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What Caesar Did for My Salad by Albert Jack
Food glorious food ... we can’t hear enough about it.
Whether it’s recipes, diets, classic dishes or the best eating house in town, we all dine out on our favourite food stories.
So what better than a mouth-watering history of the provenance of our everyday grub, from a simple sandwich and egg muffin to the infinitely more sophisticated French foie gras and a Swedish smorgasbord?
Albert Jack proves to be the perfect maitre d’ as he guides us along a veritable banqueting table of delicious facts and hilarious anecdotes.
And with his sharp eye for the strange and downright ridiculous, Jack rustles up some tasty titbits...
Welsh rabbit (no, it’s not rarebit apparently) derives its name from a bit of old-style Welsh bashing. When it was first devised in the 18th century, the new dish of melted cheese on toast was jokingly called Welsh rabbit to imply that a Welshman was too poor to have meat.
Tomato ketchup also has a colourful history dating back centuries to a Chinese sauce known as ke-tsiap which, appropriately through Chinese whisper fashion, has evolved into ketchup.
The Americans took the tomato variety to their hearts in the early 19th century and when the German settler Henry Heinz added it to his American production line in 1872, the company recipe became and still is the market leader.
Meanwhile, the fleshy nodule at the end of a dressed turkey was nicknamed ‘the parson’s nose’ way back in the Middle Ages when some wag noticed that it looked like a parson with ‘his nose in the air.’
And the British love affair with fish and chips emanates from the old Church rule forbidding the eating of meat on Fridays. Fortunately, the ban did not extend to fish and when the craze for potato ‘chips’ swept through Lancashire mill towns in the late 18th century, it was a food marriage made in heaven.
Interestingly it was Charles Dickens who was the first to call the snack ‘chips’ in print – in a Tale of Two Cities he refers to ‘husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.’
Lancashire, of course, has cooked up plenty of interesting recipes over the centuries, none more so than ‘rag pudding,’ a meat and onion dish wrapped in suet pastry and boiled in scraps of cloth from the local cotton mills.
What Caesar Did for My Salad is a beautifully frothy and fanciful concoction to be served up in small portions when you are hungry for some light entertainment.
(Particular Books, hardback, £12.99)
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Friday 25 May 2012
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