Marzipan

If you have a forensic bent and like reading recipes from pixellated photographs, you will have noted that the recipe for Christmas cake was not fully transcribed because there was more at the bottom of the page: the instructions for making marzipan from first principles. Thus:

• 1lb (450g) ground almonds
• 8oz (225g) icing sugar
• 8oz (225g) caster sugar
• ½ tsp almond essence
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp sherry ½ tsp whiskey
• 4 egg yolks

We had an unaccountable large store of ground almonds approaching sell-by date, so Dau.II elected to make the marzipan for the cake. Other recipes suggest that a whole egg can substitute for the separated egg yolks which would clearly mean less faff. My understanding about the properties of eggs is that the yolks are full of lecithin which is the best emulsifier [think the miracle of mayonnaise] available outside of a food science laboratory; whereas egg white is just wet protein. Our discussion slipped into an enquiry about what was in commercial marzipan.
TYPICAl INGREDIENTS:

• Aldi: 54% ground almonds; sugar, water, invert sugar syrup; humectant: invertase.
• Tesco: Sugar, Almonds (24%), Glucose Syrup, Water, Invert Sugar Syrup.
• Shamrock: Sugar, Almonds (25%), Invert Sugar Syrup, Stabiliser: Sorbitol, Glucose Syrup, Invertase, Colour: Lutein, Natural Flavouring (almonds)
• Dr Oetker: Sugar, ALMONDS (26%), Water, Invert Sugar Syrup, Glucose Syrup, Humectant (Sorbitols), Ethanol.

Clearly Aldi's version wins the authenticity stakes hands down. It has more almonds that the first principles mit eggs version; and twice as much as the other industrial products. My pal Ysabel from Madrid looks at ground almonds with withering contempt - "all the goodness will have evaporated in factory leaving nothing for your kitchen; if you grind shell, blanch and grint your own almonds, you won't need <ptui> almond essence". I feel sure that the egg yolks add more lusciousness than just their yellow colour. Tesco's 'nut-free marzipan' is nothing of the sort - it is shortbread, rolled thin.

The humectant which appears in several ingredient lists is a wetting agent. Invertase, the enzyme, as explained last week, works by converting some of the sugar into invert sugar syrup which is intrinsically more wet than a sucrose solution.

Sorbitol E420 by contrast seems to work because it is hygoscopic - it has an affinity for water and so stops the wet stuff evaporating. It keeps things squidgy. Things being a long list including toothpaste, face-cream, marzipan, cakes, cigarettes, peanut-butter. You and your microbiome can digest the stuff but only slowly; which give it a desirably high glycemic index. Porridge oats will do for that too, and much cheaper.

St Adelaide's Day 161218

St Adelaide,whose feast day it is, is patron saint of of abuse victims; brides; empresses; exiles; in-law problems; parenthood; parents of large families; princesses; prisoners; second marriages; step-parents; widows . . . which tells you a lot about Adelaide's life and times.
In an ideal world we'd put Christmas in a box and have it delivered on the 24th December, where its unpacking would delight and entrance the children. Decorating the tree; putting out a carrot for Rudolf; and a stiff whiskey for 'Santa' could all be compressed into a time of mystic power. As it is 'Christmas' starts as soon as Thanksgiving is finished, if not shortly after Hallowe'en.

• I thought I'd share a Christmas clip from a community in England . It's made by a younger-than-me couple who live on the same block as The Boy.  Those who have kids can dance and those who don't have dogs and even the old buffer who lives on his own has a fine Xmas jumper. They look out for each other, at least partly because some of the people make the effort to be inclusive and a little bit more generous than average.
• Well, that made feel a lot better.  All those young wans reminded me of The Capital Children's Choir - singing Lily Allen's Chinese. The Beloved and I watched this other day and pointed to various young singers - there's Ellen; that's Isla; could be Nads; the spit of UnaMaia.
• More CCC? Shake it out ?
• More Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
• Heart warming: two minority Dads become unexpected pals.
• George HW '41' Bush died recently. I wouldn't have been his greatest fan but I liked this tribute by his old friend Sen Al Simpson.
• Politics: the Irish election of 1918 graphically. Sinn Féin landslide.
• Human Physiology
• Infotoon on the physiology of stress - pinch of salt required but mostly sound.
• The Deadly Logistics of Climbing Everest
• Physiology needs food
• On the Pigs Back <Friendface alert>- spot the Dau!
• Ciabatta
• Artisan sourdough
• Cod fillets - imagine cleaning these fish at sea in a Force 7 gale.
• Dublin in the rare ould times
• Radharc on homelessness in 1960s Part1
• Part2
• Dublin on the buses
• Modern cities hate pedestrians. Jeff Speck re-designs for walkability.

