The Peking Duck Exemption
culinarycrush.biz
culinarycrush.biz
Growing up in an immigrant family and having lived in Spain a spell, I've come to realize Americans are much too paranoid when it comes to food safety.
The most important factor by far is aging. There's a reason why the French have a special name for the special job of aging cheese, "affineur". A good affinage can transform the most mediocre cheese into a culinary tour de force.
Source: I make cheese and age it myself.
Second, whether good bacteria will outnumber the "bad" depends on how many of each ... goodness value? there were at the start. If your raw milk is contaminated with sufficiently high numbers of coliform bacteria (E coli and friends) there is no amount of bacterial goodness that can make that milk good for cheesemaking. Most likely you're looking at "early blowing" (literally the cheese blowing up like a rugby ball, with a great big fissure in its center, because of gasses released by bacteria early in its maturation).
Third, some "good" and "bad" bacteria can coexist quite happily with each other simply because they do not consume the same resources and so do not compete for them.
Don't have a fourth one for you.
I remember an American colleague of mine absolutely freaking out that I was slicing up chicken without wearing gloves, and he was convinced that I'd be dead by morning from some hideous chicken-borne disease because of it. Apparently chicken in the US really is that dangerous, or something, but I guess someone from the US can comment?
Most Americans aren't like that person.
> Apparently chicken in the US really is that dangerous
Not to my knowledge. On the other (ungloved) hand, I don't know of any culinary tradition involving eating raw chicken.
Funny thing is that all those signs were next to actually healthy food ! Nothing next to the massively processed food that make up 90% of the shop.
That said, I don't think there have been egg related deaths since a raw egg eating competition years ago.
And generally, most of the sour family, and their descendents the fizzes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_(cocktail)
Egg whites add a nice... balance and mouthfeel to the cocktail that you don't really get from other ingredients.
For the yolks, flips are the big family (think nog without cream). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_(cocktail)
You can also save the yolks and make zabaione without being wasteful. Heavenly decadent on fresh fruit and easy to whip up after dinner. Also a great wow if you've got leftover champagne, as the carbonation isn't particularly important. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabaione
I usually split an egg and store the unused portion (whites or yolks) in the fridge 24 hours and use them the next day.
I guess it also helps there is a cultural aversion to eating raw food compared to the Europe and Asia.
As far as I’ve seen, all the American sterilization obsession is pushed onto the industry, not in the kitchen itself — e.g. you cannot find anything “dangerous” in most grocery stores / restaurants in the first place. The closest is steak and sashimi
Having said that, I don't know of anyone who uses gloves when handling chicken. Just wash your hands and you'll be fine. Then again, this person may have known someone who died from a staph infection. As long as you're not handling raw chicken while having an open cut on your hands or fingers (gross!) then you should be fine. Still, wash up when you're done!
I've been cooking in America for decades and have never once had an issue with cooking chicken and not wearing gloves. My mother, other the other hand, got an eye infection the day after getting a bit of raw liquid in her eye while she was cutting chicken a few months ago. A few antibiotics and eye drops, and it cleared up.
The only absurd precaution I've seen someone take in the US is that my grandmother would overcook pork to the point we would joke that it would shatter if you dropped it- however, she grew up in times when trichinosis was a very valid concern. Nowadays, it is safe to cook less than well done (some prefer medium or mid-well) though I don't know anyone willing to try it.
Fairly common in Texas.
This was one of the big controversies about Brexit, that they would be receiving chlorinated chicken from America when previously they were able to enjoy non-chlorinated chicken.
That said, even with salmonella bacteria, just wash your hands after preparing it and you'll be fine.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E9%B3%A5%E5%88%BA%E3%81%97&...
it's good.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/benschrager/status/14256753783711...
Other common raw meats include sushi, poke, sashimi, steak tartar, yukhoe (double whammy, raw beef + raw egg)
the #1 source of food poisoning is the norovirus via bad veggies by a literal order of magnitude over anything else. Guess I'd better stop eating salad and putting uncooked veggies in my sandwich
To your point about uncooked vegetables... the fact that that is what is left standing is a testament to us cooking meat and practicing proper food safety! I'm sure that stat would change quite quickly if people were having chicken sashimi more often.
