Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

The sweet leaf of a South American shrub called stevia has been used for centuries by South Americans to sweeten their yerba maté . But the United States, Canada, and the European Union will not permit it to be added to foods, because although it is surely “natural,” its safety has not been proved. (Ironically, however, it may be sold in “health-food” stores as a nutritional supplement.) While South America clearly hasn’t been depopulated by stevia-sweetened drinks, the health authorities’ reasoning goes that if stevia were permitted as a food additive in the United States and Canada, North Americans, addicted as they are to sweet soft drinks, might consume enormous quantities of it. And the effects of quaffing huge Slurpees and Big Gulps full of stevia have not been investigated.

Another sweetener used to some extent in the Middle Ages, but most enthusiastically by the Romans, was sugar of lead, a sweet-tasting but highly poisonous chemical known to chemists as lead acetate. The Romans used lead-lined cooking vessels to boil down crushed grapes and old wine that had partially soured. Soured ( oxidized ) wine contains acetic acid, and any freshman chemistry student will tell you that acetic acid plus lead metal will make lead acetate. All lead compounds are poisonous, but lead acetate is one of the few that are soluble in water—and wine. Thus, not only could over-the-hill wine be made sweet again, but sugar of lead could be produced for sweetening other beverages and foods. The oldest existing cookbook, De Re Coquinaria (On Cooking) by the first-century Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, contains scores of recipes that include sugar of lead among the ingredients.

Lead poisoning is cumulative and causes a variety of maladies from gout to sterility and insanity. It was primarily the Roman patricians who could avail themselves of lead-sweetened wines and foods, and as a result they were the prime victims. For no lack of trying (he was quite a man with the ladies), Julius Caesar was able to sire only one (illegitimate) child. His successor, Caesar Augustus, was reportedly completely sterile, whether with spouse or concubine.

Today, good old-fashioned sugar—pure sucrose, whether from sugar cane or sugar beets—plays many roles in foods besides making them sweet. It makes breads, cookies, and other doughs more moist and tender; it stabilizes foams such as beaten egg whites; it acts as a carrier of other flavors, and it caramelizes when heated, making foods brown and giving them that unique sweet-sour-bitter caramel flavor. And it preserves foods—notably, when used in jams and other fruit preserves.

According to W. C. Fields, anyone who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad. Sugar’s not all bad either.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Molasses—the plural of molass

HI, HONEY!

So many health foodies tout honey as the most natural, healthful, and nutritious of all sweeteners, certainly when compared with refined sugar. But I understand that babies must not eat it. Kind of contradictory, wouldn’t you say?

Idon’t know what “most natural” means, unless somebody can give me a good reason why sugar cane and sugar beets are somehow less natural than honey. Perhaps because they are not produced by hairy insects?

But chemically, there is quite a difference. Sugar cane and sugar beets are loaded with sucrose, whereas honey’s sugars are primarily fructose (39 percent), glucose, (31 percent), and maltose (7 percent), with only 1.5 percent sucrose. (See Table 4 on chapter 5.) In addition, 4 percent of honey consists of other carbohydrates and small amounts of minerals, vitamins, and enzymes. Most of the rest (17 percent) is water, making honey a supersaturated solution of sugars. That is, there is more sugar dissolved in the water than the water should ordinarily hold. That’s why the excess sugar will “undissolve” slowly and fall out as crystals (the honey becomes granulated ) when stored for long periods of time. It’s mainly the glucose that initiates the crystallization process.

Actually, I love the crunchiness of granulated honey. Storing it between 50 and 70ºF (10 and 21ºC) will hasten crystallization; higher and lower temperatures discourage it. Take your choice.

Among its enzymes, honey contains invertase , which converts sucrose to a mixture of glucose and fructose, or invert sugar . (See “A nano-course on carbohydrates,” chapter 5.)

Another enzyme in honey is amylase , which breaks starch down into smaller units. Honey also contains small amounts of all the B vitamins and vitamin C, plus the minerals potassium, calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and traces of others.

The healthful reputation of honey is undoubtedly attributable to these minor constituents plus its content of flavonoid antioxidants. Medical history has credited honey with a variety of therapeutic and antibacterial qualities. Moreover, honey is much more interesting than ordinary sugar because it has an intriguing variety of flavors, depending on which local nectar bars the bees are in the habit of frequenting.

Unfortunately, as an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment, honey is a good breeding ground for Clostridium botulinum , the bacterium that manufactures botulin toxin, a deadly poison. Bees may pick up C. botulinum spores while foraging (they are found in soil) and incorporate them into their honey. Human adults, with their fully developed immune systems and intestinal bacteria that destroy such spores, can handle a reasonable number of them, but babies under one year of age can’t and may contract infantile botulism. It’s a rare occurrence, but why take the chance? Feeding honey to your little Honey is just not worth it. And as one source put it, chances are your baby is already sweet enough.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Botulism—a morbid preoccupation with robots

Chapter Six

From Sea to Shining Sea

WITH A FEW minor exceptions, there are only two environments in which life can thrive on our planet: in air and in water. We Homo sapiens are one of millions of plant and animal species that thrive in our sea of air, the atmosphere, and there may be a similar or even greater number of still undiscovered species that thrive in the seas of water. And yet, few air-living species can live without water, and few water-living species (that we know of) can live without air, especially its oxygen and carbon dioxide.

But in the context of human food, that’s where the symmetry ends. As an air-living species, we have exploited our environment, first by simply collecting the plants and animals that Nature provided, and later by growing our own preferred plants and breeding our own preferred animals. In the seas, however, we are still in the hunter-gatherer stage, venturing out onto the ocean’s surface to collect what we can find. Only very recently have we begun to raise a few of our preferred species by aquaculture.

Among our preferred aquatic food species are many dozens of vertebrate fish and a variety of invertebrates, including mollusks (clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, squid, octopus) and crustaceans (lobsters, crabs, shrimp, crayfish).

This chapter is, in effect, a fishing expedition, in which we can hook or net and examine only a very small sampling of our favorite finfish, mollusks, and crustaceans.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Crappie—a species of sunfish, especially when not fresh

COLOR ME SALMON

As a chef with an avid interest in nutrition, I’ve been wondering: In light of all the controversy surrounding the dyes used in the feed of farm-raised salmon to give them their pink hues, has anyone thought about using lycopene, the red phytochemical in tomatoes with alleged antioxidant benefits, instead?