Of Soft Food, Now and in the Past
For most of the past year, one of member of my household has been unable to chew. Apart from the invasive (not to mention jaw-droppingly expensive) dental work that made it impossible, there was also the fear of further pain.
So I’ve been cooking nothing but soft food and I mean really, really soft food. Not even stews or pasta cooked al dente were soft enough.
It’s taught me a lot about kitchen practice, health, and food in the past.
Modern Food the Antithesis of Soft Food
Modern food emphases the fresh and the natural, as well as the fast and convenient. Hence it abounds in quickly sautéed or grilled meat and lightly cooked or raw vegetables. Hopeless for the dentally challenged.
Soft food is modern food’s antithesis. It’s not readily available in supermarkets and restaurants. Why not resort to jars of baby food? said one acquaintance. The thought had cross my mind, as had Soylent and Ensure.
That’s not the way families work, though. You don’t exile one member, condemning them to watch others enjoy roast chicken or pot roast. It was adult, enjoyable soft food for all that was needed.
And that meant older recipes, often unfashionable today, when soft food was more highly valued.
Soft Cuisine
So what did we end up eating? Well soups of course, especially cream of vegetable and dried pea bean soups.
Cheese Soufflé. Ruth Hartung, Flickr via Wikimedia.
And for the main course, ground meat, meat balls from different cuisines as long as softened with breadcrumbs or rice, stuffed vegetables, and keema, though hamburgers were too chewy; thin filets of white fish, and eggs, scrambled, in omelets, and in savory custards. Mashed potatoes came around and around in fish cakes and shepherd’s pie. So did béchamel as a basis for soufflés and roulardes, tuna casserole (don’t laugh, I make a delicious one), in Spanish-style chicken croquettes, and very long-cooked lasagne.
Vegetables were braised: beans, greens, carrots, or celery cut into thin slices across the grain, for example; or pureed, in creamed spinach, creamed corn and refried beans. Sad to say, because I love them, squashes and eggplants have never been popular in our house.
And as for salads, well, tomatoes could be peeled and chopped finely. Apple sauce appeared regularly, though to my English taste, this should be a tart sauce and not a sweet side dish, so I passed. And, glory hallelujah, avocados were an instant sauce as guacamole or side dish with lemon and salt, or lunch with a little canned tuna.
Breadcrumbs became my go-to source for a bit of texture in all those cakes and croquettes and casseroles, or sprinkled over soft buttered cauliflower.
Compared to main courses, desserts were a breeze. Cookies were out, but cakes, puddings, ice cream and flan all went down very happily.
Preparing Soft Food
No zipping into the kitchen, throwing a chicken cutlet in the pan and shaking out a bag of salad greens. Soft food has to be planned in advance and started well before the meal, even with blenders and processors to reduce ingredients to purees. How much more work it must have been in the past without this array of small electric appliances, all that working away with pestles and mortars and forcing mixtures through sieves.
Luckily meat balls and fish cakes freeze well, so made in quantity and frozen they became quick meals.
But how often I cursed the limited range of good quality canned vegetables in the US, compared to say Spain, since canned vegetables tend to be very soft. Rightly or wrongly I blamed the fresh and natural movement for making it so declassé to buy canned vegetables that manufacturers have little incentives to promote them. Even so, I was happy for canned asparagus, or at least the tips as the lower stem was too stringy.
Health and Soft Food
Soft food makes fiber a problem, especially since the sufferer refused high fibre cereals and could not handle whole grain breads. Thank you bean soups and refried beans in all your forms.
Calories were a problem, even with careful planning and time in the kitchen. Pound after pound dropped off, thirty-five pounds in just six months, from someone who could not afford to lose much in the first place. Forget those sneers about empty calories. In these circumstances, calories are calories. Think of all the eggs and milk in flan, I said to myself.
Flan. Wikimedia
So I was to hear from Lauraine Jacobs that in New Zealand the Pure Food Company is tending to the needs of the sick and elderly with prepared foods. Perhaps similar initiatives are under way in the States. It never occurred to me to look. Of course special diets are prepared by big companies for hospitals but most of those are less than appetizing.
Why, though, is dental care excluded from Medicare and only reimbursed to a tiny extent in other insurance plans? If preventive medicine is all the rage, what is more effective, delivers more bang for the buck, than functioning teeth? Fewer clanking MRI machines and a bit more insured dentistry, please.
Soft Food in the Past
Which leads to the past. Dentistry barely existed, except for tooth pulling, until the last century and even then much of the time false teeth, hardly ideal, were seen as the way to go.
No wonder cookbooks are full of gruels and soups, anything that delivered a little food to those who found it difficult to eat, including those with bad teeth.
And how many people lost weight because they could not chew food, which was harder to soften without modern technology? And how often did they succumb to the illnesses that are the main cause of death when people are on the verge of starving?
Looked at from another angle, in the past soft food was more prestigious than crunchy food. I had always put this down to two factors. First, that soft food was refined food, refined in the same sense that metals are refined, processing out the dross and getting to the pure essence or nature of the food. Second, since only the rich could regularly afford laborious soft food (easily pounded or mashed roots being a major exception), soft food was desirable food.
