LC reader Mary Cannon wrote in, asking if we had a recipe for manchup. A quick search of the Web told me that manchup is a dish from the Cape Verde Islands, but nothing more. Additional searches found very few recipes from Cape Verde, and none of them for manchup. Suspecting that the dish’s name might have variant spellings, I tried looking for anything that sounded reasonably close to manchup, on the Internet and in books on West African cuisine (since I couldn’t find any Cape Verdean cookbooks).

No luck.

Human nature being what it is, food writers can usually count on the nostalgia that people feel for the cooking of their homeland. A query was posted to a bulletin board for Cape Verdean émigrés. Four people read it, but none answered. There was still one avenue of hope: Cape Verde’s embassy in Washington, DC. An appropriately desperate e-mail was sent, explaining the problem.

An hour later, Jose Brito, the Republic of Cape Verde’s ambassador to the United States, wrote back. According to Brito, “Cachoupa [is] translated here in the US [as] manchup.” This was a significant clue. Going back to the Cape Verdean recipe sites, finding an answer became a relatively simple matter — although cachoupa’s name does indeed have a variant spelling: cachupa. But where did the name manchup come from? It’s apparently a corruption of munchupa, a name for cachupa that is used on Brava Island, at the southwestern end of the Cape Verde archipelago.

Cachupa is the national dish of Cape Verde. Like other great rustic dishes, such as the cassoulet of France and feijoada of Brazil, it uses highly seasoned meats in relatively small amounts together with grains and beans, and is slowly cooked to build a great depth of flavor. And like those dishes, it is even better when reheated the next day.

Cape Verdeans created one of the first fusion cuisines, incorporating the tastes and ingredients of Europe (livestock), Africa and Asia (sugar and tropical fruits), and the Americas (beans, chiles, corn, pumpkins, and manioc). They were able to do so because of their location: Just off the west coast of Africa, they were ideally suited as a stopping point, first for Portuguese explorers, and later for slave traders.

Cachupa can be very simple — barely more than samp (hominy), beans, and some salt pork, much like old-fashioned succotash. This simple peasant fare is known as cachupa povera. Wealthier Cape Verdeans — or even the poor, on special occasions, such as weddings — add more ingredients, such as a little meat or fish, in which case the dish is known as cachupa sabe, a more savory dish, like Brunswick stew. At the other end of the spectrum you’ll find cachupa rica — the richest variation. Like feijoada completa, it’s a long way from the simple peasant dish of legumes and grain. Here are two recipes for cachupa rica.

Notes: These recipes don’t indicate the number of portions or portion size; they have been edited, but not tested.

Cachupa Rica I
Ingredients
Olive oil, as needed
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled
2 bay leaves
4 cups dried hominy, soaked in plenty of water overnight
1 cup dried kidney beans, soaked plenty of water overnight
1 cup dried large lima beans, soaked plenty of water overnight
2 pounds beef or pork spareribs
1 chouriço or linguiça sausage, sliced
1 blood sausage, sliced
1/4 pound lean bacon, diced
1/2 cup fresh green beans
2 pounds cabbage, coarsely chopped
2 pounds plantains, peeled and sliced
2 pounds fresh yams, peeled, 1-inch dice
2 pounds fresh sweet potatoes, peeled, 1-inch dice
2 pounds winter squash, peeled, 1-inch dice
1 chicken, cut in 12 serving pieces
Salt and pepper, to taste
2 pounds tomatoes, quartered
Sofrito (a seasoning paste of sautéed garlic, onion, and tomato paste), to taste
Cilantro, chopped

Method
1. In a stock pot, combine 6 cups of water, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, the onion, garlic, and bay leaves. Bring to boil. Add soaked hominy and beans. Simmer until nearly fork-tender.

2. In a separate pot, brown the spareribs, chouriço or linguiça, blood sausage, and bacon, then add the green beans, cabbage, plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, and squash. Set aside.

3. Season the chicken with salt and pepper, then cook in skillet filmed with olive oil until lightly browned. Add the tomatoes and the meat-vegetable mixture to the stock pot of hominy and beans. Cook on low heat for approximately 40 minutes. Add the sofrito to taste, and simmer 20 minutes longer. Turn off the heat and let rest, covered, for at least 30 minutes.

4. Arrange the meats and vegetables on platter. Garnish with the chopped cilantro. Serve the hominy and beans in a separate bowl.

