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Adam Balic

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Posts posted by Adam Balic

  1. One of the statements made was, the fact that ‘ Antibiotics ‘ play a large role in our body’s reluctance to fight off bacteria naturally. In other words we have literally destroyed our natural immune system to fight off foreign bacteria by over-use of antibiotics

    Frankly, I think this statement is BS. The problem with this statement is that it implies that antibiotics are the problem and should not be used. Yes, antibiotics have been overused and that has been a problem, but would anyone here or elsewhere prefer to go back to a world without them? When used appropriately and wisely, they are lifesaving substances and have contributed greatly to increased life expectancy. I do, however, agree that that we have an overemphasis on avoiding all bacteria bad or good in or out of our food supply and that may be a factor in the topic under discussion.

    Though I don't dismiss the possibility, I too would like to see more data about these so-called "allergy promoting compounds" being placed in our foods.

    I agree, the statement itself is utter rubbish. A significant proportion of the population using egullet today would not be around if it was not for the use of antibiotics. Furthermore, if you did not have an immune system as is implied in the original comment then you will be dead very rapidly.

    I guess the comment could be a very confused reference to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria strains, but the point of those is that they are a issue because they are difficult to treat with antibiotics.

    The other part of the statement boils down "There is "stuff" in food, and there is also bad "stuff" happening to people, so maybe the two "stuffs" are related and maybe we should be worried about "stuff"".

    I should say that I have worked in the immunlogical mechnisms in the development of Th2 (allergic) immune responses for a number of years and at this point it is unclear what the underlying causes are.

  2. At the time I approached them and it was a case of "íf we have it we have it",

    Since we started this discussion on plucks, Thompson meats have had them for sale on all but one time on my Friday visits to the Queen Vic.

    They must have a regular supplier and regular customers. So it seems that the only thing stopping them from helping you is simply poor customer service.

    Yes and they had them there today, but it is of no use to me if I can't pre-order and be able to pick one up on a specific day. It isn't like I cook with them every other day.

  3. Grenoble is an inland city in south-western France at the foot of the Alps. I would guess that this is were the name is from, but given the ingredients of lemons and capers I not sure that the recipe has anything to do with the city ultimately.

    Grenobloise sauce (sometimes written as Grenoblois) is a browned butter sauce with lemon segments, capers, parsley, and croutons. I haven't seen the Bourdain recipe, but in theory this type of sauce doesn't have deglaze stage, just brown the butter and add garnish.

  4. I also have a sort of "Holy Grail" melon - back in 1975 I ate a melon in the Peloponnese in S. Greece that I still can't forget. It was very long and narrow, with a smooth yellow skin and pink-orange flesh. It had an amazing fragrance with a hint of banana. I've asked about it several times and nobody knows it, but people in Turkey talk about one that was once grown and sold in Thrace which is no longer available that sounds similar.

    One of these?

  5. My grandmother always made "Shepherd's" pie with cold left-over roast hogget (sheep between lamb and mutton). The meat was put through a mincer with a carrot and onions for moisture, topped with mashed potato and baked. The use of left over meat seems to be the usual practice as can be seen from this older recipe below.

    I would have always said that with lamb/hogget/mutton is was "Shepherd's Pie" and with beef "Cottage" pie, but in older recipes this dististinction wasn't made and when you think about it the recipe wasn't likely to have ever been produced by Shepherds (lack of access to an oven) so it is most like just a novelty name for another variation of meat and potato pie.

    Shepherd's Pie (1862)

    Take cold dressed meat of any kind, roast or boiled,

    slice it, break the bones, and put them on with a little

    boiling water, and a little salt, boil them until you have

    extracted all the strength from them, and reduced it to

    very little, and strain it. Season the sliced meat with

    pepper and salt, lay it in a baking dish, pour in the sauce

    you strained, and add a little mushroom ketchup. Have

    some potatoes boiled and nicely mashed, cover the dish

    with the potatoes, smooth it on the top with a knife, notch

    it round the edge and mark it on the top the same as

    paste. Bake it in an oven, or before the fire, until the

    potatoes are a nice brown.

    As for up-dating oldies, I do it all the time. Make individual portions of make a stack. :wink:

    If you page down to the bottom of This Discussionyou can see a 18th century chocolate pudding recipe I made recently

  6. So, am I understanding this correctly?

    Lea and Perrins invented Worchestershire sauce?

    Or were they the first to bottle it?

