If, like the average human being, you consume nutrients on a daily basis, typically in the format of three main meals, then you’ll probably appreciate just how important the subject of this posting is to level of enjoyment that you derive from those three meals a day.

Spices and seasonings!

These days, we’re so used to having such easy access to spices and seasonings to instantly make our foods look, smell, taste or feel better or different, that most of us hardly give a second thought to where they come from, what they are…or even what they look like!

Since most people consume spices in powdered forms, it’s highly likely that, unless you’re a chef, or a really ardent foodie, you’ve never even seen most spices in their raw forms.

In this posting, we’ll be looking at the most commonly used spices present in the world – their histories, uses, origins, and native forms.

So take a palette-cleanser…things are about to get spicy…

A Brief History of Spices

Spices of any variety have been around for literally thousands of years, but antiquity is no guarantee of accessibility. For much of human history, and well into the 1800s, spices were one of the rarest, most expensive things that money could buy – especially in places like Europe, and the Americas. The reason for this was because most spices grew in the Middle East, and Asia, and had to travel phenomenally long distances – hundreds, thousands of miles – by ship, by horseback, by mule-wagon and other things, as a result – just to reach the market of its destination. The time, effort, trouble, and danger involved in all this transport was what made spices phenomenally expensive, and why anything but the most sparing use of said spices, was a show of real wealth and luxury.

Due to the long journeys involved, and the time taken, not all spices could be enjoyed fresh when they arrived in Europe. For example, ginger was almost always either dried, or powdered. Fresh ginger root was nigh impossible to obtain outside of Asia in an age before fast, industrial transport, as it would have rotted by the time it arrived in England from say, India, or China.

It was for all these reasons that spices were so expensive, and why any liberal use of them by anybody apart from the stinking rich, would’ve been rare. It wasn’t until the later 1800s when mechanical means of transporting spices in days or weeks, rather than months, did they become much more readily available around the world.

Black Pepper

Black pepper is supposed to be the most commonly used spice in the world. And looking at any restaurant dining-table that you’re ever likely to come across, who would doubt it? But what’s its story?

Black pepper, or Piper Nigrum is actually a flowering vine, and the peppercorns that we find inside our pepper-mills are grown as clumps or strands of corns on these vines, which are native to the Kerala regeion of India. Peppercorn vines can grow up to 30ft high!!

The corns are harvested, dried, broken apart into individual pepercorn kernals, and then sold. While there are three types of pepper – black, white, and green – they all come from the same plant. The difference in colour is due to when, and how the vines of peppercorns are harvested and processed, which effects the end taste and colour.

Cinnamon

Aaah cinnamon. It’s good for cookies, cakes, rolls, and even kooky internet challenges. But what is cinnamon, really?

Cinnamon comes from a tree which is native to Ceylon, India, and Burma. Specifically, cinnamon is the bark of the Ceylon cinnamon tree, which is native to the island and surrounding countries. The bark is peeled off, rolled into tubes, or ‘quills’, and is then dried. It’s these sticks or quills of cinnamon bark which we buy at the supermarket, and it’s these quills which are crushed and ground up into a powder for cooking with. The strong, sweet, pungent taste made cinnamon a valued spice for centuries, and the price of this rarest and most desirable of spices was astronomical in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Saffron

Sweet, pungent, aromatic, and with that beautiful rich red colour, saffron is, has been, and always will be – the King of Spices.

Since ancient times, saffron has been prized above all other spices. Above pepper, above cinnamon, above nutmeg, above just about everything else. It is the most expensive spice in the world, and one of the most expensive items by weight ever produced.

Saffron is the stigmas (the little antennae-tip-things) that grow in the center of the Saffron Crocus flower. Their bright red colour make them stand out vividly against the purple tint of the flower-petals, and it’s these little stigmas which saffron growers hunt down.

The problem is that each saffron flower only grows three stigmas. And they only grow for about a month every year. To get enough stigmas to dry out to make ONE gram of saffron, you need 150 flowers.

So to get enough saffron to sell it in commercial quantities, you would need entire fields of flowers.

The problem is, because they are flowers, you can’t just harvest saffron any old way. It must be done BY HAND. The delicate stigmas won’t stand up to the aggression of machine harvesting, or even rough hand-tools, so every single little red follicle must be picked manually.

And as I said – it takes 150 flowers to produce ONE GRAM of saffron. So to get one kilo of saffron therefore takes about 150,000 flowers.

Imagine if you had to pick 150,000 flowers in just four weeks. By hand.

Now imagine how much goddamn money you would want for all that effort for something so tiny.

Now you know why saffron costs as much as it does.

Saffron has been harvested the same way today as it has been for centuries. Once it’s harvested, it’s dried, and once dried, it’s packaged, and sold. Saffron has been used as a fabric dye, as a medicine, but most notably as a food flavoring for everything from desserts and tarts in Europe, to curries and rice-dishes in Asia. Is it worth its weight in gold? Not quite. But of all the spices on this list – it’s the one the gets the closest!

