I probably don't want to know the answer, but what is it about new, massproduced cast iron that's supposed to be inferior to the old stuff?
I put up duck legs in the fat from our Christmas eve roast goose, burbled them away in a cast iron pot, aged for a fee months and then crisped up for dinner Saturday evening but this time in copper bottomed stainless steel. They were delicious, especially the crispy skin. Ate them with rocket salad, mmmmm. I suppose the stainless steel cuts the SWPL points down considerably, but they were consumed in a room in which there is sauerkraut in the making, so maybe make it back there?
Kismet, I was just thinking about this. I have one skillet (enameled) and one pot, both gifts and expensive, but want to round things out with a regular 12" one like I grew up with.
Is there any virtue to seasoning the pan oneself, or is that another affectation?
I have a set of Griswold cast iron skillets that belonged to my great-grandmother. How's that for SWPL cred?
I once gave a set if beautifully seasoned cast iron waffle irons to a friend suffering from a very deep depression following a wrenching breakup and I've never regretted it even though seasoning the replacements was a huge pain in the ass. Totally worth it.
I'm actually looking at the geeky seasoning instructions, and am tempted to give it a shot. Our pans are functional, but clearly not as well seasoned as they could be.
Cast iron skillets probably make better impromptu weapons than stainless steel.
But all mine is modern cheapass Lodge. The 10" skillet is older than the 12" -- I might have walked off with it from my parents kitchen? Or maybe it was a present in college? But the 12" Buck definitely bought new in our early dating careerafter I burned a dinner I was cooking for him badly enough to set off his upstairs neighbor's smoke alarm, and blamed it on the thin stainless frying pan I was using.
Those folks are hilarious! But sadly probably on to something, our best pan is a little omelet number from a tag sale years,ago with a broken handle and a smooth as satin surface.
7: Oh, that does explain it. I've noticed that really old pans are smoother, but I thought it was decades of wear or something like that.
9: Mine also. I've never really used them much.
7: I don't even have an orbital sander. I have the cheaper kind that just shake back and forth.
Slosh enough ghee, lard or goose fat in them and the modern cheap lodge does fine. I suppose if I ran across a teenager with access to power tools and looking for a project I'd get some polishing done but otherwise, eh, it's not worth the obsessional interest to me.
I started roasting cauliflower. Everyone (including the dog!) loves it. Thank you, unfogged!
What I'm going to do is keep using the anodized aluminum and non-stick coated stuff that I use every time I cook anyway.
And it can add iron to your food!
I have a cast-iron dutch oven less than 20 years old. I mostly use it for making stew or chili on the range. After browning meat, there's baked-on crud. I use steel wool to clean it, then wipe it with olive oil before putting it away.
The emphasis on stuff is so heavily misguided that I can't even.
I'd read that post about seasoning pan with flax oil. I think that's a bit excessive, since that stuff is expensive. Canola or peanut oil should be fine.
Non-stick is great for eggs, but you have to be careful about not using metal utensils and cleaning it without being too abrasive. You can beat the shit out of iron!
Also, I have a great iron wok which sits flat on my glass stovetop.
Note that J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a man who has a $100 meat thermometer, says the differences between old and new cast iron are "minor".
As much as I love J Kenj, I take what he says with a grain of salt since the time he admitted that one of his "tests show" was him cooking for friends at home.
That said, yes, he's probably right about that, though I don't know first-hand.
my new-ish Lodge cast iron Dutch Oven gets used mostly for baking bread. and it does a fantastic job of that. don't have to put anything on it before, or do anything more than wipe it out with a paper towel after.
When I moved into my first real apartment and got my first real job and all that I also got, at Target, a Martha Stewart brand cast iron dutch oven, undoubtedly of new construction. I kind of fucked up the sides somehow but you know what? It's fine. It's totally fine.
(Much later I also got, pretty much by accident, a 6" and a 12" skillet which do seem to date from the old days of super-smooth cast iron, and it's true that they're really nice.)
Blume got me a (new, Lodge) cast iron skillet for a present. It's great! Works good! We seasoned it with lard. Seems fine! Cleans out super easy!
I want a hundred dollar meat thermometer. There's a dual probe wireless jobbie I've had my eye on.
That's just too low hanging, fruit-wise.
Maybe I could get the kid to practice pirouettes with various abrasive on the working foot *inside* the pans? Is there a business plan in this? Perhaps a fundraiser for impecunious ballet schools!
Did I say thermometer? I meant brisket dildo.
The hundred-dollar thermometer (we're talking Thermapen, right?) is awesome. It's so much faster that it's hard to explain. Also, the company that makes them seems adorable, and sends little packets of jellybeans in with your order.
Listening to classic rock radio the other day, I thought of the ultimate SWPL burn long-con. Here's what you do, but it takes dedication. You marry the SWPL target, have a kid, and mysteriously insist on naming the kid "Maurice." And then ... at the preschool interview where they adoringly say "Oh! Named after Maurice Sendak!" you reveal the truth -- that he was named after "Maurice" from the "some call me the gangster of love" Steve Miller song.
31: no, this is a leave-in grill thermometer with a grill temperature probe.
brisket dildo
If there are any lurkers out there who have held off commenting until they could find just the right pseud, now's your chance!
My current roommate moved in with a (Lodge) pan that is somewhere between fifteen and seventeen inches across, which is hilariously massive but also kind of great. I can barely lift it one handed, and you have to just turn the burner on full and let it sit there for a minute or so before using it because of how much heat it holds. It's pretty amazing for cooking though, and makes my normal (but old!) pan feel kind of inadequate.
