Originally published @ 6:36 pm, Fri 3rd Jun 2011
People dying from a new strand of e-coli is terrible news and our hearts go out to those affected.
Enormous sympathy too for the Spanish growers of organic cucumbers who appear to have been blamed for the outbreaks centred around Hamburg in Germany, when the source of the problem is not known, and it may not be either Spanish, or organic or even cucumbers that are the problem.
The BBC reports –
“Germany had blamed Spanish cucumbers but has since accepted it was not the case.
“Spanish fruit and vegetable exporters estimate they are losing 200m euros ($290m; £177m) a week in sales.
“Sales of Spanish produce to supermarkets across Europe - not just of cucumbers, but of everything - have ground to a halt, says the BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Almeria, Spain's so-called fruitbasket.”
Talking with market traders this morning – the first thing they said was their produce was English, as it would be at this time of year. But their trade had been affected.
A lot of good food will be going to waste and I’m a bit surprised not to hear anyone suggesting cooking cucumbers for a meal.
Now maybe coming from Shropshire and having bought a book by Karen Wallace on “Shropshire Food”, I’m in a very small minority. And if when I report that on surfing for Karen’s Shropshire recipes, I found this page - http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/content/articles/2006/02/08/food_love_feature.shtml - with variations of original recipes for owl and polecat (no doubt brought to us by the Romans before Monty Python found them funny), you’ll think that I should stay in a minority.
My actual experience of Shropshire food was very conventional - meat and 2 veg, with butter; and abstention from custard which was served with the spoon standing up in the middle of it.
Actually, it seemed to me that the recipes Karen wrote up in 1986, having found them in old books and local libraries, carried no particular twist at all as to what was Shropshire about the food. Indeed, I told friends that the recipe for ratatouille had come from Shropshire to make the point.
However, on “Chicken with Cucumbers”, Karen asserts that cooking meat with cucumbers was popular in the 18th Century. I attach a photo of her recipe [CHECK]
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5148/5794249378_b4d480af35_b.jpg -hope Karen doesn’t mind too much) which I tried 25 years ago. Other cooks talk about frying cucumbers rather than boiling. http://www.e-cookbooks.net/articles/cuke.htm
But really, we shouldn’t be letting good food go to waste.