Is There a Nutmeg in the House?

Is There a Nutmeg in the House? Read Online Free PDF

Book: Is There a Nutmeg in the House? Read Online Free PDF
Author: Elizabeth David
Tags: General, Cooking, Courses & Dishes
emergence of the restaurant as a theatre-substitute could well make an entertaining little study, even a useful one. The Foodie Handbook is not such a study. For one thing, what the subject really calls for is the worldly wit of a James Thurber combined with the bite of a Jonathan Swift; for another the authors of Foodie are, for their different reasons, too self-enmeshed to create valid social comment. To be sure they are skilful enough in the arts of toadying to their public and providing it with a little giggle at itself, but the meaning of satire in its true sense eludes them. Their truly awful brand of teasy jocularity isn’t any kind of substitute.
    Tatler , February 1985

The Oxo Story
    A book celebrating seventy-five years – yes, really – of Oxo cubes is to be published by Collins at the end of November. Its short title, predictably enough, is Taking Stock . The book offers plenty of reproductions of period Oxo advertising, effectively dating from 1910, when the cube was introduced, through two wars and up till recent years. There is a selection of recipes for dishes withnames like ‘Pork ’n’ Peaches’ and ‘Oxo Parsnips’. There’s more about Oxo Katie than this reader wants to know. There’s a commentary written in a dottily blithe PR style: ‘Oxo has always been a part of history’…‘Immortalised for ever was the red Oxo van, scaled to Dinky Toy size to sell for 3d’…‘The second world war was battled through and won.’ In 1953, ‘the Queen sat on her throne and the Union Jack flew over Everest.’ Oh, and the little red Oxo cube, we find, was right up there alongside the triumphant mountaineers and the red, white and blue waving over the eternal snows.
    Critical assessment of the value of meat extracts and cubes wasn’t to be expected from Taking Stock . After all, the book is a publicity exercise. That and other aspects of the subject are not without general interest though, so here goes.
    When the first proprietary brand of beef extract was launched in Europe in 1865 the price of meat was high. Refrigerated ships in which cheap surplus beef and mutton from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas could be exported to meat-hungry Europe became a reality only in the 1880s; so when Liebig’s Extractum Carnis , as its creator called it, appeared accompanied by claims that one pound of the extract contained the concentrated essence of 40 pounds of meat – the figure varies over the years – the impression made was deep and lasting. As the late Sir Jack Drummond put it in his great work The Englishman’s Food , first published in 1939, it was not then generally appreciated, even in medical circles, that clear soups were devoid of body-forming qualities. The beef tea produced by adding water to Liebig’s extract made an agreeable hot or cold drink but it couldn’t be regarded as a foodstuff in the ordinary sense. Such broths were more in the nature of nerve stimulants, the experts agreed. That thousands upon thousands of people still today persist in the belief that meat extracts provide – again in Drummond’s phrase – ‘the essential nutritive principles of meat in highly concentrated form’ is a tribute to the power of skilled and sustained advertising combined with the boundless capacity of the human race to believe what it wants to believe.
    Baron Justus von Liebig, a world-famous German professor of chemistry ennobled in 1845 in recognition of his contribution to the science of nutrition, was a man of deeply serious purpose. He was well aware that the constituents of his condensed meat broth could not alone contribute to the formation of tissue, but did not on that account dismiss it as worthless. He believed that its stimulantaction on appetite could prove beneficial, and was convinced that the nitrogenous elements and the mineral salts extracted from the meats must have some nutritive value. He was not entirely mistaken. In 1944, ninety-seven years after he had published a
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