Well, people have been making chocolate "fondue" for years. Clearly at least somebody thinks that the dipping aspect of fondue is more essential than the cheese aspect. Are they so wrong?
I do like the sound of "chocolate hotpot" though.
I think the current geek vogue for "steampunk reimaginings" of everything needs to be applied to food somehow. How, I'm not sure... but somehow.
That can only lead to getting bits of goggles stuck in your teeth.
I want people to shut up about the sweet and the savory, already! (Adam Gopnik is first in line for thrashing.) Though I did find the sweet/savory wine article in the NYT interesting.
If I ever understand what a successful steampunk reimagining is in the first place, DS, you're on. I'm embarrassed to say that I never investigated.
Fondue bourgignon is basically a hot pot with oil rather than broth and a bunch of standard French sauces. Not as good as cheese fondue which is fricking awesome when done well, which is surprisingly difficult.
It makes more sense etymologically for chocolate, since the word comes from fondre "to melt".
From the linked article:
Remember way back then, five years ago? It was around the time of the debut of No-Knead Bread but before the dubious Bacon Explosion. The economy hadn't yet tanked, so restaurants with stars still mattered to people without expense accounts. And we hadn't begun to eat serious food from a truck, let alone to obsessively track a favorite vehicle or two on Twitter.
1. Fuck. You. Just fuck you into the Stone Age, New York Times food columnist Amanda Hesser.
2. Gluttony is a sin. Even if you tweet it.
I didn't get the part about food trucks. There have always been serious food trucks, right? I get that it's now a thing for American-born white people to serve fancy food (ironically? I can't tell anymore) from food trucks, but there was a food truck culture before Twitter.
Gluttony is a sin. Even if you tweet it.
Or write a book about it. B.R. Meyers agrees.
Food trucks have always been some places, not others? Manhattan, they're still rarer than carts, and used to be much rarer -- I think of them as more an LA thing, and in other cities I don't know at all. And if by 'serious' she means 'pretending to be serious cuisine', that's newer and rarer still -- the trucks that have been around for a long time in LA may have had good food, but good cheap ethnic food, not good 'serious' food, I think.
11: I indulged in social networking to the extent of linking to that article on FB recently. A few days of being hunted like animals on my private island hunger would do Pollan, Bourdain and Steingarten a power of good.
I got tangled up in that last comment -- I meant to say 'pretending to be upscale cuisine'.
I think it's also relatively new that you don't necessarily know where to find the food truck, and that it's good or trendy enough that people care. Unlike, say, the Chinese truck, the Mexican truck, and the Indian truck that park in X place every day around lunchtime.
A FB friend linked it. With 13 I had a brief flash of wondering if I knew Flippanter in real life, but then I realized that no, he is definitely not a female seminary professor in Tulsa.
Are you implying that I'm not in touch with my feminine side or that I don't love Jesus?
I'm pretty sure you don't live in Tulsa.
I am not an habitué of the square states.
There's something a little unfair about crabbing at professional cooks or food writers for being disproportionately obsessed with food. I have feelings about the NY Civil Practice Law and Roles that are disproportionately intense given its importance in the world, but it's because I spend a lot of time with it.
Also, the article seems to be lumping together gluttony and cruelty as if the one necessarily implied the other -- as if the people he's mocking were all engaged in animal torture as adding a frisson of enjoyment to their meals, which seems false to me.
There was a food truck culture in LA before the Kogi Taco truck (like, people who sought out particular trucs and followed them around), but it was a relatively recent thing (certainly after the turn of the millenium), and it was entirely focused on (mexican) tacos.
It's not the celebration of how good food tastes that I have a problem with--I have been known to indulge in several days of cooking to produce an extravagant meal--but I do take issue with the treatment of "eating everything" as an ethos. Chefs who look down on those poor stupid assholes who are vegetarian or keep kosher because it's the very worst thing a person could do? Get some ethical priorities. Everyone's been troubled a time or two to provide food for someone who can't partake in the main dish, and we can choose either not to invite them or make something they can eat. But most of these writers are talking about people frequenting restaurants that serve a number of dishes. It isn't sad or benighted to order something on the menu or choose a restaurant that wants to serve you.
I had the same problem with that idiotic book about anal sex everyone was reading some years ago. Fine, you like anal. Enjoy! But it's not an ethos.
24: Uh, I think I missed that review in the Times.
I guess, but is looking down on vegetarians/people who keep kosher really a big part of foodie culture specifically? Being a jerk about people who voluntarily restrict their diets is pretty common even among people who aren't serious about food -- while I'm sure there are food-industry people who are jerks about it as well, it doesn't seem to me like jerkiness that's really about the food culture.
27: It was more common a few years ago, I think. Most chefs have stopped being such assholes about it, but there was a time during the pig-fat years when it was sort of cool to be shitty to vegetarians, and brag in memoirs and on TV that you lie to Jews.
26: No less a highbrow than Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has declared "The Surrender" a "small masterpiece of erotic writing."
I'll be vomiting blood and bile for the next few hours.
and brag in memoirs and on TV that you lie to Jews
Wha wha what?!? Who the fuck was ever that big of a fucking asshole AND ADMITTED IT IN A RECORDED MEDIUM?!?
Also, I thought 25 was just a hilarious joke until the fact that there actually was a positive NYT review brought it to the next level.
Examples of all the obnoxious antics that AWB is citing are recorded in the Atlantic article Blume linked in 11.
5: Maybe it would qualify if it was food cooked on top of some lost Charles Babbage invention.
8: ... or that could be the stuff.
From linked article: She then drops the point entirely; foodies quickly lose interest in any kind of abstract discussion.
Huh?
31: Not really -- the incident where a restaurant served headcheese to someone who kept kosher seems, from the bit of it quoted, to have been inadvertent, even though the chef was flippant about it after the fact.
31: Yeah, I'm reading through it right now. I definitely agree with a lot of criticisms of hypocrisy in the foodie community; it annoys me how meat-heavy many good new restaurants are these days, with the recent burst of bbq and snout-to-tail eating and just a massive embrace of the-richer-the-better. But damn, this thing is vitriolic as all get out.
Also, this is vastly overstated and seriously weak:
"Here too, though, an at least half-serious moral logic is at work, backed up by the subculture's distinct body of myth, which combines half-understood evolutionary theory with the biblical idea of man as born lord of the world. Anthropological research, I should perhaps point out, now indicates that Homo sapiens started out as a paltry prey animal. Clawless, fangless, and slight of build, he could at best look forward to furtive boltings of carrion until the day he became meat himself. It took humans quite a while to learn how to gang up for self-protection and food acquisition, the latter usually a hyena-style affair of separating infant or sick animals from their herds. The domestication of pigs, cows, chickens, etc. has been going on for only about 10,000 years--not nearly long enough to breed the instincts out of them."
