In Defense of Gross-Out Foods

In 1687, Hans Sloane, the Irish born collector, antiquarian, and botanist, traveled to Jamaica as the personal physician of the newly appointed Governor of Jamaica.  

Hans Sloane: 1660-1753

Sadly, the Governor died the following year and Dr. Sloane, bereft of his noble patron and probably eager to dodge suspicions of medical malpractice, traveled around the West Indies for the next 15 months.  In 1707 he finally published a compendium of his observations about these distant English colonies, entitled A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher’s and Jamaica.

Many scholars have shared my fascination with Sloane’s book, and have analyzed everything from his attitudes towards slavery to his meticulous, semi-obsessive collections of insects and plant specimens.[1]  (Sloane was pretty much the quintessential early modern hoarder.  Yet unlike the people portrayed on A&E, his bizarre and compendious collection of curiosities eventually became the British museum.)

A 17th Century Map of Jamaica

My interest in Hans Sloane is slightly different.  I’m interested in what kinds of food Sloane encountered during his time in Jamaica and how these foods informed his impressions of the people he met there.[2]  At first glance, Sloane didn’t seem terribly pleased with what he saw (or tasted).  Take basic English staples: beef and veal.  Not only were these products terribly overpriced (due to the fact that meat rotted in a matter of hours under the oppressive Jamaican sun – meat markets were usually sold out by 7am) but English imports often tasted terrible to begin with.  This, Sloane surmised, had to do with the Calabash Tree Leaves that grew everywhere in Jamaica, which infected cow’s kidneys and milk to the extent that “Everything made of Milk tasts … so strong of it that there is no using with pleasure any thing made therewith.”[3] 

Neither could Sloane stand the cassava bread, so dry that it had to be dipped in sugar-water to be palatable at all.  (Sloane did acknowledge, nevertheless, that it kept men healthy in spite its insipid taste.)  The black slaves, cattle and poultry happily fed on maize (Indian Corn) but Sloane had qualms about its suitability for Europeans. 

Sloane wasn't a big fan of cassava bread
He called it "rank and poisonous"

So alien were these Jamaican foods, so distasteful were they to the European palate, that Sloane began to ponder the very definition of food in the first place.  After all, Sloane surmised, there was no hard and fast rule separating "food" from "non-food."  What was unique about mankind, Sloane reasoned, was his ability to extract nourishment from pretty much anything.  Good to keep in mind during a famine, “should it please God to inflict the like Calamity.”  Thankfully, God had also equipped man with the tools needed to deal with such situations –– teeth, spittle, digestive fluids –– enabling men to extract nourishment from nearly anything.  “[T]hough Stalks and Leaves afford no great Nourishment,” Sloane confessed, “they have sometimes kept many from starving.”  Indeed, Sloane points out, the hungry will even eat inanimate objects such as shoes and belts “soak’d and eaten” when man found himself in dire straits.

Even though the dietary divisions between man and beast collapsed under threat of hunger, Sloane didn’t see anything cruel or unjust about this inevitable state of nature.[4] “All these several differing Bodies; which, when no other are at hand, must be the Food of Mankind in the places where they are produced,” he wrote, “are … digested by the Artifice of Nature into good Sustenance to repair its Losses, and propagate its Kind.”  To the contrary, man’s ability to turn non-food into food was knowledge worth learning and passing on to future generations.[5]

But necessity alone does not determine one’s taste preferences.  [H]owever strange to us,” Sloane continues, strange and un-food-like foods “are very greedily sought after by those us’d to them. Thus Person not us’d to eat Whales, Squirrils, or Elephants, would think them a strange Dish; yet those us’d to them, prefer them to other Victuals.”

