From csmonitor.com: Music adds spice to cooking.

Sharon O'Connor can't imagine working in the kitchen without music playing in the background. But not just any music. A former cellist with the San Francisco String Quartet, she likes to find just the right piece to accompany her culinary forays. The pursuit has led her to write cookbooks that combine her passion for food and music in an inimitable way.

Each of her cookbooks comes in a boxed set with music created, performed, and recorded to suit the recipes.

Ms. O'Connor, who has cooked with such famous chefs as Daniel Boulud and Ming Tsai, is president and creator of the aptly named Menus and Music company. With 18 cookbook-CD sets already under her belt, she is now getting ready to release another eight cookbook sets later this year. [continue]

Hmmm, sounds interesting. We just use the shuffle feature on the digital music player here, which sometimes means that we cook Italian food while listening to Indian ragas.

Related:
Menus and Music - menusandmusic.com

Well, what do you know? Somebody's taken the community kitchen idea and made a business out of it. From csmonitor.com: Cooking out, eating in.

The company is called Dream Dinners and, like more than a hundred similar outfits across the country, it functions as a sort of communal kitchen where moms and dads whip up a few weeks' worth of freezer-ready meals in just two hours. It's home cooking - without the home.

It works like this: Customers use a website to select a time and date along with the meals they'd like to prepare - herb-crusted flank steak, perhaps, or chicken mirabella. When they arrive at the session, ingredients have been carefully doled out into stainless steel containers.

The would-be chefs simply mix and season, prepping meats and fish and pizza for the oven. The prepared - but uncooked - meals are then bundled into freezer bags and aluminum containers. Cooking instructions are affixed and the trove is tucked into a cooler for the ride home, where each customer will stockpile a dozen ready-to-cook meals. [continue]

I'd rather start a community kitchen or cooking club myself, but I can see where it would be handy to have somebody else do all the planning and shopping.

Related
Dream Dinners - dreamdinners.com
A full plate: Meal-preparation firm signs up 36 franchisees - Puget Sound Business Journal

Mmmmm, here's another thing to add to the "must visit when next in France" list. From csmonitor.com: Rungis: the biggest fresh-food 'buffet' in the world.

Being a "foodie" is a delightful infatuation that can lead to all sorts of unexpected situations. And so it was that I found myself at 4:30 on a dark and drizzly summer morning in Paris, waiting for a bus to take me to a market.

Most rational individuals would not wrench themselves out of bed at such an hour for a trip to the market. But this was no ordinary market. I had signed up for a tour of Rungis, the largest fresh food market in the world. [continue]

Related:
Rungis: marché de gros produits frais, grossiste produits traiteurs - rungisinternatinal.com
Rungis, world's biggest food market - foodreference.com

From Reuters: Talking wine label to chat up Italian consumers.

Who needs a sommelier? A "talking" wine label could soon tell consumers in Italy everything they want to know about a particular bottle -- from its production history to the kind of food it should accompany. "The idea is to bring the oenologist to the table so that each wine can explain itself in the first person," said Daniele Barontini, whose Tuscan company Modulgraf is putting the final touches on the product to be launched in November.

"We envision our talking wine label in restaurants, wine stores and at vineyards that offer wine tasting," he told Reuters on Wednesday.

The new "label" would consist of a chip implanted in the bottle that could be listened to with a small device about the size of a cigarette package in the wine shop or the restaurant. [continue]

From The Telegraph: Italy's DIY restaurants turn the tables on bureaucracy.

An old farmhouse that serves up delectable food at absurdly low prices is the new hot-spot for Rome's gourmets, still hoping to dine out well however dire the state of the economy and their personal finances.

But Mario's, as the place is called, is not a restaurant. Rather, it is a home where the owner chooses to cook for guests he welcomes as friends in return for "a small contribution".

Known as a private or fai da te (DIY) trattoria, it is one of a new category of eateries springing up across Italy, a response to soaring prices since the introduction of the euro that have put good food beyond the reach of many people.

An added attraction of such unofficial establishments is that diners can still smoke at the table despite draconian anti-tobacco laws.

Also, running a DIY trattoria often means paying no taxes, as well as evading strict health and safety rules and the requirement for a licence, which on its own can cost a restaurateur €70,000 (£47,000). [continue]

Link found here at Dappled Things.

From Wired: Wine Scanner Has Perfect Palette.

There is no greater anguish for a wine collector than to spend thousands of dollars on a 50-year-old bottle of Bordeaux, only to have it taste like vinegar when it's opened.

But now a New Jersey real estate developer and wine enthusiast says he has found a way to guarantee wine drinkers will never taste sour grapes again.

Eugene Mulvihill has constructed a $50,000 Wine Scanner to determine the chemical composition of wine without opening the bottle.

"When you spend $1,000 you want the wine to be perfect," said Mulvihill. "You are spending more on the wine than the food, and you expect that to be fresh."

Developed with the help of scientists at the University of California at Davis, Mulvihill's Wine Scanner is based on the same magnetic resonance imaging technology used for medical scans.

Wine is a temperamental libation that can turn into vinegar if stored improperly. Direct sunlight, heat, a loose cork or any number of mishaps can lead to a failed investment and a bad taste in the mouth.

MRI technology can detect bad wine by analyzing the chemical compounds found in the drink. Bottles under investigation are placed inside a 6-foot, boiler-like cylinder, and radio waves are shot through them. [continue]

From discovery.com: Ancient Pompeii Restaurant Reopens Doors.

Pompeii's busiest restaurant reopened its doors on Saturday for the first time since it was buried in Mount Vesuvius' lava nearly 2,000 years ago.

Frozen in time with the rest of the city in 79 A.D. by the most famous eruption in history, the restaurant is located in Via Nocera, not far from one of the city's gates.

"The volcanic ash has kept plants, radishes, pollens almost intact. We have been studying them for 10 years and learned a lot about what the inhabitants of Pompeii ate," biologist Anna Maria Ciarallo, who heads the project for Pompeii's archaeological office, told Discovery News.

Ciarallo revived Pompeian food by replanting the original vegetables and fruits in the ancient town's gardens.

"The use of plants was rather different from today. People in Pompeii ate boiled broom, poppies and mallow. Lemons, sage and rosemary were use as medicinal plants, while basil was used to create perfumes," Ciarallo said.

Catering to middle-class merchants and travelers, the restaurant had a large kitchen. A long table held charcoal to cook with and trivets to hold pots.

The oven was used to make "libum," a quiche-like pastry shell filled with cheese, similar to today's ricotta, and served on bay leaves. [continue]

See if you can read Alexander Chancellor's recent article in the Guardian without wishing you'd gone to school in Italy. He writes:

While in Rome to witness the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I saw a bit of my niece Amelia, who lives there with her Italian husband and two children. The eldest of these children, Alice, is four and attends a municipal infants' school.

Alice's education is free, but her school lunches cost €2 (about £1.35) each, which is the same amount charged by schools, for example, in Portsmouth, Luton and Wolverhampton. But Alice's school meals are of an integrity that even Jamie Oliver doesn't contemplate, let alone the council of any English town. All fruit, vegetables, rice, pasta and bread fed to Roman schoolchildren have to be organic, and no genetically modified food is allowed. Even the chocolate puddings are made from organic chocolate. School meals have to be cooked on the premises on the day that they are eaten, with recipes written by municipal dieticians aiming to make them as nutritious and tasty as possible. (...)

Alice loves her school meals, for which there are 25 summer menus and 25 winter menus, all of them different. Each comprises at least three courses, including lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as fish or meat. Typical summer menus at Alice's school include the following: pasta with zucchini, tuna in extra-virgin olive oil, potato and tomato salad, bread, fruit; vegetable purée with pasta, chicken breasts with olives, roast potatoes, bread, ice cream; saffron risotto, halibut rissoles, mashed carrot, bread, fruit. And so on. [continue]

How to brew beer in a coffee pot. Oh. my! I want to try this.

Link found here at the Food Blog.

From csmonitor.com: Home was a noodle factory.

The woman arrived by streetcar early in the morning, weighed down with equipment as she walked the block to our house. We were expecting her, so I was watching from the window.

She looked ancient to my 7-year-old eyes, though she was really only middle-aged. When my mother answered the doorbell, a short, very wide, friendly, and powerfully built woman walked in wearing a short-sleeved summer dress. Her arms were like a wrestler's. She had been here before, so she greeted us briefly and trudged straight down to our basement, tools gently clinking in the rhythm of her steps.

This was the day of our annual late-summer pasta making. It was the 1940s, and packaged pasta was nearly unknown in Hungary. Though pasta brings Italy to mind for most people, Hungarian cooks also use pasta generously - in economical side dishes, soups, bases for vegetarian dishes and, quite often, in desserts.

Even when one could find pasta on grocery shelves, a good cook always chose the homemade version. But very few made their own. The common practice was to hire a pastamaker and have a year's supply prepared at home.

My mother had to schedule the pasta lady months in advance for a full day, provide a list of the varieties she wanted, and supply the flour and eggs. [continue]

Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant sounds pretty amazing - and so does Heston. From The Guardian: A humble pub's extraordinary journey to gastronomic greatness.

Blumenthal's story is an extraordinary one. He left school with six O-levels and worked as a photocopier salesman and credit controller for his father's business.

Some 14 years later he lectures Nobel prize winners in physics on the science of food and taste, or molecular gastronomy as it has come to be known; corresponds with the likes of Harold McGee, the author of Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University and Tony Blake, the vice-president of research at Firmenich, the world's largest flavouring company; and creates some of the most remarkable and delicious food in the country.

Some people have found the idea of dishes such as snail porridge, cauliflower risotto with chocolate jelly, chips that take three days to prepare and carrot toffee as bizarre at best, but the critics and guides, with very few exceptions, have been unanimous in their praise. [continue]

Related:
The Fat Duck Restaurant - fatduck.co.uk
Mix snail porridge, sardine sorbet and you have a Fat Duck - Guardian
The Fat Duck, Bray, Berkshire - independent.co.uk
Molecular gastronomy - tiscali.co.uk

Here's what you want to do with rhubarb, oh yes you do: take 600g of rhubarb, add some sugar, dump in vodka, and you'll be a very happy camper in a couple of months when the vodka is pink and delicious. Here's the recipe. Yum.

From slowfood.com: Soda Bread, an article by Darina Allen.

Rotary querns were found in many excavated Iron Age sites (800BC-400AD), which would seem to indicate that bread-making was an integral part of daily life in many Irish homes, made with oats, barley, wheat and rye, which were grown since the early mediaeval period (5-11 Centuries).

For centuries, thin oatcakes were made on a bakestone or griddle over an open fire. Later, breads were leavened with sourdough and barm made from beer, sowans (the fermented juice of oat husks) and fermented potato juice. It was only in the first half of the 19th Century that bicarbonate of soda was introduced, enabling cooks to bake the wide range of soda breads for which Ireland is now so justly famous.

Even in the poorest country cabin, fresh soda bread would have been mixed on a wooden baking board and baked on the griddle, or in the pot oven or bastible, over the embers of the turf fire. [continue]

Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
Ballymaloe Irish bread recipes (Includes links to Darina Allen's soda bread recipes.)

We bought a snazzy digital kitchen scale the other day, because our old scale was dying. And then, completly by coincidence, I came upon The Kitchen Scale Manifesto at eGullet:

In modern home kitchens in Europe, a kitchen scale is standard equipment. In the US, one rarely sees them except in the kitchens of compulsive dieters and very serious amateur pastry chefs. Because most people in Europe have scales, recipes generally specify quantities of bulk dry ingredients as weights. For example, a cake recipe might require 250 grams of flour. In the US, the same recipe would most likely use cups, which measure volume, not weight.

So why the difference, and does it really matter? Is weighing ingredients just a complicated, confusing, and unnecessary consequence of going metric? The answer is that it does really matter, and once you get the hang of it it's actually easier than using cup measures.

It matters because the amount of an ingredient that fits in a cup varies a lot depending on how coarse the grain is and how tightly it is packed into the cup measure. Weights, on the other hand, tell you exactly how much of the ingredient you have, independent of how much air space exists between the particles. The amount of flour in a cup can vary as much as 25% depending on how it is packed. Sifting before or after measuring can make the difference even greater. Needless to say, this kind of disparity makes a tremendous difference in how a recipe comes out. One morning pancakes are light and fluffy, the next they are thin and rubbery.

Another advantage to weighing ingredients is that when you share your recipe with others, they can more easily reproduce results similar to your own. The number one complaint of home cooks is that they followed a recipe, but it didn't turn out. The number one reason this happens is that although they used the same number of cups of each ingredient as the recipe author, they actually used a very different amount. [continue]

From csmonitor.com: What's for lunch in Paris? Maybe a cooking lesson.

For years I had thought of taking a cooking class. I love food, enjoy entertaining, and most of all, live in the world's gourmet capital, Paris. But the idea always appeared a little daunting. Courses seemed expensive, time-consuming, and - most of all - too complex.

That is, until cooking school L'Atelier des Chefs opened its doors last summer, offering 30-minute classes at lunchtime, not to mention a table on which to eat your meal afterward in the company of fellow students. All that for about $20, the price of lunch in an average Paris brasserie. [continue]

What follows is an extract from a Vancouver weekly's dining section. I'm blogging this as a public service, because oh my goodness, anything Thomas Haas makes is beyond delicious. Here's the start of Boxlets of chocolates.

Attached to the signature chocolate-brown ribbon overlaid with pale-green organza, a little tag reads: "These chocolates taste best before... " with a space for a handwritten date. It's a nice piece of knowledge, but academic. Or, to put it another way, fat chance. By the time their best-by date rolls around, the gemlike, preservative-free confections inside will have long gone. All that will remain is the memory of those exquisite fillings — passion-fruit ganache, cinnamon nougat, cream infused with freshly grated ginger — and a square willow-green container far too attractive to go in the blue box.

The tradition of chocolate box as keepsake is one that patissier Thomas Haas is reviving, as you already know if you've indulged in his treats at Sen5es Bakery downtown. You will still find Haas's creations there (as well as at five-star hotels and top local restaurants), but now he's opened a production facility and factory outlet on the North Shore. It's a destination place in a waterfront area best described as "emerging", which is no deterrent to chocolate lovers: a small ad in a local paper led to lineups on Valentine's Day. When the weather's nice, it's beautiful, says Haas, looking out at the Vancouver skyline from the door of his new shop. Inside, the crimson-brocade ceiling is angled at the corners to suggest you're inside a chocolate box. A marble counter extends the width of the shop and mirror-backed shelves, custom-made from German walnut, display chocolate boxes. A couple of tables invite you to enjoy a cappuccino and freshly made croissant, or a light panini-and-soup lunch. It's all happening... or at least it will be by now. [continue]

Next time I have free afternoon, I'll be heading over to North Vancouver just to eat some of these scrumptious chocolates. (Those of you who don't live nearby will have to settle for mail order — if you're desperate enough.)

Related links:
Sen5es
Thomas Haas Fine Chocolates

Mmmm, here's a delectable chocolate website: The Chocolate Exhibition from the Field Museum. There are sections on growing chocolate, the history of chocolate, and making chocolate. When you think you know it all, take the chocolate challenge. And then go see if there's any chocolate left in your fridge!

The traditional thing to do on Good Friday (well, besides going to church) is to bake hot cross buns. Need a recipe? Here's the hot cross bun recipe I like best.

From Ananova: Camel milk chocolates.

An Austrian chocolate maker has joined forces with an Arabic camel farm to create a new delicacy - camel milk chocolates.

Vienna-based Chocolatier Hochleitner took six months to develop the treats using milk from the Al Ain Camel Farm and Dairy in the UAE. [continue]

Oh look: another book of ancient Roman recipes: Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. Now, I just love it when the publisher of a cookbook posts tempting excerpts or recipes on the web, and that's what we have here from the University of Chicago press:

In addition to a wealth of material about culinary customs and techniques in ancient Rome, Patrick Faas translated more than 150 Roman recipes and reconstructed them for the modern cook. Here are eight recipes from from the book — from salad to dessert. [continue]

Who can resist that? There are recipes for Columella Salad, Soft-Boiled Eggs in Pine-Nut Sauce, Lentils with Coriander, Roast Wild Boar, Ostrich Ragoût, Roast Tuna, Fried Veal Escalope with Raisins, and a Nut Tart.

Link found at Arts and Letters Daily.

From findarticles.com: Pasta physics - best way to eat spaghetti not making a mess.

What's the best way to eat spaghetti without splattering the sauce? Physicist Colin Humphreys discovered the risk of sauce splash is greatest as you roll the last 4.33 inches of spaghetti onto a fork. "A final reckless flick of the wrist can accelerate the spaghetti speed to over nine feet per second;" he says. [continue]

See what you learn here?

From the Guardian: The chefs who can't stand the taste of their own food.

Inventing new recipes, or changing existing ones, is a chef's primary joy. But for some, it is a challenge. "I have just created John Dory with dill puree, confit of fennel and razor clams," says Shane Osborn of London's Pied à Terre restaurant. "It involves an emulsion of olive oil with razor clam stock. When I taste it, I have to go and spit it out immediately. And then wash my mouth out."

Although Osborn has fished since childhood, fish is one of his favourite foods, both to cook and to eat, and he sees about 90kg (200lbs) a week of the stuff pass through his kitchen (the restaurant is currently closed, but should reopen in July), his allergy to it is so great that an adrenaline pen is always on hand in case of emergency.

"The sous chefs have to be taught how to insert it below my knee, in case I come into too much contact with fish and go into anaphylactic shock," he says, in a way that suggests that, in Osborn's kitchen, the fearless handling of lifesaving medical equipment is no different from the ability to whip up the perfect custard or sweet potato nage. [continue]

The Science of Cooking site is quite good fun. From the egg section:

You can tell what color egg a hen will lay by looking at her earlobes. Yes, chickens have ears! If she has red earlobes, her eggs will be brown; white earlobes mean white eggs.

Are they joking? Chicken earlobes? Anyway, they also tell you how to make naked egg, and I just know you'll rush home to try that. Oh, and there's a science of eggs page, too.

Other sections of the site focus on candy, bread, pickles, meat, and seasoning.

If you've always wanted to make a mock apple pie or to read about the spice blends of the world, this is the site for you.

Link found at Metafilter, I think, although I can't find exactly where just now.

Shrove Tuesday (that's today) is Pancake Day! Here we have yummy pancake day tidbits from Wikipedia:

In Ireland Shrove Tuesday is known as "Pancake Tuesday", while in Britain it is popularly known as "Pancake Day". In Ireland the traditional pancake is a very thin one (very like a French crepe) which is served immediately sprinkled with caster sugar and a dash of fresh lemon juice.

In the Canadian province of Newfoundland, household objects are baked into the pancakes and served to family members. Rings, thimbles, thread, coins, and other objects all have meanings associated with them. The lucky one to find coins in their pancake will be rich, the finder of the ring will be the first married, and the finder of the thimble will be a seamstress or tailor. Children have great fun with the tradition, and often eat more than their fill of pancakes in search of a desired object. [continue]

You might also enjoy the BBC's pancake facts page, which offers "Seven things you never knew about pancakes..."

