Café World is a popular, poorly-animated restaurant-running game on Facebook. Currently, it has a small selection of alien foods available to serve in-game, such as Martian brain bake and alien sushi. One of these is named Stardust Stew. The lurid blue-green dish looks like onion soup, complete with cheese melted over the top and the sides of the bowl.
One “feature” of the game is that it reduces cooking preparation to mere three steps of active intervention. In this case, the steps are as follows:
After those steps, it’s left to boil. (Not simmer.) The short-hand recipe is not meant to be comprehensible – it’s alien cuisine – but the verbs are all still English so, at a certain level, the reader can still follow along with the method of cooking. Still, what kind of stars are these that we can sift them? What kind of kitchen gizmo (and protective equipment) would be required to chop fusion rods? Gort root looks kind of like ginger; does it grow like ginger too? How large a pot does this recipe require?
Speaking of stardust and stew, and since stew is on my mind from working on edits on a related article, stew appears regularly in the Neil Gaiman novel, Stardust. Secondary characters eat bowlfuls of mutton stew, while the hero consumes an apparently meat-free one of vegetables, beans, and barley. (Gaiman uses stew in most of his fantasy novels.) I would go into more detail, but I don’t know where I’ve mislaid my copy; there’s only so far Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature and Google Books between them can compensate for a wandering physical copy.
Porpoise porridge has been minorly in the news recently, an event not likely to happen again anytime soon. It’s in the news because it’s a recipe which appears in The Forme of Cury(e), one of the earliest cookbooks written in English, specifically Middle English. It was written by a chef working in the court of Richard II. It’s a well-known cookbook as a result.
It was from this book that most of the recipes came when one of my departments held a medieval feast. It was from this book that all the recipes came when I took a medieval cooking workshop several summers ago. Editions of it have been available online and offline for years. What’s new is that this summer, back in June, the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester put a digitized version of the original manuscript online.
The porpoise has been monopolizing headlines. The BBC announced the release of the digitized manuscript with “14th Century cookbook goes online. Recipes for porpoise, pike and blancmange from a 14th Century cookbook have been made available online by the John Rylands University of Manchester library.”
This week, the two other major UK newspapers caught up with this year’s events, inspired by the press release for a tasting session based on the cookbook, held at the library’s café. On the 2nd, The Telegraph’s article was entitled “How to cook porpoise, and other 600-year-old recipies” [sic]. The Daily Mail, on the 4th, used the headline “Porpoise porridge, Sire? World’s oldest recipe book reveals dishes English kings enjoyed 600 years ago”. (Larsdatter’s Medieval Material Culture Blog comments on the factual error in the latter headline.)
All the these articles leave out their centerpiece, however. How does one make “furmente with porpeys”? The book offers two recipes. (There’s also a recipe for “porpeys in broth” but “porpoise soup” doesn’t have the same alliterative appeal.) I’ll give you the more detailed of the two.
A furment (”frumenty” in modern English) is a kind of porridge, made from wheat. It comes from the Latin, frumentum (wheat), unlike porridge which comes from the Latin word for “leek”, porrum.
Take clene whete and bete it small in a morter and fanne out clene the doust, þenne waisthe it clene and boile it tyl it be tendre and broun. þanne take the secunde mylk of Almaundes & do þerto. boile hem togidur til it be stondyng, and take þe first mylke & alye it up wiþ a penne. take up the porpays out of the Furmente & leshe hem in a dishe with hoot water. & do safroun to þe furmente. and if the porpays be salt. seeþ it by hym self, and serue it forth.
In modern English, slightly adapted: “Take clean wheat and crush it into powder in a mortar. Aerate it to clean out the dust, then wash it clean and boil it until it’s tender and brown. Then take the second milk of Almonds and do the same thing. [i.e. Powder, aerate, boil?] Boil them together until they are thick. Then take the first milk and mix it up with a feather. Take the porpoise out of the frumenty and leave it in a dish with hot water. Add saffron to the frumenty. And if the porpoise be salted, set it by itself and serve it forth.” The recipe, like every other in The Forme of Cury, is non-specific about quantities and cooking times.
In practice, the porpoise – from Latin “pig-fish” (porcus + piscis), via Old French – is a group of protected species, and thus illegal to hunt and eat in many places, including the US and the UK, so the recipe is not actually likely to be of much use to you.
Perusing early uses of “stew”, I noticed that “stewed tea” warranted its own OED notes. It made perfect sense: it’s the only case in which “stewed” reliably means “overcooked”, unless, of course, you prefer your dried fruits unrehydrated in any way or know someone inevitably prone to overcooking all foods.
The earliest use of “stewed tea” the dictionary has is from 1908. The phrase appears in Arnold Bennett’s novel, Old Wives’ Tale. Two new guests arrive at a hotel, avidly watched by the assembled guests, gathered for afternoon tea: “They vanished quietly upstairs in convoy of the manager’s wife, and they did not re-appear for the lounge tea, which in any case would have been undrinkably stewed.”
Rudyard Kipling uses the phrase twice in his 1926 collection of short stories, Debits and Credits, in “The Wish House” and “A Friend of the Family”. (The stories were written between 1923 and 1925.) In both cases, it is part of a larger repast, whether “buttered toast, currant bread, stewed tea, bitter as leather, some home-preserved pears, and a cold boiled pig’s tail to help down the muffins” in the first case, or “stewed tea with your meat four times a day”, as in the second.
A few intriguing snippets from Google Books pushes the earliest date of its use further back, if those dates of publication are correct. In 1905, a local education authority in Great Britain advised that “If you take this stewed tea it will prevent you from getting the proper goodness out of your food.” It continues on to recommend that tea being drunk promptly after brewing. In 1904, Vol. 8 of The Queen Cookery Books uses it, although the available excerpt is not enough to provide anything more than a description of what stewed tea is.
In any event, “stewed tea”, as a phrase, first shows up in print at the beginning of the twentieth century, leaving me wondering about the earlier history of words used to describe over-steeped tea. Quickly checking Google Books again: “Over brewed tea” goes back at least to 1884. “Over steeped tea”, a rarer phrase, at least to 1915. And before 1884?
There’s nothing like algae stew for evoking “desperate-but-cozy”. Philip Reeve uses it in Predator’s Gold, part of the Hungry Cities quartet of post-apocalyptic young adult steampunk.
She sat out the storm in his kitchen, while the Aakiuqs fed her algae stew and told her about other storms, far worse than this, which dear old Anchorage had come through quite unscathed. (p. 115)
The mobile cities of this world have limited opportunities for crop growth; to survive, they must bring their sustenance-production with them in the form of algae farms, in at least one case. (p. 108)
Metaphorically, “algae stew” is a phrase often used to describe a dense morass of algae suspended in water, i.e. eutrophic waters. As a result, it is a favorite dish for at least a couple of anthropomorphic sea creatures. (See Stella the Starfish and Pagoo, the story of a hermit crab by H.C. Holling.)
Algae generally is a favorite ingredient of grim visions of the future of the world and space travel. (This is a whole topic in its own right.) Stew is a favorite of all sorts of genres. Between them, I’m surprised there aren’t more algae stews out there. Perhaps they’re hidden in all those space travel visions of ambiguously “synthesized” food. The only other specific instance of science fictional algae stew I’ve wandered across, other than the Hungry Cities one, may be in the Star Wars universe: according to at least one source, it’s a specialty of Yoda, a watery dish from a swampy planet.
See also “plankton chowder” in Blish and Knight’s A Torrent of Face. (Encountered via Westfahl’s “For Tomorrow We Dine” in Foods of the Gods.)
© S. Worthen 2009