About those wild mustards

With thanks to Ellin Barret who first piqued my curiosity for this post.

Because a friend posted this meme, I was off and running. So I decided to let my fingers do the walking through Wikipedia to resolve for once, and for all, the differences between the escaped feral “wild” mustards that ravage the California landscape in spring. And yes, we do have several rather diminutive native mustard species.

What I discovered is that there was not one species, but over 30 separate species of “wild” mustard plants or brassica. And very few “wild”mustards are actually wild, they are almost all feral. Our most favored mustard species, Eurasian Brassica oleracea, that the ancient Celts and Romans were so fond of, gives us those yummy cultivars (all from the same species, like a breed), including kale, cabbage, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, etc.

Although some species of mustard plants were established crops in Hellenistic and Roman times, there are few archeological records. Wild forms of mustard and its relatives, the radish and turnip, found over Eurasia, suggests domestication took place in that region. However, Zohary and Hopf conclude: "Suggestions as to the origins of these plants are necessarily based on linguistic considerations." The Encyclopædia Britannica states that mustard was grown by the Indus Civilization of 2500–1700 BC. —Wiki

An Asian mustard species from the Hindu Kush, Brassica rapa, one of the first invasive field mustards to bloom in California, gives us bok choy, Napa cabbage (really Beijing cabbage!), rapini, turnips, canola oil, etc. More on native and invasive mustards here.

Highly invasive black mustard or Brassica nigra is the most common species found in California. The seeds were theoretically brought here by the Franciscan friars scattering mustard seeds as they walked from mission to mission—bits and seeds of B. nigra were found in adobe brick made in the 1700s. 

Also, according to the scriptures, tiny mustard seeds were held in high regard because though the seeds may be small, their potential for growth is enormous; to enter the kingdom of heaven begins with faith. Jesus was reputed to have said:

"For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20-21)

Nearly all Brassica seem to have one thing in common, a four-petaled flower shaped like a cross, hence the name cruciferous vegetables. Even the diminutive jewelflower species of California, Nevada and the Southwest have four petals, but they are so tiny, they are nearly invisible. 

No matter how you feel about invasive species, I must admit that it is pretty stunning when entire hillsides are solid yellow with mustard in spring. It’s a great cover crop, conditions the soil (and kills pests.) But it is so invasive that it also smothers all native species—including our diminutive milk maids, and vigorous California poppies.

And yes, we do have many diminutive native California brassica species according to iNaturalist. My personal favorites are a magenta wallflower, or rockcress, milk maids, desert candles, and the crazy stripped-down endemic jewelflowers—some species so rarified they only grow in one small patch in the world. It seems that each mountain range has its own species of jeweleeed—and most are endangered species.

And closely related to black mustard, and B. rapa, the Brassica napus or brown mustard species, aka rapeseed, also gives us canola oil, Siberian kale, and rutabagas. Originally from India, it spread to Asia and farmers diversified it by developing cultivars. It's a really popular cover crop in Ukraine along with those heliotropic North American sunflowers. 

Yes, North American: Helianthus annuus—though they were first domesticated and cultivated by Native Americans 4500 years ago, they were commercialized in Russia and Ukraine. Sunflowers and mustard are important sources of vegetable oil. All that oil to fuel the world. We won’t discuss the atrocities suffered by mustard gas unleashed by the Germans at Ypres during World War I.

The ancient Romans not only invented fish sauce (of the Worcestershire persuasion), they also might have invented mustard as a condiment (the Egyptians also used mustard) by mixing ground mustard seeds with grape juice (called “must"), thus giving us the word mustard!

The word "rape" came from Latin for turnip, rāpa or rāpum, Greek word ῥάφη, rhaphe. The Romans were quite crazy for their cabbages. 

Radish means root in Latin. Apparently Egyptians were noshing on radishes before the Pyramids were built. Perhaps the workers were fueled on by radishes and salt. After all, the Romans paid their workers with salt, which means salted cruciferous greens, hence the word salary.

Meanwhile, the French are still buttering and salting their radishes. Forget about that sinus cleaner, Japanese wasabi. Medieval Germans were so crazy for radishes that they grew them bigger and better. Imagine massive 100-pound radishes ravishing the countryside. Radishes, not mustard, were the first cruciferous crops introduced to the Caribbean in the 1500s.

Brassica oleracea probably came from Crete. Or it was a stowaway on Jason’s Golden Fleece. The Greeks too were so mad for radishes (which probably came from China by way of Egypt), that they made little gold radish talismans to offer up to Apollo. Why the sun god needed radishes is anyone’s guess. You’d think horses or chariots or wine would’ve been a more practical gift. Ok, I’ll stop rooting around now on Wiki.

Note bene: I never know where writing ideas will come from. It always catches me by surprise! When I was a child, I was always making equivalencies, that is relationships between things—especially plants and animals. I guess some things never change. When I finally adulted (some could clain that I am still attempting to achieve adulthood), I discovered most of my correlations were spot on. 

At one point, I thought all that wild mustard was native, and it was only one species. When I joined a California naturalist group, I learned that there were more than one invasive mustard species, and that’s probably the thing that spurred me on because I cannot tell the difference between field mustard and black mustard, it’s all mustard to me.

Potayto, potato. How about tomapotatl as pomato is already taken?

Do check out Cultivariable, a great site for everything potato, including buying seeds.

The other day I recalled reading an article in July, 2017 that claimed that potatoes also grew in North America, and I thought what was dubbed the Indian potato was merely a simile, something lost in translation, or a case of mistaken identity. There was almost no follow-up information on it. I chalked it up to a mistranslation. Looks like, but is not equal to….and then Covid came along and I forgot about it. 

Yesterday, on Facebook, Discover Magazine reposted an archived article from 2021 on Solanum jamesii, or the Indian potato, now renamed the Four Corners “potato,” which renewed my interest. But the somewhat updated article compared it to domestic potatoes because it produces tubers. I thought to myself: hundreds of others solanum species have tubers too. 

However, the Four Corners potato, Solanum jamesii, is not what we think of as the ubiquitous potato. It's related to, but not the same as the garden potato, Solanum tuberosum, domesticated in the Andes 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

I let my fingers do the Googling, and found that what are called Apache and Navajo potatoes were hybrid varieties of the domestic potato. A dead end. Back in the summer of 2017, potato farmer /poet Art Goodtimes piqued my curiosity about Solanum jamesii which led to a spirited discussion about the origin and nomenclature of potatoes. And researching "Indian potatoes" led me to another order of plant altogether, an aquatic species related to taro root, Sagittaria latifolia, or duck potato. If it walks like a duck... What quackery!

Growing up Irish meant I ate potatoes every night for dinner. When I traveled through the Andes, I ate many varieties of strange potatoes, the most bitter was black, and grew on the island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca. My GI tract never forgave me. Apparently I was supposed to also eat the arcilla de chaco, or clay jacket—which absorbs the bitterness. When it comes to eating wild potatoes, bitter is not good, and sour is even worse. Spit it out, I tell you.

Astonishing diversity of Incan potatoes in CIP International Potato Center's seed bank.

