#beef stock concentrate

[basil-august]

Taqueria Pork Bowls Taqueria Pork Bowls with Corn Esquites, Sour Cream & Cilantro

[padawansuggest]

Does anyone else just take whatever meat is in the fridge toss it in a pot cut up with potatoes some carrots a shallot so massive it’s almost an onion and a little butter and cover in water and just keep adding whatever seasonings smell good at the time and set the stove to medium and then later on come back two hours later when the fat is rendered down and the meat will fall apart without even chewing and add more water and then some egg noodles and some more seasoning because you added more water and the herbs that you didn’t want to dissolve from simmering for two and a half hours and then come back like fifteen minutes later and put it in a bowl and eat it like that?????

Because I feel like I might be onto something here 🤔

[the-merry-otter]

Potage From Meat

(15th century Italian)

"Take lean meat and let it boil, then cut it up finely and cook it again for half an hour in rich juice, having first added bread crumbs. Add a little pepper and saffron.

When it has cooled a little, add beaten eggs, grated cheese, parsley, marjoram, finely chopped mint with a little verjuice. Blend them all together in a pot, stirring them slowly with a spoon so that they do not form a ball. The same may be done with livers and lungs."

2 1/3 lb stewbeef 4 cups water "Rich juice": 31 oz (3 cans) concentrated beef broth 1 1/2 cups dry bread crumbs 3/4 tsp pepper 8 threads saffron 5 eggs 1 1/2 cups grated cheese (~ 7 oz) 3/8 cups chopped parsley 3/4 tsp dried or 1 tsp fresh marjoram 1 1/2 tbsp chopped fresh mint verjuice: 3 tbsp wine vinegar 1 tsp salt (to taste)

"Bring meat and water to a boil and cook 10 minutes; take meat out and cut up small; put back in water with broth, bread crumbs, pepper, and saffron. Simmer 1/2 hour over low flame, being careful that it does not stick. Mix in remaining ingredients; cook, stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes. This makes about 10 cups.

This is a rather meat-rich version; it also works with as little as half this much meat."

Source: Cariadoc's Miscallany

Otter's notes:

I used two beef stock cubes which was fine.

I wasn’t sure how small the meat should be cut, so I did pieces of a couple centimetres diameter. This worked well in my opinion.

I don’t enjoy skimming the scum off water I’ve boiled meat in, so I used fresh water for the second part. I did not find the result lacking in flavour.

Cariadoc isn't kidding about it sticking. Make sure to stir every 2-4 minutes. Stuck doesn't necessarily mean burned though.

It’s sooooo so tasty, can recommend

[najia-cooks]

[ID: A greyish brown stew presented alongside flatbread, red pepper paste, green peppers, and carrot sticks. End ID]

سماقية / Summagiyya (Gazan stew with chard, chickpea, sumac, and 'lamb')

Summagiyya (سُمَّاقِيَّة; also translitered "sumagiyya", "sumaghiyyeh" or "sumaqiyya") is one of the signature dishes of the Gaza strip, in particular Gaza City. It consists of lamb, chard, and chickpeas in a sumac-infused broth; savor and zest is added by a dagga of dill seeds, garlic, and peppers, and nutty depth by a generous drizzle of red tahina. The resulting stew is thick, earthy, and slodgily grey (due to the green chard and red sumac)—it also has the characteristic sourness of much Gazan cuisine.

Summagiyya is most often prepared during holidays, especially Eid al-Fitr; it's an excellent make-ahead dish for these occasions, since it's even better once its flavors have had time to meld and mellow overnight. It is served cold alongside fresh vegetables, and eaten by using flatbread to scoop up each bite. This recipe provides a spiced seitan recipe to replace the lamb, but you may also use any lamb or beef substitute of your choice.

Today, summagiyya is often prepared with Israeli white tahina, as decades of punitive import laws, taxes, and restrictions have enforced Palestine's status as a consumer, rather than an producer, of food products. Israeli tariffs on, and confiscations of, Palestinian goods have forced those tahina factories that survived to import sesame seeds rather than using locally grown crops, even as they export the best of their product to Israel. The dubbing of foods such as tahina and hummus as culturally "Israeli" cuisine works to hide this exploitative relationship, and cement an Israeli national identity through the subsuming and erasure of Palestinian existence. It is for this reason that Emad Moussa writes that Palestinian cuisine has a role in "protecting against a people's very extinction."

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) has put out an urgent call for donations to provide medical supplies to Palestinian hospitals when supply lines reopen. Also contact your representatives in the USA, UK, and Canada.

Ingredients:

For the soup:

500g (2 large bunches) chard (شلق), diced

80g Levantine sumac berries (Rhus coriaria)

1/2 cup soaked and boiled chickpeas, mostly cooked (40g dry / scant 1/4 cup)

1/4 cup red tahina

1/2 cup (60g) all-purpose flour

1 large yellow onion

1/4 cup olive oil

1 tsp kosher salt

2 cardamom pods (optional)

2 allspice berries (optional)

More olive oil, to fry

Sumac berries can be found in the spice section of a halal grocery store. If you're unable to locate whole berries, pre-ground will do.

For the dagga:

1 1/2 Tbsp dill seeds

5 cloves garlic

1/2 green cubanelle pepper

2-3 dried red chilis (optional)

1/2 tsp black pepper

1/4 tsp cumin

Dill seeds may be found at a halal, south Asian, or speciality European grocery store. They are commonly used in Indian food and as a pickling spice. At a south Asian grocery store they may be labelled soyo, suva, shepu, or savaa.

For the lamb:

1 cup (120g) vital wheat gluten, aka gluten flour

1/2 Tbsp ground sumac

1/2 tsp ground caraway

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp Palestinian 7-spice

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

1/2 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp ground aniseed

1/2 tsp turnermic

1 tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp miso paste

2 cloves garlic, grated

2 tsp pomegranate molasses

1 Tbsp white or red tahina

About 1/2 cup vegetarian 'beef' stock from concentrate, or vegetable stock

Pomegranate molasses is simply pomegranate juice that has been reduced to a thick consistency. It may be found in the sauces section of a halal grocery store.

