Confectionery
Confectionery is the art of making confections, which are food items that are rich in sugar and carbohydrates. Exact definitions are difficult. In general, confectionery is divided into two broad and somewhat overlapping categories, bakers' confections and sugar confections. Bakers' confectionery called flour confections, includes principally sweet pastries and similar baked goods. Sugar confectionery includes candies, candied nuts, chewing gum, bubble gum and other confections that are made of sugar. In some cases, chocolate confections are treated as a separate category, as are sugar-free versions of sugar confections; the words candy and lollies are common words for the most common varieties of sugar confectionery. The confectionery industry includes specialized training schools and extensive historical records. Traditional confectionery goes back to ancient times and continued to be eaten through the Middle Ages into the modern era. Before sugar was available in the ancient western world, confectionery was based on honey.
Honey was used in Ancient China, Ancient India, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome to coat fruits and flowers to preserve them or to create sweetmeats. Between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, the Persians, followed by the Greeks, made contact with the Indian subcontinent and its "reeds that produce honey without bees", they adopted and spread sugar and sugarcane agriculture. Sugarcane is indigenous to Southeast Asia. In the early history of sugar usage in Europe, it was the apothecary who had the most important role in the production of sugar-based preparations. Medieval European physicians learned the medicinal uses of the material from the Arabs and Byzantine Greeks. One Middle Eastern remedy for rheums and fevers were little, twisted sticks of pulled sugar called in Arabic al fänäd or al pänäd; these became known in England as alphenics, or more as penidia, pennet or pan sugar. They were the precursors of barley sugar and modern cough drops. In 1390, the Earl of Derby paid "two shillings for two pounds of penydes."
As the non-medicinal applications of sugar developed, the comfitmaker, or confectioner came into being as a separate trade. In the late medieval period the words confyt, comfect or cumfitt were generic terms for all kinds of sweetmeats made from fruits, roots, or flowers preserved with sugar. By the 16th century, a cumfit was more a seed, nut or small piece of spice enclosed in a round or ovoid mass of sugar; the production of comfits was a core skill of the early confectioner, known more in 16th and 17th century England as a comfitmaker. Reflecting their original medicinal purpose, comfits were produced by apothecaries and directions on how to make them appear in dispensatories as well as cookery texts. An early medieval Latin name for an apothecary was confectionarius, it was in this sort of sugar work that the activities of the two trades overlapped and that the word "confectionery" originated. In 1847, the candy bar was invented by Joseph Fry, who discovered a way to mix melted cacao butter back into cocoa powder along with sugar by creating a paste that could press into a mold.
Confections are defined by the presence of sweeteners. These are sugars, but it is possible to buy sugar-free candies, such as sugar-free peppermints; the most common sweetener for home cooking is table sugar, chemically a disaccharide containing both glucose and fructose. Hydrolysis of sucrose gives a mixture called invert sugar, sweeter and is a common commercial ingredient. Confections commercial ones, are sweetened by a variety of syrups obtained by hydrolysis of starch; these sweeteners include all types of corn syrup. Bakers' confectionery includes sweet baked goods those that are served for the dessert course. Bakers' confections are sweet foods that are baked. Major categories include cakes, sweet pastries, doughnuts and cookies. In the Middle East and Asia, flour-based confections predominate. Cakes have a somewhat bread-like texture, many earlier cakes, such as the centuries-old stollen, or the older king cake, were rich yeast breads; the variety of styles and presentations extends from simple to elaborate.
Major categories include butter cakes and foam cakes. Confusingly, some desserts that have the word cake in their names, such as cheesecake, are not technically cakes, while others, such as Boston cream pie are cakes despite seeming to be named something else. Pastry is a large and diverse category of baked goods, united by the flour-based doughs used as the base for the product; these doughs are not always sweet, the sweetness may come from the sugar, chocolate, cream, or other fillings that are added to the finished confection. Pastries can be elaborately decorated. Doughnuts may be baked. Scones and related sweet quick breads, such as bannock, are similar to baking powder biscuits and, in sweeter, less traditional interpretations, can seem like a cupcake. Cookies are small, sweet baked treats, they originated as small cakes, some traditional cookies have a soft, cake-like texture. Others are hard. Sugar confections include sweet, sugar-based foods, which are eaten as snack food; this includes sugar candies, candied fruits and nuts, chewing gum, sometimes ice cream.
