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Pumpkin curry, courtesy of Flickr user pittaya

For this month’s Inviting Writing, we asked for stories about food and reconciliation. The range of responses was surprising: We heard about a failure of familial reconciliation, a longstanding family disagreement about bologna on the wall, and today Somali Roy reveals her fraught relationship with pumpkin and reminds us of the usefulness of younger siblings. Roy is a freelance writer in Singapore who has previously written about her relationship with her (mother-in-law’s) kitchen and the joys of eating in a Kolkata cafeteria.

Giving Second Chances

By Somali Roy

At a very early age I came upon the profound wisdom that siblings, especially younger ones, are tiny minions sent by God to make growing up easy and entertaining. I engaged mine as a playmate when friends weren’t around and would occasionally bully her. But mostly I used her as a means to escape eating unfavored food by shoving it onto her plate when nobody was looking. And that condemned food, which my sister grew up obliviously consuming in copious amounts, was pumpkin.

Unfortunately, because it was my mother’s favorite, there was no escaping this soppy, milquetoast, gourd-like squash. I liked to characterize vegetables as people with real feelings. “Pumpkin is not assertive. It has no defining taste or character—it’s mild, squishy and uninviting,” I ranted. Being opinionated and judgmental about vegetables certainly didn’t help. Wasting even a mote of pumpkin under my mother’s supervision was sacrilege, so I had to improvise.

There were several variants of pumpkin dishes cooked in our house, mostly influenced by traditional East Indian recipes. Two of them that were remote possibilities for my palate were Kumro Sheddho (boiled and mashed pumpkin seasoned with salt, mustard oil and chopped green chilies) and Kumro Bhaja (thinly sliced pumpkin dredged in batter and deep fried). Both recipes successfully masked the pumpkin taste that I so resented. Anything other than these was offloaded on my sister, who was too hypnotized by the cartoons on TV to notice the pile on her plate.

When college started, I moved to another city and lodged with my grandmother. She, I discovered, nursed an even greater love for the vegetable. My days were peppered with pumpkins of all shapes and sizes. I missed my sister terribly. Once again I was forced to improvise. I offered to help my grandmother with her chores, and the responsibility of grocery shopping was readily relinquished to me. Starting then, the pumpkin supply at the local bazaar suffered, either due to untimely monsoons or truck strikes and roadblocks or just bad crops—whichever excuse suited my whim. I was thankful that my grandmother never compared notes with her neighbors.

Two decades passed in successfully dodging and evading this vegetable in a world that’s enamored with pumpkin so much that it’s used as a term of endearment: I love you, my Pumpkin. How was your day, Pumpkin? Come to dinner, Pumpkin Pie. It may be the 40th most beautiful word in the English language (according to a survey by British Council), but I knew I wouldn’t have coped well with this moniker.

However, December 2008 had different plans for me. We were relocating to another country and it was my last Christmas in Munich. The day before our office was closing down for holidays, a colleague invited me to share her homemade lunch—a steaming bowl of pumpkin soup. My heart sank. Already burdened with the pain of leaving a city I had come to love, I definitely did not need “pumpkin soup for my frayed soul” to lift up the mood.

There wasn’t enough time to Google pumpkin-induced allergies (if any) that I could fake. So I obliged my host and perched myself on the kitchen chair, staring haplessly at the bowl for an entire minute. There was nothing else to do except take that huge leap of faith. The rich, creamy taste, mildly sweet with a hint of cumin and ginger spiked with a dash of lemon was not something I was expecting at all. While going for a second helping, I double-checked that it was genuinely pumpkin, in case I didn’t hear it right. Could it be carrot or yam? She assured me it wasn’t, so I asked for the recipe.

Thus began a phase when I ordered only pumpkin soups for appetizers while eating out. The result was undisputed. Pumpkin finally redeemed itself and bagged a one-way entry ticket to my humble kitchen. When I made my first pumpkin soup using my colleague’s recipe, it was sensational and a comforting reminder that giving second chances are worthwhile. As for my sibling, she grew up to love pumpkin—whether on her own accord or as a result of intervention remains ambiguous.

