Religion & Food: Lenten Food

Simple vegetarian soups are traditional throughout Lent, and each nationality has developed its own Lenten specialty. Consider slurping any -- or all -- of the following for the next forty days:

• Eastern Europe: Vegetable-based split soups.
• France: Onion soup, of course! Call it Zuppa Magna di Cipolle and you can claim its Italian.
• Greece: Tomato soup.
• Italy: Brodo Magro di Digiuno is made with leeks, onions, carrots, cabbage, and lentils; flavored with sage and bay left. Strained, it's a rich broth for other soups or to use with rice or pasta. Pureed, it's a hearty soup.
• Russia: Borscht (beet soup) with mushrooms or barley. Sauerkraut and mushroom soup. Cabbage, potato, carrot, and barley soup.

Eastern Orthodox Church adherents still observe strict fasting -- relative to what most Roman Rite Catholics do -- during Lent. In fact, they are required to fast twice a week most of the year anyway. Check out this site to see what rigorous fasting looks like. If you decide to go the complete vegetarian route for the next forty days, check out Mollie Katzen's The Moosewood Cookbook. Published over two decades ago, it's still one of the best resources for vegetarian recipes and especially wonderful soups.

Strange but true: The pretzel is the oldest, traditional, authentically Christian Lenten bread. Some food historians trace its origin back to Roman Christians of the fifth century. Others insist that monks in southern France, or maybe it was northern Italy, cooked this egg- and butter-free snack up in A.D. 610. The former called them bracellae, Latin for "little arms"; the latter called them pretiola, latin for "little reward.

In either account, the dough configuration represents arms folded in prayer and the three holes represent the Trinity. thus you may eat these with impunity, but not gluttony, throughout Lent ...

So where does "pretzel" come from? Germans, who called these breads bretzel ("little bread") ... Palatine Germans, who would become known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, imported pretzels to the United States in 1710.

The Catholic Home by Meredith Gould

The Cabbage Family: the Effects of Heat

Why does the whole house smell like cabbage (or broccoli or cauliflower) after you've cooked it for dinner? Here ya go...

Heating cabbages and their friends has two different effects. Initially the temperature rise within the tissue speeds the enzyme activity and flavor generation, with the maximum activity at around 140°F/60°C. The enzymes stop working altogether somewhere short of the boiling point. If the enzymes are quickly inactivated by plunging the vegetables into abundant boiling water, then many of the flavor precursor molecules will be left intact. This isn't always desirable: cooking some mustard greens quickly, for example, minimizes their hot pungency but preserves the intense bitterness of their pungency precursors. Boiling in a large excess of water leaches flavor molecules out into the water, and produces a milder flavor than does stir-frying or steaming. If the cooking period is prolonged, then the constant heat gradually transforms the flavor molecules. Eventually the sulfur compounds end up forming trisulfides, which accumulate and are mainly responsible for the strong and lingering smell of overcooked cabbage. Prolonged cooking makes members of the onion family more sweet and mellow, but the cabbage family gets more overbearing and unpleasant.

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

The Cabbage Family: Effects of Chopping

Different preparation and cooking methods give different flavor balances in cabbage relatives. It's been found, for example, that simply chopping cabbage -- for making coleslaw, for example -- increases not only the liberation of flavor compounds from precursors, but also increases the production of the precursors. And if the chopped cabbage is then dressed with an acidic sauce, some pungent products increase sixfold. (Soaking the chopped cabbage in cold water will leach out most of the flavor compounds formed by chopping, at the same time that it hydrates the leaves and makes them crisper. When cabbages and their relatives are fermented to make sauerkraut and other pickles, nearly all of the flavor precursors and their products are transformed into less bitter, less pungent substances.

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

The Cabbage Family: Cabbage, Kale, Brussels Sprouts, and Others

Like the onion family, the cabbage family is a group of formidable chemical warriors with strong flavors. It's also a uniquely protean family. From two weedy natives of the Mediterranean and central Asia, we have managed to develop more than a dozen major crops of very different kinds: some leaves, some flowers, some stems, some seeds. Then there are a dozen or more relatives, notably the radishes and mustards, and crosses between species: altogether a rich and ongoing collaboration between nature's inventiveness and our own. Beyond the cabbage family itself, some of its distant botanical relatives share elements of its biochemistry and therefore its flavors; these include capers and papayas.

The Flavor Chemistry of the Cabbage Family
Like onions, cabbages and their relatives stockpile two kinds of defensive chemicals in their tissues: flavor precursors, and enzymes that act on the precursors to liberate the reactive flavors. When the plant's cells are damaged, the two stockpiles are mixed, and the enzymes start a chain of reactions that generates bitter, pungent, and strong-smelling compounds. The special cabbage-family system is effective enoughto have inspired a notorious man-made version, the mustard gas of World War I ...

The stockpiled, defensive precursors in the cabbage family are called glucosinolates... Some of the flavor precursors and products are very bitter, and some have significant effects on our metabolism. Particular [precursors] interfere with the proper function of the thyroid gland and can cause it to enlarge if the diet is poor in iodine. But others help protect against the development of cancer by finetuning our system for disposing of foreign chemicals. This is the case for substances in broccoli and broccoli sprouts.

A given vegetable will contain a number of different precursor glucosinolates, and the combinations are characteristic. this is why cabbage, brussels, sprouts, broccoli, and mustard greens have similar but distinctive flavors. the chemical defensive system is most active -- and the flavor strongest -- in young, actively growing tissues: the center of brussels sprouts, fr example, and portions of the cabbage core, which are twice as active as the outer leaves. Growing conditions have a strong influence on the amounts of flavor precursors the plant stockpiles. Summer temperatures and drought stress increase them, while the cold, wetness, and dim sunlight of autumn and winter reduce them. Autumn and winter vegetables are usually milder.

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee