February 21, 2005

Atkins and Pollard

Posted by Harry

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.

December 16, 2004

Chocolate

Posted by Eszter

It’s my birthday (it’s still the 15th where I’m writing this) 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.

November 26, 2004

Pieblogging

Posted by Belle Waring

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.

Filling:
1 kabocha squash (you could also use a small, firm, sweet variety of regular pumpkin)
10 oz (1 1/3 c) cream cheese, room temperature
1 c sugar
1/4 of a nutmeg, grated
1 1/2 t best quality garam masala
1/2 t salt
1 1/2 T bourbon
2 eggs, room temperature

Crust:
7 digestive biscuits, like McVities
1/2 c macadamia nuts, toasted
1/3 c light brown sugar
grated zest of one lime
1/2 t ground ginger
1/4 c unsalted butter, melted

1. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, and place on a lightly oiled baking sheet, Roast in a 350 F (175 C) oven for forty-five or so minutes, until soft. When cool enough to handle, scoop out flesh and pass through the medium disk of a food mill, or process in a food processor or blender till smooth. Measure out 2 1/2 c puree. Feed the rest to the baby; she’ll like it.

2. Finely chop the macadamia nuts. Crush the digestive biscuits (I do it in a plastic bag with a rolling pin, but if you have a food processor it would do this, and the nuts, nicely.) Mix all the crust ingredients together and press onto the bottom and sides of a glass pie dish. Bake the crust at 300 F (150 C) for 10 -15 minutes, till set and nicely browned. Let cool on rack (but leave the oven on).

3. For filling: whip cream cheese with sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer with the flat paddle attachment, or in a mixing bowl with electric beaters, till light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Mix in puree, bourbon, spices, and salt. Add eggs, beating just to combine and scraping down the bowl. Mix thoroughly but do not over beat.

4. Pour the filling into the crust and bake at 300 F (150 C) for 40-50 minutes, until the center is just set. Cool. Some crème fraîche would not go amiss here.

November 10, 2004

Christmas Cake advice sought.

Posted by Harry

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):

10 oz plain flour
1 ts mixed spice
1tsp salt
10 oz butter (up from her 8)
8 oz soft brown sugar
4 large eggs (that is, extra large in US terms)
1 Tablespoon black treacle (i.e. light molasses)
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
8 oz each of currants, sultanas (golden raisins) and raising
4 oz each of dried cherries and dried strawberries, chopped, but not too small
2 oz chopped blanched almonds
4 Tablespoons brandy (my doubling of her 2 Tbs)

Cream butter and sugar; mix eggs, molasses, and vanilla essence, and then beat into creamed mixture. Add nost of the flour with the last bits of egg.
Mix the fruit well with a little flour and the brandy.
Then fold together. Spoon into an 8-inch cake pan and cook in a pre-heated over at 300F for 1 1/2 hours, THEN lower temperature to 275F and bake a further 2 1/2 hours.

November 05, 2004

A taste of honey

Posted by Chris

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

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

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

September 24, 2004

Ancestor Worship

Posted by Henry

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.

August 01, 2004

A name that will live in infamy

Posted by Daniel

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.

What am I going on about? Well click the link above and have a look. Gaymard is signing up to a set of proposals put together by venal, subsidy-hungry, crass winemakers’ associations which would have two main effects:
  • French vins de pays would be labelled with their grape variety
  • The use of oak chips as a flavouring agent would be legalised in France

Of the second of these points, I am not going to say anything; the enormity of this crime against gastronomy is hopefully so great that nothing needs to be said. I will only mention that previously to the loi Gaymard (as I am calling it), France was basically the last major wine-producing country on earth where this barbarism was prohibited.

Of the first, however, perhaps a little needs to be said. Obviously, sophisticates like me and Cathy Seipp understand the issue here, but I must always remember that there are philistines and barbarians who also read Crooked Timber, as well as a couple of actual Australians, so perhaps some short discursus is in order.

Wine is the expression of a place, not of a grape. This is a fundamental truth of winemaking and no amount of oak chips can make it otherwise. The same Chardonnay grape which Ernst and Julio Gallo squeeze by the bushel to produce lakes of insipid ABC rubbish, is the grape which is the backbone of flint-dry Chablis. Some of the finest Champagne in the world is made from Pinot Meunier, a grape which, grown outside a small corner of France and a small corner of NorthWest America, is not fit for making Welch’s Grape Soda. The factors which determine what a wine will taste like are, in order of importance, climate, soil, water and only then, grape variety. It is true that the very best wines are made year to year with the same grapes, but that is because of careful selection of the vines to match the teroir, not the other way round.

So why then do all other countries’ wines put the grape variety on the label? To put it bluntly, ignorance and snobbery. Back in the days before the marketing industry dreamt up the grape variety labelling wheeze, there were only three ways to know if the wine that you were ordering with your lunch was good or bad:

1) Spend years and years learning a huge amount about wine regions and classifications,

or

2) Discuss the matter with a wine waiter employed by the restaurant for that purpose,

or

3) Actually bloody taste the thing and make your mind up whether you like it or not.

