Book

I went to the library. I checked out this book because the page I happened to open it at had this paragraph on it:

"The fondness of the Chinese for all gelatinous substances is well known, and has been described by all those who have visited that country and partaken of their banquets. In addition to employing animals and parts of animals which are rejected in other countries, as articles of diet, they import various substances which can be valuable only as yielding gelatine of different degrees of purity..." Ok, yeah. That hasn't changed noticeably in the last hundred and fifty years.

The original publication date of the book is 1859, and it is interesting to me primarily as a record of a prosperous 19th century European man's worldview. In an early chapter, he says that "...the prejudices of the stomach are, perhaps, more unconquerable than any other that tyrannize over the human mind" and that "there is a great want of courage and enterprise on this head among Englishmen." What follows is nearly 400 pages of trivia regarding what animals and animal products are known (or thought to be) eaten in various parts of the world. Read as a list of facts, it is utterly, repetitively, stultifying. It is the implications of the list which give the book its creepy fascination to me.

The 19th century was the age of Victoria, upon whose Empire the sun never set, of Manifest Destiny, of brazenly self-satisfied colonialism  and the exploitation by the colonizers of everything from timber to human labor to manatees. Yes indeed, manatees- there is a horrifying account of how many manatees were slaughtered by south American fishermen, and how cheap they were to eat. Two things emerge from the incidental information:

First, the total ignorance of human impact on the environment. I really can't claim to think that this is a case of denial. Environmental sciences are, I think, some of the newest sciences and weren't even in their infancy a century and a half ago. It's true that from the moment humans began to live in cities, there have been back-to-nature types, but these were more spiritual or mystic convictions, rather than fields of study recognized for their intellectual rigor, such as mathematics or chemistry, which have hundreds, or thousands of years of history. The prevailing attitude of human beings toward the rest of the world was "if it's there, use it up". (I think dad even said that very thing, on at least one occasion.) This is typified by the description of gathering penguin's eggs:

"It is really amusing sport. I must remind you that kicking them (the penguins) over with our soft moccasins...does not hurt them in the least, and the next day they will have just as many eggs."

I'm not about to get into a sophomoric discussion of whether it is possible to push a penguin down without hurting it, but anyone today who knows a thing about wildfowl knows that unlike domestic poultry, they lay one clutch of eggs a year, and if those don't hatch, that's it until next year, by which time the adult bird may or may not still be alive. The theme of gleefully infantile brutality which runs throughout the book is absolutely hair-raising.

The second theme has a marginally more subtle presentation, but is just as pervasive- prejudices of the stomach are not the only ones exhibited in this lexicon of carnivory. The writing style of the book first struck me as quaint, in the way many documents of that age will. It is written with a kind of exuberance which can be very entertaining, as in the first quote above. Also, the author's chauvinism in favor of English beef takes up nearly a chapter in itself, and is pretty damn funny. What disturbs me is that, while reading through this list of factoids and anecdotes, the encompassing ideological hegemony of the time becomes glaringly obvious. The author's sources are those which he would have thought reliable, i.e., information published by other men who were the products of the same socioeconomic strata as himself, and occasional historical sources written by Frenchmen. These include nineteenth century arctic explorers, naturalists, and colonial honchos. All a bunch of guys born rich enough to expend the astronomical quantities of resources then required to get their butts halfway around the world and back, and raised to think that just because they had been born rich and well connected, then they must be inherently better than everyone else, and naturally if they were better than everyone else, they must have a moral right, even an obligation to use everything in the world however they saw fit. Leaving aside the question of whether these sources could have been factually accurate (I have no way of knowing how to assess that), and as amusing as they sometimes are, each vignette is presented in a self-congratulatory tone of "Look at all the savage little brown people! Aren't you glad that God made you White?"  The very existence of the book presupposes an audience composed of wealthy, white christian westerners.

I don't imagine that prejudice, of the stomach or of the mind, is the sole provenance of rich dead white dudes. My dad had an amazing degree of  chauvinism about many things, and I distinctly remember him telling me as a child that when he was about my age, he and his friends used to catch garden snakes and set their tails on fire for fun. They hadn't invented sparklers yet, you see. I used to think these were things peculiar to him, but he was as much a product of his time and place as Peter Lund Simmons, or the woman on the max earlier this week declaring loudly that she had no hate for homosexuals, but that she just thought "it was wrong, and she wishes they would change their ways" (between desultory attempts to turn a trick for a group of cons on their way back to their halfway house).