It's newer so I have tried both rough and polished surfaces for cooking and, to be honest, the only difference I can see is that the smooth surface looks a lot prettier on the rare occasions when we've taken seasoning after use seriously.
If Maurice Sendak is their reference they aren't really worthy of the game, you need to seek out circles where "Maurice" calls to mind "Jeannette MacDonald".
OT Bleg:
What the hell's going on with my browser? In most of my tabs, I can click around and mouseover and suchlike, but I've now been to 2 different pages (one the local paper, the other a Wordpress blog) and been unable to click on anything, or even get the cursor to change states when hovering over links. I even tried closing that tab and reopening the pages in a fresh tab, but no dice.
Does this ever happen to anyone else? Any guesses what's happening?
Safari on a Mac, FWIW. Spare me any comments on browser selection.
|>
Since I didn't pause, that play function won't have any effect.
38. Happens from time to time (Chrome on a PC). Sacrificing a cockerel to Baron Samedi usually fixes it. So does closing the browser and reopening it.
I want a hundred dollar meat thermometer. There's a dual probe wireless jobbie I've had my eye on.
I bought my parents one of them for Christmas. No other way to check the internal temperature of something in an Aga, and opening the door increases the cooking time a lot.
About all I brought to my marriage was some college debt and a well-seasoned Lodge pancake griddle. The debt is retired but the griddle is still going strong. ms bill and the kids got me a "modern" pre-seasoned Lodge skillet a few Father's Days ago that has worked fine, although I did have to re-season it once with peanut oil.
How is this as a slogan for a cookware company?
100% Cast Iron. O% Irony
About all I brought to my marriage was some college debt and a well-seasoned Lodge pancake griddle.
I don't know why, but this set off "Sweet Betsey from Pike" in my head. Anyone else want an earworm?
Can't catch them if you don't know what the song sounds like.
41: an Aga
Ago ovens are beyond SWPL, Ginger.
(Never seen one in the US.)
My two favorite pieces of cast iron are an old Wagner Ware frying pan I picked up on eBay for $7 (the deep model, smoothly finished) and a new Lodge 17-inch skillet that I bought to make pad Thai because this woman urged me to, and I would do pretty much anything she suggested.
Ago ovens are beyond SWPL, Ginger.
It came with the house my parents moved into relatively recently. So far it seems to have been more trouble than it's worth.
How much does that 17 inch cast iron skillet weigh?
(Never seen one in the US.)
A friend here has one. She's a pretty famous chef, but most restaurant cooks I know have not-so-fancy home kitchens.
51: Almost 15 pounds. It's huge enough that every time you take it out when there's company, people are like, whoa (...laydeez). You can get one new for 60 bucks or so.
That's heavy enough that it would have stuck Ned Kelly to the ground if made his suit from them.
48, 53, Am working on singing all Emily Dickinson poems to "Sweet Betsey from Pike." Only about 1700 to go.
Could someone put together a cookbook -- Recipes that double as workouts?
(Never seen one in the US.)
At my first office job, we had clients who were an absolutely lovely couple come over from England because the husband was CFO of He/nz (later CEO of Stark/st). I'm pretty sure they bought the (very Brit-style) big house they did largely because it already had an Aga in it. First I'd ever heard of one, ca. 1997.
Aga stoves seems unfortunate in parts of the world where there is actual hot summer.
I guess you could cut of the gas for the summer and eat salade Niçoise and ceviche.
I really want a thermapen! Glad to hear they're worth the money.
Unsurprisingly, I love cast iron, though I don't have any old stuff. I've thrown over all of my non-stick for either plain stainless-steel, cast iron, or DeBuyer mineral steel. (The latter was thanks to redfoxtail/snarkout household, indirectly, and I am so happy with them. They rock.)
Moby, there are other non-citrus-involving things you can rely on for summer nourishment, like cocktails and beer.
Both of those can involve citrus. Especially in the summer.
I'm not opposed to citrus. I just don't feel it offers a complete replacement for cooking with actual heat.
From what I've seen of extensive real estate ad browsing, many people with Agas have a secondary stove for use during even the merely warm British summer. From conversations in my shop, it would appear that many indeed do turn them off during the summer even if they don't have another.
I always thought Aga's and equivalents (Rayburns, etc) were really posh, but I have also learned from friends that most people tore them out when renovating up until the .... early 90s? or so. (I'm unclear on the exact timeline.) So having one can mean really posh, or in an older house and haven't redone the kitchen since 1933 or what have you.
One of my friend's mothers just got a new one to replace her incredibly old & inefficient one and it really is gorgeous in situ (17th-century cottage that they've had for ages in a small, unfashionable, middle-of-nowhere village that they are slowly doing up; not posh) but I don't think I would actually enjoy having one. I do sometimes fantasise about having a secondary, wood-burning range, just for fun, though.
I've heard that if it's hot enough you can scramble eggs on the sidewalk.
in an older house and haven't redone the kitchen since 1933 or what have you
Which I suppose could also mean really, really, really posh but also encompasses plenty of 'normal' folks.
Moby, in the summer you should obviously be cooking on your outdoor grill.
Then I don't understand what's the issue.
I don't either. I just don't see ceviche as a potential staple of my diet.
Which I suppose could also mean really, really, really posh
The really, really posh people haven't redone their kitchen since the early 1800s.
I offered ceviche merely as an example. You could make sandwiches with cold cuts if you like.
Some of today's AGAs are effectively regular ovens. I have one of these in my rented house, and the conventional and fan ovens function just like ordinary ones, though annoyingly they take an awfully long time to heat up despite their small size. The simmering oven does make fantastic casseroles, though.
I also don't understand 70 at all, unless it's supposed to mean 'why spend all that money just to make things more convenient for the help, amirite?'. Which I didn't think was what you were trying to imply. Anyway, all the rich people I know have very nice kitchens.
