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Submarine Sandpaper posted:Also if it's sad Anglo midevil or anywhere else Not really anglo specific  Germanic food in general is cooked plainly, but, crucially, has spicy condiments (mustard, horseradish) on the side.I remember living in the US and having some US guy make a crack at me about British food while slathering my Colman's mustard on his hotdog like it was French's. I chose not to warn him. Edit: bean adjacency - Cicero, the Roman orator, was literally named after the chickpea (cicer). Fava beans have been found in Europe clear back to the Paleolithic, it's one of the first things we learned how to grow. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Apr 10, 2023 |
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Apr 10, 2023 12:48
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SubG posted:"People" here meaning "only the absolutely most monstrously wealthy". Cooking manuals like The Forme of Cury and Le Viandier reflect the dining habits, sometimes aspirationally, of literal kings. The overwhelming majority of people did not eat that way. Saying that people have a misconception that mediaeval food was bland because of all the spices in Le Viandier is like saying it's a misconception that 21st Century Americans like fast food because billionaires prefer to eat at Michelin-starred restaurants. Again - mustard and horseradish are by no means the exclusive province of royalty. Pretty much anyone can grow that in their back garden, and did. Same for herbs like ~sings~ 'parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme'.
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Apr 10, 2023 12:54
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Pythagoras was famously against (fava) beans. The texture was like the flesh of the dead and every time you fart it steals your life away. I don't know when people turned on tomatoes but it's very strange to me there was an aversion to them when potatoes and bell pepper are also nightshade. I assume tomatoes became popular because they're really easy to preserve during times of global war??
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Apr 10, 2023 17:48
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feedmegin posted:... I discovered Coleman's on a recent UK trip, had it on a lovely sandwich, then saw you put flour in your Mustard! Never thought a country with so many GF things that you would cut your Mustard with flour. Should know by now, read the ingredients, for everything, obvious or not. I made lengua tacos yesterday, and surfing other YouTube recipes by the same lady, she had birra tacos, with beef cheeks used along with lamb. She mentioned in passing, tacos de cabeza. Is it cheeks they would use for that, or is it whole head, like head cheese or scrapple?
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Apr 10, 2023 18:48
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Arkhamina posted:I made lengua tacos yesterday, and surfing other YouTube recipes by the same lady, she had birra tacos, with beef cheeks used along with lamb. She mentioned in passing, tacos de cabeza. Is it cheeks they would use for that, or is it whole head, like head cheese or scrapple? It can be done with a whole cow or pig head, but I've also seen it done in smaller ovens and/or because finding an entire head wasn't feasible with just cheek meat.
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Apr 10, 2023 19:54
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feedmegin posted:Same for herbs like ~sings~ 'parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme'. But yeah. It's certainly plausible that people outside the clergy and gentry would have made use of whatever happened to be locally available to season their pottage. But I don't know of any direct documentary evidence to either support to refute the idea, and mediaeval culinary manuals (or 19th Century popular songs) aren't good sources for discussing the nature of the diet of mediaeval commoners.
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Apr 10, 2023 22:43
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SubG posted:Rosemary isn't attested to in England until the outset of the Hundred Years' War (Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, received cuttings from her mother Joan of Valois in 1338). I am pleased that we know this
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Apr 10, 2023 22:55
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I've seen texts in the late 17th century referring to veggies generally as "roots and herbs," meaning like, turnips and lettuce, so there's another confounding factor in determining any that.
