Adam Balic

If loquats are ever available where you live, the taste and texture is very similar to medlars. I grew up with loquats, then couldn't get them for years. Then I moved to Germany, and found that Turkish grocery stores sell medlars. I fell upon them with cries of joy, and was at first convinced that they were actually loquats. Admittedly it had been a long time since I had loquats, so my memory may be deceiving me, but to me the two taste similar. ← Eh, I think that there is some confusion here. Medlars and loquats are related, but not very similar in texture of flavour, but the latter is sometimes refered to as the "Japanese Medlar", so the two get mixed up. The Common Medlar Mespilus germanica is a small tree (very pretty actually, large white flowers, it looks a lot like a quince) and produces numerous hard brown fruit single fruit. This fruit must be bletted (experience a hard frost), frozen or left to rot before being eaten. After this process the hard fruit softens to a dark brown putty, this can be extracted and used in cookery. See here.. I agree that they are not common, but people sometimes grow the tree as an ornamental and I saw the fruit for sale in Austria recently. My parents have a tree in their orchard. The Loquat ("Japanese Medlar") Eriobotrya japonica like warm temperatures and produces clusters of tangy fruit with large shiney brown seeds. Very refreshing in the summer.

So, based on that, one can reduce separation with an emulsifier such as lecithin. Is gumbo file (sassafras) an emulsifier? Are there others that we should be thinking about in this discussion? Also, Shalmanese's comment and Adam's below -- -- would suggest that frequent stirring at lower temperatures is preferable to letting your gumbo/curry/chili sit to boil at higher temperatures. Is this why the homespun advice about cooler stocks seems relevant? If you whisk in cooler stocks into these bases (roux, bhunoed whatever), then you're lowering the temperature both by the addition and the whisking. ← I have no experience of gumbo, so can't comment, but all the advise I had seen about roux based sauces has been to add warm stock/milk (to decrease lumps) and to simmer (relatively high temperature then) for a long period to allow the starch grains to burst and give a smooth sauce. With things like curry and gumbo, you might want a lower temperature to prevent the meat from drying out.

I recall, as a child my grandmother loved to get venison for her mincemeat. I think she used the venison suetin it, too. I have a number of recipes that call for chopped suet in the pastry. Not melted. The best Cornish pasties! ← Barbara - do you have a recipe for the venison mince meat? 'tis the season and so on.

Actually, in Canada they are often boiled in honey water. "Best bagels in the world etc"

Small drops of oil held in an aqueous suspension by various mechanisms (proteins like lecithin), If you heat the system enough these tiny droplets fall apart (e.g. for example the lecithin is denatured by the heat) and the tiny oil blobs fuse until they form a droplet big enough to see with the naked eye. Whole cows milk will do this if you heat it enough, but it has less fat then coconut milk so the effect may not be as obvious. Roux is like the base for bechamel and veloute sauces? I always add hot milk/stock for these and I have never had an isue with them seperating.

I used 200 gm of onion, so not as much as Genevose. The colour is partially the photograph (artificial lights) and due to me cooking off the tomato in the lard until "scurrissima, untuosa, lucida e densa". If anybody ever visits Edinburgh we can have a cook off.

Lets see I used 200 grams of preserved lard, so the onions were absolutely swimming in the fat. As you cook it you can 'hear' the change in the cooking, going from a boiling to a frying stage as the water evaporates. The onion etc has a lot of sugar, but there are also proteins from the onions, meat and tomato, so I said maillard rather then caramelization, but actually I don't really know the exact process involved. The long cooking times are because this is how long it takes to reduce all the liquid companants, rather then the actual braising time. I reckon that the fat is the critical part of the recipe as this is what makes the dish different from a typical braise/pot roast. The onion et al., frys in the fat, this is a really different process to a more liquid braise, the only recipe I could think of that is similar is the Sumatran Style Beef Rendang, if you look at the link you can see that there are two ways of preparing a rendang, one method gives you a typical braise, the other gives you a dish which has a frying step and the final dishes are very different in character. This is what I think is happening in this dish, but this may just be because I am really craving some Indonesian food at the moment.

Here is a link to the recipe provided by The Welsh Development Agency which is a sponsored body of the Welsh Assembly Government. The will always be variation in a recipe like this.

Hi Russ - you know this has been an interesting exercise and I have learnt a new recipe technique, but I think that I am still have no clear idea of what is now made in Naples, compared to the when the recipe was originally published. I noticed that in your version of the ragu that you cut back on the amount of lard make it 'brighter'. I'm not sure if this refers to colour of flavour, but my impression on making this dish was that the large amount of lard was important to get Maillard reactions etc and therefore some specific flavours and colours? I'm not sure actually if any of this matters in the end. Sure, I think that if you are going to produce a traditional recipe then you should try to be as faithful to the recipe as possible, but for a dish like this the final results are always going to be part of a spectrum. It is interesting how different people can read the same text, have the same intentions and come out with different results. One reason why not to write cookbooks I guess. It has been an interesting thread for me and I now think that I will tell some Italians that their favoured dish is actually French at least once a month so that I can learn some more in depth details on Italian cooking.

Obviously the next day I was extremely hung-over. But being hung-over in Vienna isn't a bad thing - lots of gluhwein. We went for a walk in one of the Danube's national parks, pretty much feeling sorry for myself eating the occasional sausage and drinking medicinal gluhwein. There are numerous fortified hot drinks in Vienna and Graz, but there is a lot of variation in quality. The best tip is to buy from the stalls with the most people clustered around them.

