Wam Bam Thanks Sam

Advertising agency Brown Melhuish Fishlock, (which sounds like a Mecca Bah entree -"Can we have two serves of the browned melhuish fishlock?") have produced another fun Meat and Livestock ad for Australian Lamb. The formula is a repeat of last year's ad, which was repeat of the rant's written for him on TV show The Fat.

The Full 90 sec Commercial is online at the MLA website and like Sam says' there'd be a lot less trouble if Australian models overseas carried a couple of cutlets in their handbags' and the same for 'boof heads perpetrating violence on our beaches. It's bloody hard to bash someone with a cutlet'.

This is a formula that can go on forever, and probably will.

Fred Harden 20 January 06  

The Not Mustard
If you read Terry Durack's piece in the current issue of Gourmet Traveller you'll get another twist to the twelfth night cake story (below), the addition to the cake recipe of Mostarda. That's Italian for mustard as you know it, but not as the Italians have come to accept it, Mostarda di Cremona is a popular pickled fruit with mustard spices that is used to accompany cold meat, bollito misto and... to make Twelfth Night cake.

I think I understand this (in Google Translation) explanation of how it's made -commercially, though I'm confused by the line "Those Indians exported sin from the English domination are particularly famous."

There are lots of sweet mustard fruit relishes on your Australian supermarket but with Mostarda di Cremona it's the addition of smaller whole fruits that makes the Italian product so different.  US Italophile Kyle Phillips has a recipe to make it .

Fred Harden 12 January 06  

Today's the night to eat cake
If you'll allow me to return to a regular rant, tonight's the night. The rant is how we don't have enough traditions that give some meaning to our feasting. No food celebrations other than Christmas dinner and getting pissed on New Years Eve. My hypothesis is, that it is because we've become a secular society, so we've lost religious feast days, and we didn't bring many of the pagan or 'folk' customs with us when the English and Irish took over this country. The 'new Australians' have maintained their richer traditions much better than we have so I think it's time we co-opted a few to add some depth to the business of eating together.

Consider Epiphany or Twelfth Night (which is actually a day to confuse you more). This is traditionally celebrated the 12th day after Christmas, on January 6th. Its religious celebration sometimes gets moved to the closest Sunday.

Epiphany is the feast of 'manifestation' and in Spanish speaking countries is quite a ceremony. They change the little Nativity scenes to show that the three wise men have arrived in Bethlehem and the baby in the manger gets a gold crown and robes. 

The best section of Carol Field's book Celebrating Italy (which I wrote about here) is that on the whole celebration of the year end, the mid winter pagan and Christian food ceremonies. In our hemisphere we won't ever have that identification with the cold, with snow covered earth, the seasonal death of crops and agriculture and need for rebirth that gave pagan ceremonies meaning and was appropriated by Christian religions.
 
But maybe we don't even need the religious occasion, consider the 'Baddeley Cake' ceremony.
  
This began in 1796 after ex-pastrycook turned actor Robert Baddeley, who was in the permanent troupe who played at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, died and in his will left the sum of £100, the interest of which was to provide a cake and a beer punch for the cast of the show resident at the theatre every Twelfth Night.

Baddely must have had a kind heart as he also donated property for a home for aging theatre folk. He separated from his actress wife, Sophia Baddeley was much more famous as a tart, when 'actress' often meant courtesan, although you couldn't tell her charms from this portrait, a fat necked woman with 'big hair'.

So we've got food - the pastry cook, kindness and goodness - his donations, some sex - via his missus, and that's enough to start a ripper secular tradition I reckon.

Now, it's almost certain that Baddeley would have served the traditional  cake that is made for Epiphany as the recipe stays pretty constant, at least in Europe. The Twelfth Night Cake appears in most Roman Catholic countries, and there are lots of recipes that call it Twelfth Night Bean Cake because it contains tokens like a Christmas pudding or a single bean. (If you found the bean you were 'king' and people had to obey you.)

Does this mean anything to modern Australians? Who cares, it's Baddeley Night today, let's bake!

Links

>The Feast Day cookbook (I'm tempted to do an HTML index to this but it looks like it's copyright.)
 
