A History of Food in 100 Recipes

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Congee is sustaining too, ideal for those who need a quick energy boost after exercise or are recovering from illness. Indeed, its fortifying properties are held in such regard that it is often served at funerals. More than that, it has provided life-saving nutrition in a nation ravaged by famine over the centuries. From 108 BC to 1911, China experienced 1,828 famines – that’s almost one a year. The one thing that enabled people to survive, that kept millions of families from starvation, was congee. Congee because of its warming and sustaining qualities and because it is made with rice.

Rice is one of the most important global foods, of which there are some 10,000 varieties. Eight thousand of these are grown for food and they have many advantages over cereal crops such as wheat and barley. Yields are higher and the moisture content is low which means rice can be stored for longer and used during periods of famine. In fact the Tang Dynasty – which lasted from AD 618 to 907 – made much of the value of storing rice by building storage depots near their newly built canals so the rice could be transported to areas of greatest need.

Understanding its usefulness, the Tang Dynasty oversaw a period in which the production of rice became a key part of the agricultural industry. Special tools were developed, as were irrigation systems for transferring water to different paddy fields. Rice was just one part of a flourishing empire, the most glistening period in China’s history. The economy grew, as did the military. Tax collecting became more efficient as every adult male was given an equal-sized plot of land together with an equal tax bill.

The elite loved their congee and so did everybody else – a poor family might get by on little else, after all. Different types of congee were made at different times of the day. On a cold winter’s morning the addition of meat – if you could afford it – warmed the body. At dusk in midsummer as the heat of the day faded, it was made with lotus seeds or hawthorn to cool and refresh. And with the addition of medlar, it would boost the immune systems of the old, feeble and weak.

There is a legend that the recipe for congee was first developed by a fisherman’s wife back in the very dim and distant past. According to this story, she took a boiling pot of rice on board her husband’s boat to provide them with food at sea. But they were assaulted by pirates and so she hid the hot pot under some blankets. Then, when the pirates had gone, she found that her rice, now cooled, had taken on a fragrant flavour and tenderer texture.

Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd: Uniphoto Japan

The Yellow Emperor, Huang Di, was the first to cook congee with millet.

Hence most recipes for congee today involve cooking the rice over a very high heat and then resting the pot for half an hour. Often accompanied by small portions of well-seasoned savoury dishes, its blandness works well as a foil for stronger flavours and if it wasn’t important stuff, there wouldn’t be an entire museum dedicated to it in Fanchung County, Anhui Province. I feel a pilgrimage coming on. After all, even Scotland doesn’t have a porridge museum.

10 (#ulink_dd38b257-edf2-5343-b563-4c7ada401951)

Dried fish (#ulink_dd38b257-edf2-5343-b563-4c7ada401951)

circa AD 800

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The Saga of Grettir the Strong

He [Atli] went to Snaefellsnes to get dried fish. He drove several horses with him and rode from home to Melar in Hrutafjord to his brother-in-law, Gamli. Then Grim, the son of Thorhall, Gamli’s brother, made ready to accompany him along with another man. They rode West by way of Haukadalsskard and the road which leads out to the Ness, where they bought much fish and carried it away-on seven horses; when all was ready they turned homewards.

The Vikings didn’t write cookbooks, which rather tallies with their image – too busy dashing off on raids to engage in more cerebral pursuits. While the Roman alphabet had spread across Europe, the Vikings tended to stick to a rather simpler system of lettering called the Futhark, the characters of which are runes. Runes have lots of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines which made them easier to carve. So when a Viking came to pillage, he might slash and burn your hut and then carve some victorious obscenity on your door. What he wouldn’t do was stop to check what local dishes you served for breakfast, before bringing out a pad and making a careful note of it.

In the late 700s, the Vikings outgrew their rocky, somewhat unfertile, land around Scandinavia and became restless. So they set off in their longboats in search of better territory, travelling far and wide in the process, from northern Europe to as far afield as Constantinople in the east and the shores of America in the west. In Britain, they raided the monks on Lindisfarne, off what is now the north-east coast of Northumberland. We know this from an account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which describes how in June 787 ‘ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter’.

The Vikings eventually settled in Ireland and Britain, in areas such as Dublin and York. And much evidence remains of their occupation, including their diet. Examination of latrine pits in York – less unpleasant when 2,000 years have passed – shows they consumed a wide variety of foods, including fruit and vegetables (carrots, turnips and cabbage), lamb, pork, gulls’ eggs, seafood and fish. They ate plenty of fish, in fact, and were tall as a result. And they had plenty of equipment to cook and eat it with: pots, frying pans and kettles, along with wooden plates and spoons and metal knives.

