MaxH

Having witnessed, years back, the huge growth in lucrative "premium" vodka products in the US market, and infiltration of vodka into drinks traditionally made from other clear spirits (Gimlet example upthread among many), I hadn't yet realized that a segment of current cocktailphiles sees this as uncool -- but it's heartening. I'm with Nathan: -- it calls for mention (in case any of you missed it) of Tolstaya on the point, and abuse, of vodka. Reviewing a then-new English translation of Russia's old national cookbook, the Russian essayist moved on to a tirade about vodka. Here's a small snippet (New York Review of Books, 21 Oct 1993 -- I strongly recommend the whole article, a savory minor modern classic for food enthusiasts):

Just as a reminder, the C. botulinum occurs in three steps: spores, then bacterial growth in a friendly anaerobic environment, then toxin production. The spores are extremely heat-resistant (surviving several hours of boiling) so there is no concept of "pasteurization" safely preventing this organism (standard food-processing prevention requires higher than sea-level boiling temps., therefore elevated pressure). The bacteria (like other claustridia and further anaerobic species) have a range of growth temperatures and a time scale, though famous fatal botulinum poisonings have happened after two weeks of cool storage. The C. bot toxin, a side effect of the bacterial growth, is fragile enough that ordinary cooking methods are normally a safety measure; but conditions listed in standard references as sufficient to kill C. bot toxin in food entail higher temperatures than sous-vide uses: Merck Manual (2006) 30 minutes at 80 C CRC Handbook of Food Toxicology (2002) 20 min 79 C or 5min 85 C World Health Organization (2002) 5min "above 85 C" or "few min" at 100C ETA: The three classic ways to prevent botulism poisoning in foods stored anaerobically without first pressure-cooking are: consume soon (before bacteria can develop much) -- recurrent phrase is "a few days" if refrigerated; stop bacterial growth chemically (preservatives or high acid); or stop the growth thermally (i.e., freeze it). The quirk about sous-vide is that a band of temperatures slightly below normal professional sous-vide cooking temps. actually greatly accelerates anaerobic bacertial growth, compressing its time scale. A respected biologist friend who pointed this out years ago uses the same equipment to cultivate bacteria in a laboratory that professional kitchens use for sous-vide cooking! A looming side issue, by the way, concerns meat confits (non-sous-vide) which in modern recipes are lightly salted, not otherwise preserved, cooked at atmospheric pressure, then sometimes stored anaerobically under fat for months, even unrefrigerated. That doesn't meet existing guidelines for C. bot safety and the problem would come if such aged confit were served or even carelessly handled (or "sampled") without much further cooking.

Actually no: in the US, tipping is customary, and forms much of servers' compensation, therefore is a duty to be honored or shirked according to the customer. (ETA: It's also voluntary to, for example, be considerate of the elderly, or of pregnant women, or to help people in an emergency. But if you don't, that too says a lot about you.) One fellow customer, a sharp observer of restaurants, has long pointed out that the customer-server interaction is an implied covenant, with obligations both ways, but that some customers only perceive it as one-way. It's not so much restaurants as what servers want (in restaurants that I know, the tip is immediately pulled off for the servers) and also, US fine-dining restaurants now often do bill a service charge for large tables (I guess to deal with those customers I mentioned with one-way vision.)