Scary movies can be chilling works of cinematic art (see Hitchcock) or cheesy, clichéd teen exploitation flicks (the Friday the 13th series and many, many more). Either way, most share a few similar techniques, using music, lighting, and camera angles to build tension. And directors know that the quickest way to the audience’s gag reflex is through its stomach.

Here are a few of the most notable food scenes in the history of the genre:

1. Nosferatu (1922) So begins one of the most enduring horror movie themes: humans (or, in this case, human blood) as food. This vampire movie, a silent film, is more likely to make you chuckle at its awkward editing and melodramatic acting than cringe in terror, but this Dracula is truly hideous-looking, with sunken eyes and pointy, oversized ears. This is what vampires are supposed to look like, not the teen idols of the Twilight series or HBO’s True Blood.

2. Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcock used food, like every other detail, to advance the plot or reveal character. There are so many great Hitchcock food scenes that two French women even wrote a cookbook based on them (available only in French, it appears). One typical scene is in Psycho, when Janet Leigh’s character, Marion, pecks uneasily at her toast—perhaps sensing the meal will be her last—as she converses with the creepy young motel keeper Norman Bates in his room full of stuffed birds.

3. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) If you’re ever tempted to complain about your sibling, just watch this classic psychological thriller by Robert Aldrich. Bette Davis is deliciously wicked—and wickedly loony—as Jane, the has-been actress who torments her wheelchair-bound sister Blanche, played by Joan Crawford. One of the most unforgettable scenes is when Jane brings Blanche lunch on a covered tray, casually mentioning that she’s discovered rats in the basement. Blanche—and the audience—knows exactly what she’ll find under the tray, but she can’t help seeing for herself.

4. Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) What’s better than a B-movie about castaways on a desert island who turn into giant killer fungi? A B-movie about castaways on a desert island who turn into giant killer fungi that’s dubbed from Japanese. Be sure to watch the hilarious trailer to the end for a view of the fearsome mushroom people.

5. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) Technically, this is a comedy spoof of cheesy disaster flicks, but it still gives me flashbacks of a traumatic experience I had with a cherry tomato that exploded on me in preschool. The horror. The horror.

6. Alien (1979) The crew members of a space ship are eating together. As soon as John Hurt’s character says that the first thing he’s going to do when he gets back to Earth is get some decent food, you know that he’s a goner. Moments later, he starts gagging and writhing in pain. At first his crew mates think it’s bad indigestion—that is, until an alien baby bursts from his stomach. I sometimes feel like this when I eat too much. (Watching the video requires sign-in and age verification)

7. Poltergeist (1982) I was 11 when this movie came out, and it left me with two lasting effects. One was a fear of clowns. The other, I suspect, was the seed of what turned me into a vegetarian a few years later. The latter was due to the following scene, in which a young parapsychologist goes to the kitchen for a late-night snack while investigating the strange occurrences in a suburban house. He munches on a chicken drumstick and pulls a raw steak out of the fridge, which proceeds to crawl across the counter and then vomit its insides. The investigator drops the drumstick, which he then realizes is crawling with maggots. Warning: Watch this clip only if you have an iron stomach. I had to stop it because it made me gag.

8. The Stuff (1985) Another entry in the more-ridiculous-than-scary genre, this cult classic about a mysterious gooey dessert that turns people into zombies includes cameos by Paul Sorvino and Danny Aiello, and stars Saturday Night Live alumnus Garrett Morris as “Chocolate Chip.” Tagline: Are you eating it…or is it eating you?

9. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) I could do a whole list of just cannibalism scenes in horror movies, but I’ll let Hannibal Lecter’s chilling description of eating a census taker’s liver represent them all. It’s not a graphic depiction (unlike the sequel, Hannibal, in which Lecter feeds Ray Liotta pieces of his own brain), but it probably introduced more Americans to fava beans than any cooking show.

