This episode is brought to you by Tab Bird In, New American Cuisine in one of Washington, DC's oldest hotels, located in DuPont Circle. For more information, visit tabber in dot com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from whenever to about one. Who knows from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick.
Brrrr. Hot as hell, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Yeah, it is. Is this some sort of what's that yoga called? That hotbox yoga?
You know the control the controller is right by your feet. What? The AC is uh somewhere on the table. What is it? A guitar pedal?
No. Well, but by Nastasio's feet, are they not on the table anymore? We have like uh for any of you remember, remember the rat? Remember the rat, the guitar pedal, the rat? I absolutely do.
Yeah, you stomp it and it turns into grungy whatever. Yeah, we should wire that up for the AC. Just wire up uh like a like a foot pedal. We have to get an old actual rat. Uh I mean those those are still in use, yeah.
You don't have to look hard. Really? I oh yeah. I played bass, of course, not uh guitar. So uh I had an actual bass Wawa pedal, but uh, you know, because I used to listen to stuff that used bass wall, but like somehow the bass law just took all of Nastasi, can you make this work?
I can't make it work. I'm a gear guy, but not when I'm trying to talk to people about base was uh it took all the chunk out of the bottom end of the base. I think what you would need to do is split before the wa, have the wa as an overlay so you could keep some of the lower end of the sound. It just always thinned the bass out, the bass wah wah. Did was it Cliff Burton solo on that Metallica album that made you get the bass wall?
No, I was a I was more of a kind of uh I okay. Like uh I was more like a Bootsy Collins kind of uh, you know. He put so many effects on his bass, it's sometimes it's hard to tell what's going on but um yeah I gotta love Bootsy Collins. Everyone loves Bootsy Collins you listen you listening to Thundercat? Oh I love him.
No. What no really? Really? No he is oh man I'm so excited you need to go listen to Thundercat. Yeah?
Drunk. The album Drunk. Yeah? Uh yeah just do it. You'll you're gonna love it.
Named after Thundercats the cartoon? I've got I hope so I think so based on the lyrics, yes. Nice. Nice. He's like the session player that all these people use Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, etc, etc.
And yeah, he's incredible. Uh are you familiar with um are you familiar it's totally separate uh with uh Austrian Death Machine? No. Yeah. So like unfortunately it's the guy who I think he's in jail for trying to kill his uh uh wife from As I Lay Dying I forget the guy's name uh Yikes uh yeah he he had a I believe it's called Austrian I think it's called Austrian Death Machine but it's all songs that are takeoffs I think there's two or three albums takeoffs on Arnold Schwarzenegger lyrics and uh and movies.
So like you know it's kind of like a like a death metal y kind of uh get to the chopper but it's just like get to the chopper like that with a fake Arnold voice. I will most certainly listen. Yeah yeah yeah I mean I can't listen to like a whole album but I could listen to like a quarter of an album. No I'll listen I'll listen for the stupid grin it's gonna put on my face. Oh yeah yeah yeah you know and I think he also I mean he doesn't just you know, stick to the shoot 'em ups.
He has a little, I think he does a version of who is your daddy and what does he do? Which is, you know, obviously, you know, everyone likes kindergarten cop. If you have any sort of any sort of soul at all as a person, you have to enjoy both the commando style of Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and the kindergarten cop style of Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Nastasia, I don't think has seen any of these movies, even though she continues to work with me for almost how long? I've watched her crap.
I she I even watched The Bachelor once with you. Yeah, like half an episode. I watched a whole damned episode. What's the phone number to call in? Uh 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. So uh by the way, speaking of episodes, uh, Matt, I don't know if you know this, but this is the last episode we're gonna have for quite a long time. I heard. Yeah, because uh we're Nastasia is gone uh next week, laying the foundations for our next uh LA event and Seattle. And then uh I'm in I'm in Taipei.
I'm gonna go to Taipei and uh spread the the good word of uh bar, you know, bar techniques in uh in Taiwan. My book was just translated over there into that talk about this on air, how they translated it in Taiwan, but the messed up thing about it is is that Taiwan is one of the last places on earth that uses traditional Chinese characters. So even though my book is now in Chinese, it is unreadable by the vast majority of Chinese uh readers because only Taiwan, and they're even getting rid of it in Hong Kong now, which you know, to the great chagrin of uh Hong Kong old timers, but the traditional characters have been phased out um, you know, after the uh after you know Mao's revolution for the simplified characters. And so honestly, I I would like to say that you could read my book in China, but nope. Nope.
Anyway. So I'll be in in uh then when we get back, I don't know, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that we that Nastasi and I have to do. So we're probably won't be back, people, till September. Right? So get all of your questions in now.
And in fact, we have a question. Oh, call her, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Hey Nastasia. Jordana here.
Rothman? Guest, occasional, occasional guest. Notable lifestyle influencer. Wait, what does that mean, lifestyle influencer exactly? Collector of various facial serums.
Wow. And wearer of status Birkenstock. You know me. You know me. Wait, wait, wait.
Are there different levels of Birkenstock? When I was a kid, it was just like leather and cork. You got the one Birkin stock. There was only one level of crunch. Are there multiple crunch levels now?
Well, actually, it goes in the inverse direction. It becomes less crunchy the more expensive the collaboration. A few levels up. Birkenstock does collaborations now? Oh, they sure do.
What the hell? What the hell? It's very hip. It's very hip, and you should listen to me, because as a lifestyle influencer of note. I mean, I I'm here to tell you.
I believe you. I believe you. But I'm just saying, like, if there's anything like you're like, like, can't anything stay pure? Like, I was okay when Doc Martin, Doc Martins lost their purity. That happened when I was a kid.
You know what I mean? Like, I always wore the, you know, like the standard like steel toe big puffy crap kicker like stuff. But then, like, I'm okay with the sequins and all the stuff. I mean, like, I I like them. But Birkenstocks were supposed to be, hi, I'm achewing all of this kind of like, I'm just hanging out, man.
But how can you have a collaboration? Who is it with? Please tell me it's with like like some sort of like Sacramento area like rapper, like Lil Mozzie or somebody. Is it who is it? Two things.
Number one, you are the enemy of progress. Number two, Birkenstocks with lots of collaborations. One of them is Rick Owens. That's not what I'm wearing. I'm not quite there yet, but maybe one day.
Wait, and they're not crunchy. No, they're super. The hammer's seen me wear them. Are they crunchy or? No, they're not.
No one will ever see me. No one will ever see me in anything like this because it would require that you could see my feet. Because I am not going full German with the sock on sandals actions. No offense, Germany. But I'm not doing like the seems like you.