I like the idea of somebody pouring cream of mushroom soup, tuna, noodles, and frozen peas into a dish, crumbling chips over the top, and putting it into a $10,000 oven.
All the rich people I know won't let me near their kitchen.
The really, really posh people haven't redone their kitchen since the early 1800s.
That's nothing; the wall of my cave-kitchen still has the original painting of people throwing spears at an aurochs.
The poor people probably wouldn't either, if they could afford better locks and an alarm.
I thought the category of SWPL was itself now SWPL and the whole thing had eaten itself.
78: No, just that some people with old houses that haven't been renovated in ages have had them since 1565 but no longer have a lot of money to keep them up. Posh doesn't necessarily mean rich, a distinction that has taken me a long time to figure out.
84: So American! Money isn't everything you know!
79: Oh god, I'd forgotten what Americans mean by casserole (why do I always seem to get caught up in UK/US differences in food names every third or fourth time I post here?). No, something like this. Really really really posh people who no longer have any money have to live off what they've killed themselves. I bet aurochs would make a fantastic casserole.
I knew exactly what you meant. I made the joke anyway. I can't really think this surprises anybody.
you can turn off the Aga in the summer because you have a summer kitchen for putting up the home farm produce.
Or, as observed, the grill; a big propane camping stove is pretty good for camping.
My contribution to workout recipes is "First grind the flour", AIHSHB.
85: Heh, I really shouldn't opine on my adopted country. The real Brits will show up and set me right any time now.
(That being said, I think Aga's are going to hit a 'too common/popular' wall soon. Also, I can always tell when a customer has an Aga, because they will tell you, even when not buying anything to do with one.)
"First grind the flour"
First, catch a deer.* Then, haul the deer home on your shoulders. After that you can pretty much eat what you want for dinner.
* (They are very fast in short bursts but tire and can be overtaken if chased for days without rest. The hard part is not losing track of them when they sprint away. This may take some practice.)
Or if you want to be "posh" you could tell people it's pronounced, "Morris", and the child is named after the E.M. Forster novel.
If it is hot out, it doesn't take days to overtake a deer.
Now that I found out deer sometimes eat birds, I'm trying to mentally recast them as ferocious killers. But it's not really working.
Or that you named the child after Lord Nuffield.
And you named the child after him because you are a big fan of the iron lung.
You don't need to chase a deer for days. The scale is much shorter.
"Oh, Maurice? His name is Latin for 'you die'."
You people obviously run faster than I do.
What do you do once you catch up to the deer? Wrestle them to the ground? Do we get to use a knife?
You can use rocks OR sticks Or a garrote made from natural fibers.
OT: If somebody were asked to update their CV, how would they list a period of time which they spent at graduate school but didn't get a degree? Say this period was previously listed as "Ph.D. Candidate" but that seems just bizarre by this point.
What do you do once you catch up to the deer?
You haul it home on your shoulders.
Posh doesn't necessarily mean rich, a distinction that has taken me a long time to figure out
See Fussell's Class for more on this in the American context.
103: "Research Assistant," assuming that's not too far from the truth. "Graduate Research Assistant" is probably more true but less pleasing.
107: you asked for a workout, didn't you?
9
But all mine is modern cheapass Lodge.
Wait, Lodge is modern and cheapass? Wow, I'm not SWPL at all, I'm 90 percent sure that we have a Lodge castiron pan and only use it when (a) a recipe requires a pan that can go in the oven or (b) it's a special occasion and unfamiliar recipe that calls for the pan and I want to do it juuust right - I might use it more, but the damn thing is so heavy, and has to be cleaned ASAP. It's annoying.
Or are you just saying that Lodge used to be good but has gone downhill and some people were into them before they were cool?
103: I use "Graduate Studies in [field]."
108: I was a GTA and a GRA at the time. I have those listed in positions. It's the education section where I don't know what to do with this.
111 is probably what I need. Thanks.
Also, do I really have to be the person who says "holy shit?!" to the $280 nine-inch skillet linked in the OP?
Lodge is genuinely not that expensive -- a quick look online says 20-25 bucks for a 10 or 12 inch skillet. And I don't know of a lower quality brand. Which is to say that I didn't mean to impugn Lodge exactly, that's all I've ever used, it's just that it's the brand I'm familiar with as the cheap stuff.
Apparently, somebody wants to know what I've done.
If I read the link will it explain to me why artisanal cast iron is worth in excess of 10x as much as a factory-produced skillet from Lodge?
I knew a musician in North Essex, where the woods are full of deer, who always kept supermarket carrier bags in the boot of his car so that if he hit one he could suffocate it and take the carcase home and pop the good bits in the deep freeze. I thought this was a joke until he showed me the stand he had built in his back garden to hang the carcase on while butchering it.
There was some legal reason for putting the plastic bag over the head of a wounded animal until it was dead. I can't remember whether it was that you weren't allowed to take home animals you had killed in your car, or whether you weren't allowed to kill them if they hadn't died, in which case suffocation mysteriously didn't count.
HIs keyboard player went to jail for for kid/die fid/dling. I left the band pictures up on flickr, though.
I half want to buy one because I have an instinctive belief that no one could have the audacity to sell something so ordinary for such an outrageous price unless it truly was markedly superior to the less expensive, widely available alternatives. But boy have I gotten burned by following that instinct before.
You could buy a $30 bottle opener as a trial.
I already have a $38 bottle opener that I bought by following the same instinct. (Not from this company.) I was not that impressed.
Lodge is fine. Maybe you need a little more oil; that also is fine.
also, Pyrex pie and loaf tins are completely satisfactory.
