Category: History

Tomorrow – the 24th of January- is perhaps my favourite food holiday of the year.

Peanut Butter Day!

Yep, a whole day devoted to just peanut butter! I’m seeing parades with beige banners, complete with majorettes tossing their batons whilst smiling through clenched jaws because their teeth are stuck together with the ol’ pb, and Peter Pan scarfing contests. The works.

I absolutely adore peanut butter, you see. I can go months without sex, but not without peanut butter. It is, for me, the mortar on which the bricks of my life are placed – the greatest solace and greatest reward. And, in a rare show of patriotism on my part, it absolutely must be American.

None of that organic crap for me. That peanut butter that separates in the jar, and tastes gritty and flat even when you stir it back together. Nope. My peanut butter requires the added salt and sugar, and the emulsifying agent that makes it so smooth. Because for me, smooth it must be. And there’s a reason, it turns out, why only American peanut butter works. It’s all about history. So come with me now as we take a skip through the history of the peanut, and the ensuing butter.

First off, let’s dispel a myth or three. Continue reading “Nuts to That! A Celebration of Peanut Butter” →

Every year, on January 19th, the United States of America celebrates Popcorn Day. And short of Thanksgiving (last Thursday in November), Apple Pie Day (May 13th), Root Beer Float Day (August 6th) or Peanut Butter And Jelly Day (April 2nd), I can think of no other food holiday that is as quintessentially American.

We love the stuff.  It’s everywhere.

No movie or baseball game is complete without it.  According to the good folks at Encyclopedia Popcornica, Americans consume 16 billion quarts of popped popcorn every year, equaling 52 quarts per person. A quart a week for each of us, then.

Popcorn is so ingrained (ahem) in American culture, that we not only eat it at ball games and the movies, we eat loads of it at home, and – like the Balkans, who must have got the idea from us – we use it to decorate Christmas trees.

We even briefly used it as packing material. American films are often derided by foreign critics as “popcorn entertainment.” Popcorn even played a major role in the development of that other great American invention, the microwave oven. Continue reading “It’s Popcorn Day! Celebrating Our Favourite Banged Grain” →

If a month is both Noodle Month and Sauce Month, surely the obvious thing is to write about which sauce goes with which pasta. But then I thought – “Wait, Pasta Month is October. What’s the difference between noodles and pasta?” So off I went to find out.

I can’t say I am much the wiser for  the effort. I assumed (for instinctive reasons rather than actual knowledge) that all pasta was noodles but not all noodles were pasta. Turns out I might be right – or it might be the other way around. It depends on where you live and who you’re talking to (and what site you believe most).

Bottom line for today though – I did confirm that posting pasta information would be relevant both during Noodle Month and Pasta Month. So I can proceed with my saucy plans for this post.

Pasta – dried pasta that is – is very much a staple in our house, as it is in a lot of people’s homes. It’s relatively cheap, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, can be served in a wide variety of ways and keeps for ages and ages without going bad. We always have a few shapes on hand: linguine (which we prefer to spaghetti), fusilli, lasagna, penne. Why so many? Well, certain shapes handle certain sauces better than others and some hold up better than others in certain types of dishes.

So what shapes go with what? Here are some (but by no means all) of the combinations we use.

• Fusilli – these twisty shapes hold onto sauce particularly well so you can use almost anything with them. Use it pasta bakes, oil-based sauces, cheese or cream sauces, meat sauce, pesto – even in pasta salads and soups.
• Lasagna – the flat surface doesn’t hold slippery sauces well so skip the oil based options and stick with the heartier meat sauces and heavy cream or cheese sauce. It’s basically a structural element so it does VERY well in pasta bakes.
• Linguine – like fusilli, this shape (a slightly heftier, flatter version of spaghetti) holds onto sauces of all types so use it with almost anything. I think it does especially well with seafood sauces.
• Penne – these ribbed tubes have just the right nooks and crannies to keep lighter sauces on board but they aren’t really robust enough to handle the heavy meat sauces. This isn’t to say you can’t have them with a chunky sauce – but it would probably be best if it were a marinara or pomodoro as opposed to a Bolognese.

Sauces are the splendor and glory of French cooking, yet there is nothing serious
or mysterious about making them. These are indispensable to the home cook.
– Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I’ve been known to question whether certain foods or culinary items need the full day, week, or month set aside to commemorate them – March is, for example, Celery Month and I think we can all agree this is overkill. But March is also Sauce Month and sauce (as a concept and a culinary category not to mention the vast array of individual sauces) is not only a topic that would easily take a month to cover; it’s a topic that deserves it. A quick primer to make my point.

Continue reading “The Saucy Month of March” →

Well, here we are – mid-January and talking about fruit normally in season from May to Sept in the US, July to September in the UK. Oh and topped in ice cream. Brrrrr.

But nevertheless, here we are on Peach Melba Day.

There are so many obvious ways to start this post. “Well, isn’t that just peachy?” or “Peachy keen!” or something like that. But as I say – they are so obvious. Why not start the whole thing by mentioning that Ms. Melba (for whom Peach Melba is named) was apparently an a-class pain in the neck. Continue reading “Happy Peach Melba Day” →