>The Food Museum site has English Christmas traditions and tells us that...
"By the 17th and 18th centuries the cake itself was often made into elaborate and even fantastic shapes, such as ships and castles, with guns which could be fired. As late as in the 19th confectioners' shops were lit up on Twelfth Night to display cakes."

>There's also a King Cake from New Orleans

Fred Harden 6 January 06  

Now that's (almost) how to do it  
Market Fresh are the company that promotes the work of MMA -Melbourne Market Authority who run Melbourne's wholesale fruit and vegetable (and flower) Market. They now have a new MarketFresh website that is worth bookmarking.  The interface is a bit loose, (it's certainly not a designer site) but it does have CONTENT - fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices.

The photographs are large enough to identify features, and large enough to push the details way down on the page. There are a few other problems, such as the inability to Browse. You have to search for everything by name, and then you get a list of varieties you can click on. It's because it's a fully database driven site but an alphabetical -'All varieties' page would be nice, so I suggest you start with an 'All' Seasonal Search which gives you a list.

Even if there are some frustrating user features, persevere. The depth of Asian varieties is great. Ever had Banana Blossom? you might know Bitter Melon, but how about the plant's leaves?

The growing regions in Australia get a big tick from us at Regional Food, the seasonal charts are welcome, there is organic information and a Retailer/Greengrocer search by Suburb (Victorian only but they say that other State's are planned for.) 

There's a recipe section, again with a Search. If you're not specific in a keyword, it does an irritating 'refresh' to prompt you for ingredients. Some of the suggested recipes came with a few unfamiliar ingredients I had to look up like 'toasted' sesame oil. Recipes were supplied by Gabriel Gaté, Stephanie Alexander and Massimo Di Luca and notable others. There are even some (token) basic preparation videos for items you can't do without like Chilli 'flowers'.

The links page is also worth a look and a few clicks, there I learnt about Melbourne's Executive Chefs club Les Toques Blanches.

What makes this site different is that most Market sites are for business, with little consumer value or information. Sydney Markets created their award winning kids site Fresh for Kids which we've mentioned before. The kids content here on the MarketFresh site is very good. It has quite hard Flash games, an adult level quiz about fruit and veggies, Kids Recipes, School project material and a dedicated kid friendly search which just adds an irritating flash banner to the same material as the main site.

(The site is clearly a work in progress because some of the lists of varieties have 'Unknown' opposite a photograph and 'Information to be loaded shortly' and it was obviously not put together by anyone who knew basic lettuce varieties. Those things are easy to fix.)

The other official Market sites are Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, and Sydney. 
Fred Harden 14 December 05

'Tis the season to eat sushi  
I had a link ready to blog about chocolate sushi candies which I was going to offer as a Christmas story, then ...well, you know how it happens, there's a junk email from a Russian caviar site that is totally incomprehensible so you decide to translate it in Google which it can't (yet). Yes, that's a scallop shell and truly the site is www.escargots.ru.

It reminded me of the faked 'gummi-eggs' on the Ikura-Salmon Row chocolate sushi site link I'd kept. So I started to write. Then in an email newsletter there was a note about del.icio.us being bought by Google (which isn't the magazine we know and love but a place to share bookmarks. That is worth a look, search for a keyword that interests you.) That's what I like about the web. You start with one link, and suddenly every thing you click on has a reference to sushi even when it's not intended. It's obvious that I'm suffering from some sort of Japanese culinary virus, so I'm going to spread it around. Read on, eat up.

Fancy a California Roll foot cushion, or an Ebi Nigiri with Velvet rice and Emerald seaweed pillow (left), the The Original Sushi Pillow Company is the place to buy one if you're in the USA. No international orders.

Google video search is the place to waste a lot of bandwidth (if you've got a fast connection to waste it with) and there I found this a very funny short documentary on Japanese Sushi there. On Atom Films they have True Confessions of a Sushi Addict (described as "a MUST SEE for all those who have gone on a sushi bender"), Sundance Asia festival had a story on a film called Mr.P's Dancing Sushi Bar about a black sushi chef (but no video trailer unfortunately so you'll have to look out for it.)

Oh and there's the chocolate sushi that started this, Koo-ki Sushi is the place, artfully created confectionery that looks like sushi. See their online catalog and read their story.

Fred Harden 10 December 05