Rowley's Whiskey Forge

Bookshelf: Alt Whiskeys

2012-01-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

...[T]he recipes in here reflect the last 3-5 years

of tinkering with different recipes, techniques, and ideas

in an effort to do one simple thing:

expand the horizons of what whiskey can be.

And, of course, have fun.

~ Darek Bell

Alt Whiskeys

A decade ago, fewer than a hundred distilleries supplied all of America’s domestic legal liquor supply. Today, we can boast four times that number. Well, “boast,” perhaps, is not wholly accurate. That growth has entailed missteps and occasional outright failures as this cohort of new distillers — who may have been hobbyists or working in wholly different fields five years ago — make the transition to more seasoned professionals.

But make no mistake: the transition is underway.

There’s an exuberance common among new distillers, a willingness to try unproven ingredients and techniques. Consider Chip Tate’s Rumble made from wildflower honey, turbinado sugar, and figs from Balcones Distilling in Texas or New Holland’s Hatter Royale, a barley spirit from Michigan finished with hops. Then there’s Darek Bell’s triple smoke malt whiskey that blends a bit of chocolate malt with a triple whammy of German-, peat-, and cherry-smoked malts.

Bell is the owner of Corsair Artisan Distillery. He’s also a hell of a distiller with the credentials to prove it. He trained at the Seibel Brewing Institute and is a graduate of the Bruichladdich Distilling Academy. His whiskeys have won numerous awards. His book, Alt Whiskeys, hit the shelves this week.

Tapping that fat vein of experimental distilling, Bell subtitled the self-published tome Alternative Whiskey Recipes and Distilling Techniques for the Adventurous Craft Distiller. Alt Whiskeys is a turning point in the literature of American distilling. There’s nothing else out there that captures, page after page, our modern distillers’ spirit of innovation with new ingredients, techniques, and equipment — or that reveals the deep connections between craft brewing and craft distilling, as evidenced by Bell’s through use of original and target gravities, fermentation temperatures, barrel notes, and other specific technical notes that read more like something from brewers' manuals than the recipes one usually finds for spirits.

“What’s wrong with whiskeys the way they are now?” Bell writes.

Absolutely nothing. As a whiskey geek myself, I am an avid whiskey lover. You might even say whiskey obsessed. BUT I do think whiskey could be better. Different. More interesting. Brewers have a palate of over 50 different types of malt at their disposal to draw from, while most distillers just use plain 2 row barley.

How could they be better, different, more interesting? The book gives ample suggestions and guidelines, starting with grains. American distillers are familiar with corn, wheat, rye, and barley, of course. Bell, however, explores alternatives; amaranth, quinoa, spelt, kamut, grain sorghum, millet, blue corn, tritordeum, and more. Buckwheat, even — not actually a grain, but it can be treated as one, as Bell demonstrates in his recipe for 92 proof buckwheat bourbon. More of them come into play in his seven- and eleven-grain bourbons.

Click to embiggen

Bell’s background as a brewer shines through across the pages. An oatmeal stout whiskey is an early tip-off, but he lays out his cards in two chapters devoted entirely to whiskeys inspired by America’s craft brewing beers. There’s the pumpkin spice moonhine, a riff on 1980’s-style pumpkin ales, and a mocha porter whiskey. Other whiskeys are based on witbier, Russian imperial stout, Octoberfest, dopplebock, American lager, Bavarian helles, and Pilsner.

But he really hits stride in the chapter on hopped whiskeys. “If whiskey is distilled beer,” Bell asks, “why has an element so critical to the history of beer never been used?” Well, it has been used, just not widely; hopped whiskeys are still a surprise even to many whiskey drinkers. Bell embraces the bitter flower cones with abandon.

Seven hopped whiskey recipes reveal multiple ways to get the hops’ nose, taste, and tang into the bottle. Some, such as dry hopping, are familiar to brewers, but hopping whiskey is not exactly the same as hopping beer. Distillers work with a sealed vessel, so there’s no just tossing in hops as brewers do during the cooking of the beer. Bell’s solution? A handmade double-valved hop insertion pipe for the still that allows distillers to add hops at particular points in the run. He also deploys hop backs, hop teas, and hopbursting, a technique that introduces massive amounts of hops late in the process that allows the distiller to amplify the hops aroma (and a bit of bitterness).

Another chapter explores alternates to hops, malt, and yeast. Wormwood wit whiskey, anyone? Chamomile wheat whiskey? How about an elderflower Bohemian pilsner whiskey, barley sochu, mint-chocolate milk stout whiskey, or cannabis moonshine? I’ve yet to taste a yeast-free whiskey, but Bell lays out how to make a soured barley example fermented with the bacteria Brettanomyces lambicus, so familiar to lovers of Belgian lambic beers.

And there’s smoke. The chapter on smoked whiskeys includes recipes, of course, but even more useful for the experimentally-minded distiller, guidelines for types of woods, how to smoke malts, and how changing the percentage of smoked grains in a mash bill affects the perception of smoke in the final product. Want to build a smoke injector? Learn how to make liquid smoke (even though Bell gives the stuff only qualified endorsement)? That’s here. So’s a corn cob smoked whiskey, inspired by a Tennessee meat-smoking technique.

About 60 recipes in all, rounded out with a chapter on cocktails from Josh Habiger.

Alt Whiskeys belongs on the shelf of every American distiller, legal, extra-legal, or simply aspiring. Whiskey lovers, see what’s going to be happening to your beloved spirit over the next few years — not just from Corsair, but from distilleries across the coutnry. The rest of you lot, if you want to understand why this is one of the most interesting and promising times for distillers in hundreds of years, get this book.

Then break out the whiskey.

Darek Bell (2012)
Edited by Amy Lee Bell, Photography by Pete Rodman, Forward by Bill Owens
Alt Whiskeys: Alternative Whiskey Recipes and Distilling Techniques for the Adventurous Craft Distiller
200 pages (paperback)
Corsair Artisan Distillery
ISBN: 0983350000
$29.99

Amazon sells it here.

Goes well with:

Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer. As I wrote two years back, "If you make sausage or cure your own meats—any kind, not just pork—don’t delay. Get a copy of Maynard’s book today. It’s the one we’ve been waiting for." Just so, Alt Whiskeys is the one we've been waiting for.

Drink What You Like (Regardless of the Mixologists' Sniffy Disdain)

2012-01-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

if i was bartending with anyone

who said shit like that

i would pull his underwear over his head

and throw his ass

out the front door

~ bigjmurf

Over the holidays, one of the local markets slashed prices on liquor. Cointreau, in particular, was nearly half price, so I bought several months' worth. As I was checking out, the clerk read the neck tag's recipe for a margarita and, sounding genuinely sad, said "Damn, I've been making this wrong for years." I asked him "Well, do you like your margaritas?" His face brightened immediately. "Oh, yeah. They're great!""Then what do you care what someone else says you should be drinking? Make them the way you like them."

Now, I like well-crafted, classic drinks as much as the next guy and hold bartenders who purport to make them to certain standards — I'll send back a Manhattan that's been shaken, for instance — but the thing about drinking is: drink what you like. Listen to what seasoned boozers have to say, but don't be intimidated by them. Do you like, for instance, your red wine chilled...or with fish? Well, cork dorks may disapprove, but drink your red wine chilled and with fish. Is what you want right now — for whatever mysterious reasons — a Long Island iced tea? Well, then, order one.

But not from this incompetent pretender:

Thanks to John T. Edge from Oxford, Mississippi who sent me this gem this morning. You'll find this guy in the video everywhere. Portland, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans (well, during Tales of the Cocktail, anyway), San Francisco, Los Angeles...and probably your home town.

You know...wait. Hang on. On second thought, DO order that Long Island ice tea from the mustachioed, waistcoat-wearing, bitters-making douchebag. The theatrics alone may well be worth the price of the drink. Who knows? He might just make you the best Long Island you've ever had.

Goes well with:

Victoria Moore's How to Drink. She writes: “It’s often said that life’s too short to drink bad wine, but I’d go further. Life’s also too short to drink good wine, or anything else for that matter, if it’s not what you feel like at the time. There’s no point in popping the cork on a bottle of vintage champagne if you really hanker after a squat tumbler of rough red wine.”
Brad Thomas Parsons' book Bitters. It's a good read for regular folks wanting to know more about the history and use of cocktail bitters, but beware that it's also kindling for the fevered prejudices of guys like the ridiculous fool in Shit Bartenders Say above.

The Whiskey Litmus Test in Wineries

2012-01-19T10:40:00.000-08:00

Last week, we spent several days in and around San Francisco, including the wine country north of the city. I enjoy wine, but I don't spend as much time mulling it over as I do spirits. So, while I've never given much thought to the cultural differences between various wineries, the question was foisted on me when conversations tilted from wine to whiskey.

In Napa, we started off one morning sampling sparkling wines. It's the kind of place where busloads of tourists disgorge during the season, but the setting was great and we had nowhere to be, so we looped back around after initially passing by. Once we were seated and were making our way through the samples, a winery employee asked what we usually drink. When we replied "whiskey," she made a face. "Whiskey? That's weird. Who drinks whiskey? Is that like a Midwestern thing?" We were a bit frosted at the putdown, so we bought nothing.

Whiskey came up at another winery (they asked what I do). Out comes a chilled bottle of Brian Ellison's white whiskey from Death's Door — smack — right on the counter. They weren't selling it; the stuff was there to fortify the staff. At that place, we did buy the wines, including a few bottles of pinot meunier, a variety better known for blending, but its rich, lush, and almost smoky notes may appeal to confirmed whiskey drinkers. Last year I didn't know it existed; this year, I hope to drink my weight in it.

The first winery was big, corporate, a name you'd probably recognize. The second was much smaller, lesser known, most of the grapes were grown right there at the vineyard, and the staff just oozed friendliness. Turns out that regardless of whether they're selling whiskey, wine, bacon, or grits, my sympathies are almost always with smaller producers who make what they sell.

Cheers to the artisans of this world.

Bookshelf: Tavern League: Portraits of Wisconsin Bars

2012-01-18T13:09:00.000-08:00

Many of these bars are the only public gathering place
in the rural communities they serve. These simple taverns offer the individual the valuable opportunity for face-to-face conversation and camaraderie, particularly as people become more physically isolated through the accelerated use of the internet’s social networking, mobile texting, Facebook, LinkedIn, gaming, and the rapid fire of email.

~ Carl Corey

Not being on Facebook is like not being in the phone book; people just expect to find you there. And for a small business owner like me not to be on Facebook is just stupid. Yet last year, I said to hell with it and posted my last status update, telling friends and clients that I’d rather grab a meal or drinks in person than spend even more time at my keyboard.

Sure, I miss invitations to parties here and there. Conversations about distilleries and restaurants go unnoticed. I sometimes learn weeks afterwards that someone has moved to Chicago or San Fransisco or has become a new father.

But new clients find me through word of mouth, family and friends still call with news, I was invited to more parties in the last six months than I could possibly attend, and work keeps me in touch with food and drinks folks almost single every day. I’m spending more time now in the actual, face-to-face company of friends than at almost any time in the Facebook years.

Carl Corey’s book Tavern League reminds me of just why I decided to ditch the ubiquitous social media site. Through evocative photos of nearly four dozen Wisconsin taverns, Corey depicts a world where friends and neighbors still gather in what some friends dismissively deem “meatspace” to socialize and to find a sense of belonging that Facebook, Twitter, on-demand television, World of Warcraft, or (my personal weakness) Xbox can’t even approximate.

Though I’ve never been to any of the taverns in the book, I’ve weighed down many a seat and stool in places like them throughout the Midwest. In his foreward A Toast to Old-Timer Bars, Jim Draeger explains their importance to Wisconsinites in particular:

Taverns have been and still are predominantly a family business. Low start-up costs, long hours, and patrons longing for a "home away from home" have all rewarded the mom-and-pop operations, and these neighborhood joints have been a cornerstone of the Wisconsin tavern experience. For much of our history, workers lived in modest dwellings: small houses, apartments, and tenements with little space for gatherings of family and friends. Without family rooms, decks, and patios, Wisconsinites used the tavern as an extension of their own living rooms, a place to socialize with friends, family, and neighbors. Tavern owners responded to this longing for a home away from home by decorating their bars to reflect their interests as well as those of their patrons. Their local flavor became a comfortable attraction to their regular patrons and gave each tavern a particular and unique character. As a result, tavern owners have been staunchly individualistic, resisting attempts to standardize, franchise, and homogenize their spaces.

Cheers to Carl Corey for a touching look at some of our beloved public spaces. Long live the Wisconsin tavern. And the Missouri tavern. And the Louisiana tavern. And all the other great places in America where locals gather to have some drinks, swap stories, shoot pool, do a little shuffleboard, and — now and then — sing along to a little Hank Williams or Waylon Jennings.

Carl Corey (2011)
Tavern League: Portraits of Wisconsin Bars
136 pages (hardback)
Wisconsin Historical Society Press
ISBN: 0870204785
$29.95

Goes well with:

A look at America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo's look at the tavern's place in American history
Jerry Apps' book Breweries of Wisconsin from University of Wisconsin Press (now in its second edition). These brands in here are exactly the ones I drank in the Midwest as a budding — and underage — homebrewer scrounging for cheap reusable bottles.
My run-in with paczki, a sometimes-vodka-spiked doughnut with Polish roots found throughout Polonia, including, where I came across them, Wisconsin

Gooseberries in Hops Syrup

2012-01-16T23:02:00.000-08:00

An untried recipe for my brewing friends who have loads of hops lying around. Yeah, I know; January is the wrong time of the year for fresh hops, but come this Spring, there will be hop shoots to eat in the German style like asparagus and, after the vines blossom, plenty of hops syrup for those tempted by such things — either for preserving gooseberries as Helen S. Wright suggested in her 1912 The New England Cook Book or for adding bittersweet notes to cocktails.

To Preserve Gooseberries in Hops

Take large gooseberries, make a small hole in the end and remove the seeds; be careful not to break them. Take fine long thorns or thin skewers and fill the stick of thorn with gooseberries, place in a covered pan, with enough water to cover the fruit, scald, but do not let the water boil, until they are green. Drain them. Have ready a syrup made by boiling whole gooseberries until they break; drain off the water. To 1 pound of hops allow 1½ pounds of granulated sugar; to this add the water and let boil until the hops are clear green; then take them out and lay them on a platter.

Boil the syrup until it is thick. Place the hops in a deep jar, then put in the gooseberries that are on the sticks, cover with syrup, and seal.

Goes well with:

Real Marshmallow Syrup, a look into a funky, bosky, and deeply odd syrup made from the roots of Althaea officinalis.
Syrup of Violets, Three Ways — one recipe from 1844, one from 1814, and an even older example of Sirrop of Violetts from 1604.
Opium syrup. Babies, it was said, cried for the stuff. More likely, the tiny little junkies cried when it was withheld...

Kinderheim Gritz: Prohibition-era Pork Belly Charcuterie

2012-01-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

North Carolina has liver mush, Pennsylvania is known for scrapple, and in some parts of Appalachia, poor-do is the local name for a dish that gives outsiders pause. These are venerable and entrenched regional charcuterie specialties with names that can be off-putting to modern eaters. Those who either grew up with them, though, or who have overcome the names, know that the stuff can be damn delicious when prepared properly.

Meat porridges such as scrapple or the unfortunately named liver mush are specialties that are particularly easy to make at home. They vary in their makeup, but share four characteristics.

They:

are made with meat (finely ground or chopped pork is most common, though beef, poultry, and even bison are not unheard of)
are thickened with cereal or buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)
have a thick, gruel-like consistency when cooking
thicken on standing so that, once cool, may be sliced and fried

Yep. It's a Kookbook.

Add to these the Ohio/Kentucky specialty goetta. Like the others, it’s an immigrant dish. Although sometimes made with beef rather than pork, goetta is essentially scrapple made with steel-cut oats in the place of scrapple’s buckwheat. Its name is a transliteration into English of the Plattdeutsch (Low German) götta, meaning groats (i.e., hulled, cracked grains). In standard High German, the word is Grütze, a cognate our own Southern grits. In fact, my great grandmother’s name for sliceable puddings such as scrapple was Happelgritz. Happel is an old dialect word for “head” suggesting that her recipe was made from pork head — a very common practice.

