Ready meals will become more popular: Brazilians still cook most meals from scratch, even though the country has some of the world’s biggest food-processing companies, which export their tins and sachets to America and Europe. Fine dining at home will largely disappear. “For the 4,000 reais a month a really good cook now costs, you could eat out ten times in São Paulo’s fanciest restaurants,” says Ms Leite. Many Brazilian mansions have no hot water in the kitchen, and there are paulistanos who time-share helicopters but do not own a dishwasher. That will change when getting congealed fat off pans stops being someone else’s job.

This from an interesting article on the parallels between the disappearance of servants in Britain (and I would add the US) in the early twentieth century and from Brazil (and I would add Mexico) in the early twenty-first century in The Economist.

Put another way, lots of the laborious “traditional” cuisines created for the well-to-do are going to vanish if the world keeps getting wealthier.

Domestic Servants Waiting for Street Car, Atlanta 1939. Farm Sevice Administration. Courtesy NYPL.

As if in response, the New York Times had an article on 27th December called Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés – NYTimes.com.  The subhead for the piece went “A thriving movement of food producers wants to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions, and redefine American cuisine for a global audience.”

Hmm, still a few clichés I’d say.  But that’s editors for you.  I wish all those enthusiasts trying to raise great farm products the very best of luck. I’d love their pork and their fruit.

The article does, though, raise yet again the whole question of just who is going to do the work.  One of the growers talks about the  great days of Carolina rice.

The flavor of Carolina rice made it world famous; the finest grains were hand-pounded, barrel-aged and scented with bay leaves. From African slaves, white farmers learned to rotate crops of peas with rice, to replenish the soil; they learned that the two foods, eaten together, could sustain life over many months of winter or hardship.

Hand pounded rice?  Certainly there seems to be evidence that hand pounded white rice tastes better. The Thai royal family, who knew good food, insisted that their rice be hand pounded even when rice mills had come to Thailand.

But is anyone seriously thinking of returning to this, except as an experiment?  Surely not.  Not with slave labor, to be sure.    So by whom? And at what price?

Afterward.  The Economist is on a roll about servants. The psychology of service: Why have servants?  talks about servants as necessary to status as they certainly were through much of history. I know of families who could barely pay their bills but felt that if they “let the servant go” they were themselves on the downward path.

And a link to a roundup of my earlier posts on servants and cooking. Will there be a return to servants? (Open the page completely and the links work).

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.

Yesterday I talked with a fried who commented that Christmas was a time for memories.  So here are a couple of mine.

As children, our Christmas stockings always had a tangerine in the toe. With luck we got a second from the wooden bowl in the breakfast room, its peel glowing, its juice so sweet and fresh.

Then years later a Swedish-American friend, a fine linguist and an excellent cook, sent her thoughts on oranges for Christmas in Sweden as a Christmas letter.  I reproduce it here.

A Swedish Orange Cake–Modified

Imagine Sweden a hundred years ago; 90 per cent of the population was rural, the country was poor, and there was not much of either communications or roads. The think  of what a fresh orange would mean at Christmas time.

Take one large fresh orange (wash with soap and water–you will use all of it–rinse and dry).  Chop in large pieces and put in blender (a tablespoon of undiluted frozen orange juice or any liquid is helpful if the orange is dry) and chop but not finely. Set aside.

Measure out a cup of raisins. Set aside.

In a large bowl, measure out:

1. Betty Crocker Golden Cake (with pudding added) Mix

2. 4 eggs

3. 1 cup water

4. 1/2 cup sour cream (I use non-fat yogurt)

5. 1/2 cup cooking oil

6. 1/4 cup orange juice (I use triple sec–but then I don’t live in Sweden a hundred years ago

If you have cake mix without pudding, you can add a package of instant vanilla pudding mix–experiment and see what you like best.

Duncan Hines or whatever will of course do as well.

