MaxH

A vivid memory from early days of public Internet food discusion (around 1983 on the newsgroup net.cooks, now rec.food.cooking) -- I think I have it archived somewhere but this is from memory, and might garble details outside main point -- is an account by an Australian or NZ contributor, former soldier in one of the multinational disputes in E or SE Asia -- possibly Korea or early (1950s or early 1960s) Vietnam conflict. Thus the events happened some 50 years ago. He described exchanges of food among soldiers allied but from units of different nationalities. All used canned food, but what was in the cans varied greatly, by national custom. He said that the ROK (Korean) soldiers had a kind of canned tiny octopus or squid, very spicy, and highly esteemed by the non-Korean soldiers who would trade all sorts of foods for it. (I've always wondered if the appeal of the novel rations was reciprocal.)

Good point (it's a famous problem in applications like wine). A quick call to my reliable silicon-valley scientific equipment dealer, Lab-Pro Inc. (link below FYI), disclosed what was news to me: compact electronic pH meters are now available circa USD $80 designed for this kind of range, for food and wine applications. (They were much more expensive when I used them as a student.) So you may want to consider this if you do much, or professional, cooking. (Maybe it will go fashionable, like sous-vide quipment. Historical note: If you review the long sous-vide thread here, you'll find that some years ago, Lab-Pro was the first to specifically propose adding inexpensive servo temperature-control technology to electric cookers to obtain a sous-vide cooker around $100 instead of then-standard lab water baths circa $1000. Home-built and then commercial versions followed.) Lab-Pro said they sell versions from Hanna Instruments (good firm FYI) and Extech (I think Extech pioneered the pocket-sized non-contact IR thermometers a few years back, I have one) and that there are certain quirks, requiring acclimation by new users. The heart of the meter is the probe tip which is expendable and lasts around a year of use; costs circa $40-50 to replace (the gentlemen dubbed these the "razor blades"). The tips should be stored in a solution. The meters require re-calibration periodically, for which another expendable (a pH reference capsule) costs a dollar or two. I think I'm going to get one of these, and if so will report. http://www.lab-proinc.com/

A superb point haresfur, and thanks for posting it. I was writing only about how pH tastes, in simple situations. (Water and lemon juice to pH 4.6 is one lemon's 50 ml of juice added to 20 liters or five gallons of water -- easy to visuallize. I think you'd taste it, but not strongly acid.) But to adjust food pH deliberately, you must test pH of the result -- a "closed-loop" process rather than "open-loop," at least until you have experience with the specific recipe. Just as good cooks taste along the way, and "cook until done," rather than blindly following some fixed recipe formula with no account for ingredient and equipment variatons. Except that errors there disappoint, rather than kill. Jenni, you're exactly right, C. b. toxins are reliably vulnerable to heat, not ingredients. That's part of the sharp distinction between spores, bacteria, toxin -- all very distinct as to nature and prevention. Frequent confusion between the properties of the three (even by food writers) is why it's vital to read up directly from the easily available public health sources.

What an innovative idea! Actually test your online presence from your customer's viewpoint. Might be a suggestion even for businesses beyond restaurants. (If, for example, Barnes and Noble had done it effectively when trying to compete online with Amazon a decade ago, they might have retained my business and, I hear, many other people's. Instead, not only did the site screw up, lose entered data, and act counter-intuitively -- accessed from the most common, vanilla-flavored office PC environment -- but as if to underline the problems, feedback to B&N yielded a request to document the PC installation I was using and all its options. Very wrong response. In reply I pointed out that Amazon's e-commerce software, accessed from various computers, simply worked. And note this was a major established national retailer, not just a small local restaurant business.)

