zarela Martinez, and Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz among others?  The answer.  Apart from clear and easy-to-follow instructions, Roberto nails it on the head about three important issues.

A few years back I was teaching a cooking class and I had roasted a few trays of tomatillos in preparation. As I was hauling them to the classroom, a student walked by and stopped me. “Uh oh chef,” he said, noticing that the tomatillos were blackened. “Looks like you burned those.” That I actually had not burned them illustrates an important point. Learning to cook an unfamiliar cuisine often means unlearning many of the principles you once thought were universal.

Dead right.

Dead right, too, to chose sauces as the way into Mexican cooking.  Sauces are the defining characteristics of all high cuisines. Get the sauces right and you are a long way to having the cuisine mastered. Mexican saucemaking techniques are radically different from (say) those of France and of the English-speaking world.  Roberto breaks Mexican sauces down into salsas (a much larger category than the salsa that goes with chips in the US), guacamoles, adobos, and moles and pipianes.  Get a sense of their structure and you won’t need to refer to cookbooks when you make Mexican food, you won’t be tied to one sauce, one dish. If anything, I wish Roberto would go even further systematizing and explaining the structure.

And dead right too to explain this about the almond sauces (almendrados).

Because almonds came from abroad and were very expensive, they became a high status nut, a staple in sauces in upper class households.  . . You are more likely to find this array of fragrant sauces in central urban areas and people’s homes rather than the local comida corrida [quick lunch place].

Roberto gives plenty of the everyday sauces that everyone associates with Mexican street food and taquerias.  Much of the great Mexican food, though, is in private houses and to this day very hard for travelers to Mexico to sample, almost impossible outside Mexico (with a few shining exceptions).  That would have been true of most of the world’s high cuisines until very recently.  The well to do with fine cooks in their homes and the homes of their friends and relatives did not frequent restaurants.

So forget French techniques, learn a few basic sauces from each group, and think of long, leisurely meals in the great haciendas and town houses of Mexico and you’ll get new insight into high Mexican cuisine.

And right now I am relishing a lovely, simple salsa of chopped pineapple, cilantro, serrano chiles, onion and a touch of salt. And as soon as I get back to Mexico and have a blender, I’ll add more varieties of salsa roja and verde to my repertoire, and the pipian of pistachios though not, I think with lamb, and the red estofado de almendras with chicken which will bring the cooking full circle since Roberto borrowed this from our mutual friend, Iliana de la Vega.

Primitive tools do not need to imply primitive results.  exquisitely carved objects and elegant painting by societies tens of thousands of years before the invention of grain agriculture attest to the essentially unlimited possibilities for bread making in the context of the earliest gatherers of grains.

This from William Rubel’s new little book, Bread: A Global History.  Hear, hear.  From an aficionado of the simple grindstone, I can attest that nothing surpasses tortillas from that simple tool.  I wouldn’t want to prepare the dough that way except as an experiment, nor would I wish it on anyone else.  That doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the quality.  And the same quality, I suspect, could be achieved grinding wheat and other bread grains.

Bread has yet to have a general historian, excellent as certain histories of French or British baking are.  William knows his stuff and this short book is a trial run for a much bigger book that I am eagerly awaiting.  Both books deal with raised breads, not flat breads, and global is a bit of an overstatement on the publisher’s part.  Don’t let that deter you.  This is well worth reading.

It covers the early history of bread to the end of the Roman Empire, bread as a marker of status, bread and fashion, a tour of the contemporary breads of six countries, and a limited but eye-opening selection of historical bread recipes. One of these is the bread fed to privileged horses in seventeenth-century England.  As he says

Even in a society more used than ours to the idea of a fixed social hierarchy, it must have felt terrible to be able to see by the bread on one’s table that one’s food wasn’t worth the trouble the master put into that of his horse.

You might also look up William’s earlier book, The Magic of Fire. It’s a lyrical and practical introduction to the variety and sophistication of hearth cookery.