What a dog's life! :-) Pépin (in his popular English-language La Technique, 1976) said this leftover minced beef can also make a good meatloaf "with addition of eggs, bread crumbs, and seasonings."Osmazome is one of those concepts frequent in older food books. (Where I get most of my food-history info -- relatively little is online.) Samples below. Note (1) anything albuminous (raw meat juices especially blood; eggwhite; etc.) coagulates at moderate temperature to nickrey's residue ("scum" to us stock skimmers) and (2) it's written that lean beef leaches out maybe half its weight as soluble products if simmered long enough. I gather osmazome meant the flavored part of soluble extracts, vs. simple gelatin, though in years of making meat glazes I never tried to separate them. Brillat-Savarin, 1826 (Physiology of Taste in MFK Fisher's edition): "Osmazome is that preeminently sapid part of meat which is soluble in cold water, [unlike] the extractive part of the meat," defined as soluble only in boiling water. He goes on about its properties. Brillat was incidentally an evangelist for chocolate.* Alexandre Dumas (Dictionary of Cuisine, 1873, Colman's ed.): "There are five principles in meat from which bouillon derives its flavor ... fibrin, gelatin, osmazome, albumin, and fat." ("An old pigeon, a partridge, or a rabbit roasted in advance, a crow in November or December," can impart more osmazome to a bouillon.) Remember that next Autumn: crows are overabundant in many places. André Simon's gastronomic encyclopedia (1952) says Thénard named osmazome and defined it as the part of meat extracts soluble in alcohol. For the science behind this, Belle Lowe's remarkable Experimental Cookery (3rd ed. 1943) doesn't mention osmazome as such (the concept became obsolete, replaced by more specific chemical information) but is crammed with food-science data, solubilities, literature refs. (the index has maybe 150 entries under "meat," many of them relevant here), all focused not on abstract science but flavor. * Example, typical Brillat: "When you have breakfasted well and fully, if you will drink a big cup of chocolate at the end you will have digested the whole perfectly three hours later, and you will still be able to dine . . . Because of my scientific enthusiasm and the sheer force of my eloquence I have persuaded a number of ladies to try this, although they were convinced it would kill them; they have always found themselves in fine shape indeed, and have not forgotten to give the Professor his rightful due."

Just to stress a detail probably already clear: for picture-taking or other protocol, it's important to get the current word directly from the restaurant. Fora like this one may give diner perspectives, but we diners aren't the people setting current restaurant policy. The Laundry's lounge area up front, where people often congregate before being seated, has hosts who'd be glad to discuss it with you I'm sure, if you were not able to get word by phone.

First, please enjoy this special dinner and have a great birthday! Comment on wine: I think I mentioned this earlier but FYI, the Laundry has been distinguished by what I call a "full-service" sommelier dept. (by analogy to the once-common "full service" US gas stations where employees filled your tank, cleaned windows, checked tire pressure, etc. etc. and you didn't even have to know how to do any of those tasks). So that someone who liked wine but knew little about it could describe tastes and budget, and the sommeliers would come up with something very satisfying. (The sort of service the Master Sommeliers program aims for.) I haven't been to the Laundry lately, but that was a tradition. In many high-end restaurants I've seen food photography, even made into a spectacle by self-absorbed people. One online food poster and former eG participant stubbornly insists that unless other tables raise an issue to his face, he presumes their approval for any photography he wants to do. It's a wonder he doesn't bring in floodlights. (His unusual views ignore diners I've witnessed, muttering their annoyance or offence but unwilling to exacerbate the situation by risking a scene.) Other people, more discreet, can still turn a meal into a studio session, everything subordinated to their photo shots. But still other diners manage to snapshot their plates without making it the point of the whole dinner and without other tables noticing. Who could object? Answer: the restaurant. It pays to phone or ask, because a few high-end places class photography with cell phone calls and prohibit both.

Jaymes, thanks for posting your experiences. They connect also to a Parallel Topic on online public restaurants comments, where I quoted you. Absolutely, I've seen this too in a few incidents at restaurants. Today, those people might rush online and tell the world their shocking revelations about a restaurant with an otherwise good reputation -- and the readers won't be their friends, so won't know about the personality behind the words.

I've read Internet restaurant comments longer than eG or CH existed and seen even gross trends on them that were misleading, and I've an idea why. An example is a site that's accumulated mostly negative but unrepresentative comments on a restaurant I know well. Everyone else I've asked, who knows the place, finds the comments misleading or atypical. A current eG thread about servers brings out an excellent point about squeaky wheels:

Also, did you see This earlier eG posting?

