Cook's Encyclopaedia

by Tom Stobart

  The red juice can be used as a dye, even in icing for cakes. For that purpose, grate the beets raw, soak them in lemon juice and squeeze the juice out in a cloth. lf the juice is extracted this way, then concentrate by boiling (not too long, or the colour will go brown) and well soured, its earthy taste is not noticed.

  To store beetroots, put them in a box, right way up, and cover them with dry sand, soil or peat. They must be kept dry or they will sprout or become mildewed.

  Spinach Beet. This plant (var. cicla) is the form grown for its leaves. There are also well-known varieties developed for their thick stalks and midribs and known as chard, Swiss chard or seakale beet (the leaf stalks look vaguely like those of seakale and are often eaten separately as a vegetable in their own right). Dark green types with red ribs and stalks are called rhubarb chard in the US. The common leafy form is a popular vegetable in the Mediterranean countries, as it produces a continuous heavy crop of green leaves during the winter and spring; it is often seen growing wild (as an escape) on building sites near the sea. Like all beets with a seashore ancestry, it likes salty soil. Beet leaves contain much less oxalic acid that do those of their near relative, spinach, so are probably more beneficial as food. Although spinach appears good when analysed, the oxalic acid tends to lock up the iron. Children who detest any sort of spinach can occasionally be induced to eat spinach beet but real spinach is generally regarded by adults as tasting better. Raw beet leaves do not taste very nice, though they are wholesome enough. The leaves of beetroot can also be cooked and eaten.

  [Beet – French: betterave, navet German: Rübe, Runkelrübe Italian: bietola Spanish: betarraga

  Beetroot – French: bette rouge German: rote Rübe Italian: barbabietola Spanish: remolacha

  Spinach beet – French: carde German: Mangold Italian: bietola da coste Spanish: acelgo]

  BELL PEPPER. See sweet pepper.

  BELUGA. See caviar.

  BENGAL GRAM. See channa.

  BENZOIC ACID. See preservatives.

  BERGAMOT. See orange.

  BESAN FLOUR. In Indian cookery, fine flour made by grinding *channa. It can be bought from shops which specialize in Indian foodstuffs or made at home by grinding chick peas and sieving out the husks. If you are trying to do the grinding in a whirling-type coffee mill, the chick peas must be crushed first or they may break the blades. Besan flour is a pale creamy yellow. It is high in protein and very nutritious. Mixed with water, it forms a batter much used in India for coating food for frying, to make such dishes as bhajias (or their North Indian equivalents, pakoras) and bondas (spiced potato balls coated in besan batter and fried). It also appears in dahi (sour curd or yoghurt) curries as a stabilizer and thickener, in spicy snacks such as murukas, and in various sweetmeats. Although a stranger to non Indian kitchens, besan has a number of uses, for example in thickening soups.

  Bhajias

  Make a thick batter with besan flour (or half besan, half rice flour) and water, flavouring it with salt, chilli powder and a pinch of asafoetida. Other mixtures contain garlic, fresh ginger, chilli, cloves and cinnamon. Into the batter dip lightly-salted onion rings, whole seeded fresh green chillies, strips of sweet pepper, potato slices, salted aubergine slices, spinach leaves – and any other bits of vegetable you wish. Deep fry them until they are crisp. Drain on absorbent paper and serve hot as an appetizer.

  BETEL LEAF is the leaf of the betel vine (Piper betel), a very close relation of the pepper vine (P. nigrum) that produces black pepper. Although sometimes the cassia leaf (related to cinnamon) is chewed in the Orient, it is the betel leaf that is the usual wrapping of *pan and the selection of the leaf is of social as well as gastronomic significance in India.

  BETEL NUT or areca nut. The astringency in a *pan or betel chewing is provided by betel nuts, which come from tall, very slender palms (Areca catechu). Originally from Malaysia, this palm is common enough in most tropical areas today. To get the nuts, which grow in bunches of a hundred or more, a man has to climb the trees – an acrobatic feat. The nuts may be harvested when green for tender nuts (chikni in India) or when ripe (chali) and orange or scarlet. The nut is encased in a husk and is about the size and shape of a nutmeg, with ivory-white meat veined with intricate folds of brown. The tender nuts are shelled, boiled to extract the tannin, and dried in the sun. The ripe nuts are dried in the husk without boiling and then shelled. Betel nut whole, cracked or as a paste can be bought in Indian food shops. It may be chewed alone or mixed with sugar and spices in the absence of *betel leaf.