There are something like 53 known species, and 4000 types, or varieties (not sub-species) of domestic potatoes in Peru alone. And even more in Bolivia and Chile—not to mention the Amazon. According to CIP, the International Potato Center, a genetic seed bank located in Lima, Peru, there are 151 to 180 species of wild potatoes, worldwide. The actual count is in dramatic flux as we discover new species, lose others due to climate change, and make advances in DNA sequencing. 

In fact, the entire Solanaceae family is undergoing genetic reconstruction. Solanaceae is a huge family, there are over 3000 to 4000 species worldwide. And solanum includes a whopping 1500 genera: potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tobacco, datura, and petunias, to name a few. They’re all members of the nightshade family.

And like most solanum species, the Four Corners “potato,” Solanum jamesii, prefers to grow in disturbed soil—which suggests to ecologist Bruce Pavlik and his wife, Lisbeth Louderback, who is an archaeology curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, that this wild potato may have been domesticated as early as 11,000 years ago. I'm not so sure about that. It’s not like hybridizing teosinte.

Escalante Valley was once referred to as Potato Valley. Pavlik and Louderback have been genome sequencing the wild potatoes near the pueblos for signs of domestication—they're looking for a genetic bottleneck. Ok, so I have trouble with their advanced reference date, as it predates Andean domestication, and, besides, it was the end of the Ice Age. Potatoes hate frost. (In the 2017 Salt Lake Tribune article, Louderback, in her doctoral thesis, quoted 10,000 to 11,000 years. See also University of Utah News).

Everything about the Four Corners “potato” is toxic—like many members of the nightshade family—unless you boil or eat the immature tubers with gobs of white clay called gleesh’ (think Kaopectate) to counteract the toxins—so it’s different than the domesticated South American potatoes of Bolivia and Peru. It’s more of a dangerous wild potato cousin with a deadly kick.

It also turns out that the Four Corners “potato” toxins are also different than those found in domestic potatoes. The toxin is the same found in tomatoes. So maybe cavalierly calling it a potato just because it has a tiny tuber the size of a grape, is a bit premature. Maybe call it tomapotatl? 

Oddly enough, Santa Rosa, horticulturalist Luther, Burbank, the man who invented the Burbank, or russet potato, aka the Idaho potato, did developed an edible white potato-tomato berry called a pomato. But, unlike the ill-fated Wonderberry, also a nightshade, which resembled a huckleberry, victim of a smear campaign touting its toxicity, the pomato didn’t breed true, so he gave it up. But in 1934, an Australian successfully bred a pomato. Many flowering ornamental solanum produce tubers too, but noshing on them could be a one-way ticket to paradise—no matter how you roll the old snake-eyes.

I realize that it’s a handy linguistic shortcut to call this wild potato cousin a "potato," because it’s so much easier to say potato family instead of saying the nightshade family. Old habits die hard. And then there’s the toxic baggage attached to the word nightshade. Think Atropa Belladonna and deadly atropine. How about an expansionist mindset, with a new name, instead of a reductionist one handcuffed by the tyranny of simile?  

The Diné word for the potato is Nimási. Maybe we should call the Four Corners “potato” that. But then we’d also have to include the Apache, Hopi, Kawaik, Southern Paiute, Tewa, Zia and Zuni names, etc., not to mention the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) names. So maybe calling it the Four Corners “wild potato” is a far better name. Otherwise we’ll have hordes of eco-nuts going afield to nosh on them thinking they’re benign.

For the record, botanists insist that pretty much all wild potato species are not safe to eat, other than in small amounts, due to their high glycoalkaloid content. Also, Solanum jamesii is not native to California, which means it was introduced from somewhere else. But where?

Wiki spells it out: “Solanum jamesii is a species of nightshade. Its range includes the southern United States. All parts of the plant, and especially the fruit, are toxic, containing solanine when it matures. Immature tuber roots are edible.” But they’re the size of grapes, so how do you know if they’re immature? They tell off-color jokes? 

It turns out that Solanum jamesii is not the only “wild potato” in the old pueblo. One or two other southwest wild potato species, depending upon how you count your potatoes, are Solanum stoloniferum aka Solanum fendleri, or Fendler’s horsenettle—genetically speaking, they are variants of one species, the controversy rages on. Horsenettles are generally not called potatoes, BTW. 

Because of the toxicity, they are often considered famine foods. And people sometimes eat the ripe berries, or ground cherries. And since they vary in toxicity, you never know which ones will be real stinkers I’m not willing to be the guinea pig.

Let’s talk toxicity. “The primary glycoalkaloid in this Solanum jamesii species is tomatine, unlike the domesticated potato, in which the primary glycoalkaloids are solanine and chaconine." And there’s also a smidgeon of the nicotine alkaloid too! Tomatine puts this species firmly in the tomato camp—name your poison. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 

Wow! Potato blossoms. Cultivariable is a great site for everything potato, and then some.

The question begs, how closely related is the Four Corners “wild potato” to South American potatoes? As James Dinneen in The ancient potato of the future, quipped, DNA-wise, “The Four Corners potato, Solanum jamesii, is related to the common potato in somewhat the same way coyotes are related to dogs.” Both are canines and can interbreed. But the domestic dog is descended from wolves. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think they're siblings.

Why does any of this matter? Because, Dear One, genetic diversity. Wild species carry a wide range of unusual survival traits. Take the Irish potato famine—had there been a way to introduce more resilient genes into the potato monoculture against the potato blight (Phytophthora infestans), then one million people might not have needlessly died. Or immigrated.

The USDA is interested in the Four Corners potato’s astonishing 8-year shelf life, resistance to disease, and to drought. Climate change is affecting domestic monoculture potatoes, which is the world's third largest important food crop. Potatoes need specific heat requirements and 12-hours of daylight in order to reproduce. Not all nightshades reproduce by seed, some spread via tubers, or reroot via creeping stolons.

I plowed through a lengthy list of solanum section of Petota, and found that Solanum commersonii is resistant to root rot and nematodes. Solanum demissum, Solanum pinnatisectum, and Solanum bulbocastanum, an ornamental nightshade, are resistant to the potato blight, and "has been used to genetically engineer resistance into the cultivated varieties of potatoes around the world." —Wiki 

Genetic traits from tough wild potato species can be hybridized into our domestic potatoes. And before you go off the deep end about genetic modification, every plant we consume has been genetically modified—from aubergine to zucchini. Especially corn and broccoli. Besides, the voodoo magic of crossbreeding solanum species is far better than sticking pins into a potato. 

Where is Mr. Potatohead when you need him?

Nothing rhymes with…

City Hall. Used with permission, Donald Kinney photo c. 2023

Last night, City Hall was lit up with orange lights to support the SF Giants, but street photographer, Donald Kinny noted that it looked more red than orange. Well, technically, if this were the early Renaissance, then he would be right—it is red, scarlet or cadmium red. Not orange.

Before 1510, the term yellow-red was used (geoluread in Old English—say it aloud with a swallowed g = y) or red-yellow to describe orange. Or the color orange was referred to as tawny (probably a Celtic loan-word). Saffron and green were the most favored colors for Medieval Irish clothing. I imagine that gold was also used to describe orange. It got me asking, why did the English language suddenly have the need to distinguish the colors red from yellow with a new word?

