Okay, so it might be time to get started Good afternoon. Thanks very much for attending my session. My name is Martin Klein I'm with the research library at the Los Alamos National Laboratory And I'll be talking about reference rot in scholarly communication today, and I'll offer a solution to the problem So this is not a it's not a tennis match. This is a team effort So I'd like to acknowledge is acknowledged my colleagues co-workers as of course here with men example who unfortunately cannot be here today Because he's on a sabbatical in Europe Sean Jones in hurry our Shankar from all of these three from Los Alamos as well and I have collaborators at the University of Edinburgh at the language technology group in particular clear grover and Richard Togan that I'd like to acknowledge and the last but not least Andy Jackson who looked into the decay of web resources at the web archive of the British Library and he and his graphs particularly inspired a lot of this work So what are we covering today is basically three main areas? I'd like to motivate The topic give you a brief introduction of what we're talking about here. I'd like to go and spend a little bit of time on our latest published research on the quantification precise quantification of reference rot in scholarly communication and last but not least as mentioned before I'll spend a little bit of time in proposing a solution of how we can address the problem All right, so let's get started with a few introductory comments, so But we talk about reference rot is basically two things that we talk about the one is Link rot and I'm sure everyone has seen the notion of Something like this the interim is four four page not found error you you visit of a page today You bookmark that your eye you try to revisit a couple of months later And then you get this right this is particularly ironic because that's the canonical website of the general assembly of the Internet International Internet Preservation Consortium But that's beside the point so link rot is the first aspect of content Drift of I'm sorry of reference rock the second aspect of reference rot is content drift all so what is that? The canonical website of the digital library conference in in the year 2000 is this DL00.org that's what the page looked like in the year 2000 This is what the page looks looked like in 2004 and just by eyeballing it you can get the idea This has nothing to do with the digital library conference of the year 2000 This is what the page looks like in 2005, and I don't even know what this is about anymore But the point is it's not about digital libraries. It's not about the conference, right? Since 2000 and about eight the page looks like this and then promised to do some fancy project management for you Believe it or not. So the point is As you all know resources on the web are dynamic not only do that come and go but their content changes Like this one a possible theory is that someone did not re-register the domain IDL00.org someone else took over and Published now content that has nothing to do with the original intention of that canonical website of the conference anymore, so Briefly summarizing the first few points the definition of reference rod is the combination of link rod and content drift That's the first definition. The observation is that those resources are subject to a reference rod, right? They change and they go away The problem becomes or one of the problem becomes when we write scholarly articles and we write research articles and reference to those resources using their URI Because that at the end of the day with the notion of reference rod in mind really threatens the integrity of our scholarly record, right? Scholarly articles are to a large extent based on the references that we trust that can be Revisited after a particular point in time and can be consumed by the reader The problem though is that unlike other scholarly articles that we also reference in our articles the custodianships for these what we call that but large resources like web pages and scholarly wikis and Your project website the custodianship is a completely different one We're talking about web admins that just happen to have a page online That it may not even know that you as the author of a scholarly article reference them another Example and you may be aware of this is This page so when you consider the case where the Supreme Court writes in a report an opinion piece and references a resource on the web just like it just is Alito did in this case and the the custodian the web admin of that web resource recognizes that and tries to Raise some awareness of his case. He changed the content of this page and says well Aren't you glad you didn't cite to this web page in the Supreme Court report and so on fourth If you had like Justice Alito did the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along Purchase the domain in order to make a comment about the trends of link information on the Internet, right? So that is basically the point you can actually make the case that content drift is the much bigger problem compared to link rod When you discover a rotten resource you see the four four of course, that's a bummer, but at least you know it's gone It's not what you expect to see where you If you see that you you don't know right is that what you intend to to see or not Or sometimes you see it to remember right exactly So another entertaining yet detrimental example of a reference rod in It's got a communication. So there's a ton of link rod studies available one of which is this one our 2014 paper published in plus one or we precisely quantified the notion of link rod and Somewhat in a brute force a top manner Estimated approximated the notion of content drift So the slides are available online. I'll share after so there's no need to Don't need to to a Russian and write down the URI of this of this article so what we did with our Current study and that literally has been published two weeks ago also in plus one we designed a method to Accurately assess and quantify the notion of content drift And come up with the precise numbers of how bad is the problem overall The data set that we used was basically the same as we used in the 2014 study We get obtained to 3.5 million articles from three different corpora from the physics pre-print archive from Elsevier and from PMC from PubMed Central All of these are articles for published somewhere between 1997 and 2012 we had to do some Some conversion and post-processing in order to extract all your rise referenced from those articles from within those articles and those your eyes are all to what we call again We're at large resources. So again, those are not references to other scholarly articles Identified for example with their DUI But those are really references to and your project website your scientific wiki data sets videos all the above right And as you can see in the table and the last row on the bottom row of this table we extracted a bit more than 1 million URIs from these three corpora so a significant actually unprecedented Scale of a data set for this kind of a study Till date to date and of course it will be become important in a second as we keep track of the Publication dates of each and every single article that references a web at large resource So these three graphs are not meant to be read So ignore the axis it's on the fourth it's just my three marketing graphs because the the curves go up right the point is is to realize that the The dotted lines the fine dotted lines are the number of URI references in all three corpora over time So these graphs are just there to support my point Authors increasingly so use URI references to web at large resources, right? So of course You see you know took up at some point later on Archive within the archive corpus it became increasingly important from let's say 2007 2008 on the point Is the trend is there we cannot and do not want to stop that trend, but it's the it's a fact, right? So we need to deal with this sort of a problem Okay, so how do we go about assessing and precisely quantifying the notion of content drift in our Scholarly articles imagine a timeline at some point in time the paper was published a paper was published at references a web at large resources Resource by the means of its URI right so a paper that contains a URI for each of these URIs then we use the memento framework and I'll Talk about this in a second the mental framework to obtain Archive copies of those reference URIs surrounding the publication date of the article that references the URI, okay, and So if you imagine that the paper was published at time T We obtain an archive copy of that URI what we call a memento From time T minus one as close as possible to a T but previous to T right prior and We might obtain a memento an archive copy of that URI Published are created rather after the article was published at time T plus one. So now we really have this Surrounding time interval basically around the publication time of the article and We create or we look for memento you call memento pairs memento pre and a memento post Previous created previous to the publication of the article and created post publication of the article the kind of unique aspect of this is that we are able to use the memento framework and We can look up those We can look for those mementos pre and post in a total of 19 archives around the world it's no secret that the internal archive is the the biggest and The the archive that has contributed most of those mementos no question about it, but there are others In total we obtain 650,000 memento pairs so pairs for 650,000 of our one million URIs So that's good We found the mementos. What do we do now? We need to identify representative mementos with the notion of what did the author intend to cite at the time of the publication of the article Well in order to do that we compare the content the textual content of these two mementos with the assumption in place that if the memento pre is the same as the memento post encompassing the publication time of the article then that is the content that the author intended to cite at the time He or she wrote and or published the paper okay Two examples for this Two screenshots of mementos pre on the left post on the right This URI was cited in in a Scali paper with the URI that I put up on top of the slide The paper was published in August of 2009 on August 15th to be precise the memento pre It's captured from the Internet archive on May 8th of that year the memento post captured on August 27th and just by eyeballing you can see Maybe something went wrong with the capture process, but clearly the content has changed So that's an example of content drift within about three and a half month So there's an issue right It's not all bad though, of course we dug out an example that displays the opposite case another URI that has been referenced by by a Scali article reference there an archive actually published published on July 4th in 1990 97 not 77 my apologies and the memento pre was Created just roughly a month prior to publication date and the memento Post as you didn't put it up there because this is still the version that you can dereference today So the argument here being this URI reference Presumably has not drifted the content of that URI reference has not drifted a bit in 19 years All right, so Back to our comparison of the pre and post memento Two questions arise now a how do we compare the textual content of these two? And be what do we how do we assess? Representatives so how similar do they have to be so that we can call them we can label them as Representative of what the author originally attended to site So we use for very common text comparison Measures some hash your current service and cosine without going into detail here the difference between the four is There's basically two to three major differences sim hash is hash-based so it is sensitive to even the Detiniest of editorial changes a comma here a fixed typo there sim hash Response to this sort of changes and gives you a notion. There's a minor change jacquard and Zürnzen are both based on sets of characters, so if you know Two bills for example of characters change jacquard and Zürnzen would would trigger that would give you a notion of something has changed and Cosine since it's TF IDF base. It's more the contextual Indicator of hey, there's the context really has changed There's a difference in the most salient of terms between these two versions. So that gives us a notion of You didn't just fix typos in these two versions But actually the content really has changed because the most salient terms are not there anymore as I've seen before right So a good spread