Again this topic is rehashing general botulism info treated thoroughly in earlier eG threads on the subject. Here's something different: background on quantitative food acidity and its intuition. Please check standard sources if you're interested; don't rely on me for critical details. pH is an attribute of water solutions, their acidity or alkalinity. Like Richter earthquake energy scale, pH is logarithmic: one degree lower pH means essentially 10 times higher concentration of hydrogen (i.e., positive, i.e. acid) ions. A pH of 7 is neutral (pure water); below 7 the hydrogen ions dominate, and the liquid is called acidic. Around pH 5 and below, foods taste acid. ("Sour" = human language for the specialized pH detector within our sense of taste.) I first measured some food pH's around 1970 and found lemon juice had a pH of 2. That's exactly 1000 times higher acid concentration than a pH of 5. If you diluted pH-2 lemon juice with pure water to 10 times its volume, you'd change the pH from 2 to 3. (You now know how to easily estimate lemonade pH.) C. botulinum spores (randomly common in nature, notably on surfaces of plants and seafood) develop to active bacteria only in anaerobic environments of pH 4.6 or higher, according to official data. Less widely explained is that contrary to some claims, complete oxygen exclusion is unnecessary for this growth [Merck Manual, 2006 professional ed.]. Quantitatively, pH 4.6 is like 400:1 dilution by pure water of a hypothetical pH-2 lemon juice (10 to the power 2.6 is about 400.) That gives a sense of how acid a 4.6 pH is. Juice of many fruits has natural pH well below 4.6, hence botulism growth is seldom an issue when home-canning them. Unless pressure-sterilized to 120 °C (250 °F) -- note you cannot achieve this in aqueous foods at normal air pressure regardless of temperature of your oven, boiling fat, etc., a persistent point of misconception -- the C. bot. spores remain viable. That means they could grow if their liquid environment's pH ever goes above 4.6 while sealed from air. Though I haven't researched this, I conjecture that the slow decomposition occurring over years (caramelization and so on) might occasionally raise the pH into the danger zone even if food was canned with safe initial acidity. It might explain anecdotes I've heard about home-canned fruits, neglected for decades, developing anaerobic bacteria that generates gas and bursts their glass jars.

Sorry if I was unclear earlier. (That response above appears to mis-read my intended meanings.) (1) I referred to people requesting general information about botulism safety and what measures reliably prevent it. The thread was already rehashing that subject. That topic does have both extensive publicly available government information, and extensive dangerous armchair misinformation. Some of the latter can be found on eGullet in past threads related to botulism safety. (2) This was not about "asking chefs" but about asking online public fora. Many people who read eG and answer queries like this are not food professionals. If the answer is simply that adequately acid food is adequate to prevent botulism (the very reason US cookbooks traditionally limited their home-canning canning recipes to certain fruits), I am not a food scientist and I would not presume to advise people how to guarantee that. But as a point of general information, you can get a supply of standard pH-sensing paper strips for a few dollars at any lab-supply firm (that's where I've gotten them, they come in little plastic boxes the size of matchbooks). Electronic pH meters also are available, but are generally much more expensive. These standard methods easily tell you quantitatively how acid the food is -- more accurately than any rules of thumb.

Jenni, relevant basics of botulinum safety have been examined repeatedly here on eG, even recently e.g. Here, and it is worth your time to review the existing discussions -- specifically for links to external authoritative sources (UN WHO, US CDC or USDA, national Health Ministries, &c.) such as WHO Fact Sheet 270. I apologize for repetition but you DO NOT want to ask random people online about this subject. Unfortunately that usually produces responses, always heartfelt, often wrong; yet it's not a subject where misinformation is OK. (Maybe not as bad as asking in late December about hangover cures -- guaranteed to evoke armchair advice sometimes merely useless but sometimes potentially lethal.) As you should confirm from authoritative sources, a standard reference point is pH of 4.6 or more acid. That's only slightly acid to the palate. In the US it's often achieved commercially in inadequately acid foods (like fresh basil-garlic-nut "pesto" sauce) by adding food-type acids to lower the pH below 4.6, and the result doesn't taste particularly sour.

Hmmmm... At least those ingredients are savory. They avoid the outrage (obvious to longtime bagel enthusiasts if not to everyone) of putting sweet things in bagel dough; but they substitute another one (even more obvious to longtime bagel enthusiasts). O tempora ...

FYI: I saw a recent blurb from an ISP and domain registrar that markets services to make commercial Web sites more effective. The outstanding impediments to customer satisfaction that it identified are content overload, confusing navigation, and excessive Flash graphics.

