Eat your heart out, Magritte.

Et le fish and chips n'est pas inconnu à Paris:



... albeit with mayonnaise or sauce tartare rather than malt vinegar.

What are those slices of lemon and lime doing next to the Parisian attempt at fish 'n' chips!? Honestly! A squirt of Heinz Tomato Sauce is allowed (preferably from a tomato-shaped plastic container), but none of that posh citrus garnish nonsense, please!

Of course, Temperance, I had to do some quick research, you know me. 
What I learn here new everyday on this site, especially from you...

https://everything2.com/title/Kiss+me+quick%252C+squeeze+me+slowly%2521

And I found it also in a thesis about
The literary depiction of English everyday life from Margaret Tatcher's rise to power to the fall  of new labour in the works of Sue Townsed.
http://e-spacio.uned.es/fez/eserv/tesisuned:ED-Pg-Filologia-Nmingo/MINGO_IZQUIERDO_Nievesde.pdf

One can it perhaps read during his "confinement" . I see that the word exists also in English. Yes all those sophisticated French words, English people borrowed from the French... ...that teasing is not worth of me...

Kind regards from Paul.

6 April 1320 - The Declaration of Arbroath.

Until the last quarter of the 13th century the relationship between the nations of England and Scotland was one of relatively harmonious coexistence, with the Kings of Scotland paying hommage to English kings only for titles and possessions they held in England. But with the ascession of Edward I in 1272 England was now ruled by a more aggressive monarch with a clearly colonial attitude towards both Wales and Scotland.

Scotland under King Alexander III had seen a period of peace and economic stability, but on 19 March 1286, Alexander died after falling from his horse. The heir to the throne was Alexander's granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway. As she was still a child and in Norway, the Scottish lords set up a government of guardians, and then Margaret fell ill on the voyage to Scotland and died in Orkney on 26 September 1290. The lack of a clear heir led to a period known as Competitors for the Crown of Scotland or the "Great Cause", with several families laying claim to the throne. With Scotland threatening to descend into civil war, King Edward I of England was invited by the Scottish nobility to arbitrate. However before the process could begin, he insisted that all of the contenders recognise him as Lord Paramount of Scotland. In early November 1292, at a great feudal court held in the castle at Berwick-upon-Tweed, judgement was finally given in favour of John Balliol having the strongest claim in law.

Edward proceeded to reverse the rulings of the Scottish Lords and even summoned King John Balliol to stand before the English court as a common plaintiff. John renounced his homage in March 1296 and by July, Edward had forced him to abdicate. Edward then instructed his officers to receive formal homage from some 1,800 Scottish nobles and that they provide military service in the war against France. This was unacceptable; instead the Scots formed an alliance with France and launched an unsuccessful attack on Carlisle.

Edward responded by invading Scotland in 1296 and taking the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed in a particularly bloody attack and at the Battle of Dunbar, Scottish resistance was effectively crushed. The campaign had been very successful, but the English triumph would only be temporary. Throughout Scotland, there was widespread discontent and disorder after the dominion exercised by the English Crown, and acts of defiance were directed against local English officials. In 1297, the country erupted in open revolt, and Andrew de Moray and William Wallace emerged as the first significant Scottish patriots with Wallace winning a significant victory of English forces at Stirling Bridge in 1297. Nevertheless Edward I and then his son Edward II continued to try and assert their dominance over Scotland.

In 1306 Robert the Bruce seized the Scottish throne and began a long struggle to secure his position against internal and external threats. His success at Bannockburn in 1314, when he defeated an English army under Edward II, was a major achievement, but the English still did not recognise Scotland's independence or Bruce's position as king. Furthermore on the European front, Scottish relations with the papacy were also in crisis after the Scots defied papal efforts to establish a truce with England, resulting in the Papal excommunication of King Robert  and three of his barons in 1320.

It was amid these events that the Declaration of Arbroath was a formal letter addressed to Pope John XXII which was drawn in Arbroath Abbey by Bernard of Kilwinning , then Chancellor of Scotland and Abbot of Arbroath, and sealed by fifty-one magnates and nobles. It constituted King Robert I's response to his excommunication for disobeying the pope's demand in 1317 for a truce in the First War of Scottish Independence. The letter asserted the antiquity of the independence of the Kingdom of Scotland, denouncing English attempts to subjugate it and was  thus intended to assert Scotland's status as an independent, sovereign state and defend Scotland's right to use military action when unjustly attacked.


The Declaration of Arbroath in the National Records of Scotland.

The Declaration made a number of points: that Edward I of England had unjustly attacked Scotland and perpetrated atrocities; that Robert the Bruce had delivered the Scottish nation from this peril; and, most controversially, that the independence of Scotland was the prerogative of the Scottish people, rather than the King of Scots. (However this should be taken in the context of the time - ‘Scottish People’ refers to the Scottish nobility, rather than commoners.) In fact it stated that the nobility would choose someone else to be king if Bruce proved to be unfit in maintaining Scotland's independence. Whatever the true motive, the idea of a contract between King and people was advanced to the Pope as a justification for Bruce's coronation over John de Balliol's claim because Balliol had proven incapable of protecting the Scottish people. For his part the Pope accepted the points in the Declaration and wrote to Edward II urging him to make peace, although it wasn't until 1328 that the Pope finally acknowledged Scotland's independence.

So, for today I suggest something using Arbroath smokies: hot-smoked haddock fillets from the town of Arbroath in Angus.

The Arbroath smokie is said to have originated in the small fishing village of Auchmithie, three miles northeast of Arbroath. Local legend has it a store caught fire one night, destroying barrels of haddock preserved in salt. The following morning, it was found that some of the barrels had caught fire, thereby cooking the haddock inside, and further inspection revealed that the haddock was not just palatable but delicious, and so the idea caught on. However it is much more likely that idea was actually introduced from Scandinavia where similar to hot smoking methods are still employed. To make Arbroath smokies, the fish are first salted overnight, then tied in pairs using hemp twine, and left for another night to dry. Once they have been salted, tied and dried, they are hung over a triangular length of wood to smoke over smouldering hardwood chippings, covered over with a wooden half barrels and sealed with wet jute sacking. All of this serves to create a very hot, humid and smoky fire. The intense heat and thick smoke is essential if the fish are to be cooked, not burned, and to have the traditional strong, smoky taste after less than an hour of smoking.

Smokies being hot-smoked, are ready cooked, and so can be eaten just as they are, hot from the smoker or warmed up with boiling water or under a grill, and with a bit of butter on top. However they can be used in more involved dishes. Cullen skink is a soup traditionally made from Finnan haddie - that is cold-smoked haddock (which unlike an Arbroath smoky needs to be cooked) but it can be made using Arbroath smokies which impart a slightly stronger smokier flavour, but whatever you do just don't use any of the lurid yellow dyed stuff sold in supermarkets.

Cullen skink is one of Britain's best soups: a full-flavoured, hearty and comfortingly creamy soup of smoked haddock, potato and leek all poached in milk. Cullen is, of course, a small fishing town on the Moray Firth, an inlet popular with haddock, while the Oxford Companion to Food says that skink is a variation of the German "schinke", or ham, denoting a shin specifically: so the archetypal skink is a soup made from shin of beef. Cattle perhaps being more valuable than fish in coastal regions, the locals around the Moray Firth adapted the idea to suit their own ingredients.

I looked in Margaret (Meg) Dodd's 'Cook and Housewife's Manual' published in Edinburgh in 1829, which has numerous traditional Scottish recipes, but unfortunately she doesn't have one for cullen skink. So for a recipe there's this very comprehensive one in The Guardian:

The Guardian - Felicity Cloake - how to cook the perfect cullen skink-



There was to have been a major exhibition this summer by the National Records of Scotland to mark the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, but due to covid-19 this has been postponed.

Your dishes of the day are always informative, Mm. I'm trying to be a bit resourceful andwas thinking of trying to make paneer nut i have half fat milk and i tjink maybe you need full fat
I don t think that qualifies necessarily as a jistorical matter.  Sorry abouttypos - on phone.

As you say I think paneer is usually made from full fat milk, but it would probably still work with half fat, although I guess that would just be wetter, and so need more whey to be squeezed out. However you could try adding some dried milk powder to your half-fat milk, to boost up the fat content ... I've done that when making yoghurt. I don't really have much experience of making paneer but maybe Priscilla knows how it's done. Although what exactly all this has to do with the Declaration of Arbroath or the history of Cullen skink is anyone's guess.

9 April 1865 - one of the last battles of the American Civil War was fought at the village of Appomattox Court House in Virginia, where the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under the command of General Robert E. Lee, were defeated by the Union Army of the Potomac under the Command of Ulysses S. Grant. Lee's army was cut off from resupply or retreat and he was forced to surrender - the document of surrender being signed in the parlour of a private house in the village.

It was the first time the two men men had seen each other face-to-face in almost two decades. Suddenly overcome with sadness, Grant found it hard to get to the point of the meeting and instead the two generals briefly discussed their only previous encounter, during the Mexican–American War until Lee brought attention back to the issue at hand. The terms Grant offered were as generous as Lee could hope for; his men would not be imprisoned or prosecuted for treason. Officers were allowed to keep their sidearms, horses, and personal baggage. In addition to his terms, Grant also allowed the defeated men to take home their horses and mules to carry out the spring planting and provided Lee with a supply of food rations for his starving army. Lee never forgot Grant's magnanimity during the surrender, and for the rest of his life would not tolerate an unkind word about Grant in his presence.


'Peace in Union.' The surrender of General Lee to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, 9 April 1865. Lee, well-dressed in his customary uniform, was the first to arrive for the meeting and had to wait. Grant, besides conducting a battle all morning had also been to fighting a ferocious headache, but this had subsided when he arrived at the house, in a mud-spattered uniform, a government-issue sack coat, with trousers tucked into muddy boots, no sidearms, and with only his tarnished shoulder straps showing his rank.

On April 10, Lee gave his farewell address to his army, and then both commanders left to report to their respective governments. On April 12, a formal ceremony of parade marked the disbandment of the Army of Northern Virginia with the parole of its nearly 28,000 remaining officers and men, free to return home. As news spread of Lee's surrender other Confederate commanders realized that the strength of the Confederacy was gone, and so it triggered a series of surrenders across the South, in North Carolina, Alabama and finally Shreveport, Louisiana, for the Trans-Mississippi area in the West by June, signaling the end of the fighting.

After four years of war and numerous casualties cake may not be entirely appropriare fare but does suitably mark the final confontation and subsequent reconciliation between Lee and Grant. Like quite a number of other 19th century commanders and statemen, both had sweet dessert cakes named after them. These cakes are often claimed to have been a particular favourite of the gentleman concerned or to have been made to an old family recipe passed down the generations, although in fact the connections are often quite tenuous and the cake and recipe may simply have been so named as a fund-raising excerse, or just to cash in on their fame.

The Robert E. Lee Cake is traditionally believed to be a favorite of the Confederate general although this is difficult to confirm. Most sources date the first written version of Robert E. Lee Cake to 1879, but General Lee had already died in 1870.  The cake in question, an orange and lemon layer cake, while quite involved is fairly typical of southern-style baking, and it, or something similar was probably fimilar in the Lee household. There are many recipes and many versions in old southern cookbooks as the cake, with the association with General Lee,  was extremely popular in the nineteenth century.  No two authorities seem to agree on the egg content of the cake (ranging from eight to ten eggs) and the icing also varies with each recipe.

Here are two original recipes both taken from 'Housekeeping In Old Virginia; Contributions from Two Hundred and fifty of Virginia’s Noted Housewives,  Distinguished For Their Skill In The Culinary Art And Other Branches of Domestic Economy' (1879) edited by Marion Cabell Tyree:

Robert E. Lee Cake
Twelve eggs, their full weight in sugar, a half-weight in flour.  Bake it in pans the thickness of jelly cakes.  Take two pounds of nice "A" sugar, squeeze into it the juice of five oranges and three lemons together with the pulp; stir it in the sugar until perfectly smooth; then spread it on the cakes, as you would do jelly, putting one above another till the whole of the sugar is used up.  Spread a layer of it on top and on sides.  –  Mrs. G.