Perhaps, though, there was a third reason. The rich as much as the poor suffered from cavities and gum disease. What monarch or aristocrat wanted to be embarrassed by being unable to chew the dish he was served?
Addendum 03/07/2016 Practical Hints
A couple of further comments on the practical side.
- I found that this was not the moment to introduce radically new dishes or to try to persuade the individual to enjoy foods that had never been enjoyable. So most of my dishes came from the tradition that every family puts together over the years. That’s not to say I didn’t experiment with new dishes. Just that they worked best if within this general structure. Luckily thanks to natural inclination and an itinerant life this was a fairly broad structure, so thank you, thank you all those of you who have sent such useful suggestions.
- More difficult than thinking up dishes was how to reorganize kitchen time and technique so that it wasn’t too time-consuming. Most hints for quick meals were totally irrelevant. That’s why it was so useful to know what could be frozen, for example, or why it was important to have a bottomless supply of good breadcrumbs (I’m not taken with most commercial ones). So I was thrilled to hear from Diane Wolff who addresses just this question in her cookbook, which she wrote when she cared for her mother who could not swallow. My copy has not yet arrived (even Amazon is not that fast) but it feels just right. So if you find yourself in this situation, you might want to check this out this note from her.
I am an author and a journalist. I have written about food in my author’s life. I am a good cook from a family of good cooks. So I wrote a cookbook and a guidebook for setting up a puree kitchen. You can take a look at the book at http://www.essentialpuree.com
My website is meant to be a resource for persons who need recipes or tips and tricks and reviews of kitchen appliances.
- Tamales: From The Cause of Crime to the Cause of Celebration at Candelaria
- Isn’t It Crucial to Have Some Food ‘Waste’?
Ah, the marvels of modern dentistry. I happened to crack open a tooth the other day while crunching cacahuates japoneses. (Mexican Japanese cocktail peanuts.) It was an easy fix, but would not have been in the pre-novocaine past. I think you’re really onto something with the significance of soft food… And I wonder whether it didn’t take on more importance after the introduction of sugar.
Those cacahuates are fierce. Glad your dentist could fix it. And probably teeth did become worse after sugar. Elizabeth I’s terrible black teeth are commonly blamed on sugar.
I cooked for my older brother for three weeks, while he was undergoing radiation treatment for a cancer on his vocal chords. Not only did everything have to be a totally smooth puree, it had to be cold or at room temperature. He could have no spice or acid at all, plus he’s always been a picky eater and refuses to eat any legumes because they make him flatulent. Prior to my visit home, he had been pretty much subsisting on ice cream and milkshakes. I made chicken stock, and then used that as a base for soups made of strained purees and cream: vichyssoise; cream of corn; asparagus; broccoli; celery; spinach; butternut squash; carrot. He doesn’t much like vegetables, but he was grateful to taste something savory instead of vanilla or chocolate ice cream, and he enjoyed the variety.
How lucky he was to have you. And it’s funny how often in the US mild shakes are the answer. Thanks for writing and I am adding your ideas to my growing repertoire.
We’ve been through a similarly challenging and expensive experience here recently – although my husband’s dental issues only lasted three weeks and he could well afford to lose the four kilos he dropped.
It’s been high summer here, so soups, casseroles and rich sauces have not been on the top of my lists. Thank heavens our hens are laying well.
Eggs are just wonderfully useful in these circumstances. We just got egg-ed out after a month or so. Had to cut them back to every other day.
Smoothies – especially if some nut butter is included for protein and fat. I make a breakfast smoothie with a banana, ground flax, almond butter, baby kale, blueberries, raspberries and sour cherry juice. It’s a weird colour but absolutely delicious and very satisfying. Alas, I am not losing weight on it – and I need to!
Thanks for the suggestion, Augusta. I need to move in to the smoothie age and your post will help with that.
Rachel, Take a look at any Greek cookbook for recipes for vegetables [zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, etc] stuffed with rice and ground meat, baked in the oven until very tender. Then there are dips made out of just about anything, including chickpeas[humus] and eggplant dip. There are many traditional recipes for soft foods in the cuisines of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East since as you so aptly point out, at one time all foods were pounded and boiled until soft and tender because that is the way people liked them.
Interesting to note that our friend from the 3rd c AD Athenaeus, mentions cooked lettuce. Even today, Greeks tend to overcook their food and steaks are never eaten rare! Also they use a lot of ground meat known as KIMAS. Also fish – grilled or poached – is always soft not to mention nourishing. Hope your loved will soon be able to munch and crunch [a characteristic of American foods if you think about it] with ease. Meanwhile, some tried and true dishes from ancient cuisines should be fun for a change. Enjoy your posts.
Thank you Linda. You are so right that Greek cooking has many delicious dishes that are easy to get down. Luckily for several years I had a Greek neighbor who was a wonderful cook. I still cherish the techniques and recipes she taught me.
