Hot Pot: Some Reflections on the Migration of a Dish
Adam Balic has a couple of his typically well-researched posts on the English dish typically known as Lancashire hot pot on his blog (which is, incidentally, heartily recommended). His investigations into the cookbook record leave the origin of the dish in doubt, its tie to Lancashire or at least to the Lancashire of cotton mills, dubious, and its antiquity more a matter of myth than record.
His story caused me to reflect on my own experience with hot pot, and, more broadly with the migration of dishes. In the last few days I’ve posted on a community, a group of Italians, determined to transport their entire cuisine to Mexico. That puts in place a whole series of mechanisms quite different from the migrant who wants to transport just certain favored dishes.
I’m that migrant and hot pot is the dish. When I was growing up in England, Lancashire hot pot was a favorite mid week meal. We were at the opposite end of England from Lancashire and no one in the family hailed from there or had ever visited there, but no matter. We called it Lancashire hot pot anyway though why, I have no idea. Did we get it from a cookbook? Neighbors? I don’t think it was radio and it certainly wasn’t TV because we did not have such an expensive object at the time. Was it a universal English/British dish with a new regional name attached? Who knows.
My mother made it pretty much as Adam describes. It was a dish of lamb chops (the cheaper ones), with lots of chopped onions topped with round slices of potato, seasoned with salt and pepper, water added to about two thirds of the way up the baking dish, and baked for a couple of hours in our electric oven. The two differences from Adam’s recipe were (1) my mother never fried the onions and (2) she topped the whole lot with a layer of streaky bacon (that is, roughly speaking, American-style bacon) which got lovely and crispy. It was an ideal middle of the week dish when the cold meat from the Sunday roast recycled into different dishes had run out and there was still enough money in the housekeeping to buy chops. It is, to my taste, an absolutely wonderful dish.
OK, we’re finally getting there. What did this migrant do? Well on reaching the United States, I discovered that lamb chops were a luxury item and that somehow the cheaper end vanished (or never arrived from New Zealand). So I used run of the mill pork chops instead. And being a modern lady, I added chopped garlic to the onions and a dash of white wine when I could afford it or vinegar when I couldn’t to cut the fat and highlight the flavor, as well as a sprinkling of something from the garden in the thyme/oregano/marjoram family.
I still make this about once a month here in Mexico. And a couple of weeks ago, in one of those “que vas a guisar hoy?” (what are you going to cook today) conversations that my walking group has when we have run out of baby showers, despedidas, quinceneras, funerals, weddings, rotary lunches, and card group snacks to dissect, I volunteered my guisado inglés (English stew). A big success because my group is already dedicated to a dish of chicken, mayonnaise, mustard, and onion covered with sliced potato rounds and baked. So this fits right into a known culinary slot. Ah, they said, but maybe we would just add a few sliced serrano chiles along with the onions or slipped between the potatoes.
Well, all this will come as no surprise to Adam who knows very well how dishes move around. But if guisado inglés gets picked up (and new dishes fly round the gossip network of Guanajuato faster than greased lightning) then in a decade it could be a traditional regional Guanajuato dish.
And historians in a generation could be pondering whether it was an independent invention or a transported Lancashire hot pot, probably concluding that the pork and the serranos were just too different to justify the latter hypothesis.
‘Nuff said. At least until I wax theoretical on the differences between the migration of whole cuisines and individual dishes.
So when you were in America you invented the Baeckeoffe!
I should say that there is strong association of hot-pot with Mills (and mining and mens social clubs), but there is no evidence that this the origin of the dish. From a pretty early date in its history people seem to associate it with Lancashire, but the earliest recipe isn’t regional (although in a later publication the exact recipe is in fact given as specifically regional). Confused? I am.
Fairly early in the piece Hotpots also shows up in places like Cumberland and Cheshire in a manner which suggests they where relatively common in these regions too.
Getting back to migration of dishes, off the top of my head I can think of a least half a dozen versions of this scenario that have happened to me or friends. I would guess that it is far more common then we suspect.
Rachel,
I am working on my own Chicago to Irapuato migratory dish, Gołąbki (golumpki), which are form of cabbage rolls. They are a traditional Polish dish consisting of boiled cabbage leaves stuffed with ground beef, chopped onions, garlic, and rice or barley, and cooked in tomato sauce. Whenever I make them I have to make a lot because the scent of Gołąbki cooking brings in the neighbors from all around and they are wild about it. Maybe we should open a restaurant featuring migratory dishes. We could call it “La Migra”.
Hi Bob,
Cabbage dolmas are more common in Algeria than grape leaf dolmas are. The recipe is pretty much what you describe, sub lamb for beef and if you’re inclined add some spices.
Independent invention or is there a connection somewhere? ;-)
I want to post reactions to these comments but I have to do other things right now. More tomorrow.
“La Migra”
hehehe — THX, Bob, I love the pun!
As a non-historian I can’t help but wonder if physical geography might not be the only place to look for clues. Some of these dishes may just be hardwired into the human brain. You have a leaf of some sort and some leftovers but not enough for a whole meal OR the family would rebel loudly if they saw that same stuff on their plates, again, one more night. What do you do? repackage and pour on some sauce. Making it up from scratch may have come later.