Sloane noticed raccoon-meat for sale in Jamaica
Ralph Beilby, A General History of Quadrupeds (1790)

Why, Dr. Sloane wonders, do people willingly eat foods that taste disgusting?  As Sloane wandered the towns, markets, and plantations of Jamaica, he recoiled at the sight of snakes and lizards relished by polite and supposedly “understanding” people “with a very good and nice Palate.”  Rats and raccoons –– bred among the sugarcanes to sweeten their meat –– were sold in local markets as good meat.  His Jamaican observations sent Sloane straight to his gigantic English library, where he found many instances of gross-out foods consumed throughout history. 

–– Ancient Greek grasshoppers “eat like shrimps.” 

–– Peoples of the East Indies dining on bird’s nests

–– Hottentots enjoying the guts of cattle and sheep

While 17th century scientific literature often attributed racial and cultural differences to the distinct climates of foreign lands, taste-preferences could not be explained this way.  The American Indians, displaced African slaves, as well as the ancient Romans apparently considered Cossi (Cotton Tree Worms) “so great a dainty” in spite of their distinct cultures and geographical origins.

But neither were new tastes so quickly learned.  Slaves from the East Indies were less desirable to plantation owners than the Jamaican born Creoles, Sloane pointed out, as the former arrived in Jamaica with a taste for meat and fish as opposed to a cheaper diet of yams, plantains, and potatoes.  

Are we in fact what we eat?  It’s a well-worn adage, but Dr. Sloane didn’t seem to think so.  In fact, precisely because the definition of food was so malleable, Sloane concluded that one’s dietary preferences should not be a pretext to classify, categorize and enslave other peoples.[6]  The Spanish very unjustly enslaved the Aztecs because “the Indians … eat Piojos [lice], and Gusanos [larva], and intoxicated themselves with their kinds of wines … and the smoak of tobacco:” incredibly flimsy justifications for extermination.  Sloane did not know how to explain the acclimation and habituation of taste preferences, but he knew that they did not conform to one's moral or cosmological worth.  Indeed, several scholars have pointed out that early modern conceptions of identity, such as race and gender, were far more fluid and mutable than we now believe them to be.[7]  Where does the sense of taste fit into the discussion?  

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[1] See, for example, Kay Kriz’s Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of Jamaica’ in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 35-78 and James Delbuorgo, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate and the Whole History of Cacao” Social Text (2011) 29:1:106 pp. 71-101. Sloane is often credited with the invention of chocolate milk, althought the “Sloane Brand” was actually invented in the 1750s.

[2] I share this curiosity with the high Tory satirist William King, who published a satirical send-up of Sloane’s interest in Jamaican food, entitled “Concerning several sorts of odd dishes used by epicures and nice eaters throughout the world” in Useful Transactions (London, 1700).    

[3] The Calabash plant was even rumored to kill horses by the fruit “sticking so fast to their teeth that they are not able to open their Chaps to feed.” 

[4] My favorite book about early modern famine is unquestionably Piero Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) orig. 1980.  But while Camporesi focuses on the divisions between the fed and the hungry, emphasizing the latter's wretched, drugged-out, state ––  bran, for example, “soaked in hot water and formed into a bran mash for the pig-men, so reduced to wallowing as to resemble snuffling animals” (38) ––  Sloane focuses on famine as a natural calamity that men should learn to deal with their reason and ingenuity.  

[5] Sloane cites some well known “famine guides,” such as Joachimus Struppius’s Anchora Famis (1578) that advises making bread out of almonds, hazelnuts, and pine-kernels, as well as the work of the Bolognese cleric Giovanni Battista Segni, who documented instances of cannibalism in his work (1602).  talks about veg and animal productions made use of in times of famine – “most attentive and sensitive treatise writers on hunger and its excesses” -

[6] Lest we be too hasty with the praise of Dr. Sloane as an enlightened cosmopolite, I should point out that he married a Jamaican planter heiress and owned slaves.  Just sayin!’
[7] See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004) and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 

Why We Drink the Ayurvedic Kool-Aid

This past weekend, I went to my first-ever Ayurvedic cooking class.  I drove up there feeling excited yet uncertain about what I might learn.  Ayurveda had been getting a lot of press lately as an alternative form of medicine, and I wasn't sure if I was ready to jump on the bandwagon.  But when I arrived, my worries were allayed with a glass of spiced raw milk: the quintessential Ayurvedic kool-aid.  

