Posts Tagged ‘Elizabeth David’
“Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice?”*…
In the late 19th century, a mysterious illness plagued the upper reaches of Japanese society…
In 1877, Japan’s Meiji Emperor watched his aunt, the princess Kazu, die of a common malady: kakke. If her condition was typical, her legs would have swollen, and her speech slowed. Numbness and paralysis might have come next, along with twitching and vomiting. Death often resulted from heart failure.
The emperor had suffered from this same ailment, on-and-off, his whole life. In response, he poured money into research on the illness. It was a matter of survival: for the emperor, his family, and Japan’s ruling class. While most diseases ravage the poor and vulnerable, kakke afflicted the wealthy and powerful, especially city dwellers. This curious fact gave kakke its other name: Edo wazurai, the affliction of Edo (Edo being the old name for Tokyo). But for centuries, the culprit of kakke went unnoticed: fine, polished, white rice…
The fascinating tale of kakke, and of the determined doctor who found a cure: “How Killer Rice Crippled Tokyo and the Japanese Navy,” in @atlasobscura.
* N.K. Jemisin
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As we opt for brown rice, we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Marcel Boulestin became the first “television chef” when he hosted the first episode of the first TV cooking show, the BBC’s Cook’s Night Out. A successful chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author, Boulestin helped popularize French cuisine in the English-speaking world (and was an important influence on Elizabeth David, and in turn, on Julia Child).
“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate”*…
Elizabeth David’s first cookbooks burst upon a Britain newly delivered from wartime rationing… By 1960, when French Provincial Cooking threw its mighty heft against the drab tyranny of “meat and two veg,” the author’s characteristic mix of tart practicality and deep erudition had already begun to work its changes on the English palate. In the late 1980s, David, by that time a living English institution, C.B.E., Chevalier du Mérite Agricole, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, embarked on a study that would leave behind the anecdotal world of recipes for a sustained historical study. Although she did not live to see its completion, her extensive drafts for the work have now been edited (by Jill Norman) and published under the title Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices…
Harvest of the Cold Months began as an investigation (launched in the mid-1970s) of early European ice-cream recipes, but quickly expanded to a global scale, reflecting Mrs. David’s longtime interest in early travelers’ accounts. She then turned her endless curiosity to the mechanical means of producing cold, an art that first emerged in the seventeenth century, and finally to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on means for supplying the world’s ever-growing demand for ice.
Yet, ice cream aside, the subject of frozen water is strange food for thought. If fire is the Promethean gift that first made us civilized, ice is a bewildering opposite; it has been tamed only by civilizations so advanced into decadence that they can warp the seasons, demanding snow in their summer drinks or ephemeral sculptures of pooling ice at the centers of their dining tables. The primal, elementally human quality of the campfire or the hearth gives way to a shiver of perverse pleasure when it comes to the activity that our forebears called “drinking cool.” (What, indeed, could be more limitlessly suggestive than the proposition a friend received in Athens one summer day years ago: “How about a nice tall cool one?”)…
Unseasonable ice brings up the ambiguous specter of civilization at its most aggressive: overlords, empires, and the Industrial Revolution, which eventually replaced the worldwide shipping of natural ice with mechanical manufacture—not, paradoxically, by means of the manipulation of cold, but of heat.Iced food and drink have continued, all the while, to be associated with ill health, sin, and bad company, the sustenance of decadent colonials or devil-may-care gourmands. In 1624, Elizabeth David tells us, Francis Bacon declared that “the Producing of Cold is a thing very worthy of the Inquisition.” To this day, most Italians avoid iced drinks as harmful to stomach and liver; they drink their summer tea chilled, but mistrust it when poured over clinking cubes of frozen water. Ice-cream manufacturers, meanwhile, invite their customers to give way to sin and temptation…
Cool, cooler, cold- Ingrid Rowland on Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices: “The Empress of Ice Cream.”
Related (i.e., also cool): “Pellet Ice Is The Good Ice.”
[image above: source]
* Thornton Wilder (whose advice Elizabeth David happily ignored)
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As we channel Márquez, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that Chapman J. Root opened the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana; his specialty was the manufacture of glass bottles that would withstand high internal pressures. In 1915 the company entered, and in 1916 won the design competition for what would become the iconic 6.5 ounce Coca-Cola bottle.
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