A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Revisiting Historical Recipes
Even if you manage to make an old recipe, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or is there?
https://eatthispodcast.com/past-taste
Eat This Newsletter 284: Marketing
Food bank economics, Pasta Grannies behaving badly, white olives, a eulogy for “foodie”, tariffs on “English” tea, and some food-flavoured Ig Nobel prizes.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-284-marketing/
Just got a warning that TimeMachine had not done a backup for 46 days. Seems like quite a delay to warn me that something is wrong.
Started getting some interesting spam this week, in which an AI has read the show notes and responded appropriately and vacuously. So I'm deleting the website and email and posting it. Is that bad?
Eat This Podcast: The Miracle of Salt
Talking to Naomi Duguid about her book The Miracle of Salt and we managed to avoid the whole pink salt diet trick nonsense. So should you. Listen at https://eatthispodcast.com/salt
Peter hasn't been in Berlin since 2018. There's some likelihood of an IWC in there on 1-2 November, and it would be great to see him there.
Top Artists for the week to 18 September, from last.fm.
1 Ludovico Einaudi 26 scrobbles
2 Zoë Keating 15
3 Bill Frisell 14
4 Group Listening 8
5 Faramarz Payvar & Ensemble 6
Annals of Automated Translation, 2025-09-19.
“There’s a new mommy sort of flavour, because after all, remember, vanilla is fermented.”
Top artists for the week to 11 September, from last.fm
1 Calexico 15 scrobbles
2 Bill Frisell 14
3 Tommy Hayes 14
4 Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny 13
5 Leon Redbone 13
Just for a laugh I decided to remove all the data that 1478 websites had stored about me. I mean, how much harm could it do?