Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Come on, man.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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Reader Interactions

141Comments

  4. 4.

    Dennis SGMM

    I didn’t have the heart to watch the video. Did she use that special salt that Sherpas carry down one grain at a time from the peak of Mt. Everest?

  5. 5.

    Violet

    Oh my god. I cook from scratch and it’s not that hard. I’ve even baked using a charcoal stove (coals on top of a metal lid make it an oven) and lived without any measuring cups or electrical appliances. You improvise. It’s not that hard. Hell, I even carried in my fuel and water and still managed to bake brownies and various other goodies.

    Megan’s a lazy moron.

  6. 6.

    McGeorge Bundy

    What a lovely quaint kitchen she has there. Sure wish I could afford all those fancy pots and pans. Being a parasite, though, I own only a microwave.

  7. 7.

    Guster

    This is very faintly off-topic, but I need my own crazy-check.

    I ordered a new laptop yesterday. They charged me $27 for overnight delivery.

    The laptop isn’t coming today. It’s not coming tomorrow. It might come Friday.

    I called to say, wtf? I pay for you to overnight the laptop.

    They said, ‘We will, once we send it.’

    Am I crazy? Or when you pay to have something overnighted, doesn’t that imply that you’ll get it the very next business day?

  8. 8.

    tBoy

    Good Lord – as if someone who spent that much time in the kitchen (her granny or before) needed to measure everything to some sort of standardized, perfect micro-unit.

    My wife measures everything perfectly and follows directions exactly and she can’t make toast without it tasting like a slice of wood.

    Her late mother measured nothing and worked in a kitchen the size of a phone booth. Everything that woman made was near-gourmet perfect.

  10. 10.

    Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods

    She’s very off-putting on camera–possibly even moreso than in print.

  11. 11.

    Violet

    Oh my gawd. She uses a food processor to SIFT FLOUR. Yeah, it’s just so much easier than twirling a handle on a sifter for about fifteen seconds. She doesn’t exactly factor in time and expense of cleaning the food processor either.

    This woman would be helpless without electricity. Survival of the fittest. Can we drop her in the woods somewhere without a GPS?

  13. 13.

    WereBear

    @Guster: You aren’t crazy… except that you expected service.

    Silly you!

    I’d cancel it with extreme prejudice. Or we’ll hear from you when the laptop goes ugly on you.

  14. 14.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    @Violet: You can’t expect someone to be a good baker who thinks 1 tablespoon and 10 tablespoons are identical.

  16. 16.

    MattR

    @Guster: Dell is usually pretty good about separating out the time to build the machine you order versus the time to ship it so I immediately understood where the company was coming from. But I also see your side. It really depends on the site and how they advertised the overnight delivery.

  18. 18.

    celticdragonchick

    I gave up after she starting sifting flour in her food processor.

    Sifting. Flour. In her food processor.

    This was after an interminable lecture on her granny couldn’t accurately measure butter. Or something.

    Her food show makes starvation look like a viable option.

  20. 20.

    PurpleGirl

    @Guster: Okay, I’d say that overnight means the next day (or should). Do you know where they were shipping from, i.e., your placing of the order may have been after their warehouse shipping went out for the day and they won’t ship for some period of time again. Just saying… I don’t want to excuse them. I think they are wrong to charge you more for “overnight” when it isn’t overnight.

  21. 21.

    Guster

    @WereBear: Thank you! It was such a weird disconnect that I started wondering if maybe I was being a complete idiot. (Been known to happen.)

    This is Apple, not some little fly-by-night place. I’m trying to think of a kitchen-gadget-related joke, but I’m too pissed.

  23. 23.

    Rosalita

    @Violet:

    Oh my gawd. She uses a food processor to SIFT FLOUR. Yeah, it’s just so much easier than twirling a handle on a sifter for about fifteen seconds. She doesn’t exactly factor in time and expense of cleaning the food processor either.

    a whisk works even better! I don’t think Martha is even that anal.

  24. 24.

    trollhattan

    I’m reminded of the Cosby joke about nicknaming the big-eared kid “Trophyhead.” McMegan needs less, not more camera facetime.

  25. 25.

    Violet

    @Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods:

    She’s very off-putting on camera—possibly even moreso than in print.

    She really is. I dislike her a great deal more after watching her baking video. I wish she’d take her baking class to the slums in Guatemala City or Nairobi. I’m sure it would be a big hit.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    @Guster:
    It depends on where you’re buying it, but often your laptop isn’t even made yet when you order it. You’re paying for faster shipping; production fast enough to get it there the next day would be a lot more. If you really need the laptop quickly, you should go to a store and buy one you can get today.

  29. 29.

    p.a.

    Glad to see my kitchen isn’t the only one being considered for an episode of Hoarders. Maybe she had to terminate the (probably illegal) domestic help.

