The trade in caviar has a rich and colorful history, influenced over thousands of years by many cultures, societies and in the last decades by regulation. The value of caviar is historically discovered in the context of social change, political relationships and environmental change. The role of organized crime is described, as the scarcity of caviar has offered the unique opportunity to fish illegally, smuggle and trade contraband to mainly European countries with millions in profits. This study highlights that these criminal networks manifest themselves at all levels of the trade: from the poaching areas where organized criminal groups cooperate with law enforcers and possess top-notch equipment to major smuggling operations in the hands of sophisticated criminal networks. Although due to overexploitation ‘wild caviar’ is increasingly difficult to obtain, the demand in the context of exclusivity and scarcity remains intact by the upper class society desire for edible gold.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2
The illegal trade in black caviar
this was a most fascinating and detailed study of how the trade in caviar works in the grey/black market. And because we in Europe are the main consumer, we are actively encouraging the devastation of the species. So whilst the common user of caviar will be shocked at the destruction of the rhino or the elephant for their horns/tusks, they are willing to keep on eating this very expensive fish roe. Sad...
Saturday, January 16
How Intermarriage Created One of the World's Most Delicious Foods
It's fascinating how things come together son. One of my favourite foods since I started working in Singapore is Laksa. It is a totally delicious concoction of noodles tofu chicken prawns beans spices and and and. Add and subtract according to taste and location. Bloody heavy but oh good Lord so bloody delicious.
By the way the best laksa you can get in London is a tiny Malaysian / Singaporean restaurant off Euston. It's a very basic place. Hardly 20 feet by 8 feet. And they've stuffed few rickety tables and chairs in there. They cook the food in the side of the restaurant and it's so bloody popular that people queue up for hours to get in. Cheap and cheerful. I'll take you there son.
But this story of laksa is also connected to the spice trade. I'll let you read this story and the map. The author talks about how Indians came to south east Asia and it was fascinating to read how a Malaysian dish in Penang got called as Assam Laksa.
The last piece is what really got my attention. I've talked about the peranakan culture - the amazing mix of Chinese and south East Indian Malay and Indian cultures. There's a museum in Singapore relating to this culture and it's quite an emotional museum. You can see people from mainland China coming over and then marrying locally. You can see their food. Their clothes. Furniture. The pain and bloodshed during the wars. Absolutely fascinating. And spices ran through it all.
Hope your first week back at Oxford is working out well son
Love
Baba
How Intermarriage Created One of the World's Most Delicious Foods
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-intermarriage-created-one-of-the-worlds-most-delicious-foods
(via Instapaper)
Laksa is said to get its name from the Sanskrit word "lakh," which means 100,000. (Photo: InterContinental Hong Kong/Flickr)
A few things are definitive of an afternoon on the coasts of Southeast Asia: inescapable heat, the smell of the sea, and a steaming bowl of laksa. If you haven't been fortunate enough to sample laksa before, picture an addictively spicy noodle soup brimming with chillies, coconut milk, tamarind and fresh seafood. If you need additional convincing, laksa was ranked seventh on CNN's list of the World's 50 best foods in 2011.
There is nothing quite like laksa, and no two laksas are the same. The soup can be found in different iterations in four Southeast Asian countries, from the coasts of Thailand and Malaysia down to Singapore and Indonesia, but its origins are more elusive. Where did laksa really come from, and how did it spread through all the regions that now claim it as their own?
To begin tracing the laksa trail back through time, we need to plot its three modern variations—curry, Siamese, and Assam—on the map.
Curry laksa is spicy and likewise includes coconut milk. It is found in Malaysia's Malacca and Johor states, and pops up in Singapore as Katong laksa, and in Indonesia as Bogor, Cibinong and Betawi laksa, to name a few. Each region has added its own unique ingredients to the mix, such as kaffir lime leaves, shredded chicken, or even snakehead fish.
