Mrs Rawson, Inventor

Mina Rawson's books are so crammed with useful information and household hints that they make exhausting reading. (See my previous post on her remarkable life here.) She was quite capable of designing her own makeshift oven using 'an ordinary old oil drum' and had endless suggestions for ways of maintaining an orderly household. With her over riding motto being 'a place for everything and everything in its place', she had some very definite ideas about how things should be done.
 In The Antipodean cookery book and kitchen companion (1897) she gives detailed instructions on washing up which involved boiling water in a cut down kerosene tin, which could also accommodate pots, pans and plates, and building a wooden rack which would fit over the wash tub on which soiled dishes and pans could be placed and hot soap suds poured over them. She also advocated a scrubbing brush with a long handle and 'a chain pot-cleaner' which could be fixed on to a handle so that 'the hands need not even be soiled'.
It should not be a surprise then that she invented, and applied for a patent for, an 'Improved labour saving kitchen utensil to be called Mrs Lance Rawson's Kitchen Help'. The Patent's Office were unclear as to whether it was a washing machine, a cooking utensil or a vegetable cleaner but from her description it is clearly intended to be a machine for washing, albeit for smallish 'articles'.
You can see the original patent application, dated 26 September 1898, by searching on the National Archives of Australia web site here.

This is how Mina describes here invention:

My invention is composed of a galvanised iron vessel or billy with a strainer inside revolving on a pivot and connected by  a handle from the outside lid. The vessels are of two sizes fifteen inches and two feet in diameter. The outside vessel has hand rests on each side with three rests inside for the strainer to stand on and an overflow to discharge all water after use. The inside strainer is also of galvanised iron and revolves on a pivot fixed to the bottom of the outside vessel and is worked by a handle from the top. The articles that require cleaning are put in the inside strainer and by turning the handle on the top of the outside vessel enables the boiling water to pass through and over the articles and cleans them without any handling.

She omits to mention that presumably the water has to be fed into the machine somehow and doesn't specify what 'articles' she has in mind to be cleaned. Washing crockery in this apparatus would seem a hazardous business and the inner drum, with a diameter of 38 cm, would only be large enough for small pans, cooking utensils and cutlery. There is no specification for the height of the vessels but if the drawings are to scale the outer vessel stood at around 61 cm with a diameter roughly the same, which means the contraption would take up a fair bit of room in the kitchen.
No doubt Mina had some sort of prototype made but just how effective this gadget was we may never know. I could find no evidence that this idea went any further than the Patents Office. The record states that the patent was not registered. The Brisbane Courier, 10 October 1898, notes only that the registrar of patents did accept the application. However there is an intriguing reference in The Queenslander (10 June 1899). A reply to correspondence received reads 'If you mean a washing-up machine write to Mrs Lance Rawson, Rockhampton who is the inventor' which suggests that the idea may have progressed beyond the drawing board.

Beating and Mixing

Who would publish a book devoted entirely to eggbeaters?  Well as it happens the same person who has published a book devoted to apple parers. Don Thornton's The Eggbeater Chronicles is a tribute to what he believes is 'America's greatest invention' a claim which he justifies thus

The rotary crank eggbeater revolutionized cooking in America. It took the deadly drudgery out of mixing food ingredients. And that was a big mix, ranging from scrambled eggs, to cream, to batters, to cakes and scores of other deserts, breads sauces.... Mixing became an art - and the variation of eggbeaters vying for attention on the marketplace told a true American success story. (Thornton, p. xiii)

Just how efficient some of the earliest devices were or what they offered in terms of labour and/or time saving  is questionable but there is no doubt that the concept of the eggbeater greatly exercised the minds of American inventors. Thornton's book chronicles the patent and manufacturing history of American eggbeaters from the first patent issued to Ralph Collier in 1856, is full of wonderful photographs and runs to more than 300 pages. According to Thornton over 1000 American patents were granted (up to 1991) and several hundred different mixers were manufactured and marketed.

