Food History

A bit of an announcement right now, and I’ll do you a proper post later in the day.

The banquet is all ready for booking. I have forms. Just send me an email address (use the comments or the contact me button if you don’t know my email address) and I’ll send you one right away. It will be held on the first Saturday in October. Fancy dress is optional and there will be vegetarian choices (yummy ones, too).

You DON’T have to attend the Convention to come to the Banquet.

“Secrets of the Bayou”

“Dr Gillian Polack is planning a fascinating banquet experience this year! As always, the recipes and menu are authentic to the time periods. Pre-dinner drinks will be set in 1945 – the first Mardi Gras after the war. Cocktails set the scene! Then for the dinner we move back in time to the culinary delights of the 1880s.

You have been invited to this Mardi Gras celebration by the great hostess Severine Sallier. Miss Sallier is upholding the old ways - she knows they’re going to fade. The railway has come to Lake Charles, it could soon be just another town on the line from New Orleans to Houston. Contraband Bayou’s pirate past and its pre-war elegance will be forgotten. This last dinner is her fight against mediocrity.

The Bayou is full of mystery and secrets – perfect for our Convention theme. There are many excellent horror and mystery novels in this exotic setting. Creatures from the Black Lagoons, Vampires, dark family secrets, and pirates’ hidden treasure all have resonance on Contraband Bayou in 1883.

The Banquet will be held on Saturday evening at the Marque Hotel Canberra, commencing 7pm with pre-dinner drinks. Tickets are $52 per person (drinks extra).”

The reason you had no recipe last night was that I was busy Star Trekking. There was a sad lack of food in the film. I’m making up for it tonight by using a recipe from Martha Washington’s 18th century book. Except I’m cheating. Madly.

Her recipe for curd pudding uses fresh curd (obviously) where I am using my third tub of Perfect Italiano cheese (kindly donated, as I explained in the first post). It’s not a sweet cake by modern standards, so I used the savoury ricotta, which is basically ricotta with a little salt. This means I can skip the salt bit of the recipe. I’m also using butter and egg yolk, which aren’t part of the recipe at all. The egg yolk is left over from the other night and needs finishing (so it’s one egg and 2 egg yolks – you could use 2 full eggs and get a lighter version) The butter replaces marrow and suet. It ’s not only the vegetarian version – it’s the kosher version.

From an historical point of view, this is not a good exchange. Firstly, suet and marrow add more flavour than butter and two flavours, where I only have one. It will not be quite as sophisticated a dish as it should have been. Secondly, suet and marrow are important to English and English colonial cooking in the eighteenth century. I am distorting the recipe beyond my historical intolerance.

I’m doing this for a reason. An important reason. So many cooks do what I’m doing. They say “I can’t eat this” and “I won’t eat that” or “I have this left over.” For personal cooking, this is fine. But what you’re cooking is between one and twenty steps removed from the dish as it was known at the time. How far it is depends on how likely and close the substitutions are. Butter is fine for the cooking for the period, but not really as a replacement for marrow and suet.

Having said that, the dish as a modern one and the ricotta in it will stand and fall according to the taste. Butter and cheese and currants are not the same as suet and cheese and marrow and currants. My taste memory kept prompting me to add sugar with the ingredients I used, and I may have to sprinkle sugar on at the end: important savoury dimensions have been lost with my substitutions. It’s in the oven now, and I’m dead curious to see how it comes out.

Curd pudding

1 tub savoury ricotta
1 generous oz shredded butter
1/3 teaspoon nutmeg
a small sprinkle rose water
2 eggs or one egg and leftover egg yolks (beaten)
2-3 tablespoons plain flour
currants to taste (I love currants, so I used about 1/3 cup)

Bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.

RESULT: Really yummy. It would make a good dessert (especially with double cream) for those who don’t like their sweetness to be all sugar. The substitutes may make this dish inauthentic, but they were worth doing anyhow.

Yesterday I made a recipe from a fourteenth century Catalan cookbook. Medieval Catalan cuisine was very Mediterranean. I need a contrast. I’ll stick to the fourteenth century, because it’s a century where many advances were being made in the writing down of recipes. Mainly, lots more recipes were being written down than earlier, which was partly due to increasing literacy, but a certain amount was due to the rise of the celebrity chef.