Sing a song

♫ I mentioned a sing-song in my story of 20 hours of Eating for The Institute. Part of the traditional schedule of events at the End of Term party is a Not Everybody Has Talent 'competition'. I've been working there 6 years come New Year, so I know this happens. Seven days out, I hadn't heard anything about our contribution; so I foolishly asked our Shop Steward, who usually arranges this event "whaaaa's happenin'?". Two hours later, I was accosted by one of newer younger faculty members to find out what I had chosen to sing that year. Apparently I had been elected Weihnachtskapellmeister - unopposed, naturally - by a fourth party. I am as happy to shirk tasks as the next government salaryman, but I figured I could do worse than previous years. In 2015, we sang the utterly repellent Grandma was run over by a reindeer. Last year, someone picked a carol with a really awkward key-change,  there was no rehearsal,  and the whole perf was a shameful ragged mess. At these events you can go religious or secular; be serious or hilarious; send up the management; or not participate. What you cannot do, in my lexicon of manners, is demonstrate that you, collectively, can't be arsed: it suggests that you think the whole event is pointless and other participants are rubbish.

♫ Now I confess that I love Holst's arrangement of Christine Rosetti's aching nostalgic hymn "In the Bleak Midwinter". Just sing it straight - it don't need tremolo, descant or trills - and not tooooo slow. It's a curious mixture of evocative rural landscape and religious sentiment. I spent a while trying to trick about with the lyrics to make an ironic attack on The Suits and government education policy. But  Rosetti's poem doesn't scan in a tum ti tum ti way so you can't easily just count syllables and replace cher-u-bim with pres-i-dent. And the reason why this piece is chosen by professional choirs is because the tune is challenging. Eventually, I threw all my efforts in the bin and went back to the drawing board.

♫ I wasn't sucking my pencil for long before I came up with Tom Lehrer's A Christmas Carol. When we were growing up in the 1960s, my Dad had a couple of dozen vinyl LPs. Two of which were of songs by Tom Lehrer. Who?never-'eard-of-'im! Tom Lehrer was a child prodigy who excelled at both Math and Music - he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. He has been recognised, by no less than Daniel 'Potter' Radcliffe as "the funniest and cleverest man of the 20thC". Like young Daniel, we kids internalised every song on those two LPs. The advantages of choosing to sing that song last Friday were manifold:

• I knew all the words
• The tune is straight-forward
• The rhythm is honky-tonk
• It's all over in 90 seconds.

♫ I called My People [N=59 in School of Science] to arms for a rehearsal at noon on Tuesday. Four (4) people turned up, which was twice what I was expecting. We agreed the song would work (although I was the only person in the room who had heard of Tom Lehrer) if we hived off the two difficult bits to soloists and announced a Dress Rehearsal on Friday morning just before The Event. That doubled the choir to N=8, if you count a toddler in a buggy who chewed cheerios through the whole rehearsal. The choir was doubled again when 'Science' was called up on stage. We gave it socks and it was a much more creditable perf than last year.

♫ Notes on sex-ratio.

• 10F:1M The choir mobilised by our College Chaplain. This is consonant with my varied experience in drum circles, samba schools and song camps: participating women outnumber men by about 10 to 1. Men aren't much interested in getting in touch with their inner selves. They'd rather be making inner shelves in a kitchen cupboard.
• 2F:14M The Engineering Faculty choir. The Institute is really woefully behind the times. But that ratio is better than, day U.Birmingham, School Eng where The Boy did his M.Eng. - there 5F:95M
• 3F:9M The Institute Senior (Grade 6 and above) Management Team. 

♫ Two sequels

• Chatting later on in the concert, it turned out that one of our choral backbone a) could play a guitar and at a pinch a banjo b) knew the difference between a key-change and a major fifth and, most importantly c) was happy to be Weihnachtskapellmeisterzweitausendneunzehn. I'm delirah about thus passing the conductor's baton.
• After the concert but before lunch, a lady of about my age came up from Finance to tell us how much she'd enjoyed hearing Tom Lehrer again. Her favourite song being The Masochism Tango. It was nice to know that we'd made one person in the room happy.