The first is inconvenient and expensive, the second involves social awkwardness and the third requires independent thought. So obviously, this was not ever going to be a seller in the big export markets of the USA and UK. So, with their never failing blend of entrepreneurial can-do spirit and utter, horrendous crassness, the Yanks and Aussies came up with a fourth alternative:

4) Learn the names of four grape varieties (Chardonnay, Sauvignon, Syrah/Shiraz and Riesling), look on the label for one of them then order the wine with confidence, proclaiming loudly to your fellow diners that you are a man of taste who knows what he likes and to yourself that all Chardonnays taste buttery, Syrahs taste of blackberries and so on, despite the evidence of your own fucking nose and tastebuds screaming the contrary.

It worked a treat, obviously, although some would have thought that the provision of incontrovertible evidence to other planets that the human race does not deserve to exist, was perhaps a bit of a high price to pay for commercial success.

I thought that the French, that most civilised nation, were going to hold the line on this one and insist with the stubbornness for which they are famous that two plus two equals four, it gets dark when the sun goes down and that “Chardonnay” is not a meaningful category of wine. And indeed they did hold the line, except it was a bloody Maginot Line. Bastards. Is there any hope at all for the world?

For the time being, it will still be possible to have an intelligent conversation about French wine. Since the new labelling standards only apply to vins de pays, and since French vin de pays is almost always undrinkable anyway, I think that the safest thing to do with French wine with a varietal label, for a couple of years at least, is to pour it down the drain or give it to Cathy Seipp’s servants. But let’s not kid ourselves; the thin end of the wedge is in the door. It won’t be long before we see bottles of “St Emilion Cabernet Merlot”, or (vomit, shudder) novelty “Sancerre Gewurtztraminer”. All flavoured with the Great Taste of Sawdust, natch. (and what the hell, why not a bit of artificial vanilla flavour too, once the principle has been conceded!)

I note in conclusion that the hated Gaymard is a native of the Savoie region. Savoie makes very few good wines and exports even fewer (if you want good wine from that part of the world, you generally buy Jura). It’s also a wine-producing region with a teroir surprisingly similar to that of New Zealand, which makes its wines from a selection of weird and wonderful obscure grape varieties not planted elsewhere in the world. And they’re not very good. Talk about … sour grapes.

July 23, 2004

"Wave of guzzling"

Posted by Chris

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.

June 12, 2004

A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down

Posted by Belle Waring

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.

March 31, 2004

Peeps!

Posted by Belle Waring

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.)

March 22, 2004

More on halal meat ...

Posted by Daniel

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 …

March 19, 2004

Vinegar, Fruit Cake, and Bagels

Posted by Harry

Invisible Adjunct generated a long discussion by asking why Americans don’t have vinegar with their fries. (They do, in fact, in the Northwest). My favourite hypothesis is this:

Almost all the vinegar in the US has been supplanted by factory-made industrial acetic acid solution crap (“white vinegar”). Even the mass-market “apple cider vinegar” is factory-made crap made by mixing the white stuff with apple juice. As a result, most US residents will simply have no idea what vinegar really is. They have to go to a real pub (rare), or some other extraordinary place like Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor ( http://www.zingermans.com ), to get real vinegar these days. Therefore anybody who tries it with the vinegar one can buy will deeply regret it.

This is analagous with my combined hypotheses about why Americans don’t like fruitcake and Brits don’t like Bagels. American fruitcake is a terrifying concoction of food colouring and formaldehyde, that no-one in their right minds would want to have in the house, whereas British fruitcake is a rich and exotic mingling of booze, dried fruits, sugar and fat. Its just a different item. Similarly bagels — bagels in the UK are normally dried out old pieces of cardboard, as opposed to the wonderful moist morsels one can easily find here in the US (and my east coast friends tell me I’ve never even had real bagels.

March 01, 2004

What did you do in Chinatown?

Posted by Belle Waring

The Romans are debating whether it is appropriate to have a Chinatown in Rome. I have spent plenty of time in the area around Piazza Vittorio, and it seems to me that hard-working Chinese people running businesses that are open all hours are obviously an asset to a crummy neighborhood (even if you have to walk “miles to get mortadella”, as one resident complains. Yes, or, er, blocks and blocks, right down to the Piazza itself, where every morning there is a big open air market with excellent butchers and salume, as well as magnificent fresh vegetables. Cry me a fiume, Italian lady.) Still, I think the Romans should embrace the possibility of a Chinatown if it means there will be any good Chinese retaurants in Rome, because they all suck now. Italians eat in a way very alien to the modern urban American: they only eat the food from their own region, and only those dishes that are appropriate to the season. (Though in Rome itself there are a few restaurants from other regions, like the delicious Pugliese restautant Tram Tram.) In principle I approve of this type of thing, deep spiritual connections to the land and so forth. After three weeks of pasta all’amatriciana every day in the winter, however, one starts to ask questions like, how about Thai? Hey, some Mexican would be good about now. Mmmm, tacos al pastor.

UPDATE: John just got back from Rome two weeks ago, and he says they closed down all those market stalls in the Piazza Vittorio because they allegedly weren’t sanitary. If I lived in the Esquilino I’d be protesting that in the streets instead of worrying about the Yellow Peril.