Her recipe didn’t seem to survive. At least, I haven’t found it yet. I recognized the gist of it, though, in a recipe from a Prohibition-era fundraising cookbook from Addison, Illinois just outside Chicago. The recipe is, simply, Gritz. Its use of steel-cut oats puts it firmly in the Germanic Ohio/Kentucky goetta tradition while its call for pork bellies appeals to modern eaters who have rediscovered this unctuous cut of pork.

From the 1927 Kinderheim Kookbook, here’s Mrs. W. G. Bohnsack’s recipe for

GRITZ

4 to 5 lbs. of fresh pork sides (the part used for smoking bacon), cut in 3 or 4 inch pieces
Cover with hot water, add
1 teaspoonful sage
1 teaspoonful thyme
1 teaspoonful sweet marjoram
2 to 3 tablespoonfuls salt
½ teaspoonful each of cloves and allspice (ground)

Boil until meat is tender. Take meat out of juice and put through meat chopper. Strain liquid and add to it 1½ lbs. steel cut oats and stir until it starts to boil and boil fifteen minutes stirring constantly. Stir in ground meat and let all come to boiling point. Put tightly covered kettle in oven at 300° and bake one hour. Turn off gas and let gritz in oven one-half hour longer. Stir occasionally while in oven. May be cooked on top of stove by stirring constantly 1 hour or until oats are soft. When cooked gritz must be consistency of corn meal mush.

Fry in iron skillet ten minutes for breakfast. Gritz should be made in cold weather only. Small pig's head may be used instead of pork sides. After having made gritz once, each cook can determine whether she needs more oats, less meat or more seasoning.

Goes well with:

William Woys Weaver’s book Country Scrapple is a scholarly, but short and enjoyable, exploration of not just scrapple, but panhas, goetta, poor-do, liver mush, haslet, pashofa, backbone pie, and other such goodnesses in need of exoneration among squeamish eaters. I drew on it here for parsing out the shared characteristics of scrapple-like dishes and for some of the German vocabulary.
My own bacon dumplings for a wicked hangover.

William Woys Weaver (2003)
Country Scrapple
162 pages (hardback)
Stackpole Books
ISBN: 081170064X
$19.95

Who Makes Popcorn Sutton's Tennessee White Whiskey? And Why Call it "Wild?"

2012-01-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

As I recall, a bumper sticker on Popcorn Sutton's truck read Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Keep that in mind when talking about one of American moonshine's most prolific self-promoters.

Here's the deal with moonshine stories; there are more lies, falsehoods, deceptions, poorly understood half-truths, bluster, bravado, misquotes, and corrupted second-hand information than at a West Virginia Liars Contest. Many of these untruths are willful misdirection, but most — maybe even the majority— of them are simple misunderstandings, innocent of malice.

I think that's what landed on my desk yesterday morning.

Ever since the Discovery Channel began broadcasting its new series Moonshiners last month, the Whiskey Forge would get frequent spikes for searches about late moonshiner Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton. Even before that, he often showed up in the site traffic reports, but this was more than the usual pings here and there. Yesterday, surfers from across the US and Canada were digging into earlier stories about Sutton.

What gives? He's been dead for some time now. Why the sudden interest? Turns out Huffington Post ran a story about him and the new 93-proof white whiskey crafted on his persona and the moonshine he made. Also turns out that Huffington Post doesn't have an ear for Southern accents. The article includes a video in which Sutton's widow Pam talks a bit about the whiskey. It quotes her as saying:

“We have a distillery set up in Nashville, Tennessee. We can’t legally call it moonshine. We have to call it Tennessee Wild Whiskey, and also Popcorn’s liquor is the first white whiskey that the federal government has approved.”

Well, a few clarifications are in order. Mrs. Sutton doesn't call it "Tennessee Wild Whiskey" in the video. What she says is "Tennessee White Whiskey." If you hear talk or read of a new "wild" whiskey, double check that source.

Sutton's white whiskey, however, it not the first approved by the federal government. Just last Fall, Whiskey Advocate magazine ran Lew Bryson's reviews of more than a dozen unaged or minimally aged white whiskeys. There are plenty of such spirits out there and plenty more on the way.

The brand's website is here, but as of today, it's just a parking page. The distillery Pam Sutton mentions isn't one of Popcorn's old rigs in which he cranked out thousands upon thousands of gallons of untaxed liquor. "Nashville" was the giveaway. Popcorn operated in and around Maggie Valley, North Carolina, about midpoint between Asheville and Gatlinburg. No, Nashville and commercial white whiskey mean one thing to me and one thing only: this particular grain spirit got its (legal) start at DSP TN-15006, our good friends at Corsair Artisan Distillery, makers of some really lovely spirits.

Darek Bell of Corsair tells me Jamey Grosser originally used Corsair stills to make Sutton's whiskey, but just secured his own Distilled Spirits Plant permit. The TTB confirms it: Popcorn Sutton Distilling, LLC of Nashville, Tennessee has its DSP*. The day to day operations guy is distiller Travis Hixon, formerly brewer at Nashville's Blackstone Brewery.

Congratulations, boys, on getting your own place set up. Any chance we'll be seeing some legal versions of Popcorn's brandies?

*Edit 1/10/12 I had originally written that DSP TN-S-15009 was assigned to Popcorn Sutton Distilling, LLC, but Christian Grantham of Short Mountain Distillery corrected the record: HIS Tennessee distillery is TN-S-15009. I can only sympathize with distillers and the endless reams of paperwork they have to endure to get a legal distillery up and running.

Goes well with:

Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned, a bit I wrote this summer about the flawed concept of so-called "legal moonshine."
One of Corsair's standout whiskeys is the triple smoke American single malt. Attendees of last year's Tales of the Cocktail session on New American distilleries got to sample some, but if you missed out on that, do try tracking some down.
Moonshiners runs on the Discovery Channel on Wednesdays. Last week's marathon of it is what made me late for a New Year's Eve party. I happen to like the show, even if—as are all "reality" shows—it is so clearly a product of artifice. Viz Popcorn's bumper sticker supra.
The West Virginia Liars Contest has been going on for decades. I've never been, but would love to make it one day.

Salsa de Venas (or Are You Gonna Eat Them Chile Veins, Buddy?)

2011-12-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

Detail of Salsa de Venas
by Michel Zabé

Common directions for cooking with chiles — from simple roasted bell peppers to the hundreds of chiles rellenos varieties — call for cutting away and discarding the seeds and ribs or veins that anchor them to the fruit’s interior. The rationale is twofold:

Discarding seeds and veins makes a more texturally refined dish
Seeds and veins tend to contain larger concentrations of capsaicin, the compound that makes hot chiles hot. Discarding them helps to temper that heat and let the flavor of the flesh become more apparent.

Removing chile veins from some dishes is all well and good, but discarding them? That’s just wasteful. Just as you can save shrimp shells for stock, collect pineapple trimmings for vinegar, or skim delicious cracklin’s from a batch of home-rendered lard, you can put those veins to good use.

Patricia Quintana does just that. In her 2005 book, Mulli: el libro de los moles, she details about a hundred salsas, moles, adobos, and pipianes that draw on Mexico’s culinary history from pre-Colombian times. From the Valle de Toluca (an area west and slightly south of Mexico City), she pulls a roasted tomato table salsa that’s heavily laced with those veins we’re supposed to throw away.

This isn’t an incendiary salsa, but neither is it for milquetoasts. Don’t spring it on your family or friends if they don’t like a bit of heat. Here’ s my translation of Quintana:

Toluca Valley-style Salsa de Venas

1 cup of veins from pasilla, negro, guajillo, or ancho chiles cleaned and dry-roasted
4 medium garlic cloves, peeled, roasted
½ medium onion, roasted
4 medium tomatoes, roasted
½ cup of water or to taste
1 ½ teaspoons coarse salt or to taste

To prepare the salsa:

Rinse and dry the chile veins. Preheat a comal or skillet and cook until toasted, but not burned. Roast the garlic too, onion, and tomatoes in the same pan until they turn dark. Allow to cool. In a molcajete or food processor, grind the chile veins with the salt and garlic, regrinding it all well. Add the onion and continue grinding. Add the tomatoes and grind until the sauce thickens,then add the water and re-season.

Presentation:

Serve in a mortar and pestle or in a sauce boat. Serve with fried charales [tiny, tiny fish] and freshly made tortillas.

Quintana's original directions:

Salsa de venas estilo Valle de Toluca

1 taza de venas de chile pasilla, negro o guajillo, o de chile ancho limpias, secas, tostadas
4 dientes de ajo medianos, sin piel, asados
½ cebolla mediana, asada
4 jitomates medianos, asados
½ taza de agua o al gusto
1½ cucharaditas de sal gruesa o al gusto

para preparar la salsa:

Lave las venas de los chiles y séquelas. Precaliente un comal o una sartén y aselas hasta que estén tostadas, sin quemarlas. Ase también los dientes de ajo, la cebolla y los jitomates hasta que tomen un color oscuro. Deje enfriar. En un molcajete o procesador, muela las venas de los chiles con la sal y el ajo, remuela bien. Incorpore la cebolla y continúe moliéndolas. Anada los jitomates y muelalos hasta que quede una salsa semiespesa; incorpore el agua y vuelva a sazonar.

presentation:

Sírvala en un molcajete o en una salsera. Acompane con charales fritos y tortillas recien hechas.

Patricia Quintana (2005)
Photos by Michel Zabé
Mulli: el libro de los moles
Editorial Oceano de Mexico
288 pages (paperback)
ISBN: 9707770953
$47.99

Goes well with:

A batch of salsa de chile de arbol, a garlic-heavy coarse table salsa we like to make around here.

My Dad's Onion Rye Bread

2011-12-28T19:44:00.000-08:00

Butter is not optional.

For as long as I can remember, my father has made onion rye bread, three loaves at a time, mostly in cold months. The first loaf we eat while it’s almost too hot to handle, rivulets of melted butter besmearing our hands; the second is half gone before it cools to room temperature; and the third, more often than not, is deployed in ham sandwiches. With 24 hours, not a crumb or crust remains.

Not long ago, I jumped at the chance to bake a few of these dense, moist loaves with him. Since snow recently had fallen, we cooled a pot of hot milk and sugar in the white stuff while the yeast proofed in the warm kitchen. Turning one’s back porch into an extension of the freezer is perhaps the only part of Winter I truly miss.

Cooling hot milk in the snow

When it came time to pull the ingredients together, I was amused that he regards aromatic elements in recipes — even his own — as I do. Only three tablespoons of caraway seeds in the recipe? Meh, sprinkle in some more until it looks right. One cup of chopped onions? We could probably put in a bit more without upsetting anyone.

Slightly misshapen, but so damn good.

Mind you, we both inflate the volume of those kinds of ingredients in the first place when we transcribe recipes, so we might easily end up using twice the spices and aromatics as whatever the recipe called for before it got to us. The ingredients below are what’re on his written directions. If you want more onions or caraway, then you’ve got a baseline.

Our family isn’t shy about slathering butter on almost every slice. You shouldn’t be, either. Because the tops of these loaves are strewn with coarse salt before baking, though, stick with unsalted butter.

Onion Rye Bread

2 cups milk
¼ cup sugar
4 tsp salt
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 packages active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
6 cups all purpose white flour
3 Tbl caraway seeds
1 cup chopped onions
2.5 cups rye flour
Corn meal
q.s. cream
q.s. coarse salt

Scald milk; stir in the sugar, salt, and oil. Cool to lukewarm. Soften yeast in the warm water and when it’s foamy, add this yeast mixture to the lukewarm milk.

Blend in all of the all purpose flour, mixing well. Add caraway seeds, onions, and 2 cups of the rye flour.

Sprinkle the remaining rye flour on a board or counter and knead the dough until it’s smooth. Put the smooth dough into greased bowl, cover, and allow to rise in a warm place until doubled in size. Punch down and fold dough from edges to center.

Cover with a clean kitchen towel and let the mass rise again until doubled. Divide into three equal loaves. Put each into a greased pan sprinkled with corn meal. Brush the tops of the loaves with cream, then strew liberally with coarse salt. Cover with a clean towel and allow to rise again until doubled in size.

Bake at 350ºF/175ºC for 45 to 60 minutes. Remove from pans when they sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Cool on wire racks (unless you plan to tear into them right away, then just grab a board, a knife, and a boatload of butter).

I’ve Never Eaten Paw Paw

2011-12-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

I wrestle daily with a neurological disorder called aphasia and, despite my best intentions, the utterances that spill from my lips are not always what I intend. Though individual words or short phrases may elude me, I do weigh my sentences before speaking aloud. The same cannot be said of all my friends.

John Audubon's 1820's depiction of
yellow-billed cuckoos and paw paws

[Note: If you’re offended by crudeness, I suggest you move on to other, more anodyne stories, perhaps about black-crusted chocolate pie or old-timey boiled cider.]

A few nights ago, a mixed group of friends gathered at our new house. When my family moved in, we inherited a dozen or so large trees that aren’t particularly interesting, well tended, or useful. Over drinks, the group kicked around ideas for replacing them.

Lemon, lime, and orange trees were obvious choices, given our climate and weakness for cocktails with a hit of citrus. I’m partial to the old idea of a gentleman’s orchard, one that holds fruit trees grown because they are exotic, unusual, or noteworthy for the region rather than strictly utilitarian. So we talked about Mexican and kaffir limes, Meyer and oily Femminello St. Teresa lemons, bergamot, Buddha’s hand citron, grapefruit, medlars, sour cherries, quince, guava, figs, and more. These are all just ideas at this point, nothing like an actual plan. When I threw out paw paw as a possibility — a venerable fruit tree of my native Missouri — one of the drinkers asked “Isn’t that the tree that smells like jizz?”

Frankly, I’d forgotten that aspect of the tree. I hemmed a bit. “Well, yes...I...I suppose it does. A bit.” I was trying to be diplomatic; the thing reeks of semen.

“Really?” another asked and then joked. “Does it taste like jizz, too?”

“I don’t know,” the first quickly answered. “I’ve never eaten paw paw.”

Three achingly full seconds passed in gravid silence before the room exploded into a pandemonium of howls while the blush of the paw paw virgin glowed like a California wildfire.

My friends are loyal, smart, kind, and funny, I wouldn’t trade them for the world. But, lord almighty, they can be lascivious.

[Edit 29 December 2011: Prompted by emails from concerned friends, I should clarify that I myself have eaten paw paw. The fruit itself carries none of the aroma supra and, in fact, is a mild, soft and inoffensive fruit, similar in texture to the local cherimoyas. It can also, according to one old report, be fermented and distilled into a brandy. While this doesn't surprise me one whit, I've yet to have any paw paw brandy. Let's see if that changes in 2012.]

Goes well with:

Pity Tits, a Guatemalan Handshake, and Why the Business is Awful, a bit I wrote about my aphasia and how I've learned to handle a willful tongue that's forever aching to do bad things.
Princeton Audubon sells double elephant (e.g. life size) reproduction prints of John Audubon's 19th century renderings of the birds of America. The cuckoo/paw paw print above will set you back about $200.

Snapdragon: Playing with Fire

2011-12-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

If you live in a hoary northern clime and it comforts you to think that those who move to sunny San Diego somehow miss the cold, then, by all means, wrap yourself warmly in that mantle of delusion. We don’t.

Though I had a deft hand at cold weather cooking and drinking, hot punch, mulled wine, and various toddies just don’t carry the restorative powers that they seem to in the darker months of those places plagued with “four distinct seasons.”

Snap-dragon
from Robert Chambers' (1879) Book of Days

But add a little fire to the booze rather than just warming it? Well, even self-satisfied San Diegans don’t turn our noses up at that. From the simply flamed orange peel over a cocktail to more elaborate preparations among the tiki crowd, the blazing romance of flames and alcohol is nothing new. In fact, one venerable bit of flaming foodways plays well in both temperate and more frosty climes — snapdragon.

Known to Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, and even further back to seventeenth century, the eating/drinking game snapdragon (or snap-dragon or occasionally flapdragon) has largely died out.