Edit. Here’s a favorable review of William’s book by Steven Kaplan of Cornell, one of the the experts on both contemporary bread and on the history of bread.   Thanks to Dan Strehl for the link.

Basket of shrimp empanadas, 5 for $30 pesos (US$2.20)

Saturday saw a group of three friends in La Viga, Mexico’s wholesale market, claimed to be the biggest in Latin America and the second biggest in the world.  It’s worthy of several blogs which will be coming along. First, though, is the shrimp empanada.  The market appears to run on shrimp empanadas available from the time it opens at three in the morning to the time when it winds down around two in the afternoon.  They’re made on the spot and served hot and fresh.

Roberto, part of a production line of two empanada makers and one fryer, explained how it was done.  The dough is made of flour from a big sack under the work bench and vegetable oil from equally big plastic garafons. It’s more like an Argentinean empanada dough than the flaky pastry (hojaldre) usually used for empanadas in Mexico.

It’s shaped into egg-sized balls (a phrase is worth many jokes in Mexico and probably elsewhere).  These are stored in a plastic bag (on left below).

Then the dough is rolled out on this oilcloth-covered counter. The empanada makers did it with two or three quick strokes. It took me half a dozen.

Rolling the dough

Then the shrimp mixture, at hand in a red plastic bowl, is sprinkled over the half of the dough furthest from the empanada maker.

Adding filling of small shrimp with chopped onion and tomato

Now comes the real artistry, the crimping. The part of the dough closest to the worker is flipped over.  The points are folded over and firmly pressed down. Then working backwards, the two hands in parallel, the sides are crimped to make a neat, secure, half oval.

Securely crimping the edges of an empanada

The empanada is thrown back to a waiting tray ready to be fried.

Perfectly uniform empanadas ready to fry

At this point, the third member of the team takes over.  He fries the empanadas about ten at a time. When they are brown, he scoops them out and arranges them artistically on a foil-lined basket with absorbent paper in the bottom.  He also fills the orders, wrapping the empanadas in absorbent paper and putting them in plastic bags.

Empanadas frying

How do they taste?

With a sprinkle of salt, a hefty dash of hot sauce, the crisp outside and shrimp-salad-like interiors warm and satisfy, cheering up a chilly morning where the wholesale aisles lit by bare light bulbs are awash with melting ice from the refrigerated fish trailers.

Like most fried things, they are not so good cold.  The dough is thin and gets tough as it cools.

Roberto and companions start work at three.  The clientele shifts from market workers to visitors as the morning wears on.  They make four hundred (each, I think, but they were too busy to answer many questions) on weekdays, eight hundred on the weekends. Certainly they were turning out a couple a minute when we were there.  Four hundred empanadas would bring in US$130.

They enjoyed seeing me make a fool of myself.  They grabbed a snack of fried fish in bites as they worked. But it was clear that the production line had to keep going if they were to make a profit.

The ergonomics of ten hours of empanada making. Note the boxes to stand on.

And here you can see the result. My empanada on the left, thick crust and uneven filling.  Roberto’s on the right. Perfect hand food.

My kindergarten-level empanada versus doctoral-level empanada (Beatriz's quip)

Huge thanks to my comadre, Beatriz, who knows the market and its people so well, and was prepared to share that knowledge, and to Tessa who made a perfect companion. And of course to Roberto and his co-workers.

Answer One. Whole grains are hard on the system.

Today we don’t eat many grains or grain dishes. They are just one element in the diet along with fats, sugars, vegetables, fruits, meats and fish. The recommended amount in the US is six ounces for a 2000 calorie a day diet.

In the past people ate huge amounts of grains.  Wheat bread provided 40% of the calories of Americans, almost certainly the most lavishly fed population ever in the history of the world, as late as World War II.  Through most of history, farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of us would have been) probably consumed between  70% and 90% of  their calories in the form of bread, porridge, or other grain dishes.

That means between one and two pounds of bread a day, or one to two average loaves of sliced white bread, between three and six times as much as we eat.

