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@commonplaceish
pls share your non-olive oil/salt/pepper kitchen staples, the condiments and acids and stuff you always have on hand
Mine always seem absolutely basic to me, and then other people don't have them. On the other hand, other people are always looking for weird stuff I don't have when they're here.
Worcestershire sauce. Soy sauce. Smoked paprika. Basil, oregano, garlic powder. Butter. Cider vinegar.
I’m posting this again because it’s a better picture and so I can @lullabyknell but check out my library’s copy of The Joy of Cooking, which for some unfathomable reason has Princess Cimorene on the cover.
First reaction: OH MY GOSH??? THE HECK IS THAT???
Second reaction: Alright, I went hunting for an explanation for this beautiful book and according to Wikipedia this was genuinely the design of the first edition.
The book was illustrated by Rombauer’s daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, who directed the art department at John Burroughs School. Working during weekends during the winter of 1930-31, Marion designed the cover,[4] which depicted Saint Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, slaying a dragon. She also produced silhouette cutouts to illustrate chapter headings.[5]
Amazing. Absolutely incredible design choice.
Third reaction is that themed cookbooks are my favorite cookbooks. Like, I now only want to buy cookbooks with extremely confusing and potentially highly misleading covers. I have a mighty and irrational need for a baking book with a cover that makes it look like a old murder mystery novel. All the recipe titles must be extremely ominous and there must be old engraving-style illustrations of the characters presenting the goods, only in the background of these b&w illustrations there are all these weird, frightening clues that craft the story of a gruesome murder mystery that needs solving. Why? Because.
WAIT THIS WAS THE ACTUAL FIRST EDITION COVER???? Oh my god
A new issue of Commonplace has just gone out: https://commonplacebook.beehiiv.com/p/commonplace-vol-6-issue-2
New Issue! New Issue!
The latest issue of Commonplace is out. https://commonplacebook.beehiiv.com/p/commonplace-vol-6-issue-1
As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.
“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”
That’s ridiculous. In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters. Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level.
Proposal for a Watsonian explanation:
In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:
1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”
2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.
3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.
4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)
The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.
Hmm. This is a fair point. It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t made in Texas.”
I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well. I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients.
1. It is not just hipsters that act like this about food. All the grandmothers I know feel this way too, and I don’t see that ever changing.
The missing ingredient is love, obviously. You can’t get that from a replicator.
Right, for that you need the holodeck.
Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here:
The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better.
Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us.
First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat.
You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales.
You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship.
You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass.
The tamale tastes like home.
You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it.
Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and
Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods.
The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma.
Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste.
Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better?
Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it.
And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.
I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.
Fourth:
You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement.
The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea.
It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge.
If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does.
holy shit boo this is fucking AMAZEBALLS and I miss the tamale ladies at Stone on the way to the Target so much right now but also you *hugs you tight*
Also, regional recipes are calibrated to work with the local tap water. That’s why pizza from New York and sourdough from San Francisco taste better–the micro-organisms in the water enhance the flavor. The chili that wasn’t made in Texas probably did taste subtly different than it would’ve back home.
There are lots of things that would change with replicators because they take out the human factor.
Maybe you really wanted that one meal from that one restaurant except the restaurant doesn’t release their recipe so it’s slightly off and always will be.
You programmed the replicator with your mum’s favourite mac and cheese recipe, but you didn’t know that your mum always added a little more salt and a little less mustard than the recipe called for, so it’s just not the same and it’s not as good.
Pretty much this. Also I think we cannot overstate the degree to which “the food always comes out exactly the same” would end up bothering people over time.
Important point is that these are “military grade” food replicators and military food is never really great. Hence the difficulty with the tea. Food replicators in private homes and restaurants are more controllable and may have programming for varieties of chilies or tomatoes or even carrots. There are 4 basic kinds of carrots but only one is available commercially, the others need to be grown at home. With a programmable home replicator one can have chantenay carrots… all the infinite varieties of foodstuff ingredients will be available with the right programming and therefore civilians in the 24th century in star trek will have perfectly customisable food. My mind is boggled now…
For a real-world example, but in the other direction:
When I was a child, my mother used to make chili using “Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix.” It made… okay chili.
