by Tom Stobart
THE COOK’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Ingredients and Processes
Tom Stobart
THE COOK’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Ingredients and Processes
Tom Stobart
Published by Grub Street
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Copyright this edition © Grub Street 2016
First published by BT Batsford, 1980
The moral right of the author, Tom Stobart has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher.
A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library
ISBN 978-1-910690-09-3
eISBN 978-1-910690-83-3
Mobi ISBN 978-1-910690-83-3
Publisher’s Note
This book was first published in 1980 so some entries may seem dated or out of date but the text has not been amended to preserve the integrity of what is considered by many to be a classic work.
Acknowledgements
The information contained in this encyclopaedia came from many people and many books. Indeed, it is in the very nature of an encyclopaedia that it gathers together what other people have discovered. They cannot all be named, but they must not be forgotten; the agriculturists, economic botanists, food scientists and cookery writers have all, in their various ways, contributed towards our daily bread and have often made it more enjoyable. What better work is there than that? However, the people, firms and organisations listed in the credits have contributed directly to this book, and special thanks are due to them.
It requires a very special type of person to keep calm and avoid panic when faced with an office piled with scribbled-all-over paper full of an author’s spelling mistakes and fantasies. Those who remain sane during the editing of an encyclopaedia deserve particular praise, as I do not think that many people realize just what a shattering amount of very meticulous work is involved.
Ian Cameron, thank you for going through the text personally. Bettina Tayleur, thank you for coping with masses of questions and keeping everything in order. Mimi Errington, thank you for research, shopping and unstinting help. Betty Leslie, thank you for the careful typing of over 300,000 words of untidy manuscript.
And to the publishers, thank you for so much faith and patience.
Tom Stobart
Introduction
Ingredients are the fundamentals of cookery, and every cook who hopes to excel should know about them. Great chefs and restaurateurs are likely to pay just as much attention to choosing their ingredients as they do to choosing their recipes – the two are inseparable.
When I was making films on European cooking, I got to know a number of distinguished chefs from various countries. Many of them worked in towns with good open-air markets. As I have always been fascinated by markets (and my love for them is one of the reasons why this book came to be written), I would visit them as soon as they opened, which was well before even an early breakfast. In the beginning, I was surprised to see a certain master chef, one of that exclusive body, the Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, was at the market before me. He was not young and was certainly wealthy enough to take it easy, but still he had come himself to prod the strawberries, smell the melons and squeeze the onions. Later, I came to accept this keenness as normal, as I observed chefs doing the same in country after country.
Great chefs become marvellously choosy and dogmatic. They are likely to tell us that coq au vin absolutely requires a real Bresse chicken and thyme from Provence, so that any idea of making it in America or Australia is absurd. In many ways, that is the right approach, even if it is a little chauvinistic. We might equally ask if a Frenchman in France could bake a proper New England Johnnycake or a Yorkshire pudding.
Of course, some ingredients – olive oil, for instance – are more critical than others – but even seemingly mundane things, like salt, are worthy of close attention. The very air can come into the equation. It is not just that local dishes do not taste right or that recipes do not work with the wrong ingredients – using the right ones is among the secrets of good cooking.
There is, of course, a no-nonsense view that holds that if a recipe calls for a Bresse chicken, the operative word is chicken and any chicken, even a broiler, will do. This is a sure route to mediocrity as it will inevitably eliminate the subtleties that are the mark of fine cooking. The more ‘nonsense’, then, the better. Why waste effort trying to imitate classic recipes with only substitutes for the ingredients they demand? Surely it is better to discover the virtues of what is actually available. We should remember, too, that inspired improvisation by cooks in circumstances where only a limited range of ingredients were obtainable led to the invention of some of the world’s great dishes.
No book can list every ingredient that is locally available or discuss every nuance. Nor can it be totally objective about such subjective qualities as taste. Personal judgement cannot be avoided – in any case, there is no such thing as a good but impersonal cookery book. What I have tried to do is to list as wide a range of ingredients as possible, to give some of their background and to identify their particular characteristics. They should have an individuality and an identity beyond mere appearance – a brown root or a white powder. It is the specific qualities of ingredients that give the cook something to build on.
While I hope that this book will provide entertainment for people who like to browse in cookery books (as I do), my aim has been to offer practical advice to cooks who buy unfamiliar ingredients and try to use them. Today, shops and markets offer the most staggering variety of produce. In them, you can drool over anything from bottled insects to dried duck’s feet and long for advice. ‘Oh, those!’ the shopkeeper may well say. ‘Some Tibetans or Koreans from up the road come in for them, but God knows how they cook them. We just get them from the wholesaler.’ It is possible that, after boiling the things for several hours, you will find that they are pan scourers.
