cooking

The past couple of posts I've gotten some comments implying I'm misandrist, which any man that actually knows me will confirm is untrue, but furthermore, would a misandrist own a cookbook called A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband With Bettina's Best Recipes?

Unfortunately, I can't link to this cookbook because it's very old. It's from 1917, but actually old cookbooks are a pretty cheap collectible. You can get some nice ones for less than $20 and they make great gifts. I suspect it's because many of them really show their age. American cooking has changed a lot and dare I say that it's better now? Yes, we eat a lot of junk these days, but it's possible to get cookbooks that have healthy AND flavorful recipes. Reading this cookbook, I get the feeling that if anything in it is healthy, it's an accident. As much as I love old things, I feel very lucky that we can evaluate them scientifically. **edit: someone just informed me that this book is available free on Google Books**

This cookbook was from a very strange era. It melds retro gender roles with a more modern emphasis on convenience, thrift, and simplicity. Back when I first got this cookbook, when I was a teenager, I never made anything from it because it had "exotic" ingredients like lard and tallow. Now I don't use it much because everything is bland and has white flour and sugar in it. It reminds me that while our health wasn't so bad back then compared to now, it was probably in the decline. There are wise traditions, but there are unwise traditions as well. I get the feeling that bread-crusted lamb chops are an unwise tradition. It's entirely possible to make unhealthy foods from scratch.

Though let's be honest, anyone who came home to these meals would probably be pretty happy. Each chapter has a trite little story as an intro that makes me very grateful that I am not as boring as Bettina, though her husband Bob is pretty lame too. Then there is a selection of recipes for each occasion. For example "A Sunday Dinner" has roast beef, brown potatoes, browned gravy, baked squash, and Devil's food cake with vanilla icing. Don't worry, it's not entirely woman's work. One progressive chapter is "Bob Makes Peanut Fudge." Don't worry, while Bob is making his manly candy, Bettina is at work on liver and bacon, fruit gems, creamed turnips, and apple sauce. In another chapter titled "Bob makes pop-overs"...Bob makes pop-overs, though really Bettina is making them when Bob comes into the kitchen and says "Let me help you with them, Bettina; this is one place where you can use my strong right arm."

Flour is added to EVERYTHING. The food actually reminds me a bit of what was served at the Baptist church potlucks my family went to when I was a child. The only thing missing is the Jello.

For Valentine's Day there is broiled steak, macaroni with tomatoes and green peppers, baked potatoes, bread, butter, and cornstarch fruit pudding. Probably the most hilarious menu is for Washington's Birthday

"Good bran bread," said Bob, reaching for another piece.

"I like that recipe," said Bettina, "and it is so easy to make."

 "What have you been doing all day?" Bob asked, "Cooking?" 

"No, indeed. Charlotte was here this afternoon and we made plans for the tea we are going to give at her house on Washington's birthday. Oh, Bob we have some of the best ideas for it! Our refreshments are to be served from the dining-room table, you know, and our central decoration is to be a three-cornered black hat filled with artificial red cherries...blah blah blah blah"

So what's on the final menu? Corned beef au gratin, baked tomatoes, apple sauce, cream pie, and GLUTEN BREAD. Yes, not just bread, but GLUTEN BREAD. Planning parties all day sounds nice though.

A little too much sugar here, which probably accounts for some of the gout men of this era suffered from (if you search Google books for this era you'll find several diabetic and uric-acid free cookbooks), but I've learned some lessons from the book. One of my major mistakes has been making extremely complicated multi-course meals. Bettina makes several simple things. She also often boils or steams things, which I didn't really do much until this year, but they are very simple and gentle cooking methods. Bettina occasionally uses a "fireless cooker," which was a primitive form of crockpot.

While I find Bettina annoying, I don't see her as a mere housewife. These days I'm sure she'd be gainfully employed as a party-planner or something. And while I don't think cooking is a "woman's role" I do personally enjoy cooking for men.

Please your stalkers with a freshly baked cake!

Bake then, even babies helped in the kitchen. Wait... that's not a baby....

Here is a recipe: Head lettuce with Roquefort Cheese Dressing

1 head of lettuce

1/2 t-salt

3 T-oil

1/8 t-pepper

1/4 a cup Roquefort cheese

1 T-vinegar

Cream the cheese, add salt, pepper, and vinegar. Add the oil gradually. Mix well, shake thoroughly. Pour over the lettuce and serve.

