How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bulb

Fennel in the Indy.

It is a staple vegetable and herb in Italian cuisine and was prized by Roman soldiers who believed it would keep them in good health. Women took it to keep their weight down, and it was chewed to help digestion. Today, fennel remains a key ingredient in many digestive teas.

It also has a racier aspect to it. It is a stimulant, and one of the three key components of the Swiss-French spirit absinthe, although contemporary brews often omit it. It boasts aphrodisiac qualities, and is said to mimic the female hormone oestrogen. It has even been prescribed as a natural breast enlarger.

From Italy, where fennel is used raw in salads and cooked in pastas, sausages, meatballs and risottos, fennel quickly spread south across to the Middle East and India, where it was assimilated into the national cuisine.

Go to Work on an Egg, or Twenty-Eight

Hideous secrets of Mrs Thatcher's diet:

"...the Tory leader steeled herself for the 1979 general election with a crash diet that featured no fewer than 28 eggs a week.

The two-week high-protein diet included one day - Thursdays - on which eggs were on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The only respite she was allowed in this grapefruit and black coffee, steak and lettuce diet was a glass of whisky "when meat is eaten". Otherwise it was "no alcohol".

The impact of such a diet on her temperament, especially when combined with her famed lack of sleep, can only be guessed at. But the ticks she made against each ingredient on her personal diet sheet seems to indicate that she followed the Mayo Clinic regime – well-known for rapid weight loss – rigorously."

The Guardian.

What a Coinky-dink!

The web is voracious. Its appetite for "content" is insatiable. And, of course, as the web does not generate any money, the budget for this content is cut again and again, and subsequently the worth of the content plummets in the scramble to shovel more into the internet consumer's gaping maw.
One way to prevent this loss of quality is of course to steal. Someone else does the groundwork, and you merely reproduce it with a few changes here and there. The Daily Mail is notorious for doing this. Yesterday I stumbled across just one such example.

Witness, BBC's Good Food Magazine. A recipe which appeared in the November print issue in 2008, by Mary Cadogan:

Pumpkin, spinach and black bean dopiaza.

And lo, on November 10th 2008 (weeks after the Good Food edition would have been on the shelves), that peerless chef, "Daily Mail Reporter" unveils a new recipe:

Pumpkin, spinach and black bean dopiaza.


UNCANNY, I tell you. UNCANNY.

Consumer Pressure

Am feeling more and more tempted to invest in a pressure cooker. New York Times on fifteen minute risottos:

I chopped an onion, diced a clove of garlic and sautéed both in the pressure cooker, lid off. After the onions became translucent, I added a finely chopped head of broccoli and 1 1/2 cups of arborio rice, stirring to coat everything in the oil. I already had stock in the fridge (a simple recipe of Mark’s from “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian”: a quartered onion, two halved garlic cloves sautéed in olive oil, to which I added three tablespoons of soy sauce, carrot peels, a quartered potato, one chopped rib of celery, a bunch of parsley stems, and eight cups of boiling water, cooked under high pressure for five minutes), so I added four cups along with a pinch of saffron and salt, and then locked the lid in place. The prep took longer than the five minutes the dish required to cook; after that, I let the steam out by pressing on the valve with an oven-mitted hand. Then I slid open the lid to find a transformation of rice and broccoli into the creamy, delicious Northern Italian dish. I stirred in a cup of grated parmesan and then tasted it: delicious.

And from a commenter:

Refried beans? 6 cups of dry pintos, 1 chopped onion, several cloves of garlic, and fill the cooker to half-way. Cook at high-pressure for 50 minutes or so, mash a bit, add salt and you’re good to go.

Making Sense of Scottish Vegetables

I'm lost.

Tomorrow is Burns' Night

Scotland's loss is Wallasey's gain. Dora Bennett, 85, one of his regulars, wheels her shopping trolley through the door and picks up her meat for the day. "I'll have a haggis," she says, without pausing for breath. Noticing the posters Potter has put up around the shop, she adds: "Oh, I didn't know it was Burns Night, my daughter just said she fancied it."

Michelle is rushed off her feet wrapping round parcels; customers ask as often for haggis as for cuts of beef or sausages.

Potter says this has become the norm. "I didn't sell a lot of haggis in the first year: I'd put a batch on once in a blue moon. But then word got round that I was a traditional Scottish butcher making this award-winning haggis and the orders started to pour in."

Consulting a list of Burns Night orders for more than 100 people, he pours the haggis mixture into a sausage machine. Sliding a white sheep's stomach on to its spout, he fills it until the intestine's white veins bulge under the weight.

I mutter that the sight is enough to turn anyone vegetarian: using the "v" word around here is a dangerous game. "Vegetarians? They're the scourge of the earth," he growls, before plonking an overflowing fleshy bag on to the worktop.

From the Independent.

Pressurised Cooking

I admit I never really knew what a pressure cooker was till I found this Guardian piece, but anything which can knock out feijoada in forty minutes is fine by me.

Vegetables of the British Isles

Thank you to William13 for this blog post on Christopher Stock's Forgotten Fruits:

The social, agricultural, and geographical history woven into just a brief introduction to Vaux’s Self-Folding lettuce or the Bedford Fillbasket brussels sprout is incredible.