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Apr 10, 2023 23:02
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It's cool as hell when we learn poo poo about historical growing and cooking from art, archeological digs, scribbles in the margins of old books, stuff like that
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Apr 10, 2023 23:30
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You know those ancient stone dildos they found in Greek ruins? I bet they were actually muddlers
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Apr 10, 2023 23:41
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Either way, juicy
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Apr 10, 2023 23:48
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My wife kind of decided yesterday she hates pans with long handles and I had to admit I mostly do too. Like, my cast-iron skillet doesn't have that large of a handle, and the only thing I often use with a handle is a flat cast-iron skillet (just a little bit of a side so it kind of needs a long handle to not die when using it). I'd probably even use my saucier more if it didn't have a long handle. They just get in the way of each other on the stove and also in cabinets. Is there a line of anything that generally has short-handled pans? All-clad has this, for example: https://www.all-clad.com/d3-stainless-3-ply-bonded-cookware-universal-pan-with-lid-3-quart.html I think we got this for my mom and it became her daily driver.
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Apr 11, 2023 07:01
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Arkhamina posted:I discovered Coleman's on a recent UK trip, had it on a lovely sandwich, then saw you put flour in your Mustard! Never thought a country with so many GF things that you would cut your Mustard with flour. Should know by now, read the ingredients, for everything, obvious or not. Just FYI, if you can get some, the dry powder version of Coleman's mustard claims to be 100% mustard flour, and it's extremely easy to make into lovely fresh mustard. https://www.colmans.co.uk/products/mustards/mustard-powder.html
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Apr 11, 2023 12:39
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SubG posted:Well, the song certainly doesn't attest to anything: it's a 19th Century English modification to an older ballad. Parsley is probably originally Sardinian and was known through most of Continental Europe by late antiquity, but isn't known to have been cultivated in the British Isles before the 16th Century. Rosemary isn't attested to in England until the outset of the Hundred Years' War (Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, received cuttings from her mother Joan of Valois in 1338). And so on. Well, firstly what do you mean 'known to have been'? People who write don't generally write about peasants, let alone what they grow, because they don't care, so you aren't going to see recipes, but 'petersilie' or similar appears to be Anglo-Saxon - https://www.etymologynerd.com/blog/rock-celery - and why would you have a word for it if you don't grow it? Secondly, 'plausible' is err rather under egging it. Why would you default to assuming people don't use their available herbs and instead subsist on unflavoured gruel? Humans are humans, we like flavour. Again, no, you won't see this in the written sources because peasants don't write.
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Apr 11, 2023 14:16
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feedmegin posted:Well, firstly what do you mean 'known to have been'? People who write don't generally write about peasants, let alone what they grow, because they don't care, so you aren't going to see recipes, but 'petersilie' or similar appears to be Anglo-Saxon - https://www.etymologynerd.com/blog/rock-celery - and why would you have a word for it if you don't grow it? The pastoral tradition has long put a lot of effort into describing/celebrating plants, and medical manuals are one of the more-surviving forms of writing and it just so happens that a 12th or 9th century medical manual looks a lot like a modern recipe book. Granted, classiboos have often prioritized describing the plants that they see in Virgil, but we can tell what plants were around from those texts and from linguistic evidence: if there's a word for it which appears in texts at all and/or a modern word which has an etymology that allows for a certain presence in the language at a given time, we can assume it was there. Without either of those things, we can't say anything other than "We don't have any evidence that they had and used it" (which isn't the same thing as assuming that they subsisted on unflavoured gruel). I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of the history and etymology of herbs and plants, but I know enough to give a few examples: we know that in the anglo-saxon period they had garlic, onions, and leeks from the words themselves. "Leek" is an Old English word. Garlic we can tell from the word itself - "gar-lic" = spear leek in OE, and it's recorded in those medical manuals. "Onion" is attested as something like onionlic in older documents which = union-leek. Likewise, "Honey" has a word for it in every Indo-European language, many of which descend from a common root. The Germanic word for honey (importantly, different from most other IE etymologies) persists through Old English into Modern English. This is strong evidence that honey had everyday use throughout this era, because if it didn't, or if it were restricted to upper-class use through the Norman era, it would have likely switched to a Romance etymology like many other words did at that time. And lastly we have records of the spread of plants. For example, weirdly enough, there are assertions (I can't remember where offhand and google credits a lot of differnet sources) that cabbage was introduced to Scotland during the English Civil Wars during Cromwell's occupation. There are records about Roman Britain which I have less experience with, but I've seen mention of complaints that nothing but grain grew in Brittania. It's a smaller assumption that plants which have been used as food sources for a long time, such as rowanberry, juniper, and hawthorn, would have been used by people in areas where they're endemic or cultivated. So again, saying with historical perspective "we don't know what they had" isn't the same as saying "they had nothing." It's just that people who know about these things aren't going to interpolate through those gaps, instead leaving them as gaps.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:50
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It's weird to me they had all the alliums with leek names. I usually think of all alliums like onions, so leeks are leaf onions and garlic is spicy onions.