So of course you'll make pancakes today, yes? Here are a couple of recipes for you:
Norwegian pancakes - Mirabilis.ca
How to make pancakes - Delia Online

More about pancakes and pancake day:
Pancake physics - Mirabilis.ca
Pancake Day (history and recipes) - BBC Food
Pancakes - Wikipedia
Lent: about foods of the season - cptryon.org
Olney Pancake Race - OlneyTownCouncil.co.uk
Perfect Pancakes -CatholicCulture.org

More about Shrove Tuesday:
Shrove Tuesday - IrishCultureAndCustoms.com
Shrove Tuesday - BBC

A page on Senegal explains how palm wine is collected there:

A traditional way to tap palm wine is to collect the sap at the top of the tree. The palm wine trees are native to West Africa.

The process of making palm wine involves an adept climber, piercing the tip of the tree and collecting the sap in a bottle which is left on the tree to ferment for a specific number of days. Some ethnic groups use palm wine as a drink during celebrations.

Wikipedia's palm wine page has more information, and do take a look at the BBC's fascinating photo series of a palm wine tapper at work. Amazing.

Related links:
Oil palm tapping - scn.org
The palm tree bandit (story) - strangehorizons.com
Palm tree in Ghana: Source of civilization - UNspecial.org

From the New York Times: When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet.

Homaro Cantu's maki look a lot like the sushi rolls served at other upscale restaurants: pristine, coin-size disks stuffed with lumps of fresh crab and rice and wrapped in shiny nori. They also taste like sushi, deliciously fishy and seaweedy.

But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings.

At least two or three food items made of paper are likely to be included in a meal at Moto, which might include 10 or more tasting courses. Even the menu is edible; diners crunch it up into a bowl of gazpacho, creating Mr. Cantu's version of alphabet soup. [continue]

You'll need a password if you want to read the rest of the article.

I thought I knew a fair bit about espresso, but I'd never heard of this new espresso-making method.

Although the term "crotchless coffee" sounds like someone has taken the idea of gastro-porn a bit too literally, it actually refers to a cutting-edge approach to producing espresso that is possibly the most innovative thing in java since the Italians began squirting stem through a fine grind of premium beans. The only practitioner in Victoria — and one of the few in North America — is über-barista Sam Jones, who can be found presiding over his 2% Jazz Espresso Bar on the edge of downtown at 2631 Douglas Street.

The new technique involes performing some radical surgery to the portafilter, the metal dish that locks into the espresso machine after the coffee has been tamped down. What Jones and a few other Web-based guys from the Barista Guild Forum did back in September was slice the bottom off, thereby establishing a free flow of coffee-laden steam where before it was all channeled through a tiny nipple on the portafilter's underside.

"With the old way, a lot of the coffee oils get left behind", explains Jones. "Not only were you missing out on some of the potential flavour, but you can't clean the filter every time and those oils quickly oxidize and affect the taste."

According to Jones, the new approach allows coffee connoisseurs to taste everything — right down to the mixture of beans used in any individual espresso blend. "Even if you don't have that educated a palate, the flavours are clearer and there's a textural difference, with the coffee gliding in a smooth froth over your tongue," adds the passionate barista. "This style of espresso smells better and reveals a full spectrum of flavour notes: it's still earthy, but with more clarity."

That's from the Report from Vancouver Island column in the Vancouver (print) edition of City Food. The cafe mentioned above is in Victoria, BC. Hmmm. Maybe I'll hop on the ferry and go try some of Sam's espresso.

Related Links:
GOTTA get me one of them NEKKED portafilters... - CoffeeGeek.com
The Bottomless Portafilter - TerryStockdale.com (scroll down)
Bottomless Portafilter - HomeEspresso.com
My first crotchless PF shots - CoffeeGeek.com
Sam Jones' Southwick recipe -torani.com
Specialty Coffee Bulletin Board: Barista Guild Board - scaa.org

From The Guardian: The appliance of science.

...the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has created a new science module for use in schools. It's optional, but every school in the country can use it. It's due to be launched in the spring and it's called Kitchen Chemistry.

The new courses are based on some of the discoveries I made a few years back which have affected our whole approach to cooking. There are 15 to 20 areas to look into, ranging from cooking vegetables - why do they stay green, or not? - to making ice cream. One of the experiments the RSC proposes is making ice cream using liquid nitrogen. It even suggests trying to break the world speed record for making ice cream this way. And the RSC has done the hazard analysis so that schools can use liquid nitrogen safely, which indicates the incredible job it has done.

It isn't quite a first. There have been similar modules in France and Germany. But what the RSC has done is open up the subject, making the module flexible so that a student can take only one part of it if that's all that interests them. For example, he or she can do that part of the module that covers the action of salt on vegetables, and include it in the normal chemistry. [continue]

From Copenhagen Capacity comes this lovely news: Danish students launch open source and shareware beer.

A group of IT-students from the IT-University in Copenhagen has launched a new "open-source" beer, writes the technical journal Ingeniøren.

It is described by the students as "a great tasting energetic beer and it's the world's first open source beer! It is based on classic ale brewing traditions but with added guarana for a natural energy-boost.

Version 1.0 is a medium strong beer (6% vol) with a deep golden red colour and an original but familiar taste."

The recipe and the whole brand of Our Beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use the recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative. Anyone that uses the material has to publish the recipe under the same license (Share Alike) with reference to the originators. [continue]

Vores Øl (our beer) has a website. I particularly like the Why beer section:

Why not? We all like beer, and as an added bonus there is a legendary quote used to explain the concept of free software (now usually referred to as open source software):

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer".

We think that our open source beer is a nice twist on this quote, and we think it is interesting to see if our beer grows stronger out in the free and perhaps one day becomes the Linux of beers. Who knows?

Link found here at Linux Today.

From the BBC: Mexico's ancient drink under threat.

In Mexico, producers are warning that the so-called "nectar of the gods" is in danger of extinction.

The popularity of the pre-Hispanic alcoholic drink, pulque, is fading in favour of more conventional beverages such as beer and rum.

Mario Grajedo wobbles slightly as he perches on a stool by the side of the road in Ixmiquilpan in Mexico's Hidalgo state.

This is pulque heartland. On the simple table in front of him is a large maize tortilla covered in hot sauce.

Beside it is a jug of the milky liquid.

Eating with one hand, he swigs deeply using the other.

His voice slightly slurred, he says: "Pulque is a very strong tradition in Hidalgo. The flavour is either bitter or sweet — depending on how you like it.

"If you like it strong then you drink it neat, and if not you put in a bit of honey. It's like tequila — it's very healthy." [continue]

Tonight I made borscht, and that got me thinking about Russian things, and that led me to RusCuisine.

The site has lots of recipes, of course, ranging from mushroom dishes to bliny. There are articles, too; maybe you'd like to read about Russian samovars, Old New Year, kvas, or the Russian bath.

Here's a bit from the page about Russian dress:

The variety of colors for traditional costume displays love for beauty and ethnic diversity. These costumes are not only beautiful, there are also convenient in wearing because they were created for work as well. Festive clothes and everyday clothes, married woman's and young girl's clothes differed only for details, decoration, color gamut. Red fabric cloth was considered to be the nattiest one, and, by the way, the Russian word "beautiful" comes from the word "krasny", the Russian for "red".

Homemade canvas and wool clothes decorated with embroidery or woven pattern have been used most often for traditional peasant costumes. Embroidery came in different ornaments (rhombuses, crosses, herring-bones, stylized patterns of people and animals) performed in naturally painted threads. Red, blue, green, white, yellow - the color gamut was rich and various. [continue]

From Scotsman.com: Chemists Hope Ancient Pie Produces the Right Reaction.

A mince pie from 1648 will be reborn today at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Ye olde Christmas treat will be baked according to a recently discovered 350-year-old recipe which includes minced beef among the ingredients. (...)

Sociologist Professor Anne Murcott, who discovered the original minced meat pie recipe in a book called "The English Huswife" by Gervase Markham, said: "Tastes changed, and by the 18th century a division was emerging between 'sweet' and 'savoury' that would be recognised today. Mostly, savoury meat pies lost their sweet flavouring.

The exception was the mince pie, which, instead, lost its meat, though it retained an ingredient of animal origin in the form of suet, which of course still remains today, the reason why strict vegetarians will either not eat it or will search for one made with vegetable fat."

There was a practical reason why the meat was removed, said Professor Murcott.

In the 18th century it was discovered that the spices and fruit mixture in mince pies could be combined with brandy or sack months before Christmas and stored safely in stone jars. But the meat could not be added until the pies were made.

"From this it was only a short step to omitting the meat altogether," said Professor Murcott. [continue]

Mmmm, another book review, this one of Uncorked: the science of champagne. From New Statesman:

Gerard Liger-Belair is a professor of champagne and a leader in the field of bubble study. While this may sound like a euphemism for "alcoholic", it turns out that he is perfectly serious. He is associate professor of physical sciences at the University of Reims and (titter ye not) works as a consultant in the research department of Moet et Chandon. (Well, who doesn't, eh? Especially at this time of year.) It would be amusing to be a fly on the wall when the dreaded dinner-party question "And what do you do?" is asked of Liger-Belair.

I can just imagine. My question would be "how can I get a job like that?"

The review contains a few interesting tidbits from the book. Did you know that champagne won't fizz if poured into a super-clean class? And how about this:

Liger-Belair also reveals that Dom Perignon was originally employed by his wine-making abbey to get the bubbles out of champagne. The French aristocracy of the 17th century loathed them, which confirms my long-held view that most French people, for all their vinous reputation, actually know sod all about wine. It was not until the return of Charles II to the British throne that the good times started to roll for fizz and Dom Perignon reversed his efforts. Then, as now, the English were partial to a bit of bubbly. [continue]

I loved the first part of the Publishers Weekly blurb about the book at Amazon.ca:

"Come quickly, brothers, I am drinking stars!" said 17th-century monk and cellar master Dom Pérignon upon tasting the effervescent wine that would come to be known as champagne.

Link to the book review found at Arts and Letters Daily.

Another one from the Beeb: Rwandan coffee used to make beer.

A London brewery has started producing beer brewed from Rwandan coffee beans.

The beer, which has a 4% alcohol content, is targeted at adult drinkers as a cappucino drink or as a digestif. [continue]

Is that ever weird! Do you suppose it's any good? I tried some chocolate beer once, and thought that was completely disgusting.

Have you read any of Anthony Bourdain's writing? He's a chef, and his books include Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a cookbook and some other stuff. He's good.

Today the National Post printed an interview with Anthony Bourdain in its paper edition. This is the part I loved:

What's the most offensive TV cooking show?

There's one [in the US] by Sandra Lee. She seems to suggest that you can make good food easily, in minutes, using Cheez Whiz and chopped-up Pringles and packaged chili mix. It inspires people to have low expectations and to settle for less, and I think that's not doing God's work.

Being a chef is God's work?

Oh, yeah. What better profession? We feed people. We nuture them. We provide a real service. We're the salt of the earth. We may be the backstairs help but we do something useful, and, once in a while, transcendent and inspiring.

Related links:
AnthonyBourdain.com
Anthony Bourdain Eats Out -powells.com interview
Bio: Anthony Bourdain -Food Network
Interview: Chef Anthony Bourdain -RestaurantReport.com
Kitchen Confidential: book review and excerpt -CookingWithPam.com
Afraid to entertain? Tony Bourdain will whip you into shape - Seattle PI
An interview with Anthony Bourdain from 7x7 magazine, on the SauteWednesday site

From csmonitor.com: Chef cooks up a grand social experiment.

"I live in the street" says a diner named Mohammed, who is at a crowded table of four at Carmei Ha'ir (Vineyards of the City), a Jerusalem restaurant. "Yesterday I looked in the garbage for food. I heard they give food for free here."

That kind of comment could be heard at many soup kitchens in Israel, which has moved away from its welfare-state roots.

But this isn't a soup kitchen; it's a restaurant overseen by award-winning chef Moshe Basson, who once counted Israeli cabinet ministers and Jerusalem's mayor among his regular clientele. He and his partner, Rabbi Yehuda Azrad, wanted to create an eatery that caters not only to different tastes, but different classes. [continue].

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Dining with dignity

From the Beeb: ‘World's smelliest cheese’ named.

Scientists at a Bedfordshire university have found what could be the smelliest cheese in the world.

Vieux Boulogne, a soft cheese from northern France, beat 14 other whiffy varieties in tests.

Experts at Cranfield University — who led the research &mdash used an "electronic nose" to analyse the cheese odours, along with a panel of 19 human testers.

English Cheddar, aged between six and 24 months, was one of the least smelly cheeses tested, along with Parmesan. [continue]

From The Guardian: Let them eat cake.

Bofinger, in the rue de la Bastille, is the oldest brasserie in Paris, the haunt of presidents and ministers, Chiracs and chevaliers. It is also my favourite place to dine in the whole world. Bofinger is a shrine to food, staffed by mustachioed waiters in black waistcoats and white aprons, waltzing around the various rooms bearing platters of fruits de mer, wobbling crème caramels, great tureens of bouillabaisse. Bofinger is noisy and vivid, thick with the stew of soupe à l'oignon, foie gras, steak frites, choucroute, butter sauces, andouillette, sticky confit de canard, towering coupes des glaces topped with turrets of crème Chantilly.

It is also one of the best places in the world to lose weight. According to established lore and several new books (the latest is French Women Don't Get Fat by Mirielle Guiliano), if you really want to kiss your ass goodbye, you should take a lesson from the French.

Despite a diet stuffed with cream, butter, cheese and meat, just 10 per cent of French adults are obese, compared with our 22 per cent, and America's colossal 33 per cent. The French live longer too, and have lower death rates from coronary heart disease — in spite of those artery-clogging feasts of cholesterol and saturated fat. This curious observation, dubbed ‘the French paradox’, has baffled scientists for more than a decade. And it leaves us diet-obsessed Brits smarting. [continue!]

(Link found at Arts and Letters Daily.)

Related article:
Brasserie Bofinger, Paris - The Guardian

Related book:
French Women Don't Get Fat: the Secret of Eating for Pleasure - Amazon.ca

Update:
I enjoyed Mick Hartley's response to the Guardian article quoted above. An excerpt from his blog:

For the Guardian-reading classes, it's an article of faith that the French do things better. They're more civilised, they eat better......they know how to live. These articles write themselves. Anglo-Saxons: MacDonalds...tasteless...constant snacking...driven...joyless...zombies. French: leisurely meals...slow cooking...eating with the family...laughter...joie de vivre...sophistication. [continue]

Tonight I happened to catch CBC Radio's Ideas program. Well, best luck! This week's show was Kubilai Welcomes Marco, which recreated part of a meal that Kubilai Khan served to Marco Polo in 1275.

The program's website offers background information:

Marco Polo was a storyteller, among the most gifted and successful ever, as proven by the enormous popularity of a series of tales that he casually dictated to his cell-mate in a Genoan jail, just a few years after abandoning the high court position that he ultimately attained with Kubilai Khan. Seven hundred years later, various versions of The Travels of Marco Polo — A Description of the World are still in print. In fact, the book still sells very well in at least a dozen languages. But in 1275, when Marco Polo first approached the Dragon Throne at Xanadu, the wannabe author was only twenty-one years old. He had travelled as far as anybody could travel back then; from west to east, across most of the then known world. And he'd definitely unearthed a tale or two along the way. [continue]

And then there are 6 recipes, which have a happy amount of detail, like this:

Salt was simply too precious and too expensive to be used indiscriminately beyond the kitchen door. Kubilai Khan commanded a small army of salt-tax officials who controlled salt distribution throughout his Celestial Empire. (Marco Polo himself served time as the salt-tax collector in Yang-Chou Province. In his book, he actually made the mistake of bragging that he'd been governor of the province, but because the salt-tax collector was in fact more powerful than the governor, he might be retroactively forgiven the apparent vanity of his boast.) Expert chefs then controlled the more micro-cosmic use of salt, which was employed in Chinese households essentially and almost exclusively as a preservative. Salt-beef and salt- pork were then as common in China as they were in Europe. Salted-Mustard Cabbage (aka Red in Snow) is still the Chinese equivalent of sauerkraut. There were even salted oranges.

Thanks, CBC.

Related:
Marco Polo - Wikipedia

From The Scotsman: Tuscan truffle museum on the scent of Italy's ‘white diamonds’.

Italy's warty white truffles, once aphrodisiacs for the Romans and now the most expensive funghi in the world, are getting their own museum.

The Tuscan village of San Giovanni d'Asso, one of the main producers of the "white diamonds of Italy", will throw open the doors of Italy's first truffle museum tomorrow.

"It's going to be more than a museum, it's going to be an assault on the senses," said Enzo Francini, the head of finances for the medieval village of 950 people.

A pharmacist, a botanist and a chef were called in to help create the museum in a 13th century castle, where exhibitions, videos and interactive programmes will explain the history of the prized fungus and recreate the modern-day hunt for it.

But creators are most proud of the "odorama" exhibition, where visitors can drink in the heady aromas of dozens of different kinds of truffles. [continue]

From Ananova: Insurers advise clients to eat chocolate.

A German insurance firm has written to clients urging them to eat more chocolate if they want to cut the risk of heart attacks.

Many scientists now accept the antioxidants found in cocoa have been shown to decrease the risk of coronary artery disease. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Dark chocolate helps blood flow
Chocolate for heart health
Chocolate in pregnancy good for babies

From Reuters: Moroccans Spend More on Food in Month of Fasting.

Moroccans spend 28 percent more on food during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, a government study showed Tuesday.

Ramadan is the holiest month of the Islamic calendar when practicing Muslims must abstain from food, drink and sex from dawn to dusk — a discipline intended to better their souls and bring them closer to God. [continue]

From the Globe and Mail: Foodies' next frontier.

Snail porridge? Parsnip cornflakes? Bacon-and-eggs-flavoured ice cream? British food sounds more disgusting than ever, and people are flocking from around the world to try it. The Fat Duck, a small restaurant a few kilometres from Heathrow airport in the village of Bray, has been enticing a steady stream of adventurous diners across the Atlantic.

Some make it part of a business trip or a vacation, others drop by on a tour of the top restaurants in Europe. Some even make the trip specially. As one diner (writing on a website http://www.london-eating.co.uk) put it, "My friend and I flew in from the States just for dinner at the Fat Duck. We could have saved money on our return flight and just flew home on the pure joy the whole experience filled us with."

They come to eat salmon coated in licorice jelly, sardines-on-toast sorbet, red-cabbage gazpacho and chocolate dessert with popping candy (that sugary delight rarely enjoyed by anyone past the age of 12). [continue]

Related:
Fat Duck -fatduck.co.uk

From nature.com: Popcorn gets poppier.

Next time you go to the movies, look out. If the popcorn vendors have read this article, your cup of popcorn might contain fewer pieces than it used to. That's because the pieces could each be up to twice the volume they were previously.

On the other hand, that's good news if you make your own popcorn at home, because you'll be able to get two cups' worth from the number of kernels that previously gave you just one. What's more, there will be fewer of those annoying, crunchy unpopped kernels.

How is it done? The trick is simple: just pop the kernels at a lower pressure. [continue]

From the BBC: Truffles batch ‘a huge discovery’.

A crop of truffles harvested by a farming couple could be one of the most significant finds in the UK for 60 years, according to an expert.

