Rachel Laudan

Here´s a comment from Myriam Mahiques, who explains herself below.  Here´s a link to Myriam Mahique´s  direct and refreshing blog, which I am thoroughly enjoying.  In response to Nick who suggested that meatballs in the Argentine were the dreaded American meatballs all over again, she explains why not.

I´m an Argentine architect, living in California. I´ve just opened a blog to leave our recipes to my daughters. Regarding your article about Spaghetti and meatballs, we prefer the meatballs fried and served as an appetizer.

Spaghetti comes with marinara sauce (tuco) or bolognesa sauce (marinara plus grind meat).
The bread crumbs in the meatballs would spoil the pasta and sauce, if you understand what I mean, if we want meatballs in sauce, we make a different recipe, without bread crumbs. It´s completely different the way Americans eat them. And we´d never put them in a sandwich.
Lasagna, after boiled, we fill it and put it in the oven, with sauce.
Almost everybody in Buenos Aires had an Italian  or Spanish ancestor. We learnt a lot from them, and it is a shame for a woman not to know how to cook. We really appreciate good food, Spanish, Italian, then French cuisine. Served at a nice table, the finest, the better.

Here´s the post that prompted all this,  an Argentinian recipe for lasagne in response to a reader’s request.

Just look at this.  Wow.  Have to re-think lots of things.

ca. 540 AD.  Recipe (not direct translation).  Take refined rice glutinous rice starch, add enough water to make a batter, heat a large pot of boiling water, set a copper pan in the water, push the pan to rotate it as you drop in a ladle of batter. The batter spreads to cover the whole pan (centrifugal force).  Take the pan out of the water and peel off the film. It looks like suckling pig skin (cooked pig skin I assume).

Cut up and add to a savory soup or sweet sesame or fruit based soup.

Commentator Huang´s note.

Modern versions are still seen in the cuisine of Fukien. In the Foochow areas there is a much beloved dish called ting-pien hu which is made by spreading a thin layer of rice flour batter along the uypper wall of a large cooking wok. As the film dries it is scraped and allowed to fall into the hot savory soup in the center of the wok.

In southern Fukien thin round rice pancake called po ping are made on a flat bottomed pan.  These are used to wrap chopped meat and vegetables to give spring rolls.  When fried they are just like the ubiquitous egg rolls one sees in Chinese restaurants in America except than the skins are thinner than those made with wheat flour. In

In short, I finally  did what I should have done earlier on, looked up thin pastries in H.T. Huang´s wonderous volume in Joseph Needham´s Science and Civilization in China.  Huang, born and raised in China,worked as a food scientist for years in the US, ending up as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, before writing this tome on Fermentation and Food Science in China.  Never has a tome been more welcome.

He has a long discussion on ping or roughly Chinese pasta (Katy, I am following his terminology here which is why I use ping not bing.  He uses it to describe the earlier wider meaning of the word, whereas as your links point out in modern times it refers mainly to round breads).

No less that 15 kinds of ping were described in the 6th century Chhi Min Yao Shu, Essential Arts for the People´s Welfare, an astonishing compendium of agricultural practices and food technology.  The one above is the only batter.

Comments, please, please. Just love these hunts.  Thanks Charles, Katy and Robyn for comments here and on Facebook about the Chinese thin pastries, and everyone else on those elsewhere.  I will acknowledge them in future posts.

Thank you everyone who has responded here, and on Facebook or Twitter, or via personal emails. Once again, I am amazed at the way these tools speed up intellectual interaction.   Soon the days that I remember when you sent off a letter and waited weeks for response and even then could never gather up the kind of interaction that’s gone on here in the last 36 hours will be a distant memory.  Please read all the responses.  There’s lots of good stuff there.

Here’s a quick, first shot at a summary.

1.  I change to griddle-baked instead of seared, thanks to Robyn Eckhardt’s comments.

2.  There is a huge world of these very thin pastries that deserves to be better known.  Very roughly they correspond to the world of Islam, including South India (though perhaps not northern Mughal India),  Southeast Asia and possibly Horn of Africa.

3. The thin pastries seem to have been used either in tharid, the signature meat and bread dish of Islam (though surely at the upmarket end) or as pie casings or wrappers for savories or sweets (Charles Perry, Anissa Helou, Susan Ji-Young Park, Ammini Ramachandran et al).

4. They are put on the heated surface in a variety of ways:

By spreading a handful of pretty liquid dough

By tapping the dough on with the hand or a spoon

By spreading a thin batter

By flipping the liquid dough on with a cloth

By using a brush to spread the dough on (Adam Balic is one who speculates this is modern)

5.  The heated surface may be a metal griddle (the commonest now, it seems), an upturned pot (I’m going to take the liberty of adding a photo that Paula Wolfert–I’ll take it down immediately if you have worries, Paula–sent Adam Balic in response to his forwarding Ammini’s video which, like the one in Ammini’s post, is black), or perhaps just stones.

6.  That the technique is a tricky one, that it could have been spread by the migration of just a few skilled cooks.

7.  That to make these pastries, you have to have either fine white flour or fine rice flour (missed that before, sorry).  Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, these were reserved for the elite.  Then new milling techniques made both much more widely available.

Note that I am assuming that all these techniques belong to a single family.  In spite of Katy’s plea, I see no reason (with possible exception below) to think they were independent inventions.  And for Nancy, who wonders why I talk about recent invention in relation to spring rolls wrappers, well, I’ve decided my default position is to assume something is recent until it is proven to be ancient.

Up for grabs.

1.  When these doughs were invented.  I’d now guess not before the (say) 9th or 10th century with the flowering of Islamic cuisine (pity we don’t know more about Sassanid).  Quite likely, as Charles Perry says, “as part of the madness for the thinnest possible bread in medieval Moorish Spain and North Africa.”  Certainly still there in Ottoman times.  (By the way, Charles, I think Gene Anderson dates Chinese dumplings too late.  I think they were there by the beginning of the CE).

2.  What the connections, if any, with China are.  Robyn Eckhardt believes the Chinese version of this pastry comes from Fujian (right, Robyn?)  Agreed that there was massive Chinese migration from their and Canton to Southeast Asia.  But do we have any evidence about the history of these pastries in South China?  Or their connection, if any, with ping.

Finally, I find it interesting to compare this with the history of oven baked pastries in Europe (raised crust, short crust, puff pastry, etc. etc).  All these depend on both fat and ovens.

The griddle baked pastries perhaps shouldn’t even be called pastries, if the European sense of pastries using fat is the norm.  They are a dry pasta or bread.