
On reflection, I would definitely have to include Almonds in my Desert Island 'Eight Top Foodstuffs'. Increasingly, I find they feature in my cooking: roast with paprika and coarse salt, to serve with aperitifs; slivered and sprinkled between sheets of phyllo pastry when making tart shells (the almonds give a good crunch to the shell, and the flavour of almonds goes with absolutely everything, from cheese to chocolate to shellfish...) ; as the basis for praline, and every dessert that stems from that; and increasingly, as the predominant ingredient within

It's one of the few foodstuffs that can readily be traced back effectively unchanged for the last millenium, so it certainly presses all the buttons concerned with 'food from times past' that so often give


Frustratingly, the origins of the stuff are impossible to pin down, and - depending on your preferred reference source - it came originally either from Persia, or from China, or from the Arabs. Take your pick. There appear to be references to something like marzipan being around in Toledo, in the tenth or eleventh centuries - when Spain was firmly in the control of the Moors - so that would tie in with an Arab provenance, maybe.....The Romans definitely didn't have marzipan - we can state this both on the basis of the roman food writers whom we are still able to consult, but more fundamentally because they couldn't have had marzipan, since they didn't have refined sugar (but relied instead on honey as a sweetening agent in cooking). That last point rather begs the question about when refined sugar itself first appeared, and this again is a rat

And frankly, for the purposes of 'did you know?' dinner table conversation, that's probably quite sufficient for our needs....

In trying to track down its earliest manifestation, though, I was fascinated to come across a reference from Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C (he of the famous oath) which was for a cough cure, in which all sorts of beneficial (but not necessarily delicious) things were wrapped inside a coating made from pounded almonds combined with honey. Who would have thought that the spoonful of sugar had been helping the medicine to go down all that time ago.....or that Mary Poppins was only one stage removed from Classical Greece!
Tonight's Dinner:
Gorgonzola and Cherry Tomato Tarts, in Puff Pastry Shells.
Blanquette d'Agneau; steamed Purple-Sprouting Broccoli.
Baked Apples, with Hazelnut-Ratafia stuffing
4 comments:
I hope that this interesting post means you make your own marzipan, because the effort/reward ratio is extremely favourable.
If not:
http://joannasfood.blogspot.com/2006/12/marzipan.html
I recently made some from pistachio nuts; good, but not as good as with almonds
Joanna
Oh, don't you just love the whole thing about it, the texture, the taste the aroma...?
Couldn't agree more - appallingly 'more-ish', and (unless you buy into the life-prolonging benefits of almonds) about as dietarily unsound as you could wish for!
Ah, but once in a while...
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