As Vikings were more talkers than writers, sagas passed down in their oral tradition weren’t transcribed until late in the twelfth century. The Saga of Grettir the Strong is one such tale. Written in the thirteenth century by an unknown author, it tells the story of a bad-tempered Icelandic Viking called Grettir Ásmundarson. Among the various acts of arson and murder committed by the outlaw we learn how his rival, Atli the Red, travels to somewhere called Snaefellsnes where he buys a large quantity of dried fish. Atli is attacked on his return; most people get attacked at some point in Viking sagas, but that is not the point. Much more relevant are the words ‘dried’ and ‘fish’. Which, written a mere 500 years after the event is, I’m afraid, the closest we’ll get to an authentic Viking recipe.

Topfoto: The Granger Collection, New York

Landing the herring from Scandinavian waters: a woodcut from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus.

Indeed fish is one of the few foodstuffs mentioned in the sagas, and there is no reference to how it was prepared and eaten. We need to wait until a bit later for this. Olaus Magnus, who wrote about the culture and history of Scandinavia in his 1555 tome A Description of the Northern Peoples, gives us an idea of how fish was dried, and it’s not unlikely that the method would have survived unchanged from the Viking period:

When you come in towards the shore [north of an area called Vasterbotten], such an abundance of fish is to be seen as its base on every side that you are dumbfounded at the sight, and your appetite can be wholly satisfied. Some of the fishes of this sort, sprinkled with brine from the sea, are commonly spread out over two or three acres of the flat level ground at the foot of the mountain, to be parched and dried by the wind; some, chiefly, fish of the larger kind, are hoisted on poles or spread out on racks, to be dehydrated by the sun and air. They are all reserved for consumption at home or for the lucrative profit of tradesmen.

The drying fish, as you might imagine, emitted quite a smell. ‘From the foot then of this crowned mountain there rises such a stench of fish hung up to dry that far out to sea sailors as they approach are aware of it flying out to meet them,’ Magnus goes on. ‘As soon as they perceive that smell when struggling beneath the darkness of a storm, they realise it is necessary to preserve themselves and their cargo from impending shipwreck.’ This use of smelly fish as an alternative to lighthouse illumination did not last the centuries, but the treatment of dried fish, known as lutefisk, did. ‘The dry stockfish [cod] is put in strong lye for two days, then rinsed in fresh water for one day before being boiled,’ records Magnus. ‘It is served with salted butter and is highly appreciated, even by kings.’

But while food and the act of eating is rarely mentioned in the earlier sagas, much is made of the importance of hospitality. There were no inns so when a Viking showed up on your doorstep, you fed and watered him, according to the Hávamál saga: ‘Fire is needed/ By him who has come in/ And is benumbed in his knees./ Food and clothes/ Are needed by one/ Who has travelled across the mountain.’ Although etiquette also demanded – according to a note elsewhere – that guests stay no more than three days. The Völuspá saga paints quite a sophisticated picture of entertaining at home. A table set for dinner is described in once instance: ‘The mother took/ A broidered cloth,/ A white one of flax,/ Covered the table.’ Clearly the upper echelons of Viking society got out their Sunday best for visitors. And what they ate represents another rare mention of food: ‘Shining pork/ And roasted birds;/ Wine was in the jug;/ They drank and talked;/ The day passed away.’

The sagas don’t touch on smoked fish, but this is was another method of preserving fish that would have been used at the time. Swedish archaeologists have actually recreated a Viking smokehouse at the open-air Museum of Foteviken. Herring hang on timber beams as smoke slowly wafts over them. But you didn’t need a smokehouse to smoke fish. Viking dwellings had an open hearth in the middle of the floor so any meat or fish hung near it would have been smoked naturally.

Over the centuries both dried and smoked fish became entrenched in Scandinavian food culture. Comparisons made between kitchen equipment that was buried with a woman entombed in Oseberg in Norway in AD 834 and the household recommendations of 1585 by the Swedish count Per Brahe for his wife, show how remarkably little had changed – both in the food eaten and how it was prepared – over the course of seven centuries. The Vikings might have bullied their illiterate way around northern Europe, but without them would you be able to seek respite in a plate of smoked herring in an IKEA food court today?