And if they had died you still couldn't kill them!
If PubMed Central keeps putting a city name in after a journal title, do I have to keep it in there? Nobody in the field is going to not know what journal I'm talking about and the city is Hoboken.
Incidentally, I hear that the seasoning you get with flax oil is pretty brittle and scrapes off easily.
Do your sources recommend a preferable oil? I have an omelette pan that's got some crud on it, that I'm considering stripping and reseasoning, and her method sounded persuasive. But if you know something better, I'm all ears.
I very very very much doubt that your pan is so cruddy that you need to strip it, in the first place.
It is cruddy to the point of being unsmooth, and has been for ages. It used to be super smooth (this is not a Lodge, but something spiffy Mom dragged home from Paris in the sixties), but a friend burned shit on it that I have been unable to get off without extreme measures, such that it is rough now, and things stick. It's still usable, but I think it'd profit from a fresh start.
In an omelette pan? I might be able to confit a chicken cutlet, but anything much thicker than that wouldn't submerge.
was a joke! just sling in a bunch of good slippy fat (lard, ghee, goose, duck) and start frying stuff. or wait for someone less jokey and impatient for more technically dreary ideas.
Four frog legs, confit au Kermit!
I've used 111, though I also got a bullshitty consolation masters and just say that I took three years to do that and non-academic employers don't know or care at all.
131: I sort of got used to that being a joke. Anyway, I don't want to call too much attention to my not getting a degree that isn't especially relevant.
Ahhh, happy memories of the grenouille variation: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RUHVCninhGA
|| I'm in Berkeley. Chance of a meetup tomorrow evening?
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I got my bullshit consolation masters and then left and then went back. The second period is what I am having trouble listing.
I didn't file for my bullshit non-consolation masters until I dropped out. So it looks like I did nothing for 4-5 years before getting the MA when it should look like I did nothing for 5 years after getting the MA.
I'm not worried about gaps. I had jobs during nearly all this period. I need to be accurate for legal reasons and would prefer not to go out of my way to point out that I'm the least qualified person involved.
why artisanal cast iron is worth in excess of 10x as much
Depends on what's important to you. I was just in a store that carried the other very expensive artisanal stuff (the octagonal ones) and they really are gorgeous, and the smoothed finish feels nothing like the Lodge the store also carries. Is that worth 10x as much? Is it being prettier worth 10x as much? Not to most people, but to some. Smoother finish: same. There's also the notion of supporting these artisanal endeavors. It matters a lot to some people, not much to others. Ditto the Borough brand having a relatively small environmental footprint. Which is all to say that if you focus on how your food will turn out, it's nothing like worth 10x as much; if the other stuff matters to you, and you have the money, and it makes you feel a little better to have something prettier, or to support specific people, or make a meaningless but nice gesture toward environmental responsibility...maybe!
Buying a used one on ebay has an even smaller environmental footprint, probably.
a relatively small environmental footprint
Organic coal?
Some of the cast iron on ebay is absurdly expensive!!! O
M
G
Some of them are "pre-Erie" Griswold pans that aren't really meant for cooking anymore; they're purely collectors' items.
Oh, you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal, if you've ever cooked a tater on a pre-Erie enamel.
130: lard! Blume can tell you about how to render the leaf lard (didn't seem that hard?) and after that piece of lard-cake.
It depends so much on who you listen to. Everyone who has an opinions seems to claim something different, but definitely not what the other guy recommends!
The linked post recommends something like six coats of seasoning. It's still brittle after that? Mightn't the opposite of brittle be goopy? Don't ask me.
The linked post mentions that lard was traditional but that it is allegedly hard to get lard with the right characteristics now: LIES.
Is it lies? She says pigs today don't eat their natural diet. Was your pig different? I confess I don't know what a pig's natural diet is. Deadwood taught me that pigs eat criminals.
Having briefly googled the pig's natural diet, I'm skeptical that any pork you had came from a pig eating its natural diet, unless the pork cost a million dollars. Maybe that doesn't really make a difference when you're seasoning a pan, but that's the distinction she was relying on.
158: our pig grew up at nose-to-tail acres where it abstained from antibiotics, learned the full waldorf curriculum and ate biodynamic acorns, as far as I know. I can't imagine its diet was so terribly different from the diet of the pigs of yesteryear, and no matter how fancy a hipster butcher you go to leaf lard is not expensive.
Does flax today grow the same way it did 100 years ago?
162: not in a way we can understand it.
unless the pork cost a million dollars
This is in fact approximately what pork costs at this butcher shop.
OT: I forgot to bcc instead of cc. Does that make the resulting shitstorm my fault or that of the people who hit "reply all" without thinking?
51: How much does that 17 inch cast iron skillet weigh?
Almost 15 pounds
See, this is why I don't use the two cast iron skillets I do have (from grandma): the smaller one isn't so bad, though it's really too small for much, but the larger one just weighs a ton. I like to be light on my feet - and hands and really wrists - when cooking.
161: Pig like that, you don't eat all at once. (But of course, people don't eat any pig all at once except at a luau or something like that.)
167: This is the pan, and this is the reason for the pan. Though I guess I've used it for a couple of other things as well.
Why would anyone use smoked fat for seasoning a raw pan anyways? Very strange.
It is,true I've always had a weakness for linseed oil, I think of it as the most Zolaesque oil because of the potential for spontaneous combustion, but its been a romance from afar.
If the pig eats anything aside from organic truffles, you might as well just spray down your cast iron with Pam.
I still have that. I don't much use it just because most of my cooking these days uses a wok. I'm not really in the market for cast iron, unless I find something used for cheap and my wife has a great Wagner cast iron that she uses for most things.