About 10kg of the fungi, prized for their flavour in cooking, were found growing underground, near Little Bedwyn village on the Wilts/Berkshire border.

A sample sent off to Kew Gardens for analysis has revealed the spores match the English black summer truffle.

It is thought the truffles could be worth up to £3,000 on the open market.

And yum, wouldn't truffles be a fun thing to discover on one's property? Live in England and you might uncover truffles or treasures left behind by Romans. Either way, it's all good.

Live in Canada and . . . well, we did find bear poop in our yard a while ago. If that bear comes back, we could have an interesting day indeed.

I'd rather have truffles.

Related:
Hunting the white truffle - Mirabilis.ca
Puppy truffle find stuns chef - BBC

My joy is complete. Found at Slashdot: Beer Found to be as Healthy as Wine.

Matt Clare writes "Researchers at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) recently found that beer has the same positive qualities that wine has previously been found to have. The media release quotes professor John Trevithick, ‘We were very surprised one drink of beer or stout contributed an equal amount of antioxidant benefit as wine, especially since red wine contains about 20 times the amount of polyphenols as beer.’ For more info on how beer helps police harmful free radicals in blood, The London Free Press also has an article."

This and the coffee thing, all in one week!

On Monday I'm going to Europe, and you can bet I'll be drinking a number of salubrious liquids over there.

Related articles:
Beer has same benefits as red wine, study suggests - Toronto Star
Beer Has Same Benefits As Red Wine: Study - HealthTalk.ca
Beer to fight cancer, heart disease and diabetes: a new study shows - NewsFromRussia.com

Yesterday's Vancouver Sun featured an article about coffee, in which the author suggests that it's not bad for us after all. I love my espresso, and I love this kind of news. Here's the start of the coffee article:

When coffee first came to Europe from Constantinople in 1615, Viennese priests warned it was "the drink of infidels." The warnings in recent times have come from scientists, pseudo-scientists, and governments.

For most of the last half century, coffee was a health pariah, suspected of causing everything from breast, colon and pancreatic cancer to heart disease, infertility and birth defects. To get to the bottom of often wild speculation based on the flimsiest of evidence, the medical world swung into action in the 1980s and 1990s, with many of the world's leading scientists and research bodies investigating coffee's effects on health.

Today, some 19,000 studies later, it is clear that most past concerns didn't amount to a hill of beans. The great preponderance of evidence has lain to rest virtually all coffee-related health concerns.

Want to read the rest? Here is a copy of the article.

The Vancouver Sun didn't put the article on its website, and the National Post (who published it last week) only allows paying subscribers see this kind of thing. Isn't that absurd? These days everything seems to be reprinted somewhere or other.

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Coffee can make you forgetful

Elsewhere on the web:
Coffee and your health - GreenBeanery.ca
CoffeeGeek.com

A friend wrote and mentioned this Economist article about Julia Child, pointing out his favourite bit:

Mistakes were summarily dealt with. An offending loaf was tossed over her shoulder among the potted plants; a misflipped potato pancake was scraped off the range and back into the pan; her false teeth were firmly readjusted in front of the camera. She began her demonstration of coq au vin by dropping a whole chicken on the floor, dusting it off and remarking: "It's OK. No one's looking."

Thanks, Lawrence!

This is from the print edition of The Province: Students to grow vegetable gardens.

B.C. elementary students could soon be plucking recess snacks from vegetable plots instead of vending machines, thorough an innovative new nutrition program.

The Little Green Thumbs project sprouted last winter in Calgary after natural-health advocate Nicholas Jones decided to counteract the fast-food takeover of school cafeterias by turning kids into kindergarteners.

"If kids really had the choice between a carrot juice and a salad, and a hamburger and a Coke, that would be powerful, said Jones.

"Give them the experience of growing a salad from seed and let them choose. It's readlly about shifting the whole nutritional environment of children, without telling them what they should be doing."

Sounds like the sort of thing every elementary school ought to try. Interested? The Little Green Thumbs website has more information.

(Credit: thanks to Caffè Artigiano for providing newspapers — in addition to awesome coffee — for customers.)

A BBC article tells of strange high-tech kitchen gadgetry. You'd think it's all a figment of somebody's science fiction novel, but no: this is stuff from the Counter Intelligence Group at MIT.

One example is the pair of oven mitts that not only have temperature sensors built in, but also talk to you with phrases like "The food should be checked in 40 minutes".

Ah, you'd never figure that out on your own, would you?

Other projects might seem to have more practical uses, like the chameleon mug which is made from a combination of LCDs, bimetal strips, thermoresisters and thermochromic ink.

The result is a cup that tells you when it is hot. More sensors could be added to warn of too much sugar or bad milk.

Because you've always needed a bossy tea cup.

One of other ideas involves using thin reusable meltable plastic wafers which could help reduce kitchen clutter by nearly one-third.

"The project is called the ‘dishmaker’. When you're ready to eat and you have, say, cups but no plates, it will take a wafer and inflate it to the right shape and depth. It's like a variable mould," explained research assistant Leonardo Bonanni.

"Basically it's a machine that should replace your cabinets, cupboards and dishwasher. It automatically recycles your dishes and then stores them very compactly as thin discs. [continue]

Ah, more about how dark chocolate is good for you. From abc.net.au:

Eating dark chocolate can improve healthy blood flow and prevent clots forming in the veins, an international heart congress has heard.

But the same benefits might not be gained from eating milk chocolate.

The research by Greek scientists was presented at the European Society of Cardiology's meeting ESC Congress 2004.

The researchers said they had demonstrated for the first time how chocolate improved the function of blood vessels, allowing them to dilate, thereby preventing the formation of potentially damaging clots. [continue]

Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
Chocolate for hearth health
Chocolate in pregnancy good for babies

Related links:
Dark chocolate ‘may help to reduce heart disease’

From csmonitor.com: There's history - and a secret - in every bite.

LISBON, PORTUGAL – You'd have a better chance of outlawing wine in Paris than of separating the Lisboans from their beloved pasteis de nata, delicious custard tarts that can be consumed in two or three bites.

Particularly revered are those made from a mysterious secret recipe at the Pasteis de Belem, a bakery and coffeehouse in the southwest section of the city. Here, the little tarts are spoken of in hushed tones.

Rightfully so, because the recipe goes back almost 200 years to the nuns who baked the pastries at the nearby Jeronimos Monastery. During the 1820 revolution, many religious orders were forced to disband. Money talked during those hard times, and the recipe was sold to a confectioner.

Today, that same recipe is perhaps the most closely guarded secret in Portuguese cuisine, allegedly known to only a precious few at the Pasteis de Belem.

Actually, one can buy the custard tarts everywhere in Portugal - throughout the world, for that matter - in any Portuguese bakery or restaurant, where they are officially known as pasteis de nata.

But only at the Pasteis de Belem do you get the original monastery special. In fact, they're called pasteis de Belem here. Pasteis de nata is for the rest of the world. [continue]

Related:
Pasteis de Nata recipe - RecipeZaar
Pastéis de Nata recipe - Leite's Culinaria (includes photo)

Ten years or so ago I came across a recipe for blackberry mint muffins. Mmmm, they did sound good. I wrote down the recipe, and mailed a copy to my bestest friend in the whole world. Then I filed that recipe in my "I really should try this" file, and promptly forgot about it. There are a lot of other things in that file folder.

A few months ago I visited my friend, and spotted the muffin recipe in her recipe collection. It's a favourite, she tells me. She's been baking blackberry mint muffins regularly all these years. Oh!

I figured I'd better get with the program, so last night at sunset I picked blackberries, borrowed some baking powder from our perfect neighbour, and baked. These muffins are excellent. Here's the recipe.

From a Guardian article, You've come a long whey.

It is said that cheese came about by chance when an Arab merchant filled a bag made from a sheep's stomach with milk to sustain him on his journey across the desert and found that the rennet had turned the milk into curds and whey. The problem with this tale is that it must have happened all the time, not just on one specific and significant occasion, but it's as good a story as any; and it is possible that others, seeing what had happened to their nice milk, left it under a ziggurat in disgust.

Cheese is now remarkable for the numerous forms it takes, having started as milk. Stilton and feta and gouda and caerphilly and gorgonzola and parmesan and camembert, and the thousands of national and regional varieties, seem as implausibly related as the great dane and the dachshund, the chihuahua, the husky, the poodle, the saluki and the common mongrel who are all, so we are led to believe, descended from the wolf. The French cantal is said to be the oldest surviving cheese.

The Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the people of the Bible, and anyone else with milk to spare and an animal's stomach, all mention cheese in their writings. Virgil wrote a poem about a peasant's dish of herbs, garlic and "old cheeses, their surface pierced midway with rushes, suspended in baskets of close-woven fennel". Job said to God, "Thou hast poured me out as milk, and curdled me as cheese." [continue]

Oh look — more on the diet of athletes in ancient Greece. USA Today interviewed Francine Segan, author of The Philosopher's Kitchen: Recipes From Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook. Here's part of the resulting article:

Q: During the ancient Olympics, what kinds of foods were served to athletes?

A: In 480 B.C., the big winner said he ate a meat-only diet for 10 months prior to the Games. And he won. Another food especially prized by athletes was figs, thought to build muscle and stamina. Hercules, an athlete of heroic proportions, reportedly enjoyed fresh figs for dessert.

Q: What about wine?

A: Wine, including dessert wine, was essential for everyone because it was used for drinking and cooking — it's in almost every ancient recipe. Wine was thought to fix everything, and there's a funny anecdote that comes from Hippocrates who gave this advice to athletes with sore muscles: "Get drunk once or twice." [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
What did ancient Olympic athletes eat?

From the BBC: Brazilians decode coffee genome.

Scientists in Brazil have decoded the genetic structure of the country's best-known product, coffee.

The success of a two-year government project was announced on Tuesday by the country's agriculture minister.

Roberto Rodrigues said an extraordinary horizon had opened up — and the coffee would taste even better as a result.

He proclaimed that Brazil would use the genetic code to create a super-coffee, richer in taste, more aromatic and resistant to disease and frost.

Suddenly, scientists know an awful lot about coffee in Brazil.

Having studied 200,000 strands of DNA, they have identified 35,000 coffee genes, a combination of which gives the drink its aroma and flavour. [continue]

From National Geographic: Ancient Olympians Followed "Atkins" Diet, Scholar Says.

The modern Olympics have radically changed from their debut in 776 B.C., when the cook Koroibos won the only sporting event: a footrace. But even then, ancient athletes were concerned with what they ate — and some even followed a meat-heavy, Atkins-style diet.

Now food historians are studying ancient Greek and Roman texts to learn about the diet of the first Olympians — and about the roots of Mediterranean cuisine.

Archaeologists have been able to uncover food remains from ancient Egyptian sites, thanks to the region's arid climate, said Louis Grivetti, a food historian from the University of California at Davis.

And while few food remains have been found in Greek excavations, "there is a wealth of information available through ancient Greek and Latin texts," the historian said. [continue]

From the Washington Post: Israeli Site Reveals Ancient Use of Grains.

Scientists working in the flooded ruins of an ancient fishing camp in Israel have found evidence that the village's residents collected wild grain, pounded it into flour and possibly baked bread at least 10,000 years before the advent of cultivated crops.

Researchers found traces of barley and perhaps other grains in the seams of a grinding stone unearthed at Ohalo II, a settlement that stood on the southwest shore of the Sea of Galilee 22,000 years ago. The discovery is the oldest evidence yet found of humans processing cereal grains.

The research adds a new twist to the still-mysterious story of how agriculture evolved, showing that humans began collecting and preparing cereals perhaps thousands of years before they contemplated growing it themselves.

"We identified barley starch and maybe wheat," said Dolores R. Piperno, a Smithsonian Institution archaeobotanist who led the research team. "Barley is the first crop to show up among cereals, and this shows that people were focusing on it even 10,000 years earlier." [continue]

This afternoon I had tea with my favourite neighbours, and mentioned the fine news about how alcohol sharpens your brain. Knowing that I'm a fan of coffee as well as wine, they pointed me to this: A coffee can make you forgetful. (Which might just mean that coffee drinkers need an extra glass of brain-boosting wine, hmmm?) Anyway, here's the BBC article:

A cup of coffee each morning may wake you up, but a new study suggests caffeine might hinder your short-term recall of certain words.

Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew - the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon.

Valerie Lesk, of the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, believes caffeine improves alertness by shutting down other brain pathways.

This makes it harder to recall words, she says in Behavioural Psychology.

Caffeine is known to excite the brain and increase alertness.

But Miss Lesk and her colleague Stephen Womble, from Trinity College, Dublin, found it can hamper or boost short-term memory, depending on what you are trying to remember. [continue]

From Aish.com: Dining with Dignity.

Had I not been tipped off, I would have thought it was a regular restaurant. Beautifully decorated, with burgundy and white drapes, matching table covers, comfortable chairs with upholstered seats, bright watercolors adorning the walls, and upscale ceramic floor tiles, Carmei Ha'Ir vies with any restaurant in the market district of Jerusalem for tasty food and tasteful ambience. Only the omission of a bill presented at the end of the meal and the large wooden box near the exit, into which patrons may or may not drop their contribution (which often is a thank you scribbled on a napkin), hint to the truth: Carmei Ha'Ir is a soup kitchen.

For a decade Yair Harosh dreamed of creating a soup kitchen "where everyone who enters would receive honor, not just food." The 40-year-old Jerusalemite, who owns a downtown juice bar, realized his dream six months ago when three of his friends, also local businessmen, joined him in establishing Carmei Ha'Ir. [continue]

From nature.com: Cat droppings yield chic coffee.

A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world's most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak, whose beans pass through the intestinal tract of an Indonesian civet before being roasted and savoured. But the elusive blend looks unlikely to be copied any time soon.

The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature. The supply of Kopi Luwak has always been tiny, but political turmoil in Indonesia has strangled production even further: less than 230 kilograms of the coffee are now being made each year.

Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Edible.com

First Wine? Archaeologist Traces Drink to Stone Age. From National Geographic:

Wine snobs might shudder at the thought, but the first wine-tasting may have occurred when Paleolithic humans slurped the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes from animal-skin pouches or crude wooden bowls.

The idea of winemaking may have occurred to our alert and resourceful ancestors when they observed birds gorging themselves silly on fermented fruit and decided to see what the buzz was all about.

"The whole process is sort of magical," said Patrick McGovern, an expert on the origins of ancient wine and a leader in the emerging field of biomolecular archaeology. "You could even call [fermentation] the first biotechnology," said McGovern, who is based at Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania.

Combining archaeology with chemical and molecular analysis, McGovern has carved a niche for himself as an expert in ancient organics — particularly wine. He has already pushed our knowledge of vinicultural history back to Neolithic times (the late Stone Age). Now McGovern is searching in eastern Turkey for the origins of grape domestication. [continue]

From National Geographic: For Most People, Eating Bugs Is Only Natural.

If you think eating insects is gross, you may be in the cultural minority. Throughout history, people have relished insects as food. Today, many cultures still do. (...)

The ancient Romans and Greeks dined on insects. Pliny, the first-century Roman scholar and author of Historia Naturalis, wrote that Roman aristocrats loved to eat beetle larvae reared on flour and wine.

Aristotle, the fourth-century Greek philosopher and scientist, described in his writings the ideal time to harvest cicadas: "The larva of the cicada on attaining full size in the ground becomes a nymph; then it tastes best, before the husk is broken. At first the males are better to eat, but after copulation the females, which are then full of white eggs." [continue]

Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
Escorpion Especial
Edible.com
Chocolate-covered scorpions

This question was posed to The Guardian's Help! column:

I found an old cookery book in a charity shop. It is in a pretty poor state so doesn't have a spine or title page. It contains:

Miscellaneous observations for the use of the mistress of a family; directions for carving; domestic cookery including cookery for the sick; bills of fare - including what foods are available at different times of the year. (For summer months, this includes plovers and wheatears and for autumn, larks and dotterells); directions for servants; wines - including how to make sack wine, beer and ratafia; and household hints - such as how to protect a granary from rats and weasels.

Can you tell me when this book was published?

Read on for the answer, which includes lots of interesting details about the book.

Anyone interested in the history of food should hurry over to read about The Lost Art of Eating at the New York Review of Books. I've been wanting to quote some interesting part of the article for you, but I'm having a terrible time choosing an excerpt. The bit about Trimalchio's banquet in the Satyricon? The part about ancient Greek food, including a mention of cheese and garlic grated into wine? Maybe the section about the manners of medieval monks, or . . . oh dear. OK, I'll settle on this:

The mid-seventeenth century brought in coffee, tea, chocolate, and champagne, as well as increasingly elaborate table settings: napkins folded into fantastic shapes, tabletop sculptures of sugar or bronze. At the Vatican, holy themes like the Passion of Christ might appear in sugar trionfi amid the canapés; so, too, might mythological scenes like the infant Hercules strangling snakes. The banqueting table became a landscape, or a stage set in its own right. It could also become the scene of international incident, as when Pope Alexander VII met Queen Kristina of Sweden, newly converted to Catholicism, at Rome's Porta del Popolo in 1655. Alexander had looked forward to the meeting with anxious anticipation; the Queen's conversion and abdication from the Swedish throne had promised him a powerful new ally for the Catholic cause. But Kristina was not quite what the Pope had anticipated. He was, after all, an Italian man (from the same family as Agostino Chigi), and he must have been waiting for a blonde Amazon; instead, his diary laments of the dark, pop-eyed little queen with the off-kilter shoulder: "non è bella" ("she isn't pretty"). When he took her off to a banquet with him, she complained that her table was lower than his and refused to sit down until their meals were served on the same level. [continue]

From The Telegraph: From slave island to chocolate heaven.

Chocolate heaven is the island of Principe, a run-down, fever-infested outpost of the old Portuguese empire with a history of slavery.

Amid these harsh surroundings and the ever-present malarial mosquito, an Italian agriculture specialist is devoting his life to producing chocolate products to wake up the most jaded palate.

Claudio Corallo, 51, who was born in Florence, is reviving an old cocoa plantation to bring back into production ancient cocoa species which were long thought extinct.

Just as wine buffs dream of vintages produced before an infestation of phylloxera bugs all but destroyed the French wine industry in the 1860s, so the real chocolate fancier lusts after the product extracted from cocoa beans grown before widespread hybridisation.

"Modern hybrids of cocoa have been grown to produce yields of tons per acre but here I have found a truly authentic cocoa plant which predates all the hybridisation," Mr Corallo explained. [continue]

Link found at Metafilter.

I've been thinking about making mozzarella, you know. How hard could it be, now that I have a recipe and maybe even a source of buffalo milk? But apparently making mozzarella isn't always a trouble-free procedure. Here a BBC article tells of an Italian who's gone to an Irish expert in hopes of solving a mozzarella problem.

Micheal Mullan has made a special study of problems with cheese starter cultures and student Giuseppe Aprea arrived from Italy to learn how to solve the difficulty with their buffalo milk mozzarella.

Buffalo milk, explains Giuseppe, is often processed on small farms in southern Italy to produce a cheese which is recognised by Europe as a regional speciality.

The buffalo typically produce less than half the quantity of a dairy cow but the milk is creamy and rich — ideal for culturing into the famous mozzarella cheese, used on pizzas.

