by Tom Stobart
Poisonous plants. Contrary to popular belief most fungi are not poisonous. However one or two are often fatal, even if taken in the least amount (see mushrooms).The *moulds, which are also fungi, are usually not harmful in the quantity that is likely to be eaten, but a few can be – the mould on peanuts is carcinogenic and the black fungus, ergot, that attacks cereal heads, especially rye, is very poisonous. It is not at all common these days.
Apart from the poisonous plants which tempt children with their berries, there are a few plants which cooks should be alert to. Sometimes people have been poisoned by oleander, which is highly poisonous, when they have used the wood to make meat skewers. Anything smelling strongly of bitter *almonds should be avoided, as this often indicates the presence of cyanide (prussic acid). Everyone in Britain knows that you should avoid Deadly nightshade, a plant, incidentally, that is much over rated in its poisonous effect probably because of the dire warnings given to children. For something really poisonous, we have to go to the legendary Ordeal tree of Madagascar (Taughinia venenifera) a seed of which, no larger than an almond, will reputedly kill twenty people. More dangerous in practice are plants which contain a lot of oxalic acid (such as rhubarb leaves) and are poisonous in quantity, but which might be eaten, and have been eaten, in emergency.
Allergies. It is possible to have an allergy, either inherited or developed, to certain foods, and to react to them as if they were poison. An example of an inherited allergy is favism, sufferers from which get headaches, vertigo, vomiting, fever, and enlargement of the spleen and liver as a result of eating broad beans. This allergy is common in people who have Levantine blood, with ancestors who came from Greece or Armenia. It is relatively common in Sardinia, Sicily and southern Italy, as well as in certain ethnic groups in North America. Some sufferers from favism will be made ill by just the pollen of the broad bean plant. Many people, perhaps more than suspect it, are adversely affected by wheat *gluten, others by cheese, and so on. An example of a developed allergy: some of those who have been made ill by shell fish seem to have to give them up permanently. In this context, I remember being told many years ago by a Spanish fisherman, that if I ate the flying fish I had caught I would become allergic to shell fish, at least for several years. I did not risk putting this piece of local folklore to the test. Allergies to components of the diet are only beginning to be understood; they are an aspect of eating that should not be forgotten.
POITRINE FUMÉE. French for *bacon.
POLE BEAN. See kidney bean (green bean).
POLENTA. See maize.
POLLACK. See cod.
POLLOCK. US name for coal fish (see cod).
POLONY may come from Polonia, the medieval Latin for Poland, or from Bologna. Either way, it now means a sausage of partly cooked, finely ground pork which has been coloured with dye. It may contain a proportion of beef and is likely to have been hot smoked. Polonies can be fried or grilled.
POLYSACCHARIDES. See sugar.
POLYUNSATURATES. See fats.
POMEGRANATE (Punica granatum) is neglected in most of Europe. The fruit is a large, thick-skinned berry with a mass of seeds each surrounded by juicy jewel-like pulp; the whole fruit is divided internally by tough membranes into irregular compartments. A good pomegranate is large, very juicy and has a good balance of sugar and acids. The colour of the inside varies from colourless to dark purple-red, which looks prettier but does not necessarily have a better taste. Poor pomegranates range through sour, astringent types with a high proportion of membranes, to those that are completely inedible.
Pomegranates originated in southern or western Asia. They were spread by the Phoenicians and the Romans got theirs from Carthage – hence the name Punica. Pomegranates require a very hot, dry summer to reach perfection – they resist drought, but need irrigation – and they will stand considerable frost in winter, so they are a typical fruit of Middle Eastern gardens. They are grown in California and in all Mediterranean countries; Puglia in Italy, Spain and Cyprus export the fruit.
The tree is small – evergreen or deciduous according to climate – and is covered with sharp spines. The fruits are painful to pick The typical flower is vivid vermilion, but there are white flowered kinds (usually with poor fruit) and even double flowered varieties which are purely for decoration. The wild pomegranate or daru, which grows profusely in parts of the lower Himalayas, is not edible but the seeds are dried and become an important condiment, the anar dana of Indian cooking. Dried pomegranate seeds of sour varieties are sprinkled on meat dishes in Middle Eastern cooking.