Let's walk through it and you'll understand why: First, kill the lights. Next, two to three raisins per person are placed in a broad, shallow dish. Warmed brandy is then poured over them — just enough to come up to their collars — and set alight. As blue and orange flames dance over the surface of the brandy and scamper across the raisins, guests take turns snatching single flaming raisins from the mix and popping them into their mouths, extinguishing the fire-robed fruit.

Around the time of the American Civil War, Anthony Trollope writes of the game in his novel Orley Farm:

'And now for snap-dragon,' said Marian.

'Exactly as you predicted, Mr. Graham,' said Madeline: 'blindman's buff at a quarter past three, and snap-dragon at five.'

'I revoke every word that I uttered, for I was never more amused in my life.'

'And you will be prepared to endure the wine and sweet cake when they come.'

'Prepared to endure anything, and go through everything. We shall be allowed candles now, I suppose.'

'Oh, no, by no means. Snap-dragon by candlelight! Who ever heard of such a thing? It would wash all the dragon out of it, and leave nothing but the snap. It is a necessity of the game that it should be played in the dark—or rather by its own lurid light.'

So, yes, darkness is essential, but speed is the real name of the game. For one, fire is hot and the faster you take your turn, the less chance of sustaining a burn. Second, the brandy won’t flame forever. The alcohol doesn’t burn off entirely (an old wives tale, a cooks’ inside joke), but it does burn until the proof lowers so much that it can’t sustain a flame.

You can understand why today’s safety-conscious parents would shut down a game of snapdragon before it ever began. Burned fingers, singed hair, booze for kids (yes, it was popularly, if not exclusively, a children’s game), burned table linens, and scorched floors get one reported to the authorities for child abuse. God forbid some antic soul should knock over accidentally a bowl of flaming alcohol onto the carpet, a pet, or another person and do some real damage.

Fortunately, I have no children. I do have raisins, however, a broad granite counter., and friends expected Christmas day. Brandy? You know I’ve plenty of brandy.

For obvious reasons, I suggest you not play snapdragon this winter. It died out for a number of reasons, not the least of which is safety. If my knuckles are bereft of hair the day after Christmas, though, you know what we’ve been up to over at the Whiskey Forge.

Drinking Advocaat

2011-12-19T10:55:00.000-08:00

I think it is better always

to have a drink before people arrive

and that way,

you’re just a bit more mellow...

~ Nigella Lawson

Now that we’ve established some semblance of a nomenclature and etymology for the egg liqueur advocaat, three questions arise:

Who makes the stuff?
Once you’ve got it, what do you do with it?
If you can’t find it, is there an easy way to make it at home?

Last things first: yes, there’s an easy way to make advocaat at home. My own recipe with fresh eggs and VSOP brandy makes 1.4 liters of about 37-proof egg liqueur (see below).

If you’re put off by the prospect of making your own, though, three main brands are common enough to find on the shelf at your local boozery or through online vendors ; Bols (from Holland), Verpoorten (Germany), and Warninks (made by DeKuyper Royal Distillers in Holland). A bottle of any of these is readily available for $17-28.

Just as eggnog and even bourbon find their ways into a variety of desserts from cookies to cake, so, too, does advocaat. Most simply, it’s drizzled over ice cream. It’s also incorporated into cream fillings for cakes and pastries, sauce (just add it to vanilla sauce), folded into tiramisu, paired with baked fruit, and hundreds of other desserts.

In its drinking form (rather than the thicker, slightly cooked, incarnation), advocaat is indistinguishable from German eierlikör. One could easily slap alternate labels on the same product for different markets. Our European colleagues have been guzzling the infamous Snowball made with these egg liqueurs for some time. Popular — or at least well-known — in the UK, it’s simply one part advocaat to two parts lemonade (British lemonade, i.e., Sprite, 7-Up, or bitter lemon soda). Here, Nigella Lawson bangs one out:

Recipes for homemade advocaat typically call for anywhere from half to a full liter of alcohol per dozen eggs. I take a middle path with slightly fewer eggs and split the difference on the booze. The result? More boozy than some, not as much as others.

Here’s how we make drinking advocaat around these parts. For a thicker, spoonable, version, use whole eggs, ditch the milk, and heat the mixture in a double boiler.

The sweetened condensed milk is not traditional — or even strictly necessary — but it does creep up in some Dutch recipes. I like the additional smoothness and slightly cooked taste it lends to the finished drink, but feel free to omit it. Should you do so, add up to an additional ¾ cup of sugar. Likewise, if you just can’t get enough liquor inside you, this recipe will easily admit another 250ml/1 cup of 40% abv alcohol.

Rowley’s Authentic San Diego Advocaat

10 egg yolks
250g/1.25 c sugar
3-4 gratings of fresh nutmeg
A pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk
750ml brandy, neutral grain spirits, or vodka

Strain the egg yolks through a medium sieve into a large mixing bowl to remove the chalazae (those repugnant, curled little white cords that attach the yolk to the shell). Add the sugar, salt, and nutmeg. Whisk gently to combine.

Stir in the vanilla extract, sweetened condensed milk and alcohol. Whisk vigorously, then pour into sterilized bottles. Seal. It's drinkable now, but better after two weeks in the refrigerator.

Makes about 1400ml of 18% abv advocaat.

Notes

Clear spirits such as vodka or NGS will not affect the color of the drink noticeably. Many people prefer them for this reason. I use aged brandy which lends a slightly darker cast to the drink.
Hold me in contempt if you will, but I use Paul Masson Grande Amber VSOP for this. Best brandy in the world? No, of course not. One of the best you'll ever get for under $10 per bottle, though. Recently, I scored a 750ml bottle at a local pharmacy for $8. Love those Christmas liquor sales...
Clean egg yolks and whites off kitchen and cocktail gear with an initial rinse of cool water. Hot water can cook the stuff and make it much harder to remove.

Throat-Rippers, Neck Oil, and a Dose of Advocaat

2011-12-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

This time last year, I wrote about three drinks that meld booze and eggs; Elise Hannemann’s 1904 eierpunsch, William Verpoorten’s modern-day eierlikör, and — from the pages of Playboy magazine — Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s eggnog.

One drink I didn’t get to at the time was advocaat, a venerable Dutch egg liqueur that's not dissimilar to eierlikör, but which comes in two forms. The first, more familiar to Americans, Britons, and others outside the Netherlands, is a pourable, eggnog-like drink. Such “drinking” advocaat is for the export market and would not pass muster among old-timers in Amsterdam, Groningen, or Delft. On the contrary, domestic Dutch advocaat traditionally has been a boozy, custardlike concoction served in small cups and eaten with spoons. Both, however, have their devotees.

The domestic stuff, made with egg yolks and whites, is sometimes called dikke advocaat (“thick” advocaat) in Holland while the version we're more likely to encounter abroad is variously known as dunne (“thin”) advocaat or schenkadvocaat (“pouradvocaat”) or drinkadvocaat, made with the yolks only. Just to confuse things, most people who drink/eat the stuff call it all just “advocaat” without modifiers.

The word itself in Dutch means “attorney” or “lawyer” but there’s no obvious connection to the legal profession at all. It is also so similar to adpokat, an Indonesian word for avocado, that two rival modern explanations for this egg-and-liquor concoction’s name have arisen.

Dropping Dutch anchor in Indonesian waters, 1669

The first is that the name somehow refers to a booze-and-avocado tipple created or adapted by the globe-trotting merchants of the VOC (the United East Indies Company) during its 17th century heyday. Irishman Philip Duff is a long-time resident of the Netherlands, a vocal proponent of its distilling traditions, and an internationally known bar and beverage consultant. He gets asked about this lawyer/avocado thing a lot.

Duff — along with many other knowledgeable souls — feel that the word's origins are well and truly lost. In an email to me, he admits, however, that he favors the avocado angle as a result of the VOC’s voyages abroad and dominance of Indonesia in particular:

The likelihood of there being a booze of some sort made, flavoured or mixed with avocado pulp is more than even, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine this evolving into something with eggs back in Holland, eggs having both a bit of the colour and texture of avocados. Or...

The word "abocado" crops up in Spanish and Portuguese and refers to smoothness, mellowness, sweetness - opening the door to the possibility that an eggs-and-booze drink originated in south/central America and was named there, then the name was bastardised when it was brought back to Holland.

Not everyone buys this, though. When I asked Amsterdam culinary journalist and historian Johannes van Dam about the origin of the word, he wrote:

Personally I do not think the name of the drink comes from avocado, because that fruit was not really known here when the drink was already known by that name.

This in and of itself would seem to put an end to the avocado argument. Van Dam prefers another explanation: that the word is meant to evoke a soothing throat lubrication, such as might be required for attorneys.


Katadreuffe and De Gankelaar prepare for court battle in Mike van Diem's 1997 Character

The popular rationale for the attorney angle goes like this: In the course of their work, attorneys must speak often and eloquently. Such a rich alcoholic drink — so the thinking goes — would both soothe their throats and relax the nervous among them to better prepare them for their loquacious undertakings.

Writing in 2006, Dutch linguistic journalist Ewoud Sanders examined various origin theories offered over the last century for the word. There's no clear winner, but he offered a convincing explanation for the side of the attorneys:

For now the battle for the origin of a little advocaat is undecided, but personally I think most of the oldest theory, that advocaat is a drink for the lawyer to keep his throat lubricated. Not so much because I think many lawyers are useful speakers, but because [in calling it that] you’re naming this motif (as linguists call it) that can also found in other drink names. Thus, a glass of genever is a keelsmeerdertje [throat lubricator] or smeerolie [lubricating oil], and the Germans know designations for spirits including Gurgelwasser [garglewater], Halsöl [neck oil] (also for beer), Rachenputzer [throat polisher] and, as other extreme, Rachenreißer [throat ripper].

Considering that opera singers have been known to gargle and swallow olive oil to soothe their throats, that in many parts of the US I've heard alcohol dubbed "throat oil," and that even Mississippi state representative Noah "Soggy" Sweats, Jr. referred to alcohol in his famous 1950's Whiskey Speech as the "oil of conversation" — well, the idea of calling alcohol as lubricant (even if it's a tongue-in-cheek circumlocution) is compelling.

Until proven otherwise, I'm betting on the lawyers. Linguistics aside — and more pressing — how do we make the stuff? Next up: advocaat recipes.

Goes well with:

Ewoud Sanders' essay Doe mij maar een advocaatje (in Dutch — the translation above is my own and comes with the usual caveats).
Planning a trip to Amsterdam? Check out Johannes van Dam's restaurant reviews in Het Parool.

A Blow to Craft Distilling

2011-12-14T09:04:00.000-08:00

A decade ago, fewer than one hundred legal distilleries operated in the United States. Today, it’s four times that number as new American distilleries have leapt from success to success. But in Washington State, a hotbed of craft distilling, there’s a real fear that this burgeoning industry just suffered a crippling setback.

Initiative 1183 passed last month with the dual intent of closing state-run liquor stores and allowing private retailers to sell spirits. The tax benefits were projected into the tens of millions of dollars. But its recent interpretation by the Washington Liquor Control Board has left some distillers wondering, rightly, whether their businesses will survive.

Writing in Monday’s MyNorthwest.com, Josh Kerns reports

Initiative 1183 adds a new 27 percent tax on liquor in addition to the current state liquor taxes of 20.5 percent, plus $3.77 per liter, according to [Orlin Sorenson co-founder of Woodinville Whiskey Co.].

Those new taxes include a 10 percent distributor fee and 17 percent retailer fee, which "result in one of the highest liquor taxes in the country," says Sorensen. "That's virtually our entire profit margin."

Sorensen has put it to his fellow distillers in the Washington Distillers Guild that they “need to remind the liquor control board that the voter's intent of 1183 was to privatize liquor, not raise taxes and fees on craft distillers and handcuff them from doing business in the state.”

Please, Washingtonians, raise a ruckus. Now. Today. Call your representatives, write letters and emails. Let them know that in misinterpreting this act, the Washington Liquor Control Board has set the stage to kill jobs and crush local businesses under tax schemes that were never the intent of Initiative 1183.

For more details from Kerns, see his original article here.

Keep tabs on developments in the forums of the Washington Distillers Guild here.

Settled in the New Digs

2011-12-13T18:42:00.000-08:00

After months of drinking down the liquor cabinets, weeks of packing thousands of cookbooks, and a three-hour flurry of actual moving, we're settled into the new house. Just shy of half the library's up. Most of the liquor is still boxed. The kitchen is almost up and running as I want it. The place didn't fully feel like home, though, until I brought over my knives. With my knives in hand, I can make nearly any house feel like home.

Salt-glazed syrup jug from potter Sid Luck gracing the mantel

I'm keeping a low profile for a while; there's a floor to lay in the attic, shelves to build and fill, and some plumbing work that makes me glad I'm not a complete novice working with copper.

Now, if you'll excuse me, that pig roasting in the oven craves my attention.

Pumpkin and Ginger Doughnuts

2011-12-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve been making booze since I was too young to buy it. But I’ve been making doughnuts and fritters even longer than that.

When I was very young, my mother taught me how to make a cheaty sort of doughnut (or, if that’s the way you roll, donut) from uncooked biscuit dough, the commercial stuff that came in a tube. Although I was barely able to tie my own shoes at that age, my siblings were all teenagers and slept in until unfathomable hours on weekends while my father golfed. If Mom was in the mood, we got doughnuts — all to ourselves.

While she handled the hot oil, it was my duty to lay out the dough, cut out shapes with an upturned glass, and then toss those sizzling fried gobs into a brown paper bag, coating them with sugar and cinnamon. They were still so hot when we tore into them that fingers of steam curled up from every bite.

With no kids of my own, it’s no longer the kind of cooking I’m likely to do. But homemade doughnuts have been a bit of an obsession ever since those early days. On a recent trip to Chicago, I idly picked up Allegra McEvedy's recent book Bought, Borrowed & Stolen where I found her recipe for pumpkin and ginger doughnuts.

With a fat ribbed pumpkin on the counter and a drive to eat up as much as is reasonable before we move, it was a simple matter of time before I succumbed to that Autumnal allure of hot pumpkin and spice. Do as you like, but swapping out an ounce of dark rum for an ounce of milk in the glaze is not the worst thing you could do this week.

From the Guardian UK, here’s McEvedy frying up a batch. Recipe follows the video.

Pumpkin and Ginger Doughnuts

150ml / ¼ pint whole milk
5 teaspoons (15g / ½oz) fast-acting dried yeast
100g / 3½oz sugar, plus 1 teaspoon extra
1kg / 2lb plain flour, plus extra for kneading and rolling
1 tin (460g / 14¾oz or thereabouts) of mashed pumpkin (or make your own by roasting 650g (1¼ lb) peeled pumpkin or squash, foiled, in a medium oven for 40 minutes, then mashing it)
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
4 tablespoons melted butter
2 tablespoons plain oil [peanut, vegetable, canola]
1-1.5 litres (1¾ – 2½ pints) oil, for frying

For the glaze:
a knob (around 1 teaspoon) butter
75ml / 3fl oz milk
175g / 6oz icing sugar
1½ teaspoons ground ginger
75g / 3oz ginger, washed and unpeeled
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Heat the milk gently until it's just warm to the touch, then whisk in the yeast and the 1 teaspoon of sugar and leave to stand for 20 minutes, until frothy.

In a large bowl mix the flour, pumpkin (or squash), cinnamon, salt and sugar, then pour in the yeast mixture, beaten egg, melted butter and the oil then bring it all together to make a soft dough. Turn out on to a well-floured surface and knead with floured hands for about 5 minutes, adding more flour as necessary so that it doesn't stick to you or the surface.

Roll out the dough to a thickness of about 2cm / ¾ inch and use two circular cutters, one with a diameter of 8cm / 3½ inches and one with a diameter of 4cm / 1¾ inches, to make your rings. Use the trimmings to re-roll, then leave them to rise for 30 minutes.
Knock up the glaze by melting the butter in the milk and whisking in the icing sugar, ground ginger and vanilla extract. Coarsely grate the ginger root and squeeze the juice into it too – you can re-use the fibres for tea / hot toddies.

Pour the oil into a wide, thick-bottomed pan to a depth of about 2.5-3cm / 1–1¼ inches. Heat it up until hot but not nearly smoking, then turn the heat down to medium. Slide one of the doughnuts in first, just to check the temperature is right: it should fizzle and float up to the surface, very gently bubbling away. Cook them in batches for 5-7 minutes total, turning halfway through so they are evenly golden brown all over, then take them out with tongs or a slotted spoon and put them on a wire rack.

