Podcasts

Good things from Nürnberg Getting to the heart of a Christmas essential

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uwe felch in front of his old brick ovens

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:52 — 16.8MB)

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lebkuchen turntableNürnberg, or Nuremberg if you want to avoid umlauts, means different things to different people. Indeed it means different things to a single person: me. There’s all the nasty stuff, and then there are the artists, the composers and, first and foremost – the cookies. Lots of things call themselves lebkuchen, but the ones from Nuremberg are the only ones with a protected geographical indication. They are one of the high spots of German festive baking, but one that I have never attempted myself.

coloured woodcut of nuremberg

For ages, I have wanted to know what makes Nuremberger lebkuchen so special, but the first time I visited the city it was springtime and all the traditional lebucken shops were, quite properly, closed. My second visit was last October, in the full flood of lebkuchen season, and I was incredibly lucky that the person I was going to see happened to know of someone he called “a lebkuchen superstar”.

Notes

  1. Uwe Felch has a website for his traditional Nürnberger lebkuchen but I don’t think he does mail order.
  2. If you really want to try making Nuremberger lebkuchen at home (I still haven’t) I did find one recipe online that looked authentic and manageable, although I wouldn’t bother with the glaze. No gilded lilies for me. Kim even has a recipe for the spice mixture, though whether it is the same as Uwe’s, only Uwe would know.
  3. Nürnberger Bratwürste also have an IGP and are also delicious. Maybe next time …
  4. Music by the St. Thomas Boys Choir, Leipzig.
  5. Cover and other photos by Joschi Kuphal. Banner photo by me. Coloured woodcut of Nuremberg, aptly, from the Nuremberg Chronicle.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 089 Be lucky

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A shrill and sensationalist article in Eater a couple of weeks ago took tech-bro bread bakers to task for taking over artisan bread. It’s had quite enough fanfare and spirited criticism already, so I’m not even going to bother linking. Instead, I’ve got …

  1. An unusual threat to an iconic breadstuff: The death of the Montreal bagel?. Note that question mark. It generally presages the answer “No”. To which, in this case, I’d maybe add, “not yet”.
  2. Speaking of bagels … 9 Inconvenient Truths About Jewish Food (That Nobody Wants To Talk About) has some choice conversation starters if you do want to talk.
  3. Biscuits in Britain and biscuits in America share one fundamental characteristic: they need low-protein flour. Which, apparently, bakers outside the American South can’t find for love or money.
  4. Those tech bros muscling in on hearth and home? They’re doing turkeys too, and doing it all wrong.
  5. Fish are in no better shape. Not for this New Zealander, nor in the European Union. (By the way, if that Economist article is not available to you, I apologise. It is becoming fiendishly difficult to know what I can share with ease and what will require you to do some jumping through hoops.)
  6. Which is why I jumped through the hoops for you on this one. I saved Wired magazine’s article on The Government’s Role in the Rise of Lab-Grown Meat to the Internet Archive, so it ought to be there for anyone to read, for a long time. Which reminds me, it is about time I made another donation to support the Internet Archive.
Podcasts

Is that a pickle … Let's not argue about definitions

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:47 — 19.1MB)

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To me, a pedant and a purist, a pickle by rights ought to have gone through a proper fermentation. It might have been pasteurised afterwards and bottled, but at some stage it needs to have supported microbial activity. And yet, I don’t think of kombucha as pickled tea or yoghurt as pickled milk. Maybe that’s because they aren’t salted. Just being boiled in vinegar or soaked in brine doesn’t qualify either, for me.

Luckily Jan Davison, author of Pickles: A Global History, has a much more open mind, which is great, because I learned a lot from her little book. And it gave us plenty to talk about.

However, there was plenty we didn’t talk about, or at least not in detail.

Sushi I had no idea about the history of sushi, so I went looking.
* From the bibliography in Jan’s book, I found Traditional Japanese Foods and the Mystery of Fermentation, which in turn led me to Food Culture, a journal published by Kikkoman. That will keep me occupied for years.
* Far less demanding, a little article on Fermented Sushi, the origin of Sushi.
* And if that gives you a taste for the real thing, Tokuyamazushi: Wild dining from lake and forest in Shiga in The Japan Times has the lowdown.

