by Tom Stobart
A point to notice is that when lemon juice is added, tahina first goes to a sticky, crumbly paste, but if you continue to stir in drops of lemon juice (or water if it gets too sour), it gradually turns to a beautifully smooth cream. Tahina is something with which to experiment. It keeps almost indefinitely in a glass jar in the refrigerator.
Homous bi tahina
Soak and cook chick peas or used canned ones. Put the juice of a lemon into the blender, and a little water if necessary to cover the blades, and add 2 tablespoons of tahina, a little at a time. Now add 1-2 cloves of chopped garlic, and blend. Finally add some 5-6 tablespoons of chick peas and some salt. Blend again and adjust the taste by adding more tahina, garlic, salt or lemon. When the homous is to your liking, pour it into a serving bowl and sprinkle it with a little chopped parsley or decorate with a sprig of mint Dribble good olive oil on top in a circle for an authentic decoration. Authentic, too, would be to dip in bits of pitta bread, but snippets of any bread will do.
TALLOW. See fats.
TAMALE FLOUR. See masa.
TAMARI. See soya bean.
TAMARIND or Indian date. The beautiful tamarind tree (Tamarindus indica) is probably a native of tropical East Africa, but it has been cultivated in India since time immemorial and today is grown throughout the world in suitably warm climates, even to some extent in the Mediterranean countries. It is the pulp around the seeds that is used. It has a fruity sour taste, as it contains a lot of tartaric acid, and can be made into refreshing drinks. Tamarind sold in shops is a brown sticky mass of pods, containing fibre and a number of seeds. It is an excellent souring agent and is much used in Indian cooking.
To prepare it, pour a small amount of boiling water on a knob of tamarind, wait for it to cool, then rub and squash it with the fingers until a purée is formed. Fibre and seed can now be sieved out .Tamarind purée is mildly laxative. Sometimes recipes say that it can be replaced by lemon juice, but the result is never quite the same. Sweetened tamarind syrup can also be bought and is used as a basic for fruit drinks.
Tamarind Sauce
Soak 450 g (1 lb) tamarind in enough vinegar to cover it. When it is soft, rub it to a purée with the fingers. Pass the purée through a sieve and throw away the seeds and fibre. Now scrape 100 g (4 oz) fresh ginger and cut it into small pieces. Peel the same weight of garlic and clean the same weight of hot red chillies. Put all in the liquidizer (adding more vinegar to cover if necessary) and churn to a pulp. Add 100 g (4 oz) kitchen salt and 225 g (½ lb) sugar. Boil the mixture. To balance the sweet-sour-salt relationship, add more sugar or more vinegar. (Usually about ½ It or 1 pt of vinegar in all is required but the quantity depends on the sourness of the tamarind.) The sauce can be bottled and is used in the same way as a chutney or wherever a hot, pungent sauce is needed with meat or vegetable dishes.
[Tamarind – French: tamarin German: Tamarinde Italian: tamarindo Spanish: tamarindo]
TANDOOR. See baking.
TANGERINE, TANGELO, and TANGOR. See orange.
TANNIA. See yam (yautia).
TANNIN. The tannins, which include tannic acid, are strongly astringent substances that occur in many plants. Their original use was in tanning leather, as they have the ability to coagulate and toughen proteins, especially those in skin. Similar effects can be produced in our insides if we consume many bitter acorns, horse chestnuts or oak leaves or even drink too much old, stewed tea. ‘Tea drinker’s dyspepsia’ is not unknown in Britain among habitual drinkers of strong tea. Milk helps to counteract the tannins by reacting with some of them before they hit the stomach. In cooking, substances which contain tannin may be used in pickling (e.g. in dill pickles) to help firm up the vegetables – oak leaves are commonly used for this in Poland. Soaking salted fish in tea rather than water to remove the salt – a method that is sometimes used in France – perhaps has a firming action. Tannin is also mentioned in wine literature, because it occurs in the skins, pips and stalks of grapes (and also comes from oak casks); it is an important element in red wines, particularly in clarification. Young wines with prospects are rough with tannin, but with maturation the tannin gets less and is involved in the formation of crust inside the bottles.
