Slices of Blue Sky • A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)

Bring Zing to Your Posts with Public Domain or Creative Commons Images

May 3, 2018 No Comments

Soon after I started blogging 10+ years ago, I learned about Creative Commons licenses, which some creators apply to their own work so it can be shared with certain restrictions (note that this blog is currently licensed with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5, and my Flickr collection also has a CC license). After figuring out the mechanics, I started using CC-licensed items to add visual elements to my blog posts (the first CC image I used was a lovely black and white photo of a crow in flight from Mark Lorch’s collection for my random musings about a Los Angeles street). I continued to use Creative Commons art, mostly from Flickr, when I wanted a picture of a carrot, or a wheel of cheese, or something similarly relevant to my post.

As time went on, new collections of images appeared and I learned about existing collections, and started to use them as sources of the art for my blog. Eventually, however, my tastes changed slightly and I started being attracted to the ‘vintage’ material in the archives. I liked adding quirky or unusual images to my posts — instead of a picture of a finished dish that I was writing about, I’d include something from an old seed catalog or a fairy tale (as in my post about turnip pickles and turnip greens).

In the spirit of the Creative Commons, I’ll share a few of my favorite sources and list some of their good and bad characteristics: Flickr Commons, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CCSearch, Wellcome Collection image library, and Google Books/Hathi Trust.

Books, Food History

The Seven Kinds of Catsup (Ketchup) You’ll Meet in a 19th Century Cookbook

April 22, 2018 1 Comment

Mushroom Catsup (Ketchup) Ad from Mrs Beeton's book of household management

Woman stirring a saucepan on a stove, lithograph by Charles Philipon, from the Wellcome Collection — Lithograph by Charles Philipon, from the Wellcome Collection

As I’ve discussed before, in the olden days, catsup/ketchup was about much more than tomatoes. Cookbooks from the 18th and 19th century are ripe with recipes for catsup/ketchup that contain ingredients that are decidedly non-ketchup ingredients, like walnuts, anchovies, and oysters.

In the early 19th century cookbook The Cook’s Oracle, author William Kitchiner shares seven recipes for catsup ¹. He is a fan of DIY catsup, noting at the end of his mushroom catsup recipe that

What is sold for mushroom catsup, is generally an injudicious composition of so many different tastes, that the flavour of the mushroom is overpowered by a farrago of garlic, anchovy, mustard, shallot, beer, wine, spices, &c.
Ready made catsup is little better than a decoction of spice and water, with the grosser parts of the mushrooms all beaten up to a pulp.

Books, Food History, Sauces

You Like Tomato, I Like Tom-ah-to, Dr. Kitchiner Likes Apples

April 7, 2018 No Comments

After posts on 19th century complaints about plagiarism and the evolution of recipe writing style, we finally get to the recipe that originally attracted me to William Kitchiner’s 1818 book, The Cook’s Oracle: Mock Tomata Sauce [sic].

When I first saw Mock Tomata Sauce on my screen, I had a few thoughts. First: ????. Next: I need to try this. And then: this reminds me of the delicious mostarda spread / sauce in the Gjelina cookbook (a concoction of lightly fried apples, coarse mustard, rosemary, etc.), so I can see it working.

Here’s Kitchiner’s recipe (mid-sentence capitalizations and “tomata” in original):

Mock Tomata Sauce. — (No. 293.)
Reduce sharp tasted apples to a pulp as in making apple sauce; pound them in a mortar with as much turmeric as will give them colour, and as much Chili vinegar as will give the same degree of acid flavour that the tomata has; add to each pint a quarter of an ounce of shallots shred fine; put all into a well-tinned saucepan and mix them well together, and give them a gentle boil; when cold, take out the shallot¹ and put the sauce into small stone bottles; your sauce should be of the consistence of a thick syrup ²; this may be regulated by the Chili vinegar.
Obs. — The only difference³, between this, and genuine Love-apple Sauce, is the substituting the pulp of Apple for that of Tomata, and colouring it with turmeric.

Books, Food History

The Evolution of Recipe Writing Style

March 31, 2018 No Comments

Last time, I wrote about an important 19th century cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle, by William Kitchiner and noted that his book was published during an era of significant cookbook evolution¹. One of the most important was how recipes were written: the structure and style of recipes.

Books, Food History

Cookbook Author Rants about Cutting and Pasting in Cookbooks

March 18, 2018 1 Comment

The following Receipts [Ed. note: recipes] are not a mere marrowless collection of shreds, and patches, and cuttings, and pastings, from obsolete works, but a bona fide register of practical facts, accumulated by a perseverance not to be subdued, or evaporated, by the igniferous terrors of a roasting fire in the dog-days. The Receipts have been written down by the fireside “with a spit in one hand, and a pen in the other,” … the author submitting to a labour no preceding Cookery-Book-maker, perhaps, ever attempted to encounter; having eaten each Receipt, before he set it down in his book.

So rants William Kitchiner, in the preface of his 1817 The Cook’s Oracle ¹, a collection of cooking instructions and over 500 recipes for all types of foods.

