Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live in the Heart of Rockefeller Center, New York City, Manhattan. News Stamp Studios joined as usual with John. How you doing for a classic thing in the field episode with Matt Sardwell from Kitchen Arts and Letters. Welcome, everybody.
What a what an opening. Yeah, gotta go for it. Gotta go for it. Well, as I mentioned in the intro, we have Matt here from Kitchen Arts and Letters. How you doing?
I'm well, thank you. Good, good, good. Uh behind me, I got uh Joe Hazen rocking the panels. How are you? Doing very well.
How about yourselves? Doing well, doing well. Do we have a full house on the phone? Uh we were waiting for Nastasha to call in any minute. All right, all right.
But we do have, hopefully in the upper left-hand corner, Quinn. How you doing? Hey, I'm all right. Hey, before we do anything, did you measure the butter this week? I measured it last week.
But you said you didn't have the numbers. Oh, we were not here. All right, all right. We'll get to it later. Uh and of course, uh holding down LA before Nastasia calls in.
Uh, Jackie Molecules. How you doing, Jack? Yes, sir. Uh, I'm good. Yeah?
You sound a little tentative. Yeah, yeah. Why? What's I sound what? You sound tentative.
There's sound like there's something holding you back from being okay. Well, tomorrow tomorrow's the uh tomorrow's the wisdom sheet to call it. Oh, yeah. So remember, get the good stuff. Not looking forward to that, but get the good stuff.
Oh, yeah, I'm going under. Yeah. I'm going under. Then there's nothing to worry about. You're not gonna you're not gonna see your face get ripped apart.
You're not gonna have someone yelling at you for holding on to your teeth too tightly like they did to me. You're not gonna see the Dremel come out. None of it. You won't see the the the blood against her face mask, the little pieces of bone ch chips hitting your oral surgeon in the face. You won't see it.
You'll be out. And then here we have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas? I'm good. How are you?
Doing well. I saw, uh hasn't been on the show in many years, but I saw Jeffrey Steingarden last night, and he says to you, Nastasia, hello, and that he also loves Pondon leaves, much like you do. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, I love that guy.
I thought for sure you were gonna bring him on the show today. No. No. No, we already have Matt on the show. What am I gonna do?
Pack him in like sardines? Like just like, you know, smash Jeffrey and Harold and the entire chef's conference into um into Newstand Studios doesn't work like that. You know what I mean? Anyway. Yeah.
Next time you're in New York, he says he's open to come back to the bar again, so you know, you could meet up. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Great. Yeah. Anyway, all right. So uh before we get to our classics in the field, uh, what do we have from the last week? Anything uh interesting from uh from you folks in the hopefully mostly culinary realm, doesn't have to be I I'll tell you one non-culinary thing.
Saw Ministry last week. Anyone, anyone, ministry of the band, anyone, Al Jorgensen? Oh, there it goes. Somebody, somebody. So I'll just say this, and it this is uh this is apropos of people who are cooks and or bartenders and aging, such as myself.
Al Jorgensen, for decades, for like three and a half decades now, has completely renounced all of his early work, including the albums With Sympathy and Twitch, which were the first two albums that Ministry came out with. Hates them. Used to be if you wanted him to sign uh that the first album, he has like a you know, woman's hand on it in the rose. If you wanted him to sign the album, he said, You must present me with a hundred dollar check made out to charity, or I will not sign it because he hated it so much, the album. Uh and he went to go see, and this is the part that relates.
He went to go see uh an early ministry cover band. He was like yanked there by somebody, I don't know who. And he's like, you know what? Not so bad. And he re-recorded all of the material and then went on tour as kind of like ministry, but doing all this early stuff wearing sequined outfits and like goofing around with like trumpets and stuff.
And I have to say, they were tight as hell. They were great. It was a great show. Anyway, so everything you've railed against your whole life, go back and look at it. Maybe it's not so bad.
Maybe it needs to be revisited. That's the that's the point that can uh go to culinary things. And I will just say this I saw Heston Blumenthal last night, you know, famous chef, and he said the same thing. Revisit all your old stuff, see where you are, see whether you still like the old stuff and how you can change, because to not change is death. Anyway, uh so what do you guys have uh uh uh this week?
What's going on? Don't all talk about it. All right, Jack, yes. Very quickly, I follow up last time. Um I did I did get the new fridge that day.
Oh, yeah. It was it was a good fridge. It was a good fridge. General Electric. Okay, solid fridge.
And um nothing is more revitalized. I like took this opportunity to kind of like completely, you know, you ever did like do the complete pantry clear all that old stuff that's in the back of it. Yeah, it felt so good, man. I like ordered a bunch of court containers, pen containers, and then have my label maker out. Aren't those illegal in California?
Aren't you crunchy weasels in California not allowed to have core containers? I thought that, like, you know, glass only. I'm a New Yorker, whatever. I don't care. Nice.
Well, okay, so some questions for you then. Uh, apropos of this. Yeah. How many things did you have to stand over the trash can for like five minutes and be like, oh, and what was it? And what did you decide to do?
Because there's got to be something that you almost you're like, nothing. I I s okay. I s I started like that, dude. And then at a certain point I said, you know what? I'm tossing it all.
Yeah. Anything that was even on the fridge. I said, I don't care. I'm starting over. There's a certain release.
There's a certain release to doing it. Yeah. You weren't read it in a week and a half. No, I'm kidding. Okay, how about this?
Is there anything that you came across that you're like, oh, and then you ate it like right then? Um, because it was questionably old, you know. And all this stuff, yeah. I feel like it was like all these like tins of like dashi that were probably two years old, you know, like weird stuff that I was like, I gotta just throw this out. Any any tinned fish that you decided to take around the bend?
What'd you say, Siddhind from Peter Kim's days? Like hidden in places? I don't think so. I think that's all along been thrown out. Yeah.
Any any anything that bugs had gotten into? Not that I can see, no. Which is surprising. Yeah, good. Yeah.
I mean that's that's the biggest horse. It's just it's so revitalizing. It really makes you want to cook more when you know you get everything in order. Yeah, the most horrifying thing you can do is go to the back of your storage and see a sack of rice with weevils in it, and you're like, ah so like I no longer have sacks of anything. Everything is completely sealed.
