spice.bkrev
Reviews
Andrew Jefford, Peat, Smoke and Spirit: A Portrait of Islay and its Whiskies (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2004), x + 406 pp., RRP £18.99.
The island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland is famous for its seven distilleries of malt whisky, Ardbeg, Bowmore, Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhain, and Caol Ila. I am familiar with the first four but not the other three, so in the course of reading the book I visited the local liquor shop to purchase them. No luck, so I bought bottles of Ardbeg and Laphroaig. My advice is don’t buy the book unless you are prepared to spend a similar amount on a bottle of single-malt whisky, because Jefford’s tasting notes are seductive to say the least.
Jefford is a multiple prize-winning author (eight Glenfiddich Awards and five Lanson Awards), whose book on French wine regions, New France, received praise from Robert Parker, Pierre-Antoine Rovani and James Halliday. Nonetheless, as a single-malt enthusiast, I wanted the book on Islay to succeed more than it did, and my overall impression is disappointing. He claims that the distillation of whisky on Islay probably began in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries as a result of contact with Ireland. However, the first definite reference to whisky in Ireland dates from 1406, in Scotland from 1494. The book contains a map of Islay, but the text mentions hundreds of lochs, rivers, mountains, villages, and other geographical sites that are not on the map. Another disappointment is the large amount of irrelevant material, such as an entire chapter on shipwrecks.
Peat, Smoke and Spirit has an interesting structure. The ‘Introduction’ brings the reader to Islay via an airplane flight from Glasgow. It contains such purple prose that I seriously wondered if I could bear to read the entire book. What follows is ‘A word or two on whisky,’ twenty-one pages of such dense technical detail that I looked forward to more purple prose. An indication of the technical detail is the twelve-page glossary, with about one-fourth of one page explaining the meaning of foreshots. Then come eight chapters on Islay’s geography, early and recent history, peat, weather, nature, shipwrecks and modern situation. In between each of these eight chapters is a ‘Glass,’ in effect a chapter, on one of the distilleries—a total of seven ‘Glasses’ in alphabetical order. The structure doesn’t really work; it results in repetition and confusion, and Jefford often mentions something briefly but then refers the reader to another section of the book for the complete account. The alphabetised ‘Glasses’ seem an indication that he could not get his head around a more sensible order.
The relatively small island of Islay produces 25% of Scotland’s malt whisky exports, some of it as ‘pure’ single-malt whisky, some of it blended with grain whisky to form ‘Scotch’ such as Cutty Sark, Johnny Walker and Ballantynes. The causes of Islay’s success are difficult to discern. The three ingredients in making malt whisky are barley, yeast and water, but the distillers themselves are indifferent to barley varieties and yeast strains, while one expert considers the effect of the water on the finished product to be one or two in a scale of one hundred. What makes a difference is peat, which is burned to add flavour to the malted barley, but most of the peat comes from one source, and most of the malted barley is shipped to the distilleries from Port Ellen. Yet the seven distilleries make distinctly different-tasting whiskies. To return to Jefford’s purple, some would say eloquent, prose, the ten-year old Ardbeg’s ‘soft, rounded notes of oily peat, of warm spice and of pale lemon fall gently through its aromas and flavours like sunbeams through high windows’ (p. 77). A sixteen-year old Lagavulin ‘opens sweetly and creamily, drawing you in disarmingly before bearing down with a swinging thurible of smoke and spice’ (p. 287). Laphroaig’s new make suggests ‘bluebells in cool spring woods or hyacinths in a moist conservatory’ (p. 336). The distilling process can make a difference, and the minimum of ten years spent in casks greatly affects the character of the whisky, but all the distilleries use second-hand oak casks, mainly from America. The distilleries are loath to reveal the secrets of their processes, for good reason, but in the final analysis some of the factors that create such an exceptional whisky are inexplicable—it’s a mystery.
