oraklet

"Danish Ris a l'amande - our Christmas dessert: Long-grain rice cooked with1/2 vanilla pod and sugar until tender. Fold in stiffly-whipped cream and finely chopped almonds. Serve with a cherry sauce. One whole almond is folded in and the lucky finder gets a prize. But the secret is to hide the almond under your tongue and let everyone else continue to hope it's in their serving!" and alas, for some reason most of my fellow danes think that it should only be served at christmas time! but for anybody trying to make this dessert, (and it's highly recommendable) please remember to let the rice cool before folding in the whipped cream. my mother in law, who is definitely not the greatest of cooks and had never made it before i appeared on the scene, never thought of the problems connected with forgetting it... and it should not be just cherry sauce. try amarena cherries (italian, in case you shouldn't know).

"Is anybody here (a) a typographer or book designer and (b) familiar with Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Splendid Table? It contains a typographical in-joke that took me years to notice. The bulk of the book is set in Simoncini Garamond, but the yields are set in Stempel Garamond and the sidenotes in Monotype Garamond. Somehow it looks great." i used to think i was a graphic designer. not anymore, as i realize i wouldn't have noticed...still, garamond, though a beautiful thing, was never any good in poster size. too many little "ideosyncratic" caracteristica that work well in small type but tend to be distracting in large type. anyway, the most beautiful cook book i know is the danish edition of verge's "cuisine de soleil" (and perhaps it's made the same way in the original french edition, i don't know). two colours of text is used with exquisite effect.

this is weird: i remember project (?) posting a detailed and very credible pie crust recipe in a thread called "things they say are easy but they aren't" or something like that, but i cant find it when searching. anyway, that's a very convincing recipe. perhaps somebody else can find it from this description?

perhaps this will do it: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...he+bread+thread copy/paste. it works for me. (sorry, i can't do the link thing) edit: wow, this is glorious software. it knows what i want to do - so voila! here's your link!

i don't know if this is naive, but "What is the origin of these dislike/disgust reactions, i.e. where the part is acceptable but the whole is not, or one part of the beast is considered tasty and another disgusting?" seems pretty easy: the whole reminds one that there was killing involved in the meal. to many this is at least tabooish. and some parts are connected with "the unclean", like kidneys and urine.

as i've never been to the usa, my ideas of it are rather vague. in my pre-e-gullet days, i would certainly never have gone for the food. i'm not so certain any more. i do think on the other hand, that most europeans will, as pp said, go there for the people and the culture.

claire, the rising should, ideally, be at least 8 hours, as this makes the wheat's taste come out much better. incidentally that's fine, cause you can make it in the morning, and have it ready in the evening when returning from work. it sure will be bubbly, and "thready", though of course you'll have to experiment with amount of yeast and temperature of rising. some will let it rise in the fridge to make it reeeeal slow. only remember to make a "sticky" dough - the rather wet dough makes it easier to work it into the desired shape (working with a generous amount of durum wheat flour on top of the dough...) and has the bonus of making the edge almost explode when it enters the oven. well, perhaps not explode, but it will be very open-structured, like a good italian bread. removing the parchment gives the bread/pizza a better contact with the stone, so that it will finish sooner, with less risk of being soggy. varmint, i think the honey is mostly for "helping" the yeast . in most bread recipes it isn't meant to be detectable (though the norwegians, swedes and germans, adding syrup, make bread that is definitely much sweeter than danish, italian or french bread.) but i'll refer you all to robert schonfeld's "the bread thread", where he offers an amazing well of valuable information on all sorts of leavening methods, among many other things concerning bread.

"There's white and "whole grain" " maybe this opens a way out of my embarressment, as i've found that whole grain makes for a wetter dough. my belief that strong flour holds more water than soft flour ("holds" meaning "needs", really) is based on using varying amounts of durum wheat flour in bread doughs, and what i've been told in baking books. hardly scientific, i'll admit.

marlene, "I bake with spelt all the time, and I tend to use slightly LESS water than a recipe calls for" i stand corrected, then! ok, but this is tricky, apparently, as i believe that more gluten means that a flour will hold more water. am i wrong there, too?