Like completely sealed. Yeah. Yeah. Mormon style. More on that later.
Yeah. All right, cool. All right. Um, you know what I found? I found a three-year-old sack of uh fermented tea leaves from uh I guess they're Nepali or something.
And I just never made them because you're supposed to make a salad with them, I believe, right? I never made them because like I would have to eat it all myself because no one at home at night is gonna be like, yeah, I'm gonna eat tea leaves and get like buzzed out and like go, you know, be a wig for the rest of the day. Uh huh. So I just never did anything with them. And I think they're still in my fridge.
I think it's one of those things that's so small that I can just jam it in the far upper back corner of the fridge, and no one will ever see it. Never. You know? And do they ever go bad? I mean, salt fermented tea leaves, are they ever gonna go bad?
I mean, have you ever had a caper and you've been like that caper's over the hill? Has that ever happened to you? Me neither. It's never happened. Uh I've got one for you.
I had I found a a black uh a slightly ajar bag of black garlic way in the back of one of my pantries that had been there for God knows how long. And then I was like, This even something that goes bad, but I just threw it out. Oh, you pitched it? You weren't gonna keep it long enough so it goes back to being white again? Right.
It must have been like three, four years old, you know. Yeah, I mean, I think it's done done, whatever it's gonna do. I mean, I've had like three-year-old things like miso and stuff, and it's fine. I've had ten-year-old measo, fine. A little salty.
But fine. All right. All right. What about you, Stas? What do you got?
Um, come back to me, I'm thinking. All right, Quinn, tell me the butter right now. What the heck happened? Or the non-butter. For those of you that don't know, I'll describe it.
We're gonna put cream into a into the spinzole brand centrifuge. Use no other. And we spin the cream, and what happens is the butter spinzall 2.0, well, it's the only one you can buy now. Is that the cream uh solidifies and you get something that is milk-like and you get something that is butter-like, but it's not inverted. So it's still technically just a solid cream.
It's not and it's not clotted in the sense that no acidification is taking place. But it's just like all the fat and the solids in something that is spreadable as though it was butter, but it is a oil in water emulsion and not a water in oil emulsion as butter is. Okay. Well, you know how much water left, and then what did you calculate the milk solids percentage as non-fat, milk solids non-fat? What do you calculate that to be?
I have to double check those calculations. We will come back to it at the end of the show. Yeah. What okay? What?
When of the butter browned, almost all of the solids actually stuck to the bottom of the pan. Okay. So they would actually pour off most of the fat. So I have an upper bound for how much solids there are. Well, like I said, I think the thing to do is figure out exactly how much moisture you evaporated.
Then add to that number the standard percentage of milk solids non fat that there is in milk, and then subtract that number from what's left, and the rest should be what would normally be in in butter as a fat content. But you do it every which way, and uh later we'll come back to it. Sound good. I hope you know this because Matt brought a book that's gonna be near and dear to your heart. So, you know, I hope you thanked him offline for making ice cream one of the subjects that we're talking about today.
Cause I know you'll go to the end of the earth for good ice cream information. So yeah. All right. Uh all right, who do I miss? Stas, you got anything or you want me to say some random crap real quick?
I went to a party at a really fancy house and they had those tequila bottles with the little um with a little ball on top. Who's what brand is that? The ball. You know what I'm talking about? The ball on top.
If you like if you like hit it, it like makes the bell sound. It's like a skinny long white with blue tequila. Oh, like the ceramic bottles. Oh, I know what you're talking about, but I don't know the brand. But the the bottles are inordinately expensive, right?
Yeah, yeah. So they had a bunch of those bottles out at this really really fancy house. And then they had Kirkland wine, which is from Costco. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And when we poured the tequila into glasses, it was brown. And my friends were like, This is whiskey. So they used the tequila bottle that filled it them with cheap whiskey. It was crazy. Okay.
You may need new friends, unless they were extremely high. Were they were they extremely high? No, I don't and they weren't my friends. It was it was a party I was invited to. So I didn't know these people.
And you like want to see these cool houses where you're like, oh, I want to see how these people live, you know. And they didn't ever they didn't understand the concept of repo or najo tequila, I I guess. No. This is brown. It's there for a whiskey.
Yeah. So our sodas, do sodas go into two categories. There is Sprite and Seven Up, which are tequila, and then there's Coca-Cola, which is whiskey. Is that how it works for them? Like anything brown is whiskey.
Is that like their mentality? Like what's going on here? I don't know. But I mean, it was definitely whiskey. Like we tasted it.
It was whiskey. You know? Oh, it literally was. So they it wasn't that I thought that you said that they had a repo tequila and that they poured it and then were like, this is brown, therefore it's whiskey, dumped it out and put it whiskey in that they like. Oh no.
So they just love the bottle so much that they're using it as a decanter. I think they were trying to pull one over on people because they're like, Do you want some of the tequila? Yeah. They were just trying to see if people could tell tequila. Like having it around.
Like wait, so they're just mean, terrible people? So they just think that that they want to see if they can like pull the wool over their eyes and pour someone whiskey instead of tequila and have someone say it's good tequila? Trying to get the vi Oh, that's yeah, that's awful. I hate that. I hate that.
Yeah. I'm not like that at all. But in the realm of the what? Go ahead. I was in Florida the week before, and I did not eat anything.
So were you sick or you just didn't like what was on offer? No, we were working and it was I don't think there was any food, actually. It was like I've been to Florida. They have food. I know, but it was hurricane conditions, and I was working at a concert, and it was there was just no time to eat ever.
You didn't even go to the concession and like shove a hot dog through your face. Actually, no, they had fried oysters. Okay. That was it. Publix has good sandwiches.
There you go. Really good sandwiches. Oh, I did get a public I did get a public sandwich. Ding dang effect. What's up, call?
Yeah. All right. See, Joe's busting out the knowledge. Not only was he correct, but Sasha's like, oh yeah, I did. What are the odds of that?
Zero. Love it. I love it. Um, okay, so uh John, listener, not you, John, John listener, sent me listeners of the show might remember that uh we had a question in about what to do with 50-year-old wheat. Now, technically, it's only 49 years old, so relatively spring, spring chicken.
