nutrition

What are your basic go-to dishes?

maki — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:04:52 +0200

Jamie Oliver has a new series on Channel4 in the UK (which we can watch here in Switzerland on cable and satellite) called Jamie’s Ministry Of Food. The premise of the show is as follows:

People in the UK don’t know how to cook basic home meals, and many live on unhealthy takeaway (takeout) food and junk food like crisps (chips).
If you teach these people to cook, they will better their lives.
Jamie teaches a group of people in Rotherham, a mainly blue-collar town in the north of England, the basic recipes. The people he teaches are then expected to teach their friends and acquaintances the same recipes, who in turn will teach their friends, and on and on, spreading the joy of cooking.
Jamie also wants to revive the concept of a Ministry of Food (see Supersizers Go WWII episode) to educate the masses about nutrition and cooking.

The activism aspects aside, the base concept of teaching people who don’t know how to cook a basic set of reliable recipes is not a bad one I think. The recipes available on the Ministry of Food site are okay overall I think, but are not exactly what I’d choose. It is very Brit-centric, not surprisingly, but also includes some jarring choices like chicken breast panfried with Parmesan cheese and expensive proscuitto (Parma ham). On the TV show itself the accompaniment was asparagus, a very seasonal and rather pricey vegetable. It looks delicious, and pretty easy - but economical? I’m not sure. (Chicken breast is quite expensive around here too, though I’m not sure if that’s the case in the UK too.)

While I do like to ‘cook fancy’ quite often, I have a core set of recipes that I fall back on for everyday, no-think, inexpensive dinners. Most of them aren’t written down anywhere - they are just in my head - and most of them aren’t that Japanese, though some are.

I’ll be writing about them in an upcoming post, but in the meantime I’d like to ask you: What are your go-to everyday, preferably inexpensive, dishes? Are there a couple that you fall back on time and time again?

The Supersizers Go ... Regency

maki — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:02:26 +0200

The sixth and final episode of The Supersizers Go was dedicated to the Regency period, the time of Jane Austen and the lecherous, gluttonous, foppish, trend-setting Prince Regent, later George IV. Again, Giles and Sue play a well off middle-upper class couple of the day—he is a small landowner with an inheritance of around £50,000—but instead of being married as in other episodes they are brother and sister. This is so that they can portray the difficult state of an unmarried woman (Sue) with not much of her own income. The cold and sometimes horrified expressions on her would-be suitors’ faces reacting to her desperate advances seemed a bit too genuine. Here she is trying to hang onto a gentleman.

Despite the elegance and relative comfort of the age for the gentry, factors such as the Enclosure Act which prohibited anyone but the landowners from hunting on the land (anyone else became guilty of poaching), bad harvests and high taxation lead to food riots and famines. It was a desperate time for the poor. The episode only touched lightly on this facet of Regency society though, and concentrated on the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy. (The scene where Sue goes around to the ‘poor’ distributing leftovers, reminded me of the scenes in Little Women where the girls go to poor German or Irish families and give them hampers, which made up of their own food wrapped up. Granted, Little Women was written in the later half of the 19th century and is set in New England, but the sentiment seems to be the same. And it’s very uncomfortable to read about or watch with modern eyes, or at least my eyes. I was not born to act out noblesse oblige.)

At the beginning of the period, the English were at war with the French, so all French foods and drink (especially the beloved claret) were banned from dinner tables. Instead, people at food that is even now recognized as being Very English: Roast beef, Yorkshire Pudding, trifle, and so on. Later on after Napoleon was defeated, French food was politically correct again, and the Prince Regent hired Marie-Antoine Carême, who is still regarded as one of the greatest chefs of all time. Just looking at the English menus vs. the French menus, there’s little wonder that French haute cuisine became so revered. (Though surely the ‘very English food’ wasn’t that bad?)

Quite a lot of things about this period seemed quite familiar, mainly I suspect from all the hours I’ve spent watching Jane Austen dramas. (I have read Pride and Prejudice but admit to having never read her other books.) Even the offal didn’t seem so bad - I suppose sweetbread came the closest to that, but I happen to like sweetbread (it’s quite bland and soft, and is usually fried until crispy on the outside in butter). The obligatory Animal Head Dish was a stuffed and elaborately decorated small boar (though they probably used a pig)…it looked rather cute. Here Sue takes a nice slice of snout.

Most of the food looked quite edible really, if a bit heavy. I’d be happy to eat things like roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, trifle, and ice cream, though in smaller quantities and with more vegetables. And now I finally know what the heck jugged hare is. (It’s chopped up bunny meat cooked with herbs and things in a jug that is poached in a vat of hot water.)

Other things from this episode:

The main chef was TV chef Rosemary Schrager, who is a very fun lady to watch. If you have never seen her, she’s sort of like the Fat Ladies, but more down to earth.
The ‘restaurant’ chef was Mickael Weiss of London restaurant La Coq d’Argent, who appeared in several other episodes too.
Exotic fruits were grown in greenhouses by the rich, and were highly desirable, as were imported nuts like pistachios.
Giles had an inheritance of £50,000, equivalent to £2.5 million today. I went back to Pride and Prejudice to compare this with what Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy had - Mr. Bingley had an annual income of £4,000, while Mr. Darcy’s income was more than £10,000. No wonder Mrs. Bennett went bonkers over the prospect of her daughter ‘catching’ Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Darcy must have had her awed once she found out. Here is a great page with a chart that compares Regency and present-day money figures, which seem to differ a bit from what is stated in Supersizers, but you can get a general idea.
Cheese was rather maggoty… (but such cheese still exists on Sardinia!)
Instead of French wine, people drank port (from Portugal), sherry (from Spain), and German wines.
Drinking and bathing in mineral water (especially at Bath) was very popular for ones health.
A lot of men suffered from gout, a very painful illness.
An unmarried gentlewoman with no income of her own really had it hard when it came to life prospects.
There was a bestselling guidebook to prostitutes called Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. Sounds quite useful.

List of food and drink consumed in this episode

Breakfast

Toasted Bread
Turtalong (bread rolls looking like mini-bagels)
Seed cake
Marmelade
Jam
Hot Chocolate
Tea (they were complaining about the weakness of the tea…it seems Sue Perkins prefers “builder’s strength” dark tea)

Dinner

Taken any time between 11AM and 2PM

First Course:

Mackerel broiled with Herbs
Roast Beef (very very well cooked)
Yorkshire Pudding
Spinach
Wow-wow Sauce (sauce made with gherkins, onions and port)
Port
Sherry

Second Course:

Jugged Hare (cut up bunny mixed with herbs and steam-cooked in a jug for three hours)
Potted Venison
Beetroot Pancakes
Asparagus
Trifle
German Wines
Port

Supper

By fashionable candlelight, around 10PM

Cold roast beef
Sweetbreads
Apple Pie
English Rarebit (cheese on port-soaked toast)
Stewed Celery
Port
Sherry

Giles’ breakfast in bed, as the Prince Regent ate

A big Meat Pie with 2-3 pigeons and beef
Champagne
Port
Moselle
Claret
Laudanum to kill the pain

(The Prince Regent suffered from gout and became morbidly obese. His nickname in the press was the Prince of Whales.)