One pound of white bread

Except that these were whole grains. Only half the British could afford white bread in 1800.  It was 1900 before the whole population could afford it. And Britain was the earliest European country to go over to white bread.  They were chewing or swallowing their way through one to two pounds of oatmeal, oatcakes, barley bannocks, rye bread, or some mixture of grains and beans every day.

Without a bit of butter, jam, olive oil, or lard to lubricate the grains, chewing and swallowing are laborious.

Worse, digesting such a lot of whole grains is a difficult, energy-consuming business ( we spend about 10% of our energy intake on digesting).  Because of this whole grains  pass through the system quickly.  The laxative effect of a small serving of whole grains is great for us sedentary modern urbanites. For manual workers the laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain.

Those who could afford them, therefore preferred processed grains with more of the bran removed. It’s even possible that they yielded more calories, perhaps even more nutrition, per unit weight because they were easier to digest.

Answer Two: Our Ancestors Thought Processed Food was More Natural and More Healthful

We tend to think of cooking as messing up.  We want fresh, natural foods that taste of themselves.  We like lightly cooked green beans, rare steaks, and the US government tells us whole grains are better for us than white bread, cakes, and pie crusts.

For most of history, the majority view was the exact opposite.  Raw meat, vegetables, whole grains were just the raw materials.  they had to be processed and cooked to get at their natural, healthful essence.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but eating whole grains was regarded a bit as we might regard eating oysters, shell and all.  We just don’t do that. We process the oyster (shell it) to get at its real briny oysteriness inside. Our ancestors thought about grains the same way.  They had to be processed to get rid of the husks, hulls, and bran and get at the pure white inside part.  The outside parts, like oyster shells, were impossible to chew, caught in the throat, and were thus not natural (in the sense of being the grain itself) and not healthful either.  And of course we still don’t eat the husks either. Or put another way. There is not a sharp distinction between processed and whole grain. It’s a question of where you stop taking off the inedible layers or the germ.

In short, in the past most people thought of processing and cooking as perfecting the rough and contaminated raw materials that were harvested or slaughtered.  Only in the past century have we done a complete about-face, coming to believe that processed grains (or sugar, for example) are neither natural nor healthful.

___________

Thanks to Maria Speck for the question that prompted this post. There are still things about grains that Maria can’t figure out.  A couple of weeks ago she sent me an email.  “What about the ‘white food’ preference of earlier humans?  After years of researching whole grains, that’s the  one question that I can only partially answer to this day,” adding that she didn’t think it could be just status or the power of big corporations.  What’s above is my answer to her question.

The first time I met Maria Speck she was already on a whole grain mission. “They’re delicious,” she said, waving her cup perilously to emphasize her point. “It’s just a lucky coincidence that they’re healthy as well.”

Now several years after our chat in the coffee shop in the cavernous atrium of a New Orleans hotel, she’s published her Ancient Grains for Modern Meals to great acclaim, as you will see if you follow the link.  I’ve been reading it, thoroughly enjoying Maria’s essays about her appealing philosophy of cooking and eating, and thoroughly frustrated that so few whole grains are available in Mexico.  Roll on January and a trip to the States so that I can get my hands on some grains.

Beef head tacos/Tacos de cabeza

Delicious beef head tacos from El Torito (the little bull).

On right.

Macisa.  Solid meat

Trompa.  Muzzle

Cachete. The meaty bits below the eyes and between the ears and mouth.

Ojo. Eye

Lengua. Tongue

Surtida.  A mixture

On left.

Suadero.  Smooth, soft meat from above the udder or penis

Longaniza.  Spicy sausage (of distant Roman origin)

Campechanos. Mixed (not, as it sometimes means, a sweet bread)

Every small town I know in Central Mexico and every neighborhood in Mexico City has someone who specializes in tacos de cabeza.  The meat is chopped finely, a small taco is dipped briefly in hot fat to warm and soften it, and the meat is spooned on).  $4 pesos (30 US cents) a taco except for tongue which comes in at 8 pesos.