claire, "Transferring your assembled pizza to the blazing hot stone can be tricky. I assemble my pizza on parchment paper and then slide the whole thing -- parchment and all -- onto the stone." good advice - remember to remove the parchment half way through baking, to get the near-full effect of the stone. easy with the silicone "parchment". the recipe you give...hm. i would advice much less yeast, no honey, much longer rise and the addition of c. 1/4 pasta flour (durum wheat) for structure. dont roll the dough! work into shape with hands! please! i'm not sure what 500 F would be in celsius, but the oven should be terribly hot. convection will be useful for adding to the shock effect (i have hardly the time to make a green salad while it bakes).

tiff, i'm not sure if i've got it right, but it seems that spelt has a very high gluten content (somewhere between 35% and 39%)...i've never baked with it, but my very competent breadbaking book tells me that it will give you a tasteful but rather heavy bread, and that preferably the spelt should be mixed with lighter flour (tipo 00, ?). it doesn't give any recipes, though. personally i think i would first try 1/3 spelt, 1/2 tipo 00 and 1/6 duro. very little yeast, lots of water, and a slow rising. perhaps a biga, or sourdough?

without having tasted your sausage - alas - i would guess it's a "slow food" thing: the pigs have probably lived in the woods and fields chewing on acorns and nuts and truffles and all the other things pigs love, slowly growing to the right size. also, probably someone scratched their backs while their throats were cut.

2,25 tbs sugar??????

"my point is that it's much easier to say that you have good taste, and argue that it comes from years of practice and experience, then it is to convince someone that you're a really good nascar driver for example. we're all convinced though." PLEASE! you know well that it is a matter of training one's senses and the vocabulary that goes with it. for instance, steve could analyze two steaks prepared by two different cooks and tell you what makes them different, whereas the average steak eater would tell you only of his preference. what do you think egullet is about? damn, how can it be so hard to understand?

macro-san, that would be a three-year old, wouldn't it? or perhaps two-year old? anyway, i find it interesting that you like danish white breads. in my (fortysix years of) experience they are boring, tasting too much of yeast, with poor textures. VERY hard to find a good quality (which is why i bake bread). now rye bread, that's another story. and right, sadly french baguettes seem to be in decline. and "italian" bread is best outside of italy (judging from my many disappointments in northern italy).

"it's just not cooking without onions"

guests mostly rave about the pizzas and the very rustic rogan josh. and are impressed by homemade stock, pasta, saltimboca, bread and cappuccino. and keep asking for recipes for the parfaits. somehow, most of friends and family have come to think i'm a good cook. they're flat wrong, though.

in my entire life, i can remember having had truly good meals c. 10 times. i can remember who i were with, and where. but the meals i can't remember in detail. this is due, i think, to lack of experience with excellence in food: i haven't been able to analyze the meals, so they've just become a haze of delight. now, someone with more experience could have made such an analysis and told us - to some extent, at least - what made for the excellence. the expressions and terms would be the same as would have been used by the cooks who prepared the meals. they would have a common standard, and know how to use it. and this is true of all crafts or art forms, and those of you who disagree with steve p. should think of how you will often feel that those outside your own craft may, for lack of knowledge, like or dislike what you produce, while you know they can be flat wrong! sure, there may be genetic, traumatic or other reasons for not liking cilantro or licorice, or one may be allergic to certain produces. but that does not in the least change the common language and terms of excellence in food that are seen daily on e-gullet. what's more, getting acquainted with these terms makes one more liable to revise one's ideas of one's preferences. i now taste and prepare food in a different way than pre e-gullet, for the quite simple reason that i can now, if only rudimentarily, use a suitable apparatus for analysis. i expect this to develop as i dive further into the dialectics of tastes and flavours.

price equals value? yesterday i bought an old used bahco wrench for 12$. a new chinese one would be 15$. hah!

