Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen

by Elizabeth David

Overview

Elizabeth David presents a collection of English recipes using spices, salt and aromatics. The book includes dishes such as briskets and spiced beef, smoked fish, cured pork and sweet fruit pickles. An emphasis is placed on the influence of the Orient on the English kitchen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781902304663
Publisher:	Grub Street
Publication date:	04/11/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 21.00(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Spices and Condiments

'The grocers were descended from the pepperers of Sopers Lane and the spicers of Cheap, who amalgamated in 1345, and in 1370 adopted the more comprehensive title of engrosser or grocer from the Latin grossarius. In a grocer's shop at that time was to he found every sort of medicine, root and herb, gums, spices, oils and ointments. Syrups and waters, turpentine and plaisters, ranged side by side with dried fruit and confectionery, pepper and ginger.'

The Magic of Herbs, Mrs C. F. Leyel, 1926

ALL SPICE: This is the dried berry of pimenta officinalis, also called eugenia pimenta, an evergreen of the myrtle family. Also known from its place of origin as Jamaica pepper and from its botanical name as pimento, it is neither a true pepper nor has it any relationship to the capsicum or sweet red pepper which we call, wrongly, pimento. Nor is it, as is often thought by those who have seen it only in its powdered form, a mixture of spices. It is called allspice because it is thought to have something in its aroma of the clove, cinnamon and nutmeg combined. I cannot myself see where the nutmeg or cinnamon come in. A hint of clove is certainly there, and more than a hint of pepper. It can indeed do duty for the clove – and often does, in my kitchen – and at a pinch, a pretty tight one, for pepper.

The main use of allspice in English cooking is to give an aromatic scent to marinades and pickling mixtures for soused herrings, salt beef, pickled pork and the like. It is an important ingredient of the spice mixture for dry-spiced beef (the recipe is on page 172), and is a much-used spice in the cooking of the Levant and Asia Minor. Since this cooking has particular appeal for me I find it useful to keep a special pepper mill – of a different colour or shape from the one filled with pepperproper – for allspice, which is at its best freshly ground or pounded.

Mention of Jamaica pepper is very frequent in English cookery books of the Edwardian period, when peppers with a number of alluring names, such as Coralline, Nepal and Malagueta made their appearance under proprietary labels. Coralline and Nepal pepper were variations on cayenne. Guinea and Malagueta pepper were made from the seeds of afromomum melegueta, a plant related to the cardamom.

Allspice was much used in English pot pourris, and there are those who use lavish quantities of this spice in Christmas puddings.

ANISEED: Fruit of the pimpinella anisum, one of the umbelliferae, is little used nowadays in the English kitchen, although at one time aniseed sweets and comfits were the delight of English children.

French anisette liqueur is flavoured mainly with star anise Or badiane, a totally different variety, beautiful when dried and with a very bitter liquorice-like taste not at all evident in the finished product. Unexpectedly a few drops of this liqueur do wonderful things for the flavour of certain fish sauces and soups. Some cooks use Pernod, also anise flavoured, for the same purpose. Anisette is more subtle. Spanish anise drinks, usually diluted with water, like Pernod, come in two versions, dry and sweet. Both are very potent and too coarse for delicate sauces. The traditional Spanish anise bottles, made to resemble moulded glass with hobnail patterns of endless variety, are a never-failing source of interest and the labels often collectors' pieces.

Aniseeds are used in some of the more interesting of the old Indian recipes, particularly to flavour fish.

CARAWAY SEEDS: Carum carvi, another of the umbelliferae. Apart from seed cake, (why were those cakes always so dry?) once the great English favourite, and caraway sweets or comfits, caraway appears little in English cooking. In Germany, Austria and in Jewish cookery it is greatly used for flavouring bread, cabbage, and cream cheeses. In Alsace, Munster cheese, the province's great dairy product, is always accompanied by a little saucer of caraway seeds to sprinkle on to the cheese. In another Alsace cheese, Geromé, the seeds are already incorporated. Swiss cheese fondues are also sometimes flavoured with caraway, or indirectly so by means of kummel liqueur instead of the more usual kirsch.

