The online magazine
dedicated to the
discussion & revival
of British foodways.

NO.72
FALL/WINTER2023

Wall of Shame

Trader Joe’s ‘clam chowder soup’ is, if not quite chowder, a decent product. It lacks the essential cured pork that forms the base of a traditional chowder so they might call it a soup but ‘chowder soup’ is an abomination in terms of both syntax and classification.

A bottle of hot sauce Old Bay hot sauce tastes good but amounts to a lazy product. Instead of brewing the sauce with components of Old Bay from inception, McCormick has added the powder to a standard sauce, missing the opportunity to create something unique. Cheaper to produce so profitable enough but hardly creative.



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Food Writing at The New Yorker

The forays of The New Yorker into food writing have proven fraught. Over the years Adam Gopnick has by no means been alone in contributing substandard analysis to the magazine. In the 21 March number Jiayang Fan continues the robust tradition by bracketing a positive review of Hawksmoor with one of the oldest and most clichéd chestnuts in the culinary world.

The outset:

“Does New York City need another steak house? Furthermore, would its gastronomic horizons be brightened by the addition of an English steak house? No and definitely not, a food-aficionado said, brow arched, when I raised the question.”

The ending:

“I was emboldened to tell [my waiter] how astonished I was that something so English could be so good. My companion tried to shush me, but it was too late. The waiter nodded with a smile. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard the sentiment.”

The exchanges indicate what ought by now to be an astonishing misperception on the part of Fan, her companion and moneyed New Yorkers able to afford the bill at Hawksmoor, which incidentally has been held in universally high regard for its British locations from their inception in East London. Fan apparently shares with those New Yorkers a provincial ignorance about the state of British food and traditional English foodways. And she apparently does not know that British cattle all are “raised on hay and pasture,” a Hawksmoor practice she appears to find remarkable.

Nor would Fan appear to understand the significance of the name. Hawksmoor’s masterwork in the form of Christ Church, Spitalfields is one of the great buildings in Europe, It shouts an eerie, eccentric, powerhouse presence just steps away from the original restaurant.

Christ-Church-Spitalfields-Hawkamoor.jpg

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A Pizza Does Not a Prison Make

On 30 May 2021 The New York Times ran an article on the appalling conditions at a Burmese political prison under the headline “They Call It ‘Insane’: Where Myanmar Sends Political Prisoners.” It is an admirable effort to expose the hideous character of the autocrats ruling the country they insist on calling Myanmar but the author of the article, who charitably will remain nameless, might have written his story with more clarity and might have had a little more respect for the intelligence of his reader. “For 134 years,” he explains,

“Insein Prison has stood as a monument to brutality and authoritarian rule in Myanmar. Built by the British colonizers to help subjugate the native population, the pizza-shaped penitentiary became infamous for its harsh conditions and a half-century of military dictatorship.”

An understandable inference that may be drawn from the passage would be the notion that the British imposed the harsh conditions and torture on the inmates of Insein but no, the author in fact refers to the Burmese themselves. In addition, it is anachronistic, and facile, to claim that the only motivation of the British or anyone else for the construction of a prison is the subjugation of an entire population. The British imperial project relied heavily on native administrators, soldiers and and participants in an array of other occupations. Subjugation was not the purpose behind the construction of Insein.


Insein-Prison.jpg Insein Prison

And pizza? Use of the concept to teach toddlers to execute wedge, or snowplow, turns on skis is acceptable enough, but not to describe one of the more idiosyncratic theories of the nineteenth century. Insein is not a pizza but rather a panopticon, incidentally a remarkable example of imperial architecture, which brought me back to a letter written for two old friends in a double sense of the word who sadly no longer are, as the euphemist would have it, with us.

None of this may appear to have much to do with food, the putative purpose of this site, but then if Jay Rayner, estimable culinary commentator that he is, considers himself qualified based on that profession, so can we. “Food,” he reasons,

“is what keeps us alive, which enables us to wonder about the meaning of existence, while engaging in the practice of art, perhaps through literature, music, theatre or dance. Hurrah! I’m good to go on all culture and philosophy.”

 

The arts of course include architecture, although current practitioners have been making the tacit case for its expulsion, and material culture, justification the excursion toward both topics.

Several years ago coincidence motivated me to write a letter about the panopticon to a pair of old friends, old in two senses. I had known both of them for a long time and while they remained sharp until their deaths a few years after the letter, they had become extremely elderly. The panoptical letter:

 

An Octagonal Education.

1. Frustration with the worldwide web.

An octagonal schoolhouse stands incongruously on the grounds of Dunwoody, a retirement complex in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. It is a striking reminder that eighteenth century builders could teach us a few things about the aesthetics of the sturdy little structure.

The origin of the octagonal schoolhouse and later libraries is not as easy to determine as it ought to be. Internet searches reveal little worth discussing, proof as it happens not only of the limitations of the ether for serious research but also of my own limitations as a surfer.

Octagonal-pagliuca-9-1-.jpg

At first I found only general discussion that a vogue for octagonal schoolhouses did exist (correct), that it was only brief (wrong), limited to Pennsylvania (wrong again) and that the idea probably originated with Quakers in England (turns out to be true). No reference at all to any connection with nineteenth century libraries, however, or anything else. It appeared that at Dunwoody I must have been talking through my ‘hat.’

 

2. A twentysomething’s mania for beer and fashion leads to debate.

Then serendipity intervened in the guise of limited edition “Anarchy Narragansett Beer ‘Hi neighbor!’” sunglasses. The neighborly business is ironic reference to the old Narragansett beer slogan, “Hi neighbor! Have a ‘Gansett,” which was so successful that the brewer folded in the late ‘70s. It was revived a couple of years ago by hipsters, who have taken the fusty brand and made it irredeemably… hip.

The only apparent unpurchased pair of the glasses in existence by late August lurked at a surf shop up the coast from us in Narragansett, and since my daughter, coveter of hipster eyewear, was working double shifts on a daily basis through the end of the summer, I agreed to snag them for her, a foregone excursion anyway because she does not drive.

My spouse Stephanie agreed to accompany me on condition that we stop for a beer (India Pale Ale from Chicago as it transpired; fate is a seamless web) at the Coast Guard House, an ugly edifice built around the excellent bones of a nineteenth century Coast Guard rescue station (the coast there is particularly treacherous) designed by McKim Meade and White. A dump it was then but the beer and view were worth the money.

goose-island-ipa-21.png

If you take the time to take your eyes off the sea and pivot west, you will note that malefactors of great wealth built summer cottages, immense ones, all along the Narragansett waterfront near the Coast Guard house. Some are Victorian confections but most were built in the ‘Shingle Style’ that flourished from about 1880 for about twenty years.

It is a particularly admirable style, at once clean and complicated, interesting but unfussy. A lot of houses where we live in Watch Hill, including ours, are Shingle Style, and its revival began here around 1990 and keeps on going, to the extent that it can be difficult to tell whether a house went up in 1895 or 1995.

 

3. Hopewell inadvertently saves the day.

And so to Hopewell, within a regal compound on Ocean Avenue near the Narragansett Coast Guard House. A brisk example, particularly elegant I thought, of the Shingle Style, or perhaps not; Steff demurred so we debated whether it was real or Revival.

After checking all of our texts on Rhode Island architecture (more linear feet than you might imagine), things looked bad for the male contingent of the home team. I found no reference to Hopewell, an obvious indicator that the house was new. In despair I reluctantly resorted to the internet and, irony again, found polemic salvation.

The Narrragansett Historical Society’s otherwise unimpressive website revealed that the house in its current form was reconstructed in 1890 for the personal physician to…Charles McKim, of McKim Mead and White. Not as colorful perhaps as his partner Stanford White, but then McKim did not shoot his mistress to death. The designer of Hopewell in its happy Shingle Style incarnation remains an item of murk. It probably was not McKim but might have been.

Hopewell-Cottage.jpg Hopewell-Cottage-Narragansett.jpg

Hopewell before and after Improvement.

Hopewell’s omission from one of my archibooks is puzzling. The one in question, Buildings of Rhode Island , is part of the multivolume series called “Buildings of the United States” edited by the Society of Architectural Historians and published by Oxford University Press. The Society and Press chose the author of the Rhode Island volume well. He was the late great William Jordy, kindly curmudgeon and, along with Vincent Scully, dean of American architectural historians during the second half of the twentieth century. Not a Nobel eligible field perhaps, but intriguing nonetheless to aging dilettantes, at least this one.

The Oxford series aims to be definitive, so Jordy’s uncharacteristic omission of Hopewell presents the puzzle. Fate takes and gives, however, and so the professor solves a different puzzle, at least for me and, if you have not nodded off from reading this yet, us.

I thumbed up the pages of Rhode Island from ‘Narragansett’ to ‘Providence’ for Robinson Hall, possible proof that not all my synapses have ceased firing. There it was, the former New Library (in 1878) of Brown University, in all of its octagonal and, according to Jordy, “unusual and especially progressive” glory.

Brown_university_robinson_hall_2009a.jpg

 

4. The panoptic principle.

During the middle of the nineteenth century Brown employed a progressive, not to say radical, university librarian. Brown being Brown, that should not surprise. Unlike his contemporaries, Charles Jewitt thought that college students ought actually to read the holdings of the library. As Jordy explains, “[a]t a time when college librarians generally conceived of their function as protecting the books from the students in locked closets,” Jewitt and his successors at Brown sought “to stimulate the student with the spectacle of the books” and hit upon the panoptic principle of architecture to provide the stimulation.

It was the great utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (an English eccentric; his embalmed self sits fully clothed in the ‘autoicon’ he designed--it looks something like a wooden phone booth with a door--at the entrance to University College London) who coined the panoptic terminology.

 

Jeremy-Bentham-Chillin-in-his-Cabinet.jpg A dubious icon.

Radical notions paradoxically tend to have traditional roots ( see Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison et al. ) and the panoptic principle fits the pattern. It gained favor in the early nineteenth century as the idealized if not quite ideal building type for prisons (the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is a particularly good example and they sell a nice T-shirt depicting the plan of the building), hospitals and (cue drumroll or thunderclap, only one; both would entail excessive celebration) schools.

Architectural theorists less idealistic and more interested in social control than Jewitt gravitated to the panoptic principal for a different reason. It allowed for the supervision of a lot of people by a small staff. Their position at the center of a radial plan had a perceived advantage in terms of surveillance, as handy for eyeing cutthroat prisoners or cantankerous patients as for unruly schoolboys.

Panopticon-prison.png

A big house.

Jordy does not say so--the topic is outside his Oxford assignment, and Rhode Island already is lengthy by the standard of many volumes in “Buildings of the United States”--but the first execution of the panoptic principle probably was by Quakers in England for schools. While nothing requires the octagonal form for a panoptic building, and neither the radial plan of Eastern State nor the circular reading room dropped into the courtyard of the British Museum as an inspired afterthought has eight sides, an octagon represents the most practical manifestation of the principle.

It would have been easier for an eighteenth century builder to achieve octagonal than circular symmetry, and the octagon was thought to boast a number of formal advantages for a schoolhouse. In pedagogical terms the teacher would stand in the center of the room as both the symbolic and actual focus of attention; the shape also allowed the arrangement of benches, desks or both in concentric rows.

In practical terms an octagon is efficient. It bestows more square footage of interior space than a rectangle of comparable size and therefore costs less to build, which also appealed to Quakers in philosophical terms. The shape eliminates dark corners and allows more natural light, and better ventilation, into the building if windows are cut into each wall.

Quaker builders brought the philosophy and form to Pennsylvania from England. They considered the formal simplicity of an octagon godly. Little octagonal schools like the one at Dunwoody popped up throughout the eastern part of the state and elsewhere from the second half of the 1700s until the middle of the nineteenth century; during the same period reform-minded towns built at least two dozen of them in New Jersey.

 

5. An eccentric campaigner for housing.

Then, during 1848, the octagonal building got a modest boost at the hand of one Orson Squire Fowler in The Octagon House: A House for All. In an echo of those eighteenth century Quakers, Fowler argued that the shape was economical because it reduced construction and heating costs; he considered its purportedly superior lighting and ventilation healthful .

Fowler, a tireless lecturer and protopublicist, was understandably enough considered an eccentric, and his octagonal dwelling never amounted to much more than a curiosity, but his efforts did result in the construction of numerous octagonal houses until the style appears to have run its course around the time of the Civil War. For the usual reasons, some farmers found the shape appealing, and the form survived longer in the guise of barns. A number of them remain, in various states of dilapidation, outside Middlebury, Vermont.

Octagonal-barn-in-Vt.jpg

 

7. A return to Providence.

And so to Brown. Jewitt had vision but, Brown also being Brown in another constant respect, the college lacked money. He therefore never saw the execution there of his beloved panoptic theory. Nonetheless Jewitt, who would go on to run the Smithsonian and Boston Public Libraries, wielded considerable pedagogic authority. It influenced Williams College to construct a small octagonal library that remains extant as part of its art gallery.

 

8. Ruskin became the rage.

The progressive tradition is an enduring one at Brown and Jewitt’s successors carried his panoptic torch to triumph with the eventual construction of Robinson Hall. The delay probably was worthwhile in terms of style, for Brown wound up with a masterpiece of airy Ruskinian Gothic as well as a remarkably innovative plan.

John-Ruskin.jpg

Go Gothic!

Jewett’s original “conception of [a] tall octagonal reading room at the center, with three radiating wings for three-story stacks” (Jordy again) combines the Quaker schoolhouse with the surveillance spokes, but in this case the inmates, not the wardens, occupy the lookout zone and unlocked books fill the open shelves to encourage selection. Like Fowler’s octagonal house, this building put a premium on light and circulation, of air as well as books: As Jordy explains, “the polygonal shape permitted an upper circle of windows for light above the reading space and ventilation from all sides, with air exhaust through…small trefoil windows…up in the conical cap of the reading chamber.” He could have added that the opaque glass floors set off by delicate ironwork throughout the entire interior give the space a pleasantly eerie glow.

Brown_University_Robinson_Hall-interior.jpg

In terms of style, Walker and Gould, its Rhode Island architects, gave Robinson a quiet riot of patterned brick and stone ornamented with sculptures depicting local vegetation and wildlife, including of course an owl symbolically if incongruously clutching a book. Polychrome is the order of this day, but only in naturalistic guise. In this the designers followed Ruskin’s rigorous dictum to use these elements “in their natural colors and textures as integral ornamentation which literally celebrated the diversity of nature’s abundance and symbolically abstracted the gorgeous striations of rock, plumage of birds, and splotchings of leaves.” (Jordy of course) It is all great fun.

Brown-Robinson-Hall-owl.jpg

 

9. A coda of sorts, celebrating contingency.

The university outgrew its Ruskinian temple to books, and Robinson now contains only classrooms, but Jewett and the library he conceived left Brown an enduring legacy. Unlike Harvard, Princeton or Yale, where flunkies fetch books from barred shelves, the stacks at all of the Brown libraries remain open to its undergraduates.

Brown-crest.png

Rule Brunonia.

This simple distinction embodies the free spirit of the institution. Contingency theory, much in deserved historiographical vogue, applies equally to research. A student looking for a book on a shelf will more than likely notice an adjacent volume he or she had not anticipated, adding a further dimension to the enterprise. The serendipity involved here incidentally provides justification, as if it were needed, for the preservation of print as well as electronic publication.

Lest anyone doubt the power of contingency, consider the progression of this note, from a little stone school at a retirement community, through sunglasses, optics and panoptics, beer, a nineteenth century nut or two (Ruskin was so strange that he had not anticipated the existence of female pubic hair. The discovery of his unfortunate wife’s bush put him off sex permanently.), the Shingle Style, Ruskin himself and the most freespirited of the Ivies; all the way, even, to pubic hair.



***

George Washington, the Second World War and a sort of elitism outside Vienna.

Sometimes parody is impossible. An example:

“The first eateries in the US were recorded around 1680, e.g. [sic] ‘The Blue Anchor Tavern’. The famous ‘Fraunces Tavern’ in New York, famous for George Washington’s farwell [sic] speech to his soldiers departing for World War II had survived until today.”

This passage appears in an actual dissertation approved by an actual university. The use of the odious term ‘eatery’ alone ought to make the essay a Fenway contender but so many other attractive attributes also are in play.

We need not belabor the part about the Second World War but it was Washington retiring from the army, not the deployment of troops, that was the impetus for the dinner in question and it only involved his officers. And despite the implicit contention of the passage, that the place had closed at the time of writing, Fraunces Tavern remains extremely busy today.

Fraunces-Tavern.jpg

Fraunces Tavern: There then, still there now.

Where, it would be fair to ask, was the Blue Anchor? The passage may refer to Philadelphia, where a Blue Anchor Ordinary considered the city’s first ‘eating house’ or tavern opened in 1682. Blue Anchors, however, also operated earlier in North America, including at least three in Massachusetts; Cambridge starting in 1654; Salem in 1674; and Boston beginning no later than 1680.

The hapless author of the dissertation, which is universally as incoherent and factually absurdist as the passage in question, does not deserve a Fenway and out of mercy will not be identified now. It is the student’s institution and supervisor, or as the university calls her its ‘promoter,’ who should shoulder blame for this kind of thing.

A teacher should by definition be held to a higher standard of competence than an undergraduate. Ignorance of underlying facts is no excuse: When a professor agrees to supervise a thesis she makes the implicit representation that she is competent to assess it. In any event the most cursory review of the dissertation would have revealed its infirmities, not least the placement of an historically renowned eighteenth century figure in the 1940s.

The website of the institution, Modul University Vienna, which is not actually in Vienna, positions the place in rarefied company: “Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Yale, Modul University Vienna--just a few of the world’s 25 top performing universities in top-cited publications.” So step aside Cambridge and the five unmentioned Ivies.

Modul maintains that the particular ranking criterion “can be considered the most prestigious and relevant category in academia.” Perhaps so, but U-Multirank, the European rating system of dubious utility that made the assessment in question, apparently believes otherwise: Modul did not score high enough to appear on its list of the four hundred best universities in the world. Modul did crack the list of another rating site, edurank.org, at number 5,144. That is tantalizingly close to Harvard (1), Stanford (3), Princeton (14), Oxford (11) and Yale (13).

According to U-Multirank, Modul is a “specialized institution” that “offers programmes in foreign language” to its student body of several hundred by its faculty of twenty five, attributes that would appear further to distinguish it from its chosen peers. Modul does not publish its rate of acceptance which, for the Ivy League schools, averages well below 10%.

In addition to its language instruction, which based on the dissertation under discussion may feature a few flaws, Modul also offers courses related to hospitality and the tourism industry more generally. In context and despite the breadth of the Modul curriculum, perhaps Cambridge and the balance of the Ivy League may breathe a bit easier after all.

The supervisor in question is identified at the Modul website as an “external BBA lecturer,” that is, apparently an adjunct professor. According to the kiprax.at website she has a masters degree but no doctorate; according to bildungsforum.at she is “a consultant and independent trainer for adult education in the core area of ‘intercultural skills.’”

Based on the dissertation she “promoted” at Modul those skills do not extend to the culture of the United States, its culinary history or history of any kind, which these days may afford her some comfort. None of that excuses her failure to conduct the most rudimentary fact checks about the assertions made by her student.

Our first shared Fenway goes to Modul University Vienna and its external lecturer as the engineers of a multicultural trainwreck.

***

Winter 2020 Wall of Shame

“The first rule for a modern fog machine like Giuliani is that the more you talk, the more confusion you can create.” Apparently, if New York magazine is accurate, a policy of bottomless Bloody Marys and piles of cigars helps propel the emission of the fog.

-Jonathan Mahler, “The Fog of Rudy: Did he change--or did America? The New York Times Magazine (15 January 2020)

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Wall of Shame: Apologimania, the British Council and false facts: George Orwell and the assault on English food.

1. The fashion of the times.

An apology has become the mandatory fashion accessory for institutions and public figures other than the odious Donald Trump. Most of the many Democratic candidates for president have apologized for something, whether for claiming an ambiguous heritage, mistreatment of staff, a prosecutorial record or any number of purported transgressions from the inconsequential to the unforgivable.

It does not matter whether or not the grievance prompting the apology is grounded in fact. Whole Foods has apologized for demonstrating racial insensitivity following widespread accusations of cultural appropriation for recommending a recipe that, it turns out, the company never posted.

During the past few years, the British government has apologized to any number of entities for any number of historical injustices, many of them involving its imperial legacy. Now the British Council has decided to embrace the impulse. On 7 February, David Sanderson reported in The Times of London under the banner “We chewed it over: George Orwell gets apology for food essay” that the council issued a bizarre apology to the (very) late George Orwell for withholding publication of an essay it had commissioned him to write in 1946.

Alasdair Donaldson, according to The Times a “senior policy analyst” at the council, issued a letter called “With apologies to Mr. Orwell” along with a copy of the 1946 essay. In his apology Donaldson writes that the council is “delighted to make amends for its slight on perhaps the UK’s greatest political writer.”

The essay is “British Food” and the council had contacted Orwell after reading a shorter article on the same subject, “In Defence of English Cooking,” from the London Evening Standard that had been published in 1945 .

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Orwell with a cuppa.