What do you sock on sandals? Yeah. Wait, are you? It does seem like you. By saying by calling it sock on sandals, that's confusing.
It sounds like the socks are over the sandals. Okay, anyway. Who other than the Germans put on sandals over socks? Well, literally, like every like gender fluid high school hip kid right now. So I don't know.
Have they all been like paying attention? Is this like are they looking at like old? I I like again, I'm behind the times. I'm behind the times. But when I was growing up, it was you had the it like you got the Birkin stocks, like you went on your German, like your folks march, and you had the socks hiked hiked up over your calves, just underneath your knees.
No, it's more like a it's more like a sort of like low, it's not like an ankle stock, but it's like sort of not even mid Catholic, a little bit below mid cap is the look these days. Jeez, Louise. All right. Yeah, well, anyway, I'll take your word for it. Hey, people, uh, since this is ostensibly a cooking show, do not cook in sandals.
Oh, I do it. I do I cook barefoot. You're a freaking nightmare. Like, you're gonna st you're gonna you're gonna hurt yourself. I ha for safety reasons.
I have to say, don't do this. I have a scar on my right breast from splattering soup on it. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Vitamixing it. I was Vitamixing hot soup in an open kimono.
So geez Louise. I play it fast and loose. Listen, listen, Jordana. I hope you know this other safety tip. When using a Vita prep, both before you use it and after you use it, verify that both switches are down and the knob is all the way to the left.
You have to verify on low. Especially with hot soup. What are you doing burning yourself? Another thing that happened is that I I dropped a curling iron on the same breast and then forgot that I did it, and then I woke up the next day and had like a welt, and I was like, oh my god, it's like sepsis, like I am in big trouble. I like wrote a panic letter to my doctor, and then I went to get ready for the day and picked up my curling iron and I was like, Oh right.
Yeah. So anyway. All right, well, anything in the name of beauty and food. So you're uh listen, you're safety challenged, is what I'm hearing. Let me tell you one thing before you do this.
Especially when you have sandals on, when you drop the knife, let it fall. Don't try to catch it, especially not with your foot sandals, lady. Okay. I'll take that. I'll take that point.
Yeah. I'll take that point. Yeah. All right, what's it? So, first of all, number one, I just wanted to wish you a very happy anniversary with the hammer.
I know that we're coming up on eleven years, and that is a very, very significant milestone, and I wish you the very best. Why is eleven why why is eleven significant? Well, I have this memory of being at Wiley Dufrein's like 11 year birthday party at WD Fifty because like they missed the 10 year, I guess, and then Jelena's came to town, and then we all like hid behind the booze and did like a surprise birthday party. So I don't know. Eleven seems really significant.
It's also lucky. I'm sure it has like some numerology significance. I don't know. It just feels big, and I just wanted to like take the second and just like shout you out, both lifestyle influencers. It's a long time, guys.
Long time. Thanks. We influence people to not have our lifestyle, that's for sure. But uh thank you. But did are we gonna are we gonna talk cooking or what?
You gotta question I have an important question. Okay, so I recently was in Mexico and I made an impulse purchase. Okay. And the impulse purchase was an entire frame of honeycomb. Okay.
Um, and I was like super excited when I found it. I was like, oh my god, this is so special, like what a beautiful, like sort of whimsical, romantic thing to bring back. And so I brought it back and it was like a real like I'm not gonna it's like a real half-slevel travel with an entire frame of honeycomb. I bet. And then as soon as as soon as I like had it back, and even when I got back to New York, I was like, what the hell do I actually do with this thing?
And I think in my mind I thought, oh, I'm gonna have a big cheese party, and then everyone's gonna eat honeycomb and cheese. But that would be like 120 people each eating like their a lifetime share of honeycomb in the space of like a two hour party. So it's not gonna happen. My question is like A, like how do I store it? B, is it like safe to just like have for a very, very long time?
C, any ideas of what I should do with it? So I'm assuming that they didn't cut the cap off of it, that it's not uncapped. It's completely capped both sides. Very good question. So it when I purchased it, it was like largely capped on the surface area, but it's definitely like because of the heat and like sort of driving around with it in a hot car in Mexico and then flying with it, etc., I can see that some of the casts have sort of like deteriorated underneath it, underneath the backpack.
Right. So for those of you that don't know, uh, the way that the way that this works is I I forget the guy's name, but there was a a single person who figured out this um thing called bee space. And bee space is if you just put the way they used to do it is they would put bees inside of uh beehive shaped what we traditionally think of as beehive shaped whinnie the poo-shaped things. Uh, and bees would just build honeycomb on the inside of it, and they would form these layers, but the layers would be stacked up in a way that was difficult to get to. The honeycomb would be glued together, it was hard to harvest the honey without uh destroying the hive, etc.
etc. Uh so they you know they would lift these baskets up and then they would break the comb apart, blah, blah, blah. Uh then this person, I believe in the 1800s, whose name escapes me because I didn't look it up beforehand because I didn't know you were we were going to talk about this, uh, figured out this idea of bee space, where if you space these things called supers, which are the sheets that the honeycombs are built on, a very specific distance apart, then the bees will form exactly one layer of honeycomb and then not attach it to the next layer of honeycomb and will make the next layer. And that is what is allowed the removable uh honeycomb frames, the large square frames of h of honey that you see today. It's this bee space idea.
Uh now a second big innovation is that bees take a certain amount of energy to produce the wax that honeycombs are made out of, because honeycombs are made of wax, that's what beeswax is. Uh, and so um it used to be they would just build the whole thing from scratch, and then they realized if you pre-make that uh the wax base with the hex pattern on it, they'll just build up the things and then and then fill them and cap them. And so now, uh in fact, what they do is is that the bees will cap them over, you'll pull them out, and then they have a hot knife. This is why I asked about the capping that will slice the top cap off, and then they sometimes heat, sometimes not, depending on what your view of heating the honey is. Of course, in Mexico you don't need to because it's so freaking hot, and then they'll dump the honey out of the uh frames, and then they'll just reuse that wax right away so that the bees can you know fill it again without using a lot of extra energy.
Now, uh so just explaining kind of what we're dealing with. Typically, when you buy honeycomb in the store in the small plastic uh boxes, they've uncapped it because you can see it kind of bleeding out. So you can that's again, this is why I asked. Now, what to do with it? That like how many pounds is it?
Ugh. I mean, it's basically like it's probably about two feet, maybe a foot and a half long, and then like a half foot high. So it's like whatever, and that's one layer of honeycomb, you can imagine. Like, I don't know, like a pound. I don't know.
