Halloween is nearly upon us...
and that means...
CANDY!
So if you're looking to hand out something a little different this year
something that will probably get your house egged.
Have i got the sweet for you:
makshufa from Medieval Arabia.
A sweet rose and nut confection that sounds absolutely divine.
We'll also look at the lineage at one of my favorite ingredients.
And one of history's most sought after commodities.
Something you ought to not have candy without: sugar.
This time on Tasting History.
Todays' recipe comes from the 13th century:
Kitab al-Tabikh, or Book of Dishes by Muhammad b. al-Hasan Al Baghdadi - The Scribe of Baghdad.
Makshufa: The way to make it is to take equal parts sugar, almonds or pistachios, honey and sesame oil.
Pound the sugar and almonds and mix them together.
Take enough saffron to color it and add it with rose-water.
Then throw the sesame oil in the dist so that it boils and boils up.
Put the honey on it and stir it until foam appears, and throw the sugar and almonds on the honey.
Stir continuously on a quiet fire until it is nearly thickened and take it up.
This actually sounds really good to me.
A lot of cool flavors that I really like. I especially love rose, but it is something that it is very easy to over do it on.
And you'll just be eating potpourri, so we'll go light on the rose.
You can always add more, hard to back it off.
Now one interesting thing is that he says to add equal amounts of the nuts and the sugar and the oil,
but what does he mean by equal amounts?
Is it equal volume? Is it equal weight? Not exactly sure, hm,
I'm going to go with equal weight but that makes the volumes wildly different.
You could also try it probably with equal volume and than the weights would be very different, but I will tell you
the way that I make it worked out pretty well. So maybe stick with the weight.
So what you'll need is:1 1/3 cup or 225 grams of sugar,
2 cups or 225 grams of almonds or pistachios.
You can use either one, almonds or pistachios. I'm going to use pistachios because I really like pistachios.
Just make sure that when you weight them that you're not including the shells.
So shell them first, and then weight them. If you're using almonds skin them and than weight them.
2/3rd or 225 grams of honey,
1 cup or 225 grams of sesame oil.
Now you really need to use sesame oil for this. You could probably get away with any kind of nut oil.
It'll still impart flavor but don't go with olive oil or vegetable oil or anything
because the sesame oil really does give a lot of flavor to this dish so it's clearly an important aspect.
A pinch or about 10-15 threads of saffron ground up
and about 3 tablespoons of rosewater.
Now I wouldn't use much more than 3 tablespoons, at least at first because like I said it can overwhelm the dish, any dish.
But if while it's cooking you taste it and you want a little more rose, go right ahead, but 3 tablespoons is really going to be more than enough I think.
So first grind the almonds or pistachios into a powder either by hand
or if you don't want this to take all week use a machine, use a blender, whatever you got.
And then mix that with the sugar. Then add your saffron, and rose water and mix those in.
Then place the sesame oil into a large sauce pan over medium heat and heat it until it's hot.
It's probably not going to boil, so you want to find out where it's smoke point is and back it off just a little bit.
So if it starts to smoke, lower that temperature.
Also make sure you use a pot or large sauce pan that you think is almost too big because once you add some of the other ingredients
it does tend to boil up, and it can boil over.
And THAT IS BAD.
Once your oil is nice and hot, turn the burner down to low and pour in your honey.
Then mix it in just a bit. Now you're going to get some foam right away when you're mixing the honey in.
But leave it alone after you've mixed it in, and it should calm down.
Takes about 2 or 3 minutes for that foam to start rising up again, at which point you're going to take the nut and rose
and sugar mixture and pour that in.
That is your point that things could boil over so just make sure you have a pot big enough.
So mix everything together in the pot and turn the heat up to medium-high.
And then let everything cook, stirring continuously until it starts to thicken.
It's very important to keep stirring the entire time because it will sit at the bottom and burn.
So just keep stirring, it takes a while. It can take probably up to 10 minutes becuase you want this to get up to 270 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's 132 degrees Celcius.
Now it's great if you have a candy thermometer for this, obviously they did not have candy thermometers in Medieval Arabia,
so they did it all by sight, but I'm guessing they screwed things up a lot before they got this down to an art.
So if you have a thermometer I definitely suggest using it, really it needs to hit 270 before you can move onto the next process.
You could take it up to 290, that's really going to darken it and let the caramel come through, but you're starting to play with fire.
or play with hot sugar as it is because it will burn like that.
So while your candy cooks make sure you keep stirring with one hand,
while you hit the Like button with the other and I will teach you the history of sugar.
"Sugar cane"
That's right. Sugar cane to be specific.
So originally this was going to be all done in one episode but
the history of sugar cane is so long and so complex I thought I would be doing it an injustice
to just speed right through it so I'm breaking it up into two episodes.
So today we will just be covering sugar cane in the Old World ie before it got to the Americas.