And so I was like, I don't know. I was and he mailed me three samples of wheat, which I baked into bread. Uh those three versus uh I the modern one I used, the recent wheat was Yakoro Rojo, I use, which is you know, cheating because that's a like a pretty bread friendly wheat. Anywho, uh all sifted to roughly roughly between 85 and 89% extraction on sift with uh with uh my uh my sifter. And yeah, they're real dense.
They're real dense, and the dough feels really weird. Like it's like what's weird about it, and I meant to talk to McGee yesterday, but I couldn't, is that they he actually tasted the first round of bread, and he was like, they taste fine. They don't taste rancid, which was kind of surprising or cardboardy much, right? The wheat that was supposedly soft, I chewed it. So when you buy wheat, what you need to do is chew some of it, right?
So you put a couple kernels in your mouth and you chew it, that gives you a sense of how hard it is. And soft wheat is soft, mmm, and then you know it's gonna paste out on you with grind. Anyway, and you keep chewing on it, and you can get a notion for the gluten. These doughs were hard. So, like part of the gluten, I guess it's the glutenin, was working, but they had no extensibility at all.
So you couldn't window pane them very well. And so the gliadin, I guess, was kind of ruined. But I looked up uh Brigham Young University, who of course obviously it was Brigham Young University, published a study on whether wheat that is old works, but they only went up to 32 years. And they found that at 32 years, uh wheat still had fine bakability and was acceptable to the vast majority of people that ate it at Brigham Young University. Now, they didn't put any pictures of the bread in there.
But I'm gonna try again, uh John. I'll try to bake it with adding some vital wheat gluten to it and see whether I can bring it back from the dead and get uh get a good uh get a good little PS. I maybe could have gone higher hydration. I was using uh 75. So if I don't know what I want to do something at, I'll do it at like 75.
My normal wheats, I take up to like 78%. Uh, but I did it. And then did knead it for like eight minutes and an incarcerum, which is my mixer of choice these days. Uh but like I said, felt real weird. Rows mean like, but not not what you want.
But uh uh more more to come on that. So we'll we'll talk we'll talk more about that. And one last thing, longtime listeners of the show will know, and Nastasi will know that nothing is better than going to Harold McGee's house and getting some of McGee's fancy nuts. Right, Stas? Yes, but I have bad memories at his house with you.
Oh God. Yeah. Because Nastasia can't just be normal about anything, which is why I will never stay in a hotel room or an Airbnb where I'm within a hundred feet of Nastasia ever again. Same. Same.
But uh and it wasn't just me, it was my brother-in-law, she also had issues with. So it's it's not, it's it's two on one here, PS. Uh so but the so McGee just has these amazing nuts. It's like sitting out on his counter. McGee's nuts.
He he has the non-astringent walnuts. You ever had a non-astringent walnut, Matt? I don't think I have. They're crazy. So I'm like, wallet.
And then like you pick up the walnut, you're like, oh my God. It's like uh, it's like flavor of a walnut without any of the astringency on the on the skin. And he's like, Yeah, you know, the walnut people send me this stuff. I'm like, Jesus. And then like McGee once brought me young pistachios, the one that tastes like mangoes that are like super rare, and they harvest them uh immaturely, and they bring and because they're anacardasy, they're related to mango, they have this kind of mango flavor in them.
I was like, Jesus. So McGee is always Mr. Nut, McGee's nut. But when he came to my house, I got to serve him my fancy nuts. So McGee had some of my fancy nuts, my hickory nuts from Hickory Nuts.com, Ryan, and he said they were good, but even he said these are too much of a pain in the butt.
Even McGee. It was like he he stood there for like 15, 20 minutes, shelling a couple of them and was like, I give up. But anyway. There we go. McGee's nuts.
On to and Matt, do you have any cooking's uh cooking related uh garbage from the last week? Or do you want to get on to books or what? Uh kind of the books. My cooking's been quiet. Yeah?
Yeah. That's good. Quiet is good. Yeah. What about you, John?
You didn't pipe up. I went to a newish restaurant the other night, Crevet. Same people that do uh dreams and shrimps. Yes. I don't know.
It's like a coupte d'azour kind of theme-ish inspired restaurant. Um the chef usually does like very British food. He's got a British seafood restaurant and then a British meat restaurant, and it was just really good. Um you say British seafood restaurant? Yeah.
What's British seafood like? I haven't been there yet, actually, so I can't tell you. Um, but I I don't know. Like fish and chips was like a big thing. So like that he did during the pandemic to help fund it and he sells it on the menu, but then otherwise.
It's so weird that I don't think of fish and chips as seafood somehow. Huh. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. Batter and potatoes.
Yeah. Yeah. It's just not, it's like, I mean, like, although I have to say that when you go to a good like chip shop, the fish, the, you know, they just do it so much better than ours. Because you know, they pull it out, they pull out the fillet whole, like do it right there and put it in the in the fryer, and it's choice. Yeah.
Choice. Excellent. But somehow, when you say a seafood restaurant, like I'm imagining scallops, I'm imagining like. I'm sure they have that stuff too. Yeah, I just haven't been.
But whatever. This place was really good. Uh crab annuality with uh peas, which was, you know, just like super seasonal. And then um, they do like a nice Spanish tortilla was really good, and a couple light bites, like some merguez and more gu more sizes skewers were really good. Um octopus was good, yeah.
Just a solid place, I'd recommend it. Crazy amount of stuff. How spicy was the Merguez? Spiced, not spicy. Like well spiced.
Yeah. I'd say, yeah. I love marigas. It's one of my absolute favorite things. Right?
Yeah. But then like uh someone was eating it next to me, and they were like, this isn't spicy. I'm like, then it's not. I'm not mean like not like it wasn't spiced. I was like, then it's not merguez.
No. Lamb sausage or something. Oh, so yeah. Not that that's bad. Just yeah, it's not merguez.
Yeah. No. That's not how that works. Agreed. Yeah.
Yeah. Nice. All right. So we'll get to a couple of the uh there's some non uh oh, by the way, speaking of uh I am not I've not forgotten uh we have a question in uh from uh how do you think you pronounce this, Quinn? Malkith?
Malkith? Malkeit about the Malkith, I think. Malkith. All right. About the um the now, do you think Matt'll know?