of similarity measures that in aggregate should give us a good idea of whether those documents are The same or not the two compared documents of the same or not So that answers the first question what similarity measures are we using and why are we using those now the question arises Since we normalize the score output of all these four measures When do we know that they're actually the same the two compared documents, right? So our intuition was ball. Let's go all out, right? They are the same as long as all four measures agree that they're the same. They give the maximum score of 100 And if that would be the case if the momentum pre and the momentum post would score 100 perfect score for all four similarity measures then we would call them as the same and hence as representative of What the author initially attended but we didn't quite feel comfortable with that So we thought we'd go for a sanity check there meaning HTTP as a protocol is able to return particular headers to you when you dereference the resource and that header can give you an indication or some of those headers can Give you indication whether a content has changed between two Between two requests for the same resource So we use in particular the e-tag and last modified headers and compare those headers for the momentum pre and the momentum post And if they are the same then we know that HTTP says these two resources are the same okay, and As a matter of fact you pass our own sanity check, which is always a good thing, right? The last majority of momentum pre and post pairs that are according to HTTP the same Indeed score the perfect score throughout our four similarity measures And hence we're really content with the idea of using that very strict rule Of perfect scores throughout the board, right? All right, so back to our comparison we do compare Moment of pre momentum post we figure out that there if there are the same if they're really contextually the same one and then the text rather is the same and We end up to see 313,000 URIs having a representative me a memento in our web archives Available so given that we started off with 1 million. We're now down to 30% That's the name of the game, right? okay, so This is good because now we know with the level of confidence what the author intended to cite at the time of publication How do we assess content drift? Well We compare the what we call representative memento with the life version of that URI All right makes sense because that's the time we're actually consuming the paper when you're reading it when we develop And we're following the reference and de-referencing the the URI that the author put into the paper Did you go back and we notice because then we have the other problem that link what kicks in again and Only 241,000 out of our 313,000 actually have still have a life version of that URI available So we can only make that comparison for 240,000 URIs Okay, so What we do next is then as I mentioned before the comparison between the representative memento that we determined earlier to the textual representation of The life version of that URI we apply our same for similarity measures to assess that similarity and For the convenience reasons basically we've been the results into six bins by similarity score So I mentioned that the scores are normalized between 0 and 100 the first bin Represents values between 0 and 20 20 and 40 40 and 60 and so on to 4th at the last bin is where the similarity score equals 100 so that's the perfect score, right? So plot it out. It looks like this and I realize it's a bit small to to read but we'll get there so we distinguish now For greater insight basically between our four similarity measures We have a sim has on top left cosine top right to cartons and on the bottom and Our bins our six bins are represented on the on the x-axis of each and every single graph The first observation that we can make from this graph is that the pattern is fairly similar, right? So we see very little dissimilarity Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, very little dissimilarity and The notion of Perfect score the similarity being the highest between the representative memento and the life version indicated the right most column in every single graph the lightest blue by this shade of blue and the The relative values represented by the line on the right axis. We see for example Sir listen to current basically score something 30% of Perfect similarity score so those 30% of those URIs have not drifted at all and Call science a bit more restrictive Just roughly a bit more than 20% of your eyes have not drifted 30% of sim hash According to sim hash resources have not drifted. So that's the the setup basically per similarity score That's a bit confusing right because it's different scores. So we aggregated all these scores into one graph Looks like this Again, the pattern is the same the shape is the same The right most column in this graph represents the amount of URI references that have not Drifted over time over all three corpora and over all URIs And as you can read roughly and that's the good news of this graph 23.7% of URIs have not Drifted it's good news the bad news of course is then the flip side of the coin right three quarters of URIs have drifted How much have they drifted? Well, that's a very tricky question to answer because there's somewhere between You know these these lower pins What that translates to in terms of how significant that change is we don't go there. We don't know But the the point is that they have drifted to some extent over time, right? the The measures that we apply arguably are Inorganic rather are somewhat crude and they only compare a text, right? So we don't know whether an image has changed for example those sort of things But since we're using a good variety of different textual similarity measures We can confidently say that you know these three out of four URI references have drifted over time This graph is where the acknowledgement to any Jackson comes in because now we're Basically visualizing the same sort of data separated by corpus and also over time so this is the data for archive for the physics pre-print and the Color pattern is the same the lights blue on top is the portion of the fraction of URIs that have not drifted And similarity is a hundred percent was a hundred rather and everything that's black as link rod So again both together make up the notion of reference rod So you can see for example we have Bit more than 20% let's say 30% of URIs unchanged not drifted for the archive physics pre-print corpus And roughly 10% link rod But if you go back only to let's say 2005 It seems like you have roughly 20% link rod and normally maybe 10% of content not drifted which means 90% of URIs are subject to reference rod either link rod or content drift So that's an alarming number right And of course the numbers go get worse the further back in time you go I talk about articles published in 1999 for example looking at an input rate of almost 50% and a content drift rate of URIs and have not been subject to content drift of maybe maybe 5% maybe 10% Point is numbers get worse over time and The pattern is basically the same for all three corpora the The reason why the PMC corpus on the top right seems a bit more Wild let's say is that we didn't get too many articles from PMC prior to 2004 2005 hence the numbers are a bit Maybe be taken to with a grain of salt there We see also the numbers of for Elsevier's actually actually worse in terms of link rod Compared to archive in our 2014 paper. We tried to analyze why that is by looking at the URIs and figured out that else view Articles published in Elsevier increasingly or more so reference comm URIs then for example archive papers do More so reference but edu domains for example that are known to be more stat more more persistent. Let's say Then comms. Orcs you name it All right So there was in a in a nutshell the results of our most recent study Quantifying precisely quantifying what the notion of content drift is in a given our three corpora generated From archive Elsevier and PMC. So what can we do about it? We introduced the notion of robust links Basically as the name gives away We're trying to make links URI references in scholarly articles more robust So now you can say well, isn't that what do eyes are meant to do for us and we say not quite So as you know, do eyes were designed to combat link rod for links that point to other scholarly articles So the design principle is slightly different in addition. It relies fully on the custodians of these do I identified resources and obviously they're Motivated strongly motivated to maintain links to their content because usage of their content is at stake All right, so they're strong incentives for such custodians like publishers to maintain Do I references so they will be Mapping to the new location in case the content has the location of the content has changed and so on to fall the custodians as I alluded to earlier the custodians of our web at large resources, however, are Motivated by completely different factors. They're typically bad men's and not scholarly publishers They don't have such incentives. They don't necessarily care for the longevity of their website yet alone the integrity of the scholarly record So, you know, there's a different Motivation behind that So from our point of view really the notion about the problem of reference rod is a is a problem that is largely rooted outside the scholarly communication Community, but we argue that it actually needs to be solved by by us by this very same community So what's the current state when we reference your URI? When we use URIs to reference that with large resources, well, we're guilty as charged because in our 2014 plus paper We referenced URIs like that included the original URI to for example the hyperlink project hyperlink.org and We kind of took the easy way out and Said oh, this was last accessed, you know on that particular date And now we are good right because we promised that what we saw on that particular day Just really what we meant to reference well neither for link rods nor for content drift This helps in any way really, but that's the current state. So we are getting for basically two steps. The one is Use the URI that you're referencing and create an archival snapshot create a memento proactively You can do this as an author when you're writing your paper You can do this as a conference or journal submission system when you receive the paper You can do this as a publisher when you're publishing the paper You can do this as an aggregation service like core for example when you're aggregating the articles from someone else Obviously you want to get as close as possible to the authoring process, but you know There's several different stages where you could potentially do that step We've seen several archives that can do that the archive is one institution where you can ask them Hey, please go and grab this URI for me archive it for me promises C has been trying to focus on the notion of archiving references for scholarly articles But citation has been around for a while for a very similar purpose archive.is is also another one of those proactive Archiving service that you can ask to archive a particular URI for you and For all these Form in this case for all these four services You will get immediately back the URI of the archive resource the URI of the memento Which you can then use for learn as we will show so have we done now that we solved the problem that we archive something Well, no, of course, we are not this example Gives you it's a reference from a Wikipedia page Points to Excuse me an archive snapshot in the Internet archive, and it tells you when it was captured So the problem with that of course is that this sort of an approach relies on the continuous Availability of that particular archive. Well, of course, we hope it's gonna stay around right no question about it But we've seen cases of archives disappear. I do remember mummify.it Doesn't exist anymore web citation has been struggling in the past with support and so on to forth We know that the Internet archive is not accessible in all countries. All right, so there is We're basically replacing one link or problem with another if you rely solely on this Sort of an approach but just replacing the original URI with the URI of the memento That does not solve the problem for good So the second step that we are arguing for is decorate your links So when you're writing your paper your first step was as we mentioned was to create an archival copy of your URI of your reference And decorate that link in your paper with the original URI. So don't throw that thing away