Notes & Queries. Medicine, US Agriculture, Celery, Noodles, Curry, Barbecue, Tiki
Food, the Forgotten Medicine. A virtual issue of the Social History of Medicine, collecting papers on the topic from different issues. Unusually helpful introduction by Rachel Rich(@RachelSRich) and Sara Pennell (@HistorySara), chock a block with good articles, access until 1st September. Via Lisa Smith (@historybeagle) at The Recipes Project.
Getting the facts about American agriculture. The first in Jayson Lusk ‘s invaluable round up of facts and figures on American farming, the USDA, and subsidies. Comparative data for other parts of the world too.
Does celery have a taste? And can machines replace human noses and taste buds in in sensory evaluation?
Instant noodles are the poor person’s hamburger, wheat flour, fat, and a meaty taste, ready in seconds in a microwave at the convenience store. The Chinese, for some time the largest market, slurped 12% less last year, quite a drop. Tastes of the better-off are going upmarket.
Curry is one of those evergreen topics in food history. Even the American Historical Association, the largest organization of professional historians in the US, is taking note.
Barbecue parallels curry in many ways: unclear origins, dubious etymologies, so many different techniques, ingredients and final results that it’s not clear there’s even a family resemblance between them, and overtones of what has come to be called culinary appropriation. I’d like to blog about both curry and barbecue at some point. In the meantime, I keep up with the flood of books and articles on the barbecue of Texas since that’s the emblematic dish of Austin, Texas where I live.
Texas barbecue means long smoked meat, particularly brisket, and it’s one a roll right now, shifting from traditional pit masters who tended to be African American or German to a younger generation, helped along by Texas Monthly Magazine, the amazing meat specialists, including Jeff Savell, at Texas A&M University, and Texas Foodways.
Aaron Franklin has a barbecue joint here in Austin, Texas where I live and last year he won a James Beard award for his work. Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto, authored with the help of Jordan Mackay, describes his technique in great detail from transforming propane tanks into smokers to the more-or-less round-the-clock tending of the smokers.
Comment One. I’m glad some people like making this tender, aromatic, meat because you wouldn’t catch me doing it in a hundred years.
Comment Two. I can’t help being struck by the irony of the down home image of Texas barbecue, very much in evidence in the book, and the quantities of beef and the 128 cubic feet of post oak that Franklin’s shovels into their smokers every week.
This is oak. It’s true that post oak is not one of the great oaks, that the drought Texas has suffered over the last few years has killed thousands upon thousands of oak trees, that lots of people eat in the restaurant, though it’s not that big.
Even so 128 cubic feet of firewood is more than our family used for heating a house and water for seven to ten people for a whole winter in 1950s England (well, one room of the house).
This is beef, the aspiration of much of the Anglo world for centuries. Well as a friend who’s thought a lot about barbecue said, before refrigeration there was not much else that was edible in the heat of the Texas summer when most plant photosynthesis just shuts down.
Moral. Texas barbecue–beef and oak–really is Texan because it just couldn’t have happened in most places in the world.
Finally, another huge irony. Here’s a thoughtful article on why a tiki restaurant makes sense in New Orleans (thanks @SteffChilds, a fellow Texas Foodways member for pointing me to this in Cookin’ Louisiana). It begins by quoting from my Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage, written in part to correct the tiki/luau image of Hawaii’s food. My goodness.
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