The drawing of the bull is standard, though the one below does not have a ring in his nose.

Another torito with chopped onion, salsa roja, limes, and cilantro to add to the taco.

My Lebanese-Mexican friend had to pick up the coffee, bread, stuffed grape leaves, and date pie that she’d ordered from Restaurant Emir on Miguel Angel de Quevedo so we pulled into the parking lot of a small shopping center on Miguel Angel de Quevedo, one of the major east-west streets in the south of the city, lined with bookstores, restaurants, and small businesses.

While the waiter piled the bags in the back of the car, we sat at an outdoor table of this tiny restaurant and ordered drinks, some pale, ivory hummus, a wonderfully smoky baba ganoush (called by a different Arabic name) and raw kibbé.  “Take that back,” said my friend explaining that she did not like the Mexican custom of adding chopped serrano chile on the side in addition to onion and mint.

The plate returned suitably purged of the chile, and as we took our servings, dribbling them with olive oil, friends of the owner began to trickle in for their regular Friday reunion, resulting in rounds of greetings and questions about friends and families.  The restaurant has a heritage of almost a hundred years, the owner’s family establishing the first Lebanese restaurant in Mexico in the historic city center in 1921, and although Lebanese restaurants and coffee shops have proliferated and every grocery store sells hummus and tortillas arabe (aka arab bread), this remains a favorite.

It was early for the Mexican midday meal so we passed on the heavier dishes and ordered their lovely grape leaves, the rice tender but not soggy, firmly packed but not dense, with a nice proportion of small chunks of lamb.

Then it was time for coffee and dessert.  As we contemplated the tray of pastries, we declined the offer of a large lady to read our coffee grounds though various other customers accepted.  Then the owner, Pepe, whispered something in my friend’s ear.  They have “kenefay,” she explained.  They don’t make it every day.

Something that wasn’t on the menu nor made every day sounded like something I should try, even though my friend’s description, “it’s bread and milk,” did not sound so encouraging.  I am no fan of soggy bread.  Forget trifle, pass on the capirotada, don’t offer me bread and butter pudding.

Ten minutes later the dish appeared.  It was about three inches square, 1/2 inch thick, what looked like the finest golden breadcrumbs on the top, what looked like a thick pastrycream beneath, all bathed in a thin syrup.  We each dug in with a teaspoon.

This wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination bread and milk.  It was rich and sweet and creamy, perhaps even a little acidy or cheesy tang and a bit of texture from the topping. Something to savor, not to eat quickly.  A lovely creamy texture, not a bit like the soggy bread I had feared.

So how did you make it?  Well, said my friend, there was a short cut with Pan Bimbo that people used at home but it wasn’t as good.  That slight hint of cheese?  I wanted to ask Pepe but he was deep into cucumber slices, tomato slices, what looked like a Cuba Libre, and conversation with his friends.  “Nata” said the waiter.  Nata is Mexico’s answer to clotted cream and really delicious.  How did you spell it in Spanish?  Well, why would you spell it in Spanish?, said my friend  who is very much part of the intelligensia?  It’s a Arabic word.

As soon as I got home I rushed to Anissa Helou’s Lebanese Cuisine.  There are three or four Mexican Lebanese cookbooks, unusual because immigrant cookbooks in Mexico are few and far between, but I thought Arabic to my native tongue would reveal more than Arabic to Spanish.  And of course, there I tracked it down.  It took a bit because I had to figure out that the golden crust corresponded to the first couple of words in her English title “Shredded pastry and cheese pie”  and that this was not a bit like what I understood by pie.  It could be made with a fresh cheese (she suggests mozzarella as a substitute)  or it could be made with clotted cream. Now  I had an English transliteration.

