balmagowry

Yup - Stonyfield uses pectin, even in the Organic. Not sure they do in the full-fat, but I think so. Very annoying. Dannon is the cleanest starter I've found - and Axelrod is pretty good too.

Can't say I blame them. At the risk of raising the spectre of the whole argle-bargle about pure language vs. language as living breathing evolving entity, I still find it jarring to hear (or to say) "beuh, ouais, j'ai fait mon planning pour le weekend." (Hmmm - that wasn't clear. "beuh, ouais" sounds fine to me, I'm afraid, though the Academie would cringe - it's the "planning" and the "weekend" that make me jumpy.)

See, here's the philosophical difference between me and the resta youse. You guys are spending MONEY for your equipment, and in two cases MONEY for your starter cultures. I am opposed to this, partly on principle and partly because I can't afford it - don't know where one begins and the other leaves off, because I'm not literally unable to afford it, but I am certainly opposed to spending money on something whose functional equivalent I already own. Anyway, here as promised is my report on the latest batch. I did almost what I said I would. Last night I made a quart batch using a little of the previous (gummy) batch as a starter. Helen, I think you were right: the amount of pectin in the original starter was just enough to make the product gummy; but the amount of gummy yogurt used to start this batch did not retain enough pectin to affect the final texture. IAC, the new yogurt is excellent, as good as the second-best I've ever made (and I'm now pretty much convinced that the best one was a fluke, though I wouldn't be above trying to replicate it on occasion), so I'm happy, and I now have a nice self-perpetuating setup where the only thing I have to buy is the milk. And the occasional mother yogurt if mine should turn funky. I think at that point I'll revert to Dannon; the Brown Cow was lovely to eat, but I wasn't crazy about the gumminess - Dannon at least is nice and neutral. Oh - and I do still have that freeze-dried culture to play with as well. Hmmmmm... decisions, decisions. Anyway, as long as I have a pilot light, I'm in business. Oh - Jensen, if you should happen to look in here - I was right about the gritty problem being particles scraped off the bottom - straining the milk resolved it. I've also changed to a heavy cast-aluminum pan for heating the milk - so no more scorching. All in all, I'm a pretty happy and self-sufficient camper.

So make yogurt! I'm going through at least 1/2 gallon a week that way - all by myself. And the yogurt is great - even though I'm still just using store-bought plain old homogenized milk. Just starting to look around for local organic possibilities, now that my yogurt culture is getting pretty reliable....

Have never bought them from Chinese store (I'll have to try this - bitter almonds are supposed to be unavailable in the US unless by prescription), but can't see why they wouldn't be the same as other bitter almonds, which do indeed contain prussic acid. I can't give you exact chapter and verse on the safe percentage, but there are some useful guidelines in various historic recipes. I've written about several of these in the past few years, and have tested them both in a "safe" modern version (using all sweet almonds and adding bitter almond extract for the flavoring) and in a "dangerous" authentic one, substituting the kernels of apricot or peach pits for the bitter almonds. (The latter BTW was quite common practice in the 18th-19th centuries and is a legitimate substitution on all counts; apricots and peaches, as well as plums and roses, come from the same family as almonds , and their pits taste the same and are equally poisonous.) The proportions given in most old recipes call for anywhere from 1/10 to 1/4 bitter almonds; I have used up to 1/4 without any ill effects. The discovery of prussic acid's poisonous properties and its presence in bitter almonds dates to the early 19th century (in fact, Mrs. Beeton solemnly mentions the danger in 1861); yet recipes calling for bitter almonds persisted in cookbooks right up until about 1920. Anecdotally, you have to figure that if many people died or got sick after eating macaroons or ratafias made from those recipes, someone would have noticed the fact! So I venture to suggest that you're OK with up to 25% bitter almonds. But if it makes you feel safer, cut back on the proportion and compensate with extract.

Damn right. I for one would like to know where this "favorite local espresso bar" is, Owen - sounds like the kind of place I'd want to go to and/or recommend....

What a perfect reply! They must love it. The fact is, though they are sometimes so embarrassed by their "inferior" English - usually not so inferior - I'm always charmed by their attempts, and of course the accent only adds to the charm. (I have a dear friend who is Hungarian-German, and his slightly fractured English is one of the perpetual delights of my life.) I wonder whether ours sound as charming to them.... Well, if not, they never let on.