I re-seasoned my cast iron skillet this evening, due to this thread. Thanks, blog.
175: Do you have a burner that can achieve Chinese-restaurant hot?
Sadly, no. It's fakery all the way down.
a wok. I'm not really in the market for cast iron
Because you already have a cast-iron wok????
No way, brah, carbon steel for woks. So it is written.
Inherited our skillet, 11 3/4", from a great aunt about 25 years ago. We use it several times a week, and in fact used it to cook cheeseburgers Sunday night. It was sitting out on the stovetop waiting to be put away today, after I'd cleaned it last night. Rubbed with kosher salt as an abrasive, rinsed out, no soap, wiped dry.
I'd never looked at the marking before today. It's a Wagner Ware. Made after 1959, because no Sydney -O- marking, so not collectable, but no "Textron" so before 1969. Probably made in Cincinnati about fifty years ago, in continuous use since, certainly the last half of its life so far.
||
Equivocalicious:
"As an array of unexpected sounds is heard, the instrument is seen from a fresh perspective, and the audience is confronted with a novel way of perceiving time."
Perhaps Moby can work this onto his CV somehow.
|>
it has always been a joke that the thing my brother and I will fight over after my dad dies are his pans. (including loaf pans, he has some great ones.) the best maybe is the old griddle, cast-iron and about 8" across, totally flat and a very small lip at the edge. it's for making hoe-cakes or grilled-cheese sandwiches (which, according to my dad's preparation, are "flat as a communion wafer." this can be easily achieved by putting the spatula on there and bearing down hard.) pancakes also, I suppose. his cast-iron omelette pan is the next-best, curved sides and a lifetime of seasoning that gives it a non-stick finish. one time my step-brother cooked a cheeseburger in there and my dad about died.
The person in the linked thread asserting lard had no discernible flavor clearly never worked in kitchens that rendered a LOT of lard on a weekly basis. In its early stages of rendering it has a very piggy barnyardy smell and when finished properly the perfume of caramelized pork, just like proper ghee is perfume of ethereally carmelized butter.
I will likely be missing his performance with sfSound on the 18th at C4NM, sadly. (Did you ever wonder why the Center for New Music uses the number 4 instead of the letter F in its abbreviation?)
133: Do you have a self-cleaning oven?
186: jealous. just now was chinese new year's (I mean, everywhere, obviously) so my favorite place made their best cookies. I was kind of trapped outside the country and then my daughter was in the hospital as you all heard ad nauseam, so I did not get any pineapple tarts, almond cookies, or pineapple-filled rounds, because they were all sold out by the time I made it to my place and they had re-opened after CNY. HOWEVER when I went, the ancient proprietor, mindful of my 14-year-long dedication to their shop, directed me to some curious green-flecked cookies (which I initially assumed were savory). in fact, he gave me buy one get one (aka two for one) which was super-sweet of him. they turned out to be delicious. they had irregularly-sized ground nubbins and flecks of dried green peas in the dough used for the almond cookies (sans almonds), rolled out and cut into flowers. the bakery uses only lard, and so the cookies are shatteringly flaky, and may require a glass of liquid at hand to ease their passage down one's gullet.
sadly they make cookies only in the run-up to CNY, and kueh the rest of the year. really good kueh, but still. they have savory ones with sticky rice dough encasing a homemade stuffing of bamboo shoots, meant to be eaten with a special sauce of soy, chiles, and other stuff. this is what they're most popular for and highly rated on local guides as maybe the best in narnia. then they have sweet kueh which I prefer, color coded as to fillings, with the glutinous rice exterior red for peanut filling, purple for yam, white with black sesame for same, um...lotus paste is pink...other ones, idk. each piece only 75c. value for money very good one, what. god damn I wish they made cookies all year, though. they're by no means cheap, but they are absolutely worth it. they don't taste in any way porky, and I didn't know it was lard until just five years ago.
I totally believe you, neb, but that line made me laugh out loud. Similarly, a blurb a few years ago for an academic title that "reminds us how the insights of a literary way of thinking to the assessment of geopolitical history are inimitable."
I did NOT SEASON the cast-iron pot tonight HA HA HA downward mobility ho! (Or something. I can't remember what SWPL is actually shorthand for. My understanding is that white people categorically dislike downward mobility, however.)
alameida! I keep meaning to ask you if you've heard the most recent Neko Case record. Portions of it made me think of you, for reasons that probably can't be justified and may indeed be based on misunderstanding, but there it is. I am willing to officially declare it to be pretty great, although ugh positive value judgments in public I'll regret this someday. I hope your daughter is recovering, or has recovered.
I can't remember what SWPL is actually shorthand for.
"The things that we middle-class white people hate about ourselves." (More or less.)
re: 177
I tend to think that's over-rated anyway. We have an ordinary [albeit fairly chunky] gas cooker, and I've never felt a desperate need for more heat when cooking with a wok.
And our wok is just an ordinary cheap carbon steel one, bought from a Chinese supermarket. And is just fine.
I got an iron one from the wok shop only because it has a flat bottom and doesn't need a ring.
wok is just an ordinary cheap carbon steel one
This is the preferred wok of the woknoscenti.
183: When our grandparents died, my brother, cousins, and I all wanted their ebelskiever pans. It took a great deal of wrestling, but I was victorious.
It's not something I cook frequently, but it does reliably make me think of them when I do cook them up. I didn't get the ice pick they used to use to turn the little tasty eggs, but I can improvise that.
We have an ebelskiever pan. I have not idea why beyond the general tendency of things from Williams Sonoma to show up in the house.
