Month: June 2008

A zest for juicy anecdotes

Sheila Dillon
Published: 02 November 2007
Price: £14.00

Sheila Dillon savours a delicious oddity full of pithy, eccentric facts to whet a gourmet’s appetite.
Citrus is the most recently published example of a modern genre – history told through a particular ingredient: salt, spices, cod, vanilla, quinine (as the flavour in tonic water) and more. Some have been bestsellers. Some have been scholarly and well-written. But it seems the fatter we get, the greater our consumption of processed food, the more we want to read about food in everything from ghostwritten glossy tomes by TV chefs to these new histories. Sales in all genres are highest in the two countries with the worst diets and most barren food cultures – the US and Britain. There must be PhD theses being written on the subject all over the Western world.

    •    Citrus: A history    •    by Pierre Laszlo    •    University of Chicago Press    •    $25/£14    •    ISBN 9780226470269 DID you know there are a…

Simply the zest

By Ian Irvine
Published: September 29 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 29 2007 03:00
Non-fiction

A short but brilliant account of 6,000 years of citrus fruits should be devoured with fervour – but a history of beans is stodgier fare. By Ian Irvine

Citrus: A History
by Pierre Laszlo
University of Chicago Press $25, 239 pages
Beans: A History
by Ken Albala
Berg £14.99, 261 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

“Do you know the country where the lemon trees bloom/ Where the golden oranges glow among dark leaves?” The citruses in Goethe’s poem about Italy symbolise the country’s warmth and abundance. In northern Europe these fruits have always been associated with health, prosperity and luxurious ease. Today, a billion trees cultivated across the world produce 100 million tons of citrus annually. More than 1,500 species exist, including the Clementine, created in France in the 19th century, and the Ugli, developed in California in the 1940s. The ease with which they can be crossed is still producing new commercial varieties.

Native to Asia, citruses were first cultivated in Persia. Seeds more than 6,000 years old have been found in Iraq. Alexander the Great brought them to the Mediterranean. The Arabs’ conquest of southern Spain brought cultivation to a peak in Andalucia, through application of their irrigation and horticultural skills.

The kitchen thinker

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 02/12/2007

Bee Wilson is sweet on avocados

In this enlightened age, prejudice is regarded as evil. But culinary prejudices are often useful. They give meals a sense of order. Without prejudice to stop us, we might eat raw potatoes and pour gravy on our apple pie instead of cream. Some people don’t have nearly enough prejudices about food. How else to explain ‘popcorn chicken’ or yogurts that you squeeze straight into your mouth? Prejudice should tell you that you can’t make popcorn out of chicken and that to eat a yogurt you need a spoon. It’s basic, really.

Having said that, it is sometimes good to have our prejudices shaken up a bit. One of my most fiercely held beliefs for many years was that avocados are necessarily savoury rather than sweet. The idea of eating avocados for pudding seemed like 1970s cooking at its worst. It turned my stomach to think of it.
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Then my sister introduced me to a weird smoothie that a friend of hers had learnt to make in Morocco. It consisted of one avocado, one banana, a slug of milk, a spoonful of sugar and a dusting of cardamom, all blitzed together to a pale olive emulsion. To my surprise, it tasted pretty good.

More recently, I was reading Citrus (Chicago University Press), an absorbing new history book. The author, Pierre Laszlo, claims that the ‘yummiest of desserts’ is to be made by mashing ripe avocado with lime juice before stirring in granulated sugar to taste. The acidity from the lime turns the avocado ‘into a smooth fluid cream’. I was sceptical. Then I made it, and found it was indeed – if not the ‘yummiest dessert’ ever – really rather nice. If you can only get over the idea that sugary avocado is revolting, there is something soothing about this pudding, a sort of dairy-free fool. It would be good served in tiny pots with a crisp lime-scented biscuit.

Nature 450, 479 (22 November 2007) | doi:10.1038/450479a; Published online 21 November 2007

Flavour and plenty

Peter Barham1

There may be more to great dishes than a dash of chemistry and a squeeze of lime juice.
BOOK REVIEWED-Citrus: A History

by Pierre Laszlo

University of Chicago Press: 2007. 262 pp. $25
BOOK REVIEWED-Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking

by Hervé This

Columbia University Press: 2007. 232 pp. $22.95, £13.95

 

Flavour and plenty

I. CUMMING/AXIOM

Gastronomy alfresco: does food really taste better outdoors?