Taking the waters at Bath

Spring water to treat whatever ails you
Ice cream (flavors include brown bread, parmesan, cinnamon, pumpkin, cardamon, nutmeg, tea)

Luncheon at the Inn

On the way to London (Luncheon, also called Noonshine, was the precursor to lunch)

Stilton Cheese with optional maggots
Cheddar Cheese with cheese mites
Cold Meats
Cucumber Salad
Lobster
Asparagus
Bread
Cider

A Patriotic Beef Steak Supper with members of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks

This was supposed to be a patriotic, anti-French statement. The Society is still alive and well, apparently. (I confess, I instinctively wanted to punch my foot through the screen and kick these geezers for some reason.)

Beef Steaks
Shallots
Beetroot
Baked Potato
Cheese on Toast
Mustard
Port
Stout

Dinner a la Marie-Antoine Carême

First Course:

Potage de Bisque à la Régence
Pain de Volaille
Champagne
Sherry

Second Course:

Bure de Sanglier en Galatine (a stuffed and dressed boar’s head, with jellies and deep fried cockscombs)
Bâtelets à la Royale
Saumon à la Rothschild (salmon poached in champagne with truffles)
Chartreuse
More Champagne

Dessert:

Pièce Montée (an elaborate sugary centerpiece)
Strawberry Soufflé
Meringues
Marzipan Fruit
Vol-au-Vents à la Neslé (a savory puff pastry pie, with a surprise inside of cockerel’s testicles, an aphrodesiac)
Even more Champagne

Byron’s Breakfast before a duel

Apparently Byron was a bullemic and anorexic obsessed with this weight.

Tea mixed with a raw egg

Gambling snack

Where Giles gambles away his family fortune

Sandwiches (meat in between slices of bread, invented by hardened gambler Lord Sandwich)

Giles in Debtors’ Prison

A Cheshire Pork Pie, brought in by Sue (to last for several days)
Port

Ball to celebrate the Coronation (1821)

Preliminaries:

Sue massages her head with raw eggs and gives herself a brandy-milk-lemon facial, then rinses her hair with rum

Ball Supper:

To start:

Brandy and claret punch
White Soup (soup with mutton, veal, bacon, almonds, macaroni)

Main:

Hare Cake in Jelly
Chicken Hogs Tongues
Petit Pasties of Veal
Collared Beef
Pyramids of Crayfish (in jelly)
Asparagus
Sandwiches
Artichoke Bottoms
Trifles
Sweetmeats
Champagne
Claret
Sherry
Hock
Port

Dessert:

Selection of ices

At the conclusion of Supersizers Go

There are three things that will stay with me after viewing the Supersizers Go series.

Wealthy English people throughout the ages used to eat a Lot. Of. Meat.
Gelatin (leaves or powder) must have been a revolutionary invention.
Giles Coren looks fantastic in period costume. I think his best periods were the Elizabethan and Regency. (He looks rather ordinary in present day garb.) Here he is enjoying breakfast in bed as a Regency gentleman, with his hair in curlers.

I’m not sure how much educational benefit there was to the series in the end, but it sure was entertaining. I would not mind seeing another season, sending Giles and Sue to other periods or perhaps even other lands. The Greeks? Byzantium? The Ottoman Empire? Vikings? The Eighties? Why not?

This of course concludes my lengthy recaps. I hope you enjoyed them.

Supersizers Go recaps

Edwardian Supersize Me, not part of the series, but sort of the pilot that aired in 2007
Description of the whole series, plus World War II (episode 1)
Restoration (episode 2)
Victorian (episode 3)
1970s (episode 4)
Elizabethan (episode 5)

The Supersizers Go...to the 1970s, grooovy

maki — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:45:19 +0200

Near the end of the fourth episode of The Supersizers Go in which the food time travellers go to the 1970s, Sue Perkins says that she saw the ’70s through the banisters of the staircase, as she and her siblings peered downstairs at the goings on of the adults. This was how I experienced a good chunk of the ’70s too. I used to peer through the treads of the very ’60s open-tred wooden staircase in the house my parents rented in Wokingham, Berkshire, head upside down, spying on my parents and their guests when they entertained.

In any case, the ’70s episode was a lot more entertaining than I thought it would be, purely for the nostalgia value. I kept on squealing in recognition at many of the various foods trotted out. It did help that I actually spend a few years in the ’70s living in England with my family, since the Supersizers focused naturally on a very British version of that decade.

Giles and Sue eat dinner on trays while watching the telly.

Some fun facts from the episode

Convenience foods and pre-prepared, pre-packaged foods took off in a big way in the ’70s. Frozen food flourished because 2/3rds of the population now had freezers. There were also dehydrated ‘just add water’ foods, boil-in-a-bag dinners, tinned (canned) foods. The ’70s housewife barely had to cook at all. Eating with a tray in front of the TV became popular.
When they weren’t eating in front of the telly with trays balanced on their knees, people were eating more in the kitchen, as informal dining became popular.
People in the 1970s Britain ate on average 800 more calories per day than we do today - fatty fried foods, meat, eggs, full fat milk (delivered in glass bottles by the milk man), lots and lots of sugar. However they were slimmer than we are, probably due to the fact that they moved a lot more, working to work or at least to the bus stop, going up and down stairs in buildings without elevators, and so on. Exercising for fitness also took off in a big way in this decade. (I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t show Sue or Giles working out with an ab roller wheel, but they did show one of my favorite childhood toys, the Space Hopper or kangaroo ball.) Not to mention disco.
Weight loss did become a big concern. Along with exercise regimens, dieting and diet food became quite popular, including meal replacement drinks like Slim-Fast. (I vaguely remember my mother following a national diet spearheaded by the BBC…she ate a lot of tuna with some sort of sour onion sauce.)
Children apparently consumed sugary sweets with abandon in the ’70s. (I remember regularly having an fruity ice lolly (popsicle) that was dyed a bright blue. I loved the way it made my tongue blue. ) Mandatory hot school dinners were phased out at the end of the decade, by Margaret Thatcher.

They drank a LOT during the ’70s. According to the aptly named Action Cook Book (written by spy thriller novelist Len Deighton of all people), for a cocktail party the host was supposed to allow for the consumption of half a bottle of liquor per person for the first 2 hours, and three quarters of a bottle per person for every subsequent 2 hours. So, during say a 6 hour extended party, theoretically the guests would consume 2.5 bottles of liquor each.
Speaking of cocktails, cocktail parties were big during this time, as well as the in-home bar. I remember that my father had a fully stocked liquor cabinet in the large teak sideboard in our living room, even though he rarely if ever drank a drop of alcohol himself. He also kept a few ashtrays in the liquor cabinet despite the face that he hated smoking. (He still doesn’t drink at all. The liquor is long gone, but the teak sideboard has survived several moves and is lying under piles of books in his current living room. It’s a Midcentury Modern classic.)
This was the decade when the package tour holiday really took off. People, or at least the affluent middle class, jetted out of the country for vacation and brought back exotic food from the Continent. They experienced fondue whilst skiing, and brought back cheese fondue from the Alps. They didn’t mention it in the program, but apparently a cheese fondue set was a standard wedding gift during this decade. (Now of course I do live now in the land of the cheese fondue, Switzerland, and I can attest to the fact that people still do eat fondue here at home (it’s an easy way to have friends over). However, I’ve never seen chocolate fondue here, which was invented in New York in 1964, allegedly as a marketing ploy by Toblerone.)
American fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s invaded Britain during this decade. The Hard Rock Café, with their American Diner menu of humongous hamburgers, chips (fries) and ice cream sundaes, opened in London in 1971. (I never had fast food when we lived in England. When we moved to the U.S. later on, going to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken was a big treat for us.)

