I agree about the licorice extract. I love licorice in candy, and I'll even chew on a licorice root/stem, but I don't want to put licorice extract in things.
I'll consult with my aunt today about the alcoholic content and see what she wants. I don't want to try to sneak anything into it. If she gives the original version the nod, I'll go with that. But now I'm intrigued by the idea of a vanilla and orange cake with an anise and ginger soak. Mmmmmm. Maybe I'll try revani (sp?) that way.

My teetotalling aunt has asked for a Harvey Wallbanger cake for her 82nd birthday; she says she had it once at the birthday party of one of the children in the extended family. I'm pretty certain there was no alcohol in the child's birthday cake. My aunt loves orange flavours in baking, so I guess that's what she remembers about the cake.

So I've been looking for a way to make a Harvey Wallbanger-like cake but without the Galliano and vodka. I imagine that the Galliano has a particular effect on the flavour, but I just don't want to buy a whole bottle of the stuff to make a cake (cuz I won't drink the sugary, syrupy stuff), and I think my aunt won't want a booze-ridden cake.

_I_ like licorice-y/anise-y flavours in things. I've seen licorice extract suggested as a substitute for Galliano, but that seems rather simplistic. Could I grind some aniseed and star anise and add it, along with vanilla, to the cake batter? If I do that, should I apply the ground spices sparingly? Liberally?

As for the vodka, I can't imagine what _it_ contributes to the cake in the way of flavour or texture. Can I substitute just plain, old water for the vodka? Or is there a je-ne-sais-quoi, beyond booziness, that vodka contributes to a licorice-y, orange-y bundt cake with licorice-y, orange-y glaze? If so, what substitute could approximate that je-ne-sais-quoi?

Thanks.

Gingershelly, my Dad's parents were born in towns on either side of the French-Swiss border, so my Bonnemaman was from the southern end of Alsace. But Bonpapa's family were originally from the Bas-Rhin, and Dad's parents lived in a minuscule speck of a hamlet in Haut-Rhin, so both sides, really, were Alsatian. The Alsatian influence can be seen in the recipes with German names or in foods common to the area (no quetsch pie in the binder, though!). There are two recipes in the binder for something called Gouglouffe. Googling gouglouffe turned up nothing, but trying kouglouffe turned up kouglof/kouglhupf/etc. According to one website, gouglouffe is the pronunciation/spelling used by previous generations in Belfort, which is where Bonnemaman grew up. Thus, I figure some of these recipes come from my grandparents' own childhoods.

My Dad maintained lots of French-ness (salad after the main course with homemade vinaigrette, escargots bourgignons, stinky cheeses, pâté, baguettes, wine with dinner, a very dry, often archly sarcastic sense of humour, etc.) but also became very North American (watching Canadian football while drinking beer and eating peanuts, barbecuing steaks, seeing to it that all calves grew up to give us beef -- i.e. he owned a cattle ranch).

If I can manage to scan all the pages and learn how to find/make a repository on the web for them, I'm happy to see people take the recipes and use them.

I was going by info on a few websites I found:
http://www.familles.com/v4/forums/forums-familiaux-papotages-autres-sujets-combien-de-ml-fait-1/2-cuillere-a-cafe-t1014755.html
www.supertoinette.com/mesures-equivalences-culinaires.html
www.cieldefrancoise.com/kit_02/trucs_...

One is rather confusing because it says a verre contains 125ml of liquid but a verre d'eau is 20cl/2dl/200ml. One of those tells how many ml is meant by a mustard glass. The superantoinette site gives volume and weight equivalents to things like "grand bol", a measure that appears in a couple of the recipes in the binder. I notice now that it gives "four doux" as a temperature as low as 90C.!!!

Thanks, ninrn. I also googled "four doux" and found quite a range, from 110C to 150C. That's 230F to ~300F. 160C = 320F. I also found a website that said baked goods made with nut flours rather than wheat flour need to be baked at much lower temperatures.
Well, I'm going to have to be willing to experiment and sacrifice some almond meal, sugar, eggs and carrots or chocolate. I hope the failures will be edible! :-)

I, too, wondered whether some of the recipes were some kind of super-abbreviated notes. But there are other recipes that mention flour (and butter, and egg yolk, and egg whites, and yeast or baking powder).

I can provide only the raw ingredients, so to speak. :-) People who are very skilled in cooking and baking can take things several steps further.

For the Bonnes Madeleines recipe, at what stage should I incorporate the flour? After combining the eggs-butter-sugar but before folding in the egg whites?

