Jambalaya

Today, the Julie/Julia Project has come to an end. A year ago, Julie Powell, a New York secretary set out to cook all 536 recipes in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child's 1960's classic, over the course of 365 days. She has achieved this and what's more, has chronicled the whole affair with much panache (and in a sort of Bridget Jones's Diary style) in her personal weblog.

The book's foreword introduces it as ...a book for the servantless cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, timetables, children's meals, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." Julie, who subtitles her weblog "Nobody here but us servantless American cooks... ", has evidently recreated these masterpieces in conditions somehat removed from those enjoyed by Julia Child and her colleagues back in the 1960s.

I recommend highly that you read what you can of Julie's account of the past year, before it disappears. Her weblog is hosted at blogs.salon.com which does not appear to be the most reliable, and many pages from the early days of the project seem to be no longer available. Let's hope that is just a temporary aberration, and that Julie will return to entertain and educate us once again after a well-earned rest.

Robert Centor (DB's Medical Rants) has commented again on the phenomenon of rising healthcare costs and suggests three possible contributory perspectives:

1 ...costs are artificially inflated each year - so that the medical establishment can make more money

2 ... the overhead of doing business is increasing - due to malpractice costs, the costs of federal regulations and the cost of labor

3 ... some costs come from new technologies

Another way of looking at it that we have much more sophisticated (therefore expensive) investigations and therapeutic interventions to offer to an expanding and ageing population, whose expectations in turn are much higher yet probably less realistic. The great bulk of healthcare expenditure goes on bringing us into this world, and seeing us out of it. There is much futile expenditure at the end of life that arises from unrealistic demands and mismatched expectations. Whenever I was asked, as Medical Director of our institution, where we could make 'savings' (aka 'cuts'), I would blithely suggest that we withdraw 'futile and ineffective' interventions, only to be met with disbelieving stares.

Ivan Illich, who once castigated the medical profession for being a positive threat to health, was rather more contrite when he pointed out in a later article in the BMJ that, in effect, as a society we have forgotten how to die. Death has become not so much medicalized as systematized — it is nothing more than a 'system failure'. "Today, it is not sophisticated terminal treatment but lifelong training in misplaced concreteness that is the major obstacle to a bittersweet acceptance of our precarious existence and subsequent readiness to prepare for our own death".

Today has not been good. Filled with a stinking cold I have been on a short fuse, sounding off at colleagues who didn't deserve it, and some who did. Petty frustrations — the stuff of life these days — became even more unbearable in the humid, post-heatwave-induced torpor. Machines played up, Murphy-like, whilst networks played down. Ho hum, ho hum.

There was a bit of good news somwhere, I am sure, but alas I cannot remember what it was.

The present uncharactersitic British summer heatwave has prompted a plethora of news articles on how to stay cool. An article in the Times, for example, covered dietary considerations ("In order to stay as cool as a cucumber, eat cucumbers"). But how do you keep your house cool? Do you open windows (to encourage a breeze), or close them? Should you draw curtains?

Richard Allan MP is looking for a net-based, secure diary system he can access when on the road. This must be a requirement for so many that its surprising that there is no obvious choice. Many such road warriors, like Richard, will be locked into corporate systems such as Exchange/Outlook, which are no help in this situation and which in any event are impossible to keep under one's own control.

Our friend Megan returned from a Breton wedding recently eulogising not only about the wedding but also about some fabulous Breton patisserie. A particular favourite was kouign amann, which is Breton (Cournouille, actually) for gâteau beurré.

I have not tried this myself, but Simone Morand has a recipe in her Gastronomie bretonne d'hier et d'aujord'hui, (Flammarion, 1965):

450g flour
300g butter
300g sugar
pinch of salt
20g 'levure de boulanger' (fresh yeast is implied)
1 egg yolk to colour (optional)

Mix the flour salt and yeast. Add the sugar, then the butter. 

Give 4 turns as for puff pastry. Rest for 15mn. Brush with egg yolk.
Dust with icing sugar or mark with a fork (dusting with sugar is more usual).

Bake in a gentle oven.

This is an odd recipe unless the levure de boulanger (yeast) is wet enough to form a dough with the flours and sugar. There are other recipes on the web here and here. Overall, the basis is a fermented bread dough over which one spreads out butter and sugar, and folds and turns as for puff pastry.

Spam is not new: it is a symptom of society's tolerance of unsolicited communication generally rather than any fault with email per se, though its prominence (and thus nuisance value) owes something to email being the Internet's killer app. Put simply, it is an invasion of privacy conceptually no different to junk mail or unsolicited sales pitches by telephone. None of these unwanted intrusions can simply be ignored: all require active intervention just to get rid of them. In this way they differ significantly from advertisements on billboards or magazines (just look away or skip over them) or even on radio or TV (go and make a cup of tea, or just wait & it will soon be over).

