Food and Chemistry Go Together Quiz

Answer: it's been soaked in salt brine, with perhaps a few other ingredients

Salt pork used to be almost any part of the pig, soaked in brine to preserve it over the summer. The salt alone would keep it safe to eat, if it was kept underwater in the brine. It was easier to make because it didn't need to be smoked and dried like ham and bacon. Nowadays, pork is available year round in many ways, so salt pork is mostly used for seasoning.

It's therefore usually chunks of fat with a little lean, cut up in small pieces, soaked in a salt brine with perhaps sugar and preservatives.

There's usually not enough salt in modern salt pork to preserve it alone.

Answer: Along with an acid, it creates bubbles to make baked goods rise

Baking soda was popular just before baking powder. Baked goods rise due to carbon dioxide that makes bubbles, like those vinegar and baking soda volcanoes we used to make in grade school. Double-acting baking powder combines the acid and alkali together and they won't start working until they're wet, then they'll work some more when they're heated.

Recipes made with baking soda have an acid too, but the two will only react once, so you need to get the batter in the oven fairly quickly, or all the bubbles will be gone. Look carefully at any recipe with baking soda, and you'll see an acid: sour cream, buttermilk, lemon juice, molasses, or something like that. Before baking powders began to be common in the mid 19th century, baking soda and its forerunners like pearlash were the only way to make cakes rise, without using yeast or frothy eggs or other tricks.

Answer: coating the item with a sugar solution, then drying it

Candying is a beautiful way to preserve real edible flowers. They can be dipped in a sugar solution, then carefully spread out to look natural and dried. Or a sugar solution can be used to preserve fruit, too. In the old days, the sugar was a way to preserve items that would go bad when their season waned, though today it's just a tasty way to keep sweet things you can buy year round like strawberries, unless you want to get really creative and try candying flowers like wild violets that haven't been sprayed with insecticide or anything..

Answer: salt

Corn used to mean any small granules, so coarse salt was corn, just as the hard grains of corn from an ear of dried corn were corn. It gets really complicated when one finds out that any cereal was called corn - wheat, oats, etc. But the main point is that grains of coarse salt were corn, and that's the only corn put on corned beef.

The salt was used to preserve it, just as salt was used to preserve salt pork, or brines were used in the making of jerky, ham or bacon.

Answer: it's an acid, to react with the baking powder or other alkali

Cream of tartar is a white powder that's an acid, which reacts with any alkali in the recipe to make it rise - usually baking soda. It produces bubbles of carbon dioxide that quickly make the batter increase in volume and become fluffy, but they'll deflate if you don't get the batter in the oven quick.

Answer: penicillium mold injected into the cheese

Two molds, Penicillium roqueforti and Penicillium glaucum, are injected into the cheese at the beginning of the cheese-making process. The molds are encouraged to grow and spread in veins throughout the cheese by "needling," or opening areas for the bacteria to grow. Different areas of France and Italy have regulations for what blue cheeses can be produced in specific areas.

Answer: they add a pink color and protect from some additional bacteria

Even back in the good old days, when all food was supposed to be safe and pure, saltpetre was added to corned beef in particular, and sometimes to pork products and other meats too. One major purpose was to give the meat an appetizing pink color after salting. Have you seen corned (salted) beef without saltpetre? Oh no. Just no. Gray beef is not good.

Pork turns gray after cooking anyway so it matters less, and one can get away with it just being salted in some recipes, but saltpeter/petre or nitrates/nitrites also prevent some bacteria from growing, so in other recipes, it's helpful or even necessary for that too, and it has been used for centuries. It may not be particularly healthful, but the FDA has decided that the amount used commercially is better than the bacteria that would start growing if it wasn't used. If you're making homemade salted meat, follow the recipe very carefully.

Answer: drying thin strips of meat on a wooden frame, over a low fire

Soda jerks wouldn't have helped in the 18th Century. Their coolers would have preserved the venison nicely once they came into existence, though. Does anyone remember soda jerks these days, with their white caps and the chrome handles they pulled to make sodas? Am I showing my age? Uh oh.

But anyway, hunters made a temporary framework of sticks tied together with string or sinew, cut the meat in strips as thin as possible, with little fat - not hard with lean venison - and dried the meat over a low smoky fire to keep the insects from laying eggs on it. Yuck. When it was dry, they removed the meat, probably kicked over the frame and used it for kindling if they needed some, or whatever, and went on their way, with their meat safe to eat for the rest of the trip.

Nowadays, homemade jerked beef or beef jerky is usually made more safely, soaked first in a salty brine with various spices, then dried over the fire. Both the salt in the brine and the drying help to make it safe to eat, and if it's stored in the refrigerator or even the freezer, it's even more safe for a long time.

Answer: it keeps the stuffing at such a low temperature that bacteria might grow

The turkey may insulate the stuffing so much that the stuffing never heats up to a safe temperature. You may have heard the food-safety warning: keep hot things hot and cold things cold. The stuffing won't be hot and could be growing bacteria as the turkey is safely cooking at a hot temperature. Old recipes called for cooking stuffing in the turkey, but turkeys have been bred differently. In the days before the broad-breasted bronze turkeys (no really, that's a turkey breed), previous turkeys may have had narrower breasts and allowed the stuffing to heat up more safely.

I was hoping it made the stuffing explode. That would be worth doing one Thanksgiving, just to watch the family's excitement.

Answer: to preserve fruits out of season with sugar

Jams and jellies used to be made about 50:50 with sugar and fruit, a high amount of sugar, but it was necessary back in the days before canning. The sugar itself preserved the fruit and made the flavor of blackberries, peaches, grapes, or almost any fruit or berry available any time of year.

Today, when jellies don't gel, we add pectin to make them thicken. In the past, before commercial pectin was available, cooks might use a small slice of high pectin fruit as a substitute, just enough to make the recipe gel without affecting the flavor too much, though the mixture might be pretty good as a combination flavor, too.

Paraffin used to be heated and poured on top of jams or jellies. The younger generation may have forgotten their mothers doing that. Nowadays, most people take the extra precaution of canning their jams or jellies in canning jars, rather than just using a paraffin top.