Disclaimer: I eat sashimi quite often (steak tartar... sometimes. There are definitely restaurants I trust less to do that safely). Just also think it's important to conceptualize the size of the dice roll for various foods.
I have seen it in restaurants but that's more to keep the food from being contaminated by hands, not the other way around.
> * About 100,000 individuals were exposed and clinical disease occurred in 20,000 people, 10,000 of whom were hospitalized, according to Science Direct website. More than 300 victims died and many more were left with chronic disease, Science Direct said.
> * According to the survivors' organisation Seguimos Viviendo more than 5,000 people have died over the years and there are 20,000 surviving victims with poor quality of life and incurable afflictions.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/fake-olive-oil-scandal-...
Some of this might be due to the influence of big ag on our education, media and regulatory systems. These measures definitely benefit the big factories and impose excessive burdens on the small local farms.
The fact of the matter is that yes, all things being equal, things like actually cooking food or not leaving things out at ambient temperature make it safer to eat.
The problem with food science is that you can have terrible food hygiene and still survive for a long time! This sort of stuff doesn’t instantly kill you
On the contrary, Americans come from a culture where food purveyors will happily kill you for a quick buck. American food safety is highly regulated because the American business model makes that necessary.
It's analogous to the process of cooking the duck, not the process of hanging it out overnight.
"I survived, so it must be safe" is not a good argument.
Which is completely different from leaving wet meat to just hang out at room temperature for many hours.
We survived for a few hundred thousand years without an ability to see or quantify microbiology.
Our noses are pretty damn effective.
For the purposes of these kinds of conversations, I think I might prefer some sober estimates of costs and benefits over platitudes.
Personally, I prefer low-enough mortality and a life well-lived.
A nice euphemism for a life that ends with massive diarrhea.
Those poor hundreds of millions dead from bubonic plague, a valuable lesson on the importance of food safety standards!
If your floor on what is acceptable is, as the "we survived" standard implies, the base continuance of the species, then you're effectively allowing that even a situation like what happened in the movie Threads is acceptable and it would not be ethical to try and prevent such a situation from happening.
On the other hand, if that isn't actually what you believe, then you should construct rhetoric that is consistent with your actual position.
You could have picked influenza to make the same point, but that wouldn't have been as theatrical.
So if you want to play the high-standards-of-discourse card, it goes both ways.
And now you're reaching for your own straw man by stating my "we survived" implies your "base continuance of the species", which is obviously an easier framing of my argument to argue against.
My rhetoric is exactly what I said: we survived.
The same goes for hams, really. Some curing yields things that your nose would go "throw this away!" to, and it couldn't be more wrong. Some Iberico and Parma can smell quite terrible, even if once trimmed it's not just safe but incredibly delicious.
The one that always gets me is olives. How the hell did people figure out how to make them edible? And why?!
Also, this is BS: "Peking duck, which also owes its name to a romanized name for Beijing"
No, it is no more Romanized than "Beijing"... One is Wade-Giles, the other Pinyin Romanization.
'Peking' is a romanized name for Beijing. So is 'Beijing.' Had the author said "a romanized name for 'Beijing,'" then you would have a had a point. Sure, you could use '北京,' but that is unnecessarily confusing.
For example, are you going to write in to Chinese radio and news outlets and insist they use English names for cities in Anglo north America and Spanish for cities in Latin America? They use phonetically semi-close analogues for major geographical place names[1].
What about Latin American speakers and their translations of US and Canadian cities into Spanish, is that now frowned? And who cares about what a despot says a country should be called (be they Turkey or Burma)?
Do I have to say Koln instead of Cologne, Roma/Rome, Espagna/Spain, Torino/Turin? Or Myanmar instead of Burma? But, whait.. what do I do when the locals have a dialectal non-official variant?