By now bells were ringing so it was off to Anissa’s blog.  And sure enough,  the alarm bells were right. Anissa had recently blogged about k’nafeh describing it as her favorite breakfast wrapped in sesame bread.  The dish shown in her photo could have been taken in Restaurant Emir, except that they serve it as a dessert and there is no sesame bread.  I’m not sure I could cope with sesame bread as well.  An amazing dish.  See if you can find it.  It’s wonderful.

Here’s a link to a map that shows Restaurant Emir.  It is run by members of the same family as the restaurant of the same name in the historic center.  The coffee shops are a different operation altogether, I understand.

EDIT. My friend says that the best place to eat Lebanese cuisine in the south of the city is in the Centro Libanés which has a Lebanese chef.  No take out, though.

And bit by bit, I will talk more about Lebanese Mexican cuisine, part of my on-going project of understanding the cuisines of Mexico’s immigrants.

In Mexico, the search for the Mexican tradition, for indigenous and colonial Spanish traditions, sucks all the air out of culinary commentary and culinary history, something I will be writing more about.  And my friend, Nick Gilman, savvy explorer of Mexico City dining, is ambiguous about the Jewish delis etc  in Mexico, which didn’t match his New York memories.  And he found only one cookbook, a collection of Sephardic recipes.

Outside Mexico, Claudia Roden, who in her wonderful Book of Jewish Food, managed to get as far as India and China, left the Jewish cooking of Latin American countries out of the story (somewhat to the consternation of some of my cuisine-minded Latin-American Jewish friends).

The failure to recognize Jewish Mexican cuisine is changing at least in the United States. And as this branch of Jewish cuisine becomes better known in its own right, there is no need to measure it (or Argentinian or Panamanian or other Latin American Jewish cuisines) against the American.   I wish I could speak about it with more authority but being neither Jewish nor related to anyone in the community I have to rely on others.  Not such a bad fate, actually, given the interpreters coming along.

First came the lovely and exuberant Pati Jinich, determined to make Mexican food a little less a matter of daunting rules, at least as she explained to me when we had breakfast last year.  Ending up in Washington D.C. with her banker husband she has forged a career as interpreter of Mexican cooking, first with classes, then a blog, and now a cooking program on American Public Television.  Many of the dishes she talks about are standard Mexican fare.

Pati does not forget Jewish Mexican dishes though.  Here is an article by Joan Nathan in the New York Times on her Mexican-Jewish classes, including gefilte fish a la Veracruzana. And here she is talking about it on The Splendid Table.

And on her website for the television series (which incorporates her earlier blog) here’s this fantastic tamarind-apricot-chipotle chicken recipe, (presumably derived from a Sephardic dish) now firmly in my repertoire of favorite dishes.  Here’s the story she tells.

My Lali, as we called my grandmother, was an extraordinary cook. I could write down pages and pages listing the dishes she made that I loved. My favorite ones always had a sweet spin to them. The roasted duck with the plum sauce, the chicken paprika with sweet pimientos, the stuffed cabbage with that heart warming sauce…

If I could have my Lali over for Rosh Hashanah next week, I would treat her with the Chicken with Tamarind and Apricots I learned to make from Flora Cohen right before I got married. A cookbook writer and teacher from Syrian ancestry, who like my grandmother, was an immigrant who made Mexico her home bringing along exotic flavors from her birthplace. Flora was known to turn ignorant brides, who did not know how to boil an egg, into competent cooks who could bring bliss to the tummies of their new husbands (hey, at least my husband didn’t starve in those first years…)

And now we have a book by Susan and Alex Schmidt which I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on,  and an accompanying  blog Challa-peño. Here’s their story.

 On that table in the middle of Mexico City, on a Sunday afternoon in 1962,  there sat, nokedli, those Hungarian dumplings, toltotkaposta, my Grandma’s famous stuffed cabbage, or Hungarian chicken paprikash.  Without fail, on the side, there were  hot tortillas, guacamole, bright green serrano chile peppers, and a shallow bowl filled with fresh cilantro leaves.

