James L. Cambias's Blog, page 20

Kitchen Report: Tortillas

The little locally-owned supermarket up in Greenfield has a good selection of Mexican items ��� I don't mean Mission brand tortillas or Paul Newman salsa, I mean stuff like masa flour, corn husks for making tamales, and big bags of dried beans. This probably has something to do with the fact that this is farm country and we get a lot of seasonal workers on the farms during the growing season. So when I want cornmeal I get the five-pound bag of masa flour. It makes good cornbread and fine polenta.

But I'd never tried making tortillas before. Somehow I had it in my mind that they require a lot of labor. In a way that's true, but the drudgery comes in turning dried corn kernels into finely-ground masa flour. Nowadays we have machines for that, rather than some poor ancient Aztec woman sliding a chunk of stone back and forth. So the only drudgery involved is going to the supermarket for masa flour, and waiting in line at the checkout.

With that step automated, the actual process of making tortillas consists of:

Mix flour with water,

Roll into balls,

Squash the balls flat into tortillas, and

Cook on the griddle. 

It was quick, easy, and the resulting tortillas were sturdy but tender. They tasted a lot better than the premade ones from the store. So I think I'm just going to make them myself from now on.

Kitchen Report: The Elvis

If you suddenly went from poverty to vast wealth, and could have more or less anything you wanted, what would you eat?

Well, if you were Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n Roll, you'd have a sandwich. Specifically, a peanut butter-banana-and-bacon sandwich, sometimes on an entire loaf of bread cut lengthwise. 

Today for brunch Diane and I tried our hands at the King's favorite sandwich. I've seen some recipes which call for the whole thing to be fried, but we stuck with two slices of regular toast, two strips of fried bacon cut in half, one sliced banana, and about a tablespoon of peanut butter from a jar. The two of us shared one sandwich. 

It's quite good, really. I think eating more than a half-sized sandwich might quickly turn into a chore, but as a little brunch it was pretty tasty. If we do it again I think I'll sautee the banana slices with the bacon, to give it a little caramelization, and Diane suggested a little brown sugar. At the back of my mind there is also the question of whether some caramelized onion might go well with this, too.

Most people's reaction to the Elvis sandwich is an eye-roll, but I suspect that is partly cultural snobbery. Consider: peanut butter, bananas, and pork are all key ingredients in Southeast Asian cuisine. Make an Elvis sandwich on a baguette with some cilantro and a shot of hot sauce and you could persuade just about anyone that it's an exciting variant version of the Vietnamese banh mi. 

Hmm . . . 

Kitchen Report: Bucatini Alla Flamande

These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande.

It's a molded pasta dish ��� you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line the inside with a forcemeat paste, then fill with cooked meat and bechamel sauce, cover with another layer of bucatini, and cook the whole thing over a pot of boiling water for about 45 minutes. When it's done you invert the basin onto a platter and if everything has gone properly, you get a sort of pasta beehive or igloo full of meat.

Bucatini, incidentally, is a long pasta like spaghetti, but it's a hollow tube.

I got the recipe from one of my dependable pasta cookbooks: The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. It leads of the section on "Special Occasion Dishes" and would definitely be a showstopper if it comes out right.

Making it was quite long and involved. I started the process about four hours before we could eat anything. Admittedly, one of those hours was devoted to making stock, and in the future I'll do that part a few days in advance. After that I made the sauce, essentially a puree of cooked celery-carrot-and-onion with some stock to thin it. So far, so good.

Then I made the "meat paste" ��� the layer that's supposed to go inside the pasta envelope and seal the cracks like spackle. The recipe was charmingly vague about what meat you should use, so I went with cooked chicken. In future I may try something a bit gummier, like maybe stewing beef. The book was also vague about how much bechamel to incorporate into the paste. I later found another vague recipe on line which did at least give an amount, and I had far underestimated it. So my paste was more like the sauce. In fact, given that it also contained pureed celery-carrot-and-onion, I realized that the meat paste was really supposed to be meat and bechamel with some of the sauce for flavor. In future I'll do it that way, which should knock another half-hour off the cooking time.

Getting the bucatini to coil around the inside of the double boiler bowl was very tricky and involved some swearing, but I finally managed to get it done, and then smeared meat paste (I just love saying "meat paste") all over the inside.

The filling was a mix of chicken, tongue, and ham. The ham dominated the flavor, but it was good so I have no complaints. The tongue added richness (and the leftover tongue became tacos de lengua the next day. I layered in the chopped meat and the remains of the bechamel, then topped with the last of the meat paste and made a flat layer of bucatini for the lid.