    I’ve found a cold metal bowl and whisk much better for whipped cream than a crank egg beater.

    That may rank just behind Malkin’s Defeatocrat cheerleader video.

  30. 30.

    different church-lady

    Today’s recipie: chicken with 400 cloves of garlic.

    Or is it 4 cloves? I’m sorry, a sinus infection broke my index card…

  31. 31.

    dmsilev

    @Violet:

    Megan’s a lazy moron.

    This is, of course, a general statement independent of whatever subject is being discussed. I suppose for full generality, one must add ‘dishonest’ to the list.

    dms

  32. 32.

    licensed to kill time

    I like to watch Jamie Oliver once in a while. He just tosses stuff in, like “throw a good knob of butter in the pot” or he shakes flour straight out of the package til it looks right. A really good cook just knows when it’s right. I think the insecure cook measures like a carpenter in the hopes it will somehow save the day.

  33. 33.

    Corner Stone

    @Guster: This is standard practice. They ship it overnight once it’s built and CQ tested.
    You’re paying for overnight shipping “once it’s ready to be shipped”.
    Standard.

  34. 34.

    Guster

    @PurpleGirl: It’s a refurb from Apple. Maybe they sell ’em before they refurb them? Because it’s not like it’ll even be here tomorrow. Over-two-nights. Looks like Friday, most likely.

    The logic board died, and it costs more to replace the logic board than to buy a brand new PC laptop. Still, I’m a loyal Mac user, so …

  35. 35.

    andrewsomething

    I literally watched that with my jaw hanging open and eyes bulging out. Sifting flour in a food processor? I know this has been commented on above, but seriously?

    Personally, I just mix shit in a bowl with a fork and it turns out pretty good.

  36. 36.

    Violet

    @Guster:
    I’ve had this happen with multiple online orders. You order it and think it should ship the next day. No. Somewhere in the fine print is some sort of “it takes 3-5 business days to prepare an order for shipping” comment. They hide behind that. I’ve even had sales people lie to me about the date of shipping and their rules, because I’ve learned to ask.

  38. 38.

    kdaug

    @Guster: Typically there’s a 24-48 hour burn-in for machines assembled from components from different vendors – say, to ensure that the video card from NVidia doesn’t have a short or some Malaysian memory chip works well and plays nice with the other parts of the rig. Something fries out, they’ll replace it and repeat the burn-in process. Once they’re sure everything seems to be working, then they’ll ship it. Saves them a lot of “Sparks flew out when I turned it on” complaints. Saves you a lot of the same.

  39. 39.

    Roger Moore

    @Violet:

    Yeah, it’s just so much easier than twirling a handle on a sifter for about fifteen seconds.

    You don’t even need a sifter. When I want to sift flour, I put it in a sieve and shake or tap it to make the flour come through. Then again, I mostly sift flour as a way of getting an even layer onto a board where I’m going to work dough, rather than to make it easier to measure accurately. If I want to measure accurately, I use a gram scale.

  40. 40.

    ChrisNYC

    Her work is making up theories like: women in the fifties had “big arms” because of putting thick batter into cake pans???? GRIFTER!

  41. 41.

    JenJen

    Oh Em Eff Gee. I seriously cannot stop laughing.

    So her grandmother didn’t have an A&P or a Food King? Did they live in the freaking Yukon Territory or something?

    Also, does she not realize how long Kitchen Aid mixers have been around? And has she never heard of wax paper for buttering a pan?

    ETA: Best line: “Rather than go through the painful and laborious of shelling our own nuts, we buy the pre-shelled kind shelled by machines.” Oh Em Eff Gee.

  42. 42.

    Yutsano

    Alton Brown would sit back and calmly point out every single thing she’s wrong about, up to and including the standard measurement faux pas, since standard weights and measures were long in use by the 19th Century. Only Alton would be, well, entertaining when he did it.

  43. 43.

    Jennifer

    There’s a reason McMegan and the other libertards identify with John Galt as opposed to the Little Red Hen. Because actually doing all the work yourself isn’t as much fun as paying others a substandard wage in return for doing the work for you, leaving you plenty of leisure time to lay around and bitch about all those useless parasites who are actually baking the bread.

    In this scenario, McMegan’s grandma was the Little Red Hen, sifting the flour with an archaic hand-powered device, working the butter into the flour with nothing more than a primitive spoon, whipping cream with an outrageously outdated whisk. McMegan is John Galt, relying on the parasites to construct machines to do it all, then paying far above the true cost of the machines in order to make sure that the deserving factory owner makes a hefty profit.
    McMegan’s cake costs more than 10x what her grandma’s cake cost, after adjusting for inflation, because McMegan is convinced herself that she’s purchased “convenience” for herself rather than having been suckered into needless consumption by a pitchman.

