The Milking Stool

This is one of the family milking stools.  Yes, it’s as short as it looks, just about twleve inches high, just right to reach a cow’s udder.

By the time I was growing up, no one milked by hand any more.  The cows lined up for the rank of Alfa-Laval milking machines.  The dairy was like magic to me.  The dairyman washed under the tail and around the udder of the cow and put on the rubber cups: In a moment or so you could see the milk going up through glass tubes into the weighing vessel, and from there along more tubes running across the top of the milking parlour and into the storage room, rippling down the ridged cooler filled with running cold water, and into the waiting churns.  One man could handle as many cows as ten a generation earlier.

My uncle used to tease me with stories about the milking stool.  Often they had only two legs, he said, because the milkers fell asleep in dark fields before the sun rose.

Anyway, what is the point of this shaggy dog story?  Many, many years ago I took my university finals in England.  They were designed to test endurance, not intelligence or knowledge, with ten three hour exams in five days covering the work of three whole years. Nothing else counted, not lab work, not field work, not essays, not earlier exams.  That one week, if it didn’t determine your future, at least made a profound difference to it.

I returned home exhausted.  And for two sunny weeks in early June, unable to think, I sat in the garden on the stool, between the wall with grape vine and the espaliered apple trees, and picked the soft fruits that were coming in, the legs of the stool digging unequally into the soft soil, so that I always ended up at a tilt.  I bottled, jammed and jellied, and even my family, who depended on preserved fruits for the winter, took years to finish up the red currant jelly, the white currants suspended in jelly, the blackcurrant syrup, the blackcurrant and gooseberry jam, the bottled blackcurrants and gooseberries that I loaded up on the pantry shelves.

Then it was time to get a job and start a new life.

I’ve dragged that stool round the world with me.  And perhaps I will put it to use again.  In four weeks I deliver the manuscript of the book on food history I’ve been working on for years.  In five weeks, after fifteen years, longer than I have spent anywhere except the house I grew up in, we leave Mexico for good.  In six weeks we will be back in the United States.

Wish me luck.  And look for my next post in a couple of months.

How did these two little islands in the Mediterranean come to have these pastries and when, what are the connections with the series of invaders (including Muslims and Brits) who took the islands, what happened to them when local people migrated to mainland Spain or the Americas?

Please just enter “ensaimadas” under search on my website and you will find a dozen posts about all this.

Then Xisca Pou Giménez,from Mallorca, but now living in Mexico, sent me these comments.

Ensaïmades are, yes, very difficult to do technically, not a single person makes them at home, never. My grandmother, who is a superb dessert maker, once made one at home because the women of her generation still know the technique and she wanted to show the whole process to my sister and I. I was amazed, very difficult.

As for the “migration” changes… There is this urban legend about mallorquinian pasteleros that tried to do them in “the peninsula” (the name of the rest of Spain for people from the islands) and they couldn’t “probably because of the differences (consistency and composition) in the water” (?). I guess the problem, as you suggest, is rather that people outside the “tradition’s core” are soon discouraged by the technical difficulties.

Many people from Mallorca migrated to Argentina. One of my grand-mother’s best friends and her husband set up a pastelería in a city where many people from my villlage (Felanitx) settled (San Pedro, in the Buenos Aires province). They managed to live extremely well selling ensaïmadas! They had the best pastelería in town.

What distinguishes a real ensaïmada from the one you found in Buenos Aires that day (or the ones you find in Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, in pastelerías founded by people from Mallorca—”La Bombonera”, “La Mallorquina”— [is] that [they], for some reason (price? health risks?) have turned away from the original recipe.

The fact is that, to make the real ones, you have put enough saïm over the almost transparent dough that you afterwards roll and then put down in a caracol shape. That “causes” the inside layers, the essence of the ensaïmada.

When you see the amount of saïm they put on there, you remember your heart and arterias and start eating them less :)! But is is difficult because they are truly delicious.

Thanks Xisca!

No one knew.  Nobody had a cure.

His mother ignored the nutritional advice of the day, advice that suggested that all that a little boy needed was meat and bread and sugar and fat. She gave him milk and vegetables as well.

The little boy worked hard, made his way out of Fort Scott, Kansas, graduated from the University of Kansas in 1903, and got his doctorate from Yale a few years later. His gums healed, his joints stopped hurting, his brown spots receded.

His name was Elmer McCollum. If you are not a nutritionist or dietician, you may never have heard of him, as I had not until recently.  We are all his debtors, though.

His Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (1918) sold 14,000 copies in its first three years and went into five editions by 1939.  It was one of the first books to suggest that more was needed in the diet than protein, carbohydrates, minerals and water.  Vitamins in fact.    Vitamin A was the name he gave to whatever it was in milk fat that enabled growth in animals (including humans).

And those brown spots. Scurvy.  In Kansas. Just over a hundred years ago.  He wasn’t unusual.  Lots of rural American children suffered from scurvy.

Now they don’t, thanks to MCollum and his colleagues in the US and elsewhere. We’ve come a long, long way.

_______________

This is just one of the interesting stories in the new book, Milk: A Local and Global History (Yale University Press,) authored by  Deborah Valenze of Barnard College.  A specialist in British cultural history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she’s written a book that is readable but scholarly.  Just the kind of book I love, just the kind of book that is needed to move food history ahead and provide a good base for the politics of food. One to add to your list.

“A long-lost medieval cookbook, containing recipes for hedgehogs, blackbirds and even unicorns, has been discovered at the British Library. Professor Brian Trump of the British Medieval Cookbook Project described the find as near-miraculous. “We’ve been hunting for this book for years. The moment I first set my eyes on it was spine-tingling.”"

via Unicorn Cookbook Found at the British Library – Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts.

Unicorn Marinaded in Cloves and Garlic Roasting on a Griddle

As someone who spent hours in the British Library, at least when it was part of the British Museum, with the old heavy book catalogs in the Reading Room and the hectic whispered social life of the North Library (the Rare Book Room), I was delighted to read this yesterday.  Do read the whole thing if you haven’t already come across it.

 

How did Japan come to be a wheat-obsessed nation that needs gimmicks like the Gopan to eat rice disguised as wheat flour? The story of Japan’s conversion from rice to wheat involves a long, relentless campaign by the best propagandists in the business—the U.S. government, of course.

via Wheat in Japan: How the nation learned to love the American grain instead of rice. – Slate Magazine.

It was first domesticated in West Africa, botanists tell us. A couple of years ago I posted on black-eyed peas in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, suggesting that they were a trace of African presence in the State.  I still think there’s something to that for the reasons I suggest in my earlier post.

Thanks to comments which have been trickling in for the past couple of years and further reading, it seems clear that the history of black-eyed peas in Spanish America, particularly Mexico, is much more complex than in the Anglo parts of the Caribbean and what is now the United States.

In Anglo regions, Africans are the clear candidates.  Judith Carney, in The Shadow of Slavery, quotes a number of English commentators from the eighteenth century who expressed surprise at this bean, novel to them, and suggested it came with slavery (124-25).

In Mexico, it seems likely that the black-eyed pea, which had spread widely in the Old World following its domestication (though not to northern Europe) was brought independently from three continents.  What follows is taken from the comments, and just lightly edited.

African origins

From Nils Bernstein

From what I can find, the earliest mention of them [in Anglo regions] is Jamaica in 1675, more than 100 years after the galleons across the Pacific started.

I was just in Chiapas, where they also have black-eyed peas, and call them (among other things) (and again with the ‘not ours’ concept) “frijol de Castilla” (also what they’re called in parts of South America, I believe), which suggests an Atlantic connection.

It turns out they’re also popular in Yucatán and Campeche, where they go by the Mayan word (or maybe a kinda Mayan/Spanish hybrid word?) “xpelón,” (they have two varieties, both cowpeas but not exactly what we know as black-eyed peas) and are favored by poorer people. I suppose them going by a Mayan(ish) word could suggest very early consumption.

With the African presence in Mexico so  under studied & downplayed (by all involved cultures/countries!), and as you say, they were in Mex from the 16th century, I wouldn’t be surprised if cowpeas came with them quite early, and the fact that ‘official black-eyed pea documentation’ starts with late 17th-century Caribbean, we could just chalk up to a lack of research into the trade and practices of Africans in Mexico in the 16th century.

Iberian origins

From EatNopales.

Both of my parents are from the highlands of Jalisco where Black Eye Peas are also consumed… but for various reasons.

The deeply rooted historical reason is that many “Spanish” families that settled the area in the 18th century are really Portuguese from ancient Lusitania as well as Extremadura. You will find a proliferation of last names such as Reynoso & Fonseca etc., By the 18th century.. Black Eyed Peas would have very much been part of their culinary traditions in Iberia.

A more recent clue comes from my own family oral history. Prior to the Green Revolution in Mexico during the 1960′s… the typical Mexican rural family ate a much greater variety of beans… usually planting about 5 varieties of which Frijol Carita, a Vulgaris which looks like Black Eyed Peas was a prominent bean in the area. However as Green Revolution farming took root the Mexican Pinto proved to be the highest yield / lowest cost bean and consumption became a little more monoculture.