♫ Prequel. I shared a family story with her because, as a Lehrer groupie, it would resonate especially. In 1969 my older brother left school and inter-railed to Greece with a school acquaintance. They abandoned each other almost as soon as they arrived. A few weeks later, more or less on his way home, The Brother was sitting on a park bench in Rome, more or less skint. He was, quite unexpectedly, hailed from across the street by an English chap whom he knew but slightly. The chap said that he was on his way to a party and why didn't The Brother come along? The happening was in a slightly run-down Roman Palazzo and who should be installed at the piano but . . . Tom Lehrer.  As I've said before, in my family [and yours, dear reader] you make your own luck.

Invertase

My pal R came up to visit from The Holy Land part of the River Barrow valley. I won't be more specific because the questions we had to thrash out were mostly about distillation. The Gardai keep a watchful eye on distillers because rogue manufacturers who concentrate alcohol by distillation have rarely read chemistry at university and have only a hazy, seat-of-the-pants, idea about the relative boiling point of a) water 100^oC b) ethanol 78^oC c) methanol 65^oC d) congeners ???^oC. Earlier this year I alluded to a case where several deaths were cause from methanol poisoning at a Balkan wedding serving home-made cherry brandy. Hundreds of similar instances happen every year.

Distillers first make a ferment of yeast and sugar (and some additives because yeast cannot live on sugar alone). Pure white p'ison sugar costs money, so anything with sugar in it will do: apples, sprouting grain, potatoes, and of course grapes. With an alcohol-tolerant strain of yeast, reasonably tight control of temperature and sufficient food, this mash might finish up at 20% ethanol by weight. Depending on how pure the inputs are, you're going to have water and more or less ethanol and less or more methanol and the other shite. I suppose you could start with dustbin full of beyond-sell-by-date cakes and see what happens. The mash is then distilled by heating up the water and condensing the vapours. First comes the methanol, then the ethanol and finally as the temperature rises from78^oC to100^oC the ethanol concentration falls off and you're getting [impure] water.

There are reasons for having a really fast fermentation: to crank up the concentration of alcohol to the max before the dead yeast start to make the kitchen smell rank. If you're using sucrose = cane sugar = the stuff you buy in the supermarket; then the yeast has to do extra work before it starts to convert the sugar into alcohol. That's because sucrose is a disaccharide: its made up of one glucose and one fructose [see R] and the currency of metabolism is glucose so splitting the disaccharide and reconfiguring the fructose are pre-requisite actions before the actual ferment can begin.

Glucose is aka blood sugar [it's our energy currency as well as yeast's] or dextrose. Me and R had a bit of a barney because he refused to accept that 'glucose' is chemically identical to 'dextrose'. Sometime food ingredient engineers will put dextrose on the table of contents to hide that fact that they are lurrying in the sugar into the product. Dextrose is a funny name for a girl but an evocative name for a chemical. It rings of dextrous, dexterity and right-handed as opposed to sinister with all those negative left-handed associations. Dextrose gets that name because if you shine polarised light through a bottle of glucose the light will be rotated clockwise = to-the-right. This is quantitative: higher concentration = more twist, longer light-path = more twist. Sucrose also performs this turn-right party-trick. Fructose otoh, the sinister member of the couple, rotates light even further anti-clockwise. As your solution of sucrose gets broken down, more fructose goes into solution and the light inverts.

You can do the breakdown by brute force by adding acid - such as citric acid: the Go To acid for food use: like all chemical reactions things go faster if you heat them up. Or you can do it elegantly with an enzyme called sucrase aka invertase. Enzymes are proteins which miraculously make biochemical reactions go faster at normal temperatures. R's 'recipes for rot-gut' advised using a jolt of citric acid and heat to increase the initial concentration of mono-saccharides and then cool the mix down before adding the yeast. The reaction [glucose --> alcohol and carbon dioxide] is, of course, carried out by enzymes too. I suggested that R might try to source commercial invertase to do the pre-processing. Enzymes really do work fantastically more efficiently than chemical reactions.

Works Do - Bob Does

It's mid-December, it is okay to start thinking about getting festive. Thursday evening was the Departmental party, to which many people look forward with dread. What if I finish up seated next to the winner of The Most Boring Colleague prize? What are the chances that I'll food-poisoning? How likely is it that the DeptLush will spill his drink into my lap? Everyone will be dicing with those possibilities. Women will be alert for the roamin' hands of the DeptLothario? Silverbacks like me know that they won't be able to hear half the conversation because youngsters mumble and the music is always too loud. We also have to worry about forgetting whose mother died earlier in the year and whose boy-friend has more recently dumped her. This year it was okay.