  [Betel nut – French: noix d’arec German: Arecanuss Italian: noce di areca Spain: nuez de areca]

  BEURRE MANIÉ. See binding.

  BHANG. See religious food laws (Hindus).

  BHARTI. See millet.

  BIANCO Dl SPAGNA. A variety of *kidney bean.

  BIBLELEAF. See costmary.

  BICARBONATE OF SODA, sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda (NaHCO3). In old books, this common kitchen chemical is often called ‘carbonate of soda’, which, strictly speaking, is *washing soda. When strongly heated to 270°C (518°F), it gives off water and carbon dioxide to change to the carbonate, but such temperatures are not usually reached in cooking. It also effervesces strongly, giving off a fizz of carbon dioxide gas, when mixed with an acid solution. This is the reaction which enables bicarbonate of soda to be used as a leavening agent, the acid being sometimes supplied by buttermilk, lemon juice or cream of tartar (see baking powder).

  In every case, the bicarbonate of soda should be mixed in just before baking as otherwise the gas is lost. It effervesces rather slowly with cream of tartar, but much more quickly with lemon juice or an acid like tartaric acid. A strong reaction of this sort occurs, for instance, in Eno’s Fruit Salts which I have seen being used as a baking powder in India.

  As an *alkali, bicarbonate of soda can be used instead of lime in softening the skin of maize for making *masa, or added to the water in which chick peas and other pulses are cooked or soaked in order to soften the skins and to make them more digestible. A pinch may be added to the water for cooking cabbage or cabbage greens, as it gives them an attractive green colour. It does, however, neutralize and destroy the vitamins B, and C. One less-known use of bicarbonate of soda is in the Rumanian skinless sausages called mititei, which are flavoured also with ground caraway seed and garlic.

  The bicarbonate tenderizes the meat, puffs it up a little and gives a strong, unusual and slightly ammoniac taste to the sausage. The use of bicarbonate of soda in water as a remedy for acid indigestion is not much recommended, but in an emergency does little harm to healthy people.

  [Bicarbonate of soda – French: bicarbonate de soude German: doppelkohlensaures Salz, Bikarbonat Italian: bicarbonato Spanish: bicarbonato de soda]

  BIERWURST is a German slicing sausage which should be rather coarse in texture.lt may be spiced with juniper berries and cardamom and sometimes flavoured with garlic. A common component in selections of German cold cuts, it derives its name (literally ‘beer sausage’) from the fact that it was once made with ham that had been marinated in beer. Bierschinken is similar but contains pieces of ham.

  BIESTINGS. See beestings.

  BILBERRY. See cranberry.

  BILTONG. This dried meat (from the Dutch bil = buttock, tong = tongue) was originally a food of the South African pioneers as they trekked northwards from the Cape. It consisted of dried strips of meat cut from game, ostriches, even failing draught oxen. The American equivalent is charqui or jerked beef.

  To make biltong, lean meat is cut in long strips 2.5 x 5 cm (1 x 2 in) along the grain of the muscle. It is salted, often well spiced with pepper and hung to dry in a current of air, away from flies and in a shady place. Sometimes it is hung so that it is touched by the smoke of the camp fire. It may be marinated for 3 days in a dry-salting mixture of 450 g (1 lb) salt, 50 g (2 oz) sugar and 25 g (1 oz) saltpetre before rubbing with spices and drying. The surface is often wiped with vinegar. The quality of biltong varies from deliciously
meaty and with the consistency of good plug tobacco to a dry, fibrous material like old shoe leather. It is best cut in very thin slices and chewed with the sundowner.

  BINDING. In cooking, materials are bound together by substances which set when heated, or occasionally by jellies, which set when cold. ln the first category come protein substances which are coagulated by heat – egg, blood and the gluten of flour would be examples – while the second includes gelatine, agar-agar and starch jellies which set on cooling.