Guess it was time to jump down the rabbit hole ...  

I couldn't get enough!
#ayurvedicexperiments #histmed

Seasoned with saffron, turmeric, cardamom, ginger, black pepper and sugar, I savored it to the last drop.

The class was a lot of fun, and we learned to make many simple, delicious, and healthful dishes.  But the whole time, I couldn’t help privately wondering why Ayurveda had become so popular?  Why were we all frantically writing down everything the teacher had to say about the “pungent” and “drying” properties of turmeric, or the “cooling” and “digestive” qualities of cardamom?  Why was I anxiously scribbling down the names of websites where I could find out if I had a vata, pitta, or kapha constitution?  And how would that help me determine what I should eat?  Throughout the class, I had this strange sense of déjà vu.  I knew I had heard this language somewhere before.   

Then it hit me.  I suddenly realized that Ayurvedic cooking had a whole lot of similarities with the dietetic teachings of the 2^nd century Greek physician Galen.  Galen had ruled that all foodstuffs contained at least one of four intrinsic qualities –– hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness –– which corresponded with the four humors in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.  As Ken Albala has shown, this was an incredibly complicated system, whereby every quality in every foodstuff could also exhibit various degrees of intensity.[1]  Certain foods acted as “correctives” that tempered qualities in other foods.

Galen's dietetic teachings persisted for
centuries after his death in the 3rd century AD

Even though physicians tinkered with the system here and there, these theories of diet dominated Western medical thought from Latin Antiquity to the present.  Over the past twenty years, historians of science have attempted to explain its remarkable resilience.  There were many reasons for this.

--The system was flexible.  It avoided “one size fits all” dietary prescriptions in favor of tailoring diet to one’s individual constitution.  Of course one person got sick from eating asafoetida-flavored mung beans while the same dish cured another man’s illness.  As no two constitutions were the same, the same food could not be expected to work the same way on everyone.

--It was a “do it yourself” type of medical thinking.  Instead of accepting that the doctor always knew best, laymen wielded a lot of power over their physical and emotional wellbeing.  Historian Steve Shapin describes doctors and laymen as exercising “joint ownership” over their health.[2]  In fact, as Harold Cook has shown, becoming a respected physician wasn’t just about accumulating a lot of medical expertise.  It was also about developing good character.  And good character meant paying attention to your patients' thoughts and habits.[3] 

There were zillions of these"do it yourself"
health guides printed in the 17th century!
This one was published in 1671

--It relied on tangible evidence.  It didn’t depend on invisible things like “calories” and “vitamins,” both 19^th century discoveries that physicians exhort us to accept on faith.  Sensory qualities of foods that one could directly experience, such as taste, were far more important to maintaining your health.  Indeed, Galen believed that whatever tasted good to an individual was actually easier to digest than other dishes that may be equally nutritious.[4]  But this was not just about taste; physicans also took into account the texture of food, or whether the food was heated up or served cold.

--The system was moderate and impervious to fads.  As I mentioned before, the system changed very little over time.  Common sense reigned supreme.  In fact, only during the 17^th century do historians witness a slow disappearance of Galenic dietetics from academic discourse.[5]  Why was that?  Well, given that the scientific revolution was getting underway, it isn’t surprising that Galen's system started to crumble at the moment when scholars were cautioned to look down upon ancient received wisdom and instead put faith in their own sensory experiences.