Confusion sometimes arises over the French nomenclature of caraway. The correct word is carvi, but it is also known as cumin des prés or wild cumin. It is not however to be confused with what we know as cumin seed. Caraway and carraway are by the way alternative spellings.

CARDAMOM SEEDS: Essentially a spice of oriental cookery, these diminutive but potent and pungent black seeds are to be bought in Indian spice shops. They are marketed mainly in their pale cream-coloured or greenish pods which are sometimes put whole into Indian dishes of lentils and other pulses, but more often and more effectively are extracted from the pods (there are some half dozen seeds varying in colour from brown to almost black in every pod) and pounded with other spices to make a flavouring for rice, chicken and meat dishes. Cardamoms are one of the important ingredients of curry powders, so although we may not know them by sight, their flavour and aroma should be familiar in an indirect way. I find cardamoms delicious and essential, although not often and not in quantity, a fortunate circumstance since they are among the most costly of spices. Perhaps for this reason they are sometimes confused, both in old French and English recipes, with grains of paradise, the seeds of a related plant, afromomum melegueta.

The botanical names of the cardamom are elettaria cardamomum, and amomum cardamomum, plants of the ginger family, their habitats are Malabar and Ceylon, and, although not a plant native to their countries, the Arabs of the Near East have a great taste for cardamom, and flavour their coffee with this most interesting of spices.

CASSIA: The inner bark of a variety of cinnamon, cinnamomum cassia, is inferior to cinnamon in delicacy and subtlety, although strong in flavour. Cassia is frequently mentioned in old recipes and Sir Kenelm Digby, who was by way of being something of an alchemist, was fond of putting it into his mead and metheglin. In the pharmacy of many countries oil of cassia, distilled from the leaves and twigs of this plant, substitutes for oil of cinnamon, although according to English law, oils of true cinnamon and of cassia must be differentiated. Cassia's native habitat is China, but in pharmacy there is another cassia plant called cassia fistula, grown in the East and West Indies and in Egypt, the pods of which are used, like senna pods, as a laxative. According to Potter, the English vernacular name of this plant is Pudding Stick.

CAYENNE PEPPER: An umbrella term for various manifestations of a fiery seed of the capsicum tribe. Two only of these capsicums, capsicum minimum and capsicum frutescens are recognized by the British Pharmacopeia as being sources of the true cayenne.

Like all products of capsicum plants, cayenne pepper is notoriously difficult, not to say impossible, to track down in its ideal manifestation. This is said to be the cayenne pepper of Nepal, a tiny violet-red pepper or chilli, of which the seeds, when ground, yield a brown rather than a red powder. Since no cayenne pepper I have ever bought in England has failed to gum up within a week or two the shaker in which it is purveyed, and since it is a potential killer of taste unless used in the most infinitesimal quantity, it looks as though it were high time that somebody had a bright idea about the marketing of this spice, which the English regard with a great affection. Were it to be bought, like saffron, in thimble-size packs or little sachets, I fancy that the sale would be enormous. Firms who pack salt and mustard for the airlines might perhaps take note?

If and when you can find cayenne in viable form – most of it now comes from Africa rather than from Nepal – it does add an important zest to cheese sauces, the beloved English cheese straws (Parmesan biscuits, page 230, are an alternative), to plain unadorned sardines, potted fish pastes, crab and lobster dishes, and some people think – I do not – to oysters.

Cayenne Salt: 'Take two ounces of finely powdered dried birds'eye chillies or capsicums, and mix them well in a mortar with two tablespoonfuls of clean salt; add a glass of white wine and two of water; put it into a corked bottle, and place in the sun for a week or more daily; then strain the whole through a fine piece of muslin; pour the liquor in a plate, and evaporate it either by a stove or in the sun; you will then have crystals of cayenne and salt; a much finer article than the cayenne powder.'

Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, Madras, 1850

One way of solving the problem of cayenne pepper.