Your last sentiment above is not uncommon at all in my experience, and the first comment accords with my observations by a different route, which was to take a variety of benchmark establishments I know very, very well and check what people on the site said about them. It was astounding. You could call this measuring, or critiquing, the "critics." If you don't know a restaurant, a "review" might tell you about the place, but if you know it intimately -- strengths, weaknesses, ebbs, flows -- a "review" definitely tells you about the reviewer. For Yelp -- keep in mind I can only say this about restaurants I know and checked, maybe 15 or 20 local ones -- I too noticed a high volume of sheer, enthusiastic misinformation. Comments posted about the wrong restaurant, or at least about food never served there (I checked); "rating" a restaurant with stars while admitting not actually eating there; and an unusually high volume of poor characterizations -- projecting limited experience or eccentric personal preferences as if they were guides to what a typical customer would encounter, when they weren't. That problem plagues today's online world of self-selected armchair restaurant critics (we talk about it here, on and off on various subforums), but I have never seen more of it on a major site.

Wow, ok, that's important to know, because I totally misunderstood it. ← As I did also, and I doubt we're alone, which is why I wrote to Lynne Olver. I'm not sure if Lynne yet sees what an issue this could be. A strong graphic that people naturally read in a certain way must be prepared with that reading in mind, or if for some reason that's impossible, the real meaning should be made very plain. Instead, there are declarations like "Information is checked against standard reference tools for accuracy ...," potentially deepening any date misimpressions. (All of which seems to me incongruous in a site so well organized in other respects.)

It's a great idea and valuable resource. Unfortunately at present, there's a graphical pitfall in the Food Timeline, which I didn't understand until corresponding with its creator. Coming as a new reader without presuppositions, I'm surprised not to see the issue (detailed below) explained clearly out front. It will be important to casual readers, depending on how they use the site. It's them I'm concerned about (not regular users, who know how the site works.) The "Timeline" display is an index of links to online sources. It's not actually a timeline (a sequence of events). I noticed a conflict between these two missions, because "Dates" of publications in the righthand column may or may not have the meaning they usually imply with such subject matter. For instance Brillat-Savarin's treatise is listed under the date usually given (1826 or end of 1825). But contemporary US writers, who dominated the US cookbook scene until the 1900s, Mary Randolph and Eliza Leslie, are listed under dates much later than publication, because their links happen to point to later editions (of which there were many). The Virginia Housewife didn't appear in 1838, Eliza Leslie's famous Directions for Cookery in 1840, or her earlier Seventy-Five Receipts in 1832. These books were actually published years earlier. But anyone reading the display as history (i.e., "Timeline,") as I did, may get the impression Randolph wrote years after Brillat, when actually she preceded him. The real first editions aren't rare, they're cheaply available in reprints, they just don't happen to be what this site points to. Also, some comparably important works are just missing (I assume because lacking convenient online source), including the same Eliza Leslie's popular US French cookbook adapting original French recipes to US kitchens, 130 years before Julia Child followed in her footsteps. Lynne Olver is aware of this conflict. I just wish something could be done about it, because the visual impact of graphical date information is powerful.

If even then. Food information online has the limitation of all information online: It didn't get online by its utility or accuracy but because someone put it there, with whatever motivation or agenda. So much basic information online is wrong (quotations, definitions, Wikipedia food history), and so much deeper information is absent.Likewise, the motivations of publishers throwing books at you differ from your own. I have a few cookbooks myself but maybe a different set from those FG described above. They were mostly chosen deliberately, often used and out-of-print. They facilitate research. Asked for traditional Viennese Christmas Goose recipes and accompaniments, far away from Vienna, I went to the Austrian shelf and quickly checked classics described recently here.* How much would have been online I don't know, a lot isn't. A sense of history also comes from looking at cookbooks beyond the limitations of your own time. Otherwise I wouldn't have learned that a local idiom there for a turkey, unlike other German-speaking countries, is Indian (per standard old pan-European "Indian chicken"). So, literally, "we're serving a roast Indian tonight." Maybe residents of the nation of Turkey feel the same incongruity when they see what we call the bird in English.

