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In case you haven’t noticed, obesity isn’t exactly in these days. We’ve banished trans-fats from many places, given serious thought to a tax on soda, and applauded the First Family for planting an organic vegetable garden. We’re reading books with titles like “Eat This, Not That” and “The Belly Fat Cure.” The popularity of a drastic stomach-shrinking procedure called gastric bypass, or bariatric surgery, is steadily increasing.

Courtesy Flickr use Fortyseven

There’s only one public figure who’s been routinely excused from our collective campaign against fat: Santa Claus. We mean it as a compliment when we say that his belly shakes “like a bowl full of jelly.”

Until now.

According to this recent Washington Post article, even some of Santa’s biggest fans have started to politely mutter that Mr. Claus should consider going on a diet.

Children love him and look up to him, the argument goes, so shouldn’t he set a healthier example? Should parents start telling their kids to leave out a Christmas Eve snack of celery sticks and sparkling water, instead of cookies and milk?

I guess it probably would be easier on the reindeer if the big guy lost a few pounds, but personally, I’m with the First Family on this one. As the President says at the end of the Washington Post article: “Santa eats what he wants.”

What do you think? Let us know in the comments area below.

Recipes, like songs and poems, are passed down from generation to generation. But some holiday recipes seems to have fallen through the cracks; they’re passed on through songs and poems, but have become a thing of holiday lore rather than practice.

The famous poem “The Night Before Christmas” makes reference to sugar plums: “The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar plums danc’d in their heads.” When reading this poem growing up, I always pictured some sort of fairy, most likely the influence of the Sugar Plum Fairy from the Nutcracker. Turns out, sugar plums are a type of Christmas sweet. (They’re also a specific type of small, sweet plum.) Use Real Butter has a recipe for sugar plums that calls for toasted almonds, dried apricots, honey and plenty of cinnamon. She concludes that the confection was named for its shape, not the specific ingredients. Miss Ginsu (who unfortunately has stopped blogging) posted a similar sugar plum recipe that called for dried figs and cocoa powder.

Another treat that lives on in song instead of practice is wassail from the Christmas Carol “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” Wassailing simply means caroling. In the Victorian era, beggars and orphans would go door to door singing and hoping to get a bite to eat or a drink. The name comes from the Middle English phrase wæs hæil, which means “be healthy.” Wassail is a drink made from ale or beer and spices, kind of like mulled wine. Other versions includes hard alcohol such as brandy or even rum. Most wassail recipes call for some kind of fruit, generally apples, which makes wassail remind me of a British version of sangria. Epicurious has a version made from sherry, brandy and plenty of spices. Chow‘s recipe includes cranberry juice, apple cider and an apple brandy.

Of course, perhaps the most famous Christmas food item that no one has ever eaten might be figgy pudding, known, of course, from “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” Unlike the sugar plum, figgy pudding actually has figs in it. But the name still manages to be misleading as figgy pudding is more of a cake than a pudding. While it was popular from the 15th to the 19th centuries, figgy pudding’s long cooking time (at least a three-hour steam) and high saturated fat (most recipes include suet, a form of fat found near an animal’s kidneys) has curtailed its popularity in modern times. Good Housekeeping has a simplified recipe that uses boxed cake mix and bakes rather than steams the pudding. Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking: From My Home to Yours, presented her more traditional, steamed recipe on NPR.

If you’re feeling adventurous and in the Christmas Spirit, try one of these recipes. If not, at least you’ll know what figgy pudding is next time you hear “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.”

Sugar plum courtesy of kevandem/flickr

Barley lollipops, courtesy of Flickr user heather_mcnabb

Yesterday, Amanda wrote about the recent discovery of evidence that humans may have started eating cereal grains tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed. Humans didn’t start eating refined sugar until about 5,000 B.C., and it took until a couple of centuries ago for someone to combine the two into a candy.

Today’s kid’s cereals are almost sweet enough to qualify as candy (especially the ones containing little marshmallows, which were my favorite), but that’s not what I’m talking about. Barley sugar was a favorite Victorian treat that was especially popular at Christmas. It was originally made from sugar boiled in water in which barley had previously been boiled, which produced a hard amber-colored candy. It was often consumed as a soothing throat lozenge.

Barley sugar is also called barley candy or barley sugar candy, although sometimes a distinction is made. Timberlake Candies, which produces handmade barley candy, says the difference is that barley sugar is made with cream of tartar, while barley candy is made without it but with corn syrup, which produces a harder, clearer product. Starting in the 18th century, metal molds were used to create colorful, remarkably detailed candy toys. A number of American companies continue to make these old-fashioned novelties, with or without actual barley water.

According to The Glutton’s Glossary, by John Ayto, barley sugar was traditionally made into long, twisted sticks, so “barley-sugar” came to be used an architectural term for twisted columns.