Gen. Robert Lee Cake
10 eggs.
1 pound sugar.
1/2 pound flour.
Rind of 1 lemon, and juice of 1/2 lemon.

Make exactly like sponge cake, and bake in jelly-cake tins.  Then take the whites of two eggs beat to a froth, and add one pound sugar, the grated rind and juice of one orange, or juice of half a lemon.  Spread it on the cakes before they are perfectly cold, and place one layer on another.  This quantity makes two cakes.  – Mrs. I. H.

General Graant's favourite was apparently gingerbread cake, the recipe for which was originally the creation of Lucy Latimer, an African-American pastry chef who was hired by the Grants to work at the White House when he president. This has more provinence but again I cannot find the original Latimer recipe - perhaps she never wrote it down - nevertheless Lucy Latimer was undoubtedly a good cook as she went on to cook for four more presidential administrations after Grant's presidency ended.

So from, 'Mrs Goodfellow's Cookery as it should be: A manual for the dining room and kitchen' publ Philadelphia (1865), here are a few recipes for gingerbread cake from the year the Civil War ended:

 

10 April 1815 - Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, then part of the Dutch East Indies, erupted: it was the most powerful volcanic eruption in human recorded history.

After several centuries of dormancy a sudden very large eruption occurred on 5 April 1815 which was heard up to 800km away, followed by several days of ash fall onto neighbourng islands. Then at about 7 pm on 10 April, the eruptions intensified and the whole mountain was observed to turn into a flowing mass of "liquid fire". What was first thought to be the sound of firing guns was heard on Sumatra, more than 2,600 kilometres away. Pumice stones and ash rained down on the surrounding islands and pyroclastic flows cascaded down the mountain to the sea wiping out the village of Tambora. The climax of the eruption was on the 10 and 11 April but smaller eruptions rumbled on for months.


A size comparison of Tambora (main) with Vesuvius (inset).

The 1815 eruption of Tambora was the most powerful eruption in human recorded history: the energy release was equivalent to about 33 gigatons of TNT, while an estimated 40 cubic kilometres of material, weighing about 10 billion tonnes, was ejected. Mount Tambora, previously one of the highest peaks in the Indonesian archipeligo, lost roughly a third of its height. All vegetation on the island was destroyed with uprooted trees, mixed with pumice ash, washed out to sea to form thick rafts up to 5 kilometres across. A moderate-sized tsunami struck the shores of various islands throughout the archipelago on 10 April, with a height of up to 4 metres on coastlines directly facing the island, and up to 2m in height at further remove in East Java, and the Molucca Islands. The total death toll has been estimated to be around 4,600. The eruption column reached the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 43 kilometres.  The coarser ash particles settled out one to two weeks after the eruptions, but the finer ash particles,  stayed in the atmosphere for several years at altitudes of 10–30 kilometres and were dispersed around the world. The eruption also released up to about and up to 100 billion tones of SO₂ into the atmosphere.

All this material in the atmoshere reduced sunlight and lowered global temperatures. In the spring and summer of 1815 a persistent fog was observed in the northeastern United States which dimmed the sunlight such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye, while in north and western Europe the summer was very cold and wet, although not abnormally so. The following year, however, the whole northern hemisphere suffered extreme weather conditions, dubbed the "Year Without a Summer", and this disruption continued for several years. Average global temperatures decreased by about 0.4 to 0.7 °C enough to cause significant agricultural problems around the globe. China, Europe, and North America had well-documented below normal temperatures, which devastated their harvests and lead to widespread famines. There was heavier than normal snowfall in the Alps and the extent of Arctic pack ice also increased. The monsoon season in China and India was altered, which, as well as causing failed harvests, caused flooding in the Yangtze Valley forcing the evacuation of thousands of people, as waell as contributing to the spread of a new strain of cholera that originated in Bengal in 1816. There were also typhus epidemics in southeast Europe and along the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

There were several other, less dramatic effects:
High levels of ash in the atmosphere led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, a feature celebrated in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner.

The lack of oats to feed horses may have inspired the German inventor Karl Drais to research new ways of horseless transportation, which led to the invention of the draisine or velocipede. This was the ancestor of the modern bicycle and a step toward mechanized personal transport.

In June 1816, "incessant rainfall" during that "wet, ungenial summer" forced Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and John William Polidori, and their friends to stay indoors at Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva for much of their Swiss holiday. They decided to have a contest to see who could write the scariest story, leading Shelley to write Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Lord Byron to write "A Fragment", which Polidori later used as inspiration for The Vampyre – a precursor to Dracula.

There really can only be one dish to mark this event - tumpeng.

   

Tumpeng is a cone-shaped rice dish made to resemble a volcano and served with various side dishes (vegetables and meat) originating from Javanese cuisine of Indonesia. The cone shape of rice is made by using a cone-shaped woven bamboo container. The rice itself could be plain steamed rice, uduk rice (cooked with coconut milk), or yellow rice (uduk rice colored with kunyit (turmeric)). The cone shaped rice is erected on a tampah (a rounded woven bamboo container) topped with banana leaf, and surrounded by assorted Indonesian dishes. Since 2014 it is the official national dish of Indonesia, being described as "the dish that binds the diversity of Indonesian various culinary traditions."

From wiki (re tumpeng):

"People in Java, Bali and Madura usually make tumpeng to celebrate important events. However, all Indonesians are familiar with tumpeng. The philosophy of tumpeng is related to the geographical condition of Indonesia, especially Java as fertile island with numerous mountains and volcanos. Tumpeng dates back to ancient Indonesian tradition that revered mountains as the abode of hyangs, the spirit of ancestors and gods. The cone-shaped rice meant to mimics the holy mountain. The feast served as a thanksgiving for the abundance of harvest or any other blessings."

There are several variants of tumpeng, served at different ceremonies.

Tumpeng Robyong – This kind of tumpeng is usually served at the traditional Javanese siraman (bridal shower). Tumpeng is placed on a bakul bamboo rice container and on top of the tumpeng is placed egg, shrimp paste, shallots and red chilli.
Tumpeng Nujuh Bulan – This kind of tumpeng is served in the seventh month of pregnancy prenatal ceremony. The tumpeng is made of plain white rice. The main tumpeng is surrounded by six smaller tumpeng, to create a total of seven tumpengs all erected on tampah covered with banana leaf.
Tumpeng Pungkur – Used in the ceremony for the death of a virgin or unmarried male or female. It is made from white rice surrounded only with vegetables dishes. The tumpeng later must be cut vertical in to two parts evenly and placed one against another.
Tumpeng Putih – White tumpeng, uses white rice since white color symbolize holiness in Javanese culture. This kind of tumpeng is employed in sacred ceremonies.
Tumpeng Nasi Kuning – Yellow tumpeng, the color yellow represents a heap of gold, wealth, abundance and high moral character. This kind of tumpeng is eaten at cheerful, happy festivities such as the celebration of birth, engagement, marriage, Eid, Christmas etc.
Tumpeng Nasi Uduk – Also called tumpeng tasyakuran. Uduk rice (rice cooked in coconut milk) is used in theMaulud Nabi ceremony, a ceremony celebrating the birthday of prophet Muhammad.

MM, some ideas?

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200413-is-hiroshima-the-true-home-of-okonomiyaki

Kind regards, Paul.

Thanks, Paul, I'll keep that for 6 August 1945. Now for today ...

14 April 1865 - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, while the President and his wife were attending the play 'Our American Cousin' at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.  Lincoln died the following morning.



Occurring near the end of the American Civil War, the assassination was part of a larger conspiracy intended by Booth to revive the Confederate cause by eliminating the three most important officials of the United States government. Conspirators Lewis Powell and David Herold were assigned to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward, and George Atzerodt was tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson. Beyond Lincoln's death, the plot failed: Seward was only wounded and Johnson's would-be attacker lost his nerve. After a dramatic initial escape, Booth was killed at the climax of a 12-day manhunt. Powell, Herold, Atzerodt and Mary Surratt were later hanged for their roles in the conspiracy.

Lincoln's assasination occurred just five days after Battle of Appomattox Court House (featured above for 9 April 1865) when Robert E Lee surrended to the Union general Ulysses Grant. As mentioned in that post, many 19th century generals and statesmen had cakes named in their honour, often with it being claimed that the cake was their particular favourite. The links between the cake and it's celebrity are very often rather tenuous but for once Abraham Lincoln's 'personal' cake was actually something he regulatly ate and enjoyed.

Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, was from a wealthy family of Lexington, Kentucky. While Lincoln had been brought up on the Kentucky frontier, the Todd family were used to the finer things in life and once having particularly enjoyed a French-style white almond cake supplied by a local caterer, they requested the recipe of him. Mary subsequently baked the same cake for Abraham Lincoln when they courted, he liked it (he once described it as "the best cake I ever ate") and she continued to bake it often when they were married.

His assassination on 14 April 1865, when he was barely into his second term profoundly shocked the country. The eponymous almond cake soon became something of a symbol of Lincoln and was quite often fepatured on civic or military banquet menus in the 1870s. The original recipe, or variations of it, continued to appear in newspapers and cookbooks for many decades, such as this one from 'The Saturday Evening Post' (USA) of 16 February 1957:

Thanks for another ACW recipe, MM. I immediately thought at "frangipane" "taartjes" (we, in our dialect make: "fransipanne" of it).
A favourite of my father and later bit-by-bit also of me...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frangipane


 

But with my "fransipannetaartjes" I meant rather this:



And nowadays one can have them mostly witout rhum.

And of course one has to be in France for the recipe...

https://cuisine.journaldesfemmes.fr/recette/332875-galette-des-rois-frangipane

Kind regards, Paul.

Galette des rois, Koningentaart, ie kings' cake, is of course traditional for Epiphany, the kings in question being the three who brought gifts for Christ. In France/Spain it usually contains a dried broad bean, la fêve - or nowadays with bought ones a little ceramic novelty - and whoever gets the portion containing the bean is king- or queen-of-the-bean. French galette des rois, as your first picture shows, usually consists of flaky puff pastry layers with a dense center of frangipane, although in the west of France a sablé galette is often made with a sweetcrust pastry. Around here a different type of cake is often made, known as a gâteau des rois, usually as torus-shaped brioche with candied fruits and sugar, and encircled with a crenellated paper band to make it resemble a crown.

I rather think from the recipe, that Abe Lincoln's favourite cake was more like an iced/sugar-dusted almond brioche sponge cake, than a flaky-pastry frangipane galette, so more like this (which is a modern interpretation of a similar Lincoln's cake recipe here made into a ring rather like an Austrian/German bundt cake):

PaulRyckier wrote:

And nowadays one can have them mostly without rhum.

But where's the fun in that?

Thanks for the reply about the "galette des rois", but to be honest I still prefer the "frangipane tartelettes" (frangipanetaartjes) that I mentioned in my former message.

http://www.delicesdemimm.com/archives/2016/10/25/34478676.html








Kind regards, Paul.

Just as a matter of interest the word, frangipane, for the sweet filling made of ground almonds, or at least with almond flavouring, is usually reckoned to be named after the Italian Frangipani family who were powerful Guelph supporters during the Middle Ages. They could trace their ancestry back to the 11th century but ultimately they claimed to be descended from the ancient Roman plebeian family of the Anicii. Their name, Frangipani, also written Frangipane, Freiapane, Fricapane or Fresapane, is generally supposed to derive from frangere il pane, or literally 'break the bread'.