Oops! Just noticed the time stamp on the original post; I cleverly deduce that either you're burning some pretty serious midnight oil or you're not posting from the US. So my suggestion of New York bookstores is less than useful. I looked on Amazon (US) and found several candidates for the role of pocket menu dictionary; the one that looked most familiar to me was Langenscheidt's. Don't know which incarnation of Amazon is handy to you, and whether an eGullet-friendly link would carry over - IAC and FWIW, here's the link.

Yes, and I sometimes think every shopkeeper in France, every owner of every little stall at every market, must have gone to the same shopkeeper school where they all learned the absolutely identical inflection and intonation with which they say "Bonjour, madame" (or "bonjour, m'sieu'") when you walk into a shop. When I first heard it I was a little intimidated because the formality and tone instantly transported me back to my Lycee days, not all of which were what you could call halcyon. That reflex once broken, it's a lovely familiar ritual to walk into a cheese shop or a boulangerie and hear the invariable (even if they know you quite well) "bonjour, madame" that signals the beginning of the formal negotiation for one's all-important small purchases. The end of the transaction, of course, is signalled by mutual "merci, madame"s (allowing for gender). It's all very proper, very civilized.

Heh heh, I can top that. The French usually do think I'm French, though during the rusty first couple of days after I arrive they sometimes puzzle over what region I'm from; by day #3 they're guessing which Parisian suburb. No matter how rusty I am, it is always a shock to them to learn that I am "New-York-aise" - one bartender was deeply impressed, saying to me in effect, "I tried to learn English once, but it's so complicated - I don't know how you can speak it!" I don't really have anything substantive to add to the excellent advice up-thread, except that the nifty book John mentions is available in this country, if you want to bone up ahead of time. Fat lot of help I am, because off the top of my head I don't remember its title or author either, but I know I have seen it at Kitchen Arts & Letters in NY; I'm sure it would also be available through something like the Alliance Francaise. I'll also repeat for emphasis what so many have already said here: the sincere attempt to speak a little French will buy you more good will than you can imagine. Used to be, the French had a surly curmudgeonly reputation for this sort of thing; I don't know whether that's changed or whether it was always exaggerated, but I have rarely seen a Frenchman fail to warm to a respectful approach from a foreigner paying him the compliment of trying to speak his language. (And no, I don't mean me, with my obnoxious unfair advantage.) Now that most French people do speak English (y'see, young 'un, when I was a kid at a Lycee it was a whole different deal because French was the international diplomatic language, so the French could be on their high horse about not needing to speak anything else!) it is possible to get into some wild conversations where you insist on speaking French to the waiter but he proudly insists on airing his English - these inverted bilingual exchanges can occasionally lead to comic mishaps, but more importantly they also lead to general mutual good feeling. EDIT to add quote & fix punctuation

There's not a lot I can add to what's already been said here, except to confirm the degree to which the side-effects of chemo can be an utter crap-shoot, from day to day, from session to session, from drug to drug, in the same patient. My mother died of her eighth cancer but successfully thumbed her nose at the first seven. She didn't have chemo for all of them, but when she did you just never knew what she was going to crave or to be able to choke down. Whatever it was - I was there with it, and only too glad to get the calories into her any way I could. During her final illness (some serious chemo that time, including cisplatin injected directly into the lung) there were ups and downs - a bad period when she just wasn't interested in eating at all; and she so loathed things like Ensure that when she was loopy on pain meds I had to trick her or blackmail her into taking even a few sips. (Fortunately for the sanity of all concerned she came out of that for the last week or two, and I had the satisfaction of seeing her eat - and really enjoy - two hearty meals on her last day.) Funny, her palate didn't change much, even during her most extreme reactions - but her appetite did. She wasn't big on sweets as a rule, but she did love bittersweet chocolate. I thought I'd gone to heaven when I discovered the Godiva dark chocolate ice creams - not only did she love them, but their flavor was so mousse-like that at her own suggestion I gave her heavy cream to pour over them. Calorie after calorie after lovely calorie. Here's another thing to be prepared for if it's a really fierce chemo regimen: an extremely capricious appetite. I live five minutes from the hospital, and at one point when she hadn't been eating much for a while I was thrilled when she called me and said she really really wanted a tuna sandwich. Ace hospital caterer, I whirled round and dished up a tempting batch, put it in a neat little vat, and came hotfoot to the hospital with bread and lettuce in separate containers etc so I could put it all together fresh on the spot. By the time I got there... she wasn't interested any more. There's nothing harder than putting a good face on that. Them's my words of wisdom for what they're worth. I'll be thinking of you and your friend. GG - I love your whiskey sour story. Yeah, it makes a catch in the throat, but the cocktail party is right up my alley. Over the years I made it a habit to bring in vodka whenever my mother was in the hospital (and when it was safe for her to have it - I ain't STOOPID), and we'd have a couple of drinks together and whatever dinner I'd brought in, watch the news together or just chat, most companionable. Until that last time, her bedside was always where the party was.