[Tannin – French: tanin, tannin German: Gerbsäure Italian: tannino Spanish: tanino]
TANSY (Chrysanthemum vulgare) is a herb of the composite family, a common wayside plant over almost all of Europe. lt has button-like yellow flowers and was once an important medicinal herb, perhaps because of the belief that what tastes nasty must do you good. Nevertheless, tansy is much referred to as a flavouring in 16th and 17th century recipes. Today few people will bother with it, and most dislike it.
[Tansy – French: tanaisie, barbotine German: Rainfarn, Wurmkraut Italian: tanaceto Spanish: tanaceto]
TAPIOCA is a starchy food made by peeling and grating *cassava root, expressing the juice, and soaking the residue in water. The pulp is then kneaded to release the starch grains, strained to remove the fibre, and dried to a paste. Finally the paste is heated on an iron plate until it forms into the typical balls, flakes or pearls of tapioca. It may also be ground into a flour. Tapioca has an international reputation for digestibility and so, as one Spanish book says, ‘es aconsejable para los niños’. Children do not always find it so advisable, and many adults will remember tapioca pudding with horror (although two of this book’s editors loved it). It can be used in soups in the same way as pasta or pearl barley. A classic Brazilian pudding is made in the same way as English tapioca pudding but with red wine or grape juice substituted for milk. The result is served cold with a vanilla-flavoured cream.
[Tapioca – French: tapioca German: Tapioka Italian: tapioca Spanish: tapioca]
TARAMA. Dried and cured female roes of grey mullet, pressed and sold from the barrel in Greece. Virtually the same as *botargo. As Elizabeth David said as far back as 1950 in her Mediterranean Food ( Penguin), the taste is not unlike that of English smoked cod’s roe. ln fact in Greece, where taramasalata is a popular part of the meze, cod’s roe, imported in barrels, is commonly used as a substitute for the roe of mullet.
Taramasalata
Put tarama in water and soak it for 5 minutes or so, as necessary, to remove part of the salt. Squeeze to remove some of the water. Pound the roe in a mortar, adding olive oil and lemon juice alternately, as if making mayonnaise, and tasting as you go. Finally mix in a little finely chopped onion and a little chopped dill. Serve with good bread, toast, brown bread or pitta, spread or as a dip.
TARO. See yam (dasheen).
TARTAR. See argol.
TARRAGON is one of the great culinary herbs. It is a perennial with narrow leaves and a very distinctive smell when crushed. There are two kinds, French tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus),which is the finest but rarely if ever sets seeds, and Russian tarragon (A dracunculoides), which can be grown from seed but has a rather different flavour. Unless you know the smell, it is very difficult to tell the difference, but if the plant sets viable seed, it will be the Russian. The safest way to start your own tarragon is to find someone with a good, fine-tasting plant and to steal a cutting. Once established, tarragon seems to stand any amount of butchery and goes on for ever, although it is choosy about where it likes to grow and needs good drainage, sun and shelter. It has a strong but subtle flavour, quite unlike any other herb, and is particularly famous for its use with chicken, although it can be used in many other ways – in butters, sauces and salads, and with eggs and fish. It is essential in many French dishes and also, of course, as the flavouring herb for tarragon vinegar (which is labelled à l’estragon) – you can make this for yourself simply by picking tarragon just before it flowers and pushing the sprigs into a bottle, which is then filled with white wine vinegar, stoppered and left for two months before use.
[Tarragon – French: estragon German: Estragon Italian: targone Spanish: estragón]
TARTARIC ACID is an organic acid common in plants, especially in sour fruits, such as tamarind. It is the main source o
f acidity in wine, in which 0.2-0.6% is present. The acid can be made by treating *argol with sulphuric acid and is available as a white crystalline substance from chemists. It is very sour much sourer, weight for weight, than *cream of tartar. It can be used in home-made soft drinks and makes a passable substitute for lemon juice.
[Tartaric acid – French: acide tartrique German: Weinsteinsäure Italian: acido tartarico Spanish: ácido tartárico]
TASTE POWDER. See monosodium glutamate.
