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Chef De Cuisinart posted:
"Texas is south of something, but it's not the south". My grandma, 8th generation southerner. Take it outside, y'all. This is a place to celebrate, not slap fight about what we stole from West Africa.
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Apr 6, 2014 04:13
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But I am southern =/
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Croatoan posted:No, there's being southern and being a dumbass from the south. You consistently say dumbassed things and yet you're from the south. Stop embarrassing us.  Y'all are sure mad about a lovely food.
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Apr 6, 2014 04:56
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Vegetable Melange posted:slap fight about what we stole from West Africa. On that note, do you know any good histories of soul food and its African roots? My mother in law made some incredibly racist claims and I want to educate myself.
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Apr 6, 2014 05:46
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Well tell us what bullshit she hacked up, then.
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Apr 6, 2014 06:53
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Croatoan posted:No, there's being southern and being a dumbass from the south. You consistently say dumbassed things and yet you're from the south. Stop embarrassing us. you're being very, very silly. saying there's no real or quantifiable technique behind southern cooking is like explaining creation away by being all 'oh don't worry your pretty little head about that, god created it all, and that's all you need to know.' CdC raises very valid points about blackening. points worth at very least discussing, seeing as this is a forum about cooking technique. any dumb poo poo can put a fish in a pan with some butter and seasoning and call it blackened, but getting it really technically right is not "not hard".
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Apr 6, 2014 09:57
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mindphlux posted:CdC raises very valid points about blackening. points worth at very least discussing, seeing as this is a forum about cooking technique. any dumb poo poo can put a fish in a pan with some butter and seasoning and call it blackened, but getting it really technically right is not "not hard". I'll give you that but "drench your protein in melted butter, then pour more butter on later" is not a southern cooking technique I've ever seen and it's just a negative stereotype. Also, I was trying to imply that there's actually a lot of skill in it, not the opposite, sorry I could have been clearer.
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Apr 6, 2014 13:25
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Vegetable Melange posted:That's pretty cool. What kind of food? German and Polish Mennonite food, along with the regular potluck fare. There's a bunch of weird staples, like those frozen cream puffs from costco, homemade deer sausage because some relatives hunt, and there's always 2 or 3 types of ham. Sometimes my aunt will make one of two kinds of delicious mennonite soup, summer borscht and another one I can't remember the name of that has cabbage, tomato, beet leaves, and a bunch of other stuff. I'll have to get the recipe at Easter. They make this one in huge vats at the Niverville Fair every year too. A couple of my aunts and uncles live really close to New Bothwell, MB so there's always a plate of Bothwell cheeses and crackers/pickles/meats. Now I'm really excited for Easter! 
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Apr 6, 2014 16:49
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Oh yeah, Polish Easter ham. As for the food ways of the south I don't have any concrete analysis, but I'll dig some up this week.
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Apr 6, 2014 20:34
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Sjurygg posted:Well tell us what bullshit she hacked up, then. I forgot how it came up, but I was talking about my time in the south with the military and about how much I missed the food. I was talking about a place a friend brought me to and the lady at the counter was amazed that I would try chitlins and she then told every person who came in that "Look, that white girl is eatin chitlins!" Mother in law then busted out with "You know, black people STOLE soul food from white people". I know this isn't true, and knowing WHAT dishes 'carried' over from African and other cooking styles might help me put her on the spot next time she tries this poo poo and force her to explain her reasoning.
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Apr 6, 2014 21:32
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Amykinz posted:I forgot how it came up, but I was talking about my time in the south with the military and about how much I missed the food. I was talking about a place a friend brought me to and the lady at the counter was amazed that I would try chitlins and she then told every person who came in that "Look, that white girl is eatin chitlins!" I have a racist mother-in-law too. Facts aren't going to change her. You might succeed in temporarily embarrassing her into silence, but be assured that she's just bottling up all the bigoted vitriol for later. That said I personally would be really interested to learn about the origins of soul food/southern cooking if anyone wants to explain. Sorry about your MIL, Amykinz. Just remember: you get to help pick her nursing home.
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Apr 6, 2014 22:04
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Wroughtirony posted:I have a racist mother-in-law too. Facts aren't going to change her. You might succeed in temporarily embarrassing her into silence, but be assured that she's just bottling up all the bigoted vitriol for later. Make sure it has plenty of black and other minority carers.
