Apicio

In most of Central and South America and Spain, they cook in syrup and call it "Cabellos de Angel (Angel's hair)," usually used as filling for pastries, just like quince jam.

To Pan, Yes, we celebrate it as (Dia de) Todos los santos (same date) and as solemnly as Remembrance Day is done here during the day. The night bestows license for pranks though. No special food. Even the dough figurines of calaveras (skeletons) that were definite hold-overs from the Mexican Vice-regal period lost its original significance and were sold at other fiesta times as toys in the fifties and then the craft died out. And as in Mexico nowadays, Halloween is insinuating itself. To Adam, Yes, it looks like normal procedure for candying fruits and citrus rinds save for the soaking in lime or other alkaline. The squash looked black lacquered though. BTW, related only to the topic for being deadly delicious, we follow exactly the same procedure for candying mature but not ripe breadfruit using granulated sugar, a special treat as a kid that I still hanker for now.

Yes they are known here in Ontario and in Quebec and Vermont as Fameuse. They are popular in backyards because the seedlings tend to produce fruits much like their parents. They are also popular as breeder and people suspect that it may be a parent of another Canadian star, the MacIntosh.

Mainly for centrepieces, garlands and wreaths, specially for outdoors since they can survive freezing and thawing. If you bite them though, you will discover that the few bites are crisp, juicy and intensely flavourful.

No large scale dairy and cattle industry. We have to look to Australia and New Zealand for that. Indonesia and the Philippines have a few recipes, mostly desserts, that call for cheese (aged Edam or Gouda), butter and evaporated milk due mostly to Spanish, Dutch and American influence. We have lots of savoury recipes using all types of taofu and coconut milk though. India and vicinity on the other hand has a varied and sophisticated cuisine utilizing milk and butter.

I have a featured menu for Los Dias de los Muertos that includes a picture of Calabaza en Tacha. It looks like halved thin wedges of winter squash that appear very dark, almost licorice black. They mentioned that it takes four days to prepare (a day to soak it in water and lime in a plastic bucket), involving slow cooking in gradually increasing thickness of syrup of dark-brown sugar. They suggest serving it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of two or three chunks of the candied squash. Let me know if you need exact measurements and precise instructions.

I make my coffee in a 1940 silex vacuum coffee brewer and pour it into a thermos carafe like this: http://citychef.ca/xcart/customer/product....4866a472e26ac83

The closest cookware to what you are looking for is Kuhn Rikons Durotherm pots. If they can only apply the same idea/principle to water kettle or even to vacuum-type coffee maker.

My heart goes to the staff of Air Canada, they give you cheerful and gracious service inspite of what the refinancing has done to their pay, benefits and pension. Unfortunately, I just launched on my diet when I took their flight to São Paulo so I could not fully partake of their business class offering but the individual seats were pretty good on a long haul flight like that. Arrived at ten in the morning. It was my first time in Sampa so I was on tenterhooks when I ventured out of my hotel in the evening. A lady approached and grabbed me by the arm calling my name. It was the stewardess who attended me in the plane.

I think that the most dramatic way to discover how food travel is to trace the dispension of certain crops and food items indigenous to the New World from their native habitat to virtually the rest of the world. Think of the post-Columbian items that have found not only acceptance but have even acquired essential indispensability in a lot of their adopting cuisines. Tomato, potato, maiz, peanuts, chili, avocado, pineapple, manioc, jícama, chocolate and many others. It is particularly hard to imagine how cuisines that are now noted for the heat and fire of some of their dishes such as that of Korea, Thailand and India managed without chili which only reached them in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. For example, when the Mexican tamal reached our shores sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the Filipinos naturalized it by adopting the noun’s plural tamales and by substituting the principal ingredient maize meal with the more plentiful and easier to process ground rice. It ran into a sort of confusion too with an indigenous equivalent boboto because they are essentially the same except boboto was enriched with coconut milk and wrapped in a sheet of banana leaf. The happy end-result is we now have both, but each adjusted accordingly, probably to draw some sort of distinction. Boboto started getting coloured and flavoured with the Mexican colour/flavoring achiote but retained its garnish of small shrimps. Tamales on the otherhand became a smarter version of boboto but colourless, it started getting enriched with coconut milk too and garnished with the requisite slices of chicken and ham, a quarter of boiled egg and three or four shelled boiled peanuts, another Mexican borrowing. One of my most felicitous finds is an ingenious combination of both versions wrapped in a single shallow cone of banana leaf. Even more delightful with just plain puto (steamed rice cake).

Not a side dish but for dessert here: http://karen.mychronicles.net/index.php?p=34

Thanks again to Danjou and also to Sheetz and Tepee. And Muichoi you let us know how your giant squid adventure turned out. I find this to be so informative because this subject hardly ever gets discussed anywhere.

Speaking of endangered recipes. I wonder if anyone here has a recipe for the real puto seco. I tried googling it but I only got butter cookies called by the same name and it made me wonder how it has metamorphed into something completely different in just a matter of thirty years. The real puto seco was a dry and powdery cookie that appeared to me made of just rice flour or rootstarch, maybe coconut milk and sugar, very fragile. They use to be sold by lady vendors from Pampanga during the October fiestas in Bataan. They sold them in three grades, depending on size and finess of the flour used. They seemed to have been baked in shallow molds 5 cm in diameter and a tad less than a centimetre thick. I wonder too if they were related at all to Aráró , a specialty of the first town north of us. What is still commercially available there now appear to have been watered down and altered, including the shape. I watched once how they were made using antique wooden molds. The dough recipe that was actually followed was that of the original Tinapay San Nicolas. I sometimes make them (for family) up here in Canada using springerle molds from Germany. I suspect that Tinapay San Nicolas descended from Springerle because both are flavoured with anise and one of the frequently used mold motifs in Germany were those of Saint Nicholas since they are intended for Christmas. Unlike Tinapay San Nicolas though, Springerle uses a noxious leavening agent called hartshorn, our amoniaco. And finally did you notice our penchant for dry powdery treats like the two above and polvoron and espasol. Is this a deliberate incitement to “hirin” and therefore to a drink of water?

