Archive for: March, 2007

Self-Saucing Chocolate Pud

Mar 21 2007 Published by under Culinary Escapades

chocpud.jpgThis recipe is kindly brought to you via Flick’s mum. A fine winter comfort food, it’ll feed four.

  • ¾ C (3 oz) self-rising flour (if you don’t have self-rising, you can fake it with cake flour plus 1¼ t baking powder and ¼ t salt)
  • 2 T cocoa
  • 1½ t instant coffee powder
  • pinch salt
  • 4 oz butter, room temp
  • ⅔ C (4 oz) superfine (caster) sugar
  • 2 eggs, slightly beaten
  • ½ t vanilla essence
  • 1–2 T milk

Sift flour, and mix in cocoa, instant coffee and salt. Cream the butter and sugar until light, then gradually beat in eggs and vanilla. (Do this a little at a time, incorporating the egg completely into the creamed butter before you add more, and add some flour mixture with last few additions of egg. Don’t just dump the egg in the butter, or you end up with a lumpy swill and have to toss it and start again.) Fold in the remaining flour, and enough milk for a fairly soft consistency. Spoon evenly into a well-greased smallish but high-sided oven dish. Add some chopped or halved walnuts to top; I used good North Carolina pecans.

  • ⅔ C (4 oz) firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1 T cocoa
  • 1 C very hot water

In small bowl mix the cocoa and brown sugar, then add hot water and stir until it’s smooth. Pour this over the pud and bake at 375°F for 40 minutes. The sauce will magically migrate under the pudding, and the whole bubbling mass will seem alive, eager to slither out of the pan like a tiny marauding chocolate Blob. Wait until it stops moving then serve with whipped cream. Delishimo.

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Boone, Blowing Rock, Valle Crucis

Mar 16 2007 Published by under Unreliable Recommendations

lichen.jpg

Spring is a good time to visit the Blue Ridge Mountains; accommodation’s cheap, the streets are empty of tourists, and although the trees are mostly bare the temperature is just right for hiking. I can wholeheartedly recommend the Homestead Inn and the chocolate and ice cream in Blowing Rock (but avoid the corned beef hash at Knight’s), sipping a glass-bottle Coke on the Mast General Store’s porch swing in Valle Crucis, cruising round the backroad hollars (yes, that is the actual term used on the road signs) spotting crumbling barns and Jesus billboards, and a barbecue dinner at Stamey’s in Greensboro on the way back.

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Motherhood Handwaving

Mar 05 2007 Published by under Pedantry

In the New York Times Magazine on March 4, Sharon Lerner argued that “making it easier for women to work may be the best way to increase birthrates.” Certainly most European countries think so; all have some form of paid maternity leave, and many are trying to increase it. Lerner goes on to note a paradox, though:

“Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea than the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece have among the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe. Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like Finland, Norway and Denmark, have among the highest birthrates.”

That is curious, isn’t it? Stereotypically, Catholics breed like rabbits, while the ultra-modern Scandinavians are the ones who forget to have children. I was so intrigued that I decided to check. I pulled the relevant data from Wikipedia (specifically, birthrates, paid maternity leave, and prevalence of Catholicism) and ran some quick stats. You can download the spreadsheet and check my figures and assumptions if you like.

euromaternity.gif Surprisingly, there’s no statistically-significant relationship between the amount of maternity leave a country offers and its birthrate. The highest birthrates on the graph, by the way, are in Ireland, Iceland, and Cyprus. The lowest is Germany’s. As you can see, Spain and Greece are not especially low; in fact, they’re about average for Europe, as is Sweden, which offers by far the most generous parental leave. And contrary to Lerner’s claim, Portugal actually has a higher birthrate than Finland.

These statistics aren’t occult knowledge. It took me two minutes with Google and Wikipedia to find the numbers, and not much longer to type them into Excel and make some graphs. Don’t magazines employ fact checkers anymore?

eurocatholicism.gif I couldn’t think of an simple stat that measures a country’s sexism (sorry, I mean “traditional attitude towards women”), but the amount of Catholicism in a given population is a matter of record. There’s another surprising result if you plot popery against birthrate. It looks like both Lerner and the stereotype are wrong–Catholics are having neither more nor fewer babies than anyone else. (If anyone can think of how to test the sexism hypothesis, let me know. Better still, do the analysis yourself, post the graph, and send me the link.)

Why this disparity between the article’s claims and the data? I’m not a demographic theorist, and I’m completely ignorant of the extensive literature on birthrates. But if one wanted to claim that maternity leave raises fertility, the first problem to overcome, surely, is that the numbers don’t back you up. One possible response would be lots of handwaving to convince readers that it only seems like you’re wrong; in this case, mysterious hidden factors just happen to precisely counteract the positive effects of maternity leave.

It doesn’t help, though, that the quote above contains some basic factual errors, as well as a couple of weasel phrases (“among the lowest…in Western Europe”). Neither inspire confidence. Of course, they also raise the suspicion that the researchers’ conclusions have been decided in advance, and the numbers are being cherry-picked (which is the other way to deal with unhelpful data). Which strategy is being employed here? I don’t know. But it’s wonderful that we can fact-check on a Sunday morning from the comfort of our living rooms.

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