Good points made here. With regards to ‘dental diets’ patients can also suffer from extremes of temperature which means everything has to be eaten at body temperature. I wonder if soft, evenly textured foods make the avoidance of hot and cold spots less problematic?
I had to have some major mouth-work a few years ago (I have Sjogrens) and I found temperature more of a problem. Chewing on one tooth had to be avoided because of pain (and a year of antibiotics made me seriously unwell and with compromised tastebuds) but it was nothing compared to the nerve pain after eating cold or hot foods.
My goodness, we did not have problems with temperature. For that I am so thankful. What a terrible year that must have been. I am discovering just how many people have had brushes or worse with such problems.
I can also recommend the cookbook put out by the Royal Marsden Hospital which caters for sore mouths.
Thanks for this, Nic. Looks very useful. I was slow on the uptake about looking for such bok.
Rachel,
Some nutritious soft foods that come to mind that you may wish to consider:
Bone soup
Variety of pulses cooked in bone broth and puréed
Bone broth and oven-roasted root vegetable purée
Baked sweet potatoes and/ or Japanese yams
Savory mousses that are not as rich with cream, example shell fish
Softly cooked rice flavored with softly cooked pulses and vegetables
Cooked broken rice or wheat seasoned with spices for flavor (there are some Indian recipes that I could send if you wish) – similar to polenta
Bala
Bala, thank you for you kindness in taking the time to put together this list. Every suggestion is welcome.
Dearest Rachel,
I was my mom’s primary caregiver for five years when she had swallowing difficulties related to dementia. I am an author and a journalist. I have written about food in my author’s life. I am a good cook from a family of good cooks. So I wrote a cookbook and a guidebook for setting up a puree kitchen. You can take a look at the book at http://www.essentialpuree.com
My website is meant to be a resource for persons who need recipes or tips and tricks and reviews of kitchen appliances.
Diane, what a wonderful gift to your mother. And what a wonderful resource. I especially like your concentration on kitchen technique. My problem was not so much recipes as setting up a system in the kitchen that could be managed in a reasonable time frame and that produced results that everyone could enjoy. And that’s what you address.
I suffer with Crohns Disease … Who’s so often puts me in the soft food world … But there are also many other limitations. I practically lived on potatos, eggs, and soft cooked rice. I came up with so many rice/veggie dishes. I would love to create a cookbook for Crohns/Colitis sufferers.
Gina, thank you for writing. What daily strength of will it must take to deal with cooking and eating in your circumstances. I don’t know whether the book I just added to my post would help. My heart goes out to you.
Pingback: Now it’s the very opposite – nullrend
Hi Rachel, I’m reading your always stimulating blog after too long. Need to check in more often!
There is one Indian recipe that according to tradition was specifically developed to deal with dental problems – galouti kebabs, an ultra soft kebab from Lucknow, really like a pate that holds together just enough to be grilled. These are round kebabs, like a patty, but is also a similar skewer version called kakori kebabs.
The story is that it was developed for a Lucknow noble whose teeth had almost entirely fallen out. The meat is pounded and usually also tenderised with grated papaya for extra softness. There is the usual secrecy about the recipe, but I think some chickpea flour is used to help bind the mixture long enough for the grilling.
The Lucknavi aristocrat had probably exacerbated his oral condition by chewing on paan, areca nuts. SInce this habit is so widespread across Asia, and has been linked to long term oral cancer risks, it was probably an impetus for soft foods. (That being said, I wonder if in the short term the astringency of betel nut actually helped with hygiene, even if the long term risk was clear – but how many people lived that long in the past. But this is just speculation).
Another useful ingredient, more used in central and southern India is finger millet, Eleusine coracana. Most millets cook to a rather coarse consistency, but this produces a jellylike softness. It is one reason, along with excellent nutrition profile, why its used as a weaning food. A standard preparation of it is ragi mudde, balls of cooked ragi flour and water which have a rather startling purple-black colour and slippery soft texture that is very easy to choke on. You have to learn how to swallow, like almost inhaling them when you eat them, ideally with a very liquidy curry to help.
If you haven’t read it Colin James’ The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris is a fascinating account of the teeth problems people struggled with in the past and the revolution caused by the rise of dentistry. Its ironical, of course, that the same period saw the huge increase in supply of sugar. One might even think it a plot on the part of dentists!
thanks for all this Vikram. I’m going to post it with commentary as a follow up.
Hi Vikram,
I have just returned from India. The Indian cuisines, because they have sauces, are ideally suited to a soft diet. I recommend making a list of the favorite dishes of the person who needs the soft food. Then you can batch cook, so you have four to six servings every time you cook. You put them in the freezer, labelled and dated. Then you are liberated from constant cooking. My Quickies for Caregivers series of eBooks is now available with hints on how to make meals so that the person with the need for the special diet is not isolated from life, but can participate in all family and social activities, including travel, with a little planning. If you have a favorite recipe, please send it along as I am trying to include foods from the major demographics in our state of Florida. Indian cuisine is one of my favorites.