by Tom Stobart
[Elder – French: sureau German: Holunder Italian: sambuco Spanish: saúco]
ELEPHANT’S EAR. See yam (dasheen).
ELVER. Baby *eel.
EMULSIONS. An emulsion is a mixture of two liquids which are not mutually soluble, for example, oil and water. Instead, one liquid is dispersed as tiny globules in the other. The emulsions which mainly concern us in cooking are of oil and water. Milk is an emulsion, and so is mayonnaise. Emulsions can be made by forcing oil and water together through a fine nozzle, or by using emulsifying agents such as egg yolk or some mustards. Emulsions break when the globules of like substances come together and amalgamate.
[Emulsion – French: émulsion German: Emulsion Italian: emusione Spanish: emulsión]
ENDIVE. See chicory.
ENO’S FRUIT SALTS. This famous old nursery indigestion remedy, which fizzes violently when water is added, consists of bicarbonate of soda (55.58%) with tartaric acid (36.61%) and anhydrous citric acid (7.81%).To use it as a substitute leavening agent, you have to mix it in pretty quickly, or the carbon dioxide gas will be gone before it can be effective.
ENZYMES, which were also called ferments, are organic catalysts fabricated by living cells. Catalysts are substances which cause or accelerate chemical changes without themselves being used up or permanently altered in the process. In nature, there are countless numbers of enzymes, each of which is responsible for its own reaction or group of reactions. Enzymes, in other words, are specific. They control and initiate most of the chemical reactions making up the life processes. Some operate only inside living cells. Others can also function outside the cell or after the organism that created them has died. Enzymes are sensitive to temperature; many will be killed by heat or strong chemicals, almost as if they were living. They may also be prevented from working by substances such as salt and vinegar. Enzymes produced by yeasts, fungi and bacteria are responsible for many natural food processes such as fermentation, ripening of cheese, souring of milk and vinegar production. Plant enzymes play their part in such diverse operations as producing a bitter-almond flavour in peach stones (or bitter almonds), a bite in mustard, or the spoilage of unblanched vegetables in the deep freezer. The names of enzymes end in -ase. For instance, an enzyme which oxidises is an oxidase, and one that hydrolyses carbohydrates is a carbohydrase. Pectinase acts on pectin. Invertase (produced by most yeasts and moulds) inverts sugar. There are proteinases, phosphatases, glycerophos-phatases, and polysaccharidases, even penicillinases. This is the specialist world of the biochemist, the cheese technologist and the brewer, but we should register the simple fact that most things we handle in the kitchen are subject to alteration by enzymes and that changes, one after another in patterns of astronomical complexity, are constantly going on in foods we keep (except in those that have been treated to prolong their shelf life).
[Enzyme – French: enzyme German: Enzym Italian: enzima Spanish: enzima]
EPAZOTE, Mexican tea, or wormseed. This is a strongly-flavoured herb, native to tropical America. It is best fresh, but can also be dried. The plant (Chenopodium ambrosloides) belongs to the same family as goosefoot and spinach. It grows wild as an escape in parks and backyards in New York City, although it does not have such a strong flavour there as it does further south. It is not available in Britain, where it would presumably grow – it can be wintered in a pot indoors. The flavour is strong (the name comes from Nahuatl epatl and tzotl meaning an animal smelling like a skunk, something dirty). It is used in soups, with beans, in tortilla dishes, etc.
ERGOT. See moulds.
ESCABECHE. See caveach.
ESCARGOT. See snail.
ESCAROLE. See chicory.
ESSENCES. An essence should contain the fundamental quality of a substance in a concentrated form, but in cooking the word is given many loose meanings. Flavoured waters, like orange-flower water, rosewater and kewra water are sometimes called essences because they are liquids in bottles, as are coffee essences and sirops. The French use of the word implies the natural, concentrated juices which run from food during cooking – the juices from roasting meat, for instance. However, with these exceptions – and a few concentrated products like essence of rennet – we are dealing with flavourings in bottles; they may be extracts, essential oils (natural or synthetic) or new chemical compounds created by the chemists. Powders, produced by drying under reduced pressure, may strictly speaking be essences but are not usually so regarded. lt is best to forget definitions and to discuss the whole complex together.