Yeah. A pound, something like that. I mean, like, it would be cool, like you would lose a bunch of the honey, but I could imagine like cutting it into blocks that people could uncap at their plate and pour all over their like individual cheese course, so don't need to do it kind of all at once. You know what I mean? I've never seen I've never seen someone do that before.
Um, how do I store it if I don't use it all at once? I guess is the question. Well, the good idea. The good news is it will the pro here's a the the good news and the bad news. The the good news is is if it's still liquid now, right, as long as it doesn't get too cold, it will probably stay liquid.
If it crystallizes right then you will need to heat it to uncrystallize it and I don't know I don't know uh the I don't know the temperature at which that will happen versus the temperature at which the wax will start degrading if that makes sense. You know from a m microbiology standpoint it's good. You know what I mean? You're at 82% uh sugar there's like almost no water activity so to speak of nothing's gonna grow in it it's fine. So whereas maple syrup at 66% uh sugar is going to uh grow mold if you leave it in your pantry uh honeycomb won't right uh now that the other thing though if you're worried about heat damage and this is something I think people don't think about don't store it on the top shelf of wherever you are that the top shelf of your kitchen especially if you cook can be like over 10 degrees hotter than at counter level um because one it's just always hotter up high because uh warm air rises but as you're cooking like uh hot air from your stove unless you're very good at evacuating it pulls up around the ceiling so the ceiling of your kitchen can get quite hot so I would try to store it as physically low as possible.
I would avoid if you can um refrigerating it just because it will almost undoubtedly then crystallize and then you won't be able to pour it out of the individual things if you choose to serve it that way. Does that make does that make sense? Yeah, totally. So basically safe to eat, store it at like more or less room camps low, maybe in even in like my garage wrapped up. So that it like stays a little bit Yeah I mean I don't know your garage, but yeah I mean like uh or you know just I I I would try to protect it from extremes of heat or cold.
Uh now let me ask you this you're in Mexico but these are regular European honey bees right these aren't uh melapona honeybees. I'm gonna be honest definitely not a question I asked at the Mercado Hidalgo and Tijuana that's not up. Oh it's in Tijuana? Okay so they're not they're not melapona then. That's fine.
Because I was gonna say that um the Melapona honey bees which typically are not grown on a regular full in fact I don't think are ever grown on a full frame like that. Um they produce a honey of possibly substantial lower sugar content and as a result wouldn't necessarily be 100% shell stable. So at the bar we store the Melopona honey in the fridge just because we don't trust that it's a hundred percent stable but other honeys yeah are are are fine. And like I say and in fact can can be a pain in the butt if you um if you let them get too cold because they'll they'll crystallize some countries like uh if you buy honey in um England typically it is creamed so it's it's it's beaten a little bit and then allowed to crystallize so that it's more spreadable and less of a liquid pouring thing but here in America we prefer a you know a porrable honey that's that's that's what we uh that's our jam the poop style yeah when it's final question although he was English come over for a cheese party. What kind of cheese?
I love cheese. What do you mean you travel? Nastasia lot Nastasia loves to say things about me. Dave are you gonna go to her cheese party? Probably.
I don't know when is the cheese party. I don't know. I have to figure out when I'm gonna open the Free Am of the honeycomb and then I and then if you want to come to the cheese party we can talk about it. I would tell my kids about the honeycomb and they would get super psyched and now be like, no, yo no, not not the cereal, like actual honeycomb. Do you like honeycomb the cereal?
Yeah. I I haven't been I I don't know. You've never had the honeycomb of cereal? I know that it exists, but I I didn't have the honeycomb cereal, no. What was the cereal you had growing up?
Um, I don't know. Oats. Oats. I had I had morning gruel. Okay, Oliver Twist.
Lisa. I want some more. This is why I'm so like hashtag blessed and have so much hashtag gratitude as a lifestyle influencer because of my humble root. You're i in the in the in the workhouse. Yeah.
I would scold her, bounce her, pick him up and bounce her. Uh singing all of her tunes. Yeah. I mean, that it's a great show, so I'm glad you grew up eating gruel. You know.
Yeah. Have you ever seen Oliver Twist? I mean, yes, I've definitely seen Oliver Twist. Fagan was like a big character and my dad loved to just sort of quote the whole thing and and really, you know, drive home the, you know, the privilege to remind us that, you know, we're better off, and so it could always be worse as a common Jewish household refrain. Yeah.
It's it's interesting that you choose Fagan because have you ever read the actual original Dickens stuff? Horribly anti-Semitic, the original Dick and stuff, and yet popularized in uh in modern culture, like the most famous uh actor of fake and whose name escapes me, but he died uh a couple of years ago, was Jewish and kind of like turned it into like kind of like his his best known uh thing. And that character was kind of rescued in a way from being this like horrible pit of an of like kind of uh anti-Semitic uh uh 19th century garbage into something that we're all like, you know, you better pick a pocket or two. You know, it's all of a sudden it's become this thing where we're like all like, you know, we're all okay, you were all okay with it somehow. You know that David has always wanted to be on Broadway, right?
In the bank line, he knows so many show tos. Things as these don't grow on trees, Nastasia, you better pick a pocket of freaking too. All right. Well, anyway, happy anniversary. Thank you for the B lesson and everything.
Impressive as ever, and enjoy the rest of your show. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Uh chat desperately wants to know uh to know has your cherry allergy been cured.
Uh okay, so has my cherry allergy been cured. Nastasia was hoping that my throat would close up, and you would all like enjoy hearing it. So when my throat closes, I do like an amazing Donald Duck impression when my throat closes up. But uh it turns out that I can now have at least a limited number of cherries. The maximum number I've had in a row to date has been like 10 or 15.
But I'm and I would my wife doesn't listen to this, so it's okay. I would be lying to say that I felt nothing. But but, right? You know, uh now you have more Oliver songs going through my head. If I could say he wasn't very greedy.
Anyway, but uh, but in other words, I am, I would like to eat an entire like whole bowl of cherries, but I I won't. So I felt a little bit and I stopped, but it didn't progress. So I never felt like I was gonna have to go to the hospital or even really take a Benadryl. I really I hate taking Benadryl. I hate taking Benadryl so much.
So I can have uh yes, I can have cherries now. So now when I go out to restaurants and people are like, Are there any allergies at the table? I don't say anything anymore, which is a great feeling because I hate to be like cherries and low quats. They're like no cum quats. I said low quats, cumquats, low quats, low quats, like Lindsay Lohan quat.