Excitedly we’d all sit down to eat to the din and clang of Hungarian, Spanish and English being spoken, with Sinatra playing in the background.

So next time you want a change of pace, here’s another of the world’s ever-increasing number of cuisines to try out.

Dec 25 and Dec 26 are the big holidays in Catalunya [the northern Mediterranean part of Spain, Barcelona and Girona where I am now staying]. They are a St Esteban staple — Dec 26th. Dec 25th is escudella i de carn d’olla, the soup. Traditionally, the leftovers of the meat from making Christmas soup are ground and stuffed into the canelons. So it goes with my wife’s family here.

OK, you might ask.  Why do you get all excited about canelons in Catalonia, Spain?  Who gives a damn?

Perfectly good question.

Answer.  They are a clue that may help sort out the history of Catalan cuisine.  Thanks to the success of El Bulli and the rest of the high end Catalan restaurant scene, the cuisine of the region is hard to see straight.  And because I think history of cuisine reveals as much about the history and culture of a region as the form of the cities or the pattern of the landscape, I want to figure it out.  The question is where to begin.

And often a seemingly trivial issue, such as the fact that canelons are one of the celebratory Christmas dishes, can be a good starting point, particularly if it stands out as an anomaly in the official story.  Here are some of the oddities.

• The traditional pasta of the region is dried, mainly short, thin fideos.  Why does an egg pasta pop up?  That’s a luxury pasta.
• The dish is baked.  Enclosed ovens for home baking don’t appear until the late nineteenth century.  Even then they would have been restricted to the better off city dwellers.  Traditional Catalan cuisine, like traditional cuisines in most places, is a boiling and stewing cuisine, not a baking one.
• They are topped (not always now but in older recipes) with bechamel.  For sure, not one of the four preparations-sofregeit, picada, allioli, romesco–that occur in the introduction to every book on Catalan cooking as the bases of the cuisine.
• And the ingredients. Butter? milk? white flour?  The last is a household ingredient only in the late nineteenth century.  Butter?  It’s available here, usually French or Danish, but the traditional fats are lard and olive oil.  Milk?  This is not a dairying region.  Even now the milk available in the grocery stores is all UHT, except for the odd bottle of organic.

So this is why I think canelons are a clue.  They are the kind of oddity that invites detective work.

What twists and turns of history could have turned a dish made with ingredients alien to the region, techniques alien to the region, a sauce alien to the region into the celebrated Christmas delicacy, made just as grandmother made it?

The Catalans have a longer story about that than I related in my last post, which I now know thanks to Jeff.  It’s an anecdote though, still not connected to broader historical changes.  So besides rehearsing the story, I’d like to annotate it as well.   That’s coming soon.

Tamasin Day-Lewis is spot on in her Saveur piece on tea sandwiches.  The always wry and informative Old Foodie pondering  why cucumber sandwiches?  My response on how to make cucumber sandwiches that the Old Foodie kindly posted on her blog some years ago. Me on the sequence of English farmhouse meals in the 1950s, on an attempt to replicate Sunday tea in Guanajuato, on what teas were and the fact that they have vanished, and on bread and the problems of getting the right kind.

And finally, Sunday tea at my grandparents.  And no this was not upstairs, downstairs, no crowds of servants, my grandmother made the food and my mother or one of us children were sent to make the tea.

Tea was important when I was growing up in England, and nowhere more so than in my grandparent’s farm house. You can see it in the photo above taken in very early spring, everything still dun brown and grey green. The village street and front garden are hidden by the curve of the hill. The front of the house was added in the eighteenth century, the working part at the back went back hundreds of years before that. That’s the background. Now to tea.

Tea began with water. Water was the topic of much conversation in the family. Most of the the various aunts and uncles had their own springs for their farm houses. We did too for our farm house. These produced gorgeous, gorgeous water. But my grandparents had a problem. Mains water had come to the village and with its added chemicals it was deemed to be quite inadequate for drinking.  So they had had a well dug and an electric pump installed.