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Apr 11, 2023 22:43
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:My wife kind of decided yesterday she hates pans with long handles and I had to admit I mostly do too. Like, my cast-iron skillet doesn't have that large of a handle, and the only thing I often use with a handle is a flat cast-iron skillet (just a little bit of a side so it kind of needs a long handle to not die when using it). I'd probably even use my saucier more if it didn't have a long handle. They just get in the way of each other on the stove and also in cabinets. Is there a line of anything that generally has short-handled pans? I've got a heavy enameled cast-iron pan, about 12 inches across and bright blue on the outside, that looks a lot like that All-clad pan you linked. Big, gently caress-off cast-iron is too heavy for most home chefs to easily pick up or slide around on the hob one-handed via a long handle so that's where I'd look for your short-handled pans. A big enameled pot is why I have an Amazon Prime membership - the cost of shipping, rendered free by joining Prime, was equivalent to about a decade of Prime membership. Enameled is different to use, for me at least (dirty heathen that I am), from un-enameled cast-iron - for one thing, I wash up with hot soapy water while the bare cast-iron just gets scrubbed with a wire scrubby and wiped with paper towels. I tend to save the bare cast-iron for certain dishes, and I generally avoid high-acid foods on the bare iron, so if I'm making anything with tomato as a star ingredient, it will be in the enameled. I like tomatoes, so I probably use my enameled pans about twice as much as my cast-iron. Whenever I use either I always want to do the thing that cast-iron is really good at - going from the stove to the oven - even if it's not really necessary. And I have recently decided to roast vegetables on the BBQ more often, and I'll be using the cast-irons there, as well.
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Apr 12, 2023 02:04
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feedmegin posted:Secondly, 'plausible' is err rather under egging it. Why would you default to assuming people don't use their available herbs and instead subsist on unflavoured gruel? Humans are humans, we like flavour. Again, no, you won't see this in the written sources because peasants don't write. But even if the average mediaeval peasant wasn't keeping a diary, we would expect there to be written records of what was cultivated by the other social classes in, e.g. diocese and manorial records. We also frequently have visibility into the life and diet of peasants via these sources when they are recorded in, for example, manorial court records. If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's an essay called "English Diet in the Later Middle Ages" by Christopher Dyer in Social Relations and Ideas which does a fairly deep dive into maintenance agreements, which are legal arrangements by which elderly tenants transfer a customary holding they can no longer maintain to a non-relative in exchange for certain considerations, including food. This sort of thing wouldn't necessarily tell us anything about the cultivation of parsley (although it does give us visibility about e.g. the specific proportions of various grains in the peasant diet over time), I'm just giving it as an example of a documentary source that you wouldn't necessarily think of if you hadn't done a lot of reading on the subject. Anyway, if we're talking specifically about parsley, then it was probably introduced into the British Isles by the Romans (who absolutely did cultivate it for culinary and medical use), but there's no evidence of its intentional cultivation in post-Roman Britain until much later. There is the linguistic evidence you mention, but it isn't like we only come up with words for plants we eat, much less cultivate. It shows up in a couple of medical and herbal manuals—e.g. Bald's Leechbook—for centuries before it gets mentioned in a culinary context, and that's a couple of centuries before the first reliable evidence for cultivation for culinary use. So it seems that it was probably a wild plant in England for some length of time, at some point became understood to be a medicinal herb, and then some time after that it became identified as a culinary herb...and at some point in this process it became common to cultivate it for use (after having been last cultivated before the end of Roman rule in Britain). Where are the exact inflection points? Well, it's unlikely that they occur precisely on the dates that we can establish via documentary sources. But pushing the dates much beyond the documentary sources is just speculation. As to why? Well, that's just the trajectory that the introduction of culinary plants into new places seems to take. In England there were superstitions about parsley, usually involving bad luck and sometimes involving death. Similarly, eggplants were frequently associated (in England as well as, for example, Italy) with madness. Give Italy the tomato, what's the first thing they do? Ornamental shrubs. But oh poo poo don't eat them, they're poison. Couple centuries later, integral part of the local cuisine. Point being you can't just sorta take our current understanding of a food product and apply "common sense" to figure out how it must have been several centuries ago.