The compiler of the Forme of Cury, a fourteenth century English collection of recipes, claimed to cook for Richard II. I used the transcription from Pleyn Delit (2nd edition, Hieatt, Hosington and Butler), because I like reminding people that it’s a fabulous cookbook, but you can also find it online, in a Project Gutenberg version of the 18th century edition.

The cheese I chose from my rapidly-diminishing collection was Perfect Italiano’s “original” ricotta. It’s not the sort of cheese that the recipe describes. The recipe demands a curd, whereas a ricotta (as the name suggests) is twice-cooked. Making a curd cheese is so easy, too, that replacing it with a ricotta is a rather modern Australian thing to do. Ricotta is so easy to obtain, fresh, and most curd cheeses around here are of the lumpy variety. And for deep-fried stuff, one doesn’t want lumps. So if it tastes good with the ricotta, that’s a handy thing for party food.

I didn’t follow the modern adaptation: I used the original Middle English with adaptations following the notes and my interpretation thereof. I really should have fried them in lard or suet. I can’t do lard at all, and really didn’t want to use suet with dairy (sometimes being Jewish forces decisions) so I fried in canola oil. Lard would probably be more authentic, if you’re trying for authenticity. Canola oil is very, very inauthentic.

I put in a bit of flour, following the editors’ suggestion, but only a little, and I do think I could have left it out.

The editors of Pleyn Delit suggested that the patties could be lighter if the eggs were whipped, but also thought that “it is unlikely that a medieval cook could have done that.”

I feel guilty disagreeing, but disagree I must. My mother has always said that you can beat eggs to a peak by hand, as long as you have lots of kitchen help to do it for you. My sisters and I did lots of beating egg whites when I was a child. I didn’t do it tonight, though, because as an adult I am far lazier and less patient.

The fritters were nice, but not as magic as yesterday’s dish. They should be let cool a little before eating, and they really benefit from the sugar. They fry very nicely in a half inch or so of canola oil. Any more oil is wasted, as these fritters are so light they rise straight to the top. I blobbed scant dessertspoons in and every single one came up perfectly. It looked as if I had spent ages shaping the rounds.

Only turn them once: they’re fragile. They go a gorgeous golden-brown and the frying makes the ricotta taste like a stronger cheese.

Frytour of Mylke

250 g ricotta
1 tsp plain flour
2 egg whites
sugar

Beat everything together. Fry until golden. Sprinkle with sugar and serve.

All my plans for answering questions have been derailed by Perfect Italiano. This is a good thing. Let me explain.

Someone called Jaya emailed me a few days ago, asking was I interested in trying samples of Perfect Italiano and providing recipes. I said I was interested in trying the cheeses on historical recipes and blogging the results and so she sent me some.

Why am I interested in this? Isn’t it the opposite of analyzing recipes and foodways and trying to understand the past? Not really. We always use modern ingredients when we’re cooking Ancient Roman or Medieval or Renaissance or any other historical food. We can get quite close to the original flavours if we’re really careful, but we’re still approximating.

What I’m doing this time is being quite honest about “This is a variation on this modern ingredient.” I’m choosing a variety of recipes from different places and times, ones that I feel would be interesting made as modern dishes. And I’m going to report on it here.

I restrained myself for a full hour before trying my first dish. You see, there was a light ricotta in the pack.

Light ricotta is so very much a product of modern Australia. Less than 6% fat – cheese with about the same amount of fat than less fat milk had in the US, a century ago. In Jane Austen’s day this would be seen as invalid food.

I thought I’d make two dishes from it. This was a bit ambitious, as it turned out, and the fault lies firmly with my first recipe.

My thought about a low fat ricotta, was that it would be perfect for a delicate dish. There’s one cheese dessert I know that is so delicate that a little bit too much orange blossom water can spoil it. You can find the original recipe in Barbara Santich’s The Original Mediterranean Cuisine. It comes from the Libre de Sent Sovi, a Catalan cookbook from the Middle Ages (a brand new version has just been put out, by the way – I need to get it – which is entirely not relevant here).

The dish is called Menjar d’Angels – it’s what angels eat. And the low fat ricotta is an improvement on an already-delectable original. I’m afraid that I made an orange-blossom version and a rose water version and ate all of both myself and I have no more low fat ricotta. If you were really diet conscious, you could make it with a low calorie sweetener, but I’d be very careful which one you choose: it really is a very delicate dish and an artificial aftertaste would spoil it.