Instructions:

For the soup:

1. Soak dried chickpeas in cool water overnight, or in just-boiled water for an hour. Drain and re-cover with water, and boil for 30-45 minutes, until almost fully cooked. Drain and set aside.

2. Simmer sumac seeds in enough water to cover by a couple inches for about an hour, until the water is dark red. Blend the seeds and water together, then strain the mixture through a cheesecloth.

If you're using ground sumac, skip the blending step. Use a cheesecloth or very fine metal sieve (such as one intended for brewing tea) to remove the ground spice from the water.

3. Whisk the flour into the sumac-infused water.

For the lamb:

1. Combine all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Add wet ingredients other than stock and stir briefly. Add enough stock to produce a soft, smooth dough.

2. Knead by hand on a clean surface, or put in a stand mixer with paddle attachment on medium-low, for about 5 minutes. You should see stringy strands begin to form in the dough.

3. Allow to rest, covered, for 5-10 minutes to encourage gluten formation. Knead for another 3 minutes. Do not over-knead.

4. Tear the dough into bite-sized pieces.

Stringy seitan being pulled apart into pieces.

You may also shape the dough into a slab and cube it with a sharp knife—the lamb or beef used in summagiyya is usually cubed—but I prefer the texture of torn seitan to sliced.

5. Steam the seitan pieces for 10 minutes in a bamboo steamer or using a metal steamer basket. Place the bamboo steamer in the bottom of a wok and cover its base by about 1/2" (1 cm), then raise the heat to boil the water; lower the heat to keep the water at a simmer. If using a steamer basket, place it over the opening of a pot containing a couple inches of water and bring it to a simmer. Start the timer when the water begins simmering.

6. Heat olive oil on medium-high and sear the steamed seitan pieces, turning as necessary, until deeply browned on all sides. Set aside.

Fried seitan pieces.

You can save a step here by searing the raw seitan, then returning it to the pot after you've fried the onions to simmer it rather than steaming. I found that this produced a mushier texture.

For the dagga (دقة):

1. Grind cumin and black pepper thoroughly in a mortar and pestle, then add dried red pepper and dill seed and crush coarsely. Add green sweet pepper and garlic and pound until a coarse mixture forms.

Dill seeds, green sweet pepper, garlic, and dried red chili on a cutting board, alongside dagga in a large granite mortar.

You may also use a spice mill or food processor.

To assemble:

1. Chop the onion. Wash the chard and slice it thinly in one direction; turn it ninety degrees and slice thinly again.

Diced chard, fried seitan, dagga, and sumac-infused water with flour.

2. In a large pot, heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil on medium. Fry chopped onion, cardamom pods, and allspice berries for a minute until fragrant. Add half of the dagga and fry until fragrant.

3. Add chard and fry, mixing often, until wilted.

Wilted chard in a wok.

4. Add sumac mixture, chickpeas, and water to cover. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer. If you didn't steam your seitan earlier, add it now.

5. Continue to stir and simmer until the stew is thick, homogenous, and greyish-brown, about 15 minutes.

Simmered stew.

6. Add the remainder of the garlic mixture, the red tahina, a pinch of ground cumin, the 1/4 cup olive oil, and salt to taste. Return the steamed and seared seitan to the pot and mix.

Serve cool with flatbread, sweet green peppers, bitter green and black olives, carrots, leafy greens, and/or pickles.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Is antitrust anti-labor?

If you find the word “antitrust” has a dusty, old-fashioned feel, that’s only to be expected — after all, the word has its origins in the late 19th century, when the first billionaire was created: John D Rockefeller, who formed a “trust” with his oil industry competitors, through which they all agreed to stop competing with one another so they could concentrate on extracting more from their workers and their customers.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Trusts were an incredibly successful business structure. A bunch of competing companies would be sold to a new holding company (“the trust”), and the owners of those old standalone companies would get stock in this new trust. The trust would operate as a single entity, hiking prices and suppressing wages. If anyone tried fight the trust with a new, independent company, the trust could freeze them out, by selling goods below cost, or by doing exclusive deals with key suppliers and customers, or both. Once a trust sewed up an industry, no one could compete. The trust barons were rulers for life.

The first successful trust was Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which amassed a 90% share of all US oil. Other “capitalists” got in on the game, forming the Cotton Seed Oil Trust (75% market share), the Sugar Trust (85%). Then came the Whiskey Trust and the Beef Trust. America was becoming a planned economy, run by a handful of unelected “industrialists” with lifetime appointments and the power to choose their successors.

A century after overthrowing the King, America had new kings: “kings over the production, transportation and sale of the necessities of life”. That’s how Senator John Sherman described the situation in 1890, when he was campaigning for the passage of the Sherman Act, the first “anti-trust” act. The Sherman Act wasn’t the first time American lawmakers tried to protect competition, but it was the first law passed after the failure of competition law led to the hijacking of the nation by people Sherman called the “autocrats of trade.”

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

The Sherman Act — and its successors, like the Clayton Act, are landmark laws in that they explicitly seek to protect workers and customers from corporate power. Antitrust is about making sure that no corporation gets so powerful that it’s too big to fail, nor too big to jail — that a company can’t get so big that it subverts the political process, capturing its own regulators:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

If American workers are derided as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who won’t join the fight against the rich because they assume they’ll soon join their ranks, then the American rich are “temporarily embarrassed aristocrats” who would welcome hereditary rule, provided they got to found one of the noble families. The goal of the American elite has always been to create a vast and durable dynasty, wealth so vast and well-insulated that even the most Habsburg-jawed failson can’t piss it away.