CHILLIES: There are numerous variations of these hot little peppers which are also known as bird peppers, Guinea peppers, African peppers, birds'-eye Cayenne peppers, and Zanzibar chillies. The seeds and fruit of the capsicum minimum or of the capsicum frutescens are ground to make cayenne pepper, while the chilli powder of commerce may be a mixture of varieties. Chilli powders and cayenne peppers are much used in herbal remedies as well as in chutneys, bottled sauces and ketchups. Whole birds' eye peppers or Zanzibar chillies are one of the components of pickling spice.

CINNAMON: The inner bark of cinnamomum zeylanicum, a tree of the laurel family. Ceylon is the source of the cinnamon webuy today. The whole bark, in pale-brown slim quills rolled one in another rather like those crackly wafers called cigarettes russes, was used at one time in English cookery to flavour creams and custards, much as we now use the vanilla pod. Since cinnamon bark is very difficult to pound to a powder it is preferable, unless you intend using it in the old-fashioned way, to buy it in ground form, but in very small quantities, for it is not a spice which keeps its aroma over a long period.

With the recipe for chocolate chinchilla on page 223, will be found a note on cinnamon as the original aromatic used to flavour chocolate – it is one of the happy affinities which should not be forgotten – and a reminder of how greatly cinnamon varies in quantity and strength, a circumstance which explains the marked discrepancy in quantities pre-scribed in recipes for an almost identical cake or pudding but written by different hands and perhaps in different countries.

Cinnamon butter is a wonderfully useful little preparation. The recipe is on page 86.

At one of my favourite London Cypriot restaurants a bowl of powdered cinnamon is offered with the hot egg and lemon soup, the delicious avgolémono of Greece. A beautiful idea. And cinnamon sprinkled on courgettes (zucchini) and on honey and cream-cheese pie are other Greek delights. It is relevant that many of the elegant silver casters which once adorned our sideboards were intended not for sugar, but for the sprinkling of cinnamon on toast and muffins.

CLOVES: The flower buds of an evergreen of the myrtle family, called eugenia caryophyllus.

One of the great spices of the Moluccas, subsequently introduced into Penang, Amboyna, Madagascar and, in spite of the Dutch colonists who took every step including the systematic destruction of the shrub wherever possible to maintain their monopoly, into Zanzibar. The whole world now relies upon Zanzibar for its supply of cloves. When the crop fails, as happened recently, the price of cloves soars. At the time of writing (1970) cloves are by a long way the most costly of spices with the sole exception of saffron. Fortunately, a small amount of cloves goes a long way, at least to my taste. I do not buy whole cloves, beautiful though they are, since for me they spoil the taste of apple pie, which is their main destination in the English kitchen. Perhaps the best use I have ever experienced of the whole clove is in the extraordinary candied walnuts of Turin in Northern Italy. Picked green, like our own pickled walnuts, they turn black and soft when cooked and half-crystallized. At first sight in the confectioner's shop these black fruits look like sugar-dusted prunes, or nuggets of some marvellous quartz, with a little aromatic nail – a whole clove - pushed into the stalk end of each fruit.

Ground cloves keep their aroma fairly well. They are, as few English cooks would need to be told, indispensable for Christmas puddings, mincemeat and hot cross buns. The venerable English cream cheese mixture described on pages 213 and 214 is less familiar. It is a dish of great character and allure.

CORIANDER SEEDS: The fruit of coriandrum sativum, a plant of the umbelliferae family. The coriander grows in Southern Europe, Sicily, Africa, India, Mexico, Malta, Cyprus, Spain, and was once cultivated in Southern England. The seeds, aromatically sweet and orangey when crushed but rather unattractive when unripe (they smell of bugs some say; others liken the smell to rubber) were sugar-coated to make the little sweets called comfits.

Coriander seeds make a delicious mild and spicey flavouring for stuffings, for sweet-sour pickles and chutneys and are one of the components of English pickling spice. A great Cypriot speciality is green olives crushed and heavily spiced with coriander seeds. Cyprus sausages are also aromatized with this spice.