[Edit:] Some things I forgot to include:

The 1970s were aptly described as ” decade of non-stop gateaux and indiscriminate sexual activity”. Sounds like the adults were having fun while I was peering through the stairs. (Not that I think my parents were ever swinging!)
The in-house chef for this episode was Mark Hix, who until recently was the chef-director of Caprice Holdings, owners of The Ivy (a famous/infamous London restaurant) and The Caprice; he now runs his own restaurant. He was the winner of two of the courses in the Great British Chef contest last year, one of which was a take on a traditional British fish dish called Stargazy pie. He seemed to enjoying himself, though he was rather disgusted at the ingredients he had to use.

List of food and recipes mentioned in this episode

Breakfast in the kitchen

Grilled Grapefruit
Boiled Eggs with Soldiers
Croûtes Forestière (see below for recipe!)

Lunch for the ad executive at a restaurant

First course:

Rougets Grillé (grilled whole fish, not fileted)
Garlic Rolls
Chardonnay

Second course:

Duck à l’Orange
Mixed Vegetables
Bordeaux

Dessert

Crême Brulée
More red wine

TV Dinner

First Course:

Boil in the bag fish
Faggots (sort of like a cross between meatballs and sausages)
Crispy pancakes
Smash (dehydrated mashed potato)
Tinned vegetables

Pudding:

Butterscotch Angel Delight (instant pudding)
Banana Custard
Arctic Roll (a frozen swiss roll of sorts)

School lunch

Liver and bacon
Lumpy mashed potatoes
Boiled cabbage

Pudding:

Chocolate sponge
Chocolate pudding with the skin on (Sue and the kids loved this combination)

Sweet shop sweets

Candy bracelets, chocolate cigarettes, sherbet fountains, bubbly bubble gum…

Concorde Meal from the maiden Paris-Bahran flight

Aperitifs:

Caviar and smoked salmon canapes
Dom Perignon

Main course:

Cold breast of chicken with fois gras and asparagus spears
Mixed green salad with vinaigrette dressing
More champagne

Dessert:

Poached orange in Grand Marnier
More champagne

Digestifs

Assorted cheeses
Brandy
Cigars

Après-ski fondue

Melted Gruyère Cheese Fondue
Bread cubes
Boiled potatoes
Vin chaud (hot mulled wine)

Sweet fondue:

Melted chocolate
Angel cake
Apples
Cherries
Marshmallows

Diet food

Ryvita
Nimble bread
Cottage cheese
Strawberry Slim-Fast

The perfect dinner (according to a 1970s poll)

First course:

Tomato soup
Riesling

Second course:

Prawn cocktail garnished with a tomato rosette

Main course:

Steak Diane
Crinkle-cut chips (fries)
Mouton Cadet

Pudding:

Sherry trifle
More red wine

(followed by one of the regular power cuts that occured in the UK in the ’70s)

Fanny Hill’s Lunch (at a swinger’s party)

French Kiss (a sort of ox tongue casserole?)
Nymphomaniac’s Prayer (asparagus spears and some kind of sauce)
Potatoes Masoch
Red wine

Pudding:

Ali Baba au Rhum
Banana Candles (a la Fanny Cradock, see below)

American diner food at the Hard Rock Café

(The first Hard Rock Café opened in London in 1971)

10 ounce burgers
Fries, onion rings
Chocolate milk shakes
Coke floats

Dessert:

Hot fudge brownie
Hot fudge sundae

Breakfast in bed

Tea (made with a Teasmaid, a combination alarm clock and tea maker)
Fried eggs
Bacon
Fried bread
Bloody Mary

Cocktail party

(following Fanny Cradock’s The Party Cookbook; cocktails following Len Deighton’s Action Cook book)

Preliminaries:

Table decoration: Lemon Pigs (lemons cut to look like pigs) and a foil gondola, both a la Fanny Cradock (see below)
Cocktails (allowing 1/2 bottle of spirits per person every 2 hours; 3/4)
Wine cup (Black Tower, soda water and Curaçao with ice, served in a big bowl…a punch bowl of sorts in other words)
All the guests except one bring a bottle of Mateus Rosé as a hostess gift

Party food:

Twiglets
Ritz Cracker Hors d’oeuvres
Cheese and Pineapple
Coronation chicken vol-au-vents
Avocado and prawns
Swedish bird’s nest (see below)
Steak tartare
Haddock mousse
Fish sandwich cake (layers of sardines, prawns, canned salmon and lumpfish eggs combined into a stacked sandwich, iced with mayonnaise )
Roast chicken with green mashed potato (mashed potato colored with green food coloring)
Salmon and cucumber mould with Liebfraumilch jelly (a salmon and cucumber gelatin mould..Liebfraumilch is a type of semi-sweet white German wine)

Dessert:

Black Forest Gateau
Cheesecake
Cheeseball
Baked Alaska

Fanny Cradock

All in all the episode was very entertaining. They did however engage in quite a lot of Fanny Cradock bashing. Fanny Cradock was (in case you didn’t know) a tremendously influential TV cook and cookbook author, the precursor to Delia Smith in the UK, the Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson of her day. Fanny Cradock gets bashed fairly regularly on British television, because she was so of her time. Besides, she evidently wasn’t very nice (she was as horrible snob, a nightmare employer, and more), her television career ended in disgrace when she ruthlessly humiliated an ordinary housewife on air, and she and her sidekick/husband Johnnie Cradock are both long dead. (I was waiting to hear Graham Kerr, aka the Galloping Gourmet, be discussed, because his cooking and style were so very ’70s - perhaps even more so than Fanny, whose television career ended abruptly in 1976 and whose heyday was probably the 1960s. But he didn’t get even a passing mention. He did get equal billing with Fanny on a documentary about television cooking that aired back in 2001 called The Way We Cooked.)

I have had a long term fascination with Fanny Cradock (see here and here), and in the course of my interest I’ve acquired some of her cookbooks over the last few years, including the massive 5-volume bound set of Fanny and Johnnie Cradock Cookery Programme, a subscription-only magazine in 75 parts or issues. Apparently the producers of this Supersizers episode referred quite a lot to the Cookery Programme, but they shoehorned her recipes in to fit their narrative.

For instance, for their Swinger’s party they made something called Banana Candles:

They said that the recipe was from Fanny Cradock, saying ‘even she got into the swing (wink wink) of things’. They also made fun of a table garnish she came up with, Lemon Pigs. I looked up the original recipes, and in fact she was not suggesting to adults that they make sexually suggestive erect bananas or decorate their cocktail party spread with lemons cut to look like pigs. Both are on the back pages of the Cookery Programme, as projects for the Small Fry, or children. Here are the Banana Candles, where the instructions clearly call for adult assistance:

Of course, Fanny did suggest some jaw-droppingly kitsch party table presentations. Here’s one of the more staid onces, also from the Cookery Programme, made entirely of deep fried bread.

I do think Fanny gets criticized more than she deserves though. Her cookbooks are on the whole not bad at all, and really encourage her readers to cook things from scratch, using good ingredients. She pays attention to economy too rather than relying on expensive food. Sounds a lot better than Butterscotch Angel Delight pudding and frozen faggots with Smash to me.