The American elite has always hated antitrust. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, abetted by Robert Bork and his co-conspirators at the Chicago School of Economics gutted antitrust through something called the “consumer welfare standard,” which ended anti-monopoly enforcement except in instances where price hikes could be directly and unarguably attributed to market power, which is, basically, never.

It’s been 40 years since Reagan took antitrust out behind the Lincoln Monument and shot it in the guts, and America has turned into the kind of aristocratic kleptocracy that Sherman railed against, where “great families” control the nation’s wealth and politics and even its Supreme Court judges:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. Monopoly threatens the living standards, health, freedom and prosperity of nearly every person in America. The undeniable enshittification of the country by its guillotine-ready finance ghouls, tech bros and pharma profiteers has led to a resurgence in antitrust, and a complete renewal of the @FTC and @JusticeATR:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Key to the new and vibrant FTC is Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who, along with Commissioner  Rebecca SlaughterFTC and Chairwoman Lina Khan, is part of the Democratic majority on the Commission. Bedoya has a background in tech and privacy and civil rights, and is a longtime advocate against predatory finance. He’s also a law professor and a sprightly scholarly writer.

Earlier this week, Bedoya gave a prepared speech for the Utah Project on Antitrust and Consumer Protection conference, entitled “Aiming at Dollars, Not Men.” It’s a banger:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-aiming-dollars-not-men.pdf

Criticisms of the new antitrust don’t just come from America’s oligarchs — the labor movement is skeptical of antitrust as well, and with good cause. Antitrust law prohibits collusion among businesses to raise prices, and at many junctures since the passage of the Sherman Act, judges have willfully perverted antitrust to punish labor organizers, treating workers demanding better working conditions as if they were Rockefeller and his cronies conspiring to raise prices.

This is the subject of Bedoya’s speech, whose transcript is painstakingly footnoted, and whose text makes it crystal clear that this is not what antitrust is for, and we should not tolerate its perversion in service to crushing worker power. The title comes from a 1914 remark by Democratic Congressman Thomas Konop, who said, of antitrust: “We are aiming at the gigantic trusts and combinations of capital and not at associations of men for the betterment of their condition. We are aiming at the dollars and not at men.”

Konop was arguing for the passage of the Clayton Act, a successor to the Sherman Act, which was passed in part because judges refused to enforce the Sherman Act according to its plain language and its legislative intent, and kept using it against workers. In 1892, two years after the Sherman Act’s passage, it was used to crush the New Orleans General Strike, an interracial uprising against labor exploitation from longshoremen to printers to carpenters to hearse drivers.

Bosses went to a federal judge asking for an injunction against the strike. Though the judge admitted that the Sherman Act was designed to fight “the evils of massed capital,” he still issued the injunction.

The Sherman Act was used to clobber the Pullman Porters union, which organized Black workers who served on the Pullman cars on America’s railroads. The workers struck in 1894, after a 25% wage-cut, and they complained that they could no longer afford to eat and feed their families, so George Pullman fired them all. The workers struck, led by Eugene Debs. Pullman argued that the strike violated the Sherman Act. The Supreme Court voted 9:0 for Pullman, ordered the strike called off, and put Debs in prison.

In 1902, mercury-sickened hatters in Danbury, CT demanded better working conditions — after just a few years on the job, hatters would be disabled for life with mercury poisoning, with such bad tremors they couldn’t even feed themselves. 250 hatters at the DE Loewe company tried to unionize. Loewe sued them under the Sherman Act, and went to the Supreme Court, who awarded Loewe $6.8m in today’s money, which allowed Loewe to seize his former workers’ homes.

This is what sent Congress back to the drawing board to pass the Clayton Act. Though the Sherman Act was clear that it was about trustbusting, the courts kept interpreting it as a charter for union-busting. The Clayton Act explicitly permits workers to form unions, call for boycotts, and to organize sympathy strikes.

They made all this abundantly clear: writing in language so plain that judges had to understand the legislative intent. And yet…judges still managed to misread the Clayton Act, using it to block 2,100 strikes in the 1920s. It appears that passing the Clayton Act did not save a single strike that would have been killed by the bad (and bad faith) Sherman Act precedents that led to the Clayton Act in the first place.

The extent to which greedy bosses used the Clayton Act to attack their workers is genuinely ghastly. Bedoya describes one coal strike, against the Red Jacket Coal Company of Mingo, WV. The mine’s profits had grown by 600%, but workers’ wages weren’t keeping up with inflation. The miners sought a raise of $0.10 on the $0.66 they got paid for ever carload of coal they mined. The company didn’t even pay the workers with real money — just “company scrip”: coupons that could only be spent at the company store. Red Jacket gave its workers a $0.09/car raise — and raised prices at the company store by $0.25/item.

The workers struck, Red Jacket sued. The Fourth Circuit refused to apply the Clayton Act, following a precedent from a case called Duplex Printing that held that the Clayton Act only applied to people who stood “in the proximate relation of employer and employee.”

Congress was pissed. They passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, with LaGuardia spitting about judges who “willfully disobeyed the law…emasculating it, taking out the meaning intended by Congress, making the law absolutely destructive of Congress’s intent.” Norris-LaGuardia creates an antitrust exemption for labor that applies “regardless of whether the disputants stand in the proximate relation of employer and employee.” So, basically: “CONGRESS TO JUDGES, GET BENT.”

And yet, judges still found ways to use antitrust as a cudgel to beat up workers. In Columbia River Packers, the court held that fishermen weren’t protected by the exemption for workers, because they were selling “commodities” (e.g. fish) not their labor. Presumably, the fish just leapt into the boats without anyone doing any work.

The willingness of enforcers to misread antitrust continued down through the ages. In 1999, the FTC destroyed the hopes of the some of the country’s most abused workers: “independent” port truckers, who worked 80 hours/week and still couldn’t pay the bills. Truckers were only paid to move trailers around the ports, but they were required to do hours and hours of unpaid work — loading containers, hauling equipment for repair, all for free. The truckers tried to organize a union — and the FTC subpoenaed the organizers for an investigation of price-fixing.