2. White lies.

Donaldson’s apology describes “British Food” as a “sturdy defence of our cooking.” He claims the British Council refused to publish it only because “the organization in those days was somewhat po-faced and risk-averse.” In his telling the council “was anxious to avoid producing an essay about food (even one which mentions the disastrous effects of wartime rationing) in the aftermath of the hungry winter of 1945.” ( Times ) Donaldson’s explanation is disingenuous on all counts and begs the question why, if the council was anxious about publishing an essay on food, it commissioned one in the first place.

 

3. A nonpredictive precursor.

The article in the Standard does fit the description that Donaldson included in his apology. Orwell is unequivocal: “It is commonly said, even by the English themselves, that English cooking is the worst in the world…. Now that is simply not true.”

He describes “a whole host of delicacies” unique to “the English-speaking countries.” They include English apples, bread, cheeses and sausage; Devonshire cream; haggis; kippers; Oxford marmalade; muffins and crumpets; Dublin prawns; and “the various sauces peculiar to England” (apple, bread, horseradish and mint). Then there are Yorkshire pudding and “a list of puddings that would be interminable” if given in full, including suet puddings, all of those last unique to the Anglosphere. “In French,” Orwell notes, “there is not even a word that exactly translates into ‘Suet.’”

It should not be surprising, then, that the British Council commissioned this cultural icon to address British foodways in a longer essay aimed at attracting foreign visitors. Founded in 1934 with the purpose of “promoting abroad a wider appreciation of British culture and civilization [by] encouraging cultural, educational and other interchanges between the United Kingdom and elsewhere,” the council remains active around the globe not only in the promotion of British ‘interchanges’--and their concomitant tourist revenue--but also of good causes in general, like literacy.

 Visit-Britain.png

4. Risky business.

Whether it knew so or not, the council was taking a chance on Orwell. Among other things, Down and Out in Paris and London demonstrates his disdain for restaurants. Orwell loathed his time working as a plongeur in Paris and regarded restaurants as a frivolous extravagance and their owners as exploiters of labor, the cardinal sin in his political theology.

He frequently ignored the wishes of his publisher and strayed from his purported subject: The Road from Wigan Pier , for example, begins by documenting the grim socioeconomic realities, including the awful food, that he encounters amongst the working class on a journey through industrial England. Then, however, Orwell launches a dissonant digression into memoir followed by a polemic promoting a heartfelt but utterly inchoate socialism. This second half of Wigan Pier so surprised and alarmed its publisher, the distinguished and tolerant Victor Gollancz, that he inserted a critique of it without Orwell’s permission as a preface to the book.

In addition to his inconstancy, Orwell did not much like the council. At one point he wrote, in awkward enough language, about creative writing that “the effort is too much to make if one has already squandered one’s energies on semi-creative work such as… composing propaganda for bodies such as the British Council.” ( Times )

It therefore should not surprise anyone that the essay Orwell gave the council bore scant resemblance to the shorter article he had written for the Standard. He had determined to deny the council the promotional material--‘propaganda’--it had requested.

 

5. It’s bad you know.

“British Food” argues that the dishes served in British restaurants are as unappealing as the food improvised by the unemployed in Wigan Pier. Some of the critique is prefigured in his “Defence of English Cooking,” where Orwell warns his reader that “you practically don’t find good English cooking outside a private house.”

Orwell provided particular examples. “If you want, say, a good, rich slice of Yorkshire pudding you are more likely to get it in the poorest English home than in a restaurant.” At the time it may have been true that Yorkshire pudding in a restaurant was inferior to many domestic renditions, although not in “the poorest English home,” in particular an urban one. The unfortunate British Council, however, cannot have anticipated anything like what it got, especially because Orwell had tempered his earlier critique of British food with a prediction that “sooner or later rationing will come to an end, and then will be the moment for our national cookery to revive.”

 

6. Imagined kitchens, imagined food.

The “national cookery” he describes in his expanded essay for the British Council is more than passing strange, and much of it bears scant resemblance to the traditional foodways of the archipelago. He describes a “heavy… slightly barbarous diet” dependent on “sugar and animal fats” that pairs “sugar with meat in a way that is seldom seen elsewhere,” although he offers no example of these abominations.

 

The only actual recipes that even arguably might come to mind are Old School mince pies made with venison or beef and a spectacular early nineteenth century dish of boiled beef flavored with aromatics and ale that Elisabeth Ayrton found in a manuscript from the North Country, which anyway uses only an ounce of black treacle per pound of meat. While it is true that some British recipes use a dash of sugar to cut an acidic sauce, Italians and Louisianans do the same thing for cooked tomatoes and other sharp ingredients. In none of these cases is the addition apparent to the diner or incongruously sweet, let alone ‘barbarous.’

According to Orwell, no soup is indigenous to Britain; “[f]ish in Britain is seldom well cooked;” and “vegetables… seldom get the treatment they deserve.” Cabbage is “almost uneatable” and other brassicas are “usually smothered in a tasteless white sauce which is probably the ‘one sauce’ scornfully referred to by Voltaire.” It is not; Voltaire was referring to a light sauce similar to Hollandaise (or ‘Dutch’ sauce as it then was known), “most confusingly” called ‘melted butter,’ that was much in vogue during the eighteenth century. Voltaire liked it. “Though excellent it is completely forgotten,” not least by Orwell, and no less a luminary than Jane Grigson plumped for its revival late in the twentieth century.

Much in “British Cookery” is factually wrong. Wensleydale cheese, for example, is not similar to Stilton; the historically correct usage is Welsh rabbit, not “rarebit;” and Michael Smith along with other culinary historians has identified scores of authentic British soups. Smith includes forty recipes in Fine English Cookery and Lizzie Boyd describes over ninety of them divided into five categories in British Cookery. These range from the crab soup of Cornwall to the many Scottish soups based on game.

 

soup-served015.png
Soup was served.

7. To return to reality….

 

Despite or perhaps because of the rigors of rationing, postwar kitchen manuscripts do not describe the ‘barbarous cuisine’ and junk food that Orwell claims for the British. One from South London for example includes homely recipes like a beef hotpot, Sherried steak with bacon, simmered oxtail, ‘risoles,’ toad in the hole, green bean and prawn salad (no sugar), as well as a number of cakes, instructions for various roasts and “Ambrose Heath’s Excellent Directions--Making Mayonnaise” but no candied meats, pasty white sauce or drowned cabbage.

Published versions of private recipes reflect a similar adherence to traditional foodways that bear little resemblance to Orwell’s description. Your Granny’s Cook Book by Sheila Hutchins, for example, appeared in 1971. Hutchins, a food columnist for the London Daily Express , had become concerned that Britain was losing its vernacular cuisine. She therefore determined to rescue its memory and so compiled the Cook Book by asking her readers to send in “recipes for things just like your granny cooked.”

The response was overwhelming in both quantity and, Orwell notwithstanding, quality. Hutchins got “thousands and thousands” of recipes and was “amazed at the excellence of the dishes.” Some readers sent “whole hand-written cookery books, and there are memories of hot dinners from long distant childhoods, of old brick ovens and black leaded coal ranges.”

It does not require an actuary to determine that these recipes and memories date from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, even earlier in some cases, which sends us back to Orwell territory in chronological terms. They reflect the food that ordinary people cooked at home.

The majority of Daily Express readers were and are what the British census classifies as lower middle and working class, so their food should be the food that Orwell addresses. It is. Hutchins got recipes “from retired cooks, from former kitchen maids at great country houses, from farmers’ wives, from aunts, great-aunts and grandmothers…. From men as well as women, sailors, Chelsea pensioners, eel jelliers, salmon smokers.”

Their recipes reflect the food that Orwell ought to have been addressing, from legs of lamb in pastry and beef stewed in beer with Cheddar dumplings to Cornish under-roast, devilled pheasant and duck pie flavored with the indispensible anchovy.

In 1947, a year after Orwell wrote “British Cookery,” Gallup polled the nation for its “ideal, no-expense-spared meal for a special occasion.” The response bore no resemblance to his description. The people chose a dinner of “sherry; tomato soup; sole; roast chicken with roast potatoes, peas and sprouts; trifle and cream; cheese and coffee.”

 

Grannys-Cook-Book001.jpg  

8. I’ll just make it up.

We probably should not trouble ourselves too long in attempting to find particular preparations that Orwell had in mind. He may have had none, for as his otherwise admiring biographers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams note, “the habit of making generalizations, often outrageous and unprovable, was endemic with him throughout his lifetime.” Orwell himself castigated Dickens for his “habit of telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth” and, ironically, the dynamic also may account for some of the more untenable assertions in “British Cookery.”

A few techniques rise at least to mediocrity: “British pastry is not outstandingly good” and “British stews and ‘made-up’ dishes… are not particularly distinguished.” Orwell does concede that puddings are “one of the greatest glories of British cookery,” but only some of them qualify:

“The other main category of puddings--milk puddings--is the kind of thing that one would prefer to pass over in silence… and they are one of the chief reasons why British cookery has a bad name among foreign visitors.”

They are “unfortunately, characteristic of Britain.”

The overall tenor of “British Cookery” is so grim (even, perhaps, ‘Orwellian’) that it not only would deter the most intrepid traveler from hazarding a journey to Britain but also would depopulate the islands of their indigenes if true. No one would choose to subsist on the diet that Orwell describes, even under the culinary disabilities of rationing, although it is undeniable that the competence of many British cooks did decline as the result of it, their earlier fascination with canned goods and a later, lamentable predilection for ‘convenience food.’

Rationing, however, does not explain Orwell’s description of British foodways in “British Cookery.” The essay explicitly disavows any attempt to assess its impact by reminding his reader

“that in talking about ‘British cookery’ one is referring to the characteristic native diet of the British Isles and not necessarily to the food that the average British person eats at this moment,” because “stringent food rationing has now been in operation for six years. In talking of British cookery, therefore, one is talking of the past or the future--of dishes that the British people now see somewhat rarely, but which they would gladly eat if they had the chance, and which they did eat fairly frequently up to 1939.”

Nonetheless, Orwell ignores indigenous traditions embodied in the work of Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, Eliza Acton and, later, the various authors identified by Arabella Boxer as triggering a revival of robust British cooking in the interwar decades. These writers include among many others the Duchess of Devonshire, Catherine Ives, Loelia Lindsay, Ruth Lowinsky, F. Marian McNeill, Countess Morphy, Lady Sysonby and perhaps especially Agnes Jekyll and Florence White. Then again, Orwell has no time for them or their middle and upper class readers.

If Boxer had wandered farther down the social scale, she should have included Florence Petty and Lucie Nicoll, whose cookbooks enjoyed repeated printings. Petty’s Pudding Lady’s Recipe Book and Nicoll’s English Cookery Book each include a broad range of ineffably English dishes, as their titles indicate, and none of them resembles Orwell’s fantasy foods. Petty in particular ought to have interested Orwell. She labored with some success to improve the nutritional lot of the working poor by going into their houses to teach them how to cook appealing English food on a modest budget. Even if he had not read her book (Orwell disdained the intellects of women), he likely was aware of Petty’s work: Her program on food and cooking was the most popular BBC radio broadcast between the wars. Rather than failing to do his homework, Orwell was undeterred by the facts.

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Florence Petty, The Pudding Lady.

9. An instance of counterfactual hindsight.

Donaldson’s self-flagellating argument that the decision of the British Council to withhold publication of “British Food” based on fear of offending readers’ sensibilities is nonsense. The council did not articulate any such reason at the time, when lots of people in both Britain and Europe were writing press reports, articles, regular columns, essays and books about food.

A considerable legion, now including the apologetic British Council, sanctifies Orwell’s work and therefore considers the failure of “British Food” to reach publication a loss to the broader canon. Instead, we should perceive the episode as an example of the principled refusal to peddle inaccurate reportage. It also was an example of disinterested generosity, for despite what Orwell produced at their behest, the British Council paid him for it. His vaunted reputation for principle took Orwell only so far: He demonstrated no reluctance to take the money.

Note:

A longer article on this subject minus the apology of the British Council appeared in the October 2014 number of Petits Propos Culinaires. The article by Blake Perkins, with meticulous citations, is “George Orwell and the defence of English food.”

***

Wall of Shame: Food & Wine's 40 Best-Ever Recipes

On the occasion of its fortieth anniversary in the fall of 2018, Food & Wine magazine reprinted its “40 Best-Ever Recipes.” The title of the survey is misleading, however, because in reality the editors at Food & Wine have named the best recipe published in each of the forty years that the magazine has existed, starting in 1978. Whether or not the editors considered the selection of recipes published in any particular year were unusually good or bad, the year got a single entry on the ’40 Best’ list.

It should not surprise anyone that British dishes do not predominate given the American attitude toward British food. Nor should it surprise anyone that French dishes dominate the selections for the first few years. The recipes from the first three, and five of the first seven years, are French.

After that, however, the French aura dims at Food & Wine. The magazine describes only two more French recipes over its span of four decades and one of them arguably does not originate in France and certainly is not derived exclusively from French cuisine.

Even though Food & Wine is an American publication, the biggest surprise that the ’40 Best’ list harbors is the relative dominance of recognizably American recipes. The list describes twelve of them, including three in the Californian idiom that was so popular during the 1980s and 90s, two from the south and one each with Caribbean influence and in the Louisiana creole idiom. The others might be found anywhere in the United States.

Other surprises; only four Italian and two Chinese entries but also two from Viet Nam. Culinary powerhouses India and Spain in contrast merit a single recipe apiece, although Food & Wine misidentifies a second as Indian as well.

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Some of the selections are simply strange, including a ghastly faro salad labelled Italian that may have Sicilian or southern elements (raisins in an otherwise savory setting) but is by no means anything a traditional Italian cook could recognize. The ersatz Polynesian baked snack is similarly suspect.

None of this, however, would qualify Food & Wine for a Fenway. To some extent its choices reflect the food fads of its evolving era, and anyway its editors have every right to choose what they like.

The problems arise, as they often do in the hand of an American writer, with the foods of Britain. The paucity of anything British in the ’40 Best’ in itself is not disgraceful in the context of Food & Wine : The magazine never has paid much attention to British food and the list understandably reflects that fact.

Food & Wine chose a single dish for the ’40 Best’ and calls it “a quintessentially English supper.” The recipe does call for mustard, an English staple, but the mustard is whole grain instead of the customary hot paste exemplified by Colemans. The other ingredients constitute a national platoon that includes penne, extra virgin olive oil, dried red pepper flakes, basil and of course Italian sausage. The recipe requires no further description to Identify the national affiliation of this unit despite the appearance of the mustard, an ingredient that lies oddly outside the Italian larder except in the guise of mostarda, an altogether different beast from the flavoring otherwise found throughout the west.

Food & Wine got the recipe from Nigel Slater, an English cook and author with an ecumenical rather than English approach to food. Slater writes appealing prose and good recipes but the pasta dish is hardly his best, while his substantial canon does include some English preparations.

Two English dishes do lurk hidden in plain sight among the ’40 Best.’ The first is a recipe for ham bathed in Madeira from the amateur Francophile Julia Child. It is, as she insists, something that the French cook, or anyway cooked back in 1994. British cooks in both the metropolis and North America have been pairing ham and Madeira since at least as early as the eighteenth century, and back between the wars, long before Julia Child, the redoubtable Agnes Jekyll published her own formula. It is more than fair to claim the dish for Britain too.

The second is chicken tikka masala which, however, Food & Wine describes as “the perfect gateway dish to Indian cooking.” No citizen of the Subcontinent would consider it such and for good reason. Its tomato cream sauce is alien to the Indian idiom and could not have originated there.

The tikka masala was in fact originally concocted in the north of England by a Bangladeshi restauranteur at the request of his British customer who wanted to sauce her tandoori. In the same way that a recipe from the English Slater may not be British, the recipe from the Bangladeshi expatriate need not be Indian.

Speculation abounds that he mixed the sauce for his first tikka from a can of Heinz tomato soup. Documented sources have identified the preparation more generally as British, a cousin to the Raj cuisine that originated in the eighteenth century, so much so that during his stint as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook famously crowned it the national dish.

Its appeal has not been insular. “For many years,” exclaims Food & Wine, “this was the most popular recipe on foodandwine.com!” Deservedly popular and worthy of a place on the ’40 Best;’ chicken tikka masala is good. As an aside the penne and tikka recipes appeared back to back, in 2002 and 2003. The reason is either coincidence or remains a mystery.

***

Wall of Shame I: A story of science fiction featuring those unlikely companions, mutton and oatmeal.

“The New York Times,” londonist.com recently observed, “is a fine publication, but it falls under our remit to call out any bunkum that anyone spouts about London--NYT included.” (Noble)

Our own remit is narrower, confined as it is to calling out bunkum, and a staggering quantity remains in circulation, about British food. Fine publication The Times may be, as londonist.com itself concedes, but on the subject of British food the American paper of record has not wreathed itself in accuracy, as a pair of recent articles demonstrates.

The bunkum called out by the website appears in an August article by Robert Draper called “Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton: A Taste of London.” “This otherwise noble capital inclining its palate to devotees of porridge and boiled mutton,” he intones in labored prose apparently intended to ring Olympian, “was never a thing to celebrate.”

Draper maintains that the food found in London was near universally vile until the onset of the twenty-first century. “The drab baseline,” he maintains, held longer than it should have--even through the roaring 90s, which brought higher restaurant prices without a corresponding leap in adventurousness.” (Draper)

Now, he claims, London finally has an Indian restaurant or two, when in fact the first one opened in 1773 and thousands (many of dubious authenticity despite their considerable charms) have thrived in the city since the Second World War.

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Bah-loney.

It is possible that Draper is an otherwise competent journalist with a gap in culinary knowledge, or at least in knowledge about London foodways. Possible, but unlikely; he also refers to Mayfair as “Mayfield.” Then again what editor at the food section of the Times allowed so anachronistic a polemic into print? Multiple culprits cratered on this one.

To return to Draper himself, it would appear that even admirers find him and his work problematic. Writing a favorable review of Draper’s novel Hadrian’s Walls back in 1999, Clay Smith observes that “several of Draper’s traits make repeated appearances.” Smith quotes a friend of Draper as maintaining that “one could make any number of arguments about what he is like as a person and probably every single one of them would be right.”

Draper had an acrimonious departure from a stint at Texas Monthly . Its editor whom, he has written, “can be a very unpleasant person,” also equivocates on the topic of Draper: “We all have our pluses and our minuses and he has far more pluses than minuses.”

Another friend toasted Draper at his engagement party by stating “Robert is a wonderful writer and a great person and an incredibly smart guy. Just ask him.” On the minus side of the ledger, the same friend who describes Draper as somewhat contradictory echoes the implied message from the engagement. He has, the toaster explains, “this sort of reputation for arrogance,” which the friend qualifies in curious terms; “you scratch the surface on him a little bit and he will make these almost endearing sorts of mistakes.” (Smith)

The reference to mutton and porridge would, according to an apologist, qualify as one of those endearing mistakes, but it also looks a lot like the product of an uninformed arrogance willing to regurgitate an unexamined and anachronistic cliché. With his article outlining a fictitious London dining culture the Times “has,” as The Spectator put it, “staggered off his stool for another bruising round” of questionable coverage on a British topic. (Steerpike)

It would be tiresome to catalogue the many London restaurants that served excellent food from the eighties onward, but in fact the only cuisine that was hard to find in a London restaurant then or during the nineties was British. It was easier to find excellent Beijing duck, boeuf bourguignon, chicken biryani or saltimbocca than it was to find anything British at all. The last thing anyone might encounter in a restaurant was mutton, whether boiled or cooked any other way.

Exceptions to the dearth of British food (but not mutton) existed, but eccentric exceptions they were, or so they were considered at the time. It took stamina to search out long lost stalwarts like Drakes, which specialized in British preparations of feathered game, or the English House, which mined with exemplary results the rich lode of the long eighteenth century, roughly 1688 until 1815, a period of astonishing imagination and variation in the British kitchen.

Imagination and variation also characterizes London kitchens today, as to his credit Draper does allow. He goes so far as to call the change he posits a revolution. But even there he does not quite get things right, as a number of internet wags have understood. Londonist is one of them:

“In a final twist of delicious irony, porridge and mutton might easily classify themselves as part of London’s food revolution. Have you seen the queues of youngsters snaking down the steps that lead to Roti King on a frigid December night, in a bid for a bowl of its rich mutton curry? Do you remember 2015’s Porridge Café, which ladled out milky oats at £7-a-pop to breakfasting hipsters?” (Noble)

In a dig at the current epicenter of hipster London, the Daily Mail identified two tweeters have taken the theme further. “Tbh,” confides Sam Freedman, “a pop-up that only did porridge and boiled mutton would probably do quite well in Shoreditch…. ” while Joseph Walsh adds that “[p]robably restaurants in Shoreditch serving porridge and boiled mutton now, but not ten years ago.” (Apen-Sadler)

They probably do, or probably will, serve both items in Shoreditch, Hoxton and other points east.

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Hip London lines up for mutton curry.

 

The first of our Fall Fenways goes jointly to Robert Draper and his hapless editor at The New York Times.

 

Sources:

Dianne Apen-Sadler, “Father would clip us round the ear if we mentioned avocado!” the Daily Mail (20 August 2018)

Robert Draper, “Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton: A Taste of London,” The New York Times (20 August 2018)

Will Noble, “Until Recently, Londoners Ate Mainly Boiled Mutton and Porridge… According To This New York Times Article,” https://londonist.com (20 August 2018; accessed 21 August 2018)

Clay Smith, “Writer-at-Large,” The Austin Chronicle (14 May 1999)

‘Steerpike,’ “Fact Check: New York Times’s London foodie ‘knowledge,’” The Spectator , https://blogs.spectator.co.uk (accessed 23 August 2018)

***

Wall of Shame II: Next time, read the cited sources.

