Eat This Newsletter 211: Nuts, again
Hello
A couple of weeks ago I was blessed with a couple of nutty stories. Now here I am again with pistachios, baklava and hazelnuts, among other treats. Life is good.
Blue Food Blues
A long article on Aeon weighs up the pros and cons of blue foods — blue foods, not seafood, because “half of the aquatic plants and animals we consume today do not come from the sea at all. They are farmed under controlled, semi-natural conditions in tanks, ponds, raceways and enclosed sections of the ocean”. Madhura Roy skips from her childhood on the western coast of India to globe-encircling commercial aquaculture making the case that aquaculture is a more sustainable source of food than agriculture.
The key point, as she explains, is that because aquatic animals are largely cold-blooded, they do not have to use much of the energy in their food to keep warm. Aquaculture is efficient. Right now, though, that has to be set against the fact that most of the food fed to the species we want to eat is derived directly from aquatic species we do not want to eat. “We” of course means the people who can afford to buy the products of aquaculture, not the people from whose waters fish are hoovered up to be processed into fishmeal, depriving locals of sustenance and livelihoods.
There is a lot of back and forth on various pros to be set against a roughly equal number of cons, and in the end it boils down to Roy’s belief that “[t]he sustainability problems of aquaculture are less complex and more solvable than those of livestock”. Is that enough?
L for Inferno
Tom Nealon is at it again, having reached L in his Condiment Abecedarium. As a result, I learned about ljutenica, Bulgaria’s signature condiment “made with roasted red peppers and some combination of eggplant, carrots, onions, garlic, salt, olive oil, chile peppers and almost always tomatoes”. So far, so interesting. What really drew me in was mention of the kitchen appliance that, in the absence of roaring communal bonfires, makes ljutenica possible, the chushkopek. Literally a “pepper roaster,” this is a device essentially unknown outside Bulgaria that I found terrifying just reading about it. Follow that link to learn all about the infernal machine. I especially liked the notion that the three-pepper, deluxe version is called the Mercedes, because the insert that keeps the three peppers separated is reminiscent of the car’s logo.
Tom also delves into the lemon with a crash course in its ancestry and the murky history of its arrival in Europe and the Mediterranean. He coyly mentions that “some people believe that it prevented the plague from wiping out Paris in the mid-17th century”. One of those people would be Tom Nealon, as heard on an episode from 2017. He does not mention the role of lemons in the rise of the Sicilian mafia, as explained by Helena Attlee in an episode from 2014. For anyone who still doubts the truth of that story, I’m happy to point you to a 2017 article in the Journal of Economic History, Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons
More about Maslins
It’s probably just me, but I get annoyed when I read a headline like this: Maslins, a Method of Planting Grains You’ve Probably Never Heard of. I had heard of maslins, even before I wrote a little bit about Lammas day, but I decided to read the article anyway.
It’s OK, a little breathless, and perhaps that’s because the author hadn’t heard of maslins. In any case, a maslin is a mixture of two or more different cereal species, usually barley, rye and wheat, which offers most of the benefits that mixtures (of species and of varieties), mainly resilience to environmental conditions and attacks by pests and diseases. Researchers in the US have apparently had their eyes opened to maslins, and are starting to take them seriously.
The word itself shares a root with miscellany, and I was delighted to find this quote from Francis Bacon in the Wiktionary:
if you sow a few beans with wheat, your wheat will be the better
Hard Graft
Another day, another nut. Forget about the fact that pistachios apparently offer all sorts of nutritional benefits at a lower calorie count than other tree nuts. Forget too the claim in an article in Aramco World that we owe the modern pistachio to “ingenious bioengineering”.
Bioengineering is not the only dubious bit of botany in the article, but I’m not here to quibble. Much. The bulk of the article explains how palaeobotanists go about their business of finding and characterising plant remains that are thousands of years old.
The Many Faces of Baklava
How can I, in all conscience, recommend something from Twitter? For one thing, there is no guarantee it will still be there when you get this, and for another, Twitter no longer offers anything unless you are a subscriber and logged in. And yet, here I am, pointing to you to a thread on the origins and peregrinations of baklava. Why? It is a handy continuation of the nuts theme, and mouth-watering. Also, Bayt Al Fann (which translates as A House for Everyone) offers a lot of interesting content from the Muslin world, including a section dedicated to Twitter threads. Baklava isn’t there yet, nor is the more recent thread about Muslim breakfasts, but I reckon it is a matter of being patient.
Recovering From a Terrible Tree Disease
Imagine this: a pathogen appears from far away, burrows deep into the trees on which your livelihood depends, and sneakily kills them. What do you do? Obviously you monitor the disease closely, rip out infected trees and burn them. You work closely with breeders to select resistant varieties, grub up susceptible trees and burn them too, just in case, and replant with the resistant varieties. By degrees and over time you rebuild the crop, attract new growers and revitalise the industry. At least, that’s what the hazelnut growers of British Columbia did.
Or you can do nothing, conspire to blame shadowy government agencies, refuse to change, and watch your livelihood slowly die before your eyes. I’m heading down to Puglia tomorrow, where I hope to be able to report on what’s happening with the olive disease Xylella.
BTW, one thing puzzles me about the way they grow hazelnuts in British Columbia; the trees seem to bush out from a single main trunk. Here in Italy and elsewhere that I have seen hazels growing, each tree is coppiced on a rotation to form a many-trunked bush. Can anyone explain, is one system definitely better than the other, or is it simply a cultural preference? (Photo by Peter Andres, from the article.)
Take care.
