SylviaLovegren

Sounds like a good recipe. I grew up loving Campbell's Scotch Broth and was pleased to discover how easy and delicious it is to make at home. Try asking your butcher if they'll get lamb neck bones or shanks for you, at least occasionally. Americans seem to be losing their taste for sheep -- we used to have mutton chops regularly when I was a kid in Seattle, not to mention leg of lamb for festive occasions. Now, all one can find in most stores is lamb chops.

What you refer to as "political correctness" I would call common courtesy and respect.

The best scallops I ever had were served with a lime parsley butter sauce. Simple and delicious.

I think artificial sugar and truvia are different things as truvia is not an artificial sweetener but is derived from the stevia plant. So far, there have been no studies showing any side effects of using stevia, unlike aspartame, saccharine, etc. One problem with artificial sweeteners is apparently they make your body crave sugar, which leads to overeating, particularly of high carb foods. Don't know -- but don't think -- that stevia has that effect.

Very interesting. And he's not only African-American, he's gay and Jewish! Quite the minority. Thanks for linking -- interesting website.

I've googled a bunch and it definitely could be real vanilla -- apparently some does grow in Barbados and the West Indies. So I'm no help at all!

Yes, it's too big. Gets stringy. Nothing you can do about it.

Maybe the 5ml is the pod size or the minimum amount of vanilla essence required? Are you sure it's actual vanilla and not tonka bean? There's a lot of tonka in that part of the Caribbean but I didn't know the vanilla orchid grew there.

When we lived in New Jersey in the US we grew a lot of okra. It goes from a tender, crisp pod to stringy almost overnight once it reaches a certain size. The pods look beautiful, tempting, delicious but the texture is like you said, pot scrubber.

I'd second Richard Olney on Simple French Food. Also, his French Menu Cookbook. Both of them marvels. His Lemon Garlic Chicken has to be one of the best things I've ever made and he is OBSESSIVE about detail and passionate about food. A learning experience all around.

One other Greek cookbook is Foods of Greece by Vilma Chantiles. It's old-fashioned, more what my mother-in-law makes than what trendy young Greeks might be cooking. But for traditional home-style food, the recipes are easy to follow and consistently excellent. Highly recommended.

Actually, she was referring to SLAVES. In the statement, she refers to them as "workers" and how her great-grandpappy was so upset when he had to let his "workers" go that he committed suicide. So, no, Frank, they weren't "servants" and, no, Paula, they weren't "workers": they were slaves. People who were owned, who could be sold away from their wives or children, people who had no say in how or where they lived or who they lived with. Not workers, not servants, slaves. I don't blame her grandpappy -- that's what (most) people who lived in Georgia in those days did. I just hope that his slaves at least weren't mistreated (except for that, you know, "slave" part). But, as Bruni said, Paula lives in a different time and should know better.

For Greek cooking, Diane Kochilas -- any of hers -- is excellent. Paula Wolfert is really good on Eastern Mediterranean and Moroccan cooking. Nawal Nasrallah's Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and History of the Iraqi Cuisine, is fascinating and wonderful.

This is a piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic that sums up the problem with what Paula Deen said, very well, I think. He calls it "guileless, accidental racism" and that seems just right. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/the-guileless-accidental-racism-of-paula-deen/277153/#disqus_thread

I hope I'm not going to drive you crazy with this. Roast pork would be hot and and somewhat dry, because of the roasting. Apples are cool and wet, so they would balance out the pork. So, yes, I'm betting the pairing initially had something to do with their effect on the humoral system, not to mention they are both products of fall, and taste good together!

That's basically the yin/yan food pairing in Chinese cooking. dcarch Yes, Chinese medicine uses a humor theory, as does ayurvedic medicine -- the idea of balance. And apparently, Latin America still uses the humors -- which I just learned trying to google the humor theory on pork and apples. I have learned that pork is "hot" and "wet" but don't know about apples.

