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(The following is long and self-indulgent, please forgive.) Mead predates wine, and was popular enough to cause a honey shortage in medieval Russia (which, in turn, prompted Russians to explore distillation techniques learned from, I believe, Arabian alchemists -- I'll verify this later). The beauty -- well, one beauty -- of wine is that nature is all set up to do the work. Pick the grapes, bung them in a barrel, wait for the must to stop bubbling, pour it off the stems and bits, drink and be merry. Well, maybe this basic recipe would not produce a satisfactory wine by today's standards, but it was a fine start. And much, still, depends on the grape. A good grape wants to become a good wine. The main function of humans is to not do anything to screw it up. Modern-day vintners need to control the outcome of fermenation to ensure a consistent product. They need to protect their yearly investment in grapes. Potentially, one bad yeast strain could cost millions. So, after grapes are picked, they are subjected to all sorts of indignities in order to kill rogue yeasts, introduce politically correct yeast strains, induce secondary or tertiary fermentations on schedule, etc., etc. I don't mean to cast wine producers as villains -- on the contrary, I think most vintners are sent to us by heaven. But the scientific approach to wine making irritates me. However, the most egregiously scientific wine producers are like vegan hippy luddites compared to home winemakers. That's where the chemistry sets get broken out. Every aspect of wine has been chemically analyzed by someone, and that aspect is available in powder form. I was recently (and rightly) called on the homebrewer carpet for making "beer soup", which means I added a can of malt extract to water to make (a very passable) ale. Well, that can of extract had nothing but barley, hops and sugar. You would be horrified to learn what home winemakers voluntarily and knowingly add to their otherwise innocent grape juice. Some years ago, my co-conspirator and I ventured into home wine-making. We trod carefully at first, dutifully sulfiting most of the grapes we picked and adding clean yeast. That was the extent of the adulteration, and the product was more than passable a year later. With increasing confidence, every year we reserved a portion of the grapes for natural fermentation. The wine from the natural batches was strong, flavorful, tasting greatly of the original grape -- it was good wine. It's all been drunk now. We missed the harvest this year, so our wine making ventures will now wait until next fall, when they will resume in earnest. In the mean time, I'm experimenting with mead. It's a modest experiment, only 3 gallons to start with. Six pounds of honey dissolved in a half-gallon of water, heated, but not boiled, then added to enough water to make 3 gallons. To that I added Champagne yeast. That's it. From what I have read, a good dry mead can be as rewarding as any wine, and takes as long or longer to develop. Some mead makers allow 2 or 3 years of very slow fermentation before bottling, and then, they claim, the bottled mead will continue to develop favorably for as long as 100 years. As with grapes, much depends on the honey used. If I have any kind of success with this batch, I will have to find a source of local inexpensive fresh honey. Then the mead-making will begin in earnest, and will become more significant to me, rooted in my area, and, possibly, fermentable by its naturally-occuring yeasts. We'll see. If any eGulletarians out there have made wine or mead, please post here. Also, please don't take offense at my remarks about the chemistry sets -- instead, let's have a nice argument about it!

Again, I regret making my original post look like a questionnaire. Your case is exactly the kind that can prove the persistance of family culture. You take it with you. I started life in late-50s and 60s America, and my family culture then was a mix of working-class American and Russian emmigre. I still haven't sorted it all out exactly, but meal time was very important, and we always ate together. Then we moved to the erstwhile Soviet Union where it was difficult and often impossible to put together the kinds of meals my mother cooked in the States. Shopping for ingredients was quite different, as well. But the importance of eating together and observing table manners never dwindled, even though that was one of our most alien (non-Soviet) customs. I'm certain that my parents would have tried to preserve the family food culture no matter where in the world they ended up. I don't know why -- it sort of flies in the teeth of the anti-bourgeoise ethic to which we paid lip-service. Why did my parents, who abandoned their comfortable middle-class San Francisco life to go live in the worker's paradise, insist on our very middle-class family rituals? Shouldn't we have all eaten like my friends' families ate, by turn in the kitchen, fork in one fist and hunk of black bread in the other? (I miss that bread. What was it... sixteen kopeks a loaf? Four kopeks a quarter loaf. Black sour rye -- butter, salt, eat.)

