Wrapped Foods

Wrapped Foods have been wrapped for many reasons: to make handling and serving easier; to hold loose mixtures together until they consolidate during cooking; to create variety in taste and textures; and to create beauty or provoke astonishment. There is a continuum, obviously, between wrapped foods and foods in which ingredients are stuffed into containers.

Many wrappings are naturally occurring materials, both inorganic and organic. Clay, probably used from very early times, still envelops baked chicken in areas as distant as E. Asia and Mexico. Large leaves are widely used, particularly in the tropics. Banana leaves wrap rice sweets in SE Asia. Banana or maize leaves are essential for Latin American tamales. Maguey fibre encloses packets of lamb or goat and chillies (mixiote) in Mexico. Ti leaves bundle up fish, meats, and vegetables (laulau) in Hawaii. And in the former Ottoman Empire, grape leaves and cabbage leaves are rolled around mixtures of meat and rice (dolmades). Sometimes seaweed is used in a similar way as in the kelp-wrapped pork of Okinawa, or the nori-wrapped sushi of Japan. Although animal skins, carcasses, and intestines are more often stuffed, they can be used to wrap. Caul fat holds ground pork together, for example for English faggots, thinly sliced meat contains a stuffing (another English example is beef olives) and ground meats can enclose eggs or stuffings from the British Isles (scotch eggs) to India (kofta).