 

1. The prize.

The Guild of Food Writers has conferred its 2018 book of the year award on Lizzie Collingham for Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (published in the United States as The Taste of Empire with the same subtitle.)

The guild bestows awards for all aspects of writing about food, from history, the subject of Hungry Empire, blogs and broadcasting to journalism including cookery columns, restaurant criticism and investigative reporting. The guild itself is a British enterprise and its awards understandably enough tilt toward British writers. Even so, the guild awards are among the most prestigious in the culinary world, which makes sense because the quality of British culinary journalism can be extremely good.

 

2. The problem.

That, however, cannot always be said about culinary authors in Britain or anywhere else. The torrent of writing related to food continues for the most part to flow to the sewer.

On first glance Hungry Empire does not take that course. Reviews that appeared on its publican were effusive. That is understandable: Collingham is a vivid writer and her thesis, as the subtitle of Hungry Empire demonstrates, is bold.

On the documented facts, however, the premise underlying Hungry Empire , that the search for food fueled the imperial project, cannot withstand scrutiny. “Food,” as Collingham herself observes, “was only one among the many commodities--textiles, dyestuffs, tin, rubber and timber--that flowed into Britain.” (Collingham xvii) Britain imported food for the same reason it imported the other commodities, to maximize the profit from its unrivaled manufacturing sector, but Collingham nowhere alludes to the doctrine of comparative advantage, an aspect of trade, not empire, that drove the economic strategy.

Unfortunately, the flaws in Hungry Empire run deeper than ascribing too much significance to its subject. In its search for a higher truth, or in placing the cart of its thesis before the horse of the facts, Hungry Empire distorts and even fabricates a historical record.

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Cart of thesis, horse of fact.

The guild’s failure of due diligence is all the more dispiriting because Blake Perkins pointed out a number of the infirmities that plague Hungry Empire in his review of the book in number 109 (September 2017) of Petits Propos Culinaires , the outstanding journal of culinary history edited first by Alan Davidson and now by Tom Jaine, each a larger than life figure and legendary author as well as editor.

Perkins also provided a more detailed critique in Number 56 (Spring 2018) of this website, an effort also ignored by the guild.

What follows in an edited excerpt from the britishfoodinamerica review, only a single example of how Collingham created unreliable narratives.

“Each chapter,” Collingham claims of Hungry Empire , opens with a particular meal and then explains the history that made it possible.” (Collingham xv) Collingham intends the conceit, which can get artificial and arbitrary, to attract readers. “If I just told the historical story,” she explains in an interview with Adam Campbell-Schmitt, “they wouldn’t be as interested. I try to tell them about real people in particular situations and how the food demonstrates why they were there and what they were doing and how these stories come together.” (Campbell-Schmitt)

 

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3. Africans in America, but where and when?

One of the twenty chapters in Hungry Empire encapsulates these infirmities. It opens with an enslaved family sharing supper on a rice plantation in low country South Carolina during the 1730s. Its eloquent opening sequence, in which Collingham describes the family and the food they prepared in considerable detail, merits extensive quotation:

“In a scene that could have been transposed from Africa, a family gathered in the moonlight around the open hearth in front of their cabin on the Middleburg plantation. Tasty food at the end of the day was their principal source of comfort after working in the rice fields since first light.1 The father was a good hunter and had found an opossum in one of his traps the previous evening; the animal was now roasting on a stick stuck in the ground next to the fire. 2 Squatting on their haunches, the family each [sic] tore a piece of maize ‘porridge’ off the mass in the big iron pot, rolled it into a ball and dipped it into a small clay jar of sauce. This evening the family’s relish was made of sorrel and watercress, which the children had collected from the edges of the rice fields. It was delicately flavoured with sesame…. 3

After they had eaten, the father went off to plant peas in their garden patch. A Carolina slave proverb that made a virtue out of necessity said that only the pods of peas planted at full moon would fill.. 4 Throughout the American South, the hours of darkness were a busy time for the slaves, as this was when they carried out their own chores after the long slog of working all day for their masters…. While the father worked in the garden, the … mother was sewing a patchwork quilt out of rags…. The children were fashioning seagrass baskets that the family would sell in exchange for a little sugar or some bottles of porter…. 5” (Collingham 97-98)

Endnotes are wonderful things. They allow the reader to weigh an author’s assertion against the cited evidence and, in the case of Hungry Empire, are essential reading. Notwithstanding the explanation Collingham gave Campbell-Schmitt, her endnotes reveal that none of the people described in the passage about Middleburg is real, none of them is based on contemporaneous documentation or other evidence, none of her sources refers to the plantation itself and few of them support any of her assertions in the text.

The citation for note 1 is page 85 from the autobiography of a slave first published in 1849. He was born in 1789 and never lived in South Carolina or worked in a ‘rice field.’ The edition cited by Collingham has no page 85 and does not mention ‘tasty food,’ but does say at page 25 that food “is one of the principal sources of the comfort of a slave,” not the principal source. In the case of the autobiographer himself, it would appear that religion was his principal source of comfort because most of his text is devoted to a discussion of it. (Henson)

Note 2 has six lengthy citations, a lot of text to substantiate the claim that the slave family ate opossum because the imaginary father was a good hunter (itself odd; Collingham describes a trapper).

The first citation in note 2 is to another slave memoir, initially published in 1859; its author was born in 1780. He did not live at Middleburg either. Four citations are archeological studies, two of Monticello in Virginia; none involves Middleburg. Collingham does not provide page references for any of those four sources.

Another source for note 2, an essay by Patricia Samford, indicates that the supper described by Collingham is unrepresentative of what slaves ate: “The wild animal and plant components of slave diets were generally small” while “domestic livestock such as pigs and cows were the principal components of the slaves’ meat diet.” (Samford 96, 95)

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Another, an essay by Elizabeth Reitz and a number of co-authors, refers to the “core diet of corn, pork, and beef” eaten by slaves and notes that “the slave diet may not have been dissimilar to the planter’s diet.” Their research found remains of opossum at four of 28 plantation sites excavated; opossum was not found in South Carolina. (Reitz 167, 170, 173) When slaves did cook meat, the archaeological evidence documented by Samford indicates that they added it to soups and stews rather than roasted it. (Samford 96)

The sixth citation, to a compilation edited by Theresa Singleton, does have a reference, to an “Introduction” but to no specific page. The introduction makes no mention of opossum, but does cast doubt on Collingham’s confident description of the family supper: “Slave diet and nutrition is a very controversial topic among students of slavery.” (Singleton 7)

The citation for note 3 does not mention Middleburg, a relish or watercress but does emphasize the importance of mustard and collard greens along with guinea squash and taro in the slave diet more generally. (Carney 178) Collingham ignores those foods.

The citation for note 4 does not indicate it is an endnote. The endnote itself includes reference to slave proverbs other than the one about planting at midnight, including “a belief that potatoes should be planted at floodtide.” (Joyner 280 n14) As that fact may infer, the proverb about midnight planting is unlikely to have made a virtue of necessity. The suspicion is confirmed by the same Singleton introduction cited by Collingham in note 2. It states that the “task labor system” was “used throughout the lower Southeast in the production of tidewater staples,” like rice. Reitz et al. , also cited in note 2, explains that under the task system,

“slaves might finish their work by mid-day, with time devoted to gardening, stock-raising, fishing, hunting, or other activities. It should be noted, however, that… the work day might be 15 or 16 hours long during the peak of the harvest season.” (Reitz 166)

Planting time is not the harvest season so the length of the workday did not prevent the imaginary father from sowing in daylight if he chose.

The pages cited in the source for note 5 do not discuss whether or not South Carolina slaves lived mostly outdoors, and make no mention of seagrass baskets or any purchase, whether of sugar or porter. In any event, most planters forbade their slaves to consume alcohol and a shopkeeper dependent on their custom would have been a most unlikely source of contraband beer.

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4. A quest for rice?

Factual infelicities aside, the eighteenth century production of rice has nothing to do with the ‘British quest for food,’ and neither does the lengthy description of rice cultivation Collingham provides. As she notes, rice was not the first choice of South Carolina planters who, in a gratuitous aside, are described as ignorant and arrogant. “Looking for a cash crop,” Collingham explains, “they experimented with ginger, silk, vines, olive and citrus trees.” (Collingham 108, 107) She might have added indigo and tobacco, further evidence that trade itself, not the demand for food, drove the imperial project in South Carolina.

Perhaps, however, British demand did make rice cultivation profitable. Perhaps not; as Collingham herself notes, “the British rarely ate rice” so the “bulk” of the harvest was sold to German states and the Netherlands instead. (Collingham 105, 110)

 

5. A candid case study of collards.

To be fair, in creating her chapter on South Carolina, Collingham operated under a historiographical disability. Any attempt to understand the foodways of eighteenth century slaves in mainland British North America runs up against a dearth of documentary sources.

That handicap, however, does not hinder only historians of slavery. Other authors have responded to a problematic record in a more responsible manner than Collingham. In their monograph on collards in the American south, for example, Edward Davis and John Morgan handle the problem posed by incomplete sources with candor, logic and grace rather than fabrication, misdirection or distortion.

They describe the first transplantation of collards to the south from a source that may surprise southerners. “Imagine this”, they request their readers:

“In the early 1700s, in a village somewhere in England, a woman slipped a spoonful of collard seed into a cloth bag. Not long afterward she left her home and boarded a ship for Charleston, in the American colonies. After she arrived, she began to plant her garden.” (Davis and Morgan ix)

That sounds dispositive, but in their discussion of the essential collards that Collingham ignores, Davis and Morgan disclose that their “English gardener is hypothetical, for there is no specific record of an immigrant bringing collard seed to the American colonies.”

Why not? Davis and Morgan provide the ready answer.

“We are talking about a pre-commercial act, carried out thousands of times as people came from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland at a time when most garden seed was simply saved and passed between generations.” (Davis and Morgan x)

Davis and Morgan demonstrate that the perennial collard, leafing nearly year round and easy on the soil, became a mainstay of the southern diet from the outset of British settlement, “for it would produce plants unlike any other vegetable in their ability to nourish.” (Davis and Morgan ix)

 Collard-Greens-Pictures.jpg

Collard stowaways.

Even so, the lack of a commercial market for collards in the colonies accounts for the lack of specific documentation:

“The ship manifests of those days and the diaries of educated and wealthier travelers often included lists of seeds but specified only those for cash crops, such as barley or wheat. All kinds of European vegetable seeds were brought over but were only listed as ‘garden seed.’ So the entry (actually multiple entries) of collards to America passed without documentation.”

Slaves and noncommercial transactions were not the only topics to fall outside the written record. “Perhaps,” Davis and Morgan reason, “the men who prepared such documents neglected such details because the kitchen garden was considered merely women’s domestic work.” (Davis and Morgan x)

So there it is, responsible writing that acknowledges gaps in the record, describes an informed attempt to fill them through inference and makes a convincing case by demonstrating an understanding of the historical context. That is something Collingham has signally refused to do throughout Hungry Empire , undermining her credibility and conclusions in the process.

A Fenway therefore goes to the British Guild of Food Writers for rewarding Hungry Empire instead of exposing its fatal flaws.

 

Sources:

Alan Campbell-Schmitt, “‘The Taste of Empire’ Retraces Britain’s Colonial History Dish by Dish,” www.foodandwine.com/news/taste-empire-book-lizzie-collingham (5 October 2017; accessed 28 December 2017)

Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in North America (Cambridge MA 2009)

Lizzie Collingham, Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (London 2017)

Edward Davis and John Morgan, Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table (Tuscaloosa 2015)

Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, formerly a slave, now an inhabitant of Canada , www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh/henson49/henson49.html (Chapel Hill 2001; orig. publ. 1849)

Patricia Samford, “The Archaeology of African-American Slave Culture,” The William & Mary Quarterly vol. 53 no. 1 (January 1996) 87-114

Elizabeth Reitz et al. , “Archaeological evidence for subsistence on coastal plantations,” in Theresa Singleton, The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (London 1985) 163-91

***

Wall of Shame: Observations on the internet in the context of sandwiches, involving the primacy of place.

1. Perils of the internet.

The internet is an invaluable source of useful information and an unparalleled way to conduct historical research. Everybody knows that. In our area of interest, for instance, a service like Project Gutenberg, engaged with diligence as it is in digitizing the publications of the eighteenth century, represents a particularly treasured resource.

We do not intend to decry the accessibility that the net has wrought; it is a wonder beyond reproach, but as everyone knows it also is a playground of falsehood, propaganda and invective. Most people know that too.

Less apocalyptic but more pervasive are the idiots and slobs who blog without due diligence, posing as authorities on topics beyond their competence or comprehension. That is hardly exclusive information either, but once in a while a food blog is so spectacular in its slovenliness that it invites comment.

 

2. A case in point.

A blog at  www.insidehook.com provides an abysmal example. A post there called “100-Year-Old Sandwich Book Has 400 Recipes, Most Of Them Treacherous” critiques a book published in Chicago during 1909. The blogger, Michael Nolledo, has conducted some secondary research, and cites Wikipedia, an often unreliable source, for one correct proposition: “The art of slapping meat to bread can famously be traced back to the appetite of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich,” but then incorrectly places his first sandwich “in the English county of Kent.”

The assertion has no citation or other support, and neither of the origin myths linked to the sandwich points to the county. Perhaps Nolledo has made an unwarranted assumption in equating the Kentish town for the man whose family seat was an estate in Huntingtonshire. One myth involves dissolution and the other duty; either places the first sandwich in London, where Sandwich gambled at his club and worked at the Admiralty. N. A. M. Rodger chooses duty: He believes the improvised supper resulted not from the reluctance of Sandwich to leave the gaming table but rather from a need to work late into the night at his desk while serving the government as a Cabinet minister. (Rodger 79; Perkins)

 

3. A legacy the fourth earl left in Chicago.

The Earl of Sandwich
The Earl of Sandwich.

The title under consideration by the blog is The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich by Eva Greene Fuller which, despite Nolledo’s characterization, represents a valuable resource.

Nolledo does concede “[t]hat there is inspiration to be had here, and much of it news to us, despite its age.” One of the preparations he describes would be news to Fuller too, and apparently accounts for the treachery proclaimed in the title: Its subheading quotes a recipe from the Sandwich Book : “Mix a pound of beef and a well-beaten egg. Form into a roll.” This, Nolledo thinks, comes from a recipe for “the Picnic Sandwich--basically a simple steak tartare grinder.” He then asks the rhetorical question:

“Does the early 1900s raw beef sandwich sound appetizing? Debatable. But it does give us an insight into how our ancestors liked their sandwiches.”

 

4. The raw...

The use of raw meat for sandwiches should not be considered ‘treacherous’ and its appeal is not ‘debatable,’ not to a lot of people anyway. The steak tartare club one night at the Standard Tap in the Northern Liberties of Philadelphia was as good as the other food there, which makes the sandwich very good indeed. Kibbee is an ancient Middle Eastern dish, Italians serve carpaccio and crudo, while sashimi and sushi have become universals.

The Standard Tap was not reviving Fuller’s picnic sandwich, because the one described at insidehook.com is absent from the Sandwich Book or, rather, incomplete . The incompetence of Nolledo is astonishing: The omission occurs because he failed to turn a page. His quotation appears at page 65 but the recipe continues on 66:

“Take a flank of mutton, remove the bones and lay the above mixture on the mutton and do it up into a roll: bind it with a tape. Sew up the ends so mixture [sic] will not bulge out; dust with pepper and salt, then roast it; when it is cold, take off the tape, take out the sewing, and slice thin. Garnish with an olive.”

The error is all the more unaccountable because the recipe instructs its reader to roll the stuffing into a ball, which is not the way to assemble a grinder or hoagie or sub.

Fuller does include a recipe using raw beef, the “Cannibal Sandwich” made with a simple tartare of chopped beef and onion seasoned with salt and pepper. (Fuller 66) The use of raw meat, while agreeable enough to some diners, may have been less than universally welcomed at the time. Writing in 1899 as “the Saunterer,” a Philadelphia journalist recounts his horror at encountering what was for him, and would have been for others, a novelty.

The Saunterer had “felt ravenously hungry” so a friend invited him to lunch. “I’ll take you to a place you’ve never been in before,” he said,

“and give you a meal that you’ve never had before. And that meal will consist of one sandwich….

The other man led the way to a place in the heart of the city, the entrance to which was on a side street. The place looked eminently satisfying, and the Saunterer felt prepared for anything.

‘Bring us a couple of cannibal sandwiches,’ said the friend to the waiter…. It sounded rather guessable and the Saunterer waited in apprehensive silence. Presently the waiter returned with the sandwich…. One of the slices was covered by a half-inch layer of red meat minced. Both started to eat, but after the Saunterer had gulped down four mouthfuls through a face that was painful in its efforts to smile he demanded emphatically to know what it was.

‘Cannibal sandwich,’ answered his friend.

‘I know that,’ was the answer.

‘well, it’s made of raw beef, chopped very fine, and it’s very good for you. See, they’re eating them all around us.’ And they were, so the Saunterer worked at his a little while longer. The sandwich fully lived up to its reputation. For the Saunterer hasn’t really felt hungry since.” (Popik quoting the Philadelphia Inquirer )

One linguist has found a handful of references to the cannibal sandwich, including the Saunterer’s. In 1905 Edward Wiley Duckwall noted: “Many people eat uncooked meat in the so-called ‘cannibal sandwiches,’” which he eccentrically likened to “smoked sturgeon and halibut.” The Fort Worth Telegram printed a recipe for “Cannibal Sandwiches of Rye Bread” in 1907. A Handbook of Medical Treatment from 1920 uses the term, and a pair of cookbooks from 1930 and 1940 include a recipe too. (Popik) Like the Fuller recipe the 1930 version arises out of Chicago: It is from something slight called The Edgewater Sandwich Book by Arnold Shircliffe who worked for a long time at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. (Ebersole)

 

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Steak tartare: not exactly unheard of?

5. A digression on wordplay.

Frederic Lyman Wells, a disciplined psychometrician who held positions at McLean and Harvard Medical School, has been described as “[a]ffable, even-minded, and a pragmatist in the American tradition,” includes ‘cannibal sandwich’ in the discussion of symbols in language from his 1917 text, Mental Adjustments , so the term may not have been that uncommon.

Wells thought the “prime condition favoring the formation of symbols in language… is that the idea shall have more than average interest for the person,” an idea like love, money or food. He mused that linguistic familiarity might breed contempt and a consequent “desire to astonish;” “Perhaps the usual word brings up a disagreeable feeling of triteness which is avoided by the use of some more novel association.” His culinary novelties other than cannibalism include hot dog, “pair of white wings wid de sunny side up (poached eggs)” and “three diamond studs (portion of Hamburger steak).” (Wells 78, 79) If the theory of “symbolic association” is (or were) valid, then someone other than the friend of the Saunterer found raw beef sandwiches irresistible.

 

6. … and the cooked.

Nolledo also makes snide reference to “the cookbook, if you can call it that,” which is inaccurate and unfair. As the recipe he attempts to describe indicates, Fuller does provide guidance for cooking, relatively complicated in the case of the filling for the Picnic Sandwich, and not only there. She asks her reader to bake biscuits; boil pork, sausage and other things; cook sweetbreads; fry oysters; and dip sandwiches filled with roast beef, lamb, minced or boiled ham in a coating of egg and milk for frying. (Fuller 10, 67-69, 91, 94, 97, 98) Her book includes recipes for setting chicken in aspic, potting liver, bubbling up Welsh rabbit and baking Parmesan crisps. (Fuller 86, 100, 104, 105) There is of course grilled (“fried”) cheese.

It is, however, a book about sandwiches and most, logically enough, are cold, but before assembling a lot of them you will need to have baked, boiled, broiled, fried, roasted and toasted lots of other things.

 

7. British food in America.

Many of the ingredient combinations and techniques bear a British cast. Fuller flavors her chicken in aspic with clove and mace, uses potted ham as well as the liver and nothing needs noting about the derivation of her good “Cheese Rare-Bit Sandwich:

Grate a quarter of a pound of American cheese fine; melt it in a sauce pan over the fire, add the yolks of two eggs well beaten, two tablespoonfuls of cream, a dash of salt and red pepper, and a teaspoonful of Worcestershire.” (Fuller 104)

Her ‘American’ cheese most likely was a sort of Cheddar, the ubiquitous style of America before the artisanal dairy revolution that did not begin until toward the end of the twentieth century, an emblem of the continuing sway that British foodways held in the kitchens of the United States.

 

8. The sandwiches themselves.

Fuller drops a few bombs--innovators will do that, and a lot of her recipes appear novel--but the Sandwich Book describes a number of imaginative assemblies we should be happy to revive. Four fragrant sandwiches represent a reminder that people used to eat a wider range of substances. Clover blossoms, and leaves of nasturtium, roseleaf or violet are treated simply with butter, a couple of them macerated overnight so the butter absorbs the scented flavor of the florals, to make delicate sandwiches on white bread.

 

nasturtium-blossoms.jpg
Sandwich additions.