    The kicker is, McMegan’s grandma probably turned out better cakes in the same or a smaller amount of time than it took for McMegan to embarrass herself on the internets.

  45. 45.

    Violet

    And who the hell bakes wearing a drapey, long sweater and long hair that isn’t pulled back? She’s just asking for her sweater to sweep across her nicely frosted cake or her hair to end up in the batter. UGH!

  46. 46.

    ant

    i thought you didnt havta sift flower any more…..?

    i just fluff it up some… dont gotta be perfect.

  47. 47.

    ruemara

    I lasted 27 seconds. One, her kitchen is too nice for the likes of her and I throw my own half destroyed kitchen that I still manage to cook multiple meals in without half that crap. When we finally lose the house, I’m going to go Big Night style before I’m homeless.

    Megan makes cookery seem painful and joyless, Cole and I curse the day you made me look at that sallow, mealy face.

  49. 49.

    Violet

    @Roger Moore:
    I know, but she HAS A SIFTER! She even uses it later in the video! But it’s “easier” to put a couple of cups of flour in a food processor than it is to sift it by hand? She’s insane.

  51. 51.

    trollhattan

    @JenJen:

    Also, does she not realize how long Kitchen Aid mixers have been around?

    I suspect this video is a delayed response to Tom Levenson’s defenestration of McMegan on her demented kitchen appliance blog post. She appears to believe the modern era began with her birth. “Electricity discovered, just as I arrive home from the hospital! Excelsior!”

  53. 53.

    Gian

    Delays in online shipping can sometimes happen because the vendor waits to accumulate enough orders to get a bulk wholesale price. As for a refurb from apple, I expect it’s just not ready yet. As for cooking? She should just get delivery. She can afford it

  54. 54.

    Joey Maloney

    She uses a food processor to SIFT FLOUR.

    I’ve seen Saint Alton do that, but only when he’s using the FP in the following steps of whatever he’s making.

    And you should always measure flour by weight, not volume; it’s highly compressible so volumetrics are unreliable.

    And the point of sifting is to aerate, to get the grains separated so they can be more easily and thoroughly wetted or integrated into whatever other ingredients.

    /Good Eats nerd

  55. 55.

    Tsulagi

    Okay, I want a fucking medal. I watched half of that thing until her twitness with elevator music from the beginning of time background drew blood from my eyes and ears.

    One thing from it, could see she and Sullivan shared the same math teachers. After endless prattling on about grandma not being able to easily measure butter, she said she was using two sticks in her recipe, 2/3 cup. SO does most of the cooking, but even I know a stick of butter is 1/2 cup. So in her math world, 1/2+1/2=2/3. Fits.

    You know, given teabagger math acumen, if the IRS would just audit all nutters’ returns they’d probably find enough to wipe out the deficit.

  56. 56.

    mightygodking

    @licensed to kill time:

    I like to watch Jamie Oliver once in a while. He just tosses stuff in, like “throw a good knob of butter in the pot” or he shakes flour straight out of the package til it looks right. A really good cook just knows when it’s right. I think the insecure cook measures like a carpenter in the hopes it will somehow save the day.

    Jamie Oliver does that when he’s cooking as opposed to when he’s baking. Cooking is an art: good cooks know that the exact amounts don’t matter and that building a good flavour profile is more important than making sure you have exactly 2 1/3rd cups of whatever.

    Baking, on the other hand, is a science, and good bakers know that if you vary up the amount of baking powder (or anything else) in your cake by so much as half a teaspoon it dramatically changes the consistency and edibility of the finished product.

    They’re two different things, which is why pastry chef is a very specific subdiscipline of chef. When Jamie Oliver bakes something, you better believe he measures everything.

  57. 57.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    haay Freddie! got any fanboi comments for McMegan’s stellar cusuinate adventure?
    ;)

  60. 60.

    Mark S.

    Megan’s grandmother flourished sometime between 1880 and 1950, depending on which bullshit historical factoid Megan’s expounding.

    My favorite part was how in the Dark Ages, Megan’s grandmother had to butter and flour the pan by hand. How did we ever survive without cooking spray?

  61. 61.

    Josie

    I managed to last until the flour sifting section before I turned it off. I cooked with my mother (94 years old) and her mother, and I never got a lecture as boring and stupid as that. It’s no great trick to cook without a lot of modern conveniences. I do it all the time. The only must haves are ingredients, containers and fire. Sometimes you can even do without the containers. The rest is all up to knowledge and imagination. I’m thinking she has neither.

  62. 62.

