The Food Almanac: Thursday, September 29, 2011

In The Food Almanac, Tom Fitzmorris of the online newsletter, The New Orleans Menu, notes food facts and sayings.

Today's Flavor
It's National Bay Leaf Day. We use bay leaves like crazy, but few people are sure what bay leaves taste like, what they add to a dish, or why we drop a leaf into every stock, stew, or gravy.

It's easy enough to find out. Crack a bay leaf into some hot water and let it steep like tea for a few minutes. What you'll taste is subtle — less assertive than most dried herbs. There's something like cinnamon and vanilla in there, plus a flavor that can only be called herbal.

When I tried this, my first thought was to just put a leaf in my mouth and suck on it, but then I remembered stories of people choking to death on bay leaves. This is a far-fetched danger, but it is real, because one of the properties of bay leaves is that they do not break down easily. Swallowing a whole leaf might cause a problem. Remove them from the pot before serving the food in it, just in case.

Bay leaves come from the same laurel tree that supplies the crowns for Olympic winners, and they've long been used in cooking. I wish I had such a tree, because bay leaves do lose flavor over time. Use them sparingly, because the flavor does seem to jump to the foreground otherwise.

Gourmet Gazetteer
Lavender is a small town occupied with raising peaches and pecans in northwest Georgia. It's nestled in a gap between two ridgelines that rise 300 feet above the flatter land. Turnip Mountain is on the west, Lavender Mountain on the east. The town is 83 miles northwest of Atlanta, and nine miles from Rome. The Central of Georgia Railroad main line runs through town, and has a yard nearby for servicing a large clay pit. What about food? Go to Martha's Skillet, three miles south of Lavender.

The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
If you can't remember when you acquired your current supply of bay leaves, scatter them on the lawn and rake them up with the rest of the dead leaves.

Edible Dictionary
lavender, n. — A leaf from the family of plants that includes basil and mint. Lavender is from western Asia. It's found in the cooking of most of the populations around the Mediterranean. For example, the herb blend known as herbes de Provence includes lavender as a main ingredient. The flavor is reminiscent of that of rosemary, but milder. It has an aroma and flavor that puts one in the midst of the blue-purple flowers the plants grow. The color "lavender" is named for the flowers. Honey made by bees from lavender flowers is distinctly different and fragrant — great in stews and soups, particularly lamb.

The Saints
Today is Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael, the Archangel. He is the patron of bakers, greengrocers, and Pensacola. The lore about Michaelmas is that if you eat goose on this day, you'll always have enough money the rest of the year.

Food Through History
The Battle of Salamis began today in 480 B.C. Let's dwell a moment on the image of soldiers trying to beat each other senseless with long bludgeons made of hard-cured pork. That done, we note that this was a sea battle, in which the Greek navy managed to defeat the Persians in a small strait between Piraeus and Salamis, near Athens. The Greek were badly outnumbered, so it was a heroic victory — if not one that resulted in the making of muffulettas.

Food on the Air
Today in 1974, the television sitcom Alice premiered. It was about the woes of a waitress working in a place called Mel's Diner . . . Also making its first appearance on TV today, in 1953, was Make Room For Daddy, which ran quite a long time. Whenever I so much as think about its star, Danny Thomas, I think of red beans and rice. When I was a boy, the show aired on Monday nights, and my mother never failed to have the beans on the table that night.

Food Namesakes
On this day in 1985, Deron Cherry of the Kansas City Chiefs made four pass interceptions in one game . . . Olympic synchronized swimmer Heather Pease was born today in 1975 . . . Oilman John D. Rockefeller, the man for whom oysters Rockefeller are named, became the first certified billionaire in the United States today in 1916.

Words to Eat By
"The worst steak in New Orleans is better than the best steak in Texas." — Bum Phillips, Texas native, former coach of the New Orleans Saints, born today in 1923.

Words to Drink By

"In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria." — David Auerbach, film director.

Check out other Food Almanac columns by Tom Fitzmorris.