A saving factor here is that the content is recipes. They're less fragile than information like food history, science, etc. where online misinformation is a big issue, on Wikipedia for instance. Recipes are meant to be fiddled with*. Change factual information and you may start a misconception. Change a recipe and it may improve! * Except of course in the Guide Culinaire, where it's forbidden.

Historical note: The Internet proper (which I cited in another thread cross-referenced to this one) became gradually available through local ISPs (although with wide geographical variability) at the same time the competing "Private Networking" services (CompuServe, AOL, Delphi, Genie, Prodigy, etc.) were ascendant, late 1980s. Those services had their own forum and email services for paid subscribers. Internet fora were free to anyone with a modem, but were noncommercial and unadvertised. Salus's Internet history book documents how the private firms gradually granted subscribers access to the Internet in the 1990s, which in the meantime dwarfed them. By the late 1990s they'd all merged into it or became ISPs. Many of the Internet recipes I mentioned have been publicly online continuously since the 1980s.

Congratulations on the anniversary; thanks for posting the mention of your site. History of food and restaurant discussion online has taken surprising (and sometimes little-reported) turns. For example, founder of the first major US restaurant-discussion site that I know of (three years before Chowhound) is less known for it today, but reportedly did better than anyone in the food-site business, after shifting focus to other appetites. The original public Internet food forum is much older still, and also has operated without interruption (and for a while, it was a de-facto recipe archive, an early version of what Fat guy mentions in another post today, and I still use some of those recipes, supporting FG's point). In the 27 years since that forum started, many online food ideas and sites have come and gone.

It's a good question. Some serious amateur cook friends get their best ideas from online sites like Epicurious. Print sources retain value when they bring something new to the party -- for example, cookbooks by experienced creative chefs. A traditional issue behind US cookbook discussions is plagiarism. It was one of the tirades in the Hesses' famous late 20th-century critique. Also, the owner of a major US historical cookbook collection (exhibited periodically at the Smithsonian) says that little in modern US cookbooks is actually new. "They mainly take old recipes, update them and give them new names." Scrutinizing cookbooks for 50 years or so gave her rare insight into this. And Mary Anna DuSablon documented an explosion of new cookbook quantity, which is not all in the interest of consumers. The tide of new titles hides books that are oustanding and useful, but usually second-hand, inexpensive, and not pushed in bookstores or on TV.

tim, I've seen many ceramic-PTFE composition pans for sale. Some restaurant suppliers display them on racks, in order of increasing lifetime and increasing price. 20-cm omelette skillets in four or five grades for instance. I often notice them in commercial kitchens. I don't know if they're what you refer to. However: Completely different from that are rugged, expensive high-end pots whose interior aluminum surface is treated to convert it to an inert mineral. I don't know exactly but I assume electrochemically ("anodized"). One veteran professional I know praised their durability and said he used them at home. That was over 10 years ago. They were 5-10 times as expensive as PTFE-composition coated pots. Not having tried them myself I can't compare their nonstick performance, but I handled them, the interior seemed smoother and slipperier than classic enameled cast iron pots (which, like stainless, are very inert and long-lasting but NOT non-stick). I don't know how many people are even aware of these products, I wish someone with serious experience of them could comment here. Such pots would be a true PTFE-free ceramic-coated aluminum, and there may be other types meeting that description.