Keeping a Galenic or an Ayurvedic diet can be complicated and very time consuming.  For these reasons, I’m pretty sure that few people actually followed either of them to the letter to the law ... both in antiquity and in the present.  But for both of these systems, the massive appeal lied in the agency granted to us laypeople as our own medical masterminds.  As I whipped up my first glass of spiced raw milk, I realized how tinkering with all these new spices –– now medical tools as well as flavor enhancers –– can be very empowering indeed.  And also a lot of fun!  

Spiced Milk

What you Need:

--Whole, cow milk (preferably raw … admittedly more expensive but so much tastier!)

--2 cardamom pods

--1 whole clove

--1/2 tsp turmeric

--2 strands of saffron (I had no idea that this was so expensive!  For this blog post, I bit the bullet, but next time I will order this online!)

--1/4 tsp ginger powder

--pinch of black pepper

--sugar (to taste)

How to do it: Add milk to a pan.  Follow by rubbing saffron strands in finger and then add them to the milk.  Follow with the turmeric, cardamom, clove, ginger powder and pepper.  Add sugar and bring the milk to a low boil, where just the sides start to bubble a little.  Strain and serve.  You can top with a little ghee if you like! 

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[1] Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

[2] Steven Shapin, “Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003), 263-297.

[3] Harold Cook “Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians” Journal of British Studies (Jan., 1994) 33:1 pp. 1-31.  

[4] Galen on Food and Diet ed. Mark Grant (London: Routledge, 2000) p. 131.

[5] J. Worth Estes,  “The Medical Properties of Food in the 18^th Century,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol 51, number 2, 1996 pp. 127-154.  

A Matter of Haut-Gout

Usually I like to cook, but the other day I home late and was too lazy to go to the store.  Luckily my neighborhood offers plenty of take-out options; I ordered out from a Chinese place down the street.  I had never eaten there, but it’s usually pretty busy whenever I walk by.  The Yelp reviews said it specialized in something called “meatless chicken.”  It was the most popular thing on the menu. 

I ordered the so-called meatless chicken, along with lo mein and an order of pot-stickers.  But when the order arrived and I swallowed a forkful, I found the dish a little suspicious.  The meatless chicken tasted unmistakably chicken-y – that part they got right.  It was chopped up into small cubes and the texture felt a little spongy, spongy enough to pass as tofu.  But it felt firm enough to also pass as chicken, chicken so heartlessly raised and artificially processed, I worried, that it barely qualified as chicken at all.  Could the restaurant have made a mistake?

#meatlesschicken #hautgout #deepfriedgoodness

The only way to find out for certain was to order the meatless chicken again, which I decided to do for lunch today.  (Note to self: they have a great lunch special.)  This time I was relieved to experience the same type of meatless meat I had ordered the first time.  I now believed myself to like meatless chicken.  The texture felt more assuredly tofu-like, and the flavor somehow less artificial.

Why was meatless chicken considered such a delicacy at this place? Yelpers called it a “specialty” that “brings me back to my childhood,” and “the best fake meat I ever had.”  The glowing reviews made clear that the appeal of meatless chicken also depended on a combination of appearance, taste, and texture: “tasty fried, slightly chewy goodness!”  A combination of sensory and social qualities made meatless chicken an acquired taste. 

What conditions must be satisfied in order to transport a food from the realm of the disgusting to the delicious?  Our enjoyment of food has little to do with just one taste or one texture, but food’s ability to conform to our expectations of what it ought to taste like.  Confirmation of the chicken’s meatlessness exhorted me to re-evaluate my former sensory observations. 

Has this always been the case?[1]  As some readers might know, I have been working on a history of food connoisseurship during the 18^th century, and I often find myself struck by the passionate responses that new edible delicacies aroused.  Take, for example, the dawn of the 18^th century, when well-to-do tables were invaded by French styles of cooking.[2]  The English found French cuisine distinctive for the culinary artistry that went into making rich cullises, dainty poupetons, the fricassees and ragouts.  The flavors of these new dishes were considered so strong, so peculiar and so indescribable that a new word entered the English lexicon to describe them: they had haut-gout.