Weirdly the English word orange is a relative linguistic newcomer. It’s a “new” color name, meaning it wasn’t recognized as a separate color name in English until the 1500s….so, yes, some reds border on orange. Especially the light cadmium reds.  

I didn’t understand that when I was taking painting classes at College of Marin why cadmium orange and red were so close in color. I dislike orange. I was pretty relieved when I discovered that color newcomer, alizarin crimson as I favor the blue reds versus the yellow reds. Also alizarin crimson was way less toxic than the cadmiums. Poor mad Vincent. Was it the cadmium yellows and reds he used responsible for his affliction?

Letting my fingers do the walking through the Google pages, I found this: “The first recorded use of "orange" as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor.” Curious as to where the term came from, I discovered that it probably came from the Old French, pomme d'orenge. 

Curiouser yet, the color term took 600 years after oranges arrived in Europe, for the color to be named in English by way of those Normans. Perhaps politics and the Reformation played into it? As in the House of Orange? The word orange, or flan bhui is flag-yellow, as there is no word for orange in Irish (oráiste is the fruit) is a politically charged color in Ireland, signifying oppression and the division of Ireland. 

And of course, as you know, in English, nothing rhymes with orange. Unless it’s a Giants home game. Then all bets are on. Then City Hall and Coit Tower are bathed in a victorious orange afterglow. But here is the clincher, early oranges that came all the way from China, or India, weren’t necessarily orange-colored. They were green! They were bitter as well. I read that Florida farmers dye those green oranges orange.

Valencia oranges marked Christmas season for my grandmother who was raised in Bantry, Ireland. Each year her Christmas gift was one Valencia orange wrapped in foil.

Horse-divers for dinner

It seems I’m necking a bottle of wine for dinner, followed by an ice cream chaser and an adult gummy bear. Adulting is for the birds. To be fair, I had an avocado horse-diver. No, not avocado toast. Since the pandemic, my meals have become rather peculiar—partially because I am noshing from the food bank, you eats what you gets, and are given, but also because of a profound lack of motivation. I did have a dinner of sorts planned, but old rice, thawed, is related to sawdust. OK so I was desperate, the rice was marginally better than expected. I was off my feed after an unexpected wisdom tooth wrestling match with some elderly kale redolent of old sneakers with a piquant bouquet of canvas and athelete’s foot.

Buckeyes as famine food

Somebody in Trinity County insisted that native peoples routinely ate buckeyes. I countered and said that buckeyes were a famine food because the toxins were difficult to remove. What concerned me was that someone would read his comment as verbatim. And you can die from eating buckeyes. Sort of like eating oleander and there is no antidote.

He did not like my response and then proceeded to berate and harass me. When that happens, I copy my comments and then delete the thread from Facebook rather than feed his angst. Since he was responding to my comments, I deleted all his comments too. Score.

From a Facebook post. 

Buckeyes are a last-resort famine food, acorns are much easier to process, have more protein and are far less toxic. The only thing you need to leach out of acorns are the tannins—which is an acid, like in black tea. And they are highly nutritious. Hardest part is peeling them for leaching.

Double leaching won’t remove all the buckeye toxins. All parts of the buckeye are highly toxic, they contain the glycoside aesculin, a blood thinner, a saponin aescin, and more alkaloids. Not a mere case of getting rid of tannins. The glucoside aesculin is a toxic compound similar to glucocides in rat poisons. Most cases of aesculin poisoning occur when people roast and eat the nuts.

Aesculin poisoning symptoms include dilated pupils, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle weakness, paralysis, stupor and causes death to ruminants like cattle, sheep, horses, deer and humans. Only squirrels can survive eating them. Buckeye nectar is so toxic it kills non-native honeybees, “buckeyed bees” are deformed larvae. Luckily the nectar does not kill native pollinators. I don’t know if the pollen too is toxic, my guess is probably yes.

According to the Pomo elders I knew, buckeye required a lot of processiing to get rid of the toxins and was only used as a last resort if the acorns failed. And they’re also way less nutritious because you have to leech them so many times (up to ten baths). It could be that freezing and leaching removes some of the toxins but buckeyes raw are not good for any mammals. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

edited for clarity

True Quinces

Nascent fuzzy quince developing, Nicasio, ©Maureen Hurley 2018

The entire back yard of my friend, poet, Rebecca Morrison’s old Craftsman house in Sacramento was a vast impenetrable expanse of quince canes. She had no idea what to do with this advancing quince wicker thicket that looked like a bad case of Einstein’s hair on brillo pads and steroids. The rabbits and foxes, however, loved it, and called it home. 

The edible, or true quince of Asia Minor (with a range from Anatolia, to Armenia, Persia, and Iran), originally hailed from the Caucasus Mountains and the drought tolerant plant quickly spread to virtually all of the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia, North Africa and the Mediterranean, the Crimea, the Silk Road, and beyond.

Many old California homesteads often had quince thickets, planted alongside the prerequisite pears and apple orchards. When left to its own devices, the quince becomes a towering thicket, but it can be tamed, trained and pruned into a tree. Sort of. Their broad leathery leaves added vibrant colors to a fall landscape. Quince was also used as rootstock for finicky pear trees, and often went rogue if the pear tree died.

When I was a child, I loved the heavy perfumed odor of quince in late fall, picking the huge waxy fuzz-covered yellow orbs after the first frost, rubbing the fuzz off to make them shine like waxy golden suns, waiting for them to blett and ripen under my bed. Positively narcotic. 

I loved watching my grandmother canning quinces, mashing and straining the cooked pulp through layers of cheesecloth, which yielded a gorgeous blood-amber jelly laden with anthocyanins and tannins redolent with notes of apple, pear and citrus. Before the commercial invention of those little blue and white Knox gelatin packets, and commercial pectin such as Sure-jell (made with citrus), quince peels were used for their pugnacious pectin power to thicken canned fruit jams, jellies, and sauces.

Quinces, once considered food of the gods, associated with fertility and wedding feasts, became the infamous golden apples of discord in Classical literature, and associated with forbidden fruit in the Bible. They make scant appearance in modern literature, but there are occasional nods here and there in fairytales, and in medieval cookbooks. 

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's nurse said quinces will be eaten at the wedding feast. NURSE. They call for Dates and Quinces in the Pastrie. Alas, that did not end well, for the wedding party that never was. In the 1859 narrative poem, The Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti called quinces goblin fruits. Let’s hope that that Edward Lear’s owl and pussycat fared a little better as they dined most elegantly on slices of cooked quince.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with the runcible spoon; and hand and hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon, they danced by the light of the moon. —Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear 1871

Quinces are astringent, and most varieties cannot be eaten raw unless your mouth is impervious to malic acid compounds and bitter tannins. Not to mention, they’re loaded with antioxidants. They are puckery, and hard as chalk, they will make your teeth hurt. You cannot eat them raw. Your tongue will fall mute, you will gag, and the lining of your mouth may want to run off with some olive oil to salve its wounds. 

Quinces, once imbued with magical powers, were reputed to stave off the plague and Black Death. Needless to say, quince, with its medicinal cornucopia, was extremely popular in the British Isles and northern Europe. Quinces were used as a condiment and digestive for fatty meats, such as goose. (Try reading this recipe aloud for shitzngiggles. Hint: þe is the, that odd þ is a th sound, called a thorn.)