Peter, thanks for report and good pix. I noticed suspiciously cheerful green color. Pure herbal products tend toward a paler green in my experience. shantytownbrown asked me: "Unless, from what I have recently learned, it is kept in a light protected (read dark glass) bottle; It is the light that degrades the chlorophyl to a brown color, and one should be wary of clear glass bottles containing absinthe that is bright green (read: color added)." Could be. What I know is I always see paler, often brown or yellow-tinged, green in quality absinthes, even very fresh, but a different color in cheap versions that also are less interesting flavorwise. And years ago I made an alcoholic spice macerate from mostly basil leaf, recommended for flavoring soups (from a formula book cited earlier -- Henley's), and it too had the paler, off-green color from the start. Such a leaf maceration step gives color to traditional absinthes. Peter, Note that water through a sugar cube is the classic custom, but burning sugar cubes is recent, and adds a burnt flavor. I never saw it in earlier writings. Some newcomers to absinthe confuse it with the original sugar-cube custom. First US writing I noticed citing burning sugar was Baggott in 1997 (linked upthread), the original Internet absinthe tutorial. After classic reports of subtle aroma and flavor in a diluted absinthe, he added:

Thanks Katie, that is the Time-Life book I mentioned. Oliver, your big German cookbooks must be different from my big German cookbooks. (In Germany when I've seen Austrian dishes, they typically were highlighted as exotic. One of the big Berlin hotels has a restaurant that specializes in them. Frankfurt's most famous restaurant once featured a few dishes, but dropped them. My German cookbooks contain only occasional high points from the Wiener Küche.) However, plenty of traditional German cooking is worthy in its own right.If the friend who asked is in Vienna anyway, the Viennese sources themselves are more accessible, as well as more authoritative than anything from US or Germany. A digest from threads I linked above: Karl Duch's trilingual Hand-Lexikon der Koch-Kunst (German, French, English) is the professional-reference "national" cooking handbook, roughly the parallel of Escoffier. Die Österreichische Küche ("nach Rokitansky," ed. Istvan) is an edition of a regional classic including a valuable Austrian-German-Swiss food dictionary -- some items have different idiom in each! Examples: Backwerk / Kleingebäck / Guetzli; Indian / Truthahn / Truthahn. Hess's Wiener Küche is another classic as is Das Franz Ruhm Kochbuch. Nur Knödel (Helmreich and Staudinger, Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, ISBN 3854474350) is a playful 1993 bilingual (parallel German and English on facing pages) celebration of the dumpling-type foods of Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia. Among newer sources, Pronay, Vienna's own expert, recommends Werner Matt and Walter Glocker's Erlesenes aus Österreichs Küche. Modern Vienna restaurant families and star chefs have also been writing their own books including Lisl Wagner-Bacher's Meine Küche, Reinhard Gerer's Große Küche, the Obauer brothers, Plachutta and Wagner. These people all know their stuff and are passionate about it, I've talked to them and tried their cooking. Classics explicitly in English are by two Viennese expats living in England: Gretel Beer's famous Austrian Cooking (1954), perennially in print, sold in many countries, I have three copies from different printings. And Rosl Philpot's Viennese Cookery (1965) with its sprightly side commentaries on the food culture there.

Not to say teflon-type coatings are for everything. The coatings (inert plastics) are relatively soft and don't tolerate much contact with metal utensils. As already mentioned, they aren't suited to the highest direct-flame dry cooking; I use them for things like toasting sesame seeds and Sichuan "peppercorns," but with moderate heat and with constant stir-fry. For that matter, bonded cookware, like Farberware and others with bottoms of different metal than the cookware surface, aren't suited to full direct flame either, for a different reason: It stresses the bond and could potentially cause de-lamination. (Farber warns of that.) By about 450 F, most hydrocarbons (including foods!) decompose to smoke and toxic (and combustible) gases; as you may know, this (not the heat) is what typically kills people in fires. My point on birds isn't, either, that if it's OK for you, it's OK for birds. I'm careful with birds, there's no reason to expose them to cooking anyway, where other gases issue in low concentrations routinely, incl. minor food smokes and gas-flame combustion byproducts. My point is, rather, that if it's not good for birds, it also is not good for you, and should be treated so. That's explicitly true of examples in paulraphael's link (carbon monoxide, ammonia, etc.) The common myth I hear is that somehow only birds are sensitive to toxic gases, implying that if you didn't have birds, you could safely leave your teflon cookware on heat, empty and unattended. A profound point. Water is toxic at extreme dose, botulinum toxin is medicine at very low dose. This needs emphasis to writers (like some latter-day absinthe experts) who blithely label things "toxic" or not according to their notions, as if it were a yes-or-no property.