Most French cooks working in Britain were male,
but this was the best picture I could find!

What was haut-gout?  Well, it’s hard to say.  While the OED traces it back to 1645, using it in the same phrase as a “pickant sawce,” haut-gout wasn’t exactly a flavor.  You won’t find it in an English cookbok. Even so, haut-gout connoted rich and highly seasoned properties that could not be described in words.[3]  For example, the pungency of soy sauce –- enthusiastically described in 1736 as having “the highest gust in the world” –– opened the taste buds to pleasurable new sensations.  Others, such as Jonathan Swift, were more dubious.  “If a lump of soot falls into the soup … stir it well,” he sarcastically advised in Directions to Servants (1731) “and it will give the soup a high French taste.”[4]  Because haut-gout didn’t represent one particular flavor, what it actually tasted like was anyone’s guess.  Tasting “expensive” could adopt a variety of guises, leading one to confuse it with the all-out revolting. 

 

Smell also wielded power over the likeability of various foods.  In the Comical Don Quixote (1702) the stench of garlic breath might be so bad as to deal a man a “double death” yet it added a “curious hautgoust” to one’s dinner.  Moreover, smell ensured haut-gout’s ability to invade personal deoderized spaces.  “I have some curious green rabbits,” a fictional French character observed in a 1719 play, “with an haut-gout that may be smelt from the forecastle to the great cabbin.”[5]

Finally, haut-gout was closely linked to the new textures of food.  Indeed, English writers dwelled upon the French sauce –– viscous, rich and pungent sauce –– that provided each dish a little something extra.  But what kind of meat swam in the creamy goo?  Who was to say that the meat was what the cook said it was?  How do we know it hadn’t spoiled? Sauce provided a dish a sense of artful mystery, but it also exhorted the diner to trust in the cook’s expertise and benevolence.  (Indeed, it’s no surprise that the saucier is still the highest paid position in a French kitchen.)  Perhaps our cultural ambivalence about sauce is innate.  The famous British anthropologist Mary Douglas noticed that “polluting” substances are often sticky or viscous.  Halfway between a solid and a liquid, sauces defy easy classification. 

But coming back to my original question, did we arbitrate between disgust and delight the same way then as we do now?  I have noticed that 18^th century ambivalence towards haut-gout often emanated not only from the strange sensations it elicited, but also from fears over where a new food’s enjoyment could lead.  Eating foods with questionable sauces or smells was believed to have psychologically addicting properties, inevitably leading connoisseurs to seek out new gustatory thrills.  Such an affliction could cause genteel eaters to consume substances that lacked culture or cultivation –– substances such as these dishes below.  So much for the civilizing process.  

This image, as well as the French bill of fare above
come from the Universal Journal, or British Gazetteer:
April 15, 1727

Post-script: By the way, the meatless chicken was ordered from Big Lantern –– 16^th street and Guerrero.  Try it out sometime! 

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[1] Over the past fifty years or so, scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have

 written about taste and disgust.  The experimental psychologist Paul Rozin has published oodles of articles about preferences and disgust, famously linking disgust to fears of our animal origins.  In his lucid and fascinating book, The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller treats disgust as an emotion that organizes the social and moral universe.  I’m still searching for more work on transforming associations of disgust into associations of taste, so if you know of any work please let me know!

[2] The rise of French cuisine has been well documented by scholars.  For the culinary changes happening in France, see Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  For the reception of French cookery in Britain, see Gilly Lehman, The British Housewife and Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

[3] During the late 17^th century, botanists became exceedingly interested in creating taxonomies of flavor, the most famous of which was devised by F.R.S Nehemiah Grew.  (I’ll talk about him in an upcoming post.)  Yet nowhere in Grew’s taxonomy or anywhere else does “haut-gout” gain any scientific elaboration.

