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Post by steev on Dec 17, 2015 19:44:49 GMT -5
Any of the Chinese with whom I've had the pleasure of dining in their own milieu never dined from a plate; they put rice in a small (~4-5") bowl, held in the left hand, added goodies from common plates over the rice, put the rim to their lower lip, and scooped food into the mouth with the chopsticks: no picking up rice with chopsticks; occasionally picking up a piece of other food, but no need for stickiness.
One might suppose these to be lower-class practices, but the family with which I was most familiar was headed by a man who had been tight with the Emperor's court, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and was Port Commissioner of Shanghai before the Revolution, so I think this was SOP.
Aside from speed of cooking, I strongly think the impetus toward polished rice was much the same as the drive to white flour: status (not that unmilled/wholegrain stuff the peasants can afford to eat). Ironic how often the peasant-chow turns out to be more healthful; one might almost suppose it had been sustaining people for millennia without causing things like beri-beri in those not eating a rich-folks diet, with lots of additional foods.
Actually, I understand that chopstick/bowl dining is waning in favor of fork/plate; can't say that's necessarily progress, although perhaps easier for children to learn. I'm not certain that "easier to learn" is synonymous with "better" (I could SO go on about my theories regarding the role of manual vs automatic transmissions in developing driving skill/practices).
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Post by prairiegarden on Dec 17, 2015 23:21:09 GMT -5
Never mind, Steev, Google is trundling "no driver" cars around the countryside already. It's rumored that they keep getting into accidents, but Google claims that's usually the fault of drivers in other cars. A news report the other day said it got a ticket for going too slow. Another news item was a driver of a hit and run got turned in by her car..it was programmed to report to someone..GPS? if it was involved in an accident, so it did and the police nailed the driver. Not that anyone should get away with hit and run, but to me there's something a bit uncomfortable about that scenario. Anyway, sorry if that Adlay is another blind alley, had been all excited to have found a source! Ah well, the intention was good even if the result not useful.
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Post by blueadzuki on Dec 18, 2015 0:40:54 GMT -5
That shoveling method is fine when the bowl is mostly full, but I was serious about that "you eat every last grain thing". Getting the last few grains when they are kind of slippery (as brown/black rice often is) is a tough job.
I wonder if that is also why North China (where the grain is wheat, not rice) doesn't usually eat their wheat as some sort of steamed bowl thing (I'm not 100% sure what you'd get if you tried to cook wheat like rice, bit I imagine it'd be similar to bulgur wheat or (far closer to home for the North Chinese) Uzbeck plov . It's usually made into either noodles or small rolls.
But in fact, I just remember the REAL reason the Chinese polish their rice, as I once actually read. It's so that the rice keeps longer. The extra nutrients (assuming anyone even knew about them) are not considered as important as the fact that, in a hot humid climate like a lot of China has, rice that still has it's oily bran will go rancid after a while, whereas if you keep it dry, polished rice will last nearly forever. WE can get away with eating a lot of brown rice because we live in an age of vacuum packing and refrigeration, but back then, it was something you'd probably only have pretty close to when the harvest came in or if you were rich enough to pay for intensive and careful storage (like the Emperor and his Forbidden Rice)
Well, I doubt the changeover is having a positive effect on their environment. Again, according to what I have read, the Chinese developed chopsticks and stir-frying mostly as a way to minimize the amount of fuel they needed to cook (a lot of China doesn't have a lot of wood). Since a lot of the swap over is due to a swap over to a more Western Style diet, that is probably having a bad effect on their fuel needs (not to mention waistlines).
Of course, you have to weigh this against the fact that the swap over MIGHT finally put a bit of a stem in the massive amount of problems being caused by the disposable chopstick industry. From what I have read, a lot of Asian countries are having real problems finding land to grow the acres of bamboo and cheap wood needed to keep the restaurant business in disposable chopsticks, and there seems to be a lot of cultural resistance to places going over to sticks that can be washed and re-used (Why I don't know, most houses use re-usable sticks at home, but using them in a restaurant is considered unsanitary).
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Post by steev on Dec 18, 2015 2:49:54 GMT -5
Yeah, I heard a report about that hit-and-run; nothing to do with a driverless car, an Instar sort of thing rather than GPS, just a drunk with denial issues; she was pretty sure about there having been no accident whatsoever; no way; didn't happen; yet it's all on the 911 tape.
