redshoesnblueskies reblogged
A Victorian radiator with a built-in warming oven to keep plates or food warm.
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
This year for my partner for Valentines I made brownie truffles with bourbon cherries in the center :3 ❤️
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
Anonymous asked:
this is a silly question, but what do you mean, "the flavor profiles might have shifted?"
Not at all silly! I’m referring to the fact that changes in manufacturing processes, ingredients, and breeding of both flora and fauna mean that the food we eat today may taste significantly different from the food of 100 years ago and yet we still refer to it by the same name.
The most well-known example of this, of course, is the Gros Michel/Cavendish issue; until the 1950s, Gros Michel bananas were the most common export, but now mostly in the US we eat Cavendish bananas, which have a different flavor. Cooking with Gros Michel and Cavendish bananas are going to get you different end results because they taste different; Rex Stout’s banana bread won’t taste like Sam Starbuck’s, and also any seasoning in the recipe (spices, etc) is aimed at complimenting the Gros Michel, and may not work as well on the Cavendish. (This is in theory, I don’t know if he has a banana bread recipe or if it was written pre or post Cavendish.)
The same goes for a lot of fruits and vegetables – we haven’t necessarily changed breeds but we’ve certainly begun aggressively breeding for flavor or size or color, and we’ve also begun importing from hundreds or thousands of miles away, affecting freshness and flavor along the way. Which means a tomato today is a different beast from the tomato of fifty years ago.
In one of the Nero Wolfe short stories, Wolfe gives a recipe for corn: roasted in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, husked at the table, and served with only butter, salt, and pepper, “it is ambrosia”. But that’s for corn grown at a farm less than three hours from Wolfe’s home, picked less than half a day before it was cooked, and picked by hand just as it came fully ripe – Wolfe knows there’s something wrong and solves a murder because one delivery of his corn is of poor quality (too old, and picked too far previously). Stout acknowledges in his recipe that it’s unrealistic to be able to get corn like that, but corn grown from different strains, picked in Mexico, sorted by machine and shipped to Chicago where it sits in a misting box on a shelf for a few days before I buy it and take it home, that’s going to taste different. I’m not slamming the globalization of food (though elements of it are certainly an issue), but it’s simply a fact: they won’t taste the same. My corn, due to breeding and preservation techniques, might even taste better! But it will be a different taste. And when you’re dealing with the delicacy of flavor that Rex Stout often does, that can cause real issues.
This extends to all kinds of things. Flour is milled differently now, and made from different grains; most things that used sugar cane or sugar beet sweetening prior to 1970 now use high fructose corn syrup (though this is a trend that is slowly reversing). Processed foods, like macaroni and cheese boxes or Cheerios or Jello, have changed ingredients to improve flavor or ease of cooking or health benefits to the people who eat them. Meat is fed differently (beef being fed primarily on corn because it bulks cows up like crazy is the most evident example) and that affects the flavor of the meat, too.
This gets even more bonkers the deeper you go. The reason modern recipes, especially baking recipes, often call for both butter and milk is that they used to call for cream, but people stopped buying cream and started buying lower fat milk, so now you have to use your lower-fat milk plus butter added to simulate cream. A recipe that called for cream was less likely to be made when people stopped buying cream, and new recipes in the second half of the 20th century were primarily the province of ad companies, who wanted you to buy their product and cook with it. If people were more likely to cook with a product that used butter and milk instead of cream, the ad companies would design recipes that way.
So if you’re looking at a recipe from before the 1980s or so, understand that the recipe is designed with ingredients that might be vastly different from, and yet share a name with, the ingredients of today. Which affects the flavor of the finished product.
Time travel is so weird, am I right?
If you enjoy reading about food history, consider passing me a ko-fi!
“The reason modern recipes, especially baking recipes, often call for both butter and milk is that they used to call for cream, but people stopped buying cream and started buying lower fat milk, so now you have to use your lower-fat milk plus butter added to simulate cream.”
So you’re saying that if I have cream but no butter i can just pour that shit in my kraft mac and cheese and get more or less the same end result?
FUCK YES.