But recently, a number farmers have had problems getting the milk to coagulate and the local cheese lovers have been left empty-handed. [continue]

Related:
Mozzarella di bufala

From New Scientist: New test marks out a true champagne.

If you get no kick from champagne, it might be cheap fizz in disguise. But a new test should help prevent fraudsters passing off other sparkling wines as champagne or cava.

Developed by researchers at the University of Seville in Spain, the test proved to be 100 per cent accurate in determining which of 35 samples of sparkling white wine were cava and which were champagne. It works by recognising characteristic concentrations of the complex mix of trace metals in the wine.

The trace metals come from the soil where the grapes were grown. Ana Maria Cameán and her colleagues analysed the concentrations of 16 metals in 18 samples of cava and 17 samples of champagne.

The cava was produced from grapes grown in the Penedés region in north-eastern Spain, while champagne has to be made from grapes grown in France's Champagne region. [continue]

I wish the Artisanal Cheese Center would move to Vancouver and offer their Hands-On Mozzarella class here. Unfortunately (for me, anyway) they're in New York instead. My only consolation is that Alaina Browne took that mozzarella class and then wrote about it on her NYC Eats blog. She's got details, photos and — oh joy — even a recipe!

Now, where can I buy liquid rennet and citric acid? Of course, what I'd really like to make is mozzarella di bufala, but I doubt I'll find any water buffalo milk for sale around here.

Thanks to Anil Dash for the link to NYC Eats.

Related:
Mozzarella Cheese - Wikipedia

From The Independent, bless them: A square of dark chocolate a day could keep the cardiologist away.

Dark chocolate has joined Guinness, sherry and red wine on the list of foods and drinks that are good for the heart, because it boosts blood vessel function.

Research found that plain chocolate containing high levels of cocoa is rich in flavonoids, the anti-oxidant chemicals that reduce the stickiness of the blood and counter the inflammation of the blood vessels. [continue]

This is just the kind of news I love to hear.

From newsday.com: Baker Turns Diet Sage to Counter Atkins.

A baker who lost nearly half of his customers to the low-carb craze has tapped Dan Brown's best-selling novel for an Atkins alternative called the "Da Vinci Diet" that he hopes will bring people back to bread.

A little math theory kneaded with biblical lore from "The Da Vinci Code" has transformed Stephen Lanzalotta into a dietary sage, answering the "carbohydrate question" with a series of lectures propounding a diet he has followed for decades to maintain a muscular 160 pounds into middle age.

Admittedly, he is neither a nutritionist nor a scholar — his background is in biology and biochemistry — but Lanzalotta argues you don't have to look far to see a worldwide problem with obesity, and people have been eating bread for too long for it to suddenly be what is making everyone fat.

"Human civilization and grain have ties that go way back. No municipal society evolved without grain, no matter what it was," said Lanzalotta, who kneads his dough by hand like ancient breadmakers. "Not that I believe bread is one of the most sacred foods, but it is one of the most important things we can eat."

Bread forms the building blocks of the body and, in moderation, can lead people to more stable moods, clearer thoughts, and a rock hard body, right down to the washboard stomach of a Renaissance statue, Lanzalotta said.

The Da Vinci Diet he created consists mostly of Mediterranean foods — the foods ancient thinkers and artists ate. Fish, cheese, vegetables, meat, nuts and wine, in addition to bread — none are taboo at Da Vinci's table. [continue]

Brilliant marketing! But I've got to mention that anybody who treats The Da Vinci Code as anything but fiction should read this.

From scotsman.com: Winemakers toast defeat of dons.

Forget about French vintage wine that can set you back a week’s pay. If you really want to impress guests and add a frisson to the table talk, try a bottle of Sicilian red from vineyards that once belonged to Mafia dons.

And what better way to spice up your cooking than by preparing pasta made from wheat grown in a former hitman’s field. The sauce, of course, must come from tomatoes and olives you just cannot refuse — also grown on former Mafia estates.

The produce is the result of a project known as the "Consortium of Hope", which puts lands and villas confiscated from the Mafia to good use by creating jobs for unemployed youth, teaching people new trades and raising anti-Mafia consciousness. [continue]

From Reuters: Law on Pizza Purity a Mouthful.

It may be too early to talk about Pizza Police, but Italian legislators are mulling a detailed draft law laying down rules to protect real Neapolitan pizza.

The draft law to separate pure pizza from the putative kind — all three pages, eight articles and six sub-clauses of it — was published under the state seal in the Official Gazzette on Tuesday.

It decrees that a Nepolitan pizza must be round and no more than 35 centimeters in diameter. The center should not be higher than 0.3 cm and the crust cannot rise over two centimeters.

The law specifies what kind of flour, salt, and yeast and tomatoes have to be used. The sub clauses go even further.

Margherita, the classic type, must be topped not with just any type of mozzarella but mozzarella "from the southern appenine" mountains.

And restaurateurs beware, you can't call a pizza a "Margherita extra" unless it is topped with mozzarella made from buffalo milk -- a southern Italian specialty. [continue]

From the New York Times: Mustard Isn't So Yellow Anymore.

When Elie-Arnaud Denoix and his father, Louis, dusted off the family's recipe for moutarde violette — mustard mixed with grape must — in 1986, the only other person here in the Limousin region making this ancient preparation was "one very old woman who just made a little bit," Elie-Arnaud Denoix said. "We knew that when she died, that would be it for moutarde violette — unless we started making it again," he said.

Given that the word mustard comes from mustum, Latin for grape must, the loss of what was once a standard type of mustard seemed, to Mr. Denoix, both ironic and somewhat poignant. Besides, he'd miss it. [continue]

You'll need a NYT password to read the rest of the article.

Related:
Recipe: Grilled Salmon With Moutarde Violette and Caraway Sauce - New York Times

A couple of weeks ago a friend showed me his copy of The Okinawa Program, saying "this is how I'd like to eat." The book explains the traditional diet of Okinawa, and suggests how the rest of us can adopt similar eating habits. The Okinawans, you see, live to an extremely ripe old age.

So tonight I asked Google about the Okinawan diet, and came up with this healthiest diet on earth article:

There exists a place on our planet where 100-year-olds live in their own homes and tend their own gardens. It's a place where breast cancer is so rare that screening mammography is not needed and where the three leading killers in our culture — heart disease, stroke and cancer — occur with the lowest frequency in the world. Where people maintain a healthy weight — without dieting — throughout life (the average Body Mass Index o the senior citizens is 21!). Where women live to be 86 years old — on average — and when they do pass on, the cause of death is generally classified as "old age" since autopsies reveal no discernible cause.

This place is the Japanese island-state of Okinawa, home to the healthiest people on Earth. A 25-year research project, the Okinawan Centenarian Study, found that there are more than 400 people aged 100 or older in a population of 1.3 million. [continue]

You might also like to visit the Okinawa Centenarian Study site. Most interesting.

Related:
Want to live to be 100? - The Guardian
Okinawans have world's longest average lifespan - canoe.ca
Okinawa-Diet.com (Companion website for the Okinawa diet books.)

I never would have thought of growing olives on Pender Island, but somebody has. From Straight.com: Pender Island olive oil is now growing on the branch.

A visit to an olive grove in New Zealand last year and subsequent tasting of some excellent oils got me thinking. The cool and wet climate I experienced that day is just like the British Columbia coast. Why can't we grow olives to make olive oil? A bit of Internet surfing, a few phone calls, and before I knew it, I was on the ferry to Pender Island. A quick drive from the ferry, and I was looking at my first Canadian olive grove. The slim trees with narrow, silvery leaves looked out of place somehow, but dozens of them sloped in perfect rows from the top of a small hill down to the ocean, which surrounds the grove on three sides, bathing the property with the warm Mediterranean-like currents necessary to the survival of the tender saplings. [continue]

Related:
Plants Database: Detailed information on Olive Tree (Olea europaea)
Olives on Pender Island, BC, Canada - from the All About Olives discussion board.

I'll confess that I have a bit of a weakness for cookbooks, and for browsing through recipes. I've got more cookbooks than any sane person needs, and I've visited more recipe websites than I can count. Today I'm going to tell you about my favourite recipe website of them all: Recipezaar. Go on, take a look at the site. It's amazing.

You can browse all through Recipezaar without joining, but it's worth signing up so you'll have access to all of the site's features. Registration is free.

Once you join, you get your own cookbook space on Recipezaar. Find a recipe you like, then click "add to my cookbook" and that recipe will be saved in your Recipezaar cookbook for later reference. You can also add recipes to your cooking plan, and add recipe ingredients to your shopping list. There are other handy features, too, like the advanced recipe search. Oh, and if you click "print this" while reading a recipe, you'll be taken to a printer-friendly version of that recipe, complete with nutritional information. Very useful.

I could go on and on about Recipezaar, but then you might think I'm affiliated with the site somehow, and I'm not. I'm just addicted, that's all. And anyway, I have to stop blogging now; I've gotta go choose a truffle recipe....

Coffeegeek.com has all sorts of interesting things to read, like how to make a shot in the dark, how to make an espresso con panna, and even — be still my beating heart! — how to make latte art. On to the latte art directions, then:

Much like rubbing your tummy and tapping your head, pouring latte art requires that you do two things at the same time. Pour the milk at a consistent and even rate AND shake the pitcher side to side with the even tempo of a metronome.

Use a wide mouth cup. Ideally I like a smaller size (6oz) but some might find a larger 12oz size to work better. The trick is with the wide mouth you will more easily see the design develop and if anything the wide mouth can assist in its development. [continue]

A recent benefit for a New York theatre company featured "updated versions of Elizabethan recipes" — in other words, the kind of thing Shakespeare might have eaten. Here's an excerpt from the resulting New York Times article: Shakespearean Diet: Pasta, No Coffee.

"As early as the 1500's in England they had tortellini recipes," said Francine Segan, the author of "Shakespeare's Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook" (Random House, 2003) and the culinary adviser for the evening.

Hard to believe, but tortellini is there in "The Accomplisht Cook," written in 1660 by the English chef Robert May. He was the Emeril Lagasse of his time, gaining notoriety while working in several noble households and famous for such stunts as baking a deer-shaped loaf of bread that bled wine when pricked. He wrote the first edition of his cookbook at 70, recording over a thousand recipes from his career, including those for liver pâté, stuffed lobster and even saffron chicken baked in a bread bowl. The recipe for tortelleti, as he calls it, advises the reader to take "pease green or dry," boil them and add fried onions, sugar and spices; then, spreading this mixture on dough to "make little pasties," boil them and serve them in a "fine clean dish."

"They didn't top it with sauce," Ms. Segan explained. "Since pasta and tortellini were so expensive and special, they would top it only with nutmeg, Parmesan and sugar."

It is impossible to say exactly what Shakespeare ate, but one can make educated guesses. Excavations around the site of the old Globe have uncovered mounds of oyster shells, Ms. Segan said. Oysters were served both at taverns as a pretheater snack and inside the theater itself, the Elizabethan equivalent of ballpark franks. Shakespeare's frequent mention of them ("love may transform me to an oyster," says Benedict in "Much Ado About Nothing") makes it all but certain that he slurped on oysters or ate oyster pie during long days at the theater. [continue]

(Update: the New York Times has moved the article to their archives, and now they're charging for access. Phooey.)

Francine Segan's website includes two recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen: Salmon with Violets and "Pears" in Broth.

Related:
Shakespeare's Kitchen - francinesegan.com

The book:
Shakespeare's Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook - amazon.ca

From Wine Spectator's question of the day, we have this bit of information about the chaptalization of wine.

Question: What does it mean to say that a wine has been chaptalized?

Answer: Chaptalization is a process in which sugar is added to the grape must before or during fermentation in order to increase the alcoholic content of the wine. This practice, also referred to as "must enrichment," is common in the colder climates of northern Europe, where the grapes' sugar levels are too low to produce wine with the desired alcoholic content.

Cistercian monks used this technique back in the 18th century by adding honey to grapes that were insufficiently sweet. However, chaptalization, named after Jean Antoine Chaptal, Napoleon's minister of agriculture, uses sugar instead of honey. Today, sucrose, in the form of beet or cane sugar, is used. Upon mixing, the sucrose is immediately converted into other sugars (dextrose and fructose), which are indistinguishable from the naturally occurring sugar already in the grapes.

Related:
Inside Wine: Chapitalization

From china.org.cn: The History of Chinese Imperial Food.

Chinese imperial food dates back to slave society. Ever since there were emperors and palaces, there has been imperial food, which was served mainly to the emperors, their wives and concubines, and the royal families. Emperors used their power to collect the best delicacies and called upon the best cooks to make delicious food for them. Imperial food represented a dynasty’s best cuisine.

Although imperial food was made exclusively for the royal family, generals, ministers, and nobility, it was the peasants, herders, and fishermen who provided the raw materials, craftsmen who made the kitchen utensils, the cooking staff who provided the service, civil officials who named the dishes, and protocol officials who drafted the dietary and culinary rules. Imperial food comprised the dietetic culture of the Chinese palaces and it is part of China’s valuable cultural heritage.

Imperial foods often were improved dishes invented by the common people. The inventors were not princes, dukes, or ministers, but cooks and commoners. The original model for a dish might have been similar to a dish you once prepared for yourself.

Food preparation is impossible without cooks, so emperors in ancient times cherished excellent cooks. The Historical Records by Sima Qian, a famous historian of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220), reports that Yi Yin, the first famous prime minister in known Chinese history, helped Tang (the first ruler of the Shang Dynasty, enthroned 1766 B.C. – 1760 B.C.) destroy Jie (the last ruler of the Xia Dynasty, enthroned 1818 B.C. – 1766 B.C.).

Yi Yin had been a famous cook before he became prime minister. Yi Yin, whose original name was Ah Heng, was a slave of the Youxinshi family. He wanted to convince Tang of his good ideas, but lacked a way, so he brought his kitchen utensils with him and won Tang’s trust by demonstrating his cooking skills. Tang described him as cooking delicious dishes and having the ability to govern the country, so he appointed Yi Yin as his prime minister. [continue].

From Slate: Offal Good.

Should you be whipping up a platter of crispy pigs' tails for a cocktail party any time soon, you might find, after persuading your butcher to order the tails for you and getting the squiggly things home, that they're bristling with little, unappetizing hairs. Fear not. In his new cookbook, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, British chef Fergus Henderson, of London's trendy St. John restaurant, advises, "By the by, dealing with any slightly hairy extremities of pig, I recommend a throw-away Bic razor (hot towels and shaving cream not required)." If you can't imagine hacking away at the peach fuzz on the curlicue tail of a dead swine, think again. The publication of Henderson's book heralds a new fashion in food, already discernable in various hot restaurants in New York: offal, the organs and extremities (nose, cheeks, tail, feet) of butchered animals, has become chic.

Foie gras, truffles, and other traditional staples of gastronomic excess now find themselves cheek by jowl on upscale menus with, well, cheeks and jowls. When diners at Babbo, Mario Batali's elegant New York Italian restaurant, fork out $10 for "Testa," they're paying top dollar for a substance made by boiling the head of a pig, skimming off bits of brain, gristle, and other effluvia that bubble to the surface, and turning it into a salami. Is this irony? Slumming? Or a culinary example of "The Emperor's New Clothes"? [continue].

Related:
St John Restaurant, London

From National Geographic: Himalaya Honey Hunters Cling to Cliffside Tradition.

Twice a year high in the Himalayan foothills of central Nepal teams of men gather around cliffs that are home to the world's largest honeybee, Apis laboriosa. As they have for generations, the men come to harvest the Himalayan cliff bee's honey.

The harvest ritual, which varies slightly from community to community, begins with a prayer and sacrifice of flowers, fruits, and rice. Then a fire is lit at the base of the cliff to smoke the bees from their honeycombs.

From above, a honey hunter descends the cliff harnessed to a ladder by ropes. As his mates secure the rope and ladder from the top and ferry tools up down as required, the honey hunter fights territorial bees as he cuts out chunks of honey from the comb. [continue]

From the Toronto Star: Trying to go with the slow.

An egg is never just an egg, especially at this time of year. It is a symbol in an edible oval package.

The egg is linked to the budding of spring. On the Passover table, a roasted egg represents a ritual offering and rebirth. At Easter, children play with brightly decorated eggs, oblivious they are participating in a tradition that traces back to a time when early Christians dyed eggs red to symbolize the blood of Christ. (...)

Paula Wolfert takes a keen interest in slow eggs. She explores their nature in her latest book, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes For The Passionate Cook (John Wiley & Sons, $53.95, 2003).

Wolfert's Sephardic Oven-Roasted Eggs mimic an old Mediterranean tradition of burying eggs overnight in the ashes of a dying fire. Drops of albumen seep from the shell and blacken, hinting of the subtle smoky flavour within. Peeled, the eggs are tea-coloured, with mottling and, sometimes, darker veins of colour.

But slow doesn't necessarily mean better.

For Huevos Haminados, a Sephardic Passover specialty, eggs are simmered up to 12 hours in a bath with red onion skins or Turkish coffee grounds. Wolfert re-creates this in a slow cooker, adding to the water handfuls of dried red onion skins, olive oil, sea salt and ground cumin. She keeps the lid off to lower the temperature.

Curious, I try it. [continue]

The article includes many interesting tidbits about eggs, and some recipes, too. You must at least go see the photo of the mabled tea eggs.

Related book:
The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen : Recipes for the Passionate Cook

From abc.net.au: Roman gladiators were fat vegetarians.

Roman gladiators were overweight vegetarians and not the muscle-bound men protrayed by actors like Russell Crowe, anthropologists say.

Austrian scientists analysed the skeletons of two different types of gladiators, the myrmillos and retiariae, found at the ancient site of Ephesus, near Selsuk in Turkey.

"Tests performed on bits of bone taken from the skeletons of some 70 gladiators buried at Ephesus seem to prove that they ate mainly barley, beans and dried fruit," said Dr Karl Grossschmidt, who took part in the study by the Austrian Archaeological Institute

"This diet, which has been mentioned in the oral history, is rather sad but it gave the gladiators a lot of strength even if it made them fat," said Grossschmidt who is a member of the University of Vienna's Institute of Histology and Embryology.

The Austrian palaeoanthropologists relied on a method known as elementary microanalysis that allows scientists to determine what a human being ate during his or her lifetime. [continue].

From csmonitor.com: Food: his passion, his science.

Cooking a cheese soufflé can be tricky. Despite following the recipe meticulously, using the finest ingredients, and heating the oven to the perfect temperature, you can still end up with a cheese cookie instead of a fluffy, brown-topped soufflé intended to impress your guests. The result, it seems, is often arbitrary.

But help is at hand. Tucked away in their laboratories, a bunch of dedicated scientific foodies are toiling away to solve the soufflé problem and other culinary conundrums: Should jam be cooked in a copper pan? When gnocchi come floating to the surface of boiling water, does that mean they are cooked? Molecular gastronomy - a branch of food science that focuses on cooking and food preparation (rather than on the chemical makeup of food, as traditional food science tends to do) - has the answers. [continue]

From foodnavigator.com: Basil and thyme oils combat foodborne bacteria.

Previous research has shown that thyme and basil have antimicrobial potential. Building on this research, scientists at Ghent university in Belgium opted to investigate the antimicrobial impact of thyme and basil essential oil and their major constituents towards Shigella.