Forty-five minutes later it was time to serve. We got it inverted onto a platter in one piece, but had trouble getting the bucatini to leave the bowl (despite a lavish layer of butter). Diane suggested lining the bowl with parchment or foil next time, and I may do that.

And then we ate it all up. No leftovers. It was good, no question. But the ratio of 4 hours preparation to 15 minutes consumption is a little high. If I can get the prep time down to maybe 2 hours I'll try making it again.

What's interesting about the dish is what it doesn't contain: tomatoes. Also almost nothing in the way of herbs or spices, nor any cheese. There's garlic, salt, and pepper. That's all. The main flavors are ham and carrot. It's quite good, but very far from the typical red-gravy southern Italian culinary stereotype. I am inclined to think it may be a very old recipe, from before 1500, although the absence of spices argues against that. Every other Renaissance-era dish I've tried has a ton of saffron, clove, or some such in it.

I confess to a little dissatisfaction with the cookbook. Most of the recipes in The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces are clearly written and appear to have been tested, but I think this one got in through a back door. The author claims to have gotten it from a Neapolitan aristocrat, and I believe her because it reads as if she simply transcribed a handwritten recipe jotted down by someone reconstructing it from memory.

Anyway, now that I have the basic concept down, I may experiment a little. I have the idea that this would make an excellent seafood dish, using some gummy fish like cod for the spackle, and filling it with crabmeat and shrimp, or maybe a chopped lobster tail. The vegetable puree sauce is very much like my father's recipe for Crawfish Alla Nantua, so I think it would do well with crustaceans.

Now that Passover is approaching, Diane has taken over the kitchen, and after the big Seder meal we'll be dining off leftovers for a while. My next big cooking experiment probably won't be for two or three weeks. Watch this space.

New Story at the Decameron Project

Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron.

In the present era, our plague isn't quite as deadly, and people are taking refuge in their own homes (though I might risk a case of COVID-19 if I can spend a couple of weeks in a villa outside Florence). It's a good time to read some stories.

A group of SF and fantasy authors have created the Decameron Project, a Patreon operation to raise funds for Italian Coronavirus relief. There's a new story every day, with an ongoing frame story written by Jo Walton. And today's story is a brand-new piece of my own, called "The Code of the Expats."

It's based very loosely on an anecdote my mother used to tell, about something that happend to a friend of hers in Mexico in the 1950s. I hope you all enjoy it, and please drop a donation in the plate at Patreon.

Astronomical Notes

The big stargazing news this spring is Comet ATLAS (it's in all caps because it's named for the acronym-titled instrument which discovered it, not the ancient Greek Titan). It's been getting some attention in the skywatching and pop-science press because it has been brightening much faster than expected as it has approached the Sun. Right now it's crossing the Earth's orbit, but don't be alarmed since its orbit is tilted and it's not getting anywhere near our planet.

Anyway, I took advantage of a rare clear night to go out and have a look. I used my binoculars, and paid careful attention to where to look . . . but I couldn't see anything comet-like. I'll try again in a week or two as ATLAS nears the Sun and warms up. 

 

 

Big Podcast News!

My short story "Treatment Option" will be the lead episode of the new DUST studios podcast series Flight 008, which releases tomorrow, March 25. You can listen to it here.

There's even a nifty trailer video!

This project began as a Web-based fiction collection, Seat 14C, which was part of an XPrize Foundation look at visions of the future twenty years from now (well, twenty years from 2017). My usual reaction to Utopian visions is to make sure I'm near the exit, so my story is a little more skeptical than some, but I enjoyed working on the project and since then I've been involved in several other XPrize activities as part of their Science Fiction Advisory Board. (No tiara.)

Non-Political Coronavirus Post

As an SF writer my thoughts naturally turn to the future. What will be the long-term effects of this pandemic?

Telecommuting: This may be the tipping point for telecommuting and working from home. A lot of businesses have resisted the idea much longer than they should have ��� chiefly, I think, from a nagging sense among managers that if employees are not around to be watched, admonished, and dragooned into meetings, the role of manager will be diminished. But if the millions of Americans working from home these two weeks get as much (or more!) accomplished as they would have in their cubicles, then businesses are going to start wondering why they need all those cubicles in the first place.

That being said, as someone who has worked from home for nearly three decades, I understand the importance of getting out of the damned house. We may see people going out to coffeshops or "coworking" spaces just to do their telecommuting.

The distinction between work and home is a recent one; for most of human history your living space and your workspace were the same. I think it's the "default state," for humans. With the barriers removed I expect a surge of people to start making use of the option.