10. Se7en (1995) Trying to cure your cravings for carbs? Just watch this scene from the movie about a serial killer who tortures and kills people according to the seven deadly sins they represent. The gluttony target is force-fed spaghetti until his stomach explodes. The ultimate victim will be your appetite. In fact, I’ll spare you the clip. If you want to see it that bad, you can look it up yourself.

What’s your favorite horror movie food scene?

Baguette. Image courtesy of Flickr user Robert S. Donovan.

In southern France near Avignon was a quiet village on the Rhone called Pont Saint-Esprit where two bakeries tended to the inhabitants’ daily need for bread. The summer of 1951 was unusually wet, and that year’s rye crop was expected to fall short. In August of that year, one of the village bakers received a supply of strangely gray flour, but with the government strictly controlling flour distribution, he had no other means of making that morning’s baguettes and proceeded to bake and sell his wares as usual. Over the course of a few weeks, le pain maudit—”the cursed bread”—wreaked havoc in Pont Saint-Esprit.

Within 48 hours, some 230 villagers became violently ill. Initially their reactions to the bread resembled severe food poisoning, with people experiencing nausea and vomiting accompanied by days of insomnia. But a few fared far worse, experiencing wild hallucinations, convulsions and swollen limbs that felt as if they were burning, some turning gangrenous. “I have seen healthy men and women suddenly become terrorized, ripping their bedsheets, hiding themselves beneath their blankets to escape hallucinations,” Mayor Albert Hubbard said to the United Press at the time. People leaped from windows to escape their visions. Some thought they were being eaten by tigers, others saw men with grinning skulls for heads. ”I am dead and my head is made of copper and I have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me,” villager Gabriel Veladaire repeatedly screamed before attempting to throw himself in the river.  Five people, including an otherwise healthy 25-year-old man, died.

The rash of disturbing behavior pointed to ergotism, epidemics of which were common in the Middle Ages but had not been seen on French soil since the early 19th century. Ergot is a parasitic fungus that thrives on rye under certain climate conditions—cold winters followed by an especially rainy growing season—and manifests itself as oversized, violet grains protruding from the head of the plant. Lysergic acid, the active component in the fungus, was used to create LSD, which became a popular recreational drug. Some historians have even suggested that erratic behavior in several young Puritan girls was brought on by ergot poisoning, instigating the Salem witch trials in 1692; however, that theory that has been called into question.

Ergotism as the cause of this episode in Pont Saint-Esprit has also been debated, with later investigations suggesting the outbreak was due to mercury poisoning, the use of nitrogren trichloride to bleach flour or even that the CIA was testing LSD as a possible biological weapon and treated the bread with the drug.

Modern scholarship has yet to suggest that the baneful baguettes were the result of witchcraft. What do you think caused the outbreak in France?

Deviled eggs, one of many Halloween treats. Image courtesy of Flickr user edgeplot

My cute little hamlet, population 148, is holding a block party this weekend, and one of the events scheduled is a deviled egg recipe contest. I don’t think it was intended as a nod to Halloween’s celebration of the dark side, but it got me wondering: What, exactly, is so wicked about mixing hard-boiled egg yolk with mayonnaise and mustard? I could understand if they were so hot and spicy they evoked the fires of hell, but most of the deviled eggs I’ve had could hardly be classified as having more than a mild zippiness. Was the dish’s name coined by Puritans who thought adding anything remotely flavorful to food was the work of Satan? Furthermore, what about all those other foods with fiendish names, like deviled ham, devil’s food cake and fra diavolo sauce?

It turns out I wasn’t too far off—Puritans had nothing to do with it, but the term “devil” has been used since at least the 18th century to refer to highly seasoned foods, according to The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams. He quotes from the Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink, by John Mariani (1999), who says, “Washington Irving has used the word in his Sketchbook to describe a highly seasoned dish similar to a curry. Deviled dishes were very popular throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, especially for seafood preparations and some appetizers.”

This definition would cover deviled ham, the most famous of which is the canned chopped ham spread sold by Underwood since 1868 (the company’s devil logo is supposed to be the oldest trademarked logo still in use). Underwood used to sell other deviled meats, including deviled tongue, but today the ham is the only demonic item in its product line.