Nonetheless.. most families still longingly idolize & occasional splurge for the special beans of the past… Flor de Mayo, Bayo, Pinquitos etc., As Mexican migrants from Jalisco first made their way to the Southeast U.S. in the 1980′s they encountered the Black Eye Pea, found that it was relatively cheap and started using it as Frijol Carita. Now with NAFTA, Mexico has been flooded with cheap, subsidized US beans and my guess is that the Black Eye Pea is considered a cheap substitute for Frijol Carita or in Guanajuato lingo.. Veronicas (on occasion also referred to as Judias)

And thanks to Adam Balic for pointing out the black-eyed peas in Annibale Carracci’s Beaneater (1580-1590).

The Beaneater by Annibale Carracci (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beaneater)

Filipino Origins

From Nils Bernstein

An inventory from an Acapulco-bound Manila galleon in 1600 had large quantities of “beans and legumes” aboard.

Besides foods being exported, it’s documented that the Acapulco-bound galleons had foods to feed the Asian crew, who didn’t like Spanish foods.

Despite the galleons also being called “nao de china”, Filipinos referred to as “Chinese” (sometimes even to this day, in Mexico), etc. it’s important to note that the Asian crew (and some passengers/slaves) were Filipino, with different culinary practices. One of those being that, unlike elsewhere in Asia, soybeans (which one historian assumed were the ‘beans’ aboard the Mex-bound ships) were NOT commonly used for food/sauces in the Philippines, while cowpeas were.

So, as early as 1600, on Acapulco-bound ships from the Philippines, there would have been beans and legumes that were not garbanzos and favas (Spanish diet, documented as being the beans on Mex-bound ships from Spain), not Phaseolus (those were brought to the Philippines, not vice versa), and not soybeans (not in the Filipino diet, not of large exportation value). Cowpeas, perhaps?!

We also know that many of the Asian crew were recruited to remain in Mexico to cultivate coconut plantations, and also many simply escaped, so fair to assume they would have carried some of those foods with them (esp something so portable and easily propagated as beans/legumes).

Again, they certainly came on Atlantic slave ships as well, though I have to imagine that being a slower process of dissemination, since unlike free Asians on the Manila galleons, it’s not as if slaves got to bring anything, or were able to farm freely upon arrival.

The yorimuni bean of Sonora is Vigna unguicalata. With Sinaloa and Sonora being on the west coast and with close ties to the galleons, and the native people calling them, essentially, ‘white man’s bean’, i thought the connection would be to the galleons rather than people of African origin living there. But as I think about it, “yorimuni” likely just refers to ‘not ours’ – since all other beans (Phaseolus) were indigenous. Yorimuni is a Yaqui word roughly meaning “white man’s bean” (yori is often said to mean simply ‘foreigner’ or ‘white man’, but its meanings point closer to a conquering foreigner to whom money must be paid, as well as traitor…that is, NOT a foreigner of African origin).  It’s very common in India and found widely in the Philippines.

It may have found popularity in Sonora (and to some degree Sinaloa) because it thrives in hot and dry weather, unlike many other beans.

They were growing/eating cowpeas in the Philippines pre-Conquest.

One of them is the celebration of Viernes de Dolores, the Friday before Holy Week. Although officially this day is in memory of the many sorrows of the Virgin Mary, in Guanajuato it’s one of the biggest festivals of the year with the streets full of flower sellers.  The politicians take advantage of the throngs to breakfast in the town square and greet all their constituents. And householders create special altars outside their front doors, with images of the Virgin, pots of fresh sprouting wheat, cut paper, white cloth, aromatic flowers and herbs.

Here you can see fresh chamomile and gold-painted bread rolls (bolillos) and oranges.

One of the lovely customs is the preparation of a special drink, almost a liquid salad, for the day.  I thought I would re-post this old piece about it. People offer family, friends and passersby water ices (nieves) and this agua.  It’s often made in huge containers such as clean, five gallon paint cans or tamale steamers.  But here’s a small scale version for an ordinary water pitcher.

Begin by grinding up a raw beetroot with a little water in a blender.  Some people just chop it but that does not give such a vivid color.

Then chop into 1/4 inch cubes a cup of strawberries, half a small papaya, half a small cantelope, a couple of oranges, and a couple of bananas.

Then finely shred half an iceberg lettuce.   Half fill your pitcher with water and stir in half a cup of sugar until dissolved.  Strain  the beetroot water into the pitcher.  Then add the lettuce and the fruit and stir until mixed.

Of course as you can see, the fruits float to the top so give it a good stir before serving.  It should be neither very sweet nor very acid, the flavors coming from the ingredients.   You don’t need a spoon but there’s nothing to prevent you using one if you want to.