To clarify, the introduced-species problem I mentioned is not about the species' known or expected role in its new environment. All past experiments of this sort (predators, microbes, plants, etc.; most, again, were natural species but exotic to the new place they were introduced) made perfect sense by human reasoning about some existing problem and the role the exotic was expected to play. The problem, rather, has been when the new species acted or evolved in some way not contemplated in the theoretical reasoning, by which time it was too late to "recall" the new species. (N.B., I don't consider myself informed enough about GMO's, let alone these GMO's, to advocate any strong opinion about them. I'm just alluding to the long history of ecological surprises of this kind -- some authors such as Diamond, already mentioned, review important historical cases.)

Further to mkayahara's comment is an understandable scientific caution about releasing new _organisms,_ which historically caused trouble even when the organisms were natural, just borrowed from elsewhere. (As Jared Diamond put it with several examples, once released, life forms tend to act and evolve in their own interest, not ours.) If a new food or drug reveals severe side effects later, you can just stop making it. I've seen that happen several times. It's different if what you create is self-reproducing.

That acronym (an Internet classic for historical reasons of little interest today) appears in the definitive summary RFC1855 as nominally "read the fine manual." Should any reader elect to render it more vulgarly, of course, that's their choice and responsibility.

Jane, OliverB's experience raises a couple of related questions about books with multiple or non-ISB numbers. Far more books in current use have 10- than 13-digit ISBNs, the latter being relatively recent. I've noticed that books in print since before 2007 (when ISBN-13 took over) often list both (sometimes the two numbers look related, though I don't think that's guaranteed) as in Oliver's experience above. So I wonder if you permit more than one ISBN when they exist, or (similar question) linking ISBNs for books reprinted identically by different publishers or at different times (I know some popular examples -- one classic Chez Panisse cookbook for instance) -- all of which would resolve Oliver's situation. Related: Before book numbers went international (the I in ISBN) there were some longstanding national catalogings. For decades before ISBN's advent, US books carried unique Library of Congress Catalog (LCC) numbers filling a similar role. That describes most US books I have that are pre-ISBN. That would be another natural number to allow for (and again, books may have both LCC and ISB numbers or if they stay in print, may start with an LCC and have an ISBN added later).

Actually what we did 20 years ago was get the inexpensive Dover paperback facsimile editions of the most famous of those historic American cookbooks (a few are especially important). Especially after the Hesses, in their harsh but scholarly landmark book of US food criticism almost 35 years ago, laid out a compact history and bibliography of such cookbooks. But the point is taken, a lot of excellent information is now easier to find. Incidentally, if the obvious absurdities of saying "corn sugar" for high-fructose corn syrup are inadequate, another is that the term is already taken. It's long been common to call dry dextrose "corn sugar" (as lactose is "milk sugar" and glucose "grape sugar"). The language is a little redundant (dextrose and glucose are the same thing, the dextro glucose isomer, but in US it's commonly been "dextrose" if from corn, glucose from grapes or other sources). I bought bulk dextrose labeled "Corn Sugar" decades ago as a kid with an armchair interest in food science which, as you see, persists. Add grapes to the natural glucose-and-fructose ("HFCS") sources, by the way. Years ago shrewd manufacturers started cooking down grape juice to use as a natural sweetener minus the dreaded S-word. Its sugar components are mainly those of HFCS. Grapes must be deadly.

Welllll ... I won't belabor this, but a food friend, distinguished humanities dean, has students who do research needing wide-ranging library access to many kinds of materials. He says most really good sources online are private, i.e. within specialized libraries or databases that charge to support themselves, therefore little of it shows on public searches. Today, Barzun's "reference book" [read: Google] users never see that content. Same for scientific sources I use, even for side interests like food (I must keep actual books handy, the good ones don't give their content out free online), and many of my remarkable primary-source food books (pre-ISBN) -- here I don't just mean cookbooks -- not to mention articles, are never even mentioned online, let alone accessible. The current and the recent obsess the online world almost exclusively. Alcuin, I'm with you somewhat on HFCS (I hardly defend absurd commercial euphemism) but miss some of your argument. Regardless of production, honey contains some 98% of subsances identical to, indistinguishable from, commercial HFCS, and we evolved from people eating natural foods full of the same substances. Consequently if HFCS inherently has uniquely evil properties compared to sucrose (of all things), the same holds for honey and fruit. Also, before HFCS became common in the 1980s, back when we consumed just 130 pounds sugars annually, processed-food makers were doing the same things with sucrose (table sugar), introducing it into all kinds of foods because people like that and will pay for it. The main reason US uses more HFCS today is an economic fluke reflecting price supports. Yet some people act like sugar-related epidemics would vanish with HFCS. That's self-deception, and distracts from deeper issues, like people preferring bread with sugar added, and voluntarily consuming huge sugar intakes of whatever type.

