fresco

Fat Guy, now that you've signed your book deal, this could turn into one of the more elaborate and ingenious writing avoidance tactics ever devised.

"Shares of McDonald's, the world's biggest restaurant chain, tumbled to $24.20 on Instinet from their close of $25.28 on the New York Stock Exchange after the news broke Tuesday evening."

I'd think that the sheer amount of fat in a goose would be some bulwark against spoilage, but maybe the food science experts have more definitive answers. Not encasing it in plastic sounds like a good idea.

My impression, and it's just that, is that the coffee served in hotels and run of the mill restaurants in the US is on the weak side compared with coffee in other countries, including Canada. Although it's certainly possible to get see-through coffee in Canada.

Do you have a covered outdoor grill, by any chance? Failing that, I can't see why scalloped potatoes wouldn't work in a crock pot, or a covered cast iron skillet, for that matter. If you like some crunchy texture (on the bottom, at least) , I'd go with the cast iron.

It sound like an updated old-fashioned recipe, "First, pluck a foundation."

i don't believe so. It would be interesting to get to the bottom of this, because from a social science standpoint (it is after all supposed to be a science) one would think this would be a fundamental test of the hypothesis that Jews have some sort of special relationship to Chinese food. If similarly situated (geographically, economically, etc.) Jews and non-Jews turn out to eat roughly the same amount of Chinese food per person per year, the questions have to change. I'd be interested to hear how you would propose to collect the data.

Thanks for the explanation. I now understand where the expression "in the jug" comes from.

I did notice that many death row prisoners choose fried chicken as their last meal. But then again, the location of the states where the death penalty is being carried out may have a lot to do with this.

This may have been touched upon in the essay, but if there is such a thing as a Jewish affinity for Chinese food, could part of it be that the Jews and Chinese often occupied adjacent real estate in many large cities around the turn of the century and onwards for the next half century? That's certainly the case in Toronto, where the original Chinatown grew up in and around what used to be the garment district on Spadina Avenue. The other point of affinity may have been that both Jews and Chinese were outsiders in early 20th century North America. Indeed, the story of Morris ("Two-Gun") Cohen is a remarkable example of a Jewish outsider identifying with Chinese outsiders. Cohen was an outcast, even among his own community in early 20th century western Canada, because he was pretty much a career criminal. But he bonded with Chinese he met in Edmonton, when he saw how shabbily they were treated, and from there, made his way to China, became an aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-Sen, the "Chinese George Washington" and later, rose even higher in the ranks of Chiang-Kai-Shek's army. I assume he ate a lot of Chinese food. http://www.invisibleheroes.com/hero.asp?issue=194

Suzanne is being too generous. There are more (and better) epigrams to be found on eGullet than ever were tossed off at the Algonquin Round Table. One that I'm partial to from this morning is courtesy of Pan, in his discussion of school lunches: "words don't cost anything and lunch does." http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...=0entry466260

One other practical difficulty is that prisons are just about the only "industry" of any size in many communities. They were placed where they were, I suspect, as a revenue source for these communities (often political plums) and making them self sustaining in terms of food or anything else would be deeply unpopular.

Think turkeys have been around and widely available in the UK for a couple of centuries, have they not?

Has anyone thought about taking up a collection and buying some decent coffee? Probably cost you each about 25 cents a day. A bargain, considering your present alternative.

Preferred work assignments generally don't. But hey, I'm no expert.

Prisons may well put inmates who are being punished on a diet that is different from the general population--I don't know. What I think is a bad idea is offering food "perks" for good behavior. Bound to cause resentment.

This cuts both ways. A lot of the prison riots and protests seem to be sparked or fueled by unhappiness about the food, and often justified. Logical, when you think about it, because food would loom large in a world where you are confined and denied most perks. I'd be against using food for behavior mod, personally, because it would probably wind up causing a lot of trouble.

Some years ago, I toured a bunch of prisons in Georgia, including some that raised most of their own food. The group I was with had lunch at one prison farm and it was good enough that I remember it today--chicken that tasted like chicken, fresh greens, etc. The sort of thing that people would flock to eat in many restaurants. I don't recall a single thing that we observed being implemented in Ontario jails, mostly because one law or rule or another wouldn't permit it.

Sorry Fresco..... Let's start over. Hi! My name is Harry. (I went through this once already with Tommy) That got a little heated and I'm still new to this whole message board thing. Anyway, I usually speak from an industry point of view. Harry Reiter Executive Chef Sodexho NBIMC Fair enough. It is easy to convey exactly the meaning you don't intend, as I well know.

After that no one can accuse you of being a rebbe without a Claus.

You know, I could be wrong, but most of us don't, as a matter of routine, cook in large batches. Perhaps you could have specified this to begin with.

Why do you think that? I can tell you the tenderest goat satay I ever had was in a place on the outskirts of Jakarta where the meat was wrapped in papaya skins overnight before cooking, but the meat was nowhere near tenderized to the point of mush! As Dave pointed out, it works well, but you have to be careful. The active ingredient in papaya is, I think, close in chemical composition to pepsin in the human gut, which breaks down food as part of the digestive process.

Also you get even cooking. And you don't with steam?

I don't know specifically about this, but the one ingredient no cookbook ever talks about that seems to make all the difference in the world is confidence. The first few times I tried hollandaise sauce, it was a nightmare, even though I followed instructions to the "t". But after a hiatus of several years, I tried it again, with a fairly casual disregard for technique, and it turned out fine every time. Go figure.

Besides being realists and knowing there is little they can do about people passing their published recipes around, celebrity chefs and cookbook writers may have some small expectation that their reputations may be enhanced in the process. I'll bet a lot of people get a bit of a charge out of preparing, say, Mario's pasta whatever, and are going to tell other people that it is Mario's. It may even encourage people to lay out real money for a cook book so they can prepare more of Mario's stuff.