Podcasts

Better baking through chemistry The food fight that changed the US constitution

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:09 — 21.9MB)

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Linda Civitello is a food historian whose latest book is Baking Powder Wars: the cutthroat food fight that revolutionized cooking. My kind of book, it uses an ingredient we all today take completely for granted to look at everything from fake news and dodgy sales demonstrations to changes to the US constitution.

Our chat barely scratched the surface. We didn’t, for example, talk about the connection between baking powder and the Indianapolis Speedway. Nor did we talk about how the rise of baking powder made it so much easier to eat an excess of sugar, fats and carbs. But we did cover a lot of other ground, from before the outbreak of hostilities to the eventual end of the war.

The winner might not surprise you if you have a tin of baking powder in your cupboard. I imagine it did surprise some of the combatants.

Notes

  1. Get Baking Powder Wars at Amazon and I get a teeny kickback – just like those corrupt Missouri senators.
  2. The banner photograph is a detail from John Frederick Peto’s Still Life with Cake, Lemon , Strawberries and Glass, painted in 1890. The cake was definitely raised with baking powder, but which kind?
  3. The Clabber Girl advertisement is from 1955, by which time, the war was effectively over.
  4. The historic link between Clabber Girl and the Indianapolis 500.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 093 Slightly different

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  1. George Orwell: British Cookery, finally published by the British Council after 73 years.
  2. More Than Peanuts: Revisiting the work and legacy of George Washington Carver for Black History Month, from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
  3. CNN Travel goes beyond the listicle for The 15 best dishes of Ethiopian food.
  4. Choices Magazine, from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, examines Food Loss and Food Waste in the United States.
  5. A ‘greener’ way to take the bitterness out of olives that saves water and recovers valuable chemicals.
Podcasts

Moxie Bread, Louisville, CO "A super colloidal suspension of fat and sugar"

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:46 — 22.4MB)

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Turkey red wheat seedsAndy Clark left Massachusetts in 1994 and wormed his way into one of the iconic bakeries of Boulder, Colorado. After that, he spent 15 years running bakeries for Whole Foods Market. All the while, he was squirreling away ideas and thinking of his own place, where he could focus on 30 great loaves a day, instead of 30,000 for The Man. The result is Moxie Bread Co in Louisville, Colorado, as warm and welcoming a place as I have ever had the pleasure to visit. We talked about bread, and grain, and about creating a welcoming experience. Oh, and perhaps the most decadent pastry I have ever tasted.

kouign amann pastry

That pastry is the kouign amann, an impossibly delicious amalgam of yeasted dough, butter and sugar that comes originally from Brittany in northern France. All the write-ups of Moxie agreed that their kouign amann was out of the world, and I was somewhat miffed that I had never heard of the things.

Now that I have …

Notes

  1. Huge thanks to Andrew Calabrese for making the introductions and the arrangements. What a great day.
  2. Also to our family and friends in Colorado for their friendship and hospitality.
  3. Moxie Bread Co is, of course, online.
  4. To learn more about kouign amann, I turned first to David Lebovitz, for a recipe and some alleged history.
  5. Eater turned to David Lebovitz too, for its informative piece about The Obscure French Pastry Making it Big in America.
  6. There’s apparently even a National Kouign Amann Day, on 20 June. If I can find one, I’ll be eating it.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 092 Not funded by vegan activists

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  1. I like the odd cocktail, but I didn’t know that they began as a way to make nasty alcohol palatable.
  2. Reflections on Gingerbread, with a recipe for a gingerbread cake from a Jewish perspective.
  3. Ken Albala, a frequent guest on Eat This Podcast, published one of his Food Rants on Cultural Appropriation, Authenticity and Gastronomic Colonialism. I didn’t find it at all ranty.
  4. What with all the big breweries swallowing craft beers, what’s a committed craftsperson to do? #SeektheSeal, apparently. I vaguely prefer the underground artist’s approach, first brought to you in ETN 041
  5. And speaking of previous ETNs, it seems that if your biscuits are bad, it might not be because you bought the “wrong” flour, at least according to The Salt at NPR.
  6. What makes the deadly pufferfish so delectable. No question mark; the scientists are telling us it is down to twelve taste compounds. Another two make it even more so. I’ve never tried fugu so I couldn’t possibly comment.
  7. The EAT-Lancet report – Food in the Anthropocene – has already been everywhere, eliciting mostly predictable comments. I’m not linking to any of them, for now.
Podcasts

Food and diversity in Laos "You eat everything"

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:43 — 16.1MB)

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Today’s guest, Michael Victor, has spent the past 16 years living in Laos and getting to know its farming systems and its food. To some extent, that’s become a personal interest. But it is also a professional interest that grew out of his work with farmers and development agencies in Laos. Most recently, he’s been working with The Agro-biodiversity Initiative, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The idea is to make use of agricultural biodiversity in a sustainable way to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of people in upland regions. One thing the project has done is to collect all the information it can about agricultural biodiversity and make it available online. When Michael visited Rome recently, I grabbed the chance to find out more about Lao food and diversity.

Notes

  1. The Pha Khao Lao website is available in English and Lao.
  2. I think that the restaurant Michael mentioned is Thip Khao in Washington DC. Duly noted for next time. Any reports gladly received.
  3. I seem to be way behind the times on riverweed. A couple of years ago even BBC Good Food had tried it. (Scroll down.)
  4. Banner photograph by Periodismo Itinerante from Flickr

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