Then beat all together (I use hand held beaters) slowly until mixed, then NO more than three minutes on high. Stir in reserved fruit gently. All of this should take about ten minutes.

Find a Bundt pan and spray for less than 30 seconds with Pam OR cream a Bundt pan with butter for 5 minutes–your choice. Pam works better.

Bake in a preheated (you knew that) 325 Fahrenheit oven for 60-70 minutes. Cool, better after a day. You can frost it with 1 cup powder sugar mixed with 1 tbsp melted butter and about two tbsp undiluted frozen orange juice (but defrost it).

OR–the unmodified version. Take a pound of butter and a pound of sugar and stir for an hour. Write me for the rest. . . . .

Apologies for Hirams Kokbok.

Thank you Christina Blatts Paulston.  For the friendship and for the recipe.  And may all of you have oranges or tangerines to brighten up the darkness of winter.  Happy Christmas.

It was the late 1960s and I was talking an after-lunch walk with old French friends S & G on one of their annual visits to my family in England.

This was part of the second of my encounters with French food. The first encounter that I have already described was with the very plain food served by a very distinguished family, a family that played a part in our lives for years and years.

About that time, my brother returned from school one day to say that one of his teachers was looking for a family who would take in a young French man about 19 years old.

So S.  came to stay.  For my father, who had read Modern Languages and Economics at Cambridge, it was a welcome chance to practice his French and for both parents, who as farmers found it impossible to get away, a stream of visitors helped satisfy their curiosity and urge to travel.

While he was with us, S met a young compatriot who was doing a year of her nursing training at the local hospital and a few years and many visits to us later, they married and set themselves up in a small flat in Paris.  S, who was quite an intellectual but who had lost all family in the war, worked as a salesperson, G, his wife, worked shifts as a nurse.  Their flat became a stayover place for our family in Paris, though never more than a night or so because it was small.

Both of them thoroughly enjoyed food, S in particular.  When we visited, we always had good food.  But it had little to do with cooking in their tiny kitchen.  True, once I remember G as a special treat had bought a small piece of beef filet neatly tied with string that she turned until browned in an orange Le Creuset casserole in the morning and reheated in the evening when she got back from work.

What made the meal though was the take out: the baguette, a bit of pate or perhaps oil cured herring for a starter, a salad, cheese, perhaps a bought pastry.  I remember realizing that living in a town was not all bad foodwise because you could buy all these things.

And by the by they had wine, something the other family never served en famille, and something that at that time my family never had either, far too expensive.   It took some years before I realized that the excruciating headache that prevented me enjoying my first trip to Versailles was in fact nothing but a hangover from the previous night’s dinner.

But back to that awkward conversation in England. By now I was in my mid twenties.  At university I had discovered the English cookbook author Elizabeth David who captured the hearts of my entire generation, at least that part of it that had the money to go to university.  Her prose was so transporting, so enchanting that it quite overrode my own experiences in France.  This was what France was REALLY like.  And of course I learned her Mediterranean Cooking and French Provincial Cooking by heart.

So  when I went for a post-lunch walk with S & G I turned the conversation to food.  How had S and G put up with the food at my family’s house all those years? I asked them.  After all they were FRENCH.   It must have been a burden they had to bear in return for gorgeous country to roam in and so many historical monuments to visit that they seemed inexhaustible.

That’s when they looked at me with such scorn.  They said nothing more but politely changed the conversation.  I felt myself shrinking like Alice in Wonderland when she ate the mushroom, I felt a blush flood up my face.

That food at my family’s house.   That had not been something to put up with.  It had been something they had anticipated and relished, something that all the take out places around their apartment could not offer, something they did not have time to cook.

Milk and cream from cows milked that day, new potatoes and green beans and raspberries from the garden, eggs laid that morning by the bantams, meat from animals that had names, three home-cooked meals a day, that a French couple who loved food had cherished for a decade.