According to the researchers who published their findings in the February issue of Food Microbiology, thyme essential oil and its major constituents thymol and carvacrol decontaminated Shigella inoculated lettuce.

They also found that thyme and basil essential oil, and their major compounds thymol, estragol, carvacrol, linalool and p-cymene, inhibited Shigella in an agar diffusion method. [continue]

This ranks right up there with the use of vinegar as a disinfectant in medieval times. Who knew?

Related:
Shigellosis
FSNET April 2, 2003

From Pigeons and Pottage, an article about the dawn of Tudor cooking:

Think of Tudor times, and an image of Henry VIII might come to mind, feasting on huge sides of meat and slinging them over his shoulder after stripping them to the bone. His table would be laden with roasted exotic birds being torn roughly by revellers, their leather flagons overflowing with ale and cider.

But the image is a false one, with table manners 500 years ago absolutely exemplary for both the rich and the poor. Much importance was placed on ‘aping your betters’ so monarchs would have to be the best behaved of all when it came to eating and drinking. Henry and his like may have the reputation of being oafish at mealtimes, but it is thoroughly undeserved, according to Ian Pearce of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. "That awful Hollywood image of throwing bones over shoulders is a load of rubbish," he said. "Table etiquette was very particular and Henry would have had to behave better than anyone."

In fact the Tudors took every aspect of food and drink seriously; moving on hugely from the more basic medieval practices. For example, ‘plates’ made of slabs of stale bread were replaced with wooden platters for the less well-off houses and pewter ones for the wealthy. Though forks were still not in use, with people eating mainly with their fingers, knives were put to good use. Breads, puddings and pies were always cut up in a particular way, and people were very careful to ‘mind their fingers’ when dishing out food. "Say there was pie for example - when you were cutting it up you wouldn't let your fingers touch anyone else's slice. You would wash your hands before and after eating with rosewater too," added Ian. [continue]

From the International Herald Tribune: A master pursues the secrets of cheese.

PARIS — Mother Noella Marcellino likes cheese a lot, though what intrigues her most is not its middle but its rind. And on the rind her delight is the Geotrichum candidum fungus, Gc for short, that flourishes on the Bethlehem cheese made by her abbey, Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

Strains of Gc are also found in such cheeses as Reblochon and Brie, doing good work in enhancing flavor and repelling pathogens. They are so diverse that they even vary from one cheese cave to another in the Auvergne - Mother Noella found 14 different strains among seven St. Nectaire-cheese makers - and all in all they testify to the richness of creation, as Mother Noella summarized in her doctoral dissertation, "Biodiversity of Geotrichum candidum Strains Isolated from Traditional French Cheese." She is popularly known as The Cheese Nun.

Mother Noella doesn't much like the sobriquet, finding it, well, a bit cheesy, and wasn't terribly happy that it is the title of Pat Thompson's excellent TV documentary soon to be shown on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. It was the prioress of her convent who told her to go with The Cheese Nun because it is catchy and fungi alone are not immediately appealing. The prioress knows about such things because as Dolores Hart she was a Hollywood star famed for giving Elvis his first screen kiss. "I think it's great," Mother Dolores told her. "No one's going to watch a film about biodiversity." [continue].

Related:
Abbey of Regina Laudis
Nun has cheese down to a science
Nun's cheese expertise wins blessing of French

From the Guardian:

It is Burns Day this Sunday and a good many Scots will be honouring the world's greatest bard with a trip to the chippie for the world's greatest fast food: the deep-fried haggis. [continue]

And I bet you thought regular haggis sounded disgusting enough.

Ancient roots of cream tea discovered. From The BBC:

Historians in Devon have unearthed evidence which they claim proves the traditional cream tea originated in the county some 1,000 years ago.

Local historians have been studying ancient manuscripts as part of research leading up to next year's 900th anniversary of the granting of Tavistock's Royal Charter by King Henry I in 1105.

After piecing together fragments of manuscripts, they have discovered that the monks of Tavistock's Benedictine Abbey could have created the famous dish to reward workers who helped to restore the building.

The Abbey was established in the 10th Century, but was plundered and badly damaged by Vikings in 997 AD.

The task of restoring the Abbey was undertaken by Ordulf, Earl of Devon whose father had been responsible for establishing the Abbey.

Ordulf was helped by local workers who the monks fed with bread, clotted cream and strawberry preserves.

The cream teas were so popular that the monks continued to serve them to passing travellers. [continue]

Now you see, that's just one more thing to thank monks for.

Related:

Tavistock Abbey - from the Catholic Encyclopedia
Clotted Cream -definition from allrecipes.com
Traditional English Afternoon Tea - from myhouseandgarden.com

Feel like baking? I've tried lots of scone recipes; the best come from the Ballymaloe Bread Book. You'll find links to a few of the recipes from Ballymaloe here. Oh, and don't miss the Ballymaloe Orange Butter Scones recipe. Yum.

From the Globe and Mail: Researcher cuts the cheese, high-tech style.

A researcher from the University of Wisconsin at Madison has figured out a better way to slice cheese — just use a laser.

"At any other university, people would have just laughed. But this is Wisconsin. It's cheese. And this is no laughing matter," said Xiaochun Li, a mechanical engineering professor and laser expert. [continue]

There's lots more detail in an article from optics.org, Lasers turn cheese into art.

(Thanks to Fr. Jim Tucker for mentioning cheese-cutting lasers on Dappled Things. I never would have thought to search for information about this before reading his blog today.)

A related suggestion:
Laser cut pizza - from halfbakery.com

You once learned about the Periodic Table of the Elements. Here's the Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad.

From the BBC: Top UK dish ‘hooked French first’.

It is thought to be the quintessential British meal, but new research claims the original idea for fish and chips came from Jewish and French dishes.

A study of the multicultural nature of UK cuisine suggests the meal was influenced by immigrants 150 years ago.

Professor Panikos Panayi of Leicester's De Montfort University has begun a £6,000 research project to investigate the global influence on British food.

He said fish and chips mixed "French frites with Jewish fish dishes". [continue]

Afghan bread rises to any occasion. From csmonitor.com:

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – From before dawn until long after dusk, there's always a line outside the bakery in my neighborhood in Kabul. Presumably, everyone in this line is there actually to buy bread, although watching an Afghan baker at work has its own entertainment value.

First, there's the matter of where the baker, Nasrullah, sits: right on top of the oven. It's a tandoor oven, basically a large clay pot with a hole in the top and a wood fire inside. Nasrullah squats as close to the lip of the oven as he can without becoming a long-lost brother of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Every few minutes, he takes a two-foot-long slab of dough and slaps it to the inner wall of the oven. Almost immediately, the dough gets puffy, turns tan, and emits an exquisite odor that draws Afghans from blocks around. Minutes later, the baker picks up two long iron tongs and gently tugs the bread from the tandoor wall and plops it in the waiting arms of his customer.

After burning myself a few times, I started bringing a light cloth to cover my arms, and to wrap over the bread to keep it warm until I got home. [continue]

Are you planning a Christmas menu and wondering what to have for dessert? We suggest riskrem, a decadently delicious rice-based pudding. It's served with fruit sauce drizzled on top, and —oh my, is very yummy.

From the Toronto Star: It's fry time for latkes.

It's a wonderful latke. Superbly shredded in the food processor. Captivatingly coloured orange thanks to sweet potatoes. Lovingly fried in oil for Hanukkah.

Okay, so the lovingly fried part is an exaggeration. Grudgingly and grumpily fried is more accurate.

Anyway, my Sweet Potato Latke (from a Mitchell Davis recipe) is a delicious deviation from the standard baking potato latke. This I know despite not being Jewish and having only minimal latke-eating experience.

These glorious sweet potato latkes were gratefully devoured by everyone who gathered Friday night for Hanukkah dinner (a week early owing to impending foreign travels). "I never tasted a latke so good," they took turns enthusing.

Maybe they were just being gracious, but anything fried in oil is welcome during the eight days of Hanukkah, which begins Friday at sundown.

Frying foods is a Hanukkah tradition to honour the miracle that happened when the Jewish people defeated the Syrians, returned to cleanse their temple and had only enough lamp oil to last one day. The flame somehow lasted eight days — long enough to press and prepare a new supply of oil (it was olive).

The miracle translates, in food terms, to oil-fried latkes becoming the quintessential Hanukkah food.

The article continues, and offers recipes for sweet potato latkes, apple cider brisket, and apple kugel.

Related articles:
Building a Better Potato Pancake
Aah, Love to Latke, Baby

Recipes:
Hanukkah recipes from Canadian Living
lots of latke recipes at Recipe Zaar
Latke recipes from jewish-food.org

So what's the traditional Christmas dinner in your neck of the woods? In much of Norway, it's an "acquired taste" thing called Lutefisk, described by some as "gelatinous white-lyed cod". Just in case you dare to try it, here are a couple of recipes from the Sons of Norway site, and here are some directions from BBC Internet's Lutefisk page:

Lutefisk - Norwegian meal made of dried fish

• Take some fish, preferably cod.


• Hang it in the sun for a month.


• When it's rock hard, take it down.

You now have "tørrfisk", which is dried fish. Smells awful. Tørrfisk can be kept for years. As long as it's kept dry.

Whenever you are in the mood for lutefisk, just get the tørrfisk from wherever you have stored it. Submerge the hard, dead, dried, smelly fish in caustic soda and leave it for 24 hours. The smell doesn't improve, but at least it becomes soft. (What doesn't become soft after a day in caustic soda?)

‘This must be wrong!’ you might think. But no, this is how it is done. When the fish looks gooey, heat it in warm water. Do not boil it, mind you. Boiling makes it rubbery, and you don't want that, it's bad enough as it is. And that's it! You have made yourself lutefisk.

This sounds horrible. And most people agree, it does taste like old, dried, dyed and re-heated fish. Norwegians use years of their life to get used to the squishy, semi-transparent piece of fishlike food wobbling on their plate soaked in grease, so do not give in on your first try. Keep your spirits up! [continue]

Related:
Lutefisk photos - aftenposten.no.
O Lutefisk - carol!

I stumbled upon this creepy bit of news at Jewish World Review: Accidental discovery led to doubts about safety of plastic.

Something was wrong with the mice eggs.

In two separate labs at Case Western Reserve University, researchers noticed a sudden mini-epidemic of defective chromosomes in August 1998.

And no one could say why.

Was it the food? The water?

Human error in handling the eggs?

After some anxious detective work, with months of valuable research in jeopardy, genetics professor Patricia Hunt made a surprising discovery:

When someone used the wrong soap to clean the plastic mice cages, a chemical - bisphenol-A, the same chemical that is used to make baby bottles, dental sealants, and linings for food and beverage cans - leached out of the plastic.

In the five years since that discovery, industry has continued to make millions of pounds of BPA, even though, the Case Western researchers learned, studies beginning in 1997 had claimed it was linked to problems such as enlarged prostates and decreased fertility.

"The first thing I wanted to do was go down to my kitchen and throw out every bit of plastic I had in my house," Hunt said. "I thought, ‘What is this stuff still doing on the market?’ " [continue]

Doesn't this make you want to go buy a bunch of glass containers?

Related:
Compound in plastic bottles causes abnormal pregnancies in mice - Case Western Reserve
Geneticists Find Component of Common Plastic Bottles Causes Abnormal Pregnancies in Mice
Common plastic ingredient linked to birth defects
Component in plastic bottles found to cause abnormal pregnancies in mice

Today I came across the most inspiring article I've read on the web in rather a while. It's the story of David Ansel, who makes soup in vast quantities. . . and delivers it to customers by bicycle. From csmonitor.com: Texas's freewheeling soupmaker.

Each week during soup season (read: not summer) he makes several hundred quarts of soup, by hand, from fresh ingredients. Then he loads the containers onto his custom bicycle trailer and pedals around the neighborhood to deliver them.

Folks who aren't at home leave a cooler and ice and a check for him. Folks who are home pop out to say hello, share a story, and inquire about his latest adventures. He also maintains an amusing and informative website (www.souppeddler.com), which includes weekly updates, such as the history of his latest offering. (...)

The inspiration for Ansel's business came from a trip he took with friends to Real de Catorce, Mexico. There, he watched a woman making and selling gorditas on the street. On the way home, he and his fellow travelers found themselves on a huge cloverleaf highway, each opting for a different fast-food restaurant at suppertime.

Comparing the experiences changed his life. Could something like this work in Austin? Soon after he returned home, he began his experiment. [continue]

Related:
Soup Peddler

From Hunting the White Truffle, an article at TravelIntelligence.net.

Truffles are born early in the summer and attach themselves by microscopic filaments to the trees under which they grow in mysterious harmony with the phases of the moon and the cycle of the tree's life. If there is sufficient rain in August the tubers can swell to a great size, ready for the truffle season in October. All attempts to seed them have proved vain; the white truffle is a parasite and can only grow wild.

In October, the Feria de Tartufo - the International Truffle Fair - transforms sleepy Alba into a hubbub of good-natured commerce. Gourmets stop and sniff as the all-pervading scent of truffles, of dark woodland places, of autumn, wafts from every shop and doorway. The excitement of the hunt is heightened by the cloak-and-dagger activities of the dealers, who dart down side streets flanked by bodyguards, their attaché cases crammed with truffles and their wallets stuffed with bank notes. All truffle dealing is done in cash, never credit cards or promissory notes. A series of dry summers has pushed up the truffle price to $50 per ounce this year, more than five times their weight in silver.

The morning market in the Via Maestra is packed with stalls selling the knobbly tubers, graded in boxes according to size and quality. Texture is important, the truffles must be firm. Colour matters too: the paler the truffle the more highly it is prized. Discolouration and pitted marks are out. But most important is the aroma. The experts - from all over the world -Japan, USA, Germany, Venezuela, take a long time sniffing and conferring in low voices over the wooden boxes. Their selection will be dispatched in polystyrene boxes inside containers lined with dry ice, to reach their destination within twenty-four hours. [continue]

See also: Midnight in the Piedmont: Chasing the Wild Truffle.

More on truffles:
The hunt for the white truffle
Truffle hunt
truffle.org
truffles - from restaurant.org
A guide to truffles - Forbes.com
On the hunt for truffles - Here-now.org

Truffle news articles:
Bad weather boosts truffle prices -BBC, 2002
Truffle harvest unearths record Mercury News, Oct 15th, 2003. (Truffle farms in Australia)
New Australian truffle genus unearthed -abc.net.au, January, 2003
Thieves seize truffle-hunters' prized sniffer dogs - Telegraph, 2002

From the BBC: Could we stomach a wartime meal?

An evening meal of cheese soup, Woolton pie and perhaps some eggless sponge to finish ... dried egg for breakfast or carrot sandwiches as a snack.

The World War II diet may sound alien to twenty-first century ears, but it has been shown to be an extremely healthy way to live.

Weekly rations included meat and dairy products, and families were encouraged to grow their own vegetables in gardens or allotments.

The surprise about the diet in the austere war years is how close it is to what nutritionists advise us to eat now - even if some of the recipes might not sound too appealing. [continue]

We've less than a week until Thanksgiving (here in Canada, Thanksgiving is the second Monday in October) so I thought I'd point out a couple of unusual ways to cook your Thanksgiving turkey.

The first is the Trash Can Turkey recipe from RecipeZaar. The intro blurb states: "A whole turkey roasted upright on a stake under a metal trash can. The moistest, tastiest turkey I've ever eaten. This is a Boy Scout Recipe. It's just great!"

And the second... oh, you won't believe this. Somebody's figured out how to cook turkey in the compost bin. Get this:

Malcolm Beck, composter extraordinaire and owner of Garden Ville in San Antonio, has a great composted turkey dinner story. He composts in large static piles (8+ feet high) turned every couple of weeks to a month or so, and some of his mixes maintain very high core temperatures for over a week after turning. Being an experimental sort, he decided one recent Thanksgiving to try cooking a few turkeys in one of his piles. He drilled a hole into one of the pile cores (I think it was shredded brush, sawdust, and manure, moistened with waste cola) and lowered a few carefull wrapped turkeys double-sealed in plastic bags by rope into the core (reading between 160 and 180 degrees F) and re-filled the hole.

Several hours later he retrieved the turkeys, too hot to touch, and reports that they were among the tenderest, juiciest, flavorful turkeys he ever ate. I would imagine that in this case, Pasteurization was adequate for relatively safe dining. As in most of his experiments, he documented the enterprise with slides.

And you thought deep fried turkey was unusual!

Update

Here's another one you should read, kids:
How the turkey nearly cooked our goose ("The flames shot 10 feet into the air out of the old, rusty barrel smoker in the backyard as we stood dumbfounded.") From the Christian Science Monitor, November 2003.

From chaihana.com: Making Traditional Turkmen Bread.

Here, Gulya is adding sawdust and kindling to the tamdyr, a traditional clay and brick oven. The tamdyr, as you can see, is about waist high and shaped like a huge anthill. The walls are about a foot thick. Gulya's tamdyr was about 10 yards outside of her house.

After Gulya pours in the kindling, she sets it on fire and lets it burn for about 40 minutes or so until the soot that clings to the inside walls of the tamdyr is white rather than black. While the fuel is burning, she covers the top of it with a piece of sheet metal. [continue]

From nature.com, this essential tidbit: Lasers reveal why the cookie crumbles.

Biscuits break because of how they cool, British scientists have discovered. Their insights could help manufacturers stamp out fragile cookies that crumble in transit - or in your tea.

As a biscuit cools, moisture diffuses from its centre to its edges, say Qasim Saleem, of Loughborough University, and colleagues. The shrinking centre and expanding edges create a build-up of stress that can lace a cracker with tiny cracks. The problem is worst in low-fat, low-sugar biscuits. [continue]

From the Scotsman: The day ancient Britons left their fish suppers.

Ancient Britons switched from eating fish to meat as soon as they started farming, scientists have discovered.

The change came suddenly 5,200 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic period, when the population abandoned fish in favour of cereal crops and meat, new research shows. For the preceding 3,800 years, during the Mesolithic period, seafood was a major part of both coastal and inland communities? diets.

The discovery emerged from an analysis of bones from 167 Neolithic and 19 Mesolithic skeletons.

Marine and terrestrial foods leave different isotopes, or atomic forms, of carbon in the bones. By testing for this chemical signature, it is possible to investigate dietary habits from skeletons.

The scientists, led by Michael Richards from the University of Bradford, found a strong marine isotope signal in the Mesolithic bones but the carbon in the Neolithic bones bore a distinct meat hallmark. [continue]

Related:
Why Did Ancient Britons Stop Eating Fish? - National Geographic. (Lots more detail.)

Banana land - a beautiful and fascinating set of photos from Don Ellis at kleptography.com.

Link found at Metafilter.

From eGullet: In Good Taste.

My name is Ugo DiFonte and I was the food taster for Duke Federico Basillione DiVincelli from the summer of 1529 to the winter of 1534, when he was poisoned. But more about that later. I have written a book about my experiences called The Food Taster. But I have been asked to write something here because there are people reading this who don't know anything about food tasters. Please be patient. I just learned how to write with a quill and now I have to learn how to use this stronzolo computer!