Menjar d’Angels

250 g low fat ricotta (as fresh as possible – make sure the use by date is a long, long way away)
2-4 teaspoons caster or icing sugar (to taste)
½ teaspoon orange blossom water or rosewater (again, to taste – add a bit at a time and taste – peoples’ preference for these fragrances highly individual)

Mix everything. Eat. You can eat them spread on biscotti, or straight from the bowl.

I thought I’d tease your tastebuds with just a hint of the Conflux testing.

Yes, it’s all over. I’m working madly on getting the information together for the chef, and I’m almost done.

The cakes and were the biggest surprise. As the testing happened and more cooks checked in with me, it became more and more obvious that I was not the only one enjoying cakes. Some were failures. Some were boring. Not many. Not many at all. That Southern cuisine late in the nineteenth century was simply chock-full of delectable cakes and pastries.

When October comes, you’ll be able to luxuriate in the names of these cakes and pies and to take the recipes and try them for yourselves. Until then, how about some of the feels of the cooks who tried them out and of the cooks’ friends who sacrificed much in the name of morning tea?

Fluffy, nice
Lives up to name, have with icing and cream filling
Good but needs icing and lemon sauce
yum
Gorgeous
Very yum – much yumness
Abs. gorgeous lemony almondy biccie
Very, very yum.
2 thumbs up
Abs. yum
Very very yum
Very good, pastry esp delish
Yum. Sweet, though
Loved
Cake amazing, but careful with frosting
Fabbo
Brilliant – but needs to be very fresh.
excellent for lovers of peel
Brill
Rose incredibly – those who loved it adored it
Excellent – but have cream filling
yum
Superamazingyum – class said
Yum
Lovely
good
yummo
Nice, class loved them
Really delicious – use pecans
Yum!

I can’t introduce you properly to the fabulous people who have got us so very far in such a short time, but I can name them by first name or alias, at least. They are Alyson, Anna, Callistra, Elizabeth, Ros, Ingrid, Karen, Kathleen, Kazari, Kathryn,
Stuart, Llyn, Marion, Sonya, Nicole, Rachel, Suzanne and Zoe. I hope I haven’t missed anyone. Thank you all so much!

Right now my biggest preoccupation is sorting out the food testing results for the Conflux banquet. I’m still waiting a few responses (a couple of which are particularly important) but tabulating it all and balancing comments is more complex this year. It’s the menu, you see. The structure of it is so very different, that sorting out the end result takes longer.

I find it interesting that only one of the testers has sent me a really colourful comment. They’ve all done fabulous jobs, but the food is closer to home, somehow and so the descriptions are more familiar.

The one really colourful description doesn’t need an explanation (except I’ve edited your daughter’s name out, Rachel, so that she has privacy and also full deniability):

We tried the Lemon Pie this evening and my 5yo daughter … has a few things to say about it.

“I didn’t like the way that the lemon sauce tasted too sweet. And I did like the meringue because it wasn’t too sweet. After we had the cake we had to brush our teeth because it hurt the sides of our tongues and throat.”

In short, Lemon Pie = FAIL.”

Most of the lemon pies didn’t match modern Australian notions of high deliciousness. You’ll be pleased to know that other pies worked better. Sugar pie was one of them. This means I get to sing old pop music when anyone asked for hints of where the menu might (or might not) be going.

In case you want to sing along with me, here’s the music:

Today is exciting. Today was exciting?

Most of the excitement was numbers, but some of it was a really fine cornbread recipe and the current excitement is nothing to do with food history, but is an online SF convention, happening at a computer near you, next weekend (draft program here). But I won’t talk about the latter in this forum, because there is, alas, no food history component to Flycon. There ought to be, but there is not.

Numbers are the order of the day, so numbers are what you get.

The first one is 53. That’s the current number of recipes I am down to test for that other SF convention, Conflux. Thank goodness I’ve done a whole heap of them already, otherwise that number would make me crawl under my bed and whimper. It’s not my final number, it’s just the number that the current round of tests will bring me to. Just as the final number will bring me to a waistline size that officially makes me as round as a rubber ball.