with the URI of the memento of the archival snapshot that you created and Indicate the archival daytime of your of the archival copy that you created So for these three pieces of information you basically create a really good full-back method mechanism meaning if your Original URI doesn't work anymore. If that's subject to link rod You can always go back to the to the memento to the archive copy if the archive is In it unavailable is you know the accesses down or the archive has stopped to operate You can always use the original URI to query other archives. Do you have a copy and? That combined with the archival daytime the third piece of information that we asked you to decorate your link with But that information together you can ask any archive for a very appropriate copy of Of that URI so basically give me a copy of the URI at time x time x meaning the publication date of the Article or whenever you created your reference there So several full-back mechanisms preparing for the worst case possible that your original doesn't work anymore that the archive is down and Other archives are hopefully still available where you can look up a copy of your URI All right So it could look like this then it's another reference from a Wikipedia actually from the very same Wikipedia article Where you would provide the original URI? Archive from the original You provide the capture daytime of that URI and you provide a reference to the archival copy that you have created Proactively as an author for example, right so they again these three pieces of information from our point of view are essential to make links more robust So what could this look like a regular link a little bit of HTML not doesn't hurt to CNI.org the canonical website of the CNI and we can use standard HTML 5 attributes to convey these three pieces of information All right, we still convey now the original URI We use the data version URL attribute to convey the URI of the momentum of the snapshot that we created and We use the attribute data version date to convey the date time at which I created that archival snapshot and close our tag so that's the the only thing you need to do as a For example as an author to make your link more robust to decorate your link for the necessary information to make it more robust We call this approach robust links. We wrote a specification document for the URI on the bottom of that slide and last year Herbert was fortunate enough together the Michael Lancet you publish this paper then they actually talked about this at CNI last year in the fall and We're able to convince the dealer package in to implement robust links So it is an as you all know, I'm sure it's an online only sort of an publication venue it's HTML and we ingested a little bit of JavaScript into the page and Results, I'm not sure if you can see results in this little anchor symbols right next to the link That you can click on and get this little pop up in the center of the screen that gives you three options for that link you can go to the To the archival snapshot of that link you can ask the memento framework to do some magic for you and go to the Link in any archive given the link date. So the archival daytime or and that's another approach that you can actually do you can leave a The creation date of that page you can go to the link as it was at the creation date of that page as well. So again, the point is Link decoration is easy. It's based on standards. We use HTML five attributes. That's not rocket science browser supported everything is good there and This is one approach with a little bit of JavaScript to make those links actionable and way more robust than before All right, so I realized that I flew through this a bit Quicker than I intended but I basically have four take away messages for you. The first one is as we've seen Scholarly articles increasingly contain your rise to a bit large resources, right? We all have been there We all wrote in our writing scholarly articles. We all use your right references to Resources that we find on the web that we intend to Convey in our message to support our point for example So that's all a significant part of scholarly communication and the trend is increasing So more and more authors use more and more you're right references to very large resources. So that's the first thing These resources, however, and that's our second observation there are subject to reference right there Not any different than any other web resource right there just regular web resources hence They're subject to the same dynamic character of the web. So we see notions of Lingrod Observe content drift. So there's nothing special just because you reference and URI in your scholarly article doesn't make the resource any more robust per se. So we need to do something about that The custodians of these resources are typically not overly concerned about a long-term preservation long-term access and integrity fixity of those resources Hence we need to do something about this and we can as publishers as authors as third parties I mentioned core for example can do something about this We can take action to proactively archive our resources because certainly we think that the integrity of our scholarly record is Worth it and the price is not all that great So for that I stopped left intentionally some time for questions. Thank you so much for listening and I'm happy to take your questions


So I'm recording this towards the end of January, which is when most people are starting to give up their New Year's resolutions. And whenever you're watching this, the message is the same, which is that personal growth and changing yourself is harder than most of us understand. And the reason for that is, well, there's a couple reasons. And I think it's important to understand the reasons if you are really serious and sincere about becoming better, changing yourself, behaving differently so that you can be a different and better person in the future. So one reason is our environment. By staying in the same environment, you have the same visual cues, auditory cues, physical objects, all of which remind you of your past conditioning. Basically, how you're already behaving today is connected to all of your current life, everything around you. This is why it is easier to initiate a change when you have moved somewhere or you're living somewhere for a while that's different. Or you have to do the behavior in a different physical space, whether you change your current room or you say, well, I've had some bad work habits. I'm going to work in a different room or a different place. Environment matters way more than we most of us understand because the current environment continues to reinforce whatever behavior, mode of being, way of feeling that we currently have. Really important. I mentioned past conditioning, which is another really, really important reason that we stay as we are for years and years because, well, we behave that way to cope with life, to cope with the people around us, to cope with our obligations, and we developed our coping mechanisms and our behaviors. And now we want to do something different and be something different. Well, that all those past coping mechanisms are very strong because they allowed us to survive, survive physically, emotionally, to make sense of the world, so to survive mentally. And so the past conditioning will keep supporting your brain. So that's the third factor I'll bring in.  I know this because that's the kind of the kind of people I draw to me are people who are so brilliant that they can make up all kinds of excuses to stay the same, to not do the different thing to change themselves, to change myself. I'm speaking to myself as well. We are so brilliant at the, are coming up with authentic feelings to not do, not rise up to the challenge of the vision we have for our life, for our spiritual growth, for our work, whatever, for our relationships, for our health, whatever it is, kinds of personal change you want to do. It is incredibly deceptive that we feel authentic about not changing. Isn't that interesting? We feel authentic about, oh, I don't feel like doing it today. It somehow feels authentic to us to not change. It feels natural to stay the way we are, and it feels unnatural to rise up to the challenge that we even want to rise up to. Our mind has some goals. It seems logical and reasonable to become like this, to become like that, to do this thing differently, to behave differently in this situation. But then when the situation comes, our past conditioning and our environment and our current relationships or whatever, they're all cues and reinforcements to feel authentic doing the same thing and being the same way. And I say that because authenticity is one of my highest values, and those of you who have watched my other videos know I talk about authentic this, authentic that all the time. But this is where authenticity is keeping us back. Authenticity, of course, can be defined in many different ways. One of the ways that it is unproductively defined is, oh, I don't feel like rising up to the challenge that I set for myself of doing this, doing that at this time, at this place, behaving in this way, or not behaving in that way, not doing this thing that I said I would stop doing. It feels authentic. It feels right to keep doing the bad habit, or it feels comfortable and it feels natural to not do the stretching of ourselves beyond what we currently are into more of our potential. It feels natural, it feels authentic, and you must catch that feeling, that understanding. You must become aware of authenticity when it's unproductive and authenticity when it is productive. It's very tricky. Like I said, our brains are so brilliant at making up these feelings and beliefs that keep us stuck, keep us the way we are for years with a particular bad habit or difficulty of forming this good habit that we want to form. I'm speaking of myself too. So, to become aware of the deception of authenticity, which moments is authenticity, so-called, actually holding us back and deceiving us. And this is why there is that phrase, which so many of us have a love-hate relationship with, the phrase of, fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it, meaning, and people have applied this phrase in different ways. We often hear that about, you know, careers and you fake it till you make it or whatever, but I'm talking more in terms of personal growth change. Fake it till you make it is to, well, fake it is not authentic, right? And so when you are in the situation where you've said to yourself, I'm not going to do the bad habit, but I still feel like doing it right now. It's so natural for me right now. My brain is making up all kinds of reasons why it's right for me to keep doing this bad habit or to not do this good habit. It may be tomorrow, I'll feel like it. Maybe next month, when the start of the month or the start of the moon cycle or whatever, you know, maybe our brains will be brilliant at creating that. I will then feel like it. I will then, so that's again, fake it till you make it means, wait, okay, I'm aware now of my current deception being deceived by unproductive authenticity right now. And I will fake it. I will fake. I will do the thing that feels unnatural to me because I believe in my potential. And I can see why, how if I habituate this thing, it will feel natural at some point. And that's the tricky part. And that's the part that we don't believe in the moment. We believe it later. We understand it later. We understand it beforehand. But in the moment, we don't believe that if we do this thing again and again and again, this good thing that we want to become and do differently and do better. If we keep doing this thing and do it now and we don't feel like it, we will eventually change our habit of habit of thought and feeling so that we actually do feel like it in the future. But it has to take a lot of repetitions of faking it, of not feeling authentic in that moment. So that's my encouragement for you today. It's for you to observe that within yourself and within your effort of personal change and see if this will help you to fake it. So that you can be that which you would truly wish to be. I hope this is helpful. I am always, always am open to your thoughts, your own strategies. What works for you to secure personal, sustainable change? What works for you besides moving? That's hard. We only do it once every couple of years or once every decade, several decades if ever. Besides completely changing our physical environment, which is hard, what works for you to secure sustainable personal change? What have you noticed works for you? I look forward to your comments below. Thanks.


