Posts by dyan campbell
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The boomer generation experienced very different social and financial circumstances here compared to Canada – where I was born in 1957 – so I am not sure how relevant Kyle’s argument was in the first place, though I have to say of all the people I’ve met in NZ born between 1946 and 1965 I’d have to say there was quite a range of… types of people and standards of living.
But the thing that interests me was Sacha’s quote (hullo Sacha!) of Malcolm Gladwell’s -
What’s going on here? The answer is obvious, if you think about it. In the 1860’s and 1870’s, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railways were built, and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy functioned were broken and remade. What that list says is that it really matters how old you were when that transformation happened.
If you were born in the late 1840’s, you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820’s, you were too old: your mindset was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there is a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the 14 men and women on that list had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity. . .
Gladwell is correct about having to be born at the right time in the right place, but he is wrong about the reasons for “America’s greatest transformation in history”. The huge leap in prosperity in the US at that time was mainly due to one piece of legislation in Britian – the Emancipation Act of 1833. The loss of both the highly profitable slave trade and cost-free labour, the great rubber, tobacco, sugarcane, cotton and mining barons were suddenly playing 2nd economic fiddle to anyone in the USA with capital, as slavery was not abolished there until 1864.
The loss of economic advantage (in Britian) was the greatest reason the Emancipation Act was argued so long (decades) before passing into law. With the abolition of slavery in the UK the USA suddenly had enormous capital flooding into their economy. And very cheap labour. Well, free labour once the initial investment was made.
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It's still pretty solid, but I'll try with a bit less milk next time.
It's not less milk you need, it's less flour. The mixture before baking is extremely liquid, but you just take bung it into a cake tin lined with baking paper, bake it low in the oven and schluup all the walnuts soak up the liquid & the small amount of highly spiced flour sets the walnuts in a dense slice. If you added more flour and used less glace ginger, walnuts & spice, it would take longer to cook and taste less sweet/flavoursome and have a drier, harder texture (less chewy and fudge-brownie like). But if it still tasted good, that's great!
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Report-back on the brown walnut cake - 'twas great, verified by independent witnesses, so thanks for the inspiration and information.
(less flour than chopped walnuts?) meant a very sloppy mix, added another 3/4 cup
I'm glad you liked it - even with the extra flour - for me the very high ratio of nuts, eggs and glace ginger to flour was a big part of the appeal. The huge amount of walnuts soak up most of the liquid in the mix, and it bakes into a moist, dense slab, rather than a springy cake. It can take a while, and you want to bake it low in the oven, shelf-wise.
I toned down the ground ginger a bit, and used straight cinnamon rather than mixed spice as in the 1924 "
The recipe does call for a huge amount of both glace & powdered ginger - but in those old recipes they used high, high quantities of spice in some recipes - cloves, allspice, mixed spice fresh nutmeg, cardamom, ginger, fine quality cinnamon - the kind of baking that was going on in Truman Capote's story.
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Perhaps it's somehow fitting, the rain and tears intermingling to make a wet grief indeed. She died of a brain tumour, she was just fifty. She leaves behind three young adults, very much devoted. She was our neighbour.
I almost missed this - but just wanted to say how much I liked this simple paragraph - it's a nice tribute, and sorry to hear about your neighbour.
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Does anyone (dyan) know anything controversial about nuts? Anything that might challenge the standard view of nuts as a health food. There was something on RNZ recently, I believe. I didn't catch it.
Islander put her finger on it for you - the oils in nuts can go rancid fairly quickly, but if they are in their shells, they keep fresh for ages.
This World's Healthiest Foods website has a searchable database, and is incredibly useful for info on storage of foods, nutrition info, and pretty fine recipes too.
We eat an incredible amount of nuts - walnuts, pecans, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, peanuts (a legume actually) and seeds - sesame, pumpkin, sunflower seeds, pinenuts... sometimes I take stock of how much we're consuming and briefly worry it's excessive, then I make a frangipaine pie or a walnut cake. Or Waldorf salad. Or blue cheese, pear and walnut salad. Or kung pao chicken. Or satay. Or kipferols. Or hazelnut plum torte. Or pecan pie.