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Apr 12, 2023 04:20
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My wife has injured her jaw, and I need some ideas for tasty soup-like things. We have a good blender (and a stick blender) and I'm happy to experiment in the kitchen. She's already tired of the soup mixes and heat-up-the-contents-packs from the grocery store. I've joked about the classic approach of just tossing everything - burger, bun, fries, drink - into the blender, hitting puree and handing her a straw but she's less than enthusiastic about that approach. I'm leaning towards foods that are already quite soft, and would not necessarily be much worse if they were homogenized. She's working from home these days and this morning suggested the slow cooker, on high for 4-6 hours, as a kind of vague idea. She enjoyed the blended-to-creamy-orangeness version of the beef-and-pea soup I'd made last week (from the freezer to the blender, with half set aside for me to eat in the original consistency with some nice chewy bread), but she's not sure about other soups that rely on texture (e.g. crackers/croutons, chunks of carrots/potatoes/beef/etc.).
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Apr 13, 2023 03:06
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ExecuDork posted:My wife has injured her jaw, and I need some ideas for tasty soup-like things. We have a good blender (and a stick blender) and I'm happy to experiment in the kitchen. She's already tired of the soup mixes and heat-up-the-contents-packs from the grocery store. I've joked about the classic approach of just tossing everything - burger, bun, fries, drink - into the blender, hitting puree and handing her a straw but she's less than enthusiastic about that approach. I'm a big fan of daal. I've made some great blended pumpkin soups seasoned with garam masala too and topped with something sweet. Lots of flavour combos go well in pumpkin soup!
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Apr 13, 2023 03:33
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ExecuDork posted:My wife has injured her jaw, and I need some ideas for tasty soup-like things. We have a good blender (and a stick blender) and I'm happy to experiment in the kitchen. She's already tired of the soup mixes and heat-up-the-contents-packs from the grocery store. I've joked about the classic approach of just tossing everything - burger, bun, fries, drink - into the blender, hitting puree and handing her a straw but she's less than enthusiastic about that approach. If you're making a bunch ahead, you can do blend without adding the cream, freeze portions in delitainers or whatever, then reheat, add cream, and blend for serving. This basic base works with a whole bunch of other veg added: add carrots, you get potage Crécy, add broccoli you get cream of broccoli soup, and so on. Congee, and more generally porridge in all its variations, is also good for this sort of thing. Also dal (in all its variations).
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Apr 13, 2023 03:35
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My first go to would be gazpacho, with it getting into the summer where I am.