So I find myself somewhat out of sympathy with a recent whine about email marketing being stopped by spam filters. "Now, after finally figuring out how to make e-mail work for them, marketers have found that the rules have changed. Their legitimate messages are being blocked by a new breed of super-aggressive spam filters; their good names are turning up on anti-spam blacklists; and they're being forced to devote time, energy, and in many cases, a good outlay of cash to keep their e-mail marketing efforts out of hot water."

Oh dear oh dear! It is the word legitimate I take exception to. What gives these folk the right to invade privacy in this way?

If society doesn't want spam it needs first to consider its attitude to privacy generally. Simply legislating against ISPs or attacking the technology won't help.

A somewhat odd editoral in this week's Lancet asks if science is stuck in the Middle Ages. "In medieval Europe a young man who wanted to become a craftsman would apprentice himself to a master, after which he worked for a time as a salaried journeyman, before setting up as a master himself. There was an assessment of his skill--the making of a masterpiece--and the system was rigorously overseen by a guild. If this scenario sounds familiar it is because even today it is in use the world over to train the next generation of scientists." Quoting the recent report from the US National Academies on the challenges facing science, the editorial goes on to say that (for various reasons) "the current system compares unfavourably with the medieval one".

So far so good. Although clearly derived from the medieval craftsman approach, the present system for training young scientists and for managing science is significantly different, not least because of the sheer scale of scientific endeavour, not to mention the potential profits and their effect on priorities and scientific behaviour. This is not to deny, of course, that medieval craftsmen did it just for love rather than money. Judging from their legacy, however, one suspects that quality might even have been more important to them than quantity. So why does the editorial conclude: "Perhaps it is time to move the career paths of scientists out of the Middle Ages?"

It is well known that an alarmingly high proportion of current scientific eneavour is of astoundingly low quality (just look at the published literature). Should we not then reverse the trend for scientists in academic institutions to become shareholders and board members of biotechnology enterprises — especially those that do not "place a high enough priority on diseases that affect those who are least able to pay," — and encourage a more quality and needs-driven scientific culture?

I read somewhere this week that Sainsbury's had been bumped from its number two position amongst Britain's supermarkets. I am not surprised.

I started regular shopping in our local Sainsbury's nearly twenty years ago - when it was the undisputed number one - and have done our main family shopping there nearly every week since: that must be getting on for a thousand visits! Over the years I have seen it improve and then gradually decline - I think as much through indifference than anything else.

Like most families we tend to buy much the same things over time, broadening our tastes a bit with each new trend, but generally behaving predictably from one month to the next (I have every till slip stashed away somewhere: these will be a goldmine for some future aspiring sociologist or market historian!). What attracted me to Sainsbury's back in the 1980s - and kept me going there even after Tesco's had overtaken it and opened a much bigger store a a mile closer to us, was it's wide range of continental foodstuffs, the general high quality of its fresh produce, but above all, its reliability. It was rare in those days for anything to be out of stock.

Now it is different: I can no longer rely on Sainsbury's. There has not been a shopping trip in the last year or two from which I have not returned short of between one and five items on my list, and sometimes more. Sure, sometimes these are specialty items (but why should they be different), and sometimes I am chasing items which may have been withdrawn altogether. Mostly, though, it is a failure of stock control and logistics. One only has to look around the store at the chaotic way in which the aisles are cluttered with pallets of stock waiting to replenish the shelves to recognise that this retail operation is nowhere near as slick as it used to be.

Another disappointment is that the company seems to do little to find out what its customers think. In all this time I have never seen a market survey in progress in the store, let alone been asked to participate. Nor have I ever been sent a questionnaire. There used to be a suggestions book 'instore', prominently displayed and frequently used, but that disppeared years ago. The Customer Service desk, when manned, usually has a queue of customers trying to exchange something or other, and is not very user friendly.

To be fair, much has changed for the better over the years. Long queues at the checkout - whilst beginning to creep back - are not the scourge they used to be (and still are on the Continent). The store layout is no longer regularly changed: things are generally where they usually are (assuming they are there at all). Overall, the range of foodstuffs is still impressive, though there is plenty room for improvement: just compare the frozen fish cabinets with those in France, Spain or Italy.

I am saddened that Sainsbury's is not doing so well. It may be that it has coasted for too long on its ability to retain the loyalty of its customers.