Sawse madame. Take sawge, persel, ysope and saueray, quinces and peeres, garlek and grapes, and fylle the gees þerwith; and sowe the hole þat no grece come out, and roost hem wel, and kepe the grece þat fallith þerof. Take galytyne and grece and do in a possynet. Whan the gees buth rosted ynouh, take hem of & smyte hem on pecys, and take þat þat is withinne and do it in a possynet and put þerinne wyne, if it be to thyk; do þerto powdour of galyngale, powdour douce, and salt and boyle the sawse, and dresse þe gees in disshes & lay þe sowe onoward. —from The Forme of Cury

Still-life of quinces by Vincent van Gogh (1887), Wikipedia 

There is a train of thought that the golden quince was the original symbol for the apple tree of Eden—as the boreal ancestral apple trees don’t thrive in warm climates. They need sub-alpine conditions in order to grow and set fruit. Which throws a spanner into the idea that those apples of original sin fame were really quinces in the Garden of Eden. Maybe Adam and Eve’s tastebuds weren’t fully developed. Or they had a really heavy frost to blett the fruit. Or maybe that’s why raw quinces are generally inedible. All that original sin hooey just to ward you off. You’ve been duly warned!

But wait, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, was an apple. The Bible tells us so. Nope. This is a rather long segue in what gets lost in translation: see, all those Greek references to apples, the ones mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, the famous apple tussle of Aphrodite, Athena and Hera, and the golden apples of discord—all need to be taken with a grain of salt as they are referring to these pome fruits, furry golden orbs, that is, quinces—not actual apples.

To keep abreast of the situation, the Greek word "μήλον" for apple—or any kind of globular, or round fruit (and apparently fat-bottomed girls) is malon, or melon. The word, "μήλον" also referred to fat sheep or fat goats. Pomaceous: anything-apple-shaped. Round. Fat. There must've been some seriously fat goats way back then. 

Sappho of Lesbos salaciously likened a young bride to a ‘sweet apple’ or (gluku’malon). Insert breast images here, or fat goats, and add a little Anthony Hopkins’ Silence of the Lambs slither sound with fava beans here. Here, have some chianti. Better yet, have some tinto riojo and gorgeous ruby hued membrillo quince paste with your manchego cheese from La Mancha. The Spanish word for quince paste, or cheese, membrillo comes from mimbre, for its wicker-like canes, and the word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmalao.

According to Wikipedia, “The fruit was known to the Akkadians, who called it supurgillu; Arabic سفرجل al safarjal"quinces" (collective plural), as well as in Judea of Israel during the Mishnaic era where it was called perishin (פרישין collective plural, or sing. prish); quince flourished in the heat of the Mesopotamian plain, where apples did not. It was cultivated from an archaic period around the Mediterranean. Some ancients called the fruit "golden apples"The Greeks associated it with Cydonia (Kydonia) on Crete, as the "Cydonian pome" while the Romans called it strythion.

Enter Eris, the goddess of discord, who wasn’t invited to the wedding party hosted by Zeusy-baby. So she crashed it and brought an “apple.” The quince, a potent fertility drug, was Mother Earth’s wedding gift to Hera, literally food of the gods. Upon the quince was the inscription καλλίστῃ (kallistēi, "To/for the fairest one"), thus fomenting a brawl between three reigning goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—which ignited the Trojan War. Aphrodite won the beauty contest, by the way.

True quince was also used as an aromatic room freshener Wikipedia

Back to that harbinger of spring, those ornamental blood-red Japanese flowering pseudo-quinces in the garden, are not quinces at all, but they do look alike—except for their tiny serrated leaves. Quinces, that is, Cydonia oblonga, with their broad pear-like leaves, are often conflated with the three Southeast Asian ornamental flowering Pseudocydonia “quince” species in the genus Chaenomeles. 

Pseudo Japanese flowering “quince,”  Wikipedia

If you mixed up the two genera, don’t feel bad. The reason why I wrote this blog post is because a San Marcos native nursery man insisted that they were closely related species—nae, he called them mere varieties. As in one species. Since my childhood memories were so closely associated with true quince, I had to set him straight. I tend to get cranky when people don’t know the difference between genus and species. Especially a nurseryman. May you eat raw quince.

See, real quinces are orphans, they are their own sole genus and species, no close cousins whatsoever to speak of.  When you’re the only species in your genus, that’s something to crow about, evolutionarily speaking. It’s either good news, or really bad news. As in the last of your kind.

The large five-petaled flowers of the true quince, like showoff apple blossoms, tend to be white, or veined with a pale pink blush—kind of like the Chinese pseudo flowering quince. They even have similar looking fruit to the pseudo-quince. Five seeds in a star pattern like an apple or a pear cut crosswise. Blame it on a common ancestor of the Maleae tribe in the Rosaceae family. Call it convergent evolution. A divine model for a divine fruit. Not to mention the Judgement of Paris. You do know that Helen bribed Paris with a quince.

• 
  

  

  True quince blossoms, Manfred Heyde Wikipedia

Forbidden foods

We have come a long way since the 1970s towards a monotonous meat diet where we eat hardly anything other than chicken and beef, and to a lesser degree, pork. Forget about rabbits, venison and swans. Disney’s Bambi Complex has taken hold of the American imagination and has culturally banned most of the meats that were commonly consumed a half century ago.

A lot of the foods mentioned in the article are banned in the United States for a variety of reasons, the weirdest being that junk food makes a mess in schools. Cadbury’s chocolate, once much better than Hershey’s, really sucks, no great loss. 

Most, if not all, French cheese is made from unpasteurized milk—the French don’t seem to have a problem with the concept. But we do. True, during the 1940s, before the invention penicillin, people could get TB from unpasteurized milk. My uncle was one of them. But now, you can pick up TB in a homeless camp. So banning unpasteurized milk products that are rigorously tested in France, is somewhat draconian. 

Horsemeat is not illegal to eat in the United States. It is illegal to import it. The butcher in Ross, California was selling horsemeat all through the 1970s. And yes, I’ve eaten it, to my horror, as I was completely horse crazy. But it tasted good. Because horsemeat is no longer popular the abattoirs are not set up to deal with horsemeat. The slaughterhouses that were used to process horsemeat went of business. You can still eat horsemeat in Canada and Mexico.

You could also order bearmeat, venison, and elkmeat from that same Ross butcher. And FYI, Julia Child was a boarder at the Branson School. No correlation that I know of, but she became a champion of French cuisine—cheese, paté, various meats. Sea turtle was on Mexican menus last time I was there.

Haggis, with or without lights, is quite good. It’s kind of like a pate. And the reason why you can’t get real haggis in the United States because of the lights, again, the United States import business is not set up for the concept. But the industrious Scots waste nothing, and use up the entire sheep including the baaa. And some real Italian salami is made from donkeymeat. Any imported cured but uncooked meat is banned in the US. 

Tell the Conch Nation they can’t eat conch. They sure didn’t get the memo in the Florida Keys.

Sushi is a grey zone. Mugu, if prepared wrong, will kill you. But that is another story.