I hestitate to add photogrpahs of the meal as my camera struggles in low light. This was at a small resturant near where we were staying. Starters A salad of bread dumplings, curd cheese, tomato and venison 'ham'. Broth of Tafelspitz with a meat dumpling. Mains Vanille Rostbraten - love the name. Veal with avacado and tomato salad No desserts, but I did have a few schnapps including a very good quince version. After this I went out drinking absinthe and beer with my friend until ~5 am. Had one of those sausages that contains chunks of cheese sometime at the end of this.

Great photographs thank you. I think that my version would have been as red as yours, except that I followed the instructions "cook, stirring often, until the tomato has become quite dark, almost black". Next time I will not process that tomato so much.

I suspect that pre-ban Absinthe had a great deal of variation in flavour from producer to producer. I drank a few of different styles of absinthe in Vienna last weekend (with the whole perforated spoon, sugar cube stage show) and although all the brands tried were 'authentic'etc, there was a lot of variation in flavour, colour and cloudy v clear with water addition. Vermouth was another wormwood based booze (the name is a clue), but it has many styles. To be honest for herbal wormwood flavour I would by a good bottle of Genepi which is made from an alpine wormwood that lacks that psychoactive element, but has a good distinctive flavour of wormwood. I like pastis, it is great with cream and mussels, not sure if this is true of absinthe.

Pernod was originally an Absinthe producer. After it was banned in France they set up the production of Absinthe and Pastis (I have read that the name "Pastis" is derived from "pastiche"= "copy, replica") Pernod in Spain. I have a poster (copy) of an older Pernod Pastis advert, It has a picture of a green faery and the phrase (in French) "Bring alive the Green Faery". I assume that they were trying to recreate some of the hype surrounding their banned Absinthe.

Gary - one thing that ha really pissed me off over the last five years in the UK is how high the mark-up is for wine in the UK. Paying £15+ for a nothing bottle of wine is not my idea of a fun night out. So as a consumer I salute you. But how is it that you can build a wine list like this, while so many others cannot?

Pork scratchings? Congratulations and best of luck with the business BTW?

Sunblush?semi-dried tomatoes are an exapmple I guess. Great images BTW.

The Western books I read make very clear the importance of the East to European cooking, but just because one group of people discovered a particular process, it does not mean that all people that use this process are derivative of them. There are enough quasi-pasta type products in Europe and the Near-East to propose independent evolution from the Far Eastern noodles. Dumplings, gruels and pancakes for instance and logically be proposed as the progenitor forms of many 'pasta' type products, whereas it seems that other types of pasta products (e.g. Hard wheat pasta) definately came from the Near-East. There are many different forms of pasta and there is linguistic evidence that some forms travelled from the Near-East to the Far East, so I think that there is room for it to have occured the other way around as well for some forms, although there is no evidence of this yet (I'm sure that there will be in the future). My surname is supposedly ultimately derived from a Tartar Turkic word for "Dried Fish", but I don't propose that all dried fish products must have developed from ideas imported from the East. Regarding the bagel, well I think that it is interesting that there is similarity between this product and the simit, but bread with a hole in the middle is a common thing - it is a convienient way of storing/transporting these breads. Finnish rye breads were made like this and threaded on strings, then hung up for storage for instance. The boiling process makes the bagel interesting, but there are many types of European yeast dumplings that are boiled, so I would suggest this as an possible origin. Prehaps what happened is that large batches of boiled dumplings were made in one go (this is quite common), what wasn't consumed immediately was baked to help preserve it, the hole was a hand way of threading them for storage. There is a similar 'storage' bread from Southen Italy, which is twice baked. You crush tomato onto the surface to soften it. Maybe some of the progenitor bagels were used in this manner.

A nice variation is to use vanilla flavoured vodka as the additional alcohol. In Vienna the mulled cider was called " Glühmost", I think.

Cool, another regional name of this dish was a "Clanger". The Bedfordshire Clanger is savoury at one end and sweet at the other. A one dish meal. Another regional variation is the "Quorn" pudding. And then there was always the option of boiled baby for dessert.

After the market we walk about town sightseeing and we dropped into a random cafe (Cafe Central sp?). Lovely interior and excellent coffee. I love the way that coffee is presented in Vienna, always with the water and the spoon.

Now I know what you mean. I would haved used an equivalent more then this as it happens, which makes me think that I need to cook the tomato in the lard for a longer period before adding the broth. Cheers.

On saturday night we visited the "Vienna Christ-Child" market. This was a great deal of fun and to my amazement the food produce that was sold there was of very high quality. The were also people walking around with special items that seem to be associated with these markets; fried potato cakes, a special pastry made of a light dough fried in lard and other similar items. In the UK there were also similar special dishes made at fairs and markets, in fact they were refered to as "Fairings" often as not. I wonder if any of them still exist? Most likely not. The item that I really liked was the berry punch. This was a variation on the normal hot punch, but contained an extremely generous portion of mixed forest berries.

Yes I was unsure of the tomato. How much triple concentrate tomato paste would you use?

One big problem with this book is that it doesn't mention the Austrian name for most of the recipes. A complete pain as the recipes look good. Tafelspitz is an exception. The ingredients are; 6 pounds of upper cut of rump 10.5 oz of root veg (celery, yellow carrots, carrots, parsley root - see above my photographs of the market). 7 oz of onions in their skins 1/2 leek 15 peppercorns (!) 8 pints water 2.25 pounds beef bones salt 4 Tbsps chopped chives pinch of lovage. Unless you cook it locally there is not real hope of replicating this exactly, as supply of the root veg and lovage is problematic.