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Apr 6, 2014 22:17
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all this blackening talk got me craving some catfish. did some with a creole sauce over logan turnpike grits tonight, was deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelicious. I did a hybrid butter method on a cast iron pan and it worked perfectly. thinnest possible sheen of peanut oil smoking hot in the pan, fish dryrubbed 1hr before, in the pan without touching for 2-3 minutes. then in a few knobs of butter, till just beginning to brown, flip, another minute or two to temp, and out and rested on a cutting board. worked perfectly - lots of crispy crust on the fish, and the pan cleaned up in under 15 seconds with a quick rinse and scrub. cooking technique is fun.
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Apr 7, 2014 01:52
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Wroughtirony posted:I have a racist mother-in-law too. Facts aren't going to change her. You might succeed in temporarily embarrassing her into silence, but be assured that she's just bottling up all the bigoted vitriol for later. Eh, she watches too much fox news to change, I know that. I'm just trying to get her to stop telling me her bullshit. And I would truly like to learn about the origins of soul food because it is so drat good.
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Apr 7, 2014 02:21
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Amykinz posted:Eh, she watches too much fox news to change, I know that. I'm just trying to get her to stop telling me her bullshit. And I would truly like to learn about the origins of soul food because it is so drat good. I was under the impression that soul food's origins were rooted in the slave trade: That slave-owners gave their slaves the shittiest stuff they could get away with as food, like tough leaves and miscellaneous meat bits.
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Apr 7, 2014 03:22
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mindphlux posted:I'd agree with subg, but the kind of heat I've always cooked with re: blackening, would just make butter taste acrid instantly. I don't disagree that browned butter makes for a good blackened piece of fish though, and may or may not be integral to the "traditional" "cajun" version - I'd just maybe add it in the last ~30sec of cooking. Anyway, I really don't give a poo poo whether or not anyone actually approaches it this way. I've just seen Ramsay entirely from cooking videos people have posted, and most of the time he's basically a spergy prick about technique. Which is cool, whatever. So it seemed weird that here he is basically just grilling some catfish with some spices and calling it a blackened catfish. I mean it's no skin off my rear end either way. Carbonara with ham and peas? Whatever. Caesar salad with ranch dressing. That's on you man. I'm just saying it's weird to see GR being that cavalier about that kind of thing.
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Apr 7, 2014 03:25
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I don't need to post anymore because SubG always posts what I'm thinking before I get to it. Or I do. Crosspost'n from the cajun thread:pr0k posted:The butter is supposed to burn? Well not even burn exactly - a good bit of it polymerizes. The skillet is supposed to be hot enough that its seasoning burns off. The butter and spices combine and make a kind of crust that isn't even really spicy anymore because most of the capsaicin polymerizes too. To be fair, cajun spiced fish that is high-heat seared but not blackened can still be delicious. And GR refers twice to "that blackened flavor" but doesn't actually call the technique blackening. You gotta figure he knows what blackening is.
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Apr 7, 2014 19:20
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Scientastic posted:I was under the impression that soul food's origins were rooted in the slave trade: That slave-owners gave their slaves the shittiest stuff they could get away with as food, like tough leaves and miscellaneous meat bits. According to the Wikipedia article, soul food has a few roots, one of them being plantation owners feeding their slaves as cheaply as they possibly could, and others being the influence of Native American foods in the region and various staples that made their way around Africa and then around the world due to exploration and (a bit later) the slave trade, like sorghum, rice, cassava, okra, and so on. Chitlins apparently came from medieval Europe, but given that the peasant food of any population is pretty much "what we can grow cheaply" plus "the parts of animals rich folk don't eat", cooked and seasoned to suit local preferences, there are bound to be common threads in any culture. Food is in many ways a lot like language. Intercultural contact leaves its mark on the cuisines of both cultures, and people with nothing in common thrown together will find a way to adapt something that works for everyone with what they have available to them. Soul food is basically the Creole of cuisines.
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Apr 8, 2014 16:08
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Bertrand Hustle posted:According to the Wikipedia article, soul food has a few roots, one of them being plantation owners feeding their slaves as cheaply as they possibly could, and others being the influence of Native American foods in the region and various staples that made their way around Africa and then around the world due to exploration and (a bit later) the slave trade, like sorghum, rice, cassava, okra, and so on. The talk page on that article is kind of funny. quote:Chitlins are eaten in other countries as well. In southern China, I had the best chitlins I've ever eaten served with greens and liver. Chinese chitlins need mentioning.Onionhound 11:28, 15 October 2005 (UTC) quote:Why are chitterlings still consumed by blacks?