Curry laksa. (Photo: Alpha/Flickr)
Siamese laksa, found in Thailand, contains coconut milk and is informed by traditional Thai flavors such as red curry paste, while Assam laksa (which has tamarind but no coconut milk) is found in the Penang state of Malaysia.
Assam laksa. (Photo: Alpha/Flickr)
Because of all the different varieties, it's difficult to say whether laksa had a specific point of origin. The history of Southeast Asia has been one of trade, with the port cities of Singapore, Malacca and Penang being major stops along the spice route. As a result, laksa began popping up in multiple regions as the marriage of different cuisines brought over by traders.
A map showing the Silk Road in red and the spice trade routes in blue. On the right, the routes stretch from India down through the Strait of Malacca, past Singapore and Indonesia and up to China. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)
Southeast Asia had an early period of intense interaction with China and India, which largely influenced the culture of the region, and therefore its cuisine. According to Professor Penny Van Esterik in Food Culture in Southeast Asia, Indian traders arrived in Southeast Asia as early as 200 BC, while the Chinese had settlements in Indonesia by the 16th century.
The descendants of these Chinese traders were called the Peranakans, and the tradition of laksa was born out of the Peranakan desire to marry Chinese food with existing Southeast Asian flavors like coconut milk, and those brought over by South Asian traders, like chillies. Often, the desire to marry cuisines resulted from literal marriages between Peranakans and locals. In Indonesia, for example, the origin story of laksa traces back to the Chinese coastal settlements. Chinese sailors set out to find local wives, and these women began incorporating chilli peppers and coconut milk into Chinese noodle soup. Similarly, the arrival of laksa in Malaysia can be traced back to marriages of Chinese traders to local women in Malacca in the early 19th century.
A Peranakan wedding takes place in Penang, Malaysia in May 1941. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)
In Singapore, laksa arrived in the town of Katong when the Peranakans travelled down to the island from the Malaysian peninsula. Southeast Asian food expert Dr. Jean Duruz followed a laksa trail in Singapore to uncover that Peranakan laksa evolved with interaction with local Singaporeans. This happened via "[t]raditions of working for, or 'marrying into,' Peranakan families" as well as "rituals of exchange of festive foods and recipes between neighbors," writes Duruz in The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore.
Of all the food that the Peranakans brought with them, it was laksa that spread most rapidly and extensively through trade channels in Southeast Asia. Why? Laksa's wide popularity is largely due to its adaptability, which makes it an appealing meal across many cultures and contexts. Even the name itself metaphorically empowers laksa's cultural flexibility. The word "laksa" originates from the Sanskrit word for one hundred thousand, and refers to the large variety of ingredients used in making the dish. Local women were able to manipulate the noodle soup brought over by their Chinese trader husbands to include their own plethora of existing ingredients. Because laksa was so easily adaptable into new varieties, it was able to serve as a bridge between cultures when traders and locals began intermarrying.
"The successful story of Laksa challenges the idea that people always like to eat familiar food," writes Veronica Mak Sau Wa in Southeast Asian Chinese Food in Hong Kong. There is nothing quite like laksa, and no two laksas are the same. Its unique adaptability is why it was able to build bridges between traders and locals on the Southeast Asian spice routes and continues to cross new borders today.
By the way the best laksa you can get in London is a tiny Malaysian / Singaporean restaurant off Euston. It's a very basic place. Hardly 20 feet by 8 feet. And they've stuffed few rickety tables and chairs in there. They cook the food in the side of the restaurant and it's so bloody popular that people queue up for hours to get in. Cheap and cheerful. I'll take you there son.
But this story of laksa is also connected to the spice trade. I'll let you read this story and the map. The author talks about how Indians came to south east Asia and it was fascinating to read how a Malaysian dish in Penang got called as Assam Laksa.