[4] I’ve always wondered whether Jonathan Swift got food poisoning from a French fricassee, for he loved to mock Augustan food fashions.  The Modest Proposal –– which recommended turning Irish babies into culinary delicacies –– can certainly be read as an indictment of connoisseurial eating.  

[5] Thomas D’Urfey, The Younger Brother, or the Sham Marquis (London, 1719).

To the Health of Martin Lister

Ah yes.  Gay Paris.  For centuries, Englishmen have viewed Gallic comestibles with a mixture of longing and suspicion.  Throughout the 18th century, the English decried French cooks in public whilst French cookbooks sold like hotcakes.  Throughout the 19^th century, English tourists journeyed to Paris specifically to dine in restaurants such as Véry’s or the Rocher de Cancale.  (Their letters, however, often discussed the restaurant’s luxurious ambiance more than the food.[1])  By the 1950s, Elizabeth David lauded Paris as a foodie haven from the tinned peas and oversized, over-salted olives that typified London’s abysmal culinary scene.  Even today, Paris remains a site of gastronomic pilgrimage.  

Martin Lister:
Foodie Virtuoso

Permit me to add Dr. Martin Lister to the ranks of English-born culinary Francophiles.  Lister was your early modern jack-of-all-trades: a physician, a botanist, and an antiquarian rolled into one.[2]  He wrote and published prolifically on a smorgasbord of exigent 17^th century intellectual matters.  The anatomy of a scallop.  A boy bit by a rabid dog.  The flavor of a “very peculiar mushroom.”

The anatomy of a scallop?  You might be rolling your eyes right now, Reader, at the apparent superficiality of Lister’s scholarly interests.  (And if you are rolling your eyes, be assured that you are in good company; neither Jonathan Swift nor Alexander Pope could stand the guy.)  To them, Lister was a narcissistic fool who liked to talk and write just for the sake of being heard, regardless of whether his so-called “research” was totally useless and imbecilic.

But let’s not dismiss Lister’s schemes too quickly.  At the dawn of the Enlightenment, many regarded these studies as critical and cutting edge gateways to new and modern knowledge.  How were we to understand the decline of the Roman Empire if we don’t know the historical conditions –– the weird fish sauce, the feasting rituals, the vomitoria –– in which the Romans lived?[3]  How were we supposed to understand the diversity of different cultures and peoples around the world if we don’t consider the ins and outs of their everyday lives? '

So in 1698, Lister set off to Paris.[4]  Did he study French politics?  Nope.  Did he study art or architecture?  Nope – Lister admitted he “had no taste” for those things.  But he did spend a great deal of time studying the diet of the Parisians.[5]  Indeed, according to his published memoir of the trip, Lister was pretty impressed with what he saw.  He was “much pleased” with the French lentils, found French turnips to be “sweeter and “less stringy” than the English kind, and rated the French (Roman) lettuce as superior to the Silesian varieties grown in England.  Hell, he even thought French salt tasted better, finding it “incomparably better and far more wholesome than our white salt, which spoils everything that is intended to be preserved by it.”  I wonder if it's Lister's fault that French sea-salt has such a huge mark-up in stores today?   

Can the inflated prices paid for French sea-salt
be attributed to F.R.S. Lister?

Like many gastronomes, Lister was equally, if not more, excited over the wines he tasted in Paris than he was about the food.  Champagne and Burgundy topped Lister’s list, being “light and easy on the stomach,” and noticed that all the best French taverns sought to serve them.  Some of Lister’s favorites:

Volne (known today as Volnay, in the Cote de Beaune region of Burgundy): Lister described this as a “pale champaigne” made on the borders of Burgundy.  He deemed it “exceedingly brisk upon the palate.”

Vin de Rheims: “Like all the other champaignes, it is harsh,” Lister said.  He describes it as “pale or gray.”

Chabri (Chablis?): “Quick and much liked.”