1.  Perhaps Krugman means that the British industrial revolution was responsible for industrialized food.  I don’t think he can because the dates are all wrong. At least in its classic period, usually, if somewhat arbitrarily, dated from 1750 to 1850, the British Industrial Revolution  had little to do with food.

The possible exceptions are the industrialization of British-style beer and an attempt to introduce continuous baking of  hard tack (crackers) for the Navy.

Water or wind continued to drive most grist mills, the major food processing machines of the day, turning grains into flour. Only if they were situated very close to a coal-pit was steam used. The most famous steam-driven mill, the Albion Mill, in the East End of London, erected by Boulton and Watt, could not compete with water and wind mills, and was not replaced when it was burned down.

(The main foci of the British industrial revolution were  spinning and weaving, stationary steam engines, later the rotary steam engine for railroads and steamships, ceramics, and new ways of making iron. Canals, railroads and steamships lowered the cost of transport. New methods of farming (still far, far from industrial agriculture) increased productivity.)

2. Perhaps Krugman means that the British Industrial Revolution, although it started in the country where coal, iron, clay, and water provided the raw materials, did accelerate urban growth, particularly in towns such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and so on, and that these towns needed industrialized food.

The towns, however, including London depended chiefly on bread produced in traditional ways. The wheat was  grown in fields plowed by oxen or horses, harvested by hand, stone ground in those grist mills, and batch baked in small ovens. The poor spent between a half and four fifths of their weekly income on bread.

This was as it had been for millennia not just in Britain but in all societies with cities. Grains fuelled cities. No other foodstuff gives so much bang for the buck. With a high caloric and nutritional value to weight recipe and easily storable, grains could be transported to cities and stored to feed them, maize or rice if not wheat. (Note, even in the late 60s, American’s were getting 25-30% of their calories from bread).

Lowered transport prices, not industrialization, made bread affordable during the nineteenth century. For bringing grain or flour to cities, horse-drawn barges (dismissed by Krugman) were very efficient. The opening of the Erie Canal, for example, dramatically lowered grain prices on the East Coast according to Wikipedia, as well as in Britain from the late 1840s on.

Only at the end of the nineteenth century, was the grinding of flour industrialized with the introduction of the steel roller mill, only in the twentieth century did flow through baking replace batch baking.

As James Belich puts it in his fascinating book, Replenishing the Earth (Oxford, 2009, 2-3), “The curious thing about London and New York was that they became mega-cities before the modern agro-industrial revolution.”

3.  The industrialization of food processing did not really get under way until after the mid-nineteenth century, its heyday being between 1870 and 1920.  By then, the entire industrialising world was in the game.

The French led the way in beet sugar and margarine; the Austro-Hungarians in roller milling of flour.  All European and American countries produced sweet and savory biscuits (cookies and crackers) and jam. Canned goods were made by Cirio in Italy, Nestle in Switzerland, Borden, Dole, Heinz and a host of others in the US, Amieux-Frères in France, Herdez in Mexico, Morinage and Kagome in Japan, as well as Crosse & Blackwell in England.

Japan worked out how to industrialize fermented goods as fast or faster than the West.  They introduced monosodium glutamate in the early twentieth century. Shanghai had roller mills for flour by the early twentieth century.  Mexico turned out crackers, Argentina dried pasta. Rice polishing mills, often made in Germany or England, were installed across the rice-eating countries of Asia.

Thus Britain was not a leader in industrialized food but one in the pack.

In short, Britain’s early urbanization and industrialization did not produce a change in the food eaten in Britain.  The big changes came later and happened in all urbanizing and industrialising countries.  Perhaps Krugman wanted to say that this caused the food in all these countries to decline in quality and that Britain is just his example. What I don’t think he can say is that Britain was uniquely affected by urbanization and industrialization.

_________

I haven’t finished yet.  I want to talk about at least four more topics.  (1) How Krugman’s thesis reflects a widely held historiography and politics of food. (2) Whether nations (as opposed to say, classes) are the best units for telling food history.  (3) Why we need to know what rural food was like before drawing conclusions about the effects of industrialization.  And (4) Why we need to take past culinary philosophies into account.

After all, I am an enthusiastic advocate of fusion cuisine.  I am ready to say that cuisines rarely map on to nations and that, in any case, nations don’t own cuisines.  Althought I never ate at El Bulli, Adrià’s restaurant, I have in the last four years lived in both Barcelona and Girona (sixty miles away and capital of the province in which El Bulli was situated) so I have had a chance to enjoy the markets and restaurants.  And I have no reason to question Adrià’s culinary intelligence.