I mean, it's pretty well acknowledged that humanity was probably a social animal from the beginning. We're not exactly tiny in the scheme of mammals, and many larger predators are solitary. Even chimps are meat-eaters and have shown signs of hunting and basic tool use.
Plus, there's plenty of good reasons to believe that domestication can produce incredibly rapid changes in animal genotypes. For just one example, humans have produced a domesticated form of the silver fox that drastically differs from the wild version within our lifetime.
Sorry, I'll get back to reading now...
35: I don't care enough about this topic to read the article, but that's a seriously tendentious interpretation of "anthropological research" for all the reasons you note and more.
36 (now that I've read the quote in 35 in full) really gets it right.
Indeed. Particularly this bit: It took humans quite a while to learn how to gang up for self-protection and food acquisition
We're descended from some kind of solitary great ape? Not impossible, I suppose, orangutans are kind of solitary, but not something I was aware was conventional wisdom.
One almost wonders if he's ever even met a human.
But yeah, I like a lot of the article, otherwise.
The article in 11 is interesting. Though the author easily highlights some of the more obnoxious tendencies of foodie writers, he/she is no less judgmental than the people he/she is skewering. A pox on both their houses, I say. Criticizing douches doesn't apparently inoculate you from being a douche too.
I'm not comfortable with the idea that Leon Wieseltier has sexual feelings.
Criticizing douches doesn't apparently inoculate you from being a douche too.
Who will tell Gawker Media?
40: That (fairly obviously, I suppose) was my reaction. There are certainly food writers who are everything from irritating to evil, but the article seemed way overbroad, blaming everyone associated with 'foodie' culture for everything bad anyone in that category ever said or did.
There's a way in which the "I'll eat anything" tendency among foodies has been misinterpreted by the foodies themselves. It's not that eating obscure meats makes you macho; that is blatantly false. But being willing to try new things in cuisine is equivalent to being willing to try new things in any area of life. It means that you are willing to test your comfort zone. This may not be a virtue, per se, but it does indicate an adventurousness that is relatively uncommon. Of course, if this culinary adventurousness isn't matched with a similar adventurousness in other aspects of life it's relatively useless.
And I should add that I think there is a significant native (maybe genetic?) component to eating. Some people just don't get anything out of it. Whether they can't taste the difference, or don't care, or are overly sensitive to taste (the so-called supertasters), I totally get that food does not have the same impact on everybody.
In LA, food trucks were common as long as I can remember, but were "taco trucks" until 5 years ago and served, you know, tacos, plus sometimes burgers.
Gluttony is bad in a world where grains and sugar makes you constantly hungry. Otherwise, 2 big meals per day is great.
I'll be vomiting blood and bile for the next few hours.
Thanks to The Surrender, my mind has been opened to the transcendent erotic possibilities of this as well.
Of course, if this culinary adventurousness isn't matched with a similar adventurousness in other aspects of life it's relatively useless.
I have eaten yak blood sausage. Ladies.
Hrm. I dunno. (And I haven't finished the Myers piece linked in 11.) I consider Pollan an ally in various ways.
And it will always, always, be available to sneer at other people's foodish ways. The foodie world will always be open to accusations of preciousness, whether the topic at hand is how to make the best Philly cheesesteak or the best souffle.
47: What's the paleo position on fruit? Part of our monkey heritage, or overly domesticated and therefore poison?
49: Whole yak penis or sheep testicles on a bed of curry, anyone? ("A Visit to Beijing's Exclusive Penis Restaurant").
51 -- fruit are cool, but you should limit quantity somewhat, unlike green vegetables which you're supposed to eat till you can't stand it no more. Unless you're the insane owner of my gym, who only eats meat from November-April because "the cavemen couldn't get vegetables in the winter."
51: overly domesticated and therefore poison
Unlike those ragingly wild cattle, pigs and chicken.
53: you're not making the paleo thing sound less stupid, you know.
S/b "eats only meat." Foiled again by word order.
"the cavemen couldn't get vegetables in the winter."
But you (and he) live in LA. Cavemen at the latitude of LA could get vegetables in the winter. Cavemen only count if they're in temperate rather than semi-tropical climates, now? I suppose you've already identified him as 'insane', come to think.
Anyhow, the more serious claims about the diet are that it emphasizes evolutionarily-preferred foods at the expense of products that are high-glycemic and follow from the agricultural revolution, not that it in fact mimics what a caveman would actually have eaten. Or it could just be an effective means of calorie restriction, given the kinds of foods that are widely available in the contemporary USA. Who knows, but it seems to "work."
59: so, South Beach Diet for dudes, yeah?
Sometimes I pretend that I'm a caveman when I eat animal crackers.
Don't judge me.
Surprisingly, I think this guy just likes to eat only meat and may not have an advanced understanding of physical anthropology. He can flip a 1300 pound tire and run a mile in 5 minutes, though, so something is working.
I mean, I mock, but I love meat and happily (mostly) omit high glycemic index foods from my diet and it seems to work. I just don't talk about cavemen, except mockingly.
I'm waiting for the GEICO ad where the cavemen eat the gecko.
Anyway, I will always be grateful to the paleo diet for that iPhone atlatl thread, which still cracks me up.
Tweety, I know you like to wear the fur underpants and pretend to be Conan the Barbarian. All guys do. This is a safe space where we can talk about such things.
67: I still want to make that app. I've actually started working on it a couple of times.
Bread and fruit are for girls; it has always been so.
Yes, I think this gets at a good deal of what annoys me in the article, aside from it being a classic of the "watch as I bash these selectively-quoted holier-than-thous with a cudgel of bigotry/elitism/irrelevance/environmentalism to show that I'm way holier than them!" genre.
The bashing of TV and Style section foodie-ism as being gluttonous and ostentatious just seems deliberately obtuse and overly narrow in its criticism. That TV show about eating bats in SE Asia probably came right after some travel show about heli-skiing in the Himalayas. And that article about the $100 lunches including duck rillettes and pork belly probably came right before the article about the great revival of custom-made furniture and how everyone of taste and class now has a $10K dressing table with exotic wood inlays and a specially-designed cufflinks drawer. It's not a problem with food critics and food writers, but a grander problem of conspicuous consumption and "fill-in-the-blank porn" that gets the eyeballs and advertising dollars. Don't hate the player, especially when they seem pretty thoughtful and pleasant off the court (I'm thinking especially of Pollan, who I know very little of except for his frequently-cited heuristic of "Eat, not too much, mostly plants," and yet gets thrown into this article as yet another bloodthirsty, unreflective glutton).
Err, 71 was to 45. And only an hour or so too late!