Sugar

Mmmm sugar! Sweet, sweet, delicious sugar. Mankind has had a love-hate, mutually destructive relationship with sugar, and it’s one that goes back centuries. Although not actually a spice, and rather a sweetener, I’m including it here as it is a flavour enhancer, nonetheless.

Sugar has been known about for centuries, for thousands of years, although it was little understood at the time. Early cultures called sugar ‘white honey’, since honey – the most common sweetener for much of history – was the only substance that most people could compare it to.

Sugar was originally produced from the sap or juice of the sugarcane plant. Sugarcane was difficult to grow, had to be harvested by hand, and was extremely labour-intensive to process. It had to be crushed to extract the juice inside the cane, then the juice had to be boiled to extract the sugar, and then the sugar had to be refined to remove the impurities. The sweet, dark, sticky syrup that comes from the extraction and refining processes is also used as a sweetener – we call it ‘molasses’.

The biggest drawback to early sugar-production, however – was where it was done. Sugarcane really only grows in tropical regions such as Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. This meant that the places where sugar could be grown and processed on a large scale were small, and the distances it had to travel to reach its desired markets were immense!

Sugar plantations in places like the Deep South of the USA, and in the Caribbean in the 1600s, 1700s and early 1800s were largely slaveholding plantations, where the backbreaking work of harvesting and extraction was done by African slaves. It wasn’t until the late 1700s and the early 1800s that farmers discovered the ability to extract sugar from sugar-beets as well – which were easier to grow in a larger variety of areas – which caused the price of sugar, once so hard to produce and transport – to plummet – and for sugar-consumption in the U.K. alone, to rise by orders of magnitude just within the lifetime of Queen Victoria.

Mace & Nutmeg

Mmm. Nutmeg. Used on almost everything from the Middle Ages onwards, it’s popular on desserts, baked goods, savory dishes and so much more! But what is it?

Believe it or not, mace and nutmeg are (almost) the same thing! Or at least – they both come from the same plant.

Nutmeg comes from the seeds or nuts of the nutmeg tree, which is native to Indonesia.

So much for the nutmeg! Mace, on the other hand, is the outer covering, husk, or ‘aril’ that surrounds nutmeg seeds. To get nutmeg and mace, the seeds are harvested from the tree, and then the aril (outer covering) is peeled off the seed. The husks are dried for several days, changing colour in the process and these dried husks are what becomes mace.

To use nutmeg, all you have to do is to grate or crush the nutmeg to use it in cooking, baking, or flavouring food. Nutmeg was extremely popular in Europe and America, but its price and rarity meant that it was used sparingly.

The spice was so prized that it was even stored inside purpose-made nutmeg boxes, which usually had built-in rasps or graters used to scrape off the necessary amounts of powder from the physical nut, so that it could be used to flavour food. Often made of solid silver, nutmeg grater-boxes are some of the most expensive antiques for their size in the world, and were usually made in all kinds of whimsical shapes and styles.

Ginger

Everybody loves ginger! From roast meats to curries, from sauces and soups to…gingerbread! Yay!!

Ginger is the rhizome or root of the zingibe officinale flowering plant. It’s use in food and medicine goes back centuries and centuries and centuries, and was first mentioned in text by the legendary Chinese scholar Kong Fuzi...does that name sound familiar? In English, it’s translated as…Confucius.

Yes. THAT Confucius! Confucius says!

And Confucius says – a lot! In particular, he said that he ate ginger with almost all his meals, that it was a digestive aid, and that ginger was imported to China from the South Pacific. In particular, from Oceania, and specifically – from Indonesia and the islands surrounding it. Ginger’s pungent taste made it a popular flavouring, and it has been used in Asian cooking (and traditional medicines) for literally thousands of years. Ginger made its way to Europe in the first century A.D., and was mentioned in the writings of Ancient Roman statesman, Pliny the Elder – who – unlike his nephew – Pliny the Younger – did not survive the 79A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius near the Roman town of Pompeii.

Unfortunately, ginger root could not be transported fresh to Europe all the way from Southeast Asia – it would never survive the journey without going mouldy – so the spice was often dried, or even powdered, before transport, so that it could arrive in places like Italy or England in a usable, if not exactly fresh – state. Ginger’s most famous use in European cooking is in gingerbread! The dense, sweet, sticky paste made from flour, ginger, nutmeg, honey and citrus peel was often so viscous that it could be shaped into almost anything – like gingerbread men – or, if your dough was strong enough – even a full-blown model gingerbread house – just like Hansel and Gretel. Gingerbread, just like almost anything sweet and/or spicy in medieval times, was a luxury, and only royalty or nobility could normally afford to enjoy this treat, since the ingredients that made the gingerbread…eh…gingery…cost such astronomical amounts of money.

Cloves

Mmmm!! Cloves! Popular in Asian and Western dishes for centuries, cloves are the dried flower-buds that come from the tree Syzygium Aromaticum – a type of myrtle tree. The tree is – you guessed it!…native to Indonesia! They weren’t called the ‘Spice Islands’ for nothing! Cloves are used in sweet and savory dishes, and clove extract (or ‘clove oil’) is a popular natural medicine, which nowadays is being explored to understand its potential medicinal effects and uses.