Essences may be made by extracting with a solvent. If the solvent is harmless, like water or alcohol, the essential flavourings may be left in solution (a tincture), but other solvents such as hydrocarbons or ether have subsequently to be removed by evaporation. On the other hand, essential oils, which are found in aromatic herbs and spices, are usually volatile and can be obtained from the natural source by distillation (usually by steam distillation as they are often fragile). Rose oil (attar of roses), for instance, has been made for many hundreds of years by simple distillation from a watery mash.
Modern techniques can separate and purify the various essential oils. For instance, the aroma and taste of dill or sage can be extracted and split up into its various components, even though it is usual for something to be lost in the process. Manufacturers like these essential oils, and we cannot entirely blame them. The public expects a particular product always to taste the same, something that is very difficult to achieve using natural (and thus highly variable) herbs and spices. It is much easier to reconstitute the components to a fixed formula. However, out of the two thousand or so flavourings currently available to the food industry, only some five hundred are in any way natural; the balance is entirely the brain-children of chemists and are not known to occur in plants in nature. Artificial flavourings are imitations of natural ones, perhaps, and may contain twenty or more separate substances in carefully formulated proportion. Since the food industry employs very expert ‘cooks’, who conduct thousands of tests, the products they come up with are often exceedingly popular. However much purists may denigrate the food industry (and not without reason), the fact remains that sales of a food do not depend entirely on appearance and advertising, but also on whether people like the product. One cannot even claim that what is natural is harmless and what is synthetic is harmful. Essential oils from household flavourings like nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, pennyroyal and even peppermint are harmful in quantity, and so also must these herbs and spices be if you eat enough of them, while no doubt many of the synthetics are harmless. The problem is to know it, while we are checking their long-term safety, we may be at risk.
And how many of this bewildering range of substances are really necessary? One thing cooks can learn from the food trade is that small, unrecognizable quantities of very unlikely flavourings can be used in improbable contexts. You might be astounded to know that the oil distilled from rue (a nasty smelling herb) is used, for instance, in raspberry and blueberry flavourings. It is even used in rum and peach flavourings. Asafoetida (another horrid smell) goes into ice cream and candy (what sort is not specified), eucalyptus into ginger-ale flavour. All this should encourage us to experiment.
[Essence – French: essence German: Extrakt Italian: essenza Spanish: esencia]
ESSENTIAL OIL Volatile oil containing substances which provide flavour and aroma. Essential oils may be extracted (e.g. from the skins of*citrus fruits) and used in perfumery or as *essences.
EVAPORATED MILK is unsweetened whole milk which has been evaporated to half its original volume, homogenized, canned and sterilized by heat (unlike *condensed milk which has sugar added as a preservative). Diluted with an equal quantity of water, it can be a substitute for fresh milk in all recipes that do not involve the use of rennet. Undiluted, it can make a substitute for cream, although it has a boiled milk taste. lt can be whipped if the unopened can is first heated in boiling water for 20 minutes and then cooled before opening or, more simply, if it is put into the
refrigerator for 12 hours and then mixed with 2½ tablespoons of lemon juice before whipping.
EXTRACTS in cooking are flavourings which have been dissolved out and concentrated. They thus include natural *essences, which are extracts, for example, of spices and fruit peels, usually made with ethyl alcohol. Also classified as extracts are meat concentrates, which are effectively clarified *stocks that have been boiled down to a fraction of their initial volume and stored for use in sauces and gravies. Commercial beef extracts such as Bovril and Oxo contain salt, yeast extract and various other flavouring ingredients.
f
FAGGOT. An old English way of using the insides of the pig, very similar in concept to the French gayette and crépinette. AII are made of minced meats with flavourings parcelled up in *caul. Much less time is needed to make faggots than to make sausages, at least if you are doing it from scratch. Traditionally liver, lungs, spleen, and scraps are minced with fat, usually a filler such as breadcrumbs. and flavourings such as onion, sage (or other herbs), spices (mainly pepper and nutmeg or mace) and salt. The mixture is rolled in squares of caul, packed in a tin and baked brown on top. Faggots are available locally at butchers in Britain, particularly in the Midlands and north of England, and in parts of Wales. An old-fashioned convenience food which can be eaten hot with gravy or cold, they are also available frozen. These and other widely distributed versions may contain a less enterprising range of ingredients than the traditional faggot.