    JenJen

    Not to pile on, but my own grandmother wouldn’t have been caught dead using cake mix from a box, but you gotta love that Betty Crocker box you see at the very end of the video. Pretty sure those mixes were readily available in the 1930’s, if not 1920’s. If anything truly revolutionized kitchen work, it was Bisquick, which came out in the early 1930’s.

    There may have been other mixes before then. I mean, Duncan Hines was born in 1880. Just sayin’ is all.

    I’m going to go pound my head into a wall for 9 minutes as punishment for watching Worst Cooking Video Ever for 9 minutes.

    @dmsilev: Oh, wow. Didn’t realize we’ve explored this territory before! OMG. Great post by Tom.

  64. 64.

    Martin

    Jesus, McMegan is 5 years younger than me and looks older than my mom in that video. Man, I never realized how not being able to do basic arithmetic aged a person.

  65. 65.

    aimai

    @Guster:

    No, Amazon does this too. When you pay money upfront for a service its called a “scam.”

    Don’t get me started on my three month old busted frigidaire washing machine.

    aimai

  66. 66.

    MobiusKlein

    @Roger Moore: I sift the flour & other dry ingredients all at once just to ensure they’re well mixed. Sometimes my sugar is lumpy, and sifting helps that out.
    But it’s not all that hard compared to the rest of the things.

    I really need to bust out my mom’s copy of “The White House Cookbook” – ala gutenberg.org/files/13923/13923-h/13923-h.htm
    You’ll be happy to know they were anti-French then too:

    AMERICAN TOAST.
    To one egg thoroughly beaten, put one cup of sweet milk and a little salt. Slice light bread and dip into the mixture, allowing each slice to absorb some of the milk; then brown on a hot buttered griddle or thick-bottomed frying pan; spread with butter and serve hot.

  68. 68.

    Benjamin Cisco

    If you don’t have an awards category for “Title of the Year”, you really should consider starting one. This is easily one of your best.

  69. 69.

    dmsilev

    You know, I think I should get in touch with McArdle and offer to recalibrate all of her measuring cups and spoons. I promise to use NIST-traceable metrology equipment, and will improve the accuracy of her baking by a minimum of 18%.

    Selling stupid cooking stuff to people like her is just like selling cryogenically-treated vacuum tubes to audiophiles: snake-oil for the modern era.

    dms

  70. 70.

    Suffern ACE

    @Mark S.:

    Megan’s grandmother flourished sometime between 1880 and 1950

    Just how old is Megan anyway. My guess is that her grandmother was flourishing well into the 1990s…

  72. 72.

    Yutsano

    @arguingwithsignposts: I was aiming for humiliation, not total annihilation there. Plus I didn’t think Bourdain baked. I could be wrong on that point however. He did survive culinary school.

  73. 73.

    aimai

    But more to the point this thread is full of win and its making a bad day look really, really, much better.

    aimai

  74. 74.

    malraux

    A couple of points. First, she’s either knowingly cherry picking, or a complete moron. Modern cake baking is probably at a high point based on the industrialization of several factors. Granulated sugar is incredibly pure, cake flour can be very finely milled, electronic scales greatly simplify the measuring process, etc. Cake ingredients are at a pretty high point currently.

    Compare that with most other foods. “Fresh” vegetables aren’t, they are harvested before peek ripeness so they don’t spoil during shipping and then gassed into freshness. Most meats are extremely poor in comparison to what it would have been in her grandmother’s day. Pork used to be known for its flavor, rather than for being as tasteless as chicken.

    Second, as widely demonstrated elsewhere, most modern gadgets aren’t particularly modern. More importantly, most gadgets aren’t very good. Seriously, I wouldn’t sift in a food processor because it’s such a pain to clean up. Just measure by weight and then make sure you hit it with a whisk to break up clumps.

  75. 75.

    JenJen

    @Violet: I KNOW! That was killing me! Look, I adore baking, I learned from my mother, grandmother, and in Germany while working as an au pair for three years (now those people can bake). I bake to relax. But you get hot while you bake if you’re doin’ it right, so what is up with that dumpy cashmere cardigan? And that hair! I hope anyone who has to suffer through a McMegan dinner party was watching that video, so that they might have the opportunity to decline pulling a long hair out of what looked like a pretty shitty nutcake.

  76. 76.

    300baud

    Two of my favorite sayings come to mind:

    + How you do anything is how you do everything.
    + Character is fate.

    I think that last one is a quote from Barbara Tuchman, probably from the excellent The March of Folly.

  77. 77.

    Ailuridae

    @Yutsano:

    Ball just celebrated its 150th anniversary right? The measuring cup stuff is insane – am I missing something?

  78. 78.

    Roger Moore

    @Joey Maloney:

    And you should always measure flour by weight, not volume; it’s highly compressible so volumetrics are unreliable.
    __
    And the point of sifting is to aerate, to get the grains separated so they can be more easily and thoroughly wetted or integrated into whatever other ingredients.