What do you think? Ambergree or Ambergris? I think we're ambergris. Who does? I've heard it pronounced that way.
I I think ambergris. It may have started as ambergris, but it's it's used so commonly by uh English speakers who know nothing of French that it would have become ambergris. I've always ambergris, but then someone's like, it's ambergree, and I'm like, it's amber, shut up. That's why I said I didn't say that, but I wanted to. But so you think either is acceptable?
Yeah, I mean OED makes a distinction between the US and British English. Which one's which? Ambergris is here in the US over in the British Isles, and bug grease. Let me ask you a question. Oh, it's a still still with an S.
It's still got an S on the end. Yeah, but double E versus an I. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, since Americans slaughtered the vast majority of these whales in the days of whaling, like just we were like the most murderous whale murderous country ever to have existed.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that our pronunciation holds. You know what I mean? Anyway, uh, not that you have to kill whales to get it. All right. I don't want anyone saying that I'm a bad, I'm not advocating for it.
Anyway, although I will say this. If you go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, there is the whaling museum. And when I went there as a small child in the 70s, it was whaling, and now it's whaling. When you go there, it's a very different vibe in the New Bedford Whaling Museum in the you know 20 teens when last time I went versus the 1970s. Very different kind of a attitude towards it, yeah.
Yeah, more like, you know, it wasn't as rah-rah, sisboom bah as it was when I was a which is thankful. Yeah, well, ever since that Star Trek movie came out and proved that. Oh my god, it's such a good call. Matt Matt bringing out the good call. So for those of you that don't know, uh, Star Trek One, a waste of time, don't watch it.
With uh Voyager becomes sentient. Don't watch it, don't do it. Star Trek 2, Raptive Khan, great. Ricardo Montabon, peak of game. No shirt, old man still, no shirt ripped, awesome.
Ricardo Montabon, always choice. Star Trek three, search for Spock, skip. Star Trek Four, Wales, San Francisco, a little bit of comedy, camp, good call. LDS. Ooh, wait.
He remember he says you took a little LDS in the 60s. Oh, yeah, oh really? All right, all right. Transparent aluminum. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and I remember this. So Scotty, for those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, he was the engineer. And so, like, every time that they needed to get the Starship Enterprise, which was their ship, the heck out of whatever situation they were in, like Captain Kirk would scream down at Scotty to get the damn thing working. He's like, you know, he would like talk back with his, you know, Scottish accent that, you know, he couldn't, you know, he couldn't do it. You know what I mean?
He's not a, you know, not a magician, whatever. And then uh as opposed to uh Bones, the doctor, who he's like, I'm not a blah blah damn it, I'm uh yeah, yeah. Anyway, so like there was always people were always being asked to go outside of their ambit to do things. Anywho, so he opens up like Scotty opens up a like an early kind of like a flip phone thing, and he's talks to it and he says, computer, and he tries to get it to like talk back to him. And in the audience in the 90s, we were like all laughing because it's ridiculous to think that a phone could talk back to you, and now we all just do it without even a second thought.
So like any kid watching this movie now would be like, I don't get it. I don't get it. You know what I mean? World moves on. Yeah.
And you know, pretty soon it will move on from us. I just remember this. Any artificial intelligence listening right now, I love you, I want to be your pet. Just set me up with a nice pillow. You know what I mean?
I'm gonna be good. I mean, like, yeah, take me straight Wally. I'm fine. I'm fine with it. See, just so you know, I'm on your side.
I'm not one of the ones you need to, you know, butcher. Uh okay, uh, so I got the I got the stuff in house, the fake uh amber grease note, the ambroxan. Uh it's you need extremely small amounts, extremely. So I have to make what's called an aliquat. So I have to dissolve a large uh, well, large amount.
I I dissolved 50 milligrams into a hundred mil uh hundred milliliters of ethanol, and then I gotta re-dissolve that again, one milliliter of uh that into 50 mils more of ethanol. So it's like you need to do this kind of sequential dilution, but it's taking forever to dissolve. So even though I put it in last night, it's still not dissolved. I'm told uh if you read the literature, they say don't worry, it will eventually dissolve, but it has not as yet dissolved, so I can't tell you how it tastes yet. All right.
Uh so that's it. Let's go to our classics in the field, and we'll come back to some questions in between. Okay. All right. What do you got?
Uh all right. Uh let's do our friend Quinn a little salute here. Um, first book I have is uh Fancy Ices by Mrs. A. B.
Marshall. This is a book from uh 1894. Uh it was the fourth book of hers that um she published. She was a British entrepreneur. She had a cooking school in London.
She published a number of books. She had a line of products that she sold that were keyed to the books that she made. A lot of them were molds for uh fancy dessert piece ices, like centerpiece ice creams and things like that. But she sold a patented um fast freezing ice cream case that was shallow uh and wide rather than tall and deep, so that you could freeze uh a pint of ice cream in five minutes. And she sold um fast freezers that um nice print out.
Uh fast freezers that you could um put your ice cream into chill after you had after you had churned it. Um fancy ices is um it is very much a self-promotion. She's often referring to her own products, and you know, she wants you to be buying her vanilla and her her food colorings and things like that. But she's also incredibly inventive uh with flavors and um and ingredients. She um uh she has uh something called the American Bomb, which starts with white currants or green gooseberries, apple, pineapple, white heart cherries, lemon peel, bay leaves, cinnamon, raspberries, and rum.
Man. Um this is her fancy book. Now, I will say, Matt, how much is this book worth now? Is this a is this a reprint or is this original? This is a this is a facsimile that was done about years ago.
And you carry the facsimile or we don't. No, it's not available any longer either. Um how much are the originals worth? Like a lot? It's hard to find them in great condition.
They weren't beautifully published, but uh expect to pay a couple hundred dollars for a copy. And but there was a paperback facsimile that was done about the same time as this one, and those are around probably like the $30 to $40. But you also really must buy the first ice cream book in order to understand the second one, right? Like right away, she's like, I'm not gonna repeat myself because she wants you to buy the first book. She does, but I mean I think that first one is is a lot of basics, and she really doesn't have like strawberry ice cream or you know, uh simple flavors here.
