Food and Drink

Chris Brooke provides some anecdotal evidence that the Atkins diet may not be all it is cracked up to be. Pollard is not much thinner than before the diet and looks… well, considerably less cheerful. Or maybe, as Chris hints in a comment, this testimony followed his incredibly disappointing evening at a local restaraunt.

It’s my birthday so I’ll take this opportunity to talk about something dear to my heart: chocolate. A friend who clearly does not realize how little time I spend working out gave me two pounds of some very good quality chocolate for my birthday. (Maybe the idea was that this way even after sharing with him I’d still have enough left for me.:) Another friend – whose wife and I have a monthly ritual of giving each other Belgian truffles on random holidays – sent me a link to a New York Times article about some of the best places in Paris for quality chocolate. One of the most intriguing gifts I’ve gotten recently came from Paris and was chocolate related: chocolate perfume. The scent is very real, and I don’t mean of some cheapo imitation American candy bar. The aroma resembles very high quality chocolate. Surprising as it may be, smelling the perfume can have healthy repercussions. A whiff of that scent will nullify any craving for poor quality chocolate (the type most likely to be around one’s office where such cravings often arise). Before completely dismissing all American chocolate, I should note that at a chocolate party where the hosts had us guests sampling and rating unidentified milk and dark chocolates from all over the world, some American chocolates actually came out quite highly ranked (including something as generic as Hershey’s dark chocolate).

I think a sophisticated chocolate enthusiast has cravings for specific types of chocolate, not just chocolate in general. So sometimes it is that M-azing candy bar you crave while other times only a Cote d’Or hazelnut dark chocolate bar, a Ritter Sport Marzipan bar or a Sport falat will do (just to name some of my favorites).

For those in the Chicagoland area, I highly recommend the Belgian chocolatier Piron in Evanston (the source of my monthly chocolate truffle ritual mentioned above). I welcome pointers to other great chocolate stores wherever they may be.

My dear, dear, deluded fellow Timberteers. Pumpkin pie is not replusive. Pumpkin pie is a silken cloud of holiday deliciousness. Last night I served the full Thanksgiving dinner to 16 people, many of whom, being British or Australian or Spanish or some such nonsense, had never eaten pumpkin pie before, though they had heard of this fabled treat. To a man and woman, they all thought it was delicious. Delicious, I say! Of course, it was a totally unorthodox pie actually made of kabocha squash. I adapted this recipe from the NYT and let me tell you, it will knock your socks off.

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The election, kid’s birthday party, and work in general, have delayed my Christmas Cake making to the coming weekend. Still, I’m now on track for Saturday morning. Making Christmas Cake generates several challenges. The first is the absence of edible glace cherries (which tend to be way too sweet here, if you can manage to find them) and appropriate chopped peel (can’t get the Whitworth’s kind, just candied muck). I overcame these problems last year rather well, by substituting dried cherries and dried strawberries. Expensive, but worth it. The second is keeping it moist enough. I’ve finally acknowledged that our oven overcooks everything, so am just doing everything at 50 degrees lower, and a bit longer—hope it will work. I’m also going to add more butter than my recipe says (I use Katie Stewart’s from the 1975 edition of the Times Calendar Cookery Book). But the unsolved problem is how to get it boozy enough. She demands just two tablespoons of brandy, which is nowhere near enough for a 3lb cake; so I have been doubling it the past couple of years, as well as sprinkling it over the cake sporadically in the weeks before Christmas. Still not enough. Should I be soaking the fruit in brandy beforehand? Should I be using even more brandy? Does anyone have experience of adding Port? While I am in my non-cake eating life all-but-a-teetotaller, I like boozy cake, but am constrained by the fact that I don’t want it to be so boozy that my kids will reject it. Advice? (And if anyone can tell me an easy way of getting edible glace cherries and Whitworth mixed peel in the Midwest that’d be great too).

Update: here’s the recipe (as modified by me from Katie Stewart):

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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.

Graham Harvey, “Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor,” Mortality 9:3 (August 2004) pp: 255 – 267

Abstract:

Following his death in 1975, the ashes of Wally Hope, founder of Stonehenge People’s Free Festival, were scattered in the centre of Stonehenge. When a child tasted the ashes the rest of the group followed this lead. In the following decades, as the festival increasingly became the site of contest about British heritage and culture, the story of Wally’s ashes was told at significant times. His name continues to be invoked at gatherings today. This paper discusses these events as ‘the making of an ancestor’, and explores wider contexts in which they might be understood. These include Druidic involvement in the revival of cremation, Amazonian bone-ash endo-cannibalism, and popular means of speaking of and to dead relatives. In addition to considering the role of ‘ancestors’ in contemporary Britain, the paper contributes to considerations of ‘ancestry’ as a different way of being dead, of a particular moment in the evolution of an alternative religious neo-tribal movement, of the meanings of ‘cannibalism’, and of the ways in which human remains might be treated by the bereaved and by various other interested parties.