    Sifting actually serves several purposes. One of them is to decompress the flour to a known state of aeration so that volumetric measures are reasonably accurate. A second is to thoroughly mix powdered ingredients before adding liquid, since mixing powdered ingredients to homogeneity is notoriously difficult. That’s important for recipes like cake and biscuits, where you want to mix the ingredients thoroughly but want to minimize working after adding water in order to avoid developing the gluten and making it too tough.

  79. 79.

    different church-lady

    @Josie:

    I cooked with my mother (94 years old) and her mother, and I never got a lecture as boring and stupid as that.

    That’s because your mother was trying to bake a cake instead of prove an idiotic point.

  80. 80.

    Jules

    @celticdragonchick:

    I gave up after she starting sifting flour in her food processor.

    Sifting. Flour. In her food processor.

    hahahahaha
    I sift with a wire wisk or a wire strainer IF I sift at all.
    She’s nuts…I read her post the other day about making a German Choc Cake but she refused to use evaporate milk and had to figure out another way to make the icing.
    Idiot.

  82. 82.

    PurpleGirl

    @Suffern ACE: She was born in 1973; she is 38. No historical perspective at all. I guess her grandmother didn’t upgrade her kitchen between the 1950s and when Megan was a kid in the 1970s. Even my mother had her kitchen upgraded in the early 1960s and she didn’t get half of what was available appliance-wise.

  83. 83.

    HyperIon

    @Rosalita quoted:

    She uses a food processor to SIFT FLOUR

    I do not ever read/watch McMegan.
    I’m mock only where she is concerned.

    real cooks measure by weight.
    So…did she weigh the flour first?

    EDIT: I see RSR got there first.

  84. 84.

    MikeJ

    McMegan has broken new ground. Not in baking, not in economics. In rhetoric.

    All the queen of the self refuting video!

  85. 85.

    malraux

    Wha?!?!? she doesn’t even check that she’s balanced the amount in each pan? My god she’s whining about whipping cream by hand? It’s a five minute process at most, which comes out about even with the time it takes to wash out the bowl from making the cake, chill it, and then wash the kithcen aid whisk again (those aren’t typically dishwasher safe.)

  86. 86.

    Joey Maloney

    @Roger Moore:

    A second is to thoroughly mix powdered ingredients before adding liquid, since mixing powdered ingredients to homogeneity is notoriously difficult.

    Absolutely true for sifting ingredients together, as you say – mixing your flour and baking powder and salt, or whatever. I was just addressing sifting flour alone.

    I couldn’t bear to watch more than the first 30 seconds of that horrible video, so I don’t know if Lady Pinksalt was mixing when she was sifting.

  87. 87.

    Kay Shawn

    Really, I can’t figure out her point. “Things used to be different before.” ?? Is that all it is??

  88. 88.

    NonyNony

    @Josie:

    The rest is all up to knowledge and imagination. I’m thinking she has neither.

    Yeah, I didn’t need a cooking example to inform me that McArdle has no knowledge and little imagination. It’s almost like her calling card.

  89. 89.

    Jules

    BTW Megan, waiting for your butter to get soft/room temp should not be included in your estimate of time. Your Grandmother was probably smart enough to take her butter out of the fridge in the morning (which I do when I know I’ll be baking a cake/making frosting) so it would have been soft whenever she got ready to bake.

    (No I can’t use my microwave, I always end up melting it)

  90. 90.

    Anonymous

    is just like selling cryogenically-treated vacuum tubes to audiophiles: snake-oil for the modern era.

    What? I’m actually a bit lost on that.

  91. 91.

    Surly Duff

    I want my time back Cole. You to TBogg. That was so amazingly full of ridiculousness, and the fact that McMegan decides to double down on her kitchen posts is just sad.

    Her inability to distinguish between time periods is also great – starting off with the premise of cooking a recipe from the 1950s with modern gadgetry is so much easier, and then quickly changing the time frame to “prior to the 19th century” to support her discussion about the problems of measuring butter before plastic measuring cups. It’s really awesome because, even though she moved the goalposts, she still got it wrong.

  95. 95.

    quaint irene

    And who the hell bakes wearing a drapey, long sweater and long hair that isn’t pulled back?

    You’ve obviously never watched Sandra Lee’s ‘Semi-Homemade’ show

  96. 96.

    nancydarling

    The mind boggles. Some sort of intervention is called for here. Doesn’t she have friends or co-workers to stop her from doing shit like this?

  97. 97.

