Month in Review - December 2011

First up this month a Christmas Quiz (in time for next year perhaps) from the Guardian here and the answers here.

In the latest issue of Gastronomica (Volume 11, number 4) there is an article about Dione Lucas by Jean Schinto ('Remembering Dione Lucas', pp. 34-45). Dione Lucas may be a forgotten name these days but in the 1950's she was appearing on American television - well before the likes of Julia Child. She had trained under Henri-Paul Pellaprat at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in Paris and she set up the Ecole du Petit Cordon Bleu school and restaurant in London with Rosemary Hume in the early 1930s. In 1940 she sailed to America and from then on made her career there. She opened her own Cordon Bleu Restaurant and Cooking School in New York in 1942 and first appeared on television in 1947, demonstrating French cuisine to American audiences when Julia Child was still learning to chop onions (Schinto, p. 34). By all accounts a complicated and rather difficult personalty Mrs Lucas regarded cooking as a serious business and as Schinto puts it 'her personality was at odds with the whole idea of mass appeal'.
What Schinto doesn't mention in her article is that Mrs Lucas made at least three trips to Australia, in 1956, 1958 and 1960 which included demonstrations in department stores and television appearances. The tours were sponsored by the Australian Women's Weekly  and promoted through the publication of special supplements of her recipes. In addition the magazine ran a series of her recipes in 1957 and again in 1966.
In her photograph on the cover of Book for Cooks, the recipe supplement which complemented her visit in 1956, Dione Lucas appears stern and competent, with her apron tied firmly around her waist in her 1950's kitchen with peg board behind the stove on which to hang the copper saucepans. She is referred to as 'America's blue-ribbon chef' (Australians were not yet ready for cordon bleu?) who has come to 'demonstrate to women how to make artistic creations from ordinary kitchen ingredients'.

When Dione Lucas tells her Australian audience how to cook she will be doing what she does five days a week in front of the TV cameras for her audiences in America. There she creates in half an hour complicated, mouth-watering delicacies that would take an ordinary cook at least twice as long to prepare.

Mrs Lucas's philosophy makes for interesting reading. Although a capable and independent woman herself (she was a divorced mother of two boys) she was no feminist but as her son says of her 'an artist in cookery' (Schinto, p.39)

I believe housewives these days spend far too little time in the kitchen planning and preparing meals. They depend too much on quickly prepared meals, so losing two of cookery's most worthwhile ingredients - glamor and artistry in food. 

Cooking, to my mind, is as much art as painting, dancing, or composing poetry, and cooking a masterpiece for the table can be a creative outlet for the modern housewife. (Book for Cooks)

She saw no need to 'spend vast sums of money to produce the most artistic and tasty meals', advocating the use of the cheapest cuts of meat along with heart, brains, liver, kidneys and 'the most maligned of all meats' tripe. For Mrs Lucas economy was achieved 'by substituting skill and careful preparation for expensive ingredients'. She emphasised planning so that meals could be 'integrated', simple menus ('concentrate on making masterpieces of each of a few dishes'), doing your own shopping 'rather than ordering by telephone' and using 'spices, herbs, butter and wine' to bring out the best in your ingredients.
Most importantly she believed 'there are no short cuts to real cookery success.

As with every other art, it takes time and practice to acquire and learn the many techniques needed by a creative cook.
I have three rules for mastering the art of cooking. First, learn to cook by making mistakes; second, learn to save the food you spoil; and third, remember not to repeat your mistakes. (Book for Cooks)

On her 1956 tour she demonstrated numerous different menus which included exotica like Coronets de Jambon Lucullus. This recipe required the hapless housewife to prepare a foie gras mousse which she then piped into ham cornucopias (made by lining cream horn tins with slices of ham). Each cornucopia was topped with a thin slice of truffle and sealed with aspic jelly (which said housewife had prepared earlier) and served on a bed of rice salad. She also demonstrated delicacies such as cabbage strudel (including making the strudel pastry), Vacherin aux Peches, piroshkis, Mousse de Saumon Judic (salmon mousse made with tinned salmon and served with sauce Bercy and braised lettuce), Lobster Thermidor, Charlotte Malakoff, Beef Tenderloin en chemise Strasbourgeoise and prunes stuffed with sauteed chicken liver and wrapped in bacon which were baked in the oven until the bacon was crisp then speared with a toothpick and attractively presented atop a head of cabbage. All rather a far cry from making the best of inexpensive ingredients.
But then as now there was more to cooking than just technique and practice. According to the recipe supplement to emulate Dione Lucas the modern cook also needed a Sunbeam frypan and mixmaster,  a Kelvinator refrigerator, a Metters oven and a Namco pressure cooker as well as Nestle milk products, Champion's malt vinegar, Mayfair ham, Aunt Mary's baking powder, Davis gelatine, Meadow- Lea table margarine and Wade's cornflour.

