A hundred years ago in the wastes of Labrador, northern Canada, a 30-year-old fur trapper could have been seen during the freezing winter months filling large, wooden barrels with alternating layers of seawater and cabbage leaves. Because his wife desperately missed having fresh vegetables during the winter – and having noticed the native Inuit’s way of fast-freezing fish – he had applied their methods to cabbage and discovered that if fast-frozen, when thawed the leaves tasted exactly like fresh cabbage. Freezing food wasn’t new but much frozen food tasted mushy when thawed: the fur trapper had discovered that instant freezing was the answer. I’m sure you will recognise his name: Clarence Birdseye. He went on to make a fortune out of his idea.
The cabbage leaves he used in his early freezing experiments had travelled a long way through history. For thousands of years they had been evolving from the wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea (Brassica, Latin for a cabbage; oleracea, suitable for cooking).
This story is from the October 2020 edition of The Field.
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This story is from the October 2020 edition of The Field.
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Rory Stewart - The former Cabinet minister and hit podcast host talks to Alec Marsh about the parlous state of British politics, land management and his deep love of the countryside
The gently spoken 51-year-old former Conservative Cabinet minister is a countryman at heart. That's clear: he even changes into a tweed waistcoat for the interview, which takes place at his London home and begins with a question about his precise career status. Having resigned from the Commons and the Conservative Party in 2019, the former diplomat and soldier has reinvented himself, first with an unconventional but promising run as an independent for the London mayoralty (abandoned because of COVID19 in 2020) and then as a media figure, co-hosting one of the country's most popular podcasts, The Rest Is Politics, alongside Alastair Campbell, the former Labour spin doctor.
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