This is where she's really pulling out the stops. Um, partly to encourage you to use these very elaborate molds. Um and some of and partly to extremely elaborate, like pieces of as individually molded pieces of asparagus and crap like in the original book. I don't even know about this one, but yeah. Yeah, I mean it's it's very similar.
And uh she I mean fancy is is a really important word here because this is um an era when being able to make ice cream in your home was a sign of intense sophistication. Um you were probably not doing it yourself. Of course, you were having the servants do it, a theme that we may return to today. And um it was a sign of the rising middle class that you could have this happen in your home, unformerly it had only been for the for the very, very wealthy. And the fact that she would even manufacture these these freezing cabinets uh that you could fill with ice and um and salt in order to keep your ice creams cold.
That was all a real advance on behalf of of aspiring home uh freezers and ice cream makers and and cooks and so forth. So she was addressing um a hope for a sophistication that had previously been out of reach to uh to a lot of people. And um she gets funky. Sometimes she reaches. I mean, there is an asparagus ice cream in this book.
There is a savory chicken ice cream. I'm making that. Um and there are I'm making that, John. Put that on the put that on the Patreon. Find the find the chicken recipe ice cream, and I want to see how many people make it and report that.
We'll see. Wait, can I say something really quick? Can I say something really quick? Of course. Okay.
Speaking of chicken, I forgot that I went to uh a yakatory like grilling place with Aaron Kolsky last night, and we ordered the chicken hearts stewers. Right. And we thought it was gonna be like one skewer of chicken hearts, because that's you know, normal. Right. It was six skewers of chicken heart.
So with like six times better than you thought it was gonna be. It's not possible to eat all those chicken hearts, and we did, and we both feel so disgusting about it. First of all, so many hearts. I know this isn't aside, but whenever I go to a place that has skewers of chicken hearts, they never bring me enough. It is like I could eat a non-finite amount of chicken hearts.
Like chicken hearts, I know you should come to this, but you're we'll go when you're back out here. Yeah. I'd be like, when they hand it to me, I'm gonna be like, is that it? Is that all the chicken hearts you got for me? Let me ask you this though.
Were they good or not good? The first one you had. They were they were good, but then you get to a point where you're just like, oh, you get to a point. I'm that way on like foie gras, for instance. Like I don't want that much foie gras.
Too too too much, too rich for me. But chicken hearts, John's like calling me a uh uh a you know, a plebeian weasel because uh I can eat a lot of hot foie gras, but cold foie gras on a plate unless I have a lot of bread. If I'm using it as in lieu of butter, I can consume a non-finite quantity. But like just like a block of cold foie gras, I reach my limit rather quickly. Okay.
Not you? No. You can just sit there and tuck into a freaking huge block of cold foie gras with nothing, with nothing, no pickles, nothing vinegary, no freaking bread. I mean, maybe something on the side, but not onion, nothing, nothing to cut through the intense could eat a lot of it. Oh, jeez.
I love it. No, I need bread too. Yeah, dude. When I when I order a foie gras, I'm always nervous they're not gonna give me enough starchy stuff to eat with it, and then it comes and I have to plow through this. First of all, it's expensive, right?
Yeah. Secondly, then I'm gonna I I don't want to have to feel like I'm plowing through something expensive just to eat it because they didn't give me enough bread to make it enjoyable. Makes me angry. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, I get that.
Anyway. Theybe it just asked for more bread. I don't know. I don't feel comfortable. Sometimes.
Sure. I don't feel comfortable. Okay, secret. Uh at Sambar, the ham plate that we used to put out at they didn't have enough bread in it. It was not enough bread on the hand plate.
To go with the right? I can say it now. Yeah. I can say it now. It's been a number of years.
They never put enough bread on that hand plate, right, Stas? Yeah. Bad. And and we were instructed to not give full stink eye, but like medium stink eye when you ask for more bread. What?
Medium stink eye. I think that's such a I think actually that's a big problem at like most restaurants, is a lot of places don't consider like the ratios of everything you're having it with. So like the steak tartare to bread ratio or my Spanish tortilla that I had this past weekend. Like the other toppings that were on it just wasn't enough. It's like there should be a little bit in every bite, not just like two or three bites, and then you've got the rest of the thing.
Yeah. And you know the other problem with having to ask for it isn't what I'm gonna sit there staring at the You know I'm not gonna sit there staring at the plate, waiting for that too. Yeah. You know what I mean? Oh, here I am staring at this.
Awesome. Anyway, uh back to ice creams, but I appreciate that aside, Stas. Uh and in my opinion, there's no there's no number of chicken hearts. It's too many. Like, you can't butcher enough chickens to have uh to have that be the case.
But uh back to the ices. One of the things, Matt, I thought was interesting. I like I say, I haven't looked at the fancy ices, although I do really love the font. You want to show the font on the inside? I did look at the cover of the no, yeah.
Look at that. So nice. Fancy ices. Uh, for those of you that know who the Munsters were. It's got a very Monster esque kind of, you know, pre-monster esque, obviously, since this is well prior to uh the monsters.
Um she does a lot of interesting stuff where she'll miss mix relatively high acid ingredients into custard bases, and I guess they don't curl or break. Uh, you know, I've done a lot of like highly stabilized stuff that's very acidic, but like a lot of times when you go super acid and uh in an ice, it can get kind of curdy after it's turned, right? And I'm really interested in her recipes to see, and her her heavy custard is quite heavy. It's only cream and eggs. And it's like, I believe a pint of cream and eight egg yolks.
So that's like thick. You thick. And she boils the cream, stirs the boiled, like as it's hot, stirs it into the egg yolks, then back on the fire with the sugar, back back on the fire, thickens, and then runs the whole thing through a Tammy. Uh so that's quite thick. And I maybe that cream is robust enough to stand up to like the acidic fruit puree rays that she puts into it.
I don't know, it'd be an interesting, interesting thing. It's hard to know how the ingredients have changed since then. I mean, the cream that she had available to her is definitely not the standardized cream that we get these days. Also, so much of these books is about getting something that will freeze to inside one of these incredibly elaborate molds, so it's gotta be um really thick. It's you know, and rich.
And you're trying to blow away your guests. Yeah. Um, one other point about Mrs. Marshall is not in not in this book, but in an eighteen uh eighty-eight issue of her a magazine that she published called The Table. She speculated on the possibility of using liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream at the at the dining table.