Good eating varieties have a superb flavour and make a fine dessert fruit if time is taken to remove the masses of glassy red or pink seeds and to separate them out from the yellowish membranes. The whole mass, ice-cold and rather like a pile of red crystals, looks wonderful served in a silver dish. The juice of pomegranates is used in meat and chicken dishes in Persian cooking, for instance in the magnificent dish called fesenjan or faisinjan, which is duck or chicken with walnuts and pomegranate juice. The juice is the basis of the sweet syrup granatine or grenadine, which is used in drinks. A long drink made of freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice, chilled and mixed with Dutch gin (a ‘Stobart Special’) is fantastic for anyone looking for something bracing and new, but the problem with squeezing the juice from pomegranates is that too much tannin exudes from the membranes and makes the juice astringent. To remove some tannin, a little dissolved gelatine can be stirred in. The gelatine reacts with the tannin to form an insoluble compound – a cloud which can be settled, filtered or removed by fining. If the fruit is allowed to shrivel before being crushed, the tannin is less. The pomegranate season is from the end of summer, reaching a peak in October and going on to Christmas. Pomegranates are sometimes associated with Halloween. In a polythene bag in the refrigerator, pomegranates will keep for several weeks.
[Pomegranate – French: grenade German: Granatapfel Italian: melagrana Spanish: Granada]
POMELO. See Shaddock.
POPCORN. See maize.
POPPY SEED used in cooking comes from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) which is probably a native of Central Europe. Used as a drug in classical times, poppy seeds were already being cultivated in India and China by AD 800. The drug is obtained from the latex which oozes out if the green seed pod is slashed, but when the seeds are ripe all traces of the opium alkaloids, such as morphine and codeine, are gone, and poppy seeds become a good food – an edible oil can be expressed from them. Poppy seed varies enormously from the relatively large, grey-blue type commonly seen sprinkled on German and Jewish breads and cakes to the much smaller, pale cream seed used in India to thicken curries. Botanists insist that the two come from the same species. The taste of baked poppy seed is pleasantly nutty. a little like sesame seed, and perhaps rather nicer. It is a frequent constituent in curry powders and in the masala to be ground for curries, but unless it is roasted it has little flavour. Indians never use flour to thicken curries, and poppy seed makes a nice sauce, but in many recipes the quantities used are insignificant and the poppy seed may only have been included from tradition or perhaps for medicinal reasons.
PORK, from the French, refers to the meat and pig, from Middle English, refers to the animal. Swine comes from the Old English swin (Latin suinus). Hog (a usual word for a pig in the US) in Britain usually implies a castrated male reared for slaughter. A boar is an uncastrated male pig; a sow, a female; a gilt (from the old Norse), a young sow.
Perhaps no other animal has been as important as the pig to man’s survival in Europe as well as in China and South East Asia. The highly evolved and custom-built pigs of today are the result of crossing the European pig, which was a ridge-backed animal, not far removed from the wild pig (Sus scrofa), and the plumper Chinese pig. This cross is attributed to Robert Bakewell who bred stock in the English Midlands in the middle of the 18th century. Today, very intensive upgrading and inbreeding helped by artificial insemination (which has come in generally since World War II), has p
roduced pigs tailor-made for the bacon industry, with long bodies and a small amount of fat, and the old fat pigs (going under such delightful names as Birmingham Cutter) are either hard or impossible to get, even if you should want them. Pigs are a lot leaner than they used to be and European butchers tend to trim off most of the fat to make the meat leaner still.