Because while sugar cane might be a cash crop in the Western hemisphere today,
it got its origins 10,000 years ago halfway around the world.
As early as 8000 BC sugar cane was eaten on the isle of New Guinea.
And while the plant was very similar to what we have today the method of eating it, probably not.
They probably just took a stalk of cane and sucked the gritty juice right out of it.
And if you've never had a chance to actually do that find yourself some raw sugar cane and do it because
it is divine. A little bitter, a little sweet, muah!
Anyway for nearly 2000 years the plant slowly made it's way up through the islands of Indonesia and finally
arriving in India. Where it was termed sarkara and it made it's way into the Ayuveda.
Which is the ancient Indian system of medicine. And basically it remained therapeutic for quite some time.
But the method of eating it changed dramatically.
Now it's unclear exactly when it happened but definitely by the 1st century AD, Indians had developed a way to
refine sugar and crystallize it.
Turning it into something more akin to what we would eat today.
And the Guptas had a name for this crystallized sugar, khanda.
So it's khanda made from sarkara, so you can see that the words candy and sugar are starting to take form even then.
This new crystallized sugar made its way East to China with Buddhist monks during the reign of
Tang Taizong, who began cultivating the crop and opening his own sugar refineries.
Those Buddhist monks were really using their heads.
" 'Knock, knock. Do you have a moment to talk about Buddhism?'
'No, we're good we're all kinda caught up with Daoism and Confucianism but thanks!'
'We have sugaaaaar'
'Why didn't you say so, come on in.' "
So then it's no wonder that Buddhism really fluorished during the Tang dynasty.
Now long before sugar headed East to China,
it heeded the mandate of the Village People
and went West.
One of the very first written records of sugar came from a Macedonian source in 327 BC.
During Alexander the Great's invasion of India, one of his officers Nearchus wrote
"There is a reed in India that brings forth honey without the help of bees,
from which an intoxicating drink is made, though the plant bears no fruit."
And whether it was with Alexander's army or in the pack of an errant Arab trader,
sugar had definitely made it to the Middle East and Arabia by the 1st century AD.
In his treatise "De Materia Medica" Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides
gives an early description of crystallized sugar.
"Sakcharon: There is a kind of coalesced honey called sugar found in the reeds of India and Arabia,
similar in consistency to salt and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth like salt.
It is good dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and taken as a drink to help a painful bladder and kidneys.
Rubbed on, it disperses things which darken the pupils."
I'm really curious what darkens pupils. Aren't pupils black?
If you have any ideas, if you're a doctor perhaps leave me a note in the comments because I'd love to learn.
We also know that by this time sugar was white because Pliny the Elder says
"Sugar is made in Arabia as well, but Indian sugar is better.
It is a kind of honey found in cane, white as gum, and it crunches between the teeth.
It comes in lumps the size of a hazelnut.
Sugar is only used for medical purposes."
Right Pliny, "medical" purposes.
"These Twinkies are for my glaucoma, man"
But Pliny was right, because really in the Western world until the 7th century, sugar was just used as a kind of medicine.
But, then some pioneering Arabs decided that it could also be used just to taste good.
Hence our candy today.
And while the first kalifs conquered their way across North Africa and up into Spain, they left a trail of sugar refineries behind them.
Especially in Egypt because the Egyptians were thought to have made the most pure white sugar ever seen.
Now honey was still of course the common sweetener for the masses,
but sugar was starting to become so prized amongst the wealthy and elite of Arabia that
Medieval Egyptian historian, Al Maqrizi, said that the court of Mamluk sultans of the 12th century
were consuming 300 tons of the stuff each month.
That's similar to the amount of sugar an average American household eats today.
But while the Arab world was gorging itself on white gold, Europe was just starting to get a taste of the cane.
An 11th century medical text from Bury St. Edmunds in England mentions
"A conserve of roses for tertian fever," and it lists "zucarri, and siruppo albo" or white syrup as ingredients.
But sugar's big break into Europe took place around the year 1096 when Pope Urban II declared the first Crusade.
Now in hindsight we can all agree, I think, that that was a bad thing to do
but there was one good thing that came out of it, and that's sugar.
The Crusaders called it sweet salt and a 13th century German monk named
Burchard of Mount Zion traveled to the Holy Land
and gives us one of the first European accounts of how sugar was made.
In his "Descripto Terrae Sanctae" or Description of the Holy Land, he says
"The canes are gathered, cut in lengths of half a palm, and so are crushed in the press.
The juice squeezed out of them is boiled in copper boilers,
and when thickened, is collected in baskets made of slender twigs.
Soon after this it becomes dry and hard, and this is how sugar is made.
Before it dries, a liquor oozes from it, called honey of sugar, which is very delicious and good for flavoring cakes."