The second number is 126. This is the total number of recipes that are out for testing or have been out for testing. This is 25% of the total recipe to be tested in a perfect world. Since it’s an imperfect world, I’ve found ways to diminish the numbers of recipes a bit faster than natural. It’s still too slow, but I only have 30 pages of recipes still to find testers for. That’s 30 out of 87 (or was it ninety-something?). Only a third to hand out instead of the ¾ there ought to be.

Several testers have reported in, which means that the number of those recipes that have actually been tested is 55. Or is that 56? Did I count the cornbread I cooked tonight?

And that ends this episode of food testing by numbers. Now I need to look at those recipes and get a market list together for my next batch of Southern delectables. One thing I already know, without looking: I need eggs, lots of eggs.

Tonight is a break from Muskett because I need to report back on a whole bunch of recipe tests. So much has been tested. Cornpone that was dull, cornbread that was delightful. Small cakes that defied foodies: they tried and tried and tried to guess the ingredients and were entirely puzzled when they were wrong, time after time. A velvet cake that was so very good it necessitated three phone calls in a week, specifically to tell me so.

Basically, my team and I have 3 ½ weeks to go and are 10% through the actual cooking. Over ¼ of the recipes are out for testing, though and some of the tests bring back such good results that the total that needs testing diminishes. So it’ a bit overwhelming but not totally impossible.

One thing I keep meaning to discuss. Here is a good place.

When a recipe from, say, the nineteenth century says ‘white vinegar’ they normally mean white wine vinegar. One tester uses white balsamic vinegar and another used the cheap acetic acid vinegar – neither of these would work.

The rule of thumb with historical recipes is that you can’t rely on the thing you use being the exact thing someone 100 years ago would have used. The big change in Australia is that we use a lot of balsamic vinegar every day. Twenty years ago we used a lot of red wine vinygar and had a thing for flavoured vinegars. A bit before that, cider vinegar was very much in vogue. All of these are on sale, but it’s a bit important to know what as on sale or home made at the time of the recipes one is reading.

I used vinegar as an example, but it’ not the only one. I’ve had testers use polenta because it was the only cornflour they could find easily (proper cornmeal is available at the Chinese shop in Phillip, if Canberra’s want to know, and at one of the Indian shops in Glenhunty Rd, Carnegie in Melbourne. I don’t know about other cities – sorry.) Some testers have asked about soda and some have asked about whether white flour is suitable.

The testers who have asked first have done better, because I could advise them.

Regardless, it demonstrates a really important rule for historical cooking. Ingredients change over time and place. What Mrs Fisher of the Old South knew is not what Mrs South in Fisher knows. None of us can cook from historical cookbooks without some understanding of the place and time.

I used to give as an example the friend who read something 15th century English and it had corn in it. They had no idea that ’seething corn’ could mean seething barley or wheat. They thought corn was maize, always and forever. It’s still a good example. I use it to remind myself that every single foray I make into an old cookbook is a foray into a particularly delectable foreign country.

I’m still a hothouse of minor ailments, but I really want to give you a banquet update because there’s so much news.

There are a hundred recipes being tested over the next ten days. I need to find testers for more of them in the two weeks after that, because most of the testing has to be finished by the end of March. The date has been moved forward. Way forward. Thirty six pages of recipes still need owners. My amazing prophetic function says that many people around me will eat cake or pie during March.

The reason for this is rather good.

Karen (Conflux chair) and I met the head chef at The Marque on Friday. I told him I was scared of him and he asked why.

“Because the menu is so different this year.”

Which it is. Very different. I explained it to him and his face lit up. He loves it. He loves the challenge of it, but also the fact that it’s familiar-sounding recipes which aren’t familiar at all. It also breaks some of the cardinal rules of fine dining. And there is a shortage of leafy greens. Not a shred of lettuce or a floret of broccoli. Australians have trouble envisaging a dinner that lacks greens.

We’re all agreed, though. It looks good, very good. And the chef likes it so much he wants it early. Karen likes it so much she wants it priced early. Karen was entirely apologetic when she said this: the chef’s eyes were full of dreams. So my March is full of books and full of teaching and full of cooking.

I’d better get over this dratted virus very, very quickly.

Every year, preparations for the banquet take their own path. I’m testing recipes far more intensively than I have done any other year, because once March hits, I’m not going to have much in the way of breathing space until late April. I have teaching and I have fiction coming out and I have other obligations. In fact, it’s going to be so busy that even looking ahead is daunting.