Two other Fanny Cradock recipes presented on this episode were Swedish Birds’ Nest and Croute Forestier. I’ve found the original recipes for both! Here are the Swedish Birds’ Nests:

A bed of finely chopped (“scissored”) chives, parsley or a mix are arranged on a plate, in a sort of double helix pattern. On top of that are arranged (going from the outer rings inwards) capers, cold diced potatoes, finely chopped anchovy filets, then finally two raw eggs. “These are particulayrl delicious when served with dark rye bread and butter”, says Fanny. Now apparently these are called Faagelbo (Fågelbo) in Swedish, but the only things I could find for the term in Google was a type of Ikea sofa, or an actual nest of eggs. Do Faagelbo exist as a food in Sweden?

Incidentally, just about all of Fanny’s recipes in the Cookery Programme have French names attached to them, with the exception of the few which presumably came from a particular country, like the Faagelbo. This is in keeping it seems with the ’70s when speaking French was considered to be very chic. (I guess that attitude still lingers to this day in some circles, especially food ones.)

Finally, here’s the Croûtes Forestière, or Fried Bread Case Filled With Mushrooms and Bacon Rolls. In the episode it’s presented as a breakfast dish, but Fanny clearly meant it to be served at a dinner party.

Here is the recipe presented in its entirety…my comments in [brackets].

1 top of a cottage loaf [For non-British people: a cottage loaf is a large, round loaf]
1 small egg
3 fl. oz. milk
4 to 6 de-rinded rashers [bacon used to come with the rinds still on!]
6 oz. mushrooms
1 1/2 oz. butter
1 1/2 fl. oz. oil
1 rounded dessertspoonful flour
6 chopped tarragon leaves [6! exactly!] fresh or dried
salt and pepper to season
1 rounded eggspoon English mustard [is an eggspoon smaller or bigger than a teaspoon?]
1 6 fl. oz. good bone stock or 1 fl. oz. cooking sherry and 5 fl. oz. stock
oil to fry

Scoop crumb from bread knob, invert on table and when hollowed out, vandyke the top edges (see picture). Beat egg with milk, pour into what is now a bread water-lily, swill round until absorbed, lower immediately in smoking hot oil and fry until interior is a good golden brown. Keep warm on serving dish in oven at Gas Mark Low or 200°F. Fry bacon rashers dry in a shallow pan turning them carefully until cooked to desired texture. Roll up, keep warm on dish with bread case and add oil and butter to bacon fat in pan. When hot toss unskinned, sliced mushrooms [people used to skin, or peel, mushrooms!] and their stalks into this mixture, shake and turn over moderate heat until they have taken up the frying agents. Toss in flour and mustard and work until smooth with the back of a wooden spoon, add chopped tarragon, dilute gradually with small additions of stock blending thoroughly after each addition until all is smooth and creamily sauced. If choosing sherry, add before stock. Season to taste, pile into ‘water lily’, arrange bacon rolls on top as in our picture and serve piping hot.

Except for deep frying the bread, this may even be edible…

Next week the Supersizers go back to the time of Shakespeare. My recap, which should be considerably shorter than this one, will be delayed until the week after since I’ll be away next week.

Supersizers Go recaps

Edwardian Supersize Me, not part of the series, but sort of the pilot that aired in 2007
Description of the whole series, plus World War II (episode 1)
Restoration (episode 2)
Victorian (episode 3)
1970s (episode 4)
Elizabethan (episode 5)
Regency (episode 6, last in series)

The Supersizers Go...Victorian

maki — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:57:25 +0200

The third episode of The Supersizers Go was not as interesting to me as the previous two, simply because I knew a lot about how the Victorians ate already. I didn’t realize how much I knew until I’d watched the episode, but it’s all come down to us via Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and other period literature, not to mention Mrs. Beeton or even the American Fanny Farmer. Also, it doesn’t look like a whole lot changed between the Victorian era and the Edwardian period, which was covered in Edwardian Supersize Me. Still, those Victorians were sufficiently different from us in their eating habits to seem quite alien, but this was definitely the transitional period between the past and modern times.

The Victorians apparently still ate tons of meat. The “eww” cut of meat presented this time was a whole boiled calf’s head, complete with grinning jaw, prepared with much disgust and gagging by food writer Sophie Grigson, the designated home cook for this episode. Giles and Sue are partaking of said head in the screenshot above. (I’ve avoided posting a closeup of the calf’s head in case you should be browsing this site during lunchtime or something.)

The great meat pie (the coffin) still lived on too. Here Sue is serving a slice of game pie to Giles during Christmas dinner.

The Victorians did introduce a lot of food from the colonies - remember, this was a time when Great Britain was the uncontested world superpower. A lot of exotic fruits and vegetables graced their tables, and curries were introduced - even though the recipes were quite different from the original. Victorian curries were basically precooked stews to which powdered spices (curry powder) was added, mostly without prior frying in oil. (Nowadays most curry eaten in the UK is cooked using more or less Indian sub-continent or Southeast Asian recipes, and the stew-type of curry has virtually disappeared - but yet it was transmitted via 19th century Britain to Japan and continues to thrive there. Food history is odd, isn’t it?)

Dinner parties with showy food, preferably prepared by your own French chef, were the way to entertain and for the nouveau riche middle class (merchants who had made money from the expansion of the Empire and the Industrial Revolution) to try to make an impression. Queen Victoria and her large, rather stodgy family were their model for how to behave. A typical middle class family had six servants including a cook, a butler, and a ladies’ maid. Men of the house were at the office for most of the day, tending to the needs of the Empire. Ladies were tightly corseted in and expected to be decorative, demure and uninterested in sex (or food), though they were also supposed to run their households like small armies. Breakfast became earlier and dinner was later, to accommodate the new urban 9 to 5 working day.

New foods introduced during this time included gelatin-based items like jelly babies and jellied desserts, and canned (tinned) food like Spam-like canned pork and corned beef, not to mention Bird’s Custard, an eggless cornstarch (cornflour) based custard powder mix which is still a staple ingredient in the UK. (And with more food being manufactured outside of the home, food adulteration and contamination became a problem.)

As the series progresses, one common running thread is that people of the past ate a whole lot more of the animal. Nowadays most people - or at least those in English speaking areas - would cringe at the thought of eating the ears, eyes, snouts and so on of an animal, but ‘back in the day’ they ate and even enjoyed the whole thing. Even now, non-Anglo cultures still eat the ‘other’ parts of an animal quite enthusiastically (pickled pig’s ears as tapas in Spain, chicken feet in China, deep fried chicken cartilage in Japan, even head cheese) but it seems like English-speakers have gotten more and more squeamish about anything but the nice looking parts of meat.

Charles Darwin, one of the most famous of the scientifically curious Victorians, was even more adventurous about the food he ate. Ever curious, he tried things like roast squirrel, rodents, various birds (owl, hawk) and so on. Even candied maggots. (Some people are trying to bring back that spirit of culinary adventure…)

The Victorians also started taking up sport for leisure and health, especially bicycling. On the other hand, sugar consumption rocketed as cheap sugar flooded in from the colonies, and smoking tobacco was supposed to be good for you.