Homeschooling: I also expect there will be an uptick in homeschooling after this ��� not just among evangelicals, secular knowitalls like my wife and myself, and political enthusiasts of every stripe. Because despite all our sitcom griping and jokes, most parents actually kind of do like their kids, and vice-versa. After a fortnight of, effectively, homeschooling their own children, I think more parents may be willing to take the plunge.

Cleanliness: A general improvement in cleanliness and sanitation is likely. All the people (like myself on occasion) who grumbled about the foolishness of trying to keep things germ-free will shut up now, and we can expect a lot more hand-washing and hand-sanitizing. This may have useful long-term effects on the transmission of other diseases. (It may also breed sanitizer-resistant germs in time.)

However I don't expect any kind of extreme permanent "social distancing" to last. We're not going to wind up living in bubbles. Humans are social animals, and a face on a screen is simply not the same as actual presence. Your forebrain may be okay with teleconferencing but your hindbrain gets lonely.

Health: A personal data point: I've been home for a week now with my family, cooking fancy meals as a bit of stress relief. Diane has been doing a lot of baking. We've been drinking more wine and cocktails. I haven't been able to get to the gym.

. . . And I've lost about three pounds. Turns out that it really is easier to eat in a healthy manner if you're doing your own cooking. And that fast food really is fattening. Not to mention those absurdly huge cookies at Starbucks.

I don't know if this has been true for others, but we may see a modest resurgence in home cooking. Especially if all those telecommuters decide to use the travel time they save as time in the kitchen.

How Risky Is Your Gathering?

In a time of alarm over virus transmission, how dangerous is a gathering of people? This post from Tyler Cowan's blog features a risk assessment calculator, giving the probability that someone at an event is carrying the Wuhan Coronavirus, based on the size of the event and the number of carriers nationwide.

It's reassuring to see that gatherings of up to about 30 people are pretty safe even if there are 100,000 carriers nationwide. This particular calculator is scaled for the USA, with 300 million people. For smaller countries, I think it would scale by reducing the number of carriers for a given risk level in proportion to population. I think.

Prince Prospero could have used this calculator when making up the guest list for his famous Masque. He invited a thousand other nobles to his event, but at the time the number of Red Death carriers in his kingdom was extremely high relative to population, so naturally the party guests got infected. If he had limited himself to a small dinner-party he might have made it through the epidemic alive.

Hamiltonian Musings

A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton.

Quick summary: it's good. Just like the soundtrack album.

And that's not just damning with faint praise. It is a great musical experience. But the staging of the show was overwhelmed by the songs. It's not a grand spectacle. The dancing is skillful but with a fairly small stage the performers mostly have to strike poses on a rotating floor section because there isn't room to move.

To me it would be as great an experience if the performers were just standing on stage in evening dress in front of the orchestra, with the chorus on risers in the back. And I find myself wondering, why not? A purely static musical performance can be profoundly moving. 

I have heard that a film version is in the works, and I hope the director isn't content to plant a camera in front of the stage. The music would work just as well against a realistic period background. The dancers could really cut loose. Freed from the theater stage, the spectacle of the show could finally match the music.

I was very impressed by the cleverness of the lyrics and the structure of the piece. At some point Mr. Miranda must have sat down with a notepad and jotted down all the words and phrases he could think of connected with a pistol duel, and then tried to build songs around them. I suspect his hard drive contains discarded drafts of a number about "fire," perhaps one about "paces," or "triggers," or "the ground."

I was also impressed by a bit of casting: all the performers who play Hamilton's friends in the first act are his adversaries in the second, which heightens the depiction of a man becoming more and more isolated as his ambition cuts him off from everyone around him. The exception is the man who plays John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton; in both acts he's the Guy Who Dies. I do wonder if in some earlier draft Laurens had a spotlight number in the first half to match Phillip's in the second.

(No doubt there will be a book or three written about this show which might confirm or explode my speculations. Until then, I'm free to guess.)

Jim says check it out.

Very Sad News

Freeman Dyson has died. He had a long, productive, and apparently happy life, so it's not really sad news for him. It's sad news for the rest of the species, which will have to get by without one of the modern era's foremost intellects.

He was one of those scientists who are better science fiction writers than anyone in SFWA. Back in 1960 he invented the concept of the "Dyson Sphere" ��� a shell of artificial habitats and solar collectors completely harvesting the energy of a star. In the 1980s he tossed off the idea now called a "Dyson tree," a bioengineered space habitat rooted on a comet, spreading vast leaves to catch the light of the distant Sun. Both notions have become staples of SF, but Dyson got there first.

I'm afraid we shall not see his like again.