I've really become a fan of retro salad dressing recently, particularly Green Goddess, even though that takes me a very long time to make since I make my own mayo.

Edit: Bettina's family recipes seems a lot better and it's also on Google Books for free. These smothered potatoes are calling me...

Guess what I had for dinner last night at a super secret supper club? Hint, "I'm so hungry I could eat a _____."

Yes, this is horse heart with truffles. Oh, I can just hear the gasps of horror right now. This was from Quebec, where it is legal. In most of Europe it's still eaten.

In California, if you are arrested for serving this, the minimum sentence is 2 years. To contrast, you could torture this animal and have sex with it and get less than a year.

Yes, I know horses are pretty and sparkly and we owe them something. But that's not logic- that's no better than basing a law on religious beliefs. And in fact such laws do have roots in religion. Horse meat has a long association with paganism and back when that was a major threat to Catholicism, the pope outlawed it.

Don't get me wrong. I like horses and I've ridden them since I was very young. When I was 14 I gave an impassioned speech in debate club about the horrors of horse slaughter. But a horse is no smarter than a pig. And if it were legal, I would eat my own horses. Many horses go lame or break their legs quite young. Instead of eating them, we often euthanize them and cremate them.That's too bad, because the meat is quite good. No gaminess, so it was a little like lean beef. Also, draft horses are much more practical if you are allowed to eat them sometimes. That's why some draft breeds are still thriving in Europe while they are mostly seen on museum farms here.

Back when I was 15

I like cows and pigs too...and I eat them.

During the dinner, a woman from Kazakhstan who grew up as a nomad said she was so happy to be eating this, since she hadn't had it for 15 years. She talked about her culture's complete reliance on the horse, which involves use for riding, blood, milk, and meat. There they treasure horse meat and offer up prayers to thank the horses for their gifts to humans.

The chefs at the dinner paired horse with another unjustly illegal ingredient, Tonka Beans. No, I wasn't going unpaleo here :) Tonka beans are not eaten like real beans, but like vanilla beans. Shavings of them are used as a flavoring that many describe as being close to vanilla. I found it otherworldly, but bizarrely reminecant of buttercream iced birthday cakes. These beans are illegal because they have an ingredient that's kind of like a blood thinner, but scientists generally agree that they are safe and they are used in Britain and France.

< sarcasm > Since there are no factory farms that are producing digusting and unsafe food whatsoever, the FDA has plenty of time to raid Michelin-starred restaurants like Alinea, which used to make desserts with Tonka. < /sarcasm >This is stupid. Tonka beans aren't even remotely unsafe. Sadly, Tonka beans don't have a lobby that would help get the stupid law repealed.

Have you seen Chris Masterjohn's latest post? Since his last posts have been rather serious, I thought he was seriously going to write a paleo book. ANd I thought...well that's quite a bit unlike the Chris I know and a little odd to boot. But seriously, it reminds me of all the reasons I'm not writing a book any time soon.

First, my unabashed love of many neolithic things. It brings to mind this comment I saw on a Meghan McArdle blog post about Nestle selling in the Amazon:

Makes me think of an account I read, I can't remember where, of some travelers or explorers in a very remote area on some island I think in Indonesia or somewhere like that. Anyway, the travelers met a local hunter gatherer and shared their dinner of white rice with him. They wrote that he cried because he had never tasted anything so delicious before. Imagine living on roots and leaves and then having people complain if you get something tastier.

I have a little book written by an actual archaeologist on prehistoric cookery. Needless to say, I have not made any of the bland and miserable-sounding recipes in that book.

I have no desire for asceticism for the sake of asceticism. Yes, I like to eat with evolution in mind, but unless someone comes up with a study that shows that my lovely neolithic goose rilettes are culpable for ruining health, I am unlikely to trade them for soggy sea weed and unseasoned muskrat stew.

It's been quite some time since I read this book, but it has the most honest title: Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, The Unknown, and The Unknowable. Yes, there is much not known and even more that is unknowable. We know very basic things about the paleolithic diet, enough for a very basic framework. But not much more. We know their diets were high in protein from isotope studies, we know they ate nose to tail from butchery marks, we know they ate some plants from coprolites (though these studies have the worst methodology), and yeah...

