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Buckles, Cobblers, Grunts and Slumps
It’s blueberry season in Maine. The abundance of blueberries got me thinking about my mom’s blueberry buckle recipe. What, pray tell, is a buckle? Buckles Fruit buckles are very much associated in my mind with New England, but my quick check of southern recipe collections suggest that that’s not the case historically. Southern recipes for buckles feature apples and plums Almond-Plum Buckle recipe rather than blueberries Blueberry Buckle Recipe. A buckle, for the curious, is an old-fashioned style of single layer cake, typically cooked in a flat pan, round or square (rather than , and includes fruit and streusel-style crumb topping. Some recipes call for mixing the fruit into the…
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Corned Beef and Corning
The corn in the phrase corned beef refers to salt-curing, or brining beef to preserve it. The corn refers to the large grains of salt used in curing the beef. The meat is placed in a crock and liberally covered with large grains (or corns) of salt. Etymologically, the English word corn comes from the Germanic root kurnam, used to refer to small seeds or kernals, cognate with kernal and with Latin grain. Corned beef, traditionally made with a brisket of beef in Eastern European and Jewish traditions, is fairly simple to do at home. Here’s a recipe from Alton Brown for making your own corned beef.
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Haggis
If you mention to anyone, at all, that you’re going to visit Scotland, you’re bound to be warned about Scotland’s national dish; haggis. Haggis is, according to the AHD “A Scottish dish consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal.” The closest thing I can compare with haggis to in terms of standard American dishes is stuffing, made with giblets. People tend to think of haggis around the 25th of January, the date reserved to celebrate the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns. All over the…
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The Truth about Corned Beef
Every year around St. Patrick’s day in the U.S. the grocery stores start putting corned beef brisket on sale, and restaurants and pubs add corned beef and cabbage to their menus as an Irish entrée. Unfortunately, corned beef and cabbage, even when accompanied by potatoes, is more American (or Germanic) than Irish; we’d do better to celebrate Irish cuisine with salmon or colcannon. Corned beef is not really very Irish, though it is very American (and Germanic). Pork was a staple of the Irish diet, particularly in the form of bacon. Historically, the Irish raised pigs for meat, and beef for milk. If you butchered a cow, you did it…
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Olive
Olives, deliberately planted and tended for thousands of years, are intimately tied to the early diets of ancient humans, who carefully cultivated them wherever we roamed, so much so that a plant with Afro-Asiatic ancestry is now grown even in Washington state. It’s no small thing, that, and it marks the importance of the olive tree in human history, given that the plant is used not only for the fruit (the olive), but for the oil, pressed from the fruit, and the leaves, and even the wood. English, etymologically speaking, obtained the word olive via Old French, olive, from Latin oliva, “olive, olive tree,” from Greek elaia “olive tree, olive.”…
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Soul Cake and Souling
Soul, soul, a soul cake! I pray thee, good missus, a soul cake! One for Peter, two for Paul, Three for Him what made us all! Soul cake, soul cake, please good missus, a soul cake. An apple, a pear, a plum, or a cherry, anything good thing to make us all merry. One for Peter, one for Paul, and three for Him who made us all. All Souls’ Day is one of the feast days of the Roman Catholic Church. All Souls’ is observed on November 2. Special prayers are offered for the deceased souls in Purgatory, believed to be waiting for eventual release. All Souls’ follows All Saints’…