It isn't difficult to understand the enthusiasm for the hand cranked rotary beater at the end of the nineteenth century when the alternatives for beating egg whites to a froth for example were a knife or a three pronged fork  or perhaps two forks held together. Using bundles of twigs was presumably no longer considered an hygienic alternative and for some reason the balloon whisk seems to have been confined to the professional kitchen. A hand cranked, rotary beater still lurks in my kitchen (along with a collection of balloon whisks and a couple of other mixers which look as though they come straight out of Thornton's book) even though, for many applications, hand beating was eclipsed long ago by electrical gadgets of one sort or another. That said however the principle on which my hand cranked eggbeater operates is essentially  the same as that of my Sunbeam Mixmaster, that is

 two revolving beater-frames, said frames occupying the same working space and arranged to revolve in opposite directions so that they may cut against each other with a very peculiar shearing action.... The advantage of having two wheels operating in the same space and revolving in different directions is that the fluid being acted upon is cut and thoroughly beaten almost instantaneously

which is the way the William's Egg Beater was described in the patent application lodged in 1870 (See Thornton, p. 3). It was this patent which became the original 'Dover' beater, the 'Dover' brand going on to be almost synonymous with the egg-beater in the USA.

 American inventors weren't the only ones to be challenged by the concept of the eggbeater and no doubt tempted by the potential financial rewards. At least two Australian patents were issued. In 1899 Robert and Fanny Venus of Launceston, Tasmania patented an 'improved egg-beater and cake-maker' (Patent no. 9796, November 27 1899, as reported in Australian Town and Country Journal, 23 December 1899, p.61) which was subsequently advertised for sale in Launceston with the claim that it would 'make a sponge cake complete in five minutes' (Examiner, 5 January 1901, p. 1). To date I have not unearthed a picture of the Venus invention.

William Valentine Paley and Thomas Henry Bussey of Charters Towers registered the  Paley-Bussey Novelty Chain Egg Beater and Cake Mixer Company Ltd. in January 1904 (The North Queensland Register, 25 January 1904, p. 47). Messes Paley and Bussey had high hopes for their invention and registered patents in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, France, Germany and of course Australia and New Zealand. The Paley-Bussey was a non-mechanical, non-rotary hand held beater which was designed to be spun between the palms of the hands. The inventors claimed that the major advantage of their machine over other designs was the amount of  beater surface in contact with the medium to be beaten. To quote the description in The North Queensland Register (15 August 1904, p. 10) the gadget had a 'peculiar configuration'

the machine has about 9 ft of wire (6½ ft in spring circumference, and 2½ ft in the chains) all working in the stuff right away from the start, whereas with an ordinary whisk there is only (at the outside) about 2 ft of wire working in the stuff, and it is mostly owing to this fact that such excellent results are obtainable.

The other particular feature claimed for this invention was that, because the chains at the bottom hang free, the beater could, to some extent at least, adapt itself to any shape of bowl or dish.

Illustration form Thornton p. 283

However useful this device may have been for beating eggs and despite its name it hardly looks like much of a labour saver when it came to making cakes.

Of all the inventions in Thornton's book the first which really looks like a cake mixer is the 'Universal' Cake-Maker which was patented in 1905.

 Universal cake maker
 Photograph Vesna Ristevski from the collection of Liverpool Regional Museum, Liverpool, Australia.

This was another American invention manufactured by Landers, Fray and Clark of Connecticut. The bowl of the mixer clamped to the bench and the cross piece, with the  'mixing fliers' attached fitted on to the rim of the bowl, held in place with butterfly nuts. The beaters moved when the handle on the top was rotated. The cake maker also came with a 'kneading rod' for making bread and biscuits. Landers, Fray and Clark manufactured 'Universal' brand bread makers, butter churns and mayonnaise makers which worked on similar lines.

'Universal' cake-makers were advertised for sale in Australia from as early as 1907. In 1911 David Jones was exhibiting them in their 'specially fitted Exhibition Rooms' at 20 York Street. Sydney along with 'all the newest inventions in culinary and domestic labour savers' (Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October 1911,  p.5). For the 'Universal' cake-maker it was claimed that it 'mixes the batter for all  kinds of cakes; easier, more uniformly, and quicker than by hand' conveniently omitting to mention that the contraption was in fact still operated by hand.

How popular was the 'Universal'? It looks as though it required just as much elbow grease as hand mixing and from my modern perspective it seems bothersome to set up and difficult to clean. But perhaps if I could take myself back a hundred years I would regard the 'Universal' cake maker with the same reverence that I have for my dear old Mixmaster - which is itself 39 years old this year.