9. A sort of second digression, on bummers.

A “Bummers Custard Sandwich” based on a version of British potted cheese consists of Roquefort creamed with brandy, olive oil and Worcestershire; an excellent pot, but better with the traditional Stilton and butter rather than oil.

The derivation of the name remains murky but Janet Clarkson conjectures with some justification that it describes a paste easier to make than a true custard. She cites one definition of ‘bummer’ from the Oxford English Dictionary as an “idler, lounger, loafer.” (Clarkson)

Also according to the OED , the usage first appears in print anywhere, in the Portland Oregonian , during 1855. Its most famous application describes the foragers on Sherman’s march through Georgia during the American Civil War. “Bummers” in the Union army, Anne Rubin explains, “were generally cast as somewhat lazy and undisciplined but gifted in their foraging skills, and certainly willing to work when properly motivated.” (Rubin 102) That characterization would apply equally if in a wry way to the cook improvising some bummer’s custard.

The culinary term appears to be associated primarily with Chicago and to have reached print for the first time in the Sandwich Book. It resurfaced a year later during 1910 in another Chicago imprint. Olive Hulse in Two Hundred Recipes for Making Salads engaged in a favorite pastime of cookbook authors; plagiarism. Other than replacing Fuller’s “cake of Roquefort” with “half a pound of Roquefort,” as an aside not an improvement to the recipe because neither author otherwise divulges amounts, the Hulse recipe is identical to its precursor down to a curious, unnecessary tripartite mixing process. ( Compare Fuller 123 with Hulse 86)

A third Chicago publication from 1912 did not bother to wear the figleaf: It repeats the Hulse recipe verbatim. (Mendelsohn 13) Then bummer’s custard appears to disappear until 1942, when a hack working for the Duluth Universal Flour Company himself plagiarized Hulse. (mnsandwiches) The lineage of bummer’s custard, at least in print, looks like it expired there.

 

10. Shall we return to sandwiches?

Fuller also uses cheese to good effect for her “Parmesan Sandwich,” in fact a form of crisped cracker with molten cheese and a simpler alternative to traditional British (and southern American) cheese straws:

“Finely grate Parmesan cheese, a dash of salt and pepper; one tablespoonful of tomato catsup; mix and place between squares of unsweetened cracker. Put crackers on a thin plate, set in hot oven for three minutes or until cheese melts and the cracker becomes crisp. Serve hot.” (Fuller 108-09)

In yet another demonstration these days that everything old is new, Fuller describes no less than eleven variations on a sandwich featuring sardines. She combines sustainable canned sardines with items ranging from anchovy paste, cayenne, cheese, the ubiquitous hardcooked egg, lemon, lettuce, mint, mustard, olives, red onion, parsley, tomato, watercress and other things; most of these sandwiches are cold, two of them hot, all of them worth a shot.

Ironically enough, Fuller describes but one filling that uses corned, or salt, beef, and it is but a cousin to the fourth earl’s first sandwich, chopped as she prepares the beef and combines it with lettuce, mustard and an undisclosed species of ‘catsup.’ (Fuller 65) Sandwich himself was fond of salt beef and had asked for it, nothing more, between two slices of bread that very first time. It remains a classic perhaps, but necessarily, filmed with fiery English mustard. (Rodger 79)

 

Notes:

-Out of print for decades, the Sandwich Book was reissued during May 2016 by the Leopold Classic Library in facsimile. Several other additions are scheduled for publication over the coming months, including one with an appalling new introduction.

-The inclusion of bummer’s custard by Hulse in her book looks a lot like padding. The preparation is neither a salad nor a dressing, nor a sauce.

 

Sources:

Anon., “Duluth Universal’s New Sandwich Book of All Nations,”  https://mnsandwiches.wordpress.com/tag/sandwich-book/ (n.d.; accessed 31 October 2017)

Janet Clarkson, “Bummer’s Custard,” The Old Foodie www.theoldfoodie.com/2010/03/bummers-custard.html (15 March 2010; accessed 30 October 2017)

Lucinda Ebersole, “The Edgewater Sandwich Book,”  cookbookoftheday.blogspot.com (16 May 2012; accessed 30 October 2017)

Eva Greene Fuller, The-Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich (orig. publ. Chicago 1909; Leopold classic Library facsimile 2016)

Olive M. Hulse, Two Hundred Recipes for Making Salads with Thirty Recipes for Dressings and Sauces (Chicago 1910)

Felix Mendelsohn, Recipes of Quality: A Cook Book De Luxe (Chicago 1912)

Michael Nolledo, “100-Year-Old Sandwich Book Has 400 Recipes, Most Of Them Treacherous,”  www.insidehook.com/nation/up-to-date-sandwich-book-400-ways-to-make-a-sandwich (n.d.; accessed 23 September 2017)

Blake Perkins, “In defense of John Montagu, inventor of the sandwich and so much more,”  www.britishfoodinamerica.com No. 49 (Summer 2016)

Barry Popik, “Cannibal Sandwich (1889) (“hamburgers in the raw”),  http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-1/2007-October/075034.html (4 October 2007; accessed 29 October 2017)

N. A. M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (New York 1994)

Anne S. Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill 2014)

Eugene Taylor, “Frederic Lyman Wells,” American National Biography Online (9 December 2003; accessed 30 October 2017)

Frederic Lyman Wells, Mental Adjustments (New York 1922)


***

On the Wall of Death: A place with a promising name earns its Fenway.

At Twenty-eighth and Tenth a bar with a clever name nestles in an enviable location below and abaft the Highline. It is called Death Avenue, and the name is not the random flight of a goth or metalhead owner. This stretch of Manhattan was, for a century starting in 1846, a deadly place that had more than earned the unflinching epithet it had acquired by 1892. (Gray)

The name Death Avenue was not earned through crime unless the definition of crime includes institutional indifference to the maiming and death of ordinary people, which, today, it would appear to do, although back then no such compunction caused second thoughts among the barons, in particular the railroad barons, who exercised outsized sway over American politics and mores including matters of life and death.

The country has changed, or at least had appeared to have changed, until the advent of Trump, and the City of New York most certainly has changed for the better since the end, first of the nineteenth century and then after the 1970s and early 80s. It is a city where the wealthy monopolize access to so many of its most coveted assets, but also a city with the decency and resolve to defy the disgusting and disfigured gargoyle in metaphorical terms that is Trump.

Death Avenue followed the Hudson River Railroad line that carried freight down Tenth and Eleventh Avenues to a terminal just above Chambers Street. The trains killed a lot of people, prompting the city to require a rider on horseback waving a red warning flag to precede each engine. Despite the urban cowboys, as they did become known (many dressed the part, Ten Gallon and all), the deaths proceeded apace. One locomotive, Number 147, mangled so many victims it earned a nickname itself, ‘the butcher.’ The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, a nonprofit unaffiliated with the city, reported in 1908 that 436 people had died on the line during the previous 56 years. (Gray)

 

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No longer a death trap.

The unobservant and unlucky no longer die on the rails of Tenth Avenue. The Highline put paid to that, replacing the surface railroad in 1934. It was an innovative and ingenious design that sent tracks through the center of urban blocks instead of over the street. The line punctured the factories and warehouses along its route, allowing the freighters to lade and unload cargo right into the buildings themselves (highline.org)

The last train, operated by an ungainly and unmourned Conrail, ran on a remnant of the line in 1980. It fell to dereliction until 2006, when construction began to reclaim it as the Highline Park that would open in 2009. Calling the linear park a success represents one of the more reserved understatements of the twenty-first century. It stands as an exemplar of enlightened urbanism, laying equal claim to the work of Capability Brown and the Olmsteads as a landmark in the development of park design. New Yorkers and visitors alike cannot get enough of its appealing stroll, while decent development along its entire reach has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the city.

The Highline also encouraged an underworld, along the avenue beneath and its adjacent streets, of lively bars, shopkeepers to the one percent and to some of the rest of us as well, gallery owners and gazers, strollers, flaneurs and gawkers coiling among them. The atmosphere along Death Avenue, except to economic ascetics like those who lionize Jeremy Corbyn, has become in a word wonderful.

 

Death-Avenue.jpg
Looks can be deceiving.

Death Avenue the bar offers a history of its site and explanation for the name on its website. It sounds eerily familiar because it is. As it happens the owners of the place plagiarized it verbatim and without attribution from a 2012 The New York Times article by Christopher Gray called “When a Monster Plied the West Side.” The theft by the people at Death Avenue, while inexcusable, does explain why the quality of the passage is so superior to any of the other prose appearing on their site.

For example:

Trendy Restaurant in NYC

At Death Ave. you will discover a trendy NYC restaurant with a unique Hellenic inspired cuisine. We are known for our historic edgy name, playful cuisine, beautiful build out [sic], speakeasy brewery, 2,000 square foot garden, pushing the envelope, cocktail program, being the anchor pioneers of the newly emerging Hudson Yards Neighborhood and of course for our positive energy. We feel that we define trendy.” (deathave.com; boldface, capitalizations, repetition, mixed metaphors and empty boasting in original)

There is so much to mock here that it feels almost unfair to comment; almost, not quite, given the surly service and preposterous prices at Death Avenue. Did readers note that the owners consider themselves trendy, an appalling enough word anyway, which makes them anything but?

The “Hellenic inspired cuisine” includes blackened chicken, a burger, coconut shrimp, a variety of sliders, roast chicken and ‘calamari.’ In terms of the uninspired interior, nothing of Greece, either the currently insolvent incarnation or its glorious and glorified classical ancestor, is much in evidence. The walls carry what is obviously only a sliver of stone veneer, the kind of thing in more capable and less parsimonious hands that has been used to symbolize--and certify--permanence and power across cultures, across time and space. In contrast this place embodies anomie and could personify placelessness.

Death Avenue has no discernable style other than the olfactory. A place that aspires to elegance stinks instead of disinfectant, which renders difficult any attempt to discern what exactly one is drinking.

Death Avenue brews its own beer; casks installed in stacks line the wall behind a bar that runs the lefthand length of the front room appear to hold the result. After several unavailing prompts, however, the pretty monosyllabic bartender grunts ‘cocktails,’ an indication that although the casks are not strictly speaking just for show, they have relinquished their intended function. At one point five of these comatose creatures behind the bar outnumber the customers by two but still fail to serve anyone anything for over five minutes.

The beers they brew are anomalous given the stated intent of the owners to evoke the Peloponnese. Mr. Big Nose and Mr. Overachiever allegedly are made in the iconic English IPA style but neither tastes like much of anything. Despite a significant difference in alcohol content--6.0 to 7.8 percent abv--their flavors are very nearly indistinguishable, a problem compounded by cross-contamination because the surly bartender uses the same paddle to clear billowing foam from each glass before serving the wrong one to each of us.

The scrape is not just an affectation, a throwback to the days of cask Dublin Guinness, but rather necessary because the carbonation system at Death Avenue is defective. During our visit the beer was so gassy the bartender gave up trying to fill any glass. As a result the price is astronomical at over a dollar an ounce, or $12 plus tax (!) for a partially filled three-quarters pint.

The serendipity of location may ensure a steady stream of customers at Death Avenue, and New York is a big city that attracts a lot of tourists, so the bar may survive on a series of first time visitors. We will not return.

***

Wall of Shame: Colman Andrews and his hired hand follow the footsteps of Fearless Leader.

The British Table: A New Look at the Traditional Cooking of ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, and WALES by Colman Andrews appeared in November of 2016. Andrews co-founded Saveur magazine, was its editor in chief and has published a number of well-received cookbooks addressing other cuisines. He has made numerous appearances on the Today Show and won eight James Beard Awards. Nigella Lawson, Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters contributed positive quotations to the back cover of The British Table. They are not Andrews’ only acolytes: He travels in the most prestigious circles of the culinary world, acquainted with an array of food writers and celebrity chefs.

The British Table has superb production qualities. The big, coffee table format sports lots of full-page color photographs taken by the founders of the Canal House blog and books, who themselves enjoy a considerable following. The thoughtful recipes in The British Table are interspersed with quotations and short essays, including biographical sketches of historical figures from the British food world, some involving their thoughts on the foods of their times, along with descriptions of dishes and their derivations. None of the sketches exceeds a single page, so none of them should trouble aspirational dilettantes lacking a developed attention span.

The-British-Table-cover.jpg  

With all these eminently marketable attributes, The British Table ought to have attracted considerable attention. The book did earn an extremely favorable if utterly inaccurate assessment and author’s interview at thedailymeal.com, a culinary website, called “Epicurean Legend Colman Andrews Authors ‘The British Table’” by Rachael Pack, its ‘cook editor.’ According to her, The British Table “is a textbook just as much as it is a cookbook and…. delves deep into Britain’s long history, often citing centuries-old writers, philosophers, and culinarians,” which if true would have been a magical feat given the brevity of each entry.

The Daily Meal website is popular, averaging some eight million unique visitors a month as of October 2016, while according to Google Analytics its growth has been among the fastest websites ever launched.

It therefore is all the more surprising that the book has received nearly no other commentary. The probable cause of course is the topic. We know of only two reviews, a rather shallow effort from an obscure Scottish blog, the other a judicious one forthcoming from the esteemed Petits Propos Culinaires.

On less cursory examination, the review and interview at The Daily Meal are not in fact anything other than fluff posted by Andrews himself. He, it turns out, now edits the site. To be fair, Pack does disclose, if in cringeworthy prose, that he “helms the editorial department at The Daily Meal.” Exaggerated self-promotion has become a hallmark at the highest level of government and Andrews is only following the Trumpish trend, but that does not prevent him and Pack from earning their Fenway.    

***

Wall of Shame: Eric Asimov and Rajat Parr traduce the palate of the Raj.

1. We demand the finest wines available to humanity.

Pushing the sale of wines, it would seem, is all the rage at Indian restaurants, especially in the City of New York. According to Eric Asimov at The New York Times , any number of places are trying to piggyback “the success of restaurants like Junoon near Madison Square Park, Gymkhana in London and Rasika in Washington, which have demonstrated how well fine wine can enhance an Indian meal.” These wine lists are “intended both to flatter the food and to create unexpectedly delicious synergies.” (Asimov)

Asimov concedes that pairing wine and Indian food, “with its intricate spicing; rich, integrated sauces, and occasional chili heat, has often posed a difficult riddle” and that “the process of integrating Indian food is not easy, nor is it intuitive.” (Asimov) Others find any such process impossible. Victor Gordon imposes a ban on the drinking of wine with Indian food. “The curry-eater,” he explains,

“has too much on his palate (and in his nostrils) to cope with another equally complex, taste experience. It is possible to read Proust while listening to Ravi Shankar but impossible to give both the attention they deserve at the same time--nor can wine and curry be appreciated simultaneously.” ( English Cookbook 175-76)

Gordon, however, was English and therefore not competent, according to the logic of Asimov and Rajat Parr, to assess matters of spice and even of taste more generally. “When the British arrived in India, it didn’t have an alcohol tradition, so they brought scotch and beer,” claims Parr. “Beer wipes out spices and destroys the flavors. To the British, that was great.” (Asimov)

2. Spice is nice.

The argument is anachronistic, unfounded, stupefying. The putative British aversion to spice either in the archipelago itself or across the seas is a hackneyed misperception.

Following a defeat of Portuguese warships, the English obtained their first commercial concession and constructed their first Indian ‘factory,’ or trading station, at Surat in 1612.

 India-Nawabs-and-Brits011.jpg

The fledgling nabobs liked the cultures they encountered on the Subcontinent, even if they misunderstood much about them, and happily ‘went native,’ not only taking Indian wives as well as lovers, but also dressing in hybrid Anglo-Indian style, smoking cannabis and not least delighting in the dishes they were served.

The foodways they found fascinated these early English settlers because they were at once familiar and exotic. “It should by no means be assumed,” explains Burton,

“that the first British settlers had considered the highly spiced cuisine of India so very outlandish or strange. In 1612, English cooking itself had barely emerged from the Middle Ages, and was still heavy with cumin, caraway, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Indeed, spices had for the first time become affordable to all but the poor in England, due to the breaking of the Arab monopoly of the spice trade by the Portuguese a century earlier.” (Burton 3; see Sen 2)

As a result of this coincidence, “when the gentlemen of the Surat factory were fêted by their Muslim friends, they were probably not being polite when they pronounced the pilaus and biriyanis delicious.” (Burton 4)

Other cultural coincidences accelerated the English acceptance of Indian foodways. During the early seventeenth century, the English still considered forks suspiciously foreign and effeminate (they originated in Italy; the horror!), and like Indian people at the time scooped their food using fragments of bread.

Banquets might be elaborate in either country, and frequently lasted for hours. Following a long lunch or dinner, both cultures circulated an array of spices on fancy trays or in special boxes. These offerings were considered digestives by the English and Indians alike. Cultural divergence does, however, appear in this picture through language. The somewhat lyrical Indian term for the practice was pan; the rather inelegant but typically descriptive English one, the voidee. (see Burton 4)

David Burton comments on the anomaly of Raj attitudes: “Considering the ethnocentric attitude of the British towards food generally, one can only marvel at the adventurousness the Anglo-Indians displayed.” (Burton 125)

3. Authentic inauthenticity built on bundles of spice.

It is a truism that curry powder is inauthentic. It also is not quite true. Nobody should argue that the use of curry powder, or curry paste, can create an authentic Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani dish. The British after all invented curry powder, and during the eighteenth century commercial brands of endless variety proliferated for use both in Britain and the Raj. Curry blends ranged from emoliently mild to fiery hot, and British as well as Indian cooks created distinctive dishes by using the spice.

A small sample of Raj creations includes country captain, kedgeree, mulligatawny, the famous curries served on P&O liners and curious Victorian ‘quormas,’ including silken versions featuring such unexpected items as cucumbers mixed with meat or fowl. The fondness for curry was by no means limited to the elites. Curry was a constant item at the lunches of military messes across the Subcontinent and on ships flying the red ensign of the British merchant marine.

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In this context the obvious question arises. Why take the trouble and bear the expense of using lavish amounts of spice, or create so many vehicles for them, if the ulterior aim all along has been to render spice invisible and eliminate flavor more generally?

That the British did not do. Instead imaginative adherents of Anglo-Indian hybrids, including the great Arthur Kenney-Herbert, created a distinctive Raj style based on Subcontinental spice.

4. A devilish dish.

By the early eighteenth century, cayenne had become the fiery flagbearer of empire in the kitchens of the Raj as well as kitchens “back home.” The British created devils and deviling to showcase spice. These compounds consist of heaters including cayenne, chilis, garlic, mustard, anchovy essence and paste, Tabasco, vinegar, and Worcestershire in various combinations. Anything savory could be deviled, and the treatment has been applied to just about everything.

Devils are undeniably pungent and the British traditionally ate them with wine. As Gordon recounts, they “produce clean and simple tastes, however hot and mustardy.” For that reason, he continues, “the devil-eater can fully appreciate good wine, whereas the curry-eater cannot.” Gordon finds it “no coincidence that devils were invented by--and for--a claret besotted (sic) age.” ( English Cooking 175, 176) The British knew that the flavors of wine and spice might enhance one another: There was no desire to ‘wipe out spice’ or ‘destroy flavor’ and anyway beer does no such thing.

5. A world of drink including a lot of wine and many, many beers.

The British in India drank a lot of things in addition to beer and Scotch. Ironically enough, the first thing they drank was wine, and they drank it with food. They also drank a lot of it. “From the very earliest time of the English factory,” or trading station, the one at Surat in 1612, the factory president set “the individual ration” per meal in the communal dining hall at a quart of wine per person. (Burton 203)

Later in the seventeenth century,

“it was not uncommon for a man to lay in a full stock of wine and invite his friends to dinner, and in the process of their giving their judgment on its quality, finish off the whole chest at one sitting.” (Burton 204)

During the beginning of the nineteenth century, one memsahib reported that wine remained “the heaviest family article, for whether it is taken fashionably or medicinally, everybody, even to your humble servant, drinks at least a bottle per diem , and the gentlemen four times that quantity.” ( quoted at Burton 204)

 Madeira-Oceans-of-Wine-cover.jpg

The Raj imported wines from France, Italy and Germany; “‘English’ was good French claret to which some brandy had been added in England to enable it to withstand the Indian climate.” (Burton 207)

The British in India also drank other fortified wines, led by Madeira, in considerable quantity. “So popular was Madeira” during the eighteenth century “that 150 to 200 pipes were sent annually to Madras alone” for the East India Company. A pipe was a barrel that held 105 gallons. Company accounts allocated 4,200 bottles to the governor and 130 for each other employee “including the lowliest Company clerk” and “even these were supplemented by a good deal more which came in privately.” (Burton 208, 207)

The records of one Madras nabob indicate that during a single month in 1774 he and his guests drank 99 bottles of Bordeaux and 75 of Madeira along with considerably smaller quantities of porter, rum and brandy. The books do not mention Scotch, which did not become “the favourite drink of the Raj” until after 1870. (Burton 208)

Even during its heyday whisky would not become a palate killer; “in India whisky was well-diluted.” (Burton 210) In Japan, whisky is considered the ideal drink for sushi, a dish of subtlety, and if it does not overwhelm raw fish it would not destroy the flavor of Indian food either.

