[Sca-cooks] Sugar beets

[Pat]

I, also, was taught to do this by my grandmother.  I remember a discussion on this list from way back in the stone age wherein Ras, Adamantius, and I all theorized that some, perhaps many, of the medieval recipes calling for sugar were speaking of sugar in seasoning amounts rather than flavoring amounts.  I know that a pinch of sugar can make a world of difference.  Not so much in flavor as in the 'brightness' of a flavor, especially in vegetables.
 
Mordonna

"Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
Also sprach Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise:
> > Why upstage me? My big gripe about modern cooking, is that modern folks, if
>> they think something doesn't taste good, add sugar and/or salt to it,
>> instead of balancing the herbs and spices or cooking it properly.
>
>One of the things I was taught, late in life (because my mom stopped
>having time to teach me to cook after I was about 13), was that a
>*small*, i.e. _spice_, quantity of sugar or salt can fix a flavor blend
>that isn't meshing, because both are flavor intensifiers. I still do
>this, and find that the spices of sugar and salt are definitely among
>those that can improve a spice blend.

Ras used to be a big advocate of that practice; I wonder if it's 
especially common in PA. I also will do that occasionally, but as you 
say, in seasoning quantities that make it largely indiscernible to 
most people. If you put batches with and without the sugar side by 
side, they'd taste different, but you wouldn't say of the one with 
the sugar, "Hey! There's sugar in this one!"

When I was doing penal servitude as a cook in the executive dining 
room for Continental Insurance (where our theoretical purpose was to 
provide the equivalent of four-star dining in-house, for tax 
reasons), I would sometimes be called upon to resuscitate things like 
seafood that had been cooked in quantity the day before (a perennial 
buffet menu item being a salad of calamari, scallops, and shrimp). 
Under such conditions, a small pinch of sugar was helpful.

My lady wife complains of the subset of Cantonese-style cooking to be 
found in Hong Kong: "Those people put sugar in EVERYTHING!!!" (Her 
family is probably from a whacking great 40 miles away to the north 
of Hong Kong. ;-) )

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04

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Pat Griffin
Lady Anne du Bosc
known as Mordonna the Cook
Shire of Thorngill, Meridies
Mundanely, Millbrook, AL