Cosmology for Christmas

I found this YouTube video via a link by a friend on a private mailing list. The channel owner, Christine Simpson, has not monetized her channel, has a tiny audience, and clearly made this video for fun. If you have the slightest interest in, or knowledge of, modern cosmology and physics, this video is very funny. If you are interested in having a Christmas party with a cosmological bent, watch it for the food ideas. Either way, I thought it worth sharing with my readers.

Christine, by the way, is interested in baking, sewing, dancing, and physics. She obtained a MSci in Physics at the Imperial College London in 2013, and she is presently working on her PhD in Gravitational Wave Data Analysis at the University of Edinburgh as part of the CDT in Data Science in the school of Maths and Informatics. She is way out of my league, but any of my readers interested in finding out more about her activities can check out her website, https://www.christinensimpson.com/.

Book Review--Mort Rosenblum's "Chocolate"

A good friend of mine found a copy of the following book at a used-book store, which he then gave to me:

Rosenblum, Mort.  Chocolate:  A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light.  (North Point Press 2005).

Like The Secret History of Chocolate, by Michael and Sophie Coe, Rosenblum tries to give the reader a sense of the long history of chocolate, including some of the biology relating to the cacao plant.  But unlike the Coes, Mr. Rosenblum is not primarily interested in giving an encyclopedic history of the plant, or even in the story of its European adoption.  Instead he is interested in how chocolate is made today, and what makes the chocolate of the French, for example, "better" than the chocolate made by the Swiss or Belgians.  So he travels and visits chocolate makers, both mass market and exclusive, in over a half dozen countries on four different continents.

Mr. Rosenblum's conclusion?  The artisans do produce better chocolate.  But individual preferences, and mass marketing techniques, can and have created strong followings for even inferior products.  (He's not just looking at Hershey, either, though he devotes a generous amount of space to Hershey; its beginnings as well as the state of Hershey as of when this book was published.)

Chocolate is a fun and informative read.  If you are interested in the subject (and who is not, at least to some degree?), you should pick up your own used copy, or look for a copy at your local library.

Old World Meets New

Here is the sort of food development we get from a collision of cultures.

The BBC News has written about a pub in Surrey, England that is selling spicy, chocolate Easter egg to its patrons.  Granted, chocolate and hot peppers are New World foods, but sugar cane is not, and the concept of the Easter egg is very much an Old World idea. The BBC article, complete with a photograph of the potent Easter symbol, can be found here.  (Thanks to Dermot Dobson for the pointer I followed to the article.)

When I say this egg is "spicy", I mean seriously spicy. This egg is made with three different varieties of extremely hot peppers, namely, ghost chili pepper, scotch bonnet, and habanero.  The result is supposedly hotter than 400 bottles of Tabasco sauce put together, and much hotter than the spicy Indian stew called vindaloo. 

The article quotes the owner as saying that the eggs are delicious, and I suspect that isn't just sales talk.  Assuming you enjoy peppers containing capsaicin (which I do, at least to some extent, though many folk do not), the combination of chocolate and pepper can be very tasty.  

Years ago, I helped host a party where one of the foods served was a specially made batch of chocolate haberero ice cream.  Because we had brought the ice cream from Pennsylvania to Texas where the party was being held (yes, we brought a hot pepper-containing food to Texas; it's a long story), the capsaicin had plenty of time to intensify, so that by the time we served it our ice cream was very potent indeed.  Sadly, many of the partygoers did not appreciate the heat, but to those of us with a tolerance for hot peppers it was a very special treat indeed.

I can't be in Surrey for Easter, and the pub has only got 24 eggs to sell (though the owner has hinted that he may make more if justified by demand), but I wish I could try this particular treat.