With the jet age, the world’s food has entered a phase of explosive evolution, and anyone who is essentially curious is likely to have a hard time keeping up. Indeed, while writing this book, I have sometimes felt like a hunter tracking the Yeti; it became evident that the Yeti was walking faster than I was. New ingredients crop up faster than they can be tried out – which should not be a cause for despair but rather of rejoicing at the richness that is available to us. At least by mastering the usual ingredients and processes, we can have more time to devote to the unusual.
This is not a recipe book, but recipes have been included for a variety of reasons. In some cases, they have been chosen simply to illustrate the use of an ingredient, or how to prepare it in ways other than those commonly used in British or American cooking. For instance, nuts are not just for eating at Christmas but can make subtle additions to the consistency and flavour of every course. Recipes are also given so that expatriates can make basic ingredients for themselves when they are living out of reach of suitable suppliers. Others are there because showing how something is made may be the best way of defining or describing it. The rest are there just because I felt like putting them in or because one of the many people who have helped with the book wanted some particular recipe. The same freedom has been taken with the methods and the science. In general, I have put in what I remember that I once did not know myself and what I still have to look up, often in books on agricultural botany or geogra
phy or biochemistry or nutrition rather than on cookery. I have also tried to straighten out old confusions. Again, even though the book has grown far beyond its intended size, there has had to be selection, as the subject is infinite.
I am frequently asked why someone who has spent so much time travelling and ‘exploring’ should want to write books about food instead of concentrating on such excitements as man-eating tigers. Food, though, is one of the greatest of all travel subjects – people who fly around the globe but never eat outside the international hotels are hardly to be described as travellers. Their only contact with foreign lands is through the soles of their shoes; they never become involved. Anthropologists, on the other hand, sometimes go as far as to marry a girl of the country they want to study, which is hardly a practical solution for the traveller, who is unlikely to spend more than a few months in any country (it is also liable to create little problems).Visiting a place and eating the food that the people there enjoy at home or on their feast days is also a way of becoming involved in local life. Those who have smelled the aroma of garlic and Gauloises, eaten tapas or meze, or chewed grilled meat wrapped in entrails will understand why, as a traveller, I became interested in cooking. They are the kindred souls that I had particularly in mind when I was writing this book. My aim has been to provide a reference source for cooks who are adventurous in spirit, whether they are able to travel widely or must find their culinary adventures at home.
About this book
Contents. The majority of the entries in this book deal with the ingredients and processes used in cooking. The ingredients that I have included are in general of sufficient culinary importance to be sold somewhere in the world. Very many things that grow wild can also be eaten or at least made edible and used in cooking to an extent that depends on the cook’s determination and ingenuity (or sometimes eccentricity). Although there are various books, like Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (Collins), about edible wild things, these can relate only to a particular country or area. A similar effort on a worldwide scale would be endless; on the whole, the wild animals and plants covered here are, at least locally, objects of commerce. Even so, I have been rather sparing in the number of entries allotted to one category of wild food that is very widely sold: fish and shellfish come in such a multitude of species, many of them rather restricted in distribution, that I have dealt only with the main edible groups. Finally among the list of intentional exclusions, I should mention that I have not gone into cuts of meat. Again, regional variation is the reason. Because not just the names but the actual cuts can differ even between different areas of the same country, any straightforward translation tables are likely to be misleadingly oversimplified. In any case, those outlines of carcases divided up with neat lines into named areas are moderately uninformative. The best way of learning about the cuts of meat you can buy is from the butcher who actually produces them.
Arrangement. The entries are arranged alphabetically and cross-referenced. Words preceded by asterisks can be looked up for further information relevant to the entry in which they appear. However, the absence of an asterisk does not mean the absence of an entry for the word, merely that looking it up will not yield much that is germane to the matter in hand.
Foodstuffs often go under so many different names that it would have been easy to swamp the whole book with cross-references for every imaginable synonym. Two restrictions have been applied to save the day here. First, only the most important dialect names, archaic names and spelling variants have been included (a particularly rich source of cross-references could have been alternative transliterations from, say, Arabic). Second, I have taken advantage of the undoubted intelligence of my readers by doing away with cross-references from the whole of a name to its second word. Thus, you will not be given a cross-reference to take you from brown sugar to sugar or from red mullet to mullet. Where the destination is not the second word of the name, a cross-reference is, of course, provided, as from green bean to kidney bean.
Units. Much of the English-speaking world is at present in an awkward stage of partial metrication. A large part of the population, especially its older members, can cope only with the traditional units, while school leavers now emerge into society thinking entirely metric. The rest of us switch uneasily back and forth between the old units and the metric ones. At present, and probably for some years to come, the only sensible course in a cookbook is to include both units.