But the problem wasn’t with the laws. It was with judges who set precedents that — as LaGuardia said, “willfully disobeyed the law…emasculating it, taking out the meaning intended by Congress, making the law absolutely destructive of Congress’s intent.”

Congress passed laws to strengthen workers and judges — temporarily embarrassed aristocrats — simply acted as if the law was intended to smash workers. But by 2016, judges had it figured out. That’s when jockeys at the Camarero racetrack in Canóvana, Puerto Rico went on strike, demanding pay parity with their mainland peers — Puerto Rican jockeys got $20 to risk their lives riding, a fifth of what riders on the mainland received.

Predictably, the horse owners and racetrack sued. The jockeys lost in the lower court, and the court ordered the jockeys to pay the owners and the track a million dollars. They even sued the jockeys’ spouses, so that they could go after their paychecks to get that million bucks.

The case went to the First Circuit appeals court and Judge Sandra Lynch said: you know what, it doesn’t matter if the jockeys are employers or contractors. It doesn’t matter if they sell a commodity or their labor. The jockeys have the right to strike, period. That’s what the Clayton Act says. She overturned the lower court and threw out the fines.

As Bedoya says, antitrust is “law written to rein in the oil trust, the sugar trust, the beef trust…the gigantic trusts and combinations of capital…dollars and not at men.” Congress made that plain, “not once, not twice, but three times, each time in a louder and clearer voice.”

Bedoya, part of the FTC’s Democratic majority, finishes: “Congress has made it clear that worker organizing and collective bargaining are not violations of the antitrust laws. When I vote, when I consider investigations and policy matters, that history will guide me.”

There's only three days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[fox-bright]

Watching the H5N1 stuff get worse and worse--I'm hoping we have until late next year before it goes reliably human-human, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was this winter--and not being able to do much makes me anxious, so I've been composing lists of stuff to do. I keep thinking, if this were August, 2019, and I knew covid was coming, what would I prepare? If this one goes off like the scientists think it might, it'll be much worse than covid.

Right now, I'm concentrating on food. My plan is to have enough hunker down supplies by mid-September that if things go bad in the normally-scheduled October-February flu season, we'll be okay simply not leaving the house at all. There are only two of us here now, and if things go bad there may be as many as four (as I have two separate friends I'd push hard to come stay here with us), so I need to make sure we have 4 meals x howevermany days I choose. I'm building up to six months, but I'm beginning the plan at three. While a lot of Serious Prepper lists have pretty generous caloric allowances, the MFH and I eat pretty light, and we're both smaller than the average adult human, which does give us even more squeak room here.

We started out with dry staples--bread flour, AP flour, semolina, rice, beans, pasta, lentils, powdered milk--though I have still to get powdered eggs (I'll dehydrate those myself), more dry beans (I'm going to use up a lot of what we have when I do my canning run for the winter, and so far I haven't been able to get my hands on kidney beans in any decent amounts), quinoa, and one more kind of pasta. Right now we have about 2/3 of what I'd want; we'll be holding things at this level, replacing staples as we use them, and if things look more serious we'll do another big shop and give ourselves additional stock of the AP flour, the bread flour, the rice (which we already buy in 40-50 lb bags anyway, we're Asian), the dry milk.

Then there's the perishable stuff; yesterday, the MFH and I took advantage of some very nice sales and got seventy pounds of meat for two hundred and twelve dollars. Beef brisket for stew, pork butt for sweet molasses chili, ground beef for hotter chili, pork loin for white bean soup. Still have to get chicken (which was pretty much sold out at our bulk place) for chicken soup (to be pressure canned), chicken and mushroom cream soup (to be vacuum-packed and frozen).

Very very soon it'll be time to harvest my leeks and my butternut squashes, for leek and potato soup (either finished with cream, blended to a smooth-ish consistency and frozen, or *not* blended down, and just socked away in pressure-canned Ball jars without the cream added; will it take me longer to thaw it, or to take my immersion blender to the hot individual meals later on?) and canned butternut for baking with or making soup or chili or making pasta sauce.

I might can a bunch of just potatoes, too, to keep 'em shelf stable (plus that front-loads a lot of the work of producing a meal later).

So I need to buy onions and carrots and potatoes and celery and garlic and mushrooms and corn, cream, red wine, tomato paste (because my vines got blight this year, sigh--I've managed to can one single run of tomato sauce and that's IT), ten dozen fresh eggs to dehydrate and powder and store in the fridge in case of egg shortages, several pounds of beans to be thrown into the chilis and...hm...fifteen pounds more, twenty pounds more, to have on hand? And then for non-canning purposes we'll need butter, oil, white vinegar (I've used a lot of it for pickles this year), various Asian food staples like black and rice vinegars, oyster sauce, black mushrooms and so on. As for pre-made, mass-produced foods, I'll probably make another post about them later.

While this is more than I'd generally stock in a single season, I do generally put about 100 quarts of home-canned food by a year, and I never keep less than 75-100lb of flour on hand anyway because of how frequently I make bread. So though it sounds like a lot up front, it's not hoarder level; everything I stock will be eaten, some of it pretty much immediately (the beef stew is so good). And putting it all by now means that we'll be less of a burden on our community safety net, if push comes to shove. When the covid pandemic hit I had dozens of jars of food on the shelf already, which gave me a little peace when things were looking scary. We were able to share some of our stores with people who hadn't had the great privilege of long afternoons spent seeing to the personal stores. That's a better option, to my mind, than needing to panic-shop right as things start getting a little wild.

Basically, if things go bad, we'll have food for a while. And if things don't go bad, we'll have food for a while. It's win-win. And it keeps the floor under my feet when I'm feeling unsteady, to be able to sneak down into the cool, still basement and look at row on row of gently gleaming jars of food security.

