May 24, 2006

• That the average parent is blind to the faults of its offspring is a fact so obvious that in attempting to prove or controvert it time and logic are both wasted. Ill temper in a child is, alas! too aften mistaken for an indication of genius; and impudence is sometimes regarded as a sign of precocity. (Did Mr Estes know our own dear Chy?) This is an excellent post.
• Here I am trying to pull an allnighter and you go and post this. How am I supposed to get any work done now? Awesome find, Chyren.
• Fantastic post. I feel I must neglect my work now.
• What a career! Them recipes is making me hungry. Weren't we all happier before cholesterol was invented? *Misses the elegant days of train travel, rings for porter*
• Nice post.
• ))) for a Quality post! Another grand find here Chy. Think I shall prepare some deefoot sausage tomorrow morning for breakfast. I'm tempted to print this out.
• I am planning on making cream of asparagus soup today and his recipe is pretty much the same as the one I planned on using, with the exception of the knuckle of veal broth. Cool post, Chy!
• Awesome
• I never knew Lafcadio Hearn wrote a cookbook. A great find!
• Fascinating, useful and appetite-whetting. Top post, Chy, thanks!
• I'm gonna actually try and adapt some of these recipes, as lately I've been getting into cooking. I think I must invest in a deep fryer, though, something I've never used.
• Whip us up a mess o' vittles, Chymo!
• Great post BTW.
• I think I must invest in a deep fryer, though I find I've gotten more use for the money from getting a big-ass, heavy skillet with really tall sides and an oil or candy thermometer. The big-ass, heavy skillet with really tall sides has more uses, usually for less money, and does a good job of deep frying. That is, unless you're wanting to do big stuff like whole chickens. Then you need a big-ass deep fryer.
• I've heard that the big-ass deep fryer is good for cooking rump roast.
• A non-fluff piece, not hideously badly written, which reads unlike a fucking satire. Believable non-dross.
• Fantastic post! It's all I can do to stop myself from sitting here reading it from 'cover' to 'cover', but I've got work to do! deep fried whole chicken????????
• /sputtle
• deep fried whole chicken???????? Hell, a chicken has nothing on deep fried whole turkey.
• Not to mention deep fried whole gallon of ice cream.
• I doubt that many thought sugarmilktea was kidding, but for those who've never heated more than an inch of oil, here's the firey truth.
• A big skillet would be too messy, wouldn't it? I'm not exactly the cleanest cook around, so I'd want to try and avoid having the oil spit everywhere. Funnily enough, I just bought a candy thermometer. Those things are hard to find.
• It's actually not too bad, in my experience. There'll be some spatter, naturally, but you'll get that with a deep fryer too. Just be sure it's got very tall walls on it -- I think mine is like 3 inches deep, maybe more -- and you'll be fine. Of course, pouring the oil out when you're done can get a bit messy, if you're not careful.
• If the skillet is well seasoned cast iron, nothing can beat it for frying. The iron spreads the heat so evenly! I'd guess that was what Estes used, since they were much loved in southern US kitchens. (I have 3 of them - one inherited from my grandmother which must be almost 100 years old.) Has anyone else had a problem accessing the first link? I've tried to visit there all day, but it keeps timing out.
• And remember, it's all about temperature! If you're going to deep-fry, for fuck's sake make sure the oil is at optimal temperature. To the contrary of general belief, deep-frying can be a healthy form of cooking. /rant There's some interesting custard variations here I think I will try. One of the things I also admire about this collection is the simplicity of the recipes. Mr. Estes leaves room for the creative cook...
• I visited the first link earlier today path, but alas, it timed out on me as well when I just now tried.
• The Gutenberg link seems to work fine from here for me.
• I meant to say, btw, that this is truly a great find, as antebellum southern recipes are hard to come by. Southern US cuisine nowadays is very different from what it was back then -- somehow we lost those old British and Indian influences. Curry powder, for instance, is nowhere to be found in what came to be known as Southern cooking. I've got a chef friend who would very much like to see this.
• Yeah, I was chuffed to see this on RW, & I spent about an hour just reading thru it, so I thought I should share.
• Don't forget this gem. I wish I could find a better link for it. (Well, here's a review of the play.) Find the book at your local library. Book Description Spanning over a century of African-American life and culture, this classic oral history celebrates one remarkable family's heritage as told through photos, reminiscences, and recipes--now back in print after six years.B & W photographs throughout.
• OH GOD I LOVE FOOD
• Mmmmmmm! I'll be beer-battered and deep fried if this isn't one scrumptious link, Chy.
• A wholesome and filling post! An iron wok also makes a fine, inexpensive deep-fryer
• UM, guys, this linkies are about cooking. Everyone who praised this post please check their testicles at the dood.