After the last reduction I pour mine into a pyrex dish and let it solidify into a nice rectangle of shoe leather. I then cut it into small cubes and put them in a ziploc bag which I keep in the freezer. I generally put a few into any sauce that needs an extra jolt of depth and flavor; and they certainly provide it.

Thank you kindly. Hope you enjoy.

It's an annual, very easy to grow. I grow it every year among my tomatoes - they are good companion plants because the borage either attracts a beneficial insect or repels a nasty one, I forget which. The leaves ARE a bit hairy, but the flavor is lovely. Borage also bears a beautiful blue blossom which is good for candying or for putting in salads. The year we were working on drinks for L&SD I saved extra borage seeds and grew some in a pot - we needed quite a lot for Claret Cup (this is what led me to assume that it belonged in Pimm's Cup as well), and cucumber peel just doesn't do the job as far as I'm concerned.

Ahhhhh... that's what I love to hear. You and me, kiddo, we could make some beyoodaful music togedda.

I think you just found your signature line, Bux! Edited to add for Sam Kinsey: "As full of myself as I always sound, I'm really here to be enlightened." Edited to add for Steve Klc: "As full of myself as I may sound at times, I'm really here to enlighten you." Waah! based on the post I just this moment put up, I claim the right to share all three versions!

I'm sorry, but that was just too good a straight line to resist. I'm going to commit the great gaffe of quoting myself. (Well... hell, it's only one snooty step beyond linking to one's own posts - which I'm also about to do.) This is the lead from our Tin House article "Chicken Marengo Revealed": Oh, did we have us some fun with that one, debunking all the popular the legends. The article itself is not available on-line, alas, but its gist (which ranges far afield from the subject of the present discussion, but is still IMO pretty fascinating) is thoroughly covered in this thread. I'm sorry. I just couldn't resist. I will now return to my customary modesty. Carry on.

You've made me realize that I'm happiest when humor is both means and end. Seriously, though, it's generally pretty easy to tell which instances of highfalutin menu language are which. Let's see: there's the incompetent translation the sincere effort at explanation the affectation, well done the affectation, badly done Have I left any out? All of these, with the possible exception of the second, can supply fodder for the irreverent and easily-amused. An all-time favorite in my family, from a Chinese menu many years ago: "Fried Frag." Never did find out what it was.... And BTW Steve supplies an important transitional point in my overbroad historical sweeps: the moment when the exotic (like mu shu pork) becomes the familiar in any culture, as that culture becomes accustomed to it. This must recur at some sort of cyclical interval.

Don't we all! Well, no, present company and self excepted, I guess. Or maybe it's just that we've beaten more track than most people.

OK, obviously I'm wrong. Looked up Dame Tartine and she is certainly a popular character in that part of the world, and the lyrics of the song do explain why she would be associated with sweets and friandises. (And BTW the Monts D'Or might be associated geographically with Mont Dore - but that's another investigation....) But looking again at Bux's word-by-word juxtaposition, it now seems obvious that "injuries" is intended to be the translation of "Dame." By an extremely convoluted mental gyration I can see where there might be some reverse logic in this, as "damn" in English certainly constitutes an "injure" in French - but unless someone in the translating chain has dyslexia or Asperger's Syndrome (which wouldn't really surprise me, now I think of it) that's a pretty long shot. "Dame" - "Injury." Well, that'll give me something to chew on for a while. Lucy - I think you should go for it! And once you've translated the French into intelligible English, maybe you can also get them to let you tranlate the French into intelligible French.

Brilliant analysis, Bux. I have to admit I was so caught up in matching the translations to the original - linguistically, I mean - that I lost sight of the underlying effort to determine what the dishes might be! As for the "Dame" problem, I have a feeling Andrew has provided the clue. I'd be willing to bet that the name does refer to the "Dame Tartine" character in the nursery song. It's a nursery song I don't happen to know, but its frequency in Andrew's google results suggests that I may be in the minority there. In that construction, "Dame" is used in the sense in which we would now use "Madame," but I bet that the answer to this riddle goes beyond language and lies in some known characteristic of the dame herself. How they got "injury" I'm still not certain, but until I see any evidence to the contrary I'm sticking, faute de mieux, with the theory that someone misunderstood something and translated "tort."

