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PROGRAMME INFO |
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From amaranth to zabaglione, Sheila Dillon and Derek Cooper investigate every aspect of the food we eat. |
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LISTEN AGAIN |
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PRESENTERS |
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- Derek's biography
- Derek's interview
- What do you know about Derek? |
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"Cooper is a man with tremendous gusto and passion for the pleasures of life and food, but he is also a man who has a blazing fury with those who are responsible for allowing our food supply to have become so contaminated and with those countless others who accept this state with apathy and disregard."
Journalist Colin Spencer |
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PROGRAMME DETAILS |
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Next week’s programme – Do We Need Haute Cuisine? – will be taking place at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. (http://www.manoir.com/afr.php). If you’d like to be involved in the discussion, please email your contact details to: thefoodprogramme@bbc.co.uk
FOOD AND POETRY
Food and poetry are not obvious bedfellows. Yet throughout history poets have used food as their inspiration. Recipes handed down over thousands of years in verse form, a drinking poem set to music, an ode to the beauty of nature’s produce.
This programme is about the many ways poetry and food have been linked in the past and the many ways we are still linking the two today.
Sheila visited Barbara Glasson a Methodist minister who runs Somewhere Else, a community group in Liverpool city centre which reaches out to marginalised people through bread-making and poetry.
Sheila’s guests in the studio were Jules Mann, the director of The Poetry Society, who have chosen food as the theme for this year’s National Poetry Day and Peter Washington, editor of the Everyman volume Poems of Food and Drink.
Steve Watson visited beer historian and brewer Ian Hornsey as he brewed beer from a recipe taken from one of the oldest poems known to man – a hymn to the goddess Ninkasi. He also went to see Nada Saleh, a Lebanese cook who made sambusej from a recipe she found in an ancient Arabic poem.
Recipes
Turnovers with Meat
Sambousek
Delicious, crisp turnovers filled with a variety of delightful mixtures to suit everyone’s taste. They appear in Lebanon with mezze or at a large buffet. They can also be stuffed with cheese for a vegetarian treat.
This recipe is probably a culinary legacy from the time of the Abbassid dynasty that started around 750AD. An Arabic poem by Issac Ben Ibrahim Al-Moussalli describes its preparation and filling which uses many powerful seasonings such as coriander, ginger, cloves and cumin.
Ingredients for the dough:
250 grams (9 ozs) unbleached white flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
30 grams (1 oz) softened butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
250 ml. (4 fluid ozs) water
For the filling:
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
30 grams (1 oz) pine nuts
1 onion (about 120 grms/4 ozs) chopped
170 grams (6 ozs) minced lamb
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt or to taste
1 tablespoon Sumac (optional)
a handful of chopped parsley
Ground nut or Sesame oil for frying
Method
Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. Add the butter and oil and work them well into the flour. Gradually add the water. When it forms a dough, knead for 6 to 8 minutes. Form into a ball, place in a polythene bag and refrigerate for half an hour.
Meanwhile prepare the filling. Put the oil in a heavy frying pan over a medium to high heat. When the oil is hot, but not smoking, sauté the pine nuts until golden in colour and remove with a slotted spoon.
To the oil remaining in the pan add the onions, stir for a few seconds, then add the meat and cook until lightly browned, making sure no traces of blood remain, stirring and breaking any lumps of meat with the back of a wooden spoon.
Season with the allspice, cinnamon, black pepper, salt and turn off the heat. Add the Sumac (if used) parsley, pine nuts and mix well, leaving this mixture to stand for a while.
Remove the dough from the refrigerator and divide into two or three equal parts. Take one part, coat both sides lightly with flour and roll out with a rolling pin into a very thin layer. Using a 6 cm. (2.1/2 in) pastry cutter place one heaped teaspoonful of filling in the centre of each circle, fold the pastry over the filling and pinch the edges to seal.
Hold the Sambousek (turnover) in the extremity of your left hand and with the knuckle of your right thumb form a notch, knocking the pastry edge inwards, forming half a pleat. A simpler method is to fold the pastry over the filling and press around the edges with a fork.
Deep fry in ground nut or sesame over medium heat until golden and crisp on all sides or bake. Pre-heat the oven to 190° centigrade, (375 ° Fahrenheit/Gas Mark 5), brush the turnovers all over with oil or butter, place on a baking sheet and bake until golden in colour.
For more flavour you can if you wish add 3/4 tablespoon of lemon juice or pomegranate syrup or follow the poem as described.
© Nada Saleh
Description of Sambousek
Oh! you, who ask for the most delicious of food,
you’ve asked the most perceptive of men, about it
Choose meat that is tender and quite red
and pound it with the fat but not using much
Over, scatter onions, in rounds,
and moist green cabbage that’s freshly gathered
And after throw rue sparingly
cinnamon and a handful of coriander
And thereafter, a little cloves
and ginger the best and pepper.
A handful of cumin, a little murrie
and the full of two palms of palmyra salt
So pound it hard oh master
then ignite a blazing fire
Now put in a pot with water poured from above
and with a lid have it covered
So that if the water has become invisible and faded away
and from the intense heat has dried
Roll it up if you wish in thin pastry
then firmly fasten its edges
Or if it pleases you more take a part of a dough
reasonably rubbed and to touch soft like so
Sprinkle flour and spread in a circle
then bind its edges to form a knot and a pleat
And pour oil in a frying pan of the grade that’s extremely good
then fry it in oil, a wondrous fry
And in a handsome receptacle place
and amidst it put a mustard that’s piquant
And savour this dainty food with mustard
for this is the most delicious of fast food.
By Issac Ben-Ibrahim Al-Moussalli
Translated from Arabic by Nada Saleh
The Hymn to Ninkasi, inscribed on a nineteenth-century B.C. tablet, contains a recipe for Sumerian beer.
Borne of the flowing water (...)
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing water (...)
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for you,
Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for you
Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake,
Ninkasi, Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.
You are the one who handles the dough,
[and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir (bread made from barley) with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, You are the one who handles
the dough, [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date]-honey.
You are the one who bakes the bappir
in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes
the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
You are the one who waters the malt
set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt
set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates.
You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks
the malt in a jar
The waves rise, the waves fall.
You are the one who spreads the cooked
mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes.
Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads
the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes.
You are the one who holds with both hands
the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey and wine
(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
Ninkasi, (...)
(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
The filtering vat, which makes
a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on [top of]
a large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat,
which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on [top of]
a large collector vat.
When you pour out the filtered beer
of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of
Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the
filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of
Tigris and Euphrates.
Translation by Miguel Civil
© A Hymn to the Beer-goddess and a Drinking Song, Studies Presented to A.Leo Oppenheim, June 7th 1964 published by Oriental Press, 1964 (Chicago).
Further information
Reverend Barbara Glasson
‘Somewhere Else’
2nd Floor
96 Bold Street
Liverpool
L14 HY
Tel: 0151 706 0155
Email:Barbara.Glasson@tesco.net
The Poetry Society
22 Betterton Street
London
WC2 H 9BX
Tel: 0207 240 4818
Sheila read:
‘I always eat peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
They do taste kind of funny
But it keeps them on the knife’
Anon
Books:
Flavours of the Levant Home Cooking from Lebanon, Syria and Turkey by Nada Saleh published by Robson Books ISBN 1861054467
Poems of Food and Drink Selected and Edited by Peter Washington published by Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets ISBN 1-84159 753-8
A History of Beer and Brewing by Ian Hornsey, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry
BBCi Food
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