When I was in college I found a book called “Chili Madness” at a local used bookstore, that had the winning recipes from the National Chili Cookoff for the last 30 years. It included Carroll Shelby’s actual recipe. So I made it. (Had to get one of my apartment mates to source beer for me, as I was not of age to purchase it yet.)
Wow. What a difference. Adding the spices at different times rather than as a blob of “spice mix”. Beer instead of water. No masa. So good!
So the bagged mix would be the replicator mix in this scenario.
@subbyp you said what about the tap water?
It has microscopic crustaceans in it.
The microorganisms are different, if not missing.
The process of creating it is removed, along with all that entails: this spice left to simmer for the entire cooking time, that fresh leafy thing added in just at the end, a tiny bit heat-wilted.
The quality, not in terms of “is it good” but “what characteristics does it have,” the difference between grass-fed beef and corn-fed, mast-raised pork and commercial feed, how much sunshine did the animal get, what breed is it, how much exercise did it get.
What soil microbes mingled with the roots of that plant and what was planted next to it and how many rainy days did it get and how much sun? You have wine connoisseurs talking about how this or that year was “a good year” because of how the patterns of temperature and sun and rain hit the vines, and everybody has a memory of getting a really good batch of blueberries from the store ONCE and wishing they could all be like that.
When I was a kid we picked strawberries at you-pick fields that don’t seem to be around anymore, and they tasted so much better than anything I’ve ever gotten from a store.
One of the things that screws up my suspension of disbelief in Star Trek is how weirdly specific and intuitive the computers both are and aren’t, at the same time. Picard always has to say “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” at the replicator so there’s obviously no means of personalization where the replicator knows if it’s Picard asking for tea, he wants it Earl Grey and you can just jump to that unless he specifies otherwise, but also that one time he was able to pull up the musical recording of HMS Pinafore on the working screen of a shuttle by pressing just two buttons, and there weren’t a whole lot of buttons on either screens, so what the fuck?
Anyway there’s probably a shitload of data storage in a Federation starship, but are they really going to fill it up with enough molecular data to store
every extant cultivar
of every food plant
at every stage of edible ripeness
prepared every way it’s commonly prepared
in combination with every other ingredient whose presence or absence affects its taste?
Plus every cut of every food animal
with all the variables of how it might have been raised, and then
with every variable of preparation?
If you bake bread it will taste differently based on how you let it rise, at what temperature, if you put it in the fridge overnight and then let it rise, if you use a starter or a pre-ferment, as well as what yeast you use and how you knead it and what flour and what water and the temperature and shape of the oven and the atmospheric pressure and humidity of the day and the altitude you’re doing your baking at and
that’s
ONE
type
of
food
and you can’t just reduce all that into “bread, artisan, sliced” or whatever
don’t get me started on the butter
or the absolute multitude of things that you could mean when you say you want “chili”
and even if you go into the Settings menu the first time you take a Starfleet posting and spend hours on end going into detail about what varieties of peppers should go into each of your favorite Mexican dishes and how much crispiness is The Correct Amount Of Crispiness in your bacon (and how thick it should be and how it should be smoked and seasoned) and how big and numerous you want the holes in your sandwich bread to be
you’re still gonna find yourself missing the taco truck and the tamale lady and that one bakery and the sort of fried rice you get when you throw six days’ worth of leftovers in plus whatever spices feel right at the time.
i always figured they’d have a gourmet chef produce a dish, scan the pattern, store the pattern in a database, and there you go. same dish every time, until the end of time. just have a masterclass chef who had this one dish they’re passionate about and have them make it.
but then you’ll run into the problem of ‘it’s a great dish but it ain’t what pappy used to make’. and that’s that.
look, you can get a gourmet chef to make you some artisanal mac n’ cheese, and it’d be great mac n’ cheese, stellar even. and the computer will even reproduce it indistinguishable from the masterclass chef’s creation- but sometimes the palette of the common folk don’t want the 12 layers of flavor in a masterclass chef’s fancy mac n’ cheese, you just want mac n’ cheese.
sometimes we do be wanting that uncultured stuff.
look, with all the minecraft builders of today, i highly doubt there isn’t some dedicated ensign or other, mucking around in the ship’s library, trying to reproduce a taste of home.
and they’ll probably frankenstein a pretty good approximation that they’ll be so proud of, they’ll have it served at their funeral.
forget that one time i saved a planet’s civilization from radiation poisoning, i finally got the mac n’ cheese right. and it’s just the generic box store mac n’ cheese with butter and cheddar.
fuck the gourmet chef’s 12 layers of flavor, some butter and cheddar? that’s where it’s at.