Refrigerator pickles Again, my ignorance knows no bounds. So while I have been perfectly happy slicing cucumbers and onions, sprinkling them with a bit of salt and leaving them in the fridge overnight, I’ve never thought of them as pickles. There are scores and scores of recipes for such things; I’ll leave finding them as an exercise.

Piccalilli Truly, I had forgotten the delight of mixing bright yellow picalilli into the mash that invariably accompanied English sausages in my youth. I like to think it was about taste as much as it was about colour, but I may be fooling myself. While I have never made my own, I am resolved to give it a go, using the recipe and instructions shared by my friend Katie Venner at Tracebridge in Somerset. They give lessons too, in fermentation and sourdough.

Notes

  1. If you haven’t already seen it, Samin Nosrat’s wonderful series on Netflix is a joy. Episode Two, on salt, has a fair bit on Japanese pickles.
  2. Photos by me, in Izmir, Turkey, and at home.

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Podcasts

What a bunch of turkeys Arrested on suspicion of cheerfulness

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I successfully ignored the Great American Blowout last year, and I have nothing new this year. But I was stung by being left out of a round-up of stuff to listen to before and after your turkey, so I am thawing out some old favourites here.

  • As an antipasto, in Talking turkey, Greg Laden explained how explorers heading west thought they were in the east and gave the bird its name.
  • The main course went further, with A partial history of the turkey, with Greg Laden again and Nancy Sorrells, a local historian in Rockingham County, Virgina. Why there? You’ll just have to listen.
  • Helping that to go down, Joe Smith explained in Another helping of turkey how the wild turkey is “the greatest conservation success story”.

But the real reason for this stealthy, under-the-radar post is to share again Calvin Trillin reading his own, perfect little story about the first thanksgiving, which previously I had hidden away on Patreon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:43 — 3.1MB)

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Cover photo by Huangavin – Own work, CC BY 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons.

Extra Matter

Not so plain vanilla

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Speaking of vanilla, … A very odd story caught my eye.

Bronze Age people in Israel were the first known vanilla users

Obvious clickbait, right. I mean, vanilla came originally from Mexico, as any fule kno. The photo, of highly ordinary vanilla pods in a very modern plastic basket confirmed my suspicions. The caption:

Although long considered a product that originated in ancient Mexico, vanilla — which is extracted from beans such as these — was used by Middle Easterners around 3,600 years ago, a new study finds.

Well dodgy, but not exactly wrong. Not exactly.

My first thought was that maybe the archaeologists had fooled themselves. After all, pure vanillin is a byproduct of the degeneration of lignin. Maybe a bit of decomposing wood contaminated the juglets in which the stuff was found. But no. The truth is even more interesting, and hidden deep in Science News’ account.

For a start, the juglets also contained traces of olive oil. And while plain vanilla usually signifies the species Vanilla planifolia, there are, in fact more than 100 different species around the world. Vanessa Linares, the archaeologist who identified the compounds, refers to “the vanilla orchid” in an abstract of her research. In fact, she compared the compounds she found with those produced by other species of Vanilla, and suggests that it could have come from one of three different species.

After a close study of vanilla orchid plants, three different species were identified as possible sources for vanilla exploitation in antiquity: V. polylepsis [sic] Summerh (central east Africa), V. albidia Blume (India), and V. abundiflora J.J. Sm. (southeast Asia).

I think, under the circumstances, I might have written “a vanilla orchid”.

Anyway, parsimony suggests (to me) it was V. polylepis from east Africa which, although apparently showy and widespread, was not described formally until 1951. If it did travel from east Africa to the Levant, that is impressive enough. Even more so is that the people who traded it 4000 years ago knew how to undertake the painstaking fermentation that is the secret to the odour and flavour of natural vanilla. The pods barely smell, and certainly not of vanilla.

So yes, not quite what Science News was trying to sell, but pretty interesting all the same. And a project for some enterprising breeder in east Africa: Domesticate your local vanilla.

Also at agro.biodiver.se.