The story of Islay and its whiskies is far from romantic. The nineteenth century was a period of depopulation from 15,000 to 5,000 inhabitants (3,457 in the latest census) as a result of forced clearances and famine, while during the twentieth two world wars and the Great Depression forced the distilleries to close. More recently the vagaries of international commerce have also resulted in some closures, frequent changes in ownership and the arrival of multinational corporations. Only one distillery, Bunnahabhain, obtains its water from a spring; the source of the others is peat bogs, and the leach-infested water is consequently brown from a high level of vegetable content and the occasional dead animal. The cause of the dead animal is often chronic tick affliction, which can result in bleeding to death or death from diseases carried by the ticks. We can be thankful that, as already noted, the effect of water on the finished product is one or two in a scale of one hundred.
Reviewed by A. Lynn Martin
Nita Tiffaha Jawary, The Perpetual Table Cuisine of Judeo-Babylon and Old Baghdad (A CD-Rom of Food Art Video Music. Stockists can be found at www.nita.com.au/perp.html)
I love food, cooking, cookbooks and books about food, and I frequently surf the net in search of inspiration or for a particular recipe and when conducting research. This, however, is my first digital cookbook! It is interactive; simply click on an entry in the Table of Contents and you will be taken to that point in the book. Alternatively the search facility may be used to locate a particular recipe or ingredient. There are short video clips, music and artwork interspersed throughout. The music is by Yair Dalal. The video clips are generally cooking demonstrations, often by Nita, and the majority of the illustrations are also by Nita.
The cooking styles of Iraq, once called Mesopotamia or The Land Between Two Rivers, can be divided into three different regions; Kurdish in the north, that of Basra in the south and the Baghdadi in the centre. The Perpetual Table is an insight into the cuisine of the Judeo-Babylonian community of Old Baghdad. This cuisine reflects the different cooking styles of the north and south as well as conforming to Judaic food laws. From the north came Turkish cooking practices and the use of sweet spices. The south was influenced by both Persia and India with the custom of using dried fruits to give a sweet and sour flavour to dishes coming from Persia and hot chilli dishes coming from India.
From clove necklace to Caulfield, this book tells the story of dishes, aromatic and sweet, taken from the ancient kitchens of Baghdad to downtown Melbourne where they are cooked today.
The Perpetual Table is a digital book of recipes, stories, cultural background and music of Judeo-Babylon and Old Baghdad pre-1951. It records a way of life preserved by a Jewish people who have lived in what we now know as Iraq for over 2000 years. The title, The Perpetual Table, comes from the Arabic expression, Sifra Daima! May your table last forever! (p. 7)
Nita is passionate about her cuisine and her recipes and heritage as are her assistants, the Synagogue Sirens. The women of the Sassoon Yehudah Synagogue regularly cook Judeo-Babylonian cuisine at home and for the synagogue.
The initial chapters focus on the history and background of this cuisine and the storytelling is descriptive and colourful. The first recipe chapter is on rice, the staple and favourite part of a meal in Iraq. The chapter contains detailed instructions for the preparation of numerous rice dishes from the simple plau with its many variations to Plau Miluk or King Rice, which consists of poached chicken surrounded by fragrant rice, liberally scattered with toasted almonds and fried sultanas, all shiny and fat. This dish shows how simple ingredients can be transformed into an aromatic centrepiece.
Following rice is a chapter on baking which was traditionally a Thursday task, with pastries and bread baked for the entire week. This is a glorious chapter conjuring up many images of baking bread and pastries, sweet and savoury. Other chapters cover recipes for pickles, salad, meats (including many for offal) and a chapter for vegetarians. Spices such as cumin, sweet paprika, cardamom, turmeric, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, sumac and saffron are frequently used.
I had a few problems with the recipes themselves. The recipes do not state the number of servings. The recipe for Kichri, rice with lentils,requires a half a cup of rice, yet the recipe for Sambusak B’jibin, baked pastry boats, calls for 4 cups of self-raising flour. Recipe layout is inconsistent and serving suggestions are often omitted. For the newcomer to this cuisine these are essential.
