 In Search of Nineteenth-Century FoodbyGillian Polack
Unexpectedly, I’m back in the land of food history this week. I’m giving a talk on the history of Jewish cookbooks in general and on Medieval Jewish food in particular to the guides at the Jewish Museum of Australia. My life is also overflowing with files full of recipe tests and comments on cakes from the 1880s, roast meats from Jane Austen’s England and alcoholic drinks from Prohibition New York for my cookbook. I feel the need to share the history. I can’t share the cookbook, because it isn’t written yet. I know the chapters and the content and I’ve had a really lovely discussion with the food artist (the ecstatically brilliant Nick Stathopoulos) but the final is a year away. This means that today I shall share some of my thoughts on Jewish cookbooks. Not just on any Jewish cookbooks. On the very first Australian one ever published, simply called Hebrew Cookery, by an Australian. It’s special in all the wrong ways. It contains salutary lessons on buying chorissa in nineteenth century Melbourne and on how the wholesale borrowing of slabs of text will out . . . eventually. The story is as much the story of me trying to find out what meats were available to kosher households in nineteenth-century households as about cookbooks, to be honest. And before I get too tangled, let me backtrack. Start at the very beginning. I wrote a conference paper some time ago. It was on Jewish family foodways for a particular family from about the 1850s to about the 1950s. The family food memory included a rather good recipe for Madeira cake, a somewhat improbable recipe for raisin wine, and a very London heritage. It was not the food of Ashkenazi Jews, but a modified form of Sephardi cooking, as practised in London in the nineteenth century. Since the family in question migrated from London to Melbourne in the 1850s, this was good and I was pleased and I informed the universe and then I promptly forgot about it. This despite the fact that the family was one branch of my own. When my mother and I were exchanging Jewish butcher stories (as we do from time to time) I mentioned that there was an early mention of chorissa in the first Australian Jewish cookbook. You can find an online copy of that first Australian Jewish cookbook online, at the National Library of Australia (see list at end). I wanted to try a recipe that contained chorissa, and I was curious about the mention of local butchers selling it. My mother went into the wilds of Melbourne to see if she could locate kosher chorissa (the Jewish version of chorizo—made with smoked beef, generally) and I looked rather more closely at the reference to butchers in the cookbook, to see if it gave any hints as to where those wonderful kosher butchers were located in the nineteenth century. Melbourne had a very small Jewish community in the second half of the nineteenth century. That I might know precisely what a butcher might have sold and what this tiny community ate was a very exciting thought. My mother, by the way, found kosher chorizo (not chorissa) at her local supermarket. It was a modern recipe, so we ate it and the evidence of our failed hunt has been entirely obliterated. You know when your eyes suddenly uncross and you realise you've been seeing everything pie-eyed? Well, I was reading that first Australian Jewish cookbook pie-eyed. Every recipe looked familiar. I had put it down to the fact that it was published in 1864 and I had become a little familiar with recipes from that period through those historical banquets I’ve been creating. Then my eyes uncrossed and I started laughing. I took a very particular book from the bookshelf and checked a footnote and then I looked for a flail to start beating myself with. Fortunately for me, I possess no flail. I have a corn tooth sickle, but that wouldn't have done the job. The book from the shelf was the very first Jewish cookbook published in the English language: The Jewish Manual, or Practical Information in Jewish and Modern Cookery. 1846 was its year of publication. Remember that date. Hebrew Cookery by an Australian (that first Australian Jewish cookbook, published in 1867), was an extract from the (as far as I know) first Australian-produced cookbook Edward Abbott’s The English and Australian cookery book: cookery for the many, as well as for the upper ten thousand by an Australian aristologist. Published in 1864. Download and take a look. Don’t be too respectful in your look, however, because the footnote in question comes from the 1846 English cookbook. The butchers selling chorissa were in London. Not Melbourne. This makes sense. There was a big Jewish community in London in the 1840s and in Melbourne in the 1860s—as I said earlier—there was not. I need to check out the first Australian Jewish cookbook more carefully one day, because the asides on Chinese cookery and on reindeer and lutefisk were not “borrowed” from the same source. Reindeer would be kosher, if killed correctly, so they’re not entirely out of place in a Jewish cookbook. They’re just . . . unexpected. The anonymous author of the Australian book (who, as I explained earlier, calls himself simply “An Australian” here, in the cookbook this is derived from) has taken bits and pieces of food travel information from all over the world and just put it in the book in the oddest of places. Thus, between stewed giblets and the method for stewing Spanish peas and beans, we are generously given a paragraph on the “Waganda Mode of Cooking.” This excerpt is attributed to James Augustus Grant's Walk Across Africa. There is an insertion for Australia, and it appears absolutely genuine. It's an advertisement for ‘matzoth’ (unleavened bread for Passover). If you wanted your matzah in Melbourne in the 1860s, the place to get it was from J Marks, 223 Elizabeth Street. If you're time-travelling, please remember you'll need 8 1/2d for a lb (but they deliver). If you want to contact the printers of the book, they were at 99 Bourke Street West and the going rate was 3d. Everything is attributed, eventually. Hebrew Cookery is plagiarised almost 100%, but the author claims that this is legitimate as his main source is out of print. And I can’r find my butcher reference. It may be in the book this came from. Extracts that use extracts of other books are messy things. The really interesting thing about this book is the author’s justification, at the end. Many of the preceding recipes are from the pen of a lady, who, several years since, edited the “Jewish Manual,” a useful work, now out of print. And although written for the peculiar people to which she belonged, we do not see why others should not use them occasionally as a change, more especially as they are easy to make, and of a good practical quality. Nay, we will go further and attest that the Jewish cuisine is unexceptionable in flavour, and more wholesome than the generality of Christian dishes, from the acid invariably used in their composition. I admit that much of the joy in this comes from slight shifts in the meanings of words over the last century and a half. There is a certain joy in knowing I am a peculiar person and that a recipe that's unexceptional in flavour is one that was good to eat (i.e., that one would not take exception to) rather than one that was dead boring. I’m torn. Do I give you more information about the author and his other (more important) cookbook? Or do I save that for another day and give you a recipe from this book. Since my files are overflowing with recipes, there is no real choice. I have to share the joy, as ever: Sopa d’Oro or Golden Soup Clarify a pound of sugar in a quarter of a pint of water, and the same quantity of orange-flower water; cut into pieces the size of dice, a thin slice of toasted bread, or cut it into shapes with a paste-cutter; throw it, while hot, into the sugar, with an ounce of sweet almonds pounded very finely; then take the beaten yolks of four eggs, pour over the sugar and bread, stir gently, and let it simmer a few minutes. Serve in a deep glass dish, sprinkled over with pounded cinnamon. Books mentioned in this column:
Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.
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