69: Nothing would make me happier.
That TV show about eating bats in SE Asia probably came right after some travel show about heli-skiing in the Himalayas.... It's not a problem with food critics and food writers, but a grander problem of conspicuous consumption....
Let's not hit the meta button yet, inevitable as it is. I suspect many people (cough the usual dreary pack of commenters at The Atlantic cough) readily valorize eating, who would not as enthusiastically approve driving fast or traveling long distances not to sample the local specialties.
74: it turns out to be fairly complicated to get the vehicle detection algorithm to work right, but there's an outside chance my grad school career will help me figure out how to do it, so, you know, cross your fingers.
This could totally add nuance to the already fraught cyclist/driver relationship, if cyclists were virtually spearing cars as they passed.
If there were only some way to text the driver as you connected. "You've been speared!"
75: I dunno, I'm pretty sure you could find a fair number of fans of "Top Gear" among the same crowd who like Bourdain and the NYT and Atlantic food critics.
Also, it rubs me the wrong way to see people writing in a professional capacity as a subject specialist accused of "single-mindedness" as if that showed their shallowness as a human being. To take one example from the article, I'm pretty sure that any professional food writer who didn't sometimes "spend[s] the afternoon--or a week of afternoons--planning the perfect dinner of barbecued ribs or braised foie gras," is slacking at their job. The man's paid to write about food, so blaming him for not bringing up a subtle discussion of Nabokov's later works seems a bit fucking uncharitable.
Also, it rubs me the wrong way to see people writing in a professional capacity as a subject specialist accused of "single-mindedness" as if that showed their shallowness as a human being.... The man's paid to write about food, so blaming him for not bringing up a subtle discussion of Nabokov's later works seems a bit fucking uncharitable.
Charity is for the poor, the weak and the hungry, not the full, comfortable and satisfied. As for single-mindedness, the libraries are full of works by people who wrote professionally and devotedly about things without being as smirkingly self-loving as Bourdain, precious as Amanda Hesser or "I Learned In Recovery/Zen/Yoga/Grad School That The Most Important Thing Is To Fabricate Some Criterion of Moral Superiority" as Michael Pollan.
or "I Learned In Recovery/Zen/Yoga/Grad School That The Most Important Thing Is To Fabricate Some Criterion of Moral Superiority" as Michael Pollan.
Oh please. Pollan is a food evangelist, sure, but you'll have to make a case that there's no need for a reform of food ways, whether Pollan gets it exactly right or not. And get that cough of yours looked after.
I don't think Pollan was originally a food writer. And I initially thought Omnivore's Dilemma was more of an expose of how food gets on the table than a book about food as dining or whatever more conventional food writing is. But I haven't read any of Pollan's books - including the botany one, which is the one I originally wanted to read - or any food writing as none of it sounds particularly interesting to me. Including the anti-food writing writing.
I think the complaint about Pollan is that by 'exposing' conventional food production as unhealthy or environmentally unsound, he's claiming to be morally superior to people involved in conventional food production, or people who don't eat according to his dictates. I don't react that way to his writing, and that criticism seems to me to be completely unconnected to Meyer's criticisms of foodies generally, but I've certainly heard people call him smug.
I linked to this of his, "Playing God in the Garden", a while back -- on genetically modified potatoes, and more generally, on the policies, regulations and ramifications in play in the GM field. The ways in which Monsanto and others escape regulation, the views of conventional farmers on all of this, the effects on organic growers, and so on.
It's quite good. Rob Helpy-Chalk said he uses it in one of his courses.
It makes more sense etymologically for chocolate, since the word comes from fondre "to melt".
Cheese melts too, you know.
Well, people have been making chocolate "fondue" for years. Clearly at least somebody thinks that the dipping aspect of fondue is more essential than the cheese aspect. Are they so wrong?
Well, what I really object to isn't doing it differently from the traditional way, but the attitude, which often seems to accompany such divergence, according to which the dish needed my touch.
Charity is for the poor, the weak and the hungry, not the full, comfortable and satisfied.
Physical and fiscal charity, yes, absolutely, because those are limited by our time and resources. But intellectual charity? The acknowledgement that anything presented in an article or tv show has been heavily mediated by editors with an agenda that's frequently sensationalist or extremely narrowly focused? That sort of charity is free, and I'm fine extending it to people who make a good living off of discussing elite-only problems or matters of taste. (Though that charity ends when they don't realize their own great fortune, which is not often the case)
Definitely not going to argue with you that there are far better writers and more subtle thinkers than the people singled out in this article (though even the most thoughtful writing about food in-and-of-itself could be criticized as neglectful of the real fine arts and literature, as this article does at one point). As I said, I have read or seen very little of the work of Pollan, Bourdain, and co. I mostly encounter it second-hand through reviews and essays touching upon the same subjects. However, I think the author of that article didn't exactly shower himself with glory either.
I don't find his tone smug whatsoever.
87 to 83, or as a continuation of 84.
Regarding the Myers thing, if this is true: "Steingarten tells of watching four people hold down a struggling, groaning pig for a full 20 minutes as it bled to death for his dinner. He calls the animal "a filthy beast deserving its fate." ", then Steingarten is a colossal idiot and the people who slaughtered the pig colossally incompetent; it shouldn't take anywhere near that long for it to bleed out.
The couple of people here who have so far said that they're not actually familiar with any of Pollan's writing might try the link in 84.
89: Maybe the pig had atherosclerosis or something.
I've certainly heard people call him smug.
Well, yes, and that's most likely true. Food and diet are a real minefield area to write about without coming off as moralizing or smug, just like writing about parenting or education. These are all parts of the fundamental human experience that we agree are important, but at the same time have extremely few objectively-supported guidelines for the right way to do things. So anyone making suggestions automatically comes off as arrogant and thinking they're better than everyone else, almost regardless of how much they try to explain their reasoning and admit fallibility.
That's why so many people instead run to the extreme of "here's how little I care about eating/parenting/living properly, isn't it amazing!". At which point, they get called out for loutishness, self-destructiveness, and general depravity.
No one ever sold a book or TV show with the pitch "Actually, my shit might stink. It's hard to be certain, and probably depends heavily on the circumstances."
And Flippanter, I am sorry that after your pointing out that there's no need to get meta quite yet, I found the nearest puddle of meta and began jumping in it like a seven-year-old with wellies on.
That's why so many people instead run to the extreme of "here's how little I care about eating/parenting/living properly, isn't it amazing!".
I felt like repeating that.
I'll also repeat that Pollan, at least in the thing I linked in 84, is not smug.
That sort of charity is free, and I'm fine extending it to people who make a good living off of discussing elite-only problems or matters of taste.
If I took that view, I'd feel like I owed Adam Gopnik a lot of fruit baskets.
