Adam Balic
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Posts posted by Adam Balic
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Retreat? You mean those places where they give you a low protein diet, loads of chanting and incense which destroys your ability to laugh at the stupidity of your fellow man? Well I fear for him, but I guess as long as it isn't an Anglican Retreat he should be fine.
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Simon are you OK.
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I was talking to a British food celeb. yesterday about "British Food" and what she thought of this renewed interest. Amounghst other things, she mentioned that when people are speak about "British Food", what they are mostly talking about is Victorian English food. Which she didn't regard as the best of British food. She regarded that best of British as being before Varrene & Co. improved French cuisine. Interestingly, she mentioned that if you compare English and French recipes before the period of Catherine de Medici, the English food was of a higher standard.
After Catherine introduced Italian cooking to the French, things really took off for the Frenchies. What a pity she wasn't married off to one of the English kings, then it would be English food ruling the waves.
edit: I did not vote for the damn Queen
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Could we get an exact method for this de-salting, I'm sick of soaking my cod. Doesn't the hot water "cook" the cod, or isn't it that hot?
Have been looking at Varenne over the weekend - interestig recipe for Otter and soot custard.
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sauteed eh, tricky, very tricky. I would be afraid they would burst. Nice sauce.
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Adam, you only bought the pork buns?
I'm impressed.edit:
Oh, further to pease pudding. I made thumb sized pease puddings, wrapped them in prosciutto with a mint dipping sauce. Quite interesting.
Bah, I'm not all talk you know
! This was nearly a year ago, time for another party.Pease puddinettes? So you cooked the pease, made them in mini-pud's,wrapped them and grilled them(?). Was the mint sauce like, mint, vinegar, sugar or something else. Very interesting, I have to cook some game soon and I think that these maybe just the ticket. Much nicer (or is that 'better", subjectively) thengame chips, bleach!
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Thai fish cakes
Helen, for my last party I served these items, all well received.
grilled Vietnamese beef in mint leaves
grilled monkfish skewered on rosemary stalks and wrapped in panchetta
venison terrine
chicken liver pate
salmon eggs on buckwheat blini with creme fraiche
various middle eastern filo pastry things
mini pizza with queen scallops, pesto, cherve.
various chicken Asian things (mini-drumsticks, various flavours)
californian rolls
vegetarian nori rolls
steamed pork buns (bought, not made)
mango salsa with prawn crackers
Cevapcici (Croatian skinless sausage)
Vietnamese spring rolls
Vietnamese rice paper rolls
Almost everything can be pre-prepared.
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I could be wrong, but I don't think French did become a court language in England, although I suspect it was an important acquisition among members of society, just as it was in Germany and Russia.
Queen Victoria, however, did read and discuss menus in French.
Yes, this of course what I meant
. Would you agree though that French culture made a large impact of it's immediate neighbors?Queen Victoria was half German and she married a German, but she read menus in French? Go figure. Actually, was German (Saxony/Prussian?) food ever in vogue in England? I can't remember ever reading this.
(huh, Plotnicki admits that there is no actual proof that peasant cuisine contributed to high class cooking. On the ropes, I tells yah.)
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Wilf - It will have to wait until the last week of the month as I will be in Europe till then.
I think you guys are making short shrift of my wine theory on a commercial level. It makes sense that a country who exports wine easily includes food both in theory (recipes) and in substance (ingredients). Of course one can say that the Brits imported port from Portugal. And why didn't the Portugese export their cuisine as well. Not up to snuff? Same with the Spaniards. I'm sure that Rioja made it's way into Britain. Where is the great impact made by Spanish food?
Hmm - interesting idea Steve. Could it be that French culture in general had a large impact on the English aristocrat class? French would seem to be a court language in England, not Spanish and not Potuguese. There is no Port in Portugal, it's only port when it leaves Oporto?
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Oh, and a large part of the reason why he using more pepper in his cooking, while other chef used other spices, was that he could. Black pepper was always a very prized spice, but its rarity and cost made its use prohibitive for many cooks/chefs. Until the late 15th.C that is when the monopoly was broken. Below is a link to some pretty good information on pepper. It would be interesting to know how the price of pepper corresponds to its use in cooking, country by country, can't find that information.
http://www-ang.kfunigraz.ac.at/~katzer/eng...l?Pipe_nig.html
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Steve - that bit about the spices is very interesting and is pretty much the meaning of "Post-medieval", as I wrote before. I am V. busy today, so I will write at length at a later date. However, before you go leaping off into the deep end of the pool, you still have to show that food at this level is based on peasant cooking. I don't think you can do that.
If your logic about taste and betterness is correct, does this not mean that the French know squat about wine, as it wa the English that really developed the two main wine regions in France?
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OK a peasant basically pays "rent" to the land lord, what the actually terms of the rent etc vary quite a bit, depending on where and when this occurs. So a peasant may have to work on his landlords property for 3 months of the year or he may have to supply a certian amount of produce per year from his own property of both or something else again. Wilh few exceptions this was bad for the peasant. These conditions existed in some parts of Italy until he 1960's! In some parts of Tuscany you can still see people that great up in these conditions - they are very short.
Truly independent farmers working their own little plot of land are pretty rare, and in European history a fairly recent phenomena.
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OK you define the distiction between peasant and farmer so everybody knows what is is being discussed. I assume you mean post-revolution, or do you have information on the period before this?
