Parasites can be beautiful
I went for a short walk today at Windy Hill. The valley oaks have few remaining rustling leaves and lots of globular masses of mistletoe.
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The shipping news
Our friend, whom we'll call "Brian", received a Christmas package from his mom this week.
Brian's mom put together a little packet of holiday treats for him. There were two pairs of comfy socks, a bubble-wrapped glass ornament for the Christmas tree (his first in the new apartment), and a carefully wrapped persimmon loaf, made from the fruit off the tree in the back yard. She brought the collection of items down to the Mail And So Forth shop, a few blocks from the house where he grew up. She filled out an address-and-payment form, and she left it all for the nice girl at Mail And So Forth to pad and pack into a shipping box.
Three business days later, he received the parcel. He thanked the fellow in brown shorts and ran inside for a matte knife to open the package.
Inside the well-padded parcel he found the socks (perfect for this chilly morning), the ornament, the loaf. And something else.
Posted by David Sloo
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baaaaa
This morning for breakfast I am eating a bowl of Bellwether Farms 's sheep ricotta with a spoonful of grade-B maple syrup atop. It is hard to imagine a better breakfast.
Sheep ricotta is somewhat elusive, even in northern California, but it is worth seeking out. Central Italia and Sardinia have lots of it, since sheep milk is used to produce the most popular local cheeses, pecorino. Bellwether's sheep ricotta is bolder, slightly sweeter, and considerably richer than most whole cow ricotta that I've tasted. A friend from Québec told me that she thinks its flavor is really too much, so clearly it's not for everyone. However, our cat Amber has definitively shown that she prefers it to cat food.
Maple syrup grading is slightly mysterious. Early in the season, the sap is different and functionally less maple-flavored than late in the season. In the U.S., the fancier and more expensive sub-grades are all under grade A. They are sweet, but they are lighter in color and not as flavorful as grade B. I've never seen grade C in a market, though it is alleged to exist. In Canada, the grades are #1, #2, #3, and so on. I'm pretty sure that I like grade B or grade #3 best, depending on which side of the border I awaken.
The best bit in the Wikipedia article on maple syrup:
The fenugreek seed, a spice, is used to make a very strong commercial flavoring that is similar to maple syrup, but much less expensive. Although fenugreek does not have this flavor, an odor similar to maple syrup often exudes from people who have eaten fenugreek.
Posted by David Sloo
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One of my favorite recipes
"You know the famous recipe for a whole steer, which you stuff with a pig. Into the pig, you put a goose stuffed with a chicken that contains a squab whose abdomen has been stuffed with a quail in which is found a bunting, the bunting containing an olive. You cook the whole thing till done, then eat only the olive. There are four variations of this dish: green or black olive, with or without pit. Of course, if the olive proves poorly cooked, it will be a blow to the chef's reputation."
Imagine this as a lead-in for an essay on stuffing in general and to an appealing, more nourishing recipe for a whole stuffed veal breast in particular (feeds 12 and involves a pound and a half of bacon). Sound good?
I took the tongue-in-cheek sybarite's recipe from a wonderful book that I've been re-reading this week. If you can't get enough of Michael Pollan and Harold McGee, plus you want some recipes to go along with the thoughtful commentary on food, cuisine, culture, and science, then you should try it: Derenne, J-P. (1996), L'Amateur de cuisine. The recipe is on p. 793. I think the book is still in print, and it certainly can be had used. (Evidently he wrote a second volume. I'll report on that when I can.)
The first volume, the one I'm re-reading, is divided into three main parts: one on the science, the cultural position, and the biological role of the whole field of cooking; a second on ingredients and getting them, running through hundreds of them in some detail; a third ('to work') on cooking. After these is a fourth section about how to structure meals throughout the day. Then come the indices: the recipes (there are something like 500) listed by category; an alphabetical index of recipes; an alphabetical list of ingredients; a table of contents.