I enjoyed reading, looking and listening my way through The Perpetual Table. Will I return to the CD-ROM regularly? Only time will tell. To me a cookbook is there to be ‘consumed’ wherever I choose, on the tram, on the beach, in the garden and THEN taken into the kitchen to cook whatever takes my fancy. To enjoy this book and all of its parts I need to be at the computer, not in the kitchen. I can print off the pages, but in doing so I lose the images, the music and video, all of which are so much a part of the ‘book.’ This brings about another question, where do I put the pages I have printed and how will I find them again? Perhaps I need an Internet Refrigerator, but at $16,999 it will be a long wait!
Reviewed by Dani Signorini, graduate of the Masters of Arts in Gastronomy (2005), University of Adelaide.
Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 409 pp., RRP $A32.95.
Here is a brilliant historical account written with a decidedly contemporary and literary flair. It is a study full of erudite and textured observation and packed with delightful citations from relatively obscure (often ancient or medieval) texts.
While in keeping with its subject, Spice remains at all times a rollicking good yarn. Jack Turner deftly blends scholarship and story telling to produce a tempting analysis of the motives and meanings behind the special place accorded ‘spice’ (particularly pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves) in western history. Turner weaves this complex history using tales of high adventure, exotic lands, brutality, betrayal, stupidity, courageousness and tragedy; with accounts of kings and conquerors, global circumnavigators, pirates, and ordinary people. Fact becomes indistinct from fiction in this story of human emotion, imagination and desire, one rooted in the often ruthless economics of commodity supply and demand.
For centuries, Europeans fed on ‘spicy’ stories (the metaphor is always suggestive of adventure), captivating hearts and minds. Some would inevitably put their lives at risk to go in search of spice.
In Turner’s rendering the characters become individuals, with emotions and desires foregrounded,
Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation
even though they might be as illustrious as Columbus. Personal passion figures from the beginning in this instance,as Turner looks behind the scenes of the discovery of the New World to suggest how spice hunters (like Columbus) were perfectly willing to fabricate the truth and perhaps to believe it, so great was their individual desire for success. The skilful humanisation of the monumental mythology that is ‘Columbus’ is retold by Turner as a story of a venture capitalist on his way to discover a spice route to the East (India) by travelling west. Turner stresses how the double misnomer ‘Indian pepper,’ ascribed by the great explorer to the central-American chili plant, illustrates that history can often stand for reality, simply as the result of the desires or machinations of an individual.
Even at the end of the eighteenth century a spice such as cloves (at that time only obtained from a tiny island of the Moluccas in Indonesia) could still drive men like the Frenchman Pierre Poivre (true!) to risk life and limb (he had as a result of earlier escapades lost an arm!) in acquiring it. In successfully stealing the spice and the plant that produced it from the Dutch, Poivre was seemingly unmoved by fear of the brutal Dutch monopoly in the Moluccas. Money, glory, power and passion only added to the attractiveness of those aromatic fruits, flowers, barks and roots we call spice.
It’s no wonder then that the term spice metaphorically refers to a certain degree of intensity, whether emotional, sensual or, for that matter, intellectual. The story of spice has simultaneously been one of human suffering and pleasure and thereby a catalyst for a diverse cultural production, from political power plays and intrigues to medical (humoral) lore, from religious edicts to romantic illusions and everyday distractions. This is the very character of the story of spice.
Turner contains the potentially explosive narrative character of this complex history by anchoring it to the theme of temptation, itself a powerful cultural force. He argues that, to a considerable extent, the extraordinary nature of the global search for spice between 1500 and 1800 involved a longing that found expression in the display of class and privilege and in romantic and spiritual sentiment. Also important was a perennial desire for the exotic and of course for unique flavours, which established spice as a culinary currency in its own right.
A ‘history of spice’? More accurately, as Turner’s subtitle implies, this is a book that quite rightly addresses how history itself is only the product of specific cultural forces. The lust for spice was clearly one of these forces that has shaped geopolitical relations, cultural mores and the individual’s sense of self, all of which have shaped the modern world.