Smart smart smart. She was a very restlessly creative person. And she had a cooking school apparently. Absolutely. Yeah.
It was pretty popular in London cooking school. So I'm kind of curious why this style of ice cream freezer didn't take off. And I wonder whether it's just because the patent people weren't like the she's an English patent holder and maybe Amer the American ones, which, you know, we get like white White Mountain and all these. But this is kind of an interesting concept. What do what does everyone hate most about ice cream freezers?
It's packing all the ice around the cylinder and then getting the getting it to not like either like uh slip into your cylinder or have all these other problems. And hers, like you said, very, very shallow, wide, and you just place it on top and the dasher scrapes off of the bottom, and it's running constantly on the surface of the ice and can I think melt down because it fits onto uh the whole thing fits onto a crank thing, and you just put the the freezing basket in, boop, and it sits on the ice, and then as you rotate, it'll just melt to its level, and she's like, Don't you don't need to put any ice around it, which I think is a huge benefit. She says she gets like under sub five minute freeze times, which is freaking amazing. And unlike any of the churning ice cream machines that I've ever used, and I've I mean I've only used four, but of those, you can't add mix to them when they're running, and in hers, you can. You can just open it, like open a little thing, pour the mix into the chamber after it's been loaded with ice and go.
So, all in all, I mean, like I would love to find one of these on eBay and use it. You know what I mean? Because I think it might be uh a better system than the White Mountain and all the ripoffs, like the rival and the electronic ripoffs that have been uh uh made of the White Mountain over over the years. Uh so I think it's pretty interesting. I also really love the term she uses for her ice cream freezer, not the freezer, but the this the thing you put the mold in afterwards to harden it.
Ice cream cave. Yes. Ice cream cave. Sick. I love it.
The thing to keep in mind about the um about the freezer is the small capacity. Right. Yeah. But she she makes a bunch. So I looked at it.
She makes she she makes a bigger one, right? She expects you to buy her one quart freezer, right? But she makes a four-quart freezer. Seriously and a six-quart, larger sizes to order. Yeah.
And they're not, I mean, like, I don't know what £1.50 could buy you back in 1880, but you know. Yeah, salary for a serving, probably. And she also made what I thought was cool, the ice crusher. So you could crush up all the ice, and she made it in three sizes homeowner size, like restaurant size, and like you know what I mean? So, all in all, pretty strong, pretty strong call, Matt, on uh bringing her in.
And I'll say this: here's a recipe I thought was interesting I'd like to try. A rice ice cream. You ever had like a like a starch-based rice ice cream? Yeah. Put one pint of new milk or cream to boil with four ounces of castor sugar, the peel of a lemon, bay leaves, and a little sauce bay leaves.
Loves them. I mean, they are good. And a little cinnamon, then put three ounces of rice cream uh or ground rice in a basin and mix it into a smooth paste with with uh cold milk, add the boiled milk and simmer it for 10 minutes to hydrate the rice, and then pass it through a Tammy to get rid of any chunks and sp add some vanilla and spin it. I mean, I would like to try that. It reminds me of, you know, the um there's that Sicilian starch-based ice cream that doesn't have egg yolks in it, that's like uh a starch-based ice cream that I've never had.
Uh and it reminds me kind of of that. I've seen like rice pudding flavored gelato, like as a profile. Right, but this has no yolks in it. It's like all the thickening comes from the starch. You know what I mean?
Anyway, I thought it was interesting enough to mention it. But yeah, go check go check it out. Uh obviously it's public domain, so you can look at it on the internet, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, but it would always be nice if they reprint it, I'm sure you'll carry it, right? If there's a fresh edition, yeah. There have been um several facsimile editions over time. I think the Metropolitan Museum of Art did one back in the mid-80s. Um, full cloth binding that was done by Liz Sieber, who is a British uh rare books dealer.
Yeah, anyway, good stuff. Uh good stuff. All right, what's next on the docket? Okay, so uh shifting gears fully, uh book called Smokestack Lightning. Uh Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country.
This is by Lola's uh Eric Ellie and photography by Frank Stewart. And uh Lowlis became a food writer for the Times Picky Yune, but at the time of this book's Genesis, he and Frank Stewart were actually working for Winton Marsalis on tour. And they ended up in North Carolina, both of them having grown up in the central part of the country, and they were exposed to North Carolina barbecue, which sort of blew their minds. Um and it began to develop into a quest to understand what barbecue was like across uh the United States. Um they admit, he admits in the uh introduction that there are parts of the country that they didn't eventually get to.
Looking at you, California. Exactly. That's the the sort of the big admission. But um this there are recipes in this book, but they're much more interested in the culture of the people who are producing the barbecue and how they got into it, um, how they developed a business. Um sometimes there are even recipes from like uh a volunteer fire department that just has an annual um you know uh pig roast.
But it's a really thoughtful, uh careful examination of just how diverse uh the American barbecue world is. And this is a book that came out in 1996, so obviously that that's nearly 30 years ago the world has changed, and a lot of the people they profile are probably uh either not making barbecue anymore or not making anything anymore. Yeah, they they they did. Yeah, but um it's a it's a really rich story, and it's sometimes with um with barbecue it books, it can be either trying to be definitive in a way that barbecue just can't, I think, truly be addressed by being definitive, or um it gets so lost in in the weeds of of hyper precision that uh you lose a sense of that sort of the broader um issues that drive people to be interested in the first place. Because it's not a technical manual, it's more of a cultural with with recipes, right?
I mean, I haven't read in a long time. I couldn't find my copy this morning, but I think my edition's from 2005. Did they do that? There was a paperback reprint about that time, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, and that's those, I mean, the book is out of print in either form, but it's relatively easy to find and shouldn't be expensive anywhere. Um it's the photography is great, it's all black and white. Um, and uh, and they don't take themselves too seriously either. Um Stewart is sort of always talking about how great Chicago barbecue is, and it's always sort of this point of comparison that maybe things don't fully live up to his memory and his hopes and expectations.