Treatment of hazards. We have seen in the previous part how the internal failures are dealt with in the deterministic approach. Let's see now how we treat the hazards, internal or external hazards. Treatment of hazards is done through avoidance of the hazards. For instance, that could be done by sighting. If you want to avoid a flooding, you will set the platform at a level where the flooding could not reach the facility. Or by laying out the facility, for instance, in making geographical separation of redundant equipment. Or by probabilistic consideration. So that's the first way of treatment of hazards. There is a second way, if the hazard cannot be avoided, is to protect the safety function against the consequence of the hazards. And we will look at two examples. The first one is about fire. And again, you will see here how we used the defense in depth approach. The first level is through the prevention. So a way of preventing fire is to limit the amount of combustible materials. And for instance, and especially during the period where the reactor is shut down, where there is a lot of maintenance being done. It's important to organize a storage area in order to avoid accumulation of waste or any material that could be combustible. The second level is through monitoring. So each nuclear plant is equipped with a fire detection system with, of course, alarms. And the third level, to mitigate the consequence of fire, is first to install fire-resistant rooms in order if one fire spreading in a room, it will not propagate to another one. So that implies putting some fire doors or fire dampers on the ventilation system. And in addition, as a mitigation element, there are fire extinguishing systems, such as sprinkler or deluge. And the last line of mitigation is through the firefighting teams on each nuclear plant. There is permanently on call some fireman who are accustomed to intervene and to try to extinguish the fire. So we have seen an internal hazard, the fire. Let's look now at an external hazard, the plant crash. Through the statistics of the aeronautic industry, we can make a distinction between three kinds of flights. The commercial flights, the military flights and the general flights. The commercial flight, there are several hundreds of thousands of such flights per year. And the probability of accident per flight is in the order of 10 to the minus 6. Now if we combine that with the probability of the crash reaching per year a safety function with some conservative estimate, the result is in the order of 10 to the minus 8 per year and per safety function. So this figure is sufficiently low for the disregarding of this kind of accident. The military flight, the number is a little bit lower, but the probability of accident per flight is about 10 times more than for commercial flight. Therefore the probability of crashes of military aircraft is in the order of 10 to the minus 7. So in general, military flight crashes are not considered unless a nuclear plant is sighted not very far from a military airfield. And for instance in some countries and in some areas the nuclear plant is protected against military flight crash. But the general flights are in the order of several million a year. And the probability of accident per flight is also 10 times more than for the military. And so the approximate probability of during a crash reaching a safety function is in the order of 10 to the minus 6. So therefore the design of nuclear plants have to consider this kind of airplane crash. And there are two different planes considered as sort of reference. The Leedjet and the Cessna, one having its motor on the top. So let's see on this figure how the European pressurizer reactor is protected against a plant crash. So if you have a look from above you have here in the center the reactor building itself. And around here the four redundant trains of safety system and here the fuel building. And you have here the diesel generator which provides the powers to the plant if there is a loss of the electric grid. So you have on two of the safety system and on the reactor building and on the fuel building you have an aircraft shell which cover completely these equipments, these buildings and that are resistant to the crash of a plant. The two other trains here as well as diesel generator are separated geographically. So the probability of reaching by the same crash to two of them is very very low. And so this is a way, geographical separation is a way to protect the whole facility against this kind of events. And of course there is some auxiliary building or auxiliary facility without any safety role which are not protected. Thank you.


Getting the most out of every ingredient. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid Blender Collection. Welcome to the British Library Food Season event, generously sponsored by KitchenAid. My name is Polly Russell and I'm a curator at the British Library and the curator and founder of the food season. And this year I have had the delight of working with Angela Clutton as the guest director. As usual with the food season, we wanted to have a series of events which were eclectic, relevant, and involving some of the most interesting voices in food and history and culture, as well as an opportunity to showcase British Library collections. And tonight's event with Simon Sharma and Claudia Rodin, chaired by Lucy Silver, just could not be more perfect. Not only are the speakers fantastic, but also the event coincides and accompanies the British Library's current exhibition, Hebrew manuscripts, Journeys of the Written Word. This includes rarely seen treasures of music, science, and philosophy from some of the most famous Jewish scholars dating back to the 10th century. And I haven't visited yet because I haven't been on site, but I've been told that there's a love potion involving basil, which is food of some sort. So I'm delighted and can't wait to see that. The exhibition is open until April and so if anyone can get to the British Library, I think it will be wonderful for you to go and visit. For this evening's event, which is about to start, please do submit questions, which are available at the bottom of your screen. And also, should you want to buy any of Simon or Claudia's wonderful books, they are available also on the tab on your screen. Now I'm going to hand over to our chair, Lucy Silver. Chair Lucy trained and worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has been the co-chair of Jewish Book Week since 2011 and directed the festival from 2014 to 2018. She is the perfect chair for this evening. Over to you, Lucy. Thank you very much, Polly. Good evening, everybody. You can see us, we can't see you, but maybe that's not a bad thing. All right, here we go. Claudia, this is about you. No one will ever produce a richer or more satisfying feast of the Jewish experience than Claudia Rodin. So said Simon Sharpe in praise of Claudia's book of Jewish Food. Claudia Rodin is a woman of many talents who became renowned at an early age as Egypt's backstroke champion. She excelled in both maths and science and could have pursued her career in either but came to London in the 1950s to study at St. Martin's with the intention of becoming an artist. In the end, however, cookery and cookery writing prevailed. Her cookery books, also social and cultural histories encompass the very best of international cuisine, from the Lebanon to Vilna, the world is her oyster. Perhaps we should say her tagine of lamb with preserved lemons. Her distinctively beautiful voice is known to us all through radio and TV. Claudia was given a lifetime achievement award last year by the Guardian Observer. Going straight to the point, Simon is not only our Renaissance man of culture, but he is also a serious foodie as his Twitter account attests. Lockdown has been unable to suppress Simon Sharma's creativity, irrepressible. Many of you will have seen the first two programmes of his superb new series on the romantics and marveled at the inventiveness of his presentation. Also current is Simon's great gallery tours on Radio 4, where he walks and talks us through some of the world's greatest museums and artists. He also gave us his dream dinner on Radio 4 last week, still available on BBC sounds. And he served as hors d'oeuvres, little slivers of whitefish and smoked salmon on rye that have a distinctly Jewish feel to them. I know Claudia and Simon well, and I'm delighted to be here this evening to interview them about Jewish food. So, my first question is for you, Claudia. Your book of Jewish food was published in 1996. Jewish food is not exactly what springs to mind. 1986. Oh, sorry, 1986. I'm so sorry. 1968. 1968 was a book of Middle Eastern food. No, sorry. Yeah, yeah. So, to continue, Jewish food is not exactly what springs to mind when people think about ought cuisine. So, Claudia, why did Jewish food excite you enough to write this masterwork about Jewish food? I was actually asked to write it by my publishers. And at the time, it was Elizabeth David, Jane Grickson and Jill Norman, who were having dinner together. And they said, well, they noticed that in my Middle Eastern book, I had several recipes that I said were Jewish dishes for Passover or for a Sabbath dish. And they suddenly said, well, we really should have. We only know one type of Jewish cuisine. We never knew there were any others. And so they asked Jill Norman, asked me to write it when she was at Penguins. And I said, oh no, there's no such thing. And also, where will I find it? It seemed a totally impossible thing. But then I did take it on and I couldn't stop because I went on and on and on and finding more and more things. And people kept telling me there's no such thing. Even my own relatives, I have a few relatives I would keep seeing. They said, well, Claudia, what are you wasting your life on? There is no such thing. We add the same things as everybody else in our countries. And yes, but since the book came out, everywhere I go to give a talk in synagogue, there's always someone telling me, you forgot. You forgot the Jews of Afghanistan. And there I find them. And you forgot the food of the Jews of Holland. Yes, now I've got them. And so not only were all those Jewish foods, there were such a thing, but there's a lot that have been left out. And you're still collecting recipes, aren't you, Claudia, for your new book, which I think is going to be called The Med and Out Next Year. Yes. Yeah. Simon, here's one for you. We know quite a lot about what people ate in general in biblical times, but it was a lowly matzah, the first food that can be called truly Jewish. Well, even that probably not, actually, Lucy. I mean, matzah, for a start, it should be said, the book of Exodus was written 400 years, at least after the ostensible exodus, if indeed the exodus happened. So we're in the kind of 9th, 10th century BC when the book of Exodus was written. So the unleavened bread, which is undoubtedly part of the Torah and part of that great epic, is likely to have been made of, certainly it didn't come in squares. It comes out of Maneshevitz or Rikuzin. Perfectly square, I don't know. It's likely to be made of primitive kind, the first domesticated grains, einkorn, to begin with, and einkorn gave way to emmer wheat as well. Those were the wheats that were really the grains that were mostly eaten in Egypt. And we have a certain amount of knowledge about this very, we nowadays think of the Middle Easters overwhelmingly kind of rice-driven in terms of its grains, but we have the first proper documents, what a self-consciously hebraic, or if you like Jewish society, of the papyri documents of the Jewish mercenary soldier and family colony of Elefantini on the upper Nile near Aswan. Their kind of daily life is quite richly