Re: Coulson's TY Skt.

Neeraj Mathur wrote:

Much of interest in this culinary commentary, too much to comment on
individually.

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:447E4524.7351@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Neeraj Mathur wrote:
I think it's been years since I drank a glass of cold milk. I use milk
for
cereal, tea, and as the main stock for milky hot drinks (lattes, hot
chocolate, hot milk with honey).

Blecch.

You need to add a tastier honey, with more of it, and more cinnamon!

Don't like honey. That's why God made maple syrup.

But nothing can repair the horror of something called "milky hot drink."

I've been drinking skim for the last four years, and started when my
girlfriend at the time forced me to start. Within about two weeks, having
even semi-skimmed (2%) just felt so nasty in any of the above uses.

I also like well-marbled meat. (Would you be the sort of Indian to whom
specifying a particular species would be anathema?)

Not unless you're going to cook it in a pseudo-Indian way. Every now and
then the college chef makes something he calls a beef curry or a pork curry;
the very idea of those things is just repulsive. I don't mind steak or
burgers, but I think ragu sauces are usually better with lamb than beef. (I

Your vocabulary has left North America. What is a "ragu sauce" other
than a brand-name spaghetti sauce, or a misspelled oxymoron?

do eat pork normally, but I just don't understand how you could possibly
want to cook it in an Indian way. No Indian restaurant, cookbook, chef or
relative of mine ever even suggests cooking either beef or pork - I suppose
that probably the greatest tribute to centuries of Hindu-Muslim unity in
South Asia is the fact that most varieties of South Asian cooking in most
parts of the sub-continent avoid both of those meats.) There is nothing more
despicably Anglo-Indian than 'beef curry' - even writing it sounds
oxymoronic.

Our Indian buffets often have goat. Like lamb, only more so.

Can small corrections of misprints or something like that qualify? As if
to
say, 'this is the text that should have been copyrighted in the 70's but
we
goofed up'? Or maybe they're just trying to say that it remains under
copyright?

Not sure. There's also the British (and German) practice of referring to
reprints as new "editions," so that actual new editions that aren't
simply reprints have to be specified as "revised" or "corrected."

Yes, I think the TY blurb said something like 'for this edition the text has
been re-set', which may have been a reason for thinking it was more changed
than it was.

I never realised until just these last fifteen minutes that porridge
tastes
far, far nicer if you put a small stick of cinnamon in when you're
cooking
it.

Was that your own invention?

Is that Brit for "oatmeal"? (which in England ... but in Scotland ...)

Well I've done some checking on this. It seems that 'porridge' is a
general
term made from boiling any kind of grain in milk or water. Oats are most
commonly used; when so, in North America, it is called 'oatmeal'. Over
here,
'oatmeal' is restricted to coarsely ground oats and the porridge made
from
them. I used rolled oats, which according to some is tantamount to the
widely disparaged 'instant oatmeal' (I keep thinking of 'instant grits'
in
My Cousin Vinny) but which suit my purpose just fine.

There's instant, which is awful, and regular, and quick- or one-minute,
the difference between the last two being that the latter is somehow
made into somewhat smaller pieces (but the texture isn't lost).

Are those 'rolled oats' like I have - flat, roundish pieces? I cook them in
the microwave for about three or four minutes bfore they're gloopy enough.

Maybe "rolled oats" were renamed "one-minute oats," or maybe the regular
kind is "rolled." I just made one-minute following the package
instructions exactly: 1 3/4 c. water, bring to full boil, add 1 c. oats,
boil, stirring occasionally, 1 minute, remove from heat and cover for a
few minutes.

Incidentally, I did some checking - it seems that people from England (at
least the three I've asked) seem to consider oats rather essential to
porridge, contradicting the internet research that led to what I posted
above.

As for cinnamon - well, I guess other people may have done it, but I
tried
it on a whim, at my own instigation. I use cinnamon quite a bit - not
only
for cooking Indian dishes, but also for other things. I make my tea
(loose-leaf, about two to three parts Nepalese/Darjeeling/Green Label to
one
part Assam/Red Label, the former for aroma and savour, the latter for
colour) with one or two cloves, three or four pods of green cardamom
(split
open, to allow the seeds to shine), a spoon or two of sugar and about an

Yeah, there's that pan-Asian (except the Chinese sphere) of overly
sweetening their tea! Tea doesn't need sugar. (At all.)