All very true. I'm sorry if I was unclear: I was looking at the issue from a speculative historical perspective, trying to imagine how it might originally have evolved. I tried to allow for changes in cuisine requiring menu descriptions all over the world with the bit about freshly invented fare and nouvelle cuisine, but this kind of analysis does lend itself to extremely broad sweeping statements, and maybe that part got swept under the rug in the process. I do think that you have to look for a moment when culinary traditions changed markedly in order to find a parallel moment when menu descriptions began to be necessary. In real life nothing is that cut and dried, but I suspect there is a correlation between the advent of cheap air travel (and therefore the ability of the less-educated to travel widely) and the need for more explanation of local culture to tourists. Then there is probably another such hypothetical pivotal moment in which the local culture itself changes just as dramatically, and menu explanations therefore become necessary for the locals as well as the tourists. 'Scuse me while I get off my broomstick and sweep some more. Broad strokes, broad strokes!

Wow - sounds wonderful. And what a perfect name! I'd drink it just for that. (Note to self: experiment with Reverse Martini, too - sounds like just my cuppa vermouth. "Initram" has a ring to it....) EDIT: There's been some discussion here of the Charbay vodkas - I think they're obtainable. Would have to be, since trying the drink with another lime vodka won't give us any standard for comparison. Funny - there must be something in the air conducive to this tequila-OJ relationship. I, who am no mixologist at all and certainly don't pretend to play one on TV, recently invented a cocktail that reads like the primitive ancestor of this one (neolithic cocktail as compared to cocktail sapiens), also loosely inspired by the Margarita, but challenged by limited ingredients on hand. Turns out that tequila, orange juice and Angostura Bitters harmonize rather well.

No, but Lucy has a point (though she mis-attributes some of its origin to me - I don't remember who said that bit about the standardized vocabulary): in France/Germany/Italy/Austria there are traditional dishes which need no explanation, unless, of course, the person reading the menu is an Ignorant American Tourist who has never heard of Jaeger Schnitzel or Rehschlegel or Blanquette de Veau. America has relatively few such classic native dishes, in part because it's a younger country, and I think the kind of menu Lucy is talking about assumes an audience of nothing but Ignorant American Tourists. This is of course an exaggeration for effect, but outside of things like Clam Chowder (and even that is open to interpretation! as discussed ad nauseam on several threads) and Club Sandwiches, many of our traditional dishes are in fact adapted or adopted from the traditions of other countries. From a practical standpoint, I can imagine the recipe-on-the-menu phenomenon ( good one, Lucy) evolving as a result of time lost while waiters explain each item in detail to one clueless customer after another; better perhaps to save some of that time and effort by providing the answers ahead of time. From that it's but a short step, or maybe two, to the kind of high-asted language used by menus giving themselves airs. America has many different kinds of pride, ranging from the blunt down-home plain-speaking variety to the "Just Because I'm a Colonial Don't Assume I Ain't Sophisticated" kind; it's the latter, I imagine, that inspires the use of language like "Tender Baby Frogs Lightly Killed." Oh lord, and I'm generalizing again - I realize Americans don't have a monopoly on this form of affectation, but it doesn't seem improbable that we gave birth to it courtesy of one of our special brands of snobbery. Then again, as culinary fashions change and restaurant fare veers from the traditional to the freshly invented (nouvelle cuisine anyone?), the explanations actually become necessary - or useful, at any rate - on a more global scale. As long as they are explanations and not highfalutin fancy talk intended to intimidate rather than elucidate! The menu Lucy mentions in Lyon is a slightly different case; there the original French is a bit high-flown, in keeping with the flamboyance of the presentation (I'm talking through half a hat here, as I have not been to the establishment in question; I'm judging based only on the... ahem... pretentious design and attitude of the web site); but the translations, over and above that, are marvels of fractured English. Hard to say whether achieved by man or machine, but they remind me of nothing so much as the "idiotisms" in English As She Is Spoke. I have to keep reminding myself that it could be a serious problem for the restaurant - and even then I can't help giggling at the sheer silliness of the results. "Madnesses of Injuries" has become my mantra when I go to the gym or to ballet class. And you can bet I'll be watching out for "Marine of the Wolf" when next I put out to sea! EDIT to insert quote for continuity

Second the motion, on both counts! And tell us how you ended up answering your questions. DID you trash the extra starter, or did you use it to feed the cultuer? DID you pre-soak the cloche? I've never worked with one, but your account has my mouth watering and my acquisition-instinct twitching....