One positive thing about the Victorians was that at least a few of them such as French chef turned social reformer Alexis Soyer did develop a social conscience, and tried to do something about the desperate living conditions of the poor. As in previous periods, the poor rarely ate any meat, and subsisted on a lot of cheap carbohydrates (epitomized by Oliver Twist’s bowl of thin gruel) and vegetables. It seems to me that this image of meat being something desirable and enriching is something that persists to this day in a lot of ways - most feasts and family gatherings still revolve around a large quantity of meat of some kind!

The most enduring legacy of the Victorians in terms of food culture may be Christmas. Things like the Christmas tree (imported by Prince Albert from his homeland in Germany), Christmas cards, Christmas stockings, kissing under the mistletoe, Christmas crackers, roast goose with stuffing (later superceded by roast turkey), mince pies and plum pudding were all started or popularized as Christmas traditions by the Victorians. With a few changes, this is still how Christmas is celebrated in the UK and in much of North America.

So…what did the Victorians leave us with? A willingness to try different foods, even from far-flung lands, a fondness for sweets, a twinge of social conscience? Not too bad. However, Sue did gain 3.2 kilo (about 7 lb) in a week despite her tightly laced corset.

Next week the intrepid Supersizers tackle the 1970s.

List of foods and recipes mentioned in this episode

Breakfast at home (Giles and Sue, at 8 AM)

Mutton cutlets
Fried potatoes
Smoked mackerel and anchovies
Omelette
Tinned meats (corned beef, Spam-like canned pork surrounded by gelatin)
Angels on horseback (oysters wrapped in bacon)
Pears
Oranges

Lunch (Giles at his club, at 1 PM)

Beef curry
Rabbit curry
Vegetable curry
Club claret
Bakewell pudding

Dinner at home (Giles and Sue, 8 PM)

First Course:

Fried sole in anchovy sauce
Mutton curry
Sherry

Second Course:

Boiled Calf’s Head
Brains in butter and herb sauce
Fried calf’s ears in tomato sauce
Carrots
Tipsy cake
Claret

Charles Darwin themed picnic (Sue and Giles at the Natural History Museum)

Roast squirrel with furry feet
Candied maggot

To drink during an afternoon of bicycling in Hyde Park

Stower’s Lime Cordial

A snack after all that exercise

Fish and chips at London’s first ever chippie (unfortunately they didn’t show the name of the store)

Giles brushing his teeth

With charcoal and honey (toothbrushing was invented, but not toothpaste)

A social climbing dinner party prepared by a French chef

Served a la Russe, or in courses hot from the kitchen

A toast to the Queen

First course:

Red Deer a la Royale
French beans
Potato croquettes
Claret

Second course:

Pigeons a la Duchesse (pigeons stuffed with veal forcemeat, sewn back together, covered with bechamel sauce, fried, and covered with more bechamel)
Lambs tongue with spinach
Claret

Roast course:

Partidges with truffles
Chicken quenelles
Snipes on liver toast
Snipe heads (whole snipe heads…you were supposed to suck on them)
Champagne

Entremets:

Russian jelly
Claret jelly
Champagne jelly
Rice cake with almonds
Torte Frangipane
Fried salsify and eggs a la tripe (the savoury)

Giles eats street food

Mystery cooked meats, possibly contaminated

Sue serves the poor at a soup kitchen

Beef soup
Gruel

Tea and a séance (Sue at home)

Victoria sponge
Garibaldi biscuits
Macaroons
Indian tea

At the pub (Giles)

(The Victorians and the Temperance Movement instituted strict licensing laws)

A pint
A pie
Dog’s Nose (a drink made of gin, cold ale and warm ale)

Sue and Sophie go shopping at Sainsbury’s (first store opened in 1869)

Bird’s Custard Powder
Heinz Ketchup
Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce

Victorian Christmas Dinner

First course:

Brown Windsor Soup
Potato Croquettes
Baked Cod’s Head

Second course:

Cold Game Pie (made with 8 different kinds of game birds, plus ham, bacon, chicken, tongue)
Boiled Red Cabbage
Roast Goose and Stuffing

Third course:

Plum pudding
Bird’s Custard
Furmity (a spicy porridge, also called frumenty)
Mince pies (with minced beef in with the spices and mixed fruits and nuts)

Supersizers Go recaps

Edwardian Supersize Me, not part of the series, but sort of the pilot that aired in 2007
Description of the whole series, plus World War II (episode 1)
Restoration (episode 2)
Victorian (episode 3)
1970s (episode 4)
Elizabethan (episode 5)
Regency (episode 6, last in series)

2 penny sausages

maki — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:45:38 +0200

Asda, a UK supermarket chain (and a wholly owned division of Wal-Mart), spurred no doubt by recent news about scarily rising food prices, has launched an attention grabbing product: the 2 p sausage. You do have to buy it in packs of 8, but a pack is still just 16p. In US cents that’s about 4 cents a sausage.

The sausages have been reduced, from 56p per package of 8. Even at that price the thought of what might go into such a cheap sausage makes me shudder. At 2p per sausage, it makes my stomach take a queasy flop.

Surely there are better ways of eating frugally than stuffing yourself with lumps of dubious chopped up mystery meat? (I love a really good sausage, but bad sausages are a very different matter.) If you’re in the UK, have you tried the 2p sausages, or would you consider trying them?

Elsewhere in the world, you can have a $175 burger topped with gold leaf and foie gras, which may not even be that good. Something’s off kilter somewhere.

The Supersizers Go...Restoration: No water, lots of meat

maki — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:26:51 +0200

I was not intending to do a recap of each episode of The SupersizersGo, but they are so interesting and just right up my alley. So, if you don’t have access to BBC 2, are here for the Japanese recipes, or both, please indulge me. I’ll try to be brief.

In Episode 2, Giles and Sue visited the >Restoration period, in the 17th century - the time of the restoration of the monarchy (Charles II), the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, and perhaps most importantly, Samual Pepys, one of the best diarists in the English language. When the Great Fire broke out, Pepys took care to bury his prized Parmesan cheese in the back garden to protect it - never mind his wife or his house, the cheese was more valuable.

It seems that this was a time of great indulgence by the upper classes, who felt liberated and happy after their beloved monarch was put back on the throne. Indulgence in those days mainly meant lots and lots, and lots, of meat.

And boy did they eat meat. All kinds of meat. This was supplemented by fish and shellfish, but it was mostly meat. It was mixed together and stewed, or made into great big pies. The one that Sue and Giles are enjoying in the screenshot is called a ‘coffin’, and is filled with all kinds of game birds and chicken and meat, including whole chicken heads. The coffin is supposed to last a week, and the pastry is reused. Cockscombs, the fleshy wavy part on top of a cockerel’s head, were great delicacies - mainly, it seems, because they were so difficult to prepare.

Water was undrinkable in London, so everyone, even babies, drank ale (mostly ‘small bear’, a weak ale), wine (for the upper classes) and other alcoholic drinks. The lack of water really seemed to wear down the intrepid pair of food time travellers.

Vegetables were considered to be rather unsafe and dirty, because they were covered in dirt! That is until a forward thinking gentleman called John Evelyn wrote a treatise about the health benefits of vegetables, and market gardens sprang up all over. (Sue, who it seems prefers to be a vegetarian, almost cried with joy when she tucked into an all-vegetable meal on Day 5.) Cheese also became more popular at this time - mainly because there was no other safe way to consume dairy products that were shipped a far way, say to London.

