Rhubarb

'It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb'
 Moby Dick, or The Whale
Herman Melville

How odd, I thought. Why in 1851, the year Melville wrote his compendious novel, would you go to a druggist / chemist / pharmacist to buy an ounce of something that is a staple these days of the home gardener and long-time favourite of the home pie-maker?

A quick search in Google further intrigues. It makes an appearance as a medicinal in the Shennong Bencao Jing (the Divine Farmer's Materia Medica) attributed to the mythical Chinese sovereign Shennong, who was said to have lived around 2800 BC, though now thought to be a compilation of oral traditions written between about 300 BC and 200 AD. Here, from The Rhubarb Compendium, is a description of its uses in Chinese medicine today.

The primary result of rhubarb root as an herbal medicine is a positive and balancing effect upon the digestive system.  Rhubarb roots are harvested in the fall from plants that are at least six years old. The roots are then dried for later use. The root is used as an anticholesterolemic, antiseptic, antispasmodic, antitumor, aperient, astringent, cholagogue, demulcent, diuretic, laxative, purgative, stomachic and tonic. Rhubarb roots contain anthraquinones which have a purgative effect, and the tannins and bitters have an an effect that is opposite that of an astringent.

Closer to home for Melville, I found these recipes for tincture of rhubarb in The American Dispensatory of John Redman Coxe M.D. (Sixth Edition 1825).

" Tinctura Rhei E.L.D.A. Tincture of Rhubarb
Take of rhubarb three ounces; Lesser cardamom seeds, half an ounce; Diluted alcohol, two pounds and a half. - Digest for seven days, and strain through paper. E

Tinctura Rhei Composita L Composite Tincture of Rhubarb
Take of rhubarb. sliced, two ounces; Liquorice root, bruised, half an ounce; Ginger, powdered, Saffron, each two drachms; Distilled water,  one pint; Proof spirit of wine, twelve ounces, by measure. - Digest for fourteen days and strain.

Tinctura Rhei et Aloes E, A
Tincture of Rhubarb and Aloes; formerly. Elixir Sacrum
 Take of Rhubarb ten drachms; Socotorine aloes, six drachms; Lesser cardamom seeds, half an ounce: Diluted alcohol, two pounds and a half. - Digest for seven days and strain through paper. E

Tincture Rhei et Gentiane E.A.
Tincture of Rhubarb and Gentian
Take of Rhubarb bruised, two ounces; Gentian root, half an ounce; Diluted alcohol, two pounds and a half. - Digest for seven days and then strain the tincture through paper. E

Tinctura Rhei Dulcis. A. Sweet Tincture of Rhubarb
Take of Rhubarb bruised, two ounces; Liquorice, bruised, Anise, bruised, each one ounce; Sugar, two ounces; Diluted alcohol, two pints and a half. - Digest for ten days, and filter.
This is an old prescription revived with slight alterations. It might as well have continued its slumber.

All the foregoing tinctures of rhubarb are designed as stomachics, and corroborrants, as well as purgatives: spiritous liquors excellently extract those parts of the rhubarb in which the two first qualities reside, and the additional ingredients considerably promote their efficacy. In weakness of the stomach, laxity of the intestines, diarrhoeas, colic, and other similar complaints, these medicines are frequently of great service."

I have no idea and could find no guide in the book at to what the letters A, D, E or L stand for.

I equally have no idea why Melville was familiar with the medical uses of rhubarb.

This week's compost

Hiya all welcome the New Year.

1.      Bruny Island

What a grim few weeks it’s been foodie posting wise. While waiting for some real news to come along, you might like to check out my short blog on my culinary toe-dipping in Bruny Island.

http://buthkuddeh.blogspot.com.au/

2.      The Oatmeal

And a cute cartoon from one of my favourite online cartoonists.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/asian_food

I remember when all Australian country towns had only one Asian restaurant, the Chinese, Happily I don't recall ever getting diarrhoea from any of them. Hmmmm...is MSG and anti-diarrhoeatic?

3.      New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s First Scandal: pizza with a knife and fork

“New York: The pizza arrived, steaming and delectable, a smoked-mozzarella-and-sausage pie presented to mayor Bill de Blasio like a gilded offering to a visiting caliph.

The New York mayor, on a pilgrimage on Friday to Goodfellas, the venerable Staten Island pizzeria, smiled, nodded at his slice and then proceeded to do the unthinkable: eat it with a knife and fork.”

This raises for me the question: Is it ever acceptable to eat a meat pie with a knife and fork. I don’t mean those gourmet fancy nancy kinda ones, I mean your Big Ben type pie.

http://bit.ly/1lNNkah

4.      The milk revolution

“It could be that a large proportion of Europeans are descended from the first lactase-persistent dairy farmers in Europe,”

Quite a lovely article that shows how questions about food tolerances and practices can lead to understanding, or at least theorising, human migration patterns.

http://bit.ly/1abd37K

Bruny Island

Just back from a five day stay on Bruny Island, Tasmania, celebrating a friend's birthday. As you can imagine it was a great occasion to eat, drink and be merry. Happily the group who went down are all massive foodies so much of the local fare was tried.

