slkinsey

It's not entirely clear to me whether Current Drug Discovery is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Regardless, Ian's interesting article does not appear to present experimental data as in a typical journal article and appears in the "Back Pages" section of the magazine. This is not quite the same thing as writing a counter-article or response, or posting a "rapid response" to, say, the BMJ -- nor does it seem equivalent to submitting an actual experimental study to a peer-reviewed journal to be considered for publication. These are the two things about which I inquired. Not that any of the above should be taken as a negative comment as to the interesting, provocative and informative nature of Mr. Hutton's article in Current Drug Discovery, which I think is pretty cool.

Evidence that this is actually the case? However, one of the negative effects of Western medicine in these countries is that many more children are surviving to adulthood and yet there has been no compensatory change in the culture with respect to women or having large families. DDT, as far as I know, is quite benign with respect to humans. The reason DDT was banned in the US and other countries was not because it is bad for humans but rather because of the effect it can have on the reproduction of other animals. Specifically, it caused the eggshells of certain birds to be thinner, which resulted in fewer of of these eggs surviving to hatch.

I assume you refer to: "Duplais P. Traité des liqueurs et de la distillation des alcools ou le liquoriste et le distillateur moderns. Versailles: Chez l'Auteur, 1855" as cited in this article by Strang, Arnold and Peters? If, as you suggest, they have made a mistake in their translation, perhaps you could provide reference to the passage(s) mistranslated and what you believe is the correct translation? I am also curious as to why you think it might be that this error has not been remarked upon in the scientific community. Or do you suppose you are among a very small minority that has rechecked the original information? I'm not asking this facetiously, I really do wonder. Have you ever thought of writing to one of the scientific journals or posting a comment on the journal's web site in response to an article they had published citing the figures you think are erroneous? Might there be other explanations for why your gas chromatography didn't find any degradation products? For instance, might any such products have reacted into still different forms over time? Or might they have precipitated and formed a sediment in the bottle? Or is is possible that the sample which you tested was not representative of all 19th century absinthes? Ah, but isn't this part of the point? Presumably most of the people suffering absinthe's alleged ill effects were did not have sufficient means to drink the expensive stuff. Unfortunately, I rather imagine that there aren't too many 100 year old bottles of carefully preserved rotgut absinthe hanging around in old cellars waiting to be tested. I would be very interested to see the CG analysic results of some really crappy absinthe, as I strongly suspect that contaminants and non-ethyl alcohol were responsible for most of absinthe's reported effects not explainable by alcohol intoxication. Great! I look forward to seeing your results. Do you intend to write them up for publication in a scientific journal? Thanks for your contributions and welcome to eGullet, by the way. Assuming your culinary interests extend beyond absinthe, you should check out our other forums as well. For what it's worth, I am rather in your camp when it comes to the alleged mind-altering effects of the various substances in absinthe other than alcohol.

Yay! Glad you liked it. I am getting ready to do a big pizza party for a friend's birthday, so I'll take pictures of my various specialties and try to post.

Hmm... I am not sure "twaddle" comprises a particularly effective refutation of FG's points. Macrosan, let me see if I can sum up what I see as your core argument here: 1. A certain level of food production equals a certain world population. Food production is the prime (or a prime) determinant of world population. 2. Inherrent in #1 is the idea that the world population will grow or shrink according to the amount of food available. 3. Increasing food production, therefore, inevitably results in an increase in world population. 4. Due to #3 above, we should not seek to increase food production. 5. What we should to is determine the optimal world population, determine the level of food production that corresponds to that population and refuse to produce any food above that level. In principle, this would actually work. Availability of food is, generally, a population-limiting factor. It works in a Petri dish and it could work on the world population of humans. However, the way population is limited by food production (aka food supply) is via starvation, disease and premature death. This is not exactly something I think we should be visiting upon our fellow humans. As Steven points out, humans do not act like bacteria. They will not placidly die of starvation when they reach a growth-limiting condition. Rather, they will kill each other, they will terrorize those with food, they will reak havoc with the environment -- they will do anything they possibly can to avoid death by starvation. I would suggest that there are better and more humane ways to control a world population that is growing to dangerously high levels. It has been amply demonstrated, for example, that lower population growth is strongly correlated with educational levels, career opportunities outside the home and overall freedom from oppression for women in a given culture. Overall affluence and education are also strongly associated with lower population growth. Let's start talking sex education and birth control while we're at it. Now... the problem is that it is very hard to start even thinking about these things in areas where the population is concerned with the quotidian task of trying not to starve to death. In this light, it is possible that providing adequate food to these areas could eventually lead to lower rates of population growth, as the local culture becomes better able to address some of the elements I mentioned above -- not to mention getting rid of some of the oppressive dictatorships that, not coincidentally, are precisely the people who stand in the way of the effective distribution of food in areas under their control. Consider this fact: high levels of food production per capita correlate with low population growth; low levels of food production per capita correlate with high population growth.

