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Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

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251–260 of 295 posts

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#251

There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell…

For some reason this immediately got me thinking about Garum[0], probably because you mentioned anchovies, salt, umami and glutamates in the same paragraph :D

also, as you said chefs must know about this:

> Garum remains of interest to food historians and chefs, and has been reintroduced into modern food preparation.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#252
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salt-cured anchovies. They're not rotten at all—they're spectacular! They're perfect on pizza, with fresh tomatoes, and in countless other dishes, either rinsed straight from the jar or melted into a sauce while cooking. Where I live (a small seaside town), everyone makes their own jars of salt-cured anchovies. They are traditionally sealed with a loose lid consisting of a slate disc with a stone or other weight on t…

>(The way you describe yours—as extremely smelly and falling apart—doesn't really suggest they're high quality. Normally, a properly cured anchovy should remain almost completely intact, so you can remove the tail and backbone and end up with two whole fillets. The peppercorns are a bit unusual as well.) Being a consumer of jarred anchovies available in Australia(likely not the best quality)… I’ve never once gotten a…

I'm suspecting that this comment chain mixes up Anchovies and Sardines. I've never had anchovies which weren't pasty, tiny, and fell apart. Sardines on the other hand can totally be split in half most of the time.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#253

The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money. Recently in my city they discovered that a laundromat had polluted the ground water. The owners are long gone. Unfortunately chemicals are forever. The municipality tried to send the bill to the current owners but that is not real justice either.

> The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money.

This is unfortunately a common issue in Canada :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canad...

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#255
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From cbc: >In 1985, the Canadian government tried to stop Jamaican bakeries and restaurants from using the term "beef patty." >At the time, Canada's Meat Inspection Act classified a beef patty as what goes in a hamburger. It could contain only meat and seasoning and it couldn't be encased in dough or a crust. Therefore, a Jamaican patty — widely known as a flaky pastry with a spiced beef filling — didn't meet the cri…

Any confusion can easily be resolved by asking the person offering to sell you one what it is. I do not need terminological rules between me and fast food vendors; if I buy a 'muffin hot dog parfait' and it turns out not to be the tasty dish I was expecting, I may complain about it but I have the choice to just not go there again. I support the idea of truth in advertising laws but I think they should be limited to f…

Patting the beef?

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#256
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask for a beef patty here, the server will look confused, and then bring you a hamburger patty on a plate

Anecdote: I asked for the "mushroom burger" on their menu at an airport years ago -- I didn't want meat and it had nothing indicting meat in the listed ingredients that I checked -- and they brought me a hamburger beef patty with mushrooms on top. Imagine both of our surprises when they brought me the plate and I was like uhm I think that's another table's order? Well it turns out, at least to that restaurant (idk ab…

If I ordered a mushroom burger (especially as my preferred “mushroom and Swiss burger”), I’d be surprised if it came without the beef patty (the burger part).

It’s not that I can’t understand that the other exists, but my brain is wired to think of mushroom as a topping/adjective and burger as the noun.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#257
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that may be true and yet it seems overly prescriptive for a state authority to determine the name of food. After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. Regional variations on names are quite reasonable. On the other hand, Canadians are a prescriptive culture. In Montreal, for instance, they are very strict about street signs and so on. Perhaps it is just how things are done by that people.

> After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. I don't know if you're not seeing the obvious or deliberately ignoring it, but the rather-salient differences between those are that (a) "cheesesteak" being one word rather than two tells you it might be a different thing, and (b) "cheesesteak" (or even "cheese steak" by itself) do not carry a single universal meaning different from the rest. You know, unlike…

> If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk".

Big Dairy got to you, huh.

There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk. If anything, cow’s milk should be clearly labeled as such, if we’re following the approach of identifying ingredients properly.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#258
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask for a beef patty here, the server will look confused, and then bring you a hamburger patty on a plate

Anecdote: I asked for the "mushroom burger" on their menu at an airport years ago -- I didn't want meat and it had nothing indicting meat in the listed ingredients that I checked -- and they brought me a hamburger beef patty with mushrooms on top. Imagine both of our surprises when they brought me the plate and I was like uhm I think that's another table's order? Well it turns out, at least to that restaurant (idk ab…

I can’t think of many places in the US where “mushroom burger” doesn’t mean a beef burger with mushrooms. Maybe in a vegetation or vegan restaurant.

Now if you asked for a mushroom veggie burger, that would be different.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s unreasonable to spend tax dollars on saving people from that ambiguity I quite appreciate the taxpayer funded regulation of technical terms - I like being able to buy ice cream at the store and know if it's "ice cream" or "frozen dessert". Or "cream cheese" vs "cream cheese product". Or many other similar things. The Jamaican patty and fish sauce ones are problematic, but also happened 25-40 years ago.

Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which terms are regulated and which ones aren't? Don't you think it would cause more confusion if people expecting to buy a Jamaican beef patty instead have to buy a "Jamaican beef-inside-pastry product" ?

> Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which terms are regulated and which ones aren't?

The solution is to ensure all common terms people expect in a daily shopping are covered. Thus why "beef patty" was covered. Sounds like you agree with the government on this one. Not covering it would make it confusing for people who would then need to keep track of which common terms are covered and which are not. Its a bit silly at times but as you noted yourself the alternative is even worse.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am shocked to learn there is no dog in a hot dog. Calling my lawyer...

In Germany if they applied the laws consistently it would actually be illegal to call it a hot dog if it wasn't dog. Supermarket had to rename "chilli beans" to "kidney beans in chilli sauce" because there's no bean species called a chilli bean

When rules like this lead to complaints about "veggie burgers", part of me wants to counter that hamburgers neither contain ham nor burgers (etymology: the food is named after the German city of Hamburg, origin of city name lost to time but literal translation of original name compatible with "Castle (Burg) belonging to person called Hamma").
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