This is a book for historians of the everyday as much as those who prefer the big picture. Spice implies both. For the culinary historian the book contains ample descriptions of the foods, flavours and the cookery of the past, of the medical lore as well as of spiritual and religious beliefs regarding spices; all appear as intermixed, seemingly effortlessly, into the broad historical context of this enormously entertaining and at times even risqué read. Highly recommended.
Reviewed by Roger Haden
For those culinarily inspired by Turner’s evocative study of spice, perhaps the perfect companion volume would be the above, Ian Hemphill’s definitive, Spice Notes: A Cook’s Compendium of Herbs and Spices (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2002), 496 pp., RRP $40.00 pb; $50.00 hb. Happy cooking!
Nichola Fletcher, Charlemage’s Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Eating. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 256 pp., RRP A$49.95.
A somewhat quirky slice of food history, which takes as its subject feasting in all its guises, Charlemagne’s Tablecloth is written by an avid cook/historian who posits ‘the feast’ as an archetypal social institution. Whereas, Roy Strong’s impressive, Feast: A History of Grand Dining (2002), is an account of ‘grand eating’ written with an eye for both aesthetics and social history, by comparison Fletcher’s perspective on the topic of feasts lacks the theoretical ‘connective tissue’ of Strong’s narrative. Also unlike Strong’s book, Fletcher’s account doesn’t follow a strict historical chronology or reveal an extensive knowledge of literature and the fine arts on the part of the author.
But Fletcher’s background as a cook does steep the book’s twenty-nine absorbing chapters with an enthusiasm that erudition alone cannot necessarily produce. Each chapter explores different —often famous—feasts of history, while also providing some varying definitions of ‘the feast’ along the way. The menu as a result varies from the table of the semi-mythical Midas to the lugubrious, infamous ‘funereal’ feast of prototypical modern writer on gastronomy, Grimod de la Reynière; from Carnival feasts to the Japanese tea ceremony; from Hogmanay to, as Fletcher puts it, ‘men behaving badly’ in the men’s clubs of nineteenth-century Britain.
Celebratory feasts don’t always attract the most expensive or glamorous of victuals, Fletcher relates. She describes with skill cannibalism and beggar’s banquets, Lenten fasting and the Mexican ‘feasts of the dead.’ The format never allows for boredom, and the book makes for great bedtime reading.
Rather light on overt historical interpretation, it thus makes up for this with an imaginative choice of subject matter. I liked in particular the chapter on venison, in part for not previously having known the extent to which deer (both stags and does) were objects of love, honour and myth as well as consumption during medieval and early modern times. Imagining Elizabeth I, for example, potting a number of deer for sport, fully aware of the cultural cachet conferred by such an act, remains as a summary vignette of how powerful a symbol and how valued a food venison once was. This particular chapter (12) also ends with a description of the author’s own venison feast, recreated to do justice to the medieval spirit in which they were originally created.
To be particularly commended is the well-judged inclusion of accounts of Fletcher’s own feasts, which somehow breathe life into the historical details of eating and drinking presented elsewhere in the book. Unlike other authors, Fletcher’s culinary knowledge permits her to capture the essence of her own feasts in her writing. And Charlemagne’s tablecloth? Fletcher describes that odd accoutrement on the first page. Entertaining, informative and enjoyable. Recommended.
Reviewed by Roger Haden
Nichola Fletcher, Charlemage’s Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Eating
Harold McGee, McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science History and Culture. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004). 884 pp., RRP $A70.00.
This is a completely revised, updated (and retitled) edition of McGee’s much lauded 1984 classic, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, with 300-odd extra pages of Mcgee’s lucid blend of scientific fact, culinary lore, and cultural analysis of foodways and history. A unique and marvellous resource for cooks who like science, for scientists who like to cook, and for the rest of us who enjoy knowing about the chemistry of cooking, the origins and history of food stuffs, and the technology of food “processing” —in the widest possible sense.
Reviewed by Roger Haden
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