Apropos, I don't know if eG did one already, but you could readily run a thread on fatuous, fashionable pop misconceptions about food science. Taken together, in an age when information including accurate information is easily available, these notions themselves may be the ultimate (if not too ominous a word) culinary sign of apocalypse. E.g., fashionable stigmatizing of HFCS (fructose-glucose syrup) without also considering that fructose ("fruct" from "fruit") and glucose (from Gk. for "sweet") are among the most common sugars in fresh fruits & vegetables, the core of our natural ancestral diet, and that honey is a natural HFCS (close in composition to common synthetics) with important trace nutrients added. Or that fructose has long (much longer than HFCS was around) been viewed as a "healthier" sugar than common sucrose because its slower metabolism causes less blood-sugar peaking, consequently less insulin response (lower "glycemic index"). These inseparable considerations are often missing in discussions of HFCS in which I see a tone suggesting if we'd just eliminate that "toxic" HFCS, we could go on eating our 140 pounds of commercial sugars annually with free conscience and no more diabetes or obesity. ... another sign of [civilizations approaching decline] is: reference books. The old civilization has piled up works of the mind for centuries ... direct access to the treasures grows less easy, less frequent, as the social revolution brings more and more of the untaught and the self-indulgent out of bondage. At that point the museum is born, and the research library. There, the inmates -- scholars and specialists -- begin to digest, organize, theorize, and publish reference books. The term Alexandrian [for civilizations nearing decline] comes from the famous establishment of this sort -- the Mouseion, the Muses’ library and scholar’s hostel, at Alexandria in the third century B.C. / Alexandrianism comes in various sizes: lesser ones can be followed by vigorous returns to discipline, firsthand knowledge, and creativeness, as happened at the tail end of the Middle Ages and again at the turn of the eighteenth century. Similarly, a healthy barbarian invasion may clear the air and the bookshelves for a fresh start. But during the very pleasant time of relaxed mental life through culture from handbooks, nobody can tell what is to happen next. Today, judging solely by the output of reference books, one would say that our Alexandrianism was of the largest dimensions since Alexandria itself. Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (Wesleyan University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-8195-6237-8)

Thoughtful cooks make all the difference. We had a great one in silicon valley who knocked off outstanding comfort foods. When I asked if he used -----'s frozen meatballs like everyone else in local "foodservice," he was aghast. "Those things sit around on the truck all day and are often mushy when I see them -- then they get refrozen and sold to someone else." Anecdote on effects of free choice: Long ago I worked on an air base while attending a large university. Both had similar, catered cafeterias. Both had disgruntled customers complaining about quality. Resident students were finding other ways to eat than the school cafeteria. The two institutions responded very differently. The base fired its contractor and hired another, which was anxious to please and the food quality went way up. The school, in contrast, made its meal plans mandatory for many students, so they had to pay whether they ate there or not. You can guess for yourself whether quality improved.

Welcome to Consumer Marketing! It seems irrational sometimes, only because it mirrors irrational consumer behavior, which marketers try diligently to accommodate. (Otherwise, why would they dicker constantly with product package sizes, or change the names or the selling pitches of products periodically? E.g., a group of mass-market US breakfast cereals that all had "Sugar" in their names when I was a kid -- sugar was perceived as appealing -- got renamed minus the "sugar," once it became a Bad Word. If anything, the cereals themselves have more sugar now, a trend in that class of products.) It's not just food products. If a US doctor prescribes an expensive medicine that you must pay for, ask if it's available in larger dosages such as bigger pills (often true). You may find that a bottle of larger doses costs about the same for the same number of pills, and they even come scored in halves or quarters, so the doctor can just write for you to break them up for the dose you need. If you're rational, that is ...