When they're cool enough to pick up, dip them into the glaze on both sides and tuck in not long after: there's not many ills in the world that can't be cured with a warm doughnut.

Allegra McEvedy (2011)
Bought, Borrowed & Stolen: Recipes and Knives from a Traveling Chef
224 pages (hardback)
Conran
ISBN: 1840915773
$24.99

Goes well with:

Ginger pie. I can't help it. I'm a sucker for ginger in all forms and ginger pie in particular.
We often have pumpkins around the house. Sometimes, they even get turned into tiki-style jack o'lanterns.
Half-Slab Pumpkin, a recipe I outright stole from British writer Nigel Slater and then let mutate into something entirely new.
Doughnuts aren't the only fritters on offer. How about some lovely brain fritters or the New Orleans rice cakes called calas?

The Moon Shines on the Moonshine

2011-12-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

Preparations for our move continue. As I go through cabinets and drawers deciding what to take and what to jettison, I stumble upon across occasional little gems. I broke out into a smile when I found nearly hundred year old sheet music for The Moon Shines on the Moonshine.

Published in 1920, the song was already a popular tune as sung by Vaudeville comedian Bert Williams — an African-American who, in one of the bizzare twists of minstrelsy, regularly performed in blackface. He wasn’t the only one. But he was the only one WC Fields is said to have called “the funniest man I ever saw.”

Lyrics by Francis de Witt — just slightly different from the recording — follow.

The Moon Shines on the Moonshine

The mahogany is dusty,
All the pipes are very rusty,
And the good, old-fashioned musty
Doesn't musty anymore.

All the stuff's got bum and bummer,
from the middle of the Summer.
Now the bar is on the hummer,
and "For Rent" is on the door.

How sad and still tonight,
by the old distillery,
And how the cob-webs cob,
in the old machinery!

But in the mountain tops,
far from the eyes of cops,
Oh how the moon shines on
the moonshine, so merrily!
How sad and merrily!

Goodness me, how misery doubles,
Ain't one thing to use for bubbles,
For to drive away your troubles,
Now the tide has gone and went.

Days and nights are getting bleaker,
shivering for an old-time sneaker,
Even water's getting weaker,
'Bout one tenth of one per cent.

How sad and still tonight,
by the old distillery,
And how the mourners mourn,
Bt the Lager Brewery!

So, mister, if you please,
Don't let nobody sneeze,
Up where the moon shines
On the moonshine, so still-ily
How sad and still-ily!

Moving Liquor Bottles? Use Plumbers' Tape

2011-11-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

Moving date approaches. Despite our best efforts to drink down the liquor cabinets, we successfully killed off fewer than thirty bottles in the last few weeks. The remaining bottles — the unopened, the rare and unusual, the mostly-full — get packed and hauled to our new house.

Fortunately, the new place is less than a mile away. This means that I get to move bottles two different ways. One is quick and easy (but prone to spillage) and the other harkens back to my days as a risk-averse museum curator. It was in museums that I learned that something like 85% of damage occurs to objects while they’re in transit; you’ve got to guard against it carefully.

Getting ready for the move

The quick and easy bottle-moving method is simple. Load up milk crates, short bottles all together and tall bottles all together. Put them in the car, short bottle crates on the bottom, and drive — slowly, cautiously — to the new place. Unload. Repeat as necessary.

You can move a lot of liquor in a short time with this method but, unpadded, the bottles may break. If the crates tip or go sideways for any reason — a sudden stop, for instance — they may spill or leak contents, either because corks and screwcaps aren’t secured or because they’re defective. Old corks in particular may not provide the seal they seem to at a glance.

You could reuse empty liquor boxes from your local liquor store or friendly bartender the same way. The cardboard dividers add some protection against breaks — but liquids in transit, especially in partially-filled containers, like to slosh around, so there’s still the leakage issue.

That’s where Teflon or plumbers' tape comes in handy. Plumbers' tape is readily available at hardware stores and plumbing supply firms. We call it tape, but it’s really a thin film of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) that doesn't have a sticky side like duct or masking tapes. It’s used in joints on plumbing projects to prevent leaks. Although it sticks to itself, it doesn’t stick to other surfaces — and that makes it ideal for sealing bottles.

Sealed with plumbers' tape

I’ll be putting some of the bottles in cases and just hauling them over in the car. I’ll drive slowly on the side streets and not make any sudden stops. But movers are shifting the bulk of the liquor library, so those bottles won’t be in my control. That means I’ve got to pack them with the expectation that they will break and/or leak. Who knows? They might even load boxes sideways.

I’ll risk a great many things. But not when I don’t have to. I’m padding all the bottles, of course, but just as importantly, Teflon tape goes on each and every open bottle the movers are taking.

Overkill? Maybe. But as Vincent Vega can tell you, bad things sometimes happen in vehicles and a roll of tape costs less than a Royale with Cheese. Losing a single bottle seems unlikely, but it was a leaky bottle that caused this mess. A leaking bottle may dampen cardboard, causing it to rip. A ripped box could mean a few hundred dollars worth of liquor — some of it no longer produced — comes crashing to the sidewalk when a mover lifts it.

And that ain't gonna happen.

How to apply plumbers’ tape to a liquor bottle

Keep the bottle upright (liquor bottles should be stored upright, anyway). Make sure the cork or screwcap is sound, dry, and snugly in place. Pulling gently to stretch it just a bit, wrap the tape 2-4 times around the joint of the bottle’s cap and the glass neck or the lower part of a screwcap. Repeat as necessary on the remaining bottles.

To remove, simply peel it off carefully. Because the tape only adheres to itself, it’s unlikely to take off any ink, paper, or decorative embellishments.

Fastest Thanksgiving Shopping Ever

2011-11-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

Home cooks and caterers know any number of tricks to sidestepping grocery crowds on the days leading up to Thanksgiving. They may, for instance, make sure all the staples are stocked well before the week of gluttony. They might get their goods delivered. Or they'll shop early in the morning while shelves are freshly stocked. But my favorite, no-fail method to get in and out of a market in the shortest time possible around Thanksgiving is less obvious.

Shop where people don't celebrate Thanksgiving.

What the French toast? Who doesn't celebrate Turkey Day? That's downright anti-American...

Well, no. Not hardly.

In my rounds of San Diego food shopping, I hit several markets regularly that serve immigrant communities: Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, North African, Polish, German, Korean, Middle Eastern, and more. Turns out, around here, anyway, that recent immigrants simply haven't quite gotten the hang of Thanksgiving yet. Especially if the regular clientele's native language isn't English, German, or some other European tongue, the fourth Thursday of November is these markets is just...Thursday.

And what better time than a weekday to slip into a store, grab a few things you need, and get on your way quickly? Parking is no problem and crowds are practically non-existent. Produce and spices in particular can be very cheap. Who knows? You might be inspired to make something you hadn't considered before.

I've already got everything we need for tomorrow. There will be punch, pie, and a huge pot of short rib chili. Not traditional, but, then, I've never been a stickler for tradition.

Caveat: don't rely on this scheme at Christmastime. Even non-Christians come out in force to shop and eat for that one.

Hot Damn, That’s My Jam

2011-11-21T16:32:00.000-08:00

Hot pepper jellies and jams are household staples in huge swathes of the Southern and Southwestern United States. The ease with which these preserves are made accounts for some of their popularity, but the fact is that a whole lot of people find the piquant sweet-and-sour taste irresistible.

You can bet I'll be breaking some out this week for Thanksgiving.

Variations on the spicy agrodolce theme include thick raspberry and chipotle jam, jalapeno jam dyed green, quivering tequila-spiked jellies, peach preserves studded with habanero strips, and — inexplicably — jellies and jams no hotter than a bowl of celery sticks, but which their makers perversely refer to as “hot.” I’ve yet to sample an example made with the blistering ghost pepper, but it’s just a matter of time before some chilehead tempts death with infernal jelly on a cracker.

Of all these, my favorites are those that pack a noticeable capsaicin punch. In his 1987 cookbook, Southern Cooking, Craig Claiborne gives the recipe for an unfussy but suitably piquant jelly. He notes, rightly, that the peppers may be strained before the jelly sets in order to make clear jelly. Personally, I don’t see the point in that when most of this is going to be spread on top of soft white cheese for snacks. But, do as you will. Likewise, Claiborne calls for food coloring is an optional ingredient. I don’t find that my hot pepper jam needs it, but you do what your family likes.

Hot Pepper Jelly

1 cup cored and ground sweet red or green peppers, with the seeds
½ cup corn and ground long hot red or green peppers
6 ½ cups sugar
1 ½ cups white vinegar
¼ tsp salt, if desired
1 bottle (6 oz) fruit pectin
Red or green food coloring, optional

Combine the sweet peppers, hot peppers, sugar, vinegar, and salt in a saucepan. Simmer about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Strain or not, as desired, and return mixture to the saucepan. If strained, the solids are good as a relish. Pour in the pectin and bring to the boil. Stir in the food coloring. Pour into sterilized half-pint jars and seal with paraffin. Store in a cool place.

YIELD: 8 TO 10 cups

Craig Claiborne (1987)
Southern Cooking
364 pages (hardback)
The New York Times Company
ISBN: 0812915992
$19.95

Call for Whiskey and Rum Papers — ADI's 9th Annual Spirits Conference

2011-11-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

This coming April, Louisville will once again host the American Distilling Institute's annual spirits conference. From April 1-4 2012, craft distillers will gather to talk about the craft, business, and future of new American distilleries.

I have had the pleasure of speaking at the ADI conference (and of getting pulled onstage for another about how craft distillers can work with writers for exposure to larger audiences) and can say that it is a great time. I strongly encourage anyone to has something relevant to say about American craft distilling to submit a proposal. Note that accepted papers will be published online and authors may or may not be invited to speak at the conference itself.

Here's a bit called As Surely as Thunder Follows Lightning, my own topic at last year's ADI conference. Penn Jensen, vice president of ADI, gives the details on what they're looking for this time around:

The growth of Artisan Distilling over the past few years has been extraordinary. The obvious parallel is with Craft Brewing, itself a remarkable achievement. As so many people succeed, begin, or look to begin a career investment in Artisan Distilling, the personal relationships, communication channels, and open access to accurate information becomes ever more important.

The ADI Spirits Conference Theme, Whiskey & Rum, addresses virtually every issue along the critical path to creating a quality whiskey or rum product. The larger picture, inclusive of all spirits, addresses everything from permitting and financing, to marketing and distribution.

Our goal is to begin an Archive of Conference Proceedings that will serve as a resource to all our members seeking to avoid costly mis-steps, and to learn from the best. To that end, we are issuing this Call for Papers.

Topics:

Any seriously proposed topic relevant to the specific or general theme of the Conference is welcomed.

Deadline:

Your proposed topic should be sent to us no later than January 15, 2012. After that date, papers may be accepted for publication but may not be assured a presentation at the conference.

Review:

Technical papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the specific field addressed.

Editing:

ADI reserves the right to edit for length and grammatical construction. Any substantive changes must be approved by the author(s).

Format:

Papers may be presented in either .doc, .docx, or .pps format

Publishing:

Unless specifically noted, all papers will be published online.

Eligibility:

You do not need to be a member of ADI to submit a paper or proposal for the conference.

Conference:

Submission of your paper does not enroll you as a member of ADI, or automatically admit you to the conference. If you intend to attend the conference, you must register online. If you are invited to attend, you will be notified regarding facilities and equipment available.

Please send you topic/proposal to:

Pennfield Jensen, ADI Vice President
3432 Valleyview Dr.
Bloomington, IN 47404
penn@distilling.com

A Whiskey Forge/Tales of the Cocktail Giveaway

2011-11-14T12:36:00.000-08:00

Click to enlarge

Keeping an extensive culinary library in the house means that even when the power dies, I can still work on food and drink projects. The flip side is that paper takes up enormous amounts of space. There comes a point — for me, it's this week — when one needs to weigh wants against needs. See, I'm shifting in fits and starts to electronic versions of some of the library materials and I'm culling printed matter in advance of an upcoming move.

I need the material for work. I merely want it in physical form. But thousands of books, bits of ephemera, and vertical files just take up so much room, so after some judicious scanning, I'm giving some of it away.

The first thing I'm giving away — right here on this site — is a set of 4" x 6" recipe cards from 2008's Tales of the Cocktail. To the best of my knowledge, it's a complete set of recipes for all the cocktails served over the five days of sessions, workshops, and panel discussions from that year. Almost 300 recipes. Among the cards are Martin Cate's rum-and-port concoction, the Dead Reckoning. From Pegu Club's Kenta Goto, there's a lovely Plymouth Gin-based La Fleur de Paradis (but note that the recipe calls for ½ ounce of Plymouth, not 12 — an issue we've seen before with genever) and an individual portion of Phil Ward's Mother's Ruin Punch in case you want to ruin any mothers this holiday season.

This stack of recipe cards wasn't available to general attendees, but to presenters and media types. Even if you bought tickets to attend Tales sessions, chances are that you didn't end up with this particular bit of swag.

So how can you score this piece of cocktail history for yourself? Easy:

Leave a comment below letting us know your favorite thing to drink. It can be booze-free or laced with alcohol — but it's got to be potable. Could be a cocktail, a homemade cordial, local beers, homemade bitters, whatever. Try to include a recipe; it's ok if you don't, but I like to know what you all are drinking. Include your Twitter account name so I can find you.
Follow me on Twitter

What's the Catch?
There is no catch. Just follow me on Twitter and let us know about your favorite drinks. You don't have to tweet or re-tweet anything. There's no Official Entry Form, you don't have to do anything about me on Facebook, and you don't have to buy my book. This is just us getting to know each other better.

On November 30th, my lovely assistant will pick a winner at random. Because the person to whom I'm giving this set of cards is following my Twitter account, I'll send a message there for a shipping address. If I hear nothing in two days, it goes to the next random commenter. And so on until we have a winner.

"But, Rowley," you may worry. "I'm in Australia. Are you seriously telling me you'll ship it all the way here if I win?" Hell, yes, mate. None of this offer-only-good-in-the-lower-48-states nonsense. I have a few thousand regular Aussie readers — why would I exclude any of you? Same goes for readers in Germany, France, Holland, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Morocco, or even far away and fabled Kansas. Anywhere. Now, if alcohol is taboo where you live or censors frown on foreign media, the package may never make it past customs agents. That I can't do anything about. In that case, it's just lost.

Candied Buddha's Hand Citron

2011-11-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

Drinking down the liquor cabinets continues. Frankly, our goal is not to drink away the hooch entirely, but to kill off the heels — those few ounces sloshing around nearly empty bottles — so that we don't schlep a lot of heavy glass to the new digs. You'd think, given the imperative to jettison dead weight, that I would refrain as well from canning, pickling, preserving, making ice cream, and like that.

You'd be right. Well, mostly. Old habits die hard.

When I stumbled across a stash of the bizarre Buddha's hand citron last week, though, I seized on the opportunity to crank out one last batch. Unlike citrus fruit with which we are most familiar, Buddha's hand citron is not even vaguely spherical. It has color you'd expect in a lemon, but the shape is more like a cuttlefish or squid. Those with a penchant for old horror stories might find it resembles the tentacled head of HP Lovecraft's monstrous Cthulhu rather than the hand of anyone, but there you go.

Known more properly as Citrus medica, the Buddha's hand or fingered citron, is striking not just for its bizarre appearance, but its strongly fragrant zest. Unlike the pith of lemons, grapefruit, or oranges which can add a distinct bitterness some dishes, this variety is edible pretty much as-is.

But it also takes to candying very well and, since plum pudding season approaches, I wanted a stash of candied citron so that if I catch a wild hare and decide to make plum puddings this year, I'll have the most elusive ingredient. It will also undoubtedly find its way into breakfast scones and accompany the occasional afternoon tea.

I started with 2 pounds of fruit but the directions below are easily adaptable for whatever amount you may have. Don't be surprised if you don't find any pulp inside. In fact, there probably won't be any at all. If you do happen to find some, simply slice away for this recipe.

