Misty @oolongstains@cybre.space

here's another really REALLY COOL historical #cookbook specifically for #chinese chefs -

"Chinese and English cook book =[Hua Ying zi chu shu]. San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A. : Chong Jan & Co., 1913"

https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:4971867$31i

this one is really cool because there's an extensive section of kind of explaining staples a cook would find in a SanFran grocery store of 1913, in both english and chinese.

all recipes i can see are western, but again in both english and chinese. a very cool little book - i'm sure their exact market was new immigrants arriving to America, trying to figure out this totally different type of cuisine, and going "what the FUCK is a blanc-mange". from the cover and how it describes itself, i'm going to guess on top of that, this book's audience was not for the more """"lower-class"""" day-to-day stuff where chinese home cooking was standard - but for if you found yourself moving up in the world and realizing "oh shit, the boss is coming to dinner next tuesday, we need to pretend to be as western as possible in order to get a raise" LOL. and i'm going to guess the aspirational nature of the recipes, coupled with the very practical advice, meant it was terrific advertising for Chong Jan & Co. (whatever they sold or did.)

my favourite section is probably the "how to do various things", where it's explained how to do things that most western cooks of the time would have already known (probably learned from their moms or the like). it's stuff that sometimes doesn't get written down so much because it's assumed everyone already knows how to do it. so whenever i see sections like this in books, i get really excited! it saves culinary techniques from "punt syndrome". the kingdom of Punt was a neighbor to ancient Egypt, but we know relatively little about it because everyone in ancient Egypt was like "oh it's Punt, everyone knows those guys!" so nobody wrote down actually what Punt was like!! sections like this mean we actually have an answer to questions like "but how would they have done this?" when a lot of other period cookbooks just have it assumed.

One-off piece from 2014.

indian classical music which changes by time of day is an immediate bookmark for me https://www.ragya.com/

yeah I use Arch btw

Ever get annoyed with `bundle install` or `npm install` not being able to find your Homebrew deps? Yeah, me too - so I wrote a tool to fix it. Give it a try! http://www.mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/2020/11/23/bundle-install-with-homebrew-magic-using-brew-bundle-exec/

*Sega Genesis voice* STREGA

Harsh but fair.

gotta go consult the dragon maid book real quick

Retro Sci-Fi ✍️ #illustration #drawing #artwork #MastoArt #tape