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Happy New Year! Image courtesy of Flickr user MarcelGermain.

When it comes time to think about how to make a new year better than the last, “lose weight” is one of the most commonly made—and broken—resolutions. This resolution tends to vilify fun food in favor of working out more. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but isn’t it possible to make a few New Year’s resolutions that embrace food? I think so. Here are a few I’m putting on my list as I dive into 2012.

Resolution 1: Out with the old standbys, in with the new. I like to cook for myself and take some pride in the fact that I pack a lunch (almost) every day. I’ve come to rely on a limited number of dishes to make because they’re filling and familiar enough that I can whip them up with ease—pasta with chick peas and spinach will always be a great, quick weeknight meal. The thing is, I feel like I’m in a rut. There’s a lot of uncharted culinary territory to explore. Time to take an afternoon, sift through the cookbooks on my shelf and get out of my cooking comfort zone and tackle new things.

Resolution 2: Bake more. I personally prefer baking to cooking and love thumbing through books like The Perfect Finish for sugary ideas. My recent acquisition of a cookie press comes with tantalizing attachments for eclairs, and a Q&A I did with a heritage grain-grower has me wanting to attempt baking bread again. (The last two tries, while edible, weren’t too pretty.) I want the practice and the satisfaction of being able to make a perfect pie crust and that elusive loaf of bread, or use balloons to make decorative chocolate bowls that could hold whatever small-scale edibles I could manage to turn out. (Yes, it’s a thing and I want to do it.) Since I’m single, ridding myself of the sugary supply would be an issue if not for…

Resolution 3: Entertain more. I look at my apartment and keep telling myself it’s too small to really hold a crowd. But after polling a few friends who can offer more detached opinions, I may have been over-thinking my space limitations. Rearrange some furniture to clear the floor and make room for people, fill the table with finger food and have a relaxed time nibbling and visiting. And be realistic. My space is geared to casual dining and I can make those kinds of meals work well.

Resolution 4: Those fondue pots living in the closet? Use them. Yes, both of them. Should I be strapped for reasons why these need to be cracked out, refer back to items 1 and 3. A trip to the Melting Pot inspired their purchase, now it’s time to follow through.

Christmas pudding, courtesy of Flickr user minor9th

By guest blogger Derek Workman

English cuisine has always been laughed at by its European neighbors as bland, greasy and overcooked. This may or not be true, but one thing is for sure—not one of our European neighbors’ cuisines can measure up to the Great British Pudding. The variety is endless, and even the French were forced to admit British superiority when Misson de Valbourg said, after a visit to England in 1690, “Ah what an excellent thing is an English pudding!”

Most British puddings are rich and sweet (a “sweet” is another name for a pudding) with the recipes often going back hundreds of years. The quintessential English pudding incorporates fruits that are grown in England: apples, redcurrants and raspberries, bright red rhubarb, or gooseberries, which apart from being a green, sour, hairy fruit, is the name given to someone who goes out with a couple on a date without a partner for the evening himself.

When is a pudding not a pudding? Yorkshire pudding isn’t a pudding; it is a savory pastry case than can be filled with vegetables or served, full of gravy, with that other English staple, roast beef. And neither is black pudding—that’s a sausage of boiled pig’s blood in a length of intestine, usually bound with cereal and cubes of fat. Ask for mince in the United Kingdom and you will be served ground beef. But that Christmas delight, mince pie, is actually filled with a paste of dried fruits. Confusing!

A pudding may be any variety of cake pie, tart or trifle, and is usually rich with cream, eggs and butter. Spices, dried fruit, rum and rich dark brown sugar, first brought into England through the port of Whitehaven in Cumbria, were items of such high value that the lord of the house would keep them locked away in his bedroom, portioning them out to the cook on a daily basis. The port was where the last invasion of the English mainland was attempted, in 1772, during the American War of Independence, when John Paul Jones, the father of the American Navy, raided the town but failed to conquer it.

The names of some puds stick in the mind. “Spotted Dick,” a hefty steamed pudding with butter, eggs and dried fruit folded into a heavy pastry, has been a gigglesome name for generations of schoolboys. Hospital managers in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, changed the name to “Spotted Richard” on hospital menus, thinking patients would be too embarrassed to ask for it by name. No one knows where the name came from, other than that currants traditionally gave the pudding a ‘spotted’ appearance. A gooseberry fool isn’t an idiot whose friends don’t want to have him around; it is a deliciously creamy summer pudding. And despite its French sounding name, crème brulee, the creamy dish with the burnt sugar topping, was actually created in Cambridge in the early 19^th century.