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Have fun Steve, wish I could join you! While you are there you might like to look up "Catherine de Medici" and "Scappi". Varenne? Actually, some of his recipes were very interesting, post-medieval stuff. But, not much to do with modern French cooking and even less to do with French peasant cooking, which I thought were the cornerstone of French cuisine and why it is so great?
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Part One
I find the arguments here very hard to understand, because I honestly struggle to follow, from sentence to sentence, whether we are discussing peasants in the true sense or ordinary working families, whether we are discussing home cooks or restaurant chefs, and who we are talking about when we say that people "preferred" one cuisine to another.
Yes, I tried to define this so that some basis for an informed discussion could be made. A "peasant" is a very diferent kettle of fish to the working class of the 19th C. I think that this is important, as if we are going to discuss the importance of humble roots in grand cuisine then the conclusions that are drawn would be very different depending on what group was chosen.
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But shouldn't the inference be drawn that the "matelotte" that Davidson describes as the predcessor for BB tasted better than its fish stew counterparts in other countries, and that is why BB ended up as the number one fish stew in the world?
Huh??!! Oh, I see. Bahahahahahahahaha (Wipes tears of laughter which obscures text from eyes). Very funny.
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"that bit is rubbish . If it ain't broke, then don't fix it, could be appied here in some specific cases I think. But this isn't important."
No I think this is at the heart of the debate because what we haven't been able to agree on was whether British peasant cuisine was as good as French peasant cuisine. I say the inference needs to be drawn that it wasn't. And I say the biggest piece of evidence isn't that the Brits employed French chefs because they were employable, it's that the British *preferred* the French dishes those chefs prepared over British cuisine. Clearly they could have told those chefs to make bubble and squeek instead of something French. But that isn't what happened. There could be only one reason that the British accepted French cooking. It tasted better. And if French cuisine of the 19th century is based on what were originally peasant dishes, one should logically conclude that "tastes better" be extended to peasant cuisine as well.
"I say the inference needs to be drawn.....", sure that's your opinion.
Steve - I won't enter this debate unless you can show me that the French chefs employed by the English during the 19th C. were actually making food based on to a substatial extent on French peasant cooking. I'm sure there are specific exaples of this, but for the most part I think that you will find that the majority of the food they were making was based on another culinary tradition.
I'm sure that many of the English preferred the French dishes too. The are stories of black-market trade going on for the pate and terrine that Careme (or was it Escoffier?) was making for the prince regent. The complexity of flavours and textures of these pate blew the poor old pork pies out of the water, but that really doesn't say anything about peasant cooking.
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Crikey, I agree with everything you said! Except this bit "But P'ism takes it one step further and says, if it wasn't upgraded, then the inference drawn should be that it *didn't taste good to begin with* or to be fair, didn't have the requisite complexity to be used as a springboard for what became 19th century middle class cooking.", that bit is rubbish
. If it ain't broke, then don't fix it, could be appied here in some specific cases I think. But this isn't important.I agree that there is a certain class of cuisine that is based on some types peasant food (eg. one pot cooking items are a good bet), but instead of putting the emphasis on the peasant cooking, more recognition should be given to the people that developed this food into the form that we enjoy now.
Oh, I think that the English employed French Chefs because there was a sudden opening in the market for them.
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Steve - wow, actual emperical evidence!
. I have read Alan Davidson's comments on BB before (he is one of my very favourite food writers, especially on fish), and they are mentioned in that link I first posted. So, it boils down to this: peasants in the area had a vaguely similar dish, called something else, which is very similar to almost everybodies else fish soup in the med (look at the Basque fish soup, to see a more "primative" version). An unknown Chef in the 19th. C. starts cooking BB, which is unlike any other fish soup. Who do you think deserves the credit for this one? Why not say that is was a dish invented in the 19th C., rather then get all misty eyed about these peasants. Must get that book. -
So the peasants had from 1792 on wards to develope their cuisine so that it could be picked up by chefs in the mid-nineteenth century? Gosh, those guys must have been really smoking, to be the source of all those dishes of peasant origin.
The War of the Roses? No, that was a couple of hundred years to early for that.
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"........chopped straw mixed with earth, of which they composed a food which cannot be called bread.". Never a truer word spoken, contempory British would call this a "Brick". Hell, what do they know about cooking though? . 'course, this is what those Frenchies were doing when they weren't folding in the casseolet crust seven times.
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Sorry, yes it would be better to say "cooks", rather then chef (I had my mind on the 19th C. when I wrote that). Cooks as trained peasants? Well, maybe we should define what people mean by "peasant". I would go with Eric Wolf's definition:
"...rural cultivators whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers that uses the surpluses both to underwrite its own standard of living and to distribute the remainder to groups in society that do not farm but must be fed for their specific goods and services in turn."
So I don't think that a cook is a peasant.
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The dish is named after the vessel it is cooked in [...]
Tunisa and Morocco both have Tajine/tagine, (dishes named after the vessel again) [...]
This would be a good topic. And then there's gratin, and casserole. Cocotte?
OK you post it. Also "Marmite" springs to mind.
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What do you mean by "trying"?
The customer is always right ...
in Restaurant Life
Posted
Oh, all this piss taking reminds me of a story relavent to the topic
. When I was staying in a Monastry in Durham (UK) I was invited to dinner with the monks and various local VIPs (Mayor etc). I sat next to the Mayor's wife. After a truely terrible meal (worst of English cooking) the Mayor's wife turned to me and said "Do you eat as well as this in Australia? I could only say that "No, we naver ate like this in Australia".