Low quat. And no one serves low quats anyway, so it's a dumb thing to say. I haven't tested I I was like, raw jackfruit is giving me reactions before. But you know, like no one serves raw jackfruit, so you don't want to have to give the explanation. So I'm going to separately test low quats and raw jackfruit.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. The people needed to know. Yeah, yeah.
Uh Devin the dude also asks, Any point to pressure frying for home cooking? Best info I found online points to its speed and tenderizing ability for tougher chickens of decades ago. Uh yeah. I am a tougher chicken of decades ago, for sure. Well, okay, so it's interesting.
Um obviously the professionals uh pressure fry. I don't have personal experience with it. Now there uh we answered some questions a while ago um from I should probably do it for the next book because it's part of the theme. It's not just low temperature cooking, it's it's like all forms of moisture management, and this is a form of moisture management. So I should in fact deal with it.
The the people who used to sell pressure fryers stopped selling them, I'm guessing because of horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible liability problems. I mean, can you imagine like having someone pressurize oil? And when you read the when you read the manuals from modern day pressure cookers and they mention like frying, they're like, Nope. Nope. Um, but that said, I would love to I would love to try it and and you know, but I don't have any I don't have any influence.
My guess um any um first hand knowledge. My guess is that uh since it's the way all the professionals do it that it produces a better product. I have never tried it. This is why so look, one of the advantages of pressure cooking is one, you yes, as you say, there's probably some tenderization effect of the um of the of the meat due to the pressure. You know, why not just test like a pressure pre-fry?
So this is why I uh most of the time I I low temp, no matter what Kenji says, I think he's wrong on this crap, and you know, we just need to do a side-by-side battle on this. Like I do a pre I do a pre-cook most of the time of my chicken before I fry it now, where I never used to. It used to be I did it the old school way where I just turned the temperature of the oil way down low, and then you would like hit it a couple of times, in and out, go in and out to try to get the inside done at the right thing. But I was never cooking any of the old tough chickens, and I've never fried an old tough bird. And it used to be the majority, if not all birds were old tough birds, but they had better flavor.
So like I you know what? I should try to get some old like roasting fowls and just pressure cook them and see whether the breast meat is even palatable at that point. That's why I usually use that stuff for soup. Soup! Uh, because I mean the flavor is really good, but Americans just don't like a chewy chicken.
Do Americans like a chewy chicken, Nastasia? Hate a chewy chicken. Mm-hmm. Nastasia's hugging the microphone, which is weird. Well, normally she hates the microphone, but she's like She's trying out a new thing.
She yeah, yeah. It's like it's like some sort of sign of like love and respect. You know how like when a dog goes up and puts its like head on your knee, she's doing that to the microphone. It's like, you know. Turns out the sound, when you make sound, comes out of the front of your mouth, and then if you point it into the microphone, she's trying to sound like one of those old smokers with the thing up their uh throat.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my god. We already talked about that on air, right? Is my most embarrassing moment. I don't know.
No. What is it? We never spoke about my most embarrassing moment. No. Please say don't do that now.
Do I know it? Of course you know it. What is it? It's not food related. I know, tell me.
I believe I said it. Just say it. It sounds like it's an issue, so we can talk about it. So uh Nastasi and I both have a habit of putting our foot like not so much our foot as like all the way down to our knees into our mouths at various points. Can't imagine.
Yeah, like like a German knee-high sock. We can get our foot that far into our into our mouth. But uh wait, which one? I need to. So I was at my so uh I grew up watching uh peanuts, you know that like uh Snoopy, peanuts, you know, Charlie Brown.
And um Snoopy used to play what's called a jaw harp, right? Some people call it like, you know, I I don't they use a different term which I won't use because I don't even understand like how it's related, but jaw harp, right? And it goes, and it's like shaped almost like a lyre with like a little like metal spring in it, and you put it in your mouth and you hum and you and you do the spring and it money meme mee meme. And so Snoopy played one in one of the peanut specials, and I used to watch it as a kid, and I always had a fascination with this instrument because it was like required no skill in the same way that a kazoo requires no skill, right? And do you like kazoos growing up?
Mm-hmm. Matt, kazoo fan growing up? Love a gazoo. Everybody loves a kazoo, really, if you think about it. People say they hate a kazoo, but everyone, if you go on, if you hand them a kazoo, they start playing the kazoo.
So uh I'm at college and I'm a book uh fiend. I I take anyone's books at all times. I like so my friend was graduating, and I went over to his room, and I'm looking at his books. So, like, you know, uh for those of you who don't know me, I I don't so much pay attention to what's going on around me, right? And so I'm looking at his books to see if there's any books that you know I can have because he doesn't want to ship them back to California where he's from.
And I hear bing miming ming me. Now, in my defense, I knew that the guy came from a musical family. Like, you know, his his dad was a professional musician, his brother was a musician, like they come from a mu musical family. So I'm hearing me. I'm like, I turn around and go in my best hey voice, hey, who's got the jaw hard?
And I turn around, and it is his grandfather who had throat cancer with a trach and a little microphone, and he was holding the microphone up to his throat saying something to somebody, and I was like, goodbye. And then I walked out, and that was probably the most embarrassed I've ever been. Every once in a while I say to myself, Who's got the jaw harp? And then like, goodbye. It's like your reflexes are just too fast.
You thought of that too quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, but I was so excited. I was like, I, you know, I've only seen these a couple of times in my life. I've owned one.
I went and found one and bought one pre-internet days. I'm like, here's someone playing one in the room where I am. Have you? Can you tell the one about uh uh forehead? No, no.
You don't have to say the beam. No. Why did he? No. No.
You're gonna be off the air for a whole month. People will forget. No, no. We were at a table with a mutual friend. Yeah.
Take it from there. No, it's not even that good because you have to know the players. I'm not gonna tell you who the players are. Basically, I say, hey, a guy's got a big forehead, huh? And the other person's like, that's my brother.
Okay. But like, you know, like standard stuff, but it's just like it's like a mutual friend. Synastasia. Why couldn't it leave? You had to sit there for the rest of the dinner.
It was fine. It's fine. His head, his forehead was large. Oh, yeah. Way worse.
The guy had, you know, whatever. Anyway. I'm sure that technology has gotten a lot better since then. Oh my god. Wait, I'm okay.
So there's a person on the line. Uh-huh. Do you want to wanna talk to them? Yeah. Well, I if you make it seem as though I don't.
I forgot about them for a minute. Sorry. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, yes, let's talk. Let's talk.