However the earliest reference to an almond filling with this modern spelling with a 'g' seems to be from a confectioner's dictionary of 1732. Interestingly though, there is an earlier reference to a tart of 'franchipanne' in La Varenne’s' famous cookbook 'Le Cuisinier françois' of 1651. This recipe is also one of the earliest references to what one would now call a puff or choux pastry such as used in the classic galette des rois (the name choux, French for cabbage, refers to the tight, thin, cabbage-like layers of pastry). Despite the name, in La Varenne's recipe the filling itself is barely mentioned and certainly no particular flavour is specified. I wonder, did the recipe's name, franchipanne, actually refer to the innovative, millefeuille-type construction, rather than the filling? Anyway, whatever La Varenne meant by it, this is from the English translation of his book which was published in 1653 as 'The French Cook':

Tourte of franchipanne.
Take the fairest flower [flour] you can get, and allay it with the whites of eggs; presently take the twelfth part of your paste, and spread it until you may see through ti; butter your plate, or tourte panne, spread this first sheet, dresse it up, butter at the top, and doe the same to the number of six, then put what creame you will, and make the top as the bottome to the number of six sheets; bake your tourte leasurely; after it is baked, besprinkle it with water of flours, sugar it well and serve.

You must have a care to worke up your paste as soone as it is made, and because it drieth up sooner then you are aware, and when it is unusefull, because your sheets must be as thinne as cobwebs, therefore you must choose a moist place.

The word frangipane also denotes a genus of plants, now classified as plumeria named in honor of the seventeenth-century French botanist Charles Plumier. But frangipane is still a common name for these bushy plants which typically have large sweet-scented blooms, and it comes from the Marquis Muzio Frangipani of the Italian family mentioned above. He was a perfumer to Louis XIII who invented a perfume that was said at the time to resemble the odour of the recently discovered flowers. This may be how the sweet, almond-smelling, confectionary paste came to be known as frangipane. But also bear in mind that the similar sweet, almond-based paste, usually known as marzipan, mazapan, or marchpane in Middle English, has been known in Western Europe for nigh on one thousand years, having been introduced to Arabic Spain from the Middle East, from where, via Byzantium, it might also have spread independently into Eastern Europe.

MM, thank you again for this further discussion of the word "frangipane". I will especially transmit to my wider circle (after the Corona lockdown) the comment about the Marquis Muzio Frangipane and his perfume (and there is my Louis XIII back of my Musketeer story).
And yes "almonds" in "Franchipane" and "Marchpane"...








Kind regards, Paul.

19 April 1839 - The Treaty of London of 1839 was signed between Great Britain, Austria, France, the German Confederation (led by Prussia), Russia, and the Netherlands - officially recognising the de facto independence of the Kingdom of Belgium. At Britain's insistence, under the treaty the European powers recognised and guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium with article VII specifically requiring Belgium to remain perpetually neutral and by implication committing the signatory powers to guard that neutrality in the event of invasion, thus the treaty became a cornerstone of European international law.

When on 31 July 1914 the Belgian Army mobilised in the face of Germany's demands for safe passage of its troops through Belgium in order to attack France (which the Germans alleged was about to advance into Belgium en route to attacking Germany in support of Russia), the Belgian King, Albert I, publicly called Europe's attention to the fact that  Germany, Great Britain and France were solemnly bound to respect and to defend the neutrality of his country in accordance with the 1839 Treaty. Informed by the British ambassador that Britain would go to war with Germany over the latter's violation of Belgian neutrality, the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg exclaimed that he could not believe that Britain and Germany would be going to war over a mere "scrap of paper". Germany invaded Belgium on 4 August and Britain promptly declared war the same day.


"The Scrap of Paper – Enlist Today", a British World War I recruitment poster of 1914.

Here's a suitable dish that should fit the bill rather well. Rabbit with prunes cooked in wine or beer is a typical Belgian dish enjoyed by both Flemish and Walloons, but here it's with the topical twist of being cooked as a parcel in 'a piece of paper' ie cooking parchment.

En papillote (French for "in a paper parcel") is a method of cooking in which the food is put into a folded pouch and then baked. The parcel is typically made from folded parchment paper, but other material, such as aluminium foil or big leaves of cabbage or banana etc, can obviously be used. The parcel holds in moisture so that when placed in an oven or on a hot surface, the food within the parcel is steamed, whether from its natural juices or from added fluid such as wine, stock, etc. It is often claimed that the idea of cooking this way was the invention of Antoine Alciatore, a French immigrant to New Orleans who in about 1840 created Pompano Montgolfier, honouring the brothers who had created the first balloons (the Mongolfiers were in the paper-making business and so made their pioneering hot-air balloons out of paper). With Alciatore's recipe a filet of pompano, (a tropical sea fish a bit like a snapper) is wrapped in paper with a sauce of white wine and crabmeat and then baked; the steam not only cooks the fish but puffs up the parchment, suggesting a hot air balloon. Antoine's recipe was certainly a speciality of his restaurant although the idea of cooking things wrapped in paper or other sheets of material such as leaves, of course goes back thousands of years.

Anyway here's a modern recipe for lapin aux pruneaux en papillote/papillot met konijn en pruimen, from the Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize.

In French:



In Flemish:

Delhaize - Papillot met konijn en pruimen

That looks very yummy. I've got a whole rabbit in the freezer as well as all the other ingredients, so I'm going to give that a go. It looks quick and easy to do and I should imagine is quite forgiving in terms of timing, so I might well add it to my regular repertoir. Rabbit, often cooked with thyme and raisins, is popular in Catalunya, and braising it with prunes is also a traditional way of preparing it in England, so I can see plenty of possibilities for adapting it to suit the occasion.

From Local Hero:

Urquhart  :  How's the casserole de lapin?

MacIntyre  :  Excellent.

Urquhart  :  Terrific. Thank you.

Oldsen  :   [thinking a moment]   Lapin? That's rabbit.

MacIntyre  :  Is this my rabbit?

Oldsen  :  Harry!

MacIntyre  :  Trudy!

Urquhart  :  We don't allow animals in the bedrooms, I should have told you sooner

Thanks MM for your recipe of the lapin aux pruneaux en papillotte.

Overhere I have never seen rabit "en papilotte", from my restaurant remembrance it was more "salmon en papilotte?"
As overhere:
https://www.750g.com/recettes_saumon_en_papillote.htm
But here it is up to my remembrance, in aluminium foil and as I see it it is much much more easy to fold it
 
And braised rabbit with plumes... in my souvenirs of childhood...my sister and I were most of our time (only during holidays at our home on the Belgian coast) "opgekweekt" (how difficult: it seems in Dutch only to refer to plants and all. Now I found: "grootbrengen" raise? bring up? and they translate also by the enigmatic "rear")
...up to our twelve by our grandmother (and mother from time to time in the house of grandmother and going to school overthere too)...

And nobody but our grandmother could prepare "gestoofd konijn met pruimen" (braised rabbit with plumes) like her



But in our grandmother's recipe there were never ever bacon slices added...as I see it the rabbit was much more baken...and it was a whole rabbit in pieces and the "head" was also included...and she added also peas and carrots...and two slices of bread..and one liter dark table beer and a lot of onions and a good "geut" (it seems to be Belgian Dutch and even in the Dutch "scheut" I find no translation: splash? gulp?) of vinegar...and when braised during two? hours the whole rabbit was continuously immerged within the sauce...my father ate from the rabbit head, but we put it in the dust bin...

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Overhere I have never seen rabit "en papilotte", from my restaurant remembrance it was more "salmon en papilotte?"...

Me neither and I agree cooking en papillote is more usually used for delicate things like fish, but the Delhaize recipe was just too good to miss to commemorate the 1839 "scrap of paper". Your grandmother's recipe sounds much like my mother's for braised/stewed rabbit with prunes, cooked in a covered pot/casserole although with stock rather than beer and she did usually added lardons/bacon bits, plus as you say, a good "scheut" (in English a 'splash' is a good word, or maybe a 'glug' or 'slosh') of vinegar or sometimes sharp cider. The rabbits were usually farm-reared but during the war, when my mother learned her cooking skills from her mother, the rabbits would probably often have been wild (granny raised chickens at home but not rabbits) and so rather tougher needing a long, slow cooking and not at all suitable for steaming en papillote. Rabbits here in France usually come whole with the head still on, but I usually remove it before cooking: Doggy-Dog always claims that as his traditional 'perk' which he happily crunches up whole (uncooked bones of rabbit or chicken are OK as they are flexible but cooked bones are stiff and can be dangerous).

Thank you very much MM for your story about your "mother's rabbit recipe". There over the channel there seems to be not that much difference with our Belgian kitchen. At least for that "item"  ...
OOPS and I forgot the story of the rabbit head (keunekop/konijnekop)...

MM, I learned today, one has still to learn being more than three times 25 (although the feeling (of the mind!) is still 25) about banana bread.

From my search it seems to come from South-East Asia...I hope you can once use it in one of your historical event recipes...

https://bestinau.com.au/banana-bread-recipe/



But no cinnamon for us here in the Flemish region (former county of Flanders) as some 20 miles further in The Netherlands. 
Cinnamon in their pancakes...bah...and sugar in their mayonaise as the Germans...bah...

Kind regards from Paul.

Thanks for the article Paul. I touched on bananas and banana bread on 'Dish of the Day page 5 for 10 April 1633 – the first reference to a fresh banana in Britain'. Fresh imported bananas and hence recipes to deal with them as they have a very short shelf life, appeared first in the Americas as they were closer to the main growing regions in the Caribbean and so fast steamships could get them to markets in the north-east US before they perished (bananas not being amenable to either freezing or canning). Even so, as your article says, banana cake/bread recipes really only became popular in the 1930s with the ready availability of baking powder, nevertheless in that post I included an American recipe for banana cake from much earlier, taken from 'Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book' (1902) - and she didn't add cinnamon either.

23 April 1661 (St George's Day) - and the coronation of King Charles II.

Other than that the total cost of the coronation banquet was £1209 15s 7 ½d - a hefty sum for the time - I can't find many details of what was eaten. Samuel Pepys was there but although he describes the event he barely mentions the food itself. He certainly wasn't on the guest-list, but nevertheless while his wife watched on from the public stands, he somehow managed to wander from table to table ogling the distinguished guests, and then sat down in a corner to eat the loaf of bread, four rabbits and a pullet, that he'd managed to purloin from the diners. He was not alone in this as in his own words, "everybody else did [eat] what they could get".

St George's Day is also the traditional date for the start of the English asparagus season. Asparagus (or sparrow-grass, sparagi, perage, sperach, sparage, asparage, sparagus, or sparagras) grows wild in Britain, although it is more common around the Mediterranean, but its cultivation in Britain only seems to have started sometime in the 16th century. During Charles II's reign, however, it was very popular, albeit with a rather short seasonal availability. For example the Garter Feast, held in St George's Hall at Windsor Castle for the Knights of the Garter on 15 April  1671, used 6,000 stalks of asparagus, alongside 16 barrels of oysters, 2,150 poultry, 1,500 crayfish and 22 gallons of strawberries. As well as Pepys' rabbits and pullet I expect asparagus featured somewhere on the coronation menu in 1661.

So here, from Robert May's 'The Accomplish't Cook' (1660), which was published immediately after Charles' return from exile, I simply offer this:

Buttered Sparagus.
Take two hundred of sparagus, scrape the roots clean and wash them, then take the heads of an hundred and lay them even, bind them hard up into a bundle, and so likewise of the other hundred; then have a large skillet of fair water, when it boils put them in, and boil them up quick with some salt; being boil'd drain them, and serve them with beaten butter and salt about the dish, or butter and vinegar.

28 April 1794 - the so-called 'Sardinian Vespers', that is the popular revolt in Sardinia against Savoyard-Pietmontese rule.