I generally like people who are known for smugness, depravity, and arrogance.
Bourdain and some of the paleo people are enjoyable.
Certainly better than people who are self-righteous about not being self-righteous.
Cheese melts too, you know.
More appropriate for chocolate than for oil, I should have said. Cheese is more appropriate than chocolate if one values traditional usage, but equally appropriate etymologically.
(though even the most thoughtful writing about food in-and-of-itself could be criticized as neglectful of the real fine arts and literature, as this article does at one point).
MFK Fisher is pretty awesome and doesn't neglect the "real" things, although she'd probably say that writing about food was a way of writing about people.
Well, what I really object to isn't doing it differently from the traditional way, but the attitude, which often seems to accompany such divergence, according to which the dish needed my touch.
So your dissertation is more in the line of an aubade to an uncaring, perhaps unknowing, complete-in-itself beloved? Hey, mine too.
Brookline police: woman threatened to kill over 'fondue' fight
A disagreement over the correct use of the word "fondue" led a Dorchester woman to threaten to kill a cake store clerk on Friday, according to Brookline police.Rakedda Ladawn Bogues, 21, of 2 Warner St., Dorchester, was arrested on Feb. 18 at 7:35 p.m. on Beacon Street for the charges of being a disorderly person, assault, threats to commit a crime, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and malicious destruction of property, police said.
Bogues and a friend visited the Party Favors Brookline store at 1356 Beacon St., where the friend spoke to a store clerk about cake ingredients, according to a police report.
During the discussion, Bogues apparently took offense when the clerk corrected her friend's usage of the word "fondue" when referring to "fondant icing."
Read more: Brookline police: woman threatened to kill over 'fondue' fight - Brookline, Massachusetts - Brookline
Maybe my intimidating ex-resistance fighter eighth grade French teacher was right about how important it is to get your verb forms right.
From this thread I learned that a) in certain parts of America there are people who think of burger vans as anything other than a good place to catch a quick dose of food poisoning which, really, wow and b) middle class morality is still equated with what you consume and how you do it and it inevitably makes you sound like a douche
Pet peeve: people being passionate about food.
evolutionarily-preferred foods
As far as I can tell, the phrase "evolutionarily-preferred foods" is being used to specifically to refer to evolutionarily dis-preferred foods - the diets of those people who were driven to the brink of extinction by the people who domesticated grains. Caveman dieters seem to have all sorts of reasons why the victory of the grain-eaters was in some way not playing fair[1], but this seems a linguistic step too far and almost bound to confuse people about what "successful" means in a Darwinian context.
[1] often including some very strange ideas about the biology of grains, which if true would imply that mammals in general could not digest grasses, which would obviously make it a bit difficult to explain the existence of all those cows out there.
103: US food trucks are much better than those incredibly shitty European burger vans. Philadelphia has zillions of them in and around the university area, and everyone eats at them every day. Different food trucks specialize in different things, too; very few people get the burgers. The Philly cheese steak, which notoriously cost John Kerry the election in 2004, was invented at a food truck.
As far as I can tell, the phrase "evolutionarily-preferred foods" is being used to specifically to refer to evolutionarily dis-preferred foods - the diets of those people who were driven to the brink of extinction by the people who domesticated grains.
Archaeologically, there seems to have been a bit of swings and roundabouts here. Certainly the farmers were fitter in the sense of sustaining bigger (order of magnititude) populations and thus passing a bunch more of their genes to the next generation, but they seem to have achieved this at considerable cost to their health and well being. Palaeolithic skeletons are very much bigger (as big as modern people) than typical neolithic ones and lack a lot of signs of diet and occupation related diseases that are common in early farming communities.
Shorter: It was more fun in the late palaeolithic, but there wasn't much future in it.
Personally, I favour the post-industrial diet, which allows me the best of both worlds. But I'm not going to get rich writing misleading articles about it.
re: 104
Heh. Not that the average paleo enthusiast is remotely interested in what actual hunter-gatherers, subsisting on the margins, may eat; rather they are interested in what they imagine manful Cro-Magnons were eating in some fanciful temperate 'around and just after the end of the last Ice Age' past. What chris says about the change in body size and life span after agriculture is true, though.
Someone should cash in and write an exercise/diet book that targets the European knight as lost ideal. Nasty, brutish, and fit.
I am hard at work on my current project the "Paleo Exercise Routine", which projects that men should do exercises in roughly the Crossfit kind of way, but that women should keep fit by carrying bundles of firewood and buckets of water.
Someone should cash in and write an exercise/diet book that targets the European knight as lost ideal. Nasty, brutish, and fit.
Already available on line here.
109: certainly. If you read books about knightly education, they were basically training in martial arts six days a week, four to five hours a day. Wearing armour. And though armour isn't _that_ heavy - a suit of plate weighs about fifty pounds and is a lot easier to move around in than modern armour, because the weight's spread over your body - it'd still serve as a kind of all-over continual resistance training. (Mail's less easy because the weight all sits on your shoulders and your waist belt.)
re: 109
Heh. Need to appeal to the gadget-coveting aspect of the male psyché, so I'm envisaging the 'weighted exercise mace' [for mace swinging], 'FitnessArmour (tm)' [weighted vest for press-ups], re-purposed agricultural equipment [the multi-flail], etc. Weekly JoustFit classes at the gym. Profit!
re: 110
Yeah, there was one of those 'meet the ancestor' type programs on tv a while back where they were looking at the skeleton of a knight excavated at Stirling Castle. Summary: the bloke was massive. Not especially tall by modern standards [5ft 8 or something] but carrying huge amounts of muscle, 90-100kg plus, and built like a (fit) rugby player.
There was also one a while back where they had some people doing 'knightly' exercises, and one of the take-away things, which I'm sure I'd read before and forgotten (or just never thought about it), was that the 'if a knight fell over he was unable to get up due to the weight of the armour' myth was total bullshit. They had the participants wearing historically accurate plate mail, and then running assault courses, doing press-ups, jumping over objects, etc. Which, when you think about it, is totally obvious. You wouldn't have armour that totally hampered people's ability to fight.
I think the "if he fell off his horse he couldn't get up" thing might have been true of cataphractoi and of the other side in the Crusades?
112.2: well, yes, most of the time. Armoured men, like English rugby players, didn't do well in the rain and mud; it's a lot harder to get up if you fall over in mud, because there's a kind of suction effect on the armour (just like on, say, a wellie). This apparently happened quite a bit at Agincourt, leaving the French foot knights floundering around and vulnerable to the English archers who were running around with big hammers.
Heat was a problem as well, because you don't just wear plate or mail over normal clothes, obviously; you wear it over a thick quilted jacket and cap, to make it more comfortable and cushion the impact of blows. If you have to do a lot of fighting in armour in (say) Malta, you have a serious problem.