Thornton, Don. The Eggbeater Chronicles. The stirring story of America's greatest invention. 2nd edition. 1999. Published by Don and Diane Thornton, Thornton House Publishing, Sunnyvale, California.
Email info@thorntonhouse.com

Keeping it cool

The Ice Cutters by Natalia Goutchanov 

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/natalia-goncharova/the-ice-cutters

The painting above is the illustration on the cover of my copy of Elizabeth David's Harvest of the Cold Months. The social history of ice and ices (1994), her last work, published after her death. With not a recipe in sight this book is more a series of thoroughly researched essays rather than a comprehensive history of ice and refrigeration but it is wonderful to dip into. She covers an amazing range of sources and there's something fascinating in every chapter (and not always concerned solely with ice).
My purpose for returning to Harvest of the Cold Months was to read up about Italian ice cream but in truth I learnt most of what I wanted to know from Mary Taylor Simeti's Sicilian Food.

The Sicilians and and the Neapolitans were mad for ice using it to cool wine, chill fruit or to make sorbetto  or granita. Taylor Simeti quotes from A Tour through Sicily and Malta written by Patrick Brydone in 1773

The bishop's revenues [the Bishop of Catania] are considerable, and arise principally from the sale of snow and ice not only to the whole island of Sicily, but likewise to Malta, and a great part of Italy, and make a very considerable branch of commerce; for even the peasants in these hot countries regale themselves with ices during the summer heats, and there is no entertainment given by the nobility of which these do not always make a principal part: a famine of snow, they themselves say, would be more grievous than a famine of corn or wine.

Visitors to Sicily in the eighteenth century were very taken by the amount of sugar consumed both in confectionery and ices and as Brydone says ices and ice cream were popular across all levels of society. Apparently most of the ice was collected in March on the slopes of Mount Etna. The snow on the mountain sides was beaten into hard ice with sticks and then rolled down to be stored in caves. The peasantry were the traditional suppliers of ice, the blocks being brought down each day by donkey, wrapped in straw and salt to minimise wastage.
The snow from Mount Etna was plentiful and low in price so that ices could be consumed even by the peasantry and trade in ice was lucrative. According to Elizabeth David  'in the eighteenth century the Bishop of Catania's income had been largely dependent on the £1,000 a year derived from the small patch of mountain reserved for snow for the Knights of Malta'. There was sufficient snow available for four or five hundred tons to be shipped to Malta each fortnight on board the ship maintained by the Knights for just that purpose. I also read somewhere that in 1717 the export of snow provided a twentieth of the municipal income of Palermo. Trade in and enthusiasm for ice was encouraged in the eighteenth century by physicians recommending ice and ice-water for the treatment of fevers.
Palermo's supply of ice usually came from mountains close to home and when the snows failed the matter was taken most seriously. In 1774 a government official was sent off to Mount Etna with an armed guard to bring back snow to relieve the 'universal suffering'.

Sicily of course wasn't the only place which traded in ice and snow, indeed anywhere where ice could be harvested it was made use of in one way or another, and, because of the demand, a considerable amount of time and energy was expended not just on harvesting but on ways of transporting and storing ice and snow. If you ever wondered exactly how ice was harvested Nicola at Edible Geography recently posted a terrific piece about just that. The subsequent story of the commercialisation of ice production and the globalisation of the trade in ice makes for interesting reading. Wikipedia has a good article on the frozen water trade and how it developed in the nineteenth century.

 Before ice was produced commercially in Sydney  it was imported  from Boston which you can read about in the Dictionary of Sydney. [nla.news-article12944577] (Sydney Morning Herald 22 March 1853, p.3)

It isn't hard to imagine how popular ice must have been in the days before home refrigeration and there are certainly many who can still remember the ice man and the domestic  ice chest which preceded the electric refrigerator. There is a photograph of ice being delivered, from the collection at the State Library of New South Wales here [a422009 / ON 225, 22] (Mitchell Library)

The ice chest in the holiday cottage we stayed in when I was a child looked almost exactly like this one which dates from the 1940s here.

The making of sophisticated ices for consumption involved both experimentation with the right balance of solids, sugar and fat, in the mixture to be frozen and with methods for stirring the mixture as it froze to break up the ice crystals and ensure a smooth texture. David mentions milk based sorbetti recipes from the late seventeenth century and milk and custard based sorbetti, involving cream, butter and/or eggs,were certainly  being made in the eighteenth century. Despite all my reading I'm still a bit confused about the difference between sorbetto  and gelato or rather confused about whether there was any historical difference. According to the Oxford Companion to Italian Food

The terminology of the past can be confusing; gelare can mean to set rather than to freeze, and a sorbetto could be a cool drink that was sipped rather than the almost solid mush we know today.