First, some history about my calling. It is a calling and not a profession. No one in his right mind decides to become a food taster. It is a calling because when a Lord or an Emperor calls you, you come. There used to be a lot of calling in Roman Times and even before. Back then, food tasters dropped like flies. None of them lived long enough to go down in history. Most of them never had names, or if they did have names they didn't live long enough for anyone to find out what they were. Mostly, it was, "Hey you. Taste this."

For a while it got so bad that some emperors used to take a little bit of arsenic every day to build a resistance. That seems stupid to me. You can take a little bit of arsenic every day for ten years, but what happens if someone slips some meadow saffron in your polenta? [continue]

Related book:
The Food Taster

The Italian government is trying to reinstate Friday fasting. From the Guardian:

Silvio Berlusconi's government has made its own, characteristically unconventional contribution to the growing debate in Europe on how to curb obesity.

In a newspaper interview published this week, the health minister in Italy's right-of-centre administration, Girolamo Sirchia, announced that he would be doing what he could to reinstate Friday as a day of fasting throughout Italy.

"Apart from being an ancient religious tradition, the weekly fast is a useful health measure," Mr Sirchia told the daily La Stampa. "It has a scientific basis. It helps to purify the system of the effects of an unhealthy diet."

In a country, moreover, where the state continues to be present in many areas of society, the government should be able to ensure that its ideas are put into practice. Mr Sirchia's cabinet colleagues are in a position to dictate what is offered to hospital patients, school students and workers in Italy's still-extensive public sector. [continue]

I've wondered how this HadiaBucks thing would turn out.

Lately, the coffee in Masset, a small town on the remote island of Haida Gwaii, tastes especially sweet. That's because HaidaBucks, a small indigenous-owned coffee house and restaurant located there, is savouring its victory over Starbucks and its claims of trademark infringement.

In true David-vs.-Goliath fashion, HaidaBucks stared down a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise. "We won," said co-owner Darin Swanson. "We did more than defend our name; we defended our honour as indigenous peoples, and our right to our heritage."

It began when Starbucks alleged that the small, struggling business was violating Starbucks' trademark rights. Threatened with legal action if they did not change their name or logo, HaidaBucks did not back down.

Instead, the bucks enlisted the help of a Victoria law firm Arvay Finlay, and launched a massive web-based campaign with the help of West Virginia, USA businessman Lane Baldwin. Now, after months of legal wrangling and a swell of public support for HaidaBucks, it appears that Starbucks is the one that backed down.

HaidaBucks has recently received a letter from StarBucks which concludes "Starbucks considers this matter closed". And with that, HaidaBucks' triumph is complete. [continue]

Link found at the Dominion Weblog.

Related links:
HaidaBucks Cafe
How to tell the difference between HaidaBucks and Starbucks
HaidaBucks t-shirts and mugs
Starbucks to sue aboriginal cafe, HaidaBucks - CBC, April 25th, 2003

Are you bored with your diet? Head over to edible com to order something a bit unusual. Canned black scorpions? Barbequed worm crisps? Smoked rattlesnake? Or will it be chocolate-covered worms? If you can't decide, maybe the canned mixed insects would be best.

Now, what to drink? Those seeking an aphrodisiac might opt for pearl dust to stir into champagne. And yes, there's snake vodka, but surely you wouldn't want that so early in the day. Why, you probably haven't even had your morning coffee yet, poor dear. That brings us to:

Kopi Luwak

This is the rarest and most definitely extraordinary coffee in the world! This coffee has been selected for us by paradoxurus hermaphroditis. Better known as the Common Palm Civet Cat. It prowls the Sumamtran coffee plantations at night, choosing to eat only the finest, ripest cherries. The stones (which eventually form coffee beans) are then collected by cleaning through the droppings.

Kopi Luwak, as it is known, is considered to be the finest coffee by native Sumatrans. Kopi Luwak has a rich chocolate like flavour and no aftertaste, which is unique. The flavour is due to the fact that the coffee has been partially fermented by passing through the digestive system of the Kopi.

Bet you won't find that at Starbucks.

(Edible.com is a Flash site. Start here if you want an animated introduction, with sound. If you'd rather go directly to the site's content, start here instead. The non-Flash version of edible.com is here.)

Related links:
Kopi Luwak: An Indonesian Island Treasure
Kopi Luwak

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Chocolate-covered scorpions

Hmmm! Look what I found about matrimony cake over at the Oxford English Dictionary website:

‘Matrimonial cake’. The classic 4" x 6" OED dictionary slip sitting on the table in the slip-filing room at the OED's offices one day in 1992 was duly catchworded. The slip, however, came not with the customary quotation but rather with a confection: a dessert, made with my very own hands, consisting of two layers of a crumbly sweet oat mixture with a date filling in the middle. Home baking was admittedly a somewhat unorthodox method for getting a Canadianism into the OED, but it was apparently not unappreciated by the OED lexicographers, who perhaps were too busy eating to complain about the lack of a proper citation. Known in most of Canada as ‘date squares’, this dessert has acquired this matrimonial moniker in Western Canada (where I grew up), for reasons that even the OED has alas been unable to determine. For my efforts were successful, and ‘matrimonial cake’ is one of the new Canadian entries that have appeared in OED Online. The word is now properly exemplified by quotations, the sources being a 1944 Canadian cookbook unearthed by our Canadian library researcher, Alice Munro's 1971 collection of short stories Lives of Girls and Women, and the Hamilton Spectator newspaper that I found on one of our newspaper CD-ROMs when an OED lexicographer emailed me for a postdating. [continue]

It was always called "matrimony cake" in our family. I didn't know that the term is a Canadianism, much less a Western Canadianism.

Anyway, one of my grandma's cookbooks has a recipe for matrimony cake in it, and the publication date is 1938. Will the OED give me a prize for finding an earlier recipe than the one they have?

See also:
Buttertarts. Because I can't think about Canadian baking without making some of these.

Oh, the things I find at the BBC. Like this: Recipes that won't go down well with a film crew.

1. Chocolate scorpions
You will need: 12 dead scorpions, a big bar of chocolate, a big pan of boiling water, a big heatproof bowl. Put the chocolate in the bowl, and gently rest it in the pan of boiling water. Once the chocolate has melted, carefully remove it from the water, taking extra care not to burn your fingers. Dip the scorpions in the chocolate, and allow to dry. Now eat. Yummy! (PS: Scorpion stings are not lethal once they're dead.)

Ha ha! Crazy Brits. But surely nobody would really... oh wait. Cybercandy offers milk chocolate scorpions.

A genuine chinese scorpion coated in the finest belgian milk chocolate. The scorpions are specially bred in the markets of China and are reputed to have many excellent health properties when eaten. They are subjected to processing under a high temperature prior to being made into chocolate confections, which destroys their toxins, they are 100% safe to eat and are in fact a tasty snack! They come presented in a clear and stylish acrylic presentation dish. (Please not scorpions are very delicate and sometimes breakages can occur we cannot accept returns on this basis)

The mind boggles.

Hate those long dinner parties where you get stuck between the same two mind-numbing personalities all night? A Swiss railroad engineer has come up with a solution -- a dinner table that is not only designed to work in the same fashion as the floor of a revolving restaurant, but one that may also "improve human communicaiton and promote world peace."

On his drawing board are plans for a long rectangular table with attached seats that continually move en masse around the perimiter. (Sort of like how sushi orbits around the chef in one of those conveyor belt Japanese restaurants.) The way it is set up, the people sitting to your left and right remain constant for the evening, but the person located directly opposite from you changes every 20 minutes or so as the night goes on.

This totally mechanized system is merely a modern hi-tech version of an old British banquet hall custom. When the hostess rang a small bell between courses, the gentlemen (who had been seated alternately between the ladies) were required to stand up and move two seats to the left; a practice referred to in the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland.

From Restaurants 2003, an article in the print version of City Food.

I'm a big fan of popsicles. Not the kind you buy in a store (why would I pay some company to add extra sugar, chemicals, and fake colour?) but rather the kind I make in my freezer, usually out of pineapple juice. Yum.

From the Great Idea Finder, here's the history of the popsicle.

Frank Epperson, a then eleven-year-old, invented the the Popsicle and the invention was accidental.

One day Frank mixed some soda water powder and water, which was a popular drink in those days. He left the mixture on the back porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. The temperature dropped to a record low that night and the next day Frank had a stick of frozen soda water to show his friends at school. Eighteen years later-in 1923- Frank Epperson remembered his frozen soda water mixture and began a business producing Epsicles in seven fruit flavors. The name was later changed to the Popsicle. One estimate says three million Popsicle frozen treats are sold each year. There are more them thirty different flavors to choose from, but Popsicle Industries says the general flavor favorite through the years has remained "taste-tingling orange".

Did they try pineapple?

Related links:
Kid inventors in history
Why is a Popsicle called a quiescently frozen confection? (It is?)
You say Popsicle, I say quiescently frozen confection (Oh. It is.)
Popsicle - from HungryMonster.com
The Kids Hall of Fame: Frank Epperson (more info, slightly different version)
Let's Talk Food: Chill out with a Popsicle

Related book:
The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle: And Other Surprising Stories About Inventions

Have you heard about the Julie/Julia Project? Julie Powell has spent the last year cooking her way through one of Julia Child's cookbooks, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and blogging about it.

I admire Julie's tenacity. I have far too many cookbooks (over 60, yipes) but would never be able to stick to just one of them for a whole year. Imagine making 536 recipes from the same book!

Anyway, there's an article in the New York Times today about Julie and her project: A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking.

Julie Powell is in the homestretch. She has 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete what possibly only Julia Child has done. If she meets her Aug. 26 deadline, Ms. Powell will have cooked all 524 recipes in the 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Ms. Powell began climbing this culinary Mount Everest last summer, on Aug. 26, and has kept an amusing, irreverent and increasingly popular daily Web log of her progress on Salon, called the Julie/Julia Project (blogs.salon.com/0001399). [continue] (NYT requires free registration.)

It was the end of the 1700s and the Napoleonic wars raged. As Napoleon pushed forward into Russia, the retreating Russian army left a stripped and ravaged countryside . . . and no food. As a result, Napoleon's army was suffering more casualties from scurvy, malnutrition, and starvation than from enemy muskets. The French government offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could develop a method of preserving food.

Nicolas Appert, an obscure candy-maker, brewer, and baker took up the challenge. He had a theory that if fresh foods were put in airtight containers and sufficient heat applied, they would keep. After 14 years of experimentation, he won the prize--given to him by Napoleon himself.

Appert packed his foods in bottles, corked them, and submerged them in boiling water. Without realizing it, he sterilized them, stopping bacterial spoilage. [continue]

The excerpt above is from the history of processed foods. Isn't it fascinating? Now you can tell your grandma about Napoleon and Appert while you can those peaches.

Related links:
The invention of canning - from cancentral.com
Canning history: from the beginning to modern days (Interesting bit about canning sardines in Norway. Illustrations.) - from sommecan.com
About canned food: whence it came: the history of food canning - from foodreference.com
canning history - from infoplease.com
Nicholas Appert - from foodreference.com

Bless the BBC for content like this: Stuffed dormice a Roman favourite.

Archaeologists in Northamptonshire are unearthing the recipe secrets of the Romans. Excavations in the county have shown the dish of the day 2,000 years ago was freshly-grilled hare and stuffed dormice.

The excavations are at Whitehall Villa, Nether Heyford, just yards from the Grand Union Canal, are revealing the secrets of Northamptonshire's Roman Heritage, including their unusual diet.

Archaeologist Martin Weaver said a burned bowl found at the site contained the remnants of hare stew.

"They also ate dormice - stuffed - and oysters. They loved their oysters," he said.

The villa sits on land now owned and farmed by Nick Adams who is discovering he has more in common with his ancestors than he realised.

"I had no real interest in archaeology or Roman things before this came along but, because it's on my land, I get a real kick.

"The Romans were actually living and working here as I am doing now. They raised sheep and farmed crops as I am doing today," he said. [continue]

Did the Brits invent lasagne? From the BBC:

Italy may be a land of lazy lunches and sun-kissed siestas, but challenge its reputation for home-grown cuisine at your peril.

With the Battle of Parma Ham not two months over the nation is facing an even more audacious claim.

Lasagne is British.

It's so British the court of Richard II was making it in the 14th Century and most likely serving it up to ravenous knights in oak-panelled banqueting halls.

The claim has been made by researchers who found the world's oldest cookery book, The Forme of Cury, in the British Museum. [continue]

Those researchers could just as easily have found the online version of the Forme of Cury, complete with photos of the pages. And here's the Loseyns (lasagna) recipe.

And "world's oldest cookery book" -um, really?

Related book:
To the King's Taste: Richard II's Book of Feasts and Recipes

Related link:
Britain shocks Italians by claiming to have found medieval lasagna recipe

Travelling with Norwegian goat cheese is one way to add excitement to your airport security check. From Aftenposten:

A block of brown Norwegian goat cheese recently raised a fuss at the Brussels airport. Security guards thought the unusual sweet, gooey substance called geitost was a dangerous explosive.

Norwegian goat cheese, also called brunost, or literally "brown cheese", is a local delicacy on bread, crackers and waffles.

The drama began when Norwegian Tore Fauske, who lives in England, was given a block of the delicacy from his homeland while on a business trip to Brussels. He was delighted with the gift, which in turn had been brought from Norway with no trouble at Oslo's airport.

Fauske tucked it into his carry-on and headed for the airport for the return trip to England.

When his bag rolled through the X-ray machines at check-in, however, security guards stopped him and sent all others in line behind him to other checkpoints.

Fauske told newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad that he then was asked to open his bag, "and the guards visibly took a step backward when I unzipped it."

Still puzzled over what the guards were worried about, Fauske emptied his bag and its contents were then sent through separately until the culprit was singled out: The block of goat cheese from Norwegian dairy cooperative Tine.

Fauske says he tried to explain what it was. "It's a goat cheese, a Norwegian goat cheese," he said of the much-loved local staple that's an acquired taste, especially for non-Norwegians.

Related links:
Teddington Cheese's description of gjetost
Ski Queen Gjetost from Tine.no

Compare your own favourite recipes to those in White Trash Recipes collection and I bet you'll feel like a brilliant gourmet chef. Just imagine serving some of these:
7 up cake
Fried bologna sandwiches ("This is for people who think a regular bologna sandwich is just too healthy...")
White Trash Farmer Omelettes
Tater Tot Hot Dish
White Trash Fondue ("You would be amazed by the things you can do with a can of Spam.")

Just what you need for next week's family picnic, kids.

There is some very fine food writing over at Making Light today. To begin, see Virtue rewarded:

I put up liqueurs just about every year. I go for the simple methods — no fermenting, no distilling. I'd like to try that, but I just don't have the room and the time for it. So I do the dead simple kind, where you take strong distilled spirits, macerate flavoring materials in them until it be enough, strain the results, and temper it up with honey or sugar syrup. Put it in a good bottle, put a good cork in it, label it before you forget, and put it in the basement until it comes out right.

Yes, those are loose instructions. That's how I cook.

If you want a dead simple recipe, take the thinly peeled-off zest of citrus fruit (but not blood oranges or pummelos or lavender gems), a leetle pinch of fresh mace or nutmeg, and a whole vanilla bean, and toss them into a bottle of vodka. I prefer Devil's Springs brand, which is seriously overproof — the East Coast equivalent of Everclear. Wait a couple of weeks. Give it a shake once in a while. Strain, and dose with sugar syrup (2 c. sugar, 1 c. water, heat until it's syrup). Let age a few months, though you can probably get away with drinking it in a few weeks.

Fruits may or may not have to macerate longer, but they do have to age longer. If you put up blackberry liqueur in blackberry season, it'll get good just in time to do in everyone at your New Year's party. Good blackberry liqueur is wicked stuff. The first time I made it, Patrick sampled the first bottle right before New Year's. "Aw, too bad," he said. "It tastes great, but all the alcohol has evaporated."

I tried some myself. It tasted like sweet innocent summer fruit. Then my earlobes got hot. "We have a winner," I said. We threw a hell of a New Year's party that year. That was the year that Jerry Kaufman broke our broomstick, and Kathryn Howes and Rebecca Lesses broke one of our chairs while demonstrating wrestling moves, and Joanna Russ got into a whipped-cream fight, and Ole Kvern went home without his shoes when there was snow on the ground. There were bodies all over the carpet next morning.

But I digress. [continue]

You mustn't miss La cuisine de Nouvelle Zion, either; the part about the candle salad just about made me spew coffee all over my keyboard and monitor.

I love Indian food, and have often thought it would be pretty cool to have a tandoor. Well! Naomi Duguid made her own tandoor while in southwestern Rajasthan, and her article about the experience appears in the National Post.

After we had talked for a while, Sangana Bai came up the stairs to have tea and a break. We smiled at each other but shared no language. I asked Jamna and Lalita if they would ask her something for me: Would she teach me how to make a clay tandoor? I could come by every day for however long it would take, but would it be a hassle for her? I waited as they translated, and then watched as Sangana Bai's face broke into a welcoming smile. "Tomorrow," said Jamna. "She says to come at 11 tomorrow morning. It will take about nine days." [continue]

A bit of nosing around on the web found a Tandoor Site, which was put together by a fellow in England who built a tandoor in his back garden, using materials he bought at "do it yourself" type stores. He's got detailed building instructions, and some recipes, too.

A tempting project idea, don't you think?

Related link:
Tandoor-Style Flatbreads From Your Own Oven

Related book:
Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbecue

I like unusual grains, so couldn't resist taking a peek at this article, Ancient Grain Spelt Finds Niche in Modern World.

LONDON (Reuters) - Little-known strains of wheat such as spelt are making a comeback in health and environmentally conscious Europe. (...)

Spelt, a tall and gangly plant, was once a key source of grain nutrition for Europeans from Belgium, through the Upper Rhine valley, Bavaria and Switzerland into Austria, but it was driven to farming's fringes by mechanization some 150 years ago.

Higher in protein content than its nemesis soft wheat, it cannot compete with the latter's huge yields under the mineral fertilizers of industrial farming. The first harvesters also broke its brittle ears and severely cut yields.

But renewed health consciousness, the rise of organic farming, and the 900th anniversary of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century German abbess and mystic, helped trigger a comeback in the rugged grain that thrives where its cousins wither.

(Emphasis mine.)

<boggle> What's Hildegard doing in an article about spelt? A web search found this reference at all-organic-food.com:

Some 800 years ago Hildegard von Bingen, (St.Hildegard) wrote about spelt: "The spelt is the best of grains. It is rich and nourishing and milder than other grain. It produces a strong body and healthy blood to those who eat it and it makes the spirit of man light and cheerful. If someone is ill boil some spelt, mix it with egg and this will heal him like a fine ointment."

Fascinating. And the Abtei St. Hildegard site even has a Spelt Products and Liqueur page.

Related links:
What St. Hildegard had to say (on spelt) - purityfoods.com
Nutritional content of spelt

Books:
From Saint Hildegard's Kitchen: Foods of Health, Foods of Joy
The Spelt Cookbook: Cooking With Nature's Grain for Life

A few spelt recipes (all untested):
Steamed Spelt
Steep Hill Spelt Recipes
Hi-Energy Cookies

This seems like a brilliant scheme:

...the Dinner Co-op operates Sunday through Thursday with 15 members, which means each member cooks once in a three-week cycle. Cooking slots are assigned at the start of each quarter, after much juggling to accommodate individual needs. A few days before every meal, the scheduled cook (who is also the host) sends a menu to all members via e-mail; any who would like to come must RSVP electronically by a designated time. Typically, six or seven members show up for dinner on any given night. The cook reports the cost of ingredients and the names of attendees to the co-op treasurer, whose computer periodically generates bills detailing who owes whom. Members pay only for the meals they attend and may bring guests.