Huh, I'm not sure my mom has an ebelskiever pan, despite being Danish and enjoying cooking. If I get her one as a present, would it be a good, thoughtful gift? Or would it be like that time I got her a waffle iron because I liked waffles?
We're not Danish, but my neighbor is.
How does he feel about making waffles?
We have a load of Zepter pans, which my wife's family bought us as a wedding gift. Loads still in storage in the Czech Republic as we've never quite been able to relay them all back to the UK.
http://www.zepter.co.uk/MainMenu/Products/HomeArt/MasterpieceCookware/Sets-.aspx
They are nicely made. Not cast iron, though.
Argh. My netnanny just blocked me out of the frat thread. It's gone back and forth a couple of times, so it might start letting me back in, but for now it's too dirty to read.
Blame ogged and his boundary testing.
192 seems too broad, though. As used here it seems to mean something more like "post-hipster wave of gentrifiers who made the neighborhood boring."
Were you not here yet at the time of the great swipple wars (which were all based on a blog listing Stuff White People Like)? I would tendentiously summarize the whole thing as "Hey, if we list a whole bunch of hipster/post-hipster white-people lifestyle generalizations on the same list as a bunch of racial microaggressions, we can make people edgy and upset while they worry that the presence of 'stand mixers' on the list means it's racist to make cookies."
I can't remember if I wasn't here for that or if I just managed to ignore it. I'm comfortable with my middleclassness.
The SWPL argument (#notallwhitepeople) was the dumbest extended discussion here, only superseded by the "is it wrong to cheat on your spouse?" discussion.
Depends what kind of cookies, right?
"The things that we middle-class white people hate about ourselves." (More or less.)
Things you middle-class white people hate about yourselves, please.
Interesting (to me) how "hipster" is basically the new "yuppie" even though it really didn't start off that way.
214.last: I'd also wondered about that.
But, ogged, would you characterize the original site as "good trolling" or "bad trolling," given that it led to such a terrible discussion? I think I was lurking at that point but I have truly lost track of all the semantic slippage involved. However, I am flattered by 209 because I never make cookies and will now consider myself down with the gente. (But isn't the word "guante"?*)
*if someone sincerely corrects me here I will either cry or finally accept that I've taken the naïf act way too far
209 is the best summary of SWPL I've seen. Was the phrase "racial micro-aggression" not available at the time?
214.2: As I recall, by the mid/late 80s even major mainstream films were slamming yuppies (Die Hard for example).
By contrast, hipster hate seems more grass roots.
209 is the best summary of SWPL I've seen. Was the phrase "racial micro-aggression" not available at the time?
Someone needs to turn "stand mixer" into a verb signifying the commission of a racial micro-aggression.
It might be that hipster schtick happenstantially lent itself to being coopted by affluent professionals in a way prior youf-culture trends didn't; as a fashion statement, it's very office-friendly. At which point you've got lot of people who are young-urban-professionals, if not eighties-style yuppies, doing the hipster thing, and it becomes easy to conflate the categories.
(and I'm back out of the frat thread. I hate these borderline netnanny decisions -- I turn into even more of a rat on crack than usual. "Can I read it now? What about now?")
I was just up at my non-university office and reminded how much more effort the younger men there put into grooming and clothing than I ever did. I don't really see this at my university office because it's all women, old men, and graduate students.
Also, the mall nearest to my house now has a Carhartt store. It's right next to Victoria's Secret.
as a fashion statement, it's very office-friendly
Not really with the wild beards.
222: demographics, no? Very big swath of that age group going to college and getting the obligatory professional jobs afterwards, often in cities? Also I think once the focus shifted in the media from "artist" to "artisan" it was easier to see it as an economic phenomenon.
226: That might not work for lawyers, but there are a great number of them around the office I was at this morning.
Interesting (to me) how "hipster" is basically the new "yuppie" even though it really didn't start off that way.
Yuppie didn't start off that way, either.
226: Oh, there are hipster looks that aren't -- like you say, wild beards, there are probably tattoo and piercing choices that'd read as hipster but still scare the drones. But if you were actively trying to reconcile hipster and office appropriate, it wouldn't be hard at all.
I feel like 230 is trying to inappropriately conflate "Hipster" and "Twee".
The ultra-defensive SWPL discussion was the best. How dare you mildly stereotype me and poke a little fun for purchasing a stand mixer! I'm not a type! What about black people who buy stand mixers! Don't you know that this class that doesnt exist is the backbone of modern US liberalism!
The Evolution of the Hipster, 2000-2009. This needs an update for the last five years, but it's not completely irrelevant.
Lee and I had lunch in a gentrifying neighborhood this weekend and it was really disconcerting and upsetting (in part because it's where one daughter's family lived for a long time before almost all being driven out in the last few years) to see all these hipster pretzel and doughnut shops and curated t-shirt stores and no black people except on the outskirts where change hasn't happened yet. It really made my stomach drop even though I am and should feel complicit in some of that. Just there's a tipping point and then it's too late and ugh.
Oh man would I kill to have a hipster pretzel shop in the neighborhood.
235 matches what I see in terms of who has the tattoos. That is, I don't see many tats on young men and I see a lot of them on young women. I realize this could be biased because women's clothing tends to show more skin and because I'm more likely to look that way.
urple is history's greater pretzel-related monster.
236,237: Is it the entire idea of selling pretzels from a shop instead of a cart that makes it hipster? Or is there something else?
241: I stopped eating donuts on donut Fridays, because I thought they made me feel even worse. But now I officially have nothing in common with my co-workers.
Why do Friday donuts make you feel worse than Thursday donuts?
242: If I were going to guess, there's nothing innately hipster about pretzels, cart or shop. Thorn is talking about a pretzel shop that has hipster signifiers like being run by young white tattooed people who talk about how handmade everything is.