Persimmons (photos)

Ripe persimmons hanging from a bare tree like small fiery suns, are a poignant sign of winter. These Japanese Diospyros kaki or Hachiya persimmons, were picked on Arroyo Road in Forest Knolls. How many times did I pass that tree and never noticed it when I was walking home from school? Unripe hachiyas are astringent and inedible until they are soft as an over-ripe tomato. My grandmother always said, you’re not supposed to pick them until after the first frost. But this year, the frosts have been so light, I got tired of waiting for winter to come. 

Like quinces and medlars, they are completely inedible until they are bletted which is a polite way of saying approaching the rotten stage. Persimmon trees really don’t want you eating a persimmon until it’s beyond ripe. Patience is required. If you bite into an unbletted hachiya, it will take the skin off your teeth, give them fur jackets, not to mention, strip the roof of your mouth, and leave your uvula wizened to the size of a peppercorn, and you will be speechless, I guarantee it. Who had to look up uvula? Not what you thought, right? 

I hated persimmons as a kid, probably because I tried to eat an unripe one. It’s an acquired taste I’m still trying to cultivate, because of their health benefits, I must admit I’m leery, but I am willing to revisit them. Just not raw. When they’re ripe, you can freeze and eat them like custard. Be sure to use a good silver plate or sterling spoon, the acid reacts with metal. Kind of like a battery. I remember watching my granny scoop out the vermillion frozen pulp and eat them on late winter afternoons, with sheer delight. But I never acquired a taste for them.

Or you can make persimmon bread, or pudding, my favorite—an excellent boozy Christmas pudding, but it requires finesse with baking powder, baking soda, soda and buttermilk (or yogurt) to neutralize the oxalates and proanthocyanidins and antioxidant phytochemical enzymes (insoluble tannins and gallic acid). Aka better living through chemistry. (Diospyros means divine fruit of Zeus in Greek). And it also requires a lot of emotional support booze before, during, and after. And then, after baking it, you have to booze-bathe the little puddy weekly. And of course, have a tot yourself to keep it company. It’s a long-term commitment relationship. After all, it is a kind of fruitcake—they don’t like to drink alone. Not to mention the hardsauce. 

I’ve long since lost my granny’s persimmon bread recipe, along with her fruitcake recipe, but here’s one by James Beard, whom she admired. It calls for a lot of bourbon. Here’s a simple version that uses both kinds of persimmons. She probably got her boiled pudding recipe from Bon Appétit! Or if boiled or steamed pudding isn’t your cuppa, you can try their baked persimmon bread recipe, which sounds like pumpkin bread dressed in persimmon pajamas. Or try persimmon bread pudding. No recipe given. You’re on your own here, wildcatting it, as it were. Both persimmon bread and pudding freeze well.

The short, squatty Japanese variety, or cultivar, Fuyus, or Fujus, look like little sumo apples with dimpled bottoms, and  are eaten crisp. No waiting, or bletting necessary. Freezing them will help ripen them too. 

Our native American persimmons, Diospyros virginiana, aka sugarplums, or possum-apples, grow on the eastern seaboard—especially in the greater Mississippi Valley. There is also a southern black species, D. texana, chapote, or tzapotl, from the Nahuatl. There are both male and female persimmon trees (and some are switch-hitters, alternating sexes), like persea, aka avocados, and like avocados, they evolved oddly to entice certain ice age megafauna, such as mammoths, mastodons and giant sloths to nosh away, so they could, erm, well, propagate. The persimmons, not the megafauna. I was told they are all good dried—the persimmons, not the megafauna. Let’s just say they had a unique seed dungheap distribution system. (The persimmons.) As for ripening tips, I’ve never seen any. But they do need to be bletted as well.

There are over 400 species of persimmon, Ebenaceae family, most are native to Eurasia. Apparently the slow growing persimmon heartwood, a species of ebony—think black piano keys—takes a hundred years to form. Patience is required. Persimmonwood also makes the finest golf clubs in the world. Ebony, a rather lousy raft material, is also so dense, it sinks in water. You knew that, right? Fore! Birdy? Or is it a mulligan? Where’s my snorkel? I think I’ve  lost the score. Or was it the plot? Think I’ll have a ‘nother neggnog. Cheers!

See also

• 
  
• True Quinces

• In defense of California Bay Laurel
• Defiant Fruitcakes
• Wild Apples

Cold comfort foods

Whoever wrote the food blog on retro foods from the 1950s and 60s, is a either candidate for the moronic twitdom hall of fame, or not a very adventurous nosher. Clearly she hasn’t tried most of the food she was bashing. She is no Anthony Bourdain, with skills to survive the 50s and 60s suburban culinary era, she’s more like from the fish sticks eating school. 

Admittedly a few of the weird concoctions the unnamed author cited were short term fads and most people did not make, nor did they like hot mulled Dr. Pepper, etc., and to this day, thanks to my aunt, I hate sweet potatoes with orange juice, brown sugar, and marshmallows, but most of the fare tasted good. 

We get that the myopic food writer doesn’t like Miracle Whip, she’s probably in good company there, besides, most people avoided Miracle Whip and Cool Whip, for the real deal, but most of the salads she objects to don’t have lettuce…

Clearly she doesn’t understand what a salad is. She writes, “We’ve put quotation marks on the word salad because we don’t consider this a salad. Salad to us means greens…” Can I say say tuna salad, egg salad, potato salad, carrot salad, Waldorf salad, bread salad, tabouli salad? The word salad come from the Latin and means any cold vegetable with salt.

She seriously has it out for anything with Jello, like ambrosia. My granny made some seriously wikkid jello-based salads. Nor does she grok the long history of aspic—that dates back to the middle ages. But picking on stuffed celery was just plain ridiculous. 

And bashing green bean casserole, cornbread, for no real reason, other than looks, and sweet potato pie because it’s—get this—not pumpkin pie? Someone please tell her most canned pumpkin pie filling is made from various winter squashes, like Hubbard, and not even pumpkin? 

All these comfort foods are part and parcel of the traditional Thanksgiving ritual.  I bet she didn’t even eat pitted black olive puppets from her fingers when she was a child either. 

Links to some of my foodie bloggies

I was compiling a bloglist of foodways for my latest food blog, expecting to find a mere handful. Instead, I found 25 blog posts, and when I compiled a growing list, for some inexplicable reason, Blogger erratically erased the correct links. I had to redo this list too many times to count. I no sooner fixed three dead links, then when I reformatted it, other links went wonky. And so on. For every step forward, I retreated two steps. It took me most of the day to undo the damage. Shame on you Blogger for once again making what once was a relatively simple task into a logistical nightmare. Ditto that with your dogged changing of spelling in the search window. Foodways is a real word. The links are in no particular order, but are mostly chronological in nature. I'm sure I missed a few.