Singh says he can think of a few reasons why his co-op has beat the survival odds. One is the built-in flexibility. Members can come five times a week or once a month if they like. "They don't feel boxed in," says Singh, or as if they have to commit the whole evening. It's considered okay to eat and run, although members often sit around and chat.

The e-mail feature also helps my making communication easy. And because members can preview menus, they can avoid dinners that don't appeal.

That's an excerpt from an article found on the Pittsburgh Dinner Co-op site. And look, they've got recipes online, too.

From the Guardian, Fit for a king: George II's kitchen secrets revealed.

All King George II's subjects could do was sing about being given a partridge in a pear tree for Christmas. The king got three partridges, it was disclosed yesterday - and ate them for his festive dinner. The hungry monarch also got 24 larks, seven quails, six snipe, three teals, three pullets and three cockerels. These were snacks in a 27-course royal banquet which began with plum broth, included asparagus, oysters and turkey and groaned to a halt with hasty pudding and, as a savoury, loach.

Every titbit of this epic gourmandising by George and his guests on Christmas Day 1737 is revealed in two royal household manuscripts for the period.

Not inappropriately, the official who kept the fuller of these records held the title Yeoman of the Mouth to His Majesty's Privy Kitchen. In effect, he was George's head cook.

The documents will be offered for sale in London by the York antiquarian booksellers Ken Spelman's early next month, when they are expected to fetch £35,000.

They list all the royal menus for nearly two years while George was Prince of Wales, and for 18 months towards the end of his reign. [continue]

If you have a teensy kitchen and figure that you can't do much cooking until you get a bigger one, this article at the New York Times might change your mind: So You Think Your Kitchen Is Small?

After reading about professional chefs whose restaurant kitchens are no bigger than yours, you might not feel quite so squished in your own tiny kitchen. (NYT requires free registration.)

Who can resist homemade Irish breads? Not me, so last week I bought a copy of the Ballymaloe Bread Book, and I've been busy trying out some of the recipes. The scones and hot cross buns were most excellent, and you've just got to try these yummy orange butter scones.

I've hunted down some Ballymaloe recipes on the web for you. Here, have a look at these:
White Soda Scones - IrishAbroad.com
White Soda Bread - IrishAbroad.com

And yes, there are more! The following recipes are on Darina Allen's CookingIsFun.ie site.
White Soda Bread and Scones, Cheese Scones or Herb and Cheese Scones, Rosemary and Sundried Tomatoes (scroll down)
Coffee and Walnut Scones, and Teeny, Weenie, Spicy Cheese and Onion Scones (scroll down)
Date and Walnut cake
Marmalade Bread and Butter Pudding (scroll down; don't use link on left side of page or you'll wind up in the wrong place)

There. Now don't you feel like doing some baking?

Related links:

Ballymaloe Cookery School Shanagarry, Midleton, Co Cork, Ireland.

Note: North American cooks using these cookbook might wonder what castor sugar is. It's a fine sugar, that's all. Ochef.com says "you can make your own by grinding granulated sugar for a couple of minutes in a food processor."

When I first posted this article, I wrote:

If you happen to have a really excellent hot cross bun recipe, would you please send it to me? I'll be baking on Friday.

I know there are a zillion hot cross bun recipes on the web and in various cookbooks; I already have some of those. What I'm after are recipes you can vouch for because you've tried them yourself and loved the results. Or your mom's recipe, say. Anybody?

Now the update is this:

I found a fantastic recipe for hot cross buns. Yum! This is the recipe we'll be using every Easter from now on.

From gomemphis.com, Thank God for macaroons.

The macaroon, a cookie with universal appeal, is a staple for many Jewish families during the eight-day observation of Passover.

Because sweetened ground nuts, coconut or a combination of both are leavened by egg whites, they meet the dietary requirements of the spring holiday, which begins at sunset April 16. (...)

Finding the exact origins of most foods is typically a frustrating task. But macaroons have a chronicled history that is firmly Christian.

Almond macaroons originated in an Italian monastery around 1792. The name comes from the Italian word for paste, maccarone, which refers to almond paste. (Macaroni means flour paste.)

A little later, two Carmelite nuns, seeking refuge in the town of Nancy during the French Revolution, paid for their housing by baking and selling macaroon cookies. They became known as "Macaroon Sisters."

As the story goes, the nuns followed the principle: "Almonds are good for girls who do not eat meat."

Italian Jews transmitted this flourless cookie to the Ashkenazim (Eastern European Jews), who added it to both their Passover and everyday pantries, writes Gil Marks in his cookbook, The World of Jewish Desserts. [continue]

All fascinating, but I wish that articles like this would cite sources. What monastery? Where's the documentation?

Related links:
Cookie History
Passover desserts have rich history (scroll down for the part about macaroons)
macaroon definition and etymology

Related book:
The World of Jewish Desserts: More Than 400 Delectable Recipes from Jewish Communities from Alsace to India

Our butter bell is a little ceramic pot with a lid, and it lives on the kitchen table. Lift the lid, and find that a bell-shaped hollow part is attached to the lid, and the bell part is full of butter. Soft, spreadable butter, and it doesn't go bad when you leave it out on the table for weeks. The bottom of the pot has just a bit of water; that's what keeps the butter fresh.

Isn't that a cool system? Here's a page about how it works. We ordered this butter bell from this catalog. It's splendid.

Juicy tidbits from the insect page of the Congo Cookbook:

Ants are collected when they take wing during migration. They are prepared thus: Remove wings, and wash ants in cold water. Add cleaned ants to a pan with a small amount of boiling water. Cook until water is evaporated. Stir butter, ghee, or oil into pan and fry the ants for a few more minutes. Salt to taste. Serve with Baton de Manioc, Fufu, Ugali, or boiled Plantains, or rice.

A simple recipe for caterpillars or termites: In salted water boil until tender a pound of fresh, dried, or smoked caterpillars (or fresh termites, wings removed). In a separate pot, boil greens (spinach, collards, or similar) until fully cooked; adding hot peppers, cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper to taste. Serve the caterpillars over a bed of greens.

A recipe for Caterpillars with Groundnut Sauce calls for two to three pounds of dried caterpillars; a few tomatoes, an onion, and a red chile pepper (chopped); palm oil; and groundnut paste (homemade peanut butter). First, soak the caterpillars in warm water for a few hours, then rinse and drain. Crush and mix together the tomatoes, onions, and pepper. Heat the oil in a deep pot. Fry the tomato/onion/chile pepper mixture. Add the groundnut paste, diluted with water. Stir. Add the caterpillars. Simmer for thirty minutes. Serve with boiled Plantains, or rice.

Grasshoppers and locusts are prepared in a similar manner: Remove wings and legs from the insects. Rinse in cold water. Add insects to boiling water and cook for twenty minutes or until tender. Strain water away. Stir butter, ghee, or oil into pan and fry the insects for a several more minutes. Salt to taste. Serve with Baton de Manioc, Fufu, Ugali, or boiled Plantains, or rice.

I decided on an insect excerpt just to make sure you're all awake, but the cookbook has lots of other sections for you to explore: chicken recipes, snacks, beverages, etc.

Now, if it's rare recipes you want - like insects, bushmeat, camel, cane rat, cat, cow blood, dog, elephant, hippopotamus, monkey, snake - start at the Congo Cookbook home page and follow the link to recipe indexes. Then look for the link to rare recipes. I'd link directly to the individual page, but that doesn't seem to work well with this site.

If you do make some of these recipes, I hope you'll let me know how they turn out.

Are you a super taster? From the BBC:

Around 35% of women are super-tasters, compared with just 15% of men, US research has shown.

The study found some people are born with more taste buds than others, meaning they are better able to distinguish between tastes.

While those with too few taste buds may not be able to tell the difference between cheap plonk and fine wines, those with more taste buds are more likely to become professional chefs or wine tasters.

Now there is a taste bud test people can do at home, based on the Yale University research. [continue]

Recipes of the Damned features "real scary recipes from real scary vintage cookbooks." It's mind-boggling to think that somebody actually published these recipes. What kind of sick mind dreams up things like Surprise Noodle Ring With Creamed Dried Beef, anyway?

From the Globe and Mail, Soup good, bad for you.

Bird's nest soup -- maybe that should be bird spit soup -- seems to be both unexpectedly healthy and potentially harmful for those who relish its exotic taste.

A chemical analysis by Massimo Marcone of the University of Guelph of several edible nests made by the swiftlet, a small swallow native to East Asia, turned up a protein similar to that found in eggs. The protein is in the nest because the swiftlets weave a new home yearly, not out of sticks or straw but their own saliva.

Marcone argues that the existence of an egg-like protein would explain the mysterious occurrence of a severe allergy attack among some who dine on bird's nest soup. Indeed, surveys in Singapore have found that the soup is the leading food allergy there.

However, the positive news for the non-allergic is that the same egg protein has been shown to have antibiotic properties. This would account for the legendary health properties of bird's nest soup, if not quite medicinally justify its price of upwards of $10,000 a kilogram.

Dean Allen has posted a Something Soup recipe over at Textism. That man should write a cookbook, or at least post recipes more often on his blog. Meanwhile, this Baklava recipe at John's Jottings looks temping.

Here are a few fun pages about the history of eating utensils, complete with excellent photos. And oh my, what you'll learn. For example:

By the 7th Century A.D., royal courts of the Middle East began to use forks at the table for dining. From the 10th through the 13th Centuries, forks were fairly common among the wealthy in Byzantium, and in the 11th Century, a Byzantine wife of a Doge of Venice brought forks to Italy. The Italians, however, were slow to adopt their use. It was not until the 16th Century that forks were widely adopted in Italy.

From the Spectator: Sin for your supper.

Before his death last year in a helicopter accident, France’s best-known baker, Lionel Poîlane, drafted a letter to the Pope in which he asked for a change to the French translation of the catechism. He wrote that the capital sin of gluttony was mistranslated. The catechism called it gourmandise, which Poîlane said meant an appreciation of good food and meals with friends — hardly sins. A more correct word would be gloutonnerie, the English gluttony, or goinfrerie, piggishness.

This being France and the subject being food, however, the matter did not stop there. A committee, De la Question Gourmande, has now been set up in Poîlane’s memory, whose sole task is to extract an admission from the Vatican that enjoying food is no sin in itself. Its headquarters is at number 56 rue Brillat-Savarin, named after France’s greatest food writer. Its patrons include chefs, intellectuals and the simply very rich, who want in on the malarkey.

In his letter, Poîlane wrote that the French gourmand has been traduced in the catechism. The true gourmand does not eat for eating’s sake. Rather, he values quality over quantity. He knows when to stop, and more often than not he regards the communal activity of eating with friends as an essential part of his gourmandise.

Other languages, Poîlane argued, have more specific translations. English has gluttony, though Poîlane cannot resist a passing dig at British cooking — ‘gourmandise is not translatable into English’. Italian has gola, Spanish gula and German lüsternheit, which translates as eating like an animal that does not know when to stop. All these terms refer to people who stuff their faces to no purpose. The gourmand, on the other hand, is engaged in a noble pursuit, the proper appreciation of God’s gifts. [continue]

(Note: I think the Spectator meant to put the circumflex accent in Poilâne above the a, where it belongs, not above the i. Oops.)

Related links:
Lionel Poilâne, 1945-2002
poilane.fr
A taste for sin?
Give Us This Day Our Global Bread
The meaty issue of gourmet v. gourmand
Poilâne bread direct from Paris

From EatMediterranean.com, all you ever wanted to know about Iman Bayaldi.

Iman Bayaldi, Turkish stuffed eggplant in olive oil, is a classic dish that comes with its own delightful story.

The name translates to "The Priest Fainted," although exactly why is a matter of some dispute. Some hold that the Muslim holy man, or iman, was so overcome by the aroma of this dish that he fell into a swoon. Other say the real story is that the priest was shocked by the liberal use of precious (and expensive) olive oil in the dish.

Mediterranean food historian Clifford Wright thinks the answer may lie in an old Turkish proverb about the parsimony of priests:

Imam evinden ash, olu gozunden yash cikmaz. (No food is likely to come out of the imam's house and no tears from a corpse.)

In its simplest form, Iman Bayaldi (also spelled "Imam" or "Y'mam" and "Bayeldi" or sometimes "Beyeldi") is eggplant stuffed with onion and braised in lots of olive oil. It's one of long line of Turkish zeytinagi or dishes in which olive oil is the star. [continue]

Mmm, I love reading about the history of food. Today the Beacon Journal offers a look at food and abstinence during Lent across the centuries.

In popular culinary parlance, people who exclude meat, eggs and dairy products from their diet are called vegans. But this form of vegetarianism is hardly new.

Nearly 1,400 years ago, Pope Gregory the Great mandated that all Christian faithful follow a strict dietary code as penance for their sins during Lent. "We abstain from flesh meat and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, butter and eggs," Gregory wrote.

For 40 days, fish became the mainstay of everyone's diet and, in places where fresh fish was not available, dried salted fish, especially cod and herring, was used.

As you can imagine, a constant diet of salted fish became boring after just a few weeks, but it was not the fish eaters who suffered most from the imposed diet. Butchers were the real victims. In fact, on Easter Sunday in Ireland, butchers and their apprentices organized boisterous herring funerals to celebrate the return of meat.

Preparing appetizing meals without the forbidden foods was a challenge, and every ethnic group developed its own Lenten meals. [continue]

Trust the BBC to provide content like this: Pancake physics to cut batter splatter.

Many Britons will celebrate Shrove Tuesday by flipping a traditional pancake but scientists think they have discovered the mathematical secrets of the pan.

The angular velocity of the object equals the square root of Pi, times the gravity divided by the distance the pancake is from the elbow times four - that is how to get the pancake back in the pan.

It is a conundrum that has taxed pancake flippers since the dawn - how to avoid ending up with batter on your ceiling.

But now scientists in Leeds University say the miracle equation they have chanced on will leave pancake-makers mess free.

It will make sure the pancake will land back in the pan, as long as you understand the formula. [continue]

Related links:
Velocity vital in pancake tossing

It's Shrove Tuesday today. Are you going to have pancakes? Here's some background about this tradition from the BBC: Shrove Tuesday otherwise known as international pancake day.

Shrove Tuesday is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. This year it takes place on March 4.

Shrove Tuesday is a day of penitence — to clean the soul before Lent and a day of celebration as the last chance to feast before Lent begins.

The English custom of eating pancakes was probably suggested by the need of using up the eggs and fat which were, originally at least, prohibited articles of diet during the forty days of Lent.

The church tradition of having pancake suppers and the secular tradition of just plain partying also derives from the practice of feasting before the fast. [continue]

There's more information at the BBC's Shrove Tuesday page.

Related links:
Archbishop takes part in pancake race
The Olney Pancake Race
'Pancake Day' Explained (recipes, too)
The history behind Shrove Tuesday
Shrovetide - from the Catholic Encyclopedia

Recipes:
Norwegian pancakes

While looking for information about a favourite cheese, I discovered that making cheese at home probably isn't as hard as it sounds. These directions and photos show how goat's milk cheese is made; all I need now is a larger kitchen and a goat! Cheesemaking kits are available, and there are tons of cheesemaking recipes and other cheese info at Gourmet Sleuth.

Related link:
How to make cheese

Related book:
And That's How You Make Cheese!

From Realbeer.com, Priest brews in washing machine.

A German priest has found a way to brew beer in his washing machine. Michael Fey, of Duisburg, built a computer interface into the machine to let it run an automatic brewing program.

The process includes turning and heating, but not spinning, according to a report in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

"A priest without alcohol, that's the wrong combination," he said. "Jesus didn't say, take this healthy camomile tea, he offered wine."

Fey brews 30 liter every six weeks, the legal limit for homebrewing in Germany. (...) He said he was inspired by the tradition of monks who brewed beer in a cauldron over a fire. To imitate the technique, he opted for a toploader washing machine. Before he started brewing, he ran it about 20 times to remove any soap residue.

The priest brews in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity law that dictates only water, malt, hops (and now yeast) shall be used in making beer.

Found at Slashdot.

Related links:
Michael Fey's home page (Includes photos of beer making process, beer recipes, etc. In German, but pretty easy to understand.)
Reinheitsgebot - English translation of the German beer purity law, written in 1516.

From Australia's ABC News online: Chocolate beer satisfies the best of both worlds.

A Danish beer brewer has launched a chocolate-flavoured dark beer which is a hit among tested beer drinkers and candy-lovers alike.

The drink is brewed with 10 grams of Valrhona dark chocolate per bottle; a dash of liquorice; and six different kinds of malt and has an alcohol content of 6.8 per cent.

The beer was first tested at 30 of Copenhagen's top restaurants in 2000.

It has been so well received, the company has decided to develop the project further, adding more chocolate to the mix.

The beverage reportedly goes down well with just about everything, complementing fish, meat and sweets.

The company has yet to decide whether it will export the product.

Last year the BBC ran an article about a chocolate beer that Meantime Brewing planned to launch in London. I wonder how that beer's selling, and whether our local liquor stores are likely to carry the British or the Danish chocolate beer. (Assuming the Danish brewer will export that beer after all.)

I love chocolate and beer, but . . . together?

From How Chinese Dishes Were Named page at the Chinese Imperial Cuisines website:

During the period of the Qin and Han Dynasties dishes were named for their major ingredients and cooking methods, During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, some dishes received fancy names.

When ordinary dishes were given beautiful names, it raised the attractiveness of the dishes and made diners happy. For example, sliced fish mixed with orange was called "powdered gold and minced jade," camels' foot simmered with hearts of rape was called "desert boat sails on green," quail and its eggs cooked together was called "mother and children get together," chicken cooked with bear's paw was called "palm controls the land," a dish of shrimp, sliced tender bamboo shoots and mushrooms was called "leaves of wind, frost and snow," a dish of sea cucumber, prawns, chicken breast, white fungus, and water chestnuts was called "butterflies swarm the peonies," and a dish of chicken and soft-shelled turtle was called "Xiang Yu the Conqueror says goodbye to his concubine." Fancy names reminded people of other things during the banquets and created a pleasant dining atmosphere.

Naming dishes is an artistic expression of the inventors' ideas. Often, dishes are named for natural phenomena and things that exist in nature: The four seasons, wind, flowers, snow, plants, gold, jade, gems, animals, and the moon have all been used in naming dishes to add beauty and appeal, to attract customers, and to increase diners' appetites. Some examples are the "wind lulling cake" (a pan-cake first baked on a pan, then deep-fat fried before eating), "snowflake shortcake" (similar to the sweet and salty square available in Beijing today), "snow-box vegetable" (a green vegetable steamed with milk cakes), "snowflake bean curd" (stir-fried minced bean curd). "lotus flower sliced chicken" (a chicken dish made of quick stir-fired egg white, sliced chicken breast and corn starch), "100-flower chess pieces" (flat noodles cut into pieces and served with soup), "squirrel-shaped croaker," and "black dragon spitting pearls" (sea cucumber braised with quail eggs). These names stress the taste, bright color, flavor, thick aroma and shape of the dishes.

