Cooking tips and wonderful flavour combinations

[luka]

if they have weird tastes i want them to tell me and i will cater to them, happily or grumpily depending on my mood thats fine. what im getting at is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. here is one example, milk burns at a very low temperature. when milk burns it has a terrible smell and a bad taste, high temperatures also sevrely damage the flavour of coffee. so if someone says luke can i have an extra hot coffee i will say of course and do it for them, its normal. if i make a perfect coffee and someone tells me i am not making coffee hot enough they are only displaying their own ignorance. chefs dont like it whn you ask them for well done steaks for the same reason presumably. there are bodies of knowledge, and they are important. these can always be expereimented with and often improved but they hav to be learnt and appreciatd first. as i say i dont use thee word authenticuty bcasue it is too problematic but its a choice between having standards and having a free for all. the balance has tipped dramtically and needs to find equilibrium again. ive got mr tea from bristol on the other thread trying to lecture me about london for instance. i dont try and lecture mms about obscure house records from detroit from the early 90s. sometimes you have to just shut up and absorb knowledge. not trying to have a go at you tea im just adding ballast to my argumnt.

 

[mistersloane]

new Collapse Journal looks good
http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_collapse7.php

Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism brings together work that explores, from many different perspectives, the multifaceted question of cookery. In this volume, a range of contributors - scientists, philosophers, chefs, anthropologists, artists - explore how philosophy and proto- scientific theory and experimental practice was linked at its outset to the culinary arts; and chart the consequences of the contemporary return of cookery to scientific precision, in the rarefied world of haute cuisine as in the world of mass- manufactured confections. Along the way we discover that the question of cookery is bound up with some profound and enduring issues in the history of philosophy, and can also suggest new approaches to contemporary philosophical problems.

 

[Mr. Tea]

not trying to have a go at you tea im just adding ballast to my argumnt.

Fair enough, it's just I really like Harringay, I know it quite well and I think it has some pretty decent food, so I was sticking up for it. And on the subject of not lecturing people on things they know better than you, it's a bit odd for a vegetarian to judge whether the kebabs are better in London or Berlin, isn't it?

 

[luka]

actually i was probbaly just being a cunt cos i was in hospital last night verey sick and ive ben very ill overe the last few days and it came to a head and ive had all my supply of booze, caffin and weed cut off as result cos i hae to get weell and im bursting with irritation. i think haringy i a good choice and i havent got a fucking clue about turkish food in germany and i never want to go to brlin ever in my life as i know i would hate it. i have to go on internt to distract myself in these situations but ijust hav to try very hard to behave and not pick on you mr tea becasue i know you are a decent bloke its just that there are areas where i think we hav quite different perspectives on things so if often you that sort of winds me up a bit, not through any fault of your own just through diffrent opinions and perspectives. i often think of you as on the opposite sid of whatver spectrum we are both on. i think in real life i would like you cos evryone says your great. im just trying to be honest and open about whats going on and sorry for sounding weird but im in a weird state so spologies....

 

[luka]

http://www.drwhogirlsknickers.co.uk/
ignore me and read this instead.

 

[luka]

‎'I'm still waiting on confirmation that these are genuinely hers since the person selling me them has been on holiday to Scotland and Wales and is coming back next month but has cashed my cheque.

She was in the new series in the episode with the bomb and the gay man. I don't like gay men being in Doctor Who as it makes it feel made up'

‎'Yes, those are purple sequins on these knickers which she claims to have worn in the sixties when making stories like The Time Meddler and The Keys of Marinus and others like those two in the sixties.

I'm a sceptic here though as these came with a price label on them and I think she just sent them to me to stop me writing to her.

If that's the case then she's a bad woman. '

'She played Martha in Doctor Who and was rubbish. I got these knickers from the set when they filmed on location for the one with the scarecrows.

I can't go into details because I might get arrested. They smell of lavender and last summer I noticed two bees sitting on them in August.'

 

[Mr. Tea]

actually i was probbaly just being a cunt cos i was in hospital last night verey sick and ive ben very ill overe the last few days and it came to a head and ive had all my supply of booze, caffin and weed cut off as result cos i hae to get weell and im bursting with irritation. i think haringy i a good choice and i havent got a fucking clue about turkish food in germany and i never want to go to brlin ever in my life as i know i would hate it. i have to go on internt to distract myself in these situations but ijust hav to try very hard to behave and not pick on you mr tea becasue i know you are a decent bloke its just that there are areas where i think we hav quite different perspectives on things so if often you that sort of winds me up a bit, not through any fault of your own just through diffrent opinions and perspectives. i often think of you as on the opposite sid of whatver spectrum we are both on. i think in real life i would like you cos evryone says your great. im just trying to be honest and open about whats going on and sorry for sounding weird but im in a weird state so spologies....