[1]
Alabama (阿拉巴马 – Ā lā bā mǎ)
Alaska (阿拉斯加 – Ā lā sī jiā)
Arizona (亚利桑那 – Yǎ lì sāng nà) [asia, profit, mulberry, that]
Arkansas (阿肯色 – Ā kěn sè)
California (加利福尼亚 – Jiā lì fú ní yǎ)
Colorado (科罗拉多 – Kē luō lā duō)
Connecticut (康涅狄格 – Kāng niè dí gé) [health, nirvana, digger]
Delaware (特拉华 – Tè lā huá)
No, just like everyone else, they use whatever their names are without worrying even the slightest bit about whether those names are phonetically close to the native pronunciation.
I notice you forgot to list San Francisco.
But, yeah, I totally agree. Use whatever the language you're using at the moment uses. Like I'm going to figure out what the "real" pronunciation is for Ex-USSR locales...
I think it's fine, really. It's a bit odd that some countries get basically native names or romanizations thereof and some get borrowings from other languages, or Anglicized variants, so a drift toward more uniform treatment "feels" more logical in a sense. It's not as if "Japan" is any more "English" than "Nihon" would be.
In a similar vein, see the question of name ordering for countries whose native ordering differs from the typical Western order. Chinese names are almost always presented in native order in English (e.g., Xi Jinping). Korean names have shifted more recently in that direction (e.g., typical coverage of "Chan-wook Park" in the 2000s vs. "Bong Joon-ho" in the 2010s... or more directly, "Park Chan-wook" now). Japanese names are almost always presented flipped to Western order, though the government has made some noise about pushing for press to use native order. This extends beyond Asia, of course, for example Hungarian names, which are also generally flipped for use in English.
The French also use Lastname, Firstname, but I don't observe that except in France. If people want to say Jinping Xi, or Xi, Jinping, (or Macron Emmanuel, or Emmanuel Macron) I don't care. And people should be free to use whatever grammars or syntaxes they wish outside of official usage. Just like people can't tell me to say 'Going to' or 'gunna' nor are we to tell foreign speakers.
If other countries are asking us to modify our speech to pronounce things in their way, then we should ask the same of them: No hard retroflex Rs in anything that has an R in English, etc. Do pronounce the puff after plosive Ts and Ps, etc, etc...
Anyhow, it's wholly stupid. Most languages do not contain each other's sounds and will be missing some, so necessarily you need to say things in your own native way.
Just imagine telling native Chinese or Russian speakers to pronounce North American placenames the in the prevailing local pronunciation. I'll continue to say Kiev the way I learned it from King Missile.
Kind of off-topic, is it just me or is this really inconsistently applied?
Like we have Kyiv (pronounced "keev") instead of Kiev because that's the Ukrainian way... but the country itself is still pronounced (in English-speaking media anyway) as "you crane" instead of "Ooh-krah-ee-nah " which is much more how the natives would say it.
I can think of probably a dozen examples where the quote-unquote "colonial" name is still in widespread, respected use even though the "native" form would be fairly trivial to use or start using.
Like what do you do when you have a Spaniard and someone from the Catalonia region and you're talking to both? Or as you mention, a couple of Ukrainians --but remember, some speak Russian as a primary language and others only as a remote second language.
It's silly. Which of the various official languages and dialects should an English name counterpart take hints from, the dominant dialect or language, what about the ostracized local language?
For a forum that is notoriously literal, I am surprised to see so many people interpret such a straightforward sentence in bad faith.
> Abraham Ortelius used C. Paquin for his 1572 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas; Italian Jesuit Martino Martini used Peking in his 1654 Latin De Bello Tartarico Historia and 1655 Novus Atlas Sinensis, which were quickly translated into English
Chang used to be a very common Chinese surname, but Zhang is now. It's the same name.
Not even close. Under the old Wade-Giles system the name of the city is transliterated as 'pei-ching'. That is because, as you note, the pronunciation in Mandarin didn't change. You seem to be imagining a sound that might be interpreted as a K or, alternatively, might be interpreted as a J, but there is no such sound.
No, not at all
What did you mean by this? It was your only comment, other than a factual error, on a contrast of the name "Peking" with the name "Beijing".
the term 'peking duck', much like the more common spelling 'beijing', are based on romanizations of the name of the city of beijing, china, which is a city, and not a romanized name for itself
bringing up the fact that 'beijing' is a different kind of romanization is only useful if the audience needs to be educated on different kinds of romanizations, which is the point of contention between the author of the duck article, Preston Landers, and 'mc32', which is four ascii characters, and not a person
It's a weird side-effect of two facts: 1) the British interacted a lot more directly with Canton than the rest of China 2) Mandarin and Cantonese are "officially" different dialects of the same language, so once you define the characters in one, you've mostly defined them in the other.