Just a few producers of baked goods and that charcuitrie from Barry. Very limited unlike the one on Fridays on the Queensway side of Sherway Gardens.

NOOOOO Caustic soda is crystal lye. Depending on the quantity of dried squid you want to experiment with just use the lye water in a bottle you can pick up in a Chinese food store. And use the smalles possible container so you do not have to dilute it too much. Use the largest container of water though and frequesnt change when flashing it out. Let us know.

I have never done this but I imagine it is not very different from dealing with lutefisk. Check out this link: http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/3227/recipes/luteing.htm

I obtain my Hungarian csabai and farmer's sausage from somebody who sets up a display in the Yorkdale mall on Wednesdays or Thursdays. I think they bring them in from Barry. I also buy my smoked pork hocks from them.

I am not ignoring your question but tell me first where you went to eat. Inquiring minds want to know.

The reference is to the particular temperature of water used for Mexican hot chocolate as in "as hot as water for chocolate." Considering that she had to give up love and even a life to look after her mother, I suspect that the expression applied too to her seething reaction to her imposed condition.

Back to desserts. In my homily on Filipino egg-based desserts I did not remember to include Silvanas. These are oval cashew nut meringues sandwiching a butter-cream filling and then the whole thing completely dusted with sponge cake or more cashew nut crumbs, a sort of individual Sans Rival. This is a close equivalent of the French Japonais save for the shape, japonais is round, and its flavour, praliné. I find Silvanas a lot easier on the conscience to enjoy because it is by far less dense and a lot less sweet than the marvelous French Macaron. This rounds up what I call the egg-based group of Filipino desserts that are undeniably Spanish influenced. In the bebinca/bibingka thread, commenting on one recipe of the Goan bebinca that asked for forty egg-yolks, Carol pointed out that similar desserts had been deviced in Mexico (Central America) since eggyolk was the by-product of using whites as fixative for gold leaf. They must have used a lot of it too there as witness just one of the churches so adorned, San Martin in Tepozotlán whose whole main altar gleams with gold. This is where you’ll find a collection of ivory santos that originated in the Philipppines. Back in the Iberian peninsula though, eggwhite is used to clarify wine (just like consommé). The yolks are then donated to the local convents keeping the nuns occupied (you know what they say about idle hands) confecting the yolks to, shall we say, heavenly delicacies. In the Philippines, eggwhite at one time was used as a binder for wall plaster which gave rise to this group of recipes that calls for lots of yolks.

Although mentioning “lye” summons images of a very caustic chemical and of paint stripper, most of the food quality lye we use is home made. We gather a weed called locally as kulitis (amaranth), dry them and burn them to cinders. Gather the ash in a cracked earthenware pot, pour some water into it and catch the dripping in a clean receptacle. We use this as a coloring/flavoring for a steamed pudding called kutsinta and a steamed rice stick snack called suman sa legia. For the hominy-like corn snack called binatog though, ash is directly boiled with the maize to leach it out. This makes the hull separate easier and more importantly, activate more protein and certain nutrients that otherwise would remain dormant. But I have always wondered about those dishes that you (Danjou) mentioned such as the beautiful chewy prawns, the beef steak that you can slice with a chopstick no less, and the reconstituted dried giant squid slices that were gelatinous instead of chewy tough. Are they toxic? How dangerous is eating these as to eating say, Scandinavian lutefisc? Thanks again.

You can comfort me with apples and seduce me with plums but I will waltz with Mephisto himself if he has marang (artocarpus odoratissima Blanco) at the end of his trident. Here is a link to PPPans’ picture of it: http://karen.mychronicles.net/?p=95

This post also belongs in the thread of Extinct restaurants you miss. In the eighties and a good part of the nineties, I frequented Le Régence at the Plaza Hotel Athénée not entirely because of the food. Their food was not astounding but was well conceived and executed. Not for the winelist either because as winelists go it was just adequate. I returned time and again because the room was beautiful, the welcome was not familiar but warm and formal, the service was solicitous but not hovering and the acoustics of the place allowed only the occasional distant clinks of glasses. I can sum up the ambiance as “dreamy.” I wish the future of dining to go back to that direction. Of course, I am aware that one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare.

Perhaps a deep appreciation of food is closer to the evaluation and judgment of fragrances. After all, food and fragrance have the olfactory nerves commonly operating in both of them. A perfume connoiseur can tell you what images and atmosphere a partifcular scent evokes and he can even identify the individual notes it employs to do this evocation with. And yet he does not have the faintest idea how it was composed. This knowledge resides in the very small and closed clique of “noses.” That is the equivalent of us all food enthusiasts savoring a dish that we will never have the priviledge of knowing how it was cooked.

Danjou, Thanks again. I notice you are based in the Philippines. Perhaps you can join us from time to time in the Filipino cuisine thread.