That's the problem right there. You obviously work with a bunch of people who don't like to eat. If they winge about fat content in your pastries and cakes (which translates to winging about real butter), then they deserve to eat Enteman's with that fake fat stuff. Take your goods to an autoshop and watch the mechanics' eyes well up with tears after the first bite. I also agree with Rachel that with food-averse people you have to make it easy for them to grab a portion. Food-averse people don't like to handle food. Grabbing a day-old Safeway donut and scarfing it down in two bites behind a giant Macintosh monitor is not really eating, is it. However, cutting one of your lovely danish in half, heating it slightly in the toaster oven with a pat of unsalted butter, and enjoying it with a fresh cup of coffee is eating, and they're all on a diet, you see.

This is even more interesting than I hoped. Thanks to everyone who's posting here! I didn't realize that my original post looked exactly like a questionnaire -- I meant merely to suggest the kinds of questions that could be asked in the context of family food culture. Now, I can think of many more questions I wish I had included.

There have been threads dealing with childhood food memories (in fact, one was started over in General Food Topics while I was typing this). This thread, however, is not about specific memories, but about the food cultures in our families when we were growing up. I'm sure bits and pieces on this have been posted here and there, but this thread is meant to bring the pieces together. What was your family food culture when you were growing up? Was meal time important? Was cooking important? What were the penalties for putting elbows on the table? Who cooked in the family? Were restaurant meals common, or for special occassions? Did children have a "kiddy table" when guests were over? When did you get that first sip of wine? Was there a pre-meal prayer? Was there a rotating menu (e.g., meatloaf every Thursday)? How much of your family culture is being replicated in your present-day family life? Even though other threads cover memories of specific foods or dishes, please include those memories here if they illustrate your family's food culture. These are personal questions (which is why I hid this thread in the Bios section), but I hope many can contribute. I am not looking for anything extraordinary, although I am sufficiently ignorant about family food cultures around the world that anything might appear extraordinary. Ideally, given eGullet demographics, this thread can become an International Comparative Study of Family Food Cultures in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. I'll make a contribution to this thread after a few sessions with my repressed memory therapist.

Look at the links I painstakingly googled off the internet (above). It is already happening. My prediction is that the box will creep up into the $12/bottle-and-less price range, WHICH IS MY PRICE RANGE, while the more expensive wines will stay bottled. But that's just my prediction, and my predictions are very often wrong (which, strictly speaking, means they were not predictions in the first place).

There have been many times when I wished I had that power.

Sediment trap. far from ideal. no improvement on what we have now. again, i return to the point: what is the advantage? if it ain't broke, etc. As I said earlier, The plastic-bag-in-a-box approach has the definite advantage and improvement of keeping the wine fresher. Avoiding sediment and letting the wine breath are what decanters are for. I'm convinced the only reason we don't abandon glass bottles completely is pure snobishness (and I count myself among the snobs). Glass breaks easily, is realatively expensive both to make and ship, and the shapes are innefficient. Corks can taint the wine or crumble and break when extracting and may not form a perfect seal. The fact that only crap wine is available in boxes and (until recently) screwtops dooms them from the start. For all rational reasons these are better containers than glass bottles with corks, but the history, emotion, insecurity and romance surrounding wine production and drinking makes for a very conservative marketplace. Don't get me wrong - I want to buy wine in beautiful glass bottles, and while I don't mind synthetic corks, I cringe at screwtops. I also know that these feelings are irrational. My sediments exactly.