Hee! I have no idea what I'd call myself, then... Actually, most "vegetarians" tend to define their eating habits by what they don't eat rather than by what they do eat, so it seems like any term for one of these dietary pracices that is defined by inclusion rather than exclusion is bound to run into trouble. [sARCASM]No choice! Man... that sounds like a fate worse than death. You might as well slit your wrists now and get it over with[/sARCASM]

Really?! That's not been my observation. Rather quite the opposite.

Not to me. My mother certainly made very little accomodation to my tastes when she was doing the cooking. Her rule was always "I am cooking something I like for dinner. If you don't like it, then you can either have nothing or you can cook dinner for the entire family." I adhere to the same rule when cooking for my parents. NB. Both my parents are only children and the grandparents have all gone to their great reward, so I don't have a lot of this kind of thing to deal with.

No right or wrong there, as far as I can tell. But thanks for the pithy comment.

Hmmm... interesting. I did a little digging, and from what I can gather there is no particularly clear botanical definition of "vegetable." I did find, this, however, which said: The definition I have always used was something like this: fruit = the ripened seed-bearing part of a plant when fleshy and edible; vegetable = herbaceous plant cultivated for an edible part, as roots, stems, leaves or flowers. Your point about eggs and cheese coming from animals is well made, of course, although the whole notion of "vegetarian" seems a bit nebulous to me as it has so many permutations and the exact meaning of "vegetable" is not entirely clear. Perhaps it would be more accurate if more clumsy to say something like "voluntary herbivore."

Well, if you really want to get technical, neither would anything with tomato... since a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. With pizza, I think it is usual to suppose "lacto-ovo vegetarian." Of course, my idea of vegetarian is greens cooked with smoked ham hocks... but that is for another day.

Yes. I forgot to mention that one. It's very un-traditional, but I do like a pizza with fig preserves, gorgonzola, ruccola and sea salt (the greens added off the heat). No pom/mozz on this one, of course.

Interesting/relevant passages from this article, in my opinion, include: and This article was apparently originally published not in a peer reviewed journal, but in a magazine called Current Drug Discovery which is a publication of Current Drugs, Ltd. which is, in turn, part of Thomson Scientific, a division of The Thomson Corporation.

I thought it had to be vegetarian toppings? Well yeah, you're right. But bacon is a food category all by itself, necessary to long life, wisdom, and incredible physical beauty. Sometimes I plumb forget it's merely meat. I understand and share your enthusiasm No bacon. Guanciale.

Make a regular tomato sauce/mozzarella pizza (going very light on the cheese), then carefully crack several eggs right on the crust right before you slide it onto the baking stone (you're going for maybe 1/2 of the pizza surface covered by egg). The eggs will "fry" right on the crust. Take it out of the oven when the yolks are still nice and runny. Sprinkle with minced parsley and drizzle with evoo. This recipe only works with a well-heated baking stone and a thin crust (otherwise, the heat doesn't come through to fry the eggs). I like to make this one with thinly sliced with home-roasted red peppers sparsely strewn across the top before adding the eggs. Some other interesting vegetarian pizze: Make a regular tomato/mozzarella pizza (easy on the toppings as always) and then top the pizza out of the oven with a salad of mixed wild/bitter greens and thinly sliced red onion dressed with the very best evoo (I usually add a covering of prosciutto, but that isn't exactly vegetarian); fresh (not canned!) slices of artichoke sauteed in evoo until brown and crispy are delicious on a pizza with a little red onion; make a pizza crust with no tomato or mozzarella -- instead top the pizza liberally with greens you have blanched and sauteed in evoo with garlic and crushed red pepper... at the last minute, throw on some dollops of strachino cheese (tangy mild soft cheese from "tired cows"); and, there is always fresh (or even frozen) porcini mushrooms drizzled with the very best evoo and sprinkled with an interesting sea salt at the table.

