by Tom Stobart
[Pigeon – French: pigeon German: Taube Italian: piccione Spanish: paloma]
PIGEON PEA or red gram. An important pulse (Cajanus cajon) which originated in Africa and are a crop of warm countries – they stand no frost. They are important for food in the Caribbean (as gunga peas or gungo peas), tropical America, Africa and the Orient – they had already reached Asia in prehistoric times. In India (where they are arhar, tur or toor, or tuvaram), they are second only to chick peas in importance. The colour of pigeon peas ranges from red to white, brown, mottled or black. It is split and husked as *dal. The green pods can be used as a vegetable. Pigeon peas are said to be slightly narcotic and can be blamed for the nap after a large curry tiffin.
PIGNUT. Alternative name for *chufa nut.
PIGWEED. See purslane.
PIKE might well be described as the barracuda of fresh water, it is a long, fast, very savage fish which will not only clear a pond of other fish but also grab young water birds swimming on the surface. The European pike (Esox lucius) is also found in Asia and is fished commercially in the Caspian Sea. Parallel species in North America include the pickerel (Esox niger) – in Britain the name pickerel retains its original meaning: a small pike. The French count the pike among the finest of food fishes, but in Britain it is not highly regarded. I have known people in Ireland treat the pike with nothing short of revulsion because of the peculiar smell it has when caught and the slime it exudes, not to mention its murderous habits. The temptation to wash off the slime as soon as the fish is caught should be resisted, as the slime contributes to the quality and tenderness. Pike are also improved by hanging overnight; the mouth and throat should be stuffed with salt. Alternatively, the fish may be rubbed with salt and left for eight hours or so. A good pike for the fisherman weighs around 4 kg (9 lb), although they can be much bigger. For the cook, 2-2.5 kg (4½-5½ Ib) is a better size, unless the flesh is intended for quenelles, as large pike are tough.
Pike may be scaled with a grater, but if the fish is to be skinned after cooking, this will be easier if the scales are left intact. The roes are considered slightly poisonous and are sometimes but not always rejected. The liver, though, is a delicacy and can be used in the sauce. The season for pike runs from May to January, as spawning goes on from the end of February to the end of April in most places. Pike taken from good, clean waters should not taste muddy; others may benefit from a soak in vinegared water. The fish may be cooked in a number of ways – quenelles de brochet are a famous French creation. A small pike of 1.5 kg (3¼ lb) will take about 25 minutes to poach in a court-bouillon.
[Pike – French: brochet German: Hecht Italian: luccio Spanish: Iucio]
PILCHARD. The name given to the adult *sardine when it is fished around British coasts.
PILLI-PILLI. See piri-piri.
PILONCILLO. See sugar.
PIMENTO or pimiento. See sweet pepper.
PIMENTÓN. The Spanish equivalent of *paprika, powdered, red sweet pepper, a very important spice in Spain. It is used in many dishes and is characteristic of several sausages such as chorizo and sobresada. In escabeche of fish, it has, in addition to its role as a flavour, some preservative action. Pimentón, as sold loose in Spanish markets, is a brilliant, dark-vermilion or tomato-red. Although inexpensive, it is said to be frequently adulterated with other substances ranging from dried tomato residues to ground almond shells. In buying it, make sure that it has a good, strong aroma. It is best not to keep pimentón too long, as it tends to lose its taste. When cooking with it, mix it into the hot fat of fried dishes, as this amalgamates it and gives the best colour.
PIMIENTA. Spanish for *pepper.
PINEAPPLE (Ananas comosus), on a world basis, is the most important tropical fruit. It originated in South America – varieties still grow wild in Brazil – and it was cultivated in the West Indies before the arrival of Columbus, whose men relished it. Very soon it spread to tropical areas around the world, although its cultivation was at first haphazard. Because of its appearance, the Spanish called it piña (pine cone). Today, the Hawaiian Islands are the largest pineapple producers. The plant was introduced there by a Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula y Marin in 1790, and scientific growing was started by an English captain, John Kidwell, towards the end of the 19th century. The canning of pineapple began in 1900; today the tonnage canned is immense.
Pineapple plants are perennial and continue bearing for a long time if allowed to, but commercial growers renew the plants every few years. The fruit is the result of the fruits of the whole inflorescence fusing into one. Most varieties are seedless.
