I left it there for the fools but they will never find it.

[caz]

Have you had a New York bagel? I have had bagels all over the US, and the ones from NYC are special. I don't know anyone who has actually eaten a genuine NYC bagel who does not agree with me.

There is a coffee shop in Southern Indiana, where I went to college, that bakes bagels and pastries in-house, completely from scratch, and the bagels are very, very good. They are the closest to New York bagels I have had outside of New York, but they are not quite there. My aunt's bagels are really good too, and she will tell you that since she left New York, she hasn't been able to get them to turn out quite as good.

Hi Rivkah,

The bagels sold here in the UK as 'New York' bagels do not, in my humble opinion, make good ambassadors for whatever reason. Probably not remotely their fault but there it is.

I have never had a bagel that can compare to those made on the premises in the 24-hour bagel shop in Brick Lane (there are two shops, but I always buy mine from the second one coming from the Bethnal Green Rd end of Brick Lane). Hot salt beef and English mustard, prawn or egg mayo, or smoked salmon and cream cheese are four of my favourite fillings.

Oh and fried kidneys on hot buttered toast are to die for - not literally except in Kate's case.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I'm saying why I think someone like Oscar Wilde didn't write it.

Fair enough, Rivkah, although since we don't know how the author intended to portray their fictional "Sir Jim", we can't say that the result fell short of those intentions. Anyway, as far as I am aware nobody was fingering dear old Oscar as the brains behind the job. But we can't ask him how he would have set about such a project, nor what the result would have looked like. Not just because he is dead, but because nobody knows what the author set out to achieve.

If James Maybrick had an enemy who was planning to use it to discredit him, and then stuck it in a bottom drawer when Maybrick died suddenly, that's entirely something else. Although, accusing your business rival of being Jack the Ripper is a little silly-- much better to accuse him of shady business practices.

You see this is the thing. I am not arguing that an enemy of the real James wrote it to discredit him; I am saying we don't know what the author had in mind for it, and by making the above suggestion then arguing against it you have merely proved my point.

It could have been written in modern times to make piles of money. Although, confessing to it then accusing your estranged wife of doing it with you is more than a little silly - much better to sit back and let Paul Feldman convince the world it's genuine while you count the money as it continues to roll in.

But of course, if it had been written in modern times to make piles of money we almost certainly wouldn't be here now, talking about how Oscar Wilde would or would not have had "Sir Jim" confess to the murders over 63 pages.

Love,

Caz
X

[curious4]

Mrs B's recipes

Doughnuts were referred to by Mrs Beeton, whose famous Household Management book was published in 1861, as "Indian Fritters", and if I remember correctly were filled with apple. I think the word 'doughnut' is American, and probably a lot older than we might think. In Victorian times people went nuts (pardon the pun) for anything sweet - some of Mrs B's recipes for cakes contain more sugar than we use in a year in 2013. I've always prided myself on my baking abilities, but will no longer countenance doughnuts, too much consideration for my arteries.

I was born just after WW2, and I can still remember 'cake shops' - there was at least one in every community, selling anything and everything so long as it was sweet and/or doused in sugar. They still exist here in the UK, but not as common as they once were, doubtless due to our greater concern for our health than used to be the case. But they exist in France even today - find a good boulangerie and my wife is in seventh heaven.

Finally, the best Jewish restaurants and food shops are still in and around Whitechapel, as the East End of London still has a large Jewish population.

What all this has to do with James Maybrick is beyond me....!

Graham

Hello Graham,

The recipe for indian fritters uses jam to sandwich together two fried ball-shaped pieces of dough. Near enough a doughnut. Picked up my copy second hand - not the original, one of a limited edition printed in the 1960s and full of advice on everything, from how much to pay your servants to how to remove scorchmarks from linen. Fascinating reading.

Best wishes,
C4

And yes, her recipes probably did kill more people than Jack! "Take three dozen oysters.." and that was just for the sauce!

[Graham]

Anyone fancy discussing James Maybrick as a possible candidate for Jack the Ripper?

What a splendid idea! Where shall we start? This isn't the first thread on these boards to be hi-jacked by food!

Graham

[Gladiator]

... doughnut ... doughnut ... doughnut ...

Anyone fancy discussing James Maybrick as a possible candidate for Jack the Ripper?

[RivkahChaya]

I don't know how trustworthy Wikipedia is, but a lot of words have folk etymologies. I know I've seen "dough-nought" in old books, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a back-formation, and doughnut didn't come first.

I'll admit I made an assumption about Dunkin and the word "donut" because they made a stink about some other company using it in a trademark once; I guess I misunderstood, or misremembered the point of the suit, but I thought they were claiming to have invented the spelling. They may have just been claiming it was associated with them. I don't remember the outcome, at any rate.

I can tell you that I was a teenager before I heard of something without a hole called a "doughnut," because the filled ones really are called paczkies in the east-- south of New England, but still "North," which is to say, north of Virginia/W.VA. The non-WASPy area east of the mid-West.

