[Sca-cooks] Corn Flakes (Was: Period Baklava)
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu Apr 5 06:46:20 PDT 2007
On Apr 5, 2007, at 8:06 AM, Martha Oser wrote:
> Actually, corn flakes came about by accident as the Kellogg
> brothers at
> their health sanitarium in Battle Creek, MI were trying to process
> corn and
> wheat into healthful foods for their patients. Apparently, they
> left some
> cooked material at some point, it thickened, and they shoved it
> through the
> rollers anyway, hoping to produce a long sheet, presumably to turn
> into
> crackers of some kind. Instead, the stuff came off the rollers in
> flakes.
> These were toasted and then served for breakfast with milk and
> marshmallows
> (talk about healthy!). The Kellogg cereal company came about after
> one of
> the brothers decided to market their cereal products for the
> general public.
I've heard this story, but don't know how reliable the "accident"
part of it may be. I know they had a bit of a project selling the
product at first, and that the whole thing was apparently an occasion
for a bit of a rift between the brothers. The one who ran the
sanitarium was constantly pushing all sorts of patent foods with
names like "protose"... I've got one of his books here somewhere;
it's pretty amusing, actually. I _think_ protose was basically
seitan, IIRC.
> In addition, I have a recollection of seeing a TV show a few years
> ago where
> they profiled a gentleman (maybe in Turkey, I think?) making phyllo
> dough by
> hand in the "traditional" way. It involved a process rather like I
> remember
> from my mother making strudel dough - gently stretching the dough
> by hand
> into a large square. The difference was that the table my mother
> used was
> about 2x3 feet and the one this guy was using was probably 8x10
> feet! This
> is not to say that phyllo dough or baklava is period, but simply
> that there
> was a time-consuming hand process for making the dough before
> industrial
> methods were devised.
Well, that's my point. If this is a Turk making a pastry by hand (and
is it cooked before filling and baking, as phyllo is?), from a ball
of dough instead of batter, and presumably calling it something else,
can it legitimately be said to _be_ phyllo, as opposed to _being
like_ phyllo? You could probably make that claim and support it well,
but I don't think it's a done deal.
I really don't feel strongly about the question, one way or the
other, but I'm deeply interested in how nomenclature relates to
conceptual identity in foods -- what makes a chowder a chowder, etc.
Adamantius
"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have 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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