We stocked up for the trip at a locavore's heaven on the mainland out of Margate, Meredith Orchards and  Fruit and Veg shop (and you really do have to stock up; there is some local veg and fruit on the Island but it's not a range to satisfy a vegan let alone a desperate omnivore) and the Snug Butchery (tho I behaved and did not get a variety of native animal and bird cuts).



Among said fare was a triffic lunch in the beautiful timber and metal airy space of The Jetty Cafe at Dennes Point: I went for the perfectly tender roast quail with red cabbage and caramelised onions. Attached is a small provedore/general store that has excellent local produce - potatoes, garlic, organic eggs, walnuts, cherries, a selection of local wines, smoked meats and cheese, when I was there.

We had our fill of oysters from Get Shucked, fresh as you could want them from the beds not 100 metres offshore from the oyster bar itself, in pristine aqua waters, best on their own or at the most with a tiny squeeze of lemon though their on premises made Worcestershire sauce was excellent if you want to go the way of saucing that plump pillow of creaminess). 

We bought big from he Bruny Island Cheese Company of cheese with perfunctory but perfectly adequate names  like Tom and Bob but whose humbleness may be in part responsible for me forgetting my the name of my favourite which was a soft wine-leaf wrapped delight (I have this urge to call it Gert as in by sea). Suggestion to Cheese Co: Your sales and tasting area is tiny, let be honest, and when you have a tasting party of a dozen or more they tend to crowd out the rest  of us poor sods who can't see the cheese and have a devil of a time then purchasing them. At the same time you have a big dining area that was untenanted the mid-morning we were there into which you could shift said large tasting groups.

Also sampled smoked salmon (average) and salted sardines (excellent) from the Bruny Island Smoke House, and here too behaved and did not tuck into smoked native fauna. Note to the Smoke House: It's difficult to sample your fish if its shredded so fine that the toothpick with which one is to sample it cannot actually spear the morsel - frustration does not help the palate.

We ate our fill of Bruny Black Devil cherries, and youngberries and raspberries from the Bruny Island Berry Farm.

Dinners were accompanied by a variety of Tasmanian wines, not the least of which enjoyed was the Bruny Island Premium Wines Captain's Pinot Noir produced at the southernmost vineyard in Australia.

But you know me, I am up for non gourmet product whenever I can, particularly if it is as satisfying as a curried scallop pie from the Alonnah General Store on South Bruny, plump pink-tounged local scallops in a Clive of India curry powdered white sauce with a nicely crisp pastry (though the base it has to be said was a little damp and stuck to the foil baking cup) scoffed down in the car as the rain squalled outside.  Also pleasured myself post a strenuous walk up to the head of the Fluted Cape and back (brilliant views, echidna, wallaby, birds galore) with beer battered fish and chips at the Hotel Bruny, It was, however, a great disappointment that while there is wonderful seafood in the seas off Bruny, and indeed the Hotel Bruny promotes the pleasures of eating seafood caught by Dave on the day, there is nowhere on Bruny to buy it fresh. For a foodie like me this seems either sad or perverse or both. We also shared an plate of excellent crumbed squid and Chris tucked into the Hotel's Ocean and Earth  - aka surf and turf - of a thick juicy local breed scotch fillet topped with scallops and squid in a light garlic sauce.

 And of course I had to check out the CWA Morning Tea at the Barnes Bay Community Hall. As lovely a ballet of jams and pickles as you could wish for, and a spiced pear cake that rewarded the giving in thereto.

If you go and are on a budget, I recommend staying at The Hideaway on Victoria, Dennes Point.

New pickle recipes

The garlic pickle, green mango achaar and lemonade syrup are bottled and being consumed. The recipes for the garlic and the mango pickles are at http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3102 - use the drop down ingredients menu - and Matthew Evans lemon syrup is at http://buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3363.

This fortnight's compost

1.      Advergamers play with nutrition by making fast food rewarding.

‘Advergaming is a relatively recent approach to advertising that overcomes many of the limitations of traditional advertising. But advergames are increasingly being used by fast food companies to target children by rewarding play with unhealthy food products... Results suggest young people actively engage with advergames and are more likely to eat unhealthy foods after playing them. While the same also holds for healthy advergames, they are much less common.’

I don’t know which I object to more; the term ‘advergamer’ or the ongoing exploitation of kids to serve commercial interests that create unhealthy kids who then are sold commercial correctives.

http://bit.ly/1bm8Qdk

2.      Snacking your way to better health

A naughty title because it isn’t really about the kind of snacking many people do. It’s about eating nuts and that ‘very study has indicated that nuts make an independent contribution to health and longevity, even after taking other factors into account.’