Still, it seems most people who could afford to do so ate tons and tons of meat. An unfortunate side effect of this was that people got very stinky. (This reminded me of the prejudice that used to exist in Japan about gaijin or Japanese people who ate too much like those gaijin - that they smelled of butter (and not in a good way) because they ate so much meat and dairy products!) The sight of so many piles of uncooked and grey, stewed meat made me feel rather queasy, but this big pot of stewed ground beef and almonds (I think), with a great big sprig of rosemary sort of growing out of it, was quite fetching.

Other fun facts:

People ate several course, and each course consisted of several savory and sweet dishes all served at once. (This was the case from the Middle Ages, if my recollection of history is right.)
Tansy and wormwood were two herbs that were very popular (the dish both Giles and Sue liked the most was a tansy omelette). Both are toxic though; wormwood later became the key ingredient in absinthe.
Parmesan became a popular luxury item, and was spelled “Parmezan”.
During the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, women were encouraged to acquire and education; once the monarchy was restored, they were put back in their place for fear their weak brains would get damaged from all that learning.
Anchovies also became popular during this period, and ice cream was the new in dessert.
Forks (with two prongs) became fashionable during this time.
Men peed into a bucket in the corner of the room during dinner. The bucket could be hidden behind a screen discreetly, but it seems some just peed wherever. (I’ve read about the noblemen of Louis XIV’s court peeing into any handy receptacle in Versailles.)

Next week’s episode will be about the Victorians. Now, I do have one big beef (no pun intended) about the series: why not present the episodes in chronological order? It seems from Giles Coren’s article that they started in the 16th century and went up to the 1970s. The jumping around from era to era makes it a bit confusing. But still, this is one of the most fun food related TV shows that I’ve seen in a good while. Down with competition reality shows, more of this kind of stuff!

List of foods and recipes mentioned in this episode

Breakfast (eaten anytime before 11 AM):

A Barrel of Oysters
Bread and Cream
Ale (‘small ale’, 3.5% alcohol)

Dinner (midday meal, taken between noon and 4 PM):

1st course:

Stewed Carp
Jowl of Salmon (the eye sockets were sucked out and eaten)
Pullet in Almond Sauce
Claret

2nd course:

Neat’s Tongue wrapped in Caul (ox tongue wrapped in the amniotic sac of a calf)
More Claret
Tansy (a sweet omelette with tansy)
Cheese (wrapped in linen)

At the coffeehouse:

Coffee

Supper:

Pigeon Pie, aka Coffin (very thick, reusable pie crust filled with cock’s heads, cockscombs, sweetbreads, sheep’s tongue, bone marrow, a couple of pigeon breasts, veal, oysters, a bit of nutmeg; baked once a week eaten over the course of the week. Sow’s udders and larks can also be added.)
Cold Meats
Cheesecake
Claret

Breakfast (Giles by himself)

Gruel

Not edible:

Sue gets her corns treated by putting snails on her feet, to eat off the skin or something.

Dinner at Ham House, in honor of the return of King Charles II, service a la française:

1st course:

Ordinary Pottage
Olio Podrida (20 kinds of meat including partridge, guinea fowl, pigeon, capons, tongue, venison, etc. all cooked together and served in a huge bowl requiring two people to carry in)
Stewed Oysters
Quaking Pudding (sweet wobbly cake of almond, rosewater and candied peel)
Boiled Pike (cooked with pomegranate)

2nd course:

Hash (the pot of ground beef with rosemary, with almonds and nutmeg)
Tongue pie
Lobsters
Buttered Crab
Snowe Cream (egg white whipped with rosewater)
Larded Pigeon
Mince Pies
Peas (garnished with cockscomb)

The Banquet course:

Ice Cream (the latest sensation)
Pineapple (ditto - becoming a status symbol of the super wealthy)
Strawberries
Jellies
Candied Fruit and Nuts
Metheglin

Each course is served with wine - no water!

Breakfast at a traveller’s inn (actually a Little Chef)

‘Venison’ Pasties (often made of beef passed off as venison, cooked in its own blood and spices; the pasties were sealed with clarified, meant to keep for a week)
Turnips
Buttered Asparagus

A Puritan dinner in the country

Marrow pudding
Scotch Collops
Roast Chine of Beef with Buttered Cabbage
Whitepot (the original bread and butter pudding, made with bone marrow instead of butter)
Caudle (a nourishing drink made by stewing oats in hot spiced ale)

Supper at Magdalene College, Cambridge

Pease Pottage
Chewitts (small pies made from minced tongue and candied fruit)
College Pudding (one of the early steamed puddings: see also The Pudding Club where the institution of the pudding is celebrated today)
Stewed Prunes
Ale

Sue takes a bath

In a tub of claret with wormwood

Vegetarian dinner at Covent Garden, following the teachings of John Evelyn

A City Sallet (a pickled mixed salad)
1 hour boiled mushrooms
Pickled samphire
Carrot pudding
Lettuce

Giles goes on a date at a tavern

He freshens up his armpits with rocket (arugula) seed
Fishheads
Prawns and lobsters
Sweet potato and burdock tart
Claret

Sue sells oranges at the theatre

Oranges
Herrings
Candied sweetmeats

(Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwyn allegedly began her career as an orange seller.)

Plague Picnic Dinner

Remedies for the Great Plague.

Roast Shoulder of Lamb
Boiled Onions (Onions were left outside plague houses to ‘absorb the vapors)
Gallbladder of a Hare
Ships Biscuits
Parmezan (Parmesan; so expensive it was traded as currency amongst the rich)
Sack

Samuel Pepy’s Stone Feast of 1663

To celebrate the anniversary of the removal of his bladder stone; held every year. Lots of toasts; with each toast a whole glass of wine was quaffed.

Fricassé of Rabbits and Chicken
Leg of Mutton
Three Carps fricasséd
A Side of Lamb
Roasted Pigeons
Lobsters
Apple, Quince and Pear Tarts
Lamprey (eel) Pie, made with a live eel from the Thames
Anchovies
Several wines
Sack posset

Supersizers Go recaps

Edwardian Supersize Me, not part of the series, but sort of the pilot that aired in 2007
Description of the whole series, plus World War II (episode 1)
Restoration (episode 2)
Victorian (episode 3)
1970s (episode 4)
Elizabethan (episode 5)
Regency (episode 6, last in series)

The Supersizers Go... on BBC Two: A fun look back at food in history

maki — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:20:18 +0200

Giles, Sue and Allegra examine a week’s worth of rations during WWII.

Last year, a very interesting hour-long program(me) called Edwardian Supersize Me aired on BBC Four. Taking their cue from the hit documentary Supersize Me, Giles Coren, food critic for The Times, and writer/actress/comedienne Sue Perkins spent a week eating as the middle-class Edwardians did - meaning a lot. The pair are back, upgraded to BBC Two, in a new multipart series called The Supersizers Go…. The premise is the same as Edwardian Supersize Me - in each show Sue and Giles spend a week eating as people did in a certain historical era. The first episode aired last night, and the era was World War II.

The Supersizers Go… is a bit more jokey than Edwardian Supersize Me was, but just as fun and informative. Giles and Sue have gotten used to each other it seems, and are are lot more comfortable with each other. The visual details were great - they found a typical 1930s semi-detached house, decorated it inside as it would have been in the 1940s, and both of them dressed in clothing of the era. I could have done without the scenes of Sue chomping on grass and the like, and perhaps the tone was a bit too lighthearted for a period which was probably not much fun at all. Still, these are minor quibbles.