    It never occurred to me that it might be a product of fermentation - like soy sauce. Or that anyone would attempt to copy or reverse engineer it at home. Its always just been there, in the cupboard. A staple. What a fascinating project.

    Now I'm going to have to put in an order from my source across the pond. Can you imagine the havoc a bottle of that stuff could wreak on a suitcase? But I want to do a side-by-side taste test, both neat and used in cooking.

    The Wikipedia entry must have been made by a North American or Australian, I have never heard a British person say "Worcestershire" sauce, only "Worcester" sauce. The British made version lists "malt vinegar" I wonder if this is used in the USA version?

    Lea and Perrins made the first "Worcestershire sauce" as they were based in Worcester, but it is one of many similar sauces that were popular at the period. Contact with Asia seems to have stimulated an interest in soy and ketchup (not a tomato sauce at this period) savoury sauces and producing similar sauces became a fashionable thing to do, a bit like how many people now have a special BBQ sauce.

    These sauces and Roman/Greek garum are seperated by over a thousand years. They were not the same sort of product at all and unlikely to have tasted similar but in the way that they were used there was some overlap.

    "Fermentation" implies bacterial action, I'm not sure that this is part of the process, but who knows.

  7. I have just found this thread and found a lot of familiar fruits (guava, santol, rambutans, langka, durian, etc.) from my country - the Philippines. I'm really homesick now for some guavas, rambutan, fresh langka, oh I could go on. Then again, being here in Korea gives me a chance to try different fruits like persimmons, gingko nuts, succulent peaches and pears.

    My friends gave me some tiny wild strawberries called snake strawberries. Pem Talgi (which literally means snake = pem and strawberry = talgi in korean).

    gallery_48583_3741_259591.jpg

    These look very similar to the fruit from mock or Indian strawberries (Duchesnea indica), which are yellow flowered and almost flavourless?

    Edit: Yes they are the same thing. They are not really a type of strawberry at all and are often used as ground covers. I remember eating the fruit as a child and being surprised by the lack of any strawberry flavour.

  8. Are they used at the green or orange stage in Korea? They are commonly used in Nonya cooking in the green state like this. A lot of english language books translates them as "limes", which they don't really taste like and causes problems with the recipes due to the difference in size of the two fruits ("use the juice of five limes" for instance).

    gallery_1643_4514_540271.jpg

  9. Jaymes, I am so envious of you. Kinilaw is not kinilaw without the very important addition of calamansi. Here in Korea, I'd had to settle for calamansi in powdered form or just plain lemon or lime juice. Wish I had a big plant like what we had back in Manila and just harvest the fruit when we need it for kinilaw or the ever present dip of soysauce and vinegar+calamansi.

    Are you sure you can't grow one there? I've grown various citrus plants all over the world. You might have to take it inside in the winter, but I'll bet you could grow one. Next time you go home, take a couple of the fruits back with you. God knows they have plenty of seeds!!

    They're really pretty plants as you know. In the US, they're sold as "ornamental citrus," and as a houseplant in cooler climates. I was told by a nurseryman that "nobody grows them for the fruit because it's so small - the plants are popular because they're pretty and smell nice and they're easy to grow."

    I'd recommend you give it a try. Whacha got to lose?

    Calamondin Orange

    They are very hardy, in Australia they have been grown for years under the name of "Kumquats", now that true Kumquats are being sold they are marketed as "Australian Kumquats". The make superb marmalade.

  10. Where are all the San Franciscans? Ceviche has been an institution in the city as long as I can remember.

    All the best seafood restaurants have always served it. I don't think anyone in SF would claim that it originated there, but if asked most would ascribe the origin as Italian.

    Come on city residents lets hear from you.

    You're talking about California? I lived in San Francisco for more than 20 years and never noticed that the "best" seafood restaurants served it. It's popular, naturally, at Mexican and South American restaurants, but that's all that I saw. And I've never heard anyone claim it was Italian.

    I would guess that there is a confusion between "Escabeche" and "Ceviche" (the Wikipedia entry for the former is a case in point), or that the two dishes have blended over the years. Variations of escabeche exist all arounf the Med. (sometimes with name variations, sometime with local names) and preserving fish cooked fish in an acid is a pretty global technique (Obviously Ceviche isn't cooked in the conventional sense).

    Oddly enough the origin of "Ceviche" is always given as a native Peruvian dish, but I would guess that the name of the dish at least must be related to the Spanish "Escabeche" which is a common cooking technique for fish and poultry. I'm not sure on this point, but I would think that citrus would have been introduced by the Spanish, so it would have to be a post-conquest dish?