• DOH! Door! Check them at the door!
• The Dood.. abides?
• Berek - I think you're in the wrong community blog. Surely there are others out there which would more suit a stud like yourself. We're all pretty much wimply folks who find great pleasure in discussing topics like this.
• One need not relinquish the wedding tackle before entering the kitchen. Indeed, the preparation of a sumptuous meal for the apple of one's eye can lead the way to many other delights.
• *checks, can't locate testicles or dood, shrugs*
• Fry me up a mess'o collard greens and testicles.
• Okay. Want some wine with that? Say, that's a mighty purty dress yer wearin' Whataya say, after dinner, we take a walk down by the lake? I'se got somethin' I'd like ta show ya.
• I'd sleep with Alton Brown.
• path is on the war.. uh.. path...
• Actually, if I were on the war..uh..trail, I wouldn't have deleted all the comments I really wanted to make, but refrained wisely from doing so. Some of 'em were quite good.
• Good as a time machine, found dishes I haven't heard of since I was a small boy. Scotch eggs, orange fool. and mushroom catsup -- my family used to make it, but not since the early fifties. Fried parsley -- does anyone do that any more? And boiled samp (good grief!) Corn fritters: haven't had those in thirty years. Notice he makes Brunswick stew with a chicken instead of a rabbit, but I suppose rabbits were harder to come by on the rails. Mr Estes, if he lived now, might have made a fine monkey: he used a lot of bananas, and some dishes are definitely unexpected like the bananas and sweet greeen peppers dish. That one -- have to see if I can canoodle the kitchens gods into making that one.
• That would be a grand one, because the alkaline 'nana will smooth out the peppers in the ol' taste buds. Like adding coconut milk to your green Thai curry. MMMMmmmmm.
• ...curry? *The Hunger falls upon him!*
• *sees Bees lying faint and pale Quick, bring the reviving curry!
• <3s BlueHorse!
• not to pile on Berek, but I've always personally believed that men can be amazing in the kitchen. perhaps because I grew up in a home where the only really good food was prepared by my dad... my husband is a masterful cook, and he takes great joy in preparing meals, from beginning to end. I definitely think it's one of the sexiest things about him :)
• I worship a good cook. Whenever I try to make things in the kitchen, they're ho-hum or disastrous. I do a little better over an open campfire, but no one is ever going to praise my biscuits or find my pot of beans more than middlin' fare. And I'm resigned to this. I've wrestled with it off and on for decades, but now I'm resigned to being labelled a kitchen-doofus and cake-scorcher of the first order. Still, I figure in a sense I'm the primary reason good cooks exist, in that I've always been choosy about what I eat. (Overly choosy, even, some tell me.) If it doesn't have good flavour for a starter, pitch it out I say. When reading a cookbook of such venerable age, I find one has to make allowance not just for individual foibles and tastes of the cook (like Mr Estes' fondness for using bananas), but for prevailing styles of cookery and cooking equipment and techniques of the past. So Mr Estes often mentions pressing things through a strainer/a hair-strainer/a colander/a fine-wire mesh and so on -- or he'll specify a gas stove for a certiain dish. As a little boy (product of a houseful of fine cooks both male and female) I termed some foods 'hotel cooking' -- by which I meant vegetables boiled to mush, meat to a pulp, and everything flavourless. Mr Estes is a product of his time -- and has no hesitation in saying dump in a can of peas, for example -- but the state of the art of food preservation and the availability or lack thereof of fresh things was a fact of life back then. And he was used to cooking for institutions like the railroad. Produce was seasonal, and intermittent. (Which is one reason why knowing to substitue things matters so much in cookbooks and kitchens of yore). He assumes you are going to kill, 'drain', pluck and cut up your chicken -- you kill it this evening and let it hang overnight and tomorrow morning, before preparing it for tomorrow night's dinner. And this was how folk still did it when I was a kid and many families still kept a few hens and a rooster in the back yard or behind the garden shed cum hencoop. Notice he mentions using baking soda to salt/retain colour in peas and beans -- a practice I've heard castigated in more recent times, (though when I've made medical inquiry about this I've been told it's probably better than using regular table salt for people). One can still find people put kitchen produce using it -- just check out what's offered at any farmer's market in the way of jars of green beans. Fashions come and fashions go, and only appetite and the enthusiasm of people for eating remains constant.
• I love cooking. If that means some people think I have no nuts, so be it. I'll be the one with the happy girlfriend.
• How the stereotype of cooking being feminine even continue? Cooking actually can be a very sexist profession. Traditionally, professional chefs are men, sous-chefs are men, even the dishwashers and assistants are men. When I worked briefly as a cook, I was the only female (though there were plenty of women working as bar or wait staff), and faced a fair amount of mild sexism for it.