It sounds to me like superstition-based marketing, if they stress "teflon/PFOA/etc free," and here's why. There have long been inert non-PTFE coatings anyway as I mentioned, the anodized or similar products, which tend to be high-end but built to last. Stainless also is extremely inert -- I didn't mention it before because this is a thread about "non-stick." I don't know Cuisinart's products but if their coating is inorganic mineral then it's in the anodized class I mentioned, and if it's a plastic it will decompose like teflon at high temperatures, and marketing such a product on the basis of "teflon-free" would be highly cynical (even if welcomed by some really, realy clueless consumers as such things sometimes are.)

Shallow or snobbish rules about things being "OK" are a helpful telltale of limited knowledge of the subject. ("Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.") Having been pestered by such people, a good friend still apologizes when she puts an ice cube in ordinary white wine in the summer. Now, I believe it's wasteful and sad to miss out on an outstanding wine by mucking around with it. But, many wines don't fit that description, and some have been mucked with more already by the manufacturer than most consumers can do if they wanted to. A very benevolent example: As you probably know, most Champagne is sweetened (with fruit sugar) to adjust sweet-acid balance; otherwise it's the totally dry type called Natur or Natural, which doesn't sell much and can be less appealing in blind tastes. Also, in countries that drink on average eight to 12 times as much wine per capita as the United States, knowledgeable people routinely mix ordinary wines with soda water, fruit juices, etc. (though I've never heard of them using Coca-Cola), where a US newcomer to wines might blanch at the idea of anything violating the sacrosanct beverage, even a cheap one. "It's not OK!" Ptui.

This topic belongs in an FAQ file somewhere -- I've seen it reappear in public Internet food discussions since, literally, the middle 1980s. paulraphael's comments (especially the opening pph!) were excellent. More: a) The reason teflon-type plastics are "non-stick" is their extreme inertness, which is also why the plastics don't interact at all with food or the human body. (I've held bottles of hydrofluoric acid in PTFE -- it will dissolve glass and most minerals -- that's inertness.) That also is why I've never noticed off flavors in acidic delicate cooking (like lemon or wine sauces) in PTFE, where I have seen it from cast-iron or bare-aluminum pans, both inherently vulnerable to this whatever the dogma of their faithful. Some anodized metal pans (effectively ceramic-coated) are also inert, but much more expensive. b) Vast misinformation circulates about nebulous vapors said to emanate (like some H. P. Lovecraft story). Here's what happens. If left unattended while cooking, at several hundred degrees F the PTFE decomposes releasing toxic gasses. (That actually is harnessed in an exotic efficient rocket engine used only in outer space called an ion drive.) As paulraphael said, you shouldn't use these pans if you are apt to leave them on heat unattended. Here's the rest of the terrible truth: you shouldn't use any pans if you are apt to leave them on heat unattended. Any surface with food, food residue, or seasoning oils releases highly toxic gasses at similar temperatures. c) The "bird" misinformation point. (From a bird owner.) I've seen people anxious about PTFE pans because they keep birds. Wrong. They should be anxious, if at all, for all creatures including themselves. Decomposition gasses toxic to birds are toxic to humans. Birds have a faster respiration, therefore show effects at smaller gas concentrations (which is why they were early low-tech gas detectors in mining). d) Every mainstream US commercial kitchen and restaurant-supply house I've seen for decades was full of nonstick-coated pans, they're the industry norm. With millions of them used in commercial kitchens, can you imagine the lawsuits if health problems had developed? e) These are not new issues, they were all public by the 1960s, for anyone who cared to notice.

PS Maggie, please urge your friend to check the thriving bookstores off the Stefansplatz area in central Vienna. It is a major book buying area by any standards, and the most convenient source for cookbooks of the region. I got most of mine there.