chromedome

North of New England, in Atlantic Canada, a "mock cherry" pie was popular in the 19th century. It consisted of equal parts cranberries and raisins, cooked together with sugar and a bit of water. I've made it in recent years, and it's rather good.

At my school, we made a tart with sweet potatoes. They were shredded, raw, and mixed with some eggs and nuts and chocolate and one or two other things which elude my recollection at the moment. Then poured into a prepared unbaked tart shell, and popped into the oven until nicely caramelized. It was pretty tasty.

DameD, Calabria is where I had my first-ever espresso. It was a shock, I didn't really know what espresso was back then (lo these twenty years ago) but I was looking to impress a girl. She didn't drink hers, and was rather impressed that I did. Later I switched to Joe's, just 'cuz everybody hung out at Joe's and it was also pretty damned good.

I've been using the Pepperidge Farm puff pastry at work, but I don't like it very much. Not that it doesn't puff...it does, beautifully...but like all shortening-based puff in my experience, it tastes like nothing in particular and has a less-than-pleasant mouthfeel. I've just gotten the green light to switch my purchasing to the Mark-Crest brand, out of BC, which is all butter. I've baked with samples and it seems to puff just as well as the shortening-based puff (they make both a high-rise and a low-rise version, depending on which you need); but the taste of the all-butter product is markedly better. This is commercial use, mind you; I haven't seen either of these in stores. The supermarkets here only seem to carry the usual Tenderflake brand.

I'll second that recommendation, loudly and clearly. Unless, of course, you really *enjoy* hunkering down in front of your oven for extended periods, cursing and wondering when they'll invent one that doesn't come with random hot spots. Aside from the likelihood of being distracted or inattentive during the 5.71 seconds when the nuts are perfectly toasted but not yet burnt, the oven can work well. However, I find that the stovetop offeres a large advantage. When I'm toasting nuts in a skillet, I can smell when they're at the right stage. Just like toasting spices, there comes a point when the aroma suddenly blooms, and you say to yourself, "Damn, it smells good in here!"

I haven't thought about that place in years. I lived just a stone's throw from there on East Pender back when I met my wife. Poked my nose in there once, thought about it, and decided I was more in the mood for a bowl of soup at On Lok (or was it Penny's? dunno). Geez, that's almost 20 years now. Holy crap, time flies...

You might want to check out "Flatbreads and Flavours" by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Flatbreads work pretty much the same way that loaf breads do, but to my mind they're more forgiving. Makes a great way to learn the basic techniques, and gives you some easy variations to satisfy that improvisational side of your character. Once you've cut your teeth on flatbreads, so to speak, loaf breads are pretty straighforward.

Mmmmmm....quinces. They are seemingly hard to find here in Edmonton, unfortunately. I like having one on my kitchen table just to perfume the air.

Hot buttered rum is a favourite of mine, too, but I can't say the cream idea appeals to me...seems a bit much. Not that "a bit much" is necessarily bad, you understand, but I'm used to the other. I tend to play around with my ingredients. I've made hot buttered rum with jaggery (Indian sugar) which gave it an exceptional flavour. I've also used a thin slice of fresh ginger, occasionally. Other spices I've used in varying combinations would include coriander, cardamom, allspice, and toasted fenugreek (methi) seeds; this last because I thought their offbeat combination of bitterness and butterscotch would be rather interesting in a rum drink. I rather liked the result. My other favourite thing with hot rum is to go fruit-based. Either a slice of lemon and some orange zest, some simmered cranberries or a decoction of tamarind pulp; all of these go well with rum and honey and warm spices. Lately I've been gifted with a huge quantity of high-grade saffron, so I've been grinding that in my mortar and pestle and adding it to my hot drinks. The earthiness of the saffron and the aromatic fragrance of the rum complement each other beautifully, in my opinion. I'm from the Maritimes; once summer's over it's rum season!

I don't get it. How does residual stew on the head result in an exposed nipple? ....ummm....or did you have some other "wardrobe malfunction" in mind?

Hi, Annanstee! Baker's flour is what some companies here in Canada call their commercial all-purpose flour. We use it a lot at my work for cookies, cinnamon buns, etc...you know... unexacting items. If you bake cakes, go for the cake flour and save yourself some stress.

Consider it as a subtle in-joke for the cognoscenti, a nod to all those centuries of devoted trenchermen who've gone before us.

That's not immediately apparent, given the title of the thread...

I would argue for Iranian cuisine, which since the days of Darius and Xerxes has seduced foreign visitors/rivals/conquerors. While today's Persian cookery dates reliably only from the Sassanids, there are arguments to be made for continuity from the days before the Medes and Persians knocked off the Babylonians. Certainly few national cuisines can claim anything like a similarly broad influence.

On the only occasion that I've managed to have clementines for baking with, I made a gratin with clementines and an OJ/sparkling wine sabayon in a standard short crust. It was good. I have a fifteen-year-old bottomless football player in the house. My last five-pound box of clementines lasted less than six hours.

