Recipes

Epic Cookbooks of American Foreign Policy and Other Stuff

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Or something like that.

1. Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations – by Chris Fair (via Abu Muqawama’s Twitter feed leading to C. Fair’s Twitter feed and so on and so forth….)

2. Pioneer Farm Cooking (Exploring History Through Simple Recipes); Cooking on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Exploring History Through Simple Recipes)

3. The I Love Lucy Cookbook (Hollywood Hotplates); The Hemingway Cookbook

4. The First American Cookbook: A Facsimile of “American Cookery,” 1796

5.

Chris Kimball had a few friends over for dinner in Boston. The menu included oysters, mock turtle soup, rissoles (fried puff pastry with various sweet and savory fillings), Lobster à l’Américaine, saddle of venison, wood-grilled salmon, fried artichokes, roast stuffed goose and a variety of homemade jellies made using a calf’s foot gelatin. This sounds like pure decadence. But Mr. Kimball, the founder of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and host of “America’s Test Kitchen” on PBS, was trying to re-create a traditional 12-course meal from the famed 1896 edition of Fannie Farmer’s “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.”

Victorino Matus in the WSJ (via The Weekly Standard)

Racist Is As Racist Does

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Glenn linked to this post at the Amazon.com food blog.

The author was shocked (shocked!) to find out that the tuna she has been using wasn’t from Italy, even though it has a vaguely Italian-sounding name. In fact, the tuna is caught in the middle of the ocean, and packaged by an American company.

So what does she do? The author swears off that particular brand of tuna! It was perfectly good when she thought it was from Italy, but it isn’t worthy enough to pass her lips now that she knows that a company based in the US is involved. Only tuna caught in the waters off Sicily, and packaged in that country, will be used from now on.

Most of the comments at the post accuse the author of being a snob, which certainly seems to be obvious. But I think it shows a much darker and vile tendency than simple snobbery. Isn’t the author exhibiting blatant racism?

Turn it around. If someone refused to use perfectly acceptable tuna from Sicily, just because it came from Sicily, they would be accused of being racist. How could they not? There isn’t anything wrong with the product, after all. They just can’t stomach the idea that those people touched the food.

So isn’t it racist to do the same thing, just because the tuna is sold by an American company?

As of this writing, the author hasn’t bothered to respond to the criticism. I doubt she will. Racists usually have a lack of backbone, after all.

“Broccoli may undo diabetes damage”

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First the good news:

Eating broccoli could reverse the damage caused by diabetes to heart blood vessels, research suggests.

A University of Warwick team believe the key is a compound found in the vegetable, called sulforaphane.

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Lead researcher Professor Paul Thornalley said: “Our study suggests that compounds such as sulforaphane from broccoli may help counter processes linked to the development of vascular disease in diabetes…”

Now the bad news: It’s broccoli.