With the Treaty of London (1718) at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duchy of Savoy (Savoia) was granted control of the (previously Spanish) Kingdom of Sardinia, in exchange for the House of Savoy giving up its ancient hereditary claims on Sicily. Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, having now gained a king's crown in addition to his ducal coronet, promptly moved the kingdom of Sardina's capital to his own Piedmontese ducal capital of Turin. He then proceeded to rule his new kingdom from there, with the parliament and government of Sardinia being represented and governed exclusively by his own men from the mainland. The Sardinian population had no representation in their kingdom's parliament and they were even barred from holding any civil or military positions in their own region. By the late 18th century discontent against the Piedmontese administration was widespread and was further bolstered by the cries for independence that were developing in other European regions (namely Ireland, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, Tyrol) as well as the contemporary events in France that were rapidly leading towards the Revolution.

In 1793 France - having already annexed the adjacent island of Corsica just two decades earlier (1769) albeit not without a fight - attempted to conquer Sardinia. The locals however, and with little support from the mainland, managed to resist the invasion. While generally in accord with the French republican ethos, the Sardinian patriotic movement hoped that by this valliant feats of arms, their Savoyard overlords would simply acknowledge their cause and in return improve their conditions and grant them a significant degree of autonomy. However the King, a strict absolutist monarch, would have none of it. His peremptory refusal to grant the island any of these wishes quickly put paid to that idea and spurred the grumbling sense of grievence into open rebellion, with the arrest of two notable figures of the so-called "Patriotic Party" being the final spark of revolt amongst the populace.

On 28 April 1794, known as sa dii de s'aciappa ("the day of the pursuit and capture"), two senior Peidmontese officials were set upon and killed in the city of Cagliari, while others were hunted down and emprisoned. Many of these Piedmontese tried to adopt local clothing in order to blend into the crowd, so anyone suspected to be from the Italian mainland would be asked  to "say chickpea" (nara cixiri) in Sardinian: failure in pronouncing the word correctly would give their origin away. Encouraged by what happened in Cagliari, the people in Sassari and Alghero did the same and then the revolt spread throughout the rest of the island. In May all the captured Piedmontese officers and officials were expelled back to the mainland.


The high point of the revolt: the entry of the Sardinian revolutionary leader Giovanni Maria Angioy into the city of Sassari in 1795.

However after two years of rebellion the uprising was eventually repressed by loyalist Piedmontese forces, bolstered by the 1796 peace treaty between France and Piedmont. Due to persecution by the ruling House of Savoy, Angloy, the rebellion's principal leader, fled from Sardinia and took refuge in republican France, where he lobbied for a French annexation of the island - but he died, still exiled in Paris, in 1808. Although local revolts continued, with major uprisings in Cagliari (1812) and Alghero (1821), Sardinia remained under Savoyard rule until 'The Perfect Fusion' (Italian: Fusione perfetta) in 1847. By this Act the Savoyard king, Charles Albert of Sardinia, finally abolished all the administrative differences between the mainland states (Savoy and Piedmont) and the island of Sardinia.

Today the date, 28 April 1794, is remembered as Sardinia Day (Sa die de sa Sardigna ) having been chosen in 1993 to commemorate the whole episode of Sardinia's fight for recognition as an equal partner with the rest of Italy.

Given the use of the word chickpea as a shibboleth to distinguish locals from outsiders during the revolt, it seems appropriate to mark the day with something made of chickpeas. Farinata ("made of flour") is a type of thin, unleavened pancake or crêpe made from chickpea flour which originated in Genoa (where it is called fainâ) and later became a typical food of the Ligurian sea coast, from Nice (where it's known as socca), to Tuscany (cecina "made of chickpeas") and Sardinia (where it goes by the name of fainè).

Chickpeas and flat-breads made from chickpea flour go back far into antiquity, although almost inevitably stories have arisen about the 'invention' of farinata. One story dates it from the time of the Punic Wars when Genoa (Genuva) was allied with Rome and claims it was created by Roman soldiers cooking their chickpea flour military rations on a flat shield placed on hot embers. Another tale says that following Battle of Meloria in 1284 (in which the Genoese fleet defeated that of the the rival city of Pisa, thereby assuming control of the Mediterranean) the Genoese galleys were hit by a storm and their stores of the dried legumes and olive oil became soaked in salt water and reduced to mush. Having nothing else to eat the crews were forced to eat the unappetising goo, which, flavored with salty sea water, turned out to be quite tasty, especially when left to dry in the sun to become kind of pancake. (although frankly I'm not sure what else they were intending to do with their dried chickpeas in the first place). Needless to say neither of these rather fanciful stores have much evidence to support them from before the late nineteenth century.

Anyway farinata is made by stirring chickpea flour into a mixture of water and olive oil to form a thin batter which is then poured into a metal pan to make a pancake typically about 4mm thick. This is then baked for a few minutes, traditionally in an open wood-fired oven. Farinata may be seasoned with fresh rosemary, pepper and sea salt. Traditionally the baked farinata is cut into irregularly shaped triangular slices, and eaten usually with no toppings and unadorned, but sometimes as an accompaniment to a few olives, slices of dried sausage, or small pieces of roasted sweet-pepper or pickled artichoke etc. Elsewhere in NW Italy, such as Tuscany, it might be served stuffed into small focaccia rolls (although I believe that's mainly just in Pisa) or put between two slices of bread, as it is traditional in Livorno (I think). But for all these slight regional variations, farinata typically remains a simple street food sold from bakeries or pizzerias, or served in bars as a uncomplicated, slightly salty appetizer, to accompany drinks.

     
Farinata - simple and unadorned (L) or maybe with just a little rosemary and sea-salt (R).

MM, what one learns here every day about history. As I am from the Low Countries, more focused on this history and the ones of France, Britain and a bit on the Holy Roman Empire not so aware that there was a history after "Rome" in italy. I have heard about the new Italy of 1870, Garibaldi, Mazzini and all that...but that from Sardinia is completely new to me...Thanks for this interesting story.

"Many of these Piedmontese tried to adopt local clothing in order to blend into the crowd, so anyone suspected to be from the Italian mainland would be asked  to "say chickpea" (nara cixiri) in Sardinian: failure in pronouncing the word correctly would give their origin away."
We have perhaps an equivalent in the history of the County of Flanders...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matins_of_Bruges
https://forvo.com/word/schild_en_vriend/
Yes it is the "sch" that the French as "sc" and also the "g" in "guild" that they pronounce as the English one in "good"
https://forvo.com/word/goed/#vls 
and here we say the same for "goed" as for "hoed" (hat) the same as in French as for "Hector": "Ektor"
That's quite difficult for "Ollanders"...

That said I learned also a lot about "chickpeas", where I had no idea what it was...after research it seemed to be our "kikkererwten" (frogs peas)
I and my partner have some bad experiences with that stuff. A "green lady" had convinced the partner to seek for these chickpeas as it was so healthy and so good for the digestion. Give me normal peas anytime...perhaps because we had cooked them as normal peas...
And now I see it is a basic food allover the world...and you can make flour of it?...

From my search of this evening if I all understood it well...you can make pizzas from normal  flour and also from chickpeas flour?

farinata as pizza...thin and foccaccia some 2 cm thick...?
https://www.11inchpizza.com.au/whats-the-difference-between-pizza-and-focaccia/

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

That said I learned also a lot about "chickpeas", where I had no idea what it was...after research it seemed to be our "kikkererwten" (frogs peas).

It would seem that the Dutch word, kikkererwten, like the English chickpea (from Middle English, chiche pease), is just modelled on the Middle French, pois chiche, (with the 'ch' pronounced more like in the English word 'church', rather than the soft 'sh' pronunciation of the modern French word, pois chiche), and where 'chiche' came originally from the Latin cicer. So all these names have nothing whatsoever do with chickens (or kippen), nor indeed frogs (kikken).

Incidentally the surname of the Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was derived from cicer, ie chickpea. Plutarch said that the name was originally given to one of Cicero's ancestors who had a cleft in the tip of his nose resembling a chickpea, but it is more likely that Cicero's ancestors were simply involved in growing and selling chickpeas. Cicero's family was not alone in taking its name from a humble legume: the name Fabius is from fava bean (ie broad bean), Lentulus from lentil, and Piso from pea.

I can understand why you didn't appreciate chickpeas if they were cooked like ordinary garden peas because they usually need to be soaked and then boiled for a good half hour to get them soft enough to eat. But when properly cooked I think they are nice to eat just like that - or you can mash them up and mix with sesame, garlic and lemon juice to make hummus (again the word basically means 'chickpea' in Arabic) - or mix the chickpea flour with onion, garlic, herbs and spices, shape into small balls and then deep fry to make falafels. Miam miam.

Watch for the sun falling from the sky because I am about to make a post to do with cooking and food.....not a great strength of mine. Chickpeas are an important part of subcontinental fare. used in a potato salad with garam massala, onions coriander leaves and eiher tamarind ot yoghurt to make a great side dish - for the afternoon - as are dehi burra  - batter cakes soaked in yogurt with raw spices in a powder on top. The flour  for these- called gram, there, is also the basis for yummy pakoras - usually vegetable there but in UK chicken ones are more common. Best bought  in the subcontinent from bazaar street stalls and to hell with the probably backdoor trots likely to follow. Going off to have a pine for my other life.

MM, thank you very much for the immediate reply...the whole day busy to prepare for the French thread about the German "Sonderweg"...excuses...I will comment tomorrow...
Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

I can understand why you didn't appreciate chickpeas if they were cooked like ordinary garden peas because they usually need to be soaked and then boiled for a good half hour to get them soft enough to eat. But when properly cooked I think they are nice to eat just like that - or you can mash them up and mix with sesame, garlic and lemon juice to make hummus (again the word basically means 'chickpea' in Arabic) - or mix the chickpea flour with onion, garlic, herbs and spices, shape into small balls and then deep fry to make falafels. Miam miam.

MM, you are an inexhaustible source of culinary knowledge...

As I have learned it now from you, we can give the chickpeas a go, as suggested by our "green believers" acquaintances. And I wasn't aware that chickpeasflour was a basic food allover the world. BTW: They say also "kekererwten", which is closer to the Latin "cicer" (spoken as we learned in the Fifties, as Kaesar as in the Dutch keizer and the German Kaiser)

And now I remember about "linzen" it seems to be "lentils" in English. And also a recommendation of some "green" friends.
And a vague rememberance of the nunschool, where we learned about the Bible and a Jacob? selled his brother's "eerstgeboorterecht" (never meet the word again since that time: it seems to be "birthright"...but that don't sounds right to me...hasn't it to be "primogeniture"?) in exchange for a dish of lentils soup.

That said: What is the difference between "lentils" and "chickpeas"? And can you do the same with them as with chickpeas?

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

They say also "kekererwten", which is closer to the Latin "cicer" (spoken as we learned in the Fifties, as Kaesar as in the Dutch keizer and the German Kaiser). Paul.

Yes .... Although certainly not an expert I am interested in language, and so as I undersand it, in French, the hard roman 'c', as is caesar or cicero, (ie pronounced like the 'k' in kaiser) changed over time. Thus the roman word for "song" canto(s), with a hard "k", became chantos ("ch" pronounced as in the English 'chant'), and eventually, "chante", that is with the modern French soft "sh" sound. But frankly that's just my take on it and I'm very far from being an expert on this.

PaulRyckier wrote:

And a vague rememberance of the nunschool, where we learned about the Bible and a Jacob? selled his brother's "eerstgeboorterecht" (never meet the word again since that time: it seems to be "birthright"...but that don't sounds right to me...hasn't it to be "primogeniture"?) in exchange for a dish of lentils soup..