And I, in the name of sophistication and the reading of a woman who had never seriously cooked in England, had denigrated it. And had spurned and disdained my mother’s extraordinary accomplishment in making such extraordinary food seem so ordinary.

They were puzzled. I was humiliated.

Never again would I so cavalierly dismiss my mother’s work.

The gourmet was typically a rich male amateur to whom food was a passion. Foodies are typically an aspiring professional couple to whom food is a fashion. A fashion? The fashion. Couture has ceded the center ground to food.

You don’t live with the same menu for years–you discover, embrace, explore minutely, get bored, and move on tomorrow to fresh meals and pastas new.

You are an elite, an international elite with branches in every country. You are helpful to planet earth rather than doing any harm.  Glamorous. Fun.

Who wrote this, when and where? That was the challenge. Thanks Karen, Susan and Erica for your entries.  Speaking as Katerina la Vermintz Karen added ruminations on her own blog in her inimitable and well informed voice. Check them out, specially how to be a 5 minute faux foodie.  Susan hit the button.  And maybe Erica too, though she wasn’t letting on.

1984.  That’s the date. A quarter of a century ago.

The quote is from  The Official Foodie Handbook by Ann Barr, editor of Harper and Queens,  and Paul Levy, who is his own introduction, the inventors of the invaluable term “foodie.”   The man himself, a self confessed foodie, Paul Levy reflects here.  It’s a wonderful send up and ruffled quite a few feathers when it came out.

And  I have to plead guilty.  This is my past.

Get it for yourself. $1.99 on Amazon.  Still current.  I swear, you will learn history, attitudes and those invaluable turns of phrase.  And have a good laugh.

1984. That is pretty amazing.  On re-reading The Official Foodie Handbook, I had the same feeling as John Newton writing in the Sydney Morning Herald three or four years ago.  “The alarming thing is nothing has changed.”

Nothing has changed.  Barr and Levy nailed modern culinary philosophy, eating well is doing good.  Of course it took Carlo Petrini of Slow Food to give this institutional form and Corby Kummer of the Atlantic to coin the phrase “Doing good by eating well.”

But, my goodness, we’ve had a quarter of a century of this message and people are still signing up in droves.  And the message really hasn’t evolved that much.

So why?  Because this is the truth?  I don’ think so.  Because entry requirements are low? Perhaps.

I am taken back to English pubs in the west country before urbanization and gastropubs hit, when there was bread and cheddar and scrumpy.  Scrumpy, a local cider, alcoholic of course, actually very alcoholic sometimes, had that tingle that taste.

But I’m drinking tepache. So what’s tepache?  It’s a Mexican drink.  If you are a visitor, you might see it on the outskirts of towns, a wooden barrel with TEPACHE in wobbly red letters, under the awning of a little cart, or in a market as here, with the 30 cent offering in plastic bags and  and the rather more expensive in plastic glasses.

The signs say “Tepache 100% natural de piña”  or made from 100% natural pineapple.  It comes from the signature barrels under the table.  It’s been sweetened, I think with piloncillo, raw sugar.  It’s tasty but a bit sweet for my taste.

Tepache is also commonly made at home.  It’s not difficult and it’s actually a great trick for using up that mountain of trimmings and core that always result from preparing pineapple.  You just take the lot (making sure of course that you washed the outside before trimming), put them in a glass container (plastic is not good for this), add water and wait four or five days.

This is day one.  Day two sees bubbles, day three and four the jar looks increasingly murky, and perhaps even develops bits of mold on the top.  Never fear, carry on, strain the liquid and throw away the pineapple.

What you have is this: a nice glass of unsweetened tepache.

Tingly, sour, refreshing I much prefer it to the sweetened version.  And so reminiscent of scrumpy.   But it seemed to me just coincidence–a Mexican pineapple drink and English cider–until I was pulling everything together for this post.