But I am rather disappointed that TH White's wonderful description of tilting armour turns out not to be entirely accurate. 50-60lb is perfectly OK for running and fighting in.
re: 113
I don't know. Wiki suggests that cataphract armour could weigh about 40kg, and they often had saddles that partly fixed them in place [so they wouldn't fall off when they hit the infantry at full plet]. No idea if they could regain the saddle if they came off, though.
Wiki also says:
The notion that it was necessary to lift a fully armed knight onto his horse with the help of pulleys is a myth originating in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. ... Even knights in enormously heavy jousting armour were not winched onto their horses. This type of "sporting" armour was meant only for ceremonial lancing matches and its design was deliberately made extremely thick to protect the wearer from severe accidents, such as the one which caused the death of King Henry II of France.[1]
Back to the OP, meat fondue is a thing (a thing that is indeed a lot like hotpot), so I can't get too worked up about that. That said, I love a good cheese fondue (it's my specialty dish) and it certainly doesn't need re-imagining.
If you have to do a lot of fighting in armour in (say) Malta, you have a serious problem.
Yeah, I'd guess, although humans are actually pretty good at dealing with dehydration [makers of sports drinks not-withstanding] I suppose that heat exhaustion would eventually get you.
113: wiki says that a full suit of cataphract armour weighed up to 40 kilos. That's a lot, but it's still perfectly possible to get off the ground, move and fight with that sort of load, especially as the cataphracts were mounted rather than foot soldiers. A modern infantryman moving on patrol on foot could easily be carrying 80 or 90 pounds, especially if he's a signaller or machine gunner.
If you have to do a lot of fighting in armour in (say) Malta, you have a serious problem
Not an insuperable one though, as the Crusaded-upon found out.
Also, a lot of this is dependent on how medieval tactics actually worked; you can afford to carry more weight if your role is basically to take part in one hopefully-decisive massed charge than if you're meant to be manoeuvring and fighting constantly.
Come to think of it, a medieval knight would have a squire and a couple of servants following him around, so you bet they got to tote all the heavy stuff.
re: 120
Yeah, although as ajay says, modern infantry men carry something akin to the same load, and modern infantry blokes are doing foot patrols, and things not strictly analogous to the one-shot charge of medieval warfare.
1) On the lying to Jews and vegetarians thing: seriously, this is the first time you've heard of this? Waiters do it as a matter of practice, and chefs tell waiters to do it. Working at a restaurant, I heard this just about every day. And while it's sort of macho for the big famous chefs to "trick" people into eating pork, down the line it's mostly laziness about accommodating something you've never bothered to think about. Of course, most serious kosher-keeping people won't go to restaurants where the entire kitchen isn't kosher. For myself, I don't care so much about a little chicken stock, as long as it's not enough to make me sick. But I don't know how many home cooks have cornered me to inform me that "a little bacon" wasn't going to "hurt" me, and that I should "try" some. ("Fear of meat" is not a category of vegetarians that I know of.) We've discussed this before, but meat-eaters in relationships with vegetarians seem to be the ones who are tortured by the injustice.
2) Steingarten is the worst, and he seems central to the argument in the 11 article. He's not even a cook; he's just someone who thinks he's better than you because of where he spends his money. (It's not just food, either; he is also very proud of going to theaters and discos you haven't heard of, and brags about disappointing women on dates by making them do what he wants to do.) One of my students, who, ironically, keeps kosher, lent me The Man Who Ate Everything, and I read it, muttering, "oh fuck you" the whole time. His argument is that people who don't like what he likes are pathetic losers, and vegetarians and kosher-keeping Jews are not even really alive. I asked my student how he felt about it, and he said he enjoyed reading about things he doesn't eat, just like he enjoys reading books about things he doesn't do. So I guess not everyone wants to stab Steingarten in the eye with a pen.
121. The knight would have had at least one pack horse for the serious weight, led by the squire.
On the lying to Jews and vegetarians thing: seriously, this is the first time you've heard of this? Waiters do it as a matter of practice, and chefs tell waiters to do it. Working at a restaurant, I heard this just about every day.
I wonder if you could successfully sue? Don't see why not. Misrepresentation or something.
"Fear of meat" is not a category of vegetarians that I know of.
Really? It seems a pretty common one to me. I mean, it's grounded in a moral choice, but a lot of vegetarians treat meat like it's genuinely taboo. The idea that they may have accidentally ingested a tiny amount of it, unknowingly and with no moral culpability, really does seem to strike a lot of people with revulsion. Of course that's just another reason why sneakily feeding people meat is a shitty thing to do, rather than a reason to be snooty about vegetarianism. But still, the 'fear' is real.
When I was a vegan I don't think I felt that revulsion as such, although I tried pretty hard to avoid eating animal products, but lots of people I know do feel it.
well yeah; if any of us found out that, unknowingly and with no moral culpability, we'd eaten human flesh, we'd feel pretty revolted. Given the premis that vegetarians start from, it's totally understandable behaviour.
125: I think it's less common to do it now that there's better awareness of things like food allergies--don't fuck with people's food--but it is still common to sneer, especially in these middle-brow restaurants. (A truly classy place would never; a low-brow place is there to serve you what you want.) Just a few weeks ago, I was ordering at a new place and wasn't sure if there was meat other than the kind stated on the menu, so I ordered something "without meat" rather than without the kind of meat. I wasn't pointed about it or weird; I've been doing this for 17 years. But every person who came to my table, to take the order, fill my water, bring me a drink, deliver my food, mentioned something about my order "with OUT MEAT in it!" coming right up. I guess it strikes me as weird that this is still hilarious to waitstaff in 2011.
126: Possibly it could be categorized that way. But it does seem fundamentally different to me from the implied attitude toward that fear, that it's a childish unwillingness to try things.
("Fear of meat" is not a category of vegetarians that I know of.)
Maybe this guy would qualify.
re: 127
Sure, I'm not saying they are wrong to feel that way; just that it's wrong to deny that they do.
(And of course, to top off 128, it did come with a few specks of meat in it. This is pretty common IME. I ate them because I don't mind the flavor; it just makes me sick because my stomach isn't used to it.)
re: 129
Yeah, especially ironic given that most vegetarians in the West weren't always vegetarians. It's not that they have literally no idea what meat is like; it's that they have made a choice not to eat it.
But every person who came to my table, to take the order, fill my water, bring me a drink, deliver my food, mentioned something about my order "with OUT MEAT in it!" coming right up. I guess it strikes me as weird that this is still hilarious to waitstaff in 2011
Well if you do insist on going to a steakhouse...