The flavour of pork and the hardness of the fat depends on the food with which the animal has been fed, so that pork for special purposes may come from animals that have been fed, for example, on peaches or acorns. Pigs are fastidious and have a very lively gastronomic sense, in spite of their greed. Following the tastes of man, they will readily eat truffles (and would no doubt get stoned on a good château bottled wine if their masters could spare it). Pigs are clean by nature, and the mud on a wild pig is more correctly regarded as a mud-pack for beauty treatment than a sign of slovenliness. In peasant societies, pigs are kept in atrocious conditions, but that is not the fault of the pigs. Neither are they to blame for the long and close association with man, which has meant that they share with humans a number of unpleasant parasites and diseases. Both Jews and Muslims regard pigs as unclean from a religious point of view, and it is said that this shows a practical approach to hygiene. But why? It was only necessary to cook the meat thoroughly to be safe. However, religious food laws have meant that a large area of the world, stretching from Turkey to Pakistan and southwards over northern Africa, has been denied the pig’s many advantages. Here man must depend on the goat and sheep, animals which may be more suited to the arid regions that make up much of this part of the world, but do not have the pig’s versatility As for the diseases, which undoubtedly exist, the danger is greatly reduced with animals kept under clean modern conditions, though it is still inadvisable to eat pork which has not been cooked to a high enough temperature throughout or which alternatively has not been salted for long enough to kill harmful parasites. A veterinary inspection stamp is not an absolute guarantee of safety.
Most of the important culinary products of the pig have been covered elsewhere in this book, eg. *ham, *bacon, *sausages, *lard – more food products are derived from the pig than from any other animal. The pig is, for instance, the only mammal whose skin we eat. We tend to take this for granted, or perhaps think we do so because of its relative hairlessness compared with the cow or the sheep. However, pigs in cold countries, such as northern China, may have quite hairy coats; in any case, even the baldest pig has to be scalded and have its bristles scraped off during preparation by the butcher. In peasant economies, the family pig (which is like a good dustbin that converts kitchen waste to more food) is still killed in the autumn, usually in November, at well under a year old. The occasion is one for both work and feasting. In the Spanish matanza, the pig is caught and dragged squealing to a wooden table on which it is held while a knife is plunged into one of its arteries. This, it is claimed, with dubious justification, makes the animal instantly unconscious. It is necessary for the heart to go on beating for a while so that the blood is pumped out. (Modern methods are more humane because the pig is first knocked out with an electric shock to the head.) After the killing, the carcase is scalded and scraped free of bristles, the entrails are removed and the carcase hung up to cool. The insides are sorted out, but the gall bladder is almost the only part of the pig that is thrown away. The intestines are opened out, washed in a stream, turned inside out, scraped, salted and soaked to cleanse them for use as sausage skins. It is a day’s work for most families to turn a pig into the hams, bacon and sausages that will subsequently be cured, dried and smoked to provide food over the winter. The variety of products made from the pig is a wonderful tribute to man’s invention, since virtually nothing is wasted. Cooks who have not experimented are recommended to try trotters, head, ears and all the other parts that are neglected in countries where people can afford to live on gammon and pork chops.
In most European countries, the skin is usually cut off the joints and used separately It is very gelatinous and a most useful addition to the consistency of an assortment of dishes. In Britain, Denmark and other northern countries, the skin is usually scored and crackled when pork is roasted. For good crackling the skin should never be basted with fat, which turns it to leather, but may be brushed or basted with water which produces bubbly-looking crackling. If skin is roasted without scoring, it is inclined to turn into a hard sheet (where I live in Spain, suckling pigs are not properly scored for roasting) and scoring needs to be done neatly and carefully It is something that butchers rarely have time to do properly; and you should do it yourself. As with other meats, the way pork is cut up is subject to great local variation. In some countries a leg of pork is very difficult to obtain as legs all go for ham. On the other hand, the fillet, which does not cure well and is removed from bacon ribs, much in demand in America and China, may be inexpensive if there is not the specialist demand for them. Pig’s liver is always cheap, often ridiculously so; though inferior for cooking in its own right, it is the best liver for pâté maison.
Salt pork. A light brining often improves pork. The heavily-salted pork used on ships in the past and known to sailors as salt junk was nothing like the salt meat we are used to, which is pinkish and served with fresh vegetables. It is said to have had something of the appearance and hardness of old mahogany; and was so salty that it could blister the tongue. Of course, at sea in sailing ships, with limited fresh water, it was not even soaked properly before being used. This unappetizing stuff was commonly believed to be the cause of scurvy, and so any fresh meat or fish, even of unpalatable sorts was eaten by sailors, but in vain, as it was fresh fruit and vegetables, even sprouted beans and grains, that contained the vitamin C they needed. Nowadays there are better things to eat during the winter or on long sea voyages. When we complain about the additives introduced by the food technologists, as indeed we should, we ought also to remember salt junk as an example of the crude expedients once used in preserving food.