So a sorbetto  might also have meant something which was more like what we would call a granita, courser in texture and slushy, which evolved into today's sorbet, a water ice with a smooth texture while gelato  is a milk or custard base ice. In the end I suppose it doesn't really matter whether all gelati are sorbetti but not all sorbetti are gelati or vice versa. 
Given my previous defense of blancmange I was very chuffed to find this - of Sicilian gelato Taylor Simeti says

Sicilian gelato is not made with cream at all, but with crema rinforzata, which is nothing other than the omnipresent biancomangiare  in a particularly liquid form.

Hurray for biancomangiare.

Steak Diane

I am old enough to remember when Steak Diane was considered a sophisticated dining choice so I was very interested to read this post from Deanna Sidney. What surprised me was the recipes she quotes. My own recollection is that one of the best features of Steak Diane was the strong garlic flavour  (well this was the 1960s) but the American recipes don't include garlic at all.
Doubting myself I checked with Ted Moloney and Oh, For a French Wife, first published in 1952  'at a time when cooking in this country [Australia] was not very inspired and one could count on one hand the good restaurants in our two biggest cities.'
In the section titled 'Home at Five Thirty' Moloney gives instructions for the following menu

Globe artichokes with hot melted butter (or oysters au natural if artichokes are not in season)

Steak Diane with Pommes de terre Duchesse

Salad

Cuban Bananas

a four course dinner for six people which could be whipped up after work albeit with just a little preparation the night before.

He begins the directions for Steak Diane with 

'To the best of our knowledge it was immaculately groomed Tony Clerici, whom we first knew at Romano's, who introduced Steak Diane to this town. Tony had such flair as he stood beside your table to deftly prepare this steak in a heavy copper pan, tantalize your appetite with its sizzle and aroma, and then serve you.'

Tony Clerici was indeed often credited with the introducing Sydney to Steak Diane and his recipes featured in The Australian Women's Weekly in 1954 (20 October) and again in 1967 (7 June). (Mr Clerici was part of the Sydney restaurant scene for many years, with Romanos in the 1930s and 1940s and later at Primo's Lafayette and at Prunier's Chiswick Gardens.)

Romano's was one of the  places to eat in Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s (you can read more about Azzalin Orlando Romano here).

(These photographs of the interior of Romano's are from the collection of the State Library of NSW)

What Clerici's recipes proved was that whilst garlic may not have been acceptable for the patrons of New York's fashionable eating places it was certainly very much part of Sydney's Steak Diane.

Tony Clerici's recipe from The Australian Women's Weekly 20 October 1954.

The article of June 7 1967 includes a number of variations on the theme from other Australian chefs, all but one of which include garlic, and one from an unnamed American source which not only doesn't mention garlic but doesn't use Worcestershire sauce either!

Biancomangiare

From Mrs Beeton

'Biancomangiare' sounds so much more exotic than 'blancmange' or 'cornflour mould' but, although it might have become nursery fodder and is now something of an anachronism, I like to think that blancmange is more than a mere 'cornflour mould'.
My researching of the history of blancmange began a while back but this post was prompted by a recent piece on The Cook and the Curator  which talked about blancmange being set with gelatin, and how the mould was chilled to get the mixture to set.
The blancmange I know, which my mother made, comes from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book of 1949 where it goes by the unfortunate name of 'cornflour mould' and involves nothing more than milk, thickened with cornflour and flavoured with lemon rind and sugar.
Blancmange has a long history, it was ubiquitous in European cookery from as early as the twelfth century. According to the Oxford Companion to Food  blancmange is the Anglicized version of blanc manger which simply means 'white food' (although there is some debate about this, see Hieatt and Allaire-Graham references below) and in the 14th- and 15th- century English blancmangers were made of shredded chicken breast, sugar, rice and either ground almonds or almond  milk. Unlikely as this idea sounds the Turkish dessert tavuk göğsü (which is certainly made with chicken breast but doesn't always contain rice and is more usually made with cow's milk) is still popular and delicious, and these days something of a tourist attraction. 
Although it appears there is no hard and fast proof that blancmange or tavuk göğsü  have their roots in medieval Arab cuisine it seems highly likely. Barbara Santich in her The Original Mediterranean Cuisine (Wakefield Press, 1995) says of blanc manger

this is one of the great classics of medieval cuisine, an international dish of high repute. All the recipe collections contain at least one recipe for blanc manger or menjar blanch. Its basic ingredients are ground rice or rice flour, milk or almond milk, sugar and rosewater...To these might be added shredded chicken breast, or fish or lobster in Lent.

