Hello

I’m always slightly puzzled when a theme emerges from what I think of as an essentially random habit of collecting shiny things as I come across them. This time, longer articles full of information, some maybe more useful than the rest.

Fish

I love to eat fish. To cook it, not so much. In truth, I’ve never really understood fish in the same way that I understand meat, and now that I have a basic introduction from Jason Mulvenna I could probably improve.

It is hard to single out any one piece of crucial information. So here are three: fish are more watery and have less connective tissue and shorter muscle fibres than meat, all of which means that they cook very much more quickly. Then there’s the fact that fish proteins coagulate at a much lower temperature, and you can understand why a fish can go from raw to overdone in the blink of an eye.

Seeds

Mothers’ day is not all that important to me, not least because there are so many variants on which is the day. But it does provide a useful peg on which to hang an article, which The Botanist in the Kitchen has done with a splendid edition of the Gather & Sow newsletter.

The topic is seeds, the size of which is determined by the “mother” plant parent. The Botanist (there are actually two of them, Jeanne L. D. Osnas and Katherine A. Preston) does a great job of explaining the sorts of things that influence seed size, from the giant coco-de-mer to the dust specks that are orchid seeds. (I had no idea that the little specks of vanilla seed are actually giants among orchid seeds.)

As ever, there’s a recipe of the month too, which makes use of tiny vanilla seeds and huge coconuts, with the added benefit of a thoroughly practical guide to safely opening a fresh coconut.

Cheese

When I asked Trevor Warmedahl, the Cheese Trekker, about challenging cheeses a couple of months ago, he brought up casu marzu, the infamous maggot cheese of Sardinia, and I think we agreed that it is the very fact of the maggots that makes it so challenging to modern, western sensibilities. Now, National Geographic has a long article dedicated to sampling Sardinia’s legendary maggot cheese and yes, the maggots run through it just as they run through the ripe cheese.

What I really don’t understand, and which the article fails to explain, is why it was banned first in Italy and then throughout the EU. Yes, it contains maggots. And there’s a throwaway line about the author being reassured by their gastroenterologist. But no hint of why the EU considers casu marzu a “contaminated and decayed product.” Unlike, say, roquefort?

This comment from microbiology professor Francesco Fancello sums it up for me:

The great divide … isn’t between casu marzu and maggot-free cheeses. It is between cheeses made by hand in shepherds’ huts and cheeses mass-produced in factories—between artisanship and mass production.

Flat

Just as, maybe, we’re all getting used to the idea of a blowtorch in the kitchen, along comes a new multiuser tool: the tortilla press. Taste magazine explains how The Smushing Machine is finding lots of new users and uses beyond turning balls of masa into tortillas. Plantains, tuna, escalopes; all are finding themselves squished to perfection. If you have a tortilladora perhaps you will be inspired. If you don’t, I doubt that this will tip the scales. If it does, please let me know.

Artificial

A good debunking will always keep me reading. So, maybe you know the story of how in the middle of the 19th century, the natural ice barons of the northeast US invented the term artificial ice for that made by the nascent technology of refrigeration, and then used that framing to sow fear and suspicion, delaying the adoption of technological cold.

It wasn’t so.

Virginia Postrel dug into the claim and explains that it was cost not mistrust that kept refrigeration waiting. A good read at Works in Progress.

Take care