Stocks’ suggested sites in Scotland, for example, would take the vegetable tourist from the Isle of Arran, where Donald Mackelvie bred the purple-skinned Arran Victory, to the Arbroath home of the Golden Wonder, a chance mutation discovered in a field of Maincrop by John Brown in 1906, and raw ingredient of the original ready-salted crisp.

Along the way, Stocks’ intrepid tourist would encounter William Sim, who abandoned potatoes in favour of emigration and carnations (his is still the best-selling carnation variety in America), as well as the Scottish Potato Bubble of 1900-04, fuelled in part by Archibald Findlay of Fife, a grocer’s son and breeder of optimistically named varieties such as Eldorado and Millionmaker.

Satisfy Your Salsify

Hugh has a recipe or two in the Guardian for those tackling the ugly root:

The simplest way to prepare these lovely roots is to peel them, put them in a roasting tin, trickle over a little olive or rapeseed oil, add a few bashed garlic cloves and a bay leaf, and roast at 200C/400F/gas mark 6 for 20 minutes. Serve with a sprinkling of flaky sea salt, or follow Jane Grigson's excellent suggestion and sprinkle on some gremolata, that zingy southern Italian condiment made of lemon zest, finely chopped garlic and parsley. Or boil or steam them until just tender, chop small and serve with a mustardy, garlicky vinaigrette and perhaps a few pieces of diced ham, rather as you might with a celeriac remoulade.

Cookie Rumble

Beautiful photos and recipes for seasonal cookies in the New York Times. Wish I'd read this before I started trying to make some.

Hit the Highway, Hershey

Anyone who has performed a chocolate taste test will know that compared with its British counterpart, American chocolate has a distinctly different flavour. To many, Hershey's chocolate has a more bitter, less creamy taste than its British equivalent, and seems to have a grittier texture.

It all comes down to what exactly chocolate is. In the UK, chocolate must contain at least 20% cocoa solids. In the US, on the other hand, cocoa solids need only make up 10%.

A Cadbury Dairy Milk bar contains 23% cocoa solids, whereas a Hershey bar contains just 11%.

Much of Europe would scoff at either definition. The continental preference is for richer, darker chocolate, with a significantly higher cocoa solid count. Many European chocolatiers make chocolate with upwards of 40% cocoa solids, a world away from our elevenses bar from the newsagent.

But the cocoa content isn't the only thing which separates British chocolate from its American namesake.

Fears about the takeover of UK chocolatiers Cadbury by US manufacturers Hershey, via the BBC.

Re-Crispening

Chris Hunt, a plumber, starts the day with packet of pickled onion Monster Munch, has a roast beef Monster Munch sandwich for lunch and a Flamin' Hot flavour bag for dinner.

He is so obsessed with the corn snack that he has even devised recipes to include Monster Munch in rice and pasta dishes.

The 26-year-old finally changed his name after being dared to by friends.

Mr Munch - or Monster to his pals - said: ''I just can't get enough of them. I love all the flavours, but admit roast beef is a particular favourite.

From the Telegraph.

Cooking with Oil

For Rachel Clayton, the chef responsible for each of those meals, the knowledge that her kitchen’s output is the highlight of 110 workers’ days is just one more problem. Rachel runs the galley on the Captain WPP oil platform. Working 12-hour shifts for two weeks without a break, she and her team prepare everything from scratch — they have to be bakers, butchers, patisserie chefs and salad washers. They do it all on one delivery a week. And, if the weather is bad, even that delivery may not arrive. “That happened on my last trip,” Rachel says. “We were due a boat on the Saturday and it didn’t arrive until Wednesday. We got by though.” Rachel, 31, has been doing this now for four years.

The Times.

Bisque Please

Mouthwatering lobster bisque recipe from the NYT. I had this once, at party in a marquee of a discreetly grand house in Sussex, most delicate dish I've ever consumed. Gorgeous.

Eating History

The Celts loved their ham and bacon," says Wood, who hopes her new book of historic recipes will inspire people "to hold themed dinner parties from history". "The first Celts came from the Hallstat region of Austria, where the salt mines are, and they spread a taste for salted pork and lamb. They liked simple foods, like hearty stews, although they didn't have too many herbs. They had a cinnamon-like herb called bog myrtle, but it was the Romans who introduced many of the herbs and vegetables that we now know and love."

Leo Hickman in The Guardian.

Thirsty Thrift

Cooking with leftover tea, coffee, cider, beer and wine. And you can always use Guinness to rinse your hair.

Peptic Rank

A fascinating run-down of the amount of time it takes to digest various vegetarian foodstuffs, and the process of digesting meats.

Oh, God, there's more.

Pudding Snub

Controversy rages in the comments at the Times when Lindsay Bareham tries to reinvent Spotted Dick.

Pudding ist Wichtig

Times masterclass on making steak and kidney pudding. God I want some now. A reader suggests substituting dried shiitakes for those who cannot stomach offal.

Squash

Drool-inducing page of squash and pumpkin recipes at the Times.