28 December 2015

New old stuff

1. The pre-mayonnaise vitello tonnato continues with Vitello tonnato and the mayonnaise conundrum. Either way, I don’t get enough of it.
2. Reinventing the Greenhouse goes to China to examine proper solar-heated greenhouses, just like a 1978 book on my shelves. How soon before these become a thing in urban agriculture?
3. Fun, guys:
   1. The Year in Fungi from Nicola Twilley.
   2. Speaking of Chemistry explains the taste of truffles in a video.
   3. Behold, the Agar Art Contest. Not strictly food, but how can you not like people who paint pictures with fungi (and bacteria)?
4. Tucson Becomes the First UNESCO-Designated Creative City of Gastronomy in the U.S.. Shameless plug for my interview with Megan Kimble, Tucsonite and author of Unprocessed.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:42 — 19.4MB)

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Maybe you’ve read about experiments that show that when potato crisps crunch louder, people say they’re fresher. And beyond crisps, all sorts of taste sensations can be manipulated by the sounds that surround them. Heavy metal apparently renders a Cabernet Sauvignon more robust. The drone of an airplane engine renders the umami of tomato juice more or less irresistable, a fact I can attest to. Top chefs are using sound to manipulate the dining experience, but when it comes down to it, I was very doubtful that drinking beer while listening to music would have any noticeable effect. I was wrong.

The revelation took place on a freezing morning in a deconsecrated church in Kilfinane, a little village between County Cork and County Limerick in Ireland. Caroline Hennessy — minus white coat — conducted the proceedings, plying us with samples from the Eight Degrees Brewing in nearby Mitchelstown, while Brian Leach played some music he’d recorded specially for the occasion. It was all part of the Hearsay Audio Festival 2015, a delight in so many ways, and although I hadn’t intended to produce a podcast there, I couldn’t pass up the chance. So here it is, and if it sounds a little rough around the edges, that’s because it was possibly the most difficult episode I’ve ever assembled.

Notes

1. Of course that shoudn’t be a Guinness in the photos, it should be a Knockmealdown Irish Stout from Eight Degrees Brewing, but as you can tell I’ve been in a terrible rush.
2. If you’re looking for a guide to Irish craft brews, Caroline Hennessy’s book Sláinte is available from Amazon.
3. Brian Leach was kind enough to let me have clean copies of all his music. My apologies if I massacred it in the mix.
4. I would have made an even bigger mess of things if Andrea Rangecroft, a superb audio producer, had not let me have her recording.
5. I have no words to thank Hearsay Audio Festival. It really was a wonderful experience in so many ways, thanks to them, the other participants and the people of Kilfinane. I hope to be back.

14 December 2015

Give us this day

1. Our daily bread, being a long interview with one woman’s bread hero, the Finn behind Bread magazine.
2. Not everything here is new; thanks to my compadre Luigi for pointing me to an article from a couple of years ago, Bread in the Middle Ages.
3. Not to nit-pick or anything, but articles like this debase the term “genetically modified”. Which is a shame, I think, because it is a good explanation of the difficulties of breeding wheat, in French.
4. You’ll be wanting a bit of cheese with all that bread, to be sure, to be sure.
5. Never mind the jetpack, where’s my complete meal in a pill?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:51 — 17.0MB)

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Visitors to Rome are often astonished not so much by the big famous fountains that dot the city but by the smaller flows that gush or trickle from what seems like every street corner. All that water, going to waste. Those drinking fountains – known locally as nasoni or big noses – deliver endless streams of delicious, cold water night and day, summer and winter, and it surprises many people to learn that public water fountains have been a feature of the city since well before the Republic. Indeed, clean water was the right of every Roman citizen.

Dotted around the city and its environs you’ll also see traces of the engineering that made the public drinking fountains possible: the long, straight lines of the aqueducts and, more often, the occasional broken arch. In many cases, the city’s water supply still traces the routes of the aqueducts and even uses their structures. There is a lot of information about the waters of Rome online, but nothing beats a personal tour guide. I was lucky enough to persuade Katherine Rinne, who supplies a lot of the online information, to show me how it all worked.

Notes

1. Katherine Rinne’s book The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City gives much, much more detail. There’s also a much earlier book of the same name by H.V. Morton, which lacks some of the scholarship that Rinne supplies.
2. If you think I’ve belaboured the antiquity of the Roman public water supply, you’re right. Because a very popular podcast slighted my adopted home by ignoring it completely.
3. I highly recommend drowning yourself in the interactive timeline of the waters of Rome. Hours of desktop diversion. Alas, it does need Flash player