Star Anise

Aren’t star anise cute!? These spiky, usually eight-sided spices come from a tree in southern China and have been used for medicine, cooking, flavouring and even cosmetics – for centuries. The name comes from its star-like shape, and because its flavour is similar to the anise flower, from which we get aniseed – another popular flavouring agent. In fact, because star anise tastes so similar to actual aniseed, it’s become a popular flavouring agent in baking, and cooking, and is widely used in things like toothpastes and perfumes, as a cheaper alternative to aniseed.

Cardamom

Originating in India, cardamom is a spice related to ginger, and is grown in the form of pods or seeds of the cardamom plant. Today, it’s more often found in Malaysia and Guatemala than India, but it remains a popular spice in Indian (and other southeast-Asian) cuisines.

Apart from its culinary uses, cardamom is also used as a drug or medicine – it can even be smoked! As medicine, its most common use is as a digestive aid, but it can also be drunk in tea-form to lower blood-pressure, or to help treat fatty-liver disease – sounds mighty useful for something that you might use when you’re busy baking desserts!

Vanilla

Yes, believe it or not, but that thing which flavours your custard tarts, ice cream and other desserts – is a spice!

Vanilla comes from the pods, or ‘beans’ of the Vanilla Orchid, which is native to Mexico. Believe it or not, but on the “spice rarity scale”, true vanilla flavouring is actually the second-rarest and second-most-expensive spice in the world!…which one is first? That’s right – Saffron!

But how could a spice that’s used in all kinds of desserts, not to mention incalculable quantities of ice-cream – be so rare!?

Like saffron, it’s because real vanilla is bloody hard to grow!

See, for the vanilla beans or pods to sprout, the vanilla flower which produces them, has to be pollinated. If this was left up to nature, it would take forever, and we’d never get the chance to ever enjoy the stuff – but fortunately for us, there are other ways to stimulate a vanilla plant. The first method was discovered in 1837 by a Belgian botanist named Charles Morren. His research led him to the realisation that the vanilla orchid is pollinated by the rare melipone bee, which is native to South America. The problem is that waiting for bees to pollinate the flowers could take forever! Morren tried to speed up the process, but was unsuccessful, and his method failed to bear fruit!…or in this case…uh…vanilla pods.

Surprisingly, the person who DID discover how to grow vanilla wasn’t Belgian, and wasn’t even a scientist! He was a 12-year-old African slave-boy named Edmond Albius! Like Morren before him, Albius discovered that you didn’t need cute little bees to pollinate vanilla flowers – that it could be done by hand. The problem was that Morren’s method was too haphazard to work properly. Albius’s breakthrough was using a stem or stick, or even a blade of grass, to manipulate the flower so that the pollen from the stamen inside the flower could be transferred to the stigma – thereby pollinating the flower!

Nearly two centuries later, and vanilla orchids are still pollinated in this exact same way as little Edmond had done, way back in 1841! The method is easy, and quick, but because it’s so delicate, it’s an operation which can only be done by hand – this is why real, true, authentic vanilla pods are so rare, and expensive – because every single flower has to be fertilised by hand.

Conclusion

And this concludes our foray into the delicious world of spices. Are these all the spices in the world? Certainly not, but they are among the most commonly used. These days, people are so used to getting their spices in powders and packets, containers and bottles, that they tend to forget what they look like, where they come from, or even, how rare and difficult they used to be to obtain. Hopefully this posting has been an informative, entertaining and educational look at how our spices came to be, where they came from, and why they were once among the most valuable commodities in the world.

If you’ve ever grown up in a country, or a city, with a large ethnic Chinese population, or been invited out for lunch by Chinese friends, then you might well have experienced the Chinese custom known as “yum cha”.

But what is Yum Cha, where does it come from, what does it mean, and what are the customs and traditions that surround this most Chinese of Chinese meals? Today, we find out together.

What is Yum Cha?

Literally, “Yum Cha” means “Drink Tea”, in the Chinese dialect of Cantonese, spoken largely in southern China and Hong Kong. In a broader context, “yum cha” refers to a late-morning or early-afternoon meal, eaten with friends and family, which comprises of loads of dumplings, small dishes, light meals and pots of Chinese loose-leaf tea. In this respect, “yum cha” is similar to the British traditions of Elevenses, Brunch, Morning Tea, Luncheon, or Afternoon Tea, in that it is a meal taken with tea, shared with friends, and made up of loads of little snacks and dishes.

A word commonly associated with “yum cha” is “dim sum”. What is it?

Dim sum refers to the small dishes served to diners in yum cha restaurants, usually in bamboo steamer-baskets. Most people think that “dim sum” refers to dumplings, but actually it can refer to any of these small dishes served in this manner, which accompanies the tea. Together, tea and dim sum = yum cha.

Where did Yum Cha come from?

The tradition of dim sum, light snacks (the words ‘dim sum’ translate to ‘barely fill your stomach’) eaten during late morning or early afternoon, date back centuries, and are believed to go as far back as the Song Dynasty in the 1000s or 1100s A.D. At this time, tea and dim sum remained separate entities, and there was not yet a meal which combined them both. This remained the case for centuries. The combination of tea and dim sum, to create the meal known today as “yum cha”, is believed to have started in Canton Province (Guandong Province today) in the 19th century.