described and it's very, very heavy on breads of different kinds. Now, einkorn and emmer wheat would have been these flat, rather grayish discs, which would have been the first matzah, really. So a kind of harder, tougher, some more biscuity-like version of the basic shape of pita bread. So in the sense in which this was a kind of a ritual, festival-directed kind of food, you could say that was one of the first distinctive... Distinctive... Thanks very much. Simon, I want to... There'll be people out there in the audience who don't know very much about the rules of cash-root or kosher cooking. So could you just give us a very brief explanation? I mean, as brief as you can. And then I want to ask you, has kosher cooking... It's dangerous to say as brief as you can to me. As you well know, Lucy, you'll be... Do your best. ...on that later. Do your best. You've got lots of questions. In your opinion, has kosher cooking stunted the creativity of Jewish food? Those are two different questions. You want me to... I can talk about cash-root. There's a nice... Cash-root, really, for a start, like a lot of the Bible, you know, that old joke about the... ...rescueship captain who arrives on the desert island to rescue Mr. Goldberg. And he says, well, it's wonderful to pick you up, Mr. Goldberg, but tell me, why do you have two synagogues? And he says, one I go to and the other one I wouldn't be seen dead in. The same thing is true of the Bible. There are two completely different accounts of the creation and genesis. And similarly, there are two different accounts of cash-root. One in Leviticus and one in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy was almost certainly written at least a century after Leviticus. And Leviticus is more forgiving, you have to say. The basic rules of cash-root is you've got to separate meat and milk. You shall not see the lamb in its mother's milk. There are complicated, which really would be, dull criteria about the animals. You have to chew the cards and have a clove and hoof. But then there were all sorts of definition of what is an abomination. The great anthropologist, Mary Douglas, wrote a great book about purity rights and cleanliness rights. And for the first time it made sense that really what those biblical rules were all about, what were regarded as anomalous. And for Deuteronomy, flying insects are anomalous because they're creepy crawly things and they're also kind of bird-like. And therefore, Deuteronomy, I think it's chapter 14, says, very definitely you shall not eat it. But Leviticus says, no, absolutely not. Grasshoppers, locusts, cate-dids, all those kinds of things are perfectly kosher. And one culture that Claudia knows very well, Claudia, supreme ethnologist of Jewish life. Gemini culture, habitually, ate locusts. You ate locusts before, in effect, they ate you, or got rid of all the stuff that were, and still do. And interestingly, the rabbis in the Talmudic period, being unable to reconcile these two totally different approaches to whether you can eat insects or not, particularly flying insects.  There's a Gemini cookbook I have on my shelves. Claudia probably has it as well. And locusts, crunchy locusts is a very important part of it. All right. Maybe we should... Have you tried it, Lucy? That's great, Simon. Maybe we should leave the second part of that question. And so, Claudia. Claudia, we've just celebrated Jewish New Year, which we call Rosh Hashanah. Tell us about the sort of food your family used to eat on Rosh Hashanah in Cairo. And who would be invited to the festivities? In Cairo. In Cairo. Yes. Well, I was part of a very big extended family. And we used... Well, some of us, we had different groups and we weren't always the ones in my parents who were the hosts, but we also often were. Well, I'm just... Yes. There were several things that we wanted to eat, was let me see, things that were green to represent new life, lots of different vegetables, things that were white that represented purity. We also had things that were orange and we had a kind of squash that was like a spaghetti squash. It means it had fibers that came apart with which you made a jam because it represented gold. In the Ashkenazi tradition, it is cemis that people eat. But we also had... She says, Claudia, for people who don't know. Yes. Eastern European Jewish. But of course, most important of all, we had... We did have apple and we did have honey, but sometimes we just dipped in sugar to represent the sweetness of life because it was most of the things we ate were symbolic. I should have started with the very symbolic things.  And here in England, we've started eating a whole fish with the head on. But in Egypt, we ate the head of a lamb. But if it wasn't the head of a lamb, it was the brains. We would eat brains. I mean, they were wonderful brains. It was tongue. Or it was something to do with the head because the symbolism in Egypt was that we would be at the head, and the Jews should be at the head. But now we have become to say that we have to be at the head of doing good deeds. Nice. So that is more acceptable. Thanks very much, Claudia. This is a bit of an impersonate question, but was your family kosher? No. But nobody was that I knew in Egypt. We were a very lax community. My generation and my parents' generation. But my grandparents' generation were very religious. I mean, there was an uncle who was a Kabbalist. But yes, they were very religious.  But so at a certain point, well, maybe I won't go into it, but my grandfather explained why he wasn't kosher anymore. And a lot of Jews had a similar explanation. Shall I say? Yes, yes, if you can. No, quickly. Yes, that my grandfather, when they came from Syria, because they came from Syria, they all lived in a quarter with a slaughterer and with the synagogues, the Jewish school, everything. And then they moved away to grand districts. And from there, they couldn't, it was very far to keep going to the Jewish district they had been into to buy. They went to buy at the market all kinds of things. And then my grandfather saw the slaughterer going to buy from the Muslim butcher. And so he went and told the slaughterer or rather the butcher, the Jewish butcher, obviously. How can I come all the way to you when you buy to him? And his explanation was that all the Jews were away, all of them asking for the same cuts. He couldn't cut, you know, slaughter all these animals just for the cuts. For the fine cuts required by Jews. Okay, and Simon, I'm sorry, I'm asking you for this sort of exegesis generally speaking. Simon, Claudia's book of Jewish food divides Jewish cuisine into two overarching categories, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Again, in two sentences, can you tell the people in the audience you might not know the difference, something about the origins of Ashkenazi and Sephardi? Well, Ashkenazi, you know, just means really, it's a description really of Northern European Jewish cultures generally. So Germany, France, the Rhine Valley, extended to Poland, the Pale of Sattlement. Sephardi and Mizrahi, there are, I think most people know now that there are Sephardi community originally was Spain, Portugal, the Italian community, particularly the Roman community was completely distinctive with their own language, in fact, Judeo-Italian. But the whole of the Margrethe, you know, was full of Jewish cultures, but they were very far-flung indeed, way beyond Turkey and Persia, both had enormously important cultures with their own foodways and extended all the way to Afghanistan. Indeed, the great lost Jewish cuisine has to be from China, from Kaifeng, you know, where Jews had a very powerful presence under the Northern Song dynasty in the 11th, 12th and 13th century all the way through.  It's what they do in New York anyway. So if only we had those documents of, we know that they kept halachik law and most of the festivals. So it'd be wonderful to know what Jewish Chinese cooking was. The only one missing, I think. Well, maybe, is it there in your book, Claudia? I don't think we have any good sources for it. So you ask, yes. I have a Chinese scholar from China. Yes, who actually contacted me to say I heard that you are interested. But she had looked into it because her work was on Jews. And she was particularly interested in Jews. But she said there was nothing left now. The only thing that somebody who went to the region, they went there and they bought something that, I forget now the name of a pastry that was supposedly Jewish, but it came with Lithuanian Jews. Well, that doesn't count at all. It's just, you know, in Manchuria, there was a lot of Manchurian Jewish culture had a great aunt who lived in Harbin. But for example, I could be, this is a rather nice story that when, we thought when I was making a story of the Jews, we wanted a film of particular community which had been boiled down to one person in Kochi, a woman called Sarah Cohen. So this is not the great Iraqi-Calcutta-Mumbai connection which produced Sanctuus and Proliphic and gastronomically very creative cultures. This is the culture of South India, of Kochi and Kerala. And they had their own particular food ways. And you can go to Kochi. Some of you listening or watching may have done this. And you still see it makes one cringe a little bit, Jewtown, it's actually called that. And the beautiful Paradisi synagogue, which is, oh, which was begun during the period of Portuguese and Dutch incursion and has decorative elements from them all. And they went to see Sarah Cohen, who I think, I know she was very, this is 10 years ago and she was already pushing 90, but she was very determined and a tough, tough old bird. And then we were interrupted by this young Muslim man actually in a not very Muslim part of India who had brought her Friday dinner in the Kochi style. And he in fact was doing a doctorate on Kerala Jewish cooking. And Sarah was his principal source actually, so S-O-U-R-C-E. So these food ways went absolutely everywhere. I just want to say one thing about, you know, obviously Ashkenazi cooking is originally much more familiar. Heavy in starch, in potatoes, in pickled foods, in salted foods. Oh, by the way, actually, one, to go back to my favorite subject, one travelers midrashic account in the Middle Ages described locusts being pickled actually as well in Egypt. So locusts were everywhere. Sephardi food is the glory of the sort of things that Claudia writes about so beautifully over and over again. But what it won't say is there's one aspect to the ritual of Jewish life, which is a crossover moment, I think. Claudia may disagree between Ashkenazi and Sephardi cooking. You're not supposed to start cooking on the Sabbath on Shabbat. So both in the classic Sephardic cuisines of Spain and Portugal before the expulsion in 1492 and in the Ashkenazi world of Poland, you were very stew driven. You took your pot of a meat and a meaty stew with lots of vegetables, sometimes with semolina and whether it was Adafina in the Lusitanian and Iberian world or whether it was Cholent in the Ukrainian and Polish world, you then put it in the baker's oven and it stayed there. So you weren't actually doing the cooking and you retrieved it during the Sabbath having not cooked in because it was slow cooking. It was still hot and delicious. And my mother was one of the, it was a tradition in the Ashkenazi community all over Ashkenazi Jewish world but into London as well in the early part of the 20th century for children to go and pick up the Cholent part which my mother certainly did. It was one of the few things that my mother herself was actually brilliant at doing. Her Cholent was prize winning and I'm not crazy about Ashkenazi cooking myself but I do love a perfectly made Cholent. Claudia even, I think in your book you