Pretty much. You can add basically any mix of dairy-and-fat to Kraft mac and cheese and as long as the proportions are more or less the same, you’ll get a decent cheese sauce. If you don’t have butter but you do have some kind of oil like canola or olive oil, you can also substitute that for the butter, just reduce it a little. My personal favorite is to use alfredo sauce in place of the milk and butter, because it adds a depth of flavor, but you can also use greek yogurt mixed with water to thin it (plus some butter or oil if it’s skim), or cream. Cream’s a bit rich for me, so I’d water it down a little, but if you like full fat milk or creamy sauce, it should be pretty delicious.
Kraft dinner isn’t formulated specifically to accept these substitutions, but it’s formulated to be the easiest possible thing to mix into dairy-and-fat to produce sauce, so you can screw around with it quite a lot before you produce something that’s actively inedible.
This also applies to the techniques and tools we use for cooking!
Obviously the go-to here is the microwave, but refrigeration has probably had a larger impact. And the electric stove, omg. I have a recipe from my dad’s cousin’s mother-in-law that she wrote down in 1947. It’s a rewrite of her mother’s recipe. It requires the oven to be pre-heated to 425, the item to be baked at that temperature for 10 minutes, and then for the oven to be allowed to fall to 350 during the remaining 30 minutes of baking. I was extremely confused. Turns out, it was rewritten to deal with… the electric oven. Because wood-burning ovens often don’t maintain set temperatures and can, apparently, have that be treated as a feature rather than a bug.
Don’t get me started on pans.
No please, get started on pans
*whips out my pans*
Ok y’all, I’m an amateur connoisseur of cheap pans because most of my cookware are hand-me-downs. I am the kitchen equivalent of the youngest child in a frugal family that throws nothing away. My oldest pans go back to mid-20th century, but I’m in line to inherit some older ones, and I’ve gotten to use those in other people’s kitchens.
There are three levels to pans, and I can never keep up with them all, so I pretty much stick to my old aluminum skillet that was used for years by boy scouts on camping trips (and it shows), my ikea thin stainless steel skillet, and my old cheap copper-bottom pots. (I used to use teflon-coated steel. Alas.) These rules also apply to baking, though, and there I have more options because I like experimenting with things if I won’t have to skip dinner if I screw up.
Level one: Material. This says how hot the pan will heat to and how long it will stay at that heat. Iron vs aluminum vs steel vs copper (with the copper usually an outer coating, so this is a double whammy of trying to figure out the pan’s temperature situation, but I’ve been using these pots for a couple decades and just Know). Materials were different earlier, so it wasn’t just that you didn’t have safe-to-touch handles on them - no, you had pans that heated up at different speeds and stayed hot for different periods of time. Iron stays hot forever. This changes cooking times and food temperatures.
Level two: Thickness. Along with material, this determines how soon the food starts getting hot (thinner = sooner), how long the pan stays hot (thicker = longer), and how long the pan lasts (though coating plays a big role here). The iron skillet that will probably be mine someday is a single cast piece that’s built like a tank. It may outlast the human race. It also takes approximately a glacial age to start heating, even though it’s iron and shouldn’t take that long. “Pre-heat pan,” some of my recipes say. Wow.
Level three: Coating. Seasoning, for pans that don’t have coatings. Greasing, for everyday use. This is where teflon gave us all cancer came in. My granny always preferred crisco, and she never liked teflon much. In a pinch, she would allow spray-in pam, but she felt is was generally inadequate. (She was right.) The amount and thickness of greasing depends on what you’re cooking. If you’re cooking cornbread, you need a lot. No, more than that. Keep going. Add a bit more for good measure.
Pretty much all the pans I see in the stores now are single-piece stainless steel or anodized aluminum, both relatively thin compared to pans of the mid-20th century. Even those cheap copper-bottom pots with welded-on, plastic-covered handles that were ubiquitous in my youth seem to be vanishing. The exception are woks, which I do still find in various places.
This makes for a more uniform cooking experience, but recipe notes like “Stew tomatoes separately” and “Remove pan from heat, cover, and let simmer for half an hour” don’t transfer well to the newer materials and thicknesses. Otoh, I don’t have to keep a giant tub of crisco anymore. It’s an adjustment, and it’s one that I’ve watched happen in my lifetime, as three generations of my family wrestled with old recipes and adjusted cook times, heat levels, greasing, and even seasoning of our recipes for these changes.