FAHRENHEIT. Named after German physicist, Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), this system of measuring temperature is only just being phased out of use. Fahrenheit took as zero the temperature of an equal mixture of snow and salt and, as 100, the temperature of the human body. This put the freezing point of water at 32°F and its boiling point at 212°F – a difference of 180. Improved instruments later showed that the temperature of the human body was not exactly 100°F. Although the Fahrenheit scale was satisfactory for all daily purposes, it was not used by science because the *Celsius scale was linked with metric definitions.
FARINA. Although this word is applied to any flour (for instance, farina dolce is chestnut flour in Italy), it is most often applied to potato flour. This mixes easily with water and absorbs it quickly. It is a good binder, so is used commercially as a filler in cooked sausages, where a compact texture is needed. Farina made from wheat, another common type, would not produce the same result, so one cannot necessarily substitute one farina for another. Fecula is much the same as farina, but with the starch separated from the source (potato, corn or arrowroot) by washing with water, it is then allowed to settle out and is dried. *Cornflour and *arrowroot are typical feculas.
FATS and OILS are essentially similar substances, fats being solid and oils being liquid at ordinary room temperatures. Mutton fat will melt in places as hot as Death Valley and sunflower oil will solidify when the Fahrenheit thermometer reads zero (-18°C). A little simple chemistry is necessary to show what is meant by words such as saturated and polyunsaturated, which are much bandied about in discussions on diet and health. Fats and oils are formed by the combination of a fatty acid with an *alcohol (usually glycerine).There are dozens of fatty acids, of which the simplest is *formic acid (HCOOH) and the next *acetic acid (CH3COOH).
The fatty acids form a series of ascending complexity which goes on through butyric acid (C3H7COOH), which is found in rancid butter, and caproic acid (C5H11COOH), the smell of billy goats, to the very much larger molecules involved in most of the fats. The molecules are composed of carbon, and hydrogen atoms in chains, and when these chains contain only carbon atoms with their fullest possible complement of hydrogen atoms attached, then the fatty acid and any fat formed from it are said to be saturated – their molecules can take no more hydrogen. But in some fatty acid molecules, there are extra linkages between adjacent pairs of carbon atoms in the chain and each of the two carbon atoms involved in such a double bond consequently has one less hydrogen atom linked to it. The fatty acid is then unsaturated – monounsaturated if it has one double bond, polyunsaturated if it has more than one.
The double bond represents a potentially active point in the chain, and unsaturated fats are thus less stable and more easily changed. For instance, it is relatively easy for the oxygen in the air to attack the double bonds. The oxidation products have an unpleasant smell and taste – we say the oil has gone rancid. But if the double bonds are replaced by extra hydrogen atoms – a process known as hydrogenation – then the slow oxidation is prevented.
Hydrogenation also raises the melting point, and the unsaturated oil becomes a saturated fat – the basis of margarine production.
As an industrial process, hydrogenation involves heating oil with hydrogen under pressure, using nickel as a catalyst. Any unsaturated oil can be hydrogenated – fish oil, whale oil or vegetable oil (even mineral oils, but they are not used in food). Saturated fats keep well, but if they are consumed in large quantities, they are often associated with raised serum cholesterol levels and may be involved in the development of atherosclerosis, a condition in which arteries, such as coronary arteries, become clogged with a fatty deposit. Monounsaturated fats are relatively neutral in this respect, but people who switch to eating less saturated fat and more polyunsaturated fat can benefit from the lowering of their serum cholesterol level. The value of partially substituting polyunsaturates for saturated fat is still a controversial issue, but it is recommended by several well-known medical bodies throughout the world.