The last piece is what really got my attention. I've talked about the peranakan culture - the amazing mix of Chinese and south East Indian Malay and Indian cultures. There's a museum in Singapore relating to this culture and it's quite an emotional museum. You can see people from mainland China coming over and then marrying locally. You can see their food. Their clothes. Furniture. The pain and bloodshed during the wars. Absolutely fascinating. And spices ran through it all.
Hope your first week back at Oxford is working out well son
Love
Baba
How Intermarriage Created One of the World's Most Delicious Foods
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-intermarriage-created-one-of-the-worlds-most-delicious-foods
(via Instapaper)
Laksa is said to get its name from the Sanskrit word "lakh," which means 100,000. (Photo: InterContinental Hong Kong/Flickr)
A few things are definitive of an afternoon on the coasts of Southeast Asia: inescapable heat, the smell of the sea, and a steaming bowl of laksa. If you haven't been fortunate enough to sample laksa before, picture an addictively spicy noodle soup brimming with chillies, coconut milk, tamarind and fresh seafood. If you need additional convincing, laksa was ranked seventh on CNN's list of the World's 50 best foods in 2011.
There is nothing quite like laksa, and no two laksas are the same. The soup can be found in different iterations in four Southeast Asian countries, from the coasts of Thailand and Malaysia down to Singapore and Indonesia, but its origins are more elusive. Where did laksa really come from, and how did it spread through all the regions that now claim it as their own?
To begin tracing the laksa trail back through time, we need to plot its three modern variations—curry, Siamese, and Assam—on the map.
Curry laksa. (Photo: Alpha/Flickr)
Siamese laksa, found in Thailand, contains coconut milk and is informed by traditional Thai flavors such as red curry paste, while Assam laksa (which has tamarind but no coconut milk) is found in the Penang state of Malaysia.
Assam laksa. (Photo: Alpha/Flickr)
Because of all the different varieties, it's difficult to say whether laksa had a specific point of origin. The history of Southeast Asia has been one of trade, with the port cities of Singapore, Malacca and Penang being major stops along the spice route. As a result, laksa began popping up in multiple regions as the marriage of different cuisines brought over by traders.
A map showing the Silk Road in red and the spice trade routes in blue. On the right, the routes stretch from India down through the Strait of Malacca, past Singapore and Indonesia and up to China. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)
Southeast Asia had an early period of intense interaction with China and India, which largely influenced the culture of the region, and therefore its cuisine. According to Professor Penny Van Esterik in Food Culture in Southeast Asia, Indian traders arrived in Southeast Asia as early as 200 BC, while the Chinese had settlements in Indonesia by the 16th century.
The descendants of these Chinese traders were called the Peranakans, and the tradition of laksa was born out of the Peranakan desire to marry Chinese food with existing Southeast Asian flavors like coconut milk, and those brought over by South Asian traders, like chillies. Often, the desire to marry cuisines resulted from literal marriages between Peranakans and locals. In Indonesia, for example, the origin story of laksa traces back to the Chinese coastal settlements. Chinese sailors set out to find local wives, and these women began incorporating chilli peppers and coconut milk into Chinese noodle soup. Similarly, the arrival of laksa in Malaysia can be traced back to marriages of Chinese traders to local women in Malacca in the early 19th century.
A Peranakan wedding takes place in Penang, Malaysia in May 1941. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)
In Singapore, laksa arrived in the town of Katong when the Peranakans travelled down to the island from the Malaysian peninsula. Southeast Asian food expert Dr. Jean Duruz followed a laksa trail in Singapore to uncover that Peranakan laksa evolved with interaction with local Singaporeans. This happened via "[t]raditions of working for, or 'marrying into,' Peranakan families" as well as "rituals of exchange of festive foods and recipes between neighbors," writes Duruz in The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore.