    Vany

    Christ, she’s probably writing a book on this, and probably has a contract in hand. If you have a really stupid thesis, be sure to double down (viz. “Liberal Fascism”)

  98. 98.

    dmsilev

    @Anonymous: There are some so-called audiophiles who claim to be able to hear differences in their music based on all sorts of tiny differences in the equipment used. As you can probably imagine, there’s an ecosystem of predators that feed on such prey. The specific example I used comes from this: metal-wear.com/stereo.html

    We have known for some time that the cryogenic processing of vacuum tubes results in audible improvement in sound reproduced by amplifiers employing those tubes. Apparently the relief of residual stress in the metal structures within the vacuum envelope results in reduced microphonics. That is, the cathode, grids, and plate vibrate less in response to an impinging sound field after they are cryogenically processed. Odd order harmonic distortion is significantly reduced. This is desirable because small variations in the separation of the elements in the vacuum result in corresponding changes in electric field strengths; the sound field modulates the plate current in a way that distorts the original signal. That is why frozen tubes sound better than the standard variety.

    (I was Googling around looking for information on amplifiers which work while they’re at 4 Kelvin, a very different question, and found this). It’s pure balderdash, but it sounds scientific and there are evidently people who will pay money for it. Offering to “calibrate her measuring equipment” using the fanciest words possible is at the same level.

    dms

  99. 99.

    scav

    Did she so need additional hits that she had to deliberately re-stage the same train-wreck? I like that. A one-train-wreck pony,

  100. 100.

    Jay C

    @MobiusKlein:

    Well, the White House Cookbook folks couldn’t have been all that Francophobic: I noticed they put their co-author’s qualifications right up in the foreword:

    Hugo Ziemann was at one time caterer for that Prince Napoleon who was killed while fighting the Zulus in Africa. He was afterwards steward of the famous Hotel Splendide in Paris. Later he conducted the celebrated Brunswick Café in New York, and still later he gave to the Hotel Richelieu, in Chicago, a cuisine which won the applause of even the gourmets of foreign lands.

    Bummer about Prince Napoleon – at least old Hugo’s chow didn’t carry him off – but it’s unlikely the book’s readership, even in 1887, were going to think of an extensive resume in French cooking as a particular negative (they may have been low-tech, but they weren’t stupid….)

  102. 102.

    p.a.

    @PurpleGirl:

    She was born in 1973; she is 38. No historical perspective at all. I guess her grandmother didn’t upgrade her kitchen between the 1950s and when Megan was a kid in the 1970s. Even my mother had her kitchen upgraded in the early 1960s and she didn’t get half of what was available appliance-wise.

    I’m still cooking on a 1958 30″ GE electric stove I inherited from my parents. The oven has a built-in meat thermometer port which will shut off the oven when the set temp is reached. It has 2 built-in 110v ac outlets, one of which is tied in to the stove’s timer for timed operation. The large (8″) burner has a switch to option its use as a 6″ burner. It also has an electric griddle which, when plugged in, controls the 2 burners it covers from one burner control. And this wasn’t a high-end range- they were the 36″ or 40″ models. It was a mid-range model that was a standard part of what is most certainly a ‘starter home’. My point being, as many have pointed out already, folks were hardly living in a state of nature back then.

    Meagan reminds me of the comment about every generation of teenagers thinking they were the ones to invent sex.

  103. 103.

    MonkeyBoy

    One reason to sift is to mix ingredients and remove lumps.

    In olden days some of those lumps may have included wheat weevils or grain moths. I guess using a food processor winds up increasing the protein in the final product.

    [I know a family whose whole house was recently full of grain moths because of an infected bag of bird seed that had gotten misplaced in the basement]

    Also, did anybody else notice her moving an empty wine glass out of the shot of the cakes on cooling racks? Her end result may result from her ignoring the adage “Don’t Drink and Bake”.

  107. 107.

    WaterGirl

    @Guster: I have run into this before, with multiple vendors, and it can be maddening if the distinction isn’t made clear: between “shipping immediately and you will receive it tomorrow” and “we will overnight it to you as soon as the item is available”.

  108. 108.

    Surly Duff

    @p.a.:

    All factually correct, but McMegan’s response would be, “Of course they had some sophisticated equipment in the 1950s, but I was being general. To be specific, you cannot claim that such equipment existed in 1850. I don’t recall Harriet Tubman discussing having electric stoves. Don’t be so naive.”

  109. 109.

    Arclite

    One of the problems with McMegan’s presentation is one of consistency. She keeps jumping back and forth between the 1950s and pre-1900, two totally different worlds. Yeah, in 1880, women did spend a lot of time in the kitchen and it was laborious, but by 1950, there was electricity in most households and most kitchens were supplied with modern cooking tools like temperature controlled ovens, stainless steel cookware, etc. I have measured butter by floating it in water, I always cream butter and sugar by hand, still use a flour sifter, etc. They don’t take long. If you need your nuts a finer consistency, chop them with a knife for God’s sake. And honestly, how many people have a kitchen aid? I have lusted after one, but don’t bake enough to justify it, and also live in a small apartment with little space.