I’ve prepared for this in a number of ways. I spent time in January catching up with all sorts of things, making up for the time I lost when I was ill (I’m still ill, to be honest, but it’s not nearly as debilitating as it was a few months ago). I caught up with a large chunk of it, but am not there yet.

Now I’m sprinting through as much recipe testing as I can, so that I can make sense of things early and make sensible decisions. So that I can leave testing for a month and not fall behind.

I had no idea of the mouthfeels of the cuisine or what sort of things made it distinctive. This was very dangerous – we all think we know a lot about Southern cooking because of KFC. KFC is not Southern cooking. It comes from a lot of the same basics, but it’s Southern classic the way an icy-pole is real ice cream.

I have nine recipe testers (and happy to have more, if anyone’s been shy about volunteering) and I have given them each as many recipes as they are wiling to handle and then taken the number and doubled it, and that’s what I’m testing over a three week period. I am exactly half way through my share of this first batch. Between us, we’ll have tested seventy-five recipes in three weeks. A fifth of the whole, though I may be able diminish the numbers of remaining recipes, if the results of the first round shape up nicely.

This approach has one massive advantage. Tonight, with a duck and biscuits and duck sauce all happening at once I realised that Southern cooking has some characteristic scents. I hate it early on, because there is so much fat that it overwhelms me. But when the dishes are almost there, that invasive scent of butter and other fats mellow and what you get is a very welcoming, warming scent. This transition has happened with every single meat dish and quite a few of the other ones so far. There is a moment when everything turns delectable.

Today I’m taking a break from cooking.

I should never have pulled together all the printouts of recipes I wanted to test. Not the big list. That’s still terrifyingly long. The one for the next fortnight.

I have eight people helping me with testing. The least anyone has taken to check out is two recipes and the most is ten. Between them they’re making a dent in what needs doing. So I ought to be able to plough through my bit of it easily. Except I did that printout.

Basically, my nice pages tell me what I’ve done and what I’ve left still to cook, just in the next 2 weeks. And looking at them makes me tired.

Let me talk you through it so that you, too, can be tired and you too can take a day off cooking.

I have 3 savoury and three dessertish sweet potato dishes, none of them yet cooked. I was going to make two or three of them yesterday afternoon and get my classes and my friends to sample them yesterday and today, but life intervened.

I have one egg dish, which I have actually made and which worked, as opposed to the several recipes for biscuits, which I have not yet started on at all. Maybe I’ll do one recipe for biscuits tomorrow, to go with the duck I’m roasting and the brown onion sauce that’s to go with the duck. That’s a good idea. Three recipes ticked off and just one dinner (and lunch and dinner again and lunch again – the portions are not small in Southern recipes in the nineteenth century. One of my cake recipes served 21 people, including seconds and thirds.)

I have pies. Many pies. We’re talking a US cuisine, so of course there are pies. One pie is made (and eaten by the Conflux committee, with much gusto) and a few more are still to come.

Fried chicken is done – three times over already. Yes, since I stared testing a few days ago I have fried chicken in three different ways. I’ve only made two kinds of fritters, so I have finished with fried chicken (for now) but not with fritters.

And that’s all my printout tells me. It really doesn’t explain why I’m taking the day off. I must be purely lazy.

Yesterday and today I cooked an awful lot of rich food. My idea was to use the weekend to make inroads into the recipe testing. It worked. I never want to eat again, but it worked.

I made two types of fried chicken (in very small batches). The results were passable, but not magic. I’m contemplating fried chicken further because there must be a really good recipe from the right period out there, but all the ones I’ve been looking at are similar in nature to these two.

My friend the barbecue expert found a way of transforming the magic of barbecue beef to a modern barbecue. So, one good excellent recipe for beef and none for chicken. It’s not ideal, but it’s a good start.

The vegetarian food also got off to a mixed start. One reasonable and one not particularly nice recipe of the two I did first. But an egg recipe turned out to eb great for vegetables as well, so it’s, again, not perfect, but a reasonable beginning.

All the cakes, all the pies, all the nibblies so far are delectable. Wonderful. Entirely perfect for Australian tastebuds. How do I know this? I took them to meetings and to classes and slipped them into bags of things I was returning to friends. I had a swarm of demands for the recipes.