I'm particularly struck by such clear writing, Derenne's perfect willingness to state opinions and facts in the same breezy sentence, and especially his anecdotes and explanations that precede many, many of the recipes. The structure is definitely that of a food book, not a cookbook. But it certainly is also a cookbook, and an easy one to follow.
Posted by David Sloo
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Cold noses and Brillat-Savarin
We were pleased but a bit sad to attend a going-away party that our friends Daniel and Ellie threw for themselves last night. They're moving to Paris, and they're determined to stay at least until they have tasted a reasonable minority of the available cheeses. We expect this will take two years, minimum, and we'll miss them. (Well, except when we're tasting cheeses with them while visiting Paris, at which time we won't miss them at all.)
But it was a fine excuse to go out on the coldest night of the year in San Francisco and dress up in woolens. We even wore scarves.
Posted by David Sloo
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Chopper strands acrobats on pylons
Yes, that is a helicopter, and the little lumplets on the pylons are humans. I don't know exactly what they are doing, but as I watched, the helicopter flew away. The little lumplets did not wave. I speculate: a try at a solution to prison overcrowding.
Posted by David Sloo
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Pickled, potted, and canned
I'm reading S. Shepard's 2000 Pickled, potted, and canned: How the art and science of food processing changed the world. Naturally, it is mostly full of fascinating tit-bits and details. How could it not be, with chapters like Drying, Salting, Smoking, Pickling in vinegar, Pies, Pots, and Bottles, Canning, and Fermenting?
Did you know, for example, that sour apples or oak leaves can be added during fermentation to sharpen the flavor of your sauerkraut? Did you remember that Isabella Bird -- the strangely fascinating 19th century travel writer -- could barely stomach the local food and brought with her on a jaunt through rural Japan "a small supply of von Liebig's meat extract, four pounds of raisins, some chocolate, both for eating and drinking, and some brandy 'in case of need'".
The book is really a history of preservation in Britain, but with a lot (in a few cases) and a little global context. It's a bit of a romp through the market aisles, since practically every foodstuff gets preserved in one way or another, and the book is simultaneously rich in detail and slightly sloppy.
Sometimes, it feels like an amalgam of pre-war notions and rather modern material scholarship. For example, we learn that: 'modern ketchup also originated as a dipping sauce. The name is derived from the Siamese word "kachiap."'
Hmmm. Siamese? No one has used the word Siamese for the Thai language in donkey's years. Moreover, English borrowed almost no words from Thai until we finally got our vegetables and seasoning straight in the 20th century. Besides, it seems like the word kachiap might not actually exist in Thai. There is a plant called krachiap, and it is edible.
Catsup has been around in the English language since the 17th century, and the Malay word kecap is usually given as the souce. It evidently means 'taste', but it's just the commoner Indonesian name for 'fish sauce'. Nick Yee wrote a brief but sensible article on why the English catsup and the Cantonese ke-chap are similar rather than genetically related.
A page after the questionable catsup etymology, Shepard claims that 'the recipe for Tabasco sauce is still a closely guarded secret'. Hmm. Edmund McIlhnny Jr., the grandson of the first Tabasco emperor, said in 1991: "There is no secret ingredient in our sauce; it is pepper, vinegar, and salt. It is not difficult to duplicate. But the sauce without the Tabasco name will be hard to sell." (A. Naj, 1992, Peppers, p. 175.) As for the preparation, that was filed for U.S. patent in 1870, and has therefore been public knowledge for a long time.
It's hard to blame Shepard for the series of errors. The book is distinctly non-scholarly -- lacking notes and using a most whimsical transliteration of Arabic -- but it is full of scholarship and detail. Her editor at Simon and Schuster should have spent a little more on fact checkers and a little less on scare-quotes: the book is absolutely riddled with quotation marks, which seem to mean anything from 'this is a funny word' to 'this is an actual quotation'.
Posted by David Sloo
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what is a lord to do?
The image below appeared on the New York Times's Web site today as the attraction for an article about ski resorts. I don't know anything in particular about ski resorts, but an activity that involves the phrase "Lord to: Goat" certainly deserves admiration.
Posted by David Sloo
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