Candied Buddha's Hand Citron

One large or two small Buddha's hand citron (about 2lb/1k)
sugar (about 6.75 cups)
water (about 3 cups)

Wash the fruit well, trim any greenish or brown spots, and cut into half-inch cubes — including all of the pith and all of the zest. Place them in a large pot and cover with cold water. Bring the water to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook about 30 to 45 minutes until the cubes become translucent. Drain the blanched fruit and return it to the pot.

Add 2 ¼ cups of sugar and 1 cup of water. Repeat until the cubes are completely submerged.* Bring the mixture to a boil over high heat, then reduce it to a low simmer. Cook, without stirring, about one hour. You're looking again for translucency. Turn off the heat and let the poached citron cubes remain in the syrup covered overnight until cool.

The next day, strain them from the syrup (don't throw out the syrup) and arrange on a cookie rack set over a lipped tray to catch any syrup that drains from the pieces. Allow to dry at room temperature for 2 to 3 days until the pieces are dry to the touch. Toss them with granulated sugar and seal in an airtight container.

Notes:

*For 2 pounds of diced fruit, I used 6 ¾ cup of sugar and 3 cups of water.

You can, if you want to speed the drying a bit, train a fan on the candied cubes. Do avoid drying them, however, in the oven since this may result in something more leathery than tender and supple.

I haven't yet decided what I want to do with it (except, obviously in, cocktails and perhaps desserts) but this recipe yields about 5 cups of fragrant citron syrup. Gingered citron lemonade is as good a place to start as any...

Kill the Open Bottles

2011-11-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

As a freelancer, it's important for me to wrest as much value from the things around me as possible. In that vein, I keep a number of "yard work" shirts. They have frayed collars, bleach stains, little rips and tears — flaws that make them unsuitable for wearing to client meetings, but just right while raking leaves, trimming hedges, painting, etc. Old jeans serve the same purpose. The truth is, though, that I haven't had a yard in fifteen years.

That's not thrifty; that's hoarding.

But not this week. This week, I'm culling possessions ruthlessly.

We're in the midst of closing on a nearly 100-year old Craftsman home just off Balboa Park in San Diego's North Park neighborhood. I've already weeded the clothes. Today, I start pulling books I no longer use and boxing the library in earnest. Before the week is out, I'll turn that gimlet eye on the offsite storage unit.

But during the entire time, we're shifting how we use the liquor library. When we drink at home, we usually decide what we feel like, then simply gather bottles and start mixing. With several hundred open bottles at home, nearly any cocktail is possible, except for the most outlandish concoctions of modern molecular cocktology (or whatever it's called). The kind of drinking has to go on hold for now. Until we're settled in this place, the simple new rule for any bottle of spirits is:

Kill the open bottles.

We'll start with those holding just a few ounces of booze and then move on to more full bottles. I know we won't be able to drink it all, even with the help of friends, but I'm not moving frayed, torn old shirts — and I'll be damned if I'm moving heavy glass bottles with next to nothing in them.

Goes well with:

My Culinary Library: What Good Does It Do? Once you find yourself with a few thousand books about food and drink, you've got to ask yourself: What's the point? Here's what I came up with.

Root Beer Cake

2011-11-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

Root beer cake. Yeah, I know. Sounds like something Ernest Matthew Mickler would've praised. But I stumbled across a recipe for just such a thing while reading Andrew Carmellini's new book American Flavor and it struck a nostalgic chord. I've also been on soda and baking kicks lately as well as preparing to move (we bought a house this week), so anything that reduces the number of cans, bottles, and boxes from the kitchen larder or the liquor closets get boosted to the top of the to-cook, -drink, -make list.

When I said I'd made a root beer cake, the looks at home could only be described as nonplussed. If I had described it as a dark spice cake or a moist cousin of German lebkuchen, the initial response might've been more enthusiastic. Turns out that the cake is very much like a spice cake, spiked with star anise, cardamom, nutmeg, lemons, and pepper. The top is covered with with spiced glaze flavored with some of the same spices.

Like a spice cake, it gets better on the second day. And the third. I'd make this for kids and to bring along on picnics, but, man, the doughnut potential here is so, so tempting.

A word of warning; the batter is very liquid. You might think something is amiss (especially since the measurements for the cake are odd). Not to worry; it comes out just fine.

From Andrew Carmellini's American Flavor, here's...

Root Beer Cake

The Cake

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature, for the pan
1.5 cups plus 1 Tbl all-purpose flour
One 12-ounce bottle (1.5 cups) root beer
½ cup molasses
½ tsp plus 1/8 tsp baking soda
¾ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup plus 2 Tbl vegetable oil
3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
One 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated on a microplane or on the finest side of a box grater (1 tsp)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 ¾ tsp baking powder
1 ¼ tsp ground star anise
1 ½ tsp ground cardamom
½ whole nutmeg, grated (or 2 tsp ground nutmeg)
Finely grated zest of 2 lemons
1 tsp kosher salt
½ tsp fresh-ground black pepper

The Root Beer Glaze
¾ cup heavy cream
1 Tbl sassafras bark (or ½ tsp sassafras extract; see Note)
2 cups powdered sugar
Pinch of ground star anise
Pinch of ground cardamom
¼ tsp kosher salt
¼ whole nutmeg, grated (or about 1 tsp ground nutmeg)
Finely grated zest of ½ lemon

To Make the Cake

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Grease the bottom and sides of a 10-inch cake pan with some of the butter.

Cut out a piece of parchment paper so it fits closely into the bottom of the cake pan. Line the bottom of the pan with the parchment, and then grease the parchment with more butter.

Shake 1 tablespoon of the flour into the cake pan, and shake it around so it sticks to the butter. Tap out any excess flour that doesn't stick to the parchment or to the sides of the pan.

Pour the root beer and molasses into a deep medium-sized pot, and bring the mixture to a boil over high heat. (You need those high sides because the baking soda will froth up very high, and you don't want it to spill over! So make sure there's some meaningful space between the liquid and the top of the pot.)

Pull the pot off the heat and whisk in all the baking soda, so it froths up. Then put the pot right in the fridge to cool down a little.

While the root beer mix is cooling down, whisk the brown sugar, vegetable oil, granulated sugar, ginger, and vanilla extract together in a mixing bowl. The mixture will be a little chunky at this point.

Crack the egg into the bowl and whisk well. The egg is what makes everything come together smoothly: you should have a thick paste. Set this aside.

In another mixing bowl, combine rest of the flour with the baking powder, star anise, and cardamom. Grate in the nutmeg and lemon zest, and add the salt and pepper. Whisk everything together so it's well combined. Take the root beer mixture out of the fridge. Pour a third of the flour mixture into a large mixing bowl; pour in one-third of the root beer mixture, then one-third of the sugar paste. Whisk everything together slowly (so it doesn't splash everywhere), and then add another one-third of the flour, another one-third of the root beer, and so forth, until everything is combined in the bowl. (The mix doesn't need to be completely and smoothly combined until the last of the wet and dry mixtures are in the bowl.) You should have wet, almost liquid batter.

Pour the batter into the cake pan, put the pan on a cookie sheet (to catch drips and splashes), and put on the middle oven rack.

Bake the cake for 45 minutes without opening the oven at all (this cake will sink if you shake it up while it's baking). Check it: the cake should be high and dark brown, with a little bit of spring-back when you touch it (but not too much-it's a very moist cake), if it's not quite ready, rotate the pan and put it back in the oven for another 5 minutes before checking it again. The whole baking process shouldn't take longer than 55 minutes, even in a slow oven.

While the Cake is Baking, Make the Glaze

Whisk the cream and sassafras together in a small pot, and bring it up to a boil over medium-high heat. As soon as it boils, pull the mixture off the heat, pour it into a glass or ceramic container (something that won't crack from the heat), and put it in the fridge. Let the mixture cool for about 30 minutes while the sassafras steeps into the cream, so you have a nice root beer flavor.

In a mixing bowl, combine the powdered sugar, star anise, cardamom, and salt. Grate in the nutmeg and lemon zest, and whisk everything together.

Strain the cooled cream through a fine-mesh strain into a small mixing bowl (so the sassafras pieces don’t end up in the glaze).

Gently whisk ½ cup of the cream into the powdered sugar mixture, holding back the last 2 tablespoons see if you need it. If the mixture is dry and not coming together as a glaze, add more cream. Whisk the mixture well, until you have a shiny, thick liquid.

To Finish the Cake

When the cake is ready, pull it out of the oven and let it rest for about 5 minutes.

Flip the cake out of the pan onto a serving plate. Spread the glaze thickly on top of the warm cake with a spoon. The glaze will melt and drip down the sides as you slather it on.

You can serve the cake as soon as it's cooled to room temperature-but like all spice cakes, it's even better the day after you make it. Store it covered at room temperature.

Andrew Carmellini (2011)
American Flavor
336 pages (hardback)
Ecco
ISBN: 0061963291
$34.99

Goes well with:

Drinking Cheerwine Like It's My Job. Root beer's all well and good, but I swear that there will come a day when a Cheerwine cake will cool on our kitchen counter.
My review of Andrew Schloss' new book Homemade Soda — and how my mom came to think there was a drive-by shooting in her dining room.
My take on Brad Thomas Parsons' new book Bitters. It's because I make my own bitters, infusions, and extracts that I happened to have everything on the ingredient list for this cake.

Tiki Cannibal Carnage for TDN: Nuku Hiva

2011-11-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

Thursday Drink Night happens, more or less, once a week on...um, lemme check. Yep. Thursday. Celebrants sometimes gather in person, but it's more of an online deal in which cocktail bloggers, spirits writers, bartenders, and drinks enthusiasts fire up their computers, chat with each other, and mix cocktails based on a theme or a particular spirit. This week, the theme is tiki...with a twist.

From the Mixoloseum blog regarding tonight's Thursday Drink Night:

[The] theme will be “Nuku Hiva” based on recent events on that tropical Polynesian island. A little back story:

In early October, the charred remains of a German adventurer were discovered at a campfire site on a South Pacific island. The tabloid media were quick to portray the slaying as a possible case of cannibalism on Nuku Hiva, an island historically known for human sacrifice. But locals are offended and experts say such killings are a thing of the very distant past. (read more)

Therefore, in honor of this darkly exotic mystery, the goal of the night is to create tiki drinks with at least one German ingredient! Bonus if you use fire! Stop in to the chatroom after 8pm EST for all the fun and frivolity.

Now, what's a German ingredient? Kirsch? Yes. Bärenjäger? Yes. Jägermeister? Yes. Jägertee? Sure. Speckklöße? Not so fast...

Goes well with:

A bit I wrote a few years ago on Santa Maria tri-tip, bringing together The Smiths, Mr Gay UK, a taste for human flesh, and the inestimable Jeffery Jones in the 1999 film Ravenous.

Bookshelf: Homemade Soda

2011-11-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

Around the time I started brewing my own stouts, ales, lagers, and "wee heavies," my father mentioned his fond memories of making root beer as a kid before World War II. During a subsequent school break, I scrounged up a few cases of empty bottles and pulled together ingredients to make an extract batch good old-fashioned American root beer with him. It was my first batch of home-brewed soda and the project taught me some early lessons in how not to work with yeast.

When the bottles began exploding in my parents’ dining room, my mother — then a schoolteacher — mistook the sounds of shattering glass for a drive-by shooting. Her students, she thought, had finally found her.

Mom was rattled, but unharmed. Over the years, I’ve collaborated on a number of undertakings with my father, from baking onion rye bread to laying bricks and building a deck, but that stab at root beer was our last joint beverage project.

The promise of homemade sodas occasionally came back to pluck at the edges of my imagination over the next few years and I ended up acquiring a decent collection of materials about the history and how-to of soda making. One of my favorites is Homemade Soda, a new-ish recipe collection by serial author Andrew Schloss. Not only does he have multiple root beer recipes, he gives various ways to prepare and then carbonate syrup bases; mixing with seltzer, carbonating with a siphon, or even — if you want to try your hand at it — brewing and lightly fermenting.

Schloss includes recipes for honey cardamom fizzy water, blazing inferno chile water, caramel seltzer, black lemonade, maraschino ginger ale, the “original” Orange Crush, homemade tonics, sarsaparilla, birch beer, spruce beer, various cream sodas, chai fizz, sparkling lemongrass lemonade, and an entire chapter devoted to shrubs, switchels, and other vinegar drinks.

The cocktail applications — both for the base syrups and the carbonated final product — hold a lot of promise. Regardless of whether you get all boozy with this or intend to use it as inspiration for treats for the kids, the historical asides, directions on equipment and processes, and light tone make Homemade Soda an easy and enjoyable read.

Goes well with:

Fix the Pumps, Darcy O’Neil’s compendium of old soda fountain syrups and tinctures recipes.

Andrew Schloss (2011)
Homemade Soda: 200 Recipes for Making & Using Fruit Sodas & Fizzy Juices; Sparkling Waters; Root Beers & Cola Brews; Herbal & Healing Waters; Sparkling Teas and Coffees; Shrubs and Switchels; Cream Sodas and Floats; and Other Carbonated Concoctions
336 pages (paperback)
Storey Publishing
ISBN: 1603427961
$18.95

Champurrado for Day of the Dead

2011-11-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

One night, when we were still new in San Diego, Dr. Morpheus and I attended a neighborhood party commemorating Día de los Muertos. We live about 20 minutes outside Tijuana; this is a very local tradition. Friends had spent days preparing mole, forming tamales, and doing the other prep work for the feast of traditional Mexican foods.

As we chatted with neighbors, Morpheus suddenly told me “I’ll be right back. Want some hot chocolate?”

“Sure,” I said.

Then I saw that he was headed to a huge, cylindrical Rubbermaid cooler. Guests were coming away from it with cups of steaming drinks. “Wait...” Even from across the room, I could smell what flowing from the cooler’s tap. But he was already gone. When he returned a few minutes later, he handed me a cup. He still hadn’t tried his.

“Don’t drink that,” I warned him. “You won’t like it.”

“It’s hot chocolate,” he explained as if I were an imbecile.

“That’s not all it is. Try it. It’s not something you’re going to go for, though.” We’ve known each other nearly twenty years; I know what the boy likes to put in his mouth. The look of surprise that leapt to his face at the first sip was pretty much what I expected.

“What the hell is that?”

That was champurrado, a subspecies of corn-thickened beverages common to Mexico known as atoles. Atoles can be plain or flavored with pineapple, peach, cinnamon, pumpkin, coconut, guavas, sweet potatoes, plums, peas, mangos, strawberries, sunflower seeds, and, quite literally, hundreds more fruits, spices, vegetables, and seeds.

Champurrado, one of my favorite varieties of atole, is flavored with canela (Mexican cinnamon) and chocolate. At a glance, it does look like hot chocolate, but if you’ve spent any time around corn (ahem), you can pick out the aroma well before tasting it. And if the aroma doesn’t give it away, the consistency certainly does.

An acquired taste? Yeah, sure, I'll grant you that. An acquired texture is more like it, though. Sometimes, it's almost pudding-like, but in general, champurrado isn’t thick like oatmeal or Cream of Wheat cereal. But even the smallest sip reveals it’s thicker than hot chocolate. More like a cream of tomato or pumpkin soup. Use masa if you’ve got it, but the corn that’s most commonly added around here is masa harina, a finely ground dry cornmeal used to prepare tamales and some kinds of tortillas. It’s first mixed with water to make a loose slurry, then added to the chocolate mix, the whole thing then heated a few minutes; if you add the masa harina all at once, the stuff clumps up like cornstarch.

Aficionados are split on whether to use all water, all milk, or some combination of the two, but here’s how we do it when Autumn sets in and the mornings are so chilly. This makes a moderately thick champurrado. If you like it thinner, simply add more water or milk to the pan while heating.

I've got the champurrado covered for tonight; who's making the mole?

Champurrado

One 3 ¼ oz disc of Mexican chocolate (Ibarra brand)
One 5-6” stick canela (Mexican cinnamon) or 3-4” regular cinnamon
2 ½ cups water (divided use)
1 cup milk
½ cup masa harina
1 small cone of piloncillo* (or ¼ to ½ cup turbinado or brown sugar)

Bring 1 ½ cups of water to the boil in a saucepan. In a separate mixing bowl (or the measuring cup if it’s large enough), mix together the remaining 1 cup of water with the milk and the masa harina. Stir together until it reaches a smooth, uniform consistency.