I won’t be making any of these recipes public until after Conflux. I never do. I promise, though, that I’ll release all the fabulous cakes and pies, even if we don’t use them on the final menu.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to sleep off my endeavours. I have achieved a great deal this weekend, but I am exhausted. Also about 3 sizes bigger in clothing.

I’m very good at terrifying myself. Today I’ve outdone myself.

Last night I made a shopping list, because I was going to the markets with a friend and I thought “I can get some of this Southern cooking underway – all I need is to plan a little.” I’ve tested three dishes already. Two of them were wild successes and the other was a bit sad, and this emboldened me.

I have a big bag of corn in my lounge room, looking rather intimidating. I have a giant cabbage. I have much sweet potato and ordinary potato. I have three chickens. I have flour and more butter and cream and buttermilk than I would normally eat in a year. And that’s not all. I have a fridge full of fabulous stuff, all ready to be tested.

So what is scary about this? It’s for testing in the next three weeks. Most of it in the next two weeks.

I thought “Hey, I can do this.” I looked at that big bag of corn and that amazing amount of cream.

I thought “I can’t possibly need all this.” So I printed out all the recipes I’m cooking. All twenty of them. I have pies and fritters and cake and roast meat and fried chicken. I have biscuits and jumbles and potato salad. I have… a major case of wondering how I’m going to do all this, and lose weight too.

Tomorrow’s Conflux committee meeting doesn’t know it yet, but they are about to endure jumbles and a cake and maybe even a pie. I’m going to share the love.

I am getting very excited about the Conflux banquet. I know it’s way two early to get very excited. I know the banquet isn’t till October. It’s just that things suddenly feel exciting.

First of all, the first two recipes tests went like a dream. My Tuesday night and Wednesday morning classes ate the cakes that appeared magically from five minutes work (and a bit of rising time) an declared that velvet cakes were delectable. Tonight, some friends tasted the first biscuit (sweet one – a macaroon, not savoury) and also enjoyed them. Two thumbs up as the verdict.

It’s going to be a very interesting testing period if al the recipes turn out to suit Australian taste buds so very well.

The other thing that has happened is an email from the Chair of Conflux. Am I ready to meet with the hotel chef? Oh yes, I’m as ready as ready. I have a note of what I think we’re doing all prepared and the main problems and my suggested solutions sketched out.

Its going to be a bit of a surprise to him, this menu. Last year’s was so very elegant and formal and had so many exquisite and tiny courses. This year it’s different. Tamara sums it up in two words “Scarlett O’Hara.” What that means is something quite, quite far from any of the banquets I’ve done to date. It’s not the date or the region: it’s the style of the gathering. It’s going to be a socially engaged event, with the possibility of dancing. And the food and the courses reflect this. And I am getting excited all over again.

I’ve got twenty recipes to send to testers tomorrow (and heaps more for those people who want to test and haven’t quite got round to asking) and then I can find something scrummy and do some more testing, myself.

My favourite bit of information so far, is that those two-thumbs-up macaroons taste exactly like the ones I’ve always made. I’m pretty sure I know why, to. But that’s a story for another night.

I’ve done all the groundwork and I’m ready to begin the bit of the Conflux banquet preparations that is most fun for everyone. I have 400 odd recipes to be tested. What I need now are lots of volunteers. You don’t have to have done it previously, and if you’ve tested recipes before you are more than welcome to test more this year.

The dishes are for Southern US from the nineteenth century - amazing stuff (and mostly, not so hard). Not diet food but it really does look delicious.

Email me at banquet(at)confluxdotorgdotau or at any other address you might have. Let me know how many recipes you are happy to cook before March (1, 2, 20 - I do not hate numbers as long as they are above zero) and any food restrictions you might have. I’ll send out more calls after the first batch of test reports comes back (I’m going to use that first batch to reduce the numbers of recipes somewhat).

I need everyone who wants to join in – doesn’t matter where you live! I can’t possibly eat all this food. If I do, I will need new clothes.

I especially need people who are willing to venture into the old-fashioned barbecue territory. Slow cooking for many hours. I simply don’t have the facilities to do this myself – all I can do is test the sauces with roast meat, which is just not good enough.

I have so many delectable cakes and pies to be tested, too.

Email me! (or leave a note here and I can email you)