Originally, the focus of the establishments which served tea and dim sum was still on the service of tea, and were still identified largely as tea-houses. However, as the 1800s progressed, it made more sense to combine service of tea and dim sum together, in a purpose-built restaurant – this became known as yum cha.

One of the first mentions of yum cha in literature was by the Xianfeng Emperor of China, who ruled during the mid-1800s, when he wrote of “one cent houses”, referring to how a cheap meal comprised of tea and dim sum could be purchased at special restaurants.

And yum cha culture flourished from there!

Yum Cha flourished, especially in southern China through the late 1800s into the 1910s, 20s and 30s. The growing Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Second World War forced many refugees to flee mainland China, settling in Taiwan, and Hong Kong, where they could live beyond the grip of the communists. These refugees also fled to British colonies in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaya and Singapore (where they were known as “Sinkeh” or “New Guests”).

Where-ever it was that they ended up – they brought their yum cha culture and expertise with them, and established yum cha restaurants in these new locations. Apart from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, war-refugees also fled to Australia, New Zealand and to the West Coast of the USA, where a large Chinese expat community (largely based around San Francisco) already existed, introducing western audiences to yum cha dining. When the wars ended in the 1940s and 50s, yum cha dining took off once more. It has remained popular ever since.

Yum Cha Customs

For yum cha virgins who have never attended (or attended very few) yum cha meals, there are certain traditions or customs which are followed to ensure a pleasant, comfortable and enjoyable dining experience. Here are the main ones to take note of. Not everybody follows them, and not all of them make sense, but they’re interesting to think about, nonetheless…

Keeping the Lid Up

While you can of course, order other drinks while enjoying yum cha, the traditional drink is, of course – tea. The meal wouldn’t be called “drink tea” without it, now would it?

When the pot is low on tea, pick up the teapot lid and flip it over, or close it halfway. This is the traditional way of getting a waiter’s attention that the pot is empty and needs refilling.

Tapping the Table

Another really common yum cha practice is finger or knuckle-tapping. This is done when somebody else at the table refills your teacup during the meal, but you can’t (or don’t want) to stop and thank them verbally. This is either because you’re eating, reaching for something to eat, or are busy talking, and don’t want to interrupt the conversation. Traditionally, it’s done by tapping the index and middle-finger together on the table, or the first knuckles of the same two fingers.

This practice is said to have originated in the 1700s during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled China for sixty-odd years between the 1730s-1790s. While traveling incognito around his kingdom, he insisted on pouring tea for his dining companions, like anybody else. As the emperor was deified by the Chinese people, this was seen as a gigantic honour for the recipient. The traditional way to acknowledge this was to kowtow in the emperor’s presence – something which would’ve of course, immediately blown his cover! Instead, the emperor asked his friends and companions to knuckle-tap instead. The bent fingers symbolised kneeling, and tapping the knuckles represented bowing to the floor.

Is this legend true? Not very likely, if at all. But it is a fun urban legend to spread around. The truth is that we may never know where the tradition of finger/knuckle-tapping came from, but what is true is that people still do it today.

A Group Affair

Yum Cha is always done with friends and/or family. I guess you could yum cha alone, but…that’d be pretty sad, wouldn’t it? Plus, you’ve got all that damn food to eat! Nah, yum cha is always done with others, and always in the late morning, or over lunchtime, into the afternoon. Nobody goes out to yum cha for dinner. It’s just not the done thing.

To Peel or Not to Peel, that is the Question…

…whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer from the bacteria and fungi, or by peeling, end them…

A popular staple of yum cha are steamed buns! Charsiew Bao (pork buns), or similar buns (usually served as part of dessert) come hot from the wok, all steamed, shiny, glossy and smooth on top! Some people will tell you that if you eat these buns, you should always peel away the shiny upper skin on top of the bun, to expose the soft, fuzzy under-pastry beneath, prior to eating.

Right?

Eeeehm…no.

The reasoning behind this practice dates back to the days when you could buy buns like these from street-vendors. The belief was that since you didn’t know who had handled the food, or how it was cooked or steamed, you should always peel the shiny layer of dough off the top of the bun, before eating the bun itself. This stopped you from getting all kinds of bacteria and nasty stuff in your food when you ate it. But is there any truth to this?

Hehehe…no.

The fact is, if there is anything on top, it’d be killed off during the steaming process, so eat that bun confidently, with pride, indulgence, and enjoyment!

BUT!

Do, please, make sure, that you peel off the PAPER LINER that is UNDERNEATH the bun, before you eat it. Or else, you’re going to look like an idiot trying to explain to people why you’re chewing on a sheet of paper with your meal. Or you could just tell them that it’s extra protein or whatever. I dunno. Yummy, yummy protein… Regardless, no, you don’t need to peel anything, except for the paper liner – which, by the way, is there to stop the bun from gluing itself to the bamboo steamer-basket during cooking.