Mark Kurlansky's "Salt: A world history" has a chapter devoted to Avery Island and McIlhenny. I'd never have guessed that the marriage of an investment banker and a salt miner's heiress would have resulted in a hot sauce. IIRC McIlhenny bought the pepper seeds from a transient. After the Civil War the bottom had dropped out of the salt market, and they needed to do something else by way of generating an income.

In all fairness to the MidWest, I think the availability of ingredients, and the influence of multiple cultures, was not quite the same there. The point I was striving for in my sleep-deprived state was that Acadian food was utterly transformed by the move to Louisiana. Acadian cooking, in l'Acadie, was also very plain meat & potatoes food; unless you couldn't afford meat and therefore ate fish, which were free for the taking. There are many Acadians "of a certain age" back home who won't eat fish, because when they were growing up that was poor people's food. It was the impact of multicultural, geographically favoured Louisiana that awoke their dormant "eating well" genes, I think. IIRC, most of the Acadians were of Norman, Picard, and Breton ancestry. I know little of these influences, except the obvious transference of the Norman apple culture to Nova Scotia. Can anyone of greater knowledge point out survivals of these influences on modern Cajun cooking? Oh, and Smithy...forget Evangeline. For a great read, I recommend "Pelagie," by Antonine Maillet. Maillet is an Acadian writer from New Brunswick, and was the first Canadian to win the Prix Goncourt for the best novel in the French language. "Pelagie" tells the story of a determined matriarch bringing her clan back home from Louisiana in the years following the Expulsion. It is available in English, and is a damned fine yarn. Amazon seems to have only the French version, unfortunately...Alibris has several copies here.

Researchers in the US and UK have discovered by trying the experiment that you can inject commercially-made mayonnaise with live cultures of listerium or salmonella, and they will die. The mayo is acidic enough to kill them on contact. I still wouldn't leave it on the dash of my car or anything, but a half-hour is pretty safe. Homemade mayo requires a little more caution, of course. As far as specific times, well...there I'm out of my depth.

I don't drink a lot of Starbucks espresso thingies, because quite frankly I find them vile. As for their drip coffee, I drink quite a a bit of it because that's what we serve and it's free for employees. I've always found a lingering, almost chemical bitterness from Starbuck's coffee, regardless of the roast or the blend. I don't know of any reason for that, but it's there. My guts are bitching at me, too, since we've switched; and I'm drinking less coffee overall. And Bloviatrix, both here in Edmonton and back in Halifax there are companies roasting and selling fair-trade coffees at prices well below Starbucks. Better product, too.

The rule of thumb I was taught at school was pretty straightforward. Check how the bottle was closed; if it has a stopper it will keep pretty well, if it has a traditional cork it should be consumed at your earliest convenience. Of course both of those descriptions are pretty vague...

Damn, that would take some serious self-confidence. Not many people would have the stones to cook for one of those chefs, never mind all of them!

Nothing to contribute as far as utensils...but man! what a cool site. Gonna lose an evening there, sometime real soon...

It's all good. I have a small mortar and pestle (a treasured christmas gift) which I use for most things. I have a coffee whizzer thingie that I use for some spices and/or mixes, because I find that things like cinnamon or methi seeds are difficult to grind adequately in my little mortar. And I like pepper grinders for suitably-sized spices, like coriander (though I guess I could use my mortar to bust up larger spices, like allspice, so that they'd fit the pepper grinder...never thought of that before). Use what you've got, is my advice, and if you find yourself longing for one of the others, go buy it. They're all cheap and plentiful; so there's no reason to not have it if you think you'd use it.

The comparison of Cajun with Acadian cuisine is rather instructive. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, the staple starch was potatoes, rather than rice. Soups and stews were a mainstay, often made thick and sticky with grated potatoes; an obvious forerunner to many of the filling rice dishes of Louisiana. "Rappie Pie," for example, is a dish still made by Acadians; chicken or beef or pork slow-cooked in a big ol' casserole dish filled with grated potatoes. You start by frying some salt pork in it, and a bit of onion (and in the old days, perhaps, some salted herbs if you had 'em). Pork, and especially salt pork, was a big favourite. Went into everything, including desserts (take a pastry square, put a piece of crisp-fried salt pork in the bottom, cover with apples, fold up the corners to make a smaller square...when almost done, pour hot maple syrup into the middle...return to oven until it's all bubbled over and sticky...mmmmmmm). Chickens and beef were seldom eaten when young and tender, they were slaughtered after they'd been used up as chicken/milk producers; hence long/slow cooking was a given. Pork was salted down or turned into sausage. Fish was plentiful, and was used heavily in a variety of dishes. Lobster was so common, in some times and places, that it was used as fertilizer for the garden. Seasoning was simple and straightforward; usually just locally-grown herbs salted down for preservation. It was all about filling a stomach frugally but unequivocally. Now take that background, and transfer it to Louisiana where anything and everything can be grown; and where there were a world of new influences to be assimilated...

Hear, hear. Personally I find Japanese to be the least interesting of the major Asian cuisines, so Tokyo would be out for me. As a travel-envious forty-year-old who's not been out of Canada, I find all the arguments interesting if distinctly hypothetical.