I'm certainly no Biblical scholar either,  but I thought the whole point about that particular fable was that, being twins, and so neither was really the "primogeniture", other than just by fate and so they were really equals - only they weren't. Although perhaps your "nunschool" put a different spin on the story. But whatever, foodwise, the King James Bible translates the said dish as a "mess of pottage" ... that is a serving (and by the word "mess" it implies it is to be shared: a mess at a medieval dinner was usually four people) of "pottage", which was the ubiquitous porridgey broth, perpetually on the go in every medieval household throughout Europe, ie it meant just the usual food from home.

PaulRyckier wrote:

That said: What is the difference between "lentils" and "chickpeas"? And can you do the same with them as with chickpeas?

Same as with any dried legumes really: soak first and then boil until tender, although note that some - red kidney beans in particular - do very much need to be boiled, not just simmered, for at least ten minutes to destroy all the toxins. But, after boiling, just don't throw away the water you've just boiled your beans/lentils/chickpeas in ... because it's a brilliant vegan substitute for egg-white, albumin, whether to use in cakes, biscuits, or even meringues.

MM, 

I knew about the French Cicero. It was just that we after three years Latin with César and Cicero, we had in the fourth "Latin- Sciences" to say "kaisar" and "kikero" because the linguists had discovered that...And "kaisar" was for us not that unusual as in Germa, and Dutch..., but "kikero" in God's name...everybody tried to avoid to speak it out in class ...

David and Esau. Twins you said. I am not that well versed in the Bible. We Catholics from the nunschool...no bible... we had to believe what the nuns said, and the pastor and the pope...and to seek now for the Dutch protestant "Statenbijbel"...




Chickpeas and lentils...MM, you were and are such an irreplaceable acquisition for this board.

PS: and now in a hurry to my German Sonderweg...

Kind regards, Paul.

Just for you Paul - and bearing in mind that today (13 May) is apparently International Hummus Day, - here are some chickpea recipe suggestions from The Guardian newspaper: One tin of chickpeas – 17 delicious ways to use it, from halloumi salad to chocolate torte.

Meles meles wrote:

Just for you Paul - and bearing in mind that today (13 May) is apparently International Hummus Day, - here are some chickpea recipe suggestions from The Guardian newspaper: One tin of chickpeas – 17 delicious ways to use it, from halloumi salad to chocolate torte.

 
Thank you so much MM. Paul.

As the holiday season is at an end, the nights are drawing in and covid travel restrictions are returning, I have now more time on my hands to serve up some more helpings of the 'Dish of the Day'.

19 October 1216 - the death of King John of England.

Popular Victorian histories and historical fiction generally cast King John in the role of pantomime villain: a spiteful, irreligious, tyrannical, cruel man, who lost swathes of inherited territory in France, and then, by pushing up taxes to fund vain attempts to get it back, alienated his subjects, and who annoyed Pope Innocent III so much the pontiff excommunicated him and ordered England's churches closed. All of which led to civil war, Magna Carta and a French prince, Louis, being offered the English throne. Modern historians have modified this view, pointing out that he inherited a lot of the nation's problems from his predecessor, his elder brother Richard I, and that he was generally an able general and a competent, hard-working administrator. Nevertheless he was not at all liked. The chronicler Matthew Paris's epitaph reflects the contempt with which John was widely held by his contemporaries:

"Foul as it is, Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John."

John had been forced to accept Magna Carta in 1215 (which formally placed limits on royal power for the first time) but John had not the slightest intention of keeping to its terms and his opponents remained justifiably suspicious. Early in 1216 he led his army of foreign mercenaries against the Scots, who had occupied Northumberland, and on into southern Scotland, killing and pillaging as he went. He then turned his attention south advancing into East Anglia and attacking the homes and estates of his enemies there, forcing those he defeated to swear an oath to disregard Magna Carta. In May the heir to the French throne, Prince Louis of France, landed in Kent with a sizeable army to back John’s opponents and claim the English throne. He marched on to London, where he was welcomed.

The armed conflict swayed this way and that for months as John rampaged around Eastern England. He was in Lincoln on September 22nd and from there travelled towards East Anglia arriving in Bishop’s Lynn (now known as King's Lynn) a major port where he could get supplies, on October 9th. Whilst in Lynn, John was taken ill but nevertheless he set out again for Lincolnshire on the 12th October. He travelled via Wisbech whilst his baggage train appears to have taken a different and rather more disastrous route via Sutton Bridge on the edge of The Wash. Here it got trapped in quicksands and the incoming tide swept away carts, men and draught animals. Among the possessions lost were most of John's general domestic baggage but also, according to some chroniclers, sacred relics and other precious treasures. The English crown jewels certainly disappeared at about this time.

Bereft of his household belongings John spent the night of the 12th and 13th at Swineshead Abbey. He then continued onwards arriving at Sleaford castle on the 14th October where he stayed overnight, his condition having now noticeably worsened. On the 15th he wrote to Pope Honorius III (Innocent had died in July) that he was suffering from an "incurable infirmity" and asked for the kingdom to be put under the Church’s protection (a stratagem he hoped would ensure the succession passed to his son Prince Henry, now shortly to become King Henry III, rather than Louis of France). By then he was too ill to ride so on the 16th John was carried by litter to Newark – a journey of some twenty or so miles - arriving there that evening. John died in Newark castle during a fearsome thunderstorm on the night of October 18th and 19th. His body was subsequently taken for burial in Worcester cathedral.


King John's tomb in Worcester cathedral.

Immediately there were rumours of assassination and poison, which were compounded over the following decades by medieval chroniclers, who, in there attempts to further blacken John's character, offered a variety of conflicting and sometimes bizarre explanations for the king's decline. The early 13th-century writer Ralph of Coggeshall, for example, attributed John's death to gluttony. Ralph's contemporary, Roger of Wendover, agreed and then went further to succinctly blame it on a surfeit of peaches and new cider:

"[The King] on the following night travelled to the abbey which is called Swineshead. There, as it is thought, he was seized with so much sorrow of mind at his baggage being destroyed by the waves, that being attacked by acute feverish symptoms he began to be very ill. But his very hurtful gluttony increased the troublesome nature of his illness, who, having indulged too much in eating peaches and by drinking new cider, strongly intensified and inflamed the fevered heat within him."

The Brut Chronicle (the collective name of a number of medieval documents written in a poetic prose style mixing legend with contemporary events ) trumped both these chroniclers with a bizarre tale which it attributed to a "Brother Simon" of Swineshead Abbey, involving a dish of plums poisoned with a toxin extracted from a toad using a broach pin and administered to the king by a vengeful monk after a falling out over John wanting to sleep with the monk's sister! Ascribing the death to gluttony or by poison were of course deliberate devices of the times to illustrate how greedy or hated John was. But regardless of how entertaining these tales are, most likely John was simply carried off by that age old scourge of the medieval king on military campaign - dysentry.

But the death by "a surfeit of peaches" story is too good to simply pass over without further comment.

Peaches were not unkown in England at the time, although being difficult to cultivate, highly perishable and too fragile to transport far, they would have been rare delicacies, especially in October, although if anyone could get hold of peaches in England in October, it would surely be the King. Of course any peaches eaten by the king need not have been fresh but might rather have been dried or otherwise preserved and then cooked into a dish. Fresh fruits was generally viewed with considerable suspicion and medieval doctors tended to advise against eating them. However since their patients rarely took such professional fears into account, medical practice recommended eating the fruits cooked rather than raw, preferably well-cooked with wine and sugar (both having warm humours) to counter the cold and moist humours of the fruit itself. Peaches were also particularly infamous as they were thought to provoke lust, lavisciousness and lechery  - again note the specific mention of peaches may well have been simply to further darken King John's reputation, which was not unfounded even allowing for the standards of the time, as an impulsive, even violent, sexual predator.

The earliest comprehensive cookbook in England, the 'Forme of Cury' (written in about 1390, so nearly 180 years after John's death) makes no mention of peaches at all, has only one recipe for a dish of plums and just three for pears, although there are quite a few using apples, while dried currants or raisins occur as minor ingredients in a great many dishes. It's only really in the 16th century that peaches start to be mentioned as a regular food source in England, whether consumed raw, cooked or preserved.

Peaches simmered in cider would be an appropriate dish for today but I can't find a suitable old recipe. However as indicated above, besides peaches, plums and pears were also implicated at times in John's death depending on which chronicler one believes, and indeed the whole "death by fruit" story is most likley just fanciful fiction. Accordingly for today here's a recipe for fruit tarts made with peaches, plums, pears, apples or whatever you have, taken from the 'Good Huswife's Jewell' by Thomas Dawson, first published in 1585:

To make all maner of fruit Tartes.
You must boyle your fruite, whether it be apple, cherrie, peach, damson, peare, Mulberie, or codling, in faire water, and when they be boyled inough, put them into a bowle, and bruse them with a ladle, and when they be colde, straine them, and put in red wine or Claret wine, and so season it with suger, sinamon and ginger.

Alternatively, if you prefer to follow 13th century medical advice and avoid fruit completely, one could still go along with the spirit of the fanciful tales about King John's death and have that "homely and savoury dish" according to Mrs Beeton, toad-in-the-hole.

Toad-in-the-hole, with that name, is quite an old dish (and even supposedly has its own link to King John) although it is probably not as ancient nor royally connected as 'The Wit's miscellany' (p118) suggested in 1774 when it described: "... a certain Pudding call'd "A Toad in an Hole" ... the original Receipts for making them (if Tradition don't lye) were given them by their Great Benefactor, King John, who had them from King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table".

Early recipes, such as the two below, generally used fairly large chunks of meat, entire steaks, or even whole meat joints for the 'toad', although this extravagance wasn't to everyone's taste: in 1797 the writer Fanny Burney complained that Mrs. Siddons at Sadler's Wells "seems as ill-fitted as the dish they call a toad in a hole... putting a noble sirloin of beef into a poor paltry batter-pudding".

So for a couple of old toad-in-the-hole recipes, there's this from 'The English art of cookery, according to the present practice' by Richard Briggs (1788);

Toad in a Hole
MIX a pound of flour with a pint and a half of milk and four eggs into a batter put in a little salt beaten ginger and a little grated nutmeg put it into a deep dish that you intend to send it to table in take the veiney piece of beef sprinkle it with salt put it into the batter bake it two hours and send it up hot.

... and this from 'A Shilling Cookery for The People' by Alexis Soyer (1845);

165. A Fried Toad in the Hole.- Take a steak of the size required, not less in thickness than what I have before stated, and partly fry on both sides; have ready a pint of second-class batter, as No. 470; remove the steak for a minute, add more fat in the pan, put in the batter when it is beginning to become as thick as paste, place the steak in the middle, raise the frying-pan a sufficient height from the fire on a trivet, so as to cook gently; turn it over; or put the pan in the oven; when well set it is done; serve on a dish, the bottom uppermost.

The meaty component of toad-in-the-hole is now usually sausages although it only seems to have settled on this modern form in the 1920's.

Thank you very much MM for this thread related to King John. 

I thought that I mentioned the unfair treatment of King John corrected by modern historians in the thread about King Richard Lionheart and his mother Eleqnor of Aquitaine
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t1471-richard-lionheart-and-mother-eleanor-of-aquitaine
But as I read it again no it wasn't there. But anyhow I read and mentioned it perhaps on the forum too that there was a rehabilitation of poor King John among nowadays historians...
But if you can trust Wiki it seems that even that rehabilitation isn't fully  univocal among those historians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John,_King_of_England

As for your toad-in-hole...first time I hear about it...we have perhaps overhere some similar recipes, but up to my knowledge not that...

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/sams-toad-hole



MM, as I like some "heavy" stuff and I agree bad for the "line", I will nevertheless give it a go...even with my restricted culinary arts...

Kind regards, Paul.