Nor did the advent of whisky signal the demise of wine. At Government House in the Simla hill station during 1877, for example, fourteen guests sat down to tiffin and thirteen to dinner. The guests put away six bottles of Champagne, eight of Bordeaux, two of Sherry, a modest pair of beers, and two of whisky, while the servants accounted for four more bottles of Bordeaux, seven of beer and six glasses of brandy. (Brennan 217) The quantities of wine may appear lavish but are rather demure by the contemporary yardstick of stocking a bottle per diner for a typical dinner party or holiday feast.

Consumption of wine was all the more remarkable because only robust varieties, accounting in part for the prevalence of fortified wines and the practice of lacing Bordeaux with brandy, could survive the unrefrigerated voyage out from British ports and the oscillations of the Indian climate.

The tastes of diners and drinkers at Government House of course were grander than most, and after about 1820 “beer began to displace wine as the favoured drink.” Before then it had been considered too expensive for everyday drinking and anyway too “liverish,” or strong, for India.

The ascent of beer only began when an English brewer developed a light ale specifically for India, not an alcohol bomb or hop devil capable of obliterating the flavor of food. It was not until the 1870s, however, that breweries became successful on the Subcontinent itself. (Burton 209)

So all that is old is new again, and restaurants pushing wine with Indian dishes are returning to the roots of the Raj whether or not they know it.

Asimov is a wine writer and Parr a sommelier. For straying from their fields into the unfamiliar terrain of culinary history to make things up, they have jointly earned their Fenway.

 

Sources:

Eric Asimov, “The Best Pairing for Indian Food? It’s Not Beer,” The New York Times (13 September 2016)

Jennifer Brennan, Curries and Bugles: A Memoir and a Cookbook of the British Raj (New York 1990)

David Burton, The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India (London 1993)

Victor Gordon, The English Cookbook: New Ways with Traditional British Foods (London 1985)

Coleen Taylor Sen, Curry: A Global History (London 2009)

***

Wall of Shame: Heinz ‘malt’ vinegar as foisted off on the American market.

The Oxford English Dictionary , defines ‘malt’ standing alone as “barley or other grain that has been steeped, germinated, and dried, used especially for brewing or distilling and vinegar-making.” Others are not so liberal. In the Food of the Western World (London 1976), the redoubtable Theodora FritzGibbon defines malt as “barley in which the starch content has been converted to sugar by fermentation.” She allows for no other grain.

According to one industrial giant, however, one of those others implied by the OED is corn. Corn is an industrial curse and artisanal glory in the United States. For the bad news first, federal subsidies render corn the dirtiest cheap and mutilate its production to create any number of zombie products. Ethanol in gasoline for marine use promotes the growth of fungus that fouls engines; high fructose corn syrup tastes bad and, hidden as cheap filler and addictive sweetener in products that are only the worse for it, promotes obesity.

For the good news, unsubsidized smallholders in New England produce the best corn in memory and they do it in a sustainable way. As in the American south, some of their corn is milled into superb meal; Kenyon’s gristmill in Usquepaugh, Rhode Island, has ground its famous white meal forever.

As good as something made from corn, how many readers would accept the OED definition applied to single malt Scotch? Can Scotch consist of ‘other grain,’ of oats, or rye, or sorghum or corn? Other whiskys may but malt scotch cannot. No whisky made with anything other than barley describes itself as ‘malt,’ but seizing on the technicality that is the OED dodge, that is how Heinz describes the inauthentic and debased vinegar it dumps on the unsuspecting American market. Would anybody buy corn vinegar? No company, however indifferent to quality, even tries to sell it, but ‘corn malt’ is a constituent of the ‘malt’ vinegar Heinz flogs in the United States.

 

 Heinz-Malt-Vinegar.jpg
Not really malt vinegar.

That is deceptive. “Malt vinegar,” according to food.com, “is made by malting barley…. Any English recipe calling for vinegar typically refers to malt unless otherwise noted.” Can it be coincidental by the way that barley costs considerably more than corn?

At recipetips.com, the entry on malt vinegar explains that it “is produced from barley cereal grains that are malted,” not form corn or anything else. It is of course possible to malt corn; malting is a process. As a name, however, it refers only to barley. Even so, Heinz has not even bothered to dilute its deception by reference to ‘malted corn;’ the company calls the ingredient it chose for polluting its vinegar ‘corn malt.’

An injunction should issue prohibiting Heinz from the use of ‘malt vinegar’ to describe the product. None of the literature to address malt vinegar even considers corn, and traditional malt vinegar was made from beer in the manner that wine vinegars are made from… wine. As Alan Davidson defines it in the indispensible Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford 1999), “ Malt vinegar used to be called alegar which is a more appropriate name as it is [or was; Editor’s note] made from an unhopped type of beer.”

Malt vinegar is of course associated with Britain and nowhere else, where malt is barley and corn is maize, and traditional British beers never have contained corn. Malt vinegar should not contain it either.

In the United States, Heinz has ignored the meaning of ‘malt’ as commonly understood by adding an adjunct to its ‘traditional’ vinegar. Such is not so in the United Kingdom, at least as for as long as the union lasts. Heinz does not adulterate malt vinegar there; neither does Sarson’s, once a charming family firm (they published lovely promotional cookbooks offering lots of decent recipes incorporating their product), now also under the arm of a multinational behemoth. Unlike the Heinz imposter roaming the United States, its product remains good.

The current Fenway goes to Heinz and the FDA is under investigation by the Wall for negligence in allowing Heinz to engage in consumer deception.

***

It has required no little reluctance to award this Number’s pair of Fenways. The recipients have made the task so easy we suspected a setup.

 

Fenway the first.

 budweiser-renames-its-beer-america.jpg

 

Our first Fenway goes to InBev, brewer of the beer formerly known as Budweiser.

In this political season of scoundrels cloaking themselves in a problematic patriotism to burnish credentials notwithstanding their unfitness for office, the Belgian owner of Budweiser has decided to rename its beer ‘America’ for the summer.

The change will, according to Ricardo Marques, formerly a Budweiser vice president and now the apparently enigmatic vice president of America, create “probably the most American summer of our generation,” whatever that means. To help ensure this Most American Season Ever, America will print the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner on each of its cans. That should go a long way toward imprinting each drinker of America with an appropriately nationalist fervor.

The multinational brewer of exclusively bad beer has demonstrated a certain courage in proceeding with the change despite its unsuccessful test marketing of Stella Artois as ‘Belgium.’ It seems that not even the cognoscenti who know what it looks like want to wrap themselves in the Belgian flag.

Sources speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of true patriots reveal that the owner of America has failed in its effort to obtain trademark protection for the name. The brewer will threaten rightful ‘infringers’ with litigation anyway, but that should not defer deep pocketed competitors rushing to obtain a free ride on the brainstorm. Perhaps we should expect a multitude of Americas along with ‘God Save America’ beer in evangelical enclaves with a nonalcoholic version for Utah, ‘Not My President’ in Texas and ‘Build the Wall’ in Arizona.

Speaking of multitudes, not to mention the huddled masses drinkers of America clamor to deport, the Belgians have undertaken a less unwelcome initiative. With a knowing nod to the history of the United States, they also have changed their slogan for America from the monarchical to the republican. And at least the new one, ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ is less deceptive and more descriptive than the temporarily outgoing ‘King of Beers,’ although on the other hand it is most unlikely that the drinkers of America, as opposed to drinkers of other American beers, will have any idea what the Latin means. Still, in terms of taste the King never much resembled royalty, and the new slogan does reflect the fact that the beer is loaded with adjuncts, stabilizers and gas in addition to the fewer ingredients found in better beer.

With his firm grip on reality and with his exquisite taste, Donald Trump has taken credit for the ploy, an unequivocal affirmation of its idiocy.

Make America Bud Again.

 

Fenway the second.

The second Fenway goes to the similarly egregious practitioner of terrible taste and manufacturer of terrible food, McDonalds.

This one requires no elaboration.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation via The New York Times back on 5 February 2016, “McDonald’s has found a way to make a kale salad that contains more calories than a Big Mac.”

 

Stay tuned as the Wall of Shame hits keep on coming. 

 

***

 

Our inaugural 2016 Wall of Shame award goes to Saveur.

Even when Saveur gets something about British food right, the magazine gets it wrong. In fairness, Saveur is the least objectionable of the glossy food magazines, and a furtive pleasure, at least at times, of the Editor and a number of her friends.

At the outset of each year the magazine publishes “The Saveur 100,” descriptions of things involving foodways. The compilation casts a wide net. The magazine itself describes them as “Recipes. Chef’s Secrets. Where To Eat Right Now,” but entries may cover ingredients, tools, the restaurants, categories of restaurants (this year’s includes a list of places offering pho in Anchorage, Chinese restaurants in Pittsburgh and a guide to five Koreatowns across the United States), cookbooks, techniques and recipes.

The business plan of the magazine is much of the moment; its publisher knows about all those studies that chronicle the shrinking attention span of the average American, so each entry is short and illustrated with outsize photographs of food porn. Some of the choices seem a little obvious or a little stale, fads that have lingered too long; Meyer lemons, sea urchin, a beefburger of all things. Others, however, are astute.

Number 79 this year is Maggi, which essentially is salted and liquefied MSG. It is not as revolting as it sounds, and Saveur even managed to entreat Sean Brock of all people to endorse it, at least to a guarded extent. “It’s my secret weapon” (well, not anymore), admits Brock, but are diners at Husk actually ingesting MSG? Brock is ambiguous: “It’s definitely cheating, but if you’re not charging people, I think you’re allowed to do whatever you want to do at home.”

 Maggi.jpg

In the Editor’s home Maggi does not enjoy much purchase. The cheating there entails Kitchen Bouquet, a potion preferred by the cooks of New Orleans. It boasts a few attributes that are superior to Maggi’s. Even though Kitchen Bouquet is produced by a subsidiary of Clorox (!), unlike Maggi Kitchen Bouquet is not a chemical concoction. Instead it is a mixture of caramelized vegetables; carrots, celery, cabbage, onion, parsley, turnip and parsnips. The sludge itself is black, so in addition to imparting a rich depth to gumbo, stews, savory puddings and pie, gravies and more, it darkens and thickens without flour.

Unlike Maggi, Kitchen Bouquet will not induce any headaches. And unlike Maggi, the dose of Kitchen Bouquet need not be but a drip, because it is not so salty as we might surmise. Unlike Maggi, Kitchen Bouquet is not salty at all. A serving contains “0%” sodium according to the USDA mandated “Nutrition Facts” list on the label.

Maggi may not be our preference, but the additive is handy enough, and nobody at bfia chooses to quibble with Brock. One of the best entries in the Saveur 100, number 20, is his recipe for barbecue sauce, but the magazine unaccountably and without disclosure substitutes chicken stock for the more authentic pork.

kitchen-bouquet.jpg  

We also can quibble with Saveur about other elements of its 100. As always the underrepresentation of British foodways is lamentable.

It is exemplary of the magazine to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary republication of a classic Treasury of Great Recipes. Vincent Price wrote it with his wife Mary, who was English. It is no celebrity potboiler but rather a careful compilation of recipes from around the world that work. Unusual, perhaps even radical in its time, the Treasury included a chapter on English food that neither mocked nor apologized for it. Price liked English cooking (“there are some English delicacies which can’t be beat in any country”), which goes unmentioned in Saveur. (Price 149)

Horseradish (number 24) and watercress (number 63) are good ingredients that have not been burdened with overexposure or overpraise. They also represent bedrocks of British cooking, but nobody would know that from reading Saveur. It therefore is more than ironic that the entry for watercress follows “The Eternal Charm of the English Meat Pie” at 62.

 duck-and-waffle-008.jpg
Duck & Waffle, London

It is the only entry to embrace a British food as such, and is a recipe from the redhot Duck & Waffle in London. It is good enough, if hardly extraordinary, and the pastry embedding Stilton is more gimmick than breakthrough, but otherwise the recipe hews to tradition and its inclusion is welcome. Unwelcome; the “frumpy” characterization of English meat pies that require “little nips and tucks to bring them up to date,” even if Saveur does find them “old school cool.”

They do not require cosmetic surgery to remain attractive. In “The Tradition of the Savoury Pie,” Elisabeth Ayrton explains, by

“1615, it was inconceivable that the table at any feast, or any grand occasion, should be without its pies and pasties.

The meat pie attained its full perfection only in England and held its pride of place from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century.”

Pie-how-to-make-pastry-attractive001.jpg  

These creations were anything but ‘frumpy.’ “Most, if not all, early pies were raised,” or freestanding, made initially by hand but later by using special fluted molds. (Ayrton 85) The pies that emerged from them were, and are, elegant in appearance and bursting with flavors intensified by rich jellied stock. Price understood. In the introduction to his recipe for Melton Mowbray pie, he describes it as “impressive” in appearance and adds that it “is a masterpiece of jellied meat enclosed in a flaky pastry crust. Beautiful, too, for a cold buffet.” (Price 176)

All these raised pies are eaten cold, but by the eighteenth century, complex hot pies also proliferated, filled with luxurious ingredients--game both feathered and furred, artichokes, morels, oysters, truffles and more--in a parade of savory variations.

Saveur traduces the tradition. Even though the magazine treads lightly, even light-heartedly, British food has been the butt of more than enough misplaced and timeworn ridicule, while pandering to popular misperception never produces a benign result. The first Fenway of 2016 therefore goes to Saveur , our first repeat recipient.

 

Notes:

-Sean Brock’s barbecue sauce is a Thing We Like. It includes his recipe.

-britishfoodinamerica got to A Treasury of Great Recipes long before Saveur. An essay on Vincent Price, his life and his cookbooks (there is another) appeared, appropriately enough, in our First All Hallows Number during October 2010.

 

Sources:

Anon, Saveur , “The Saveur 100,” Special Issue (2016)

Elisabeth Ayrton, The Cookery of England (London 1977)

Mary & Vincent Price, A Treasury of Great Recipes (New York 1966)


***

Bring back Heinz London Grill: Please bring it back; and be not tempted by French cans of cassoulet, and as long as we are mourning the passage of a minor icon we should demand the return of a major one while protesting against the proliferation of pathetic websites. And so the Fenways fly.

The Editor just has endured eating the crappy contents of a can of ‘Le Cassoulet Mitonné’ from the French producer William Saurin, which was purchased at a reputable shop in Paris and dragged home across the sea in a fit of foul judgment. The sausages, a wide disc and small cylinder, tasted the same, like nearly nothing, and the texture of them both was slime The experience triggered some reminiscing with no little uncharacteristic nostalgia about Heinz London Grill.

Was London Grill an epicurean delight? No it was not. Was it a guilty pleasure on an arrival home in the middle of the night after a brutal workday or troubled flight? Oh yes it was. The sausage was admittedly soft and laden with filler but by throwing a hot dog from the freezer into the pot the London Grill became more than passably good. And even without the addition of the dog some noticeable nuggets of bacon and kidney more than compensated for the quality of the indigenous sausage, while the edge of acid from some tomato added a snap of fake spice.

At some point back in the day, in a clipping long since misplaced by the Editor, an article in the London Evening Standard described London Grill as the poor man’s cassoulet. Its author was right, not least in comparison to the canned, bland and flabby French alternatives, like William Saurin’s, to the real thing.

 London-Grill.jpg Which would you choose?

 

Heinz London Grill, neither identifiably a product of London nor a product that ever encountered a grill, once was not only cheap but also ubiquitous throughout the south of England. If the use of the past tense hints that any of this sounds too good to be true it is, as often becomes the case, not true, not any longer. Heinz no longer makes its London Grill despite the entreaties of customers. Its obduracy earns Heinz a first ballot Fenway.

That loss in turn triggered renewed thoughts about Crown Pilot Crackers, which Kraft stopped selling in 2008. The loss of the pilot cracker is particularly poignant. Pilots were the oldest product of Nabisco, itself no publicly minded paradigm but now the vassal of Kraft, a company in many respects even worse.

A descendant of hardtack, the pilot was the first distinctively American cracker, although it was not yet called that. Under the name either of biscuit or ship’s bread, it was one of the country’s earliest commercial products, first baked by John Pearson for use onboard ships in 1792. (Oliver)

British commercial biscuit producers--Carr’s, Bath Olivers, Jacob’s--may now be the best in the world but they had no jump on their American avatar. In this as in many maritime things the Americans not only had anticipated the practice of their putative masters but also had surpassed them early on.

As Andrew Smith explains in The Oxford Companion to American Food ,

“the making of crackers was among the first food industries in America. During the eighteenth century, cheap, hard crackers called ‘ship’s bread,’ ship’s biscuit,’ and later, ‘hardtack’ were widely manufactured for use on ships and for those migrating westward. These large, sturdy crackers made only of flour and water--no shortening--kept for a very long time. (Andrews 173)

What, precisely, is a cracker? According to www.bakerpedia.com, it is

“…. A savory and crunchy product made by layering sheets of strong dough and baking until the texture is crunchy…. Crackers by definition are 60% flour, which is higher than most other baked products. The low moisture content of crackers leads to longer shelf life then other baked goods.” (bakerpedia)

Other characteristics of crackers that people tend not to notice, or note in passing without wondering why, are the patterned pinpricks they all display. The holes are there, as most mostly unnoticed things are, because they serve an essential function. “Crackers also always have small holes called docking holes cut into them in order to prevent large pockets of air from forming in the product.” (bakerpedia)

Old School crackers are austere for good reason. The long shelf life was bought by eschewing fripperies like sugar or shortening. “Historically, crackers were made with extremely low fat content in order to prevent rancidity in the product.” (bakerpedia)

All of this sounds convincing before bakerpedia derails in a vasty way. Its credibility craters when the site asserts that during “1801, another baker, from Texas, Josiah Bent, accidentally burned a batch of biscuits. He noticed that when they broke they made distinct cracking noises, which lead [sic] him to call his new product ‘crackers.’” (bakerpedia) These assertions are idiotic.

Texas? Americans in Texas in 1801? Ship’s biscuit in Texas at that time, when no ships put into port there? When Texas was part of Mexico and not a market for anything American? None of this is possible let alone likely, so the bakerpedia site sounds about as credible in the broader sense of things as the unhinged governor of Texas, who has activated the state military to prevent the federal government from enlisting the assistance of Walmart to tunnel under the state in plot to impose martial law. We suppose Texas taxpayers enjoy squandering their earnings.

In fact Texas had nearly no Anglophone settlers until after Mexican independence in 1821, when the new nation encouraged the immigration of Americans to help populate the sparsely settled province. Nor does the immolation of a batch of biscuits account for their new name.

It was indeed Josiah Bent who coined the term cracker, and he did coin it in 1801, when he engaged in one of the first commercial branding exercises in America. Also from The Oxford Companion : “One of the earliest brand-name foods was Bent’s water crackers, which were initially manufactured by Josiah bent, a ship’s bread baker in Milton, Massachusetts.” (Andrews 173)

As his biscuits cooled, Bent noticed they made a cracking sound so he began to call them crackers to distinguish them from the biscuits of his competitors. The Bent bakery still exists in Milton, if no longer operated by Bents, and still bakes four kinds of heritage crackers. Their hardtack and cold water, or ‘warming’ crackers still contain only flour and water but their common crackers and pilots use a yeasted dough along with salt and brown sugar (Chaparro)

In terms of pilots, Bent is a nanobaker. Production is small and distribution narrow. Two bigger companies, Diamond Bakery out of Hawaii and Interbake Foods based in Richmond, Virginia, each make species of pilot crackers but only for regional distribution but not to New England.

Diamond calls its product the “Original Hawaiian Soda Cracker;” it is available online but is not quite a pilot. Interbake makes “Sailor Boy Pilot Bread,” a name that harks back to the original description of ship’s cracker and is in fact one. According to a subsidiary Interbake website Sailor Boys have a something of a cult following in Alaska, which accounts for some 98% of the product’s sales. It does feel fitting that a virtually imperishable product lives on at the ends of the earth, or at least at the extremities of America.

New England took such a grievous blow when Nabisco first dumped Crown Pilots in 1996 that an effective protest ensued. It originated in Maine, spread throughout the region and created conditions that forced Nabisco to resume baking Crown Pilots the following year.

The battle had been won. Fighting the power, however, always seems fraught and the war was lost on unconditional terms in 2008. (Cox & Walker 104) Kraft considered inadequate its sales of ‘only’ some 120,000 pounds--sixty tons--a year of crackers revered within the vibrant chowder culture of New England. This was not just a matter of denying people something to crumble into their soup, although Crown Pilots served that purpose in spades. No bowl of its legendary chowder at the Black Pearl in Newport, for instance, ever crossed the bar or slid onto a table unescorted by Crown Pilots.

The loss was worse in terms of preserving historical foodways. Chowder is “a sea-borne dish that made its way ashore.” (Cox & Walker 35) The earliest renditions originated on fishing boats plying the Grand Banks in the seventeenth century, perhaps even earlier, when cooks chose ship’s bread to thicken soups made from the immediate catch at sea, finfish rather than clams and most often cod or haddock.