In Delizia! The epic history of Italians and their food John Dickie talks about De honesta voluptate et valetudine  - Respectable Pleasure and Good Health (1465) the first printed cookbook. Written in Latin and authored by 'Platina' the Vatican librarian under Pope Sixtus IV, most of the recipes in this book originated from a professional cook, one Martino de Rossi. His version of biancomangiare (which Dickie translates as 'white eating') consists of peeled almonds and the boned breast of a capon pounded to a pulp and cooked with spices and sugar. Blancmanges like this were apparently often poured over meat and were highly prized, 'to achieve the desired degree of whiteness, it was prepared with particular attention to cleanliness, sometimes in a separate corner of the kitchen.'

This illustration from Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi *(reproduced from Dickie) shows a Renaissance kitchen, with pies being prepared on the the long central table, sauces being sieved in the right foreground and the lone blancmange-maker on the left.

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food says that the popularity of  biancomangiare was 'its unearthly and expensive whiteness'.

Using white meat, ..., carefully prepared to retain its palor, and white forms of starch and sugar, biancomangiare would have glowed with the luminosity of a full moon among the sombre stews and sauces, the deep browned roasts, decorated with gold and silver, and the brightly coloured tarts, pies, and sauces of the banquet table. Like white linen and the ethereal pale complexion of a pampered princess, this delicate dish speaks of conspicuous consumption and a flagrant use of costly commodities.  

Gosh! 

Searching through the modern recipe books on my shelves, Claudia Roden  (A New Book of Middle Eastern Food) gives recipes for balouza (made with cornflour and water, flavoured with orange blossom or rose water with blanched almonds or pistachios) which she says is 'like white opaline encrusted with little stones' which 'trembles like a jelly'. Balouza Muhallabia is made with milk rather than water and the nuts are used as a garnish. In Moroccan Cuisine Paula Wolfert  includes a dessert called Mulhalabya which is made in much the same way and garnished with blanched almonds and cinnamon. In Anissa Helou's Lebanese Cuisine the dish is muhallabuyeh.
Mary Taylor Simeti (Sicilian Food) says that blancmange has been a Sicilian favourite for centuries and  likely arrived in Sicily with the Arabs. The 15th-century recipe she reproduces is very similar to that described in Santich, using ground almonds and veal or chicken broth (to make a savoury almond milk), rice flour, sugar, cooked chicken meat pounded to a paste and flavoured with sugar, rosewater  and served with 'a sprinkling of sweet powdered spices'. In Sicily the modern blancmange is made with cow's milk or almond milk and cornflour.
Whilst it might not speak of conspicuous consumption or glow in the dark I still like to think of 'cornflour mould' as a direct descendant of Medieval biancomangiare.

So where does the gelatin come in? The early blancmanges made from a good chicken or veal stock would have owed some of their viscosity to the gelatin extracted from the bones during the making of the stock but this was clearly supplemented with the pounded chicken flesh and starch of some sort, if indeed the intention was to produce a set blancmange rather than just a warm, thick goo. The thick goo would of course have set  to some extent once it cooled. Until gelatin made from bones was commercially available, around the middle of the 19th-century, making a jelly involved calves feet and a long and tedious process of boiling and straining and clarifying. Isinglass, gelatin prepared from the dried swim bladders of fish, was commercially available  from the late 18th-century (and is still used today as a clarifying agent in the production of wine and beer).** It follows that recipes calling for the use of either isinglass or gelatin would most probably date from the 19th-century.
According to the Larousse Gastronomique,  Carême  said of  blancmanges that 'these delicious sweets are greatly esteemed by gastronomes, but, to be enjoyed, they must be extremely smooth and very white'.
His recipe calls for almond milk that is filtered and strained and gelled with isinglass. Similarly both Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton writing in the later half of the 19th-century also use isinglass.
Acton (Modern Cookery) does include a recipe for making blancmange using calves foot stock, cream or milk and finely pounded almonds but also includes recipes requiring isinglass. Of isinglass she has this to say

At many Italian warehouses a preparation is now sold under the name isinglass, which appears to be a highly purified gelatine of some other kind. It is converted without trouble into a very transparent jelly, is free from flavour, and is less expensive than the genuine Russian isinglass

Russian isinglass was made from the swim bladders of sturgeon. She has recipes for 'good common blanc-mange, or blanc-manger'; a richer blancmange made with cream; a strawberry blancmange 'or Bavarian cream'; quince, apricot and currant blancmanges; and a 'jaumang' or 'jaune manger' which apparently was also know as 'Dutch flummery' and incorporated eggs.*** All these versions are set with isinglass.
Mrs Beeton provides recipes for blancmange made with isinglass using almonds,  milk and cream and recommends flavourings from bay-leaves to Maraschino and Curacao; a cheap blancmange made with milk and set with gelatin and a blancmange for invalids set with isinglass neither of which involve almonds. She also notes that

A nice blancmange, if wanted quickly, can be made by using the powders prepared by Goodall, Backhouse and Co., or Yeatman. A blancmange for children may be made of Brown and Polson's Corn-flour.