[fatehbaz]

In the 19th century, British colonists faced several challenges in India, [...] [including] malaria. [...] The imperialists needed an answer to the problem and they found it in quinine. [...] [T]he British promptly embraced quinine, consuming tonnes of it every year by the mid-1800s. [...] Quinine was so bitter that soldiers and officials began mixing the powder with soda and sugar, unwittingly giving birth to “tonic water”. [...] [I]t prompted Winston Churchill to once proclaim, “The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.” [...] If by some good fortune malaria did not claim them, plague, cholera, dysentery, enteric fever, hepatitis or the unforgiving sun could. Preserving and protecting the body was [...] crucial to the success of the colonial project. As historian EM Collingham aptly summarised in her study, “The British experience of India was intensely physical.”

One way the colonists tried to deal with this challenge was through food and drinks. “The association between food and the maintenance of health was a concern of Anglo-Indian doctors, dieticians and the British authorities throughout the duration of colonial rule [...],” writes Sam Goodman in Unpalatable Truths: Food and Drink as Medicine in Colonial British India. [...]

---

The Medical Gazette, for instance, recommended treating dysentery with a “low diet” comprising thin chicken soup [...]. Botanist-physician George Watt too extolled the virtues of sago. In A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1893), he wrote that sago is “easily digestible and wholly destitute of irritating properties” and in demand [...]. For fever, weakness and sundry ailments, beef tea [...] was considered an ideal remedy. And for cholera, The Seamen’s New Medical Guide (1842) prescribed brandy during the worst of the sickness and half a tumbler of mulled wine with toasted bread and castor oil [...]. Ship masters and pantrymen would stock their vessels with foods with known medicinal benefits such as sago, arrowroot, lime juice, desiccated milk and condensed milk (the iconic Anglo Swiss Condensed Milk tins, later known as Milkmaid, enjoyed a permanent spot on British ships).

---

Businessmen too recognised the precarity of life abroad and realised that therein lay a perfect commercial opportunity. By the 19th century, numerous companies had cropped up across Europe, including in England, that would sell food in hermetically sealed tin containers.

One of these was Messrs Brand & Co. Recommended highly in Culinary Jottings for Madras by Colonel Robert Kenney-Herbert, Messrs Brand & Co had several offerings [...]: essence of beef, concentrated beef tea, beef tea jelly, meat lozenges, [...] potted meat, York and game pie, and A1 sauce [...]. Another company, John Moir & Sons, focused mostly on canned soups [...], selling oxtail, turtle, giblet and hare.

---

By the late 19th century such was the popularity of canned foods that rare would be the pantry in a colonial home that didn’t store them along with medical provisions like opium, quinine, chlorodyne and Fowler’s solution (an arsenic compound). [...] As Flora Steele and Grace Gardiner wrote in The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, “A good mistress will remember the breadwinner requires blood-forming nourishment, and the children whose constitutions are being built up day by day, sickly or healthy, according to the food given them; and bear in mind the fact that in India, especially, half the comfort of life depends on clean, wholesome, digestible food.”

To assist the British woman in this ostensible duty, there were a number of cookbooks and housekeeping manuals [...]. The Englishwoman in India, for instance, published in 1864 under the pseudonym A Lady Resident, had a whole section with recipes for “infants and invalids”. These included carrot pap cooked into a congee with arrowroot [...] and toast water (well-toasted bread soaked in water). Steele and Gardiner too had a few recipe recommendations [...], including champagne jelly (“most useful in excessive vomiting”) and the dangerous-sounding Cannibal Broth (beef essence), which they said should be consumed with cream [...] to treat extreme debility and typhoid. [...]

---

One dish born of this encounter was the pish pash. The pish pash is considered an invention of the colonial cook, who adapted the kedgeree – the colonial cousin of khichdi – into a light nursery food. The famous Hobson-Jobson defined it as “a slop of rice soup with small pieces of meat” [...]. None other than Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal, gave confirmation of its efficacy when in 1784 he wrote to his wife from the sick bed [...]. There are enough records to show that the imperialists counted marh (starch water from cooked rice) and bael (wood apple) sherbet among their go-to remedies and benefited from the medicinal qualities of chiretta water and ajwain-infused water.

---

All text above by: Priyadarshini Chatterjee. “How food came to the rescue of the British in India.” Scroll.in (Magazine format). 26 April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[methanes]

i made beef burgundy bourgunion bourgeoisie Anyways it’s came out really yummy and with mashed potatoes that i fucked up for a second but then it turned out it was really good as a potato soup and then using the beef as like concentrated and anyways now i can’t stop farting btw

oh and when i reheat the potato’s it becomes more like potato’s and i think the beef would go well w more stock like i could freeze it ? into cubes .. but how ..

[cy-cyborg]

Onion free tacos

Ok, it took a while but I think I finally made a decent beef taco (+seasoning) recipe without onion! A few folks asked for an update when i figured it out so here you go, It doesn't taste exactly like the store bought (old el passo) stuff, but i still think it's really good!

For 1kg of beef taco mince, i added:

Black pepper

Oregano

Smoked paprika

Minced garlic

Minced ginger (this really helped make up for the savoury flavour that you loose when you take out the onion)

Garlic/herb salt

Coriander (cilantro)

Siracha sauce (add little bits at a time, or it becomes overwhelming. If you dont like spice, only add a very small amount)

Beef stock (be careful to check the stock has no onion, most do but the brand "Massel" in Australia is safe)

Ketchup (NOT TOMATO SAUCE as tomato sauce has onion in it and tends to be sweater than ketchup - though that might vary depending on where you are - e.g. american ketchup is WAY sweeter than what we have in Australia. for Australians, Heinz tomato ketchup is safe. You can also use tomato paste concentrate for something more neutral, just make sure to add more beef stock if you do)

Chili flakes - i used hot flakes, but they come in medium and mild too if you're not into spice

Kidney beans

Cook the mince in a frying pan and add the seasoning/sauces/beans while cooking. Once done, serve with cheese, sour cream, any salad you like (my partner adds cherry tomatos and lettuce) and either siracha sauce or ketchup (most of the hot sauces and taco sauces have onion in them too). If you're making soft tacos/buritos, I also recommend getting all the meat out of the pan and frying the whole taco in it to melt everything together using the leftover juices/oils! The only downside of this recipe is that it is very oily, so be prepared for that lol.