Caller. Uh hi there, am I on? Yeah. How you doing? Hey, babe.
This is hey, this is Mel from Oregon. Um, I'm super glad I called in uh right before you went off the air uh for a month. But I I I have I have two questions. I'm gonna ask the first one and then we'll see if Nastasha lets me get the second one. Um so I'm I'm interested in uh doing recipe development on uh vegan ice creams or vegan frozen desserts.
Um do you have a recommendation for what kind of machine I can use in the like you know thousand to two thousand dollar range that will give me like really accurate test results when I scale up to a larger type of equipment? That's real cheap. Um that's so like how first of all, like how as am I? Yeah, yeah, right. How handy are you?
Are you handy with equipment? Uh pretty darn handy. Okay. I mean because uh you know, it's like on sub 1000, right? As far as I remember, it's been a long time since I've searched.
You're looking at something that will, you know, you're not looking at doing like one-off stuff like like doing LN or even like trying to get used Paco Jets, which are much more expensive. Like usually, you know, everything sub 1000 is like those countertop kind of home stuff, and the problem with those is just the refrigeration units just simply are not powerful enough. So you're never gonna be mimicking the batch times that you're gonna get out of um a real like you know, commercial, like more than more than six thousand dollar machine, right? So it's like, you know, and and the difference between a machine that has a batch time of like 20 minutes and the difference between that and something that can have a batch time more like eight minutes is enormous in terms of testing for the ultimate texture that you're gonna get um out of the out of the product. So um I would say if you are handy, and I am also always hesitant to have people buy used equipment, but um, you know, the generation of ice cream machines that people used to use uh in restaurants that are relatively small, like tabletop-ish but big, still run off of a 110 or still air-cooled, right?
Stuff that makes your life easy. Like, for instance, the old uh the old Carpajani LB uh LB 100s, like those used to be like top of the line machines for their size, but they haven't been made in like a decade. So it might be possible to buy one. I think spares are still out there. Now I haven't looked, but spares are still out there.
You might be able to get one or find a restaurant or something that's closing down and get one. Um back when I was going to try to get my own ice cream maker, they uh Carpegani used to make a very small, uh, uh vertical machine that was functionally the same size as like the Lelos and those kinds of uh inexpensive uh um inexpensive being $500 machines, but was originally like a $3,000 machine that uh you know you used to be able to get for like $800 or thereabouts. I haven't looked for one, but I also haven't seen one in in a zillion years. But it's good for like kind of like prototyping work. Um I would say that uh it's a tough it's a tough thing.
If you're just looking, I mean like uh I don't know if this is making any sense. I mean, I would do an eBay search and uh or even Craigslist or look at uh online auctions and see if you can get one, but then you have to be willing to realize you have to realize that um no matter how much of a tinkerer you are, tinkering with uh refrigeration is a huge pain in the butt because unless you have some sort of illegal c connection to an HVAC thing, you have to hire a real uh you know, a real um refrigeration person to come in and look at it because no one will sell you the refrigeration stuff without the proper permits. You know what I mean? No one. Like even for the modern stuff, which shouldn't necessarily be an issue in terms of the refrigerants, like no just no one will deal with you.
Uh and so I in general have stayed away from working with um working with uh trying to tinker with refrigeration. Um geez, you're in a tough spot there. Jimbo from the chat says the Mousso well polah fifty thirty is uh twelve hundred used on Amazon and he thinks it's a solid buy for this purpose. Yeah. I have to look at it.
What's the batch time on that sucker? Jimbo be fast. Yeah. Um anyway, so we're cogitating on this. What's your what's your second question?
Did you uh using liquid nitrogen to do recipe development? Or is that gonna be just way too fast to compare textures to the commercial equipment? No, liquid nitrogen is fine for recipe development. You just gotta um you know, as long as you get the I I would take a a very standard base and then do it with liquid nitrogen so you get a feel for it. Uh get the rubber scrapers when you're doing the kitchen aid.
Don't try to do it by hand. Uh and then realize that um you know, ten times out of ten, most people uh either under or over freeze with liquid nitrogen, it's very hard to get exactly the right um the right you know, freeze level. Um you also have to be a little bit careful 'cause it foams so much that it's somewhat difficult to completely control the overrun just because there's so much bubbling on it. Uh so, you know, i I love I you know, liquid nitrogen ice cream, we used to that's how we used to make ice cream for people at events just 'cause it was easier than going over to the pastry department and wheeling over their tailors and their uh you know, their tailors and their Carpaganis, and then they would bitch that we didn't clean 'em out right and they needed it for their class, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So like liquid nitrogen was just how we would make it.
Um, you know, we had Paco Jet too, but y that was always hard because the freezers were never quite in the right order to do Paco Jet Alaminute, and then if it was spun out beforehand, it would melt. So anyway, like it was always just easier for us to do LN out of the out of a KitchenAid once you have the rubber scraper. And it's definitely, if you have an easy supply of liquid nitrogen nearby, it's it's not it's expensive on a on a batch per batch basis because you're using probably more than a liter of liquid nitrogen to make a liter of ice cream, right? But um in terms of its initial outlay to see whether or not you like what you're doing, it's relatively less expensive. You can also honestly just you know use one of the old, get a rival salt and ice if you're only doing it occasionally.
It's just it's hard to be a hundred percent um consistent. I've had good luck with an old rival. Uh I've had good and bad luck with White Mountain because the wood dashers on the White Mountain, um the official, you know, old school one, the wood dashers I've had I've had some that I've had good luck with, and I've had some that I've had bad luck with, and I ascribe it to the fact that they want to use some oldie time wooden dasher instead of some like modern, like actual like Delrin or plastic, you know, dasher. I don't know why the hell they do that. I like I don't need some sort of you know, I'm not doing it to like try to commune with my ancestors and trying to make freaking ice cream, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. That's great information. Um, and my last question is can I put 190 proof through the spenzol?
Uh well, it's unsafe. I mean, that the it's just an explosion hazard. You know, so it's not gonna hurt the it's not gonna hurt the spinzole, but um, you know, it's you know, the flash point of of that stuff is I I'd have to look it up, but it's probably room temperature or below, so it's you know, we don't we don't like making a lot of uh alcohol vapor. So I would just uh caught I would caution you, I would caution you there. Okay.
What's the what's the what's a good I upper limit? Uh I don't know. I looked it up based on flashpoint once. It's whatever I put into uh it's whatever I put in the manual. I don't have it off the off the top of my head, you know.