Many supermarkets offer a year-round array of fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and cheeses. For the first time in history, our eating habits are no longer dictated by seasons or climate. How did we reach this situation of plenty, in which cooking and eating are driven by pleasure as well as hunger? Only a few decades ago, bananas were a luxury in northern countries and strawberries arrived in time for tennis at Wimbledon. Citrus and Kitchen Mysteries dig into these issues in different and complementary ways.

Pierre Laszlo looks at the widespread availability of citrus fruits as an example of how foodstuffs have been propagated around the world in response to religious, economic and political trends over the centuries. Citrus fruits originated in Asia and were later enjoyed by the Romans and cultivated in southern Europe, having been introduced in about 300 BC by Alexander the Great. The conquering Spanish and Portuguese brought them to the New World. Laszlo highlights technological developments that have contributed to the global spread of citrus fruits — for example, the creation of new strains that can grow in different climates or have increased resistance to diseases or variations in flavour. He describes advances in juice extraction, packaging, storage and transport.

NOTA BENE
‘Citrus: A History’

By NINA C. AYOUB

Mining peel, pith, and pulp, Citrus: A History (University of Chicago Press) is new from Pierre Laszlo, a chemist who enjoys a cultural ramble.

As with his 2001 book on salt, Mr. Laszlo takes a single subject down many paths, among them botany, commerce, exploration, art, literature, perfumery, cuisine, and a little autobiography. The author recalls a French childhood of “minimal fruit diversity.” Even past the deprivations of World War II, citrus was a treat for the holidays, says the scholar, now an emeritus professor at Belgium’s University of Liège.

Citrus first spread from Asia, he says, with the Indian conquests of Alexander the Great. Mr. Laszlo links aspects of its further spread and survival to religious groups. In the Mediterranean region, he writes, the Jewish diaspora ringed that sea with citrus as Jews preserved the seeds of a lemonlike fruit essential for autumn’s Sukkot celebrations. Later, Muslims established a lasting presence for citrus in Moorish Iberia. Tracing Spanish and Portuguese explorations, the author follows citrus from Old World to New, most notably to Brazil in the early 1500s. There, the story goes, a convict castaway from a Portuguese ship fathered both Brazilian citriculture and dozens of children with indigenous women.

Citrus: A History by Pierre LaszloChicago UP £14 In the mould of Cod by Mark Kurlansky, here is a scholarly and stimulating monograph. Laszlo, a…

Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., March 06, 2008 Adar1 29, 5768 | | Israel Time: 17:25 (EST+7)

Pure gold
By Ronit Vered

In the beginning there were apparently only three: the etrog (citron), the pomelo and the mandarin. Today there are dozens of fruits and thousands of species of citrus fruit in the world, but modern genetic research indicates only these three as the family’s original primeval ancestors. In ancient times, the three existed in nature as wild trees; all the rest are the product of mutations that occurred by chance and received enthusiastic encouragement from mankind, or hybrids – the product of crossbreeding among the various species.

Some of the mutations and the crossbreeding took place very early. The orange, recorded in Chinese culture over 1,000 years ago, is the product of crossbreeding a mandarin with a pomelo. Some of them are later developments: The grapefruit, which appeared in the Caribbean in the 17th century, is the product of crossbreeding a pomelo with an orange. The Clementine is one of the babies in the family, and not only due to its size. It is named after the person considered its inventor, Father Clement Rodier, a French missionary who was sent to Algeria in the 19th century to bring the Gospel to the Muslims. But even when it comes to a fruit that came into the world relatively close to our own times (between 1892 and 1904), it is not easy to separate myth from fact. Nobody can say with certainty whether the monk and his colleagues in the order, who ran an orphanage, came across the mutation spontaneously or were involved in crossbreeding and therefore invented the Clementine.

Pierre Laszlo, a French professor of chemistry, has written a fascinating book in which he tries to trace the spread of citrus fruits in the world. This journey passes through marvelous stops along the way. There are the etrog orchards of the Levant, which spread because of religion, in this case Judaism. There is the story of the scurvy- stricken fleet of British Admiral George Anson, who embarked on a trip around the world in the 18th century with six ships and 2,000 sailors in order to prevent Spanish domination of the commercial routes. The fleet returned with one ship and fewer than 200 sailors, because his competitors were aware of the strategic-economic value of the secret of curing scurvy – lemon juice – and denied Anson and his men the simple treatment.