I kind of just threw everything in the pan until it started smelling good so I don't have exact measurements, but I can update with those once I've made these a few more times.

Also, for folks who are allergic to garlic and onion, I found this recipe. I personally didn't like it, but my support worker (who is allergic to both) made it, and she said she enjoyed it. It does have spring onions in it, but you can take them out, and it doesn't seem to change much if they're an issue for you.

[sonichasdonenothingwrongever]

3 cups of concentrated beef stock bc I couldn't resist the visible marrow on a $11 beef shank, and 1.5 cups of tallow bc 1/3 fat is a lot for anything LOL

[beardedmrbean]

About that Hanukkah tag post, I mean my generation is justifying Osama bin Laden and say America needs to be burn to the ground due to slavery and such.

Hmm, yet Muslim and Latin Americans countries are a okay. Oh right right the left only know about the USA/UK meddling and not you know the corruption that the USA/uk took advantage of.

Okay they wouldn’t get nuance about the Palestine-Israel conflict. These fuckers were raised on tv and not by parents

Tangent, I think I understand what working class boomers feels after the summer of love. Being part of a generation who upper middle class brats are so out of touch yet you realize they will have more power than you in your lifetime.

Hanukkah tag post just proves that there's people that no how much they deny it, they absolutely hate Jewish people, only reason to do that at all, since while the largest single concentration of them is in Israel for sure there's a equal number of Jewish folks spread across the globe, spamming their tag is only showing that it's not about Israel for the people doing it.

If you've got a legitimate beef with Israel, you're going to know better than to spam the tag.

as for the bin laden thing, another post last night

People on here cheering for that ship that got taken by yemeni pirates without a single ounce of knowledge about what else is going on in that corner of the world is the one that really bugged me.

that's going to accelerate the deaths of thousands through treatable diseases and starvation because of rerouted shipping, not like the guy from Israel even owned the boat just stock in it anyhow

It could be funny if it weren't for the massive humanitarian disaster that's already there, oh and I thought after all those protests because of that woman who the "morality police" killed that we weren't going to be cheering on iran for much of anything.

but hey it's ok to ignore a misogynistic oppressive regime that delights in destabilizing the entire region if we can stick it to those pesky jooz right guys.

with the boomer parents, there's all kinds of them the mythology seems to have leaked out to the point that folks think it's the straight up truth

[scotianostra]

January 23rd is National Pie day.

Is it really a year since I last posted on this? Last year I took us on a journey of our Nations favourite, The Scotch Pie, everyone has their go to Butchers or even Bakers for theirs. The Killie Pie is legendary, The Macaroni Pie is another legend, you can still get this elsewhere, but Greggs discontinued their version in 2015. The  Mince Tattie and Baked Bean Pie was always a favourite of mine growing up, our local bakers did a great job of this, sadly the bakers is no more. And this time of year you can find Bells Steak and Haggis usually on offer at the supermarkets throughout Scotland, especially for Burns Night, which is only a couple days away.

Anyway this year I want to concentrate on the Steak Pie.

Us Scots love a steak pie to celebrate the New Year and cannot get enough of them, according to industry experts. But why has it become an annual tradition across the country?

One theory holds that steak pie became the national dish at New Years because January 1 wasn’t generally taken as a holiday so families were too busy to cook.

They would buy steak pies to feed their families instead, this continues to this day as people want a delicious meal after the previous night’s celebrations. So you could say it was essentially one of the first ready meals.

Or is it that the Steak pie is the nation’s hangover cure on what is often the roughest morning of the year for many, after a night of celebratory drinking?

Another theory is that because it is a big meal you can keep warm and serve to visitors throughout the day, as people come to the house. I don't buy into that one, we Scots always put on a spread on the table, Shortbread, Black Bun, even Dundee Cake was waiting for any first footers and others coming through the door in the wee sma' hours.

In days gone by oor mammies used to cook their own steak pies. so here's a recipe for a traditional Scottish steak pie, as seen in the main pic.

Things you’ll need to make a Scottish Steak Pie

Large Pot/Pan

Mixing Bowl

Pie Dish.

Ingredients

800g Diced Beef Stewing Steak (Approx 2lb)

2 tbsp Plain Flour

2 tbsp Olive Oil/Butter

2 Large Roughly Chopped Onions

500ml Beef Stock (Approx 2 cups)

35ml Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Pronounced – Wooster-sher ( Approx 0.14 cups)

1 tbsp Tomato Puree

1 tsp Dijon Mustard

Salt and Pepper to taste.

Now my mum always cheated buy buying ready made Puff Pastr, but you can make your own.

Add ons

Many Scots swear by a Steak and Sausage pie, rather than just steak alone. We don’t mind adding sausages also, but personally like to have just steak most of the time. However, this recipe is easy to adapt if you want to! We’ll share more in variations below, but you can add 4-6 sausages if you like as well.

ake your mixing bowl and toss the beef in the plain flour, this will help insulate the meat while browning as well as helping the sauce to thicken. You can season the flour to help add an extra depth of flavour if you’d like.

Heat your pan and oil/butter, once hot add the onions and cook until soft.

Once the onions are soft add the beef to brown it, this should only take a few minutes.

This process of browning simply means to lightly cook the surface of the steak to caramelize it and add a richer flavour to the meat.

Once browned add the stock, Worcester Sauce, Tomato puree, Dijon mustard and seasoning.