5 December 1952 - The Great Smog of London.

On the evening of 4 December 1952 an anticyclone settled over London, causing a windless temperature inversion with cold, stagnant, heavier air trapped under a layer of lighter warm air, and so overnight a thick, clammy fog settled on the city. Late November had been unusually cold meaning Londoners had burned much more coal than usual to keep themselves warm, either in their own household hearths or in the electricity generating power stations that still existed throughout the city. Moreover while better-quality "hard" coals (such as anthracite) were mostly exported to pay off World War II debts or reserved for industrial use, post-war domestic coal tended to be of a relatively low-grade, dirty, sulphurous variety.

The result was that Londoners awoke on 5th December to thick damp fog mixed with sulphurous smoke from home and industrial chimneys, and sooty particulates from steam locomotives and motor vehicle exhausts. Private car ownership was of course rather limited but there were thousands of diesel-fuelled buses, especially after the electric tram system had been phased out just the year before. The Great London Smog continued to blanket the city until a rising wind finally dispersed the worst of it on the 10th December.



Although London and other industrial cities had been accustomed to heavy fogs for at least a century, this one was denser and longer-lasting than any previous fog. Visibility was reduced to a few metres making driving difficult or impossible and much of the public transport system, apart from the London Underground, ceased to operate, as did food and other deliveries to the shops many of which closed anyway. At its worst the ambulance service was brought to a halt, forcing casualties to somehow transport themselves to hospital. In the inner London suburbs and away from town centres there was little disturbance by moving traffic to thin out the dense fog in the back streets and as a result visibility could be down to a metre or so even in the daytime. At night the situation was even worse as nearly all street lighting used incandescent light bulbs which gave little penetrating light and so walking out of doors became a matter of shuffling along to feel for potential obstacles such as road kerbs and even, ironically, lamp-posts. The smog was so dense that it even seeped indoors, resulting in cancellation or abandonment of concerts and film screenings as visibility decreased in large enclosed spaces and stages or screens became hard to see from the seats. Most outdoor sports events were likewise cancelled.



There was no panic, as London, and indeed other big urban conurbations, was infamous for its fog and most people stoically struggled, on coughing and spluttering, while the city slowly ground to a halt. But as the data started to be analysed and statistics compiled, it emerged that the mortality rate had surged in early December and it remained at an elevated level for several months. By February, as deaths continued to mount, it was evident that the fog had directly caused some 4,000 to 6,000 deaths, mostly through respiratory tract infections and bronchial problems (plus many others through road accidents, falls etc), while over the same period 25,000 more people than usual had claimed sickness benefits. Overall it has been suggested that as many as 10,000 Londoners had died as a direct result of the 1952 smog.



The presence of tarry particles of soot and of acidic sulphurous aerosol droplets in London's notorious fogs had always imparted a particular greeny-yellow-grey colour. Accordingly they were given the nickname "pea-soupers" ... and then in a reversal of the idiom, "London Particular" became the name for a thick pea and ham soup.

The term London Particular, for the city's distinctive fog is first recorded in Dickens' novel, 'Bleak House', (1852), when Esther Summerson arrives in London and is greeted by a young man who has been sent from the lawyers in  Lincoln's Inn to meet her coach:
"I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.
"Oh, dear no, miss," he said. "This is a London particular."
I had never heard of such a thing.
'A fog, miss,' said the young gentleman."

However likening the fog to pea soup goes back a little earlier: there's a mention in 'Maxwell: a novel' by Theodore Edward Hook (1834):
"On the occasion of which now I am to speak, there was any thing but gaiety and mirth. It was a wretched morning; there fell a mizzling rain through the peas-soup atmosphere of London, which chilled every living thing, while a sort of smoky misty, foggy vapour, hovering over the ground, made 'darkness only visible."

Another reference appears in 'Chevely; or, The man of honour', Volume 2, by Baroness Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1839):
"It was not, therefore, until he had left Italy, that Lord Cheveley felt his utter wretchedness and desolation: and London in December was not calculated to lessen it, as it only presents a pea-soup fog, which renders the necessary and natural process of respiration, almost what Dr. Johnson's idea of fine music ought by B to be, impossible!"

Inevitably the satirical magazine 'Punch' found humour in the occurrence when in 1860 it outlined some venture capital schemes ('Punch, or the London Charivari', Volume 38, 18 February 1860, in "Facts for Foreigners"):
"Besides a plan just set for making champagne out of cucumbers, a scheme has been devised for the extraction of pea-soup from London fog. When the foreigner remembers that our fogs are now so frequent that the clear blue sky in England is never clearly seen, he may form a faint conception of the work which is cut out for this Company of Soup Makers. The fog will daily furnish a lot of raw material, which English ingenuity will soon cook into a soup."

Calling London's fogs pea-soups, or pea-soupers was commonplace, however it is less clear when the term 'London Particular' became transferred back to refer to actual pea soup. There's really little evidence of pea-and-ham soup being called London Particular before the last few decades of the 20th century (we're talking the likes of Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith amongst others, who all claimed it is 'traditional' but failed to give any sources - similarly the famous restaurant 'Simpsons-in the-Strand', which has certainly been in business since 1828, has tried to suggest it was their invention, but again they've never been able to back this up with any evidence, at least none that I've been able to find). So while 'London Particular', meaning simply 'speciality of London', has a well-recorded pedigree for well over a century when applied to a number of other food products such as brands of beer, stout and even a Madeira fortified wine, its use for pea and ham soup seems to be a very modern development.



Nevertheless to mark the day the obvious choice is still pea soup based on dried peas cooked in a stock, which has been a cheap and ubiquitous staple throughout Europe - from the Med' to the Baltic- for well over a thousand years; "pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold, pease pudding in the pot nine days old." Local variations abound so the peas might be small split green or yellow ones, or big grey marrowfat peas, or replaced by lentils or even beans. The stock might come from a ham bone, a pork knuckle, beef bones, or just whatever you had; ham or bacon pieces might be replaced by sausage or be completey absent; while the whole might be augmented with carrot, turnip, celery, or a big swirl of cream. But whatever recipe one follows -  or none at all - it's perfect comfort food for the dark and dismal days of winter.

London Particular soup wasn't the only result of the 1952 Great Smog as the death toll and disruption to commercial activity also prompted belated changes in urban and industrial policies, practices and regulations, including the Clean Air Act of 1956.

Thank you MM for again a great story related to food. I have never in my life seen a yellowish, greenish fog. Perhaps because I always lived on at nearest a five miles from a middle size city as Ghent, Ostend and Bruges. And it is so flat on these places, so flat...as I think fog as a lot to do with valleys? As in a plain, from the lightest breeze the fog is easely evacuated? I observed it many times in train at a particular point where there was a conjunction with two "elevated railway verges?", or on the road driving under such a railway verge, that the fog was dense on one side and at the other side it was cristal clear.
So as London lays in the valley of the Thames?

PS: MM, you don't believe it (and I can more and more understand Comic Monster) but I sought for more than half an hour the English translation of "verhoogde spoorwegberm". Even the woord "spoorwegberm" the mighty Google didn't detect. Only the use in I suppose all Southern Dutch sentences...I tried with "treinberm" but nope...I can't guess what the Dutch word is for that...I had a look in "het groene bookje" the official word list of the Dutch language union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_list_of_the_Dutch_language



and not there too.

As we say in dialect the French way: "treintalus" I found via French in Google:
https://www.linguee.com/french-english/translation/talus+de+voie+ferr%C3%A9e.html
"railway embankment"
then "raised railway embankment"?
But I still don't know what "spoorwegberm" is in Dutch... ...

Back to pea soup: I like it more with carrots and just  some "bouillon" blocs (is that your "stock"?). I have for convenience just some five ingredients: fresh onion, tomatoes, from the freezer: leek and green celery (cut fresh in pieces before freezing) and if carrots or peas needed bought fresh and added. And I make two liters for two persons for four days.
Coincidentally I start now with such a "preparation"...

Kind regards, Paul.

10 December 1901 - On the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, the first Nobel Prize ceremony was held in Stockholm.

Born in 1833, Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist who made his fortune primarily as a manufacturer of explosives and armaments. He held 355 different patents - dynamite and gelignite being the most famous - and he owned the Bofors company, which he redirected from its previous role as a general iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of artillery and other armaments. In 1888, Alfred's brother, Ludvig, died while visiting him when he was staying in Cannes and a French newspaper mistakenly published Alfred's obituary in which it condemned him for his invention of military explosives:
"The merchant of death is dead", it declared and then went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday".

After reading his premature obituary Nobel was disconcerted at the idea that he would be remembered in this way and his decision to posthumously donate the majority of his wealth to found the Nobel Prize has been credited at least in part to him wanting to leave behind a better legacy. He died in 1896 at his villa in San Remo, Italy, unmarried and with no children. In his will, after taxes and bequests to individuals, he allocated 94% of his total assets, (31,225,000 Swedish kronor equivalent to about  €170,000,000 today), to establish the five Nobel Prizes to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. The first three of these prizes were to be awarded for eminence in physical science, in chemistry and in medical science or physiology; the fourth is for literary work "in an ideal direction" and the fifth prize is to be given to the person or society that renders the greatest service to the cause of international fraternity, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses.



The inaugural Nobel prizes awarded in 1901 were to Wilhelm Röntgen for his discovery of X-rays (the Physical Science Prize) and to Jacobus van 't Hoff for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics (the Chemisty Prize). The first Physiology or Medicine Prize went to the German microbiologist Emil von Behring who had developed an antitoxin to treat diphtheria, which until then had caused thousands of deaths each year. The Nobel Committee chose the French poet René François (Sully) Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature, which was a contentious decision as many thought his work unremarkable and expected it to go to Leo Tolstoy. The first Nobel Peace Prize went jointly to the Swiss humanitarian Jean Henri Dunant for his role in founding the International Red Cross Movement and initiating the Geneva Convention, and to the French pacifist Frédéric Passy, founder of the Peace League and active, with Dunant, in the Alliance for Order and Civilization.

The 1901 inaugural Nobel Prize Ceremony was followed by a grand banquet held in the Hall of Mirrors of the Grand Hôtel in Stockholm which was attended by 113 guests, all of them male. The cost per person was 15 Swedish kronor (approximately €200 today) and for that they got five courses:


I was intrigued by the "Gelinottes rôties", which I half-wondered might be a deliberate play on words alluding to Nobel's invention of gelignite, but no, gelinottes are what are known in English as hazel grouse; a small game bird much like a British red grouse. Nevertheless still keeping with an explosive theme for a showy dish to mark the inauguration of the Nobel Prizes, in place of the ice cream parfait that was served in 1901, how about a bombe surprise?

A bombe surprise is a hollow, spherical chocolate shell, filled with one or more layers of ice-cream and looking almost exactly like a Napoleonic cannon ball or explosive shell, hence the name. (In  culinary terms en surprise usually denotes something filled or stuffed with a contrasting flavour/colour which is only revealed, as a surprise, when you cut into it). Chocolate and ice-cream bombes are made by lining two hemispherical moulds with chocolate and then filling them with concentric layers or marbling, of coloured ice-creams, praline, liquors, etc. They were very fashionable desserts in the 19th century particulalry as it was only the very grandest houses or hotels that could afford to install the ice-making equipment and have the numbers of staff to continually hand-crank the old-fashioned ice and salt ice-cream churns, and so be able to produce them.

The history of ices and ice cream actually reaches back to ancient Rome (Roman emperor Nero served his guests snow flavoured with honey and fruit) and to Chinese and Arabic cultures, which understood how to use salt with ice collected from mountain tops to create freezing temperatures. But all these were basically flaovoured water-ice sorbets, from the Arabic word sherbet or sharbat, meaning a sweet refreshing drink. In the 15th century ice sorbettos (mixtures of water ice and sweet fruit flavourings) became popular in Florence and from there travelled to France with Catherine de Medici's cooks when she married the Duke of Orleans (m.1533), soon to become Henry II. True ice creme - essentially frozen custard, made with cream, eggs and usually some starch from flour - start to appear around the late 16th century, such as the much-praised 'crema fiorentina' that featued at the wedding banquet of Marie de Médici to Henry IV of France in 1600, see Dish of the Day II page 4 for 6 October 2018.

