Everyone knows the saying about what the world’s “oldest profession” is, but you will find a very close runner up in the kitchen. The history of those who cook professionally to make their living goes way, way back to the origins of civilization itself.
It’s another epic journey across the ages, this time with a focus on my own chosen profession and day job. This is the long, ancient history of chefs (and restaurants).
Theme music by the incredible Michael Levy of Ancient Lyre. “An Ancient Lyre” and much more is available from all major digital music stores and streaming sites.
Have you ever wondered if there’s more to history than dates and major events, what some of the stories and daily lives of regular people looked like? Do you need a reminder that history is populated with real people, who had lives just like we do?
Come take a sweeping journey back into the past as we explore the entire history of civilization, but on a more intimate level, examining as closely as we can the daily lives, challenges, and of course foods, of your average subsistence farmer living in any time and culture.
Theme music by the incredible Michael Levy of Ancient Lyre. “An Ancient Lyre” and much more is available from all major digital music stores and streaming sites.
JAKE PENZELL BENAY O’CONNELL LILI RASMUS DUNCAN MCHALE REBEKA DAVIDSON HALEY LEWIS DECEMBRIANA ANNE URBANCIC KAYKE J RYAN GERRY RYAN DE BOER MELODY ROSS AMY EDMUNDS
I love this dish. It’s packed with flavor, specifically the flavors of West Africa. It also incorporates a few more “exotic” ingredients typical of East Africa and its trade connections. In that way, we can say this spicy, sweet, tomatoey fish stew is in honor of the great Bantu expansion, when the Bantu peoples of West Africa embarked on many waves of migrations which successively took over much of the continent south of the Sahara.
Paired with fufu or with corn porridge, let this dish and all it’s many flavors transport you to Africa.
RUSTIC AFRICAN FISH STEW
2-3 filets White Fish, cooked* 1/4 cup palm oil 2-4 pounds Tomatoes, rough diced (or a large can of whole peeled tomatoes) 1 lb. fresh Red Chili Peppers, de-seeded and sliced (African or Jamaican varieties best here) 1 Head of garlic, peeled and smashed 1 small ginger root, peeled and minced 1 onion, sliced 2 tbsp. black peppercorns, coarse grind 1 tbsp. ground tumeric 2 lbs. mixed bitter greens * 2 tbsp. tamarind paste* 2 tbsp brown sugar 1/2 cup vinegar
*On the fish: -Stews, especially in Sub Saharan African, are meant to be like… well, a stewpot! Throw in what you have! Incorporate last night’s dinner! So that’s what I did, in my case it was some char grilled tilapia. – This recipe works great with raw fish too, if you’d rather use that. It has a stronger seafood flavor though. I’ll include down in the instructions how to cook it both ways.
*Note that tomatoes and chilis are only in African cuisine post contact with the New World and the Columbian Exchange, but these days are pretty quintessential to African cuisine. Additionally, tamarind, ginger, and black pepper are ingredients from East and Central Asia, which made their way around Sub Saharan Africa via trade networks across the Indian Ocean
*Before I got cooking, I went outside and harvested some wild and garden greens to cook into my stew.
Dandelion, frisee, and arugula.
Once your ingredients are picked and prepped, the cooking part is pretty simple.
In a stewpot or dutch oven, warm up the palm oil over medium heat and saute the onion, ginger, and black pepper for a few minutes until a little soft.
Add the hot red pepper, tumeric, and the smashed garlic cloves and continue to cook for 5 more minutes, when things are just starting to brown up. Add the vinegar and deglaze the bottom of the pot before adding in all the tomatoes, sugar, and tamarind paste.
Bring the mixture to a boil, then immediately turn down to a simmer. Cook on low for 1-2 hours.
When everything is nicely melded and cooked down, add the greens. It will seem like a lot, but cook down quite quickly.
This is when you’d add the raw fish if that’s what you’re using. Let the fish simmer in the sauce until it flakes apart. If using pre-cooked fish, add at the very end of cooking, turning off the heat as soon as you do. Flake the fish apart and let it warm up in the still hot mixture.
The “American Melting Pot” is far older, larger, and even more diverse than most people imagine.
After Columbus reconnected Eurasia and Africa with the Americas, the world began to change in ways it never had before. Europeans, Africans, Asians, and American Indians began migrating out of their landmasses of origin. Some movement was voluntary, much was not. . . . but people of all origins soon found themselves flung around the globe, forced to interact and work with each other, mixing their cultures and genetics together to form hybrid societies.
With hybrid societies come hybrid cuisine. The world’s first fusion food is born as people and their culinary traditions converge.
Did I mention we’ll also cover the origin of hard liquor and mixed cocktails? Don’t miss this episode.
