Changes

Ooh, I’m struggling to stay awake and it’s still really early.  It was raining this afternoon, which I think adds to the drowsiness in place — the boys are a heap on the sofa, “watching” sports.  (He’s just “resting his eyes,” not sleeping, and the little snores are from the fan… 🙄😝). Jerry began his day by sitting on my tummy to wake me up, then he stretched out for a full body petting, and then he transferred over to Don for more petting.  He’s been touching one of us all day, but still comes looking for more petting.  Silly little pup!  

It was a typically hot summer’s day today, and Don commented on how much things have changed in his lifetime.  When he was a boy, he said, on a day like this, women would still be in the kitchen preparing a full meal — roast (mainly beef), potatoes, dessert, etc — in a kitchen over a wood fire, without fans or air conditioning, sometimes no electricity, and no fans.  We laughed that it must have been the origin of the saying, “if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!”  But in all seriousness, I remember that my grandmother cooking over a “coal pot” - or a small, charcoal fuelled grill — for certain items (Christmas ham being one that stands out.). There are people who wax nostalgic about wood burning ovens for baking bread or pizza, and hordes who object to the use of a microwave oven in cooking (and others who swear by it) but we were discussing how much things have changed so that modern cooks do not have to rake out ashes, set and light a fire and so on just to bake a chicken.  Of course there are many who will still be working over a stove when it’s over 30C in the kitchen to prepare meals — food service workers in particular —and many of us have the luxury of having a meal delivered to us.

So you all know that I collect cookbooks, right?  I recently acquired The Unofficial Narnia Cookbook, which tries to create menus based on the Narnia books, and some of those menus are based on English periods, from Tudor times to the Victorian and Edwardian eras.  Those menus, especially the earlier periods, mixed sweet and savoury dishes in ways that are uncommon to modern palates.  The author highlights some of the main differences, notably that there are ingredients that are unusual to us.  In Elizabethan times, sugar was not widely available, for instance, and foods were sweetened using honey.  Meals were often multiple courses, served in order that’s different from present-day soup-salad-fish-meat-dessert-cheese (for an elaborate meal) and would be accompanied by beer/ale (as water was often unsafe to drink) Plus they would often do elaborate pies that had live fillings (four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie for example!) and gild desserts.  In some ways, I’d love to have seen / participated in one of those meals, but in others, not so much.  Anyway, I’ve got a couple of books that cover Victorian and Edwardian menus, periods in which the wealthy had begun importing chefs (French cooking was particularly prized) and they used a number of delicate (and fussy) sauces.  Plus afternoon tea became more popular so tiny tea sandwiches, miniature cakes and other delicacies, were featured.  There was, of course, a huge division between the wealthy and the poor, and between town and country dwellers.  Someone else wrote The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery which focussed more on Tolkien’s writings, and the menus of his country Victorian childhood.  Again, there are items that are different to modern diners; things like rice and pasta, for instance, are practically unknown.  But the pride of my collection was my just-acquired The Forme of Cury, one of the earliest known cookbooks, dating from the 1300s and Apicius’ Cooking in Imperial Rome, written somewhere in the first century.

It’s like Christmas for me, finding those two!  They’re translations, of course, as I don’t read Olde English or Latin with any facility, but diving into them is just awesome!  Time travel in probably the only way we can really achieve it — at least until someone works out how to do the timey-wimey TARDIS type stuff!  (Yes, in addition to Star Trek I’m also a Doctor Who fan!)  I was lost in the pages today, just trying to get a sense of the spices that were used and how they were used.  There’s a whole section in “Cury” (an old word for “cookery”) on “kitchen physike” which includes some (questionable) treatments for illness.  Apicius is even more fascinating, as it deals with foods that were served at Roman banquets when Rome was the Empire.  It’s surprising to me that humans haven’t changed much in over 2000 years!  See, in ancient times, spices were very expensive and highly prized.  Many were imported from India, or the Levantine countries, and were transported over land, or by sea, so they weren’t easy to get.  Roman politicians created laws to restrict or outlaw spices that they wanted to control so they could become richer.  The history around how cooking was done, which spices were employed and how (the Roman work just lists the ingredients, not the quantities nor how they were to be combined) as it was partly intended to restrict the knowledge to qualified cooks and not for general use, and partly because paper (parchment / ink) was expensive and reading wasn’t very widespread.  Again, meals were different, and sometimes the seasonings seem repulsive to modern palates.  Modern preservation and agricultural techniques are better than they were then, and transportation is faster and easier, so our spices are more plentiful and less expensive than theirs.

I’m going to be eating virtually for a while, through these and others of my collection.  I still have fantasies of cooking things — I got my support worker to take down some of my baking supplies from upper shelves where I couldn’t reach them since my back surgery in which I was shortened by 10cm — so I could try cooking.  Still working up the energy to do that!  Meanwhile, I’ll journey through the centuries via their recipes (I also got a Mrs. Beeton’s, the handbook for Victorian housewives) and I may even try something simple.  Good night!