From 1956 http://www.flickr.com/photos/totallymystified/8576176743/

Using isinglass or gelatin then is perhaps a more refined, middle-class, modern approach to blancmange. But not without its pitfalls. At least with cornflour you know whether or not you have used enough to get the mixture to thicken to the right consistency. Setting with gelatin requires the right ratio of gelatin to liquid and the texture of the resultant gel depends on both the concentration of gelatin and the speed with which the gel forms. Cooling the liquid quickly results in a more fragile gel,  the gel formed at room temperature is more stable. More worrying is that the gel will start to breakdown if the temperature goes above around 30 degrees C, which may not have troubled mesdames Acton and Beeton but can be a problem in an Australian summer. And for my money the texture and mouth-feel of a blancmange made with cornflour is superior. Call me a philistine but I'm happy to stick with my 'cornflour mould' especially since it's really biancomangiare.

For a much more detailed and scholarly look at the history of and debate about blancmange see Erin Allaire-Graham 'From Fast to Feast: Analyzing the ubiquitous "White Dish"' and Constance B. Hieatt 'Sorting through the titles of Medieval dishes: What is, or is not, a "Blanc Manger"'.

* Of Bartolomeo Scappi, Dickie says he 'was undoubtedly the greatest cook of the Italian Renaissance'. His Opera, published in 1570 in six volumes, is 'a comprehensive cookery guide, and a meticulously illustrated monument not just to one exceptionally successful career but to the careers of those hundreds of nameless cooks who had brought Italian food to such heights.' There is more about the Opera here and see the original here. If you follow the links in this post you can also sample the translation and Deanna also includes a couple of his recipes.

**My favourite reference to isinglass is from the stage show 'Oklahoma'. 'The Surrey with the fringe on top' has wheels that are 'yeller', brown upholstery, a dashboard of genuine leather and 'isinglass curtains y'can pull right down, in case there's a change in the weather'.

*** Eliza Acton's 'Jaune Manger' required 8 egg yolks and was flavoured with the juice of 'four sound moderate-sized lemons' and a pint of sherry. In Delizia! Dickie describes a 'Yellow Neapolitan-style blancmange' from 1529 which involved almonds, boiled capon breast and sugar worked to a smooth consistency and then mixed with rice flour, cinnamon and ginger  and coloured with saffron. This was 'tempered with meat or capon broth and cooked with verjuice'. Cinnamon and sugar were added on top before serving.

Eating in Berlin

Food isn't perhaps the most compelling reason for visiting Berlin. It is a fascinating city with more than its fair share of wonderful museums and a modern history which resonates in one way or another with everyone but when it comes to eating most tourists probably think cabbage, potatoes and wurst. And probably the worst of the wurst is the one that gets the most publicity - currywurst. Supposedly, at least as far as Berliners are concerned, invented by one Herta Heuwer using ingredients available in the British zone after the end of World War Two the currywurst is nothing more than a sausage drowned in tomato sauce with curry powder sprinkled on top, served with chips.

 Irina Dumitrescu ('Currywurst', Petits Propos Culinaires, 98, July 2013, pp.71 - 77) says of currywurst that 'any sane non-German, with properly calibrated taste buds and a sense of the limits to which innovation in food should be taken' naturally recoils from the idea of eating one. Yet it is so much a part of the popular culture in Berlin that there is a museum dedicated to currywurst - imaginatively named Deutsches Currywurst Museum - and there is even a novel about the invention of curry wurst which you can read about here (and an interesting article 'Beyond Currywurst and Döner: The Role of Food In German Multicultural Literature and Society' by Heike Henderson which discusses this work, which you can read here.) Dumitrescu sees currywurst 'as a symbol of troubled German national consciousness in the post-war period', a sign of 'the kind of creative chaos cities like Berlin ... foster so well' and a 'riff on traditional food that keeps it squarely in the middle, even if unrecognisable'. Be that as it may for a whole variety of reasons currywurst holds a significant place in the local food culture, encapsulating memories and tradition for those who can read the message.