122: and fully-armoured mediaeval soldiers fought on foot as well; foot knights and men-at-arms made up a significant amount of both armies at Agincourt. So they would have been slogging around the battlefield on foot, not just sitting on a horse charging.
As a rule of thumb you can fight perfectly well while carrying a third of your body weight. This is the "irreducible fifty-pound load" that John Keegan says all infantrymen have always carried.
You can tab over rough ground while carrying two-thirds of your body weight, but it'll be slow going.
I ate them because I don't mind the flavor; it just makes me sick because my stomach isn't used to it.
I would be tempted to say this is a psychological thing; I can't believe that eating a few specks of meat would actually cause physical symptoms in someone who normally doesn't eat it.
if any of us found out that, unknowingly and with no moral culpability, we'd eaten human flesh, we'd feel pretty revolted
Not necessarily. Assuming that it wasn't someone to whom one had been introduced, that is.
ajay, I am not sure you try to speak for everybody but you sure don't speak for me. Eating meat if you didn't eat it at all for a long period has real effects. Also, knowing I ate anyone's flesh would make me sick. Even if it were Khadafi's ...
135. It occurs to me that a lot of the kights in armour subthread seems to have been predicated on the idea that the equipment and tactics of the armies of Charles Martel were in any way comparable to those of François I, or at least Charles VII. I'm not convinced that this provides a valid basis for speculation.
Eating meat if you didn't eat it at all for a long period has real effects.
Just because the symptoms are psychologically induced doesn't mean they're not real. I'm just doubting that eating "a few specks" of anything that isn't actually toxic would cause nausea (or whatever) through purely physiological mechanisms.
Halford's evangelism has prompted me to give the Paleo diet a try. After two weeks I will say my sweet tooth is much suppressed and I do feel less hungry most of the time.
re: 139
FWIW, I mock the paleo diet, and lots of other faddy diets, but I do generally feel healthier and less hungry if I don't eat many processed carbs, and other high GI foods. Meat, fish, lots of veg and low quantities of whole grains. As per tweety above.
109-112: The History Channel has often broadcast programs showing men wearing plate armor while doing somersaults, cartwheels, shoulder rolls, etc.
The History Channel has often broadcast programs showing men wearing plate armor while doing somersaults, cartwheels, shoulder rolls, etc.
Because, in the olden days, this is just what people did of course.
Also, quilting bees. Life was very dull before TV and the internet.
Quilting bees wearing plate armour, or quilting squares of plate armour?
You'd need a lot of bees to make a quilt, I'd have thought.
MFK Fisher is pretty awesome and doesn't neglect the "real" things, although she'd probably say that writing about food was a way of writing about people.
She says exactly that in the little foreword to The Gastronomical Me.
"So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love."
(I have loved and often quoted this since reading it in college.)
135: Sorry I wasn't clear; eating a few specks does not make me sick, but eating, say, a substantial chunk of chicken upsets my stomach. I know plenty of vegetarians with much more or less sensitivity, whether psychological or physical I don't know, or if a reaction is "not real" if you can't keep something in your stomach. (I have a very intense psychological aversion to representations of cannibalism; no idea why, but I will vomit. At the time, I'm not thinking, "Oh my GOD this is SO disturbing"; I just get up and have to vomit. Clearly psychological, but the symptom is being sick, not having emotions about it.)
a substantial chunk of chicken upsets my stomach
I've totally gotten this too when I've polished off an entire grocery store roast chicken in a sitting.
Hm, I never have any problems eating an entire roast fowl. I recommend studying the law.
Grocery stores use small chickens, the bastards.
147: ah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks.
Quilting bees wearing plate armour
Don't bees have chitinous outerwear already?
Yes, but they need the quilting as well, to serve as padding. See 114.2.
if any of us found out that, unknowingly and with no moral culpability, we'd eaten human flesh, we'd feel pretty revolted
154: I actually threw up while watching that episode. It was hilarious! And then I barfed.
I chew on the flesh at the edge of my own finger nails, but I don't know if that is cannibalism from a technical point of view. I think of it more as a crutch for not smoking.
Anyway, all this talk has inspired me to use the Arby's gift card I got for a belated Christmas gift.
149: And liveblog when you argue each case with your wife.
Anyway, all this talk has made me want to see The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover again.
Since this thread now seems to be primarily about cannibalism and medieval warfare, this seems appropriate.
I'm with ajay. As long as it was no one I knew or would miss, and provided it was harvested humanely, I would have the same moral qualms (the easily ignored kind) about eating human meat as any other.
provided it was harvested humanely
It pretty much has to be.
160: You should do a "Cannibalism Week" every year, like the Discover Channel and "Shark Week."
161: I'm an organ donor and would have absolutely no problem with donating my meaty bits for culinary experimentation after the recyclables had been removed. Perhaps I should put together something along the lines of the necrocard. I'd prefer slow roasting over an open flame, but I'm not really particular.
164: Unless you are committed to putting on a great deal of fat, you'll be way too dry that way.
Has anyone seen Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day? I had it out from Netflix on the single-disc plan for three months before returning it unwatched. The reviews were all over the place and I got a little scared.
165: Don't worry, Moby. I've got it covered. You can rest easy.
It's a great excuse for not exercising.
I think for anyone past teenagerhood, braising's probably the best way to go. Fatty or no, there's a certain toughness that comes with maturity.
People who cook people in crock pots are the luckiest people of all.
or are overly sensitive to taste (the so-called supertasters
I was more relieved than I expected to be when a very pleasant vintner suggested to me that my relentlessly consistent distaste for wine and beer might be a type of supertaste. (They always, always taste bad to me, like nail polish remover or gasoline. Not remotely like an edible liquid. No, a fancier wine or beer will not taste drinkable to me.) I had always assumed it was because I'm an uncultured barbarian, so it came as a kindness for him to point out that it could be physiological.
I recently read a large soy or corn grower in the Midwest call himself the pipeline by which Monsanto transfers money to Cargill. I'm going to think on that a while.
They Might Be Giants has a song about a supertaster.
I'm going to think on that a while.
And then, I think, you should eat him.
Teo's essay in 160 is really interesting, and also beautifully written.
I tend to go with the "humans have a universal revulsion to cannibalism, except in instances of absolutely desparate hunger or for purposes of ostentatious displays of brutality" line of thought, but that may be just a failure of imagination on my part.
139 -- yeah!
172: But you can drink liquor in a mixed drink? I bet there are wines out there you'd like, it's just that 'fancier' isn't the right direction to move in. Stanley's coblogger made a Concord grape nonsense of a wine that wasn't wine, as such, but was a very pleasant alcoholic fruit drink, and I'm sure there's other stuff like that out there.