Later in the preface, he continues his tirade:

Most of these books² vary but little from each other, except in the prefatory matter: cutting and pasting seem to have been much oftener employed than the pen and ink: any one who has occasion to refer to two or three of them, will find the receipts almost always “verbatim et literatim;” equally unintelligible to those who are ignorant of, and useless to those who are acquainted with, the business of the kitchen.

Yes, Dr. Kitchiner³ is passionate about his work and doesn’t think much of his contemporaries and predecessors. He backs up his claims with hundreds of pages of (supposedly) original content, clear writing, and fully tested recipes.

Baked Goods, Main Dishes

Torta Verde: a Savory Pie from Italy

March 4, 2018 8 Comments

Now and then a food magazine contains a recipe that becomes a standard my kitchen. Even more rarely, a single issue will contain two standards. The May/June 1998 issue of Saveur was one of those rarities, with two recipes that I have made many, many times and consider critical parts of my cooking repertoire.

The first is clafoutis;, a dessert of fruit embedded in a custard, a dessert I make a few times during the cherry and apricot season in the spring. Although it can be adapted to fall fruit like apples and pears, I haven’t tried those variations. The second is torta verde, a savory pie from the Liguria region of Italy. In this torta, a thin olive oil crust holds a mixture of Swiss chard, feta cheese, onion, potato and eggs. I probably make it once a month, all year round, especially before long domestic flights because it is superbly portable and has robust flavors that stand up to taste-killing aircraft cabins.

Food Charts, Insects as Food

A Word Cloud For Insects as Food (Entomophagy)

February 28, 2018 No Comments

For a little while, I was collecting articles about Insects as Food. I thought it would be fun to feed them into a word cloud generator, so I piled the articles into a giant text file, made some small adjustments and pasted the text into one of the free on-line cloud generators. Initially, I used WordItOut because it was user friendly and allowed a good amount of creative control. For the 2018 update, I switched to Tableau Public after learning from Clearly and Simply how to make Word Clouds in Tableau.

The word cloud shown below was built using text from 33 articles (over 27,000 words) from a variety of mass-media sources like magazine articles, newspaper articles, blog posts at media websites, and trade publications. They aren’t a random sample of news coverage and are probably somewhat cricket heavy. Before submitting the text, I edited the source material to remove plurals from certain top-ranked words (e.g., crickets -> cricket, insects -> insect, etc.) and also removed many common words (the, and, him, her, etc.).

Making Food

Three Businesses That Fight Food Waste

February 24, 2018 3 Comments

Countless initiatives have been launched to fight food waste. Traditionally, these have been non-profit, volunteer-driven efforts like San Francisco’s Food Runners (which collects prepared food from restaurants or events for distribution to the needy) or food banks (which might collect surplus food from manufacturers or groceries). Recently, bunches of for-profit companies have been wading into the field, hoping that their efforts to decrease food waste might lead to increases in profits.

A few months ago, the Meetup.com group Food Innovation Circle set up a panel discussion on food waste reduction as a business opportunity. Representatives from three San Francisco-area companies told their stories and answered questions:

Renewal Mill – this company’s goal is to convert byproducts into useful ingredients. The presenter was Claire Schlemme, Co-founder, CEO.
Regrained; – their focus is giving new life to the ‘spent grain’ leftover from beer making. The presenter was Philip Saneski, Vice President of Product.
Imperfect Produce – a produce delivery service that specializes in fruits and vegetables that don’t meet industry standards because they are too small, misshapen, or lightly bruised. The presenter was Dylan Bondy, head of outreach.

It was fascinating to hear how these companies were working to reduce food waste and establish sustainable businesses. Below I’ll share an overview of each company’s based on the event and a little bit of research.

Food Charts, Insects as Food

Tracking Retail Cricket Powder Prices

February 10, 2018 No Comments

Cricket Powder Retail Prices - February 2018

Person pointing at a chart (from the Internet Archive)

I have been following the field of entomophagy (insects as food) for a while: watching the news, and occasionally writing news roundups or more detailed pieces (see archive section below). So I have been wondering, as news coverage has increased, new products are launched, and companies start scaling up their insect-rearing operations, what is happening to retail cricket powder prices?

In early 2015, I started recording the retail price of 100% pure cricket powder at a handful of on-line stores (shipping costs were not considered). The results of these surveys are shown in the chart below (from my collection of charts at Tableau Public).

Food of Mexico, Main Dishes

Mexican Rice and Vegetables in Achiote Broth

February 3, 2018 No Comments

As a follow-up to my post about achiote (annatto seeds), this post shows a way to use them in your kitchen to make a spicy rice and vegetable dish that can be a centerpiece of a vegetarian meal. Achiote has an interesting flavor that’s hard to define — it’s a great change of pace from the typical Mexican flavors that we encounter.

The recipe, which is adapted from a non-vegetarian one in Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen, has four basic steps: making an achiote paste, preparing vegetables, cooking the rice, and adding the vegetables at the end.

The paste in this recipe is similar to the small blocks of “Achiote Paste” sold in Mexican grocery stores, blocks of spice that could be loaded with artificial colors, preservatives and who knows what. If you’re OK with the additional ingredients or have found a brand that is all natural, you could use part of that spice block to replace the homemade paste in this recipe, but that would reduce the brightness of the flavors.