The Hotpots described from the UK seem to be the answer to a housewife just wanting OUT of the kitchen one night. It also sounds like the forerunner of the automated ‘slow cooker’ now on sale in most small appliance departments. I’ve noticed a human tendency to try to make money by taking something easy and complicating it and then inventing a machine to be sold to make it easy again.
It is true that a dish like “hot-pot” is one general solution to a certain set of conditions, which is one of the reasons why you fine similar dishes being found throughout the world and in history.
But when you are looking at a specific dish you can be a bit more particular. For instance for “Hot-pot”, there are three consistent ingredients, mutton, potatoes and onions. The inclusion of potatoes means that it can’t really be any earlier then the late 18th century in England. Looking at the technology, as a baked dish for mill workers or miners then this puts the dish even later into the 19th century. So what looks like a simple an obvious dish, suddenly turns out to be a relatively recent invention, that was dependent on the conjunction of a number of different developments.
I was discussing with Rachel the other day that the more I read about food history, the more I find that most of the food that we (and others) eat is of relatively recent mint. It is true that you can often follow the history of a particular dish over a long period (centuries), but the history of a dish isn’t the dish itself. The history of scones goes back centuries, but what most people think of a “Scone” developed in the early to mid 19th century (after the introduction of chemical raising agents), ditto Shortbread, although in this case the raising agent (yeast) was removed to produce a modern version. The list goes on.
In terms of the development of cuisine through the migration of dishes and ingredients, one thread in this is the acute transportation of a dish, ingredient or technology, rather then gradual development. I think that it is an important concept in a period where people are getting more nationalistic about their cuisines and also as we go through a period where there is a lot of folk-lore being developed about food origins. These are black and white views in general as many people need a complete story (true or not) and are not satisfied with an academic approach which is “This is what we know too date”. People can be fiercely protective about this folk-lore, as it is one of the main props for their world view. Cassoulet is an ancient dish so it’s inclusion of New World beans must mean that there was pre-Columbian contact between Europe and the New World, Hot-pot is an English peasant dish, so real Hot-pot can’t include oysters, Mole is a famous Mexican dish and can’t possibly have an non-Mexican influences on it’s development…again the list goes on.
Getting back to the migration of dishes, on the weekend I was given some special beans smuggled into Australia years ago from an isolated Croatian village. To make a particular dish, these are the “correct” beans to make and are only found in this village.
As it turns out I had also just ordered these exact beans from an online service. They are a relatively common type of bean in Italy called Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco (“Tongue of fire”) and are though (not actual data on this) to have come from Tierra del Fuego. I will be interested to grow them either way, but will they taste different now that I know that they are relatively common and not some super special rare variety?
Great discussion that cries out for some more full posts.
Adam, Sorry if I mis-represented you. And I don’t in any way want to say my experience with hot-pot transmogrifying into guisado inglés is in any way extraordinary. In fact as some of your examples and Bob’s cabbage rolls show, it happens all the time (Bob, I shall be coming your way one of these days for your mother-in-law’s horchata and your cabbage rolls).
Ji-Young I suspect there’s a connection between most of these stuffed cabbage rolls but it would take working out the relations between east and central Europe and the Ottoman empire.
Kay, I think the instincts are probably universal. It’s laundry day, I need something quick. How can I stretch this till tomorrow. And so on. What seems to me not as universal is the response. Even after years in Mexico, a quesadilla is not what comes to mind as a quick supper. I need to look at Elizabeth Rozin again. She has theories about independent invention of similar dishes around the world. Another post, ha!
Adam, a blind tasting of the two beans is in order! Or perhaps the reverse.
As I said, this is a subject that merits much more attention. I’m out tonight and tomorrow but later this week?
There was no mis-representation. I just wanted to clarify a few things, in my original posts I played down mill worker connection as I wanted to emphasis the up-market nature of the first generation of recipes.
“Hot-pot is an English peasant dish, so real Hot-pot can’t include oysters”
Not sure what you mean by this.
Oysters only became a luxury food after the collapse of most oyster beds due to pollution and over-extraction in the mid 19th century. Up until this time they had been a staple food of the poor across England (and elsewhere).
You may have meant people were not aware of this and assumed oysters could not possibly be part of dish of ‘peasant’ (or rather proletarian?) origins.
Cheers
Dennis
In context, I think that my meaning is quite clear.
“People can be fiercely protective about this folk-lore, as it is one of the main props for their world view. Cassoulet is an ancient dish so it’s inclusion of New World beans must mean that there was pre-Columbian contact between Europe and the New World, Hot-pot is an English peasant dish, so real Hot-pot can’t include oysters, Mole is a famous Mexican dish and can’t possibly have an non-Mexican influences on it’s development…again the list goes on.”
Dennis, Thanks for your comment and reminding us that oysters were a food of the poor for centuries (and not a very safe one either).
I think though that Adam has answered your query. He was talking about the reaction of others when he discussed the origins of hot pot, not in this sentence about what happened in the past.