describe that even in your parents' time they still took the pot, didn't they? To the oven. No, because we, when I was born we were living in a little island that's residential and it's now one of the grand areas of living and there weren't a communal oven. I beg your pardon, the grandparents' day. It is in the Jewish quarter. There was the public baths and the public baths, they always had a fire to warm the water, to heat the water and at night it was the dying coals that people would go and put their pots in but it was the people in the Jewish quarter. By the way, when I was saying that people were always telling me we missed out and you know when I was speaking at the Sephardi synagogue by the way I called the whole part of my book Sephardi although now we call them Israhi but at one time in Israel they called everybody who wasn't Ashkenazi Sephardi but because they moved the Sephardim or the people I called Sephardim they moved from east to west and backwards and forwards but not north to where the Ashkenazi were so they had contacts and cultural sort of hybridization between themselves so there was something common about their food which wasn't between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi but with, sorry, what did you ask? That's absolutely fine and very interesting Claudia. You've both been rather rude in your own way at various times about Ashkenazi cooking and Claudia, you described it in your book I mean this is a summing up kind of all carrots and dumplings and grainers but boiling hot, have you changed your mind over the last 25 years about how you were cooking? Yeah, no, no, but all the way I did love many, many dishes and I still eat them when I can but I have to say that the Ashkenazi themselves don't think much of their food If you see in Israel, I was there at a conference that was called many, many years ago long before my Jewish book which was called Kus Kus or Gefil to Fish and it was, they had asked people from various communities to come and cook in Jerusalem. We were in this hotel, Glad Hotel where we had to be watched by what you call them sort of making sure that you were doing everything kosher but yes, at the end of it there was a big, big party where the, because we had to cook as well as talk and people had to have a taste but at the end there was a big dinner in a restaurant called, I forget, now I forget names, but on one side was all the Sephardi food on the other was the Ashkenazi food and all the Ashkenazi came to eat at the Sephardi and none of the Sephardi went to cook, eat at the Ashkenazi table but there is now, there has been lots of changes and at the beginning in Israel, at the beginning of the state they didn't want a Sephardi food, Sephardi food was despised and it wasn't considered Jewish, it was considered ethnic Jewish food was considered Jewish but it was despised as well because it represented a food of oppression and a food of, it had to be forgotten and left behind and the food that they considered Israeli was hummus and falafel and all those things which they found already there but actually one person told me there is only one food you can say is truly at that time Israeli and it was Turkish Nitzel Turkish Nitzel? Well it's sort of, I want to just sort of complicate things a little bit and I must remember that you know the term of the century around 1900 for example whether the food was horrible then Jerusalem had an enormous Jewish majority there were about 70,000 Jews to about 15,000 Palestinians they were a small, very, very small minority in Palestine, Israel overall but they were a serious majority and I don't want to give the impression that Ashkenazi food throughout is something I think despised is quite a strong word really you know there is one more Ashkenazi bakery near the Lion Gate in the Old City that's been going since the Ashub, since the 1920s and you will not find a more sumptuous array of pastries if I was doing it, you're right to say that I held my nose a bit at Ashkenazi cooking my own family, unlike Claudia, was a mixture of both and originally from Izmir, other shamans were went to Batashania and Romania where a lot of intermarriage with the Ashkenazim happened but Romania was one place, Batashania in particular where there were Ashkenazi and Safadi households who mixed regularly including the ingredients of their kitchens and you know there are some things I attempted I mean it is, gefilte fish gets a terrible wrap and usually deserved and there's nothing more ghastly than these gray, soggy, lumpen, cement like things with their little kind of carrot yarmulke, their little carrots sitting on top but if gefilte fish is only, it is right, it's very close to Canel de Brachet, isn't it? It's actually a dumpling of finely ground fish if your fish is good, if you add egg whites, whipped egg whites to it you're careful about the spice and you don't over-poach it these things can be actually... I hope you're listening very carefully in the audience Claudia, if you want you to add something I have to say that I'm talking about a certain period and everything has changed in Israel including Ashkenazi food has become very, very fashionable I think already 15 years ago or 20 years ago but it became fashionable through the American gourmet magazine New York Times and all the... it was the American deli food and the American idea of Jewish food that made Ashkenazi food become the soul food of the elites because they were powerful elites of Israel The answer to my childhood in Glasgow in comparable cooks and I still haven't tasted anything that compares Simon, look back to your party Ashkenazi roots you spent the latter half of your childhood in Goldersgreen What was in your lunchbox? Yeah, this is really embarrassing Lucy I thought, well, Lucy's... Lucy grew up as Lucy Cohen, I think that's right, isn't it? Yeah, indeed, yes But no relation to the staggeringly great smoked salmon purveyor in Goldersgreen Road called Cohen Smoked Salmon it was still there when you... I don't think it was when you arrived, Claudia but anyway it was really, really very good at least in my childhood memory but my mother, you know, because I did not do school lunches really I had packed lunches as you say Lucy and it was always, always smoked salmon with sometimes a smear of cream cheese on it on rye bread every single day and I was sort of, you know... I think it was the point I hadn't realised that it was kind of luxury food and would infuriate, you know, my mates in the 19... my non-Jewish mates in the 1950s bloody Jews with their smoked salmon so I think it was probably at the moment when I opened my sandwich box and said, oh no, this is a terrible thing to say not smoked salmon again my best friend, a fellow called Sid Harris took his open blade pencil sharpener and snatched it away and started not to eat my smoked salmon sandwich but to tear it it was a kind of sandwich pogrom that actually happened so I attempted to retrieve the... and got my hands freshly sliced I still... Ms. Nake and me putting up to the camera it's very faint now but I still bear the scar, 12 stitches actually of this personal attack on my smoked salmon sandwich You could have swapped and given poor Sid a taste of your daily fare, couldn't you? Yeah, terrible, that actually never occurred to me you know, because I didn't realise the hips are annoyingly luxurious food I want to remind everybody to submit questions and there will be time for questions so do send them in and we'll look forward to them later on Claudia, on a more serious note perhaps You add something or the sense of not being prejudiced and all that but of course when we think of Jewish food and the shtetl, it's one kind of food but then there was all the kinds of foods that came out of Hungary and Austria and they joined the Ashkenazi food culture with, you know, some of the grandest foods of the world so... Good, I don't think with any Ashkenazi... Yes, I still think that the Ashkenazi is a very good point, Lucy to say, for example, there's a there's a dumpling crescent which is essentially Hungary and Bohemia so Hungary and Czechoslovakia and you think, oh, but of course the dumplings can be again you know, like a filter fish can if you know how to cook it properly very light and very refined and there are stevery dumplings and, you know, gorgeous kind of cherry and fruit dumplings and that's a particular subset of the Ashkenazi world Right, so moving on a little bit to a different area Claudia, under the Spanish Inquisition Jews had to give evidence that they'd become good Catholics they truly converted Did food have a role here? Yes, well, because a lot of women were brought before the court of the Inquisition and they were reported by a jealous or somebody who had a grudge against them it could be their maid or it could be the neighbour but the one thing that they were brought in for which is in the courts of the Inquisition in the archives it was always about food apart from things like candles, they might be using candles but it was always food and there were some, of course the main thing was that they didn't eat if they didn't eat enough ham or bacon or pork and so everybody was putting pork of some kind in their dishes and it became such an important thing or rather for the whole population, not just the Jews people who were old Christians, not just the new Christians and the Muslims who had converted as well they all put pork in so as not to be taken as a possible Jew and it has influenced the food of Spain this is why wherever you go you rarely find a soup or a salad or any vegetable dish without something either a little piece of pork somewhere or just the pork fat on it is there but the food that they had at that time I heard about several of the dishes that were mentioned as Jewish dishes and one of them was what you call it an aubergine and cheese gratin do you know that? Berenjena con queso I think so but the thing is I found it in Turkey it is the favorite dish of the Jews of Turkey and it is so extraordinary that that was a dish that actually brought a lot of trouble to women in Turkey if they cooked it, but here they brought it to Turkey but in Spain they would have been that's great Claudia and actually bringing in Turkey I've just got a question for you Simon about the Ottoman Empire could you tell us how food... in questions Lucy sorry kind of ask an historian questions really okay come in at the end what do you want to know about the Ottoman Empire? okay what I wanted to know is something about the relationship between the Jews and the sultan Selim II oh yeah okay so that's yeah one of the Jews who became very important to originally was Portuguese from the Mendes family who became a kind of treasurer and a kind of sort of deputy vizier to Selim II was also, we know this, was also the great caterer Selim II was notoriously copulent and particularly after prayers on Friday light to gorge on this very complicated and delicious kind of abundance of food that was both savory and sweet and Mendes was who was known as the great Jew had an enormous caravan which used to go all the way through the different courtyards of Topkapi to deliver this so yeah I think I began that's that's that's kind of you so I apologize for saying I'm getting all the questions so in fact there's a chapter about there's the couple of pages about this in volume two of my Jewish history not the great catering but I you know it was interesting though to switch it slightly that within this very kind of mixed up food world of my Sharma grandparents my mother Steinberg grandparents weren't mixed up at all because that was really purely Lithuanian Ashkenazi food but in the more kind of mixed up Balkan tradition there were there were foods that came absolutely I mean one that's very I think