• I had an excuse for leaving after a couple of hours
• I weasled some useful information about retirement from the MBC
• nobody spilled anything into my lap
•  nobody was sick ditto
• the food [international tapas] was better than expected:
• papas bravas; lamb tagine; falafel; hallomi in a bun; duck 'wings' with hoisin sauce; gambas & chorizo bake
• you can't fool a tableful of biologists: "waiter, this wing is suspiciously like a femur"

I was at home by 9pm, €25 lighter in the pocket and looking for a small alcoholic bevvy and a hot water bottle before falling into bed.

Yesterday, Friday, was the last day of term. I had read all the Literature Reviews of my final year research project students . . . and given them a chunk of mostly positive feedback. All my exams were marked and I was up to date with the lab reports. I was only at The Institute because free food was on offer. Free Food was on the table because, by long tradition, the Christmas after folk retire from The Institute, they are invited back to be tribbed by their line-manager and presented with a clock by The President. With unaccountable generosity all employees are invited to dinner in case any of the recently-retired wants to catch up with colleagues, cleaners, porters or administrators.

Before that, again by long tradition, there is a bring-and-buy cake sale and raffle to raise funds for local charities intercalated with a Christmas sing song. As with much of modern Christmas tradition, it never rains but it pours. On top of a morning of doing justice to the home-baking crew - it would be unfair not to sample one of everything - we were expected to trencher through a mountainous plate of turkey-and-stuffing-and-ham-and-gravy-and-roasters-and-sprouts. I usually go for the vegetarian option because the queue is shorter; but this year I went trad . . . and followed it with mince-pies-and-brandy-custard.  Even with a damn good Kobayashi shake, I couldn't stop myself falling into a drooling sleep on the sofa as soon as I sat down at home.

Eat local

We live in Ireland, have done for the last near 30 years, and we'd like to think it's a happenin' place rather than a rural backwater on the edge of Europe. Certainly we get all excited when something creative bursts out of Ireland and becomes A Thing in the wider world. Let's think . . . The Book of Kells, Guinness, U2, Ryanair, Identigen, Stripe, CoderDojo, Nobó . . . note that two of those global brands are in the Food & Bev sector. There must be more F&B globals because Ireland is renowned for its 40 shades of green Kerrygold smoked salmon. If there's anywhere on the island that's down with the food, then it's got to be The People's Republic of Cork. Dau.II works in the epicentre of épicerie - The English Market in the centre of Cork City. When she came to visit on the weekend, as well as some olives and some fancy french pastries, she brought news of two interesting local foodie start-ups at least one of which has burst out on to a wider international stage.

Hive Mind operates out of Myrtleville, Co Cork, on the idea We Keep The Hives You Keep The Honey. Why would I need that? you ask, I can get Boyne Valley Squeezable for about €8.00/kg and Boyne Valley Pure and Natural for €11.00/kg. That makes suspicious-me wonder WTF is in the (Impure & Unnatural) cheaper stuff. And before you assume that Boyne Valley honey has been sourced and dew-picked from an Irish hive be sure to read the small print on the label. Packed in Ireland, produce of Many Countries is likely.  I've had a slap at the difference between smoked Irish salmon and Irish smoked salmon. Immediately after that you should be looking for the Fair Trade symbol . . . and not finding it. That should assure you that some peasant in Honduras and Guatamala is working at the hive for rather less than a latte-an-hour - possibly a latte-a-day. Me, I prefer the wholly industrial food-chemist-created Lyle's Golden Syrup for about €2.00/kg - at least for my flapjacks. Hive Mind will take €300 off you at the beginning of the year and give you the produce of a single hive - which averages 15kg/year. They will cut you in for a 1/3rd share at €100/yr. That sounds like a good deal from me: knowing and trusting your supplier is important if you are to have any foodie street-cred at all at all. And you'll get a fortnightly progress report by e-mail through the season. I'm assuming that, if your hive gets colony collapse disease or varroa or gets eaten by a marauding bear, then you-the-venturer have to suck up the loss. Contrariwise if it is a bumper season with accessible clover Trifolium repens and a finish of ivy Hedera hibernica then you get all the bounty. Sounds like something for which there should be an insurance market.