So I'm not worried about really anything that we do uh at the bar. And you know, like I say, it won't hurt the unit. It's just you know, um a lot of people are complacent when it comes to alcohol vapor. Ask anyone that's done traditional um distilling and then had some sort of a horrible fire uh as a result of uh vapor. So um again, I'm not saying it will explode.
I uh I just from a safety standpoint as the manufacturer, I can't tell you to do anything where the where you have something that is possibly at or above the flash point of the of the liquid. It's just not it's not possible for me to even discuss it. You know what I'm saying? Uh I just cut him off, actually, because we got one more caller to sneak in here if we can. Alright, caller, you're on the air.
Hopefully they have like 10 questions. Hey guys. One question is not promise. All right. Um I have a fried chicken question.
Uh we we made some version of uh hot chicken last night uh on a on a whim, and uh the texture of the crust uh kind of sucked. And I'm wondering if you have any suggestions, um uh, you know, tried and true techniques to just get a get a good crust, even if it involves using some kind of modified starch. We have a couple things on hand that we can use. What do you do that you didn't like? Um I mean I I did like the uh flour, buttermilk, flour.
Uh basically hit it with flour three times and then dropped it in the fryer. Um but it just seemed, it just wasn't really crispy. Um what was in the buttermilk? Uh it was a little bit of hot sauce, some seasoning, and uh buttermilk. Okay.
So in the so if you're going to do a uh traditional like flour, buttermilk, flour kind of a situation, uh I would in general put the seasoning into the buttermilk. It's just easier to do than trying to season your flour mix, but that's me. Uh also you need egg in there and baking soda. Uh and I think I I I have I put soda and powder in, but at a minimum you're gonna want soda and um and uh egg. And uh that should increase the crunchiness level uh substantially when using kind of regular flour, and that's gonna give kind of your your traditional, well, my traditional kind of kind of crust.
Now that I know there's a there's a whole different there's a whole different scenarios, right? There's the there's the direct out of brine into flour kind of people, but like if you're gonna do uh like like flour, buttermilk, flour, i you you didn't use egg. Uh actually I did. I did uh I used egg yolk. Yolk.
I mean the yolk is gonna soften the crust, right? So I would like in general, like I understand where you're coming from in terms of not wanting like there's a lot of people out there who think that uh hard and crispy are the same thing and they're not like I don't like a hard crust, it doesn't have the right kind of shatter, right? And so like I can understand yolk as a tenderizer, but I've only ever used whole egg in uh and I use it at about the r uh it's been a while since I looked it up, but it's about an uh an egg per cup of buttermilk, I think is what I use. And did you use uh soda and or powder in the in the in the buttermilk or no? No, I didn't.
Yeah. So I would try the soda and the powder because that's gonna uh poof the coating out a bit, and so like those air holes that you're gonna get from the blowout on it, I think is gonna increase your crunch level substantially. I think the protein from the egg white is gonna help you in this case and not make it too hard. I think if you were gonna use like a crap ton of eggs, then that would probably uh damage that, um damage that. Um right now at the restaurant, I know uh, you know, they're we're doing a bunch of like non traditional like slurry based coatings that are almost entirely starch based, right?
And so for those you're working with the properties of specific starches. So adding things like tapioca will give you a little more chew and crunch. Uh potato will give you like a lot of that initial like swell. So like a lot of people doing mixtures of like rice, potato, uh a little bit of tapioca for pliability and chew if you like that. Um but if you're you know, a traditional a traditional flour coating can be quite crunchy, but I think maybe it's the the soda and the so soda is good for a number of reasons one it's going to i well it depends on on your stuff it's gonna make it turn brown faster because remember the buttermilk is uh acidic so if you don't add um if you don't add uh some sort of base to neutralize it the acidity is going to um it's gonna make it be very blonde so it's gonna take a long time for the color to develop properly uh I can't say offhand in a fry coating what acidity will do to the texture of it if I had to guess I'd say it would make it softer so adding the baking soda is going to make it uh neutralize some of that acidity gonna make it so that it browns more effectively but also will immediately create it's the equivalent of using seltzer so like for people who use seltzer water in their batters or or carbonated vodka or whatever in the heck people are using now to introduce air bubbles into the batter to lighten it and make make things more crispy uh adding soda to buttermilk creates an instant reaction it's like an acid base reaction that instantly aerates the mixture and it's gonna add to um the crunchiness of the of the finished product so I think your main thing is soda and then you can also experiment you can add some powder you want to be careful about going too crazy on soda and powder because some people are more uh what's it called more um sensitive to the taste of leaveners than others but it's pretty easy to go over leavened on stuff like that and then people can start tasting the leavening if that you know Nastasia although Nastasia hates like over baking soda things, except for she drinks water that is fundamentally flavored with baking soda.
So as normal, she is a conundrum. Don't you like that weird baking soda water, Nastasia? Yeah, yeah. Why? I don't know.
Weird. Yeah, no accounting. But anyway, give it a give it a shot and let us know. Alright, sounds good. Thanks.
Alright, cool. All right, now. We're just about out of time here. Alright, but I gotta do my I gotta do my last uh it's the last one for a while. I carry 80 pounds of books here.
Okay. If Nastasia allows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter what I say, go. Oh, it doesn't matter what I do.
Oh no, big bad cave. Big bad game. Oh my god, go. You know what? You know what?
It's like we live in Dave Arnold's world. Oh yeah, we live in Dave Arnold's world. We live in Dave Arnold's world. I wish you people were on this telephone call with us earlier in the day. Yet another depressing call.
You know what just like God forbid any of you have to build stuff somewhere else because it's a nightmare. I don't wish the kind of crap that we have to go through on any Dave Arnold's world crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Do you let me ask you a question, Nastasia?
You like Elon Musk, right? Mm-hmm. So imagine. Yeah, but he's balls. He owns his own.
She was saying he's mean to people and is like, and you're done because you're not working out. And you're done because you're not working out. So imagine if he didn't own like his own means of production. First of all, like he makes this thing called not a flamethrower because he's not allowed to sell flamethrowers. By the way, flamethrower, for those of you that are never caught on fire before in your lives, I can speak as someone who has.
Flamethrower is the most horrifying weapon. I mean, not every form of killing somebody is pretty terrifying, pretty bad. But like spraying someone with gel that can't be put out even under water is just a horrific way to kill somebody. You know what I mean? Uh but anyway, imagine if if uh if if we were like Elon Musk and we went to these factories and we're like, we're trying to build this flamethrower, but we're gonna call it not a flamethrower, but basically it's a flamethrower.