Cachupa Rica II
Ingredients
4 cups crushed dry hominy
1/4 pound dried kidney beans
2 onions, chopped
2 bay leaves
2 garlic cloves, chopped
Olive oil, as needed
Salt
1/4 pound beef, cubed
1/4 pound bacon, diced
1 pig trotter
4 sausages (linguiça or chouriço), thickly sliced
Paprika, to taste
2 potatoes, peeled, 1-inch cubes
1/4 pound savoy cabbage, coarsely chopped
2 cassavas, peeled, 1-inch dice
Chopped cilantro, for garnish

Method
1. Add the hominy, beans, half the onions, one of the bay leaves, 1 garlic clove, 1 tablespoon of the olive oil, and a pinch of salt to a stock pot. Cover with water and boil 30 minutes. Turn off the heat and set aside.

2. In large pot or Dutch oven, heat 3 tablespoons of oil over low heat and add the beef, bacon, pig trotter, sausage, the rest of the onions, the remaining garlic clove and bay leaf, paprika and salt to taste. Cover and let stew for 3 hours. Add a splash of water if the pan threatens to dry out.

3. Return the beans and hominy to a boil. Then add the meat mixture. When the beans and hominy are nearly tender, add the potatoes, cabbage, and cassavas. When the potatoes are fork-tender, remove the pot from heat. Allow the dish to rest 30 minutes before serving. Garnish with the chopped cilantro.

Cachupinha
Here’s a similar dish, more quickly prepared and brighter tasting, as it substitutes fresh ingredients for the dried ones usually found in cachupa.

Ingredients
2 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, sliced
1/4 pound linguiça, sliced
2 peppercorns, crushed
5 ears of corn
1/4 squash, sliced
1/2 pound fresh fava or lima beans
2 ripe tomatoes
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Method
1. Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, linguiça, and peppercorns and cook gently until the onions are softened.

2. Cut corn kernels from the cobs. Add the corn, squash, beans, and tomatoes to the linguiça-onion mixture. Add just enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the vegetable are tender and the water has been absorbed. Taste for seasoning and garnish with chopped cilantro. Serve.

References
Cape Verdean Foods
Cape Verdean Cooking

Article © 2002–2009 Gary Allen. All rights reserved. Visit Gary’s Web site, On the Table.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

On June 11th, I had the pleasure and honor of being on a panel at The New School with some esteemed colleagues—John T. Edge, Anne Mendelson, Betty Fussell, and Molly O’Neill—to talk about one of the 20th century’s most important and controversal food journalists, Craig Claiborne.

Because I’ve been publishing Leite’s Culinaria for more than ten years, I was given the exciting and onerous task of discussing the future of food journalism, a topic about which if you ask 100 people you’ll get 125 responses. I was utterly terrified. To be in such company, who collectively have published enough about food to fill a library, was overwhelming enough. But then to grapple with a topic few people have a viable, concise answer to? (I had visions of suffering the same fate as many Elizabethan actors at the rotten-vegetable-filled hands of a displeased crowd.) After all, if people knew the future of journalism, they’d already be making money from it.

In my research I discovered that technology, with its Internet, mobile communications, computers, etc., is both an asset and liability to food writers. To tackle my topic, I chose to speak to leaders in the writing, publishing, and technology industries…aw, hell, it’d be so much easier, and you’d get so much more out of it, if you just watched the panel instead of listening to me blither on here.

When we pick up a dinner fork we rarely think about how or why it came to be. Using it is as natural as using our own hands. But the fork is a relative newcomer to the table, appearing many centuries, even millennia, after the knife and spoon. The fork’s short and rocky history is the story of the evolution of etiquette and table manners. It’s also the story of how a doomed Byzantine princess, a French Cardinal disgusted by his dinner guests, and an intrepid English traveler forever changed the way western society eats.

Forks were in use in ancient Egypt, as well as Greece and Rome. However, they weren’t used for eating, but were, rather, lengthy cooking tools used for carving or lifting meats from a cauldron or the fire. Most diners ate with their fingers and a knife, which they brought with them to the table. Forks for dining only started to appear in the noble courts of the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire in about the 7th century and became common among wealthy families of the regions by the 10th century. Elsewhere, including Europe, where the favored implements were the knife and the hand, the fork was conspicuously absent.

Imagine the astonishment then when in 1004 Maria Argyropoulina, Greek niece of Byzantine Emperor Basil II, showed up in Venice for her marriage to Giovanni, son of the Pietro Orseolo II, the Doge of Venice, with a case of golden forks—and then proceeded to use them at the wedding feast. They weren’t exactly a hit. She was roundly condemned by the local clergy for her decadence, with one going so far as to say, “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”

When Argyropoulina died of the plague two years later, Saint Peter Damian, with ill-concealed satisfaction, suggested that it was God’s punishment for her lavish ways. “Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. . . . this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take his revenge. For He raised over her the sword of His divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy and all her limbs began to wither.”