Of the vegetable oils regarded as suitable in a low-cholesterol diet, safflower, sunflower, soya, cottonseed, corn and sesame are best, but wheat-germ oil has exceptional qualities when raw and fresh. Olive oil and peanut oil are in the middle category, as are the oils in some nuts and in avocado pears. Oils in fish are generally good – some, like herring oil, very good – and chicken fat is tolerable. But coconut oil or fat, ordinary commercial hydrogenated peanut butter, palm oil, butter, pork, mutton and beef dripping are medium to high in saturated fats, as also are hard margarines and vegetable shortening.
A few fatty acids are suspected of being potential health hazards. One such is erucic acid, which when used experimentally in large quantities has been suspected of causing damage to heart muscle in animals. Significant quantities have been found only in rapeseed oil but new strains of rape now yield fats with little or no erucic acid content. Within the EEC, consumers are protected by a directive which fixes the maximum permitted level of erucic acid in oils and fats intended for human consumption. The allied mustard oil is much used in Indian cooking in various areas, particularly in Bengal, and might be suspect.
We should not worry unduly about this, but remember that over the centuries man has evolved a physiology to deal with a wide variety of different foods. He is likely to get into trouble only when he takes a lot of any one thing continuously, without a change.
The best oils gastronomically are cold pressed and retain some of the flavour of their origin. Some oils that come from oilseeds have tastes which are thought displeasing or interfere with the purposes for which they will be used. This is particularly so when the oils have been heat treated or extracted with solvents. These oils are decolourized and stripped of their flavours by heating with steam under reduced pressure. Such treatment will remove nasty – indeed almost any – tastes.
In normal conditions, fats and oils exposed to the air gradually go rancid because of oxidation. This can be arrested only by extreme measures, such as removing the air (as when nuts are sealed in a vacuum). Polyunsaturated oils, being more reactive than saturated fats, go rancid more quickly. The process is encouraged by traces of metals (molybdenum, nickel, copper) which act as catalysts, by ultra-violet light (so oils are best stored in the dark), by the presence of free fatty acids (present as impurities or produced by heating) and by warmth (since it makes chemical reactions go faster).
Common sense therefore dictates keeping oils in a cool place, decanting from large containers into small ones for use an
d keeping bottles full. Many fresh cold-pressed oils naturally contain vitamin E, an anti-oxidant which helps protect the oil from going rancid. In some countries manufacturers may add synthetic anti-oxidants (even vitamin E sometimes) and sequestrants. The latter are chemicals that hijack stray ions and attach themselves to metals. They render inactive the substances that encourage changes. Sequestrants are much used to maintain colour, flavour and texture in commercial products, from beverages to canned crab.
Oil that has been continually heated in the deep fryer is prone to rancidity, because of the accumulation of free fatty acids; its polyunsaturated fat and vitamin content are slowly reduced, and it may acquire an unpleasant flavour. There is even the possibility of harmful substances eventually being produced if the oil is overheated. Frying oil should be discarded if it smells objectionable, foams excessively, smokes easily and darkens in colour. Fat for deep frying lasts longer if it is kept clean by straining between fryings. lt should be used at a temperature below its smoke point; and at other times should be kept carefully covered, cool and away from air and light. The metal from which the cooking utensil is made is important. Iron pans and, worse still, untinned brass or copper pans, encourage fats to break down, but stainless steel or chromium-plated pans do not have this effect.
Some frying fats can stand heating to about 280°C (450°F) before they break down. In general, the more saturated the fat, the higher the temperature it will tolerate. Unsaturated fats break down at lower temperatures, although their performance in this respect can be improved by refining.
The type of oil or fat used in the kitchen is immensely important. Fats give flavour and character and even the most careful stripping does not render them entirely neutral. Even if tasteless, they each have their own quality of ‘greasiness’ and produce quite different results when mixed with flour in a sauce, boiled in a pudding or used in a pastry. Recipe instructions which just call for ‘oil’ or ‘shortening’ should be more specific – the difference between mayonnaise made with olive oil and maize oil will be only too obvious.