I went back to the original recipe that Dr. Ramiro González of  Guadalajara gave me.  Along with his note that the enzymes in tepache made it excellent for drinking with heavy food, he added, words to the effect that it could also be made with apple or quince peel, something I have never seen in a Mexican cook book.

And then I remembered the bottle of cider from the north of Spain that I buy in the wine store chain Europea occasionally when I am homesick for scrumpy at the ridiculous price of US$ 7 a bottle.

.

Bingo.  there is the barrel.   We’ll never know.  Did the Spanish find an indigenous pineapple drink that they liked because it reminded them of cider?

Or did the northern Spanish cider drinkers begin making their drink in the New World, first with the familiar apple and quince that could be grown in the mountains of Central Mexico, then as an economical way of using all the pineapple brought up from the hot country on mules and hence very expensive.

Influence or convergence?

Anyway, tepache is great stuff.

And PS.  If you leave it a bit longer, you have a nice mild pineapple vinegar.

I have been at a loss to explain the use of cowslips in pudding and wine. A typical recipe is: 1 peck chopped flowers (16 imperial pints volume), 1/2 lb Naples biscuits, 3 pints of cream, 16 eggs. Even scaled down this is a lot of flowers. And they are not large or flowers either. If it was for the yellow colour, there are better choices.

However, in wine it is said that “The blossoms of the Cowslip are sometimes used to give a muscadel flavour to home-made wine,—therefore termed Cowslip Wine; but their long-lost virtue of curing paralytic disorders rendered them still more valuable to our ancestors. On this account the plant was called Palsywort, or, contractedly, Passwort, and had the cheering name of Herba paralyseos, in the Latin herbals of the medical botanists.”

In fact the flowers were thought to be narcotic; “The flowers are certainly indued with a gently narcotic and sedative property, and we are informed on credible authority that they will frequently, in delicate habits, relieve pain and induce sleep when other narcotics would only irritate and distress the patient.”

Eh, you were not a particularly energetic child were you? In my family (back in Croatia) a bit of milk boiled with poppy heads was given to children to make them quiet or go to sleep.

I think that going to sleep with cowslips sounds better than sucking on a rag dipped in laudanum, the English equivalent of milk boiled with poppy heads.   Interesting about their narcotic properties.  I there any modern work on this?

I agree that the quantities required in many recipes seem improbably large.  And I think even more improbably large in the past.  I was taken aback looking at the photos that popped up of cowslips in Google Images to see fields golden with cowslips.  That was not so in the past.  Even in the best spots for cowslips, they were scattered, not massed. These photos must be of protected areas (parks and the like) where not even cattle graze.  So it would have been even harder to collect such quantities.

Two other thoughts occur to me.  One is that cowslips appear at the time of year when everyone in the past was desperate for something fresh.  Even the young leaves of hawthorn (bread and butter, they were called) were nibbled by children.

The other is that at least in the twentieth century, cowslip recipes tend to crop up in works by writers with a “folk” or anti industrial bent.

Adam I agree about the problem of gluts. Our fruits were pretty staggered but even so . . . And the expense of putting up fruit and vegetables.  I’ve always vaguely wondered why Americans (at least so I read) canned vegetables and we never did.  I think probably there were two reasons.

First, we could just about squeak fresh vegetables through the winter though by April my father expressed everyone’s view when he said he yearned for something green.  I don’t think that would have been so easy in the northern United States.

Second, the equipment for canning vegetables was pretty expensive.  We canned (bottled) fruits but because they were in syrup it did not need a pressure cooker or even lots of jars.  A special order went in to the grocer in the nearby small town for large quantities of preserving sugar.

And for jam we never, ever bought jars.  Every possible jar (and there were not many bought jars because we did not buy things in jars) was saved and the collection grew over the years.  I recall on a discussion list someone asking who would hoard old jars?  Well, the entire British population post World War II, that’s who.  Frantic visits to relatives when you ran out of jars. The jam was topped by a bit of wax paper.  If some mold grew, well we scraped it off.