Ices, both sorbets and ice-creams, were much in vogue around the beginning of the 19th century. Smart confectioners like Guglielmino Jarrin who had a classy shop in Recency London coloured ices with burnt sugar, indigo, cochineal and saffron, or the new commercial colourings, carmine, vermillion, Prussian blue or Spanish green. Jarrin was the first to describe in English the use of the bombe mould in 'The Italian Confectioner' (1820), which incidentally was one of the first books to include illustrations showing in detail how to use the ice-cream making equipment.

Making all these fancy frozen confections however still required large quantities of ice, which was still only obtainable by harvesting it from ponds and lakes in winter, and then storing it in insulated underground 'ice-houses' until required later in the year. Grand country houses with their huge kitchens, cellars and stores, and also importantly their ornamental lakes and fishponds, were able to harvest and store their own ice, but everyone else was reliant of ice suppliers and the inevitable Summer price rises when demand rose just when stocks started to dwindle.

Continental Europe had always, inevitably because of geography, been better supplied with ice than Britain, which might have spurred-on Britain's search for more reliable alternatives. Accordingly from the 1840s the Wenham Lake Ice Company of London started importing huge quantities of ice from the Great Lakes area of the US and Canada, to sell to confectioners, fishmongers, dairies, wealthy households and classy hotels. Quick to catch at an opportunity, Italian immigrants like Carlo Gatti set up a business in London in the summer of 1850 selling hard, gaudily coloured ices made ftom often dirty milk and cornstarch and luring customers for their 'penny licks' with cries of "ecco un poco!" ensuring their nickname as the Hokey-Pokey men. About the same time, a US doctor John Gorrie, working to relieve malaria, built and patented a proto-type compressed-air refrigeration system, which was then developed by others to produce the first fully functioning refrigeration systems, capable of getting temperatures down to below 0°C and holding there permanently. For economies of scale these systems were often huge, powered by steam engines and with the freezer compartment about the size of a room. They were used primarily for the transportation and storage of food: very few if any private houses or hotels could afford to run their own and so ice-cream makers still used simple crushed ice and salt freezing mixtures to get the required low temperatures. However there was now another soucre for the ice which was largely independent of the season. Finally around the end of the century smaller domestic ice-making machines started to become available, although at a price. This advertisment in the 'London Graphic' of 1889 for the Champion Ice Machine is clearly aimed at a domestic market, although the price was about what an average worker earned in six months.



Nevertheless by the century's end refrigeration technology was sufficiently advanced that ice-creams were no longer exotic dishes to be served with great ceremony to kings and emperors, but could be bought in the street for a few pennies or be regularly featured on restaurant menus. A bombe surprise, though, remained more then just an ice-cream.



Charles Ranhofer (chef of the famous Delmonico's restaurant in New York) gives detailed instructions for making them in his book 'The Epicurian' (1894), including this one complete with a smoking fuse:



Similarly Auguste Escoffier (chef at various times of the Ritz, Savoy and Carlton) in 'Le Guide Culinaire' (1903) contains suggestions for sixty different bombes each with a specific name derived from the flavours and colours of the ice cream filling. I was rather hoping there might be a bombe Suèdoise or a bombe Stockholm, but alas no, although I reckon yellow vanilla ice-cream, then blueberry and curaçao (ie the colours of Sweden) should do the trick.

Bon appertit.

Thank you as ever MM, for your dish of the day, stuffed with a lot of history and anecdotes.

With the bombe surprise you mentioned I thought immediately about the dessert many times of ice cream with a "fusée" in the middle for an anniversary. And brought in by the patron in the restaurant with the fusée ignited and along the custom the party had meanwhile to sing the obliged "happy birthday...."...
My search in google didn't give that much...I learned that there exists even a "gateau fusée", nothing at all where I was searching for...
To see what I mean and you have to imagine it in the  middle of Ice cream or cake brought to the table...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJYTHuN7VeY

And MM you know me, always going up the side track...
Also with restaurants and light and burning...
And they come also at the side of the table at least overhere...
"Crêpe comédie Française" and they said to me that it was also called "Crêp

e Suzette", but I still think there is a difference, although up to know I don't see one on the first sight?



And again a further side track MM, but still the restaurant subject and the service for instance by two persons and on a "chariot" next to the table...

It was with my father I think end the Seventies (I had to arrange it all while he didn't understand nearly one word English)
in San Francisco...

I still remember that to enter we had to wear a "cravate" (tie? (in our dialect we say: "plastron")) and of course we hadn't one...but no worries the "garçon" supplied us with one on an "élastique"...

And they came also with a "chariot" aside our table with two "garçons" to cut the "rosbeef" (I didn't find anything on the web)
(about the cutting I mean)



And it was all by all relatively cheap...if we had done that in Belgium (even in that time)...we have needed some "blauwe briefjes" (notes of thousand Belgian Frank, with a bit bluish background)

Kind regards, Paul.

I assume you mean like this: I think it's just called a carving trolley. This is in Simpsons-in-the-Strand, London, in the 1950s, when women still wore hats to 'dine out' in a classy restaurant.

   

Meles meles wrote:

I assume you mean like this: I think it's just called a carving trolley. This is in Simpsons-in-the-Strand, London, in the 1950s, when women still wore hats to 'dine out' in a classy restaurant

 
Indeed MM, but not such a classy trolley as yours. Not that much luxe in San Franscico. More something like that if I remember it well. It is after all already more than 40 years ago.




And according to what I heard the waiters and people in general did earn as much as we in Belgium, but they had to pay lesser taxes, but not such a generous wellfare system as overhere.

PS: You said:
" when women still wore hats to 'dine out' in a classy restaurant."

Not sure if that was the case overhere too. That classy restaurants overhere were too expensive in that time for our parents and us, their children...
I remember that women had to wear a hat in the Mass and sit at the left side. Technically our mother could have done it otherwise (and as she was a feministe...), but then the local religious community would have reacted with disdain and it would have reflected on her husband not been seen as holding her in line... yes that old fashioned it still was end the Fifties, start of the Sixties...(in the religious environment of that time at least)...

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Indeed MM, but not such a classy trolley as yours.

Well yes, that one in the small picture at right is actually an antique Victorian one. But then Simpsons restaurant (the bigger picture) probably still use something very similar today as they've been in business since 1828 which is when Queen Victoria's uncle William III was still on the throne. Unfortunately Simpsons has recently announced its closure, ostensibly due to current Covid restrictions, however there is a fear that due to financial losses from being forced to close during the epidemic they may never reopen. I've never eaten there (it was always well out of my price range) nor indeed have ever particularly wanted to (pretentious, public school, parliamentary types, combined with huge roasts à l'Anglaise, is not at all my idea of a pleasant meal), but nevertheless it would still be a shame if such an historic old business were to disappear.

Regarding hats ... Yes my mother always wore a hat to church and indeed following the church service for the marriage of my sister (1976) she insisted on continuing to wear her hat throughout the wedding banquet. More recently, when my partner's grandmother died in 2001, for the church service (in the parish church of Mettet, about 20mins south of Charleroi, should you know it) all the women were indeed to the left and all the men to the right. On that occasion my mother-in-law did wear a (very chic) hat, but I don't remember womens' hats being particularly de rigueur amongst the congregation as a whole. On that occasion my parents-in-law did the full open-coffin, laying in state thing ... in the front hall of their house, with a priest leading prayers and sprinkling holy water; much to the distress of my mother-in-law who, though devoutly catholic, was more concerned about the drops of water on her nicely polished parquet floor. Accordingly the Holy water got quietly dumped into a vase of lillies, much to bewildement of the priest whose aspersorium had suddenly become dry.

And then an uncle unfortunately (though rather conveniently because the whole family were already gathered together) died that same weekend. So when granny was being carried out the front door to her funeral, uncle was discreetly being brought in via the kitchen - through the vol-au-vents and sandwiches being readied for that evening - to the newly vacated spot in the hall. But all that is another story ...

MM, while I searched for Wiliam III (don't change it now, while my answer on that side will be seen irrelevant in that context) and even had the idea to even further side track your thread) 

I see that you added in the meantime an interesting story about women hats in churches, including an interesting side story (at least for me) of coffins. And yes in the Seventies I had also to visit an open coffin at home with the corps "opgebaard" (laid out?) in the "schone plaats" (the best room) (the place for special events)(the salon, which was always empty, as people lived in the kitchen)...

Unbelievable MM, what common memories we have about Belgium. I really enjoyed your story, even if it was about corpses ...

But back to William III and Victoria. And even further side tracking your "dish thread"...I think you meant William IV? As I only find one William III and it was yes "the" William, the Holland one...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_IV

But looking for William IV I came on Victoria's uncle: "our" Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha...
And then I read this 
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2019-03-24/was-prince-albert-really-the-illegitimate-son-of-prince-leopold/
My head was "spinning?" from all these difficult family relations and connections...

Does that mean that Queen Victoria is then 

the daughter of Victoria of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (sister of Leopold) and of, if Leopold "did it" with "Louise"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Louise_of_Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg_(1800%E2%80%931831)
 
married to Albert, son of Leopold (or in the more decent case of his brother) of Saxe-Coburg Gotha?

Queen Elisabeth II seems to have a lot of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha anchestry in her family...
as our Belgian royal family...and yes starting with Leopold a lot of seemingly sexual appetite...we have the testimony of it...
Although it seems a bit watered down perhaps by introducing new "blood" and of course the political environment is also changed...

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

...I think you meant William IV? As I only find one William III and it was yes "the" William, the Holland one...

You are quite right Paul - I had indeed forgotten the Dutch William, so my regnal numbers were out. Very well spotted.

But regards the whole funeral/coffin business - quite frankly that is really only half of the story. However when I tell it to British people they think I'm exaggerating, but it was really like that, only actually even more bizarre. I suspect you Paul, being Belgian, might well understand ... but it was a surprise and a rapid cultural learning experience for me. Oh, and then just a few years later we had the funeral of my partner's father: a funeral/cremation here in France but then a Mass in his home town in Belgium ... but then where were his ashes going to go? Mon dieu what a drama that was: with aunties competing with each other over who was going to smuggle his ashes back to Belgium, either hidden in their handbag, or just declaring the urn a memento of their summer holiday. Utter madness!

In the end his ashes ended up in my garden, scattered around a mature American 'sweet gum' tree (Liquidambar sp.) which reaches across the path to touch with its branches and outer-most twigs and leaves, the mature 'Persian silk tree', (Albizia sp.) around which his son's ashes are scattered. Now, more than ten years later, both trees are still growing well, side by side.

Yes indeed MM, that "funeral/coffin business" sometimes in our "modern" eyes and as people from the city, was real madness.

And I guess we had most funeral customs in Belgium from France (even in the North ).
And still in the Eighties, with a new partner from a rural municipality, witness of the corps of the deceased one in a coffin in the "best place". I guess the corps had first passed the undertaker for preparation? (new word for me, as I saw in French the long word "entrepreneur des pompes funèbres")

PS: I said that I felt with Comic Monster...take now for instance our word "afgestorvene". On the mighty google it seems not to be a much used Dutch word, as there was nothing but some I guess Southern Dutch examples...after some trials I found out that the more correct word (at least in official Dutch) was "overledene" (and yes then I found "deceased one").
And I wanted first to use for "afgestorvene" the word "defunct" analogy with the French "défunt", but "hola" (we say "hoela") as I see now what it means in English: 
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/defunct

And even in France...

you said:
"then where were his ashes going to go?"
We had two years ago a home help. Her father was a Frenchman and a kind of artist of expresionist paintings and allowed to live by the female owner (eigenares) on a vast domain with a castle. When he died and his wife living overhere and not able to do all the arrangements for the funeral had to sent the two daughters. They wanted all three to bury the former husband and father on the domain. But that was "counted outside?" the French authorities and the red tape. The two sisters had to do two times the 1800 Km return trip and then the red tape to recuperate the paintings (as they had worth on the "art market") with a notary (because they both were divorced).
At the end have the sisters burried the ashes of their father on the domain with a simple cross in the sight of their father's preferent view.


