Knowledge Capture in the Kitchen Clouds

 

Are you one of those foodies who collects recipes from everywhere ? Magazines ? Family members ? Friends ? Foodie web sites & blogs ?

That's me. I pile them and then periodically file them, plus cull a few.

In particular I've made the effort to collect family favourites for my daughter, Kat, from my Mother (Nan) & my Mother-in-law (Nanna). I gave them each one of those dinky A5 "My Favourite Recipe" folders, which came with preprinted cards to be filled in. Nanna busily typed away on the supplied cards using her trusty older manual typewriter. Luckily so, as Nanna has become very frail, hard of hearing and now lives in another state.  How easy it is to lose family favourites in such circumstances. We also nearly lost Nan before her family favourites were collected - in the end I hand wrote many of them myself, while Nan spent months recovering in hospital from lifesaving cardiovascular surgery.

And my sister-in-law, the Apprentice Chef's Mother, was stunned to find out that I had some of the treasured family favourites "captured" from Nanna, in a little A5 "My Favourite Recipe" folder. So I was able to photocopy & pass them on. I've even put a couple on Facebook to share with the widely scattered family.

Over the years the Apprentice's Chef's Mother & I learned that Nanna's tablespoon equals 2 metric 20ml sized tablespoons & her dessert spoon equals 1 metric 20mil sized tablespoon. So, along the way, we both experienced a few very runny disasters with Nanna's usually superb Mango Cream Tart due to our adding insufficient gelatine. But we followed the recipe - we wailed. That was before we did some knowledge sharing & jointly figured out how to convert Nanna's quantities to standard Australian metric's. Disasters ceased.

With so many foodie web sites and blogs, we are now very blessed with the technology to do knowledge sharing in the kitchen, compared with the old days of laboriously handwriting onto scraps of paper or in exercise books. My daughter, Kat, keeps muttering that my own collection of older handwritten items in their foolscap sized exercise book are at risk of fading away. Dropping hints that the contents need to be transferred to one of our pc's & maybe even online - perhaps on one of those nice foodie Cloud apps - so helpful. OK - I've made a start at Taste.com where you can your create own online recipe book - but I've usually been too busy to make much progress. Like Mother like Daughter perhaps ? 

However there is also the nagging question - you could invest a lot of time setting up online repositories of family favourites & other saved for future culinary experiments - but how can you be sure that they won't disappear without warning - poof ? Especially as Taste.com does seem to have set up a regular recipe deletions initiative - find out more here

Like when my carefully saved SAI Global favourites list, with associated "what's changed" email updates, underwent a massive bi-section. They changed their business model - after 6 years previously with no changes. Another victim of the Global Financial Crisis in fact. Now my list of favourites was too long for their new model - so they arbitrarily chopped it in two for me - before I could choose which sublists should sit where. Much muttering and hours rearranging online.....

Interestingly a recent New Scientist article, provocatively headlined "Digital Doomsday",  questioned the limited longevity of electronic media and basically pointed back to keeping paper records as being more likely to resist the vagaries of ageing. Huh ? Heresy ?  "A century or so after a major catastrophe, little of the digital age will remain beyond what's written on paper.... "Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years," says Season Tse, who works on paper conservation at the Canadian Conservation Institute. The oldest surviving "book" printed on paper dates from AD 868, he says. It was found in a cave in north-west China in 1907."

Hence you keep hard copies as backups - and the kitchen library grows and grows.

 

 

 

Saik Chrouk Ch'ranouitk - Kat's Khmer Kitchen inspired Knowledge Sharing

The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon was my first big cookbook purchase - made while I still at Uni - just. The Australasian Institute of Mining & Metallurgy awarded me with a cheque for topping the class in my second last year of my Metallurgy Degree - but it was not presented until I was writing my thesis in my final year. Too late to spend on textbooks.

So I indulged myself and lashed out on Charmaine Solomon's 500 + page culinary encyclopaedic work. A big step up from the ubiquitous little high school textbook aka the Commonsense Cookbook.

What I loved about the Complete Asian Cookbook, was the way Charmaine Solomon shared her knowledge - not just on how to cook the food - but also how to serve, what utensils to use and where to buy unusual ingredients. But more than that - I loved the stories she shared in introducing each chapter on the different countries & regions covered. It made it all seem more real.

My favourite pages, in the Indian section especially, are easily identified by their stains and splashmarks - with handwritten comments indicating likes or dislikes - successes or DNCA (do not cook again). There was the time I smoked out the whole block of units with chili fumes when experimenting on Szechwan Chicken (p393) without an exhaust range hood.

We'd travelled to Angkor Wat - Siem Reap in Cambodia, so it was inevitable that my then 13 year old daughter, Kat, would choose a Khmer dish for a school Technology & Design assessment task encompassing cooking "something" with noodles. While the Indian-Pakistan & Chinese chapters in the old faithful "Encyclopaedia" were huge at nearly 100 pages each, the section on Cambodia and Laos was too slender. Dismissed too were the magazines I'd brought back from Cambodia, just in case, for a future school assignment. And there aren't too many Cambodian foodie blogs, other than Phenonmenon. The Cambodian section of my Asian clippings folder consisted of just 2 dishes : Beef Salad and Nhoam Moan Chicken Salad. Nothing at Taste.com either. So past all of these, and to the Net to find something suitable : settling on "Saik Chrouk Ch'ranouitk" aka Khmer Coconut Pork Skewers.

