It is an awesome thing, Alan Davidson's new Oxford Companion to Food, in its jaw-dropping scale and extraordinary erudition.
The 20 years it has taken to prepare the tome is only part of the story. When I first met Alan Davidson, back in 1991, he was recovering from a perilous brush with his dodgy heart, and many people feared that the 10 years of work which he had already completed on the book would amount to nothing.
He himself didn't seem too perturbed, however, as we walked from his house in Chelsea - where he and his wife Jane produced the food newsletter Petits Propos Culinaires - and ran their publishing company Propect Books - to the little office just off the King's Road where he worked away day by day on the Companion.
And when we next met, in a field in east Cork where we had come to see a fulachta fiadh - a Bronze-Age cooking site - in operation, he was chipper and as quietly interested as ever, and an entry on the fulachta fiadh duly appears in the Companion, written by the food historian Regina Sexton. Davidson had realised that without contributors the work would never be finished, so he abandoned the idea that he could do it all himself, and Sexton is one of just over 50 contributors who write specific entries.
But, for the most part, this is Davidson's book, and scholarly but not stuffy. There is much about the history and sociology of food and eating, but it is never tiresome to read. Instead, the work is utterly gripping, no matter what entry you turn to.
Did you know, for example, that broad beans are thought of as funeral foods, suitable to be served at a funeral feast, and from this derives the term "beano"? Davidson explains that there "is a mysterious shadow over the history of broad beans, and an actual problem which may be linked with it".
The ancient Egyptians regarded them as unclean, and followers of Pythogoras were forbidden to eat them. The reasons were unclear, beyond a general belief that the souls of the dead might migrate into beans.
Whatever the reasons, beans were associated with the dead. The problem, Davidson surmises, may have all been to do with favism, a form of poisoning which afflicts certain susceptible people when they eat the beans, and which can cause severe anaemia and jaundice. Pythagoras himself may have been a sufferer.
THE whole world of food is here, from Sonofabitch Stew - "a cowboy dish of unusual character " - to tansy - "the flavouring herb for the Irish sausage drisheen" - to the fact that the name "hot dog" to describe a frankfurter in a bread roll is thought to originate from around 1900 when the newspaper cartoonist T.A. Dorgan first portrayed talking frankfurters, also known as "dachshund sausages" because of their shape. The originator of the bun-and-sausage idea is unknown, however.
The Companion's entry on ginger is the provocation for this fine dessert recipe, from Peter Gordon's absorbing new book, Cook at Home with Peter Gordon. Davidson points out the long association between ginger and sweet things, for it as often preserved with sugar to create a sweetmeat.
Here, however, the fresh green ginger is used to give a creme caramel with marvellous zesty freshness.
Ginger Creme Caramel
400g caster sugar 100 ml water 600 ml milk 400 ml double cream 80g stem ginger, finely sliced 7 eggs
Pre-heat the oven to 170C.
First make a bain-marie: fill a roastingtin with 3cm hot water and place it in the oven on the middle shelf. Now bring half the sugar and all the water to the boil in a saucepan and continue to boil until it caramelises. Do not stir or the caramel may crystallise.
When the caramel has turned a dark golden colour, pour it very carefully into the ramekins and leave it to set. (A handy hint: to clean the saucepan, put boiling water into it and boil for a few minutes to dissolve any caramel left behind.) Put the milk, cream and ginger into a saucepan and slowly bring it to the boil. While you're waiting, whisk together the eggs and the remaining sugar for 30 seconds. When the cream comes to the boil, pour it slowly into the egg mixture while whisking gently then divide it among 6x300ml ovenproof ramekins. Sit them in the bain-marie and pour in more hot water to come three-quarters of the way up their sides. Cook for 35 minutes, then test them by inserting a thin knife into the centre: it should come out clean but if it doesn't cook them for three to five minutes more and test again.
Take the ramekins out of the bainmarie and leave them to cool before covering them and placing them in the fridge to firm up over at least three hours.
To serve, run a blunt knife around the sides of each ramekin then gently shake it from side to side. Invert it on a plate and tip out the creme caramel with the syrup.