Concluding Remarks

Anyway, that’s the end of this little look at one of Chinese cuisine’s most popular and famous creations: Yum cha! Now, go forth – eat, drink, and be merry. Or at least try to be, in our current global climate.

We all love to eat. And we all have particular foods, or dishes that we hold dear to our hearts, out of nostalgic, sentimental or patriotic reasons. Every nation and culture on earth have dishes that they regard as sacred, and as being quintessentially part of their lives. But not all is what it seems. In this posting, I’ll be talking about just a few of the dishes and foods which have surprising backstories.

Let us begin!

Food: The Hamburger
Claimant: The USA.
Origin Country: Germany.

Aah, the hamburger! The quintessential fast-food menu staple! But why are they called hamburgers when there’s…no ham…inside them?

Actually, hamburgers are named after the city of their origin – Hamburg, Germany! The original concoction was a simple ground beef sandwich. When the people of Hamburg (also called ‘Hamburgers’) moved to the USA, they took their “Hamburg Steak Sandwiches” along with them. Deciding that this was an even bigger mouthful than the sandwiches themselves, Americans shortened them to just ‘hamburger’, and later on, shorter still, to just ‘burger’.

Food: Fish and Chips
Claimant: The UK
Origin Country: Various.

Ah, fish and chips! We like fish and chips! As British as bad weather, hot tea, and more accents than you can shake a stick at, fish and chips has long been seen as a staple of British cuisine!

Right?

Wrong.

Actually, fish and chips only goes back to Victorian times, barely two hundred years ago! The idea of battered, crumbed fish, deep-fried in oil (or as was common in Victorian times – beef tallow…mmm…tallow!), actually comes, not from England, but from Russia! Observant Russian Jews would abstain from doing any useful work on the Sabbath Day, except that which was absolutely essential, as dictated by their religious teachings. This includes the kindling of flames.

Since you can’t kindle flames on the Sabbath, you can’t cook. So instead, they would batter, crumb and fry their fish the night before, so that they would have a quick, convenient and delicious food to eat the next day. This custom of frying fish came to England with the immigration of Russian and Polish Jews in the 1800s when they fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.

The idea of chunks of potato being fried in a similar manner comes from Belgium. Unable to fish during the winter months, Belgians would dice up potatoes into slabs or blocks and deep-fry them in oil or tallow as a fish-substitute. This method of cooking potatoes is also what gave rise to the “french fry”, since they were created in the French-speaking area of Belgium. That said, American-style French-fries are much thinner than British/Commonwealth-style Chips.

The first fish-and-chip shop…or as most people affectionately call them – chippies! – dates back to around 1860 in Britain. Fish and chips were a fast, tasty, filling, and relatively cheap dish. The industrial revolution allowed for the widespread construction of railroad networks which allowed for fish, potatoes, and other foods and vegetables to be, for the first time, transported in-bulk across the country in a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks. This spike in the availability of fish meant that the price dropped and it was cheap enough to be fried up and served to the working-classes as a convenient and crispy lunchtime snack.

Food: Doughnuts!
Claimant: The USA
Origin: The Netherlands.

Mmmm. Doughnuts. The staple food of Homer Simpson, Garfield the Cat and most American children, the doughnut has long since been a popular sweet snackfood. Chocolate-stuffed, jam-filled, custard-pumped, cinnamon-dusted, sugar-glazed…the list of varieties goes on forever!

But where do they come from?

Despite their popularity in the ‘States, doughnuts actually come from the Netherlands, and were brought to what would eventually become Manhattan, with the Dutch immigration in the 17th century. The doughnut is directly descendant from the Dutch Oly Koek, literally ‘Oily Cake’, so-named because it was a sweet cake or bun that was cooked by being fried in oil (much as most doughnuts are still made today).

Variations of the Oly Koek remained popular in the area around what would become New York City for centuries, and are mentioned in the writings of early American writer, Washington Irving, who said that to find the genuine Dutch original, you had to find Old Dutch families who had been living in New York for generations!

The first record of a ‘dough nut’ comes from the early 1800s, when it was mentioned in an English-language cookbook from 1803. By the end of the decade, the spelling of “doughnut” or “dough nut” had become accepted, and the original Dutch snack was slowly morphing into the treat we know today.

Doughnuts at this time were not as we would currently recognise them, however. The majority still resembled buns rather than circles of sweetness. Although debate seems to rage over this, it appears that the modern holed doughnut was invented in the mid-1800s as a way to make the doughnuts cook more evenly when they were deep-fried.

Food: Chop Suey
Claimant: N/A. Supposed origin: China.
Origin: The USA.

Any film, or book, set or written back in the 1800s or early 1900s in the USA that mentions Chinese culture or food is likely to mention this dish at one time or another. It’s mentioned in the 1936 film “San Francisco”, when two characters decide to go out for a meal of ‘chop suey’.

At the time, it was believed by unknowing Americans, that chop suey was a genuine Chinese dish. It isn’t, a fact more widely known today than it once was. The word ‘chop suey’ is a corruption of the Chinese words “Za Sui”, which basically means “Bits and Pieces”. This is because chop suey was usually made out of whatever food was available and served up to hungry people looking for a cheap meal. As such, it doesn’t really have a recognised ‘recipe’. These days, ‘chop suey’ is largely seen as a historical curiosity, but there was a time when most people with limited knowledge of Chinese cuisine literally didn’t know any better.