Would 300F be adequate, then, for the ground-almond/hazelnut recipes? And could I use the convection setting if I lower the temp to 275?

Please let me know how they turn out if you try them, blue room! I want to make the chocolate croissants for Xmas day.

There are, I would guess, more than 200 recipes in the binder, which was my father's. There are a lot of recipes for sauces, a lot for meat dishes (most often for veal), a few fish dishes, and a small number of vegetable dishes. Lots of recipes for deep-fried-dough things, not all of them sweet.

Now, my sisters and I have been wondering whether the range of recipes reflects what his family ate, or whether it reflects Dad's tastes, and, therefore, which recipes he asked for. Dad hated vegetables. He ate corn. He ate romaine lettuce (a salad after the main course at dinner was a must). He ate onions and garlic. I don't recall his stand on celery; he may have cooked with it.

Maybe I'll start a new thread and over the coming weeks post some translations of the savoury recipes. I don't know if they're extraordinarily yummy; I haven't tried them yet. But at least they may be interesting. Stock up on eggs and butter. And veal. (What was with all the veal? Was it more economical to slaughter calves than to feed them into adulthood, there in western Europe?) I think I'll start with the recipes for rabbit.

Thanks for the link. I would think of doux as gentle or mild when talking of heat.
I guess one bakes slowly in a slow oven. I have on occasion come across a recipe for a cake to be baked in a 300-degree-F oven, or even 275. I tried one for a semolina cake, which cake ended up in the "epic fail" bin. Has anyone on these boards ever baked something other than macarons at 275 or 300 and succeeded?

There plenty of recipes from the same source that use flour and lots o' butter in the baked goods. But they have more detailed instructions.

There are also a lot of recipes for desserts that call for "pains au lait" soaked in milk. Maybe they're a use for no-longer-fresh breakfast rolls.

I knew it was pound, but I forgot it was much more than 200gr. Thanks. See response to Paulj below.

Oh my gosh, that's right! Thank you, Paulj.

So, for the little hazelnut cakes, it's 250g each of ground nuts and powdered sugar. The chocolate croissants are 250g each of ground nuts and sugar, and 125 of chocolate. Carrot cake: 250gr each of sugar, carrots and almonds. Chocolate cake: 250gr of sugar and 125gr each of ground almonds and grated chocolate. The tea cakes were already in grams.

I know why I got 200 stuck in my head. One of the measurements that appears in several recipes is a "verre", which someone online said is 200ml (that is if it doesn't specify a verre a moutarde, or something like that). One recipe calls for a teacup of flour and 3/4 of one of sugar. Any guesses at what a "tasse à thé" was to an Alsatian cook around the 1920s? About 180ml maybe?

These recipes are in a binder of photocopies from, I presume, my grandparents' cook, and maybe even from their parents' kitchens. Not all the recipes are for baked goods. But it occurs to me that the baked goods requiring only the whites of eggs may have been useful in the meals whose main dish used only the yolks (and there are many such recipes in the binder).

I've had to decipher, first, the European cursive script, then the French (the specific cooking/baking terms were the big challenge), then the abbreviations, and then the measures.

Hello,

I have some old, handwritten, ultra-concise recipes from Alsace that seem like aides-memoire for the cook. Where they mention an oven temperature at all, they say only "gentle oven" ("four doux" in the original French), and I don’t know what that means. Most lack baking times. Some list only ingredients. By the way, egg whites are "battus en neige", which I take to mean they’re beaten into stiff peaks and not just frothy. Any French-speaking bakers out there, please correct me if I’m wrong.

Sometimes weights of dry ingredients are given in grams, sometimes they're given as 1/2 livre or 1/4 livre. According to a source I found online, one livre is 200 grams, so I've rendered such recipes in grams using that formula.

If you were to turn the following ‘recipes’ into recipes-for-stupid-people, what would you add to the instructions? The translations are mine, as are comments/questions in square brackets.

1) Little hazelnut cakes: 100gr hazelnuts ground with a bit of sugar, 100 gr powdered sugar, 8 egg whites, lemon zest. Beat the egg whites, mix with the hazelnuts and the sugar. Butter the moulds and bake in a gentle oven.

2) Chocolate croissants: 100 gr ground almonds, 100 gr sugar, 50 gr chocolate, 2 egg whites (use a little more if the eggs are small), not beaten, a pinch of cinnamon, one ground clove. When it’s well mixed and the dough is of even consistency, roll it out and form little crescents. Let bake slowly.