No worries, that's cool. And thanks.

Sorry to hear you've been in hospital and I hope you're over whatever it was and get a spliff and a beer very soon.

 

[Slothrop]

I think I asked a while back for decent things to do with seitan. This:
http://www.vrg.org/journal/vj2000mar/2000marvietnam.htm#Recipes
(the vegetarian pho bo) is pretty good.

And owners of the Flavour Thesaurus can while away a few minutes trying to figure out how many pairings it has on the go at once.

 

[slowtrain]

‎'They smell of lavender and last summer I noticed two bees sitting on them in August.'

I liked this bit a lot.

 

[mistersloane]

"They look like space knickers don't they? I love the futuristic sparkling metal and the blue is the same as the lower spine of the Daleks Invasion Earth DVD"

Ok MAYBE DR WO DOESNT TYR EVRY1 GAY

 

[luka]

its positively buccolic.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Made laksa again with tamarind concentrate this time - amazing stuff, really pungent, sweet and sour. It's been sitting in my cupboard for years, in fact I think I inherited from a friend who used to live here. Seems to be fine, though.

I always thought it had a lot more to do with early industrialization and urbanization - generally disconnecting people from the seasons, from the idea of local produce, from knowing that the nicest apple isn't always the most regular shaped one, from having one pig and using the whole of it when you kill it, from using what's available at the time rather than expecting everything you want to be in the supermarkets and all that sort of thing. I mean, he's right about fetishizing foreign stuff to an extent, but that doesn't generally happen to countries that are self confident about their own cooking - you have to lose the game pies before you want to fill the gap with watery spag bol.

I was thinking about this yesterday and I think this is probably the most important factor - Britain being both the first industrial society and also the first society (excluding city-states, I guess) to become primarily urban. Until fairly recently - not sure when, but well into the modern period - people cultivated small plots of land and kept pigs and chickens even in the inner parts of London, and would have seen live cattle brought into markets like Smithfield before going to the abattoir. The mass urbanisation of the 19th century changed all that, and gave rise to millions of people who'd never see crops being grown or animals being raised. And cities were soon insulated from 'proper' countryside by belts of suburbs and industrial zones. Which would go some way to explain differences in attitudes to food in France, which has a similar population but well over twice the land area.

 

[baboon2004]

Which would go some way to explain differences in attitudes to food in France, which has a similar population but well over twice the land area.

And twice the propensity to shoot anything that moves.

 

[Mr. Tea]

And twice the propensity to shoot anything that moves.

(insert standard joke about Lambeth/Mosside/Nottigham)

Yunno, I suspect I'd take a huge amount of pleasure in shooting, skinning, gutting, butchering, cooking and eating a wild animal. And then dancing around wearing its skin afterwards to placate its departed spirit. Possibly.

Edit: nothing rare or endangered, I'm not AA Gill.

 

[slowtrain]

I was thinking about this yesterday and I think this is probably the most important factor - Britain being both the first industrial society and also the first society (excluding city-states, I guess) to become primarily urban. Until fairly recently - not sure when, but well into the modern period - people cultivated small plots of land and kept pigs and chickens even in the inner parts of London, and would have seen live cattle brought into markets like Smithfield before going to the abattoir. The mass urbanisation of the 19th century changed all that, and gave rise to millions of people who'd never see crops being grown or animals being raised. And cities were soon insulated from 'proper' countryside by belts of suburbs and industrial zones. Which would go some way to explain differences in attitudes to food in France, which has a similar population but well over twice the land area.

I'm not entirely convinced that agriculture/access to land/growing your own food/etc = good cuisine/food.

I mean, I can make boiled cabbage with cabbage that I've grown, but it's still just boiled cabbage? From what I've read it seems that British food has been derided as bad since well before industrialisation, not for the poor quality of their ingredients, but simply because of what they do with their ingredients.

It seems to me, speaking only really for Western Europe that it hasn't been access to land that has made for good cuisine, but, well, I don't know what? Access to a wide range of ingredients (money) and a lot of leisure time?