According to They Might Be Giants, a single pear could taste like a million pears to a supertaster.
assumed it was because I'm an uncultured barbarian
This sounds more convincing, She-Ra.
I don't have any other evidence that I'm a supertaster. Yeah, I like distilled liquors. Don't like hard ciders, either. Fermenting doesn't make drinks taste good to me.
That was always the leading explanation, apo.
Barbarians, almost by definition, LOVE fermented drinks.
Megan will never know the joy of drinking a fermented beverage from the skull of her slain enemy.
Doesn't work well with water and even the most hardcore of barbarians can't drink a skull full of straight gin.
Unless she uses bondo to plg the eye holes, you can't get that much in a skull-cup.
Fermenting doesn't make drinks taste good to me
So you're saying you consider it a yeast infraction?
OT: No more mastrubating to American veterans of the First World War. And, I believe, to veterans of any regular army in WWI. This is a tough day for those of us with a predeliction for trench porn.
Hmmm. I completely love some of the foods that supertasters object to: coffee, grapefruit, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and spinach.
We're back to the non-flattering explanation.
175.last - I've been giving it a try too, but am running into problems with things tasting absurdly bland due to the no salt requirement. I'm just starting to experiment so hopefully I'll figure out a way to make things that can stimulate my incredibly dull tastebuds. I'm the opposite of a supertaster, whatever that is. It'll come in handy after the collapse of civilization when there's nothing to eat but raw lizards and bugs.
190 - I use salt -- would be pretty hard to do it otherwise.
For the aficionado of WW I porn, I give you T.E. Lawrence:
The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies--a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.
Really, what can one say, other than ATM?
I've been giving it a try too, but am running into problems with things tasting absurdly bland due to the no salt requirement.
I am not following that part super religiously. I have been going low salt as opposed to no salt.
Celery is really salty, as vegetables go -- if you were trying to get the flavor without adding salt to things, you could nibble celery sticks.
191,193: That's the direction I'm heading. I've decided to take the whole thing more or less as a set of suggestions rather than commandments. The major benefit so far has simply been making me attentive to what I'm eating.
There's kind of a hierarchy of sins; salt is a pretty venial one, as is coffee; since I couldn't live without either, I don't.
192- Dare I mention that the Decemberists have a trench porn song?.
166,7- Have never seen the film, but I did like the music Tindersticks did for it. They do good film music.
172, 177- I tried the Rodenbach Grand Cru neb recommended, and it tasted pretty much like fruit juice to me. So while I no longer consider his opinions on beer valid, that might be more to Megan's taste.
I keep waiting for Stanley to interject "Don't taste me, bro!" into the cannibalism discussion.
I was looking at the Wikipedia page on the Paleolithic diet and clicked on the link to Nunamiut, where I read: The Nunamiut people are a semi-nomadic inland Inupiaq Eskimos located in northern and northwestern Alaska, mostly around the Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, whose ancestors date back hundreds of years.
It's a civilization that goes all the way back to, like, the Napoleonic Era, man.
The great thing about that sentence is that it still wouldn't make any sense even with a bigger number.
My ancestors date back about 230 years, but before that, there just wasn't anything. Poof! White bears.
Before then your ancestors were unable to reproduce, as they were considered undateable.
Teo's essay in 160 is really interesting, and also beautifully written.
Thanks.
The great thing about that sentence is that it still wouldn't make any sense even with a bigger number.
It's also of dubious grammaticality at best.
If only there were some way to correct it.
You can wind down salt more than you'd believe. I used to salt food a lot. Now, I put a little with potatoes, with omelets and rather more with pulses. I've stopped adding it to other fresh vegetables entirely except a few specific recipes and I never put it to meat or fish. I think I've bottomed out there.
The food did taste bland at first, but my taste buds adapted or something in about six months. The only downside is that restaurant food often tastes horribly over-salted these days.
Coffee, on the other hand...
Worth pointing out that just by avoiding processed foods and cheeses you're likely (depending on what you were eating before) to cut way down on the salt intake, even if you're adding a little bit of table salt to your fresh vegetables or eggs. I don't salt meat anymore at all.
Coffee, on the other hand...
My grandma puts a bit of salt in the coffee grounds before brewing. She's the only person I've ever seen do this.
I don't salt meat anymore at all.
Sure, you eat it right there at the kill.
207: I've seen somebody put salt in the sugar holder, which is kind of the same thing.
My grandma puts a bit of salt in the coffee grounds before brewing. She's the only person I've ever seen do this.
There is an episode of Good Eats that Alton Brown does this on. Supposed to make the coffee less bitter I guess.
210: Don't they put salt in chocolate for the same reason?
Supposed to make the coffee less bitter I guess.
Why? If you like your coffee tasteless less bitter, buy a mild blend.
Why? If you like your coffee tasteless less bitter, buy a mild blend.
nosflow's first link in 212 actually does a really good job explaining it.
Is their really a valid medical reason to eat a low salt diet if you don't have a serious high blood pressure problem? In any case, eliminating salt entirely from almost any savory food is crazy. We are hardwired to want some. Bread or pasta without any salt is disgusting, meat tasteless, and even most vegetables benefit from some salt.
215. It really is a matter of what you're used to. I would have fully endorsed what you say before I started to reduce my salt intake, but it's very largely a matter of what you're used to, and that can change by getting used to something else.
Most people eat far more salt than the recommended intake, even if their blood pressure is fine. It doesn't do much harm in most cases, but you don't do it because you're hard wired to it, you do it because your mother puts a ton of salt in her food.
I'm not advocating a fetishistic approach to salt - if somebody told me I could never eat cheese or olives or anchovies again, I'd hang myself. But I've come to find that most vegetables without salt actually taste much more of themselves than with. And I find meat as salty as I like without adding extra. I'd guess I still eat more than the recommended intake, even so.
you do it because your mother puts a ton of salt in her food.
I thought that we generally cook with reasonable amounts of salt, and it's only that salt gets added in huge amounts to highly processed foods that's driven consumption through the roof.
146: yeah, I know that line by heart.
The "hard-wired" argument is simply that in a world of sodium scarcity we (and deer etc.) developed a taste for salt. The taste is still there but it can work against us in a world of salt plenitude* if we don't consciously control it. Pretty basic stuff which at some level I do not think is very controversial.
So to 216's you do it because your mother puts a ton of salt in her food, the question is, Why did *she* put a ton of salt in her food?
*See also sugar/sweet, fat, portion size etc. This paper is an overview of evolution and diet (note that one of the authors is a key early proponent of matching diets to earlier days). Actually the Wikipedia article on Paleolithic diet has fairly extensive discussion of the yeas and nays.
I love the photos of paleolithic-style dishes in the Wikipedia article. Make me restaurant reservations...in the paleolithic era!
