A friend and occasional reader had a great time making fun of me over the weekend for my references to Westphalia and the 30 Years’ War. He found them, how can I put this? Abstruse. Arcane. Nerdy. The only thing to say to that is Welcome to the world of Joe Pastry. Yet I can’t […]
READ ONAnybody out there know what “petit four” means? I ask because I’ve never found anyone who can tell me definitively. The words literally mean “little oven” in French, but that’s where just about every explanation I know of ends. It’s speculated that in French kitchens of old (and I mean manor manor and/or palace kitchens) […]
READ ONThough it’s never been proved, ergotism has long been suspected as a cause (or partial cause) of one of the strangest phenomena ever recorded in Europe: dancing mania. One of its first documented instances was recorded in the French town of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1374. There, for some reason, a crowd of people began dancing ecstatically […]
READ ONYou got a problem with that? I suppose I frequently do, though mostly with her recipes. In general I don’t like the corner-cutting she does (especially in the icings department), and I think most of her cake and candy recipes are poorly tested. However, if you don’t think she employs the greatest team of food […]
READ ONOn the sweet side, we could do candy, but then every food column out this week is about making candy. And not to be cynical, but you know as well as I do that no parent is going to let their child eat anything home made that comes out of the trick-or-treat bag. It’s one […]
READ ONThe great thing about ze galette is that there no right or wrong way to roll out the dough. As long as you can gather the edges up around the filling without there being gaping cracks, you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Like last week’s bread, it a lackadaisical affair. There are […]
READ ONIf you’ve had a chance to try making pain à l’ancienne this week, you’ve undoubtedly noticed one thing: this dough is very wet. It sticks to everything including hands, bowls, implements, the table, you name it. Thus you must be prepared to spread plenty of extra flour around. You must also be prepared for imperfect […]
READ ONNothing quite like a quiet Sunday morning browsing the food sites looking for recipes. In fact I just got back from a little trip over to Saveur. I don’t know one food fanatic who doesn’t love that magazine…if only for their amazing photography. But they’re just so easy to make fun of sometimes. This recipe […]
READ ONOr is it fingers? I got so busy showboating in the last post that I forgot to answer the dang question! It was: do fruits start to degrade in nutritional value after they’re picked? From what I know the answer is no. Fruits are divided broadly into two types: climacteric and nonclimacteric. The first type […]
READ ONConsidering how many visitors I get on a given day, I must have one of the least commented-on blogs on the web. Yet all of a sudden I’m on a roll, having received half a dozen comments and three emails in a single week. Oh yes, I can feel it, Joe Pastry is about to […]
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