A note on native foodways in the British Isles vs. foods introduced by Romans
Wild Apples

Defiant Fruitcakes

A note on Medieval spices

A note on Medieval turnspit dogs

Folklore: Foodways, saying, a food thief/ house sprite
Folklore: Foodways/ How to make Irish Soda Bread

Folklore: Irish Soda Bread Recipe
Corned beef & cabbage came out of Hell's Kitchen

Groundcherries by any other name 

On Jack O Lanterns and squashes 
Lemon Meringue Merengue
Elderberry Whine

Baking a Cake on Bastille Day

Writing down the bone soup

Recipe for bone broth
Tea vs Chai—if by Land, or Sea
Tapping trees: a soggy story
Arbutus, Madroño, or a Strawberry Tree by any other name
Irish salmon
Naked man in a filbert bush, and spotted dick

Shrove Tuesday Pancakes

Fat Tuesday pancakes

Huckleberries

A note on native foodways in the British Isles vs. foods introduced by Romans

I read an interesting post in a Facebook group, British Medieval History, on foodways where someone said, “Introduced by the Romans to Britain: Apples, asparagus, turnips, peas, garlic, cabbages, onions, leeks, cucumbers, artichokes, figs, chestnuts, cherries, celery, wine, plums, etc...”

The list struck me as wrong. I was off and running when I saw that the thread commentor, Paul Davis had credited the Romans with bringing apples to the British Isles. I told him, I suspect if you dig deeper you’ll find that apples were not introduced by the Romans. 

Specific species of apples, cabbage and onions, probably were probably introduced, but apples, kales, and wild onions too were part of the northern European Neolithic landscape. And there were plenty of native brassicas as well. Don’t forget the color woad comes from a brassica. 

Cabbage was domesticated in Western Europe ca. 1000 BC, probably by the Celts. Brassica is from from bresic, a Celtic word for cabbage. Whether native or feral, brassica species favored the white limestone cliffs of Dover, and the Isle of Wight. Brassica oleracea has successfully crossed with native brassica species so it’s impossible to tell them apart. And then there’s another continental shared species, arbutus, or strawberry tree, native to Ireland, but curiously not to Britain. 

I am no botanist or scientist, but I did extensive research on apples, because the information struck me as wrong that apples were introduced to the British Isles via Rome, via Kazakhstan. Also, apples, specifically crabapples, played a significant central role in Irish and Welsh mythology. Then there’s Avalon, the isle of apples. The reason being that certain plant species were circumpolar, such as the corylus, rosids, vaccinium, malus, prunus, brassicaceae and allium—sort of like reindeer/caribou, foxes, etc., so no one region can claim species origin. 

Shrove Tuesday on the fly

Laissez les bons temps rouler!  I just realized it’s Shrove Tuesday! I made minimalist buckwheat pancakes on the fly—sans crêpe pan. Stuffed with Laurel Cheney’s cranberry goat cheese and drizzled with maple syrupl, they were divine, but too fragile to flip as I didn’t get a chance to let the batter rest. I forgot to flip mine, does that mean I’ll not be shriven? So they didn’t roll up as nicely as they should have, but they went down the hatch just fine. Burp. 

Somehow this post got lost in the shuffle, or flat out disappeared, when I was compiling a list of food blogs. I found it again on Facebook. So all is restored. Sort of. I don’t have the final rendition.

I used buckwheat pancake flour, an egg, some oil, a little sour cream and milk to thin the batter. Butter for the pan.

The ingredients for pancakes can be seen to symbolise four points of significance at this time of year:
Eggs ~ Creation
Flour ~ The staff of life
Salt ~ Wholesomeness
Milk ~ Purity 

See Pancake Day

A note on Medieval turnspit dogs

A dog at work inside a wheel near the ceiling;
Remarks on a Tour to North and South Wales (1800). —Wiki

An administrator of Facebook’s British Medieval History group—got his knickers in a twist, and got more than a little heavy-handed with me, he blocked me, then threw me in Facebook jail, after deleting all my posts, because I posted a comment on Vera Moraes’ query about medieval pets. The reason cited was because my mere mentioning of turnspit dogs, was outside of the BMH timeframe, cutoff date is 1485— but here’s the thing, they probably were used during the Middle Ages.

The first ever book on the history of native canines in the British isles, was published in 1565, well out of the medieval timeframe, and was translated from the Latin in 1570. How long it took to research and write the book was not recorded, but one could surmise it was the work of a lifetime, or decades in the making. If so, then it was compiled close to the end of the Medieval era. 

The publication date of said dog book doesn’t mean that turnspit dogs were only used from 1570 onward. The book’s subject, native dogs of Britain, would’ve been quite specialized. Printed books were still a novelty item of the wealthy classes, who could afford them. And a book on native dogs of Britain, even more specialized. Question is, WHY was the book compiled?

Just like the Middle English manuscripts, Forme of Cury, and To the King's Taste, books were published long after the original recipes had been invented—because the information was in danger of being forever lost. I suspect an influx of foreign (French) dogs were flooding the market, to the point where British breeds were in danger of being lost. Imported spaniels (Spanish dogs) were mentioned as well.

The book mentions turnspit dogs among other types of dogs. But I’d bet a roast beef dinner that turnspit dogs were used much earlier. People weren’t dumb. If someone could design a grist mill (ca. 800 BC), using a stream, a windmill, or horse/ox/donkey/goat-drawn wheel or thresher, or build a spinning wheel, a standard household item ubiquitous across Europe in the 1300s (earliest drawing of one 1035 AD), they could easily envision a dog in a turnspit cage. The model was at hand. In fact, when I saw engravings of mechanical turnspits, I thought they were spinning wheels stored on the walls.

Linnaeus dubbed the turnspit dog its own breed, Canis vertigus. But by the 18th c., “The breed was lost, since it was considered to be such a lowly and common dog that no record was effectively kept of it. Some sources consider the turnspit dog a kind of Glen of Imaal Terrier, while others make it a relative of the Welsh Corgi.” —Wiki

My Berkeley Medieval Studies professor, Dr. Dan Melia, astutely pointed out that early books were written to preserve what was in danger of being lost. Not just for piety or pleasure. This comment was in reference to a segue to the Irish epics—they weren’t invented in the Middle Ages, they were transcribed during that time because the stories were in danger of being lost due to societal upheaval—namely the arrival of the Vikings. Different concept. They weren’t written in a void but they certainly codified what came before.

Dog were owned by all classes, not just the wealthy. Anyone who had a farm had dogs to work hogs, sheep, cattle. And ratters were very important to the miller! Also, dogs were employed as draft/draught animals, how we get the term dogcart. The ornate grill structure used to lay and corral the burning logs were called firedogs. And the iron turnspit architecture was referred to as dogs.

Both the Irish youth-hero Fionn, and his Arthurian Welsh counterpart, Gwion/Taliesin, were left in charge of turning the salmon of wisdom on a spit.

The fisherman took a salmon of great size and beauty, which they placed at the fire to broil, leaving it in charge of Fionn, who was to take care that it did not burn, on pain of losing his head. ...Sparks flew from the fire, which raised a blister on the fish. —Taliesin, Or, The Bards and Druids of Britain: A Translation D.H Nash, 1858

Fionn applied his thumb to the scorched part of the fish, then stuck his thumb in his mouth, and was “gifted with prophecy and foreknowledge.” A similar tale follows in the story of Gwion/Taliesin. The name Gwion is a Welsh cognate of Fionn. In the Norse Saga of Sigurd, Sigurd was in charge of roasting the dragon’s heart. The boy heroes all disingenuously gain arcane knowledge and the gift of forethought. Sigurd gained knowledge of the language of the birds.

These medieval fragments merely serve to illustrate that turnspit were indeed used and young boys were employed for the mundane task. Knowing how young boys were ingeniously quick to shirk their chores, it’s a short leap of faith from turnspit boy to turnspete dog.