So you can see that by his instruction to use it to make cakes, by now even in Europe sugar was no longer just used for medicine,
but it was still extremely scarce.
In 1226 King Henry III asked the Mayor of Winchester to find 3 pounds of Egyptian sugar.
"If so much is to be had at one time."
But soon after that with tensions rising between the Muslim and Christian worlds,
the island of Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean took up the mantle to meet the demands of Europe's burgeoning love of sugar.
One 15th century traveler said of the island
"So much sugar is made that I believe there must be enough for the whole world."
Now you would think that would make the price of commodity go way down but it didn't really
because by then the sugar trade had fallen under the control of one of history's great merchant powers
Venice. A Venetian trader bringing in 100,000 pounds of sugar into the Port of London in 1319 placed a
price of 2 shillings per pound on the sugar.
Now, it's hard to kinda do a conversion of what money was then to what money is now but
you can think that an average worker was making about 40 shillings A YEAR.
So 2 shillings for enough sugar to make about two cheesecakes, that's like 5% of your annual salary?
For some sugar?! D:
So obviously most people still could not afford sugar that came from sugar cane,
but by the 14th century we're starting to see cookbooks like The Forme of Cury, one of my favorites,
really using sugar in its recipes. So we can see that it's becoming extremely popular with the wealthy of Europe.
Sugar then was most often sold in hard cones or loaves and would have to be chiseled or broken off to use in cooking.
But once it was broken off the uses for sugar became endless, and not just for eating.
See, because it was so prized the wealthy of Europe would use sugar in ways that were extremely audacious.
Like creating sculptures out of sugar that were not meant to be eaten.
In England and France they had the rather ironic name subtleties,
and in the South in Italy they were called trionfi, or triumphs, a little bit more on the nose.
At one feast thrown by Gaston IV, Comte de Foix in 1457 to honor the Hungarian Ambassador there was featured
"A heraldic menagerie sculpted in sugar: lions, stags, monkeys, and various other birds and beasts
each holding in its paw or beak the arms of the Hungarian king."
Now just a few years of Gaston's lavish banquet, the history of sugar gets completely upended.
And that's because on his second voyage to the Americas Christopher Columbus took with him
sugar cane from plantations on the Canary Islands to grow on Española/Hispaniola.
And thus began a dark chapter in the history of sugar
because most of the people who were working those fields in the Caribbean were brought over from Africa in chains.
And so that is where we're going to leave it for today.
The next 400 years in sugar's history is so complex, and so important that I can't just buzz through it.
It needs a whole episode and so it's gonna get one, hopefully next week.
But in the mean time let us stay in the Old World and finish making our Medieval Arab candy.
So once the mixture hits 270 Fahrenheit or 132 Celcius,
or a few degrees hotter, but make sure to watch it. Don't let it really get above 290.
Remove the pot from the heat continuing to stir.
Then put the mixture onto a baking sheet lined with either parchment or aluminum foil.
Now you can do this a couple of different ways, the recipe is not clear, so you can either make little candies like I did
just by putting little blobs of the mixture onto the baking sheet.
You can try to get them to be beautiful little circles, I bet that would be nice. I was unsuccessful.
Because I was still stirring with one hand, you need two people. The other thing you could do is you could pour the entire mixture out to the baking sheet.
And let it cool, and then break it up more like peanut brittle. Either one should work.
Then let it cool at either room temperature or even better put it into the refrigerator.
I would actually keep this in the refrigerator because it really does start to get sticky if it's at room temperature.
The colder, the better, and you get a nice shine on it. :)
So here we are, makshufa. Our 13th century Medieval Arab candy.
They're actually really lovely. I ended up putting just a few sesame seeds on top for a little diversity in color.
Cus it was kinda brown, and looked a little unappetizing.
But you can, you don't have to. They are really sticky though. So definitely keep them in the
definitely keep them in the refrigerator cus just a minute, granted my AC is out, but just a minute outside of the refrigerator and they are rather sticky.
But lets do this.
It's hard. It's like peanut brittle.
But it's really good, just like peanut brittle.
So yeah, that's going to get stuck in your teeth, but it is so worth it.
Those are delicious. It's like peanut brittle, and I love peanut brittle but the flavor is very different,
because it is sesame, that's what I'm tasting. And a little bit of pistachio.
But, the flavor is wonderful and than at the very end
the rose hits.
So 3 tablespoons, that's all I would go with.
Don't overdo it, because the rose is there, but it's not overpowering.
But it's wonderful.
So many different flavors along the way, quite the little journey.
So if you don't want to hand out Baby Ruth or Snickers,
though you probably should,
go ahead and make these and hand them out to the kids.
Though they're actually really sticky, so actually I would not hand them out but
make them anyway, because they're delicious.
Anyway, happy Halloween and I will see you next time on
Tasting History for more of the history of sugar.