Hindsight ought to tell us that ignorance is inherently to be deplored, which has nothing to do with food, specifically. But it does tell you something about why I find the subject of food fascinating. Food, like clothing, is a universal need among humans. The study of food is illuminating as much for the fact that the subject leads into other things as for its own merits. Here's this book- like anything you read, it is what it is. No doubt the author never imagined that I would take it as an amusing, gruesome cautionary tale of cultural hubris and environmental degradation, but I too am a product of my time and place.

Once again, I think I'll change the name of this blog

 

"Supercilious Otter."

I am positive that the beast on the right is close kin to me.

Hip-hip Halloween!

Mrs. Darling, originally uploaded by Chinkypin.

Here's the Mrs. Darling outfit I came up with for Cynthia. I was not too thrilled when she said her office theme was Peter Pan this year. Nothing against it, just kinda 'meh'. Especially the part about being Wendy's mom. I looked up a picture of the Disney version of that character and the stupid thing is wearing this utterly wretched lilac gown with a giant white flounce around the neck. Aside from being inappropriately juvenile looking, there is no way I would put a redhead in that color. So I did the best I could. I figure, if you have to be a meh kind of character, at least you can get to look smashing while you do it. Which I think she does, even if i did make the costume myself.

I'm especially proud of the fact that, except for the lace, the main ingredients for this came from goodwill. The top is one of a pair of sheer panels I've been toting around for years, and the skirt is a set of silk blend (!) curtains I paid ten bucks for last week, and ran through the washer & dryer before I read the care label. Good thing I was being uncharacteristically cautious, and set the machine for low heat. The curtains were even lined already, so i didn't have to buy any extra fabric for that!

Bread again

Sometimes the bread turns out extra fancy lookin. I've made some procedural improvements since I last  posted my recipe- I now wait for the dough to rise about an inch above the top of the pan, then preheat the oven to 475 degrees. The bread goes in for 15 min at high heat, then I turn the loaf around, reduce the heat to 350 for half an hour, and then turn off the oven and let it coast for about 10 minutes. It seems to make a pretty good loaf. I don't have a convection oven, if you do, take that into account when calculating times & temps. Also, I quit putting cracked wheat in it. It just made it extra bumpy, and swapping in an equal amount of additional oatmeal does just fine.

Egg Buns!!!

I've been thinking about this for months. Brioche rolls with an egg baked inside, plus bacon cheese & chives. The concept is good, but my egg installation technique is a little faulty. I think I need to use a slightly less delicate dough, to offset the added moisture of the egg in the roll. Also, as you can see from the picture,the amount of roll to egg and cheese is pretty disproportionate.

I used the same recipe for the bread as I used back in February to make king cake, minus the spices & vanilla. Once the dough was made, I cut it up into 8 or 9 pieces, flattened out the portions and put them in small bowls so that when I put in the eggs, they wouldn't just run off. Then I sprinkled on some bacon, cheese, and chives, and pinched them closed. I had the oven pre-heated to 400, and the baking sheet heating in there with it. When I'd got about buns assembled, I carefully rolled them out of their bowls onto the hot cookie sheet and baked them for 19 minutes. Which was just about enough time to knead down the other half of the dough and assemble the second batch of rolls.


I was hoping that the dough would insulate the eggs and keep them from overcooking, but as it turns out, the bready part kind of took over. I couldn't get a whole egg to go in there properly, so in the second batch, I just put in the yolks and cheese with about a spoonful of white, but maybe if I used small eggs, the things would turn out a little better. Fortunately, the brioche is a nice tasty recipe, and the roll part was very good with jam.

So, why today? I blame it on IKEA and bad knees. I work all day on Sundays, and lately it seems like every time I do that, I end up wide awake at 4 o'clock in the morning with aching joints. Maybe I just need to buy new shoes, those concrete floors are mighty unyielding.

On the other hand, there is a world of difference between setting the alarm to go off before sunrise, and getting up at 4:15 just because you can. I got to see the crescent moon at five this morning, and had my egg bun for breakfast before 9. Of course, none of it would have happened if I hadn't rolled over and thought "Well, shoot, I forgot to go buy eggs at QFC while they're 99 cents a dozen...I could just go get them now...they are open 24 hours..."

Oriental Field Trip, Episode 2

This week was Mooncake festival. I think officially, it is the Mid-Autumn festival according to the asian lunar calendar, but I usually think of chinese holidays in relation to the particular food associated with them. So, off I went to Fubonn, and naturally, it would be a shame to pass up the chance to try something really weird. So I got the other two things: sun cakes, and a box of mochi choco cheese pies. I'll get to those in a minute.