All you gotta do is look at the technology of flamethrowers. It works, it's been used for like a hundred years. They have flamethrowers, build it, and they came back and they're like, yeah, yeah, but how about this? It's a lighter. You want to sell this lighter?
No, I want to make a flamethrower! And that's the same problem we're having with a different piece of equipment in our factories in China right now, right? They're like, they're like, hey, you want to build this other thing that like we already know how to build? And we're like, no! Yeah.
Anyway, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about the last installment for at least a month of classics in the field. Alright, so today, because we're not gonna be here for a while, I bought like a multiple kind of circular classics in the field that has um a lot to do with stuff that I was uh interested in growing up and kind of you know, people I've known books, books I have read. And so I'm trying to figure out exactly where exactly where we should start it. But I'll start with this.
The very first book. So I grew up in the Did you read cookbooks growing up, Nastasia? No. Did your mom have them around the house? Some.
And did you but did you read them at all? No. So when did you start caring about this? If if you do. I don't.
You don't care about food at all. No, I don't care about cookbooks. Well, how'd you get interested in food? I like to eat it. But you used to say that you like to cook it.
I like to cook it too, but I have never used cookbooks. Where did you learn anything? I don't know. Watching people? Which people?
Being in working in Italy. Working where in Italy? Like living with people in Italy. Working with people. How long did you live in Italy?
Off and on for two and a half years. How old were you? Twenty-five. So you didn't cook anything before you were twenty-five? Not really.
Okay. Uh what about you, Matt? You like cookbooks? I like cookbooks. Anyway.
That's a good answer, Matt. I'm just trying to find the shortest route. Yeah. You guys are the worst. Honestly.
Honestly, people. This episode is brought to you by Tabbert Inn. Tabbert Inn. Washington, DC's quintessential hotel is located on a quiet tree-lined street just five blocks from the White House. Vibrant yet unassuming the tabern is comprised of 40 sleeping rooms, each unique in character and design.
Faced on an eclectic American cuisine in their acclaimed restaurant. Or enjoy a cocktail and listen to live jazz in one of their cozy Victorian seating areas. Mingle with travelers from around the world who find the tabard the only place to stay when taking their travels to Washington. For more information, visit TabardIn dot com. Uh so when I was growing up, I would read uh all my mom's books, including of course the famous Julia Child's Mastering the Art of Uh French Cooking with Simone Beck, but I never really got much out of that.
The very first book that my mom bought me when uh I moved out of college uh with my eventual wife, we got an apartment, was Julia Child's uh The Way to Cook. And so that was kind of my seminal introduction. And by the way, I think probably although I haven't read it in years, still kind of a a a great book. But at that time, um Julia Child's main you know career as a television personality was mostly in the past. She had like some TV shows on.
This is at this point in the in the mid to late in the early mid-late nineties uh but the kind of second wave of people that she had brought on were really big on TV and one of those people was uh Jacques Papin so uh Jacques Papin was uh the chef for uh I believe he cooked for uh Charles de Gaulle he cooked for uh Mitterrand uh and then when he came to the United States he actually quit being that kind of a chef to come to the United States to work for all of things Howard Johnson's and uh so I was huge you know I I loved him I I was introduced to him actually through uh Julia Child's work and then he had his own show uh which I which I used to watch um at some point in the in the 90s when I moved to New York I stumbled and this is before I met him so long story short when I started working for the French culinary institute Jacques Papin was uh one of the deans there so I kind of got to work with him kind of get to know him remember what this what the interns used to call him Jackie Peeps I thought you named him that well I made it up but then they started using it Jackie Peeps so we uh so I would work with him uh on a lot of stuff we used to see you know work with with demos together but before I ever worked at the French culinary I think one of the reasons they wanted to hire me was because I found in a uh in a thrift store a a book uh a two volume set I actually only found one volume and I had to search for years to get the second volume called uh Jacques Papin's The Art of Cooking and this is a uh a book that I think anyone should search out if you want like a view into kind of a very specific time in kind of the crossover between French cooking and American cooking. So this was put out uh by Knopf back when uh, as uh it was told to me, old man Knopf still ran the publishing firm. And this book was a two-volume set on French cooking. It was put out in 1987. And it was a huge bomb.
It didn't sell hardly any copies. So this is not, this is not uh Jacques Papin's like one volume that was used to be two volume set of black and white step-by-step shots. This is a full color two-volume set, including uh Jacques Papin's uh making menus, but his step-by-step stuff on how to how to make kind of all of these crazy things. Back before I could look the stuff up on the internet, Jacques Papin had how to devein foie gras in these books. Uh he just has like a whole series of this like weird, like old school recipes that I think you should really really really um take a look at, including like his famous uh techniques on many different ways to eviscerate and uh and break apart chickens.
So Jacques Papin was very famous for saying he could uh completely debone a chicken in I think like 12 seconds or something like this. Now, when I knew him, he wasn't quite that fast anymore, but he was still pretty fast. Uh and I still to this day use the technique uh for that Jacques Papin does for when I'm gonna bone out a chicken to keep it whole, which is you know, you cut down the back, you open up any you you could look it up. He's put that online. Nastasia makes fun of my.
I used to be very fast. Nastasia says I'm terrible because she's only seen me try to do it with turkeys, which are significantly harder to debone. What were you making fun of me for, Nastasia? I can't remember what you were doing. But like I had to talk about it and inside out bone without cutting a turkey, and you were making fun of me.
Yeah, I don't know, whatever. Any any opportunity to make fun of me. But this book didn't sell anything, I think, because Americans weren't quite ready for it. In it, he tells you how to uh eviscerate and skin a rabbit, uh, and how to take a whole baby lamb, rip its skin off, take the guts out, uh, and prepare all the different parts. He was friends with a lot of like interesting uh people.
So there's a recipe in here for chicken salad that was given to him by Danny Kaye, uh the actor and uh conductor musician, uh, which uh to this day it's kind of like an old school low temp way of bring of putting the chicken in, putting lots of chicken into a small amount of uh broth with uh vegetables, bringing the pot up to the simmer and then covering it and letting it ride out as a way to cook it all the way through without overcooking it, which is a technique I used for years before I had other better uh techniques. So definitely a classic in the field uh worth searching out. I spoke to him about it once, and I was like, hey, uh hey chef. I was like, uh, you know, I have this uh your set of books from Knopf in the 80s, and he was like, This is your best books I've ever made, but uh I can't sell them. Anyway, so you basically he even said this is his master work that you should go check it out, even though it's completely it was completely impossible uh to sell it.