There is SO much pop anthropology floating out there right now. Like the idea that cultures like the Inuit or the Kitavans are paleolithic relics. It shows just how far this movement has gone away from actual anthropology, which recognizes that the paleolithic is an era that is OVER. There are no more paleolithic cultures. There are some foragers left, but ALL of these groups have had significant contact with agriculturalists and many have also been agriculturalists at some point in history. This is called agricultural regression and its well-known in anthropology, but apparently has not taken hold of pop culture, though the Boston Globe had an article on SE Asia that featured it recently. So most modern foragers are NOT living fossils. Laughably, many of these cultures mistakenly held up as examples of the Stone Age are not even foragers. The Kitavans, for example, are horticulturalists. Horticulture is a form of agriculture, which differs in some very significant social, cultural, and environmental ways from agrarianism. It's shifting vs. settled, communalism vs. private property, hoe vs. plough, agrobiodiversity vs. monoculture. It's different from the agriculture we know and it's almost always accompanied by foraging, but some foraging does not a forager make.

I wish mainly in this post to demolish the arrogance that is pervading the "paleo" movement. It's rather extraordinary since in many ways the movement is a reaction to the arrogance of mainstream health authorities.

I was happy to see that it seems Erwan wishes to do this as well:

The whole Paleo approach has become very fashionable with various camps arguing over a number of things that we really can’t know about for sure. How do you answer the critics who say this approach romanticises a brutish existence?

Let me be a bit provocative here, purposely: I do not care about my ancestors. They’re all dead!

An evolutionary approach is only interesting if it helps us, people of today, people that are still alive. In that sense, I am not interested in a so called “truth”, but in what we can experience today, and how understanding our past may help us improve our present lives. I am not living a caveman lifestyle, I’m sorry. I am a man of today, I’m in the here and now. I am not “sprinting and lifting heavy things” thinking that I am mimicking a caveman lifestyle. That is BULLSHIT. I am sprinting and lifting heavy things (among many other things I train) in order to be ready to do so in today’s world when the need arises. It’s about real-life preparedness and not role playing. MovNat is about connecting to reality, not to a reality that does not exist anymore.

When I was little my mother read the Little House books to my sister and me. Looking back, I wonder if those books were part of what predisposed me to liking traditional foods, hunting, and farming. We had The Little House Cookbook as well and I remember being intimidated by the receipes, which called for things like lard.

I feel that it's a major accomplishment in my life that the recipes in this book now seem so normal to me. Lard? No problem, I've got plenty in my fridge.

One thing I'll always remember is the heart-shaped cakes that Laura and Mary got for Christmas. Back then such desserts were truly special. They each got one teeny tiny little cake to treasure and the fact it was made with white flour and sugar was unusual.

The cakes were too pretty to eat. Mary and Laura just looked at them. But as last Laura turned hers over, and she nibbled a tiny niblle from underneath, where it wouldn't show. And the inside of that little cake was white!

What else was in those cakes? Lard and cultured buttermilk. Not something to eat every day, but made with some good ingredients at least. Being a holiday today, I try to be mindful of such an eating philosophy. If you are going to eat something that's not the pinnacle of health, it might as well be good. Grandma's pie? Yes. Costco pie? No thanks, I'll have more turkey.

When I lived in Sweden I had the pleasure of having a very large kitchen and many friends who couldn't afford to go home, as well as interested Europeans. I helped cook both American and Canadian Thanksgivings. One of my goals in life is to once again have a really big kitchen where I can entertain my family and friends for meals like that. But for now it's just my small family and we are keeping it mostly paleo besides some candied walnuts. Disorganization is on our side— a good homemade pie crust is hard to make! 

Another goal is to cook more of the recipes in this book. Blackbird pie anyone? First I need to practice shooting.

He cut into the pie's crust with a big spoon, and turned over a big chunk of it onto a plate. The underside was steamed and fluffy. Over it he poured spoonfuls of thin brown gravy, and beside it he laid half a blackbird, browned, and so tender that the meat was slipping from the bones. He handed that first plate across the table to Ma..."It takes you to think up a chicken pie, a year before there's chickens to make it with," Pa said. He ate a mouthful and said, "This beats a chicken pie all hollow." 

Have a great Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading this blog!