Quezi

An insurance company’s fire brigade (from a Hogarth print 1763 PD)

As the Great Fire of London consumed the buildings, almshouses, schools and churches of the City of London in 1666, property owners watched their buildings and livelihoods go up in flames, each knowing that they had lost everything because fire insurance did not exist.

Immediately after the fire, rebuilding and reconstruction of the City started. One man involved in the rebuilding and property development was a Nicholas Barbon. In 1667 he established a mutual society called “The Fire Office” which offered fire insurance, this later became known as Phoenix Fire Office. An appropriate name for the society as the Phoenix is a mythical bird which burns itself and then arises from the ashes reborn.

In 1682 it was recorded that for 30 shillings the company would insure a property for £100 for a period of 7 years. The company had its own men complete with liveries and badges employed to extinguish fires. [1]

It was the first of several fire insurance companies formed after the fire. Others included the Friendly Society (1683), Hand-in-Hand (1696) Sun Fire Office (1710) and Royal Exchange Assurance (1720) [2].

To identify that a property was covered by fire insurance, attached to the building at a height easily seen from the street, but out of reach of thieves, was a sign or emblem called a fire mark which was issued by the company. Each company had its own distinctive design which made identification of the property easier for their fire fighters and the company representatives. They were made of lead with the individual policy number stamped upon them.

Designs included for Sun Fire Office, a large sun with a face; the Royal Exchange Assurance, their offices; and Phoenix, obviously Phoenix rising from the ashes.

Later fire marks were made of tin, copper, or similar material. These are more often called fire plates. They are more an advertising medium as most do not have a policy number stamped on them.

These fire marks are now very rarely to be seen on buildings. Those surviving the passage of time are now collectors items and they often appear in auctions.

As mentioned above, each company organised its own fire brigade to protect its buildings; at first volunteers who had their own jobs, but soon the insurers recruited permanent firemen. By the early 19th century London insurance companies banded their fire brigades together and this was the first step to the fire brigade being taken over by local government.

Fire insurance and fire marks were soon taken up in the provinces, and the idea was also exported to the American colonies and Europe.

[1] Notes and Queries

[2] The constitution and finance of English, Scottish and Irish joint-stock companies

Farmhouse hash (photo by adactio - CC-BY)

Where Sunday dinner is the special meal of the week, people often eat leftovers on Monday. Of course, if a ham or roast was served on Sunday, there could be enough meat left to reheat and serve as such, but often and in many countries there are very loose recipes for using leftovers, and they have a variety of names.

In the Scandinavian countries it is called pyttipanna (Swedish, similar in Norwegian and Finnish). The expression always reminds me of the army name for hash on toast, and it looks a little like that, but it only means “bits in the pan.” It consists of diced onion, potato, any kind of meat or sausage, and possibly vegetables, and is often served topped with a fried egg. The Danes call it biksemad and give it a dash of Worcestershire sauce.

The British will probably immediately recall bubble and squeak, a very similar concoction, but only one of several in Great Britain that traditionally also include cabbage. The Scots enjoy rumbledethumps, and stovies, which is cooked all day in the oven. The Irish have a great affection for colcannon, which is Gaelic for white cabbage, a basic ingredient. They even have a song about it, the refrain reflecting their love for the dish:

Yes you did, so you did, so did he and so did I.
And the more I think about it sure the nearer I’m to cry.
Oh, wasn’t it the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.

The Dutch eat something called stamppot, similar to the Belgians’ stoemp. In Tyrol, they cook Gröstl, which is served with a fried egg, as in Scandinavia. In Catalonia, a similar dish is trinxat, and in Portugal, Roupa Velha (Portuguese for “old clothes”), often made from leftovers from Cozido à Portuguesa. The Colombians seem to prefer their leftovers for breakfast, calentado, which means “heated.” It has to include rice and potatoes, beans by choice, but no cabbage.

In Malaysia, where Sunday dinner may not be so important, they also prepare something similar, bergedil, usually made with minced meat, potatoes, and onions, fried until brown, apparently served as a patty.

I am confident that most other countries have a similar meals.

This is a guest post by myoarin. Thanks!

Choose your knife! (photos by Lucy Boynton - CC-BY)

A knife might seem like a simple object, but its form results from hundreds of design decisions.

Does the knife need to cut things? The obvious answer is “yes”, but butter knives and putty knives are more for spreading than cutting. Nevertheless, most knives need a cutting blade.

A good kitchen knife has a steel blade with a very sharp edge. So sharp, in fact, that it will be blunted by being used to cut things, and therefore must be regularly sharpened using a sharpening stone or sharpening steel. A knife with a hardened blade never needs sharpening (nor can it be sharpened), but the blade will be thicker and not quite so sharp.