Kat was adventurous even then, in her approach to cooking and she's fiercely independent. Nevertheless I was called on periodically and a whole lot of knowledge sharing took place in our tiny kitchen that night eg how to timetable, adapting from grilling to stir fry-simmer etc.

All served on the requisite bed of noodles & finished with coriander leaves. It looked and tasted great - although be warned - it's heavy on garlic !

Kat learnt some Asian cuisine from me & I learnt from her, that we can't dictate to Gen Y how & what resources should be used, plus it's okay to innovate beyond prescriptive guidelines, if that makes sense. That applies inside and outside the kitchen. 

A metaphor for knowledge sharing, experimenting & innovation between the generations ?

See the full gallery on Posterous

Serendipity - Storytelling of Wine and War - Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table

It was @Reemski who triggered it - not the Wine and War - but finally got me underway to list my family's library collections on LibraryThing. 

 And inevitably revealed, the books that I always meant to read, continually bobbing up and down in the overladen bookcases around our home.

Thus in the early weeks of 2010, and 70 years after the Axis invasion of France, I finally began to read "Wine & War" (E-Reader excerpt) an alternate view of WWII through the eyes of winelovers, Don & Petie Kladstrup. As described by The Wine Doctor, their book is a series of stories of survival under Occupation as told by many of the wine making families of France. It is these stories that predominate over the often awful military details described elsewhere. And also because of these unusual circumstances one man was able to gather the stories of wine and food of regional France.

The story starts in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and just across the river from Salzburg, where I had first heard of its Eagles Nest during a trip to Austria in late 1981. We had peered up at it - barely visible so high was it - as our Guide told us of its history as Hitler's fortress. Really ...  just an interesting aside from our skiing holiday in the area near St Johann's am Pillersee in the Austrian Alps. WWII seemed so long ago to us back then, in our twenties, and yet in1981 these events at Berchtesgaden had occurred less than 40 years earlier.

The Kladstrups tell of the vast quantities of French Champagne and wine plundered & railed to Berchtesgaden, despite the efforts of many French to secret as much as possible away behind fake walls in their cellars.

In the opening page the Kladstrups describe the uncovering of half a million bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Mouton Rothschild & many other vintages recovered from Berchtesgaden in 1944 by Sergeant Bernard de Nonancourt & others in the French Army. And there were many, many other items stashed there - thus in reading "Wine & War", I began to appreciate Berchtesgaden's significance.

In fact it was the stories in "Wine & War", that made understanding life under the Occupation a closer reality. In movies we often see occcupied Paris, but less of the countryside, such as the Great Wine Regions of France. In "Wine & War" the family stories tell of yet another war after so many ... of taking the longer term view ...  of preserving the family's wine heritage & economy to be ready in the years after the  conflict ended. And also to comprehend the creation of a "borderless" Europe -  what would be later called the European Union - to avoid such wars in the future.

Memorable  stories for me were those of members of French wine families in POW camps - such as Gaston Huet of the Loire who organized the great wine tasting party on January 24 1943, the feast day of St Vincent - patron saint French winemakers - but in the end had to be spread over several days to accommodate 4000 prisoners.The plan was for 700 bottles of wine to "be obtained to enable each prisoner just one glass of wine. The organising committee was composed of representatives from each of France's wine regions "- an indication of the geographic spread of the POW population. Many of the prisoners did not come from wine backgrounds, and so Huet generously shared his knowledge of wine regions, wines & their characteristics, so that the rare experience could fully savoured.

Huet recalled years later "I don't know what we would have done without that party. It gave us something to hold on to. It gave us a reason to get up in the morning to get through each day. Talking about wine and sharing it  made all of us feel closer to home, and more alive."

In fact it was years later when the Kladstrups went to interview Gaston Huet about his opposition to the French Government bringing the TGV railroad through the vineyards, that the whole story of wine in France during the war began to unfold.

Equally evocative - Roger Ribaud also in a POW camp - 'Christmas 1940 "On this Noel of 1940, I have begun to write a little book in an effort to dispel some of the sadness that we are living with and share some of the hopes we cling to in our captivity, of returning to our homes and loved ones and the values we hold most dear" ... Ribaud began to make a list of French wines, every wine he could think of: some he had tasted, others he hoped to taste. He sorted them by region : Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Alsace, the Loire. He classified them according to their finesse, body and bouquet. '

It would become a book entitled Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table - The Head of the Household from His Cellar to His Table  - this is a memoir of great food and wine and how they can brought into perfect harmony" - google it and you will still find reference to this great work -with copies sometimes still available.

Writing on whatever scraps of paper he could scavenge made "long cold lonely days seem shorter"... and Ribaud "asked other POW's about their favourite wine and food combinations , what grapes grow best in their regions  and how they prepared certain foods  ... over time he compiled a huge core of information and knowledge, not only about the famous wines but about small country ones barely known outside their villages...... 

"After the war, his book was published to great acclaim and hailed as one of the first books that paid serious attention to regional wines and food .... Roger Ribaud sent a copy to each of his fellow prisoners of war 'I hope this will ease the pain of imprisonment and yet be a souvenir of our friendship and the years we shared together'."

Roger Ribaud stressed that one did not have to be an expert to know about these things, that most of this could be learned by reading, tasting and talking to others ..."

True knowledge sharing ! And in the most unexpected situations ...