When the water comes to a bowl, stir the masa mixture again to loosen it. Pour it into the boiling water along with the chocolate, piloncillo and cinnamon. Reduce the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the chocolate and sugar have dissolved and the canela flavor has suffused the entire mixture.

Serve in squat mugs (to better hold the heat).

* Piloncillo is the small, very hard sugar that comes in cones/pylons and is available at almost every Mexican market. We've used it here before in our pineapple vinegar.

Dispatching Zombies for Halloween

2011-10-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

They might not seem like much one at a time.

But in a group, all riled up and hungry?

Man, you

watch

your

ass.

~ Morgan to Rick Grimes

The Walking Dead

Halloween candles from Chicago's P.O.S.H.

Last Thursday, I bought candy — bags of candy — for tonight’s trick or treaters. We won’t get very many visitors, I know (there just aren’t that many young kids in our neighborhood), so I expected to have leftovers. What I didn’t expect was that the boys would devour nearly half the stash before Halloween. Yeah, ok, I may’ve helped.

Treats the neighborhood kids won’t be getting tonight, though, are our zombies. Seriously, now; it’s Halloween. What else are we gonna drink? After the recipe, check out Blair Reynolds of the Oregon Bartenders' Guild crank out a slightly tweaked version.

First, though, from Beachbum Berry’s Tiki+ app, here’s Don the Beachcomber’s midcentury version of this potent tiki classic. And a parting word of warning. As Morgan says above, these might not seem like much one at a time, but a bunch of them? Watch your ass.

Don the Beachcomber’s 1950 Zombie

1 oz lime juice
1 oz lemon juice
1 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
1 oz passion fruit syrup
1 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
1 oz white Puerto Rican rum
1 oz 151 Demerara rum
1 teaspoon brown sugar syrup
dash Angostura bitters
sprig of mint

Shake well with lots of crushed ice, pour into a tall glass. Garnish with mint sprig.

Bookshelf: Bitters

2011-10-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

It has become a cliché of modern bartending that bitters are to cocktails as salt is to soup. They are the seasoning, the ingredient that can turn merely acceptable drinks into stellar ones. Or, as one Filipino friend explained to another in a turn close to my heart, “Bitters are to cocktails as bay leaves are to adobo.” You may or may not be able to pinpoint the taste, but without it, everything has a certain flatness.

If you already make your own cocktail bitters, chances are that Brad Thomas Parsons’ recent book on the subject holds little new for you. On the other hand, if you’re just starting to dabble or don’t know where to begin, Bitters conveniently brings together a lot of material in one place. With no other bitters manual in print, one might even call it indispensable for the DIY cocktail enthusiast.

After some introductory remarks and history, Parsons dives into the meat of the matter with short profiles of some two dozen players in today’s bitters boom: Fee Brothers, Bittermans, The Bitter Truth, Dr. Adam Elmegirab’s Bitters, Bar Keep Bitters, Scrappy’s, and more. Not a bad lineup considering that a decade ago, Angostura, Fee Brothers, and Peychaud’s were the three remaining bitters producers that survived Prohibition. He includes recipes for thirteen bitters such as apple, orange, rhubarb, coffee-pecan, and root beer bitters. A substantial collection of cocktail recipes using bitters — more than half the book — rounds out the pages.

Parsons clearly has spent much time obsessing over bitters; he interviews appropriate authorities and booze pundits, he includes the right companies and products, and he hits the high points of history. He’s done his homework. Yet there’s a clumsiness about his writing. After going on for some length about sassafras, for instance, Parsons calls for using it in a recipe — but what part of the plant? The powdered leaves he writes about? The root he mentions? They are as different as ham and bacon. Or consider this entry under Snake Oil Bitters: “Not much is known about this lineup of Brooklyn bitters or their creator...” Really? That’s either lazy or disingenuous.

The passage that prompted me to bark out in disbelief, though, is this:

Once I’ve sized up a joint, I’ll ask the bartender, “Do you make your own bitters?” More often than not, the answer is yes.

Oh, come on. Laudable as making bitters is, I guarantee you that the vast majority of American bartenders do no such thing. I can only imagine that this is a sampling error stemming from Parsons’ preference for places with what he deems “serious bar programs.” I like those places, too, but they're far from the only game in town.

While there are welcome lists of bittering and flavoring agents, there's no attempt to give them Linnaean names or even thumbnail descriptions. When plants' common names vary from place to place and related plants often parade under the same name, specifying genus and species is especially important, a convention one finds in the most useful gardening books and horticultural tomes. The lists entirely omit traditional bitters coloring agents such as sandalwood, Brazil wood, and cochineal.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad to own a copy. If you’re into cocktails, you should get one, too, if only to understand this core ingredient better. Even if you have no intention to macerate, infuse, percolate, and use homemade bitters, there’s a wealth of recipes for cocktails using commercial examples. It's just that I would prefer to have seen a stronger editorial hand here, a more rigorous historical and scientific review before Bitters had gone to print. If I sound disappointed, it’s because the book is merely good; it could have been great.

From Brad Thomas Parsons’ Bitters, here’s his twist on cherry bitters, inspired by time in the Pacific Northwest. “Devil's club, sometimes known as Pacific ginseng,” he writes, “is a shrub that grows in North American forests with a cool, wet climate, and for me it instantly evokes memories of hiking the trails around Snoqualmie Falls. Rounded out with the addition of Oregon hazelnuts, this aromatic bitters takes me back to Seattle every time I add a dash or two to a drink.”

Cherry-Hazelnut Bitters

Makes about 20 ounces

½ cup lightly toasted and skinned hazelnuts
½ cup dried tart or sour cherries
2 tablespoons devil's club root
½ tsp schizandra [sic] berries [see note]
½ tsp wild cherry bark
½ tsp cinchona bark
½ tsp cassia chips
¼ tsp chopped dried orange peel
3 star anise
2 cups 101-proof bourbon, or more as needed
1 cup water
2 tablespoons rich [2:1] syrup

Place all of the ingredients except for the bourbon, water, and rich syrup in a quart-sized Mason jar or other large glass container with a lid. Pour in the 2 cups of bourbon, adding more if necessary so that all the ingredients are covered. Seal the jar and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight for 2 weeks, shaking the jar once a day.

After 2 weeks, strain the liquid through a cheesecloth-lined funnel into a clean quart-sized jar to remove the solids. Repeat until all of the sediment has been filtered out. Squeeze the cheesecloth over the jar to release any excess liquid and transfer the solids to a small saucepan. Cover the jar and set aside.

Cover the solids in the saucepan with the water and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Cover the saucepan, lower the heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Remove the saucepan from the heat and let cool completely. Once cooled, add the contents of the saucepan (both liquid and solids) to another quart-sized Mason jar. Cover the jar and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight for 1 week, shaking the jar daily.

After 1 week, strain the jar with the liquid and solids through a cheesecloth-lined funnel into a clean quart-sized Mason jar. Repeat until all of the sediment has been filtered out. Discard the solids. Add this liquid to the jar containing the original bourbon solution.

Add the rich syrup to the jar and stir to incorporate, then cover and shake to fully dissolve the syrup.

Allow the mixture to stand at room temperature for 3 days. At the end of the 3 days, skim off any debris that floats to the surface and pour the mixture through a cheesecloth-lined funnel one last time to remove any solids.

Using a funnel, decant the bitters into smaller jars and label. If there's any sediment left in the bottles, or if the liquid is cloudy, give the bottle a shake before using. The bitters will keep indefinitely, but for optimum flavor use within a year.

Note: The schizandra [sic] berries called for are from the plant Schisandra chinensis, widely used in traditional Chinese medicine. Look for deep red dried berries in health food stores, spice shops, online shops, and in Korean markets, where it is sold as an ingredient for tea under the name omija. Go for whole berries rather than powdered for an easier time filtering.

Brad Thomas Parsons (2011)
Photos by Ed Anderson
Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas
240 pages (hardback)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1580083595
$24.99

Bookshelf: The American Cocktail

2011-10-29T14:22:00.000-07:00

She was rather like one of those innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your system so that, before you know what you're doing, you're starting out to reform the world by force if necessary and pausing on your way to tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at you like that, you will knock his head off.

P.G. Wodehouse (1919)

My Man Jeeves

With Christmas less than two months off, we’re solidly into cookbook season. This year, that means cocktail books as well. Of those, a handful of new American drinks titles should be on the radar for the cocktail geek in your life (even if that happens to be you). We’ll take a look at some of them over the course of the next week.

First up is The American Cocktail by the editors of Imbibe magazine. Imbibe writing is spirits-heavy, but covers drinking broadly, so any given issue may have stories on tea, soda, coffee, wines, beer, cider, or even water. Producing a cocktail book was a natural course for them; I’m glad to see the editors finally got around to it.

Headnotes on fifty recipes in the book give historical context, ingredient notes, and drinks origins. The recipes themselves are from bartenders across the USA and are broken into areas of the country (The South, Northeast, Midwest, West, and West Coast) where regional ingredients from sassafras to huckleberries lend a sense of place to all of them. Without getting to the elaborate preparations of molecular mixology, the book gives a pretty representative look at what drinking looks like in craft cocktail bars around the country. Wisconsin Kringle syrup to liven up your brandy, anyone? What about a persimmon margarita?

An eight-page appendix of American craft distilleries is a particularly welcome addition, as is specifying particular spirits from local distilleries throughout the book. Yeah, yeah, distribution is limited for a lot of the spirits, so you can usually swap out the specific spirit with a similar one you’ve got on hand, but hats off to the bartenders and editors for making the point to call out local liquor in many of the recipes. Hunt around online; you can often find merchants willing to ship local wet goods to your door.

In the section on the South, spirits and wine director Shannon Healy at Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill — my old stomping grounds — deploys the North Carolina cherry flavored soda Cheerwine in a bittersweet cocktail called Big Bay Storm.

Big Bay Storm

1.25 oz Gosling's rum
.75 oz ounce pineapple juice
.75 oz fresh lemon juice
.75 oz Campari
Ice cubes
1 ounce Cheerwine soda

Combine the rum. Campari, lemon juice, and pineapple juice in a cocktail shaker, add ice, and shake vigorously. Strain into an ice-filled Collins glass. Top with the Cheerwine. Stir to combine and garnish with the orange wheel.

From Portland, Oregon comes Evan Zimmerman’s North by Northwest cocktail, balancing apples in three forms (local brandy from Clear Creek Distillery, fresh-pressed juice, and apple butter) with lemon juice and Averna, a dark Italian amaro we use to good effect in dark Manhattans from time to time.

North by Northwest

1.5 oz Clear Creek apple brandy
.75 oz fresh lemon juice
.75 oz fresh-pressed apple juice
1 tsp apple butter
Ice cubes

Combine the brandy, lemon juice, apple juice, Averna, and apple butter in an ice-filled cocktail shaker. Shake well and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

The Editors of Imbibe Magazine (2011)
Photos by Sheri Giblin
The American Cocktail: 50 Recipes That Celebrate the Craft of Mixing Drinks from Coast to Coast
144 pages (hardback)
Chronicle Books
ISBN: 081187799X
$19.95

Drinking Cheerwine Like It's My Job

2011-10-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

Moderation. I'm familiar with the concept, of course. But there are occasions when it just doesn't sit well.

Pinched from Cheerwine.com

The last time I left North Carolina, for instance, I drove off with nine cases of Cheerwine stowed in the trunk. Nine. I don't believe that, until that day, I'd bought nine cases of anything ever for myself at one go.

But while living near Chapel Hill I had picked up the habit of downing two or three of the cherry-flavored sodas each day. It's a distinctly North Carolina soda and just wasn't available where I was headed. That was going to be a hard habit to shake. As far as I knew, the stash in my trunk was going to have to last for months, maybe as much as a year if I...ugh...if I practiced a little moderation.

I'm not alone in my obsession; Tar Heel natives have doted on Cheerwine since 1917 and in a recent slideshow on fifty iconic Southern food brands, Garden & Gun magazine led with the red stuff. Recipes abound for using it in cakes, as a braising liquid for hams, in barbecue sauces, ice cream, and, increasingly, cocktails.

The batch I hauled away is long gone, but fortunately I no longer have to make a 2,500 mile trek to get what may well be my favorite soda. Here in Southern California, BevMo carries single bottles. The cost is a little more than I used to pay...but overall, it's cheaper than the interstate microimporting I used to do. To help find a source close to you, the soda company offers a zip code finder here and will ship it. Kegworks ships as well.

I never got around to braising a ham with the stuff or using it in a brine, but I admit that now that I have a source for it, it might be time for another case.

Or two.

Caveat: I haven't seen anyone selling Cheerwine in plastic bottles online, but stick with glass bottles and cans. In North Carolina — and, admittedly, this was years ago, so things may have changed — the plastic bottles I bought often held flat soda, even when freshly opened. This was never a problem with cans and glass bottles.

Georgia Moonshine Raid Results in Arrests...What? Oh. Nevermind.

2011-10-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

This summer, I wrote a bit on so-called legal moonshine (link below). I wrote a number of things — some more clearly than others — but the take-home message was this: if laws permitted the manufacture of moonshine, it would cease to exist. Furthermore, dubbing legally produced spirits "moonshine" invites trouble from the get-go. Yes, of course, the public will be curious. But we're also curious about car crashes, burning houses, and train wrecks. Doesn't mean we want to get involved.

Spinning curiosity into cash requires overcoming generations of not just curiosity, but actual fear about moonshine as well. This is the stuff, after all, that supposedly makes one go blind and kills people. Marketing wholesome, tax-paid liquor as moonshine can be done successfully, but distillers and marketers who chose to try their hands at it would do well to think hard about why they'd want to do that, the makeup of their target audiences, and possible alternatives before forging ahead.

And there's the possibility that federal agents will want to arrest your ass.

Just ask Dwight Bearden, operations overseer of the Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery in Dawsonsville, Georgia. This past Friday, agents showed up on reports that moonshine was being made at the yet-to-open distillery.

I don't know whether the informant was just a spiteful prankster or simply ignorant, but the location of the distillery should've been a tip-off to the feds that they might take the complaint with a grain of salt: Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery is located smack-dab in Dawsonville's city hall.

In the end, the distillery was cleared of any moonshine selling, sampling, or production. The still is not yet complete, so, no, they weren't making any. Of course, a different business name might've prevented all that nonsense in the first place...but then this may just be PR gold. "Did I ever tell you," the story will one day go "about the time the feds almost shut us down?"

Best of luck to you, Mr. Bearden! We'll be keeping an eye on your progress.

Goes well with:

Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned.

Charles Bukowski Stamps

2011-10-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in storage, I've still got an armload of Charles Bukowski books, most of them autographed. Over the years, I've given some away as gifts. Others just languish in the dark. I thought at one time that if I ever had trouble paying rent, I could pawn them off on Hank Chinaski enthusiasts for some extra scratch. Held onto some very old Lovecraft books and autographed Burroughs, too, for the same reason.

There was a time when I was enamored of his writing. Jaw-dropping amounts of booze, gambling, and desperation. Loose women and soul-draining work. During long, snowbound Midwestern winters, the Southern California he described, even with its bums, drunks, adulterers, addicts, and assorted losers, held an almost aching grip on my imagination.

Here's the deal about Bukowski, though: once you've read ten of his stories (any ten: pick 'em), you've pretty much read his entire oeuvre. Despite his sometimes mesmerizing use of English, there's only so much I can read about an alcoholic's inside take on bleeding ulcers, distended livers, and drunk-tank vomit before I wonder...what else have you got?

So I stopped buying Bukowski books. Stopped reading the ones I own. I still got a smile today, though, when I was digging through old papers and found my long-lost Bukowski stamps.

These aren't supposed to exist.

Bukowski spent nearly 15 years working for the US Postal Service. His novel Post Office is an autobiographical take on those awful years and remains perhaps his best-known work. Although one hears occasional rumblings about the possibility of an official USPS Bukowski stamp, that hasn't happened. These stamps are a bit of subversive art I picked up in New York back in the 1990's and made to look like actual postage stamps, complete with a little Glassine sleeve. They are an homage to America's most famous real-life postal worker, if not our most celebrated alcoholic.