In some cases, chocolate confections are treated as a separate category, as are sugar-free versions of sugar confections. Different
Alcohol proof
Alcohol proof is a measure of the content of ethanol in an alcoholic beverage. The term was used in the United Kingdom and was equal to about 1.821 times the alcohol by volume. The UK now uses the ABV standard instead of alcohol proof. In the United States, alcohol proof is defined as twice the percentage of ABV; the measurement of alcohol content and the statement of content on bottles of alcoholic beverages is regulated by law in many countries. The term proof dates back to 16th century England, when spirits were taxed at different rates depending on their alcohol content. Spirits were tested by soaking a pellet of gunpowder in them. If the gunpowder could still burn, the spirits were taxed at a higher rate; as gunpowder would not burn if soaked in rum that contained less than 57.15% ABV, rum that contained this percentage of alcohol was defined as having 100 degrees proof. The gunpowder test was replaced by a specific gravity test in 1816. From the 19th century until 1 January 1980, the UK measured alcohol content by proof spirit, defined as spirit with a gravity of 12⁄13 that of water, or 923 kg/m3, equivalent to 57.15% ABV.
The value 57.15% is close to the fraction 4⁄7 ≈ 0.5714. This led to the definition that 100° proof spirit has an ABV of 4⁄7. From this it follows that, to convert the ABV expressed as a percentage to degrees proof, it is only necessary to multiply the ABV by 7⁄4, thus pure 100% alcohol will have 100× = 175° proof, a spirit containing 40% ABV will have 40× = 70° proof. The proof system in the United States was established around 1848 and was based on percent alcohol rather than specific gravity. 50% alcohol by volume was defined as 100 proof. Note that this is different from 50% volume fraction; the latter does not take into account change in volume on mixing. To make 50% ABV from pure alcohol, one would take 50 parts of alcohol and dilute to 100 parts of solution with water, all the while mixing the solution. To make 50% alcohol by volume fraction, one would take 50 parts alcohol and 50 parts water, measured separately, mix them together; the resulting volume will not be 100 parts, but between 96 and 97 parts, since the smaller water molecules can take up some of the space between the larger alcohol molecules.
The use of proof as a measure of alcohol content is now historical. Today, liquor is sold in most locations with labels that state its alcohol content as a percentage of alcohol by volume; the European Union follows recommendations of the International Organization of Legal Metrology. OIML's International Recommendation No. 22 provides standards for measuring alcohol strength by volume and by mass. A preference for one method over the other is not stated in the document, but if alcohol strength by volume is used, it must be expressed as a percentage of total volume, the water/alcohol mixture must have a temperature of 20 °C when measurement is done; the document does not address the labeling of bottles. Since 1 January 1980, the United Kingdom has used the ABV standard to measure alcohol content, as prescribed by the European Union. In common with other EU countries, on 1 January, 1980, Britain adopted the system of measurement recommended by the International Organisation of Legal Metrology, a body with most major nations among its members.
The OIML system measures alcohol strength as a percentage of alcohol by volume at a temperature of 20 °C. It replaced the Sikes system of measuring the proof strength of spirits, used in Britain for over 160 years. Britain, which used to use the Sikes scale to display proof, now uses the European scale set down by the International Organization of Legal Metrology; this scale, for all intents and purposes the same as the Gay-Lussac scale used by much of mainland Europe, was adopted by all the countries in the European Community in 1980. Using the OIML scale or the GL scale is the same as measuring alcohol by volume except that the figures in the latter case are expressed in degrees, not percentages and measured at a temperature of 15 °C. In the United States, alcohol content is measured in terms of the percentage of alcohol by volume; the Code of Federal Regulations requires that liquor labels must state the percentage of ABV. The regulation permits, but does not require, a statement of the proof provided that it is printed close to the ABV number.