In the British edition of this book, metric units are given first, followed by their Imperial equivalents in parentheses. Anyone who cares to check the conversions will quickly find that they vary considerably in their accuracy. The rule here is a very simple one: conversions have been made only as accurate as they need to be, which is to say pretty accurate for baking, where quantities are often critical, and often quite approximate elsewhere. The abbreviations that have been used for the various units are the conventional ones with the exception of litres, for which the Italian abbreviation It has been chosen as being less confusing typographically than the more usual l. The various units are covered in some detail in the entry on weights and measures.
Scientific names. Popular names for plants or animals can often be confusing, with the same thing having a variety of names or, worse still, the same name applying to a variety of things. Scientific names are supposed to sort out the confusion by being internationally accepted. Unfortunately, though, the scientists have managed to create some muddles of their own and have had to ape the College of Heralds in unscrambling confusions in nomenclature. For example, two biologists may independently have given a name to what later turns out to be the same species; the older of the two names is the one that sticks (unless, of course, it has previously been used by someone else as a name for another species altogether). Groupings into genera, families and so on are meant to reflect relationships and to make up a sort of genealogical table. But since there are no church registers in evolution, taxonomists have to work on the available evidence, so that generic names (the first word in the name of any species) tend to be changed. To make a biological name unambiguous, you have to add the name of the person who first described the species (and ideally the date of the description).You will then know that when you are talking about White mustard as Sinapis alba Linnaeus, you are referring to the same species that other authorities have called Brassica alba or Brassica hirta, which is all very clear for a scientist. For the purposes of this book, such extremes of scientific pedantry seem unnecessary and the scientific name that seems to be most commonly used has been adopted without the name of its author. For the most part, scientific names are there either for precision or just as an extra piece of information that might be useful. There are, however, some things such as edible fungi and exotic fish and shellfish that have no popular names in English. Where a number of species of the same genus have been referred to in the same entry, the convention has been adopted of abbreviating the generic name on its second and subsequent appearances, as in Brassica napus and B. rapa.
Translations. Entries for the more usual ingredients and processes give translations in French, German, Italian and Spanish. For processes the translation is always the infinitive i.e. the French for boiling is given as bouillir – literally ‘to boil’.
Sources. Books that have been important as sources of information have been acknowledged in the particular entries for which they have been used, and the British publisher has been given for the edition that was consulted. Some books, such as Alan Davidson’s invaluable works on seafood, therefore receive quite a number of mentions. There are, however, a number of titles that have been consulted for a large number of entries. Five that have been at hand throughout the editing of this book are Food Science – A Chemical Approach by Brian A. Fox and Allan G. Cameron (University of London Press, 1970), Success in Nutrition by Magnus Pyke (John Murray, 1975), Teaching Nutrition and Food Science by Margaret Knight (Batsford, 1976), The Oxford Book of Food Plants by S.G. Harrison, G.B. Masefield and Michael Wallace
(Oxford University Press, 1969) and my own Herbs, Spices and Flavourings (Grub Street, 1998).
Cookery adviser Elizabeth David
Cookery editor Mimi Errington
Copy editor Ian Cameron
Organisation Bettina Tayleur
Research Victoria Burgess
Jill Hollis
Alice Macnab
Corinne Molesworth
Mrinalini Srivastava
Marijke Taylor
Consultants A.M.C.K. Bannerman, M.B.E.
Gordon G. Birch, D.Sc.
Maggie Black
The British Turkey Federation
The British Waterfowl Association
H.P. Bulmer Ltd
C.A.M.R.A.
J.G. Davis O.B.E., D.Sc., Ph.D.
Percy Fox & Co. Ltd
Freezer Family
Fyffes Group Ltd
Good Housekeeping
H.J. Green & Co. Ltd
Wendy Godfrey
Harrods Ltd
Irish Distillers International Ltd
Robert Jackson & Son Ltd
Leon Jaeggi & Son Ltd
Jardox Concentrated Products Ltd
R.A. Knight
Norman Kolpas
The Metal Box Company Ltd
National College of Food Technology
The Prestige Group Ltd
Duncan Rayner Ltd
The Scotch Whisky Association
The Earl of Selborne
Janet Simpson
Tate & Lyle Ltd
Margaret Trotter
Thompson & Morgan
Van den Berghs
Hiram Walker & Sons Ltd
a
ABALONE and ORMER. These flattened molluscs of the genus Haliotis, the sea-ears, are best known for their ornamental shells, which have a row of holes and a fine mother-of-pearl lining. They have almost lost their spiral shape and creep around in a limpet-like way eating the algae on rocks below the low tide mark. The edible part is the muscular foot which serves the creature for both anchorage and locomotion. After the animal has been taken out of its shell, the dark-coloured visceral hump (the guts) must be removed. The remaining foot should be beaten soundly to break up the muscle fibres. Otherwise it will be exceedingly tough.