[Pork – French: porc German: Schweinefleisch Italian: carne di maiale Spanish: carne de cerdo]
PORT. Portuguese *oyster.
PORT, by legal definition in Britain but not necessarily elsewhere, is a wine from a particular region in the valley of the Douro river some 80 km (50 miles) inland from Oporto in northern Portugal. The hillsides where the vines grow are very steep, and holes for vines often have to be blasted in the rock.
The port that was originally shipped to Britain was just a full bodied red wine, often fortified with brandy to make it travel better. It was this, not modern port, which was said to have given the 18th century Englishman his gout. From about 1830, however, the brandy began to be added before fermentation was complete. At an alcohol concentration of 20% the yeasts die, and further fermentation cannot take place. lt is the remaining unfermented grape sugar that makes port sweet.
Until fairly recently, port was made by old methods in very picturesque surroundings, and the grape crushing was done by foot. There are now destalking machines, and cleverly devised methods which remove much of the hand work without altering the quality of the wine. Crushed pips and stalks would ruin the taste, as port, unlike sherry, is fermented with the skins. When the moment is judged right, the fermenting juice is run off straight into huge casks which already contain brandy. Fermentation then stops. The proportion is about 22 lt (about 40 pt) of brandy to 100 It (176 pt) of half-fermented must. This brings the alcohol strength to about 20%. Some two months later, the new wine is run off the lees and shipped down to Oporto. There, in the shippers’ lodges (which are like cellars except that they are not underground), the various wines are blended in the shippers’ various styles.
Ruby port is a youngish wine which has not lost its colour, and is blended sometimes with tawny. Tawny is older, and has mellowed and become orange-red. White port is made from white grapes. Vintage port is made only in years when the shippers consider the vintage to be exceptional, and it gets special treatment. After the best blend has been determined, the ch
osen wines are mixed in huge wooden vats and left there for two years before they are shipped to the wine merchants. There the port is rested for a couple of months and then bottled. (In my grandmother’s house, a pipe – 56 dozen bottles – was bought and bottled for each son and put in bins in the cellars.) Bottles are ideally black, but usually they are just dark. Very good, long corks must be used to make a tight seal against the air while the port matures. After the bottles have been filled and corked, they are stood for several days before the corks are sealed by dipping the neck of each bottle in a mixture of paraffin wax and tallow. They are then laid on their sides in bins, where they should remain undisturbed for at least 15 years. Certainly vintage port must never be moved before it has lain for 7 years or before the deposited crust has hardened. As the bottles are put down, they are marked with a streak of whitewash to indicate the upper side. Vintage port should not be drunk before it is 15 and preferably 20 years old. It usually goes on improving for up to 40 years, but after that may deteriorate.
Old port must be decanted with great care. The whitewash mark must be kept uppermost and the bottle kept steady when the cork is removed. With exceedingly old vintages – 40-50 years old – the cork may have started to crumble; the neck of the bottle then has to be removed. Before tackling this tricky job, stand the bottle upright for a day or so. Then heat the claws of a bottle tong until they are red and clamp them around the bottle neck beneath the flange. Hold them there until the redness has disappeared, then remove them. Place a cold wet cloth against the neck which, because of the contrast in temperature, will break off.
At table it is traditional to pass the port decanter to the left, but this is only a matter of convenience. It is an old custom, and practical because each person fills his glass and then places the decanter next to his neighbour’s glass on the latter’s right. Port is not very popular in the hotter countries. It is a drink for the winter or for damp days, which is why it is still popular in Britain, though it is drunk to some extent in other countries of the Commonwealth, particularly Canada, as well as in Scandinavia and Switzerland. Perhaps surprisingly, France is the largest importer of port, which is drunk there as an aperitif In cooking, its use is virtually limited to English dishes -jugged hare, Cumberland sauce and a few sweet dishes. Port type wines are made in South Africa, Australia, California and elsewhere, with varying success, but as yet without great distinction.