I'm right in saying Claudia O'Corretti called my grandmother Sarah called it Fritaka and it was basically kind of ground up chicken patties actually but chicken is important and you you've grounded up you I think some sort of dill was used which I don't like very much but it was ground up with onion in the way in which kind of beef patty would and it be fried but it was I remember served with rice by my by my grandmother and it was it was something that she certainly said anyway originally came that her husband who's I say my grandfather died before he was born particularly liked and was a kind of ismiri thing and certain and my mother inherited that and she made that sort of very well too and it was always called a Fritaka and sometimes you come with kind of braised tomatoes and I think it was worth to tell us something I feel I wish I could bring the portrait that I've got downstairs of my great grandfather because he was the chief rabbi of Aleppo and he is he was he was made that he was he was given the post by the Sultan Abdelhamid and he has he is there in a what is he called his his robes and his kaftan and his his turban and all the medals given to him from Abdelhamid and so we did feel as not only from Aleppo but from the Istanbul part of the family that we were Ottoman and in a big way and from all the different parts we inherited all these dishes and I could say yes this is where we are from and this is where we are from we had a very brief period in Vienna I think actually some of my great uncles lived in Vienna and there was a saying that where shamans lived empires fell the Ottoman Empire fell followed by the Habsburg Empire as we know followed by the British Empire and hey here I am in New York the bad spell is not right I was going to ask you when did Jewish cooking first come to Britain but you put me off there's the famous fish and chips thing really which is only half for our chips and the potatoes were not absolutely not part of unless Gloria corrects me as far as I know not part of safari cooking fried fish of course absolutely was and fried fish certainly was sold on the streets of 18th century London and the first time which is rather wonderful I think actually that Jewish cooking was sort of recognised in the publication of the book which I'm sure the British library has got lots of first editions cooking for private houses I think it's called 1845 and the very last chapter you can read it online actually everybody it's called Jewish and foreign cooking before you get to foreign cooking there is Jewish cooking and there's a celebration of not any of fried fish of food by being fried but eaten cold the following day for example fish like pink fish like salmon actually apparently was fried by Jewish communities and then eaten cold for breakfast or for lunch the following day the other dish there are two other kinds of Jewish cooking which are celebrated in Eliza Acton's book one are the use of pounded almonds of almond flour to substitute the wheat flour obviously that arose out of Passover practice when you weren't allowed to have leaven types of pastries and salt beef what Eliza Acton called smoked beef but actually is kind of pickled or salt beef which she says without meaning to be offensive said it's so good that it resembles the flavour of a perfectly cured ham which was the best way probably to celebrate it this is quite nice because this leads us to talking a little bit about and this is for you Claudia how and why was the Delhi first introduced in New York in the early 20th century who did it cater for actually I'm just trying to think well really in the 19th century and it was let me see where did I say I can't answer the phone sorry mind you Claudia you said the purpose of the Jewish Delhi well it was no no it just makes a funny noise I'm just going to say this for you Claudia it was when the pogroms in Russia and there was this mass of 2,300,000 Russian Jews arrived in America and they arrived from Stettles and they lived in tenements and many of them were males were men on their own and they couldn't afford to go out to places they wanted to eat their own food and neighbours started cooking for them and giving them food and gradually it started lots of places where they cooked the kind of foods that they had at home at home and gradually they became there were more and more people and families where the women went to work also couldn't cook at home so the Delhi became a very important part of American Jewish life and somehow that kind of food that was created at the time when they were between the Stettles and the tenement that became the idea of Jewish food that the menu of the Delhi until today from the salt beef there were different kinds of delis there were the meat ones and then there were the fish ones which were called dairy and that had fish and creams and various deli things so they specialised in different things one thing that happened in New York that was born in New York is the pastrami because people say it's something that is Romanian but it's not the Jews in Romania didn't make it that way it was something completely unique of New York Now we're going to throw this open to the audience in a minute so I've got a last question for both of you so Claudian Simon perhaps starting with Claudia can you tell us about this new way of Middle Eastern cooking which is led by Yota Motelenghi and his Palestinian partner Sami Tamimi and Sarit Pakker and Itamar Shulovich of Honey & Co do you think Claudio you might have influenced the Middle Eastern cuisine in any way? Yes because they say so they say that it was their bedside reading every night to get inspiration but because it was my Middle Eastern book was translated into Hebrew very early on it's 50 years ago and as Yotam says he was born the year that my first book came out and in Israel it was the first book that actually had Middle Eastern recipes and well I do find that all the chefs there had an award at the Jewish Film Festival or Jerusalem Film Festival for the influence I had and then I went to for the award and several chefs invited me to special dinners that they made and said you know that the book was where they had their original source material but somehow that's unsurprising Simon would you like to add anything about the kind of cooking that Ottolenghi for instance and Sammy to Mimi present in Jerusalem or I think you're... Yes I think the book is a wonderful book because again in the spirit of Claudio's work there's a lot of folk history in it and it does indeed go back to the days when I was a little bit nostalgic about because it seems to be a gloss golden age where Jews and Arabs in cities like Jerusalem Jews and Palestinians in cities like Jaffa and Jerusalem sort of shared a lot of food culture and there's a lot of that in the book on Jerusalem it's a wonderful evocation of if there is any who don't know it the Makhaneh Yehuda food market is absolutely an incredible place one of the greats in Barcelona it's one of the great extraordinary kind of food markets of the world but there are weird phenomena for example I read a small story here in New York that one in four Americans buys hummus every week from their supermarket this is absolutely extraordinary originally hummus was in the idea that it might be it was meant again for rather in the spirit of Claudio's history of how Delhi started in New York it was originally made by a man called Norman Soha in the 1980s and the mid and late 1980s for Israelis, so a large Israeli expatriate community in New York who wanted to be reminded of the hummus back home and the fact that the business grew and grew and grew and eventually was bought by PepsiCo by the makers of PepsiCola who delivered I think it was 12 million free samples to supermarkets all over the country although I have to say my first introduction to hummus in the 1970s was via the Arab restaurants in Jaffa and I don't think that the Tel Aviv would produce quite the same kind of standard quality of hummus I don't know that I've really found it elsewhere Simon you might like to I'm very purist about hummus, I like to make my own and cook my own cookies Of course you do Simon, and of course you would like to give us your recipe and of course you would like to give us your recipe for chicken soup but you don't have to put them up on your website unfortunately because there's a lot of people out there with a lot of questions for you so before I turn to them just quickly Claudia I just want to say yes I think what is happening with your tam and all these others but primarily your tam they have created a Middle Eastern novel cuisine that is absolutely wonderful but it keeps changing because it is like the global cultures today are creative and they have to keep creating and some like your tam have incredible magic about what they do and do it extremely well and I find this is particularly upsetting to Middle Eastern restaurants that are Turkish and Lebanese and all that who always do the same traditional thing their menu is set in stone and they find that these people, young chefs or older chefs from Israel feel free to do not, they can use anything from any Jewish community whether it's Yemenite or Persian and feel free to do what they want with it and so what they are doing has made a huge impact on international global gastronomy or cuisine wonderful, you may have an opportunity to sort of expand on this sort of things that we've touched upon but now I'd like to open it to the floor and here's the first question from Cheryl and she doesn't actually specify who this question is too so either of you could pick it up as someone who was brought up on Jewish food and still appreciates it in what ways do you think that Jewish food would change? It's a little bit like you were just mentioning and Fat, Claudia, in relation to... Yeah, I mean in America it can change completely because people there feel you have to be creative and they do for instance latkes with courgette and it has nothing to do with the latkes that we know but in France people when I gave a recipe using a different fish for gefelter fish there was uproar that I had to change it in my French edition because the French are traditionalists but here it just changes with what is available Here's a question for Simon from Philip Coles Simon, you mentioned locusts did John the Baptist eat insects or carob beans? Absolutely unqualified to answer the question not having been there at the time I have no idea I don't mean to blow the question but certainly we know that locusts were we don't even know if they were consumed in biblical times we know they were consuming plague of locusts but we certainly do know that in very ancient Jewish communities in Yemen and indeed in Ethiopia it was absolutely standard and as I say, Yemeni cookbooks survived from quite a long time ago so when the first Jewish rediscovery of Yemenite Jews occurs in the middle of the late part of the 19th century they certainly discover that locusts are basically be your happy hour snack Thank you very much Here's a question from Aaron Valance I would love to know whether there are any dishes specific to the Jewish community in Britain that you don't see anywhere else I guess that's for either of you Claudia? Yes, it is the fried gefilte fish you don't see it anywhere else and because like the fried fish in Bata it came with the Portuguese Jews who came to England in the 18th century and the way of frying in Bata is something that the Portuguese has brought even to Japan but the Jews brought it here but they started also frying gefilte fish because everywhere else gefilte fish is just stewed white this is the only place that you can find that Did you want to add anything? I don't know about you Claudia but I would counsel people trying it outside the