And choice, Laura, Karen, Kay, and Cindy is something I have thought about a lot.  Almost anything (including as Laura points out, husbands and children) takes time and space.  So my feeling about gardening is if it gives you pleasure or it is necessary take the time to do it properly.  But we are lucky to have the choice of not doing it, something my mother would have dearly loved. I don’t vest having a garden with great moral punch.  And that’s lucky because I have just moved too much in my life to ever have the garden I simply assumed I would. I’m currently self sufficient in ginger, bay leaves, limes, lemon grass and a few other herbs and the curry tree is coming along nicely.  But batting between two cities means it’s just not worth growing vegetables and most fruits.

Which leads me to a bit of a puzzle, Ji-Young, about school gardens.  I can see they make sense to teach children something about where food comes from in California with its long growing season.  But if you are in the northern US then school vacations coincide with the most active garden time (and not coincidentally I assume).  So what do the children see?  Seeds going in the ground.  Then the second part of harvest?   But your points about serious policy versus rhetoric are very well taken.

And Maria, you probably have the best garden of the lot of us.  I love reading about it.  And no chemicals is a tough road.  I don’t even think it’s the right road but me might disagree about that.

Finally, that was one lucky peacock.  I’ve never tasted peacock, unlike you Adam, but had I been older and a food historian I might have prevailed on my parents to kill it.  As it was, no one ever turned up from some local stately home to collect the thing though we put the word out. And no one had the heart to wring its neck.  So yes it made an awful noise.  And it got the best of the young plants all too often.  But it did look rather stunning with the petals drifting down from the apple trees.

The main vegetable plot was to the west of the house.  It was, I would guess about 20 or 25 feet by about 60  feet.  The two narrow ends (parallel to the house) were anchored by the perennial vegetables, the middle stretch had neat rows that varied according to the season (March and April were drear with little left).

Asparagus

Savoy cabbage, white cabbage, purple sprouting, cauliflower, brussels sprouts

Runner beans (so gorgeous, climbing their poles with their red flowers)

Haricot beans

Broad beans

Carrots (never did well)

Peas

Spring onions

Potatoes for new potatoes (so pearly when forked up, so creamy, not just little old potatoes)

Radishes

Leaf lettuce, cos lettuce

Jerusalem artichokes

Rhubarb

On one side of this were five espaliered apple trees of different varieties for different purposes, cookers, keepers, eaters.

Then came the flower bed (close to the house) and at the bottom, the strawberries and the raspberries.

Espaliered on the front (south wall) of the house was a pear and a green gage, on the west wall an apricot and a fig, and on the garden wall, another pear and grapes.  A few figs ripened, the rest made green fig jam.

Outside the back kitchen door was the herb bed: parsley (never lasted past Christmas), various thymes, marjoram, rosemary, fennel,  sage,  lavender, chives.

Around the vegetable beds were blackcurrants and gooseberries, outside the front kitchen door redcurrants and white currants against the farmyard wall, in the lawn was a mulberry and a filbert (I wanted a whole nut walk like my aunt).

Through the garden gate in the orchard were damsons and cider apples trees (in some disarray) and a walnut that sulked.

From a small part of one of the fields came potatoes for the rest of the year and swedes (rutabagas).  From the kale for the dairy in winter came, well, kale tops.  From the hedges came elderberries, blackberries, more nuts,  and marginal nibbles–hips, haws, sloes for gin, leaves to nibble on in the spring.

Occasionally my mother bought vegetables: watercress from the watercress beds in the next village, cucumber and tomatoes in the summer from the greenhouses at the Manor in the village a mile away.

We usually had oranges in the house and sometimes bananas.  50 lbs of seville oranges turned up every February to be made into marmalade for the year.

No canned fruit or vegetables (except our own).  Frozen peas appeared in the early 1960s.

Did my mother like gardening? No.  Did she have help?  A man from the village came in one day a week to do the heavy digging.