Liver and onions

  Yesterday I started looking at legumes. Before you start scratching your head in confusion, legume is the largest umbrella that encompasses a huge range of sub groups. If something is referred to as a legume, it is effectively a seed from a pod so it includes all manner of veg from mange tout and sugar snaps to peas and chick peas, broad beans, haricot and on through lentils and split peas, (Is this list going on for much longer? -Ed). I think you're getting the idea.

  Peas are legumes, as well as a group on their own and pulses, which you may have heard of, refer to the dried versions. Their existence and importance in history form all over the world is well documented and surrounded by many stories but a couple I like is that legumes were considered so important by the Romans that several names refer to them, like Cicero from the chick pea and Fabius from the fava bean. Also, lentils were used as a packing for transportation. The Egyptians packed one of the obelisks they sent as a gift in lentils, (which, quite sensibly, got eaten).

I got a request for liver. The parsnip puree made it special.

  Cereals are basically the seeds of grasses cultivated for human consumption, also known as grain. This sometime includes leguminous plants such as soya. Soya however is not a grass seed, it's more like a pea or haricot and comes in a pod and is the most widely eaten plant in the world. However, this isn't so surprising when you consider how many forms it takes. 

  Most obvious is probably as soy sauce. (As a little aside, the names soy and soya are a derivative of shoyu, the Japanese name for soy sauce.) It is also eaten as bean sprouts, soya oil, soy milk, miso, tempeh and tofu amongst other things. It looks like the soy bean came from China originally and started to be cultivated about the fifteenth century BC and was very popular is it provides proteins, fats, carbs, vitamins and minerals.

  As you've possibly noticed, I've got a bit distracted. I've been reading a very interesting book that has led me down all sorts of interesting, (Some may say geeky. -Ed), avenues about the origins of all sorts of foods. I'd better speed things up as I want to get on to cooking techniques instead of food origins. What you've probably also noticed is how ancient our ingredients are and how there was a long time between when we started walking upright, when we started farming and now. In that time, food helped us develop and evolve and we, through a process of natural selection, made plants and animals change to suit our needs. 

  It's really tempting for me to get upset about how the recent industrialisation of food is a frightening experiment but I'll put a lid on that for now. Instead I'm going to continue to celebrate our combined heritage and mutual evolution.

Catch you tomorrow.

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com