Banchan is the fabulous Korean tradition of small side dishes, of which perhaps no other culture is so famous for. Served alongside rice for thousands of years, the number of dishes served at a meal was a metric for social status and prosperity.
The Korean love of kimchi, or pickles and fermented foods, really shines through in the endless array of varieties, of which there are hundreds, and those are just the officially famous ones. The concept of kimchi is limited only by imagination, and the number of ingredients both domestic and foreign that Korean chefs can get their hands on. Fermenting foods may have been a necessity to survive the long, cold Korean winters in ages past, but it’s also incredibly delicious.
I suppose I could have gone full royal court and made 12 sides, but I thought that just a humble 6 would be a good start, and decent tribute to the long history of kimchi in Korea.
So today. . . or over 4-5 days more accurately. . . we’ll be transforming this…
…into THAT.
and then we can make this!
a delicious bibimbap, or Korean Rice Bowl. But first we have a lot of pickling and fermenting to do. So let’s get started. (Feel free to scale these recipes up or down)
Here in this classic dish we have two essential elements of Japanese coming together: Soy and the Sea.
I couldn’t say I did any historical Japanese cooking if I didn’t make something with Dashi, the ubiquitous broth of dried seaweed and smoked fish flakes that’s essential to so many dishes. The unique flavor of Dashi is said to be that of the Sea itself.
And tofu, originally invented in China, was a vital source of protein for Buddhist monks abstaining from meat, but of course other people enjoyed it too. Tofu gets such a bad rap these days, but when its treated simply, fried up perfectly to be crispy on the outside and creamy within, it’s really tasty!
Both of those things come together simply and deliciously in Agedashi Tofu, a dish still popular today but some version of which must have been eaten for many centuries in Japan. Shallow fried tofu in Dashi, or “ocean stock” if you like, garnished with some nice veggies.
What does it mean for one culture to “steal” from another? How often does it happen? Is it a bad thing when it does? Listen to explore those questions and more, as we visit the Far East once again, this time even farther east. . . to Japan and Korea.
Also known. . . by myself at least, as the lands of umami and kimchi.
To further explore Episode 20, the Columbian Exchange, we’ll be making some classic recipes that were only possible once Eurasia and the Americas began mixing their ingredients.
To start, I can’t think of a better example than Mexican mole sauce. Mesoamerican chocolate and chili peppers bring the strongest and most unique flavors to this dish, but they’re used with Old World bread, sugar, spices, nuts, and seeds, and of course pork. Pork is ubiquitous in Mexican cuisine today but wasn’t around until Spanish colonists brought their pigs en masse to the New World, shaping a new cuisine in the process.
Mole has a reputation for being complicated, but it’s really not. It just has a lot of ingredients. Basically though, you just need to cover five bases for a good mole sauce: spiciness (from chilis), acidity (from chocolate, tomatoes, and citrus), sweetness (from dried fruit and cane sugar), spices, and thickeners (nuts, seeds, and bread).
To be extra authentic, pick up a cone of pilonciillo sugar from a Latin grocery store. Also, a more classic chili for this recipe would be pasilla negro chilis, but I am using the varieties I grew in my garden and dried this past summer. I’ve got chipotle, ancho, and cayenne.
It’s almost Anthrochef’s 2 year anniversary. And to celebrate, we’re starting a recipe that will take 2 years to fully cook! That’s right, we’re fermenting some soy sauce from scratch.
I can think of few better examples of the power of human cultural tradition then something like soy sauce. Honestly, who first decided to make a soy and wheat dough, let it get moldy, dry it out, then let it ferment in brine for 2 years before consuming what resulted as a foodstuff??
It’s remarkable that people figured this out.
This recipe is a couple weeks of actual work, and then indeed a very long 1-2 year waiting period for the sauce to fully age (Full disclosure, this post is actually just part 1…) . It’s worth it though. Homemade soy sauce has an earthy, umami rich flavor that’s hard to locate in a store, even in the best Asian markets.
It will be a little scary eating this moldy soy dough brine when all is through, but we have a few elements on our side to battle any bad bacteria. Sunlight is key to the soy sauce fermentation process and also good at killing off bad microbes. Also, using charcoal as a weight should soak up some impurities from the water. Finally, when we strain this out a year from now, we’re going to boil before serving, one last measure of food safety before consuming this potent, delicious sauce.
Ginger, garlic, and green onions. Those three ingredients tie Chinese cuisine, both modern and Medieval, together, and make up the beginning of so many recipes. Here, they will be our base for a delicious bone broth, as well as some northern style potstickers to go swimming in it.
Yum. This recipe looks like a lot of work, but is really quite simple, easy, and hopefully elegant. The potstickers are homemade but easy to assemble, made from a healthy and nicely textured whole wheat dough to simulate more ancient flour. Really, the hardest part of this recipe is waiting all day for the soup to cook.
ANTHROCHEF 