And when you look at it, it's kind of cool to see an old uh like a young Jacques Popin. You're not used to seeing this young Jacques Papin, are you? It's kind of like, you know, I mean, how cool does he look? Cool? Cool.
So that brings me to uh the other classics in the field that I have today, uh, which is when I read Jacques Papin's memoir, which came out I don't know, 10, 10, 12 years ago, something like this, uh, he mentioned one of his favorite cookbooks, and it turns out when I read that that it was also one of my favorite cookbooks, but you have to find the correct editions. So uh there is a famous set of cookbooks called Um uh well, there's a famous cookbook author, uh Henri Paul Pelleprat. Pelop I don't know what Pelleprat, Pelleprat, in a in English it would be Pelleprat, but it's probably Peleprat, which is uh the French it's spelled Pelleprat. Anyway, it's the it's called the Modern French Culinary Art in English. And this was a book, this guy was uh the chef who uh helped, he was the founding chef of the Cordon Blue School in Paris, which, and this is where the circle turns around, uh, where Julia Child got trained.
So uh the Cordon Blue Cooking School was founded in the 1890s, and it was um kind of a uh what's called a collaboration to go back to uh Jordana. How would what do kids call that now? A collab? I guess. Collab.
Uh between uh Marta Destel, she was a a journalist, and uh this chef, uh Pelleprat, who was um they started this cooking school in 1895, specifically for women. Now, in their modern way of putting it, it's they want to uh provide the emancipation they wanted to provide the emancip uh what's it emancipation of women through education, which seems kind of a goofy thing to say about a cooking school back in the day, but it was specifically aimed at um teaching uh women. Now, uh Pelleprat, he was a professional chef, and then between World he taught at the culinary school, then at World War I, I think he had to uh deploy for a little while. In between World War I and World War II is when he wrote this famous book. Uh and then he writes, and this this book, this copy of it, and this is the important part, you need to look up to get a copy of it, you need to look up the Virtue Press.
So the Virtue Press came out with uh a series of books. They were a publishing house out of Ireland and London, and they translated a bunch of French works. Among them is the is the Modern French Culinary Art. The edition I have is from 19 in the late 1970s, but or the early 1980s. But you have to you have to get it.
And he uh he basically says it is a great. I'm trying to read the the Pelleprat section. He thinks the author thinks that this is a book that people are going to use at home. So this the interesting thing about it for me is this kind of idea of modern day people when they want to learn professional cooking, learn professional cooking. And it's very different from home cooking.
And people who are interested in home cooking are more interested in kind of modern cookbooks of quick and easy meals or how to do this or that sort of uh kind of uh cuisine in a in a simple way at home, rustic kind of cooking. But this whole era was full of how to do extremely weird high-end stuff but in a home style, i.e. not necessarily having all of the base sauces. So that's the interesting thing about uh um Jacques Papin's The Art of Cooking and about uh Pelleprat's book. But he goes, I can't find the the section because I did lost my post-it notes, but he um he goes through basically saying that everyone else who writes books on this subject uh are charlatans, and how he has taught people how to cook at the Cordon Blue for over 30 years, and every single recipe in here he's cooked himself, and therefore this isn't some BS that other writers uh write.
This is the real deal. Uh and so you know, for that reason alone, and because this was Jacques Papin's favorite cookbook as a young man growing up, uh came out initially, I think, in 19 in the 1940s. He died in 1949, so this probably came out in the like 30s or 40s to look at. But the other books you need to get out of this virtue thing, and this is the one that I think Nastasia would enjoy, is called Buffets and Receptions. Now, buffets and receptions, and you want to get the edition that I have, which is from I believe 1979.
It's a translation along with uh editing into English uh by some chefs Pierre Mengalate, Walter Bickel and Albin uh Abel Abelnet. Uh and this book, if you can find it, is the biggest gem of a book that I think you can get. If you think that finding like an old LaRussa gastronomique is interesting, you gotta get this. Not just because it's the only cookbook you're gonna have with a recipe for whale in it that tells you exactly what size whale you need to buy. So if you get and by the way, I'm going to Iceland and I'm not gonna eat whale.
I don't want it. Would you eat whale? No. I would not eat whale either, and I'm not you know saying you should you know eat whale, but there is a recipe in this book. But uh the pictures in this book, if you ever wanted to know uh what the buffet customs of any like European uh country were in the 70s and before, because all the people who were writing this book, these two books, the Peloprat and this book, have connections all the way back to uh actual kind of Victorian times, and so it spans an era of cooking that's really lost to us.
So when you go see like a uh a buffet at a cooking school and you see all that stuff in Gillet and Aspic, it's kind of like weird and ridiculous, right? What do you think when you see that stuff? Negros like all kind of touching, touchy, touchy, touchy food. But when you read this book and you look at these pictures, it goes back to an era when this was really much more of a live thing, and so you have like the crazy, crazy presentations of like uh a peacock made of uh butter with like all sorts of like food terrines. Look at this, Nastasia.
Wow. Look at this, like the trout, like totally laid out. So there like I used to just sit and read this book for hours. I don't think I've ever made a recipe out of it. But I used to sit and read this book for hours.
Look at this. Look at this, look at this rock lobster thing. It's like all the crazy, like high aspic, high touching, high uh, you know, puff pastry presentations. And so they really are a treasure. I don't believe that any of these books are available uh on Google Books because they're all still within copyright.
But if you can look up the Virtue Press, the modern French culinary art, uh, buffets and receptions, uh, and the New International Confectioner, which is the third of their main things that came out of that series in the 70s out of Britain, some of the best kind of 70s uh pictures that you're ever gonna see in cookbooks, like uh just like cool, amazing window onto the past, really a great set of editions, and Jacques Papin's uh books out of the 80s. Oh my god, that's hundreds of dollars of books I just dropped on the ground. Uh The Art of Cooking, which is a fantastic series, maybe outdated for all you people, but the people on the YouTube aren't doing all these old school things. People on the YouTube are doing new school stuff. If you want a window in the past, you gotta look at the step-by-step pictures of uh the stuff in the it that was happening back then.
And if you go any earlier than these books, if you go into the 30s and 20s, there are some step-by-step books with step-by-step pictures of what's going on, and I can bring uh some of my old confectionary books in to talk about at some point. But um because of the relative uh cheapness of production of books later on uh and relative cheapness of photography and printing, this kind of book only really became as big as it is later. And so you gotta look to this era if you really want a window into that era of cooking. Anyway, classics in the field. Talk to you guys later, cooking Issues.
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