Sediment trap. far from ideal. no improvement on what we have now. again, i return to the point: what is the advantage? if it ain't broke, etc. The wine box is a change in packaging. As long as the product itself (the wine) does not suffer, then the benefits of non-breakable, stackable packaging are significant for the producer and the seller. Shipping costs per volume of wine would decrease dramatically. Breakage would be reduced. Warehousing costs would be reduced. For the consumer, the benefits would be negligible -- boxes are more convenient to transport and store, that's about it -- but if the savings in production costs are passed on to the consumer, there will be no complaints. A quick search yielded frightening results: Look at this, and fear the future. This, too, if you're not afraid of finding out what our fellow country-people are swilling. Bastards. Read this if you think Randall Grahm is cool -- he is not. He is a traitor. Coming soon -- Big House Red in a box. The second paragraph tells us of some traitors in France (quelle supris!) -- Domain de Fontavin. In a box. It's happening... make it stop! Ozzies: always ahead of the game ("Box wine sales rocketed and competition got to such a stage in the late '80s that producers were reputed to be putting better wines in the boxes than in their low-end bottles.") I can hear it now: "Grandpa Ivan, what's a 'bottle'?" "Well, little Ivan III, it's sort of a box made from glass." "That's dumb."

Sediment trap.

I plan to be as unreasonable about screw-tops as the NRA is about any gun law. Slippery slope straight to wine-in-a-box hell, I tell ya. Plastic corks don't bother me, however, although some of them are a true bitch to remove.

I was just kidding about the wine-rack industry, although there are some monstrosities in the world of wine-racks that no one would miss. I wasn't kidding about the boxes, though. I'm sure they're air-tight, or can be made air-tight, and lined with the same non-reactive material used on screw-caps and artificial corks. You can make an array of volumes, from ten-liter super-size cartons down to juice-box-size by-the-glass servings. Costco would love it. What are the practical reasons why this should not be done? The screw-top is one big slippery slope, I tell ya.

I guess it hasn't occurred to anyone that synthetic corks and screwcaps will be the death of the wine-rack industry. Our children will be storing bottles upright, as God intended. Edit to add this: If we can get past the stigma of a screw-top on our Lafite, why not dispense with the bottle altogether and go with the wine-in-a-box concept accross the board? Much more efficient to store, handle and ship, plus no breakage.

No information re: name origin of "Carnaroli" can be found on the web. If it came from carne, it would probably have retained the "e", like other meat-derived Italianate words, such as carnevale. Maybe it derove instead from carnale. I did find a lot of people named Carnaroli, however. Risso Carnaroli was developed in the 1930s by crossing other existing varieties. Maybe Carnaroli was the name of the person who did it.

Probably, if the temperature in the smoker is low enough not to roast the malt. All I have for smoking purposes is a Weber grill, so I thought I should combine the kilning and the smoking of the malt. Coincidentally, I watched "Follow that Beer" on FoodTV last Sunday (starring affable home invader Gordon Elliott), and saw the malting floor in the Stella Artoir brewery in Belgium. Just a bunch of wet barley spread over acres of floor in a thin layer. Supposedly, it only takes 2-3 days for the barley to sprout. Then the trick is knowing just how much you want it to sprout before you kiln it. Also, the duration and temperature of the kilning is critical. Also, the type and amount of hops, type of yeast... I have no idea what I'm doing. If beer of any acceptable quality results, I will be pleasantly surprised.

Whether my potential is glorious or not is yet to be seen. I am buying barley because I need to malt it myself. I am attempting a smoked beer, and the smokiness is achieved by drying the green malt over smoke. <Emeril> I don't know where you buy your malt, but where I buy it, it comes unsmoked. </Emeril>

Dstone001, I just want to let you know that your severe chastisement of my "can of soup" approach to home brewing, coupled with a recent thread on smoked beer, has inspired me to attempt to brew a from-scratch batch of mesquite-smoked beer. And now that the cooler weather has set in, I can attempt a lager, which I've never tried before. I think I'll buy a bag o' barley this week.

Vologodskoe butter? (just being patriotic) Ah, my heart swells with pride as my eyes mist up with bittersweet emotions. Of course, we invented butter, you know.

More from the Canadian site: So, two very different plants are processed in two very different ways, and the resulting products are identical?