St. Laurence (Red): The town is situated in Provence, between Toulon and Nice.  This, Lister said, was “the best wine that I ever tasted.”

18th century wine Bottles
Bottoms up!

There you have it.  A 17^th century antiquarian tasting wines in the name of science.  But Lister did not think of his Parisian edible experiences as mere vanity projects, or half-assed rationalizations for pigging out.  Lister claimed that access to good food and fine wine were essential measurements of civilization’s progress: 

“Natural philosophy and physick had its origin in the desire to discover a better and more wholesome food than the beasts have, and taught mankind to eat bread and flesh, instead of herbs and acorns, and to drink wine instead of water.  These, an a thousand other advantages, were blessings conferred on mankind by the science of medicine.” 

To reject these comforts, according to Lister, “seems to me the most ungrateful to the author of good.”[6]  Before Brillat-Savarin sung the praises of gourmandise in the 1820s, Lister in 1699 was living it up as a testament to man's ingenuity and God’s infinite benevolence.   

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[1] For analyses of 19^th century English reactions to Parisian restaurants, see chapter seven in Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

[2] J.D. Woodley, “Martin Lister,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

[3] The sketchy boundaries between serious science and frivolous dilettantism are discussed at length in this is Joseph Levine’s Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).  The subtitle speaks for itself, but does not do justice to how acerbic and hilarious this book really is!

[4] Martin Lister, Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 (London, 1699).

[5] Even at the publication of the Journey to Paris, the wits were suspicious of Martin Lister’s foodist proclivities.  William King mocked him in his famous Art of Cookery: in Imitation of Horace’s Art of Poetry rhyming “sing that man did to Paris go, that he might taste their soups, and mushrooms know.”

[6] Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698, p. 108.

Tempeh Taco Tuesday

Have you ever had an authentic San Francisco “tempeh taco”?  They are hearty, healthy, delicious, and oh so easy to make.  

Tempeh Tacos: A vegan, gluten-free bite of goodness!  

I’d love to take credit for the invention of the tempeh taco, but that honor belongs to my old roommate.  If you ever get to San Francisco and manage to find him, make sure you ask him to whip some up!

Now, I would love to enlighten my clever and efficacious readers with a tale about how the tempeh taco singlehandedly shaped centuries of British culinary history.  Maybe I'd add an epilogue that chronicles the exploits of the tempeh-loving diaspora now in the United States.  But I don’t think the British ate very much tempeh in those days.   

However, tempeh-tacos broach another question in the history of food: the history of “substitutions.”  Now, substitutions are timeless facts of cookery.  We make use of them all the time: when we want something healthier, something tastier … or when we’re just too lazy to go to the store. 

How might one write a history of the substitute?

On the one hand, the substitute provided men of limited means with vicarious enjoyment that would otherwise be out of their reach.  Shortly after turtle feasting took the British public by storm during the 1750s, “mock turtle” made its culinary debut.  It was made from calves brains and forced meat and dressed up with a few Creole influences, such as Madeira and cayenne pepper, to remind people of the real thing.  Indeed, mock turtle wasn't all that different from “calves head hashed:” an older traditional stand-by.  It used similar ingredients, similar methods of preparation and required the same amount of labor to prepare.[1] Calling the dish “mock turtle,” however, implies some degree of culinary expertise, a familiarity with real turtle, and a finished product that is somehow more than the simple sum of its ingredients.  There was nothing very embarrassing or humiliating about this substitute at all.  In fact, it was often served alongside real turtle!  

This is the first reference to "calves head turtle" I have found
Dated November 27, 1760

By the turn of the 19^th century, however, it seemed as if the substitute’s status began to decline.  War, a few bad harvests and impending bread riots prompted social ‘reformers’ to devise all kinds of wacky substitutes for bread.  The pamphlet below, published in 1796, included an entire glossary of underutilized comestibles that that were sure to please the pauper’s palate.  "Dogstone" soup, anyone?