Food: The Croissant.
Claimant: France.
Origin: Austria & Germany.

Ah! La croissant! The Crescent! Leavened dough folded, folded, folded and refolded over and over sheets of butter, before being proofed, and baked, and coming out hot, savory, tangy and crunchy and soft and oh-so-rich…mmmmm.

Who doesn’t like croissants? They’re as French as the Eiffel Tower and beheading the nobility! But believe it or not…they’re not french at all!

The croissant actually originated in Austria, created by Viennese bakers who were creating a type of bread roll known as a “Kipferl” (literally “Twisted” or “Curved”). The idea of a leavened-dough roll or bun in the shape of a crescent migrated to France with Austrian immigrants in the 1800s, but even then, it wasn’t a Frenchman who was responsible for the transition from Kipferl to Croissant!

Again, it was an Austrian, a former army officer turned civilian baker, August Zang, who moved to Paris in the 1830s. In Paris, Zang set up the “Boulangerie Viennoise” (literally “The Viennese Bakery”), where he sold modified versions of his native Kipferl, which became known as the ‘Croissant’ we love today.

I found this highly entertaining YouTube video this morning. Was uploaded a few days ago by the channel ‘It’s OK to be Smart’:

Highly informative and mostly accurate, EXCEPT for the part about Medieval cooks putting pepper on rotten meat. That has been a persistent myth for centuries. It never happened. It never happened because pepper in the Middle Ages was EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE. No cook who wished to remain in his master’s employ would dared to have wasted such expensive spices on meat already past its prime.

Other than that, a fascinating look into the history of salt and pepper 🙂

Sailors in the Royal Navy received three “square meals” a day, served to them in a wooden, square tray, which wouldn’t slide and roll around on a rocking, creaking sailing ship.

Each morning, we break our evening fast, with the first meal of the day. At night, we dine upon dinner, or sup upon supper. We take dinner in the afternoon and supper at night, or lunch in the afternoon and dinner at night, and supper as a late-night snack. We have elevenses, morning tea, afternoon tea, Bruncheon, Tiffin, coffee-breaks, tea-breaks…Where did all our different meal-names and meal-times come from?

Get yourself something to eat while we sink our teeth into the history of our meals.

“Breakfast”

“We’ve had breakfast, yes! But what about second breakfast!?” 
“I don’t think he knows about second breakfasts, Pip…” – LOTR

Breakfast! That meal that’s so important, hobbits have it twice a day!

In our modern lives, breakfast is our regular morning meal, eaten any time between daybreak and noon. But why do we call it ‘breakfast’? Why not sunmeal or upfeed or dawning snack?

The word ‘Breakfast‘ comes from the Middle Ages, when days often started at sun-up, with hard physical labour, working the land. Or started with morning prayers in a monastery or church. Most people would rise at dawn, and not eat until they had tilled fields, split firewood, fed the animals, prayed and handled the most important of household chores during the limited hours of daylight. It was only after this exertion that one could ‘break one’s fast’. Eventually, it just became known as ‘breakfast’.

Breakfast staples such as pancakes, bacon and eggs, toast, and porridge, developed over the centuries. In the days before Lent, people observed Collop Monday and Shrove Tuesday. The two days before Ash Wednesday.

During these days, people had to use up all their meat and perishable foodstuffs before the period of abstinence called Lent, since none of these things would last and would rot during the period of fasting.

So came about pancakes (which used up extra eggs, flour and dairy), and bacon and eggs, which used up excess eggs, and meat. A ‘collop‘ is a slice of meat, so basically ‘Meat Monday’.

Most countries around the world survived on porridge or pottage for breakfast, and every society has its own variation. Rice congee or porridge in Asia, oat or barley porridge in Europe, cornmeal porridge or gruel in the Americas.

In Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary, the entry of “Oats” is hilariously defined as: “Eaten by people in Scotland, but fit only for horses in England“, to which a reply was typically: “What fine people, and what fine horses!”

In England, the ‘Full English’ breakfast was typically the norm for those who could afford it, during the 19th century. Bacon, eggs, sausages, toast, beans, black pudding, and tea. A substantial amount of food to keep the body fueled during hard labour on the farm, or in one of the new manufacturing jobs that was popping up around England during the Victorian era.

Cornflakes and other breakfast cereals started appearing in the late 1800s, in the years after the American Civil War. These were championed as healthfoods by such people as John Harvey Kellogg. J.H. Kellogg, along with his brother William Keith, were vegetarians, and believed strongly in a grain-based diet, without the eggs, meat, bacon, and sausages common on the breakfast tables of the 1800s.

One of the more interesting reasons as to why the Kellogg brothers developed cornflakes was due to their views on sex. As Seventh Day Adventists, they believed in sexual abstinence. Surely, a change in diet would distract people from their morning shag, and make them better, more holy people?