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Apr 8, 2014 16:42
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Bertrand Hustle posted:Soul food is basically the Creole of cuisines. Or Metis!  The French-Canadian Voyageurs would eat pemmican and bannock on the road whilst spreading their seed and french culture to the native communities on the fur-trade routes, and back home it would still be fairly simple aboriginal foods with a french twist: buffalo tourtiere, wild berry pies, stews and soups, wild rice, meatballs, salt fish and meat, and eventually canned stuff like saskatoon jam or canned meats. It was also interesting because the Voyageur were known to bring other regional native cultural tricks and traditions back to their own communities, and have salt wives of a sort along the trade routes so different tribal values were getting significantly mixed all along the way. They'd get busy with the locals and if a kid resulted, they would apparently do what they could to support their numerous families, and sometimes even taking their bastard boys back to their own communities to grow up and become voyageurs. These kids would have had a taste of their mother's culture for the first portion of their lives and then it would mix with the voyageur culture and whichever other aboriginal culture would be in the region their dad came from. It makes for a really fascinating mix of cultures.
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Apr 8, 2014 17:09
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Bertrand Hustle posted:According to the Wikipedia article, soul food has a few roots, one of them being plantation owners feeding their slaves as cheaply as they possibly could, and others being the influence of Native American foods in the region and various staples that made their way around Africa and then around the world due to exploration and (a bit later) the slave trade, like sorghum, rice, cassava, okra, and so on. The GF wants me try sorghum, but to me it's just cattle feed... She swears its The Next Big Thing in grain fads. She wants to serve it as part of spring menu she is doing for a popup restaurant in Boston. What do you goons think of sorghum?
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Apr 8, 2014 17:34
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People eat millet now and that's always been bird food to me, so why not. Can't say I've ever had it, though.
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Apr 8, 2014 17:41
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Here is an article all about grains written by my future wife, in case you haven't seen it. I don't even care at all about whole grains but found it really interesting.
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Apr 8, 2014 17:46
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Clavietika posted:Or Metis! Sounds like miscegenation to me! That is pretty fascinating. I'm Jewish and the stereotypical Jewish food is herring, potato latkes, etc - essentially Eastern European. The Claudia Roden book on Jewish cooking covers a huge spectrum of cuisines, from right around the Mediterranean and into Eastern Europe, reflecting, like your post, the exchanges between different cultures. I've never had sorghum but I'm absolutely open to trying it. Oats used to be animal feed, defined by Doctor Johnson I think as a cereal that is fed to animals in England but eaten by people north of the border (Scotland). So sorghum being animal feed matters not! quote:Definition of "oats": "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people."
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Apr 8, 2014 18:48
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Squashy Nipples posted:The GF wants me try sorghum, but to me it's just cattle feed... She swears its The Next Big Thing in grain fads. It's not really a grain application, but sorghum syrup (pressed out of the plant bodies, I think, and probably boiled down) is a dark-colored sweetener similar to molasses or rice syrup. My family has a recipe for what we call oatmeal sausage, which is basically pig head ground up with steel cut oats and pressed into a rectangular block. Sort of like scrapple but using oats instead of wheat flour. We cut it into centimeter-thick portions and pan-fried it in a cast iron skillet until brown and crispy on the outside, then served with sorghum syrup. I've made oatmeal sausage a few times, but the flavor is never quite right. Part of it is the quality of hog, but the rest is the sorghum syrup - while it's similar to other plant-based sweeteners, nothing else has quite the same flavor.
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Apr 8, 2014 18:53
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Clavietika posted:Or Metis! oh god why did you have to remind me of that :puke: 
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Apr 8, 2014 19:18
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pr0k posted:oh god why did you have to remind me of that What is seen cannot be unseen.
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Apr 8, 2014 19:24
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bartolimu posted:It's not really a grain application, but sorghum syrup (pressed out of the plant bodies, I think, and probably boiled down) is a dark-colored sweetener similar to molasses or rice syrup. My family has a recipe for what we call oatmeal sausage, which is basically pig head ground up with steel cut oats and pressed into a rectangular block. Sort of like scrapple but using oats instead of wheat flour. We cut it into centimeter-thick portions and pan-fried it in a cast iron skillet until brown and crispy on the outside, then served with sorghum syrup. This is a true thing. Sorghum syrup is also the only thing that is quite right to serve on cornbread.