Early recipes ashore also used biscuit to lend chowder heft, in much the same way the English thickened sauces with breadcrumbs rather than flour. The first printed recipe appears in the Boston Evening Post of 23 September 1751. It resembles a traditional English hotpot, but made with fish rather than meat, but still stands as a recognizable ancestor of the chowders we know. True to its time, the recipe was rendered in whimsical rhyme:

“First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning,
Because in Chauder there can be no turning;
Then lay some pork in slices very thin,
This you in Chouder always must begin.
Next lay some fish oer crossways very nice
Then season well with Pepper, Salt and spice;
Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory and Thyme,
Then Biscuit next which must be soak’d some Time.
Thus your foundation laid, you will be able
To raise a Chouder high as Babel;
For by repeating o’er the same again,
You may make Chouder for a thousand Men. (Cox & Walker 17-18)

The shipborne origin of this dish is obvious. If it adds herbs unavailable on a long voyage, the salt pork, biscuit instead of potato and fish is a combination that was available to any eighteenth century cook on a seagoing fisherman.

Seven years on, Hannah Glasse included “Chauder, a Sea-Dish” in the sixth edition of her Art of cookery Made Plain and Easy . Other than the addition of allspice and a pastry lid, her base recipe does not differ from the one in the Post . It does, however, offer the reader scope for improvisation. The options Mrs. Glasse offers include “a Glass of hot Madeira Wine, and a very little India pepper,” otherwise considered cayenne, and if “you have Oysters or Truffles, and Morels, it is still better; thicken it with Butter.” (Cox & Walker 35)

These recommendations have not survived the centuries and likely were improvised by Mrs. Glasse herself rather than derived from some old galley salt. That, however, does not render her suggestions either inauthentic or unattractive. Their addition makes good chowder too.

Returning to the putative subject to hand, the common thread of biscuit is our immediate interest. The authors of an eccentric and rather slight history of chowder contend, each “bowl of chowder contains the soup of colonial desire and the scent of painful past.” (Cox & Walker 49)

They do not refer to the loss of the Crown Pilot but might well have done. The painful scent or crunch of a painful past was not inevitable: The people of Maine petitioned Kraft to license the baking of the crackers to an independent bakery, even for a limited term. Kraft refused, and earned one of the more avoidable Fenways in the history of the award.

 

Sources:

Anon., “Cracker,” www.bakerpedia.com/cracker-z (accessed 12 May 2015)

Camila Chaparro, “Milton’s G. H. Bent Co. presses on with hardtack, broken cookies, and specialty sandwiches,” Boston Globe (3 July 2014)

Robert Cox & Jacob Walker, A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal (Charleston SC 2011)

Sandy Oliver, “The Crown Pilot Cracker Escapade: 11 Years Later,” www.working waterfrontarchives.org/2008/03/27/the-crown-pilot-cracker-escapade (accessed 14 May 2015)

Andrew F. Smith, The Oxford Companion to American Food (Oxford 2007)


***


 

Price gouging in Charleston.

Charleston, South Carolina, despite its current spot at the top of the American tourism heap, is not all sweetness and light. Some unscrupulous shops have not shied from taking advantage of the city’s overheated culinary scene and ‘goat. sheep. cow.,’ despite the laudatory reviews it has garnered, is one of them.

goatsheepcow-logo.png  

Ordinarily we wish entrepreneurs well, and have nothing against the proprietors (although the demeanor of staff in the shop tends toward icy), but at some point a level of price gouging requires an attempt at correction.

Estimable Creminelli sausage, cured with either Barolo or whiskey, will set you back $45 a pound plus tax at the Charleston shop when you can get it straight from the source online for $28. Some markup on a product imported from the wilds of Utah is to be expected but not that much.


American Airlines.

britishfoodinamerica does not ordinarily address modes of travel, and even though American Airlines has scaled our Wall of Shame in part on the basis of food, this essay admittedly is an outlier. It is, however, an outlier that requires posting. Sometimes a service is so bad that it becomes imperative to expose the perpetrator.

The Editor has endured the recent misfortune of three long flights on American Airlines. Domestic service in the United States tends in general to the abysmal, but international flights on United States carriers normally involve less discomfort. They need to compete with the services that unAmerican airlines offer their passengers, like (marginally) better food, free booze and decent inflight entertainment systems.

AA_logo.jpg

Nothing, however, is normal at American Airlines these days. They appear to have given up any attempt to provide even minimal amenities for their customers, even on international flights.

The Editor traveled recently on American between New York, San Francisco and London. All three flights had three things in common; tired aircraft, tired crew and bad conditions.

The aircraft that carried the Editor from New York to San Francisco, a Boeing 767, normally provides one of the more comfortable ways to fly in economy class. The seating configuration is good, two-four-two, so that nobody is squeezed into a Siberia three seats from the aisle. A walk about the cabin to stretch legs and prevent circulatory problems is possible, not the case on the atrocious narrow-bodied 757.

The American airframe, however, must have rolled off the assembly line circa 1982. The upholstery was shabby and soiled from too many flights and too little maintenance. The plane was worse than stale: It smelled unclean.

The inflight entertainment consisted of tiny bulbous televisions hanging along intervals down the center aisle; some seats cannot see them. They must have been original equipment and belong in a museum. Perhaps American could profitably sell them at an antique auction. They may not have as much wear and tear as the seats; the airline showed a single film during the entire flight. The erstwhile audio system was defunct; no music or talk channels, no channels at all.

The entire cabin had required a refit many, many winters ago. Its condition got the Editor, normally a sanguine flyer, thinking about safety.

Cost-cutting appears out of control; the airline managed a profit during the last quarter, its first since emerging from bankruptcy, but the price to its passengers is high. The captain said something over the sound system in terms the Editor previously had not heard, “we have a headwind and can’t go too fast.” He sounded resigned, even defeated, and the reason may not have involved the wind. We were flying nose up (things rolling down aisles toward the tail), often a telltale sign that fuel conservation rather than external conditions dictated our speed.

The older cabin crew looked weary for good reason. A lack of onboard supplies made their work unnecessarily arduous. American no longer provides complimentary food on domestic flights. Instead, passengers choose what to purchase from a short menu of items like sandwiches and salads designed by Marcus Samuelsson, celebrity chef, television personality, internet impresario, socialite and general entrepreneur.

Samuelsson has undeniable talent--his cooking at Aquavit presaged the Scandinavian craze--and a compelling background. Orphaned in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden by adoptive parents, émigré to America and runaway success story, Samuelsson now refers unselfconsciously to his stature as a brand. He has evolved from a chef to the operator of a sophisticated and wealth-generating public relations machine, not necessarily a bad thing but not a transformation likely to endear him to the self-appointed purist. In part that explains why he has encountered a slew of criticism lately from Eddie Huang and also reasonable people.

 Sammuelson.jpg

Some of the problem stems from resentment and some is just politically correct. Among other things, Huang decries the prices at Red Rooster as too high for Harlem, considers the purportedly African-American food there inauthentic and labels the venture itself patronizing. None of that sounds particularly fair, let alone pertinent.

Based on the airline menu, however, the conglomeration of the brand threatens to dilute if not impair or even undermine it. According to American, Samuelsson “brings a unique blend of culture and artistic excellence to customers with his New American Table cuisine” but the food on the Editor’s flight was nothing of the kind. It is hard to defend the claim that the cobb salad or cheese and turkey sandwich the airline offers at a high price is either unique or excellent.

The worse problem for Samuelsson is the linkage of his image, or brand if we must, with American’s. Money is nice but so is reputation and the airline’s cannot be good. It is as if he is goading his critics, daring them to find another reason to decry his integrity. In general the carrier itself remains tarnished, although its merger with USAir, hardly a beloved institution either, may help. Sometimes hope does triumph over experience but in this case the union looks more like a race to the bottom.

The problem also lies in the particulars. Even if the food were distinctive, you would not know because, on the Editor’s flight at least, most of it was unavailable. Each flight attendant continually had to inform passengers that much on the menu was not onboard. This task was harder than it sounds because the aircraft carried only a handful of them. An attendant had to give each passenger a quick glance before retrieving the card and moving on.

In aesthetic terms, what there was, was bad; menus were worn, stained, even torn. The association with such a thing cannot be the kind of branding wizardry that any business would invite.

Menus were not the only item in short supply. Apparently American considers tea too extravagant to stock in adequate amounts. When the Editor visited the galley to ask for a cup she was told, not without regret, she could not have one. The aircraft carried only two teabags and, fair enough, the attendant wanted to share them with as many people as possible later in the flight by brewing a pot. But even then things went awry. Either the tea was too poor or the pot was too big to produce much beyond brackish brown water.

It is impossible to fathom how the flight crews at American tolerate their predicament but then the job market stinks. Serial unforced errors on the part of the airline tax their patience and stamina: Sharing the menus means service is slow; nonexistent choices and insufficient supplies turn customers ornery.

Not, however, the cabin crew on the Editor’s otherwise dismal flight to San Francisco. They were courteous and as accommodating as the circumstances allowed; in a word, wonderful.

That word, however, is not synonymous with the attitude of their counterparts on the London flight, a debacle deeper than the one the Editor experienced over the United States. They apparently believed that their charges were a collective nuisance to be tolerated if not despised. This may be the traditional view that exalted beings like professors at the University of Chicago Law School take of their students but it is not much of a credo in a service industry. Self-defeating too, because demand for cabin attendants on cargo flights is not robust.

On British Airways the crew invites passengers to help themselves to snacks and drinks in the galleys. On the American jaunt across the Atlantic, attendants angrily ejected the Editor from theirs and one of them sternly instructed passengers not to stand outside the toilets. It apparently is not airline policy either to sell beer except during a designated cabin run or to allow passengers to relieve themselves of it.

american-airlines-new-logo-livery.jpg  

The aircraft itself, a 747, shared multiple characteristics with the San Francisco 767. It was shabby and dirty, dirtier than the 767. Seatback pouches contained empty wrappers, dirty napkins and scraps of food. Even the inflight magazines (forget about requesting a newspaper or noncompany periodical) were grubby, sporting torn and missing pages.

Unlike the domestic flight, this one did carry an entertainment system with a screen for each seat. Unfortunately a number of them, including the Editor’s, did not work. The aircraft carried neither equipment for repairs nor spares; either that or the cabin crew declined to make an effort to remedy the fault.

No menus on this flight and no mention of Samuelsson’s cultural or artistic genius either. The airline does not extract payment to dine on international routes and therefore dispenses with such fripperies. The beer selection was bad and the food itself worse, but that is a tired trope of weary travelers and need not trouble us now.

A Fenway for American Airlines, not so long ago a star of the airline industry but now reduced to the stature of decrepit wallflower.


***


A note on the “Adelaide” sandwiches and Scotch Woodcock chronicled by Lady Clark of Tillypronie, featuring some sleuthing and a good natured lament.

This comprehensive cookbook containing literally thousands of Edwardian recipes, many of them intriguing, was assembled from the Lady’s notes after her death. There were a lot of them, enough to fill sixteen notebooks compiled during a period of fifty six years. Her effort is all the more impressive, even unlikely, because Lady Clark herself did not cook.

Lord Clark commissioned one Catherine Frere to construct the cookbook and she was a terrible choice. It took her twelve years to complete an assignment that she executed with incompetence. Many recipes lack stated quantities or proportions for some or all ingredients; others are not in fact recipes at all. The layout of the book defies comprehension.

There is no table of contents. Judging from the arrangement of the recipes and index she must have been a sadistic obscurantist.

Sauces get split among chapters arbitrarily, if alphabetically enough, from fish through meat, poultry and vegetables, but then follow ‘Melted Butters and Butter Sauces’ at the tail, which makes these most ubiquitous sauces of the time the most difficult to find.

Despite the presence in the chatelaine’s Cookery Book of any number of sandwiches, you will find no index entry for them. This evil whimsy continues in the text itself. Once you stumble upon “Chicken ‘Adelaide’ Sandwiches” in the chapter on Poultry you will encounter a footnote explaining that a “different recipe” (for anchovy), also called “Adelaide Sandwiches,” is under “Fish.”

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That sounds fair enough, but when you flip the pages back to Fish you notice first, in the proverbial fine print, that the chapter excludes fish puddings, pies, sauces and soups but, apparently, not sandwiches. Nor, apparently, fish sauces after all, at least not all of them, for on the second page of the chapter sits a recipe for “Cod and Oyster Sauce.”

After the welcome if unheralded and inaccurate warning you will find with some relief that “Adelaide Sandwiches” does indeed appear, and first. Your hopes, however, immediately are placed on hold: The only text reads “ See Anchovy Sandwiches, No. 2.”

Off you go and there, at No. 2, resides the subtitle “Adelaide Sandwiches,” and there you will find a culinary construct more Baroque than Edwardian. You need to ‘wipe, bone, and pound’ anchovies with “½ spoonful” of “half-glaze,” which will have entailed a lot of work for a very little liquid, grate tongue and Parmesan, resort to a pastry cutter, fry tiny rounds of bread and wrestle with a hand-held salamander. Not a Lady’s work but then the staff at Tillypronie was a big one and boasted several cooks.

The two Adelaides have not a thing in common except for tongue, and it is only a second choice instead of ham for the chicken. That variation originates with a Mrs. Hulse from Orchard Leigh, not Adelaide, while the fishy version has no pedigree. The term cannot refer to technique, because the two recipes do not share one either.

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Your eye necessarily wanders in search of less arduous enterprise than the Adelaides, down the page perhaps to “Anchovy Toast, or ‘ Scotch Woodcock ,’” one of the most classic of the British savories and a dish that deserves revival. This one looks a lot more feasible, at least at first glance. Here it is:

“Make some good buttered toast thick and soft, having carefully cut off all crust. Clean and bone and pound the anchovies, and spread them over the toast. Pile the toast, cut into squares, 3 layers, on a dish, and pour over it warm custard made of 3 eggs and a little heated cream and seasoning…. Of course this quantity is for a small dinner.”

Small indeed; other than the eggs, Frere provides no quantities of anything.

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The previous entry follows suit. “ Caviar is good on rounds of toast for breakfast.” Perhaps so, but only if you are not among the ninety-nine.

These are no cherry pickings. The recipes for caviar and for cod and oyster sauce are bracketed by the following revelations, forward:

Bass’, for Bass Pie, see Cornish Fish Pie under Fish Pies and Puddings.

Bombay Ducks,’ see Curries; also Note, end of Fish Recipes.”

And aft:

Cod Kedgeree’. See Kedgerees.

‘Cod Rechauffe. See Fish Re – dressed.” (typefaces, boldface and spacing as they appear in the original)

If we wander over to the Curries, all we find under ‘Bombay duck’ is the instruction to buy “the prepared kind sold at Army and Navy Stores. Westminster,” unhelpful as that may be to, say, a resident of Aberdeen. ‘Kedgerees,’ however, appears neither in Curries nor as an alphabetical index entry, but rather back in ‘Fish’ even though its  origin is India and primary constituent rice.

Despite or because of all this perversity, Clarissa Dickson Wright, an unpleasant recipient of her own Fenway, claims that this was “Elizabeth David’s favourite cookery book.” David herself identified Hilda Leyel’s Gentle Art of Cookery instead, but we should have no doubt that David would have approved the impracticality and lack of regard for her readers that Frere displays.

This is doubly dispiriting because Lady Clark’s own voice sings. For a recipe requiring superheated water it is necessary to “have the kettle not simply boiling, but rattling its lid.” (emphasis in original) This kind of imagery is both endearing and didactic. Her use of italics itself is deft; the instruction to start a sauce by mixing the flour “with very little cold water, lest it should be lumpy,” could not be bettered.

If you get to ‘melted butter,’ that great misnomer, you will get six. “ No. 2. English” may be best and offers a timely hint. The opening gambit of boiled water and flour should be executed “as thick as gruel” before adding the butter to melt in proportion of one pint ‘gruel’ to 6 ounces of butter; another salutary imagist instruction, this one for a sauce otherwise prone to oiling.

On balance, there is much to like that is tough to find and much to loathe in Frere’s presentation of Lady Clark’s notations. For that the compiler has earned a posthumous Fenway.

 

 

***

Bon Appétit climbs our Wall of Shame and publishes some good recipes in the process.

1. The English assimilate; we grind an axe.

According to the Better Homes and Gardens Heritage Cook Book (2d ed. New York 1976), the English have been called America’s ‘invisible immigrants’ “because they came here speaking English (although not ‘American’), have many similar traditions, and usually have had little difficulty making the transition from British subject to American citizen.” ( Heritage 222)

Whether or not that is the case, British cuisine has become America’s invisible food. After dominating American foodways for over two centuries, the Britishbon-appetit-cover.jpg culinary tradition now is unknown and unremarked by most Americans. In its April 2012 issue, Bon Appétit does its best to perpetuate the condition. The issue includes an article on “Easter Sunday” that features recipes from Canal House, a catering operation in the wealthy enclave of Lambertville, New Jersey, run by two former food stylists.

Canal House has reaped a considerable amount of favorable publicity, demonstrating the copycat nature of many journalists more than their analytical skills. Less charitable commentators might also note that all this coverage of industry stylists takes the contemporary obsession with appearance and connections over substance and skill to new heights. While it is fair to note that the partners at Canal House have published some workmanlike if mostly workaday recipes in, it must be said, a stylish if standard format, all the fawning does seem a little undeserved.

 

2. The stylists in the closet…

What are the media darlings doing, at least according to Bon Appétit , for Easter? They are entertaining guests. One of them, “Jeremy Lee, the chef at London’s Quo Vadis, has taken the red-eye flight just to be here for lunch.” We are not told why, or what we should make of the reference to the restaurant, a celebrity haunt that has struggled in recent years to find an identity.

This lack of focus is both irritating and typical of the article, which might have been written for the stylists by their publicist. It has lots of photographs and two pages of recipes but little text, and what does could be indicted for adjective abuse. We do get a remarkable slew of tired bromides given the limited word count: “Serve good food and good drink to good company;” “wine and food turn strangers into minglers;” and other driveling clichés too embarrassing to reproduce. All of them of course come presented as epochal insight. And no, skeptical reader, the piece is not intended as parody.

The reference to London does hint at the nature of the recipes, although Bon Appétit fails to pick up the thread. Canal House strives for fashion despite its insistence on simplicity, so an otherwise exemplary potted crab gets an unnecessary dose of Meyer lemon, one of those former flavors of the month, and some intrusive harissa, another veteran centerfold. They serve watercress soup, ham encased in toasty breadcrumbs and sauced with Madeira, greens in a horseradish dressing. There are two cakes, a ginger one for baking in a pudding bowl, the other made with marmalade and orange peel.

 

3… cooking English food.

Neither Bon Appétit nor Canal House itself identifies the provenance of any dish; all of them are recognizably English notwithstanding the random fripperies. Nobody, for example, other than British people cook with a pudding basin. Why not give some credit where it ought to go? Do the purveyors of fantasy perfection at both ventures fear becoming figures of fun for featuring English food?

It is past time to come out of the closet.


Wall of Shame special bonus item: Ruth Reichl resorts to unfortunate phrasing in Saveur.

We previously have remarked that American writers tend to bungle their forays into British foodways. Ruth Reichl provides an example hot from the press.

Saveur calls its April 2012 offering the “Las Vegas Issue.” That is unfortunate enough in itself, but a number of curious propositions unrelated to the artificial city also lurk within the issue. One of them appears in the profile by Reichl of Amber Unicorn Books, a Las Vegas store that includes a selection of cookbooks. The profile itself covers two pages but after subtracting the photograph and blank space, the actual copy describing the shop covers just an eighth of that; not much literary bang for the buck.

 Las Vegas Show Girls
We’re here for the books.

Despite the scanty substance, Reichl has managed to blow her coverage from the outset. She opens the profile by confiding that

“The last thing I expected to find in Las Vegas was a phrase of apples. Well, actually, the last thing I expected to find in Las Vegas was a store that had a book that had a recipe for a phrase of apples, a medieval English dessert that resembles a fruit pancake.”

Reichl does not identify the book, which may be just as well from her point of view if not her readers’, because it is most unlikely that she found any recipe for ‘phrase’ in it.

The dish itself may be described as a sort of hybrid omelet cake or perhaps a fried batter pudding. Whatever terms we use to describe the thing, it is no ‘phrase.’ The preparation has been spelled variously through the ages--it does predate the advent of standardized English--but never like that. It appears most often as fraize, fraze or froise, and sometimes as frasye or frausy.

Despite Reichl’s description, the fraize is not limited to sweet renditions; despite her implication, it is not limited to apples either. Fraizes can be savory as well as sweet; bacon appears as an ingredient more frequently than anything else in the random recipes the Editor has found. That may be a representative sample; in Alan Davidson’s glossary to the Prospect Books facsimile edition of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, he defines ‘fraze’ as “[a] word spelled in many ways by various authors, e. g. fraize and froise. It means a kind of pancake or omelette, often containing slices of bacon.”

The fraize probably does date to the middle ages, as Reichl asserts, but enjoyed a longer run than she implies. In the entry for the term, spelt ‘froise,’ from The Food of the Western World (London 1976) , Theodora FitzGibbon includes reference to one from 1575 “quoted as being a pancake with bacon on it.”

Lizzie Boyd goes back much further. She considers the technique a relative of Yorkshire Pudding and Toad in the Hole. All three dishes may originally have been cooked in the dripping pan kept under roasting meat, which originally served double duty “for frying small pieces of food.” She surmises in British Food (Woodstock, NY 1979) that

“[a]t some point it must have been discovered that the result was greatly improved if the food was coated in batter before frying to give a crisp finish. This method of cooking, mentioned in fifteenth century manuscripts, was sometimes described as a ‘froise’ or ‘fraise’ from which we get Bacon Froise.” (Boyd 34)

The practice may explain the origin of the term. According to FitzGibbon, “[i]t is thought to be onomatopoeic, and to represent the sound the food makes when dropped into deep fat.”