3) Chocolate cake (good recipe) [sic]: 6 eggs. Beat the yolks with 100 gr of sugar, 50 gr of ground almonds, 50 gr of grated chocolate, beaten egg whites. Butter the pan with melted butter. Gentle oven.

4) Little tea cakes: 4 egg whites, 300 gr of sugar, 200 gr of flour, some ground almonds and a little fleur d’oranger.

5) Carrot cake: 100gr of crushed sugar [powdered sugar? orig: sucre pilé] , 100 gr of cooked then grated carrots [sic], 6 eggs, 100gr ground almonds, lemon rind. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar, add the carrots, then the almonds and the beaten egg whites. Also add the lemon rind. Butter the pan and put into the oven 3/4 hour. [I'm leaving out the icing instructions]

6) Good Madeleines [sic]: 8 eggs, for flour the weight of 7 eggs and for butter the weight of 6 eggs, for sugar the weight of 8 eggs. Cream the butter, then the eggs and the sugar for half an hour. The egg whites beaten. [what might beating by hand for half an hour translate into for a mixer?]

Thanks.

While I can't recommend one (I've only ever owned one), I can tell you what to avoid: The Black & Decker wide-mouth combo blender and food processor. With the food processor part on it, it looks a little like the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth FP described in the Cooks Illustrated review, but with only one, uh, chimney-type-thingie.

Anyway, it's an honest-to-goodness labour-making device. I hate it utterly.

It has lots of very narrow spaces in the lid that food gets whirled into, and I have to use a mascara brush to get the food out of them. The sprayer at the faucet won't do it.

If I have to grate something into fine pieces, I'll always still have pieces of food to dice with my knife; big, flat chunks of food stay above the grating blade, and some of the pieces that make it down into the bowl also need further dicing.

With both the blender and the food processor (using the chopping blades rather than the grating one), very frequently only the food at the level of the blades gets blended/processed. So it's "turn the machine on, turn the machine off, open lid, get an implement that will scrape the sides of the 'bowl' but won't get stuck on or sliced up by the blades, push unblended/unprocessed food down gingerly, close lid, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat...."

I could use a food-chopping/slicing/grating/smashing machine to avoid the actions that aggravate the arthritis and deQuervain's tenosynovitis in my dominant hand (those actions include using knives, and washing dishes/pots/pans/utensils, etc). The machine we have is _not_ it.

I hope you find a great machine.

Hello,
My brother-in-law makes his own mead and has given us a bottle. But neither of us drinks. We DO use spirits in cooking, though.
Does anyone have any ideas about how to use up mead in cooking? What will the honey flavour go with? I believe it's also got some spices in it.
Ciao!

I've never noticed if the mangos in the supermarkets/fruit markets have, er, proper names. A country of origin, sometimes. But I'm in lowly Scarborough, the eastern suburb of lowly Toronto, in lowly Canada. And Monsieur Alphonse may not yet send his mangos my way. ..... Or do I need to look only in Middle Eastern grocery stores or Chinese grocery stores?

Daaaahhhhhling, I drink tea in the morning! And the afternoon. And often the evening. And none of that insipid Ceylon bilgewater, either! A luscious, malty Assam is best. Coffee.... feh!

See response to RetiredChef re mango and sticky rice ;-)

I found this topic, and posted my list, because I was curious to find out whether there are correlations in other people's dislikes. Do mangos and coriander leaves appear on the same 'yum' or 'yuck' lists, I wondered. Does a dislike of marzipan correlate at all with a dislike of cilantro? If someone dislikes some bitter things, do they dislike all bitter things? It's certainly not a scientific approach or result, I know. But I have simply been wondering!

By the way, I'll eat a few slices of those yellowy-orange-coloured mangos as long as they're sitting in a big bowl of sweet, Thai sticky rice pudding (and lots of coconut milk!). Otherwise, forget it! And I'll eat semi-sweet chocolate, and even straight cocoa nibs, if they're combined with raspberries or raspberry spread (the way-more-fruit-than-sugar kind).
A fabulous feta is a deity among cheeses. And Iranian feta? My-o-my-o-my-o-my-o-my-o-my!

I couldn't tell you if the spray is better. That is something for Wine Drinkers to answer. Speaking solely as a lazy person who doesn't want any more gadgets to store or fuss with, the spray is _easier_ to use. Besides, all I ever do with leftover wine is cook with it. I seek nothing but the convenience. :-)

The 'yuck' list:
Weird, unpleasant, non-food-like flavours: lychees, mangos, coriander leaves
Bitter-tasting: rapini, olives, coffee (love the smell of coffee, can't stomach it)
Odours & flavours reminiscent of regurgitated stomach contents: marzipan & almond extract -- they're the same taste/smell to me, emmental/swiss cheese, gruyere
But I looooooove chaumes, and it never smells nasty to me. Go figure!