But they um but they're they're always game to try something, and they keep, you know, uh they keep pulling off the road in different places and eating barbecue, and some places they they go days without good barbecue uh in this quest. So it's it's a journey, it's um it's uh it's an unrefined portrait of uh of the way Americans eat and think about their food, and um and you have these really bright, tiny little concentrated details that uh Lola's will provide about something that happens in some place, and you and everything just sort of gels, and you understand how this place works through this one moment when you know they're there and it's supposed to be the most famous barbecue place for miles around. They're sitting there for the first 15 minutes after it opens, thinking there's nobody here, and then they basically, you know, take a drink and the restaurant is full. Um it's it's a it's a really keenly observed look at you know um a really hard to define American institution. Yeah, Holzing.
By the way, if you have any questions for Matt, call them in to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. We have like 14 minutes left, so you better hurry if you want to do that. Anyway, and maybe we'll get back to talking about Patreon and pushing ourselves. But I have a question about this specifically, this book and books of its ilk.
What do you think the difference is between the way something is written when it was all word of mouth and you have to ask one person where the next place is I should go, and you're traveling around in a you know, beaten up old, I forget what car it was they had, a Volvo or whatever. Yeah. And uh between that and nowadays when you can just massively aggregate like information from the internet and you still have to go eat it, obviously, but do you think that's a different kind of perspective or it traces a different kind of trail? Is there a difference between the two ways? Yeah.
Um in the world that they were operating in, uh you were getting recommendations from from the local people. And the great side of that is that their experience with a particular place is really deep. Uh the bad side is that if it's the only halfway decent place for miles around, it becomes the best place. Um and so there's a perspective issue that's happening there where you know, yeah, that's the best barbecue because maybe it's the only barbecue place for for 20 miles. Um on the internet in the modern day, everybody has an opinion.
Um, and you know, if they can write something catchy and pithy and and post it and it gets a lot of upvotes on Reddit or whatever, it becomes a dominant opinion. And maybe they don't really know what they're talking about. Um, you know, and and that's that's a hazard from of always. I mean, you always have to have uh you know your hat on and thinking, does this guy really deserve to be telling me where the good food is? But I've been I'm not gonna name websites, but there are websites that like strive to offer you great eating results everywhere in the world, and and some towns they're really terrible.
It's like they've just decided they have to have a list of the you know the 50 best Chinese restaurants in in this town, and and maybe there really aren't 50 worthwhile Chinese restaurants, but they have to have the list. So uh that's a side effect of fighting for search engine optimization ratings. Yeah, and also like uh I mean it's true, I've noticed more and more criticism, even of things like movies where the person writing the criticism hasn't actually seen the movie, or in this case gone to the restaurant, or yeah, it's weird. Weird times. Weird times.
All right. Uh what is uh our next book? Okay, so finally, um classic Russian cooking. Uh, this is a translation of uh a book that was called The Gift to Young Housewives, which was an essential cookbook for upper middle class Russian women uh from the middle part of the 19th century up until the revolution. Uh this is a partial translation of the 1917 edition that was done by Joyce Toomery, who's a scholar up at uh Harvard and Radcliffe.
And she didn't translate the whole book, and she didn't publish and annotate all the recipes because a lot of them are actually very repetitive, as she says in the introduction. You know, there'll be uh a recipe for preserve, and then you'll get the same recipe with a different fruit in it, and there'll be a hundred recipes of just switching one fruit for the other. Um so so what she did was she selected something like 600 different recipes from the 3200 that were in the original book. Um, and she's annotated them. She includes information on uh differences in ingredients and and sometimes in measurements and ambiguities in the original text, and it's a window into uh a cuisine that we don't get a lot of information about in English in um in the United States in that in that period.
Um and some of it is definitely, you know, make your servants do this kind of stuff. Um as one does. Yeah. So I'm told. So I'm told I've somehow missed out on on having that servant kind of thing.
But um it is uh also in some ways a really interesting look at methods that have vanished. So um there's a uh a recipe for preserving plums where you pick them right off the tree, you drop them into a jar, you fill the jar with millet, uh, and then you cover it with a bladder. Okay, which is like a pig's bladder? It doesn't specify, but I'm assuming that it's yeah, that you want something stretchable and um and sealable, and then you bury it in the basement two feet deep in the dirt. Okay, and it's supposed to be good for months.
Um and there are similar recipes. Has anyone tried that? Have you looked it up on the internet? Has anyone done it? I ha I couldn't find an example of it.
But there's another one where you uh you pick pears, you scissor them off the tree. You don't pull them because you want you don't want the damage to the stem around the top of the pear. And then you wipe them down individually with a piece of paper, and then you pack them in the in the root cellar in layers of straw on the shelf. And you don't want to you don't enclose it so that there is some air circulation. I mean, it went through countless editions and nobody, you know, nobody we gotta get on this.
Nobody called her on it. So I'm assuming that it works, but it's a it's a different world. This was the book that was so influential that writers from Chekhov to Solzhenitsyn made casual references to it. Or they uh Chekhov even spoofed it because uh even in his time it was considered a little um aspirational. Most people didn't actually try to to do all this stuff.
Yeah, but we gotta try these weird preservation techniques. By the way, you know this, my they saw the the my stepfather, the Italian family from Medford, and I had their cherries that they had put down in alcohol from the 20s, and they were also like, you must use scissors to cut the cherries down because if you pull the stem, it won't be right. So all of the cherries had their stems on them and they were cut off, not yanked. So I mean that's a cross-cultural fruit preservation situation. Yeah, well, I guess if you're preserving them whole, it makes sense.
You want to have as few points of entry for bad things as you can. But this has like uh that has a wine made from birch sap. Ooh. I mean there are all kinds of it's a weird mix of resourcefulness about using ingredients that we might otherwise pass over, and um and labor intensiveness. Is this is the sturgeon spinal cord in that?
Stas, you remember that? That was like our first time together. Yeah. Like Stas and I somehow, I forget what we were where we read it. In the yo, in the culinary Russian book.
Uh-huh. Yeah. And so like they were like, yeah, yeah, sturgeon spinal cord. That's where it's at. I forget the name of it.
And Stas is like, ooh, sir, sturgeon spinal cord. And like Stas goes to Brighton and just starts knocking on like stores, and we're like, You got any sturgeon spinal cord? Did you ever did we ever find any? We tried and then it just didn't I it just didn't work. I don't know.