• Hey, when it's tasty, I don't bother to lift the chef's apron!
• i dunno, i love to cook and i'm gay... not that it affected my, er, coinpurse, however...
• yes that's right, i'm the dood with whom you should check your testicles.
• Cooks, in my experience, are the butchest guys around. Manliest men per capita of any artform, I would say.
• mac ho! ye chefs wi' bonnets set askew some monkeys vastly admire you
• So Alex Ander, I assume you mean chefs in really good restaurants who do that for a living? I think there are a number of female professional chefs who would disagree. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that that's been my experience in mid to downscale restaurants. Could you clarify a little?
• I hear tribal drums.. I see smoke signals on the horizon.. ;)
• Chy - that's the only thing I've ever read on Monkey Filter which makes me laugh every time I re-read it.
• Heh. Well, I of course was refering to male chefs as those are the center of the debate, but even the female chefs in my limited culinary travels were all a little bit more masculine than your average sorority girl. I really haven't met that many chefs, and they were all in mid to low scale settings, but the image of a male chef has always been of something of man's man to me. I don't really even get how there is any stereotype to the contrary, as I've never really run into before, in real life or anywhere else.
• But, hey, if you wanna wrassel... *takes off shoes, rolls up pant legs*
• Sure, I'll wrassel. *Checks callouses, find them painful, but impressive, decides that the hair on legs gives some sort of power upgrade, tries for that cockeyed wrestler look in the commercials.* Well, sweetie, I'm not sure why you want to rely on stereotypes, but if they have value to you, I don't think they're really harmful in this instance, except for the sorority girl thing.
• It's useful to talk in general at times, but really I was just saying that I don't know why anyone would say cooking wasn't masculin and would generalise about cooks characterising them as anything other than such.
• Um, didn't your mother cook?
• If you want to call it that. I guess I don't know if it's inherently masculin or femminin, I will stick to my original point that there are masculin male cooks. Not that it means bugger all to begin with.
• I know exactly what Alex Ander is saying. For all that women do most of the cooking in the home, professional cooking is, for the most part, a very macho profession. Maybe they are trying to compensate, I don't know. But it's a very masculine environment, even to the point of just being all out sexist. There are plenty of female chefs, but many fewer than male, and I would expect that most of them faced a fair bit a sexism in their life. At least, that is what it's like at your average restaurant - maybe the world of high end cooking is nicer.
• Think it's like making clothes or brewing or any of the areas which once, in more agricultural times, fell mainly into the ambit of women: once enough money as a tailor or a brewer or a weaver could be earned, enough to support a family, then men started doing it, too.
• I agree with Alex and jb that the high-end professional chefs are often male. A close friend works in restaurant management and in every hotel she's worked, the head chef has been male. Another friend's husband is a chef at a four-star hotel here (we don't have any five-stars in Christchurch) and he's incredibly sexist. He also studied at chef school in Austria for four years so he takes his chefing very seriously. My friend often complains that he thinks he's a brain surgeon.
• Almost all professions are male-dominated.
• My friend often complains that he thinks he's a brain surgeon. Well, he could be. Does he cut up his own organ meats?
• Cue: Chy posting that flickr set of the preparation of Vietnamese dog & brain/blood dog sausages.
• I thought I was a brain surgeon once. Turns out I was just a zombie chef.
• 1) Anyone, of any gender, who cooks well, rocks. 2) Sexism is icky. 3) Dog sausages are likewise icky. 4) Anyone want some butternut squash risotto? It's got sage and parmesan, and crunchy toasted squash seeds on top. 5) This link is awesome. Thanks, Chy!
• mmm risottooooo..../drroooooolllll
• I'll have the risotto please. And where's my coffee? I ordered it 15 minutes ago. *recalculates Pallas Athena's tip*
• Er, sorry, Koko! Comin' right up! Look, it's organic and shade-grown and there's a little cream pitcher and an artistic arrangement of sugar lumps and everything. /Smiles toothily, jingles tip jar
• *steals Medusa's dinner roll*
• hey! you bun snatcher, you ;) *stabs TUM with spork, uses ensuing uproar as cover to steal Koko's sugar lumps!
• *bangs fork and spoon on table, then starts picking crunchy yummy toasted squash seeds off the top of the risotto
• *walks in, widens eyes, backs out*
• thread all squashed now?
• It occurs to me that I should have this on my PDA.
• Mmmm, leftover risotto... cold and creamy.
• I now have the text on my PDA, and have archived the images to my home PC for backup. I cannot wait to start cooking some of this. There are some nifty book-nerdtastic errors, too. You can see here that pineapple pancakes are in the index's "N" section, and as well, from page 87 on, the index is one page off. Also, there are two handwritten recipes in the back, one here and one completely illegible one here.