Listened to Harold McGee at the Oxford Symp on the tedium of growing vanilla. Did not realize his dissertation was „Keats/the Progress of Taste." An English instructor whose life’s work is writing on organic chemistry. Career moves. Kids watch/learn @Harold_McGee @OxfordFoodSymp
Then I read Ken's piece on herbs/spices in 3 Roman cookbooks, Apicius (4th.c. CE), Martino (1470), Artusi (1891). Hypothesis: spices are exotics, driven by status. Herbs are local, driven by palate. Lesson #1: No basil in Italian cooking for a long time @kenalbala @OxfordFoodSymp
Lovage, rue, cilantro (you read that right) and mint everywhere in Roman/Italian cooking... until they turn their noses up. Only in late modernity is Basilico Genovese valorized, dropping its mintiness. Apparently Italians hate mint in their basil. Now protected by EU bureaucrats
"Apicius in [his] recipes has us grind pepper and lovage, moisten with fish sauce and then combine with more fish sauce and wine – often with the addition of more herbs, honey or raisin wine. These are a basic flavor combination..." Sweet, salty, acidic, smelly... Italian food.
Tomato screws up Italian food royally. "Try a pinch of rue in a tomato sauce... The acid accentuates the bitterness and makes it completely unpalatable. On the other hand, salty fish sauce and sweet honey does balance [it] pleasantly..."
To polish up on my low level basil game I read up Lauren Allen's „...the use of Basil all over the world, in every culture, at all times.“ That was a little too much basil for my palate.
Exquisite paper by Julia Fine at Oxford V-Symp. ‘Half-Coloured w/ Turmeric’: The Visual Function of Spices in Early Modern Britain. 17th century recipes with loads of turmeric for curries/pickles. British homes as contact zones in domesticating the color of empire. @juliafine19
Michael Krondl presses hard on the question of how and why chilis were incorporated in South Asian cuisines? If turmeric in 17th century London is the domestication of Empire, what exactly is the cultivation of chilis in India in the 17/18th centuries? Subaltern appropriation?
"Because chilis entered cuisines under the radar of elite cookbooks they present an even greater explanatory challenge. [T]hey are not a fashion that can easily be can be periodicized like 16th.c Italian fad for cinnamon sugar."
"Van Linschoten, after visiting the Portuguese India describes all the types of pepper available on the Malabar coast, including a cheap form of black pepper called camorin, but makes no mention of capsicums. Not until 1670s is it described it in the East Indian context."
K.T. Achaya references Purandaradasa from the 16th.c., postulating it refers to chilis: “I saw you green, then turning redder as you ripened, nice to look at and tasty in a dish, but too hot if an excess is used. Savior of the poor, enhancer of good food."
"There are two problems with this verse, the first is that black pepper as well as chili starts out green and ripens to red. The second, as Divva Schäfer has pointed out, is that the poet’s work wasn’t codified until the nineteenth century."
