Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 026

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14 March 2016

Crackers no more

  1. BMI – body mass index – is nice and simple, and simply misleading. Fivethirtyeight offers a great overview.
  2. Some UK dairy farmers are seeing the merits of micro-dairies.
  3. While some drinkers question the need for – and, indeed, the meaning of – the label “natural wine”.
  4. “A salame is a salume, but a salume is not necessarily a salame.” Confused? You need Salumi 101.
  5. Rachel Laudan turns adversity into a thoughtful, thought-provoking and, perish the thought, potentially useful article on soft food.
Extra Matter

All about that Indonesian cracker

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Water buffalo skin dryingIf you listened to my most recent podcast you have heard me declare Indonesia the global leader in foods that crunch. I was particularly struck by a large square of tasty nothingness, an airy pillow about 10 cm square and 2 cm thick that was somehow vaguely familiar and yet utterly strange. I even guessed that it might have been made somehow from the starchy water left after washing rice.

Today I learned the truth, and I could not have been more wrong. The cracker in question is the bovine equivalent of porky scratchings, and as someone who, in his youth, had consumed a scratching or two, knowing that explains the vague familiarity.

Today I met Ibu Tima and her son Nico, who make smaller versions – 2 cm cubes – of these things 1 for a living. The process starts with the skin of a water buffalo, bought from the local butcher. That gets cut up into pieces and boiled (exact details are a little hazy) and then the hair and outer layer of skin are scraped off. The pieces are then boiled again before being cut into cubes of about 1/3 cm and placed out on a mesh frame under the sun. Tima or Nico stir them about every now and again, and after two days the skin cubes resemble light yellow amber.

Transformation into crackers starts with soaking the cubes in warm oil. They’re not really frying at this stage, just being warmed up a bit, although they do expand a bit too. Then comes the drama of chucking the warm cubes into really hot oil, where they hiss and spit and bubble and expand like that crazy foam insulation you squirt into big gaps around windows.

And that’s it, after a minute or two draining: cubes of tasty, crunchy nothingness.

I was suitably amazed, and of course I had to share my learnings. ‘Cos that’s what we do when we’re on mission.

  1. These things being, apparently, krupuk kulit. I should have known Wikipedia would know, but of course I had no clue what to look for. I might have guessed too, that Indonesian scientists have confronted the contaminating possibility of pork scratchings. ↩

Podcasts

Crackers about Indonesian food Impromptu ramblings to excuse my failure to deliver

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:31 — 11.2MB)

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crackersI’m on what the real professionals call a mission, or, failing that, duty travel. And once again I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. So, rather than admit defeat and just leave well enough alone, I decide to record a little reflection on the food of Indonesia, at least, the food I’ve eaten so far, halfway into the trip.

I forgot to mention durian. I guess that tells you all you need to know about how little of an impression it made. Yes, it smells. Yes, the taste and texture are odd. It wasn’t that bad, but I certainly won’t be packing one in coffee grounds and triple-wrapping it to bring it back with me, as one colleague advised.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 025

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29 February 2016

Happy leap day

  1. I’m in a town I’ve never been to before. Where should I eat? Not any place that rates highly on Yelp, and here’s why.
  2. In case you missed it, that story about “fake” Parmesan containing wood-pulp. You get what you pay for, although that’s not to say you couldn’t make a perfectly acceptable, wood-free Parmesan-style hard cheese outside Emilio-Reggiano.
  3. Just as you can probably make an perfectly acceptable, Giera-grape based sparkling wine that isn’t officially Prosecco. In New Zealand, for instance.
  4. All about emulsifiers, bedrock of so many prepared foods. Possibly more than you want or need to know, but a good companion to …
  5. … Nostalgia at the stove, Cynthia Bertelsen’s critique of modern food writing.
Podcasts

Chewing the fat about chewing the fat Nonagenarians illuminate the recent past of Italian food

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:21 — 14.2MB)

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book cover 2 Karima Moyer-Nocchi is an American woman who teaches at the University of Siena. When she had been here almost 25 years she developed something of an obsession. On the one hand, she watched “a bewildering decline in the quality and craftsmanship of Italian food together with a skyrocketing deification of it”. On the other, “in a vicious circle, the decline stimulated the explosion of the gastronomic nostaliga industry, which in turn, hastened the very process it claimed to quell”.

This is not something you would notice. The modern idea is that Italian cuisine has always been more-or-less what it is, and that if there were a difference between social classes, it was more about how often they ate certain dishes, or the quality of the ingredients, than about what they actually ate. As Karima Moyer-Nocchi discovered, that rose-tinted view is at odds with what actually went on.

In an attempt to make sense of the changes, Moyer-Nocchi turned to women, now aged 90 and more, who had grown up under fascism and who, perhaps, could shed light on the recent history of Italian food. She gently coaxed their memories of food from them, and created a book that is part oral history, part academic history, and that puts the current mania for Italian cuisine in perspective. There’s no way we could cover it all in one interview, but I think you can get some idea of how things have changed, mostly for the better, and also how little one knows about the real history of food in Italy.

Notes

  1. The book is Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita, and in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that if you follow that link straight to Amazon and buy it, I get a teeny reward.
  2. The banner image, from a photograph by Henri Roger-Viollet (I think), shows Mussolini taking part in the first wheat threshing in Latina in 1932, a temporary victory in the Battle for Wheat. The podcast cover image is from a photograph by Mario Giacomelli.
  3. In another episode about food in Fascist Italy, I talked to Ruth Lo about the festa dell’uva

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