Cooking them (baking) destroys some of the best nutritional properties of the oils, though. The protein and fibre remain, and it's the protein content I think of when I use them in baking.
Finely chopped macadamias on asparagus with butter is very nice this time of year...
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I believe the phrase American imperialism was coined back then, yes. I still have the literature.
Nah, the term American Imperialism was coined long, long ago and came into popular usage during the aftermath of the Spanish American War and paved the way to Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance or "the Rio Pact" as it is sometimes called.
The treaty was adopted by the original signatories on September 2, 1947 in Rio de Janeiro (hence the colloquial name "Rio Treaty"). It came into force on December 3, 1948. It was registered with the United Nations on December 20, 1948.[3] It was the formalisation of the Act of Chapultepec, adopted at the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace in 1945 in Mexico City. The United States had maintained a hemispheric defense policy under the Monroe Doctrine, and during the 1930s had been alarmed by Axis overtures toward military cooperation with Latin American governments, in particular apparent strategic threats against the Panama Canal..
It has been the source of much American... uh... presence and persuasion for either political or economic gain (usually the same thing) over the years.
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Thanks - temptation will definitely be succumbed to! Will report back, within a week or so I reckon.
Yr welcome. You may already know all this, but in case you are not a very experienced cake-maker when I wrote this:
"Method: Mix butter & sugar together until fluffy, add treacle, milk and stir together.Add dry, mixed ingredients, keeping walnuts and ginger until just at the end."
I should really spell out this - when mixing the wet ingredients, don't over beat the eggs into the mixture - just blended in - and when mixing your dry ingredients, you can just blend them in a bowl (still dry) with a whisk, to avoid clumping, and add it quite gently to the wet mixture, adding the nuts and ginger before you are finished blending. The object is to blend wet & dry with as little stirring as possible, as this is the main cause of tough cakes.
With muffins, it's even more necessary to barely blend wet & dry - very gently turning it over and stirring is one of the real tricks.
Also - when measuring your treacle, retain the syrupy measuring cup and when you measure your milk or buttermilk, you can stir it with a spatula and get the rest of the treacle (as a great deal sticks to your cup).
Buttermilk is worth getting for this - it works wherever milk works in a cake, and makes a much nicer (moist, soft) texture for most cakes. Ditto scones and (especially) pancakes and waffles.
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Dyan – your recipe for colonial brown walnut cake – something like this? I have the colonial brown walnut tree, and am seriously tempted, it sounds great.
ChrisW almost that exact recipe – minus any condensed milk at all but with much more butter and sugar – is in my book. I have 4 types of Brown Walnut Cake in this book – which has multiple versions of every cake there is – their section on “sponges” goes on for pages and pages. The book assumes you know the method (or rather explain general methods for different categories of foods it at the beginning of the book itself) so recipes are lists of ratios and measures of ingredients. You can fit way more recipes in that way – this is a very information dense book with a lot of different things in it.
But I make their Brown Walnut Cake version 4 – it goes like this – I have modernised “teacup” and “dessertspoon” measures.
1/3 Cup butter
1/2 Cup brown sugar
3 eggs
3/4 Cup treacle
1/2 Cup milk (or buttermilk for a more moist cake)1 & 1/2 Cups standard flour (as opposed to “high grade”)
1/4 teaspoon salt (slightly < about 1/6th really)
1 teaspoon baking soda (baking powder hadn’t been invented yet)
1 Tablespoon ground ginger
3/4 teaspoon mixed spice1/4 lb (about 1 & 3/4 Cups) fresh walnuts
1/3 Cup finely chopped, crystalised gingerMethod: Mix butter & sugar together until fluffy, add treacle, milk and stir together. Add dry, mixed ingredients, keeping walnuts and ginger until just at the end.
Bake in lined, 8 or 9 inch cake tin at 180C or 350F for 40 to 45 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. This cake tastes better made a day before, as flavours develop.
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dyan, that is such an invitation! And I think he'd like his friend (cousin Sookie?) just as much. (And, Haha Jones..)
I always thought they'd all have a thoroughly good time and get along like a house on fire...