A knife may have serrations along its cutting edge—a regular pattern of ridges and valleys produced by grinding or with a laser. These make the knife cut better when using a sawing motion. Closely-spaced serrations and can help compensate for the reduced sharpness of a “never needs sharpening” blade. Slightly broader and more pointed serrations are good for cutting foods that cannot easily be cleaved. The serrations on the blade of a steak knife help to tear the fibers of the meat. A knife for cutting bread may have quite broad serrations, to help to cut the slices without applying much downward pressure which would squash the bread.

The curve of the blade is also important. If the blade is parallel to the handle, it won’t make a good table knife because a diner holds the knife at a slight angle to the plate and the knife would only make contact at the very end. Instead, the blade must be gently curved or angled. On the other hand, a curved blade is useless for scraping out the last of the contents from a jar, because it only makes contact with the glass at one point along its curve.

When a knife is held in one hand and the food in the other, as when peeling an apple, the angle of the blade is not so critical. A paring knife, used for peeling and cutting fruit and small vegetables, benefits from having a pointed tip to the blade. The tip is used to pierce the skin of a tomato to get the cut started without the risk of splitting the tomato and spraying its contents by applying pressure to start a cut with the main edge of the blade. A paring knife also benefits from having a sharp corner at the end of the blade closest to the handle. This corner is amazingly useful for removing small imperfections from fruit, or eyes from potatoes. For reasons I don’t understand, knives with this sharp corner are harder to find than they once were.

Not only must the blade cut the food, it must release it after the cut. A slice of bread or a wedge of apple will fall away from the blade easily, but some foods need a little help to break the surface tension and allow air to enter between the food and the knife. A row of dimples makes a big difference to the ease of slicing tomatoes, while a cheese knife benefits from having holes in the blade to allow air in from the other side. A small hole near the far end of the blade is useful for allowing large knives (such as those used for butchering meat) to be hung up between uses.

The back of the blade needs to be thick enough that you can comfortably guide the blade with an extended index finger, however a very cheap knife (manufactured by pressing rather than by machining) will be less comfortable to use because it won’t have this thick back of the blade.

A little asymmetry of the blade’s cross-section is not normally a problem, except when cutting hard items such as raw carrots. In that case, asymmetry (due, for example, to a blade with serrations on one edge only) will make it impossible to get a straight cut, because the blade will tend to follow a curve.

The knife handle must be large enough and thick enough for easy control, and smoothly shaped so that it is comfortable to hold. It should have plenty of weight, as this makes the knife easier to control, and should certainly have enough weight that the blade doesn’t touch the table when the knife is laid down. A knife that will be carried around (such as a camping knife) requires either a sheath or a blade that folds into its handle. It may benefit from a hole in the handle so that the knife may be attached to a lanyard or a belt.

A one-piece knife where the handle is made from the same material as the blade is easy to keep clean. Failing that, the handle must be attached without a gap in which grime would accumulate. The handle may be attached by rivets, clips or glue.

The knife should be heatproof so that the knife can be placed in the dishwasher. Some old bone-handled knives fail in this regard. However, despite the urban legend that they must always be hand-washed, many bone-handled knives are dishwasher-safe.

A traditional silver-plated blade will tarnish easily in the dishwasher, so the modern buyer always prefers a high-quality stainless steel knife, or perhaps even an expensive ceramic-bladed knife that doesn’t alter the taste of food in the (slight) way that a metal knife does.

Specialised knives include

• fish-knives (with a deep blade shaped to assist flaking of the fish) ,
• disposable knives made from plastic, or occasionally from wood for environmental reasons,
• the relatively blunt cutting edges of Splayds and cake forks,
• knives for chopping (which must have a heavy blade to carry the momentum of the chop deep into the object being chopped, and whose handles must have space to protect the fingers from hitting the chopping board), and
• knives with rounded ends for use by children

Fresh lingonberries - once called red whortleberries (Photo by Kimtaro - CC-BY)

Over the last few years lingonberry has become a fairly familiar English word. Thanks to a well-known Swedish furniture store putting lingonberry jam, jelly, and cordial on its shelves, and a few foody articles in lifestyle sections of the newspapers, many of us have a general idea that this small red berry is from Scandinavia, can be made into preserves with sugar, and spread on toast.

You can soon find out that it grows in every cool, northern country from Alaska to Siberia, and it has a lot of different names. I wanted to know when English-speakers started calling it by the Swedish name, lingon, and whether there was a traditional English name that went back centuries.

Cowberry was the “traditional” word I had hopes of at first, but it is regarded as an 1800-ish made-up name* by the Oxford English Dictionary. “Red whortleberry” is an older name, and can be traced back to Shakespeare’s era.

There be two sortes of Whortes, and Whortel berries, wherof the common sort are blacke, and the other are red.
Lyte’s translation of Dodoen’s Herbal, 1578

None of the other names claimed for this berry seem to have a paper trail going back as far as red whortleberry, and that seems like the best candidate for a traditional English-language name. Very likely there were also other regional names that didn’t get into print.

