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g.johnson

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Everything posted by g.johnson

  1. Plotters (my emphasis) FG Plotters
  2. Pole vaulting requires more technique than sprinting. Therefore poll vaulting is superior and only plebs follow the sprints. But don't mind me, I'm a communist.
  3. Sorry. Hangs head in shame.
  4. Plotnicki: Thank you for your helpful review. I have revised my summary of your arugment according to your suggestions and trust it is now acceptable. 1. It’s OK to compare haute cuisine with home cooking because they’re so similar but we can’t compare pig bellies to loin because they’re so different. 2. Anyone going anywhere in Europe passed through France and dropped off a packet of spaghetti, but didn’t bother taking any foie gras home with them, for unspecified reasons which reflect badly on them. 3. Although there aren’t many French modernists, France is central to modernism because Picasso lived in Paris for a couple of years. 4. The price of an item is independent of scarcity but reflects its true worth because it’s set by the hidden fork of the connoisseur. Makes much more sense now.
  5. Let’s see if I’ve got the argument straight. 1. It’s OK to compare haute cuisine with home cooking because they’re so similar but we can’t compare pig bellies to loin because they’re so different. 2. Anyone going anywhere in Europe passed through France and dropped off a packet of spaghetti, but didn’t bother taking any foie gras home with them. 3. Although there aren’t many French modernists, France is central to modernism because Picasso lived in Paris for a couple of years. 4. The price of an item reflects its worth because it’s determined by the markets except when it’s determined by a small group of connoisseurs. Newtonian in its elegance: four premises to explain the culinary universe.
  6. Gunn Erikson, the Chef of the Altnaharrie Inn (2 Michelin stars but now closed alas) was, I believe, self taught.
  7. The opposite according to the OED. It's derived from 'scrump' which is a variant of 'scrimp'. Scrimp as a verb means to economize (as in scrimp and save), and as an advective it means withered. So scrumpy is cider made from withered apples rather than the best. Here endeth the lesson.
  8. All these recipes make my raita seem embarrassingly simple. I grate cucumber and onion, squeeze out excess moisture and stir it into the thickest yoghurt I can find. Maybe sprinkle with a bit of ground roast cumin, or paprika if I’m being lazy.
  9. Shabbat goy, ramadan infidel, whatever.
  10. Yorkshiremen: Short arms, deep pockets.
  11. I have to bow to your greater experience in this matter.
  12. So, to extrapolate, you were only ever suggesting that French food should be compared with French food. In which case I agree. It is better. Or not.
  13. I don’t know whether it’s still done, but in the 70s it was common to use carbon dioxide to pump even cask conditioned beers – the technique was called ‘top pressure’. The result may have been somewhat better than the pasteurized beers but they were still overwhelmingly gassy. I'm sure CAMRA frowned on the method and would not have regarded the ale as 'real'.
  14. I'm not suggesting that science doesn't generate true(ish) statements about the world. I think it does. But how it does it is a bit mysterious and not at all consistent from discipline to discipline.
  15. You’re confusing cost and worth. A bit nouveau, you know. Absolutely not. It is to say that there can be disagreements even amongst the informed. You inadvertently point out the flaw in your argument. There is no reason to suppose that the cooking method that gives the most flavor is that which produces the best texture. (I would guess that the opposite is more often the case.) Further, it is ridiculous to suppose that there is a single aspect of flavor or that all aspects of flavor will be optimized by the same cooking technique. And informed eaters can legitimately disagree on the method they prefer because it’s subjective. This is manifestly true. If it were not every restaurant would serve identically prepared dishes.
  16. Lakatos too fails, I believe (though I’m an admirer of his), since there is no objective way of determining how fruitful a given research program will be. There really is something to Feyerabend’s anarchy (to the extent I understand it).
  17. Plotnicki: You’re confusing different issues. The presence of trace substances in a perfume or wine is an objective fact, and those with the requisite skills can detect those substances. Whether the presence of those substances is a good or bad thing is, however, purely subjective. It is true that some statements about kidneys (‘this kidney is off’) are objective: we could define ‘off’ to mean ‘having greater than 10^5 bacteria per gram’, say. Similarly we could define a standard of cooking based on internal temperature. However, the statement that kidneys taste best when fresh and cooked rare is, again, subjective.
  18. If the prevalence of French food in some countries can be explained merely by its superiority then the converse question needs to be answered. Why is it not prevalent in Italy, Spain and elsewhere?
  19. Is the spread of French cooking connected with the wine trade? The dominance of French restaurants is probably greatest in the UK which has historically also been the largest consumer of French wine, I believe. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch that French fashions in food should follow their wine. Any single explanation is bound to be wrong, of course of course.
  20. Eliot, Auden, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Nicholson, Moore, Lewis, Epstein, Woolf, Lawrence. Edit: Sorry to repeat some of Wilfred's.
  21. Bloody Hegelian.
  22. According to this hypothesis, England, Holland and Scandinavia should have the best cooking. The worst would be Spain and Portugal with France somewhere in the middle.
  23. If the modernist spirit (whatever that may be) doesn't reside in the people where does it reside?
  24. It's a lot easier than the "name three famous Belgians" game.
  25. Off the top of my head: Picasso, Miro, Gaudi, Lorca, Marinetti, Pirandello, Svevo.
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