In The Essential New York Times Cookbook, Amanda Hesser includes an 1878 recipe for deviled crabs, saying that today’s deviled eggs are the mild-mannered cousins of deviled crab and kidneys, which “were meant to be spicy and bracing, the kind of food you had after a long night of drinking.” She also notes that in David Copperfield (the Dickens novel, not the flashy magician), “Mr. Micawber saves a dinner party by turning undercooked mutton into a devil,” covering the slices with pepper, mustard, salt and cayenne and cooking them well, then adding mushroom ketchup as a condiment.

Eggs notwithstanding, today the devil is most frequently invoked to imply a dish is truly tongue-searing—there must be dozens of hot sauce brands out there with names like Droolin’ Devil, Mean Devil Woman and Hell Devil’s Revenge. Dishes called chicken, shrimp or lobster fra diavolo—which means “brother devil” in Italian—show up on restaurant menus in the United States, but they appear to be an Italian-American invention, most food historians agree. In Italy, a similar spicy tomato sauce would usually be served with pasta, not meat, and be called pasta all’arrabiata, meaning “angry-style.”

There are also a number of foods that get their evil-sounding names to differentiate them from their angelic counterparts. In The Glutton’s Glossary, John Ayto writes that angels on horseback are a late-19th century British dish of oysters wrapped in bacon and grilled, and that devils on horseback are a variation made with prunes instead of oysters.

Devil’s food cake would seem to be another example of this, its dark, chocolaty richness a contrast to white, fluffy angel food cake. But on the What’s Cooking America website, Linda Stradley writes that devil’s food cake is actually a synonym for red velvet cake, which would suggest that it was the redness of the cake that evoked the devil. Today’s red velvet cakes usually get their vivid hue from food coloring, but the color was originally achieved through a chemical reaction between unprocessed cocoa and the acid in buttermilk.

There’s one more food I can think of with devil in the name, although when I first encountered it I never would have guessed it was a food at all. While traveling in Konya, Turkey, in the 1990s, my local guide took me to a bazaar. At one herbalist’s stall he opened a jar of something he called devil dung (he actually used a different word, but I try to keep things G-rated here) and told me to take a whiff. There was no mistaking how it got its name—this was some foul-smelling stuff. But my guide wasn’t able to come up with the English words to explain what it was used for.

It took me years, and the invention of Google, to figure out that this substance was actually asafoetida, also called hing, an herb used most frequently in Indian vegetarian cooking. I’ve never tasted it, to my knowledge, but its funky smell is supposed to mellow with cooking. As a bonus, it’s considered an anti-flatulent. In my book, that puts it firmly on the side of good, not evil.

These artifacts are thought to have been offerings from the earliest farming communities that lived in this area. Chemical analysis of charred food residues preserved inside a number of vessels shows they were used for processing freshwater fish, which supplemented their fledgling agricultural economy. Image courtesy of Anders Fischer.

When humans made the switch from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, it was a revolutionary transition. Archaeologists have linked the change to population growth and a wider variety in diet. Traditionally, archaeologists saw this as a relatively instantaneous changeover, with societies adopting livestock and cereal cultivation as well as the use of ceramic containers to process and store foodstuffs. But using pots as an indicator of when this shift took place is problematic, especially given evidence that even foraging societies used vessels. Now a new study of pots paints a different picture of this pivotal point in human history and suggests that the shift to farming was not as rapid as previously thought.

Researchers from the University of York and the University of Bradford focused their attentions on potsherds from inland and coastal settlements around the Baltic. Farming has been practiced there since about 4,000 B.C. Human remains from before this point in time show a diet heavy in marine life, while later remains indicate a diet heavy in land-based foods. So if anything, it’s also a region that could support the rapid change view. In an analysis of lipids (fats and other molecules) on 133 potsherds, the researchers found that even after the practice of domesticating plants and animals was well in place, people still continued to forage for food in nearby waterways. So even though the know-how was there, the cultural shift to relying on farmed foodstuffs was much more gradual.