219: To clarify, my impression is that a weak form of the "paleo" argument is pretty non-controversial--that our evolved tastes make us particularly vulnerable to over consumption of salts, sugars, fats, food period, especially in a world where marketers know that as well. As you move towards " therefor eat like you imagine a caveman would" people get off the bus for different reasons, including technical evolutionary biology ones.
220: YOUR EYES BETRAY YOU, GLUTTON!
you do it because your mother puts a ton of salt in her food.
Nah, that would be my butter consumption. My mom has since switched to a healthier diet, but I'm still on my childhood one, minus the mandatory dinner veggie. On the other hand I eat very little in the way of modern style processed foods (as opposed to cheeses and cold cuts) and I don't really snack.
Unprocessed cold cuts are tricky to find.
He eats ones processed ancient style.
re: 216
Yeah, I'm almost the same. I use chicken stock to flavour some sauces, and I put a reasonable amount of salt in pulses and a little with rice and potatoes, but I almost never salt vegetables and I find a lot of the food in restaurants over salty. It's not an aversion to salt in general. Sometimes I'll go town with soy or fish sauce, and some foods really benefit from it; but vegetables I can happily eat steamed or raw with no salt and I use lower than normal levels of salt in most things. I also don't have much taste for saturated fat or dairy. If it wasn't for the sweet tooth, I'd be positively skelf-like.
People vary a lot in how their blood pressure responds to dietary salt. Both dietary salt and alcohol beyond 1-2 drinks/day raise blood pressure. If you're prehypertensive to start with, cutting way back is a good idea, starting with processed foods.
Regulation of blood pressure by the human body is insanely complicated; Renin-angiotensin system is a good keyword. There are many ways to affect the system at the margins (diet, statins, exercise). The hapmap study as well as numerous previous association studies failed to find common (>2% incidence) alleles clearly associated with elevated risk of hypertension. More precisely, lots of studies have found associations that couldn't be reproduced later.
Many people are perfectly healthy with extremely high dietary sodium levels. In contrast to insulin and glycosylation pathways, where the thrifty phenotype hypothesis has explanatory power, I don't think there's evidence that it does for angiotensin.
Lawrence was deeply upfucked. It's amusing to imagine old howling-mad guerrilla x really awful writer* x gay leather freak biker** in a slightly later era - he'd probably have been a lot happier and less effective, but then, was most of the stuff he effected worth having?
*have you actually read Seven Pillars? Robert Graves' criticism is worth remembering: "he wanted to write a great book".
**he got killed on a blind bend on his Brough Superior V-twin - now that's hardcore.
Also, Megan drinks nothing but distilled rainwater and grain alcohol, to protect the purity of her bodily fluids.
216: I'm not advocating a fetishistic approach to salt - if somebody told me I could never eat cheese or olives or anchovies again, I'd hang myself. But I've come to find that most vegetables without salt actually taste much more of themselves than with.
Agreed. Salting vegetables, certainly as a matter of course, strikes me as very odd, to be honest; which is not to say that a sprinkle of fresh parmesan (salty!) doesn't benefit some veggies. I adore olives and cheeses, but almost never add table salt to anything except a pot of soup.
It's a drag, actually, because I have chronic hyponatremia (low sodium) due to a medication I take, and am actually supposed to push sodium. It's pretty difficult to do so on a mostly-vegetarian, few-processed-foods diet.
Lots of salt in your blanching water will keep your veggies colorful. True fact.
231: Green? Black? Kalamata? What kind of olives are we talking here?
I roast most of my vegetables at this time of the year, and I love the crinkle of kosher or sea salt on them. Mm. But I'm a salt fiend.
230: I've heard that. I don't seem to find myself blanching veggies often, though.
It's really a matter of, as Chris Y. and others said upthread, what you're used to. Some say that my food is bland (by which they mean not salty enough), but I don't register it as bland. The standard advice if you don't use much salt is to make liberal use of herbs and spices, and I do, because otherwise the food is bland, duh. I don't know what the paleo diet says about liberal use of olives, feta and parmesan cheeses, and so on. A no-no, I imagine.
I really frickin' love olives, and have been known to sip a bit of (kalamata) olive juice straight. Yum.
really awful writer*
I will again note my fondness for this passage describing his qualifications to produce a translation of the Odyssey.
Yet, actually, I'm in as strong a position vis-a-vis Homer as most of his translators. For years we were digging up a city of roughly the Odysseus period. I have handled the weapons, armour, utensils of those times, explored their houses, planned their cities. I have hunted wild boars and watched wild lions, sailed the Aegean (and sailed ships), bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men. So I have odd knowledges that qualify me to understand the Odyssey, and odd experiences that interpret it to me.
Olives are totally cool, feta and parmesan not so much.
I don't think I'd be able to do the paleo diet (even aside from the meat) because of its prohibition on legumes. I think I just draw a line there. Limiting or eliminating grains, okay, I get the idea, at least where bread and rice and pasta are concerned, but beans?
It seems kind of obvious that the paleo diet goes hand in hand with significant physical activity, calling for lots of (meat-sourced) protein. If you spend your days heaving things around, it makes sense.
he got killed on a blind bend on his Brough Superior V-twin - now that's hardcore.
Added to the Flickr group.
69: Nothing would make me happier.
I can't believe you lot left this low-hanging fruit hanging there unplucked.
Someone posted on this earlier:
http://www.outofthefryingpan.com/recipes/fondue.beef.shtml
we used to do beef fondue when I was a kid. It was fun.
Meat fondues were one of those seventies things that inexplicably[1] kept hanging on in my corner of the Netherlands long after everybody else switched to more eighties fads like nouvelle cuisine. Cheese fondue we only knew from Asterix in Switzerland[2]
[1] Not very inexplicable; Heine's old proverb might not be correct anymore for most of the Netherlands, but in my neck of the woods the world would end fifty years after it had ended everywhere else
[2] Not Tintin in Switzerland, a very different book though oddly available at the local library.
It is easier to sell the parts of paleo currently associated with rich masculinity. An annoying uncle of mine was poor-me byajting about not eating bread; I remarked that, having given up the modern inanition of autos and indoor heat, I cou eat anything I wanted.
No heat seems to give me pneumonia, even in Berkeley. Pityw
246: Is that written in Esperpaleo?
This seems on-topic: getting lunch at this salad bar joint, I topped everything off with some spicy croutons. They are way too spicy, and croutons probably didn't need to get reinvented.
Shouldn't you post an update to this post sometime soon?
Meat fondues were one of those seventies things that inexplicably kept hanging on
NYC inexplicably got a faithful recreation of Paris's Le Refuge des Fondus, down to the wine served in baby bottles, in 2008.
I read part of 251 as "babies served in wine bottles".