An inescapable addition to any British pudding, especially the steamed ones, is custard; rich, golden and runny, it is poured hot over a steaming bowl of treacle pudding, apple crumble, plum duff or any other delicious pud hot from the oven. Another complication: Ask for “a custard” in a British bakery and you will be given a small pastry with a thick, creamy filling, which you would eat cold. Pudding custard is a flowing nectar made from egg yolk, milk, sugar and vanilla pods, and the thought of licking the bowl after your mum had made it fresh must linger in the top five of every Brit’s favourite childhood memories.

The Christmas pudding reigns supreme, the highlight of the Christmas dinner, especially if you were served the portion with the lucky sixpenny piece in it.Copious quantities of currants, candied fruit, orange peel, lemon peel, eggs and beef suet bind the Christmas pudding together. Then go in the spices, cloves and cinnamon; brandy if you want it and a good slug of sherry. It’s then steamed for an hour, maybe two hours, it depends on the size of the pudding.

But it isn’t just the wonderfully rich pudding that is important, it’s how it is served. You warm yet more brandy and then light it, pouring it over the hot Christmas pudding moments before it is carried to the table. If served when the light is low, the blue flames dance and sparkle around the traditional sprig of berried holly stuck into the top of the pudding.

So, you may laugh at our fish ‘n’ chips, make rude comments about our drinking warm beer, or call us a nation of tea drinkers, but you will never, even in your wildest gastronomical dreams, match the rich British pud!

Derek Workman is an English journalist living in Valencia who “delights in searching out the weird, the wonderful and the idiosyncratic, which Spain has by the bucketful.” He blogs at Spain Uncovered.

Gingerbread men. Image courtesy of Flickr user Ann@74.

On a recent visit home, I pondered what I have always thought to be the most perfect gingerbread man ever. The cakey confection with a delicate balance of seasonings, an almond nose and raisin buttons and eyes comes from Ukrop’s bakery, and Mom and I have searched high and low to find a comparable recipe and figure out how they are made . Thus far, success has been elusive. The gingerbread man always stares back with his silently taunting grin. My thoughts then turned to the other gingerbread man who runs and runs and fast as he can, sassily tormenting those who want to eat him along the way. It turns out the tale of the gingerbread man is part of a genre of folklore about goodies gone wild.

Believe it or not, there is a classification system for the stories that we usually hear at bedtime, all neatly grouped and numbered based on their shared motifs. Folklore can be organized into animal tales, fairy tales, religious tales and so on. Of special interest—at least for this post—are the stories in group AT 2025, or more colloquially, ”The Fleeing Pancake” stories. No matter what part of the world you’re in, the basic ingredients of the story remain the same: a baked good pops out of the oven, runs or rolls away and escapes a series of pursuers before being eaten. What changes—and what makes this story fun to look at across different cultures—is how the details are changed. In European versions of the story, it’s a pancake—or sometimes a cornmeal johnny-cake or a bunnock, a small cake of oatmeal and treacle—that lifts itself out of a frying pan and goes on a spree. In some German tellings it willingly offers itself to two hungry children. In Norway, the pancake is ultimately consumed by a pig, and in other places it’s a fox. Every time the pancake encounters a hungry character, he mockingly lists all of the others who unsuccessfully tried to scarf him down; in Russian versions the pancake’s boasting is in verses meant to be sung by the storyteller.

The American variation of the story, “The Gingerbread Boy,” was first printed in the May 1875 issue of St. Nicholas magazine, the landmark children’s literary journal. Before that, the story seems to have belonged exclusively to oral storytelling traditions. “‘The Gingerbread Boy’ is not strictly original,” the unnamed author explained. “A servant girl from Maine told it to my children. It interested them so much that I thought it worth preserving. I asked where she found it and she said an old lady told it to her in her childhood.” (Though I have to admit, as fun as it was seeing how the story originally appeared, I missed the “Run, run as fast as you can/ You can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread man” chant I remember from how the story was told in my childhood.)

It’s also a story that has been re-imagined by others. Author L. Frank Baum, best remembered for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, used the folktale as inspiration for his children’s fantasy novel John Dough and the Cherub. In this story a baker uses a magical life-giving elixir in his batter for a life-sized gingerbread man who sets out to explore the world—and is pursued by a villainous character intent on eating him so that he might enjoy the benefits of the magic potion by proxy and live forever. The Stinky Cheese Man has a little humanoid mass of smelly cheese running around town with no one wanting to follow him on account of his odor. In The Runaway Latkes, the potato pancakes traditionally served during Hannukah decide to make a bit of trouble.