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Apr 8, 2014 19:25
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Mr. Wiggles posted:What is seen cannot be unseen. I am so so glad the sound didn't work on the copy I saw.
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Apr 9, 2014 00:37
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bunnielab posted:I am so so glad the sound didn't work on the copy I saw. For those of you curious, a slightly more tame version with some poetic license and sound.
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Apr 9, 2014 00:51
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Wait, is oatmeal in sausages not common? I know it's not in every type but I thought it was pretty common? I've seen family/friends make them with like millet and all sorts of grains like that.
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Apr 9, 2014 04:13
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Oatmeal is quite common as a binder in black pudding/blood sausage.
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Apr 9, 2014 08:38
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Just chopped no salted a napa cabbage and daikon for kimchi, but I had to basically double the recipe because my cabbage is the size of a toddler. Thank you, Asian mega market, for helping me to realize my April of odd farts.
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Apr 9, 2014 23:42
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Hello friends. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz9r4H9kaTI This lady's like the Laotian Manjula. So sweet and friendly.
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Apr 15, 2014 05:11
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dino. posted:Hello friends. nice. I make this dish (or my version of it anyways) to bring to barbeques, it's always a huge hit but wow, that is a lot of MSG. I love MSG and all, but the most I'll ever add to a dish/marinade is a pinch - 1/10th of what she's using maybe. after a pinch or two stuff just starts tasting crazy to me. I also like that she returns her mixing spoon to sit in the MSG dish while she's not using it, so even more is probably being picked up. does anyone know anything about the 'frozen crab' stuff she's using? I've never heard of it/seen it.
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Apr 15, 2014 05:56
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I'm gonna bake a fairly simple cake from an old cookbook and have 'modernised' the recipe, but I just wanted some insight on whether I've missed anything or made any silly mistakes etc.Old Recipes posted:Lemon Cake, Rich.—Beat three-quarters Modern Version posted:Lemon Cake, Rich
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Apr 17, 2014 00:01
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It sounds like the recipe tells you to harden the icing in a moderately low oven, like meringue cookies. The "see that it is not hot enough to colour the icing" and the fact you put it on a hot cake looks like a clue to that. IF that is the case, the sugar for the icing probably isn't icing sugar, but superfine sugar instead. Maybe cut the recipe down to one egg white and try both of them? Also: a lot of meringue cookie recipes have you heat the oven to a temperature, toss in the cookies, and then shut off the oven and leave them for a couple hours. Your recipe may be calling for you to put the icing onto the hot cake and then harden the icing in the cooling off oven.
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Apr 17, 2014 03:18
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I wonder if the "firm froth" is more of a "firm peaks" than what you might imagine a froth to be? I've made lovely light airy cakes by folding beaten egg whites into that kind of mixture, though I will say that I am not a reliable baker.
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Apr 17, 2014 05:57
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Amykinz posted:It sounds like the recipe tells you to harden the icing in a moderately low oven, like meringue cookies. The "see that it is not hot enough to colour the icing" and the fact you put it on a hot cake looks like a clue to that. IF that is the case, the sugar for the icing probably isn't icing sugar, but superfine sugar instead. Maybe cut the recipe down to one egg white and try both of them? Yeah taking a quick look a cool oven is 90C, so yeah meringue icing, blech. I may make my own icing, then again tesco seems to have superfine sugar for baking so I might be able to keep closer to the recipe. Nicol Bolas posted:I wonder if the "firm froth" is more of a "firm peaks" than what you might imagine a froth to be? I've made lovely light airy cakes by folding beaten egg whites into that kind of mixture, though I will say that I am not a reliable baker. I'd imagined it to look like almost like meringue, I just liked the phrase firm froth. 
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Apr 17, 2014 11:48
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Chat Thread title is relevant again. Penny Arcade recently announced a fourth annual PAX con: PAX South, to be held in... wait for it.... San Antonio, Texas. This joins the already existing PAX Prime (Seattle), PAX East (Boston), and PAX Australia (Melbourne).
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Apr 17, 2014 12:53
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Berlin was good. So was the beer. I covered schewinshaxe, currywurst, döner and shitloads of crispy pork belly at a Chinese restaurant (rightly) famed for its grilled meat. I don't think I'm going to eat meat again for a while.
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Apr 17, 2014 16:36
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