Both Richard Bradley, in 1736, and Mrs. Glasse in 1747, printed recipes for fraises. She equates them with fritters. Her Art of Cookery includes two recipes, using either almonds or apples, and gave Davidson his spelling of ‘frazes.’

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At the tavern: We’ll take the fraize.

The London Art of Cookery was ostensibly written in 1783 by John Farley, proprietor of the celebrated London Tavern. Farley’s tavern was so famous that tourists travelled from the continent to London for the principal purpose of dining there. In fact the book was ghosted to trade on that fame, just like the cookbooks marketed under the authorship of celebrity chefs today. The marketing strategy for the book succeeded; it became a bestseller and ran through multiple printings for decades. The 1807 edition includes an ‘almond fraze.’

Maria Eliza Rundell published the first edition of A New System of Domestic Cookery during 1806; expanded editions remained in print as late as 1880 and include her original recipe for a bacon fraize. It is decidedly savory:

“Cut streaked bacon in thin slices an inch long, make a batter of a pint of milk, three eggs, and a large spoonful of flour, add salt and pepper; put a piece of fresh dripping in the pan, and when hot pour half the batter, and on it strew the bacon, then the remainder of the batter, let it do gently; and be careful in the turning, that the bacon do not come to the pan [sic].”

This is a good recipe, as serviceable today as it was in the early nineteenth century.

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Thanks for the fraize.

The entry for “fraize” in Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford 1999) states unequivocally that “[f]raises survived into the 20 th century.” Boyd’s use of the present tense might imply that the dish survived far into the century, but probably not. During 1973 Michael Smith had written in Fine English Cookery (London):

“The fraze has completely disappeared from our repertoire, for what reason I cannot imagine, as this omelet-cum-pancake is a very tasty first course or a main course for lunch or high tea.” (Smith 94)

His recipe from Fine English Cookery expands on the traditional savory ingredients by combining asparagus and tomato with the customary bacon. We admire Smith’s work but found Mrs. Rundell’s recipe superior.

None of the sources cited refer to Reichl’s usage. So a fraize is a fraze but not a phrase, was not merely medieval and need not be dessert. How did Reichl stumble? Perhaps she never really saw the book that she does not identify; somebody might have told her about it. Maybe she takes bad notes, or dictated her Saveur profile of the Amber Unicorn over the telephone to a functionary at the magazine. Spellcheck might have intervened. Whatever the explanation, her phrasing is unfortunate and deserves a Fenway Award.

***

Reichl indicates to their credit that the owners of the Amber Unicorn recommend the purchase of Vincent and Mary Price’s Treasury of Great Recipes from 1965. It was unusual for an American cookbook of its time to take a respectful stance on British food, and the Prices devote a chapter to the subject, as we explain in the Appreciation of Vincent Price from the October 2010 and 2011 Numbers of britishfoodinamerica. Then again the Amber Unicorn recommends the irritating abridged translation of Dumas on Food. It omits many of the Editor’s favorite passages.


OSCAR season Wall of Fame award: And the Fenway goes to… Slow Food Dublin.

While surfing the net for the lore of Dublin coddle, the Editor found a site with the promising tag of “Slow Food Dublin.” Slow food is a good thing, Dublin is a good city and it now offers diners much choice of good food. All good, we ought to think, but we would be mistaken.

If the treatment of coddle in “Dishes named for Dublin” is representative, it would appear that the agenda of ‘Slow Food’ tilts to the political rather than culinary. This slant is all the more surprising because the article dates from 2010, a post-Troubles time, but then resentment knows no reason, as the reflexive hatred of an African-American president within certain benighted circles sadly shows.

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Listeners need not have the aural capacity for hearing a dog whistle to discern the drumbeat of Slow Food Dublin in its disparate treatment of Theodora FitzGibbon and Monica Sheridan.

FitzGibbon is introduced as a “Thrice-wed” woman “who cooked with” a “hedonist,” not the first criteria that come to mind on the subject of food unless you are a Medieval cleric, but no matter. She also, according to Slow Food, “snootily dismisses” Dublin coddle with “class-conscious disapproval” in “a single paragraph.” The proffer of evidence on this indictment is brief. It is the entry on Dublin coddle from FitzGibbon’s Food of the Western World :

“A traditional Irish dish which used to be eaten on Saturday night in Dublin after the pubs closed. It consists of sliced onions, sliced potatoes, thick rashers of bacon and sausages put in a saucepan in layers. It is well seasoned and water to a depth of water of the saucepan is added; it is covered and cooked slowly for 1-2 hours.”

The Editor makes no claim to genius but cannot find a trace of anything but description; no patronizing, no snobbery, no ‘dismissal.’ She does, however find some rather egregious typographical errors in the Slow Food citation. In fact FitzGibbon wrote that “water to the depth of ¼ of the saucepan is added,” not the inane “water to a depth of water of the saucepan,” and cooks her coddle for 1½ to 2 hours.

Furthermore, The Food of the Western World is, as Slow Food would know if it consulted the subtitle of the book, an encyclopedia, not a collection of essays or recipes, and neither the length nor the factual content of the entry for coddle is atypical. Here, for example, is the one defining “douglas:”

“French beef consommé garnished with slices of cooked sweetbreads, artichoke bottoms, and asparagus tips.”

If The Food of the Western World indicates that FitzGibbon disdained coddle then she must have felt genocidal about douglas; its entry runs to fourteen words compared with sixty-three for the Irish dish.

Slow Food discusses a Douglas too, in this case Norman; he is identified as “the hedonist” who “cooked with” FitzGibbon “on the Isle of Capri.” That was in 1948 and makes for an interesting footnote because Elizabeth David had spent time on Capri with Norman Douglas before the war. He and David were lifelong friends despite their considerable difference in age, and she never really got over his death.

On the subject of relationships, FitzGibbon married twice, not three times, first during the Second World War to Constantine FitzGibbon, an American army officer, and then later in life to the filmmaker George Morrison. (“Women of history”) But hey, divorce is divorce, right?

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Coddle, however, is not coddle the way that Sheridan would have us cook it. Her recipe specifies a miserly pound of sausage and even omits the essential potato. Undeterred, Slow Food Dublin proclaims that coddle is “dealt with briskly and comprehensively (and with none of the class-conscious disapproval of Theodora) by Monica Sheridan in her 1965 Irish Cookbook.”

Sheridan on coddle, as quoted with the usual errors by Slow Food:

“This is a dish that is eaten by families who have lived for generations in Dublin and who look upon the city as their local village. Sean O’Casey ate Dublin Coddle. Dean Swift ate it in the deasnery [sic] of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the 18 th century. I must say that I could live without Dublin Coddle, but if I thought it could make me write like Swift I would be quite prepared to lump it and like it. It is eaten especially on Saturday night when the men come home from the pubs.”

So Sheridan, putative champion of the Dublin workingman, derides his favorite dish. And aside from her speculation about O’Casey and Swift and ‘villagers’ (DeValera dinosaurs consider anything rural, however symbolic, superior to the city within the Pale), the background facts presented here are no different from the ones in The Food of the Western World.

The writing style is another matter; maybe a dose of coddle might have helped. As it is, the introduction to the dish combined with her rump of a recipe demonstrates that Sheridan is neither brisk nor comprehensive but rather awkward and incomplete.

FitzGibbon visited coddle at least three different times in print, apparently unbeknownst to Slow Food Dublin. In contrast to Sheridan, she provides a good authentic recipe, in Irish Traditional Food , and has nothing bad to say about it: “Combining two of the earliest Irish foods, this has been a favourite dish since the eighteenth century.” ( Irish Traditional Food 118)

In the introduction to her recipe from A Taste of Ireland , FitzGibbon further explains that bacon and sausage are “two foods known since the earliest Irish literature…. Leeks and oatmeal were no doubt used in the earliest form of Coddle, but, since the eighteenth century, potatoes and onion have supplanted them.” She also recommends serving the dish with soda bread and stout, something she would not bother to do if she considered it a nonstarter. ( Taste of Ireland 21)

Slow Food Dublin adds that coddle “is rarely encountered, even in the poorest Dublin homes, many will contend because it provides an all-too-vivid reminder of the bleak past when times were hard and diets meager.” This feeble stab at the politics of resentment and self-pity misses the point that coddle is good food. It also appears to be wrong.

When Darina Allen went in search of Dublin coddle for The Complete Book of Irish Country Cooking , she had no trouble finding it throughout the city, not least wherever taxis ply their trade:

“Every time I went to Dublin I would sound out a taxi driver about coddle. Most of them grew instantly nostalgic. Some talked of sneaking home to ‘the Mammy’s’ for a feed of coddle, but, interestingly, just as many talked about ‘the wife’ or ‘herself’ making it regularly. So there’s no question that coddle is alive and well and still being made on a regular basis in Dublin.” (Allen 120)

Anecdotal evidence from the United States reinforces Allen’s conclusion. The Editor knows a number of Dubliners abroad who relish coddle including Gerry Farrelly, a proprietor of the Fig Tree in Hoboken, New Jersey. He recalls that his mother always thickened her coddle with cornstarch; other innovators throw some white pudding into the pot to similar effect. Either way coddle keeps apace with other dishes, not least in the Editor’s kitchen, where it ranks among the most requested dinners that she cooks.

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As an added bonus, the author of Slow Food Dublin has told readers a cautionary tale in printing an excellent example of the run-on sentence. This was not intended to be ironic:

“When Arthur Guinness brewed his first pints of porter at St. James’s Gate in 1759 and Saturday night revelers sought gastronomic comfort in a nutritious and substantial repast after a bellyful of the other at their local tavern, the coddle their patient wives might have concocted would not have been filled with flaccid grey sausages made from mechanically recovered remnants of fat and gristle mixed with a gansy-load of cereal to bulk it out and absorb all that fat but with meat and little else but meat; and the bacon in their coddle would more likely have been a nubbly dry-cured shoulder than a handful of slimy, paper-thin, tasteless slices that had been pumped full of water and chemicals.”

Perhaps, if we discount the serial speculation, this would be good to know except that once again the facts interfere with the presentation at Slow Food Dublin. While a brewery did open at St. James’s Gate in 1759, Guinness did not begin brewing porter there until 1778. Before then Guinness brewed English style bitter ales, but the introduction of “extra stout porter,” as it initially was called, proved so popular that by 1799 the brewer had abandoned ale altogether. (“Guinness 250”)

So cook some coddle, kick back, raise a glass of stout to Theodora FitzGibbon and have a laugh at the expense of Slow Food Dublin.

The britishfoodinamerica recipe for Dublin coddle appears in the practical .

 

Sources:

Hannah Acton, “How bad is Guinness 250?” the critical , www.britishfoodinamerica.com (October 2009)

Darina Allen, The Complete Book of Irish Country Cooking (New York 1996)

Anon., “Women of History,” entry for “Fitzgibbon, Theodora” at www.abitofhistory.net

Theodora FitzGibbon, The Food of the Western World (London 1976)

Irish Traditional Food (New York 1983)

A Taste of Ireland (London 1968)

***

The Diner’s Dictionary

climbs our Wall of Shame, and the Editor discusses the distinction between ale and beer along with musings on gumbo, rumbledethumps and other favorite foods.

1. Ale may sometimes be beer but beer is not ale.

During the course of research on a Canadian subject, the Editor consulted The Diner’s Dictionary by John Ayto. (Oxford 1993) As is all too often the case, she became distracted from the task at hand and began browsing through the Dictionary. Inevitably the page turned to ‘ale’ and its definition was perplexing. Actually its definition is idiotic.

The reference book states that “this term gradually died out” after the fifteenth century; ‘ale’ became the poor etymological relation to ‘beer’ and survives only “as a sort of folksy-cum-nostalgic synonym for beer .” There follows some tortured discussion of roasted or unroasted malt, and the archaic observation that beer once had hops while ale did not. (Ayto 3; emphasis in original)

‘Ale’ never is a synonym for ‘beer,’ although in Britain, but not the United States, beer may be a synonym for ale. The British usage of beer is all-encompassing, a general catchall for the full range of fermented malts from lagers and Pilseners through mild, pale and bitter ales, India pale ales, porters and stouts. A glance at any number of labels in any number of nations would have confirmed for Mr. Ayto that ‘ale’ remains a term in broad and current circulation.

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There is nothing in the least nostalgic or elegiac about it. Nobody anywhere, for example, ever refers to ‘India pale beer .’ Nor is Porter, whose history Ayto recounts with competence, a beer in strictest terms. It too is ale.

In a more fundamental way, nothing that Ayto writes has anything to do with the difference between ale and beer. In fact the distinction, lost to the clueless editor of The Diner’s Dictionary , turns on yeast. You cannot brew either ale or beer without it: Yeast facilitates fermentation. The strains used to make ale are top fermenting, that is, they float to the surface to do their work, with sometimes unintended consequences.

Top fermenting yeasts will breed with naturally occurring airborne colleagues to add complex notes to the ale. It is its great strength for the drinker (beguiling brisk flavor) and a problem for the brewer (the unpredictability of wild yeast makes consistency a bugbear). Unlike beer or kegged and most bottled ales, ale in cask continues to condition, requires careful keeping and spoils quickly once it has matured.

Ales predate beers by some centuries. It was not until someone in central Europe, either in Bohemia or one of the states that would later unite to become Germany, identified bottom fermenting strains of yeast that beer in the American usage was born.

Bottom fermenting yeasts do what their description implies, they sink. That isolates them from wild yeasts, making it easier to produce consistent batches, but they take a lot longer to work and impart not only a predictable, but also a less interesting tone to the… beer.

2. The mystery of sago solved.

Once burnt, twice wary, so the Editor succumbed to further distraction and started to test other definitions. Some of them, she must in fairness note, sound sound. Ayto understands haggis and its roots athwart the border; it once was as English as it now is Scots, and he gets it.

‘Sago,’ which features in oodles of late nineteenth and then twentieth century British, but not American, cookbooks, has mystified the Editor for ages. What is it? Ayto answers that sago “is a powdered starch obtained from the pith of a palm tree ( genus Metroxylon ) which [sic] grows in India and Southeast Asia.”

It would seem that Americans ignorant of sago have been a lucky lot because, according to Ayto, in the west “its main culinary use has been in the making of insipid and glutinous milk puddings whose sufferers must often have wished that more of the annual production of sago were put to its other use, as a textile stiffener.” (Ayto 302) Apparently the English have been eating what an American calls ‘sizing,’ a dreadful enough commodity in its intended alternative use that is guaranteed to cause scratches, hives and heartache unless new clothing gets a preliminary wash to wipe it away. Ayto also makes relevant reference to Drake and Hakluyt at sea, and to Glasse and Raffald in the kitchen, along with an aside that the word itself arises direct from the Malay sagu . It would be churlish not to admire narrative of this caliber.

3. Pone poorly placed, gumbo bungled and additional infelicities.

Other definitions, however, inspire less confidence. Corn pone provides an example. Ayto declares that it is “cooked by either baking or frying,” although it should be fried. He also asserts that ‘pone’ “comes from a Native American term for ‘bread’; it also is related to Delaware apan , ‘baked’.”

Sometime between 1647 and 1650, however, Richard Ligon had encountered both the term for the food and learnt the means of its preparation on Barbados. It would be difficult to believe that many, if not any, Bajans had reached mainland North America at that point, or that they had had eaten corn pone there, and it is equally if not more implausible that any of them had much knowledge of the Delaware language at that point.

In Barbados before 1650, a pone was the iron griddle used to make “something akin to a pancake from cassava over an open flame.” ( see, e.g., No Peace 47n20) So a pone need not involve corn; true pones are fried, not baked; the term most likely is of Arawak derivation; and so has nothing to do with a Delaware word for ‘baked.’ We could suspend a certain amount of disbelief on Ayto’s discussion of ‘corn pone,’ and give him the benefit of doubt, even if that would require a bit of a leap. 

Unfortunately for the prospects of that leap of faith, another entry--this one within the scope of the Editor’s knowledge--provides an example of unmistakable trouble; gumbo. The Diner’s Dictionary starts its definition of gumbo by stating that it “is a thick soup--or thin stew, depending on your point of view--of the southern states of the USA;” so far, so proverbially good, or perhaps not. (Ayto 156) While some gumbos are thickened with either file or okra, but by tradition never both, many are not. Paul Prudhomme, who should know, explains that different roux will produce differences in the texture of a gumbo and it is not always thick.

Roux rather than okra is the foundation of any gumbo. Ayto, however, does not appear to know that. His entry for ‘roux’ defines it as “simply a blend of equal amounts of flour and butter” of “essentially two sorts;” white and the relatively uncommon light brown. While roux will affect the texture of a soup or stew, it will not necessarily thicken it.

In Louisiana, roux are primarily flavoring rather than thickening agents, and run a spectrum from the little used white roux all the way to nearly black. The primary roux of gumbo are dark red-brown and black; as Prudhomme notes, “the darkest roux result in the thinnest, best-tasting gumbos of all.” (Prudhomme 27)

Roux_four_ways.jpg

The darker the roux, the more flavor it imparts to foods and the less capacity it has to thicken liquids; as flour caramelizes, its molecular structure changes so that it no longer absorbs liquid. Also unbeknownst to Ayto, Louisiana roux are not made primarily or even typically with butter. Fats with the higher temperatures necessary to withstand high heat for darkening the roux without scorching and destroying it are considerably more useful; fats like canola or corn oil, lard or bacon rendering.

Ayto is no better with ‘jambalaya,’ which does not descend ‘from Provencal’ usage or practice, and he ignores altogether the pungent pink remoulade of Louisiana that bears scant resemblance to the white French sauce that he does describe.

Readers might forgive The Diner’s Dictionary for its ignorance of one cuisine, but its treatment of Louisiana is not anomalous. Brownies do not always include nuts and Ayto’s chowder bowl is less than half full, for while he does mention the French leg of its origin myth (‘chaudiere’) he overlooks both the Old English (‘jowter’) and geographical rather than nation theories, which is too bad. As John Thorne explains in Serious Pig , place provides the likeliest source: “Chowder is the natural child begotten in the great convergence of fishermen off the North American coast,” an “inevitable outcome of a sea cook’s confrontation with salt pork, ship’s biscuit, and a freshly caught cod.” (Thorne 158, 159)

A Mulligan is indeed an American term for “stew composed of any spare vegetables and pieces of meat that happen to be to hand” but then a recipe he mentions “calls for canned Willie” and what is that? Ayto does not say but according to the Oxford Dictionary of American Slang it was an army term for corned beef or hash from before the First World War.

corned_beef.jpg

Perhaps Ayto is merely Eurocentric and ought not to have ventured across the sea. Perhaps not; the Scottish term for a dish of buttered mashed potato, onion and cabbage topped with molten cheese, ‘rumbledethumps’ is indeed onomatopoeic, but probably not because of “the effect of the dish on the digestion.” Instead, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, the term is a union of ‘rumble’ and ‘thump.’ ‘Rumble’ is archaic Scots usage for mashing or scrambling a food and thump is self-explanatory.

All of this started with Canada, where it unfortunately cannot end. Ayto does not care about its cuisine so The Diner’s Dictionary includes no entry for chaud or tchaud, cipaille, fricot, poutine or tourtiere, let alone The Lumby. You will need to consult britishfoodinamerica for any of that. In more general terms, save your money for the Oxford Companion to Food , Theodora FitzGibbon’s’s excellent Food of the Western World or Alexander the Great’s Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine.

Sources:

John Ayto, The Diner’s Dictionary (Oxford 1993)

Paul Prudhomme, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen (New York 1984)

John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne, Serious Pig (New York 1996)  

***

January bonus feature:
special Wall of Shame ‘honorable mention’ awards.

An unwelcome surprise, or , a desired recipe goes missing.

The Cook's Oracle

Don’t buy this book

At a date undisclosed on the book itself, a company called Cuisinarts has published an attractive facsimile of Apicius Redidivus, or, The Cook’s Oracle by Dr. William Kitchiner . The cookbook first was published in London during 1817; the facsimile, which does not indicate when it appeared, is of the 1831 edition. It, or at least the original version, is a superb book that features a lot of good, beautifully written recipes that reflect a subversive sense of humor. Both book and author deserve lengthier explication from britishfoodinamerica, and will get it, but meanwhile we should warn readers not to buy the Culinarts edition. Without purpose or warning, the obscure publishers have abridged the original, as the Editor would have known had she cracked its spine prior to purchase. Granted the error arose out of the Editor’s foolish contributory negligence, but this publishing sleight of hand is more than enough to earn Cuisinarts an ‘honorable mention’ inscription hard by the imaginary location of our Wall of Shame.

Rowley Leigh mails it in.

It has not been possible to avoid observing from time to time the infelicities that mar some of the recipes that Rowley Leigh publishes in the Financial Times . It is not that he is a bad chef or person; in fact he is a great chef and winning prose stylist. It is just that his FT recipes do not always work and we cannot shake the suspicion that he sometimes lacks the time or enthusiasm that he should devote to his column.

Pile of Cabbages One of his best concepts is a cabbage cake that appeared under the headline “Pleasures of eking out” in his Weekend FT column of 8-9 November 2009. Readers may question the decision of britishfoodinamerica to exhume the subject from our Archive if not the crypt, but patience is necessary in many things.