When I let other people make me tea, or when I have one of those
tastes-less-filling teabag teas like Red Rose, Tetley, or PG Tips, I have it

Evidently you can't get real tea in Canada?

with just a dash of milk and no sugar. I have to leave my teabag in forever

again with the milk!!!!

to get any kind of flavour out of it - commonly about half an hour or more,
just in my mug, and then reheating it in the microwave (with the bag still
in) before adding that dash of milk. But when I make my own, as described
above, filled with spices and real teas, it's just far too thick to avoid
milk and sugar. The most committed non-sugar tea-drinkers to whom I've tead
my tea have given in and taken sugar - and been enchanted with the result.

So you're making juice, not tea.

That said, one and a half spoons of sugar in 1.8 litres of tea is hardly
oversweetened! It just balances things like the cloves, and cuts just enough
of the bitter. Come visit me sometime, and see for yourself!

Happy to!

inch of cinnamon - makes about three to four mugs. Since this academic
year

You say "mug"; Hyacinth Bucket says "beaker" to apparently refer to the
same thing. I've asked about this before but never got a real answer.

I've always thought 'beaker' was the same thing as 'tumbler' - that is, a
big thick glass. The OED says 'a large drinking vessel with a wide mouth, an
open cup or goblet'. I use 'mug' to mean the kind of large earthenware
drinking vessel, usually with a big handle - aren't these 'mugs' in the US
as well? A coffee mug?

A beaker is a cylindrical piece of laboratory glassware with a minimal
pouring-spout. It is not any sort of drinking vessel.

You use "mug" properly, but Hyacinth Bucket, of *Keeping Up
Appearances*, daily offers her neighbor Elizabeth coffee in a "beaker,"
which looks like a mug.

I've been doing the same in my coffee (when I make instant coffee,
boiling a
mug of skim milk with a spoon or two of coffee; before my percolater
broke I
drank it strong and black). The other night, when I couldn't sleep, I
made a

Percolator? We haven't seen percolators over here in decades. (Even the
9th Britannica described as optimal a coffee-preparation method
essentially identical to the vacuum apparatus, which was a delightful
physics experiment except the necked spheres tended to break.)

To be honest, it was probably a drip machine rather than a proper
percolater, although one of my flatmates once did have a percolater (the
non-electric stovetop type).

mug of hot milk with honey and threw in a piece of cinnamon. This
morning,
realising I was out of Coco Pops (think chocalate Rice Krispies) and
Special

We have Cocoa Puffs (and Count Chocula)

I have the feeling that, when I was a kid, I tried those and found them
wanting in comparison. My childhood's definition of England was a place
where you could get Coco Pops, Ribena (a blackcurrant drink), and Lion (a
chocolate bar) and where, instead of everything being written in English and
French, it was written in English and Welsh (this is because my childhood
visits to England, after we moved away from there, were to Aberystwyth,

I thought Aberystwyth is in Wales, not England?

where my grandparents lived). I thought it was a general rule of life that
everything had to be in two languages, English and something else. This may
have been reinforced by seeing a few things in India (Jaipur, Delhi, Agra -
all my family lives in the tourist triangle) in English and Hindi. Visiting
my aunt in London or trips to the States completely threw me, shattered my
understanding of the world.

Yet you went into linguistics nonetheless.

K, I resigned myself to porridge, saw my cinnamon and was inspired. It
was
great! For porridge, I mean.

Cinnamon really is one of the greatest things known to man.

I use dill a lot. Cinnamon being a sweet spice is limited in
application.

What do you use dill in? It's true that cinnamon is limited to deserty or
drinky-type things, but it's got quite a range there. Do you use asafoetida
(or 'hing' as in Hindi)?

Eggs, fish.

The name of "asafetida" is disgusting; I have no idea what it is.
Something they used to use for a stuffy nose, was it?

I did once discover that you _can_ put too much allspice in Swedish
meatballs.

I've never made them, but I shall try.

The McCormick Spice Cookbook (from the 1960s) was excellent -- it was
99¢ in a supermarket long, long ago; I only once saw a hardcover
("spiral"-bound, actually) edition -- back when Marshall Field's had a
full-inventory book department -- but would love to find that edition,
as the paperback has quite fallen apart.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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