  11. Made some Boston Baked Beans from an older recipe (1 kg pea beans, 250 gm salt pork, 3 Tbspn sugar, 1 Tbspn molasses, 1 1/2 tspn dry mustard). really like them but it occurs to me that I have no idea what is served with them if anything?

  12. Right to be specific, many rumours of cat eating are just that and quite racist in over-tone due to the general taboo in many regions on eating cats. What I am interested in is the specific observation that eating cat in North Eastern Spain seems  to have occured in a manner that has no comparison to near by regions

    The vast majority of recipes in these books are derivative from either earlier spanish sources or contemporary sources from other cuisines. Neither the earliest Spanish cookbook "Sent Sovi" nor the the Arabic "anonymous andalsuian cookbook" includes cat, and none of the earlier or contemporary european sources I'm familiar with do either.

    It's this lack of correlation in any contemporary cuisines that has always made me suspect these particular recipes (there are only a few) as perhaps a mistranslation of another animal or the like?

    I admit however to some bias in that I am squeamish about the eating of cats. (pets are not food, food are not pets...)

    I don't think that any of these early Iberian sources could be described as "Spanish", and if eating cats is a regional activity you would expect patchy references. Speaking to my BIL last night, during WWII cat was on the menu in Chianti, this seems to be a common pattern of behaviour during periods of food crisis. Once normal food supplies resume, the old taboo's mostly come back quite quickly. Not in all cases though.

    One thing that is worth pointing out is that in the most parts domestic cats are not pets. Anybody that has lived on a farm with a resonable population of "farm cats" knows that these range from the rarely seen and feral to almost friendly animals. It wouldn't take a great shift in perspective to see these as food, especially in regions were truely indulged cats (and their owners) as pets do not exist to re-inforce taboos.

    I do wonder if eating domestic cat reflects a tradition of eating European wild cat (Felis silvestris silvestris ), which would be always considered as game and never as a pet. It's range tends to refect areas where actual recipes or rumours of cat consumption occur. From text sources I doubt that a the difference in use of the two sub-species could be determined.

  13. I have this Portuguese recipe for cuscuz am I right in thinking that "farinha da terra" is manioc flour?

    Tomen huma quarta de farinha da terra peneirada pela peneira braca, e ralla, botem-na no alguidar da massa, se va borrifando com limitada agua, e trocendo se nas maos comuita forca so para huma banda, de sorte que fique em grani-as, e como estiver toda a farinha feita desta forma, se deitara em huma joeira, e se joeirara, e o que ficar de sima sao os cuscus, e o q for abaixo se tornara a burrisar com o mesmo burrisador fino, ou com hum ramo de murta, ou de outra qualquer cousa limpa, que nao amargue, e na agua com que se borrifar a farinha se ha de ter delido hum bocado de formento, e acabada esta farinha da forma dita, se botarao os cuscus dentro em hum cuscuzeiro forrado muito bem de papeis por dentro, e sa pora ao fogo huma panella de ferro, ou de barro em hua trempe com agua, e fervendo bem se Porã o cuscuzeiro emsima da boca da panela; e como estiver cozido o cuscus, que sabendo a pao cozido; entao se tire para fora, e torne a ir ao alguidar a desfazerse tambem com grande Força so para huma banda, e estando desfeita se pofao ao Sol a secca, durar. E nesta forma se faz cuscus. Quando se ouver de comer., se faz o caldo a parte em huma tigela como quizerem, ou de carne, ou doce, ou como se faz para aletria; feito o dito caldo, e fervido, se tira do lume, e por sima se lhe deita o cuscus e se deixa enxugar, e assim feito se poem nos pratos com canella por sima; se manda a mesa. Assim se faz o caldo para aletria.

  14. Right to be specific, many rumours of cat eating are just that and quite racist in over-tone due to the general taboo in many regions on eating cats. What I am interested in is the specific observation that eating cat in North Eastern Spain seems to have occured in a manner that has no comparison to near by regions.

  15. As it happens I am both Australian and a parasitologist. People don't eat cats here as a form if population control. I can't think of any disease that you are likely to get from consumption of well cooked cat brains. The diseases that you are likely to get from contact with a cat will be from contact with living animals (largely from faecal contamination). Kangaroo is now in every supermarket, former bans on eating kangaroo were largely to do with a need to feel "British" rather then Australian and fears of adulteration of beef and lamb.