Mooncakes were something my dad made when I was in junior high school. Some of his crazy restaurant friends got this idea that selling mooncakes would be a good idea, so around this time of year, our house became a mooncake manufacturing sweatshop. Totally illegal, total madness. Completely unsanitary. The things are filled with red or mung bean paste, typically, the making of which is a multi- day process. Basically, it's refried beans made with sugar and lard, cooked down until there's almost no water left in it. Dad made hundreds of pounds of this stuff. As time went on, he got progressively more fed up with it, and kept trying things to make the process more efficient. He tried leaving the beans, in 2 or 3 gallon batches, simmering on the stove overnight one time. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough water in the pots to make it work. During the night, the bottom half of the beans turned into charcoal, filling the first floor of the house with smoke. My mom woke up, ran downstairs, whipped my door open in the wee hours, and barked "ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?!?" I woke up and said "of course!" and mom slammed the door again. I'm cracking up really hard right now, but at the time it was very exasperating. I was fine (obviously), since my door had been shut all night, and being dead asleep, I hadn't noticed a thing until mom burst in, fearing quite reasonably that I had died of smoke inhalation. As a surly tween, this didn't really make sense to me until I got up and peeked out into the dining room. I saw nothing. Not as in, nothing worth remarking on; I mean the atmosphere was as white and opaque as milk. I have rarely been so utterly confounded. Also, it is no good thing to have to show up at middle school smelling like burnt beans.


Errata: Jej disremembers "the bean cloud". This would indicate that she was away at college, which would date the incident to my sophomore or junior year in high school. I think she is correct, since furthermore, I seem to think that dad's restaurant was already defunct at the time it occurred. I was reading something very interesting the other day about false memory- but naturally I can't remember where it was!

Mooncakes aren't particularly tasty, in my opinion, personal associations aside. They're really heavy, and rather bland, and they traditionally have a salted egg yolk in the middle to represent the full moon. While I no longer abominate the egg yolk as I did when I was a child, I can't say I like them either. They do give a salty-sweet balance to the desert, but the texture is grainy and I don't care for it. Mom loves 'em. Still, I do get all nostalgic every once in a while- once a year is often enough to eat these things, I guess.

I always preferred flaky cakes, which is what I was hoping the package of sun cakes was going to be like. When I was in pre-school and kindergarten, dad's mad scientist cooking hadn't yet spun out of control the way it did later, and he would make the flaky pastry on the dining room table, carefully fill each one with bean or date paste, and deep fry them. The proportion of pastry to filling was better, and the pastry itself was a satisfying thing to eat. It was crispy and rich, and the layers would go from feathery and loose on the outside to chewy and dense near the filling. In taiwan, I ate a similar thing that was filled with honey. These packaged things are only distantly realated to either confection. The outside is flaky all right, but there seems to be no filling as such, there is rather a layer of hard crunchy stuff that is not much different in flavor from the rest of the thing. But they are not inedible.

The last thing I picked up is something I may have read about somewhere. I probably dismissed the idea from my mind, thinking I'd never lay eyes on them in reality. But there they were: mochi with chocolate and cheese filling. I am enamored of the packaging, which is highly reminiscent of Nabisco products. They are exactly what they say they are. It had a very helpful diagram on the box explaining their composition: there is a layer of chocolate. It is actually pretty good chocolate, too, kind of like the outside of a york patty, but tastier. There is a layer of mochi. It is what it is. And there is a layer of cheese stuff. Which is a lot like the stuff inside ritz bits, with a certain essence of marshmallow quality added.

Want one? I dare you.

Once upon a time...

Beer Wench, originally uploaded by Chinkypin.

I worked in a costume shop. I think I made this about 6 or 7 years ago, in one of the first years we carried leg avenue brand costumes. As is usually the case, for the first year or so they made halloween costumes, they put some effort into the quality control and manufacturing. The stuff they came out with was pretty much rental quality, and it was stinkin' cute. They made about the first sexy snow white on the market, and they never really lived up to the standard after that. They lost their creative edge, and the products themselves got really chintzy. I wish I'd kept more of their catalogs, because as time went on the wholesale ad photos were about the only thing about that company that were worthwhile.

