Aglaia Kremezi kindly sent a link to her own explorations of pasticcio, which she describes as “our version of Macaroni and Cheese, a comforting filling dish that mothers bake for their kids even when they are grownups …”
A brief survey of the food of Corfu Sofrito is not what you think it is
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The island of Corfu was part of the Venetian republic for hundreds of years. So when I went there on holiday I expected to see some Italian influences, and there were plenty; Venetian lions, eroded by time; elegant buildings; Italian restaurants everywhere; and dishes with Italian-sounding names, like sofrito and pastitsada. Also, a curiously neon version of limoncello, made in this case from kumquats rather than lemons. I was fortunate to have an introduction to Cali Doxiadis, an expert cook who has made her home on Corfu, and over an excellent lunch on her terrace I plied her with questions.
Cali wasn’t too keen on kumquat liqueur or its history. You’ll find all sorts of tangled accounts of how kumquats got to Corfu. Many of them mention Sidney Merlin, a Greek-born British marksman and amateur botanist, and most of the stories say he introduced kumquats to the family’s estate in northern Corfu in 1860, which would have been quite a feat as Merlin would have been only four years old. One even gives the date of introduction as 1846, ten years before Merlin’s birth, which was actually the year that plant hunter Robert Fortune brought them from China to Europe. As best as I can tell, Merlin’s kumquat’s arrived in 1924, a few years after he had successfully introduced Washington navel oranges. Wikipedia tells me that “to this day,” the Washington navel “is known in Greece as ‘Merlin’,” a fact I did not know at the time and so could not confirm with Cali or anyone else. Who knows, maybe it was introduced twice, once by Merlin and once, much earlier, by an unknown British colonial officer.
Notes
- Huge thanks to Aglaia Kremezi for intrdoucing me to Cali Doxiadis and of course to Cali for her hospitality and patience.
- The old town of Corfu really is a delight, and a World Heritage Site to boot.
- Pastissada de caval can still be found in the Veneto. And here’s a once-over-lightly guide to Corfiote foods.
- I snatched a bit of music from John Skolarikis.
- Banner photo by Lucy Clink. Those two little blobs are me and Cali talking. Cover photo borrowed from Mavromatis, purveyors of kumquat products.
Eat This Newsletter 056
29 May 2017
- Wendell Berry takes the coastal elites to task, with style and grace.
- I like what the American Anthropological Association had to say on the matter: “Maybe the colonial narrative is as guilty of reductionism as the nostalgia narrative – but at least it moves the conversation away from a weakness of rural character to the demonstrable effects of economic policies and practices.”
- Then there’s the whole question of who is actually doing the work in agriculture. Longreads has an extract from a new book that gives a voice to migrant workers in California.
- From Berkeley, mind, a little bit of history on innovations in food processing. “Today, there are more than 400 types of mixed salads.” And that was just the start of it.
- Do people perceive those bagged salads as “healthy”? Probably not, according to one graphic Marion Nestle lifted from the 12th annual Food and Health Survey produced by the International Food Information Council. She also reminds us that the IFIC is “industry-funded” and that “the data come from an online survey taking 22 minutes to complete”.
- A Feast for the Eyes is celebrated in The British Journal of Photography. You may never look at food photographs in the same way again. Well, you probably will, but you may also think a bit more about them.
Let me take a brief moment here to moan again about how hard it is to find interesting food news that originates outside the USA. Help me out, if you can.
Eat This Newsletter 055
15 May 2017
- You’ve seen the photographs of “Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful” now learn how they came about.
- Sharanya Deepak takes us Inside the Birthplace of Indian-Chinese Cuisine.
- If you eat cheap chicken, you do not want to read Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant in The New Yorker.
- The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser was one of the first books to really open my eyes to the meanings of food and eating. Now it has been reissued.
- Civil Eats writes about Seed Rebels. In the past, I’ve interviewed many of the principles: Carol Deppe, Jack Kloppenburg of the Open Source Seeds Initiative and Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network.
Citrus breeding is bananas
My compadre Luigi I have been going back and forth on a recent research paper that delved deep into the breeding history of lemons and limes. It is utterly mind-boggling stuff, which neither of us feels able to understand, let alone summarise in any meaningful way. Luigi shared this picture from the paper:
I’ll just fondly remember my conversation with Helena Attlee, who explained that citrus are just really promiscuous.