The style of the recipe in question embodied a certain flamboyance verging on excess, but was more amusing and diverting than discomfiting. The cake in question consists of cabbage, sausage, porcini mushrooms and not much more. With those concurrent lodestones the cake ought to be good, and is even better than that, one of our favorite cold weather comfort foods, so we were pleased to find ‘another’ recipe for cabbage cake featured a year later in Mr. Leigh’s column of 13-14 November 2010, “Savoy but Ritzy” (granted, pretty clever). It is for ‘cabbage cake with mozzarella and chestnuts.’ It also is the same, in large part verbatim, recipe as last year’s with the substitution of the mozzarella, chestnuts and some canned tomatoes for the sausage and porcini.

This may not be the worst sin against originality; Darina Allen, no slouch in the kitchen either, has published the nearly identical book under some two dozen titles, but it is noteworthy in the least to purchasers of a book or lulled by the promise of timeliness into thinking that we get something new.

In the case of Mr. Leigh’s cabbage cakes they do not. The preamble and first three (of six) paragraphs in the two recipes are identical down to the florid phrase “Overlapping bountifully,” which of course was the giveaway. The remaining paragraphs differ only in the names of ingredients. Coincidentally enough, at some point last week the Editor decided to consult Mr. Leigh’s cookbook from 2000, No Place Like Home (London: Also reprinted in paperback 2006) about an unrelated matter. It is organized seasonally and the cold weather passages beckoned. The reader will know what was found. It was the bounteous cabbage cake, described in identical terms right down to the ‘bounteous,’ but with mozzarella and ceps rather than chestnuts, a most minor adjustment that brings us back to the 2009 iteration. As Ian Fleming was wont to observe, once is happenstance, twice coincidence and three times is enemy action. Honorable mention therefore goes to Rowley Leigh during this season of light.

Rowley Leigh continues his assault on practicality.

In an earlier Pizza Delivery, britishfoodinamerica has noted Mr. Leigh’s propensity for publishing recipes that are uncongenial to the home cook. We do not mean to pile on here, and if at this writing he is suffering with an illness that requires hospitalization, as a member of his staff at the estimable Café Anglaise has confided to us, then everyone at bfia fervently wishes him the speediest recovery.

Mushroom Foraging Nonetheless we do read the Weekend FT and Mr. Leigh writes a weekly column there, and back on 2-3 October it was headlined “An ideal mix of surf and earth.” Ideal it is, in terms of one definition of the word, that, ‘unattainable,’ at least for most of us. The recipe is for “Scallops and ceps” and its title is accurate; not much more goes into the dish. The combination of scallops and mushrooms is deservedly iconic across most cuisines, but unfortunately this also is typical of Leigh’s work for the FT. We do not learn much from a simple sauté and ought easily to come up with the concept ourselves, so the column holds little interest. The three big sea scallops specified per person will not come cheap, and the pound of porcini to transform them will set you back anywhere from $37 to $60 this season.

It would be cheaper to go out, almost anywhere (to Leigh’s restaurant off Queensway in London, among many more), although to his credit Leigh does note that “[o]ther wild mushrooms--chanterelles, for example--would do almost as well.” Then again we have not noticed bargains in the world of chanterelle lately.

Paula Deen, never liable to be accused of intellectual rigor, takes the Politically Correct path with a glib pronouncement.

Many legitimate grounds exist for decrying the celebrity of the braying and bombastic Paula Deen, but one of her typically confident recent pronouncements requires a special commendation. That, however, is to get ahead of ourselves in a manner that would crush the intended narrative if allowed to continue.

According to The Oxford Companion to Food , “[i]n medieval Europe bacon and ham were always smoked as part of the preservation process needed to make them last through the winter.” ( Companion 729) The Companion goes on to explain that “[b]acon, in the modern sense, is peculiarly a product of the British Isles, or is produced abroad to British methods…. ” ( Companion 47)

Hanging Ham European references to curing meat with salt brines and dry rubs appear even earlier than descriptions of preserving them with smoke, and go back as far as the proverbial printed word itself.

Enter Paula Deen in an advertisement for the Smithfield ham people that is broadcast on the American ‘FoodTV’ channel during the holiday season. Deen proclaims that “Smithfield is the birthplace of bacon” because “it was here” that Native Americans taught “the colonists” how to “smoke and cure their own meats.” Presumably these unskilled husbandmen previously had subsisted during the winter on either tree bark or Chinese takeout. It is not possible to overlook Deen’s imbecilic confidence in her own glib anachronism, which of course has earned her a considerable folksy fortune. Perhaps she and Sarah Palin could form a neo-Know Nothing presidential ticket.

Back in the world of letters, however, the Oxford Companion makes not a hint of reference to Native Americans in tracing the origin and development of smoked bacon or cured meat because no authority hints at the connection.

Source.

Alan Davidson (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford 1999)

Televised travesty, an ongoing trial of the times (as further demonstrated by the previous notation on Paula Deen).

During one of its theatrical cooking competitions broadcast on 21 November, “Iron Chef America” referred to a quintessentially British fruit. Alton Brown, the ‘host’ of the FoodTV cable channel program, saw some berries in one of the competitor’s mixing bowls and identified them as gooseberries. They were not.

Gooseberries are green and fuzzy; they have a stemmed top and tough tail that require removal to make them edible. The berries that Brown saw were a waxy mustard gold in texture and color, and sported neither top nor tail. They were the substance marketed in the United States variously as Cape gooseberries and cloudberries. The imposters are both easier to use and less versatile than the genuine article, because they do not require topping or tailing and are sweeter. We like Cape gooseberries and think they make a fine fool, whether you stew them with a drip of booze for combination with barely whipped cream and sugar to taste in the classic way or call them something else.

***

Vogue climbs our Wall of Shame, or the degradation of Jeffrey Steingarten.

11/10

Back in August Vogue magazine ran a cover story by Jeffrey Steingarten and accompanying photographic spread featuring Gwyneth Paltrow. Steingarten met with Paltrow at the London house that, he eagerly tells us, she and her husband Chris Martin bought from Kate Winslet. The resulting article ostensibly concerns an analysis of her cooking skills but in fact veers immediately into a certain amount of digression. Readers of britishfoodinamerica may justifiably wonder why we should either address celebrity (not our strength) or wait for three months to do so. The answer is plain: The Editor found the article astonishing the more she considered it and after considerable hesitation decided to discuss it with our readers.

Steingarten, Vogue’s principal food writer, is a respected curmudgeon who has demonstrated both a formidable interest in food and an acid wit. He has published two acclaimed volumes of essays and, of more impact on the celebrity circuit in this increasingly illiterate age, appears as a ‘judge’ on the “Iron Chef America” television program. Ordinarily he will not suffer fools, or anyone else for that matter, and for all these reasons would seem to be a good selection to document what passes these days for a serious culinary discussion with Mrs. Martin.

Gwyneth Paltrow Paltrow is no stranger to the cover of Vogue and in fact is among the clutch of celebrities whose image the magazine breathlessly recycles. But food? This is a woman prone to the worst kind of soulless ‘health’ regimes and sufficiently free of self-awareness to post revolting recipes on her “Goop” website, the woman who infamously traveled around Spain in the tow of several food celebrities to eat nothing but vegetables while her colleagues gorged on pork. Steingarten himself professes to love pig; on one of his “Iron Chef” appearances he declared that the best part of pork except for the skin is the shoulder, and nobody ought to dispute him, at least on this. Perhaps, in the parlance of our times, he would take Paltrow down. He has sneered down the affectations of celebrity before, notably on “Iron Chef” where he regularly has ripped into fellow judges whose culinary qualifications he, sometimes properly, finds lacking. A particularly excruciating episode featured a stream of recombinant insults spat with what looked like genuine anger (Steingarten feigns it a lot) at “Today” show factotum Natalie Morales, a looker like Paltrow if not quite in her league. Steingarten has been nothing if not reliable in this respect and, we expected, would slap Paltrow with the same treatment.

We got something different, although the Editor differs with a number of colleagues about what, precisely, we got. As an enduring aside, self-parody is a difficult medium. The celebrity autoparadist in particular must not only let the ego relinquish the wheel, but also must take reckless and relentless shots at his own persona to succeed in the enterprise. After reading, rereading and returning to Steingarten on Paltrow for reading again (despite the limited shelf life of assays in the genre) the Editor cannot divine his intent.

The intent of Vogue itself was, however, reasonably transparent. The article represents interview as fashion shoot and product promotion; Paltrow, it turns out, is writing a cookbook (‘She likes pizza! She deep fries!’). The spread covers eight pages, and the vacuous fashion photos favored en Vogue take five of them. Glamorous Gwyneth improbably gowned in her kitchen; saucy Gwyneth bottomless in her pyjama top amidst a sea of books (‘research’ for the cookbook, sexy gravitas or so they think); simpering Gwyneth looking ‘sexily’ dim in Prada: This is vintage Vogue, and even though it all sounds like a bit of farce, the magazine is nothing if not serious about itself in its devoutly shallow way.

Emu Nest Enter Steingarten, coathanger in mouth, bearing gifts (including of course an emu egg) and gawking. She is beautiful and ripped! Her jeans are torn; Steingarten finds them “pierced with more slits and slashes than any I’d ever seen…. I reasoned that the slits and slashes must have been administered intentionally and by artifice, perhaps by lasers and at a great price” and she is luminous, even prettier in person than on screen. Further fueling Steingarten, the laserjeans have slipped a few inches to bare more skin and reveal that Paltrow has “an enviably flat stomach”! And she’s thirty seven! Steingarten loses his mind. He cannot stand it, Gwyneth (for they are first name familiar and, he hopes, friends so soon) dazzles him speechless.

Hygiene is another plus; Paltrow is “a neat freak;” her kitchen is “beautiful and clean… all white and filled with enviable appliances” to the point where a cynic like the Editor might be forgiven for suspecting that its mistress does not cook there much, but that would sour the mood and anyway neither did Mrs. Beeton let alone that other culinary sex kitten Elizabeth David, in her case at least not much.
In a new iteration of food pornography, Steingarten marvels at Paltrow’s “laser sharp knives” and “how skillfully she uses them” before confiding that “[s]he is extremely adept at kneading.” At one point they share a “remarkable hour of perfection.” No telling where this would have gone but for the ‘unscripted’ arrival of her perfect little children.

Paltrow “seems to be in control of her time, scheduling every hour closely, with precise awareness of how long things take, including cooking [!],” so Steingarten “was surprised that she was willing to devote so much time to my little project,” presumably but not certainly the food part anyway. The Editor, however, lacks the charity to marvel at a celebrity’s consent to the publication of a panegyric that includes lots of free publicity for a profitmaking book project. Maybe Conde Nast itself will publish the Paltrow cookbook.

Based on a survey of the Editor’s colleagues and internet reactions to the article, Steingarten was, astonishing as this will sound, unselfconscious not to say unironic. People in the main gushed along; Gawker alone found the ‘story’ fatuous but took it at face value like everyone else. The Editor alone suspected some stab at comedy, a view repudiated by friends and colleagues as well as the broader public.

Steingarten’s foray into the hybrid zone of food/fashion only peripherally concerns itself with cooking or cuisine to focus instead on unctuous celebrity worship and, if any of it was intended to dabble in parody, the effort fails. Steingarten has too much regard for himself and for the celebrity culture that has enriched him to engage in self mockery, let alone demonstrate any self awareness, with any conviction. As a result, this self appointed avatar of good taste and serious cooking, a man who cultivates the persona of ruthless, even cruel exaction in matters culinary, has given his readers an exercise in misplaced social climbing and shameless celebrity promotion.

None of this may be uniquely English but it reflects badly on everyone trying to improve the quality of culinary writing. britishfoodinamerica therefore adds Jeffrey Steingarten to our Wall of Shame without hesitation.

The Second Fenway Award: Adam Platt and New York magazine join our Wall of Shame.

A number of publications and websites including britishfoodinamerica, in our February number, recently have reviewed Highlands , a new Scottish restaurant and bar in the West Village of Manhattan. The latest is Adam Platt, the restaurant critic at New York , whose review appears in the 19 April issue of the magazine.

Platt gives Highlands a miserly single star while implying that its prices are expensive--he cites a “prodigious (and prodigiously priced)” Scotch whisky selection (misspelled with an ‘ey’)--but taste is taste, and we note only that we disagree, rather than criticizing him on both these counts.

The review, however, includes more than enough attributes to earn New York its Fenway independent of Platt’s judgment about Highland’s food or cost. As so often is the case with British food, preconception trumps experience.

Platt assumes that Scottish, and for that matter all of British cuisine is contemptible, and his assumption imposes an intellectual barrier that he cannot breach. Thus, the chef at Highlands “does a decent job” with “the threadbare Anglo-Scottish culinary repertoire,” so “the food is better than it should be.” This compliment is backhanded indeed, as the discussion by Platt of particular dishes demonstrates.

Ma Broon's Page 188 His arch discussion of the Celtic word skink is both patronizing and irritating. Haggis is “famously gnarly;” kedgeree a “concoction;” the term faggot is sophomorically wrapped in quotation marks; cockles in shallots and Pinot Gris is “not in especially Scottish style,” presumably only because it is good, unless Platt does not know his history.

As we hope is apparent by now from the pages of britishfoodinamerica, the British culinary tradition is hardly ‘threadbare.’ During each of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more (and more varied) titles about British food appeared in print than about any other cuisine, and until the twentieth century American cooks looked predominantly to British models. Furthermore, Platt is mistaken to conflate Scottish and English food. Scotland itself has a varied and distinctive cuisine that is particularly strong in seafood, curries and savory pies. In The Oxford Companion to Food , Alan Davidson says that, “to venture an understatement,” Scotland “is not at all difficult to distinguish from England; the differences leap to the eye in many different aspects of the two cultures, including notably food and cookery. In these and other respects the people of Scotland have closer links with Scandinavia and France... than do the English.” (Davidson 705)

Page for page, Scotland may have the finest literary canon of any cuisine, and not just because the nation has produced fewer publications than its bigger neighbors within the archipelago and on the continent. As Davidson also notes,

“the same genius which resulted in a quite disproportionate number of Scots being responsible for British achievements in medicine, engineering, philosophy, and the construction and administration of the British Empire flowered in a different way to produce some of the finest... writing on food.” (Davidson 705)

Ma Broon's Cover It is not the case that this writing covers anything other than Scottish food, for Davidson cites as his examples the cookbook authors ‘Meg Dods,’ whose nineteenth century recipes and their notations cover more than five hundred pages, Marian McNeill and other keepers of the Scottish culinary flame. He also should mention the delightful and instructive ‘Maw Broon’ cookbooks from the 1930s, which purport to be scrapbooks of handwritten notations interspersed with stained and yellowed recipe clippings, and prefigure the postmodern fascination with the graphic novel. As ought to be obvious, writing that is good must produce food that is good as well.

Haggis is delicately seasoned with allspice and other things rather than ‘gnarly,’ and it is ancient tradition rather than ‘gourmet’ innovation to serve it with mashed turnip and potato. It is a butt of jokes, but anyone who tries the dish likes it, and Platt should have better things to do than recycle cliché. Kedgeree too can be a delicate dish, and resembles nothing more than a pilaf of smoked haddock and rice bound in light curried cream. The marriage of wine and shallots with seafood is prototypically Scottish; as Davidson notes, the French have influenced Scotland’s unique cuisine for centuries, and its ancient trade with France has made wine a prevalent Scottish drink and kitchen staple at least since the seventeenth century.

Platt’s contempt for British food colors his perception of the rooms at Highland. We found them elegantly spare; he describes the restaurant as a cartoonish theme park. The wry postmodern wallpaper is parodied as something from “the bridal suite of a not very grand Scottish bed-and-breakfast;” a carefully sited stag’s head is “nailed to the barroom wall;” the small staff wears tartan ties! Do not take us at our word, however: Visit Highlands and see for yourself.

Platt has achieved no mean feat in cramming so many clichés and distorting so much history into a review that runs to barely half a page. Our second Fenway goes to New York magazine.

Sources.

Hannah Acton, “A Visit to a New British Block of New York,” the critical , britishfoodinamerica.com No. 4 (February 2010)

Maw Broon’s Cookbook: The Nation’s Favourites (New Lanark, Scotland 2007)

Maw Broon’s But an’ Ben Cookbook (Dundee 2008)

Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion To Food (New York 1999)

‘Mistress Margaret Dods,’ Cook and Housewife’s Manual (Edinburgh 1829)

F. Marian McNeill, The Scots Kitchen (Edinburgh 1929)

***

Saveur number 123, October 2009

( www.saveur.com )

Saveur Magazine britishfoodinamerica honors Saveur number 123, its issue for October 2009, as the first member of our Wall of Shame. Saveur could use less filler in the form of open layout and big photographs, and more content instead, but those relatively minor flaws would not qualify the magazine for posting on The Wall. We like Saveur and probably consider it the best of the glossy food magazines (no default judgment; Gourmet never was in the running). At five bucks a copy it also is gratifyingly cheap in a field of overpriced competitors. This, however, is not a question of hurting the one you love or under-appreciating the accessible. We are not snobs at bfia.

The dual crimes against British food in Saveur 123 unfortunately leapt upon us. First, the issue has done what American publications usually do and marginalized (or vaporized) the subject. Possibly worse, the magazine simultaneously has shrouded British food in the usual sackcloth of cliché. Second, Saveur has chosen to ask a good writer to recycle a journalistic evergreen instead of mining one of her more interesting storylines.

Sheep Graphic The cover story, “WHY LAMB RULES,” is billed by the magazine editors as “the ultimate guide to the other red meat” in which “we unlock the secrets and illuminate the subtleties of this fascinating ingredient, sharing the experiences of cooks around the globe and presenting recipes--from a classic spice-infused Greek moussaka to an aromatic Middle Eastern stew--that showcase lamb’s incomparable beauty.” Not to get all technical, but the recipe exemplars selected would appear to span a region rather than the globe and the subject is taste, not beauty; we are discussing food, not sweaters or suits. That, however, does not qualify Saveur for The Wall either. If all food writers were held to the standards of elite authorship, there would not be much food writing.

WHY LAMB RULES includes a series of recipes and techniques for the preparation of lamb. None of them is British. Possibly worse, “Part One” of the article, “Lamb Around the World,” intones authoritatively that “[i]n Great Britain, the meat--most often a big cut, like a whole leg--tends to be cooked simply: roasted, say…. ” It seems that all the British can manage is the cremation of crude slabs of flesh. The author, Anissa Helou, whose Fifth Quarter (Bath 2004) is a good if challenging book about cooking offal, ought to know better: She makes a glancing reference to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Meat Book (reviewed in the practical ) in noting that sheep usually are not confined to feedlots. In common with a number of American book reviews, however, Helou does not mention any of his recipes; is there an embargo on them? Meat includes over two dozen recipes for lamb, many are British and Fearnley-Whittingstall could have included more.

Sheep Graphic Helou makes no reference to London lamb and barley with mushrooms; hotchpot of beef, lamb and veal; the multiple variations on Irish stew; simmered lamb with caper sauce; clubland rib chops stuffed with foie gras (or its homelier cousin, chicken liver) and their tomato bacon sauce; shoulder chops sauced with creamy onions; leg roasted with anchovies or stuffed with oyster forcemeat; nor any British curries (the Scots have a particularly robust inventory). There are no pies, not lamb and apricot, shepherd’s nor Scottish mince; and no scotch broth either. There is nothing from the salt marshes of Wales. The offal expert omits devilled lamb’s kidneys, Lancashire hotpot and kidney-stuffed onions baked in rum. Sorpitol, though not British, would have been a nice Goan addition. In the event, we get only the usual suspects from France and the Mediterranean rim.

As an aside, our Rural Correspondent cannot fail to note that autumn (the British refuse to use ‘fall’ for unfathomable reasons) is not the optimal time to run a feature on something so associated with spring in this era of seasonality (visit the lyrical on this point). That, however, is an issue between him and Saveur that does not qualify the magazine for The Wall.

The editors of Saveur chose Lizzie Collingham to write its regular “Classic” column for Issue 123. The column gives Saveur bonus points toward its award. Collingham is the author of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (New York 2006), called Curry: A Biography in the original 2005 British edition. Although a trickle of political correctness seeps into the bilge (you cannot leave imperial historiography without it), Curry is good work and we recommend it. Why, however, has Saveur decided to revisit chicken tikka masala? The subject has been done to death, and in fact the “Classic” column is essentially a thumbnail of the first chapter in Collingham’s book. Even the recipe printed by the magazine is a rerun, with minor modification and a less convenient format, of the one published in Curry . Other print, as well as internet, versions of the dish abound.

Back in 2001, the late Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary in the Blair government, famously declared that chicken tikka masala was a British national dish; since then, pundits lacking imagination have reiterated the shibboleth that it is the British national dish. The assertion is a tired chestnut reiterated by mainstream media and recycled all over the blogosphere on a regular basis. Saveur should have commissioned the formidable Collingham to tell us something new. After all, we do pay money, if not an unreasonable amount, for the magazine.

We should not, however, become distracted: WHY LAMB RULES is the primary basis for Saveur’s posting on The Wall. One of these fortnights bfia will retaliate by posting our own Lamb Number without committing seasonism. We will not overlook Charles Lamb either. For now, however, we are content to confer our first Fenway on Saveur.