Not if you feed them a rich, healthy, carbohydrate breakfast which gives them lots of energy to enjoy their morning romp even more…

But then, Dr. J. Kellogg was a man who believed in the wholesome benefits of yoghurt enemas.

So much for the dietary views of Dr. Kellogg…

Throughout most of history, breakfast was eaten…whenever. It wasn’t until the 1700s that it started seriously becoming a morning meal. The long working-hours of farmers, industrialists, inventors and the landed gentry…okay maybe not the last one…meant that a meal in the morning before heading off to work was necessary, and it wasn’t practical to go home for a meal halfway through the day, so it was eaten as early as possible before heading off into the humdrum routine of the day. By the Victorian period, Breakfast was well and truly set as the morning meal.

Brunch!

We imagine brunch as a modern thing. Housewives have it with their friends. The rich and idle have it when they wake up late from drowning in their Egyptian cotton sheets. It’s the lazy dude’s meal. Right?

Wrong.

‘Brunch’ as we know it today, first arrived in the Victorian era of the 1890s. It was created as a joke in the popular comic magazine, ‘Punch‘, as a sort of long, Sunday lunch, to be enjoyed after weekend church-services, starting with breakfast foods and slowly morphing into heavier, more substantial luncheon-style foods in the afternoon, all enjoyed in a relaxed, lazy atmosphere.

Brunch has extended its reach and now exists in countries all over the world, from America to China. From enjoying a light meal at a country club, to a casual yumcha in Hong Kong.

“Luncheon”

Ah, lunch! Not everyone has lunch. Some people think it’s an essential component of life. Others enjoy long, lavish, relaxing luncheons, eaten with friends and colleagues. Some just skip it and survive on two meals a day. But what is it?

‘Lunch’ is the new kid on the block, as far as mealtimes are concerned. Originally, there was breakfast, taken in late morning or midday, and then dinner or supper, taken in the late afternoon. ‘Lunch’ as we know it today did not even exist.

But from the 1700s onwards, with breakfast getting earlier and work-hours forcing dinner further and further back into the evening, it was often several hours between meals. Imagine having breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning, or eight o’clock, and then starving for ten or twelve hours straight until dinnertime?

Something had to be done!

So, people started eating in the middle of the day.

Originally, nobody knew what to call this newfangled meal. ‘Noonings‘ was one suggestion, since it was eaten at midday. Another was ‘Nuncheon‘, a word which had survived from the 14th century, and which meant a light snack or refreshment. Eventually, mankind on a whole, settled on the word as being ‘Luncheon’. Or just ‘lunch’ for short.

Just as working habits had forced the creation of lunch, so had the time to prepare food forced the creation of a new item in the home – the lunchbox.

It was impractical to stop in the middle of the workday to go all the way home and make and eat lunch. And it was expensive to stop in the middle of the workday to go out and buy lunch all the time. It would be far more convenient to cook or make lunch at home, then bring it to work and eat it on the spot. To transport this new meal called ‘lunch’ came the lunchbox!

Lunchboxes were originally just whatever you could find to carry your lunch in – wooden crates, barrels, empty buckets with lids on top…but eventually, dedicated lunchboxes (typically made of cheap, pressed steel) came onto the market. These would hold two sandwiches, some snack-foods, and maybe a flask of hot coffee, tea, soup, or just ordinary drinking-water.

Tiffin

Lunch varies around the world, and the common or garden-variety lunchbox is not suitable for all situations. In Asia, where most people eat rice or noodle dishes instead of bread, it would be difficult to pack fried rice, dumplings or noodles into a conventional western-style lunchbox and take it to work, or school. Let’s introduce the tiffin-carrier:

‘Tiffin‘ is an old English word for a light, refreshing luncheon. A relaxing meal taken in the middle of the day. Commonly used by British expats and colonials living in the Empire’s oriental extremities during the 1800s. It comes from the word ‘tiff‘ meaning a light drink or snack. Eventually, it evolved to mean something a lot more than tea and cucumber sandwiches, however.

The ‘Tiffin-carrier’ is a type of food-container invented in the 1800s for transporting the comestibles which typically made up the midday tiffin – curry, rice, noodles or flatbread, vegetables and soup. Tiffins typically came in two, three, four and five-tier arrangements (in some examples, six or more), but three or four was most common. This was to keep each food-component separate and to make access to the food much easier, by simply opening the carrier…

…and unstacking everything, bowl by bowl…

Until everything was neatly laid out in front of you:

Tiffin-carriers remain extremely popular in Asian countries, and they’re as common over there as thermos-flasks are in the Western world. People in western countries are starting to use tiffin-carriers, however. They find them useful for things like sandwiches, sushi, salad, leftover spaghetti, Chinese food and for storing snacks for lunch. You can still buy them brand-new, or you can buy vintage reproductions, or even fancy antique brass and copper ones at fairs and antiques shops.

“Dinner!”

Of all the meals we eat today, dinner is probably the one which has seen the most change over the centuries.