    One thing I am glad for: not having to shell my own nuts.

  111. 111.

    Chrisd

    Every cake recipe in that classic 1950 cookbook she’s using assumed the (predominant) use of a nice standard mixer and standard measuring cups. In fact, the pictures accompanying the recipes repeatedly show the mixer, the cups, the pans. Nothing has changed, except the bizarre part where she now sifts with her food processor.

    This video depresses me. I cannot believe this woman works for the Atlantic.

  112. 112.

    Gina

    @quaint irene: Another *urp* inducing thing is when the cook/host wears elaborate multi-stone set rings that they don’t take off as they handle everything from dough to raw chicken. I can’t watch shows with a hostess who wears blingy rings because it’s just too nauseating.

    In the late Jurassic, when I worked as a jeweler, we’d get rings in for repair or sizing from women who proudly stated they’d NEVER taken them off. The amount of goo that would extrude from the tiny crevices when we’d put them into an ultrasonic was *vomitrocious*.

    Protip: you shed skin cells, there is oil and moisture on your hands, things you handle goop up in the openings; never taking off jewelry and cleaning it is like never showering or changing your undies.

  114. 114.

    Gina

    @Arclite: Also, in 1880 and for about 100 years forward, having household help in the form of a cheap employee was pretty standard for most middle-class homes, especially in the south.

    /Dad was raised in North Carolina

  115. 115.

    pragmatism

    from the comments at tbogg:
    UncertaintyVicePrincipal: I’m going to propose that the opposite of “Occam’s Razor” is “McArdle’s Calculator”.

  116. 116.

    malraux

    @Chrisd: It’s not just that she’s an employee of the Atlantic who happens to do crap like this in her off-time. This is the stuff the Atlantic is paying her to do.

  118. 118.

    TooManyJens

    I couldn’t get past “they didn’t have measuring cups until the turn of the 20th century, so it was really hard for people in the 1950s to know how much butter they were using.”

    Jesus Christ.

    Also, I have never *not* creamed butter and sugar by hand. It’s just not that hard!

  119. 119.

    sukabi

    @Guster: it’s a way to gouge you…, I ordered an air conditioner from Home Depot a couple of years ago… had it overnighted (cost almost $200 just for shipping — so sue me, it was 100 degrees +, and all the local stores were sold out and wouldn’t be getting any more in for the season) anyway, when it didn’t arrive the next day, called customer service and they told me it had been shipped and would arrive in about 3 days, I’m like WTF I paid an extra $200 to get it overnight… they gave me the shippers info so I could contact them… The shipper told me they didn’t do overnight, and the air conditioner would arrive in about 2 weeks… I told them to forget about shipping it, I was refusing delivery… called Home Depot back and canceled the order… and drove my ass across the mountains to pick up an air conditioner at a Lowes. It cost a lot less for the gas than the shipping.

  120. 120.

    sukabi

    @TooManyJens: I got a bit passed that point… to where there wasn’t any such thing as low fat milk, it came with cream on top and you had to shake it up… but her recipe calls for whole milk, and instead of getting her lazy ass to the store and buying a bit of whole milk she has to guess at how much cream to add to her low fat milk… what a f^cking twit.

    and what’s stopping her from adjusting the recipe to just use the low fat milk? most times it’s just not going to make that much of a difference…

  122. 122.

    sukabi

    @Chrisd: she’s clearly retarded… I’ve never seen any one “sift” flour with a food processor… unless you’ve got a “mixer” blade, it’s not going to incorporate any air… and if you watch all the chef / cooking shows they all use a standard sifter or a fine mesh sieve to sift…

    try “whipping” potatoes with a food processor and the regular cutting blade… if you process too long (which isn’t very long) you get a very shiny, gluey, dense mess… unlike with a mixer which does incorporate air and makes them fluffy.

  124. 124.

    Jay C

    @Arclite:

    One of the problems with McMegan’s presentation is one of consistency

    Shouldn’t surprise anyone: she’s like that with her non-culinary output as well….

  125. 125.

    another christopher d

    Speaking of Sandra Lee, I better wait until Cocktail Time! to sit through ten minutes of McArdle lecturing about cooking.

  126. 126.

    alwhite

    I grew up cooking with my mom who ran her own catering business. In addition to “normal” wedding, bar mitzvah, anniversary stuff we did a monthly fund raiser for an immigrant aid organization that had to be a different nationality every month. She did that month after month shopping from ’50s and ’60s grocery stores. Not only did that mean from scratch it usually meant making stuff from scratch without all the parts.

