Titbits
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
titbits - " a small piece of interesting information, or a small dish of pleasant-tasting food" Cambridge English Dictionary
I'm a bit late in the day with this so it's a this and that kind of post. With today's title titbits - sometimes spelt with a hyphen - tit-bits and by the Americans as tidbits. Which you might think is just because of pronunciation, but apparently has something to do with a long-ago root word of 'tyd.' But I won't go there today.
When I looked up titbits in Google images - apart from the more generalised meaning demonstrated in the image above, I found two 'real-life' manifestations of the word - one to do with food - the other not.
First we have the magazine which ran from the first issue in 1881, to the last in July 1984. The pinups began appearing post the second world war.
It wasn't just a pinup magazine however and not all that raunchy - just light stuff - titbits - which Wikpedia described as an "emphasis on human interest stories concentrating on drama and sensation". Apparently Virginia Woolf submitted an article at the age of eight which was rejected. A truly trivial titbit.
On the food - well sort of food side - there is an Indian mouth freshener called titbits - a bit like tic tacs I suppose.
And then I suppose there is the general term you use in relation to food which is a tiny kind of treat - a taster. Something to probably entice you to eat something more.
Enough. On to a very few little bits and pieces from here and there.
I am constantly amazed at how many different ways you can make or tart up flat bread. And this month's Coles Magazine in its section on making bread, had what they called ripple bread - really a kind of flatbread shaped in a particular way and sprinkled with a dill based za'atar mix for which they gave you the recipe. It came with four pictures of the process which very frustratingly did not include the most important process - how you got it to have all those ripples. All it said was:
"Roll the dough onto a rolling pin. Transfer to prepared skillet or pan and gently fold and pleat dough over the base of the pan"
Surely this was the bit of the process that you need to see how to do. But it looked like an interesting idea, and obviously open to all sorts of other interpretations for the topping. The recipe like the others in this section - all worth looking at - came from their food director Sarah Hobbs.
Curtis Stone on capsicums
Apologies for the wonky scan - try as I might I just couldn't get it right.
Anyway in the seasonal produce section of the same magazine Curtis Stone had a few pages on capsicum. As well as the mandatory recipes - a salad, a dressing for roast capsicum and a prawn and capsicum stew, there was information about the differences, general ways to cook and serve them, and tips on how best to cut them. Good but not amazing I guess, unless you are a beginner cook, in which case useful.
As was this little chart of some pairings that you might not have thought of. What goes with what is rather vital for the everyday fridge raid kind of cooking that we are all faced with is it not? So here are some newish pairings that you may not have thought of.
Capsicums may well be seasonal, and this may well be their season but they are hardly cheap. Personally I think they are a ridiculous price. I really must go to the Queen Vic market sometime to see if they are as ridiculously priced there. You used to be able to buy them when in season for less than $2.00 a kilo. And no it wasn't decades ago. Ditto for zucchini.
This came from an article in the Gastro Obscura newsletter. Water pie is an American Depression era response to scarcity. The main ingredient is literally water - and this is a tart - not a pie. Americans call tarts pies. Diana Hubbell the writer of the article tells us:
"Plain, old H₂O forms the base of the filling, along with sugar, flour, butter, and a little vanilla. And yet, through a little alchemical magic, these ingredients transform into a wobbly, translucent custard."
or as one of her interviewees - Genevieve Yam from Epicurious says it's: "a gooey amalgamation of butter and sugar far greater than the sum of its parts."
But how on earth does it work? There are no eggs to make it all stick together. Well:
"As the pie heats in the oven, the sugar melts, the butter emulsifies, and the flour leaches just enough starch to bind the whole mixture."
Apparently it's become quite a thing on Instagram et al. where Sprite is more frequently substituted for the water. However, our author Diana Hubbell tried both and decreed the water version better. They were both still a bit liquid when they came out of the oven but set firmer in the fridge overnight. Our author thought the Sprite version too sweet and also too liquid.
You'd have to wonder though, wouldn't you where those Depression era cooks got the butter and vanilla from - surely they are expensive? Sugar too? Although I suppose if you had a cow, then you potentially had butter. Vanilla though? Although the Amish made something similar with nutmeg - and maybe just the sugar would do. Below the finished result for the water pie, and the two pies before they went into the oven - water on the left, sprite on the right. Interesting, and as the article was at paints to point out - how creative were those women?
Mint syrup from mint stalks.
This is not a photograph of mint syrup made from mint stalks. Obviously it's made with the leaves, but it was the nearest I could find to what I thought a mint syrup made with the stalks would look like. Darker than some mint syrups which were pale gold.
There was not a single one which seemed to be made from the stalks, and yet here was Yotam Ottolenghi, in a recent newsletter on hersb, saying:
"Mint stems are worth saving separately: simmered with sugar and water and strained, they make a brilliant simple syrup - good in cocktails, lemonade, or spooned over fruit."
Is he trailblazing again? Has nobody ever thought of this before? Or is he not mentioning that there were lots of leaves in there as well? It makes you wonder.
This is a kind of postscript to my piece on A cauliflower and cheese soup from a few days ago. As I was writing it I felt sure that I had seen a recipe on the Smitten Kitchen website, but couldn't find it. Because it turns out it was a broccoli and cheese soup that she had experimented with until achieving the best version even though, before she began she had:
"heard of the soup, but it always seemed to be in that category of foods it was better not to investigate. ... But once it got in my head, no amount of earnest effort could distract me for long. So, I got to Googling and mashed up several well-rated recipes with overlapped ingredients."
Her first two attempts were not right - the first being too much like cheese sauce with a few flecks of broccoli, the second had less butter, less cream and more broccoli, but didn't really seem right. The third was the above with:
"a broccoli level that made the soup more green than white and a cream level that tasted rich but not worrisomely so."
Now I would have given up after attempt number one. But then I'm not a recipe developer, making my living from devising perfect recipes. Maybe if the notion ever struck me again, I might think back to my earlier efforts and try to improve upon them. But I probably wouldn't remember anyway. Just like I didn't remember having written about cauliflower cheese soup before - twice!
YEARS GONE BY
June 18
2025 - Jottings
2023 - Over the top?
2022 - Some leftovers
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2017 - On holiday
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