Fat Tueday, Pancake Night

Yes, it’s Fat Tuesday! Pancake night, that’s what’s for dinner. My granny always made crêpes and stuffed them with cottage cheese, sour cream, sugar, and lemon with zest. Erwan Bouchina’s son, Antoine’s lonely crêpe pan was put to good use. No buckwheat flour though. They’re quite filling with the stuffing. I can handle about two, and I’m done. Laissez les bons temps rouler! 

• NOTE: THIS POST ALONG WITH 12 OTHER POSTS WAS ERRONEOUSLY REMOVED BY BLOGGER FOR VIOLATING COMMUNITY STANDARDS ON 5/14/21. It was reinstated as a draft the next day. I am still pissed off.

A note on Medieval spices

The early Medieval era, when the Irish epics were first recorded, wasn’t quite the gastronomic desert we imagine it today. Sorrel sauce, and sour verjuice was used to flavor meats, as were rose hips, sloe plums, bitter cherries, crabapples, pears, huckleberries, bilberries, bog berries (a type of cranberry), and juniper berries; coriander seeds were used, as well as caraway, fennel, and mustard seeds; lots of pot herbs were used, such as young tart pine needles, heather, woodruff, and many types of mint—also mushrooms, garlic and onions. Rose petals were a popular dessert flavoring too.

Caraway seeds and greens were used, both as a spice and a pot herb. Any Roman potherb or spice that was introduced and easily grown in Britain would also have been readily available. Main spices used during the British Middle Ages were introduced during the Crusades, but some were introduced to Britain by the Romans. Roman cooks traditionally used aromatic herbs (dill, coriander, cumin, chervil, laurel, carrot, parsnip, lovage, rue, anise, mint, mustard, oregano, savory, myrtle...). I would imagine rosemary was also used as well as geranium and carnation, or pinks. Spices included pepper, silphium or laser, saffron, turmeric, cardamom, ginger and nard. Cinnamon was considered a medicine. I imagine clove was also a medicine, as was sugar!

I once hosted a medieval Celtic feast for my final project at UC Berkeley, using traditional ingredients. Toasting the oats for shortbread produced a strong vanillan flavor, as would using fresh pine needles, etc. We discovered that leached ashes were also used as leavening agent, when eggs weren’t available. Kind of a primitive baking soda, or powder. (See pearl ash, or potash—there's a reason why it's called potash!)

The medieval Irish roasted their oatmeal, and then flattened the hard grains in a saddle quern (think rolled oats) before making their famous griddle cakes. Roasting the oatmeal imparted a strong vanillan flavor. Just because we think of vanilla as a modern flavor, it doesn’t mean the compound itself didn’t exist in other foodstuffs. Epic hero Cú Chullain roasted his oatmeal on an iron griddle for his oatcakes before going into battle. Medieval Britons primarily used rose water, etc., and later saffron, as a custard flavoring.

In Germany and Scandinavia, during the end of the Middle Ages, powdered deer antler was also used as a leavening agent (ammonium carbonate) for hard cookies such as Springerle, Liebkuchen, and Hartshorn. (Leavening could also be made by distilling hair or decomposed urine.) Apparently the ammonia odor as they were cooking was memorable. Cookies as strong medicine....

Contrary to popular belief, Essex was not the original place where saffron was cultivated. Greece, maybe. It comes from the Middle East, especially Iran. Saffron is a Persian word. Saffron was the costliest of all medieval spices, more costly than sugar. The English word "saffron" probably stems from the 12th-century Old French term safran, from the Latin—safranum, from the Arabic za'farān, from the Persian word zarparan meaning "flower with golden petals".

Saffron as a color is also mentioned in medieval Ireland as a dyestuff, but other plants were also used to achieve that color dye, including gorse and brassica. The color itself, regardless of its plant origin, was called saffron, which is a well-attested classical reference. It doesn’t refer to the edible crocus sativus, as the edible crocus is not native to Britain. And it sounds like crocus wasn’t introduced until ca. 1560, when the bulb first appeared in the Netherlands. It didn’t become a common garden plant in Northern Europe until ca. the 1620s.

Speaking of medicine, you can get a fair indication of spices used during the Middle Ages by looking at the medicinal cures from the Middle Ages...Rosa Goidelica. (now I can't find a reference to it....I know it exists as I once spent an afternoon reading it in the Rare Books basement of the Doe Library at UC Berkeley). One of my favorite recipes for a toothache, eat a cinnamon-infused chicken—but it must also be eaten at the crossroads. Apparently saffron rice was another medicinal favorite. Wherever  did they get the rice from? That sort of dates it, timewise, along with noodles—to the age of Marco Polo.

Any spice popular in Rome would’ve made its way into the cooking pots of Britain. The Greeks and Romans were aware of cardamon (a member of the ginger family) and used it as a perfume, and it was well known in Egypt and the Middle East. The Indian spice could’ve been reintroduced by way of the Vikings several centuries after the Romans pulled out of Britain.

Groundcherries by any other name

CNN posted a slouchy article on the process of genetically modifying groundcherries, a species of tomatillo, for commercial harvesting. I think the headline, Groundcherries, the latest modified fruit scientists want you to try, was designed to get a rise out of readers. Anything for a few hits on Facebook. If the header didn't grab your attention, the synopsis was even lamer: They taste like pineapple, but also like vanilla. They're "tropical" but also a bit like a tomato. A bit like a tomato? they're such close cousins, they're practically Irish twins.

I’d chalk the article up to uninformed journalism, replete with bad headlines, or bad tastebuds, or both. Of course, the CNN journalist Arman Azad might not have had anything to do with the epic headline fail. Could be a wonky editor. I can't answer for their tastebuds. Vanilla? Really?

Of course, most Facebook readers lost their collective minds. If the headline hadn’t read “modified” would all the howling Facebook readers have had such an adverse knee-jerk reaction? One could almost hear all those knees smacking their owners in the chin. Don't knock out all your teeth in the process.

Groundcherries (Physalis peruviana) are not some kind of new frankenfruit. Modified does not mean inter-species spliced GMOs, no foreign fish, or alien fungus genes inserted into your tomatoes or groundcherries. People have been domesticating tomatillo species for millennia. If anything, they should be dubbed heirloom plants—even though they're considered to be weeds the world over.

Cape gooseberries, or Inca berries, Physalis peruviana, take some time to ripen.—Wiki

The CNN article nattered on about the significance of scientific development of a more compact groundcherry bush with larger fruit, and more fruit clusters. Talk about burying the lead sentence! If the CNN journalist had merely called the process “domestication” then there probably would have been no flappy Facebook furor. Talk about the five Ws of journalism gone awry. Never bury the lead.

The real problem is developing a commercially viable crop, so that Physalis peruviana can be harvested and shipped. It's just not commercially viable as is—wild grown. Harvesting, shipping, etc., is problematic, as the big rambling bush likes to flop about and lay down on the ground, and randomly drop its fruit—hence the name—groundcherries.

Cape gooseberries, Inca berries Physalis peruviana, yellow ones are the sweetest.

As to gene manipulation, any food you eat has already been modified. Call it domestication, cultivation, or breeding—whether by natural selection, farmers, monks, or scientists... Everything we eat has been modified, unless it's completely wild.