"you've just summarised the main point of the starting post. This "nation of gastronomes" is a part of the French identity; it is an assumed persona." assumed. hmm. that's not what i meant to say. rather, that it is bred into them. their educational system is doing a very good job at making them think and express themselves in an "intellectual" way. by "as a frenchman, you're supposed to be a gourmet. it's part of their identity, or at least the upper and middle class identity.", i mean that they DO eat well, and a good deal of them ARE fine cooks. nothing assumed about that, really. and the "going back" is probably only going back to the cuisine grande mere of the first half of the 20th cent., but never the less a going back. i have a feeling that you're making this an either-or issue - either truth or myth - where it is rather, as i see it, something in between: the cuisine grande mere was largely dependant on terroir, seasons etc., and this is seen by the likes of verge to be at one time a virtue and a challenge. i don't think this makes "celestine a fraud". am i still just summarizing?

sure, the french shop in supermarkets for a lot of produce. there's even a lot of pre-made stuff consumed, and perhaps this is a growing trend. still, if i look at my experience from living in bayonne in the early 80's, and knowing quite a few frenchmen, and besides the experience of my mother and grandmother who both have lived in france, there is more to it than that. what i see is a tradition of being interested in gourmandise. this is often on an "intellectual" level rather than everybody being able to cook - but: as a frenchman, you're supposed to be a gourmet. it's part of their identity, or at least the upper and middle class identity. i use the term "intellectual" because food and wine is discussed in the same way as is philosophy or politics. you could say, perhaps, that it is part of the general french love of things intellectual, classifying etc. of course, this does not make "the mythical provence" any truer. but the stuff you can buy in a nice french supermarket - i'd love be able to get it in my local supermarkets here in copenhagen...

"Is a reproduction an art work, and if not why not?" that's easy: there's no way of reproducing a piece of "plastic" art without there being discernible differences. take rembrandt, with his multible layers of transparent paint creating shadows glowing with an inner light. impossible to reproduce in print. and this does make an important difference in the overall impression of the work, so much so that i could only start to understand his paintings when i first saw some of them "live". same goes for dürer's etchings. toscanini held the same view on recordings, but then, he didn't know how advanced the recording technique would become, and perhaps recordings can't even be seen as reproductions...but that discussion could prove too long for now! " the score isn't the art work in the case of music" i think it can be agreed upon that for us to be able to speak meaningfully about a certain piece of art, it has to be 1) concieved by the artist 2) delivered in a medium 3) percieved by us. doesn't much confusion stem from narrowing the term "art" to one of the three links in the chain? also, i think it makes sense to say that the aestethics of an art form is the craft part of it, and for us to be able to understand the ideas of the artist, we must share his knowledge of the craft with him? and further, that the goal of artists is to make us wiser (as contrasted to knowing, the goal of science...), or to put it, perhaps a bit pathetical, better. of course, much art today is on a meta-level - commenting mostly on it's own aestetics - but even then it's about refining our perceptions (which is then supposed to have the once-removed ethical effect). perhaps one could make a hierarchy of the art forms based on the ease with which it will reach our feelings or move us: music gastronomy story telling plastic arts this is not the same as saying that these art forms are actually cultivated by the individual or society in this sequence. now what does "move us" mean, or rather, why does "art" move us? well, one by one: music is basically a cultivation of singing or even humming. a parent who does not soothe an infant by humming to it is considered abnormal, i think! so, music plays on our feelings with sequences of anger, sorrow, joy etc., making us live through these feelings as a sort of make believe. and gastronomy - basically it's food, which is pretty basic as it is a matter of life, death and power, but as we know, it's also the cultivation of sensations. and it's mighty powerful as it can play on our memory in the way described by, say, proust. story telling - that's been covered by a numberless amount of critics. suffice it to say that it's probably the most powerfull art form, as it's able to tell us in a very direct way who we are, why, how etc. plastic arts. oh dear. they have changed so much over time, but perhaps one could say they are really the most magical of the art forms, as they can make mortal objects and moments seem immortal. sure can tell stories, too. is this a mess? i'm not sure. it seems to me that all art forms have in common that they work on our fears of death or loneliness, and longings for immortality or understanding who we are - that, and the joy of playing intricate games with (or cultivate) those issues. and the greater depth of experience of feeling and aestetics it can unite in a whole, the greater the art.

hmm - could it be that they have hung on a grabber with opposite polarity? (if that exists?)

ah, thanx sladeums. from amazon.com, i got the impression that the cia book connects technique and dishes more than does pepin. and all the other stuff might be interesting. so, right, i'm tempted to buy both (and though english is sometimes an obstacleous language, what am i to do when i can't find any danish equivalent(s) of those books?). they're not that expensive, anyway.

suzanne & snowangel: thanx a lot for advice. but, er, ahem,...do you know the cia book? does anybody else?