The Wikipedia entry on barley sugar suggests that barley candy arose as a linguistic misunderstanding between the French and the English. The French brought sucre brûlé, or burnt sugar, to England, who mistranslated it as “barley sugar.” This was then retranslated into the French as sucre d’orge, literally barley sugar. I’m skeptical that the story is true, but I’m a sucker (no pun intended) for etymological legends.

In any case, today you can visit the Musée du Sucre d’Orge, in Moret-Sur-Loing, southeast of Paris, where you can watch the confection being made and learn about the Benedictine nuns who made it. Although the nuns stopped production in the 1970s, they passed their recipe on to a local family that continues to make the heart-shaped candies stamped with a cross, which are packaged in an adorable tin.

According to an article in the latest issue of Science, our ancestors may have been more sophisticated eaters than we’ve been giving them credit for.

Sorghum field in Zimbabwe, courtesy Flickr user 2E0MCA

After analyzing starch residue on dozens of ancient stone tools found in a cave in Mozambique, archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary came to a surprising conclusion. The residue was sorghum, a wild cereal grain. Previous archaeological evidence has suggested that grains entered the human diet perhaps 23,000 years ago (and grain storage started more recently, around 11,000 years ago).

But these tools were about 105,000 years old!

A snippet from the press release:

“These residues could have come from wild sorghum and imply that the site’s inhabitants were consuming this grain, in contrast to the conventional assumption that seed collecting was not an important activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa.”

Looking up more information about this, I came across several blogs and online discussions that ask a question I’ve never considered: Do we need to eat grains at all?

Interestingly, many of those who argue that we don’t need grains (or should only eat them sparingly) are influenced by something called The Paleo Diet, which “encourages dieters to replace dairy and grain products with fresh fruits and vegetables—foods that are more nutritious than whole grains or dairy products.”

Here’s the premise of that diet:

During the Paleolithic, we evolved a specific genome that has only changed approximately 0.01 per cent in these last 10,000 years. However, during this recent time span mass agriculture, grains/grain products, sugars/sugar products, dairy/dairy products, and a plethora of processed foods have all been introduced as a regular part of the human diet. We are not eating the foods we are genetically and physiologically adapted to eat (99.9% of our genetic profile is still Paleolithic); and the discordance is an underlying cause for much of the “diseases of civilization.”

I’ll be interested to see if this evidence of early sorghum consumption changes anything for Paleo Diet proponents. The new finding certainly seems to counter the idea that eating grains isn’t “natural” because it only started relatively recently.

As usual, I’d like to know what you think…

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Sunflower seeds, like the ones in this biscuit, can turn green when exposed to baking soda. Photograph by Lisa Bramen

Several weeks ago I baked a batch of buttermilk biscuits with sunflower seeds in them, using a recipe from a cookbook I’ve had since college, Vegetarian Pleasures by Jeanne Lemlin. They were delicious fresh out of the oven, but when I broke one open the next day I noticed what appeared to be vivid green mold in the biscuit surrounding the sunflower seeds, which had themselves turned a dark greenish brown. I was alarmed and, well, perplexed. Was it because I had used roasted, salted sunflower seeds, having failed to find raw ones at my supermarket? Or because I had used baking powder and baking soda that had both expired?

A few days ago I decided to try the recipe again, this time with raw seeds found at the health food store, and brand-new baking powder and baking soda. Same delicious results fresh out of the oven. And same algae-green specks surrounding the seeds the next day. Clearly something strange was going on here.

I found the solution to my food mystery at The Kitchn, where food science writer Harold McGee explained that certain foods—sunflower seeds, carrots, blueberries and walnuts, for instance—are sensitive to changes in pH balance. When they come into contact with an alkaline substance, such as baking soda, they can change colors. I realized after seeing the list that I had encountered foods with this discoloration before, though never so vividly or jarringly as occurred in my biscuits. The discolored food, I was relieved to read, is perfectly safe to eat. McGee suggests decreasing the amount of baking soda in your recipe, or distributing it more evenly, to prevent the reaction.

Until this experience, I had never given much thought to what baking soda, or baking powder, actually does (or what the difference is between them). In its regular Nagging Question feature (which is often good for interesting tidbits of information), Chow explains that both of the white, powdery substances contain sodium bicarbonate, a leavening agent (it creates gas, causing baked goods to rise). Baking soda is the straight stuff, and is alkaline; it requires an acidic ingredient, such as buttermilk, lemon juice or brown sugar, to be activated.

Baking powder, in addition to the sodium bicarbonate, contains cornstarch to prevent clumping and acidic salts to activate the production of carbon dioxide. It can be used in recipes that don’t contain enough acidic ingredients to activate the sodium bicarbonate on their own. Baking powder acts more slowly than baking soda; the salts in it only dissolve partially when they are mixed with the other baking ingredients, and don’t fully work until they are heated in the oven. This is why baking powder is often called “double acting.”

For a neat demonstration of the color changes that result from pH reactions, without having to eat baked goods look like they’ve been pulled from a dirty aquarium, check out these instructions for creating your own pH indicator using baking soda and red cabbage juice.