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North/Central Europe: Information on Buttermilk

What is buttermilk? Where does buttermilk come from?

Natural buttermilk is a product of the butter-making process. After a cow is milked, the cream is removed from the milk by either allowing it to rise to the top and then pouring it off, or using a mechanical device like a cream centrifuge to remove it. The cream is then churned or mixed vigorously so that the butterfat molecules gather together in bigger and bigger lumps. These lumps are butter. When the lumps of butter are finally removed, the liquid that remains is buttermilk.

Ireland: Chicken 'Frigasse' (Sicin in Anlann Bán): March 3, 2008

The technique called fricassée has turned up all over Europe under many different names over the past few hundred years (in English alone you might get fricace, frigasie, fricasey, frigacy...), so it's no surprise that there's an Irish variant, which dates back to at least the late 17th century. While these days "fricaseeing" something normally means to sauté the meat and then cook it further in a sauce, originally the term meant to cook sliced meat by boiling or stewing it; then the sauce would be added. The sauce usually involved eggs and cream, along with seasonings or spices meant to sharpen the effect. This is one of the ways the Irish dish is done: though in local usage, frigasses might also be made with a brown or beef-based sauce, and could include other meats -- lamb, veal, rabbit -- and vegetables.

This typical chicken frigasse is adapted from an eighteenth-century recipe from County Cavan. Like most other frigasses of the period, it's garnished with button onions and mushrooms.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

Switzerland: Aelplermagrone

Once upon a time, a couple of hundred years ago, macaroni was a big deal. A popular song even remembers how a young dandy called Yankee Doodle "stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni" -- meaning that he was trying to position himself way upmarket by suggesting that he was on the cutting edge of the newest and hottest fashion trends.

These days we tend to take macaroni for granted, relegating it to a very basic level of eating -- comfort food, at best. But it deserves better. There are places where they still remember that even very basic and simple pasta dishes can, by careful treatment, be elevated to far higher-than-usual status.

One of these places is Switzerland, the home of älplermagrone. The name doesn't translate perfectly into English. Magrone is of course macaroni, but Älpler doesn't only refer to the mountains and the people who live there, but more specifically to the men who would go up into the high pastures with the cows every summer. They stayed there for months at a time and lived on either what they had brought up with them on the upward journey, or what they got from the cows they were tending.

What they obviously had lots of was milk, butter and cheese (because they also made cheese every day from the fresh milk). The way this dish is prepared emphasizes how much milk they had: enough to boil the macaroni in, instead of water. And this treatment produces a surprisingly rich and tasty base for a dish that would really stick to the ribs at the end of a hard day's work in the open air.

The cheese of preference for this very exalted version of mac-and-cheese would naturally be Bergkaese, one of the hundreds of matchless mountain cheeses made by small dairies and smallholders in all the great Alpine regions. The Swiss cheese Sbrinz also works well. But if you can't get these, Emmental, Gruyere or (if you can get it) Appenzeller cheeses will all still produce a really nice result.

Fried onions to top it all off, and (often) apple slices or applesauce on the side, complete the dish.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Carrageen Moss Blancmange

Carrageen moss is one of Ireland's more unusual natural resources. First of all, it's not a moss: it's a seaweed. And to add to the confusion, there are any number of ways to spell its common name: carrageen, carrageenan, carragheen and carragheenan, take your pick. They're all derived from the Irish word carraigín, which means "moss of the rocks" (though some think that the -ín ending is actually an Irish diminutive, which changes the word's meaning to "little rock" and connects it to a relatively common Irish place name).

At any rate, the scientific name of the Irish version of the seaweed is Chondrus crispus. This reddish-brown plant grows on or near just about every Irish coastline. It has been used for centuries as a food additive. Local people would gather and dry it -- usually in the sun: this treatment bleaches it. When someone wanted to use it in a dessert (which might be a long time later, as dried carrageen lasts just about forever), all that had to be done was to soak the dried seaweed in warm milk or water, depending on the recipe. The seaweed then releases a delicate natural gel that acts as a setting agent when the dessert mixture cools.

These days, carrageenan's main worldwide use is as a thickening agent in all kinds of commercial food preparations (shakes, ready made desserts, and so forth). But it's still used in various Irish traditional dessert dishes, especially when the cook wants a more authentic effect than gelatine would produce. Probably its commonest use is in that ancient and traditional dessert, the blancmange -- a light, molded sweet pudding. In blancmange, which must have a light and subtle taste to work correctly, the carrageenan adds a hint of the sea -- a delicate flavor hard to identify but very habit-forming once you've experienced it.

Carrageenan can usually be found in health food stores, and can often also turn up in gourmet specialty stores. Click "read more" for the blancmange recipe.

(Looking for still more traditional Irish desserts? Click here!)

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