I don’t know shit about Star Trek but I can tell you:
As a child I loved the hard, crumbly, springy, salty feta cheese that was sold at the deli in Market Basket. (Tell me you’re from NE without telling me-) The deli clerk would pick up these great blocks of feta and put them in a plastic container full of brine. In the UK i was startled to learn that this is not Greek feta cheese, and that feta cheese is actually soft and sweet and sour and smeary, and I don’t like it at all. The closest thing to the experience, “my” “feta” cheese, is Apetina (sold as salad cheese - it isn’t legally feta) when cubed and sold in brine. And it isn’t it. I read pages trying to understand what Apetina is, and it isn’t Feta because it comes from Denmark, not a specific area of Greece, but that doesn’t explain why Market Basket feta and Apetina are both tasty and brittle and dry and briny, and Actual Real Feta is like failed chèvre. “The terrain on which the animals graze (in Greece) is very different from that of Denmark,” one website offered hopelessly. I don’t think a work cafeteria is prepared to deal with this, I really don’t.
Annie’s macaroni with white cheddar, in the purple box with the bunny on it. Smartfood popcorn. Smartfood popcorn! I crossed an ocean not realising I wouldn’t eat it again. People have, with the best of intentions, have heard my grief about this tried to tell me how to make Mac and cheese from scratch as if I don’t fucking know. This is not a bechamel, sir, this is not a roux-based sauce, this is white cheddar powder and if you don’t know then you don’t know. Operating under wild cravings, I bought a packet of UK-produced cheddar powder from apparently the only company in Europe that makes it - apparently as a protein supplement - and cannot explain what is wrong with it to my own family, let alone a computer. Let alone a catering company. Let alone a work canteen run by a catering company’s computer. “White cheddar popcorn,” you say, and it gives you popcorn covered in cold grated cheese. We can’t even reconcile this between friends on a planet let alone the vastness of all spacetime.
Those Maruchan creamy chicken ramen noodle packets - did you know they stopped existing? They never will again. Do you remember them enough to teach a computer?
When my husband moved to the US he just could not get sausage. He was astonished by American sausage: sweet breakfast sausage, fennel sausage, hot sausage - but could not get back bacon (“Canadian bacon?” “No, back bacon”) or sausages for a fry up. He found an English butcher in the USA that would ship the right kind on ice, and had a fry up and was happy. Now I think suddenly of hot sausage, Market Basket again with those twelve-packs of weirdly red sausage. If we can’t argue these distinctions with people then what can we do?
Did you know that Old El Paso spice mixes, those cheap “Mexican” ones, have the same names and packaging but the ingredients vary by country? Just like Coca-Cola, thought to be the universal American import, actually being made from the cheapest sugar source in the country of manufacture.
I don’t know anything about Star Trek. I am absolutely starving.
The Sheboygan bratwurst my dad would drive from Chicago to get when I was a tiny child just don’t exist where I live now, and it is regional variations that would be keeping restaurants like Joseph Sisko’s going in Star Trek.
The thing they don’t tell you about medieval gruel (pottage) is that it’s fucking delicious
The Ramen_Lord Book of Ramen By Mike Satinover (Ramen_Lord) and Scott Satinover, Ph.D. Copyright © 20
The Iron Age Kitchen, The Scottish Crannog Centre, Loch Tay, Scotland
I just think that 'animals are living intelligent creatures that have feelings and deserve to be respected' and 'when done properly farming is beneficial to both people and animals and there's nothing wrong with raising and killing animals for food, clothing, and other products' are concepts that very much can and should coexist
sorry for a long post but i’ve been collecting vintage recipes for a while and i would like to share a small selection of my personal favorites with you
@doeskin-pantaloons
I may have to try some of these. Carefully.