Tasting menus:
Hysterically expensive soirees consisting of hysterically minute courses separated by vaaaaaaast stretches of time spent sitting, waiting, sitting, waiting. I come away with a sore back, unsated hunger, and a feeling that I have been suckered. At least the restaurateurs should tell people when the next 'course' will be so that they can get up and walk around in the meantime, and maybe go for a burger.

Ciao, 'hounders:

I'm going to try out some French baking recipes, but I want to know if there are any ingredients that may not 'translate' well.

For example: Say a recipe calls for "1/2 sachet de levure chimique".

In France "levure chimique" seems to be disodium pyrophosphate, bicarb & cornstarch (some might have cream of tartar instead of the phosphate ingredient), but Magic brand baking powder is cornstarch, monocalcium phosphate & bicarb in that order.

I can buy Dr Oetker Baking Powder "sachets" here in Toronto, and they have the European list of ingredients, but whereas the European sachets are 11 g, but the Canadian ones are 14g. Does that mean the ingredients differ in some way from the European stuff?

So, to make French gateau au yaourt, when the time comes to add the half-sachet of "levure chimique", do I use 5.5 g of Magic Baking Powder, 5.5 g of the Canadian Dr Oetker Baking Powder, or 7 g of the Canadian Dr Oetker Baking Powder?

Also, if I'm using an 80+-years-old recipe calling for "levure chimique," will that mean it's using cream of tartar instead of disodium pyrophosphate? And if so, will that affect how I make the cake?

Are there any other ingredients that might not translate? Is there an important difference between flours (I noticed a long Chowhound discussion about the differences between American and Canadian flours)? Butter? Anything else?

ChefJune,
Could you please post a recipe for your ham cooked in rye dough and cognac?
By the way, is this an uncooked (but smoked or brined) ham you use? Or is it an already-cooked ham that you are actually heating up rather than cooking?

Alas, I'm no longer in the market for a mother-in-law, but perhaps my husband and I can adopt a Northern Chinese mother. Is there an agency we can apply to? I can provide references!

I like the idea of bringing along some xian cai to a congee resto (and half of a salted duck's egg). :-)

Husband and I went to Old House just recently. I liked the Di San Xian, and I did get tomatoes and scrambled egg, too. It was a lot sweeter, and had more sauce, than any I'd had in China, but it was good to have. My husband really liked it!

Thanks for further leads, and thanks for the advice about coin tofu (how do I say coin in Mandarin?).

No soybeans? Wow.

In any case, it's delicious. There was only one riben doufu dish I had that was ho-hum; it was in some kind of brown sauce (some version of hongshao, maybe?).

I've bothered to ask for it in only two or three places that had dumplings on the menu (figuring that if they serve jiaozi, they might have other foods outside the usual Cantonese menu). And I've only ever asked using its Mandarin name. But even if I remember the appropriate tones for a phrase, I don't execute them properly. So I might actually have asked for something totally unrelated to food.

I'll cut and past the characters in your post, Teep, for use in a restaurant.

I looked up smelly/stinky tofu. Hmmm. I don't remember the green scrambled tofu in Beijing smelling strong. I'll have to try the Taiwanese smelly tofu. As long as it's not stinky like durian, I'm happy to try it.

I see by the Chowhound-inserted link that Metro Square is something in Markham!!!!

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Metro Square Cafe Restaurant
3636 Steeles Ave E, Markham, ON L3R1K9, CA

I forgot to ask:
What is "Wok-Hay"?

I haven't lived downtown for a few years, so I didn't know there's a Xinjiang restaurant in Metro Square (CBC/Roy Thomson Hall area, right?). Do they serve mutton kebabs? I had a _whole lot_ of mutton kebabs in Xinjiang. Many from freshly slaughtered sheep. When food was fresh in China, it was reallly, really, really fresh. I loved how they would bring you the live shrimps or the live snake you ordered before they cooked them/it.

But it would be great to go to a place that makes and serves la mian/laghman (if I recall correctly, the 'gh' was a gutteral sound, like the 'ch' in Loch Ness). Did you get to see the chef make the noodles?

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Metro Square Cafe Restaurant
3636 Steeles Ave E, Markham, ON L3R1K9, CA