A recipe for ham cooked in milk spiced with coriander seeds was given by William Verral in his delightful little book, The Cook's Paradise, 1749. Verrai was master of the White Hart Inn in Lewes, and probably obtained his coriander locally, for Sussex was one of the counties where the plant was cultivated. Vincent la Chapelle, chief cook to the Earl of Chesterfield and subsequently to the Prince of Orange, whose book was written and published in English before being translated into French, gives a basting liquor for spit-oasted turkey made from two glasses of champagne or Rhenish wine aromatized with cloves, bayleaves, garlic, sliced lemon and coriander seeds.

Coriander leaves in their fresh state are much used in Cyprus, in Spain, in Mexico and in the Middle East.

Very large quantities of coriander seeds are used in curry powders. And, with juniper berries, coriander is one of the flavouring agents of gin.

Whenever possible buy coriander seeds in whole form. They are very easy to pound.

CUMIN or CUMMIN: One of the endless tribe of umbelliferae, Cuminum cyminum is indigenous to the Upper Nile, and cultivated along the North African coast and in India.

The seeds of cumin, or more properly speaking, the fruit, provide one of the most characteristic flavourings of Middle Eastern and of Moroccan cooking. The warm spicy scent of cumin pervades the souks of North Africa and of Egypt, gives the grilled lamb kebabs of Morocco their typical flavour (there is a recipe on page 139), goes into a hundred and one Levantine vegetable, meat and rice dishes, and is often, although not invariably, an ingredient of Indian curry compounds.

To me cumin is one of the more important spices. Both the whole seeds and ground cumin are in frequent use in my kitchen, for spicing chicken, rice dishes, lamb, and aubergines. It is one of the many spices which should be warmed to bring out its aroma before it is put into the cooking pot or sprinkled on meat for grilling. Although cumin looks so similar to fennel, aniseed and caraway seeds, its aroma is quite unmistakable.

CURRY POWDER: Although there are so many made-up curry powders on the market, I find that I seldom use any of them. To me they are unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower. Too much hot red pepper, too much low-grade ginger, too much cheap white pepper, too much mustard seed and fenugreek, in fact too much of too many spices, probably inferior and certainly far from fresh, make commercial curry powders an unattractive proposition, however traditional they may be to the English kitchen.

I learn from the excellent book on food plants* recently published by the Oxford University Press that pepper, i.e., ordinary pepper, black or white, was the most pungent ingredient in Indian curries 'until chillies were introduced from America in the sixteenth century'. This explains a good deal about the evolution of Indian curries. It must have taken generations for the cultivation of and the taste for chilli to spread throughout the vast sub-continent of India, and for the inhabitants of all the widely differing provinces and states to accustom themselves to the new fiery condiment. For as long as three centuries there would have been many isolated pockets of resistance where the old mixtures remained, accounting for stories of the elegant and subtle food of the Moghuls, for the ingenious and mild vegetarian dishes of the non-meat-eating sects of India. The cookery book of which I have written on page 191 describes Indian dishes which sound utterly delicious, far far removed from the curries of London Indian restaurants and of English recipes; and Mrs Balbir Singh's Indian Cookery, published in 1961 and still, happily, in print, gives many fascinating, beautiful recipes for Indian dishes made with just a few mild spices and never a sniff of bought curry powders.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2000 Elizabeth David.
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Table of Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
Spices and condiments,
Aromatic herbs, dried or fresh,
More flavourings Bouquet garni,
Measurements and Temperatures,
Sauces,
Cold Sauces,
Sauces for Fish,
Béchamel Sauce,
Tomato Sauces,
Butters,
The Colonel's Sauce Cupboard,
Salads and first-course dishes,
Fish,
Fresh Fish,
Salted and Smoked Fish,
Rice and vegetables,
Meat dishes,
Meat and Vegetable Dishes,
Fresh Meat: Kebab Cookery,
Fresh Meat: Lamb, Beef, Pork,
Fresh Meat: Anglo-Indian Cookery,
Cured and Brined Meat,
Chicken, Turkey, Duck and Goose,
Sweet dishes and cakes,
Savouries,
Chutneys and pickles,
Beverages,
Bibliography and reading list,
Some shops and suppliers,
Acknowledgements,
Index,