 In the interests of gastronomic tourism it was necessary to try this concoction but not at a street stall or at the Currywurst Museum but, perhaps more fittingly, at the Domklause restaurant attached to the DDR Museum.The DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) Museum is all about what life was like in East Germany, and rather than stuffy static exhibits it provides an interactive experience. For example you can wander around a typical apartment - sit in a mock-up of a typical lounge room, rummage through the cupboards in the kitchen and fondle the clothes in the wardrobe. You can also sit in an interrogation room and a prison cell and participate in a rigged election. Along the way the museum answers a good many questions and provides some understanding of what  East Berlin was all about. The Domklause restaurant completes the picture by serving food which was popular in East Germany.

The museum is on the site of the exclusive Berlin Palashotel (1979 - 1992), home of the original Domlkause where official visitors, western tourists and DDR officials wined and dined in style. The present Domklause serves some of the dishes the hotel patrons would have enjoyed such as Erich Honecker's favourite meal (smoked pork, potatoes and sauerkraut) alongside more plebeian fare such as Ketwurst (hotdogs), Krusta (pizza) and Grilletta (hamburgers). The Rationalisierungs- und Forschungszentrum Gaststätten or Gastronomic Rationalisation and Research Centre was responsible for the development of these fast food products specially engineered to give the citizens of the East their own version of the taste of the West untainted by hints of capitalism. Given the choice the East German ketwurst is a better bet than the West German currywurst in my opinion but eating currywurst here posed a thought provoking link between life in the east and the privations of life in the west immediately after the war.  Dumitrescu points out that currywurst was essentially just an inventive way of making the substandard sausage available at the time into something more palatable. Using German sausage, American ketchup, the British contribution of Anglo-Indian curry powder, and French fries a serve of currywurst was West Berlin on a plate.

Whilst the DDR museum is very informative and the restaurant food is fun there is something a little disturbing about the whole experience. Since the project is geared towards western tourists it is heavy with the suggestion that the DDR was both a serious mistake and a bit of a joke, clearly doomed to failure. West was, is and will continue to be, best. There's a sense that this very recent past is all ancient history without any real acknowledgment that in fact Berlin is full of people who have had personal experience of the way of life on display in the museum. For them the difficulties of a life lived in fear of the Stasi, with no political freedom and little consumer choice is balanced by memories of happy family times, of growing up, of friendships, of holidays, of comradeship and purpose. Many people who have lived under a communist regime are not entirely convinced that their lives are suddenly 100 per cent better now that they live in a democracy.

In Berlin they talk of Ostalgie, which is literally nostalgia for the east, for those aspects of their culture like consumer goods, food products included, which disappeared overnight. East Germans essentially became immigrants in their own country, with a yearning for those everyday markers of their identity. Since the 1990s there has been a boom in nostalgia and companies manufacturing products formally only ever available to residents of the DDR. The Original Ketwurst stand at Friedichstrasse station (see also here) is but one example of the places specialising in food nostalgia. Vita Cola (which you can sample at the Domklause) and Spreewald pickles are available again. There is even a game called 'Kost the Ost' (Taste the East) based on cards featuring 46 different DDR food brand labels (only three of which are still available), 10,000 of which were sold in the first week of its release in late 1996. (For more information, if your German is up to it, see here. This site is also the source of the pictures of the cards.)

 'In this business of Ostalgie, East German products have taken on new meaning when used the second time around. Now stripped of their original context of an economy of scarcity or an oppressive regime, these products largely recall an East Germany that never existed. They thus illustrate the way in which memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon, but also the process through which things become informed with a remembering - and forgetting - capacity.'

 Quoted from Daphne Berdahl, '"(N)Ostalgie" for the Present: Memory, Longing and East German Things' in  On the social life of postsocialism. Memory, Consumption, Germany. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2010 which you can, and should, read here. These comments might just as well apply to currywurst.

The wall which once separated east from west, or what is left of it, is now also a tourist attraction. The Berlin Wall Memorial tells the story of how the wall came about and the role it played in people's lives.  Bits of the wall still exist in various parts of the city. Chunks turn up in odd places as street art.

 This recent article is a reminder of how using the Berlin Wall as a canvas began, not all that long ago.