So step one in making tea was to turn on the small electric pump attached to one side of the old porcelain kitchen sink that looked out over the back farm yard. After a few gurgles, clear, fresh well water began to trickle out to be collected in the kettle. This took a while. The big kettle was put on the AGA to heat. This took a while too, partly because so much water was needed, partly because the well water was icy cold.

Step two while all this was going on was to assemble the tea equipment: large brown tea pot, tea cozy, water jug for topping up the tea pot, strainer for collecting tea leaves, slops bowl for throwing out tea dregs, sugar bowl, and milk jug.

Step three means backing up a bit. Milk was another problem. Not its availability. My grandparents always had at least a hundred cows in milk. But they were now all Friesians (Holsteins) because the British Milk Marketing Board paid by volume not fat content.

Well, now, we couldn’t drink that kind of milk, could we? So my grandparents had a dear little Channel Island cow that gave the most glorious rich milk. It was a bit of an indulgence, I realize in retrospect. An “old chap,” one of the farm workers who was now past heavy work, had to milk her by hand morning and evening. What the cost per pint can have been I cannot even imagine. At the time, though, she was a friend, to be greeted when she was walked up the village street, her big dreamy eyes, her slobbery tongue and muzzle, her black fringed ears.

By now the kettle was boiling.  The tea pot was rinsed out with boiling water to warm the pot. Then the tea caddies were taken down from the shelf over the AGA. My grandparents bought a selection of different teas from Stokes the grocer in the town three miles away. Depending on their preference for the day, different proportions were spooned from different caddies in a flat caddy spoon and added to the pot. Then came the boiling water, and water for the water pot too, and tea cozies to keep them warm.

Then the whole equipage was carried up the couple of steps to the breakfast room (they ate almost all meals in the breakfast room because the dining room filled up with farm paperwork).

We children sat on the bench under the endlessly fascinating prints of the Grand National showing horses falling about all over the place, and facing the fire on the other side of the room and the two miniature barrels one of port and one of brandy that we never got to touch. My grandmother sat at one end, everyone else sat in Windsor chairs around the table, never less than a dozen or so.

There was bread (and that was an even bigger story than water) and butter (hand churned from Channel Island milk), and scones (little flaky rounds, not the great dense hunks that now go by that name) with raspberry jam from the kitchen garden and clotted cream (thank you cow), and Victoria sponges. They had to wait.

With great ceremony, and much asking of preferences for milk and sugar, my grandmother poured tea into angular blue and white tea cups. Those who took milk got Channel Island milk. Not ideal even then, in my opinion. Thick gobs of cream rose to the surface, making it almost like a tea-flavored dessert. Once I had learned to drink it without milk it was clear and astringent and glorious.

Only then began the elaborate ritual of handing around the eatables, and we were expected to sit, and eat, and listen, and no getting up from the table.

Why tell this story? Nostalgia, of course. The fact that English farmhouse teas of the kind I assumed happened every Sunday without fail have yet to find their chronicler. The fact that stories like this show that just perhaps Elizabeth David is not the last word on how bad English food was. The fact that this quality of eating (and I know that high quality eating is usually located with dinner not other meals, but be that as it may) is not necessarily open. Only the rare visitor to England would ever have known that such teas existed, let alone be invited to participate. The fact that such quality is not  democratic, that it may mean pretty ghastly economic and social distinctions. The “old chap” for example did not eat like this. For all those reasons.

cultivating the right type of mushroom on soiled nappies can break down 90% of the material they are made of within two months. Within four, they are degraded completely. What is more, she says, despite their unsavoury diet the fungi in question, Pleurotus ostreatus (better known as oyster mushrooms), are safe to eat. To prove the point she has, indeed, eaten them.

Bioremediation: Bottom feeders | The Economist.

So if you see markets flooded with cheap oyster mushrooms in a couple of years, you’ll know why.  But are enough people going to follow Dr Vazquez’s example and eat them?