I bet you’ll never guess what this is:
The giraffe is no help at all. It’s so-called “English beer yeast, with glucose”; my daughter bought it for her horse, but apparently some people eat it for extra vitamin B. It’s 100% natural–that’s always assuming you consider brewing beer to be natural, I suppose– and it’s “rich in proteins”. It looks quite awful, I certainly wouldn’t eat it:
I suppose it’s related to Marmite. I quite like Marmite. What’s the significance of the giraffe poking out of a circle, I wonder? She also gives the horse cod-liver oil to drink. I love that.
Something else I noticed the other day at the stables was Hoof Polish. It has one of those royal warrants on it “By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, purveyors of hoof polish”. I knew there was something funny about that family. They’ve all got hooves. You notice she always wears white gloves in public.
A Bad Guide 
This page tells us (I hope) that the giraffe design is 50 years old and was done by Arent Christensen, who was evidently important in the history of comic books in Norway. And travel posters and had a more famous brother (at least by Wiki standards).
Over here we say, “brewer’s yeast.”
I give the cats tablets of dried yeast a vitamin B supplement for their fur.
My sister’s loves them and get them as treats. Dummkatz couldn’t care less and usually just chews them into pieces and leaves them on the floor.
I jolly hope that “Ølgjær” is not some sort of ointment to help a guy “comb the giraffe”.
I quite like Marmite.
Today I was saying to a French lady who’s spent twenty years on Mars that one must be raised with Marmite to like it. Have you ever tried Marmite with peanut butter?
I once had a boyfriend who drank brewer’s yeast mixed in his orange juice every morning, using it to wash down a handful of vitamins. He’s dead.
Of course, brewer’s yeast. I’d forgotten that. I think it’s a nice giraffe drawing, though I still don’t see the symbolic significance–but I can’t find any pictures by his more famous brother, so I guess he’s had the last laugh.
Marmite & peanut butter is an interesting idea, I’ll give it a whirl. I recently tried a peanut butter & onion sandwich. Robin, fiancée of Jamessal, said it was something her uncle liked, and he lived in Kenya. Maybe peanut butter experiments are an African thing, I know the British tried planting “groundnuts” in Africa in the 1940s. I think they’re the same as peanuts.
Dummkatz isn’t so dumn. I’m not going to try it, Nij, though I like to eat baking yeast (in small quantities).
Vegans do need to get B vitamins (B12 in particular) from someplace; brewer’s yeast or nutritional yeast is one possibility.
Yes, groundnuts are peanuts. Though Africa has native groundnuts, too. More than you probably want to know can be found in this post from a couple years ago.
Their mention in Robin’s soup recipe reminds me that there are some quite good (to my mind) African ways of making peanut soup.
AJP, baking yeast is not meant to be taken raw. Nutritional yeast (mixed in a smoothie with banana, yogurt and a little coffee) saved my sanity if not even my life during a difficult time years ago. But mixing brewer’s yeast with citrus juice would taste absolutely horrible. Perhaps Nijma’s friend had lost his sense of taste (something that I hear destroys your taste for life).
I did not grow up with Marmite but it can be quite palatable as a spread if it is not too thick and it is mixed with something else such as butter (i mean spreading one, then the other, on the piece of bread). I never thought of using Marmite with peanut butter (something I did not grow up with either but found quite tasty). I had African peanut soup (with chicken) in a cafeteria in Philadelphia (years ago). It was so delicious that I went back every day for the week I spent there.
Sig might be interested in this book linked to by MMcM in his post about peanuts. Thank you very much for it, M. In the 1960s, my cousin, who lived in Sierra Leone, used to make a very complicated vegetarian ground-nut stew. It was really good.
AJP, baking yeast is not meant to be taken raw.
I know, everyone tells me that, but I love it. I only eat a little bit.
I could easily spend a day on your peanut post, M. It has some great links. I’d forgotten that peanuts used to be called monkey nuts in England when I was young. I wonder if the pignut in The Tempest might be a truffle.