As for the word lingonberry, the earliest citation in the dictionary is from 1955, but Google Books shows it in use in North America long before that. Perhaps Swedish immigration to the US helped lingonberries make it into English?

All the small low-growing berries on hills and heaths seem to have had a fairly low status with 19th century British writers who expected only children and poor people to bother picking them. Red whortleberries were “made into pies and eaten by the common people” and their taste was inferior to cranberries and bilberries, according to some rather snooty Victorian authors.

Berry-picking is more of a traditional seasonal treat than a chore in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, where lingon and other berries are valued for their contribution to the cuisine. Preserved with sugar, lingonberries make tasty and colourful sauces, jams, and jellies that go well with savoury, meaty dishes. Put a dollop on a plate of pork or venison, or eat a classic Swedish bacon pancake with lingonberry jam (lingonsylt). Give a special flavour to sweet goodies like cake or pie filling, or drink lingonberry cordial, tea, liqueur or Norwegian tyttebær ale.

*OED call it a “a book-name” based on the Latin botanical name Vaccinium Vitis-idaea where vaccinium is like vacca, Latin for cow

Swedish baked oven pancake, or batter pudding, with bacon pieces. (Photo by s8an - CC-BY)

Millions of people in 32 countries have read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. In its homeland, Sweden, enough books have been bought for more than a quarter of the population to own a copy. There’s a Swedish film version called Men who Hate Women, and talk of a Hollywood movie in the pipeline.

Outside Scandinavia many readers are interested in more than the plot and characters. We also enjoy a taste of Swedish life – and a taste of the food: smørrebrød open sandwiches, pickled herring, lots and lots of freshly-brewed coffee, and the “bacon pancakes with lingonberries” given to Larsson’s investigating journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, on a trip to the far north Norrland.

A Swedish bacon pancake (fläskpannkaka) is typically cooked in the oven, not on top of the stove. Fatty salt pork is a traditional alternative to bacon, or you can use any kind of diced ham that works for you. This is an easy-going recipe where you can vary things without disaster. It’s a simple batter pudding (ugnspannkaka) that may remind British readers of toad-in-the-hole – also oven-baked batter but with sausages instead of pork/ham/bacon.

Make them like this:

Cut 6oz/170gm bacon into small chunks cook till crisp in a frying pan or hot oven.

Heat oven to 220C/425F.

Take a shallow ovenproof dish or roasting pan at least 30 cm/12 inches square, or 3 US quarts capacity, and heat half a stick, 60 gms, of butter in it.

Whisk together:

• 4 eggs
• 1 US cup, or 125 gm of flour
• 2 US cups, nearly half a litre of milk – use less milk if you prefer a thicker batter
• Pinch salt if wanted

Making the batter in advance and ‘resting’ it for an hour or two is recommended by perfectionists.

Pour batter into the hot fat, sprinkle the bacon cubes on top, and bake for 20-30 mins until it looks puffy and well-browned. Time will vary according to depth of batter in dish etc.

There are lots of variations – try adding lemon zest or chives, put the ham in before the batter, and so on. Swedish tradition and Larsson’s novels say you should serve it with lingonberries or lingonberry jam/jelly. You can also try cranberry or redcurrant jelly, strawberry jam, and/or a dusting of powdered sugar.

Heart-shaped meander (photo by Lazy Susan 23 - CC-BY)

The expression meander is used to describe something that winds around without crossing itself, be it it a creek or river, or a repeating decoration in art or architecture, or also the description of such a line in mathematics.

The word dates back to classical Greece, the name then and now for a river in western Anatolia that does just that: winding back and forth in a fairly level estuary. Many other rivers, of course, meander, why the word is most familiar in this context. The Colorado River meanders through Grand Canyon; the Mississippi meanders—less now. In 1820, Congress began to address the problems of river navigation and ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to reconnaissance the Mississippi. The Corps of Engineers have been active ever since, trying to improve navigation and control the river, proudly so, to judge by its websites, and not just the Mississippi.

Why does flowing water meander? Anything that obstructs its course causes the flow to divert. If the banks of the river are loose earth, the water soon starts to carry it away—to erode it—on the outside curve, curving back at the next obstruction, eroding on the other side of the stream. As Grand Canyon shows, this also happens even if the stream flows through soft rock.

Kids love to play with water, trying to build dams and such, and can discover how meanders develop if they are playing in sandy soil.

As the meandering curves in both directions increase in diameter, they form “oxbows,” the curves eroding towards the neighboring curves. Eventually, the curves can meet, or a larger flow of water breaks through the last bit of land that separates them. That leaves the oxbow as a lake or side-arm of the stream, something familiar on most meandering rivers.

In art and architecture, a rectilinear meander is also called the Greek key pattern. A curving line on the same principle is called a wave or running dog pattern.

This is a guest post by myoarin. Thanks!