To be really good, a pineapple must ripen on the plant, because the stern is full of starch, which is converted to sugar and rushes up into the fruit at the last minute. In the moment of ripening, the pineapple receives enough sugar to double its content almost overnight, but this sugar never reaches the fruit if it is cut immature. Thus, fruit imported into temperate regions by ship never ripen properly in spite of being kept, and people who have eaten pineapples in the tropics rarely buy them back home. Pineapples that have been shipped by air are another matter.
Pineapples should always be bought ripe. Unripe ones are tasteless – don’t believe the greengrocer who says, ‘it’ll ripen in a warm place.’ It won’t. Overripe pineapple is also nasty. Avoid fruits with discoloured patches or bruises, dried-up or shrivelled ones, and any with wilting leaves. There should be a nice pineapple smell, and you should be able to pull out a leaf of the crown. Pineapples will keep for 2-3 days in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.
Europe gets pineapples from a number of places, including Africa, the West Indies, the Azores and the Canary Islands. In the US, pineapples are grown in Florida, and some come from Mexico and Puerto Rico. But the classic is the Smooth Cayenne from Hawaii, weighing up to 3-4 kg (7-9 lb) and used for both canning and eating fresh.
Apart from sugar, acid and the lovely taste, pineapple contains a digestive enzyme, bromelin, which digests proteins such as egg white, gelatine and the protein in meat. Hence, raw pineapple cannot be made into a gelatine jelly, though *agar-agar will do the trick. Recipes calling for pineapple and gelatine specify canned or cooked pineapple, as heat puts the bromelin out of action. Pineapple is used in many sweets and in fruit salads, as well as for preserves. It is cooked with ham and pork. Savoury dishes containing it often incorporate Hawaii in their name. In the US, pineapple often is flavoured with a dash of vodka or white wine; in Europe, with kirsch.
Pineapples were already common in Europe in the 19th century, when they were grown in heated glasshouses; there are dozens of recipes in Victorian cookery books. The skin and parings were boiled with sugar to make flavourings for creams. In canning factories now, the parings are used for juice – nothing is wasted.
[Pineapple – French: ananas German: Ananas Italian: ananas Spanish: piña]
PINE NUT. Although the seeds of pine trees are in general edible, many are too small to be of value, and others have a strong taste of turpentine which cannot be sufficiently reduced by roasting. There remain a good number of species producing excellent nuts, which have been used as food from time immemorial. Some kinds were of more than local importance; husks have been found in the rubbish tips from Roman camps in Britain. In North America, the nuts were a favourite food of the Indians, and even today it is the Indians who collect the cones of the Two-Leaved nut pine commercially in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
The Mediterranean Stone pine (Pinus pinea) provided the original nut used in European and Mid-Eastern cooking. The Stone pine is the romantic umbrella-shaped tree of Italian landscape paintings. It grows wild in coastal districts from Portugal to the Black Sea, and has been planted on the North African coast. In places, the forests of Stone pine are beautiful and extensive. Particularly famous is that at Ravenna on the Adriatic coast of Italy, but other notable Italian localities are Viareggio, San Rossore, Fallonica and Castelfusano. ln Spain, the best nuts come from Huelva, and the second best are from Tarragona.
The large, shiny cones of the Stone pine are gathered between November and March and are stored until the summer, when they are spread out in the hot sun to open. The nuts can be then shaken out of the cones. Cracking and extraction of the kernels is nowadays done by machinery. The kernels keep well in cool, dry places (or, if necessary, in a jar in the refrigerator), but are always expensive.
Pine nuts are white or cream, soft in texture, with a slight ‘pine’ flavour. They may be eaten raw, but are better fried or roasted (they burn very easily) when they taste more nutty. They are to be had chocolate coated or made into a nut butter, but their main interest lies in their use in Mediterranean cooking.
In France, Stone pines grow in Provence and to some extent in the pine forests of the Landes (in omelette landaise, pine nuts are fried gently in butter before turning in the eggs in the usual way), but you could not say that pignons were an important ingredient in French cooking. In Spain it is another matter. One finds piñones in every shop, and uses range from sweet preparations such as pinonate (a paste of pine nuts and sugar) or bandullo gallego (a type of pudding or cake with pine nuts on top) to bacalao with raisins and pine nuts, and escaldums (a chicken dish from Majorca with onion and tomato, butter and marjoram).