I didn’t mean to imply that the brewer’s yeast killed him. I could just have easily have said, “He married someone else and died” as a cautionary tale. He died of some horrible disease; clearly the brewer’s yeast (and it smelled horrible) didn’t protect him.
The Chinese takeouts here make something with beef, peanuts, and those little red chiles. The closest thing I can find to it on the web is called Kung Pao Beef.
And, as MMcM points out in his post, there’s Indonesian satay.
the brewer’s yeast (and it smelled horrible) didn’t protect him.
It’s a good mosquito or midge repellent, apparently.
My father ate sandwiches of peanut butter and liverwurst. For years I never knew that there was any use for liverwurst.
any other use, I meant to say
My husband learnt recently from his godson to combine two elements of his usual breakfast: Put Marmite AND avocado on the same piece of toast (usually with a little Tabasco sauce). So far the toast with the peanutbutter is part of the later, marmalade stage. (All our peanut butter is homemade. Actually I started out there with a typo: mom… “Mommade” would be cute, in a very American way. But I corrected it.) (Momemade would be a little too Jabberwocky.)
And…at our venue in France, in the summers, “levure de bière” is always offered on the end of the salad table, with the vinaigrettes, &c. The children tend to eat a lot of just bread and butter and brewers’ yeast tartines. I sprinkle it on my lettuce.
I have never thought of using it on lettuce, but it is good on things like spaghetti sauce (or even just spaghetti), like grated cheese (or even mixed with grated cheese), as it tastes a little cheesy.
I bought some at home, once, but somehow it languished in the cupboard. It’s having it laid out rather elegantly (for a “picnic” – the French so civilizedly dine and sup al fresco all summer long) – handy. And we are told, healthy (and the summer place is a vegetarian community).
Long ago, when home wine-making was popular, you could buy “Burgundy yeast” and “Bordeaux yeast” at Boots. We did a controlled experiment – two otherwise identical liquids (part Boots grape juice, part elderberry juice) were treated with the different yeasts. We bottled the resultant wines and opened them many months later for a tasting. And the flavours were discernibly different. We were rather impressed.
Boots was a class joint, I’m not surprised. Though I think my mother bought one of that Boots home-made wine packs, and in our case it didn’t turn into anything either alcoholic or drinkable.
I once had a boyfriend who drank brewer’s yeast mixed in his orange juice every morning, using it to wash down a handful of vitamins.
My brother used to do this (I have no idea whether he still does), but rather than dying he got married, moved to Austria, and became a successful pharma executive. Another cautionary story!
I just hope nothing like this happens to my daughter’s horse.
LOL!!!
I just remembered a family visit to Disneyland and onwards when I was a kid. My sister and I bought a bottle of big yeast tablets from somewhere – I think a Chinese store in San Francisco. If memory serves me, I gobbled most of the tablets and got sick.
Children buy odd things. My goddaughter made me buy her a glass eye.
How many eyes does she have now?
With women, the eyes have it.
As a kid I used to love licking the cup after mixing the yeast in the dough. Of course, we’ve always mixed the yeast directly with sugar to jumpstart it, and then used a bit less of it in the bread.
Tonight I came home, weary after a day of teaching and a long drive through falling wet snow, to find my wife putting the finishing touches on a complicated labor-intensive vegan casserole. When I asked her what this new thing was, she started naming ingredients in a fatigued sort of way. She came to “what’s that thing that people use instead of Parmesan cheese sometimes … ?”
“Brewer’s yeast?” I ventured. Yes, more or less: “nutritional yeast”.
I could not have answered that question two days ago. (Thanks, m-l.)
Not tofu?
When I first met my husband, he marinated tofu in tamari and a little burgundy and used it in stir fry.
I forgot to mention that I had never heard of brewer’s yeast before my brother started using it, and for the longest time I thought he was talking about something called “brewsies.” I still think of it that way occasionally.