Defiant Fruitcakes

Filed under "Lost Desserts" Hundred-Year-Old Antarctic Fruitcake Found in 'Excellent Condition Conservators with Antarctic Heritage Trust have uncovered a perfectly preserved fruitcake that dates back to Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition, which began in 1910.

A curious headline made me think of my Victorian grandmother who made fruitcake, or steamed pudding, every fall for Christmas gifts. It did seem like they would keep forever. I guess that Hundred-Year-Old Antarctic Fruitcake Found in 'Excellent Condition is proof enough. The proof is in the pudding, literally.

When the nights began to draw in, my grandmother would haul out the dried fruit she had stockpiled in the closet, usually three types of raisins, including tiny tart currants (real currants, not tiny raisins), and golden sultanas; prunes (sometimes she added dried figs, or Medjool dates— but that was rare); candied ginger, and the prerequisite jars of preserved glacéed fruit—a mixture of citrus, citron (candied melon peel) and candied cherries. (She used to make glacéed fruit from scratch—I remember helping her make candied orange rinds.) She'd gather kidney suet for the lard. And a bottle of port.

We'd crack pecans and walnuts from 25-pound bags, tossing the buggy ones in the fire along with the shells. They'd sizzle and hiss like snakes as we gazed into the fire while she told me stories.

In Ireland, Valencia oranges were a special Christmas gift. They arrived from Spain wrapped in foil, and were cherished right down to the rind. Dried raisins and nuts were hard to come by, and spices were a luxury few could afford, so women hoarded the ingredients, when they could get them, for that special steamed Christmas pudding or wedding cake. In Ireland, wedding cakes are traditionally fruitcakes: a symbol of wealth and abundance.

The key ingredients of the fruitcake were part of a curious family history. They were foot soldiers marching in an act of defiance against unjust American land laws. During the 1920s, Asians and Indians, ineligible for US citizenship, couldn't own farmland in California. This made my Irish grandfather angry, so he bought farmland in Fresno for his friend Jahn Singh, and held the land title to circumvent the unjust alien land laws. 

As she assembled the fruitcakes, she told stories of my grandfather and Jahn Singh. Every autumn Jahn Singh remembered our family with bushels of fruits and nuts. My grandmother would receive crates of oranges, raisins, pecans and walnuts as payment for the Fresno farmland that my grandfather had bought for Jahn. 

When the anti-Japanese California Alien Land Laws of 1913, and of 1920, also known as the Webb-Haney Act, were repealed in the 1950s, my grandfather turned the land title over to Jahn Singh. 

The law prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship " from owning agricultural land or possessing long-term leases over it. It affected the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean immigrant farmers in California....The California Alien Land Law of 1920 continued the 1913 law filling many of its loopholes... the leasing of land for a period of three years or less was no longer allowed; owning of stock in companies that acquired agricultural land was forbidden; and guardians or agents of ineligible aliens were required to submit an annual report on their activities. —Wiki

Something ancient was evoked as my grandmother assembled the ingredients. Assembling fruitcake was a multiple-day affair, from making the candied fruit, to shelling the nuts, and soaking the dried fruit overnight in alcohol.

My grandmother soaked the dried fruit overnight in port, or rum. Next morning, she sifted the flour with baking soda, and a litany of spices (equal parts cinnamon, ginger, and a scant measurement of nutmeg, allspice, clove and mace) to coat the dried fruit and nutmeats. Then she doused the dry mixture with a mixture of creamed butter, eggs, brown sugar and dark molasses. During Prohibition, bootleg whiskey was used to soak the dried fruit if a bottle of port couldn't be finagled from the church stores.

My grandmother mixed the ingredients up with her large knotted hands in vast ceramic vats, standing over them like a field marshall. The round, and half-round cake pans were already well greased and the bottoms lined with oiled brown paper bags.

She filled the cake pans to the brim (fruitcake doesn't leaven, or rise—though the dried fruit soaking in alcohol, may have contributed some wild yeast), tamping them down on the table with soft thuds to dislodge any air bubbles. Then she placed the cakes in three tiers on tall racks inside the vast aluminum canning pot half-filled with water. The canning pot was a modern day version of the cauldron—double-trouble, boiled and bubbled. 

The fruitcakes were steamed atop the stove for several hours, they were never baked in the oven. That would’ve been sacrilege. The steam vent atop the canning pot lid, with its three roller latches, chattered a little song and tapdance into the evening hours as I drew pictures with my finger on the steamy kitchen windows dripping with condensation. By the way, fruitcake, a steamed pudding, is a medieval dish, pretty much unchanged across the centuries. Her recipe was practically straight from The Forme of Cury. 

Once the fruitcakes (or steamed pudding) had cooled overnight, there was a three-fold bathing ritual (in port or whiskey) a swaddling ritual (wrapped in thin muslin or in cheesecloth), and a cloaking ritual (in tinfoil), before they were placed in their air-tight Christmas tins. They needed to be carefully tended during the first few months, dressed and bathed every few days until they ripened. She kept a few extra fruitcakes on hand to ripen, as fruitcake was deemed best when it was left to ripen (or ferment) at least 3 months, to a year, or longer. A union of space and time.

Fruitcake (aka figgy pudding) was never eaten fresh from the steamer. The flavors needed time to mellow and meld into a rich marriage of spiced goodness. Months, years, even. She had a few fruitcake that were ancient. Not 100 years old, but old enough. The time-defying secret was in the ritual bathing in booze. Fruitcakes were unwrapped to receive an annual anniversary bath of booze to preserve them, then rewrapped, placed in tins, and stored in dark cupboards. And later, they were delegated to the back of the refrigerator. And forgotten.

Whenever unexpected guests came over, she'd bring out thin slices of the dense, boozy, nut-studded fruitcake, along with the pot of Irish tea and a sidecar of whiskey. The thin fruitcake slices were like a rich mosaic of stained glass panes on the shining plates, Sadly, the guests wouldn't touch the fruitcake, perhaps thinking it was the commercial American version, a baked sawdust hockey-puck affair, studded with plastic candied citron and day-glo cherries, so she eventually quit making it. And I never thought to ask her for the recipe.

How did the fruitcake, something once so opulent, and made with love, become such a hated symbol of the holidays? The substitution of facsimile ingredients: rancid nuts, inferior dried fruit, and the prerequisite jars of commercial glacéed fluorescent plastic fruit that swept the market during the 60s and 70s, directly led to the fruitcake's fall from grace. The honeymoon was over. Americans said, Let's call the whole thing off. Another tradition bit the dust. And the very word was beggared and denigrated to an insult of insanity: She's a real fruitcake.

It must've made my grandmother sad to let go of such a venerable tradition, to let die a family labor of love that was passed down the generations from her mother, and her mother's mother, in Ireland. A family heirloom. I still collect the fruitcake tins, though I haven't made a fruitcake, ever. None of my cousins would dream of making fruitcake today, My mother was not domestic, and all my aunts are gone now... no one left to carry on the tradition.

One of many fruitcake recipes in my grandmother’s extensive recipe collection, I found this one from Helen Civelli Brown:

Now about that case of 100-year-old Antarctic whisky on ice they found....