For those interested in reading other takes on the gingerbread man, the University of Pittsburgh has an online collection of tales from all over the world. Tell us about your favorite spin on the story in the comments section. And if you are traveling through Richmond, Virginia during the holiday season, find a Ukrop’s bakery for one of their gingerbread men. I’ve yet to have one escape my grasp.

A plate of pizzelle. Image courtesy of Flickr user flaurella.

‘Tis the season for specialty foods that grace store shelves and dining tables but once a year. And for some people, certain times of the year just don’t seem quite right unless the table is graced by those unique edibles. Have you ever gone to ridiculous lengths to make sure that you and yours could have that one, prized food on your stomachs? For this month’s Inviting Writing, tell us about the distances you traveled, the favors you called in, the sleepless nights, the hours spent slaving in the kitchen and whatever else you had to do to secure a special dish. Send your true, original essays to FoodandThink@gmail.com by Friday, December 9 and we will publish our favorites on subsequent Mondays. I’ll get the ball rolling.

How I Got My Cookie Fix

By Jesse Rhodes

For almost every special occasion—anniversaries, graduations and always at Christmastime—Mom would invariably make platters of pizzelle. For the uninitiated, these are Italian cookies made via a waffle iron-like press where dollops of sticky dough—punched up with flavorings like vanilla, anise or cocoa—are flattened out into wafer-thin discs emblazoned with fabulously intricate designs. Coated with confectioner’s sugar, their resemblance to snowflakes is striking. And, due to their delicacy, trying to eat them requires some skill. One wrong bite and the entire thing snaps, smattering the front of your shirt with flecks of white powder, which, admittedly, can be some source of entertainment. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect cookie. Not content with trying to time visits home to when Mom might be making them, I decided I needed an iron of my own. The problem is that every pizzelle manufacturer has its own cookie design. Logically, pizzelle made in any other machine should taste just like the ones I ate growing up, but none quite inspired the same sense of nostalgia as the look of Mom’s cookies. So, like hers, mine had to be the Vitantonio model 300 pizelle chef with cast iron grids, made in the good ol’ U.S.-of-A. No substitutions.

This particular machine had not been produced since the early 1990s, and eBay seemed to be my only hope for scoring one. It turned out other people had a similar appreciation for the goodies this iron made and were willing to shell out big money, sometimes paying upwards of $100, which was well above what I could afford. Nevertheless, I was not above engaging in bidding wars. Despite knowing that the odds of actually winning were slim, I blithely kept placing bids in dollar increments, sticking it to whoever had the means of investing more money than I in a uni-tasker kitchen appliance that, admittedly, even I would only use during the winter holidays. Sure, my fellow eBay bidders could have their cookies. But if I had anything to say about it, they were going to pay for them.

It was late July and weather forecasters were making a big t0-do over the fact that the heat index would hit a whopping 105 degrees. Since that day also happened to be a Saturday, and I wasn’t about to waste a day off sitting inside with the blinds closed and A/C cranked, I got up early to at least get a walk in and went down to the local Goodwill before  the weather became too unbearable. While browsing the mishmash of kitchen goods, I saw it. Nestled among the tortilla makers, griddles and cannibalized hand mixers sat the blackened and dingy object of my culinary affections. I wondered how it could have ended up here. Perhaps an Italian grandmother had died and whoever settled her estate thought this thing made really bad waffles. Whatever its origins, it was mine. And for all of five dollars. Plus the cost of a new electrical cord. (I went back on the hottest day of the following summer thinking the stars would align again and there would be another one sitting on the shelf. No such luck, not that I technically needed a second. But the thought of a pizzelle iron trophy room, glittering in chrome-plated glory, was an undeniably attractive idea.)

I got home and set to work cleaning, cracking out the liquid soap, the dish rag, the automotive-grade steel wool, the bottle of Turtle Wax liquid chrome polish, but soon noticed that one of the tapered, black bakelite feet was a little loose. I know well enough that turning a screw to the right tightens it, but on upending the iron and turning it around a few times, telling my right from the appliance’s right was anyone’s best guess. So I ventured a guess, made a few turns, and soon heard an ominous “clink” as the foot fell off in my hand and heard the sound of a renegade nut rolling around inside. Turning it right-side up again I stared at my gimpy little pizzelle iron, barely able to maintain its balance. There was no avoiding a trip to the hardware store in order to buy a few tools to crack this thing open.