Also, I love pyrex for ovens; let’s keep pyrex forever. I can’t make lasagna without it.
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
From the (theoretically forthcoming) CUISINES AND FOODS OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOMS: Cracknels
Using the vestigial English term “cracknel” to define this common snack food format of the Middle Kingdoms may at first seem a strange choice, considering the weird peripatetic course the word has charted across this world’s linguistic landscape over the last century or so. Having started out as a 1400s-period descriptor for a twice-baked savory-or-sweet biscuit, it then became gradually attached to all kinds of sweet and savory crunchy things, from pretzels (hard and soft) to commercially-produced crackers to (in southern US usage) the little bits of pork crackling left over after rendering lard. Various wafers, candy bars and nut-brittle-type sweets also use the term. (Check out this aggregation of Instagram posts including the hashtag #cracknel. Your head will spin at some of the things that turn up.) There’s even a Biblical reference, where “cracknel” turns up to render a Hebrew term suggesting biscuits that have been pricked with a fork before baking.
The connection seems, logically enough, to be the concept of crunchy things, which makes sense considering the term’s English etymology. According to the OED, it comes to us from the French craquelin, which is derived from croquer/“to crunch”. These days craquelin can mean (in general usage) a cracker, or (in more specialized usage) a pastry dough used to produce a crackly finish.
The cracknels that turn up in the earliest-preserved Tudor cookbooks, though, most closely match the Middle Kingdoms approach – a twice-baked biscuit, the first baking being of a long thin roll of seasoned dough, and the second baking of thin bits sliced off that roll. By the late Tudor period on our Earth, the second bake had been dropped out of the process, and the dough was simply rolled out very thin and cut out into rounds (see the recipes here reflecting this technique). But during the period being covered by the present Middle Kingdoms works, the preferred cracknel style closely matches the Tudor one… and is easily recognizable to a modern this-Earth baker as the normal method for making biscotti.
The words best used to render “cracknel” in the major languages of the Middle Kingdoms are surprisingly close (Arlene and N. Arlene kechte, Darthene chekech, Steldene emekch, even Ladhain kchhe). This, along with the words’ age – all of them are archaic – tempts one to think that they jointly preserve a common root word in what we may as well call the “late Medioregnic” dialect: the little-known common language/lingua franca spoken by human beings during the long terrible period when the phenomenon known as the Dark overshadowed the world. During this time much knowledge, even of languages of discourse, was lost in the near-extinction of humanity. So there’s an odd satisfaction in thinking that so small, homely and enjoyable a thing somehow persisted through the long disaster and (along with humanity) made it out the far side, back into the light.
The technique for making Middle Kingdoms-style cracknels is simple, and very close to the modern this-Earth biscotti method. Make a fairly firm dough with flour, a leavening agent (though some regions forego this), enough eggs to hold it all together, some honey if you like, and whatever herbs and seasonings (or in some cases cheeses) you favor. Roll this dough into “logs” and bake these until they color and firm up. Remove from the oven and allow to cool enough to cut them into small thin slices. Then return the sliced pieces to the oven at a lower temperature and bake them again, turning once during the process. The this-universe-Italianate cutting method of slicing on a sharp diagonal is sensible (in that it exposes the maximum amount of surface area to the gentle heat of the second baking) and attractive, but not mandatory. …Though there are regions of the Kingdoms where, if you had no other clue, you could tell where you were within thirty leagues or so by how the locals cut their cracknels.