And to be fair there probably is more to German food than currywurst, cabbage and potatoes. Although I haven't seen this publication myself there is a new book due soon, if not already available, called Beyond Bratwurst. A history of food in Germany by Ursula Heinzelmann, published by Reaktion Books which promises a broader spectrum of culinary delights.

The joys of marketing - discovering the Mlekomat.

Food markets are endlessly fascinating. There's the people

 and what they sell and how they display their wares

 and then every now and again there's a complete surprise, something you've not encountered before. like whole heads of sunflower seeds

or the Mlekomat.

These photos were taken in the market place in Ljubljana but it appears that the Mlekomat is neither a new or particularly unusual sight in Europe. It is just an automatic milk dispenser - you can watch a very cute video of how it works here - but such a good idea.

Abandoned blogs revisited

The universe works in mysterious ways. This morning Eater.com announced the appointment of three full-time restaurant critics (here), one of whom, Robert Sietsema has been somewhat critical of his new masters in the past. In the Columbia Journalism Review he wrote

Eater, a Web site spun off by the real-estate blog Curbed, has become a clearinghouse for professional and amateur reviews, along with restaurant gossip and periodic reports on the progress of coming restaurants. The site legitimatized instantaneous reviews published by bloggers under auspices that were opaque to the reader, giving them equal billing with professional reviews. Whether a meal was eaten for free by a reviewer who'd announced his presence beforehand, or according to principles of professionalism and anonymity, is of no concern to Eater. The site captures the culinary zeitgeist of our era, with its mixture of lively gossip and real-estate reporting.

His article is titled 'Everyone Eats ... but that doesn't make you a restaurant critic' and you might guess he is critical of the amateur reviewer and their lack of ethical standards. (I would guess that he is also critical of the writing style and language non-professionals use. Well it might not be unethical to use 'legitimatized' but surely 'legitimated' would be better?) Presumably now that Eater.com has its own professional critics it will be raised above 'the digital free-for-all'. Going into the professional reviewing business is a big step for a site whose original manifesto was restaurant news and gossip, they now claim to be providing a public service by filling the gap left because traditional print media continues to place less emphasis on traditional reviews - slashing budgets and sacking reviewers.

Sietsema himself was a victim of these cut backs, having been the restaurant critic of The Village Voice, published weekly in New York, until May 2013 when he was sacked and then joined Eater. (You can read more about Sietsema and his career in The New York Times, at Eater.com and at the Huffington Post ).
The idea that Eater.com is becoming mainstream and that digital media is becoming more and more like the traditional media it was meant to replace prompted this piece from Amateur Gourmet which laments the loss of the 'looseness and scruffiness' which made blogs so appealing in the first place. And Adam should know because he has been blogging for 10 years, although there is nothing amateurish about the review he published of his meal at el Bulli back in 2009 which I still think is the best I've read (and believe me, in the interests of research, I've read many).

And both of the above prompted Phil Lees to  post this graphic which only confirms that the Internet is indeed littered with deserted food sites and abandoned food blogs.

Deserted sites and abandoned blogs.

Anyone who starts a web site or a blog presumably does so with the intention of persevering. Sadly it seems the enthusiasm eventually wains. Many of the blogs I have been following have been abandoned and usually one assumes for good reason. In some cases a hobby has turned into a job, and very few people who are paid to write want to spend their spare time writing for nothing. In some cases life has just taken over so that there is no time either to research or to write. The blogs I am interested  in cover a wide range of interests including some which concentrate on restaurant reviews. Maintaining these review blogs involves a good amount of time spent eating at a not inconsiderable personal expense so it isn't hard to understand why these enterprises might stall. And if, as in my case, writing is a slow process then writing anything more than one thing at a time is pretty much impossible, so that any other writing commitments mean that blogging has to take a back seat. Anyway that's my excuse.

And of course many people have just moved on to some other means of communication - Twitter or Instagram or both, or are so busy keeping up with these and maintaining a presence on Facebook and Snapchatting that writing any more than a few sentences is out of the question. Whilst it's easy enough to understand why people move on I wish they would leave some sort of comment on their abandoned blog or web site so that you know what's happened to them. Is it worth checking back from time to time in case they resurface? Have they got a new job, moved somewhere else, given up eating or just become bored and /or lazy? Some sort of final post, even just something along the lines of 'gone fishing', seems only polite if you feel what you have been doing has had any merit or been of interest to your intended audience, whoever they may be.

So, should the day come when this blog ceases, rest assured there will be a post to that effect.