The most interesting part for me of course was look into how people ate during the war. I already sort of knew that food was strictly rationed then, especially things like sugar, fats (butter in particular), meat and eggs. What I didn’t know though was that people were required by law to “eat up”: it was even a crime to waste food, and some people even went to jail for it! Imagine if that were the case now - most of us would be spending some time behind bars.

The government sent a lot of instructions on how food was to be eaten. There was something called the National Loaf, made with “more of the grain than white bread”; it was fortified with calcium and vitamins and was required eating. It was dry and grey, and was nicknamed Hitler’s Secret Weapon. There was also something called Special Margerine included in the weekly rations, also laced with vitamins. Vegetables however were not rationed. People were encouraged to Eat for Victory. And there were those infamous dried eggs, imported from America.

To supplement the rationed food, the British people grew tons of vegetables in their gardens (encouraged to “Dig for Victory”) and resorted to foraging in the wild for things like nettles and snails. A black market also sprang up for forbidden foods. Housewives desperate to liven up the table also resorted to a weird range of foods that pretended to be something else - Mock Duck formed from sausage meat, Mock pies, and more. (The Mock part reminded me somewhat of the tendency of some current day vegetarians to try to make Mock versions of meat-based dishes…Tofurkey anyone?)

It seems that food served at designated British Restaurants, initially set up to feed people who had beem bombed out, was not rationed, so eating out became very popular.

Generally though, people ate a lot of carbohydrates, especially potatoes and National Loaf; much less fat and meat, and tons of vegetables - though it seems prepared in ways that sound rather awful from a modern perspective. The most famous wartime recipe was something called Woolton Pie, made by cooking equal parts of potatoes, cauliflowers, carrots and swedes (large turnips) with water and ‘vegetable extract’ (I assume this is something like Marmite) with water to a mushy state, then topping with a potato or whole wheat (wholemeal) pie crust. On the show Sue did most of the cooking, guided by chef and nutrionist Allegra McEvedy (who’s also one of the Guardian Word of Mouth bloggers), though Giles did step into the kitchen when the American G.I.s (bearing nylon stockings as gifts of course) came to visit and whipped up some horrific sounding cake that used paraffin as the fat.

The result of this kind of eating was that by the end of the war, the British people were much healthier than they had ever been - and probably a lot healthier than current day Brits. After a week of WWII eating, both Giles and Sue lost weight and improved their overall fitness indicators. This is probably why there are some calls to return to a ‘wartime diet’ (most prominently from that improvement-minded guy Jamie Oliver).

In any case, the first episode was The Supersizers Go.. was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. Next week’s historical era is the Restoration. Looks like Sue and Giles will be imbibing a lot of alcohol.

The scariest looking food in the episode: a ‘rabbit blancmange’ served at a post-war Victory Party.

Links

Disappointingly, the Beeb haven’t set up a dedicated site or even a page for the series as of yet. I hope they will, because I really wanted to read more about the subject. In the meantime here are some related sites I’ve found:

Giles Coren writes about the whole series. He says each era left him healthier at the end!
Home Sweet Home Front has a lot of interesting information about life during WWII, including rationing.
This World War II site also has information on food rationing.
The World War II era on the British Nutrition Foundation site.
For digging further into the World War II era, this reprint of the official Ministry of Information book Eating For Victory sounds interesting.
The Old Foodie is one of my favorite blogs, serving up a snippet of food history daily.

A list of the foods and recipes mentioned in this episode

Breakfast:

Wheaties (made from stale bread cut into cubes and dried in oven)
National Loaf (nicknamed Hitler’s Secret Weapon)
Scrambled eggs (made with powdered dried eggs imported from America; only one real egg per week per person allowed in rations)
Tea

Dinner:

Woolton Pie
Oatmeal Sauce
Raw Cabbage Salad
Sherry
Beer

Giles on night watch:

Spam sandwich (can of Spam on National Loaf bread)

Sue’s midnight snack:

Cold lamb chop

At the British Restaurant (John Lewis’ staff canteen - bananas seen there were strictly forbidden during the war):

Skilly (a much hated soup)
Cottage Pie
Carrot and Swede
Apple Crumble

Mock Dinner:

Mock Crab with Mock Mayonnaise (margarine, dried egg, vinegar, cheese, salad cream)
Mock Duck (sausage meat, onion, grated apple, sage, shaped into a duck)
Mock Apricot Tart with Mock Cream (grated carrot, almond essence, plum jam; cream is made of margarine, sugar, flour)
Mock Coffee

Lunch with the G.I.s:

Sue’s face painted with beetroot juice
Sue’s legs painted with gravy (to simulate stockings)
Lettuce and Margarine Sandwiches
Mock Hamburgers
American Pinwheels
Lemon Sponge (made with paraffin in lieu of butter)
Custard
Ersatz Coffee (roasted chicory and dandelion root)
Nylons and a can of pineapple given by the G.I.s to Sue

Winston Churchill’s wartime lunch (he didn’t ration himself, apparently):

Native Oysters
Petite Marmite (a soup)
Roast Venison with Mushrooms
Ice Cream and Raspberries
Stilton
Apples, Grapes and Walnuts
Pol Roger Champagne
Chardonnay
Claret
Port
Cognac
Cigars

Foraging in the fields lunch:

Snail and Nettle Consommé
Rabbit Casserole with Ear Fungus
Steamed Alexander Bracken

Sunday lunch:

Snoek Piquante (snoek was a fish imported from South Africa)
Braised Sheep Hearts (hearts obtained on the black market)
Wartime Trifle
Sherry
Red wine

Supper in the Tube (sheltering from the bombing):

Cheese and Crackers
Turnip Soup
Wartime Sausages (3% meat)
Cocoa

Victory Lunch (a party after V-E Day):

Victory Scotch Eggs
Pilchard Sandwiches
Cheese Dreams (cheese and beetroot sandwiches fried in margarine)
Mock Banana
Fish Eyes and Goo (tapioca custard pudding)
Jam Tarts
Rabbit Blancmange
Orange Squash Jelly
Toffee Carrots (unpeeled carrots on sticks dipped in melted sugar)
Honey Chocolate
Carrot Fudge
Patriotic Pudding
Eggless Victory Cake (with lots of icing made with black market sugar)
Onions as raffle prizes (onions were in very short supply)

Supersizers Go recaps

Edwardian Supersize Me, not part of the series, but sort of the pilot that aired in 2007
Description of the whole series, plus World War II (episode 1)
Restoration (episode 2)
Victorian (episode 3)
1970s (episode 4)
Elizabethan (episode 5)
Regency (episode 6, last in series)

Pondering macrobiotics

maki — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:13:06 +0200

In the last few years, there seems to have been a resurgence in the interest in macrobiotics in Japan. At least it does seem so judging from the magazine articles and cookbooks devoted to the subject.

If you’re unfamiliar with macrobiotics, it’s a form of almost-veganism (macrobiotics does allow for some fish) with quite idiosyncratic theories. It originated in Japan, was exported to the West, and gained popularity in some circles, especially the ones devoted to alternative lifestyles (like hippies and such). There’s a tendency in Japan to get overly impressed by anything (or anyone) in Japanese culture that gets popular in other countries, which I think accounts for at least part of the renewed popularity of macrobiotics - or makurobi as it’s abbreviated to - there. The macrobiotic diet has a lot of similarities to the traditional, or pre-WWII, diet, but isn’t quite the same. It’s also not the same as sho-jin cooking - elegant vegan cuisine that was originated by Zen Buddhist monks.