    As part of my under-graduate degree we tested a large range of local butchers mince (lamb or beef), a surprising amount contained kangaroo.

  16. Eating rooks (young rooks were eaten, why Ramsey would shoot and eat an adult is beyond me) makes a certain amount of sense, they compete for grain and it is relatively easy to harvest large amounts of young rooks from the a rookery.

    Eating cat doesn't make much sense. The kill vermin and as carnivores they would be expensive to feed. If there was a rational reason for esting them then you would expect the practice to be more widespread, but in a European context it seems to be confined to the North-East of Spain.

  17. This recipe is from Libro de Guisados (1529), which in tern is the Spanish translation of the Catalan Libre del Coch (1520). Translation was by Robin Carroll-Mann and the original file can be found at Stefan's Florilegium.

    Obviously it is an older recipe, but I have seen another recipe for cat with migas and another for cat in tomato sauce.

    GATO ASADO COMO SE QUIERE COMER

    You will take a cat that is fat, and decapitate it. And after it is dead, cut off the head and throw it away because it is not for eating, for they say that eating the brains will cause him who eats them to lose his senses and judgment. Then flay it very cleanly, and open it and clean it well, and then wrap it in a cloth of clean linen. And bury it beneath the ground where it must be for a day and a night; and then take it out of there and set it to roast on a spit. And roast it over the fire. And when beginning to roast it, grease it with good garlic and oil. And when you finish greasing it, whip it well with a green twig (99), and this must be done before it is well-roasted, greasing it and whipping it. And when it is roasted, cut it as if it were a rabbit or a kid and put it on a big plate; and take garlic and oil blended with good broth in such a manner that it is well-thinned. And cast it over the cat. And you may eat of it because it is very good food.

  18. I've noticed in looking through historic Iberian sources that there seems to be a number of recipes for cat. As the recipes are from general recipe collections, I assume this doesn't represent a response to famine or invading Prussians.

    Was this a widespread practice and how long did it continue for I wonder?

  19. This, I think, is a New England novelty.  Set me straight if it's offered elsewhere.  Behold the Breakfast Pizza.

    gallery_28660_4947_34600.jpg

    This has scrambled egg, cheese, sausage, ham and bacon.  Usually there are two or more pies on the pass but we were "late" at 7:45 (the place is jammed at 5 in the morning). I ignored it for a year or two then tried it on a whim.  It is the most delicious creation known to man.

    Somebody has gone and sold you a quiche boyo and after all that rugged fisherman stuff! :wink:

    I'm always surprised by how different the North American lobsters look from the European types, like a tiny twist in reality. Those lobster rolls look fantastic BTW.

  20. The flavours of Balsamic and the Montilla vinegar are not very similar. Montilla wines are produced near Cordoba, most of the wine is made from Pedro Ximénez and the most interesting wines get produced using the Solera system in a similar manner to Sherry, by the wines are naturally high in alcohol so they are not fortified like Sherry.

    The vinegars can be lovely products, really nice nut, dried fruit and rancio characterisitics, but should not be considered a cheap alternative to Balsamic.

  21. Sorry, I should have said that I am interested in information about alcuzcuz in post-Reconquista Iberia. There is a lot of speculation on line, but very little actual data.

    Several sources mention it was banned during the hight of the Inquisition period, yet it appears in the two major cookbooks produced in Spain and Portugual during the same period. This doesn't make sense.

    Other sources mention say that "migas" are decended from alcuzcuz, yet migas come in a huge number of forms, most of which don't resemble couscous and none of which (to my knowledge) are steamed like couscous.

    Obviously alcuzcuz was still known as a dish by the literate population in Spain and Portugual at the time (Pedro Calderón de la Barca names one comic character "Alcuzcuz" in fact), but was it still consumed outwith these social strata I wonder?

  22. This afternoon I had a happy time translating (badly no doubt) a recipe for alcuzcuz from Francisco Martínez Montiño's "Arte de Cocina". Originally published in 1611 this book seems to have been popular enough to be republished into the 19th century.

    The recipe for couscous prepareation itself is very detailed and correct. What surprises me is the presence of the recipe at all, as various sources say that during this period "alcuzcuz" was deeply out of favour with the Inquisition and was eventually banned.

    Not only is it a detailed recipe for making couscous, it also mentions a specific vessel for steaming the couscous ("alcuzcurero"), which suggests to me that the dish was better known in at least some levels of Spanish society then is generally acknowledged.

    I would be interested in hearing any other historical information abour alcuzcuz, if it exists.

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