Hat tip: David Glenn.

Herve Gaymard. Remember the name of this philistine, moron, horrific Gaullist placeman and all-around fils de putain. I suspect that if the revolution comes and some semblance of humanity, civilisation and decency is restored to the moral cesspool that we see around us, your grandchildren will be encouraged to ceremonially burn him in effigy once a year, on a ritual fire made of oak chips. You might also want to make a note of the name of Denis Verdier, who revisionist historians of fify years’ hence may even suggest deserves more of the blame than the hated Gaymard.

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I’d planned to post on the obesity panic before Belle’s latest , but no harm in making it theme of the day. I was reading John Ardagh’s Germany and the Germans and was interested to come across the following passage, which suggests that the current obesity panic in the US (and the UK) has a precedent in postwar German experience:

For centuries the Germans were famous for their hefty appetites—and their waistlines proved the point. The fat-faced, beer-bellied Bavarian, two-litre tankard in hand before a plate pile high with Wurst or dumplings, was a stock character and no far from reality. In pre-war days, poverty often dictated diets, and potatoes, bread and cakes were staple items of nutrition. In the 1950s this pattern changed dramatically as sheer greed steadily replaced subsistence eating. The Wirtschaftswunder period was equally that of the notorious “Fresswelle” (“wave of guzzling”), when a new-rich nation reacted against the deprivations of wartims by tucking in more avidly than ever before—and this time to a far richer diet. This continued until about the early 1970s, when alarming medical statistics appeared suggesting that 10 million Germans were overweight, including 25 per cent of children (spas began to offer cures for fat children).

Ardagh recounts that in the face of this panic the Germans did succeed in changing things, and that consumption of potatoes fell from 163 to 82 kilos per capita per annum between 1953 and 1987. Meanwhile consumption of fresh fruit and green vegetables went up over the same period.

Henry’s Harry’s post about his only proper job, and the tea breaks which it necessitated, reminded me of the finest weblog devoted to tea and biscuits: A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down. This week’s biscuit of the week is is Lidl’s Choco Softies: “In the second of our Lidl’s inspired reviews we couldn’t come away with out my picking up a pack of Lidl’s own brand version of a German classic the Super Dickmann.” I honestly have no idea what any of these things are, but nonetheless it is a very charming site.

Now that Easter is coming, it’s time to focus on what matters: Marshmallow Peeps. This special, nauseating American food product may be a more worthless candy than the apparently styrofoam-based Circus Peanuts. Nah, Peeps are #2; the Circus Peanuts are the worst. But did you know you can pay top dollar for gourmet passion-fruit flavored Peeps in NYC? Or that with a little Martha-like craftiness you can decorate an entire office with Peeps? Here’s my special fun-filled Peeps trick: put a marshmallow Peep in the microwave (on a plate) and set for one minute. It’s a flaming orgy of sadistic Peeps-destruction! Mel Gibson’s got nothing on me (though I doubt the edifying spectacle will cause anyone to confess to murder.)

Following on from Chris’s post on the ethics of ritual slaughter, I thought I’d put up a link to one of the best things I read last year in the Guardian, on the ins and outs of the Halal meat industry. Suffice it to say that the definition of “Halal”, as with so many regulatory issues in the food industry, is a somewhat fluid concept, subject to the same sorts fo industry lobbying and regulatory capture as any other (reading between the lines, I pick up that the real problem for the halal industry is that if you don’t stun animals before slaughter, then they tend to kick around a bit, damaging the meat and leading to wastage costs which cannot always be passed on to the consumer).

Suffice it to say that if you really believe that it is a grave sin for you to eat meat which was not killed in the precise manner prevalent in Mecca around 622 CE, then it is probably not a good idea to go shopping for stuff branded “Halal” in the UK. It looks to me as if vegetarianism is the only religiously safe option for fundamentalist Muslims in the UK. For non-fundamentalists who understand that the strict traditional approach is not consistent with the realities of a modern abbattoir, then surely there can be no principled objection to starting up a debate about what compromises can reasonably be expected between religion and animal welfare.

I have no comparable information easily accessible online about the Kosher meat industry, but kosher/non-kosher scandals are a staple of the North London local press, so I would guess that similar arguments go through …