I think the answer must be that, even though beet and cane produce the same exact substance (sucrose), what we get when we buy a bag of refined sugar is not chemically pure. No doubt, the devil's in the detritus that sifts through in the final filtering process. From the Canadian Sugar Institute's site, cited by nightscotsman above, on how sugar is produced: Notice, first of all, that the process for sugar beets seems more slap-dash. Second, in both cases, the sugar is filtered before drying. These filters would have to be fine on a molecular level to produce chemically pure sucrose, and even so I bet some negligible levels of impurities would seep through. I doubt the filters used in the industries are anywhere fine enough to produce chemically pure sugar. I've bitten into a sugar beet. Cane tastes better than beet. Edit -- this from the C&H site cited by nightscotsman: "Cane sugar contains trace minerals that are different from those in beet sugar, and it’s these minerals that many experts say make cane sugar preferable to use."

I had smoked beer (Rauchbier) years ago in Bamburg, erstwhile West Germany, where it's said to have originated (although by some accounts, all beer was smokey in the early days of brewing). To make beer, barley grains are soaked and allowed to germinate, or malt. The resulting green malt is next roasted, mainly to stop the malting process, but also to enhance the color and flavor of the malt. The dried malt is then brewed and fermented to make beer or ale. To make smoked beer, brewers kiln (dry) the malt over smoke, instead of using smoke-free heat. The type of wood used is, as with all smoking, very important. Bamburgian breweries use beechwood. Brewers will mix smoked malt with regular malt to achieve a balance of smokiness. Beer made with 100% smoked malt might well be undrinkable. I don't know where on the scale of smokiness lay the beer I had in Bamburg -- I suspect moderate to high -- but it was too cloying for me. I drank many litres of it during my brief stay, and have not sought it out since. However, it would be a blast to try brewing some myself! Hmmm..... Mesquite?

Some restaurants might charge a grindage fee.

Sheesh, what a bunch of snobs. (And I say, if this is snobbery, then Hooray for Snobs!)

If I did, I'd have to find another rhyme for "selection".

I don't know where the stress goes in words like "dolsot", "banchan" and "gomasio", so I guessed. I play a bit loose with "kimchee", stressing it on the first syllable in one case, and on the last in another. Also, I have no idea whether Dalton Trumbo ever had panache. Let's say he did. Bibimbap! A fortnight ago, at a bistro I frequent, I set out to order myself something piquant. With all the panache of a young Dalton Trumbo I hailed a waiter and ordered the gumbo. The gumbo arrived. It was cold and translucent. And much as I hate to be seen as a nuisance, I yelled, "Please remove this gelatinous slop, And bring me a bowl of your best Bibimbap! "Bibimbap, sir?" the waiter inquired, "And what, may I ask, did this craving inspire? We have on our menu eclectic selections So trendy they'd give Paul Bocouse an erection. Our chef uses all of the latest ingredients, Assembled on platters with utmost expedience. The dish is just rice cooked with meat, is it not? Is that what you mean when you say 'Bibimbap'?" I cradled my head and silently wept. Why was I cursed with this grossly inept Little twerp of a waiter who calls himself "Reed", Is all of nineteen, listens only to Creed, And hasn't yet tasted life's bitterest dregs. "You might as well say that an omelette's 'just eggs'," I exclaimed in a voice that rang out like a shot: "There's much more than that to a good Bibimbap!" "'Bibim' means 'stir things together', and 'bap' Is Korean for 'rice'. But it's what goes on top Of the rice once it's boiled that makes it a dish: Vegetables, tofu, some meat, even fish! But first, take your dolsot (a bowl made of stone) And get it real hot on the top of the stove. Throw in a test grain of rice. If it pops, You're ready to start making your Bibimbap! Fill the hot dolsot two-thirds full of rice Add kimchee, chopped scallion, fried tofu is nice, Some steamed greens, perhaps microgreens, if you care, Some red chile powder, or threads, if you dare. Or you can use banchan, which, like DNA, Can be combined in such wonderful ways. At last, lay a raw or fried egg on the top, Gomasio sprinkles -- voila! Bibimbap! The waiter, impressed by my bold exposition Retreated, post haste, to the restaurant's kitchen, From whence, in a heartbeat, some figures emerged, And seventeen men at my table converged. They lifted me up like a speck of kimchee And bodily threw me right out on the street. I picked myself up. Like a hero, I rallied, And marched right back in, and ordered a salad.