Bring the mixture slowly to the boil.

Once it begins to boil reduce the heat and allow to gently simmer for 2.5 hrs.

During this time stir occasionally and, if you have a gas stove that doesn’t have a low enough setting to simmer keep rotating the pan to avoid too much heat in one place.

If you’re adding sausages (see variations) then you can chop and add them about halfway through cooking. If they have a high fat content you may want to fry off in a separate pan or even boil for 10 minutes to remove some of the fat so that the pie won’t get too greasy.

Once the sauce is good and thick and the meat is breaking apart nicely tip the mixture into the pie dish, it should be roughly 3/4 full.

Preheat your oven to 180°C or 356°F, approx gas mark 4.

Cover the top of the pie dish with the rolled puff pastry, use your thumb or a fork to push down or crimp the edge of the pastry along the rim of the dish, helping to seal the mixture and the flavour in.

Make a hole in the centre of the pie to allow steam to exit during cooking.

Place your pie into the preheated oven for roughly 30 mins or until the pastry has risen and is golden brown.

You can find this recipe and more like it at https://scottishscran.com

[milfzatannaz]

shitty pics but I had two small pork tenderloins in my freezer, and I was kinda tired of roasting them or making stew. So I cut it into rather large chunks, and I seared them in my dutch oven with a seasoning blend of cumin, chili powder, red pepper flake, etc. while they browned I sautéed some onions and garlic in my instant pot with bay leaves and a cinnamon stick, adding tomato paste and chili crunch (I needed something spicy and concentrated!) when it became fragrant. I added the pork to this and deglazed with beer, topping with a glug of beef stock and adding lime and orange juice. I let that shit pressure cook for an hour and it came out AMAZING.

then I made quesadillas and topped them with cotija cheese and I’m very very happy. I’m using the leftovers for nachos and ramen this week!!!!

[tafferling]

One-pot bolognese by Taff

I have been kind of... away from social media for a while, so have a recipe in my absence.

What you need:

A single tall pan (so, a pan that is deep, goes up!) with a lid. Either wide enough to fit whole spaget, or you gotta CRACK

One (1) onion

250 gr of ground beef (can substitute with beef/pork mix or maybe even turkey or chicken I am sure). Except today Taff went nuts and added 500gr cause she loves her meat mmm mmhmm. nom.

Two (2) garlic toes. Or as Taff says: INFINITE. They are meant to be pressed, but I usually just chop them, I like the chunks.

125 gr of spaghetti. Mine are supposedly done after 9 minutes, so that may be important.

One (1) cube of beef stock. They are like these dried stock cubes, come in 11gr per cube here.

A packet (400 gr) of tomato sauce of your choice. Preferably a taste you really like, since this is a quick cook so a lot of the flavour ocmes for it. Taff, as she realised her tomato sauce is just tomato with MORE garlic: *mwahaha*

Recipe says: Ketchup, one dinner spoon full. Taff says: Concentrated tomato puree. A LARGE SQUIRT

Recipe says: Chili flakes, half a tea spoon. Taff says: Cayenne pepper, OH MY GOD NOT THAT MUCH, TAFF (half a tea-spoon is enough, don't be me)

3 and a half DL of water (that's deciliter, not Dying Light - so 350 ml)

How you do it:

Chop up the onions (don't cry don't cry don't cry, oh no, I'm crying) and press or chop the garlic

Put on pan, add some oil (I use olive oil) and fry the onions for like two minutes until softish (don't cry, don't cry, don't- oh god we are doing it again)

Add garlic and meat, fry for another 3 minutes until meat has some colour

Add the water and the tomato sauce, plus the beef stock and the chili flakes cayenne pepper. Squirt in ketchup tomato puree.

Stir

Throw in the spagets

Stir

Put on lid and let cook for 12 minutes (that is more than the 9 the spagets usually need)

STIR sometimes so the spagets don't get burnt at the bottom

Eat (put some Parmesan over if you have it)

[najia-cooks]

[ID: First image is of two dark brown glazed lamb chops. Second image is a close-up; one of the chops has been cup open to show a pink interior. End ID]

Seitan lamb chops

This vegan meat can be used as a substitute for lamb chops or rack of lamb. Like well-cooked lamb, it is fine-grained, moist, subtly sweet, and meltingly tender. Once simmered it is ready to be seared, breaded, fried, or sliced, and included in your favorite recipes.

The seitan is made using the washed flour method, which kneads dough in water to separate the gluten from the starch: this allows you to control how much starch you leave alongside the gluten in the dough, and thus how tender versus chewy your final cut of meat will be. This recipe makes a dough that leaves more starch in than most seitan recipes do, and then kneads the dough again to distribute that starch into an even, fine grain. A simmer in a spiced, aromatic broth leaves the final product tender, moist, and flavorful all the way through; the broth is then cooked down to a glaze.

The spices called for in this recipe are geared towards replacing lamb in Palestinian recipes, but they can easily be swapped out to complement the flavor profiles of other dishes.

Recipe under the cut!

Patreon | Tip jar

Makes 4 large lamb chops.

