One day, I will stop talking about food and books. But not today

[selenay]

Interesting comment piece in the Guardian today, prompted by the writer's trip to a local pizzeria that had decided to remove all salt from their pizzas and remove salt shakers from the tables. It was quite refreshing to see someone sensibly say that removing all salt from everything isn't always a good thing.


I do my best to eat a low-sodium diet. However, there are reasons why we season things. A few weeks ago, I accidentally left out the pinch of salt when making some pastry. It's literally a little pinch, maybe a quarter of a teaspoon, for a quiche that gives six me-size servings. It was the blandest pastry that I've ever eaten and affected the taste of the entire quiche, despite the fact that it was Quiche Lorraine and thus there was bacon in the filling. OK, it was maple-cured bacon which is generally much less salty-tasting than regular bacon but you'd still think that it would be OK. No, leaving out that tiny pinch of salt from the pastry made for incredibly bland pastry that detracted a great deal from the overall flavour of the dish.

There have been other times when I've forgotten to add salt to things when the recipe calls for it. The amount that I should have added is always tiny and the recipe when properly constructed doesn't taste salty, but leaving out seasoning makes a bigger difference than I would ever have imagined. I really don't like overly salted things and never think to put salt on the table when people are eating at my house (sorry, everyone) but leaving out the seasoning completely is no better than over-salting. Salt, used in correct proportions, simply enhances the flavours in the dish without making the dish taste like salt.

What always concerns me with the groups lobbying for salt bans and so on is that it's not just about the food taste. Too little salt can be just as bad for you as too much. What would be far more sensible is educating people about how much salt is healthy, rather than advising a total ban on all sodium.


And that's my soap box for the day :-)

Last night was my second round of Humira, this time only taking two doses rather than the initial four. It all went very well and I feel good today. No nausea, my fatigue is no worse than normal (so far), and no reactions at the injection site. At the weekend I drop the prednisone dose again so it will be interesting to see how my body deals with that.

Speaking of the weekend...

Easter has sort of crept up on me. I really need to think about my baking and cooking schedule. So far, I'm thinking about hot cross buns on Friday now that I have a good stove to bake in. Maybe treat myself by making a small chocolate cheesecake on Saturday, which will be ready to eat on Sunday. Meals need to be thought about. I'm thinking something that went 'baaa' on Sunday, but need to do a bit of recipe research.

I've finished my Edward III book. I may steer clear of biographies for a while: it's hard to read about the decline of someone you've become attached to and who did amazing things.

I'm now onto Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones as my dead tree book. This is out of print so I had to buy it second hand from Abebooks. I'm two chapters in and loving it just as much as I loved the (I suspect surprisingly faithful) BBC adaptation. I'm starting to get towards the climax of Declare by Tim Powers (my Kindle book) and it's really ramping up now. This is not a book to read over breakfast, if I ever want to go to work!

Amazon announced today that they're working with Overdrive to allow library lending later in the year. This could be very interesting - I wonder when/whether my local library (which uses Overdrive) will get on board? And how painful will it be to use? My experience with Overdrive and my mum's Sony eReader hasn't been very positive on the ease of use aspect, so hopefully they'll do something a bit more intuitive with the Kindle. After all, ease of use is one of the Kindle's big selling points!

Of course, if it turns out to be horribly painful to use and the titles offered aren't ones that I want to read, I'll probably continue to buy rather than borrow. I wonder whether the publishers think about that when setting these things up?

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

The thing that I have heard about library lending of e-books (and if I'm remembering correctly and this is going on, I hope it's in the process of being corrected), is that the publishers or distributors or whoever is in charge of the rights are so fixated on forcing e-book lending to work exactly like regular book lending that they're eliminating many of the advantages of the format: Allowing each library only as many "copies" of the e-book as they've bought, so that only that many library users at a time are permitted to have that particular e-book "checked out," which is annoying but somewhat understandable -- but also (aggravatingly) forcing a time limit on each copy of two weeks after a checkout before it can be lent again, so that even if someone finishes before their due date and "returns" it, it can't be lent out again any earlier, which is just ridiculous.

Probably some of the worries have to do with the ease of digital piracy, and the fear is that whatever measures are in place to force each e-book to delete itself from the library patron's e-reader when the two weeks is up are going to be subverted by tech-savvy users and the e-books are going to wind up freely copied and distributed. (Which, you know, could also happen with bought copies of each e-book, presumably.) And also not liking the idea of patrons being able to borrow library books without an inherent rate limitation forcing libraries to buy multiple copies of popular books and leading impatient people to just buy their own copies rather than waiting for their turn with the library book. This I think is coming from the "why buy the cow?" mindset of presuming that libraries wind up hurting book sales. (There was a Neil Gaiman post not too long ago on how his publisher experimented a few years back by making one of his books freely available for download for a one-week period, and how the resulting effect in his sales figures during and immediately after that period was an increase, as people got a sample of his writing and wanted to buy not only that book but other titles from his back catalog. The value of free samples in drumming up business. And the value of libraries in giving people a taste for reading that they'll go on to throw money towards gratifying.)

[paranoidangel]

I don't think there's anything wrong with bland food - I much prefer it to anything seasoned.

I have one recipe (for chocolate chip muffins) that has salt in. I tried putting it and and I tried taking it out and it makes no difference whatsoever.

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

Hmm. This got me wondering about salt, and make me think: given that salting was used as a preservative, and therefore salted meat being better to eat than potentially-dangerous non-salted meat, I wonder if we've selectively bred for a likes salt trait.

[selenay]

I'm all about taste with food. Bland is fuel, where food is something to enjoy and savour :-)

Some recipes, I agree, you can't taste any difference. And different people like different things. I'd never really noticed how much difference it could make until I made the Bland Pastry of Doomy Blandness. It was definitely noticeable, despite only being a small pinch that got left out.

[selenay]

Hmm, that's an interesting thought. I've always vaguely thought it's because some sodium is necessary for the body to function properly, but perhaps our taste of lots of salt is due to the preservative thing.

New perspectives are a good thing :-)

I really need a food icon, as I seem to talk about it so much :-)

[paranoidangel]

As far as I'm concerned, I eat because I'd fall over otherwise. And I have to read or watch TV while I'm eating because it's boring. If I didn't have to eat I'd quite happily not eat.

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

I use salt as a chemical reactive agent and sparingly. The only exception is when I'm making puff pastry savoury biscuits/nibbles 'cause I'll do a few that are encrusted in sea salt for flavour and decoration. And certain types of cake that don't need salt at all.

However, I agree that commercial food is WAY too salty. And unnecessarily so. When most of the commercial ingredients have been quick-frozen at the farm or dehydrated, freeze/oven-dried, cured or pickled/preserved - why are they adding more salt to the finished products as a preservative? It's pointless! By the same token a salt-free pizzeria must be next to a chocolate teapot shop as they're about as much use as each other.

My theory is that the social denial culture of salt, sugar, fat etc, has less to do with 'health' than it does with human laziness and Victorian quack values. If it didn't companies wouldn't get away with tripling the amount of sugar in 'fat-free' products. The easy way around everything is to cook it yourself. Unfortunately, from what I've seen of the ban-salt brigade, they want to put an end to being able to buy a bag of salt for gritting a path with let alone a small drum of salt for seasoning food with. :/