At the other end of the Mediterranean, in Turkey, Greece and the Lebanon (where there are some fine Stone pines to be seen from the airplane as you land in Beirut), pine nuts come in a variety of sweetmeats, in jam, pilau, rice pudding, and stuffings for chicken, turkey, vine leaves and vegetables. In Italy, sweet things containing pine nuts include zelten and strudel from the Trentino Alto Adige (with a strong Austrian influence) or pan giallo or pizza di polenta from Lazio, even the fave dei morti or charlotte alia milanese of Lombardy and the pinoccate of Umbria. Pine nuts are also a usual ingredient in the extraordinary sangumacclo, which, with many regional variations, consists of pig’s blood with candied citron peel, sometimes sultanas, sugar and even chocolate. They are used with spinach (spinaci alla romano), pasta and cauliflower (pasta coi cavolfiori) peppers or aubergines (capunatina di melanzane), and sardele in saar from Venice (in which sardines are marinated in vinegar), sardines (pasta con le sarde), and with swordfish (agghiotta di pesce spada) from Sicily. Also, as in Spain, there are pine nut and dried grape combinations in regional recipes for bacalao and stock-fish (as in stoccafisso in agro dolce), and for hare (Iepre alla trentina).These combinations are a survival from an ancient style of cooking.
But the most sophisticated recipes using pine nuts come from around Genoa, where pine nuts go whole into a variety of dishes, and are pounded to form the basic thickener of sauces. Best known of these is the famous pesto alla genovese, a superlative sauce for pasta made from pounded pine nuts, garlic, cheese and basil. From the region come such specialities as salsa al funghi (soaked dried Italian fungi pounded with garlic, anchovy, pine nuts and tomato), salsa alla genovese in which pine nuts are pounded with capers, anchovy, parsley and olives with a dash of garlic and vinegar, and salsa verde alla genovese (pine nuts pounded with basil, garlic, anchovy, salt and oil) to go with the boiled meats known as bollito misto, and salsa piccante (see below). From the US come piñon cookies.
It is rarely necessary to peel pine nuts, as you buy them ready to use, but the Spanish soak the nuts in tepid water for half an hour as a preliminary. The most important edible-seeded pines are: P. pinea. The Mediterranean Stone pine. Portugal to the Black Sea.
P. cembra. The Swiss Stone pine or Arolla pine. (German: Zirbel) from the Alps, Central Europe and Russia. ‘Russian nuts’ in Norway.
P. roxburghii.The Chir pine of West Himalayas and Afghanistan.
P. gerardiana.The Nepal Nut pine of Himalayas which gives ‘Neoza nuts’.
Pinus cembroides. The Two-Leaved nut pine. Colorado to Mexico.
Araucaria araucana. Chile pine or Monkey-Puzzle tree. In Chile, it produces enormous cones. The seeds are eaten roasted.
A. augustifolia.The Para pine from Brazil.
A. bidwillii. The Bunya-bunya pine from Queensland.
Salsa piccante
Pound together a handful each of chopped parsley and capers with two anchovies and some white breadcrumbs soaked in olive oil. Rub through a sieve and stir in more oil, a little vinegar, salt (if necessary) and black pepper. Use as a sauce for fish or vegetables – cauliflower, green beans, scorzonera – at your choice.
[Pine nut – French: pignon German: Piniennuss Italian: pignolo Spanish: piñon]
PINTO. Variety of *kidney bean.
PIRI-PIRI, peri-peri, or pilli-pilli dishes are meat or fish served with a special hot-pepper sauce. Piri-piri dishes are Portuguese African, particularly from Mozambique, but the hot sauce has been taken into Portuguese and South African cooking generally and has its addicts. Laurens van der Post reminisces about its preparation in First Catch Your Eland (The Hogarth Press). ‘Of course, every cook in Mozambique has his own particular way of preparing piri-piri. l have chosen one provided by a Portuguese housewife of Mozambique. According to her instructions, one begins by squeezing out some lemons, passing the juice through a sieve, warming it in a pan, inserting peppers and chillies that must be red (and freshly picked, she emphasised).They are simmered on a low heat for just five minutes. The mixture is then taken from the stove, separated from its juice and the peppers pressed into a fine paste. A pinch of salt is added and the pounding continues until there are no lumps left in the pulp. This pulp is returned to the pan with the original lemon juice and further simmered while being constantly stirred. This then is the piri-piri sauce which can be eaten with steak, mutton, fowl, fish and crustacea and always best I would say with rice of some kind to provide the exact civilising corrective to the pagan incitement of the sauce.’