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is by Anissa Helou (you can read about her background here). She has written a number of books including Lebanese Food and The Fifth Quarter (about offal, which I think has recently been re-published) and my current favourite Mediterranean Street Food. Two of her recent posts about yufka pastry (here and here) were particularly interesting. All her work is well researched and she takes great photographs.

Two other books this month. First  Giorgio Locatelli's  Made in Sicily (my review is at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf  here.) I had thought that Mary Taylor Simeti had the last word on Sicilian food but I enjoyed Locatelli's book where the recipes are a bit more accessible for those who want to avoid some of the historical background.
The other read (which I haven't started on yet) is by Richard Wilk, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, entitled Home Cooking in the Global Village. Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Despite a cover which doesn't seem to do the content justice - a pirate with an eye-patch and a parrot on his shoulder holding a platter of food from 'Blackbeard's Burgers' - this is a book about globalization. More specifically it is about Belize and how globalization has been influencing patterns of food consumption there for over three hundred years. None other than Sidney Mintz (he of Sweetness and Power) says

'Wilk's narrative food history of  a timberland backwater reborn as a tourist mecca redefines the term 'colonial'. It makes a solid theoretical contribution to clarifying the real meanings of terms like 'fusion' and 'blending', when applied to food in the modern world. A thoughtful and stimulating essay on the present, pitched entertainingly against a tatterdemalion and ragged colonial past.'

Sounds irresistible doesn't it? I am pleased to say Wilk himself doesn't go in for words of any more than about four syllables.

And another historical/anthropological read which might be of interest - Rachel Lauden on servants and how the survival of 'traditional' laborious cuisines depends on having someone prepared to do the work - here - with  links to some other interesting articles.

Looking for Lamingtons and Chasing Čupavci

In an earlier post (here) I raised the issue of the provenance of the Australian lamington having discovered, in Croatia, the exact same cakes calling themselves  čupavci. (When I made my notes on a scrap of paper in a cake shop in Split I wrote down čupavac which Google has persuaded me is the wrong spelling. Čupavci is obviously the plural -we would translate this as lamingtons - but I don't know whether the singular lamington is the čupavc or the čupavca, such is my knowledge of Croatian.)
From the little research I have been able to do, thanks to the internet, the general consensus seems to be that čupavci are a traditional cake/dessert in Croatia with no hint of how far back that tradition might go. Since coconut seems to be the defining feature of both lamingtons and čupavci the answer would seem to hinge on the availability of dessicated coconut. The process for drying coconut was developed by a gentleman by the name of Henry Vavasseur whose company began producing commercial quantities of dessicated coconut in Ceylon (as it was then) and shipping it to Europe in the 1890s. This would suggest that both lamingtons and čupavci could have been 'invented' at around the same time and certainly no earlier than 1890. Advertisements for desiccated coconut imported from London began appearing in Australian newspapers in 1895.*
Lord Lamington was governor of Queensland from 1896 until 1901. According to Dr. Katie McConnel, curator of Old Government House in Brisbane, Lady Lamington mentions the cake named after him (or her) in her memoirs and credits their French chef, Armand Galland, with its creation. ** Galland stayed in Brisbane after the departure of the Lamingtons, where he established a wine business. I couldn't find an obituary for Armand (who died in 1923) but that of his wife, Cladie, who died in1934, confirmed that she was born in France, not Tahiti as I quoted previously, and that the couple came to Australia in 1897 ( The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 23 June 1934). Armand was not employed at Government House until some time after that, perhaps as late as 1900. In none of the early newspaper references I could find is  the creation of the lamington attributed to Armand Galland, or indeed to anyone else.
In The Brisbane Courier 19 July 1901, Galland is advertising himself as 'open for engagement to do Luncheon, Afternoon Tea or Dinner Parties in private houses' but he does not promote his association with sponge cake dipped in chocolate. Nor would it appear that the lamington was instantaneously well known.
In the 'Mutual Help' column of The Queenslander (Brisbane), 14 December 1901, the editor responds to a reader's query with 'Have not heard of a 'lamington cake'. Can you give some clue to the appearance and ingredients of the cake?' So it seems that by the end of 1901 the lamington was known outside the confines of Government House but only to a select few. Perhaps the few who had sampled afternoon tea as prepared by M. Galland.
Subsequently (4 January 1902) The Queenslander  publishes a lamington cake recipe, the first to appear in a newspaper, submitted by 'a subscriber'. Although called lamington cake rather than lamingtons this first recipe was for small cubes of cake exactly as we know lamingtons today. Now would have been the perfect moment for Galland to claim ownership of the recipe but he did not do so.
On 26 November 1904 The Queenslander again publishes a lamington recipe this time provided by Miss Schauer of the Brisbane Technical College. Amy Schauer trained at the Sydney Technical College and was appointed to the Brisbane Technical College in 1895 where she taught until 1937.   Miss Schauer  and M. Galland were at least acquainted - Galland was an examiner of chefs at the Technical College in 1902 - but she does not attempt to credit Galland or acknowledge his claim to the recipe for lamington cake. It has been suggested that the lamington may have been invented by Miss Schauer but she makes no such claim at the time her recipe is first published or throughout her long life (she died in 1956). Perhaps neither M. Galland or Miss Schauer thought that the invention of the lamington was anything special or indeed anything to be proud of. Nonetheless lamington cakes quickly became established in cookery competitions at local fairs and horticultural shows and recipes appeared regularly in newspapers and began to be published in cookery books in all states.
Very recently David Lebovitz wrote about lamingtons on his blog and garnered a tremendous response from his audience. There was no mention of čupavci but two responses linked lamingtons to Hungary and other responses confirmed a link with Eastern Europe through the popularity of 'coconut bars' in of all places, Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland boasts a sizable population with Eastern European ancestry. In particular large numbers of Hungarian immigrants came to Cleveland between 1870 and the beginning of World War One and it is claimed that at one time Cleveland had the highest Hungarian population of any city outside Budapest (see here).
'Coconut bars', called kókusz kocka (coconut cubes) in Hungarian, described as 'smallish, stout oblong cakes entirely covered by a thin icing of chocolate and shredded coconut' are a speciality of Jewish bakeries in Cleveland and almost unknown elsewhere in the US (see here and here). It would appear undeniable that 'coconut bars' were brought to Cleveland by immigrants from Europe. If my original assumption is correct, that is that lamingtons, čupavci, and coconut bars all date from around 1900, when desiccated coconut became readily available, the question then becomes why Australia, or more specifically Brisbane, and Hungary? Which came first, the lamington or the kókusz kocka, or is it possible that identical cakes were produced at roughly the same time in both Hungary and Queensland?