Maybe I'll trade them for a bottle of Thomas H. Handy rye. I'm pretty sure he'd approve...

Goes well with:

I've always enjoyed pseudobiblia, the books and ephemera from our literary past said to exist, but sprung entirely from an author's imagination. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, for instance, falls into this category, as does The Courier's Tragedy, a fictional Jacobean revenge play written by the equally fictional Richard Wharfinger in Thomas Pynchon's very real The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, ancient secret rival postal services operate under the very noses of us hoi poloi. Had anyone actually affixed Bukowski stamps to envelopes back when postage was only 29 cents and mailed them, they would've fit right in the paranoid world of Miss Oepida Maas.
What Do You Want from the Liquor Store?, a bit I wrote about Ted Hawkins' fantastic song Sorry You're Sick after hearing it on This American Life. Hawkins' performance and links included.

Bacon Dumplings for a Wicked Hangover

2011-10-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

Though I make Speckklöße only, at best, once a year, I lust after them each and every week. Speckwhat? Think of them as bacon dumplings. Think of them, also, as restorative after a night of debauchery and something you can make almost on autopilot. Hot, cheap, smoky, lightly greasy, carb-heavy with bacon’s ineffable umami loveliness, and better than aspirin when that bottle you hit last night smacks you right back. I could eat a dozen. Which is about how many this recipe makes.

Dumpling eaters. Don't make yours so big.

In Germany, Klöße and Knödl are names for poached dumplings made from potatoes, semolina, yesterday’s bread, flour, breadcrumbs, even crumbled dry pretzels. These dry ingredients are softened with stock, milk, or other liquids and are generally bound with eggs and flavored with fruits, nuts, or various proteins such as fish, cracklings, or — in this case — bacon.

Sidestepping the intricacies both of territorial nomenclature and of nearly infinite dumpling species, we’ll call these simply “Klöße.” That weird character, that ß, represents a sound we often make in English, but for which we don’t have a single character. It’s called an eszett and is pronounced like a double-s, so you’ll see these sometimes as Kloss (singular) or Klosse (plural). Speck is smoked bacon so Speck-Klöße are simply bacon dumplings.

Like all the German foods I ate growing up, I learned to make these in the American Midwest where German, Swiss, and Austrian bakeries, Konditoreien, sausage shops, and butchers were commonplace and the Germanic (or, as we called it, “Dutchy”) influence on home cooking was pervasive. The older I get, the less I eat the German foods of my youth. But as I work through our bacon inventory, I’ve been building a craving for a bowl of Speckklöße.

Today, I capitulated.

Speckklöße

The recipe calls for simmering the dumplings. Seriously: simmer. If you boil these, they are likely just to fall apart in the pot. Edible, but in the same way a fistful of dough is.

3” square of slab bacon, diced into tiny cubes (about 8 slices if using pre-sliced)
1 medium loaf of crusty bread
1 cup/250ml hot milk
2 eggs, beaten
Salt and pepper
q.s. rich chicken stock

Cut the loaf into slices (crust or no crust: your call, but save the cumbs) and pour the hot milk over them in a large bowl. Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen towel or a cutting board (careful that it doesn't tip the bowl) to keep in the heat and moisture. Fry the bacon pieces in a medium pan. When the bacon is browned, pour it, grease and all, over the soaking bread in the bowl. When the mixture cools, add the eggs, salt, and pepper. Mix gently but thoroughly.

Shape into small round dumplings about 1.5”/4cm in diameter. If they seem too wet, add some of the reserved breadcrumbs or even a small bit of flour. If they’re too dry, add a bit of stock. Then simmer the dumplings gently in rich chicken stock (I flavor my stock with roasted garlic and cumin) until they float and are cooked through (about 10-15 minutes).

Serve hot in shallow bowls with some of the stock.

Notes

About the bacon: Use the very best you can find. I like slab bacon, but pre-sliced is fine. Allan Benton’s stuff is amazing, but if you’ve got a local shop making or selling high-quality smoked pork belly, by all means shop there. And do check out Maynard Davies' Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer.

About the bread: It’s easier to get good cupcakes in San Diego than good bread. Fortunately, we have Bread & Cie, a bakery that consistently puts out the sorts of high-quality breads I knew in the Midwest, on the East coast, and in Europe. Go for something with some character, a tight crumb, and a crisp crust. By all means, use flavored breads if you want to experiment; just keep in mind the effect that things like olives, rosemary, or jalapenos may have on the final dish.

For that matter, you can play with the poaching liquid. I find the idea repugnant, but you could — if you possess the perversity to do such things — swap out the bacon with country ham and poach these in coffee as a red-eye dumpling concoction. But beef stock, fumé, and vegetable stocks are all fine. Water, too, in a pinch, if it’s salted. Deep-fried in fat takes it an entirely different, though no less delicious, direction. Want to sauté some onion and include it in the dumplings? In. Got cracklings from rendering your own goose fat? In. Knock yourself out.

The version above is the no-frills classic I prefer at home, but there’s no reason not to take the basic idea and run with it.

Lord knows the Germans have.

On the Road

2011-10-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

Locals say black wooly worms are a sign of cold winter to come.

I've been in Kansas City all week and jet off to Chicago in a few hours, then back to warm, sunny San Diego.

And, man, my bones are aching for it. When I woke at 5 this morning, it was just a hair over 40°F outside. I know, I know; that's not cold. But for me, it's on the harsh side of brisk. And, frankly, if I were to put on some socks and fire up the tea pot, I'd feel a lot more cozy. I'll get on that in a minute.

Meanwhile, I'm repacking and planning my attack on the Windy City, one sure to include cured meats, sausages, and distilled and fermented beverages. Ooo, and bakeries. San Diego may be warm, but we lack for solid, old-world style bakeries.

I'll be back soon. There will be a recipe for hangover dumplings, some food book news, and that thing I did with Chartreuse (or, rather, in which I was an all-too willing accomplice while watching cartoons at a Kansas City gay bar).

A Smooth and Creamy Pâté

2011-10-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

My introduction to Nigel Slater’s writing was at Kitchen Arts & Letters, Nach Waxman’s cookbook store in New York. Its manager, Matt Sartwell, understood my tastes and my interest in titles from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He also understood that I was willing to pay more for such imported books because they were often more interesting than so many of the latest American offerings. Or, at least, the titles in that particular store were.

Once, nearly ten years ago, I was browsing the shelves and making a small pile of books to take home when Sartwell asked me if I’d heard of Slater. The name was only vaguely familiar. British was all I could come up with, perhaps a columnist. “His earlier books weren’t anything special,” I recall him explaining as he took a book from the shelf “But his latest one” — and here he pulled an old clerks' trick by placing it in my hand — “is quite good. He writes like you talk.”

I wasn’t at all convinced that anything resembling more of me was something the world needed.

But I humored Sartwell and flipped through the book. The more I plucked through its pages, the more I realized that this guy did write a lot like I speak. Not entirely. Maybe a bit more floral and breezy than I might be. His ingredients, tastes, and methods of cooking, though, as well as a casual style that puts less emphasis on exactitude than on appropriateness, was uncannily similar to my own. He wrote of “enough” butter, glugs of brandy, and splashes of wine. Commonsense in a way that made me appreciate just how uncommon sense truly is.

I added the book to the pile. Some books in my library I don’t open for years on end. Not a month goes by, though, that I don’t crack open Slater’s Appetite for inspiration. Still on my Braunschweiger high, I was craving a bit of liver sausage. For wont of a proper smoker here at the house, though, braunschweiger was out. Chicken liver it was, then.

The milk was whole, the brandy from Jepson (which I wrote about here), and the schmear photo is mine. The rest of this is all Slater (sounding freakishly like me):

A Smooth and Creamy Pâté

There is a constantly recurring lunch in my house that consists of little more than deli shopping laid out on the kitchen table, eaten from its wrappers and cartons. It is a Saturday morning thing, really. Hunks of bread, either freshly baked sourdough or a crisp ficelle, some tiny, purple-black olives, miniature gherkins, a knobbly salami, and a couple of fat wedges of cheese are pretty much what we seem to have. Yet it is a favorite meal, one I enjoy as much as any other, I like a pear with mine, too, or a huge bunch of sweet, muscaty grapes. The star of such a meal is often a white china dish of homemade pâté to go with the little gherkins, or cornichons as they seem to be called nowadays. It is so difficult—almost impossible—to find a commercial pâté that is both velvety and pink enough that I think it worth making your own. The method that follows may sound pedantic, but it is small points such as the sieving after the initial blending that make the difference between a good pâté and one that is truly sublime. Some swamp-green canned peppercorns, hot, soft, and addictive, to scatter on as you eat will bring untold rewards.

Enough for 6

chicken livers—about 14 ounces
milk—enough to soak the livers in
butter—½ cup, plus ¼ cup at the very end
whipping cream—6 tablespoons
brandy [Jepson Rare Alembic Brandy]

Trim any dark or green bits from the livers, cover them in milk, and leave them for thirty minutes. This will rid them of any bitterness. Soften two-thirds of the ½ cup butter, not so far as to melt it, but just so it takes a finger easily. Melt the remaining third in a shallow pan. When it starts to foam, drop in the livers, drained of their milk [and blotted dry on paper towels]. Take care—they will spit at you. Let them develop a pale, golden crust on one side, then turn them over and do the same to the other. It is essential that the butter is hot enough for this to take only a few minutes, otherwise, the center will not stay pink and the pâté will lose its magic.

Now tip the livers, their butter, the softened butter, and a generous seasoning of salt and black pepper into a blender or food processor with the cream, and blitz to a smooth puree. Pour a couple of good glugs of brandy into the empty pan, put it over the heat, and bring to a boil so the alcohol burns off (some people ignite it at this point, but I have never found it makes that much difference). Pour the brandy into the creamed chicken livers and continue to blitz. No matter how much you whiz the pate there will still be some graininess, but it should remain pink.

Now, using a rubber spatula, push the mixture through a stainless steel sieve into a bowl. I know this is deeply boring, and the sieve is yet another thing to wash up, but it really does make a crucial difference to the pâté, turning the grainy and the mundane into the blissfully velvety. The point is to have as smooth a texture as possible, and you can only get that by sieving. Scrape the whole lot into a terrine or bowl, smooth the top, and put it in the fridge to set.

Half an hour later, and no longer because the mixture will discolor, melt the ¼ cup of butter and scrape off the froth that rises to the surface. Pour the butter over the pate and return it to the fridge to set. I tend to leave mine for most of the day or overnight, but it should be ready in three or four hours. It will keep for a day or two.

Details for the American edition:

Nigel Slater (2002)
Appetite: So What Do You Want to Eat Today?
448 pages (hardback)
Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0609610783
$35.00

Goes well with:

A trip to Kitchen Arts & Letters (1435 Lexington Avenue, New York City, 212.876.5550, www.kitchenartsandletters.com)
Jepson made the brandy I used to great effect in our quince-infused brandy. At $19.99, it was a steal. Peel your eyes and keep 'em peeled for that price at Trader Joe's in case they ever score a great deal on it again.
Jennifer McLagan's new book on offal cookery, Odd Bits. I recommend this one less because there's any particular resonance between the writing styles of McLagan and Slater than because of the odd bit recipes I yoiked from each.

Muoi Thien Huong

2011-10-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I made a huge batch of boiled shrimp for the boys — more than could be downed in one sitting. I was a little taken aback that anything was left at all, but, to be fair, the pot had been brimming with not merely shrimp, but cobs of corn, fat links of smoked sausage, garlic heads, and more, all seasoned with a satchel of South Louisiana spices.

Leftover shrimp aren't exactly a curse, but they were already cooked, so they wouldn’t work in gumbo the way I make it. I was thinking of a simple salt-and-pepper treatment I’d done on shrimp last year when Luke Nguyen sprung to mind. For the last several weeks, I’d been reading the recipes of this Vietnamese-Australian cook, author, and culinary explorer; his muoi thien huong (salt-and-pepper seasoning) seemed a perfect fit.

Within five minutes, I’d cranked out a batch of Nguyen’s simple seasoning laced with ginger and five-spice powder, sliced two limes, dumped a handful of cold cooked shrimp on a plate, and started dipping.

I ate alone. There would be no leftovers this time. Nobody saw my smiles.

From Secrets of the Red Lantern (in which it's also deployed with shrimp), here’s Nguyen’s

Muoi Thien Huong
(salt and pepper seasoning mix)

1 Tbl salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp five-spice powder

Mix thoroughly and store in an airtight container

Afterwards, in the wake of my speedboat gluttony, I realized the rice noodles in the cabinet would’ve made a nice complement, maybe with a splash of fish sauce and fresh mint.

Ah well. There will be extra shrimp next time, too.

Pauline Nguyen, Luke Nguyen, and Mark Jensen (2008)
Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Vietnamese Recipes from the Heart
344 pages (hardback)
Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740777432
$40.00

Goes well with:

Easy Shrimp, a stripped-down version of the above from last year for an even more streamlined way of dealing with leftover shrimp.
Shrimp aren't the only Vietnamese thing that makes me smile. The fish sauce fried chicken wings at Pok Pok in Portland were, hands down, the culinary revelation of the year. We dispatched an inordinate number of chickens replicating the recipe.
When I boil shrimp South Louisiana style, I dink with his his ingredients and proportions, but Chuck Taggart's seafood boil seasoning recipe over at Gumbo Pages is the backbone of what goes into my own pot.
Two other seasoning/spice mixes, one from Hungarian Louis Szathmary and one from Donald Link of Cochon in New Orleans.

Kruidnoten Liqueur, A Genever Recipe

2011-10-03T08:11:00.000-07:00

Hiram Walker makes a gingerbread liqueur, biscotti-flavored cordial is not unheard of, and in his The Joy of Mixology Gaz Regan gives a recipe for a Jägermeister-spiked Oatmeal Cookie cocktail. Americans, though, simply don’t make cookie-flavored cocktails and cordials at home. Not often, anyway.

Fitting then, that the Dutch — who, after all, ran the first commercial still in America in the 17th century and gave us our word cookie — have a recipe combining the two. In a post last month, Lizet Kruyff relates a recipe for kruidnotenlikeur from Maak van de noot een deugd (roughly “Make a virtue out of nothing”), a new Dutch cookbook devoted entirely to cooking with kruidnoten.

Kruidnoten are tiny gingerbread cookies, cousins to the Christmastime specialty peppernuts. A direct translation is "spice nuts" but "nuts" refers to their diminutive size; they are no more likely to contain nuts than are peppernuts (or doughnuts, for that matter). Typical spices in the little cookies include ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, white pepper, cloves, and coriander, but such things vary with the baker.

With the help of Renée de Vries, an internet specialist at the University of Amsterdam, I tracked down online excerpts from the book. Why? Well, because Kruyff’s blog calls for 12 liters of genever, a Dutch spirit enjoying a modest renaissance in the US. Even counting my personal stash of current and vintage bottlings, there are probably not 12 liters of the stuff in our entire neighborhood. Plus only 500 grams of sugar to make a cordial with that much liquor? Something is not right. A look at the original reveals that her "12" liters is actually "1/2" liter. Big difference.

My somewhat loose and streamlined translation follows. For sticklers, see the original recipe below. Kruyff suggests both using white rum as an optional base spirit and, if you're so inclined, adding a splash of cream after the maceration. The original recipe notes that you can use cane sugar for a "warmer" taste and darker color.

Kruidnoten Liqueur

1/2 liter jonge genever or vodka
3 handsful of kruidnoten
200ml water
500 grams of cane sugar

Push the kruidnoten through the bottle's opening. Put the bottle away for about six weeks in a dark closet. Give the bottle a shake now and then to show it who's boss and so that the flavors can blend. Do not worry if it looks nasty.

After six or seven weeks, strain through cheesecloth or a clean tea towel into another bottle. Do this again if you doubt whether particles remain.

Make the syrup. Put the sugar and water in a saucepan with a thick bottom. Bring to the boil, stirring. Stir until all sugar is dissolved. Let cool, mix with the kruidnoten infusion and pour into a pretty bottle.

Proost!