They probably make the pretzel dough with a stand mixer.
242: It seemed to be staffed and populated entirely by hipsters when I walked by, but I've never known it existed and so I don't really have room to assume. It seems to have become an entirely hipster-based neighborhood, though as noted above it's kind of unkind to make that judgment and I do in fact have many friends who live, party, and fit right in there. Probably I could too. It was just really unnerving and I'm trying to figure out how I feel about it.
How does a pretzel shop with that many employees even survive?
Yes, I assume "hipster pretzel shop" just means "'artisanal' pretzel shop, run by a young person who seems to think it only takes three months of dabbling in a craft to earn the moniker 'artisan'."
249 before seeing 247, but seeing 247 does not cause me to reconsider 249.
Like I said, Mobes, I'd never heard of it, but most of them are at pretzel central in peep's neck of the woods. They only branched out here in the last six months or so.
They have a branch in Columbus. I could walk over during my lunch hour and get a lemon basil blueberry pretzel!
The farmer's market around the corner from our house (which, sure, whatever, call it hipster, I don't care. There are man buns and beardsin evidence) has veered so far from things that come from actual farms that it sort of cracks me up. Last weekend we got donuts, frito pie, booze and coffee. Farm fresh!
248. I was just looking at the website that hosted the professionally photographed and nicely typeset image in 235.
What are the economics of Paste magazine and its linked websites? The owners are not clearly identified, one of the linked websites streams live music recorded in their studios by real bands. Somebody's been putting money into this for many years, since before the recession. Is the website like a loss-making lifestyle expression storefront? But the owners are anonymous.
Nothing against the images or the recordings, they're nice enough, but clearly a scale of production different from a nicely done tumblr page or a blog of well-written snark with haphazard images. Where does the money come from and why, and who actually decides how high the production values should be?
253: Well I mean look outside your window. What could grow in those conditions?
I really have nothing against the pretzel shop, which I'm sure has good pretzels! It just seemed like a signifier more than when it was hipster diners or the hipster friend chicken bar (where the fried chicken was really, really good and it's going to sound really racist to say that there were a good number of black people there but there were) that now there's this vital community initially that hoped to coexist with the white Appalachian and black residents who'd been there before and yet every little artisanal popsicle shop has probably chipped away at that potential outcome a little more. But I'm not saying this because I love ghettos and urban blight either.
248: One of them is listed as a stay-at-home mom, so... are they even all employees? It's confusing.
hoped to coexist with the white Appalachian...residents
It feels like the ultimate obnoxious move under these circumstances would be to open an artisanal moonshine bar.
that now there's this vital community initially that hoped to coexist with the white Appalachian and black residents who'd been there before and yet every little artisanal popsicle shop has probably chipped away at that potential outcome a little more.
I wish I understood this kind of thing better. Adorable businesses move in-rents go up-poor/minority residents move out makes sense to me. But is there a more direct way in which adorable businesses chip away at the pre-existing communities? It feels as if there is, but I don't really get it. Replacement of more community-appropriate retail? Or something else?
255: things are melting, man! I saw some special greenish-brown under the normal greyish-black snow yesterday and eventually realized it was honest-to-god grass.
257: I would read that as someone who identifies as a SAHM, but has a part time job.
There are man buns
It cracks me up that this is now a hipster identifier. When I think "man bun" I generally think "Latin soccer player". But then I guess there's probably some overlap in those demographics.
IME a big part of the dynamic of gentrifying neighborhoods is a trinity of absentee landlords, sketchy local gov't, and section 8 housing.
Once this trio is in place, local community has a much harder time thriving, property values drop until developers can come in, to the benefit of the sketchy alderman. The countervailing force against this is longtime residents who are usually churchgoers.
My claim is that the hipsters/ artists are basically economically peripheral, even if they are who is visible from the street. I say this based on Chicago and Saint Louis neighborhood revivals or failures that I've seen enough of to think about, regional dynamics may differ.
263 seems very accurate, and I've seen all of this from the outside. To 259, though, initially businesses would try to get buy-in from the involved locals, churchgoers and otherwise, and hire from the neighborhood, provide formal mentoring opportunities for local students, set things up to let people use food stamps when possible, that sort of thing with a focus on coexistence. I don't think that's even part of the equation for a lot of the newest businesses where the people coming to the neighborhood never knew the neighborhood before it gentrified and don't have or wouldn't know how to make connections there except with other gentrifiers/hipsters, some of the latter of whom are of course poor too.
What does "section 8 housing" mean in this context?
This seems like the right thread for an OT public service announcement that criterion collection is currently having a 24-hour 50% off flash sale.
265: I'm assuming it goes with the absentee landlords, that they're getting government money to provide non-government-owned low-income housing, and in many cases don't bother to keep the properties in good shape. Section 8 is rent vouchers for people who qualify because of income, age, or disability status.
If you're poor enough, you qualify for a housing subsidy under section 8 of some law. The landlord may either be OK, maybe making a few units in a building section 8 and doing some maintenance, or he may be an inspector-bribing slumlord. In the latter case, any tenants who have their shit together will leave, so section 8 + slumlord means junkies.
Or are you asking to be "funny?"
Or are you asking to be "funny?"
I don't know what this would mean either.
Anyhow, I know what Section 8 is. I wanted to know if you meant project-based section 8, housing projects that accept vouchers but are in theory mixed-income, of if you were just conflating it with low-income or subsidized housing per se. It sounds like it was something between options two and three. Either way I think blaming gentrification on low-income housing is pretty shitty (and not true in my experience) but I mostly wanted clarification on what specifically you meant.
