Pan

Germany is about 1/2 Catholic, isn't it?

For those who are considering Sephardic seders, you might consider an Italki seder - that is, one with traditional dishes of the Italian Jewish community, many of whom were neither Ashkenazic nor Sephardic, but came to Italy directly from Israel after the destruction of the Temple. One year, my mother and I cooked recipes from Edda Servi-Macklin's cookbook of recipes from Pitigliano, the walled hill town just over the border with Lazio in Tuscany where an ancient Jewish community lived until WW II (the survivors moved mostly to Florence and Rome, I believe). The charoses we made from the cookbook had dates and oranges in it, and we made a delicious, lemony meatloaf and accompanied it with rosemary roasted potato slices in a casserole with tomato slices. The meal was a great success.

No. Please start a thread about it.

I like both raisins and currants. So sue me.

I'd make an analogy to things Anglo-Indian and call this Indo-Dutch or something. I didn't notice rijstaffel for sale in restaurants in any areas of Sumatra, Java, or Bali I visited in the 70s. I think you're correct: It's something Dutch colonists brought back from the East Indies. Or, to be more accurate, their cooks brought it back!

I think you weakened your argument with that tangent. Since a lot of the greatest art of all time is specifically religious, it's kind of preposterous to suggest that it could have been greater if it was secular. Perhaps you might want to stick to food in this argument? I have to throw my hat in the ring with Steve here. When an artist chooses his/her own parameters with respect to creating art, that can be a positive force and can provide focus and specificity. When limitations are imposed from without it often compromises the work. Of course, its a hard position to prove due to lack of control comparisons but from my own experience I find imposed limitations to be deleterious. And you think that, since you find it deleterious, so did Michelangelo, Rafaello Sanzio, Tician, Masaccio, Duccio, Giotto, Rembrandt, Durer, Donatello, Andrea and Giovanni Pisano, etc., etc.? The fact is that imposed limitations were a function of the patronage system. Now, you can criticize the system of patronage that existed before the 19th century or so, but it was responsible for providing steady income for a large number of great artists and an even larger number of not-so-great artists. And during the time when every artist needed to be retained by a patron, a very large number of great works were created. Nowadays, artists are free to work as they like if they don't have commissions and feel like making art works, but there is no guarantee (to say the least) of steady income. If you prefer the current system, under which very few artists can support themselves with their artwork and those who earn a good living at it are mostly those who appeal to a single person (the current critic of the New York Times) or a very small number of people who may choose to buy out a whole show (such as the Saatchi brothers, I've heard - perhaps that's old information, though), more power to you, because patronage isn't coming back any time soon. But to make an argument that amounts to an indictment of the quality of all art produced on commission and for patrons doesn't seem very sensible to me. So shall we get back to food?

EZE? Jeez, do I have to look that up on an airport code reference site?

Sure, Anil, but Roti Telur is a Mamak specialty (Muslims of Northern Indian or mixed Northern Indian and Malay ancestry), just like Roti Canai. Sure, Chinese Malaysians like it, too, but it really doesn't fall under "Chinese street food." I used to like the Hong Kong-style egg cakes Mrs. Han made on Mosco St. and Mott in Manhattan. Does anyone know what happened to her? Retired?

I had fiddleheads once and didn't think much of them. I preferred the tiny wild ferns people sometimes eat in Malaysia and somewhat larger ferns also eaten there, but on the whole, I think ferns are weird-tasting and not meritorious. To each his/her own.

I think you weakened your argument with that tangent. Since a lot of the greatest art of all time is specifically religious, it's kind of preposterous to suggest that it could have been greater if it was secular. Perhaps you might want to stick to food in this argument?

I agree with you.

Would you say the same thing about excluding insects and worms from your diet? Objectively, the same holds true in those cases, right? So are most of us gastronomically impoverished because of our refusal to eat such protein sources?

I definitely see your point there.

In 1987, I spent over a month in Hong Kong (10 days) and China. I loved the fish ball curry stand on the Kowloon side of the Star Ferry, and it was the first place I went back to when I returned to Hong Kong after my trip in China. The fish ball curry on the Hong Kong side just wasn't as good. If I can include drinks, I spent 9 days in Beijing in July, 1987, and noticed that there were carts selling some kind of drink in cups covered with cheese cloth. When I asked what it was, I was told "sour milk," so I avoided it for a few days. When I tried it, it turned out to be whey. It was cooling, soothing, and hit the spot big-time in the dry 95 F heat.

i would think that it poses limitations to the enjoyment of food. just like present-day limitations like low-fat, no-carbs or similar. my point is that, thinking that this-or-that is healthy will of course influence the way we eat, and we may even end up not eating what we really want - or actually liking what we eat, as it makes us feel saintly and healthy. but this has nothing to do with the gastronomic striving for the most refined combinations and preparations in food. so, popular and quasi-religious beliefs do conflict with gastronomy. I simply disagree with you. Clearly, you've never lived in a country in which nearly everyone believes in the humoral system. There is more than enough choice in the humoral system to cause it not to interfere with gastronomy one iota. You might as well claim that French cuisine is too limited for gastronomy because they don't eat wichety grubs, waterbugs, and dirt. You might be interested in reading some anthropology books or/and articles that discuss the humoral systems in Malaysia, India, the Arab world, Latin America, the Mediterranean, a different system of a comparable type in China, and the Greek humoral system itself as applied to food. Does it aid in showing pairings? Yes. Does it interfere with gastronomy? Only if you think "gastronomy" involves eating so much, say, durian that you get sick. My Malay former neighbors would give the reason for the sickness as an excess of humoral heat and you would attribute another reason, but it wouldn't change the fact that you'd be sick. All those traditional medical beliefs aren't all hokum, you know. Now, sure, if gastronomy to you means eating something or everything to tremendous excess, the humoral system conflicts with it - as does every other medical system.