Flavorings for Kingdoms cracknels are a matter of seasonal availability and the whim and affluence of the baker or cook. Steldenes favor putting chopped fresh or dried whitefruit in them (because of course they do: Steldenes are well known to put whitefruit in everything) and numerous other fruits as well, ideally dried; also fruit pickles and syrups, nuts and nut creams, especially almond and chestnut, and metahnë or weeproot, a close analogue to Armoracia rusticana, our common horseradish. Mid-latitude Arlenes tend to favor mellower spicery (yellow berry-pepper, capsicums, green onions and garlic, the various wild and tame parsleys) and grated hard cheeses, from the very mild to the very sharp. Western and “upper” Darthenes lean toward warm-country flavors: sweetbark, yellow citron (identical to our Citrus medica) and green citron (a local analogue to Citrus ichangensis, the Ichang papeda); anise, ginger, caraway, honey-rush (a relative of Saccharum officinarum, our sugar cane), and mint-grass. People from cooler, wetter climates (“lower” Darthen and Arlen, upper Steldin) prefer hotter or “darker” spicery in their cracknels: whitefruit again, dark berry-pepper (similar to our Piper nigrum), poppyseed, various nuts (walnut, chestnut) and smoked honey. But even inside these general areas of preference there’s endless variation, influenced by whatever local ingredients are felt to suit cracknels particularly well.
(There are also regional differences in preparation. The most extreme of these would possibly be native to North Arlen, where, as a substitute for the second baking, some people deep-fry their cracknels. Up south in the more conservative parts of mountain country, mentioning this behavior will inevitably start a discussion about the naughtiness and perversity of the decadent North. Brawls have occasionally started over this issue. Let the tourist beware…)
In the towns and cities of the Kingdoms, every bakery of any note makes cracknels to their own recipe and seeks to lure customers away from other bakers by unique combinations of flavors or superior baking technique. Competition (both informal and formal) is intense. In both Prydon and Darthis there are annual contests for the best cracknel in the city, and it’s not unknown for judges in these competitions to be bribed. In Prydon, for some years since the enthronement of the new King—when people started having time or inclination to be thinking about this kind of thing again—there has been a push to require competitors to formally swear in one or another of the Goddess’s City temples that they will not accept gratuities or otherwise seek to influence the contest outcomes. But so far no formal action has been taken… King Freelorn perhaps having wisely decided to keep his (and the Lion’s) nose out of it.
Fortunately one doesn’t need to have a Middle Kingdoms commercial bakery in the neighborhood to experience cracknels. They’re easy to make at home. Here are two representative recipes. One is in the Steldene style, with Jalapeño and chipotle chilies standing in for the inevitable whitefruit (and adding not only smoked paprika but Cheddar cheese, which the more hidebound Steldenes might look a bit askance at… but ask me if I care. They won’t be eating them). The other is more northern Darthene in its flavoring, using caraway as an aromatic and substituting lemon for the ubiquitous green or golden citron of the warm North.
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
An Intro To Indian Dishes, by BuzzFeed India
Food Network is shook!
This is the best thing I have ever seen.
Source: facebook.com
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
Tonight @dduane remade “Dean Swift’s Burnt Oranges” so we could have a better photo for the upcoming RealIrishDesserts.com website. As the photographer, I think the dish looks good. It certainly tasted good…
Peeled orange segments are cooked in a mixture of orange juice, butter, wine and sugar until everything turns to a caramel sauce, then finished with whiskey which is briefly set alight to make crunchy crystals in the caramel. That’s the Burnt bit, and the trick is to make the crystals without charring the fruit.
In period the alcohol would have probably been brandy. This could be a flambée trick at table, but it’s really meant to be done in the kitchen because each bowlful is finally topped off with cream and orange zest before serving.
(Dean Swift of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin was Jonathan “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift. We have NO plans to include his dining suggestion from “A Modest Proposal” in EuropeanCuisines.com or anywhere else.) :-P
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
Be warned, people. These are REALLY GOOD. The ones on the plate have already vanished, and I have no idea how many of the ones in the tin are going to survive to make it down to the pub tonight…
redshoesnblueskies reblogged
American recipes are like
- 2 tablespoons of spice you have never heard of
- 1 can of a food that does not come in a can in your country, wtf America why is everything in cans??
- 1 stalk pf something that has a totally different name where you are from and you have to google what it is
- 2 ounces of this liquid … what the fuck is an ounce??
- Preheat oven to some temperature that sounds like it is as hot as the sun
- Turn on a broiler. Find out what a broiler is.
- 2 pounds, dammit where is my calculator, of this product that seems to be plentiful in America but non existence in your country. Google how to get it on some shady black market.
- Give up and wonder what the hell America even is.