* All the information I have managed to glean from newspapers is thanks to the wonderful National Library of Australia Trove database.
** The Age, Melbourne, 6 June 2009

Month in Review - November 2011

On two separate occasions this month I had much the same discussion with friends about how we were all scrambling to keep up to date with the latest information on the things that interested us - food, books, films, food events - and how, even with the best intentions, we struggled to share what information we did have. So from now on the Month in Review won't be a digest of the fascinating things I have done during the month, riveting reading though that may be. Instead I thought I could use the blog as a means of  spreading the word. This first effort only includes journals, articles and books which I have come across lately which I think might be of interest. In future I hope to get contributions from friends so that I can include up-coming events and reading which covers a broader spectrum.
However, given that we have to start somewhere, here is the Month in Review for November 2011.

The Australian Humanities Review is an on-line journal  published quarterly by ANU which 'provides a forum for open intellectual debate across humanities disciplines, about all aspects of social, cultural and political life, primarily ... with reference to Australia'. The November 2011 issue is entitled 'On the Table: Food in Our Culture' and can be accessed here. I haven't worked my way through all of it but there are articles by Colin Bannerman, Barbara Santich and Adrian Pearce which are worth a look.

Locale The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies (here) was launched this month. The first issue covers a broad range and includes among others an article by Jacqui Newling on tea in the early days of the Sydney penal settlement, one from Helen Leach (the New Zealand pavlova queen) on regional dishes and one entitled 'Unearthing Paradox: Organic Food and its Tensions'.

For the anthropologists, I have only just discovered  a new book by Carole M. Counihan, A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2009) which the reviewer in Gastronomica described as a 'beautiful feminist ethnography'.

My friends know of my on-going interest in the effect of technology on our food lives, which is why I recommend reading this article from the New York Times entitled 'Are Cookbooks Obsolete?'

And finally I had a bit of a chuckle over this piece from The Guardian, a review of Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking first published in 1951. Needless to say Ms David remains well know whereas the author of the review, Lucie Marion, - well have you ever heard of her? Ms. Marion had herself published a book on French cooking, Be Your Own Chef: Simple French Cooking in 1948 and no doubt saw ED for the rival that she was. Whilst her criticism of ED may well be justified it didn't do her any good.

For anyone who has the time or the inclination to venture to Melbourne the programme for the Wine and Food Festival in March 2012 is now available. One of my criticisms about the similar event in Sydney is that it centres on restaurants and chefs rather than programming a wider range of cultural offerings.  Well not so in Melbourne where they include a week of Foodie Films!