As for other ways, in some cases, the stem ends of small red chillies are put in olive oil and stored for a couple of months before being used. Other cooks let the peppers and any spices infuse in the oil in a slow oven or on top of the stove, while the flavours can also be blended by standing the seasoned oil in the hot noon sun. Piri-piri is also available in a powdered form.
PISANG STARCH. See banana.
PISCO. See brandy.
PISTACHIO NUT or green almond. The nuts are borne on a small deciduous tree (Pistacia vera), native to Asia and still found growing wild in the mysterious ranges around the head-waters of the Oxus. It was brought into the Mediterranean many thousands of years ago and reached Italy from Syria during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. The tree can withstand very poor conditions. It will grow on dry, rocky hill-sides, as long as it gets hot summers. In Europe, it is grown in southern Italy and Sicily as well as in Greece and to a small extent in France and Spain. In the US, it has of late been grown in California, Texas and Arizona. However, most travellers would associate pistachio nuts with Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa Persia and Afghanistan, Tunisia and Algeria. They go with the salted melon and sunflower seeds sold on street corners; the salted nuts are sold in the bazaars in their horny shells, open-lipped like biscuit coloured bivalves.
The growing nuts look like clusters of small olives. The flesh may be an intense green or sometimes paler, according to variety. The skin adhering to the nut is papery and red-brown to creamy. The nuts are gathered when the outside begins to shrivel and to turn yellow. They are spread out in the shade to dry for a week or more. Since the shell gapes to expose the kernel, there is no need for cracking. Once dried, pistachios keep well.
The flavour of the pistachio is mild, but in some varieties there is a resinous taste which is a reminder of the mastic and terebinth bushes to which the pistachio is closely related (both of them can be used as root stocks for grafting).The resinous taste is particularly strong in wild nuts and is said to be preferred by the inhabitants of Turkestan. The cultivated varieties vary considerably. They are propagated by grafting, although nuts are often planted. As there are male and female trees, a single pistachio tree is useless; and male trees have to be included in every or
chard for pollination. It takes 15-20 years for the trees to come into anything like full production, but some nuts are produced four years after grafting. Trees yield between 9 kg (20 lb) and 27 kg (60 lb) of nuts, which are always expensive, usually three or four times the price of other nuts.
Apart from being salted to eat by the handful, they are mainly used in cooking for their decorative effect. They appear in various sweetmeats, and are also included in stuffings, pâtés and stuffed meats (like the Genovese cima and the coppa romano), where they look like green islands in the slices. There is also the famous pistachio ice cream, particularly of Italy and the US. If this is not expensive, it is certain to be faked with other nuts and green colouring. Other uses of the nuts as a main ingredient are limited, but include the cake-like mazaresi al pistacchio of Sicily. Pistachio nuts are sometimes added to expensive Indian pilau dishes. They are grown to some extent in Kashmir, but are mostly imported from Afghanistan.
To remove the skins from pistachio nuts and leave the nuts with a fine green colour, blanch them in salted water, then treat them as you would *almonds. A beautiful green oil can be pressed from pistachio nuts, but it is too expensive for use in the kitchen (although it is used in perfumery), and it also goes rancid very quickly. The nuts contain about 54% oil and 22% protein, so they have good food value.
[Pistachio nut – French: pistache German: Pistazie Italian: pistachio Spanish: pistacho, alfóncigo]
PI-TSI. See water chestnut
PLAICE. See flatfish.
PLANTAIN. See banana.
PLOVER. Plovers are small waders. Most of these birds, including the rare dotterel, were formerly shot and netted for food in Britain and elsewhere in northern Europe. Now the British plovers are sadly reduced in numbers, and, as with any wild bird, it is important to check the status of a species before using it as food. Gastronomically, the Golden plover (P iuvialis apricaria) is reckoned the best, followed by the Grey plover (P. squatarola) and finally the lapwing or Green plover (VanelIus vanelIus), which is less nice to eat but whose *eggs were once collected. Plovers are usually hung for a day or so before cooking, and they should be eaten only in winter.