Ingredients:

For the dough:

720g bread flour (or any white wheat flour with at least 12% gluten)

About 2 1/4 cups water

For the dry flavoring mix (scaled to 455g dough yield):

2 tsp (7.5g) ground sumac

1 3/4 tsp (5.25g) onion powder

1 tsp (4g) kosher salt (1/2 tsp table salt)

1 tsp (5.5g) vegetarian granulated sugar

1 tsp (2.5g) black peppercorns, toasted and ground

3/4 tsp (2g) caraway seeds, toasted and ground

3/4 tsp (3g) garlic powder

3/4 tsp (2.5g) ground turmeric

3/4 tsp (2g) cumin seeds, toasted and ground

3/4 tsp (1.5g) aniseed, toasted and ground

1/2 tsp beet powder; or 5 drops red + 1 drop green food coloring

1/2 tsp (2.5g) MSG (optional)

To fry:

4 tsp vegan margarine or ghee (سمنة), divided

4 tsp olive oil, divided

For the simmering broth:

2 Tbsp soy sauce (I used Chinese aged soy sauce)

1 Tbsp red tahina

2 tsp miso paste (preferably red)

2 tsp pomegranate molasses

2 tsp vegetarian 'beef' stock concentrate (optional)

1 small yellow onion, quartered

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 bay laurel leaf

1 stick cinnamon bark

5 allspice berries

5 green cardamom pods, crushed

2 cloves

1/2 tsp black peppercorns

1 tsp vegetarian granulated sugar

Several cups water

Instructions:

To wash the flour:

To make seitan using the washed flour method, a dough is first made out of flour and water; then, the dough is washed in water multiple times. The water carries off the starch, leaving the gluten behind.

1. Make the dough. Mix flour and water in a large mixing bowl until dough comes together. Knead for several minutes, and then cover the dough and allow it to rest for another 10-15 minutes to develop gluten. After resting, the dough should be very smooth, elastic, and stretchy.

2. Soak the dough. Fill the bowl with enough cool water to cover the dough, and let it soak for about an hour. This allows gluten to continue developing.

3. First wash. Leave the soaking water in the bowl, and begin to knead the dough with your hands under the water. Repeatedly pull, stretch, fold, and press the dough for several minutes to knead, occasionally using your fingertips to break through and shred or mangle the dough as you pull. Soon, the water should be a thick, opaque white.

4. Drain the dough. Set up a colander over a very large container, and pour the contents of your mixing bowl through. You can also just pour the starchy water down the sink if you don't have plans to use it (to make liangpi noodles, or dumpling wrappers, or any of the recipes out there for vegan bacon using wheat starch...).

At this point, you will see two distinct substances in the dough: the gluten, which is thin and stringy and feels rubbery when pinched, and the starch, which is thick and 'globby' and feels soft when pinched, offering no resistance. We want to wash the flour a few times until most of the starch has been removed, and there are only some small globules interspersed throughout the stringy gluten.

5. Second wash. Return the dough to your mixing bowl and fill it with fresh cool water. Knead and pull the dough for another few minutes, until the water once more turns opaque. There should be fewer large areas of starch in the dough, and more development of the gluten strands. Drain the dough again (just like in step 4).

6. Third and fourth wash. Repeat this process another time or two, until the starch globules are about 20% of what you see, and the gluten is around 80%. For the last wash, the water should be a bit less opaque with starch than it was for the first one, but it should be more than a bit cloudy. You should see your fingers when you cup some of the water in your hand, but not the bottom of the bowl.

After the third wash

After the fourth wash

7. Drain the dough. Drain the seitan again and allow it to continue draining, flipping over once, until it is noticeably less wet. Squeeze the dough to remove any extra water or starch on the surface.

You now have your washed flour! This will be the base for the rest of the recipe. I had 455g of dough at this point.

To finish the dough:

1. Add all dry ingredients to the dough and knead again to distribute evenly; or use a blender for about 30 seconds until everything is well-incorporated and the gluten strands are visible.

2. Pull the dough into a single long, thick strand, and then tie it into a couple knots. Do this a few times to build structure.

To cook:

The dough will first be seared to develop a crust, then simmered to infuse it with more flavor. After a rest in the simmering liquid, it is seared again to re-crisp, then tossed in the thickened liquid to form a glaze.

1. Divide dough into four pieces. In a large skillet, heat 2 tsp of margarine and 2 tsp of olive oil (or use all olive oil). Add dough pieces and push flat with a spatula. Fry, turning as needed and intermittently pressing flat with the spatula, until the surface is browned and crispy.

2. Mix liquid simmering ingredients together and whisk to combine. Pour over browned chops and add whole spices and aromatics. If necessary, add more water to cover.

3. Slowly bring simmering liquid up to a bare simmer. Don't let it come to a rolling boil, which could produce a spongey texture.

4. Cook at a very low simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and allow to soak in the simmering liquid (including spices and aromatics) for at least an hour in the fridge, or overnight.

This is a good place to stop for the night if you want to make these ahead of time.

5. Remove lamb chops from liquid. In a large pot or deep skillet, bring simmering liquid (including spices and aromatics) to a boil, uncovered, until considerably reduced.

6. Strain to remove whole spices and aromatics. Return to pan and continue to reduce until thickened to a glaze-like consistency.

7. In a clean skillet, fry lamb chops again in remaining margarine and oil until browned and crispy. Add glaze and cook, flipping and agitating occasionally, for a couple minutes until coated.

Serve immediately over rice or frika (فريكة / freekeh), topped with fried pine nuts, alongside plain cultured soy yoghurt, pickles, olives, and a side salad, etc.

[riflebrass]

Picture for street cred. Here's something that actually deserves to be in the cooking tag unlike the ribs I made earlier lol.

I've been collecting drippings every time I roast a pack of chicken. I ended up with roughly a quart after removing the fat. I simmered the stock to further condense it down to about a pint to concentrate the gelatin for a richer broth and added some drippings from the ribs I made for lunch.

I cut up almost 2lbs of chuck steaks into bite sized pieces then seared it in the soup pot. I added a minced onion, some garlic, some bay leaves, the chicken stock, and about a pint of beer. I brought the mix to a boil then let it simmer for an hour.

After an hour I chopped up 4 medium russets and a couple hands full of baby carrots and dumped them in the pot. Half an hour later I dumped in a couple hands full of chopped celery and let it go another 15 minutes.

To finish it off I scooped out some broth, mixed in some corn starch into a slurry, and reintroduced it to the pot until it thickened to where I wanted it.

And to top it off a slice of toast fried on the skillet because it's superior to using a toaster.

@theminingengineer want to trade a bowl for your beef barley stew?