Historians of this age have also linked edible substitutions to the abstracted impersonality of industrial life.[2]   As men and women became increasingly disconnected from the food they ate, they came to be nourished on spurious imitations that, in society's eyes, did not even count as food, robbing them of the last vestiges of humanity.

The reigning king of all substitutes, unquestionably, was the potato.  This is the Irish lumper, known colloquially as the “famine potato.”  

A student recoiled in horror when she saw these warty, mutant potatoes.
"However might one peel such a thing?"  

Yet the potato seemed to create even more controversy over substitutes.  Potatoes grew like weeds, they were easy to store, and they didn’t even require any preparation.  In many ways they resembled fast food: simply boil and serve.  Potatoes unarguably provided a lot of nutritional bang for the buck, yet they raised serious red flags even for the most well-meaning and morally upstanding 19^th century social reformer.  According to the literary critic Catherine Gallagher, there was something a little dirty and blasphemous about the fact that it was the “substitute for the very food that most commonly stood as a signifer for all food.”  Second, given the pauper’s overly picky palate, how could one encourage the poor to choose tubers over wheat?  And last, in a political climate where the mere sight of a poor person chowing down portended Malthusian apocalypse, reformers wondered whether all these edible substitutes were really such a good thing after all.[3]  

Alas, noble readers.  Have the processes of industrialization robbed the substitute of its soul?  For many Britons, the most visceral (and painful) reminders of World War II were the fascinating edible inventions –– margarine, powdered eggs, snoek piquante –– that sought to artificially approximate feelings of culinary normalcy in war-time.[4]  But perhaps we are today turning a culinary tide in the history of substitutions.  After all, many of today’s most expensive breads now regularly eschew glutinous wheat in favor of beets, turnips, almonds and rice …. the edible symbols of poverty at the turn of the 19^th century.

How to Make Tempeh Tacos

What you need:

--1 package of tempeh (I like the flax kind from Whole Foods)

--Half of an onion, diced
--A handful of shiitakes, chopped

--Corn tortillas

--Salsa

--Hummus

--Kale

--Pumpkin or sunflower seeds

Sauté your onions, shiitakes and crumbled pieces of tempeh in a skillet with olive oil.  Add add soy sauce in small intervals and mix vigorously.  Add the kale last to the mixture … it tastes best when it retains a little crunch.  In a separate sauce pan, sauté some pumpkin seeds in olive oil mixed with a teaspoon of cayenne pepper.  Keep your eye on the pumpkin seeds … they’ll keep browning well after you take them off the heat.  Add the tempeh mixture on top of the corn tortilla.  Now comes the magic.  Reader, I know what you’re thinking … salsa and hummus … together?!  But these contrasting flavor properties actually work surprisingly well together.  If you are lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, try to snag a bottle of salsa from Papalote Tacqueria.  Spicy, creamy and smooth, this hummus-salsa combination is divine.  Top with your crunchy-spicy cayenne-pumpkin seeds.  Enjoy!

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[1] To compare the two dishes, I drew on a recipe for “Calves Head Hashed” from Susanna Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (London, 1759) and a recipe for “Mock Turtle” in Francis Collingwood’s The Universal Cook (London, 1792.)  Both call for many of the same ingredients, are around the same length, and involve the same number of “steps” to prepare the dish.   

[2] See, for example, Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001)

[3] The original, published in 1798, doesn't mention potatoes much, but by the time the 6^th edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population came out in 1817, Malthus had added a bunch of extra sections devoted to potatoes in Ireland.  The potato's many roles in British (and Irish) history are meticulously documented in Redcliffe Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1949) an “oldie but a goodie” to say the least.  But my favorite piece of potato-eating scholarship is Catherine Gallagher, “The Potato in Materialist Imagination” in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 

[4] See Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (London: Allan Lane, 2011).  Also check out Ina Zweiniger-Bargeiolowska's Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).