The other Cork-founded Food&Bev asset is Neighbourfood [neighbourhood geddit?] which serves as a nexus between foodie consumers and a range of local farmers and food producers. How it works: You order on the web, pay by credit card and collect your basket of earthly delight on Tuesday evening.

• Delights?
• How about Free-Range Chicken, Organic Veggies, Fermented Tonics, Freshly Made ready-to-eat meals, buffalo meat, chocolate, beer, preserves, oils, body care bits, ice cream, freshly cut flowers, real bread, natural/biodynamic wines, sweet treats, sugar-free sweet treats pantry essentials and even kindling, logs and much much more

I believe them when they claim that the process of collection is part of the positive experience. In Lidaldi I feel bullied into scrabbling my groceries off the check-out under the baleful eye of the check-out person who is being productivity paced by the management. Neighbourfood sounds like our Subtitles Film Society you go along expecting to meet your friends and neighbours-in-food, and maybe the producers. Swap a few recipes, praise the new ice-cream, moan about the weather, and try not to imagine which one is your husband's lover. Common ground makes Community.

Why would you bother?

We watched a retrospective on Groucho Marx on Friday night as a way of draining out some of the accumulated stresses of life away from the sofa. Duck Soup is set in the fictional country of Freedonia. If we don't live actually in Neurosia, then we are very close to the borders and can nip across the frontier for the weekly shop. Most of our friends can tick one or more of the following boxes:
home-birth [__]; La Leché League [__]; home-education [__]; home-brew [__]; poitín [__]; rice-cakes [__]; soya milk [__]; vegetarian [__]; shit-in-a-bucket [__]; tree-hugger [__]; owns a kaftan [__]; votes Green [__]; has driven a VW minibus [__].
. . . so when we go out visiting we're likely to come back with something peculiar to eat. I don't mean snails or locusts or pancreas fritters . . . if only: I'll trying anything except morris-dancing or incest. What sticks in my craw, sometimes literally, are mady-uppy food-engineering products created by the Food&Bev industry to feed a demand and/or feed the company's share-holders.

For example: a packet, two slices down, of Kelkin gluten-free Brown Bread "No frowns with our brown" appeared in our kitchen after a meeting of the local Buddhist sangha. We don't have hens at the moment and I'm not about to throw food, or even 'food', straight in the trash; so I ate it . . . toasted. It was fine. But it was about 4x the cost of regular brown bread. And, more worryingly (because we're made of money and that is not an issue), it had 4x the number of ingredients. Compare:

• My sourdough:
• starter; flour; water; salt N=4
• Kelkin gluten-free Brown Bread
• Water; rice-flour; tapioca starch; potato starch; cornflour; sunflower oil; yeast; psyllium seeds; golden syrup; humectant - glycerine; apple fibre; egg white powder; salt; thickener - hydroxypropyl-methyl-cellulose; corn starch; colour - caramel. N=16

It  annoys me when the most abundant ingredient in any food product is water - especially when that product is sold by weight. Water is really cheap even if you have to pay for it, compared to anything else you may throw in the bowl: every ml is profit. I've no idea how much water is in my sourdough (because every loaf is different but every loaf is good) but I know it's got less water than flour. Typical proportions 3 flour:2 water. The next four Kelkin ingredients are starch, any starch, so long as it's white so long as it isn't wheat. WTF? It's brown bread: but the food engineers can >!ka-ching!< that by lurrying in the caramel. which is convenient and cheap for adulterating food to give it a homely brown colour but contains 4-methylimidazole (4-MEI) which is probably carcinogenic. Don't get all het up about that 4-MEI though, you'll create more as soon as you cook stuff in your own kitchen. All that tasty maillard browning - in toast, chips, pork-roast - is basically caramel. Here's a sensible piece on the Maillard over-reaction.

But my substantive point is that there are loads of cultures in which wheat and rye form no part of the diet. The whole of India south of the chapatti line; the whole of Central and South America with their beans, corn and squash . . . or potatoes and quinoa diets; or chunks of Central Africa scarfing down the cassava. If you really can't tolerate gluten, why would you want to eat something that looks and tastes like bread when you could be doing yourself proud with corn tortilla, rice-n-beans, or roast potatoes? [Wow! imaging having roasters every day: I could handle that]. It's like the rather sad chap we knew who came to vegetarianism late in life and used to make chops nut-cutlets, gravy and two veg for dinner . . . ignoring a super-tasty world of pakori, tacos, saag aloo, jollof rice, tostadas, dhal, megadarra.