I'd like to read some more on the subject anyway.

 

[don_quixote]

(insert standard joke about Lambeth/Mosside/Nottigham)

Yunno, I suspect I'd take a huge amount of pleasure in shooting, skinning, gutting, butchering, cooking and eating a wild animal. And then dancing around wearing its skin afterwards to placate its departed spirit. Possibly.

Edit: nothing rare or endangered, I'm not AA Gill.

most things that you buy that have to be shot are ludicrously cheap as they are usually wild or at least not farmed. we can buy whole rabbits off loughborough market for £3. i'm sure a whole pheasant on leicester market was less than £5 too. and there's no free-range/organic bollocks because it's bloody wild, of course it's organic.

problem is, no one eats these things nowadays. rabbit is moreish.

 

[baboon2004]

(insert standard joke about Lambeth/Mosside/Nottigham)

Yunno, I suspect I'd take a huge amount of pleasure in shooting, skinning, gutting, butchering, cooking and eating a wild animal. And then dancing around wearing its skin afterwards to placate its departed spirit. Possibly.

Edit: nothing rare or endangered, I'm not AA Gill.

Thank God you're not AA Gill, an' all.

The French will outdo anyone on horse burning.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm gonna have to get me down to the market at some point and buy some game. It's weird that it's a sterotypically 'posh' thing to eat but, as you say, the same price or not much more than a naff battery-farmed chicken from Asda.

I suppose it'll be another couple of months before the season really kicks off, though. I think the autumn might be my favourite time of year for food...

Where my parents live in France it's pretty rural - the landscape's not at all dissimilar to, say, Hampshire or Wiltshire, except the towns are much further apart - and hunting is a really big thing there. But it's entirely practical rather than ritual, i.e. they use guns, not dogs, and they shoot animals to eat them. It's also a thoroughly working-class thing to do. I guess it's just a consequence of having a much bigger percentage of the population living and working on the land; not only is there much more land but farms tend to be much smaller than they are over here.

 

[don_quixote]

rabbit is so much more popular in france though, you'll find rabbit is expensive and farmed in france, and, irony of ironies, probably imported from britain

 

[Mr. Tea]

rabbit is so much more popular in france though, you'll find rabbit is expensive and farmed in france, and, irony of ironies, probably imported from britain

Because most people in Britan can't bring themselve to eat the cute fwuffy ickle bunnikins.

(The extent to which the concept of 'animal rights' in this country is based on little more than an appeal to fluffiness is revealed by the restaurant whose owners got hate mail and even death threats after they put (grey, obvs) squirrel on the menu - I mean, the damn creatures are a pest FFS and haven't even been in this country for much more than a hundred years...see also the ALF wankers who 'liberated' a bunch of mink from a fur farm, which went to do devour every mammal, bird and fish in the local ecosystem...sigh...)

Slowtrain's point about how food in Britain has been "derided as bad since well before industrialisation" is exactly what I want to examine a bit further. I'm asking whether the average English peasant say, 300 years ago, ate any worse a diet than his French counterpart. Given how notoriously poor and oppressed the working class were in France - they still had an absolute monarchy at the time, remember, while England/Britain had at least an early form of parliamentary democracy - I'd say it's unlikely, perhaps even the reverse to an extent. Which may have something to do with how horses are regarded in this country as either pets, sporting accessories or a charmingly obsolete mode of transport (oh, and tools of riot control) whereas in France they're fair game for the table.

AFAIK, France's famous Cult of Cuisine dates mainly from the 19th century and has always been centred around upmarket restaurants in Paris. Traditional French farmhouse food has always been about doing tasty, generally fairly simple things with local meat, game and fish and seasonal fruit and veg, and then you've got the traditional cheeses which are delicious as they are.

I could be talking out of my arse here but I think English rural food was probably much the same around the same time, whereas it was in the cities that convenience, longevity and low cost of food became very important during industrialisation and so low-quality, mass-produced, processed foods (Spam, Primula, custard powder etc.) came into being. Conscripts from inner city areas were notably shorter, scrawnier and generally less healthy than those from rural areas in both world wars, I seem to remember if GCSE History hasn't forsaken me entirely. In fact it was the appalling health of young men conscripted from Britain's cities that was the main impetus (or one of them, anyway) for the creation of the NHS and the welfare state as a whole, IIRC.