For bottled spirits over 100 mL containing no solids, actual alcohol content is allowed to vary within 0.15% of ABV stated on the label. Alcohol proof in the United States is defined as twice the percentage of alcohol by volume. 100-proof whiskey contains 50% alcohol by volume. In the United States the term "degrees proof" is not used. For example, 50% ABV would be described as "100 proof" rather than "100 degrees proof". Canada labels by percentage of alcohol by volume; the old UK proof standard was still in use as late as 1972. Alcohol by volume Cask strength Gravity Volume percent
Trade secret
A trade secret is a formula, process, instrument, commercial method, or compilation of information not known or reasonably ascertainable by others by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors or customers. In some jurisdictions, such secrets are referred to as confidential information; the precise language by which a trade secret is defined varies by jurisdiction, as do the particular types of information that are subject to trade secret protection. Three factors are common to all such definitions: A trade secret is information, not known to the public. In international law, these three factors define a trade secret under article 39 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights referred to as the TRIPS Agreement. In the United States Economic Espionage Act of 1996, "A trade secret, as defined under 18 U. S. C. § 1839, has three parts: information. Trade secrets are an invisible component of a company's intellectual property, their contribution to a company's value, measured as its market capitalization, can be major.
Being invisible, that contribution is hard to measure. Patents are a visible contribution, but delayed, unsuitable for internal innovations. Having an internal scoreboard provides insight into the cost of risks of employees leaving to serve or start competing ventures. In contrast to registered intellectual property, trade secrets are, by definition, not disclosed to the world at large. Instead, owners of trade secrets seek to protect trade secret information from competitors by instituting special procedures for handling it, as well as technological and legal security measures. Legal protections include non-disclosure agreements, work-for-hire and non-compete clauses. In other words, in exchange for an opportunity to be employed by the holder of secrets, an employee may sign agreements to not reveal their prospective employer's proprietary information, to surrender or assign to their employer ownership rights to intellectual work and work-products produced during the course of employment, to not work for a competitor for a given period of time.
Violation of the agreement carries the possibility of heavy financial penalties which operate as a disincentive to reveal trade secrets. However, proving a breach of an NDA by a former stakeholder, working for a competitor or prevailing in a lawsuit for breaching a non-compete clause can be difficult. A holder of a trade secret may require similar agreements from other parties he or she deals with, such as vendors and board members; as a company can protect its confidential information through NDA, work-for-hire, non-compete contracts with its stakeholders, these protective contractual measures create a perpetual monopoly on secret information that does not expire as would a patent or copyright. The lack of formal protection associated with registered intellectual property rights, means that a third party not bound by a signed agreement is not prevented from independently duplicating and using the secret information once it is discovered, such as through reverse engineering. Therefore, trade secrets such as secret formulae are protected by restricting the key information to a few trusted individuals.
Famous examples of products protected by trade secrets are Coca-Cola. Because protection of trade secrets can, in principle, extend indefinitely, it therefore may provide an advantage over patent protection and other registered intellectual property rights, which last only for a specific duration; the Coca-Cola company, for example, has no patent for the formula of Coca-Cola and has been effective in protecting it for many more years than the 20 years of protection that a patent would have provided. In fact, Coca-Cola refused to reveal its trade secret under at least two judges' orders. Companies try to discover one another's trade secrets through lawful methods of reverse engineering or employee poaching on one hand, unlawful methods including industrial espionage on the other. Acts of industrial espionage are illegal in their own right under the relevant governing laws, penalties can be harsh; the importance of that illegality to trade secret law is: if a trade secret is acquired by improper means the secret is deemed to have been misappropriated.