Of all the food that the Peranakans brought with them, it was laksa that spread most rapidly and extensively through trade channels in Southeast Asia. Why? Laksa's wide popularity is largely due to its adaptability, which makes it an appealing meal across many cultures and contexts. Even the name itself metaphorically empowers laksa's cultural flexibility. The word "laksa" originates from the Sanskrit word for one hundred thousand, and refers to the large variety of ingredients used in making the dish. Local women were able to manipulate the noodle soup brought over by their Chinese trader husbands to include their own plethora of existing ingredients. Because laksa was so easily adaptable into new varieties, it was able to serve as a bridge between cultures when traders and locals began intermarrying.
"The successful story of Laksa challenges the idea that people always like to eat familiar food," writes Veronica Mak Sau Wa in Southeast Asian Chinese Food in Hong Kong. There is nothing quite like laksa, and no two laksas are the same. Its unique adaptability is why it was able to build bridges between traders and locals on the Southeast Asian spice routes and continues to cross new borders today.
Monday, November 16
Kitchen Rhythm: A Year in a Parisian Pâtisserie
Kids
Here's something that you may have experienced but may not have really understood. The power of sound when you are eating something. Frequently you would close your eyes when you're eating to understand how the various food elements sound like. Not just taste like or look like. Highly underrated kids, highly underrated.
Try it out with your breakfast cereal. Or with your rice. Or with the fries. Or with the crispy skin of the chicken. Or the snap when you bite into a chocolate shell. Or when you bite into an apple - the wet crunch. Simple thing kids but they add much more flavour to your food. Look on the bright side, you will end up having more fun and benefits from your food than others.
And the girl is an oxford graduate Kannu :) I'm envious that she has a job baking. I would love that but I don't think I have the patience or the artistry to do the detailed work that desserts demand (nice alliteration eh?). Plus I'm not supposed to do desserts anyway. Diya will be upset with me.
Love
Baba
Kitchen Rhythm: A Year in a Parisian Pâtisserie
http://blog.longreads.com/
(via Instapaper)
http://blog.longreads.com/
(via Instapaper)
Illustration by Kjell Reigstad
The Longreads Exclusive below is based on Frances Leech’s ebook of the same name, published in 2013 by Vintage UK.
***
To make chocolate mousse, enough for 150 people, say, first whip the cream — liters and liters of it. Then, separately, whisk the egg yolks. Boil sugar and water and add to the yolks, still whisking, in a thin drizzle. Melt the chocolate, then stir, fold, and whisk everything together with some gelatin.
What is missing from this description, the bare-bones sketch in the red address book that alphabetizes all of my work recipes, is the physical sensations. When I started my apprenticeship in Paris a year ago, I learned that baking can be at once precise and vague. Measure everything to the last gram, simple enough. Harder to describe what the meringue mixture should look like when it is just right, hard to put the steady pressure of a hand piping cream into words. I looked and looked and was frustrated over and over.
Then I started listening. When the dough for puff pastry is sufficiently kneaded it will start to clunk in the mixer. When the cream for the chocolate mousse is softly whipped it will fall with a slap slap slap into the bowl. Drifts of cream, like rumpled silk, not stiff damask. Pour the boiling sugar onto the egg yolks and listen as the hornet’s nest whir changes to a pata-pata-pat-a-pat.
Sound is so important in baking. White chocolate squares clink like Scrabble tiles. Properly tempered chocolate makes a slight crack when you bite through the shell to a yielding ganache, as all the molecules have been neatly lined up — a different guilty pleasure altogether from the cottony thunk of a cheap candy bar. There is a perfect word in Japanese for the thin chocolate sheets we use for decoration, pakipaki, the sound they make when snapped into shards. One of the quiet moments in the otherwise doom-laden film Perfect Sense shows a candle-lit restaurant with a couple of patrons — they had all lost their senses of smell and taste in a global pandemic — carefully breaking a long cheese biscuit in half and in half again, holding it up to their ears.