If you've got a bit of time to browse, take a look at the rest of the Chinese Imperial Cuisines site. There are sections on the history of Chinese Imperial food, Chinese food and health building, nine different cuisines. . . . They've got a learn to cook Chinese dishes section, too.

One link led to another and then I wound up reading about Jewish history in Spain: In Spain, Inquisitors Tracked Conversos by Their Foodways. The article outlines some of the horrible things the Inquisition did to the Jews, and mentions that the inquisition looked for Jewish food practices when determining whether a Jewish convert to Christianity had really abandoned the old faith or not. The article is fascinating, but what a sad, sad history.

"One Inquisition list of Jewish food practices, quoted by David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson in "A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews" (St. Martin's, 1999), reads in part:

cooking on the said Fridays such food as is required for the Saturdays and on the latter eating the meat thus cooked on Fridays as is the manner of the Jews;... cleansing or causing meat to be cleansed, cutting away from it all fat or grease and cutting away the nerve or sinew from the leg;... not eating pork, hare, rabbit, strangled birds, conger-eel, cuttle-fish, nor eels or other scaleless fish, as laid down in the Jewish law; and upon the death of parents... eating... such things as boiled eggs, olives, and other viands...

Inquisition prosecutors also paid special attention to those who fried meat in olive oil rather than lard, as was the common practice in Spain at the time. (Ironically, as Gitlitz and Davidson note, these lists helped to instruct later generations of conversos, who would otherwise have had difficulty finding information about Jewish practice.)

Amazon's description of the book mentioned, A Drizzle of Honey : The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews, has more information.

Update, February 7th, 2002:
A Cuisine Returns After Centuries of Exile: Sephardic Cooking Re-emerges in Spain, Altered But Tasty as Ever - third article in this series, from forward.com.

From Ananova, Spies to publish cookbook.

German special agents have published a cookbook of secret recipes.

Top Secret - Schnitzel for Spies, is a new book by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) - the German equivalent of MI6.

More than two-dozen exotic recipes are included in the book, gathered from German special agents stationed around the world.

Each recipe is spiced up with anecdotes from the agents about how they have made use of their culinary skills.

The stories include advice to a German security chief from a Nigerian counterpart on how to tackle black magic attacks.

Another contributor claims an operation in the desert had to be cancelled when a spy camera designed to withstand extreme heat and dry conditions fell into a pot of Turkish honey. [continue]

From the Barley in Islamic Literature page at islam-online.net:

Viewed as the only vegetation on earth that can become a sole source of nutrition from birth to old age, scholars of hadiths (prophetic sayings) have understood barley to be very nutritious, beneficial in coughs and inflammation of the stomach, and to have the ability to expel toxins from the body and act as a good diuretic. At least twenty-one hadiths recommend sattoo (powdered barley). Talbina is a meal made from satoo, formed by adding milk and honey to the dried barley powder. The Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) recommended talbina for the sick and grieving (Khan p.1). He is quoted as saying, "At-talbina gives rest to the heart of the patient and makes it active and relieves some of his sorrow and grief" (Bukhari 7:71#593).

According to ibn al-Qayyim, barley water using five times the amount of water as barley, should be boiled until the contents reduce to three-quarters. This milky mixture is a thirst quencher. According to Firdous Al-Hikmat, a suspension prepared from one part barley and 15 parts water until the volume is reduced to two-thirds after boiling is beneficial (Khan p.1-3). The Japanese drank the pure juice from young barley leaves in powdered form for a number of years (Hagiwara p.4). Science has proven the benefits of all of this and more. [continue]

The page has lots more information, a few photos, and a recipe for barley soup from Yemen.

From (where else?) How to host a Roman orgy:

As soon as your guests seat themselves, ask them to remove their shoes, and have your slaves wash their feet before hors d'oeuvres are served. A full banquet should consist of at least seven courses. For starters, try dormice rolled in honey and poppy seeds, a favorite of Trimalchio, the unfrugal gourmet of Petronius's Satyricon. As an entree, you might offer the "Shield of Minerva the Protectress," invented to tickle the gluttony-dulled palate of Emperor Vitellius: The recipe calls for pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt. (You'd better hope none of your guests asks what "milt" is.) Sow udders were another popular Roman delicacy, especially when the sow had been fattened on figs. Next, dazzle your guests with a "Trojan pig": a roast pig stuffed as full of other creatures--live quail, in the case of Trimalchio's famous dinner--as the mythical horse was of Greeks.

Since the Romans ate mostly with their fingers, dinner will be pretty greasy. Good table manners called for diners to throw bones, shells and cores on the floor. You should, however, send servants around with ewers of perfumed water to wash guests' hands between courses; the very height of elegance was to use pretty slave boys from Asia Minor on whose long hair guests could dry their hands. [continue]

So now you know!

Related:
definition of milt from dictionary.com
Roman recipes at the Roman orgy page

From the New York Times, Monks' Brew Showers Blessings on Belgian Town.

With his billowing white beard and black and white hooded habit, Dom Armand Veilleux, a Canadian-born monk in his mid-60's, more resembles a figure from Umberto Eco's novel of monastic mystery, "The Name of the Rose," than your average brewery executive.

Yet just across a snow-dusted garden from the room where he receives visitors, a microbrewery throbs, its six huge stainless steel vats fermenting more than 13,000 gallons of beer a day.

Only five years ago, the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Scourmont, where Dom Armand has been abbot for almost five years, turned out 15 percent less. But these days, Belgian Trappist beers — heavy brews, often dark and with as much as 9 percent alcohol — are surging in popularity, spreading blessings on the hilly farmland around Chimay, pop. 10,000, traditionally one of the poorer Belgian lands that snuggle against the French border.

You can read the rest of the article at the New York Times website, which requires free registration. Or you can skip the registration thing and read a reprint of the article instead: Brewery grows as Trappist beers grace more tables at the International Herald Tribune site.

The NYT version has photos, the IHT version doesn't.

More news about Trappist beer:
Brewer monks battle to protect a rare and potent ale

Fresh Mozzarella made from the milk of water buffalo is one of the greatest delicacies in all of Italian cuisine. Origins of this exquisite cheese are somewhat obscure, but it is known that water buffalo were introduced into Italy from Asia in the seventh century and that most of the production occurs in the region of Campania, particularly around Benevento and Casserta. [continue]

The Mozzarella di Bufala page describes a visit to a water buffalo farm near Benevento, and then to a cheese plant to see the buffalo milk transformed into that most wonderful of cheeses. Read all about it! (They've got photos, too.)

Related links
Buffalo Mozzarella

Riskrem is a yummy dessert, and it's a one of the traditional Christmas foods in Norway. It involves rice and cream and some other stuff, and is served with a red fruit sauce. Here, my dears, is the riskrem recipe.

Buttertarts are right at the top of my favourite delectables list, and I was so pleased to learn (via CBC Radio, a few years ago) that buttertarts seem to be a uniquely Canadian thing. If we're going to have any food represent Canada in a national cuisine kind of way, it might as well be something scrumptious, I think, and buttertarts are certainly that.

So a few days ago I decided to do some baking, but didn't feel like making pastry for tarts. It seemed a good time to try this recipe for buttertart squares. Yum! They're easy, dangerously delicious, and there's no messing about with pastry and tart tins.

The other day I came across these mushrooms in the woods, and I haven't a clue what kind they are. So I'm thinking of taking The Land Conservancy's upcoming mushroom identification workshop over on Vancouver Island.

What sounds even more interesting than the fall clinic is the one they have planned for next spring, which is about cultivating edible mushrooms. (Like you'd want to cultivate any other kind, eh?) Scroll down that mushroom page to see the amazing mushrooms somebody's got growing out of a straw-filled plastic bag.

Tonight we learned a bit about the Amharic language, Coptic crosses, and Ethiopian icons. All this was at Nyala, Vancouver's Ethiopian restaurant. (The food there is yummy.) The owner, Assefa, showed us how to write a few words in Amharic, and explained a bit of the language's orthography. We chatted some more, and he showed us his Ethiopian Icons book, and his 8 coptic crosses. What fun! I've gotta go back to photograph those crosses. And, of course, for another delicious dinner.

Hey, Vancouver apple-eating friends, here's something for your calendar. The Apple Festival will be held this weekend (October 19th and 20th, 2002) at the UBC Botanical Garden. The Apple Festival page says:

Older varieties of apples such as the Grimes Golden, brought to BC by settlers early this century as well as new varieties such as Ambrosia, recently discovered in Cawston BC, will be among the over 70 "best of the old and the new" varieties to taste or to purchase. This year there will be 20,000 lbs for sale of which one third will be organic.

For those wishing to "grow their own" apples, there will be 40 varieties of trees for sale, suitable for the home garden or for a container on a balcony, together with lots of advice for the first time grower.

Apple trees can be grown on balconies? That'd be interesting.

I didn't find much about the Grimes Golden apple on the web, but the Ambrosia apple seems to have had better press. BC Tree fruit has an Ambrosia apple page, and here's a little about the Ambrosia apple from rootabaga.com:

In the early 1980’s, the Mennell family of the Similkameen Valley in British Columbia discovered a tree in one of their orchards bearing unusual apples. The apples had the general conical shape of the reds and goldens nearby, but everything else about them was different. They tried them, loved them, and decided to try growing them.

I expect there'll be samples of lots of different apple types at the festival, so I'm looking forward to that.

Related Links:
UBC Botanical Garden - directions for visitors
List of apples available at the festival

Did you know that Canada's official date for Thanksgiving wasn't proclaimed by Parliament until 1957? HistoryTelevision.ca [update: page no longer available] notes:

Like so many Canadian historical events, Thanksgiving was largely determined by the weather. Or, at least that's what E.C. Drury (the premier of Ontario between 1919 and 1923) claimed after Parliament proclaimed in 1957 that Thanksgiving Day would be on the second Monday in October. Before then it was celebrated later in the year.

The site includes other interesting tidbits, too, like:

Before settlers came to Canada the Ojibwa Indians celebrated two thanksgivings. The first was in the spring to mark the rising of the sap and in appreciation for their deliverance from winter and the other to celebrate the fall harvest. The first time Thanksgiving was celebrated in Canada by early settlers was in 1578. English explorer Martin Frobisher, while trying to find a northern passage to the Orient, observed a day of Thanksgiving in the Eastern Arctic.

(This Thanksgiving posting brought to you by thoughts of tonight's scrumptious dinner.)

Thanksgiving links:
Canadian Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving recipes
2learn.ca's Thanksgiving page

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Unusual turkey-cooking methods

Mmmmm! The Enthusiast's Online Chai Resource has all sorts of goodies: recipes for traditional chai and quick and easy chai, serving ideas, and brewing tips. There's a chai meringues recipe, too.

(Thanks to VanEats for this link, and for lots of other interesting food-related posts.)

I was browsing for dessert recipes when the link to cake in a jar jumped out at me. Now, regular recipes are interesting enough, but things like this really get me wondering. Who came up with the idea? Who sat around one day and thought "Hey! Can we bake cakes in glass jars?"

Apparently the jars can be sealed the same way you'd seal jars of jam. (No, not with the wax method, silly.) One site points out that the cakes can then be "stored for emergencies." That's good to know, isn't it? If we ever do have a big earthquake in Vancouver, canned cake will be just the thing to have on hand.

I might have to try this one day, just to see how it turns out.

Chocolate cake in a jar
Apple cake in a jar
Banana nut bread baked in a jar

The Japanese café on Robson Street serves Italian coffee, panini, bubble tea, and lots of other stuff. I love their bilingual signs, like this one. And the black sesame ice cream? Surprisingly good.

What to do about dandelions? I like the solution offered by Capturing And Dressing the Wild Lion's Tooth. It starts off with "The best way to rid your lawn of dandelions is to pick the leaves for greens, the blossoms for wine and jelly, and the roots for coffee." Dandelion roots in coffee? Really?

I'd like to try the dandelion wine and jelly, but those recipes are probably time consuming. Dandelion won-tons sound easy to make, though.

I found a bit more about Johannes Bockenheim today. Remember him? He was Pope Martin V's cook, back in the 15th century. (See the orange omelette for harlots and ruffians blog entry from June 29th.) here's what nicomarin.com says about Johannes.

Johannes de Buckenheim (the name of the small town near Worms, where he was born) was a German clergyman whose activity as cook in the Papal Curia in Rome during the reign of Pope Martin V led to a moderately successful ecclesiastical career in the dioceses of Worms and Mayence. Two manuscripts have survived from his Registrum coquine, which was composed between 1431 and 1435. These manuscripts are preserved in the National Library in Paris and in a private collection in London. Written in Latin and containing 74 recipes, the treatise furnishes rather summary instructions on preparing the relative dishes and must therefore have been used by Bockenheim as his own personal cookbook. The culinary tradition transmitted by the book was relatively archaic: for example, this cuisine is characterised by the infrequent use of sugar, which was becoming popular at the time. Nevertheless, the book's originality is expressed by the constant indication of whom the dishes were intended for - a fact which is understandable, given the international nature of the people who supped in the Papal Curia's dining hall. In fact, the recipes always end with a piece of advice: et erit bonum pro (excellent for) Germans, Italians, Swedes, etc., and for social categories such as barons, nobles, kings, the poor, prostitutes. . .

I wonder if the Bibliothèque National feels like putting a digital version of Johannes' recipes up on the web.

While some zoos are making food puzzles for monkeys, others are feeding mealworms to kids. According to an Ananova article, the Chester Zoo offers cheese, chili, and barbecue flavours of fried mealworms. I bet you can't wait to visit.

Pitting and juicing cherries is annoying, but I'll go to a bit of extra work to see how a medieval recipe for cherry pudding turns out. And anyway, the rest of the directions are simple enough. Add wine, sugar, a bit of butter, and bread cubes. Boil, simmer, stir, reduce. The bread cubes smoosh down into mush and absorb the liquid. The result is an unusual pudding. It's good, but rich enough that small servings satisfy.

Do you remember the orange omelette recipe I blogged about weeks ago? That tempted me to order The Medieval Kitchen, the book which includes the omelette recipe, the cherry pudding recipe, and about 150 others. The authors have supplied a modern, measurements-included version of each recipe. The original wording is offered as well, and there's a historical information section and a list of ingredient equivalencies, too.

So many recipes to try! This will keep me busy for ages.

At Meinhardt's yesterday we found this Pater Nostri pasta. The name amused me, but this blurb printed on the package is even better:

Councils for one good baking:
To carry to boiling salt water (1 litre of water in 100 gr of pasta), therefore to pour and cook second the established times. Like this Laporta's pasta expresses the maximum of the taste, of the goodness leaving unchanged all its characteristics.

Laporta pasta is produced only with carefully durum wheat semolina, drawing rigorously in bronze and dried slowly to low temperatures. Thanks to these characteristics our past has a colour yellow amber, a wrinkledness to able to absorb every sauce and become a wellbalanced dish in line with the "Mediterranean Diet."

I've got to start paying more attention to Italian packaging.

The University of Texas just happens to have 14 Mayan teapots. They've also got an archeologist, Terry Powis, who wanted to figure out whether the ancient teapots were used for chocolate drinks. Residue samples were analysed, and yup, chocolate it was. Based on the age of the teapots, this suggest that "the Maya, and their ancestors, may have been gobbling chocolate as far back as 2,600 years ago, pushing back the earliest evidence of cacao use more than 1,000 years."

I found these details at the National Geographic site today, in a fine article entitled Ancient Chocolate Found in Maya "Teapot". Part of the article convinced me that I would have liked the Mayan diet:

The Maya had a lifestyle many kids would envy — chocolate at every meal. "It was the beverage of everyday people and also the food of the rulers and gods," said Haas. In fact, the scientific name for the cacao tree is Theobroma cacao — "food of the gods." Hieroglyphs that depict chocolate being poured for rulers and gods are present on Maya murals and ceramics.

I thank the Italians for Nutella, and I was impressed when chocolate sprinkles arrived with my breakfast cereal in Amsterdam. But chocolate at every meal? Hard to beat those Mayans.

Related links:
Chocolate's frothy past
Early Mayas Were Chocoholics, Scientists Say
The Maya hand down a recipe for chocolate
Maya recipes, including a recipe for hot chocolate.
Maya Ruins
A virtual tour of Belize (That's where the teapots were found.)

At the farmers' market there were raspberries, cherries, and chantarelles. Some kids sold lemonade, some adults sold hemp cola, and some guy off in the corner played classical music on his guitar for us. We saw hundreds of neighbours, seven dogs, and a whole lot of fruit and veggies.

The goats' milk cheddar cheese looked interesting, so we bought some. Just so you know, God did not mean for cheddar to be made from goats' milk. We realised this when we tried that hideous cheese, and promptly threw it out. <sigh />

So next time we'll start at the cheese shop, where they sell real cheddar, and also a variety of good cheeses made from goat's milk, like feta, gjetost, and so forth. And then we'll go to the farmers' market.

Johannes Bockenheim was Pope Martin V's cook, and I'd love to know what was going through his head when he added notes to his recipes. Johannes specified the sort of people for whom each recipe was intended. How odd! I wonder what made him decide that a certain dish was appropriate for princes, and another dish for prostitutes.

This morning I made one of Johannes' recipes: orange omelette for harlots and ruffians. It's easy, fast, and really good, although quite different from the savory omelettes I'm used to.

The recipe is included in a book called The Medieval Kitchen. Sample recipes, including this one, are on the book's promotional website.

References to the ancient silk road made me think of objects being traded: silk, jade, spices, and so forth. After reading about Najmieh Batmanglij's new cookbook, Silk Road Cooking, I'm far more interested in the recipes and cooking techniques which spread along the trade route.

A Washington post article about Batmanglij's book quotes the author: "The idea of interrelationship is evident in the simplest of foods, such as breads, rice dishes and dumplings, says Batmanglij. As evidence, she points to the similarity of the names of certain foods in very different languages. Steamed filled doughy breads or dumplings, sweetened or not, for example, appear as mantou in Chinese, manti in central Asia, momo in Tibet, mantu in Iran and Afghanistan, manzu in Japan, mandu in Korea. "They're each a variety of filled buns," she says. "And the language shows the dishes and their names are related."

The article includes four recipes from the cookbook. Chinese Tofu Dumplings, anyone?

Related Links:
Silk Road Cookery

The shops are full of fresh organic strawberries, and so I've been peeking at strawberry recipes on the web this afternoon. (The oddest recipe I came across is for strawberry pasta, but that's not quite what I had in mind!)

Delicious Italy.com has a tempting page about strawberry festivals in Italy. This makes me want to rip up my to-do list and run away to Italy, right this moment. They list six strawberry towns: Farra di Soligo, Montevarchi, Maletto, Marsiliana, Ostra, Marsciano, Viggiano, Vairano, and of course they all have strawberry festivals of some sort. The page includes a recipe for Italian Strawberry Ice Cream.

I also came across a recipe at Diana's Desserts for Zabaglione with Strawberries. I wonder if that would be good....

More:

The Festival of Strawberries article from Italian Cooking and Living