Category: vegetables

A Truss of Greens

illustration from Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

In his 1857 novel Little Dorrit Charles Dickens describes the foodstuffs purveyed by a small restaurant as seen through its dirty windows:

They walked on with him until they came to a dirty shop-window in a dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot meats, vegetables, and puddings. But glimpses were to be caught of a roast leg of pork, bursting into tears of sage and onion in a metal reservoir full of gravy, of an unctuous piece of roast beef and blisterous Yorkshire pudding bubbling hot in a similar receptacle, of a stuffed fillet of veal in rapid cut, of a ham in a perspiration with the pace it was going at, of a shallow tank of baked potatoes glued together by their own richness, of a truss or two of boiled greens, and other substantial delicacies.

Though such delights as glimpsed through a dirty shop-window might not tempt more delicate appetites, a “truss or two of boiled greens” can be a nice addition to dinner. The 1865 cookbook Mrs. Goodfellow’s Cookery as It Should Be presents a tasty recipe for boiled greens. Its author writes, “Vegetables are a most useful accessory to our daily food, and should be made the object of greater study in their preparation than they usually receive.” Here’s to this useful accessory finally getting its due.

Boiled Greens

Much depends upon boiling greens, and the manner in which it is done. The water should be soft, and a handful of salt thrown into the water, which should boil before the greens are put in; when, in, the water should then be made to what by cooks is termed “gallop,” the saucepan kept uncovered, and when the greens sink, they are done, take them out quickly and dress for table.

 
Baumgarthuber, Christine. Fermented Foods: The History and Science of a Microbiological Wonder. Reaktion Books, 2021.

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Of Filthy Fat and German Manners

German village

In the small Thuringian forest village of Möhra, where Hans Luther (the father of Martin Luther) was born in a modest house on a narrow side street, Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew took a room in a hotel whose only virtue was a larder full of black pudding. The austere amenities Mayhew enjoyed there apparently planted the the seeds of what would eventually grow into a deep and abiding hatred of the German people, which he distilled into the two-volume German Life and Manners as Seen in Saxony at the Present Day: With an Account of Village Life-Town Life-Fashionable Life-Domestic Life-Married Life-School and University Life, &c., of Germany at the Present Time (1864).

Mayhew railed against almost everything about German life and manners. He found the faces and breath of the German baronesses dirty and stale, the carriages and state equipages inexcusably muddied, the language coarse and the homes slovenly. Even household pets elicited Mayhew’s disgust: “Never was such a race of domestic animals to be seen on the face of the earth,” he writes, “cats with back-bones not unlike a miniature ridge of the Alps, and dogs as thin and long-legged as French pigs, and as underbred as those in the streets of Constantinople.” For Mayhew, “filthy, barbarous Deutschland” was a commonwealth of noxious burghers and ailing animals.

German food was a source of constant vexation as well for this excitable journalist. He abhorred the German love of sour bread and root vegetables, and German meat he found nauseating, especially a “filthy fat called ‘speck.” He loathed how this “hump of black, baked pig-meat, stripped of every particle of fat, is not a very tempting-looking, nor even a very toothsome dish, to persons of the least refinement.”

German Life and Manners was a flop; readers and critics generously speculated Mayhew took leave of his senses while roving the German countryside. Nothing else could explain such an odd and irascible book from an otherwise circumspect writer. But for all its faults, it does remind us, albeit in a roundabout way, of Germany’s more charming culinary traditions, like this recipe for speck and potatoes from Die Küche im Deutschen Bürgerhause: Ausführlichste Anleitung für Anfänger in Kochen, Backen und Einmachen (1901), a dish that surely would have sent Henry Mayhew into paroxysms of revulsion.

Speck Potatoes

12-15 medium potatoes
10 grams salt
1 liter meat stock, or hot salt water
30 grams butter
20 grams smoked pork speck (bacon), finely chopped
2 small onions, finely chopped
1 bunch parsley

Wash the potatoes, peel them, cut them into thick pieces and put them into water. Put the butter in a large dutch oven, heat it over medium heat and, once the butter melts, throw in the chopped onions with the finely chopped speck, and roast until light brown. Drain the potatoes in a colander and put them immediately into the hot fat with the bacon and onions. Add the salt. Mix everything together and allow to cook for fifteen minutes. Then add the meat stock (or salt water), cover the dutch oven, and let the mixture cook until the potatoes are soft. Make sure to stir every so often so the potatoes don’t stick to the bottom of the dutch oven. The dish should be ready in half an hour. Once it is cooked through, sprinkle chopped parsley over it. Serve these potatoes with beef steak, sausages, or other meat dishes.

 
Baumgarthuber, Christine. Fermented Foods: The History and Science of a Microbiological Wonder. Reaktion Books, 2021.

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And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up a copy of my book, which you may find on one of the sites listed here.

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Modernistic Tomato Soup

vintage ad for a canning kettling


Canned tomato soup has its charms. Or at least so believes Wayland Gladstone Hier, who, in The Manufacture of Tomato Products: Including Whole Tomato Pulp or Puree, Tomato Catsup, Chili Sauce, Tomato Soup, Trimming Pulp (1919), tells us that “canned tomato soup is a commodity which is increasing in favor with the housewife.” She is lured, Hier explains, by its easy modernity. “How much more convenient the modern way is,” he writes, “and when the quality is just as good and often better than can be obtained the long troublesome way, it is natural that canned tomato soup should become increasingly popular.” Canned tomato soup, Hier concludes, “is also cheaper than buying the canned tomatoes and making the soup from them.”

If you too find canned tomato soup an alluring food, but think it too insipid for the dinner table, try the following “modernistic” recipe for tomato soup with stock from Jessie Marie De Both’s Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book of the DeBoth Homemaker’s Cooking School (1929). It’s economical and avant-garde (by early-twentieth-century standards, that is).

Tomato Soup with Stock

1 chopped onion… 2 whole cloves… 1/2 teaspoon celery seed… 6 each peppercorns and tomatoes, or 1 qt canned tomatoes… 1 tablespoon flour… 1 tablespoon shortening

Take bones and trimmings from roast beef or steak. Cover with cold water, twice as much as the meat, add seasonings and cook slowly 2 1/2 hours. Skim off fat, add tomatoes (cook 1/2 hour if fresh tomatoes are used). Skim out bones and meat, and strain liquor through a puree strainer, rubbing all the pulp through. Heat, thicken with flour cooked with the shortening. Serves 8

 
Baumgarthuber, Christine. Fermented Foods: The History and Science of a Microbiological Wonder. Reaktion Books, 2021.

Would you rather receive The Austerity Kitchen by email? Then sign up for my Substack.

And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up a copy of my book, which you may find on one of the sites listed here.

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