Through all these years fermenting vegetables, I have often wondered why there is so little a tradition of this kind of food preservation in Britain. Did the prevalence of beer easily make malt vinegar available for vinegar pickling? Perhaps the relatively mild winters meant less of a hunger gap than in colder climes eastward? Maybe the early entrance of rural workers into a wage economy cause an earlier loss of indigenous food traditions? Might there be foodways left to be discovered? I’d like to believe this last, but I don’t have an answer.
I scour old cookbooks and find not much– perhaps an occasional mention of making fizzy drinks with “yeast” (which of course could so easily be wild rather than derived from baking and wine making) — elderflower champagne, for example, or bottled drinks of burdock and dandelion, or nettle. But these are sugar ferments, and different from preserving in brine with bioactive bacteria– i.e. sauerkraut, kimchi, cucumber pickles. Somewhere in Hannah Glasse I once read a reference to wedges of cabbage in salt brine– but that didn’t feel like a common cultural practice.
It was a thrill when I learned about Beetroot Stout, a delicious, nourishing, medicinal vegetable-based cocktail. When I queried Glyn Hughes of the incredible site The Foods of England Project, he responded that the only thing that came to mind for him was Potato Cheese (to England– only hypothetically– via Germany):
Enter a caption
http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/potatocheese.htm/ Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette – Thursday 19 July 1855
The immediate association was with Kishk, a Middle Eastern cultured milk and bulgur wheat ferment, Read the rest of this entry »
Kitchen Counter Culture 