A few days later and a mile and a half mile walk up to Cherrydale Hardware, I found myself staring at a display case jam-packed with socket wrenches, puzzled by their strange denominations: quarter inch, three-eights of an inch, half inch, three-quarters of an inch. The clerk kindly asked if I needed help and told him I needed a crash course in what these things were.

“What are you trying to do?” he asked.

My mind raced. I mean, could tell him I was fixing a pizzelle iron, but that would require explaining what the thing was, which would then require a description of the beautiful snowflake-like cookies—maybe mention the powdered sugar—and then realize I was standing in a sawdust-and-plywood, mom-and-pop-style hardware store telling a total stranger that I’m repairing a cookie press.

“I’m fixing a waffle iron.” Waffle iron. Yes. With big, muscular Belgian grids ready to churn out hearty breakfast-of-champions-grade golden waffles. It was a perfect fudging of the truth. The clerk instantaneously suggested a quarter inch wrench, which I purchased, along with a five dollar appliance cord, and went home.

The repairs were quick and painless. Soon I had it plugged in and heated until the grids were smoking hot, dropping teaspoonfuls of vanilla-flavored batter and finally making my own cache of cookies. I have since made them up for friends and as table offerings at social gatherings, and there’s a certain sense of pleasure that comes from introducing people to a cookie that always seemed so unique to Italian kitchens. It’s a feeling that just barely trumps the satisfaction of having a personal reserve of pizzelle at home stacked in a popcorn tin that sits beside my favorite chair.

A loaf of parkin, courtesy of Flickr user Johnson Cameraface

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.

So goes one version of a popular rhyme about Guy Fawkes, whose failed plot to assassinate the King of England in 1606 1605—Fawkes was caught under the House of Lords with barrels of gunpowder—got him hanged, drawn and quartered. Sure enough, 400 years later, the act of treason is still remembered: November 5th, known as Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night, is celebrated throughout England with fireworks, bonfires and the burning of the traitor in effigy. The celebrations once held an anti-Catholic undercurrent (Fawkes and his co-conspirators were Catholic), but that has all but disappeared today.

I first heard of Guy Fawkes Night in a 1992 cookbook, The Inspired Vegetarian, by British author Louise Pickford. She includes a recipe for “Miff’s Spicy Pumpkin Soup,” which her Aunt Miff used to make for a Guy Fawkes fireworks party every year. She recalls that “all the children would spend hours preparing pumpkin lanterns to hang in the garden. We would watch the fireworks, huddled around the bonfire, with mugs of steaming pumpkin soup.”

I asked my cousin’s husband, who grew up in Exeter, in the southwest of England, whether he recalls any particular Guy Fawkes Night foods, and he couldn’t think of any—with the possible exception of beer. But up north, particularly in Yorkshire, there are a couple of treats that are associated with the holiday. Both revolve around treacle, or sugar syrup.

The first is parkin, sometimes spelled perkin, a gingerbread-like oatmeal cake usually made with dark molasses and golden syrup (a light sugar syrup—the closest American equivalent would probably be corn syrup). One of its features is that it keeps well; in fact, many recipes advise aging the cake for several days to let the flavors develop.

Pinning down food origins is always tricky, but the BBC reports that parkin may have originated with the Vikings and was certainly around by the time of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Why it’s associated with November 5th is unknown—one possibility is that it dates to the Viking Feast of Thor, which was celebrated around the same time of year with bonfires and a similar cake—but some in Yorkshire even call the date Parkin Day. The one place that refuses to serve parkin, though, according to the BBC, is Fawkes’ alma mater in York.

The other Guy Fawkes-related treat, also from Yorkshire, is bonfire toffee, sometimes called treacle toffee. Also made with black treacle (or molasses), golden syrup and Demerara sugar (a light brown sugar), it’s made by boiling the sugars to a very high temperature with water and cream of tartar (other recipes call for butter and/or condensed milk), then letting it cool in a sheet pan until it becomes brittle. The pieces are broken off with a hammer. I couldn’t find any information on why this candy is associated with Guy Fawkes Night in particular. But, for a sweet tooth like me, who needs a reason?

Of course, in recent years another candy-centric fall holiday from America has been creeping into British culture, leaving some people there to worry that, in time, gunpowder and treason will be all but “forgot.”