Yes, and in fact much of it was actually artificial: "Wood vinegar and creosote oil" being the cliché 20th-century formula. (Firms making it more directly from wood smoke have pointed that out.) Arguably, since those two components are wood by-products too, their mixture could be labeled (from the usual euphemistic viewpoint) "all-natural" or made from wood alone. But they were likely industrial by-products from some non-gastronomic wood-processing steps. Even truer commercial smoke extract is, I assume, made in bulk with cost-conscious industrial methods, therefore different from one made from the wood of your choice under conditions you control.

I consider it worse to endure awfully clever introductory graphics or animation, even demanding sometimes you download a new tool just for the privilege, only to find that the site still lacks the basic information you seek, such as restaurant hours -- for many customers the whole reason to check the Web site at all. That's negative marketing and may cost the restaurant business. The Web designer idiotically throws obstacles in the customer's path and the restaurant complacently allows it. Seems to happen especially when restaurants "farm out" sites to third parties intoxicated over cute graphics rather than customer needs. There should be a public recognition of this perversity, like the Darwin awards or the one for the year's worst opening line in a novel.

I have to salute the integrity of anyone today making such confession online (instead of hiding an ignorance by hastily checking Wikipedia or Google, or even worse, holding forth authoritatively with whatever factoids they just looked up). Not all effects of having Wikipedia and Google are positive.

Not to mention "C. Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans and N. Africa" (Davidson, OCF). Not unlike the practice of cooking spiced ground meats and rice rolled up in grape or cabbage leaves, done with variations throughout the Mediterranean basin, Turkey and the Balkan peninsula, North Africa, even the Caucasus. People from all those places have sworn to me that their native country was the first. (One learns to expect such claims when talking to people from different countries that share regional cooking traditions!)

By the way, nakji, your koftas in curry sound delightful. I'd be interested in your comments after you try the dish.

I've been reheating various homemade meatballs ("Italian," "East-Asian," "Swedish") in all kinds of sauces since about 1975 and never had any problem proceeding directly from frozen, nor noticed any tendency for them to cook to mush. (Any more than I've noticed any tendency for cheap tough meats to tenderize in stews or braises in less than 2-3 hours; a recent pot roast took six). Maybe that reflects on the quality of my meatballs. But I'll mention the venerable US tradition (which I've also practiced at home) of keeping meatballs hot in sauces for buffet service, where they may simmer for a couple of hours over a spirit burner. It's always worked out well for me. I'll add wryly that in my region with its many Vietnamese restaurants featuring "pho" soups [not actually an O in "pho" nor pronounced like one; the soup is French pot-au-feu evolved in Vietnam with local ingredients] you can encounter little meat or fish balls of hard-rubber consistency, resembling the hard little toy "Superballs" that bounce so effectively. Some of these meatballs recall a long-ago dining critic's phrase "USDA Steel-Belted Radial" and defy softening if cooked in anything less than boiling lye. (Use lye, not acid -- acid hardens albumins, alkali softens them -- if you want to try that.)

I didn't notice Wise's non-charcuterie content (the shop itself was known for meat products). While there may be much better charcuterie books today (even out here in these former colonies, so far from France, whose chattering youth all seem to fancy that "beignet" means mainly fried dough from New Orleans and "macaron" the fashionable Paris sandwich cookies) I'd describe its role rather as historically important. Just as for instance Morrison Wood on savory international cuisines (US, 1940s) or Yoxall on Burgundies (UK, 1960s) or Mrs. Chiang on Sichuan home cooking (US, 1970s) are not unique or maybe primary choices today, but in their time and for years may have been the only books in their markets with this content, helping popularize their subjects, showing the way for later authors who built on their work (and occasionally even credited it). -------- The wine of the Clos [Vougeot] was sent to the Popes in their exile in Avignon, and Petrarch said that it was this that made them so reluctant to end the schism and return to Rome! One abbot, already mentioned, sent thirty hogsheads to Pope Gregory XI, and four years later -- Vougeot, even then, took some time to develop -- was made a cardinal. Harold Waldo Yoxall, The Wines of Burgundy, Stein and Day, second edition 1978, ISBN 0812860918. From original.