Thus, if a trade secret has been acquired via industrial espionage, its acquirer will be subject to legal liability for having acquired it improperly — this notwithstanding, the holder of the trade secret is obliged to protect against such espionage to some degree in order to safeguard the secret, as under most trade secret regimes, a trade secret is not deemed to exist unless its purported holder takes reasonable steps to maintain its secrecy. Commentators starting with A. Arthur Schiller assert that trade secrets were protected under Roman law by a claim known as actio servi corrupti, interpreted as an "action for making a slave worse"; the Roman law is described as follows: he Roman owner of a mark or firm name was protected against unfair usage by a
Collins English Dictionary
The Collins English Dictionary is a printed and online dictionary of English. It is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow; the edition of the dictionary in 1979 with Patrick Hanks as editor and Lawrence Urdang as editorial director, was the first British dictionary to use the full power of computer databases and typesetting in its preparation. This meant that, for instance, subject editors could control separate definitions of the same word and the results could be blended into the result, rather than one editor being responsible for a word. In a edition, they used the Bank of English established by Hanks at COBUILD to provide typical definitions rather than examples composed by the lexicographer; the current edition is the 13th edition, published in November 2018. The previous edition was the 12th edition, published in October 2014. A special "30th Anniversary" 10th edition was published in 2010, with earlier editions published once every 3–4 years; the unabridged Collins English Dictionary was published on the web on 31 December 2011 on CollinsDictionary.com, along with the unabridged dictionaries of French, German and Italian.
The site includes example sentences showing word usage from the Collins Bank of English Corpus, word frequencies and trends from the Google Ngrams project, word images from Flickr. In August 2012, CollinsDictionary.com introduced Facebook-linked crowd-sourcing for neologisms, whilst still maintaining overall editorial control to remain distinct from Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. This followed an earlier launch of a discussion forum for neologisms in 2004. In May 2015, CollinsDictionary.com added 6500 new Scrabble words to their Collins Official Scrabble Wordlist. The words are based on terms related to and influenced by slang, social media, food and more. CollinsDictionary.com – Collins English Dictionary, American English Dictionary, French, German and Spanish
Triple sec
Triple sec Curaçao triple sec, is a type of strong and colorless orange-flavored liqueur. It is a variety of Curaçao liqueur, an orange-flavored liqueur made from the dried peels of bitter and sweet oranges; the etymology of "triple sec" is unclear. "Sec" is the French word for dry. Triple sec may refer to the schnapps being distilled three times, having triple the flavor, being three times as dry as other spirits, or it could just be a marketing gimmick. Triple sec may be consumed neat on the rocks. However, it is more used as an ingredient in a variety of cocktails, such as sangria, Kamikaze, White Lady, Long Island Iced Tea, Skittle Bomb, Corpse Reviver #2 and Cosmopolitan; the Combier distillery claims that triple sec was invented in 1834 by Jean-Baptiste Combier in Saumur, France. However, the Combier distillery was more famous for its élixir Combier, which contained orange but many other flavorings. According to Cointreau, its orange liqueur was created in 1849. Triple sec was widely known by 1878.
Grand Marnier List of liqueurs
International Bartenders Association
The International Bartenders Association, founded on 24 February 1951 in the saloon of the Grand Hotel in Torquay, England, is an international organisation established in order to represent the best bartenders in the world. An annual event, both World Cocktail Competition and World Flairtending Competition were presented and organised by the IBA; the IBA sanctions a list of official cocktails. Each year the events take place in different destinations. For instance in 2006, the competitions were held in Meliton Porto Carras Hotel, Greece, from 6 October 2006 to 7 October 2006. IBA Cocktails are measured in centilitres rather than the more used millilitres. List of IBA official cocktails Official website
Cocktail
A cocktail is an alcoholic mixed drink, either a combination of spirits, or one or more spirits mixed with other ingredients such as fruit juice, flavored syrup, or cream. There are various types of cocktails, based on the kind of ingredients added; the origins of the cocktail are debated. The Oxford Dictionaries define cocktail as "An alcoholic drink consisting of a spirit or spirits mixed with other ingredients, such as fruit juice or cream". A cocktail can contain alcohol, a sugar, a bitter/citrus; when a mixed drink contains only a distilled spirit and a mixer, such as soda or fruit juice, it is a highball. Many of the International Bartenders Association Official Cocktails are highballs; when a mixed drink contains only a distilled spirit and a liqueur, it is a duo, when it adds a mixer, it is a trio. Additional ingredients may be sugar, milk and various herbs. Mixed drinks without alcohol that resemble cocktails are known as "mocktails" or "virgin cocktails"; the origin of the word cocktail is disputed.