I think I am working my way to an answer.  It goes something like this.  At the heart of every cuisine lies a series of techniques, usually associated with the making of sauces.  Often these depend on particular ingredients but it’s the way of treating those ingredients that really matters.  This creates the character of the cuisine and is the contribution it can make to the  world’s culinary heritage.

So, to take a somewhat dated but probably familiar example, at the heart of classic French lies the use of emulsions, gels, and starches to make sauces, combining meat stock, fat, flour, and acids in a huge variety of ways.

Now perhaps what bothers me most about the “Mexican” cuisine that I have encountered in the United States, in England, and in Girona is that it fails to capture the techniques used in Mexico.  Although I have lived in Mexico for the past fifteen years, I venture the following characterization with some trepidation because my Mexican friends may just say I am talking through my hat. But I will plough ahead anyway.

Mexican sauces, of which there are an enormous variety, are pureed vegetable sauces that play on the flavors, the textures, the colors (and to a lesser extent the piquancy) of an extensive range of fresh and dried chiles combined with the acidity and textural additions provided by tomatillos, tomatoes (and to a lesser extent by other ingredients such as lime, vinegar, xoconostle, etc.) plus onions, garlic and often cilantro. The more complicated of these sauces also employ other thickeners and spices including the notorious chocolate, but also allspice, cinnamon, fresh ginger, raisins, capers, toasted tortillas, and a host of others.

To become a really competent cook in the Mexican tradition is to become quite at ease with all the implicit rules of combination of these basics.

In my opinion, these sophisticated sauces can make a huge contribution to the world culinary heritage.  Delicious, with a huge range of applications in the kitchen, as well as inexpensive and healthful, they are unappreciated gems that go way, way beyond the better-known pureed tomato sauces.

So, if Adrià could capture this repertoire and showcase its virtues, he would be doing all of us a huge favor. If not, then for my money however great the food it would be an opportunity lost, one more of the exploding number of “Mexican” restaurants worldwide.

Update Sunday March 18th.

Thanks to all those who have picked up on this.  Following up Elatia Harris’s comparison to Indian food, Mexican sauces are not just tomato sauces with chilies added any more than Indian sauces are bechamel sauces with curry powder added (as happened in nineteenth-century France and England).  Nothing wrong with tomato sauces with chilies, nothing wrong with bechamel with curry powder.  Both can be just fine.  But neither introduces new culinary techniques.

The one description I have seen of the mooted restaurant seems vague and not reassuring.  (Carmen “Titita” Ramírez’s El Bajio is terrific by the way but it’s not a taco spot).

 ”Albert [Ferran's brother] has mentioned before that the team has considered opening an outpost of the traditional Mexican restaurant El Bajío or at least collaborating with its owner Carmen “Titita” Ramirez, but nothing to that effect is confirmed. He told Eater last year, “It won’t happen next week, but maybe I’ll open an authentic ceviche bar in the neighborhood, or a taco spot with the lady from El Bajío. Who knows?”"

via Ferran Adrià to Open Mexican Restaurant in Barcelona – Adriawire – Eater National.

“Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes,were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!),preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).”

In this second post I’ll simply tackle the question: Is urbanization a cause of bad food?

London certainly exploded in size in the nineteenth century, going from just over a million in 1819 (the beginning of the Victorian period) to seven million in 1901 (the end of the Victorian period).

Other nations, though, were also urbanizing.  New York soared to four million. Paris went from 1 million in 1844 to 1.8 million in 1872. Edo (Tokyo) had had well over a million since the mid-eighteenth century.  In 1800 Beijing and Guangzho had a million people. Istanbul was huge too, and had been for centuries, though, perhaps not reaching a million. By 1900, still in the Victorian period, Berlin, Chicago, Vienna, and St Petersburg also all had more than a million. Melbourne and Buenos Aires had half a million.

This list includes some of the most famed centers of gastronomy, including at the least Paris, Vienna and Istanbul; many would also want to put St Petersburg, Beijing, and Edo on the list.

From a historical perspective, this is scarcely surprising.  Big cities have traditionally had the best food of their epoch, including Ancient Rome (a million), tenth-century Baghdad (probably half a million to a million), and thirteenth-century Hangchow (about the same).  The reason is simple.  Big cities are where the rich and powerful live. They have the power and the will to command (seize, grab, extract, or buy) the best food.

In short, urbanization does not generally produce awful food but the finest food of the epoch.

So even if we accept Krugman’s assumption that English food was awful, it’s not likely that this was because London was a big city.

What about industrialized?  That’s for another post.