I’ve been generally trying to increase my repertoire of vegetable and grain based dishes this year (though I’m not a vegetarian), so I’ve done quite a lot of research into makurobi these past few months. There are plenty of very appetizing looking cookbooks coming out regularly, and I’ve collected quite a stack of them.

Yet it’s quite unlikely that I’ll be turning into a full-fledged macrobiotic convert any time soon. The main reason is that I can’t fully buy into one of the central philosophies of the religion - I mean, theory - that of yin and yang foods. Basically the theory is that all foods have yin (dark or cold) and yang (light or warm) energies, and we are better off eating close to the center of the yin and yang scale. Foods that are at the center are generally things like whole grains, beans and other pulses, root vegetables (but not potatoes), and so on. Since macrobiotics did originate in Japan, brown rice is the king of grains.

At the extreme ends of the scale are things like white sugar and white flour, both yin, and meats, which predicably are yang. Fair enough I guess, since most current nutrition research seems to say that we should be eating less of these foods. Where things get a bit problematic for me is when fruits, vegetables and other things which all other sources say are good for you also get placed around the yin - yang scale and are deemed not good. The nightshade family is the one that stands out here - this includes things like tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes. These are supposed to be very yin, and to be avoided.

Well okay I thought when I first read this - tomatoes and eggplants are summer vegetables, full of water, and might be considered cooling (so are things like summer squash, melons and cucumbers). But don’t you want your body to be cooler in the warm months? Besides, tomatoes are full of good nutrients. Also, while in Japan tomatoes and eggplants are often eaten cold (in salads, or grilled and chilled), in other countries they are more often eaten in hot dishes. It’s rather hard to me to accept the idea that a Middle Eastern dish with tomatoes and eggplants in it is purely ‘cold’. Macrobiotic thinking is also rather anti-hot spices, believing them to be too stimulating. I doubt this philosophy would have made much headway in say, India.

Things like eggs and all dairy products are also extreme on the yin yang scale - dairy is very yin, eggs are extreme yang. If there was a number one evil food according to macrobiotic thinking, it could be the egg, which is supposed to be so full of extreme yang energy that it could almost make you lose your mind, or at least any sense of ‘balance’ you can hope for. The egg’s parents are also considered evil, because chickens have a lot of nervous, twitchy energy. Apparently if you eat too much chicken, you’ll start acting and looking like one. In the one English book I’ve gotten about the subject, “The Hip Chick’s Guide To Macrobiotics”, it says this (page 108):

These days, because chicken is considered the ‘good’ meat, chicken eaters eat lots and lots of it with impunity. Ever notice people with chickenish noses? Or birdlike haircuts?

This is one of the statements made in the macrobiotic literature that made me shake my head in disbelief. Eating chicken turns us into chicken-like people…where the heck is the logic in this? On another page of The Hip Chick’s Guide, the author (who is a comedienne by trade it seems, though she ‘completed her macrobiotic training at the Kushi Institute’ and is a ‘macrobiotic chef, cooking consultant and hypnotherapist’.) she makes the case for whole grains over meat, fresh fruit and other foods by saying it doesn’t decay like those other foods do. Well of course it doesn’t - it’s dehydrated. Instead of comparing a steak, a banana and a glass of milk with a grain of brown rice, she should have compared a piece of beef jerky, a banana chip, and a spoonful of skim milk powder, no? (I’d recommend getting this book only if you’re already a convert to macrobiotics incidentally; avoid it if you’re a skeptic or it may turn you off completely. If anyone can recommend a good, level-headed book about macrobiotics in English please let me know.)

Another statement was in a Japanese book written by one of the grand old men of the macrobiotic movement, Michio Kushi, where he stated that women who had moles on their breasts will not only have difficulty getting pregnant, but will also, if they do become pregnant, be likely to have a miscarriage or for their babies to die very young. This mind boggling statement made me almost throw out all the literature right there.

The lack of scientific backing for many of the claims is what brings macrobiotics down for me. In fact, I do find this whole Infinite Universe thing that surrounds macrobiotics to be quite illogical and laughable in some respects. You can’t be convinced to follow a philosophy if some of the statements made therein make you giggle.

However, there do seem to be some recent attempts to reconcile scientific research with macrobiotic thinking, at least according to the Wikipedia page. What I’ve seen in the current crop of Japanese books about macrobiotics is the tendency to play down the philosophical and cult-like parts and to focus almost solely on the benefits of a mostly vegan, sugar, dairy and egg-free diet. (Orange Page, a popular magazine, has a number of “mooks” (magazine-format books) devoted to the subject, which all bear the motto in English on their covers, ‘No Milk, No Eggs, No Sugar’.)

What I do get out of the current crop of macrobiotic cookbooks are many clever and tasty ways of dealing with vegetables and whole grains, and cooking ‘sweet’ things without adding sugar, which is not a bad thing. I’m not likely to be giving up my fresh tomato salads and grilled eggplants anytime soon though, and despite having some jerk chicken for dinner last night my nose is still quite small and round.

Instant ramen and cup noodles are very, very bad for you

maki — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:05:23 +0200

Perusing a number of links related to the food stamp budget experiments, a popular cheap food item that keeps coming up is instant ramen noodles. As I wrote yesterday, even during my very lean (budget-wise) years I didn’t try to fill up on instant ramen, since it has been ingrained for a long time in my mind, courtesy of my mother, that instant ramen is quite nutritionally horrendous. Some people erroneously think it’s healthy just because it’s Japanese. (This has been brought up here before. And yes, I know ramen is a Chinese product, but modern instant ramen was invented in Japan.)

So what makes instant ramen bad? It’s the manufacturing process. In order to create a dessicated, long-keeping noodle that cooks very fast, it’s deep-fried in oil. There are air-dried instant ramen varieties out there, but they take a bit longer to cook (though it’s only about 5 minutes), and more importantly are not the real cheap kind.

To make things worse, the instant soup mix has more fat in it, not to mention a lot of salt and mystery ingredients. Take a look at the nutritional information for Maruchan instant beef noodles for example, noting that they suggest a serving size of half a pack. When is the last time you ate just 1/2 a pack of instant ramen? A full pack, which is what most people have, is 380 calories, 126 of which are from fat, and most of the rest from white flour. Cup noodles are even worse. The rather healthy sounding Nissin Chicken Flavor with Vegetable Medley have in a real serving (I mean come on, 1/2 a cup of cup noodles?) 536 calories, which come almost exclusively from fat, white flour, and sugar. And really, how satisfying is a cup noodle?
(Note: The label reproduced on Calorie Count seems to be wrong, as it indicates a serving is “1/2”. If you go by this label reproduced on The Daily Plate, 1 cup is 1 serving, which contains 300 calories. Still, it contains 13 grams of fat (9 g saturated fat), 1060mg of sodium and the carbohydrates come from refined white flour. If you want to consider this a healthy snack, go ahead.)

That’s not to say that instant ramen has to be avoided at all costs. I like it myself sometimes. But it really should be delegated to the same category as potato chips and Twinkies, and never be used as the main carb component of a main meal. Pass this along to your college kids! :)