Eat This Newsletter 138: Deceptive
Hello
Things aren’t always what they seem. Temporary offers, healthy appearances, artisanal breads, culinary history and edible class signifiers all come under scrutiny in this issue.
Enjoy!
A spicy bookshelf
The National Heritage of Spices offers five pieces of in-depth reading (and a listen) that explore spices in various ways. If you’re interested, though, I would advise visiting sooner rather than later, because I fear that it will soon require you to log in. That’s because it is the “featured content” of the Bloomsbury Food Library, and previous sets of featured content require a log in to see them.
The Bloomsbury Food Library is a new one on me. Put together by the publisher of that name, it describes itself as “a growing and vibrant digital resource. Home to the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content it reflects the interdisciplinary nature of this growing subject, making it an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food.”
I’d be delighted to hear of anyone who wants to contest that “widest-ranging collection” claim.
The aesthetic choice
Presentation is important, I understand that. All things being equal, a person is more likely to prefer a dish that looks good over one that doesn’t. More of a surprise is that the “prettiness” of the dish can also make a dish appear healthier.
That’s the conclusion of a study in the Journal of Marketing (which is behind a paywall, so I’m linking to the press release). The real suprise, to me, is that the kind of prettiness matters. So-called classical aesthetics, involving such things as symmetry, order and systematic patterns, can bestow a healthy halo on food that expressive aesthetics cannot. The reasoning seems to be that classical aesthetics involve things that characterise beauty in nature, and we all know nature is healthy. Expressive aesthetics are about merely looking good rather than, somehow, looking natural.
Which, of course, led me scurrying to the search engines for those photographs we’ve maybe all seen, of expressively aesthetic fast food items depicted next to their real life counterparts. Alas, the original site has decayed away, but thanks to The Internet Archive, it lives on.
Funnily enough, if you pressed me, I’d say that the pretty version is indeed healthier.
Artisanal bread from Japan
This is going to be a shock to some, I know, but it is perfectly possible to make a soft, white, fluffy loaf using only time-honoured methods and honest ingredients. This I learned from an article from 2018, reposted on the website of the Real Bread Campaign. Many Japanese breads make use of a technique called tangzhong, which involves cooking some of the flour in water or milk. I’ve seen a lot of interest in this technique in the various bread forums I frequent, but never tried it myself. It produces a loaf that is softer and fluffier, which is just what Japanese people want. Even that, though, is changing.
Meanwhile in Japan, crusty breads — such as the French baguette (furansu pan) — are becoming more common, but remain exclusive to specialist bakeries. Sourdough loaves are a rarity and often expensive, predominantly offered in Western-style coffee shops or wholefood-style establishments.
The article mentions the idea of iitoko-dori, “literally best-part taking”. The phrase describes the adoption of a Western (or maybe any non-Japanese???) dish adapted to meet local tastes. This seems to me to be vastly preferable to endless arguments about who is appropriating what.
China’s path to new crops
Path dependence is the idea that the choices available today are constrained by choices that were made some time back. A new research paper in PLOS One looks at the way existing cooking techniques affected new crops as they made their way into China.
Wheat and barley arrived in China about 4000 years. But while the people of western China adopted the new plants quite quickly (you can tell by looking closely at their bones) those in central China were apparently not as keen.
The reason, according to the researchers, reflects north-south differences in cuisine that can be detected 8000 years ago. Northeners had millet as their staple grain, while southerners ate nuts, tubers, fruits and rice. Overlaid on this, central China is part of the northern complex, where millet was prepared by boiling or steaming the whole grain. Western China’s approach to wheat and barley was to mirror their neighbours to the west, grinding the grains to make flour that was baked into breads.
It took much longer for cooking methods in the east to adapt to the new cereals, not least because it takes far longer to boil wheat than millet, and the taste is quite different. There is some evidence, too, that in the course of this adaptation, wheat itself was selected to be more amenable to boiling and steaming.
This east-west vs north-south story adds detail to the episode with Martin Jones on Prehistoric food globalisation
Classy garlic
Of course garlic used to be an indicator of the uncultured lower orders, but surely not any more? Well, yes and no.
Garlic and Social Class is an entertaining little look at the past and present social meaning of — let me put my cards on the table here — this most delicious ingredient, fundament of so much that is good about food. The recent episodes on taste made clear the old association of “strong” flavours with primitive behaviour and bad taste, This article says that the alliaceous slur is alive and well, even in the heart of Rome.
Digging further, that was in 2007. The garlic snob seems to have taken himself off to Milan. Their gain, I’m sure. I have no intention of doing any further research into the matter, so don’t even ask.
Take care, and stay safe.
Jeremy