I like Cel-Ray with pastrami! So there! I just looked at the ketchup thread. I do not like ketchup by itself in anything. If it's used as an ingredient in such a way that the resulting sauce tastes like something else, that's fine. I do like good tomato sauce, preferably from scratch, but canned tomatoes and tomato paste can be quite acceptable.

(1) Vanillin. I've gradually come to the conclusion that I hate vanillin, although it's a mild form of hatred. But I have lately taken to refusing to buy any product that uses vanillin instead of real vanilla. It's so inferior, in addition to the fact that it's artificial, and I have no way of knowing whether it won't be proven dangerous at some future point. (2) Artificial preservatives, artificial flavors, and artificial colors generally. On the rare occasions when I buy a loaf of bread in a supermarket, I will not get any loaf that contains preservatives like potassium sorbate or calcium propionate or sodium pyrophosphate (or whatever that stuff is). There's no reason for me to put those things into my body. But the fact is that whenever I do buy bread (and that's not that often), I usually get it in my local health food store, it has no preservatives and gets moldy quickly if I don't eat it quickly, but it's much better when it's fresh. Living alone is a problem if you want good bread. (3) Things like pectin or corn starch when added to yogurt. I can't stand them in that context. Give me pure yogurt any day, even if it isn't organic. (4) An overabundance of salt. This is a big problem for me in many restaurants, coupled with an overabundance of fat, but at least the fat often doesn't taste bad. (5) Green bell peppers. I seem to have an allergy to all bell peppers and no hot peppers of any color. Go figure. But though I like the taste of ripe bell peppers (red, but even more, yellow/white/purple) even though they're no good for me, I do not like green bell peppers. Obviously, many people do, but I find them bad-tasting and somewhat irritating to my tongue. (6) I also hate commercial mayonnaise.

Fat Guy: I think that the people who read your reviews count on getting an honest reaction based on your taste. But I doubt that you can really accurately judge an African cuisine based on eating in restaurants in the U.S. So what I'd suggest you do is simply describe the food you ate and give your readers your appraisal of how it tasted to you. It's my belief that the most obvious and least problematic way for a reviewer of anything - movies, paintings, music, restaurants - or at least anything that can't be objectively quantifiable (e.g. this car is best in its class because it's inexpensive, gets good gas mileage, scored best in crash tests [objective]- and also drives smoothly and has comfortable seats [subjective]) is to be upfront about having an opinion. Taste is subjective, and you contribute your knowledge and taste and your writing ability when you write a review. So don't say "the cuisine of x African country sucks"; say "I have eaten n times at restaurants a, b, and c, in City D, and I have found the x-African cuisine found at these restaurants wanting."

If this was true, the world would be one sorry place to live in. Fortunately, the world only acts like this is true and it exploits the fallacy of it all for profit. Fortunately there are those of us who know better. All that remark means is that you're so convinced of your own taste that you effectively have an absolute belief that it is the best and all who disagree with you are WRONG. Think about that: You can't be that arrogant, right? So what did I misunderstand in your remark?

A treife gefilte fish? Crayfish? Just as treif as a cockroach, and you know it.

Until the late 19th or early 20th century, almost all of them, I believe. You seem to be making an unwarranted assumption: that meals balanced for humoral hot and cold will not please a gastronome. I would strongly assert that there is no basis for making such an assumption. Humoral theory does not conflict with gastronomy.

My all-purpose hot sauce is the kind of Sambal Oelek that doesn't have belacan/terasi (shrimp paste) in it. It's just a hot, fiery red pepper sauce. I use a little at a time but should remember to get more soon, as I'm running out.

I've spent only the amount of time in Austria that was necessary to take a train from Rome to Vienna, change enough lire for a tram to another station, hope a train to Budapest, and get from Vienna to Gyor, the Hungarian border town. However, one of the more memorable meals I've eaten was at an Austrian-style restaurant in Budapest. It was a delicious roast goose. Just fabulous. Nowadays, there are geese on the campus of Queensborough Community College, and I keep thinking "dinner!" as I walk past them. Hungarian food generally uses lard, and I had several other very tasty meals there. What would have been a classy mid-priced restaurant was across the street from the flat I stayed in for 2 weeks. Meals there came out to between around 850 and 1250 Forint (roughtly 100 Forint=$1 in those days), but that was a really significant sum of money, probably equivalent in buying power to something in the $30s/$40s - in 1994 dollars. And those meals would have gone over that top number if I had ordered more expensive specialties like Libamay (made from goose liver).

I want to commend all of you for addressing this issue seriously....So I'll address it frivolously: Just judge the unfamiliar cuisine by the standards of French haute cuisine, find it wanting, and move on.

Thanks for all the responses. My brother ate lunch at Bouley Bakery a couple of times and pronounced it the best value he's ever experienced in any restaurant. I really do look forward to going there for lunch some time. Perhaps we could have some kind of get-together there in May, when I'll have more lunchtimes free.