Doomed by God for using a fork. Life was harsh in the 11th century.

After this inauspicious debut, forks were understandably slow to catch on. But Maria’s Byzantine manners did make inroads. By the late Middle Ages the spread of forks can be tracked by their appearance in city inventories and as items of value bequeathed in wills. These suckett forks were used primarily for eating candied fruits in syrup or foods likely to stain the fingers. According to some sources, eating sweets with a fork was a practice common among courtesans, causing the Church to ban forks as immoral.

By the 1400s dining forks began to appear in Italian cookbooks, and it was another noble marriage that spread the influence. Italian forks became popular in the French court when Catherine de Medici arrived from Italy to marry the future Henry II, bringing several dozen intricate silver forks with her. Henry’s courtiers were ridiculed for the amount of food they spilled trying to eat with the unfamiliar forks. Despite the laughter, the use of forks spread to wealthy French families eager to adopt the new Italian vogue.

While forks were becoming more common on the continent, it took a brave English traveler to bring them across the channel. Thomas Coryate traveled extensively throughout France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany in 1608 and published an account of his journey after his return to England. Crudities Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months or Coryates Crudites contained this observation on eating in Italy:

“I observed a custome in all those Italian Cities and Townes through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels . . . The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, doe alwaies, at their meales use a little forke when they cut the meate; for while with their knife, which they hold in one hand, they cut the meate out of the dish, they fasten their forke which they hold in their other hande, upon the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitteth in the company of any others at meate, should unadvisedly touch the dish of meate with his fingers, from which all at the table doe cut he will give occasion of offence unto the company as having transgressed the lawes of good manners . . . The reason of this their curiosity, is because the Italian cannot by any means endure to have his dish touched with fingers, seeing all men’s fingers are not alike cleane. Hereupon I myselfe thought good to imitate the Italian fashion by this forked cutting of meate, not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and oftentimes in England, since I came home.”

For his troubles his friends called him Furcifer. Our word fork comes from the Latin furca, so furcifer literally means “fork-bearer” but was also an acerbic pun; in the slang of the day, furcifer was also a man doomed to hang.

As the fork grew in popularity it also changed form. The straight, two-pronged fork was fine for spearing foods but not well adapted to scooping. A third, and sometimes fourth, tine made food less likely to slip through, and adding a slight curve to the tines made it an even more efficient scoop. The new shape and function of the fork led to a remarkable change in the design of table knives, which led to a dining divide between Europe and American that continues today.

The rift started, by some accounts, with Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to France’s King Louis XIII, who was so disgusted by a frequent dinner guest’s habit of picking his teeth with his knife that l’Éminence Rouge, as Richelieu was known, had the tips of the offender’s knives ground down to prevent it happening. Always desperate to follow fashion, others in the court soon did the same. Whether the story is true or not, once forks began to gain popular acceptance there was no longer any need for a pointed tip at the end of a dinner knife to hold and spear the food. In 1669, King Louis XIV of France decreed all pointed knives on the street or the dinner table illegal. Not only were new knives to be made with rounded tips, all existing table knives were to be rounded off to reduce the potential for violence. The new style of knife rapidly spread to other European countries, including England.

By the beginning of the 18th century, knives imported to the American colonies had the new blunt tips. Because Americans had very few forks and no longer had sharp-tipped knives to spear food, they had to use spoons in instead. They’d use the spoon in the left hand to steady the food as they cut it with the knife in the right. They’d then switch the spoon to the opposite hand in order to scoop it up to eat. Our distinctly American style of eating continued even after forks became commonplace in the United States. Emily Post calls the practice “zigzagging” in her 1920s etiquette books. I like think of it as the American Shuffle.

Well into the 1800s forks were still considered an affection by some, and the source of confusion to others. One diner in Maine complained that, “Eating peas with a fork is as bad as trying to eat soup with a knitting needle.” In his 1824 memoir, wealthy English silversmith Joseph Brasbridge had to admit to his host at a dinner, “I know how to sell these articles, but not how to use them.” And as late as 1842 Charles Dickens noted that fellow passengers on a Pennsylvania river boat, “thrust their broad bladed knives and two-pronged forks further down their throats than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in the hands of a skilled juggler.”