@ people who carry bags everywhere what do you put in them what is there to bring other than chapstick, keys, phone and maybe a tampon why are you packing a suitcase to be outside for 5 hours
One of my favourite bits of linguistic trivia is that in Ancient Greek, the word ἰχώρ (cognate to the modern English "ichor") is attested in extant literature to mean both "the bodily fluid which gods possess instead of blood", and also "gravy", which implies several things about Ancient Greek culinary culture's attitude toward gravy.
I keep doing this weird trick to myself where I'll find a recipe for a new type of rice and beans and decide to try making it from dried beans like the recipe suggests, only to realize halfway through the process that whatever is wrong with my brain makes waiting for dried beans to cook absolutely harrowing
The thing about black beans is that if you, at any point, think "surely they must be cooked by now," no, they're not
(from Pedro Martin's "Mexikid Stories", https://www.mexikid.com/)
I think so much about the food people ate pre-Columbian exchange. Huge parts of cuisine extremely important on both sides of the pond just didn't exist.
You've probably heard a little about what was brought over from the New World, corn, potatoes, cocoa, cassava, peanuts, chili peppers, avocadoes, cranberries, pumpkins, and the like. Imagine cooking without chili! Without potatoes! Modern Indian cuisine contains enormous amounts of potatoes and we just didn't have those for the vast majority of history. The best of the nightshades all on one contiguous hunk of land. Hell, tomatoes! Almost forgot about those.
But we don't often look at what the Old World had. Wheat! Barley! Rice! A profusion of incredible grains, really, the finest poaceae has to offer. Carrots! Tons of rosaceous plants like apples and cherries and pears and peaches and apricots! Grapes! Soy and Bamboo! Okra and watermelon! All these things were simply never found in the Americas. The grains one is the wildest for me, the variety of grains available across Eurasia and Africa was truly astounding.
You know what binds together the food of all cultures across the world? Onions. Onions are fucking everywhere. There's probably onions growing near you right now. Allium Gang Unite.
@pomegristle
Recently, while staring far too long at a potato chip, it occurred to me that the ridges could possibly be used to create a lenticular effect. So I got out some chip dip (and the smallest paint brush I have) to test it out. I started with a simple 2-frame illustration of a football and a basketball, then I painted a little sour cream and onion dip bird. 🥔🕊️ - via my new @brockdavisart instagram
here's a fun parchment fact for you re: reusing a surface: sheepskin was often used for legal documents because it's hard to scrape out a word and rewrite without it being obviously damaged, unlike good quality calfskin where it can be undetectable that something has been altered
this has a lot of potential for fiction tbh because you could have the success of a crime hinging on whether a particular charter was written on sheep or calfskin, and therefore impress all your readers with your knowledge of the relative qualities of different types of parchment
Your knowledge on parchment is truly some of the most useful information I've ever absorbed about the middle ages. I'm writing a medieval fantasy novel where the main characters are gathering information to make a compendium of sorts so there's a lot of writing and craft involved. I'm glad I know to do research on medieval writing practices, I wouldn't have thought to check that before!
lmao i'm glad my yelling is hopefully improving the quality of future historical and fantasy novels, even if only in regards to their codicology 😆
Got any more extremely useful tidbits of information, like maybe their diets besides potatoes and whether or not they poop in a pot in their bedroom or do their private business in like some sort of outhouse, or maybe even what animals the rich, middle class, and poor were capable of owning at the time?
well i mean i can guarantee that medieval european diets definitely didn't involve potatoes
the rest is all gonna be wildly location- and century-specific so there is no universally true answer (except for no potatoes). for early medieval ireland, fergus kelly's early irish law and early irish farming are useful sources though
i am however not a historian, i am a literature specialist, i just know about books/texts and therefore things that are relevant to the contents or production of books/texts
I'm a food historian; fire your questions this way! Some praxis visible on sideblog @thejoyofseax, should that be useful.
Stone cooking supports used to grill skewers of meat by Minoans on Santorini, circa 3600 years old. The line of holes in the base supplied coals with oxygen. Many consider modern "souvlaki" street kebabs a direct descendant of this portable food system. Museum of Prehistoric Thera, Greece. More: https://thetravelbible.com/museum-of-artifacts/