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Apr 13, 2023 04:21
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Blend things separately with just a little water. When I had my wisdom teeth out, I had like puréed green beans, puréed grilled pork chop, etc. I was honestly really into it after a few days of the usual suspects like scrambled egg and mashed squash. Definitely worth a shot imo
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Apr 13, 2023 04:21
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i like nice words
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ExecuDork posted:My wife has injured her jaw, and I need some ideas for tasty soup-like things. We have a good blender (and a stick blender) and I'm happy to experiment in the kitchen. She's already tired of the soup mixes and heat-up-the-contents-packs from the grocery store. I've joked about the classic approach of just tossing everything - burger, bun, fries, drink - into the blender, hitting puree and handing her a straw but she's less than enthusiastic about that approach. I was making blended meals for my father for about half a year recently, due to a throat infection. Mostly I added some flavourful fat (like bacon or lard + aromatic vegs), some pulses (like peas) and some alliums (like onions or leeks). You can rotate all sorts of variants of those ingredient groups. Like your beef and pea soup that you refer to. Also, add some msg or something. You can add blended potatoes into the stew for thicker stew texture. Or serve it with mashed potatoes, similar to how you would serve a curry with rice. If you leave out the potatoes you can use the leftover puree as a pasta sauce or daal with minimal modifications. Or eat it as stew. Or turn it into something hummus like. If you want to store it, cook it with less water then you think it needs and rehydrate to the right level just before warming it up. When he felt good, I was also making fluffy omelettes or pancakes. If it lasts longer you should stock up on some medical grade meal replacement stuff for days when your experiments fail or something. Don't buy the supermarket stuff, we had a brand the hospital recommended.
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Apr 13, 2023 09:09
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Interesting article on kiviaq and other traditional fermented foods https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-kiviaq
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Apr 13, 2023 09:50
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Finally got back to this:ExecuDork posted:I've got a heavy enameled cast-iron pan, about 12 inches across and bright blue on the outside, that looks a lot like that All-clad pan you linked. Big, gently caress-off cast-iron is too heavy for most home chefs to easily pick up or slide around on the hob one-handed via a long handle so that's where I'd look for your short-handled pans. A big enameled pot is why I have an Amazon Prime membership - the cost of shipping, rendered free by joining Prime, was equivalent to about a decade of Prime membership. Yeah I got a bit of Le Creuset, but I do like have a set of pans I can throw in the dishwasher. This sounds inconsistent to me talking about my cast-iron and all that because it is. The pans we want to replace are some really old stainless steel with handles in particular. I really don't use the pans at all, and I use the pots sometimes.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:29
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I stumbled across a cook book called Encore! Recipes from Hong Kong Kitchens (a fundraiser for the HK philharmonic orchestra, full of recipes submitted by patrons of the orchestra I assume) from 1983. Flipping through, the recipes are mostly reasonable (for 1983), but this one caught my eye: Chicken Meatballs with Spicy Sauce. The meatballs are fine, but the spicy sauce is great: 1/2 cup fruit chutney 1/4 soy sauce 1/4 water walnut-size piece of fresh ginger, grated. I started sweating just reading that ingredient list, now I think I have heart palpitations!
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Apr 15, 2023 11:22
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I was at a cookout the other day and my boy made something he called "crazy corn". It was boiled corn on the cob rolled in kewpie mayo and drizzled with yakisoba sauce and topped with bonito flakes, scallions, and furikake. It was really good, you should check it out if you're into Japanese flavors. He likes the shrimp furikake but the kimchi flavor would be even better IMO.
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Apr 15, 2023 21:25
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That sounds delicious.
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Apr 15, 2023 22:11
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I think I have now cooked everything
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Apr 16, 2023 17:06
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Happy Hat posted:I think I have now cooked everything Start over again at the beginning and do it better this time
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Apr 16, 2023 17:10
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therattle posted:Start over again at the beginning and do it better this time pancakes coming up
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Apr 16, 2023 17:14
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Happy Hat posted:I think I have now cooked everything Was it filling?