I especially loved Capote's conceit of sending off brillant cakes to unmet (though not random) folk.
Maybe we could do this?Heh, I love that too. Capote was a genius - and the cakes his characters make sound awfully good. My favourite point in the story is when Haha Jones takes a good look at who's buying his whiskey, and bursts out laughing. "Which one of you is a drinkin' man?"
Dyan - my Nan used to make the most awesome walnut cake. She had a walnut tree in her garden and had to find some way to use them all up - preferably with as much lovely golden syrup (rather than all treacle) as possible.
I'll bet it's the same recipe! In my old book it says you can make this cake with golden syrup which in my childhood was sold in 3 shades, light, golden and dark, (dark being like light treacle). It's incredibly delicious, much more delicious than you think anything that simple might be.
The Mt Eden bakery, years ago, used to sell these things called beestings
Ohmigod we used to buy a lot of stuff from that place. I'd reacted with Canadian scorn to most bakery goods here, then someone took me to that place and I had to conceded their cinnamon scrolls, eccles cakes and beestings were very good indeed. The bakery is gone, sadly, but not forgotten.
"Flavour buds" - I googled the phrase because I was pretty sure it was an advertising phrase, and sure enough it was from an instant coffee ad campaign that ran through the 50s and 60s. But I remember the term "flavour buds" being used to describe Jello mix too. Also in "Tang" the orange flavoured astronaut's drink.
Jello - formerly "calves' foot jelly" does have some pretty impressive theraputic properties - as it is high in albumin it was (and still is) a good thing to offer anyone who is convalescing. I can see why getting the calves' feet and making your own gelatine went out of style though.
I am fascinated by - and used to research and refine exhaustively for one of my jobs - food for convalescents. To know which foods are high in albumin, or the difference between beef tea and beef consomme (one is made of boiled water poured over raw meat, then flavoured with pepper, fennel or aniseed to make it palatable) and the other is a cooked beef stock - with very different properties in terms of how they react in a seriously ill person's digestive system.
Barley water, peach snow (or pear, apple, berry snow) all have particular properties for particular conditions. In days gone by, if a fussy, unwell child would or could not eat would be tempted with things like a whole egg and milk custard, flavoured with vanilla and strawberries, or peach snow, if very ill - and these treats would often be enough to get them eating again.
The whole concept of food and our relationship to it has changed since those days, and the lost art of tempting appetites for the purpose of getting people to eat what their bodies need is in need of resurrection for modern eaters.
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"tan square" in deference to the existing conversation, it's always been "caramel cake"
No, no, "tan square" has a lovely ring to it... I made "Brown Walnut Cake from hundreds of recipes in my NZ Colonial Cookery because the name was so descriptive, so simple. It's brown, walnut and cake. The whole name just makes sense. The recipe uses no sugar - but a whole lot of treacle and lots and lots of walnuts. It's incredibly delicious, though in deference to modern times, I use much less butter.
Cheese 'n onion sandwich? It's many things.... I used to quite like the cheese and onion sandwiches served by the White Lady, after a gig at the Gluepot, decades ago. They used to serve them in little paper bags, and they were so greasy that you'd hold them out, away from your body on the diagonal and the grease would stream out one corner... when it slowed to a trickle it meant the sandwich had drained enough and the molten cheese and giant chunks of onion had cooled to a relatively safe temperature. They were not fine cuisine, but to distance runners who had not eaten for 4 or 5 hours they were quite wonderful. Plus they were pretty much the only thing you could buy in Auckland in the middle of the night, after a gig back then.
And for all of you wanting cake, Christmas cake, or cake with booze... here is the best Christmas cake story... A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote.
Islander! Your fictional character, the small boy Simon - I always wanted to send him to spend a day or two making cakes with these fictional characters, Buddy, Buddy's Cousin, Queenie the dog and Haha Jones the Indian.
Once you get fictional characters who take up space in your mind being introduced to other fictional characters... well, Islander you did a fine job creating them. Simon does not quite haunt me, but he is in a pantheon of fictional characters I almost believe in - against common sense, in a way that would probably qualify me as a bit crazy... Simon, my dear child, I'd like you to meet Buddy and his dog Queenie...