Cooking

Do not, under any circumstances, heat an empty Teflon-covered nonstick pan on the range for more than two or three minutes. At temperatures above 500 degrees (beyond the range of normal home cooking), Teflon will release fumes that cause flu-like symptoms in humans and can be fatal to birds.

(No birds were harmed in the preparation of this post. One human, however, feels like he’s been chewed up and spit out of something big.)

While the sun was setting this evening, I drove up to the Catalina foothills. Tucson’s sunsets are the kind that are so rich and colorful that you think photographs of them have been photoshopped. Just beautiful. Anyway, on the way back I stopped at the local swanky mall (I think the proper marketing-speak is “upscale”), which is home to an Apple Store. I bought Tiger. The shop was packed. They were handing out scratch-cards and I ended up winning an iPod shuffle, which was a nice surprise as I never win anything. Then I came home and while Spotlight was indexing my computer with metadata goodness, I put the kid to bed and made the first stage of a recipe for croissants. (They take three days to make!) Then I finished a paper I was supposed to draft and now I’m having a beer. I imagine people like John and Belle go through life in this well-adapted manner all the time, but personally I’m still trying to figure out what was in my lunch this afternoon that caused all this to happen. Naturally I’m now warily waiting for the house to catch fire or the cat to explode or something, because things clearly need to balance out.

Jared Diamond tells us more about rat by-product consumption in the Old West in Collapse:

In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea. Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats. that protect themselves by building nests of sticks, plant fragments, and mammal dung gathered in the vicinity, plus food remains, discarded bones, and their own feces. Not being toilet-trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out, cementing the midden to a brick-like consistency. In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.

These middens are quite valuable to paleontologists interested in finding out about local vegetation in specific periods; they serve as rough-and-ready time capsules. Diamond seems to have an interest in rats as food sources; he also tells us in passing about recipes for laboratory rat that circulated among British scientists during the post-WW II period of food rationing.

I’m about to jump on a plane to Europe, after jumping off a plane from Hawaii yesterday, but couldn’t resist blogging this aside from a recent Scott McLemee column.

At one point, they [‘Chairman Bob’ Avakian and his philosopher sidekick] note that the slogan “Serve the People,” made famous by the little red book, could be used—with very different intentions, of course—at a McDonald’s training institute. This is, on reflection, something like Hegel’s critique of the formalism of Kant’s ethics. Only, you know, different.

Chairman Bob is stealing a riff here from Damon Knight’s famous short story “To Serve Man,” which was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode. I imagine that Chairman Bob’s version is more laboured and less funny than the original: “Don’t get on the ship. The book, To Serve Man, IT’S A COOKBOOK!” has to rank as one of the best closing lines of all time.

There’s a wonderful passage in Colm Toibin’s ‘The Master’, a fictional biography of Henry James, where the hero is on his way to see the house in Rye where he’ll spend the rest of his life. It came to mind when I sat down to list my favourite cookery books.

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I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB is anything to go on, I’m in good company:

Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’

Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s The Hive [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be—something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves—but does JJR really say it anywhere?[2]

fn1. One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.

fn2. Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at Spirit of the Laws I.15.v.

We mostly mention and link to political and academic blogs on CT. But there are whole worlds of other blogs out there. One such world that I like to visit whenever I get the chance is the food and recipe blogosphere. This week, Chocolate and Zucchini is celebrating its first birthday, congrats! That blog has come a long way. It has been mentioned in various media outlets across the globe. Its author, Clotilde, is throwing a birthday party this week in Paris (her home base) and has even opened up a forum for C&Z readers to discuss all topics related to cooking, baking, restaurants, etc. The wonderful images with which she illustrates her posts add that much more to visiting her site (and it’s all licensed under a Creative Commons License). Reading C&Z always makes me wish I had more time to cook and bake.

Another food blog I visit on occasion is Foodgoat, which takes food discussion to another level including comments about new food products on the U.S. market. And today I found C’est moi qui l’ai fait! through C&Z, another blog sure to get me inspired in the kitchen. My own modest contributions are on a recipe page I compiled mostly made up of some Hungarian specialties. I owe all that knowledge to my Mom who didn’t succeed in getting me excited about cooking while I was still living at home, but who has been a source of inspiration (and much helpful information!) an ocean apart. She is quite the cook and even has a cookbook out in English about Hungarian cooking (written in her “spare” time while continuing her first-rate scientific career). The recipe section, by the way, is one of the most popular parts of my site through search engine referrals (yeah, well, I’d like to think people are interested in my research, but I can’t blame them for preferring to cook a good chicken paprikash instead). I have also started to document good restaurants in Chicagoland.

In my part of the world, the weather is getting chillier and various fun holidays are approaching so I anticipate spending more time cooking and baking (although my upcoming travel schedule may challenge me on that). This is a good time to take stock of relevant blogs out there. I invite you to post links to your favorite food and recipe blogs (and other sites) here.

Have you ever read a blog post so aggressively, ferociously wrongheaded that it temporarily sucks all the fun out of political blogging?

Case in point. Glenn Reynolds seems to think that it’s fair to associate the Kerry campaign with a poster for Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by a distributor in the Benelux countries. (I’m still waiting for an explanation from the Kerry/Edwards campaign for White Chicks.) He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.

I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.

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Here is something I just had to share, even though it has nothing to do with politics, philosophy, and the assorted types of cleverology we generally deal with on CT. But it is a solution to a particularly vexed question nonetheless; how to make an unlumpy roux. Roux are the bane of many cooks, since they so often end up either lumpy or burnt. But as they’re the basis of so many sauces, it really helps if you know you can rely on yours.

Like many culinary innovations – malted hops, blue cheese, potato crisps – my discovery occurred by accident/necessity. I was trying to prepare a chicken and broccoli bake and a chocolate and orange cake using only two saucepans and in under an hour to have them both in the oven by the start of the England-France rugby match and be able to serve them at half time.

So, instead of doing the roux in a saucepan (both were being used already), I made it in a tin bowl sitting on top of the blanching broccoli, just as you would to melt chocolate if you don’t have a microwave. The steam of the boiling water melted the butter quickly but didn’t burn it, and the flour mixed in without a single lump as the heat was so evenly dispersed. There was barely any need to stir and the whole thing took about 3 minutes from start to finish.

People are always saying their methods are foolproof when they’re not, but I promise that this one cannot fail…