The Chinese I was most involved with, oddly enough, were northern Chinese (Mandarin/Manchurian) as contrasted to the Cantonese most prevalent on the Left Coast of the USA; Mandarin Chinese are more common on the East Coast, I think. In any event, they weren't in the habit of putting tea in their bowls to clean them and drinking the rinse; SO declasse (possibly a Korean habit)! You've just gotta love people's eating habits and mores; took me a while to adjust my Western European-derived issues about gustatory sound-effects to Asian standards.
I would note that classy Chinese don't use cheesy restaurant bamboo dispo chopsticks; they bring their own personal chopsticks, often made of very upscale materials (ebony, rosewood, or ivory [boo!]); what is done at home is, of course, another matter. That restaurant chopsticks are disposable makes perfect sense, given that they might have been previously used by one of "THOSE" people (whatever is your preferred unacceptable racial/cultural/sexual/religious/political group); I mean, really, what orifice might they have stuck those in, while dining; one can't be too cautious, can one?
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Post by prairiegarden on Jan 11, 2016 15:55:15 GMT -5
Another possible source is at Strictly Medicinal Seeds (formerly Horizon Herbs) but it might not be the same either. They do mention using it for beads but also say it's a "tasty raw chew" and that it's ground and made into tea, so at least a nod to the food potential. (I'm not deliberately tracking these down, I've ordered from these people in the past so get their catalogs, just in case you are beginning to feel a little haunted).
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 11, 2016 16:11:41 GMT -5
The thing that complicates things is that the bead one can, and often IS used for food as well. It isn't a matter of the soft shell one being less nutritious, just harder to hull; and the advent of mechanical hulling has probably largely erased that.
Think about it being similar to how macadamia nuts have become comparatively less expensive (not that they aren't still considered a premium nut, but buying them in bulk from any grocery store is now pretty easy; they are no longer some sort of exclusive gourmet treat from your honeymoon.) Back when the only way to crack the shells was one by one with a hammer and a lot of skill (or from what I understand, putting them in a depression at the bottom of a cliff and droppings boulders down on them, the extreme price was fully justified. Nowadays when the nuts can be shelled mechanically on an industrial scale, it's a lot easier, and hence, the nuts are a lot cheaper. I am pretty convinced that similar innovations, should anyone ever decided it worth building them, would be a major step in bringing the same world wide cachet to such things as the Australian Qandong and the Central African Oyster Nut (which basically needs a machine that can slice and rip as well as crack.)
So it is entirely possible that, by now the commonness of the soft shell for the industry may, ironically be more a force of habit than necessity; EITHER may be now usable to make a salable product on an industrial scale. With time, the hard shell may in fact surpass and become the dominant (it is slightly bigger after all) and the soft shell become even more elusive.
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Post by steev on Jan 14, 2016 4:24:15 GMT -5
Not to belabor the issue (much, perhaps), but scooping the last rice from one's bowl is easy, when one is scooping "down-hill"; granted, one can't tilt one's bowl that far up unless one is focused on eating, rather than eye-contact. In my experience, eating was more important than maintaining eye-contact, which was so easy to re-establish, once "business" had been taken care of.
I'm inclined to think that fork/plate dining is useful simply because it may be more facilitative to interpersonal interaction; not requiring the same interpersonal visual interruption as chopstick/bowl dining, but what do I know? There may be a potential PhD in this.
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Post by steev on Jan 27, 2016 23:55:42 GMT -5
Continuing to not belabor the issue much (well, maybe a tad), I think the issue of chopstick-lift rice might be skewed by Japan's O. japonica rice (stickier than other species) and extreme exposure to Western culture, post WWII, promoting "plate", not "bowl".
I would note that it was, in my experience, rude to put one's lips in contact with one's chopsticks, which would be going into shared dishes; another reason why no-contact-slurping was SOP.
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Post by prairiegarden on Feb 18, 2016 1:13:15 GMT -5
Found another source ( Tradewindsfruit.com) for Job's Tears and this one has nary a mention of beads,
Product Description 10 seeds per pack. Perennial grass grown for its pea-sized seeds which are edible when cooked. The seeds have numerous uses, being employed as grains, in coffees, teas, and eaten out of hand. They have a mild, slightly peanut-like flavor. The plant also has a variety of medicinal uses. Perennial above 25F, but often grown as an annual. #925 Maybe this will work?
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