And, in thinking about the humoral theory of medicine, I bet that pork and apples were partly paired because pork was considered "hot" and apples "cold" -- but not sure about the dry and wet parts. I'll see if I can find anything.<br /><br />This article has a bit, but mostly has some good bibliographic references that may lead you to more:<br />http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/nutr216/ref/nutr216_ref/taboo_bougmil.html<br /><br />One source I just found says that pork was considered "hot" and "wet", which is why it needed to be roasted, to make it "dry" -- then combined with a "cold" ingredient, such as mustard or apple. Don't know how reliable that source is, though.<br /><br />Here's another good explanation of humourism and some foods and how they were classified.<br />http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2012/07/27/cool-cooler-coolest/<br /><br />I'll dig around some more and see if I can find a chart of humors and food, to see if any more of your pairings reflect them.

Have you looked into some of the ancient through medieval medical beliefs that also caused foods to be paired? The idea of melon with prosciutto stems directly from early medicine. Melon was considered to be cold and wet and had to be balanced by hot and dry -- ergo, prosciutto. English food writer of last century, Elizabeth David, said that her mother into the 1950s wouldn't allow the family to eat melon without powdered ginger, for the same reason -- the "hot dry" ginger counteracted the "cold wet" dangers of the melon. Without the balance, you could get sick or even die. This was the "humours" theory of medicine. There was also a theory that the level of where the food was grown influenced its effect on the body -- so melons, growing on the ground, were less healthful than, say, apples, which grew high up. I don't know whether this latter theory affected food pairings, but the humours theory definitely did.

I haven't had the Istabul variety, but I've had my mother-in-law's and my aunt's homemade baklava and I just can't eat the stuff they sell in stores anymore. It's like a photocopy of a Rembrandt.

We'll have to agree to disagree as the original statement wasn't that we should treat the confederate flag as the germans treat the nazi flag, only that we should see it the same way -- "as an ugly symbol of oppression." Protected speech is really at the heart of this matter though considering this woman is being punished for expressing her opinions. I actually think it's very relevant and am astonished at the number of people that scream "first amendment" when the first amendment clearly does not apply. It is every person's right to fly the confederate flag if they wish, but the first amendment does not protect the individuals who choose to from a huge chunk of society labeling them as disgusting racists for doing so.Thank you. That's exactly what I meant.

My mom's wild crabapple jelly. It was so intensely flavored, with a tartness to it, pure ambrosia. The boughten kind tastes like sugared vaseline to me. Just not worth eating. And the trout we used to get in the mountain streams in Idaho and Montana, cooked right out of the water, in fresh bacon fat over a wood fire. And the new potatoes, just dug, boiled, mixed with freshly shelled little peas, just picked, salted and buttered, then warm cream from my grandmother's neighbor's cow stirred in. I'm drooling over my keyboard here.

I'm confused. Who was talking about repressing anyone's 1st amendment rights?

So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. http://www.theroot.com/views/did-black-people-own-slaves?page=0,1 So .6% of slaves were owned by free blacks, if I'm doing my math right. Not exactly an argument for the huge impact of enslavement of black Americans by other black Americans.

Your documentation about how many blacks owned slaves? And while slavery, per se, was over 150 years ago, blacks were not allowed to vote in much of the South until the 1960s and it took years after that and strong federal intervention to make it happen. I'm very happy your family no longer uses racial slurs. Some of my family -- who live in Savannah, Georgia, by the way -- still say the most awful racial things, and mean them, when they think there's no one listening. When Americans see the Confederate flag in the same way Germans look at the Nazi flag -- as an ugly symbol of oppression -- them I'll truly believe we are finally moving on.

I think the problem comes because of the history of slavery and racism in the South. Not that there isn't racism elsewhere but not that long ago white people owned black people there and fought a war to be allowed to keep on doing it. It's still a raw topic for a lot of folks, as well it should be.