Jewish community not actually to have a full-on Bata really but actually just to dredge the ground fish with onions and spices whatever you want to do it like that, that's actually what my mother did and it could be tiny little cocktail fish balls or large patties and they're both very good and they stay good mysteriously for days afterwards but actually yes now that's the way most of the Jews do it but when Eliza Acton gave recipes she called fish in the Jewish manner it was a Bata was that ground fish there or whole fish? Yes that would be some chips fish so we have written that so here is a question from Win Brown, she says can you tell me anything about the kinds of food eaten by African Jews or was it basically the same as other Jewish traditions I'm thinking particularly of Ethiopian Jews Well I know that I mean as far as I know about it actually and again I'm working again on the rediscovery of Ethiopian Jews first of all by a great Karriite ethnologist in the 1890s and he describes food in the Jewish community which is richly slaughtered but is indistinguishable from the kind of food eaten by the rest of the Ethiopians one particular case in point being in Jarrah this extraordinary kind of rather I don't know how we all feel about in Jarrah not my favourite kind of thing but it is why you mop part meat stews very spongy, Claudia how does it get to be so spongy and cloth-like and certainly Ethiopian Jews Gondar, Gondar is a great Ethiopian was the centre of most of the Ethiopian Jewish community and they were the first people who went talk about using in Jarrah rather than plate stews which seem to be sort of indistinguishable from I think yes I know but there are of course now communities, there are communities now the Abodaya community in Uganda which is quite important and very distinctive Jewish community and I think all the rest of you have been frozen or maybe it's me who's frozen but the Abodaya community also I think developed as I understand it Jewish variations on what standard East Africa food is I mean there is quite a thriving there was a Jewish community in the Sudan but they were of Iraqi and Syrian origin and so their food was something they adapted it to things that they found there but I don't know of something purely African myself apart from the Ethiopian ones Lucy did you want to say something? My niece has a café in Tel Aviv actually and with the chefs are Eritrean and so the food is Eritrean and then once a week they also put on Eritrean music so if anybody wants any details I can supply them later Polly This is a question from Rebecca What would you say distinguishes Jewish food from the other food native to a place Is it mainly that it is shaped by cultural laws? For me or yes I find that very often Jews come from a country and think that they eat exactly the same thing and then you find out from the people in the country one Jewish have realized how different their food was but for instant the reason why it's different yes it has to do partly with the kosher laws they use oil instead of butter or else goose fat instead of pork fat so there's a different in taste but there are for instance the Sephardi Passover cakes are made with almonds there is that kind but there is something else and that the Jews moved they were migrating for all the various reasons of work of trade of persecution but they brought something from one country to another and it created a mix of two cultures sometimes of three cultures and in various countries in some countries like in Turkey the food remained very different although the Jews who came from Spain because the majority or great number went straight from Spain to Turkey and they kept until recently their food of Spain in an unbelievable way which I researched quite a lot but they didn't stop them from eating shish kebab and pilafs from adopting foods from Turkey as well but I remember at a conference a Turkish gastronom said can Claudia tell us why I'm 50 years old that was a few years ago and I have never eaten the Jewish food of Turkey and the Jews have been here well he had to go and eat in their homes but now I must say that it has got into restaurants that there are Jews and caterers who learn from Jews and they sell to restaurants the specialities of Jews I just had something really that Claudia was saying yesterday when we were having a preliminary conversation there are certain foods which were unknown in the ancient world or not known to the Romans or Greeks even though we think of them as quintessentially and Claudia's book and Claudia mentioned this yesterday because the Jews were living in Sicily they got artichokes from the Arab culinary world and brought them into Italy Jewish artichokes had that distinctive migratory route the same thing with melanzane but very often it's a matter of what the Jews carry there are tiny little variations for example something I rather like Biales which you may in Britain know they're quite well known in New York which are not the same as bagels or bagels they're flat, they're round but they're flat and they're solid, no hole in the middle there's a little depression in the middle they're caramelised softened onion shreds they're very very good if they're done properly and that was distinctive not just to Poland but to Bialystok in particular, hence the name and certainly wasn't, there was nothing else like it in the Polish bread basket as far as I know That is wonderful, thank you both for such rich answers just a quick note here, hi Lucy we would love the details of your niece's café It's on Benjahuda but I doubt that it's over at the moment sadly it used to be the journalist's café on Benjahuda and I will find the details anybody can contact me at lucyatjewishbookweek.com We're going to be inundated Here's a question from Adam Lieber Why do you think Ashkenazi food never got the uptake and glamourisation in the UK that we see in New York and the USA and do you think Hasidism appreciate the quality seen across the pond or from the developments within the food from the younger chefs I think why do you stick this question about Ashkenazi food about having the uptake and glamourisation in the UK versus across the pond has it ever glamourised in America despite the spectacular globalisation of the bagel which is another comparable to hummus but I haven't done the kind of food ways research on that has it ever glamourised it was always the same stuff turned out at weddings and bar mitzvahs and it made it into Hollywood scenes in various Hollywood movies the Jewish co-in brothers or whatever it is of people that inevitably family feuding catastrophic bar mitzvahs really where gefilter fish and smoked salmon and various kinds of slightly suicidal chicken were presented but it was never really glamourised but it was popularised so it's that's simply because the Jewish community the film industry, the entertainment industry or the catering industry was very it was sentimentalised I think is the proper word place like Barney Greengrass which is still a wonderful place for every conceivable kind of smoked fish not just whitefish but sturgeon and not just smoked salmon but whitefish and sable and sturgeon on Amsterdam Avenue is a place where people go to remember their grandparents from Brooklyn and the Lower East Side there were of course places like that in London there was the Great Salt Beef Cafes of Blooms and the Great Bagel Emporium there is still one there but it keeps on being resurrected in a slightly different version I think yeah because Ashkenazi Jewish culture in America was such a big thing you know the comedians the comedians were at the weddings and they were at the hotels in the hills with whatever and they were talking about food all the time it was their jokes and their things and it's got into Hollywood talk and American talk it's sort of so it is because the community there was so powerful it was the Golden Community of the World. Yeah there's a story of the visitor to a very excessively lavish bar mitzvah who is you know who goes into the main dining room and is astonished to see a full sculptural bar mitzvah boy down in Potato Kugel and someone says is that you know is that a sculpture by Zadkein and the host there no no Zadkein only works in Chop Lever you know right Polly I don't know whether we've got time for any more questions but kind of this links in and I think it's just arrived on my phone and it's from Omar Petillo what did Ashkenazis eat before we knew about potatoes for latkes they used they didn't do latkes they did other things but yes they didn't have it's a khanika thing because of the you know the miracle of the oil the miracle of the oil by the way it's not in the book of Maccabees it was an invention by the Mishnah and the Talmudists much later on but he was supposed to eat something in oil a very good example of the radically divergent food ways is in the safari world you eat oil fried donuts with with jam filling and as you rightly imply you know as the question of rightly implies potatoes were kind of unknown until the late 18th century so like a fairly recent invention in fact it's a kind of lukumadis they are little fritters and so do the Moroccans as well I don't know how much time we have we've got Polly I wanted to actually have the final question if I may which is for both of you what food could you not what would be your least dispensable food what food could you not live without Simon what food do I like the least what food do you like the most what food do I like the most in Jewish food oh dear you go first Simon's floored I feel having you know like 3000 recipes that I've tried over the years I can't say one difficult as a food writer because I've got too many not a recipe but a food like I think Nigella said roast chicken for instance is it not particularly Jewish no I mean roast chicken you know I couldn't live without roast chicken is it as good as kosher is kosher chicken is it especially good as kosher chicken yes it depends on things whether it's good or not I do like chocolate I do make chocolate I live without it maybe I could do laptop liver yeah Polly do you think that time's up I think very sadly time I think really sadly time is up I can't thank you enough Lucy you've done the most beautiful job and given the difficulty of this technology it nevertheless feels like we've been in the most wonderful intimate informal but informative conversation with the three of you it has been wonderful and I think that the telephone in fact enhanced it because it was just like being at your house Claudia it has just been wonderful I'm definitely putting on an event next year which is going to be called kus kus or gefilter fish for sure food season and I've just got this kind of tantalising question about what was it that the Chinese eight Chinese Jewish communities and I think everyone it's just been absolutely tantalising and delicious listening to you but to all thank you if wonderful audience so thank you for your beautiful questions so sorry we couldn't answer them all if you have enjoyed this evening's event please come back and join us for other food season events which are taking place between now and the end of October today we have an amazing double bill two events one called beyond the bank which is looking at some really inspiring initiatives which are taking sort of food solutions out to communities beyond food banks really inspiring work and another event on food futures with D Woods Tim Lang and Dan Saladino which will be very interesting on the future of food we would absolutely love to see you again thank you again to our sponsors and most of all thank you so much to Lucy Claudia and Simon for just an evening I don't think any of us will ever forget thank you so much thank you pleasure thank you Lucy thank you