This is a knockoff of one of the last things they came up with that hit the balance between sexy and tawdry. The first run of these costumes was well made, nobody else had a similar thing in that color combination, and the packaging looked great, as I recall. We sold dozens. I made this up because I wanted one of those darn things, but I didn't want it quite as short as the ones you buy. It's in really poor shape right now, the pleather belt is disintegrating in the way things made out of plastic frequently do, but I can't bring myself to get rid of it. The trim with little hearts is just so adorable. Sigh.

Wearable muslin up for grabs

That is, a throw-away which is made up in a potentially usable material, just in case it turns out ok. Interior finishing is ugh-leee (it's brown, and pretty raggedy) it has no fastenings (it's pinned together in the front) and it doesn't come with the apron because that isn't really an apron- it's my ironing cloth tied on to give me an idea of what it would look like if it did have an apron. But, it's still sorta cute. Really, if anybody wants to be alice in zombieland or something, it's yours. Dimensions: bust, very low cut and about 32"; waist, about 27"; length of back about 15 or 16", length of skirt, 26". And it has really small armholes- I got treefrog arms. If nobody cares for it, I'm gonna tear it up by the end of the week, cuz there's other stuff I could use the material for.

Honey Glazed Orange-Creamsicle Peach Tart

This is kinda cheating, but I liked the way this turned out even better than the original pastry cream recipe I posted last month. I actually made this some time ago, but I got wound up in some projects, and never got the pictures off my camera. I uploaded some shots of what I've been doing for the last few weeks to my Flickr photostream, if you want to see them.

This will make one 6" tart.

You will need: the leftover pie crust and half a cup of cream filling from the recipe posted on August 24. Also, a very ripe peach and about 1/2 cup of greek yogurt. And about a tablespoon of honey. Roll out the pie crust scrap and bake a miniature tart shell with it. Be aware that most crust recipes will shrink substantially during baking. A friend of mine at the office sent me this link to a shrinkless pastry crust, if i ever try it, I'll tell you how it goes. BUT! I didn't have that recipe when I made this, so nevermind for now. Bake your tart shell. When it's cool, mix the yogurt and pastry cream together and spread it in the shell. At this point, you could chill it until you're ready to serve it, but I don't think that it'll set up- it will probably stay a bit sloppy. Just before you want to eat it, heat the honey in a little sauce pan. Slice some peaches onto the pie, and when the honey has boiled gently for about 20 seconds, spoon it over the peaches.

Why do I like this better? Lots of things. While I do love figs, peaches are a better choice here. The yogurt adds a subtle tartness that goes with the fruit better, for one thing. I think the fact that I used orange flavoring in the cream sorta requires a little acidity to taste right- citrus flavor should have some tartness to it, and it didn't without the yogurt. Boiling the honey for a few seconds causes it to form a chewy, caramely coating when it touches the cold pie. The whole business just adds up to a more interesting flavor and texture profile.

Coming soon: Halloween. I got some things to show you. Eventually.

Tea and Goodwill

How often do I drink tea? Every damn day. How often do I use a teapot? Like, never. My fascination with teapots is this sort of guilty obsession, because I own three or four, and don't ever use them. But seriously, they're adorable!

I've wanted one like this for quite a while. Until this set turned up at Goodwill, I figured I'd have to wait until somebody gave me a gift certificate to some Shmantzy Tea Shoppe or something, because a pot alone will usually retail for over 25 bucks, which I think is way too much to ask for a thing that I don't need, and has absolutely nothing  unique about it. I paid $3.99 for the teapot and 99 cents for the teacup.

So what did I get for my five bucks? The teapot is heat resistant. I could actually heat it on the stove, if I wanted to. It even has the little squiggly piece of wire with it to put between the pot and the burner so it doesn't shatter. It has a glass diffuser insert. This is way cool, because even high-end brands like Bodum come with plastic ones which will stain over time. I've actually passed up one or two Bodum brand pots at Goodwill, for that reason- they look pretty gnarly with the diffuser thing all gunked up. The spout is surprisingly well designed. I thought it looked really ungraceful, as though it had been cut off at the wrong angle and they'd just said the hell with it, and packed it up anyway, but in fact it is about the only teapot I've ever used that is perfectly dripless. It doesn't drool on itself! How neato is that?! The teacup wasn't born with the pot, but I'm pretty sure it's made of pyrex. It has a little anchor mark in the bottom that I think is a trademark for the Anchor Hocking company.


I  also got another handful of vintage sewing patterns, which I should really really quit buying, but the envelope illustrations are so hard not love.