[Graham]

Rivkah,

Etymology
"Dough nut"

The earliest known recorded usage of the term dates to an 1808 short story[7] describing a spread of "fire-cakes and dough-nuts." Washington Irving's reference to "doughnuts" in 1809 in his History of New York is more commonly cited as the first written recording of the term. Irving described "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks."[8] These "nuts" of fried dough might now be called doughnut holes. Doughnut is the more traditional spelling, and still dominates outside the US.[9][10] At present, doughnut and the shortened form donut are both pervasive in American English.[11]
"Donut"

The first known printed use of donut was in Peck's Bad Boy and his Pa by George W. Peck, published in 1900, in which a character is quoted as saying, "Pa said he guessed he hadn't got much appetite, and he would just drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut."[12] According to John T. Edge (Donuts, an American passion 2006) the alternative spelling “donut” was invented when the New York–based Display Doughnut Machine Corporation abbreviated the word to make it more pronounceable by the foreigners they hoped would buy their automated doughnut making equipment.[13][14] The donut spelling also showed up in a Los Angeles Times article dated August 10, 1929 in which Bailey Millard jokingly complains about the decline of spelling, and that he "can't swallow the 'wel-dun donut' nor the ever so 'gud bred'. The interchangeability of the two spellings can be found in a series of "National Donut Week" articles in The New York Times that covered the 1939 World's Fair. In four articles beginning October 9, two mention the donut spelling. Dunkin' Donuts, which was founded in 1948 under the name Open Kettle (Quincy, Massachusetts), is the oldest surviving company to use the donut variation; other chains, such as the defunct Mayflower Doughnut Corporation (1931), did not use that spelling.[15] According to the Oxford Dictionary while "doughnut" is used internationally, the spelling "donut" is American.[16]

Thank you Wikipedia.

Nut is nothing to do with 'nought' - it means the 'nut' of dough that was used to make the delicacy, which in its earliest form (and still is here in England) spherical, and often filled with jam, apple, marmalade, whatever, to make it even more unhealthy.

Graham

[RivkahChaya]

Doughnuts were referred to by Mrs Beeton, whose famous Household Management book was published in 1861, as "Indian Fritters", and if I remember correctly were filled with apple. I think the word 'doughnut' is American, and probably a lot older than we might think. In Victorian times people went nuts (pardon the pun) for anything sweet - some of Mrs B's recipes for cakes contain more sugar than we use in a year in 2013.

If the word "doughnut" is American, then it's pretty old, because it used to be "dough-nought," you know, a zero made from dough. It been a long tome since American English used the word "nought."

"Donut" actually belongs to Duncan, and as such, should be capitalized, but it's gotten to be like Kleenex, or Band-Aid, in US English anyway, where the most common brand name becomes the generic term.

If you come from the Eastern US, where there are a lot of immigrants from E. Europe, particularly Poland, only unfilled pastries with holes are doughnuts. The circular filled pastries are paczkies. It's pronounced "patch-key," and it's a Polish word. It sounds very much like a Yiddish word that means "hanging around, doing nothing," so it caught on.

[Michael W Richards]

Since any given area almost anywhere in the world would have access to the ingredients used in making bagels, or bread, one would think each locations flavor would reflect both the taste and quality of those locally harvested ingredients. Mike mentioned perhaps the water in NY makes those bagels taste better...well, .. they can and do bottle some of the finest tap water available in NY, so that may well be a contributing factor.

But some places do make simple foods better than others....if youve ever eaten in Italy you will know what I mean.

Best regards

[Graham]

It'd be easier to hide strychnine, or arsenic, for that matter, on a powdered sugar doughnut. Did they have those in London in 1888?

Doughnuts were referred to by Mrs Beeton, whose famous Household Management book was published in 1861, as "Indian Fritters", and if I remember correctly were filled with apple. I think the word 'doughnut' is American, and probably a lot older than we might think. In Victorian times people went nuts (pardon the pun) for anything sweet - some of Mrs B's recipes for cakes contain more sugar than we use in a year in 2013. I've always prided myself on my baking abilities, but will no longer countenance doughnuts, too much consideration for my arteries.

I was born just after WW2, and I can still remember 'cake shops' - there was at least one in every community, selling anything and everything so long as it was sweet and/or doused in sugar. They still exist here in the UK, but not as common as they once were, doubtless due to our greater concern for our health than used to be the case. But they exist in France even today - find a good boulangerie and my wife is in seventh heaven.

Finally, the best Jewish restaurants and food shops are still in and around Whitechapel, as the East End of London still has a large Jewish population.

What all this has to do with James Maybrick is beyond me....!

Graham

[RivkahChaya]

Chris,

It's connected to the idea that Florie did indeed instruct the cook to make bagels (because she was Jewish) and perhaps put strychnine in them. We have to pin down the exact type of bagel before we can go there.

Mike

It'd be easier to hide strychnine, or arsenic, for that matter, on a powdered sugar doughnut. Did they have those in London in 1888?

[Chris]

So the writing on the wall in Goulston Street was really telling us that Maybrick had eaten a bagel which had disagreed with him?

[The Good Michael]

Chris,

It's connected to the idea that Florie did indeed instruct the cook to make bagels (because she was Jewish) and perhaps put strychnine in them. We have to pin down the exact type of bagel before we can go there.

Mike

[Chris]

I can't help feeling that the Maybrick threads aren't what they were.

Once upon a time they were full of educational information on all kinds of erudite topics. What are they full of now? "O costly intercourse of bagels!"

[The Good Michael]

Have you had a New York bagel? I have had bagels all over the US, and the ones from NYC are special. I don't know anyone who has actually eaten a genuine NYC bagel who does not agree with me.

There is a coffee shop in Southern Indiana, where I went to college, that bakes bagels and pastries in-house, completely from scratch, and the bagels are very, very good. They are the closest to New York bagels I have had outside of New York, but they are not quite there. My aunt's bagels are really good too, and she will tell you that since she left New York, she hasn't been able to get them to turn out quite as good.

A recipe is a recipe. Many bagels taste the same because the same recipe is followed. From San Francisco to Miami and from Seattle to New York, you can get the same bagels. There is a New York elitism that one cannot get, however. But I don't like that in my bagel, preferring plain white ones. I suspect that water makes a difference in bagels, but wouldn't make one better than another.

Mike