(Some exceptions seem to include "bus" and "taxi", which in HK are obviously based on the English words, but Mandarin has their own, self-describing names for.)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33870873
and further here:
Can you see my sourced cousin comment?
It is very easy to hear the similarities between bak ging and Peking… clearly they are related, exactly the same mouth tongue and aspiration.
But sure, it’s from mandarin back when mandarin pronounced it just like the Cantonese do :) not from Cantonese at all.
Whereas for Cantonese, there's difference in vowel quality and the final -k of 北.
It wouldn't be misinformation if Mandarin indeed used to be pronounced similar to Cantonese... but that's just not true since earlier Mandarin never had -a- for the vowel of 北; it was an innovation in several southern Chinese languages. At best we can say that they used to be pronounced like their Middle Chinese ancestors.
Doesn't an internal temperature of 160° F kill everything except some weird toxins?
I suspect that most meat left overnight at room temperature and then cooked "well done" would be perfectly fine.
It's worth noting that food safety is not limited to living micro-organisms but includes everything from physical objects (choking on a chicken bone) to the bi-products of micro-organisms (such as alcohol or the toxin that causes botulism). Although bacteria produces the botulism toxin, the toxin itself can't be rid of afterwards through temperature.
But yeah, as you also pointed out, bi-products that can cause illness are separate issues from "killing living organisms that cause illness", and heat is not always the magic solution. Heavy metal poisoning is another example of something that heat will not take care of.
"Amatoxins cannot be destroyed by any conventional cooking method, including boiling or baking. Freezing or drying the mushrooms also fails to remove any amount of amatoxin..."
https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/most-dangerous-mushroom...
This is also probably somewhat effective in killing some amount of pathogens at least on the outside. Not sure if same is done for cavity.
> 2. Air is pumped into the crevice between the duck’s skin and meat, allowing the skin to balloon and separate from the meat.
Is to blow the duck up like a balloon with your mouth
https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/687850/Saturday-K...
PS: it doesn't turn me off in the least and I find many food safety rules to be ludicrous, protectionism, and counter productive.
For example: I find that the requirement to wear gloves while preparing food that I see people touching things they would be less likely to touch with their bare hands, touching, and then continuing to prepare the foods. For me, without gloves I can tell when my hands are dirty and wash them but when gloves I feel nothing and am therefore less likely to wash. Have no proof that this is true for everyone but I'm fairly confident that if I had hidden cameras looking for violations I'd find more for people using gloves than not.
Also in a similar vain there's sushi
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/22/national/gloves...
There are plenty of other bad food regs
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/11/americans-r...
https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/why-americans-dont-get...
I'm American, and I'm pretty careful about those details.
Beef is dry aged for 60 days at 40F and 75+% RH, and no one has concerns about a raw center of a dry aged steak. A half-day at 70F seems equivalent if not less severe
See comments above about how US meat safety concerns are usually a consequence of slaughtering and butchering in the most cost effective manner.
I'm not as familiar with factory duck processing as I am with chicken... but I'd generally assume the worst for anything that ends up at the supermarket.
Chinese five-spice is useful; I've used it as a short-cut in curry. Coriander, turmeric, fenugreek and five-spice.
Personally, I'm not brave enough.
I had it in a large restaurant in Kyoto called "Bird"
I mostly blame myself for thinking it would be a good idea. It did taste pretty good though.
Likely relating to many early interactions with China occurring in the Guangdong region.
Yes, it is. A romanization is spelling a word in the Latin alphabet when the people who use that language as their first language use a different writing system.
Is chopstick a romanisation?
Whole article is based on a strawman.
Edit: Even the "evidence" of healthcode violations used in the article is of hanging the COOKED duck in the window, not the raw duck. Restaurants (yes, even Chinese ones) use a cooler to hang the raw duck because the ambient temperature is way too hot.
(It came out great BTW)