MDMD(5): Cookworthy?

[John Bailey]

Hi Michel, and thanks for a fantastic post, which set me thinking about a 
few things Gastronomickal...
(P.S. anyone ever notice how most of P's main male characters are a bit 
paunchy? There's always a reference to a potbelly somewhere.)


>From: Michel Ryckx <michel.ryckx at freebel.net>

>
>In mr. Richler's novel 'Solomon Gursky was here', there's the story of an
>expedition to the North in the 19th century (first half).  The Royal Navy
>ordered thousands of cans; they chose the cheapest offer.  When on their 
>way,
>it turned out they were of bad quality.  Winter came and the only solution 
>was
>cannibalism.  They all died in the end.

Not really related to M&D, but another great cannibal story is the film 
Ravenous (1999), which is set in the American wilderness in 1848 but has 
some wonderful, really wonderful outdoor shots of the kind of terrain I 
imagine in M&D. Beautiful footage, and a ripping cannibal yarn, which I 
always love, despite my vegetarian sensibilities.

>
>When you have, at sea,  no refrigerator --and the Seahorse crosses the
>Equator-- there are only a few ways to have food preserved.  The easiest 
>thing
>would be meat, brought alive, which must have costed major logistic 
>problems.
>But it can be very easily smoked or dried (mmm, smoked ham) and then 
>preserved
>for weeks, even months.  Then there is cheese, at least the hard variation, 
>but
>cheese cannot stand higher temperatures very well, say above 18 degrees 
>(this
>is Celsius) : it begins to 'sweat' and its quality is deteriorating very
>quickly.
>
>Very difficult would be the preservation of fruit and vegetables.  Lack of
>certain vitamines causes scurvy.  The only vegetables and fruit I can think 
>of
>to preserve for a longer time are carrots, onions, beans and apples 
>--potatoes
>not yet widely used in kitchens at the time.  There are also fruits that 
>can be
>dried, like apricots (then hardly available, one of my favourite desserts 
>as a
>kid) or prunes.  Problem: they need a lot of drinkable water before being
>prepared, and water was another major logistic problem.
>
>What was fairly easy if the circumstances were hygienic enough --they never
>were--, was the preservation of flower.  And they had biscuits (from 'bis'
>--twice of course-- and the French 'cuit' (baked in this case): a cookie, 
>on a
>ship only consisting of flower, yeast --which had to be kept alive, another
>problem when temperatures were rising--, salt and water, baked twice).
>

I think biscuit was a standard food for sailors. It is mentioned in the 
previous chapter if I remember. Really doesn't sound too appetising, more 
like chewing granite. Although in Southern France there were periods when 
even flour was so scarce that villages would be forced to eat 'dirt bread', 
using dry soil instead of flour. Travellers described these people as 
turning literally yellow and very frail, prone to fall over and die if they 
had to exert themselves by, say, bending down to pick up a stick. Not good 
stuff.

>Tenerife, from the time of the Portuguese king Henry 'the Seafarer' on -- 
>he
>was the one, I think, who financed Diaz' expedition who in his turn 
>discovered
>the Cape, proved to be a solution.  But there was another problem in the 
>18th
>century: the sugar plantations.  From the 14th-15th century on, sugar 
>plants
>were coming westward from Asia, reaching the Mediterranean, then moving to
>Tenerife and later to the Americas albeit not on their own I presume.  The
>woods of Tenerife were very quickly replaced with sugar plantations.  The
>quantity of fruits available there (lemons, oranges, . . .) was hardly 
>enough
>for ships passing by. (this I have from F. Braudel again)
>
>It is no wonder different countries were looking for ways to preserve food.
>I've been looking for 'portable soup' but I've nowhere found a thing on it. 
>  I
>imagine it was one of the early experiments on preserving food.  And the 
>name
>'Cookworthy' sounds to me like a brand.  Or maybe there was a way of 
>preserving
>food in clay?
>

Would the hold of a ship be warm? Below the sea level there would be no 
windows, and the ocean would be surrounding it. Could food have been 
preserved longer there?


>The best way to have alle vitamines out of vegetables is to boil them (I 
>very
>seldom cook vegetables, much better to steam them and when making soup, fry
>very slowly on a small fire your vegetables for about 20 minutes, add 
>boiling
>water, add some spices, cook for one minute and your soup is ready, having
>preserved all the healthy stuff).

This recipe makes a killer potato & leek soup too.

>
>Now, one of the specific things of the British kitchen (which is according 
>to a
>lot of people over here in Belgium, an oxymoron) is to boil everything that 
>can
>be boiled; even meat, and boil this for quite a long time; though this has 
>been
>changing over the last decades. But the habits in the Kitchen change very
>slowly.  A study I read some years ago on the origins of the differences
>between French and British cuisine said that from the 14th century on food
>became a way of French aristocrats in differentiating themselves from the
>common people;  this went on for about 4 centuries.  There were experiments
>with all kinds of bouillons, sauces, fonds, and so on.  Very often a sauce 
>had
>his name for the nobleman who paid the cook: mayonaise is a sauce dedicated 
>to
>the Duke, or Baron or whatever, of Mayon; béarnaise of Béarn, etc. . . . 
>and
>the French bourgeoisie adopted this in the 19th century in a more or less
>altered way, culminating in Escoffier.  This did not take place in Britain,
>where noblemen and common people were eating the same things, generally, 
>the
>differences minor.
>

In Wolfgang Schivelbusch's 'Tastes of Paradise' the notion that spices 
became popular because they could disguise meat that had gone off is shown 
to be largely false: spices from around the world did play the role you 
describe above. I often wonder whether the same heirarchies occur in 
Pynchon: compare the wonderful feasts he regularly describes with Zoyd 
Wheeler's breakfast of Cap'n Crunch cereal with chocolate Quik on top. I 
hope Mr. P. is not a food snob.

>Now, a ship sailing from the North Sea to the Cape was not taking a direct
>line: having left Portsmouth, passing along the very dangerous Gulf of 
>Biskay
>(heavy storms; very deep there; having witnessed a storm near Biarritz many
>years ago it really scared me off), they set sail for Tenerife.  But then, 
>they
>almost had to cross the ocean to the Brasilian coasts.  There they had to 
>wait
>for the right winds to cross the Equator, turned and sailed to the Cape.
>Imagine a rough parabola from Tenerife to the Cape, with point zero of the
>curve near Brasil: that was the route they were using.

I don't quite understand this. Can you elaborate?

  No wonder the common
>sailor after a few years had his teeth fallen out and was frequently 
>suffering
>from a kind of herpes-like disease.  A dentist was not needed on those 
>ships.
>

This I understand. In an interesting aside, I saw a news story on a boy who 
had scurvy recently, which is obviously rare enough now to warrant a news 
story...Not so rare in other parts of the world, though. Anyway, the young 
kid refused to eat *anything* but cheesy garlic pizzas, and his parents 
could not handle his tantrums so they provided him with this every day. The 
nutrients in a cheesy garlic pizza are obviously lacking, so he caught 
scurvy. I think he recovered after going to hospital.


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