  Excessive use of binding agents results in a tough, heavy, leathery, sometimes barely edible product, and the skill of the cook lies in sailing as close to the wind as possible – too little binding and the structure disintegrates. An Austrian chef once advised me: ‘lf your bread dumpling falls to pieces when you poach it [as a test], you can always add some flour. That is what they do in Gasthaus kitchens where they can’t cook, if they add too much flour, they make little cannon balls – to throw at the chef.’ Adding too much binding agent is a common error in hotel kitchens. On one occasion when I had rather foolishly undertaken to make a kofta (meat ball) curry for 150 people, I expressed concern to the Spanish chef who was helping me that with such a quantity the meat balls would collapse and we would finish with a mess. He looked at me patronizingly, grabbed the flour bin and tipped several kilos into the mixture. ‘Now they will remain whole,’ he said confidently. He was certainly right. But the most feather-weight and delicious quenelles, meat balls, pâtés and other creations which need binders are made by cooks who with subtlety and skill are able to reduce binding substances to almost nothing.

  The word ‘binding’ is also used to describe the thickening of sauces, as with beurre manié (an intimate mixture of flour and butter which chefs keep at hand to bind sauces quickly), egg, blood or cornflour.

  BINDONE. See salame.

  BINGLEBERRY. See raspberry.

  BIRDS. (Domestic and game birds have individual entries, as have peacock, ostrich, swan and pigeon.) Wild birds of many other kinds were commonly eaten in the past. Eating them was a necessity to colonists in the New World and to the poor in Europe. In places like St Kilda, survival without a harvest of sea birds would have been impossible. In British markets, a variety of birds were sold, especially water birds and species that were easily shot or netted. Amongst them were bitterns, whimbrels, curlews, lapwings and other plovers, spoonbills, herons, redshanks, knots, greenshanks, godwits, ruffs, stints, dunlins, dotterels, moorhens, coots, corncrakes, water rails, cormorants, fulmars, gannets, herring gulls, black-headed gulls, puffins, rooks, jays, starlings, blackbirds, thrushes, wheatears, fieldfares, larks – and many more. As food, some were nice and some were not. A few, if kept on an artificial diet for a while, would improve in flavour. Seagulls kept on bread and scraps lost their fishy taste. Others had first to be skinned. It was even claimed that certain birds – wild geese for instance – would lose their fishy taste if buried in the ground for a few hours. (Some friends advise that a cock capercaillie is much improved by this treatment, especially if you forget where you buried it.)

  Today, many birds which were once eaten freely, have become rare and are protected. Others are still used as food in some countries but not in others. Few will see harm in a salmis of moorhen served in some country restaurant in the Camargue, but it is another matter when birds are sent in thousands to town markets. If larger grain-eating, running or swimming birds are seriously wanted for the table, then some enterprising person will start to breed them. But this does not happen with the smaller birds, especially if they eat insects. Most notable amongst the wild birds regarded as delicacies are thrushes, ortolans, warblers and larks. These are birds which flock together in autumn or migrate southwards to winter quarters in Africa. In either case, they are then in large groups and are easily netted or caught with bird lime. They are caught either as they come southwards through France and Italy, or when they land to rest on Mediterranean islands such as Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearics. Such small birds have to be consumed in quantity as each bird is little more than a mouthful.

  Choosing to eat game birds – grouse, pheasant or partridge – but not lark or thrush, is not merely a question of sentiment. Game birds are controlled, encouraged and even bred for shooting, but every adult male from Biscay to the Adriatic seems to be armed with a shotgun, and blasts away at everything that moves (including his own kind).The birds are decimated every year. It is heartbreaking to see a sack of small birds, which have been shot indiscriminately, dumped on a kitchen table. One may watch the wife sorting them through, discarding a crossbill here and a rare warbler there among the assortment of kinds she does not recognize or relish.

