Food News!

[minoanmiss]

Two posts in one.

First: Silphium has been rediscovered! With INFINITE thanks to bironic for telling me! Somewhere Apicius is doing a little dance.

https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/10/1/102/htm. (with thanks to lyonesse

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/miracle-plant-eaten-extinction-2000-years-ago-silphion (beware of paywall)

https://twitter.com/lostsupper/status/1573296595860332546. (beware of Twitter)

In other news:


So yesterday I was regaling my coworkers with a time when I was told something I'd prepared had Too Much Flavor and my Utter Incomprehension Of This Statement [1] and A said, "There is an ... idea, a concept, of experiencing the true unadorned nature of the food without any other flavors to interfere. Like in Japanese cooking." And he and I talked about the intrinsic flavors of bread and rice and corn, and about layering flavors, and about flavors enhancing each other vs the pure flavor of something by itself. At one point I said, because I'm me, "I think... the same person can look really good in a three piece suit and greatcoat, or naked, or anywhere in between, and I think food can be the same way," and A nodded sagely.

I wish I could have recorded the conversation -- it was very interesting and I lost a lot of the memory after I fell asleep on the bsu.

What do you think?


[1] i.e. playing it up to be entertaining. In real life the ensuing discussion was really edifying, but yesterday I got S to laugh when I declared, "and so I Dishonored my Ancestors and didn't add any hot pepper"

Comments

[darkmarcy]

Oh, I get the "true" unadorned flavour of things!
I will happily snack on just sticks of cucumber. No dip needed! (I also used to eat raw celery stalks.) Raw (peeled tho, I don't want yersinia :'D ) carrot on its own is lovely! Shredded if I want to make an effort.

I have been very suspicious of adding sauces or dips into anything ever, things work for me as they are already. Maybe I have a very sensitive sense of taste, I dunno.
But then again, heating, cooking or whatever way of preparing foodstuffs opens whole new flavour doors. (Not to mention mixing with other ingredients) I think the three piece suit/naked-analogy is very good!

[minoanmiss]

Aww, they don't take homemmade cards or "cartoons". There goes my sources of images.

blushes delightedly at you

[darkmarcy]

Whoops, wrong comment to reply to but I got it!

[amaebi]

Thanks for the stuff on Silphium, which I hadn't heard of!

That sounds like a great food conversation. :)

A little extra treasure from the NatGeo article

[amaebi]

"Grainger, who worked as head pastry chef at London’s Atheneum Hotel for five years before earning a degree in ancient history...."

Re: A little extra treasure from the NatGeo article

[minoanmiss]

I want to invite them over for dinner! What a resume!

Re: A little extra treasure from the NatGeo article

[amaebi]

And what a lively demonstration of the multifariousness of human beings, our capacities and interests. In a world that wants to slot us or discard us, since it's so handy when the empirical world adheres to a simple model....

[dine]

that is incredible news! how amazing that such an important 'lost' food is still there. I hope they're able to increase its cultivation

[asakiyume]

I love how you expressed it, about food, and I 100 percent agree.

And that's fantastic about silphium, too!

[acelightning73]

Max Miller, in his YouTube channel Tasting History, has done a Roman recipe with silphium in it. IIRC, he thinks it might be related to asafoetida.

Oh hell yes

[ororo]

Absolutely so.

I was out for dinner last night and there was a tuna appetizer that exemplified this beautifully. It is so easy, with too much acid especially, to overpower the delicious freshness of a delightful piece of fish. This appetizer had a lovely dressing on it, but the tuna lost done of its fishy goodness.

Sushi in general is a great example here. You've got your sashmi, your sushi with just the seasoned rice and a dot of wasabi, then you can get into some ridiculous rolls that might kill the taste of your fish if you don't balance the flavors correctly.

I can also liken this to music. Do you hear one note, a few notes, or do you hear the whole chord?

[jadelennox]

I love both very highly flavored or spiced food, and, like, plain tofu with a tiny bit of tamari, or a boiled potato with salt, or a salted bowl of (any kind of) rice. Those are flavors! And it's hard to outdo the taste of a perfectly roasted potato, tbh. But I also like food in which I've dumped half the spice rack, or something that burns off the roof of my mouth. Or a complexity of flavors like in the layers of gumbo flavor.

I dishonor my ancestors by no longer eating meat. Just ask my grandmother.

(I mean, don't ask her. She's dead, and also would have used that yiddish word while not thinking she was being racist at all. And also once she cooked the matzah balls in chicken soup and lied to me about it, and when Dad yelled at her about that she shouted it's not healthy to have food restrictions! and my dad yelled Ma, you're a kosher butcher! She was an amazing cook, though.)

[amaebi]

I am compelled to pay tribute to that last paragraph, which I love. Thank you!

[anna_wing]

I hope that the Turkish botanical establishment can do what the Australians did with the Wollemi Pine, propagating it and establishing it in the garden trade by the million. Since silphium is edible, it could be sold for climatically suitable kitchen gardens everywhere.

[minoanmiss]

I hope with you, so hard. I want to cook with silphium before I die. I already have the garum!

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's awesome news.

[lunabee34]

I love both highly flavorful food and minimally seasoned food.

I really enjoy the taste of most fruits and vegetables, so I enjoy a minimal prep of just salt and pepper, maybe a little acid, maybe a little fat of some kind, where the taste of the fruit or veggie is the star.

For example, my dad's sweet corn straight out of the garden: I don't want anything on it--not salt, not butter, nothing. Just that glorious corn all on its on. It tastes like distilled sunshine. Or his tomatoes. Just a sprinkle of salt and that's it.

But I also love highly seasoned fruit and veggie dishes.

Where I feel this the most is with seafood. I like a blackened redfish now and then; I can't betray my Gulf Coast roots. But mostly, I want to taste the seafood. I want to eat an oyster raw. I want to taste the sweetness of the crab. I want to taste the delicate flavor of the fish. Too much seasoning overwhelms those inherent flavors.

[amaebi]

(I like roasted sweet corn with lime juice and chili powder, too.)

[lunabee34]

That sounds amazing! I've never had it that way.

[amaebi]

Highly recommended.

[acelightning73]

That's also a principal in Chinese cooking. The art of combining flavors, seasoning food with things that cause it to taste more like itself. You're supposed to notice the intrinsic taste, aroma, texture and appearance of the food, as highlighted by the way it's cooked. (The Japanese probably stole the idea from the Chinese, the way they stole their language, their writing system, and a lot of social nonsense.)