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Apr 16, 2023 17:54
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BrianBoitano posted:Was it filling? Some sucked... Seal is overrated
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Apr 16, 2023 17:57
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Happy Hat posted:Some sucked... I don't know anything beyond "Kiss From a Rose" I got a pasta roller because I was swayed by an instagram pasta man, and it's been lots of fun. I made cut long noodles and I just made my first raviolis. The flat noodles were tasty. Hopefully the raviolis are too! The hardest part was keeping air out of the ravioli pockets. Probably a trick move I'll learn over X years. Edit: Ravioli was loving delicious. Freshest-tasting pasta and filling I've ever had, and only one of them burst! I thought they were all gonna empty their guts, I've got no faith in myself. Brawnfire fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 16, 2023 |
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Apr 16, 2023 18:28
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Feisty-Cadaver posted:I stumbled across a cook book called Encore! Recipes from Hong Kong Kitchens (a fundraiser for the HK philharmonic orchestra, full of recipes submitted by patrons of the orchestra I assume) from 1983. Now I gotta see if I can pull up any menus for what the colonial era British ate in Hong Kong, because I’ll bet that’s a special kind of weird. Growing up in the 90s my folks did a fair bit of business in Hong Kong (back when it was still “the orient”) and while my Dad got excited about chicken feet because he ordered whatever looked good at other tables, Mom was super excited to take us there as a family to experience it. Sadly, the 1999 handover and a kinda gnarly divorce got in the way, but it was a nice thought. Of course, like much of the boomer life, you can only have nostalgia for something that was only there in the way you experienced it and not as it actually was. Maybe I’ll go someday, but I don’t know. The bars are better in Singapore, my fiancé has stuff tied up in her first marriage to a Cantonese guy and his family, and things are uh, tense with the PRC kind of all the time. But it’s a whole world that just doesn’t exist anymore- I’ve rented a flat in East Berlin on air BnB, I’ll never know what it was like to get lost in the streets of London because I have google. I’ve spent plenty of time in Madrid but I’ll never know how sleepy it was under Franco, and my time in Montreal has never been worried about separatists blowing up a cafe. The thing that does stay the same, besides old architecture and literature, is the food. Everything we cook, every time we visit a place that is a “hole in the wall” or an old taberna, we are participating in a living culture and spreading it further along. It’s the reason recipes have head notes and people bitch that they can’t just google the specs- it’s the transmission of history and the creation of meaning. So learn to cook from your aunties and abuelitas, enjoy things for their heritage and not because it got Columbus’d by a particularly cutesy subsidiary of ConAgra. Live for today, cook for yesterday, and teach for tomorrow.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:57
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^ this is an incredibly good post
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Apr 17, 2023 20:33
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prayer group posted:^ this is an incredibly good post 
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Apr 17, 2023 20:52
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bloody ghost titty posted:Maybe I’ll go someday, but I don’t know. The bars are better in Singapore Yeah I lived in HK the last 10 years, now in SG (thanks, job). Things changed pretty drastically after the protests and especially after the national security law, where they started arresting teenagers for sedition for holding up blank pieces of paper at gatherings, etc. I'd usually take my lunch down at the central pier, and there would be cops just randomly ID and bag checking every local HKer. Surprisingly they left the middle aged white guy alone... One of my most memorable meals in HK was a Hakka place that had been there for ages, all the wait staff were in their 80's, etc. I swapped my tea cup to the other side of my place cuz I'm left handed. A couple minutes later our waiter wordlessly came over and moved my teacup back the the "correct" side, haha. Food was great though. The bars in SG might be better, but it gets old quick paying $15 for a freakin' beer. Or I can go the store and get six pack of something ok for only $30! but yeah good post.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:01
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ExecuDork posted:My wife has injured her jaw, and I need some ideas for tasty soup-like things. We have a good blender (and a stick blender) and I'm happy to experiment in the kitchen. She's already tired of the soup mixes and heat-up-the-contents-packs from the grocery store. I've joked about the classic approach of just tossing everything - burger, bun, fries, drink - into the blender, hitting puree and handing her a straw but she's less than enthusiastic about that approach. do you think she'd be able to eat silken tofu in miso soup or something like that? she might appreciate a change in texture from blended foods that's still soft and slippery enough to just go right down the hatch. and even if she can't do that right now it might be a good "progress food" after her jaw has healed up a little bit.
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Apr 18, 2023 08:06
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