  Garden warblers (Sylvia borin) and Lesser whitethroats (Sylvia curruca) are the main warblers among the victims but other species get caught on bird lime or nets. These little birds migrate southwards in autumn and are caught particularly in the South of France, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Cyprus and Greece. They are plucked and singed, sometimes drawn and sometimes not, but the feet are usually cut off. They are then cooked in various ways and eaten whole, beak and all. In France, they are brushed with butter and wrapped in vine leaves for cooking. Elizabeth David (Italian Food) mentions them put inside ovole (Amanita caesarea), those beautiful orange mushrooms related to the death cap. In Sicily, they are sometimes cooked inside hollowed-out onions, with the top put back so that they are steamed in an atmosphere of onion vapour. In northern Italy, they are generally served with polenta, usually after grilling on skewers (in the company of robins and other small birds); in Cyprus and Greece, they are even pickled. One is expected to chomp the whole bird, head, beak and all.

  Skylarks (Alauda arvensis) flock together in autumn, when the birds are very fat. Thousands used to be netted each year and sold in markets both in Britain and in continental Europe. The flesh of larks is excellent. They are probably best known these days as the basis for the famous Pithiviers lark pâté.

  Song thrushes (Turdus philomelos) and Mistle thrushes (Turdus viscivorus) are netted in huge numbers each autumn when they run the Mediterranean bird gauntlet on their way south. ln Majorca, for instance, people start out before dawn with huge V-shaped clap nets to go to the tops of the mountains. At dawn, they are in position with nets spread, waiting for the flights of migrating thrushes to come in. Thrushes are still commonly sold in the market. In Spain they are stuffed with sweet white grapes, wrapped in cabbage leaves and braised. Thrushes taste good, but not sensational, and surely only a deaf man could ever prefer a thrush on a plate or in a pâté de grives.

  The Ortolan bunting (Emberiza hortulana) is widely celebrated for the delicacy of its flesh, while its fat is, in the opinion of many gourmets, almost the equal of that of the green turtle. The birds were once netted annually with a decoy in many thousands, put in dark rooms (which kept them quiet) and fattened on millet and oatmeal, until, in the words of one old author, they became ‘mere lumps of fat weighing three ounces’. At this point, they were killed. Today, they are a particular speciality of the Landes and are sometimes to be found in cages behind the restaurants that serve them. Sometimes ortolans are merely beheaded and have only the crop removed before being cooked with the insides (trail) intact; they may also be drawn and stuffed with foie gras or a delicate forcemeat, or threaded on skewers between slices of toast (to catch their fat) before being grilled. There are also very elaborate recipes in which ortolans are cooked in hollowed-out black truffles and served with a Madeira sauce. Like warblers, they are eaten beak and all if they are whole, merely cut into two by the diner ‘like a sausage and just as tender’. They may even be boned and stuffed, a job requiring total dedication to gastronomic art.

  [Birds – French: oiseaux German: Vogel Italian: uccelli Spanish: pájaros]

  BIRD’S NEST. ‘Among the many travellers’ tales which called forth such ridicule from sceptical readers of early voyages, the accounts of the Chinese cuisine were held to be amongst the most extravagant ... that the Chinese
should make soup out of birds’ nests, was an absurdity so self-evident that it destroyed all possibility of faith... the reader having no conception of the possibility that a bird’s nest could be made of anything but sticks, moss, mud and feathers.’ (The Revd. J.G. Wood’s Natural History, 1861.)

  The birds (of the genus Collocalia) that make the nests used for soup are similar to swifts. One of the species was named the Edible swallow, as if it were the bird one ate. The birds nest in colonies in stupendous caverns in South East Asia – Java, Malaya, Thailand, the Philippines – and, like swallows, stick their nests to the rocky walls and ceilings. They make them, however, not of mud but of a gelatinous spit which they secrete for the purpose. Collecting the nests in semi-darkness and the stink from the droppings that cover the cavern floor is dangerous work. It is like scraping a cathedral roof while balancing on a sweep’s pole. There are two main categories of nest, black and white. Black nests are the cheaper, but are full of debris and need a lot of cleaning to make them edible. The white nests are clean and are more expensive. There are numerous grades, the best being the most absorbent and therefore swelling more when soaked. First-grade nests are whole, almost white cups with little in the way of feathers and foreign matter. Second grade, or Dragon’s teeth, are bits of broken nest, and the third grade is made of fragments pressed into cakes. Nests from different areas are also assessed on their own merits by experts and are even used for distinct purposes.