    I don’t usually use the word but bitch is the only term I can think of to define that bitch. She has no idea – about anything.

  127. 127.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @Gravenstone: Lissen ‘tard. You may not be aware, but Freddie started out blogging as a McMegan fanboi…if I membah right from the old days she inspired him to start blogging.
    I am just curious if he has evolved.
    I did.

    and liek i said……i BEEN stalked. i wouldn’t wish that on n/e one.
    This is just a little gentle trolling.
    ABT.

  128. 128.

    Vicki

    “Rotary Egg Beaters – The rotary egg beater eliminated the long and laborious hand beating of eggs and batters. The rotary egg beater was purchased in sufficient numbers to make a substantial impact on American cooking. In the Sears’ 1897 catalogue a “Dover” egg beater sold for 9¢.

    1865 – The first patents for rotary egg beaters began showing up around 1865.

    1870 – Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island invented and patented, US Patent #103811, the hand-cranked egg beater with two intermeshed, counter-rotating whisks. It was an improvement on earlier rotary egg beaters that had only one whisk.”

    My grandmother had a wood stove, no electricity, no refrigerator and churned her own butter. But she had a rotary egg beater. Has the woman never heard of research?

    Before standard measuring cups and spoons guess what they used? CUPS AND SPOONS. Coffee cup. Teaspoon. Tablespoon. Mercy, my grandmother lived in a mountain shack deep in Appalachia and she figured it out. Give me a break.

  130. 130.

    Mart

    Not quite the 50’s she refers to, but my mom taught me to be a kick-ass baker in the early 60’s. (She was worried my awkwardness would not get me a proper cooking wife.) The mothers would fight over my pecan pies at the school bake sale. I learned to prepare every part of it from scratch. We had exotic ingredients like Karo syrup, brown sugar, butter and flour. We had amazing implements like beaters (hand and electric!), rolling pins and pie pans. WTF is she waxing about?

  131. 131.

    chamois

    Jeez, you guys are harsh. She baked a cake and tried to link it to social history. Not riveting video, not perhaps altogether accurate, but harmless. Apparently you all have never had a less than stellar moment in your lives. I admit I don’t read her stuff and don’t have an overall opinion on her political and economic views, but it’s a fucking little cake, people. Get over it and move on.

  132. 132.

    uptown

    And then we have folks like chamois – “I have no opinion, but I’ll give it anyway, while bashing everybody else”.

  134. 134.

    jake the snake

    @licensed to kill time:
    I remember Justin Wilson measuring in the palm of his hand.
    Once he was question about his measurements. He poured some salt into his hand, then transferred it to a measuring spoon. His estimated palm of the hand measure was a perfect tablespoon.

  135. 135.

    jake the snake

    @Vicki:
    My mother cooked on a wood stove for many years, though she
    had an electric stove and a refrigerator as long as I can remember. She was a great cook, though she once told me that she couldn’t cook at all when she and my father got married. Like a lot of good cooks, she liked to experiment.
    Some things did not turn out well, but a lot was amazing.
    My favorite dessert was what she called chocolate dumplings.
    Basically apple dumplings with chocolate sauce rather than apples. I begged her for years to write down the recipe.
    She told me that she would have to make it, and write it
    down as she went along. Unfortunately, she passed before she got around to it.

  136. 136.

    4jkb4ia

    @Tsulagi:

    I know a stick of butter is 8 tablespoons.

    I think McMegan was inspired by SCA cooking in that video. You have almost no measures in any of the primary sources and definitely no machines.

  137. 137.

    4jkb4ia

    This thread was great. My husband’s policy on baking is that the kitchen is too small.

    (I have a recipe for ginger cake that I am going to make someday.)

  138. 138.

    Left Coast Tom

    I thought she was from a long line of intimidating academic caterers, or whatever she claims for herself. I didn’t feel “intimidated” watching the portions of the clip that I could vaguely tolerate…I think “nauseated” is the right word.

  139. 139.

    malraux

    @4jkb4ia: It was not only too small, it was cluttered with way too much crap. Seriously, if small electric appliances cover a majority of your counter space, you’re missing the forest for the trees with cooking.

  141. 141.

    Petorado

    You people will never make good right wingers — the video lost all credibility when I saw her granite countertops.

    Now that that’s out of the way, McMegan is confusing gadgets with skill and knowledge. If you know what you’re doing, you can figure out how to do fantastic things remarkably well. If you look back in history at all the amazing feats humankind achieved before calculators, computers, satellites, and gasoline engines, it makes you appreciate what the human mind can do.

    McMegan is as lazy in her personal life as she is in her professional career. Things are only achievable if they are easy, quoth McMegan. And that’s why she’s become the poster child for intellectual, as well as culinary, laziness.

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