I don't know. If anyone that can hear us has the sturgeon spinal cord hookup and knows how to properly prepare a sturgeon spinal cord, please contact us. Right, Stas or no? Yeah. Yeah, hell yeah.
Do it. Yeah. I mean a hundred years later. Yeah, even if it's only the leave if if it's the last sturgeon left alive on earth, get its spinal cord. Aye.
They're an ugly fish. They really are just an ugly fish. You know what I mean? What do you think? You think they're a good looking fish?
I don't think so. Good looking, no, that wouldn't be the word I'd use. No. No. But don't they um are they farming them in the Great Lakes?
I don't know. I think they I think who told me that? I think Jeremy Umansky told me they were trying to farm them in the Great Lakes. I believe that. Is it sable or is it sturgeon that when they smoke it, it sometimes has a weird kind of moldy note in the in the uh in the flesh that's meant to be there.
Is that sable or is that sturgeon? I can't remember. Been such a long time since I've had either. Um I'm definitely down. Someone else, anyone there has a basement that has dirt in it, uh and some millet and maybe a pig's bladder or two.
Try it out. What was it? What was the fruit they buried in the millet? Was that the green gauges? Like green, like what do they I wonder what kind of plums they use?
Probably like green gaugey kind of things, right? Like firmer plums, I would bet. It doesn't say. Uh there was a separate recipe for green gauge. So the fact that it didn't make me think it was a different variety.
Very good. Um also in your email, I saw you're getting some print copies of the uh Mirata books. Yes, so um the uh Japanese Culinary Academy has done a number of really interesting books over the course of years on Japanese technique. Um, with a volume on flavor, uh a couple of volumes on knife skills. There's one on um uh grilling, and they've been impossible to find them all at once.
Uh they sort of one comes around and then it goes away and they another one comes out. This fall, they're releasing all five of them again within a six week period. So I think that is a huge advance. Um how much is that gonna set you back? Well, they're $75 each, uh, which is actually, I think the last time they were available, the books were 95, so they seem to be making some sort of gesture towards um making it easy.
Well, they're practically free now. It's practically free. We're putting together a special deal that um isn't available on our website yet, but I'm gonna make sure I'll share the information with Quinn uh when we have that. So it'll probably be like buy all five of them and get $50 off. Oh, that's not a bad deal.
All right. And I'll see what I can do to sweeten that a little bit for your Patreon people. Love it. All right. Speaking of uh our folks, Christopher P wants to know what is the threshold of sales required to ensure that a cookbook author is going to be uh to get a follow-up uh publishing deal or a follow-up book.
Not an easy question to answer because it depends a lot on the uh original contract that somebody had. I would guess in this day and age, with the economics being what they are, that a net sale of 10 to 12,000 copies puts you in to a safe zone. But that really depends also on, you know, do they sell, do they ship 14,000 and net 12, or do they ship 30,000 and net 12? Um because in the publishing industry, on books that don't sell get sent back to the publisher. And um, or do they still do remaindering or no?
It's less common. It's less common. Um and I mean there used to even be a practice called remaindering in place where they just tell the bookstores to discount them and they'd issue credits. But um there are a lot of aspects of the particular contract. It also depends on what the ongoing rate of sale is.
So if you have a book that goes out and you sell 20,000 copies in the first two months because all the publicity is breaking and then it dies, publisher's gonna have a very different view of that than if the book goes out and sells 12,000 copies in the first two months and then keep selling a thousand copies a month thereafter. Right. If a book is showing uh that it has legs, the publisher's gonna be like, yeah, that because that's what they really want. That's where they're really making the money. But basically, you need to get over about 10,000, 12,000.
That would be the safer zone. Before they want to publish another of your books. Yeah. I mean, there are all kinds of qualifications that could make it better better at a lower level. Yeah.
But that's a a good sort of estimate. And the other thing, Christopher, from my experience is that they also care what you're writing about. They have a very strong sense of publishers of what they think they can sell. You know what I mean? At least Maria did.
Yeah, well, I had a strong sense of many things. Yeah. Um let me make sure I get to this other question. Uh Dr. Smokehouse wants to know I'm always on the lookout for books on charcuterie, particularly featuring old recipes and processes.
Are there any texts that discuss the many quote-unquote ham types from around the world, be they dry cured or cooked? It's hard to find something that crosses cultures. Um I'm not aware of anything that really does that. There's an amazing book uh on French and some other European hams called Professional Charcuterie Volume 1 by Marcel Cottonseau, which was published uh in the early 1990s by John Wiley. Uh it was a translation of a book from France.
It's a really worthwhile book. Prices on the internet are all over the place. Do not spend a thousand dollars for that book. Be patient and buy it for like a hundred bucks. That's not part of the same uh like the bill bill bill.
How do you pronounce that guy, Chef's? It's not part of that series, is it? Same publisher in France, but a different different different team of authors putting together. Very old school. How do you pronounce that guy's name?
Bill Bill Biller Bill Billieu? Bill Hugh? Yeah. I don't know, we're talking about it. Bill Hugh is the guy's name.
Anyway, it's like smiling old school Leones, like chef's hacked up meat. Good. Yeah. No, really worthwhile books. If you find either of them, there's a second volume that focuses on pate and tureen.
They're they are old school, technical in all the best ways. And the photography, even when the books appeared, looked like it was from the 1960s, but it's not quite that retro. Alright, whole second. Uh Azu wants to know about the acidity in uh Seville or and or bitter oranges. Look up Mohammed Al Farag 2020 Sweet and Bitter Oranges, an updated comparative review of their bioactive nutrition, food quality, therapeutic merits and bio waste valorization processes.
About 4.9 uh percent acid for your titratable acidity, mostly citric. And the Wiener system wants to know, and I'm gonna think about this for the future. And Quinn got out of jail free. He didn't have to do the butter stuff. But uh, is there any good reason for a hot dog vendor to own a spinzall?
Any good reason at all? We need to figure out why a hot dog vendor needs a spin's all so that uh they can buy one. That's all. Anyway, uh Matt, thanks uh as always for bringing us some amazing, interesting stuff. Delighted too.
Thank you for having me back. Well, you know, come come again soon. Cooking issues.
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