Dinner gets its name from the word ‘to dine’ or to eat. Since you eat all the time, ‘dinner’ was basically defined as the main meal of the day. First came your breaking of the evening fast, and then after several long hours, dinner, usually in the afternoon, much earlier than we’re used to today. Expensive firewood and candles meant that it was impractical to eat dinner at night.

Dinnertimes changed throughout history, as working-habits shifted and pushed dinner forwards or backwards on the 24-hour time-scale. In some lower-class households in England, or people who made up the servant-class, ‘Dinner’ was the midday meal, and ‘supper’ was had at night. This was because the demands of domestic service prevented servants from eating ‘dinner’ at night, since they had to cook and serve for their employers.

On a whole, though, dinner was pushed back further and further as time advanced. Originally eaten at midday or early afternoon, it moved to the late afternoon or early evening by the late 1500s. With the arrival of ‘Luncheon’ in the 1700s, ‘Dinner’ was forced back even further. It was now steadily in the late-afternoon, evening timeslot, and kept there by the new working-hours of office-clerks, lawyers, bankers, shopkeepers and other people now involved in the professions and trades brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

With candles becoming cheaper, and with new forms of lighting such as oil, gas and eventually, electricity, it was finally practical and comfortable, to eat dinner at night. Most people will typically have dinner between five and seven o’clock at night, depending on their work and time schedules.

“Supper”

When most people think of ‘supper’, they imagine a late-night snack or meal, but, as with ‘Dinner’, ‘Supper time’ differs depending on where you live and your general social background. Some people consider ‘Dinner’ the midday meal, and ‘supper’ to be the evening meal, while others consider ‘luncheon’ the midday meal and ‘dinner’ to be the evening one.

That being the case, where does supper fall?

The origin of the word ‘supper‘ in English comes from French and German, the words ‘Souper‘ and ‘Suppe‘. ‘Supper’ was originally the evening meal, but as workdays got longer, breakfast earlier and dinner later, which was backed up by ‘lunch’ at noon, Supper, like Dinner, was kicked back further and further. Most people now consider it to be an after-dinner meal. Usually something light, before retiring, or something enjoyed with friends and family after a night out. However, in some places, ‘supper’, ‘dinner’ and even ‘tea’ are all synonyms for the same thing – the main evening meal.

Morning Tea, Afternoon Tea & Elevenses

Anyone who grew up on a literary diet of the Famous Five, The Secret Seven, the Adventurous Four, Paddington Bear and The Wind in the Willows will probably have heard of such English meals as Morning Tea, Afternoon Tea and some mysterious snack called ‘Elevenses’.

What are they?

These typically light meals became popular among the English upper-and-middle classes during the Victorian era. Changing social and work-habits meant that mealtimes changed drastically. While their menfolk were out earning, women of the well-to-do classes would go visiting. It was the man’s job to earn a living. It was the woman’s job to make all the social connections to ensure that the wage or salary brought home would grow as time went on.

Morning tea and afternoon tea centered around tea, naturally. This beverage was once so rare and expensive, women kept their tea-caddies locked and had the keys with them at all times. But with the opening of China in the 1850s, the import of Chinese and Indian teas became cheaper and it was now available to a much wider range of people.

Tea was designed to be light. No heavy roast beef or rice and pasta or noodles. Similar to the Chinese custom of Yumcha, tea was meant to be light, refined and relaxed. Enjoyed with close friends and relations, or business-partners and colleagues. Tea consisted of small cakes, biscuits, and sandwiches – stereotypically, the classic cucumber-sandwich. Light snacks not designed to fill you up, but to distract from hunger until the main meals of the day, such as luncheon, or dinner (depending on if it were morning, or afternoon tea). In some places around the world, ‘tea-time’ grew later and later, from its 2 or 3 o’clock position, to four, five, or even six o’clock at night, becoming synonymous with ‘dinner’.

Instead of morning tea, one might have ‘elevenses’, taken, as the name suggests, around ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. Since the Industrial Revolution forced people to wake up earlier and eat breakfast earlier (six or seven or eight in the morning), by midday, they could be especially hungry. Elevenses or morning tea was designed as a light snack, to be enjoyed halfway between breakfast and lunch. Depending on where around the world elevenses may take place, it might have coffee, or tea. But typically also comes with sandwiches or small cakes. But it shouldn’t be confused with ‘Brunch’ which generally concentrates on heavier, stomach-fillers to keep you going into the afternoon.

Time to Eat

Mealtimes and meal-names have changed and evolved over the centuries. Some have remained fashionable, such as the long, lazy, Sunday Brunch, or the exclusive, Friday or Saturday dinner out at a restaurant. Some have changed drastically, such as the time (and speed) at which we eat breakfast. Some names continue to change or evolve, depending on where you live and your social background. Dinner. Supper. Lunch. Tea. Tiffin…It changes and changes all the time. For more information, explore the fascinating documentary series’ below, which provided much of the information for this posting.

Hungry For More?

A lot of the information gleamed here came from episodes of…

“The Supersizers“, presented by Giles Corran and Sue Perkins.

“If Walls Could Talk“, presented by Dr. Lucy Worsley.

“Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner“, presented by Clarissa Dickson-Wright (of ‘Two Fat Ladies‘ fame).