TEA. The word probably comes from tay in the Cantonese Amoy dialect, and that is how it was pronounced by our ancestors. Tea is native to southwest China (and Assam), and has been drunk by the Chinese for many centuries, but was not really known in Europe until after Dutch ships brought some back in 1610.The first authenticated British reference is by a Mr Wickman of the East India Company agency in Firando, Japan, in 1615. It was not until the 1640s that tea began to come into Britain and France in any noticeable amount. During the years of Cromwell’s power, there were great advances in the use of tea, at first mainly as a medicinal brew. In 1660, Samuel Pepys recorded tasting his first sup. By the time that Charles II returned from exile two years later, tea had become a meal. Fine cups and saucers, bowls, teapots, spoons, trays and caddies for keeping the precious tea were soon introduced, and the presiding host or hostess brewed and poured the tea – an echo of the Japanese tea ceremony, perhaps. The social history of tea had begun. Colonists in America had begun to drink tea, too, and the British government’s refusal to remove the hated tax on it, along with the grant of a monopoly to the British East India Company for supplying tea to the colonies, led to the colonists burning tea-laden vessels in Annapolis, Maryland and tipping tea cargoes into Boston Harbour in the famous Boston Tea Party in late 1773.
During the 18th century the imports of tea to Britain had increased over 45-fold, but it was still highly taxed and thus expensive. At the end of the century, Sir Joseph Banks suggested growing tea in India and even visited China to collect seed, so that some 50 years later, when Major Robert Bruce found tea growing wild in Assam, there were also tea plants from China in the botanical gardens in Calcutta. With the spread of plantations in India, tea gradually became the drink not only of every Briton, but indeed of every Indian. Tea is best when fresh, and in the reign of Queen Victoria it came by fast sailing ships. In the great race from Foochow to London in 1866, the tea clippers took only 99 days to complete the 16,000 mile voyage, and the first two arrived within 10 minutes of each other. By 1880, Britain was importing 160,000,000 lb of tea a year, most of it from India, which is still the largest producer of tea in the world. The British still drink some five times as much tea as coffee, unlike the Americans, who drink twenty-five times as much coffee as tea.
At first, tea was never drunk with milk It was China tea, of course, to which the Dutch ladies added sugar and even the leaves of peaches and plums to give it a bitter almond kick. Tea taken to the accompaniment of cakes and sandwiches (an idea that hardly originated in China) is said to have been the invention of Anna, Duchess of Bedford, at a house party in 1840.In the North of England, high tea is a substantial meal eaten at around 5.30-6 p.m., when the breadwinners return home from work It consists of meat or fish as well as bread, pies and cake, all washed down with tea. Until recently, there was some social distinction according to whether tea was a proper meal or just a way of tiding over until dinner, the main evening meal.
Tea is much drunk in Russia and Iran (where the samovars keep the water, not the tea, hot). In Syria you may get a cup of cardamom flavoured coffee from the police at some remote border (if you are not there under arrest), but, in Iran, it will be a glass of hot, sweet, milkless tea. In India, except in the south, where the preference tends to be for coffee, tea will be thick with milk and sugar, and sometimes strongly flavoured with mint as well. It is made by boiling milk, sugar and sugar and water with tea for 2-3 minutes, and then straining it.
Tea is the leaf of a tree, Camellia sinensis. Left alone, it will grow 7.5 m (25 ft) high, but it is pruned to form a low bush for ease of gathering. The leaves look something like bay leaves, and the flowers are beautiful, white and sweet smelling. Because the plant likes heavy rainfall, the typical tea garden is as often as not seen as terraces of neat bushes on mist shrouded hills. Most beautiful are the tea gardens in Ceylon, with waterfalls, swirling clouds, and orchids in the trees. Most dramatic, though, are the gardens in northern Iran which you come on when you cross the Elburz Mountains, leaving the desert and, within the space of a few miles, plunging into dense rain forest along the Caspian Sea.