We watched Il Sorpasso on Sunday night as a last minute pick as my stepson joined us so subtitles were favored and that is one great movie with a fabulous end. Not sure I'd buy it but highly recommended for rental. Worth watching for the priests asking for help in Latin alone, wonderful shot of the dewy, plump cheeked young priest following our hero's in their way. And the record player in the glove box!!!!
270 to 268. It seems like maybe I'm being uncharitable, that the real problem is absentee landlords plus Section 8, but to be honest I'm not entirely clear why a slumlord who has the additional layer of complexity of dealing with (sure, maybe bribeable) inspectors and HUD and whoever is going to be worse than a slumlord that just rents market-rate units. In Boston as best I can tell all the worst (that is, shadiest, least concerned with conditions) slumlords rent to students, who are obviously not getting vouchers.
"the real problem" in 272 should be "the real problem lw intended to highlight"
270: I guess I see it as the difference between a neighborhood like mine, where old houses had gotten dilapidated and often split into multifamily rentals before new residents got a historical district named and bit by bit its acceptability as a place for UMC people increased but still maybe 1/3 of my block is either reasonably-priced rentals or people who've lived here for 30+ years (up through four generations), and the gentrified area I was talking about, where there were actual race riots and very low home ownership rates even if families had been living in the area for a long time. In the latter case, slumlords preying on poor people were a key part of what led to the area's hard times and gentrification was a response to what was seen as a failed neighborhood. Nia's grandmother is appalled by all the bars and doesn't eat at any of the restaurants and considers them out of her price range, though getting an actual grocery store into the neighborhood has to be a plus for long-time residents like her.
275: yeah, I definitely get the slumlords piece. But I think the conflation of slumlords and Section 8 rentals, or the view of Section 8 as an enabler for slumlords, is at best a reductionist view of what Section 8 is and does and shades -- for me -- uncomfortably close to arguing that government-subsidized housing for low-income people is per se bad for neighborhoods. Maybe I'm reading too much in on a topic where I have sensitivies!
Anyhow, I know what Section 8 is.
This is what I meant by "funny." If there are junkies, gentrification is unlikely, because the first rehabbers will get their plumbing and equipment stolen. I understand that not all section 8 tenants are shitty, and that decent section 8 buildings exist.
My main point is that you can't tell what's going on just by looking at what kind of hipster shops open up, and to outline one way rehabbing gentrification can fail. Feel free to tell me what I think if you prefer.
275: I know I don't mean it that way! I think having more section 8 housing in more diverse locations rather than centralized in, well, a slum owned by slumlords, has pretty clearly been shown to be the way to go. The problem is not poor people getting government subsidies (again, huge fan!) but limiting the options they have to spend those subsidies to people and locations working against their interests. Is that any clearer?
Is Section 8 housing standing in there as a signifier of intense poverty rather than mild poverty? That a neighborhood with a lot of Section 8 housing is vulnerable to predatory development not because of any negative effect of Section 8 itself but because it's a stand-in for a neighborhood with very low levels of community organization and political power?
Oh, and I disagree with large parts of 277. But also everyone I know with a house left empty for any significant amount of time gets their plumbing and equipment stolen because heroin. I was seeing it as the section 8-slumlord connection, which is meaningful here because so many suburbs have been unwilling to welcome decent section 8 apartments or public housing complexes and drag their feet and put it off in zoning as long as possible while the people who are eligible for those theoretical buildings have to live elsewhere.
279 is right, but I also want to elaborate.
Low income housing in cities where you can buy a liveable house for under $100,000 is a bit different from what you might have experienced on the coast. I went to a talk a guy was giving about Youngstown. The process (which in this case lead to massive depopulation instead of gentrification) was for housing prices to drop low enough that owners could ignore the value of their units in terms of fixed capital. That is, they can buy another house for less than the cost of a significant repair so the house is leased until it is abandoned in such condition that its value is negative. And, since HUD and the county don't have well-aligned incentives, HUD doesn't require the owner be current on property taxes. Thus, the owner has probably not been paying property taxes because he knows it will take longer for the county to seize the house than it will for the house to be abandoned anyway.
This is what I meant by "funny."
Yeah, I'm still at a loss. I asked you what Section 8 meant in this context. It's a large program that has operated in different ways at different times and means different things to different people, as I mentioned. And it seemed like, in fact, you meant something pretty specific by it, which you were successfully able to clarify.
But since you seem to have a strong prior that I'm being mean to you -- there, that's what you think -- I'll happily disengage.
OT: I'm wondering if the guy on the call who put up his name as "Ali G" is making a deliberate joke or not.
I see that 265 was an actual question and not casual snark, sorry for my initial misreading and my pissy response.
historical district Absolutely, improvement if this happens. One really nice neighborhood in StL got saved this way, is now pretty fancy. Actually, in that case, there was one guy who spearheaded the historic district designation and organized to keep DOT from bulldozing half the neighborhood.
In one Chicago neighborhood I know that hasn't recovered, there are three buildings on the same block owned by one problem guy; two blocks over, a large building stood empty for a year while unwinding the scam of a landlord who left the country after burying the building under construction loans. Those are both cases of a particular behind-the-scenes bad actor.
281 is interesting.
281 seems like another argument for Georgist taxes.
There's a carhartts store in downtown Seattle, and I expect the cuts to converge to the fashionably useless. Pfui. But the Ben Meadows catalog now carries women's pants.
We as a family have switched to using this cast iron skillet ( http://www.castirondirect.co.uk/cast-iron-skillet ) and we've never looked back, food has tasted better and its easy to clean, plus it lasts forever!
We've also got some other cast iron goods in the kitchen, seems all the fancy new tech on cookware doesn't beat good old fashioned iron!