Wednesday, November 4
This Is the Story of the Hamburger
As a food historian in training son, this was a fascinating read for me. First of all I think it's very unhealthy but bloody hell it tastes so bloody good. The feeling of you holding a Burger King double bacon whopper burger with cheese with both hands and then taking the first bite through the smooth sesame bun and then to the lettuce to the tomato to the sauce to the beef and then cheese and then the bread all means that you have a taste explosion in your mouth. And it fills your mouth. Makes you chew with gusto. Slowly. Eating it with happiness. Dedication. Determination. How it fills your mouth. The contrasting aromas filling your nostrils. The feeling of the floppy burger in your hand juggling it delicately as you don't want to squish the bun but also don't want the fillings to drop out. A tough ask.
When you come, I'm going to make the Philly cheese steak for you. That was soooo nice :)
Love
Baba
This Is the Story of the Hamburger
http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/05/the-story-of-the-hamburger.html
(via Instapaper)
Its rise from a lowly patty of chopped meat to the aristocracy of foods; its charismatic
and delicious descendants; the arguments it inspires—over ethics and blends and tastes;
and Silicon Valley’s attempt to replace it with a meat that is not meat at all.
The quest to perfect the American burger.
Grills were being wheeled onto patios, cookouts prematurely envisioned, National Hamburger Month just days away. For the Burgerati, the high season of the hamburger was nigh, and the group had come together in late April for a conclave at the Ox-Cart Tavern, a gastropub in Ditmas Park. Many of them had first met over Instagram, where leering, close-up photographs of hamburgers are a pornographic currency. Four of the Burger Babez, an all-female monthly burger club, were in attendance. Brad Garoon, who blogs as Burger Weekly, sat beside Ammar Shallal of Burgerator, a global burger-rating mobile app. Three of the people at the table were from Burger Lift, a start-up that manufactures stainless-steel trivets for individual hamburgers.
Wednesday, October 7
Is the Croissant Really French?
This was a fascinating story kids. About how the croissant was born and then moved to its adopted country France. I always thought that it was invented as a response to the win over the ottomans but no. The French really make delicious croissants. I loved their food. The only quibble is that the portions are too small.
Today is the final of the great British bake off. It's so popular. No wonder. I think desserts and pastries are the toughest to make. You have to be precise. Desserts are unforgiving. Unlike main dishes and starters and soups, a good dessert is a mark of a great chef. Takes time. Takes precision. Takes dedication. Takes huge amounts of practise. And practise. And practise. Quite a tough one. And all that I am not. All you are so health conscious that I cannot even practise. So my idea of going on a dessert course is now shelved. Grumbles.
Anyway. Have fun reading this.
Love
Baba
Is the Croissant Really French?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/croissant-really-french-180955130/
(via Instapaper)
One bite of a croissant just pulled from the oven at Michel Lyczak’s bakery in the southern Parisian suburb of Malakoff is bliss: a satisfying crunch and scattering of crumbs, the indulgent mouthfeel of butter wrapped in the overwhelming sensation of lightness. Few foods are as culturally iconic as this flaky breakfast food, so quintessentially French that many English speakers defer to its native pronunciation (krwa-sohn).
Yet as recently as the 19th century, the French viewed the croissant as a foreign novelty, sold only in special Viennese bakeries in the pricier parts of Paris. And how it came to France in the first place remains obscured by layer upon layer of legend.
Experts do agree that the croissant was inspired by the Austrian kipfel, a crescent-shaped baked good featuring a generous amount of butter or lard and sometimes sugar and almonds. According to popular lore, the kipfel originated in 1683 as a comestible celebration of Austrian victory over the Ottomans at the siege of Vienna. The story follows that a baker, up early to make bread, saved the city when he heard the Turks tunneling underneath the city and sounded an alarm. The kipfel’s curved shape, said to mimic the crescent moon of the Ottoman flag, then would seem to pay poetic tribute to the indomitable spirit of a city that resisted a powerful invading force. (Conveniently, another legend holds that the cappuccino was invented almost simultaneously, inspired by the strong
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