The flavour and quality of tea depends on the variety and on the soil and climate where it is grown. Fresh tea leaves are mildly astringent and stimulating to chew. They are processed in three ways. For green tea, the fresh leaves are dried immediately after picking to inactivate enzymes and prevent oxidation. For Oolong tea, the leaves are half-fermented, producing tea a stage between green and black For black tea, the leaves are wilted, bruised by rolling and allowed to ferment in contact with air, so that they are oxidized (like a browning apple) before they are dried. For all types, The leaves of all types are still picked by hand, usually every 7-10 days, in part because the grade of tea depends on the size of leaf – it is the labour-intensive nature of the crop that prevented tea being grown on any scale in the US.
For ordinary black tea, the plucked leaves are taken to the factory and spread on racks at a temperature of 25-30°C (77-86°F) to wilt. By gentle drying, the moisture content is reduced somewhat, and the leaves become flexible. At this stage, they are rolled in machines that break up the cells (this was once done by hand) and expose the juices to the air. The rolled leaves are once more spread on trays and allowed to ferment. As the juices are oxidized, the leaves turn red-brown, after which hot air is blown through the trays until the rolled leaves are dry and the enzymes have been killed. In the case of smoky China teas, such as Lapsang Souchong, the rolled leaves are dried over a wood fire to give the characteristic tarry taste.
Teas are named after their type and leaf size, and the place of origin. Some teas are flavoured with flowers or with essential oils, and many are blended, a practice that began at the tea table when hostesses, realizing that mixtures were often better than single teas, made their own combinations. Today, this is done by expert blenders who have access to a huge range of teas. Blending allows the deficiencies of particular teas to be balanced out. Teas may also need to be matched to the water used to brew them. Price is another factor in blending – a mixture of the best teas with cheaper ones will offer some of the fine flavour without being too costly. Tea caddies of the early 18th century had compartments for six or eight different teas to be blended at home, but by 1800 the blending was beginning to be done at the grocers, often to formulae provided by their clients. Earl Grey tea is probably the earliest of such blends that is still available in the shops.
Hard water makes poor tea, and if naturally soft water or rain water is not available, distilled water might be used. Water from a softener is often better than hard water, but not ideal. Tea is best made by putting the leaves into a hot teapot of suitable size at the rate of 1 heaped teaspoon per person, with an extra one for the pot. The water must be fresh and have only recently come to the boil, and the pot must be taken to the kettle – not the kettle to the pot. Pour the boiling water over the leaves and let it brew for 3-5 minutes, according to the type of tea, stirring it after 2 minutes to open the leaves. If tea is to be kept hot for long, reheated or used cold, it should be strained off the leaves after 5 minutes so that excess tannin is not infused.
A cup of tea contains something under 1 grain of caffeine and 2 grains of tannin. Several cups are stimulating, yet not harmful, but ‘stewed tea’ may contain enough tannin to tan the stomach lining, and people swigging cuppas from dawn to dusk may suffer from tea-drinker’s dyspepsia, especially if they eat quantities of cakes and biscuits as well. (China tea is unlikely to cause such problems, as it is take
n weak without milk, and not very hot.)
Assam. The extreme north-eastern corner of India, stretching between Darjeeling and Kohima, is an area with some of the highest rainfall in the world. Assam teas are usually full-bodied and provide the strength in many blends. For quantity, this is the most important tea area in the world.
Black teas are fully fermented teas that are used in all the standard English blends. Most of the teas from India, Ceylon and Africa are black, and there are also black teas from China.
Brick. Coarse leaves, stalk and dust, steamed and pressed into bricks: Rich paste is often added to hold the leaves together. Exported from China to Russia and also used in Tibet, it is easily transported and is the type that is brewed up with yak butter and salt. At one time tea bricks were used as a form of currency.
Broken grades, such as broken Orange Pekoe, are generally of good quality Better grades contain tip. Flowery broken Orange Pekoe is fine quality tea with tip and is much sought after by connoisseurs.
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) started to produce tea in 1868 and gave its name to teas of a totally different type from the original China teas. The tea grown at 1800 m (6000 ft) or above is of great quality, with teas being less good. Political and economic upheavals in Sri Lanka meant for a time that the quality of the tea was not of its previous high standards, but the quality is now returning. The teas from Indonesia are very similar in character. Many of the planters in Sri Lanka (mostly Scottish by birth), who were forced out for political reasons, moved to Africa, where there is a thriving and expanding tea industry that produces excellent quality teas.