And again in France. We went two or was it three times to France with a first stop over to further destinations and the last stop returning and that at a small municipality near Granville (a town with a famous past and still the harbour for the hydrofoil to Jersey (we did it once))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville,_Manche

Our "hotel" (B&B) was a simple farm although with a lot of land (five hectares I believe) and after the second time we were already one of the family.
But then the second time returning we saw at the daughter's face that something had happened, but she didn't say what. We had to wait for the mother the farmer's wife to hear that her man during that night was  deceased.

And I have it seen many times with such women, head of the household and boss behind the man, that they always stayed firmly with two feets on the ground. She simply said: Do you want to see him a last time? He lays upstairs in our sleeping room. And when we arrived upstairs after a while of silence she said, they will come with the "sapeurs-pompiers" to bring him down through the window. The "garçon" has arranged it all.
When, even in normal talk, they were speaking about the eldest? son or simply the son, they never said his name. At least there in Normandy and it sounded that odd to me.

Kind regards, Paul.

14 December 1911 - The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his expedition were the first to reach the geographic South Pole, five weeks ahead of the British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen and his team returned safely to their base and later heard that Scott and his four companions had died on their own return journey.


L-R: Roald Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting at "Polheim", the tent erected at the South Pole. Photograph taken by Olav Bjaaland on 16 December 1911.

From his previous experience in the Arctic and Antarctic, Amundsen was aware of the dangers of scurvy. Although the true cause of the disease, vitamin C deficiency, was still not completely understood at the time, it was generally known that the disease could be countered by eating fresh meat. Accordingly Amundsen planned to supplement sledging rations with regular helpings of seal meat which he laid out as resupply depots along his intended route to the pole . He also ordered a special kind of pemmican which included vegetables and oatmeal: "a more stimulating, nourishing and appetising food it would be impossible to find". The other staple of the sledging team's rations were  biscuits - lots of them - for the final push the sledging rations consisted of 1,320 tins of pemmican about 100 kg of chocolate and of over 42,000 biscuits.


Hjalmar Johansen packing biscuits before the expedition headed for the pole.

These were of course not fancy teatime assortments of chocolate digestives, custard creams and bourbons, but rather dense hard-tack types (to be crumpled into the pemmican stew) although there were also quite a lot (approximately 7500 biscuits or 50kg) of a type resembling oatmeal/hobnobs. The Polar Museum in Tromsø, Norway (dedicated to the expeditions of Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen), has postcards with the recipe for these biscuits made by for Amundsen supposedly by a Mrs Klausen:



I think they'd go well with cheese.

Records show that in the race for the South Pole, both Amundsen's and Scott's sledging teams drank cocoa, but Amunden's team accompanied theirs with these typical Norwegian oatmeal havrekjeks, while Scott preferred wheat flour biscuits specially made by Huntley and Palmers (although of course it was Amundsen's use of dog-pulled sedges in place of Scott's man-hauled ones that was the more decisive factor in the former's success and survival and the latter's death). Both expeditions made rather more lavish provision for their base camps near the coast, which had to survive cut off from the rest of the world for well over a year even before either made their push for the South Pole.


Inside Scott's base hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island, likely Christmas Day 1910.

The supplies taken on Scott's expedition (taken from the appendix to the 'Journals of Robert Falcon Scott', published in 1913), included:
"Messrs. J. S. Fry & Sons supplied our cocoa, sledging and fancy chocolate - delicious comforts, excellently packed and always in good condition.
Messrs. Huntley & Palmer: Ship's biscuit, fancy biscuit and cakes, and all the sledging biscuit which stood us so well and was so conveniently packed for travelling.
Messrs. Colman of Norwich: Flour and mustard, as in the Discovery Expedition.
Messrs. Henry Tate & Sons: Sugar, which was in perfect condition even after three years.
Messrs. Peter Dawson, Ltd: Whisky.
Messrs. Cooper, Cooper & Co.: 'The South Pole Tea,' which, like the cocoa, helped us to accomplish our best marches.
Messrs. Griffiths, Macalister & Co. of Liverpool supplied our tinned meats and general groceries.
Messrs. Price's Patent Candle Co., Ltd.: Candles, which were purposely made edible, though never eaten.
Messrs. John Burgess & Son, Ltd.: Pickles and condiments.
Messrs. Abram Lyle & Sons, Ltd.: Golden syrup.
Messrs. Beach & Sons, Evesham: Assorted jams.
Messrs. Frank Cooper, Oxford: Marmalade and preserved fruits.
Messrs. Gillard & Co. Ltd.: Pickles, sauces, and curried meats in tins.
The very good pemmican we used came entirely from J. D. Beauvais of Copenhagen, while Mr. Maltwood of the Liebig Co. supplied Oxo and Lemco.
Messrs. Shippams, Ltd., of Chichester supplied small potted meats and table luxuries for the outward voyage and for the base, and also delightful Christmas puddings,
Messrs. Heinz Co.: Baked beans, tomato soups, and many relishes.
Messrs. Reckitt of Hull: Starches and cleaning materials.
Messrs. Gonzalez Byass & Co.: Port and sherry, champagne (Heidsieck)."

Good to see all those old established British firms which were all familiar names from my childhood - but how many are still in existence, I wonder?

Well, just speaking from here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I know Huntley and Palmer, and Heinz must be because we still get these here. And Colman's mustard. I suspect we have all of these in our cupboards right now. Maybe not Heinz because most NZers buy Wattie's Baked Beans, which used to be a NZ company set up by Sir James Wattie (the Sir is because of the company, not before it); I am not sure if it still is, as so many of our iconic brands seem to be stolen by Australian companies.

I only ask because I was recently surprised to learn that the Colman's mustard factory in Norwich had closed, although I now see that while mustard production has been transferred to Germany (!) the company still exists and continues to make other products at Norwich.

I remember Shippams' Meat Pastes of Chichester, the town was dominated by the factory, in an olfactory way, especially when they were making bloater paste! I know they were taken over by the Princes Food group some years ago although the name may still exist.

17 December 497 BCE (by the Julian Calender) ie. 16 days before the kalends of January – The temple to the Roman god Saturn was dedicated in the Roman Forum and the anniversary was thereafter celebrated as the first day of the winter festival of Saturnalia, with the festivities later being extended through to 23 December. Many of the customs associated with Roman Saturnalia have echoes in how Christmas has traditionally been celebrated.

The Saturnalia  holiday commenced with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn and a public banquet in the forum, to be followed by private parties. There was a general carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms and were characterized by role reversals and behavioral license. Slaves were treated to a banquet of the kind usually enjoyed by their master sometimes with master and slave dined together or even with the servants waited on by their masters. Saturnalian license also permitted slaves to disrespect their masters without the threat of a punishment. It was a time for free speech: the Augustan poet Horace calls it "December libert". Everyone knew, however, that the levelling of the social hierarchy was temporary and had limits; no social norms were ultimately threatened, because the holiday would end.

The toga, the characteristic garment of the male Roman citizen, was set aside in favor of the Greek synthesis, colourful "dinner clothes" otherwise considered in poor taste for daytime wear. Romans of citizen status normally went about bare-headed, but for the Saturnalia donned the pilleus, the conical felt cap that was the usual mark of a freedman. Slaves, who ordinarily were not entitled to wear the pilleus, wore it as well, so that everyone was "pilleated" without distinction. A common custom was the election of a "King of the Saturnalia", who preside over the merrymaking in a similay way to the medieval Christmas "Lord of Misrule". Gambling and dice-playing, normally prohibited or at least frowned upon, were permitted for all, even slaves.

19 December was traditionally the day of gift-giving although gifts might be exchanged throughout the holiday. Gifts of value would mark social status which was contrary to the spirit of the season and so gifts were often the small pottery or wax figurines (sigillaria) made specially for the day, or just small novelty gifts and of course toys for children. Nevertheless gifts between friends and family could be personal and expensive. In his many poems about Saturnalia, Martial mentions gifts of writing tablets, dice, knucklebones, moneyboxes, combs, toothpicks, a hat, a hunting knife, an axe, various lamps, balls, perfumes, pipes, a pig, a sausage, cups, spoons, items of clothing, statues, masks, books, and pets. In a practice that might be compared to modern greeting cards, verses sometimes accompanied the gifts. 


'Saturnalia' (1783) by Antoine Callet.

A key part of Saturnalia was eating, drinking and partying, and while the rich might be enjoying fancy imperialist tit-bits at their private dinners, for most Romans it was just a time to fill up on plenty of solid fare at a time of comparative plenty with the animals having been slaughtered and the harvest brought in, but with few fresh products available and the hungry months looming into view. Pork was the favorite Roman meat and in the words of the poet Martial, "a pig will make you a good Saturnalia" and pork sausages and even live pigs are recorded as Saturnalia gifts. Pigs were also the traditional sacrifice offered to Saturn (and other "chthonic" deities of the earth and Underworld). A Roman citizen heading home from the Temple of Saturn with their share of pork from the sacrifice, or with their doggy-bag of sausages from the public banquet, could expect plenty more pork to come over the next few days. So for something a little less porcine to start off the festivities, here for today are are a couple of recipes for sweet/spicy little party cakes to serve as an appetizer (gustatio). They are both taken from Cato The Elder’s 'De Agricultura':

MUSTACEI 
Mustaceos sic facito. Farinae siligineae modium unum musto conspargito. Anesum, cuminum, adipis P. II, casei libram, et de virga lauri deradito, eodem addito, et ubi definxeris, lauri folia subtus addito, cum coques.

Must cakes, flavoured with sweet grape must, aniseed, cumin and bay
Moisten 1 modius of wheat flour with must; add anise, cumin, 2 pounds of lard, 1 pound of cheese, and the bark of a laurel twig. When you have made them into cakes, put bay leaves under them, and bake.

GLOBI
Globus sic facito. Caseum eum alica ad eundem modem misceto. Inde quantos voles facere facito. In ahenum caldum ungen indito. Singulos aut binos coquito versatoque crebo duabus rudibus, coctos eximito, eos melle unguito, papaver infriato, ita ponito.

Ball-shapes, sweet cheesecake bites
Globi to be made thus: Mix the cheese and spelt in the same way. Make as many as desired. Pour fat into a hot copper vessel, and fry one or two at a time, turning them frequently with two sticks, and remove when done. Coat with honey, sprinkle with poppy-seeds, and serve. 

I'm tempted to give both of these a go and so I'll say no more for now, other than to proclaim, Io Saturnalia!

MM, thanks as always for again some delicious historical dishes.

What one learns here each day on this board. But nevertheless I had to seek for today for instance about:
"bloater paste"   
https://www.cooksinfo.com/bloater-paste

"greek synthesis cloth"...is that such one?


 
"chthonic"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic

You said:
"I'm tempted to give both of these a go and so I'll say no more for now, other than to proclaim, Io Saturnalia!"

I thought and tempted to buy a "christmass meal" with all it around, as it means not too much work. But with the dangerous Covid 19 around I will have to stay in a long queu and there I am afraid of.

And as I am not able to create the cullinary "highstands?" (masterpieces?) as you, I decided instead to do it myself with some nevertheless delicious stuff (along the opinion of the partner and me) as smoked salmon and all...and from the freezer a choice of meat...will buy some extraordinary ice cream that I know (also to put in the freezer) to prepare with fresh fruit as dessert and some toasts that you can buy nowadays nearly everywhere to start with...

Kind regards, Paul.