The first recorded use of cocktail not referring to a horse is found in The Morning Post and Gazetteer in London, March 20, 1798: The Oxford English Dictionary cites the word as originating in the U. S; the first recorded use of cocktail as a beverage in the United States appears in The Farmer's Cabinet, April 28, 1803: Drank a glass of cocktail—excellent for the head... Call'd at the Doct's. found Burnham—he looked wise—drank another glass of cocktail. The first definition of cocktail known to be an alcoholic beverage appeared in The Balance and Columbian Repository May 13, 1806, it is said to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else. Etymologist Anatoly Liberman endorses as "highly probable" the theory advanced by Låftman, which Liberman summarizes as follows: It was customary to dock the tails of horses that were not thoroughbred... They were called cocktailed horses simply cocktails. By extension, the word cocktail was applied to a vulgar, ill-bred person raised above his station, assuming the position of a gentleman but deficient in gentlemanly breeding....
Of importance is... the mention of water as an ingredient.... Låftman concluded that cocktail was an acceptable alcoholic drink, but diluted, not a "purebred", a thing "raised above its station". Hence the appropriate slang word used earlier about inferior horses and sham gentlemen. In his book Imbibe!, David Wondrich speculates that cocktail is a reference to a practice for perking up an old horse by means of a ginger suppository so that the animal would "cock its tail up and be frisky."Several authors have theorized that cocktail may be a corruption of cock ale. There is a lack of clarity on the origins of cocktails. Traditionally cocktails were a mixture of spirits, sugar and bitters, but by the 1860s, a cocktail included a liqueur. The first publication of a bartenders' guide which included cocktail recipes was in 1862 – How to Mix Drinks. In addition to recipes for punches, slings, shrubs, flips, a variety of other mixed drinks were 10 recipes for "cocktails". A key ingredient differentiating cocktails from other drinks in this compendium was the use of bitters.
Mixed drinks popular today that conform to this original meaning of "cocktail" include the Old Fashioned whiskey cocktail, the Sazerac cocktail, the Manhattan cocktail. The ingredients listed match the ingredients of an Old Fashioned, which originated as a term used by late 19th century bar patrons to distinguish cocktails made the "old-fashioned" way from newer, more complex cocktails. In the 1869 recipe book Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, by William Terrington, cocktails are described as: Cocktails are compounds much used by "early birds" to fortify the inner man, by those who like their consolations hot and strong; the term highball appears during the 1890s to distinguish a drink composed only of a distilled spirit and a mixer. The first "cocktail party" thrown was by Mrs. Julius S. Walsh Jr. of St. Louis, Missouri, in May 1917. Walsh invited 50 guests to her home at noon on a Sunday; the party lasted an hour. The site of this first cocktail party still stands. In 1924, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis bought the Walsh mansion at 4510 Lindell Boulevard, it has served as the local archbishop's residence since.
During Prohibition in the United States, when alcoholic beverages were illegal, cocktails were still consumed illegally in establishments known as speakeasies. The quality of the liquor available during Prohibition was much worse than previously. There was a shift from whiskey to gin, which does not require aging and is therefore easier to produce illicitly. Honey, fruit juices, other flavorings served to mask the foul taste of the inferior liquors. Sweet cocktails were easier to drink an important consideration when the establishment might be raided at any moment. With wine and beer less available, liquor-based cocktails took their place becoming the centerpiece of the new cocktail party. Cocktails became less popular in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, until resurging in the 19