By the time of the first World’s Fair in 1851, the fork reigned supreme and required a new set of rules to help the confused or socially self conscious. Like it or not, the fork had arrived and modern dining began. As one 1887 book of manners put it,

“The fork has now become the favorite and fashionable utensil for conveying food to the mouth. First it crowded out the knife, and now in its pride it has invaded the domain of the once powerful spoon. The spoon is now pretty well subdued also, and the fork, insolent and triumphant, has become a sumptuary tyrant. The true devotee of fashion does not dare to use a spoon except to stir his tea or to eat his soup with, and meekly eats his ice-cream with a fork and pretends to like it.”

As Jacob Bronowski points out in The Origins of Knowledge and Imgination, “A knife and a fork are not merely utensils for eating. They are utensils for eating in a society in which eating is done with a knife and fork. And that is a special kind of society.” Other societies have evolved chopsticks or more ritualized use of the fingers for eating, but the fork is a uniquely western approach to dining. However, following the delirious profusion of pickle forks, fish forks, pastry forks, and oyster forks of the Victorian table, the pendulum has swung the other way. The rise of casual dining, convenience foods and drive-throughs means that for the first time since the 1500s we regularly eat complete meals with our hands. Forks and knives may again become the source of confusion and social unease. If history is any guide, it’s about time for another Furcifer, an intrepid and well-traveled diner, ridiculed at first, who will change the way we eat forever.

While no one know exactly when and where Red Velvet Cake originated, a story (and a recipe) began circulating around the United States in the 1920s about a cake that supposedly was served at the restaurant in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here’s an account of this urban legend as it appeared in Jan Brunvand’s book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (W.W. Norton, 1989):

Our friend, Dean Blair, got on a bus in San Jose one morning and shortly after, a lady got on the bus and started passing out these 3 x 5 cards with the recipe for “Red Velvet Cake.” She said she had recently been in New York and had dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria and had this cake. After she returned to San Jose, she wrote to the hotel asking for the name of the chef who had originated the cake, and if she could have the recipe.

Subsequently she received the recipe in the mail along with a bill for something like $350 from the chef. She took the matter to her attorney, and he advised her that she would have to pay it because she had not inquired beforehand if there would be a charge for the service, and if so, how much it would be. Consequently, she apparently thought this would be a good way to get even with the chef.

Because of this story, and similar variations, Red Velvet Cake is also known as Waldorf-Astoria Cake, $100 Cake, $200 Cake, etc.

There’s also a scientific myth associated with Red Velvet Cake. It has sometimes been asserted that the cake’s red color comes from a chemical reaction between the baking soda and the chocolate in the recipe. This is the result of a simple misunderstanding of the chemistry involved. While cocoa powder contains anthocyanins (red vegetable pigments) they are only red in the presence of acids –they turn blue-green in the presence of bases. When cocoa is mixed with the baking soda, a base, the combination should turn the cake an unappetizing brownish-gray. It doesn’t, of course, because the anthocyanins are present in very small quantities, and any color shift is masked by the more prominent brown of the chocolate. The red color of the cake comes from a much simpler source: large amounts red food coloring.

The supposed red color resulting from the baking soda/cocoa combination also appears in connection with Devil’s Food Cake. I wonder if Red Velvet Cake was created because Devil’s Food Cake doesn’t look nearly as red as its name would suggest. This is akin to some folks adding green food coloring to Key Lime Pie because it doesn’t appear “limey” enough.

References
Beard, James and Thollander, Earl. James Beard’s American Cookery. New York, Budget Book, 1996.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 1997, (rev. 12004).

Article © 2002–2009 Gary Allen. All rights reserved.
Visit Gary’s Web site, On the Table.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

Icebox cakes were a favorite when I was a child. They seemed almost magical in their simplicity, and they still appeal to a kind of retro-sensibility. (In fact, I made one for my parents when they were visiting a few months ago.) I’ve seen some fancy versions that attempt to improve on the original by adding coffee or even mint candies, but it’s hard to do better than the classically simple recipe that’s still on the Nabisco chocolate wafer box. The recipe, known as “The Famous Icebox Cake,” has been around at least since the 1940s.

To make the “cake,” simply alternate layers of chocolate wafers with lots of sweet vanilla-flavored whipped cream in a deep dish, and put it in the refrigerator overnight. The cookies absorb moisture from the cream and develop a dense texture, a bit like devil’s food cake. My mother used to make these cakes in the summer, before we had air conditioning, when using the oven would have been brutal.

Not only was it easy and cool (in every sense), but we kids could join in and were always ready to assist with licking the last bit of whipped cream from the beaters.—Gary Allen

Article © 2006 Gary Allen. All rights reserved. Visit Gary’s Web site, On the Table.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.