I admit that I am happy we have a bag of mixed nuts in the fridge into which I can dip when I have that urge to snack and I do feel righteously healthy when I do J

http://nyti.ms/1cnQiKL

3.      American food holidays

I just knew you all would want to know that there is this site from which you can find out what food to celebrate on what day with your US friends.

http://bit.ly/1flBjFd

4.      Five reasons why ‘food’ is a massive global

Food is an essential part of health and wellbeing – chosen, prepared, cooked and consumed correctly, food is medicine – it can and has been an enormous catalyst to gains in life expectancy and quality of life to populations around the globe. But – and this is an important ‘but’ – mismanaged, unregulated, recklessly advertised, poorly produced and over consumed, food can have dire public health consequences. And those consequences are currently playing out around the world.’

Not new info but a good summary for the water-cooler discussions we should be having.

http://bit.ly/1caesOj

Rescue Brinjal Pahi

When you use eggplants in a Sri Lankan curry the recipe often calls for them to be diced, then salted and rolled in turmeric and then deep fried before being added to any masala. I prepped these rescue small globular fruit and then put them into a pahi gravy of coconut milk, coriander, fennel, cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, fenugreek, garlic, ginger, onion, curry leaves, mustard, chilli, sugar and vinegar.

The eggplant has to be deep fried till the flesh is soft enough to easily push a knife point or wooden skewer through it.

The combination of the sugar, vinegar, and the roasted spice mix is beautifully complex on the palate and the eggplant has a lovely smooth texture if cooked well.

The recipe for this is at http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3102 at Aubergine 2 in the left hand drop down menu.

The predictable post re christmas cake

Made it for this year. The van Reyk matriarch has approved both the texture and the flavour.

Even approved me chucking all the fruit and nuts that used to have to be chopped by hand into a good sturdy electric whirring chopping thingy which may be why the texture won her approval - beautifully fine shreds of the fruit mice mixed in with the semolina to give a fine grainy most texture. I am sure my granny, whose recipe this is, would have been more than happy to give up the knife and arduousness and just press on and let the machine whirr while she go onto other parts of the cake prep that can't be done with a machine, like buttering the greaseproof paper line of the baking tin (I use that new fangled baking paper but am attached to buttering it anyway).


Mind you at some stage in the transition from gran to mum to me I do recall a hand turned bench top mincer coming into play also, so it's not as if I am working outside of a family tradition.  Also somewhere long the way mum began using an elective mixer for creaming the butter and sugar and then adding in the semolina.  I have followed this practice also much as I would love to fantasise about kids sitting around a big copper bowl mixing creaming away as I did when young on our kitchen table. Again, it's majorly handy to be able to give this job over to a machine while I get on with other bits of the prep.

I have retained hand beating the egg whites, however. I have succumbed far enough to using a rotary hand operated beater rather than a whisk, but for the eggs moving to the electric whisk seems just that step too far. Or maybe it's just that expending SOME effort in the making is still sort of gastro-morally necessary.

I also have retained grinding the spices in a mortar and pestle. This is mainly because the quantity is so small that I would never be able to grind it fine enough in my Sumeet, that extraordinary kitchen companion that South Asian cooks rhapsodize about, and which lives up to its hype for grinding spices and turning out perfectly blended mint chutney.

As is putting it all together. I use a bowl which seems smaller to me than the one gran used but then I am bigger than the 7 year old who sat cross-legged with what was to him a cauldron into which gran dropped handfuls of the fruit mince mix and sprinklings of the spices. And the bowl is a good steel one. But I do still enjoy getting a wooden spoon and turning over and over this thickening mass of batter, and let me assure you that it is a wrist-straining effort at first till you add in the required small amounts of pineapple juice, honey, brandy and rose water at which point it gets slightly easier.

The mixing becomes easiest when the beaten egg whites are added. I recall when I first came across the direction to 'fold' egg whites into something and I had no idea what on earth that meant, or more accurately how much folding I was supposed to do - till the egg white was totally integrated?  wouldn't that just defeat the whole purpose of beating air into them? fold while leaving some lumps of egg white sitting there surly? would that lead to meringue pockets in the cake? As it is I have move to the well-integrated position and the cake is none the worse for this.

We didn't have an oven at home, and gran used to take the ready to bake mixture across the road to her cousin's house for the final transforming. She used to use the browning paper test to check the heat of it; I am more confident that my electric oven will deliver the right heat.  

The trick with getting the right moistness and firmness is that once the cake has set enough that when pressed gently on top it stays firm, turn the oven off and let it finish cooking as the oven cools. If you have used the six layers of greaseproof and the extra layer on top the recipe calls for, the cake won't burn as it finishes and you don't run the risk of burning it by waiting, waiting, waiting till you reckon it's ready.

If you want to make this yourself, and you really should give it a go if you like fruit christmas cakes that take several steps away from the ordinary, then you can find the recipe here under Cake 1 in the right hand drop down menu.

http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3102

I've written more about my gran and her cookbook and reflections on the foodways of a Sri Lankan Dutch Burgher at  http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3499