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.