I haz shiney

[pecunium]

My Canadian Girlfriend Loffs Me.

Which is, I suppose, what one should expect. commodorified came to visit me after visiting fairestcat and going to WisCon. This is good. I get to introduce her to my father/sisters, and show her Eastern Tennessee.

We went shopping last night, and I bought bread flour (King Arthur's), and checked the local brands. White Lilly's all purpose is 2 percent protein. That's the same as Swan's Lake Cake Flour. I'll have to get Maia's banana bread recipe and see how it does with the softer flour.

She also brought be a birthday present, a bright; newly reconditioned, iPod Nano, which iclysdale was kind enough to load up with 7 gigs of music; mostly strange to me.

I've loaded the songs onto my machine. I'll have to sort it out (right now all the song titles are four-letter strings ABBA, ABRD, CBGB, etc.. But the artists/albums are correct). First step, make the folders non-hidden.

Second, import the songs to my iTunes. Third... synch the iPod to my iTunes, so I can build a library I wan't to take with me for amusement when I head to SF at the end of the month.

Life is pretty good right now.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The distinction is actually, almost certainly, the other way round. The make biscuits in the south because the local wheat wasn't hard enough to make good breads.

Toss in a bit of Irish/Scottish types (who also had soft wheats at home, or were working with low-gluten flours like oat) and biscuits/johnnycakes/soda breads are pretty much a given.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

That last sentence should be interpreted as "this was what you learned at your mother's knee", not an observation on the development of baking in the entire region, although it could work either way, and you're right about people settling on the best methods for the materials they had available--it had to have been the second half of the 19th century at the earliest before the big flour mills like Pillsbury got into flour distribution on a national level, and by that point the biscuits and cornbread inclination was well-established. Southern urban areas probably showed a difference, but then these were the areas that both had immigrants used to working with and preferring hard wheat and yeast breads, and the purchasing ability to bring in what they needed. Biscuits and cornbread are still very much a "country" marker, and a lot of people who either are rural, or who strongly self-identify as having rural backgrounds will express a preference for these, even when they eat a lot of yeast bread.

I think the pattern reinforced itself--start out with soft wheat/corn meals as your working materials, toss in people with ethnic cooking backgrounds who are more accustomed to soft wheat and non-wheat baking, and they're likely to stick with what they're accustomed to baking and what they're accustomed to working with, absent any substantial change agents.

The thought of oat griddle cakes becoming corn griddle cakes on this side of the Atlantic is an interesting thought.

Here are a couple of other regional brands to look for Weisenberger Mills is a Kentucky family business; House-Autry is a North Carolina concern that specializes in corn meals.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Well, there are irish in Boston (though they, mostly, came later) and they do bread. I'd say it's because they can (just as Heidi saved up the white rolls to take to Grandmama). Bread was a status marker.

This very morning I made corncakes with House-Autry corn meal. A bit softer/finer than the stuff I get back in Calif. (but not as sweet as the stuff I made myself back home). Takes the moisture better.

Flavor wasn't that much different. We'll have to see how it does at cornbread.