I also do a big reduction in order to save space in the freezer. One thing I find, however, is that this practice inevitably results in a fairly dark stock (due to maillard reactions, caramelization of sugars, etc.) even after it is diluted back to normal strength. As chance would have it, I helped a friend with a huge backyard cook-out in Queens on Saturday. Among other things, he gave me 8 large chickens on Friday which I completely deboned and marinated in chimichurri to be grilled at the party. As a result, I now have a huge bag of raw chicken bones in my freezer waiting to be made into stock next weekend. Man... Big Apple Meats is such a cool place for this kind of thing. We got an obscene amount of meat for something like a hundred bucks.

You can ge them at IKEA for less than 20 bucks... real end grain.

I imagine Michael and perhaps others will weigh in on this, but I thought I'd add my own 2 cents as well... Pigs that are cooked in a closed environment such as the "barrel roasters" you describe strike me as more "smoked" than "roasted." As a result, open pit roasting such as Michael describes tends to produce meat that is less smoky but has more "roasted" flavor. This is probably a result of several things: A) there is less smoke around the pig; B) the pig is roasted over direct heat as opposed to indirect heat; C) because the pit is open, the cooking environment is not as moist; D) due to B and C, there are more crispy bits and roasted-tasting compounds produced by a combination of direct heat and slight dehydration at the surface.

Well, I would imagine that one health concern would be the heart-attack when someone unsuspecting walks into the bathroom and sees a sow soaking in the tub! I do have some pretty damn funny pictures of a pig defrosting inside someone's bathtub...

FWIW, I don't think you need to add a whole lot of cheese to the bechamel sauce. Add some, sure... but the rest of it can just be grated and tossed with the other ingredients to melt in the oven. This will eliminate a possible source of problems and simplify the whole procedure. IMO, another important element is to cook the pasta well below the threshhold of "al dente" as it will finish softening in the oven. This probably works better with things like penne and ziti than it does with elbow macceroni. As for the orange color... maybe a little tomato paste in with the roux?

Thanks for the links, Trillium. Interesting reading. I thought two pargraphs in Olsen's response were of particular interest/relevance: and

According to their web site, Berndes uses Autograph as its non-stick coating for its SignoCast and Tradition lines. Autograph is Dupont's premier PTFE coating... Thanks Dave. Good catch! That is certainly good news to potential buyers. That said, my understanding is that a major factor in the durability of a nonstick surface is the number of coats applied (I think this is the difference between Calphalon's "Commercial" and "Professional" nonstick lines, for example) and we do not have any data on that AFAIK, although a closer look through their site may reveal some.

I don't see any commentary. Where did you find it? I'd like to check it out.

Hee! This is what is so cool about you, FG. You went and ordered two different kinds of ribs and four sides after having had lunch!

No personal experience, but we can learn something from their web site. The cast aluminum like this line, this line, this line and this line appear to be 6 mm thick at the base, which is encouraging. The spun aluminum products appear to be 3 mm to 5 mm thick, which is bad to OK for unclad aluminum. I would definitely expect the thinner pans to warp. The main thing to consider with these pans, really, is the nonstick coating. If you get a cast aluminum pan that is 6 mm thick on the bottom, it will have pretty good thermal properties. However, nonstick coated pans are only as good as the nonstick coating. Once that coating wears away, the pan is junk. Plus, nonstick coatings have only limited usefulness in my opinion (I only have one large nonstick fry pan and don't see the point of nonstick saucepans, etc.). I honestly don't know anything about the nonstick coating and how well it holds up, or whether they have different coatings on the different lines. The other thing to consider about these pans is the cost. They are not all that cheap, especially when compared to, say, a similar pan in Calphalon Commercial Nonstick which we know from user reports has an almost indestructible nonstick coating. In the example I just showed, I'd spend the extra 4 bucks on the Calphalon fry pan every time based on the information I have. That said, I would never spend $114 on a 12 inch nonstick fry pan. I'd wait until Fat Guy told me about another big sale on Amazon and I'd pick up the Calphalon fry pan for 25 bucks.