Tofu in tamari AND burgundy? Was that your first dinner together?
I think she means “before I whipped him into shape”.
Empty, I’m full of admiration for your family. Wonderful people they are.
Language, if the language and hats and editing don’t work out you could try marketing a sports drink called Brewsies. It’s the beverage of champions.
Tofu in tamari AND burgundy
Heavy on the burgundy. There was a tie wrap in it from the veggies too; he called it a “twist-em noodle”. At the time he was an actor; his day job was cooking in a vegetarian restaurant.
Was that your first dinner together?
Not quite. Our first date was a different vegetarian restaurant where they served peanutbutter sandwiches.
He started out marinating with burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff …
Thank you, Crown, for the admiration, whatever it’s for. We are not all vegans — only the great big boy — but my wife and I eat less meat when we used to, and we sometimes manage to have something that all of us can eat and enjoy. My wife does the lion’s share of the cooking these days, and she has been expanding her repertoire.
Hat, I love “Brewsies”.
Tamari is non-alcoholic, and mellower than soy sauce. It wasn’t all that good, especially the twistem noodle, but at least I didn’t have to cook.
Brewsies–sounds vaguely New England, maybe non-rhotic, certainly not a midwestern twang.
I once had a sort of waking dream where I discovered Hat had a single brother who could cook, it was love at first bite, and Hat became my brother-in-law. Wonder what that was about. Maybe it’s common when you’re the oldest to want a big brother or big sister.
Brewsies is what you hear if someone says brewer’s yeast so rapidly that it comes out brews yeese, right?
More like brewa’s yeas’ I would think. Maybe it’s like the the way Mark Twain used to write dialect.
If I’m right in reconstructing the timeline, that marinade was at a time when tamari was a rather confusing term here in the States.
When George Ohsawa (the Macrobiotic guy) started promoting it in the ’60s, he called traditional Japanese soy sauce containing wheat “tamari.” Then, in the mid-70s, the Book of Tofu guy decided that should be called “shoyu,” with “tamari” reserved for wheat-free soy sauces (being a soybean purist). Which is mostly the labeling followed today, except that we still after 30-odd years have to have explanations like, “This shoyu soy sauce is macrobiotic ‘tamari’ soy sauce.”
Maybe it’s like the the way Mark Twain used to write dialect.
You mean maybe Hat’s brother speaks the way Mark Twain wrote it down?
Brewsies for brewer’s yeast is almost as good as squares for squirrels.
soybean purist
Now there are some concerned about the plant estrogens in soybeans.
Back in my Wobegon vegetarian days, I used to get a product called miso from the coops. No point now, I’m cutting back on salt.
You mean maybe Hat’s brother speaks the way Mark Twain wrote it down?
It sounds like dialect to me, but I can’t place it. Maybe the Hatssons have lived abroad so long they don’t have a regional accent, but speak a sort of internationalese. Here’s an example of the spelling technique from Huckleberry Finn:
It’s not really non-rhotic. Some r’s are dropped, but not others, and some are added to the end of words, depending on the character, and some t’s are dropped and some added.
come to look at it
Then I admire Mrs Empty and the great big boy the most.
Thanks for the explanantion, MMcM. I’m unfamiliar with tamari and had automatically assumed it was some kind of tamarind sauce, because I knew that from Thai cooking class.
the way Mark Twain used to write dialect
Mark Twain was very particular about the fact that his characters spoke different dialects and he himself was not haphazardly mixing them up.
According to the authors note at the beginning, Huckleberry Finn is supposed to have 6 different dialects.
The novel titled Huckleberry Finn has characters speaking a total of 6 different dialects, but each of these characters only speaks one.
Well yah, the book, not Huck himself.
Here’s what he says (and I know not everyone shares my enthusiasm for MT, but they can just sit on it).
Okay, seven dialects.
Like it says on John Cowan’s website, there are three types of people in this world, those who can count and those who can’t.
Eight dialects, it seems to me.