Karin Sitalsing, Marije Sietsma en Helga de Graaf (2011)
Maak van de noot een deugd: koken met kruidnoten
120 pages (hardback)
Loopvis
ISBN: 9081764802
€ 17,95

Granizado de Michelada

2011-09-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

A discussion arose yesterday among colleagues over what, exactly, a michelada is. Everyone acknowledged that it was Mexican, but after that, there was some...confusion. Despite the protean ingredient list one finds in bars from El Paso to Tijuana, a michelada is a simply cold beer that’s been hacked.

The embellishments of a michelada may be as straightforward as a squeeze of lime and dash of salt or may involve more complex iterations involving chile, Worcesterchire sauce (called salsa inglesa or "English sauce" in the Mexican idiom), Maggi seasoning, tomato juice, Clamato, shrimp, etc.

In the same way that something as straightforward as iced tea morphs from a sweet North Carolina specimen to a passion fruit-laced California example (or a bloody mary changes between bartenders), a michelada in Veracruz will not be the same as one in La Paz — or Dallas. With little effort, one may drift from the safe and familiar harbor of, say, a Corona-and-lime into more exciting territory of drinks a lot like seafood cocktails.

Add to this mix Fany Gerson’s granizado de michelada, a frozen concoction more akin to an Italian granita than a San Antonio thirst-quencher. Gerson, author of My Sweet Mexico, has written a complementary book called Paletas about Mexican ice pops, shaved ices, and aguas frescas. It’s a cool little book and, despite the obvious appeal to parents with young kids, bartenders and cocktail types would do well to crack it open; more than a few of the recipes include sugar, water, and spirits — the very definition of a classic cocktail. Well, minus the bitters.

Gerson’s main topic — the paleta — is a typically Mexican popcicle. You’ll find easily approachable ones everywhere, flavored with strawberry, tamarind, mango, or coconut. But you won’t have to scratch around long in Mexico to find varieties with corn, hibiscus flowers, berries, melon, rice, chiles, chamoy, and more.

In addition to lime-and-chia, rice pudding, strawberry-and-horchata, coconut, lime pie (with crushed graham crackers pressed into its surface), avocado, grapefruit, watermelon, and other kid-friendly flavors, frozen alcohol-spiked varieties in the book include:

Paletas de crema y cereza con tequila (pops with sour cream, cherry, and tequila)
Paletas de sangrita (with a tequila-laced spicy tomato base)
Paletas de donaji (mezcal-orange ice pops)
Paletas de platano rostizado (roasted bananas with rum)
Paletas de rompope (rum- or brandy-spiked egg nog)

For my friends in Pennsylvania who may not have ready access to such things, here’s Gerson on her frozen michelada:

Micheladas, often called cheladas, are drinks made with beer, fresh lime juice, and sometimes chile. Micheladas especiales, or cubanas, use the same foundation but add Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and Maggy sauce, a popular seasoning that has a salty, caramelized, deep flavor. This raspado is inspired by these popular beverages.

Granizado de Michelada
(beer with chile granita)
SERVES 4 TO 6

2 small piquin or arbol chiles
3 cups water
½ cup sugar
Zest and juice of 3 limes, plus juice for wetting the rim
¼ cup chile powder
½ tsp salt
2 cups cold medium-dark beer

Combine the chiles, water, sugar, and lime zest in a saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Let cool to room temperature, then stir in the lime juice. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve. Pour the mixture into a shallow nonreactive pan and put it in the freezer.

Once the edges start to freeze (about 1 hour), scrape lightly with a fork, bringing the ice crystals from the edges to the center. Return to the freezer and continue scraping every 30 minutes or so, until the mixture is completely frozen and looks like small ice flakes.

Place the chile powder and salt in a bowl and stir. Wet the rim of a glass with lime juice, then dip it in the chile powder. For each serving, place ½ cup of the granita in the prepared glass. Pour about ¼ cup beer over the granita and serve immediately.

Note: It's always best to serve granita as soon as it's ready. But if you leave it in the freezer and it hardens, simply take it out of the freezer, let it soften for 5 to 10 minutes, and then scrape it with a fork again.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to slip off to get some chamoy for tonight's round of mangoadas.

Fany Gerson (2011)
Paletas: Authentic Recipes for Mexican Ice Pops, Shaved Ice & Aguas Frescas
128 pages (hardback)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1607740354
$16.99

Goes well with:

My take on Gerson’s previous book, My Sweet Mexico
The Tex-Mex Cookbooks of Robb Walsh, including his recipe for a more traditional michelada

The Vanderbilt Fugitive

2011-09-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

In issue 41 of The Southern Foodways Alliance’s quarterly newsletter Gravy, co-owner, bartender, and extraordinarily nice guy Bobby Heugel writes “At Anvil Bar & Refuge in Houston, we believe in the narrative power of a great menu. Our Summer in the South menus approaches each cocktail-character as an advocate for Southern traditions and ingredients—few of which are more iconic than buttermilk.”

Set aside for the moment — careful, now, don’t jostle it — the notion of a cocktail-character and instead cast your eye on the concoction Heugel presents in the piece: the Vanderbilt Fugitive.

The original Vanderbilt Fugitives were a group of early twentieth-century writers and poets who came together at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Counted in their ranks were Southern men of letters such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), Allen Tate ("Ode to the Confederate Dead"), William Ridley Wills, and others. You can just feel bourbon dripping from the walls at the evocation of their names.

But this isn’t a bourbon drink. If you recall, it’s a buttermilk drink. Oh there’s rum, yellow Chartreuse, Averna, all kinds of delicious things — but it’s the buttermilk that gives it that special je ne sais what?

The Vanderbilt Fugitive

1.75 oz El Dorado 5 Year Demerara Rum
1 oz rich, acidic buttermilk
.5 oz Yellow Chartreuse
.5 oz Averna Amaro
.5 oz maple syrup

Combine all ingredients with ice and shake for at least two to three minutes, allowing cocktail to expand in volume. Strain into a Collins glass with cubed ice. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg.

~ by Yao Lu and Anvil colleagues

Goes well with:

The SFA’s “foodletter” Gravy. Download it here.
When in Houston, drop by Anvil. If you’ve more than six in your party, make certain you all order a Ramos gin fizz — and on no account tell them I sent you.

Masala Chai

2011-09-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

On dark, chilly weekend mornings, I shower, quietly slip on soft old jeans and the frayed (but so comfortable) thick white Oxford I wear only at home, putter around the kitchen, and plan the day’s chores.

Before hitting the day’s punch list, though, I usually brew an oversized mug of steaming hot masala chai. Masala chai — or, simply, chai or a chai latte in the United States — is an Indian take on hot, spiced tea, almost always tempered with milk. It's enough to hold me over until the rest of the house is up and we tackle a proper breakfast. With a huge cup of it in hand, I’ll mosey out to the front patio, brush the fallen bamboo leaves from my garden chair, and catch up on international news.

Unlike my iced tea recipe, which is fairly set, my chai recipe oscillates between simple and, admittedly, overly complex. Procedures and ingredients shift around to accommodate my moods. Sometimes I dump everything in a pot and just cook the hell out of it. Other times — like this morning — I use a three-step procedure that’s still pretty simple and still just uses one pot.

Depending on what I feel like, I may include fresh ginger, fennel seed, black pepper, a bay leaf, or even vanilla. But I always use cinnamon, cloves, turbinado sugar, black tea, whole milk, and — the core of any good chai for me — cardamom.

Here’s this morning’s batch. It's not nearly as heavily sweetened as commercial concentrates such as Oregon Chai. Want more sugar? Hell, you're an adult. Add more sugar.

Masala Chai

2 cups water
1 4” stick of cinnamon, broken into several pieces
8 whole cloves
8 green cardamom pods, crushed
2 cups whole milk
2-3 Tbl turbinado sugar
1.5 Tbl loose leaf black tea, such as Assam

Bring the water through cardamom to a boil in a pot. Cover, reduce to a simmer, and let burble away about ten minutes. Add the milk and sugar. Bring almost to a boil, add the tea leaves, then cover and let rest about 3 minutes. Strain. Drink it as hot as you can stand it.

Goes well with:

Fat Lips Spill Sips. Ever wonder why some cocktail shakers, cups, and pots just always seem to spill while others don’t? It might be a trick of physics called the Teapot Effect first identified in 1957.
Hot Cocoa for a Chilly Morning. When San Diego gets cold and clammy in the late winter, I'm more likely to break out a mug of hot cocoa than hot tea. This is the recipe I use.

Rum-Fueled Blackout

2011-09-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, San Diego lost electricity when a power line from Arizona failed, leaving almost 5 million people without power. Normally, my neighbors are calm, quiet types, but when the flow of electricity just stopped that afternoon, their hooting and hollering sounded as if someone had tossed bags of wolverines and bees in their living rooms.

Rumors were rife and nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened. We weren’t sure how long we’d be without power, so we loaded bags of ice in the freezer and avoided opening the refrigerator to eek out as much residual cold as possible.

Hours later and still with no power, we realized that some frozen foods might not make it, so we decided to break out the most ephemeral food in there: a mango/maraschino sorbet.

I’d lifted the recipe almost verbatim from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, except that I swapped out the dark rum he called for with slightly larger dose of lower-proof maraschino liqueur. Maraschino — not to be confused with the lurid red maraschino cherries one finds on ice cream sundaes, fruitcakes, and certain Manhattan cocktails — is a clear, aged liqueur made from Marasca cherries. It has an old-world affinity for fruit salads, so mango seemed a good fit.

It was.

But we didn’t forget Lebovitz’s original call for rum, so I hauled out a bottle of Coruba, a dark Jamaican rum, for drizzling over the sorbet in our candle-lit living room. I drizzled — at most — a tablespoon over the softening deep yellow sorbet.

The boys had other ideas. They turned their small bowls into drinking vessels by sloshing in several ounces of rum over their scoops. We each squeezed lime over what we had. I had lime-rum sauce on my maraschino/mango sorbet; they had slushy maraschino/mango daiquiris.

Everyone went to bed happy.

Mango-Maraschino Sorbet

2 fat, ripe mangoes (2 pounds, just shy of l kg)
2/3 cup/130 g sugar
2/3 cup/160 ml water
½ oz fresh lime juice
½-1 oz maraschino liqueur
Pinch of salt

Peel the mangoes and cut the flesh away from the pit. Cut the flesh into chunks and put them in a blender with the sugar, water, lime juice, maraschino, and salt. Squeeze the mango pits hard over the blender to extract as much of the pulp and juice as possible. Puree the mixture until smooth. Taste and adjust lime juice or maraschino.

Chill the mixture thoroughly, then freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Goes well with:

For the maraschino, I used Luxardo brand. Maraska is another good choice.The former, wrapped in straw, is easier to find, but online merchants sell both if you don't come up with either in your local stores.
Blackouts aren't the only thing to cause us to drink in SoCal. Earthquakes do, too.

Recycling Revisited: Isang Litrong Liwanag

2011-09-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

I mentioned last week that I no longer put our empty bottles in the recycling bin behind our house because an intruder used them as cover when he broke into our home. But that doesn't mean that I'm against recycling or repurposing used bottles.

Here's one of my favorite uses of empties:

In the Philippines, the used bottle issue doesn't involve intruders, but poverty and darkness. Millions of homes are without electricity and daytime darkness is commonplace. Using an appropriate technology innovation from MIT students, MyShelter Foundation has launched its Isang Litrong Liwanag (A Liter of Light) campaign that converts discarded bottles into stunningly elegant solar bottle bulbs.

In a nutshell, a one-liter bottle is filled with a water and bleach solution, sealed, then secured in the roof of a home, school, or warehouse with no electricity. A simple hole in the roof would admit rainwater and a mere shaft of light. Not very useful. The solar bulb, though, emits light in all directions.

Hell, I have electricity and I'm mulling over the idea of installing a few — in the garage, a tool shed, wherever.

From Liter of Light's tumblr post:

MyShelter Foundation has spearheaded a daunting project. Through the “Isang Litrong Liwanag” (A Liter of Light) campaign, the foundation seeks to provide sustainable lighting to a million households by 2012.

For more about MyShelter Foundation and the Liter of Light campaign (with more images and video), see its website.

Bookshelf: Odd Bits (and Brain Fritters)

2011-09-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

I have licked the inside of a dead man’s skull, yet cannot bring myself to eat brains.

Brains don’t disgust me; it’s not that they are icky, yucky, or gross. After all, I dote on sweetbreads, said to be of similar consistency. No, it’s that, of all an animal’s odd bits, the brain is so clearly the seat of cognition. It’s not for nothing that a German word hammers this point; the brain, the human one, anyway, is das Denkorgan, the “thinking organ.”

Surely, I have eaten brains, given all the scrapple, brawn, and brei I’ve downed since childhood, but I’ve never actively pursued a hot platter of grey matter. I could chalk up my eschewing brain to mere caution. After all, transmissible encephalopathies such as mad cow disease and other pernicious, degenerative brain disorders, no matter their rarity, can be traced to a heady diet. But the truth is that I hesitate at the idea of devouring thoughts — even a lamb’s.

I’ll eat livers, lungs, trotters, and tongues, but no one — not Fergus Henderson, not Mrs. Beeton, not Charles Ranhoffer of Delmonico’s, or even Escoffier himself — has come as close as has Jennifer McLagan to convincing me that my thoughts about brains ought to be reconsidered.

McLagan’s new book Odd Bits covers brains as well as beef cheeks, liver, tongue, heart, Bath chaps, guanciale, pig ears, haggis, kidneys, sweetbreads, testicles, ribs, lungs, marrow, and more. After writing about the culinary use of bones and fat in two earlier well-received books, her latest subtitle (How to Cook the Rest of the Animal) pretty much sums it up. In this troika of titles, McLagan has firmly established her expertise in converting cast-off bits of mammalian anatomy into tasty dishes. Hair, I suppose, or eyeballs may remain unaddressed, but when she’s covered even toenails, her expertise in offal is unassailable (really, now, what is blood orange calves’ foot jelly but quivering red essence of toenail?).

Continuing hard times and a growing taste for stronger flavors means you’re going to be seeing a lot of what polite company once referred to as "variety meats" on menus. You could do a lot worse than sitting down with Odd Bits and reading up to understand what you’re seeing when you’re out — and how to make some of those toothsome morsels at home.

Taking her inspiration from Australian chefs and food writers Greg and Lucy Malouf, McLagan presents a cocktail menu snack: cheese and brain fritters. She writes:

Frying and the addition of cheese often help persuade people to try something they think they don't like. I serve these as appetizers with drinks—that way guests only have to try one, but I'm pretty sure you won't have any left. The recipe is very straightforward; just make sure the cheeses are very finely grated, a microplane is the ideal tool.

Cheese and Just a Little Brain Fritters

3 eggs
½ cup/¾ oz/25 g very finely grated Gruyere, packed
¼ cup/⅓ oz/10 g very finely grated Parmesan, packed
2 Tbl finely chopped chives
Finely grated zest of 1 orange
½ tsp fine sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
3 sets poached lamb's brains (see below)
1 Tbl cornstarch
1 cup/7 oz/200 g lard

Preheat the oven to 200°F/100°C. Place a baking sheet lined with paper towels in the oven.

In a bowl, whisk the eggs, then slowly whisk in both the cheeses and the chives, orange zest, and salt, and season with pepper.

Slice each brain lobe into ½ -inch/1-cm slices and toss them in the cornstarch to coat. Transfer them to the batter and stir to mix; you will have something resembling a lumpy pancake batter.

Melt the lard in a heavy frying pan over medium heat; you should have about into ½ -inch/1-cm of fat. When hot, drop a little batter into the oil, it should sizzle and rise to the surface. Now add a few spoonfuls of brain batter mixture to the fat; don't overcrowd the pan and adjust the heat so the fritters bubble gently. Cook the fritters about 3 minutes, or until set and golden on the underside. Using a slotted spoon, gently turn them over and cook for about another 3 minutes. As they finish cooking, transfer the fritters to the baking sheet in the oven to keep warm. Serve right away.

Cleaning Brains

The general method for cleaning brains involves removing any remaining skull fragments, then soaking them in a light brine (about 1 teaspoon of salt per cup of cool water) both to draw out blood and to help firm the lobes. After soaking, the membrane is removed and then the cleaned brains often poached in water or stock.

Jennifer McLagan (2011)
Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal
256 pages (hardcover)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 158008334X
$35.00

Goes well with:

McLagan's blog where she's got some behind the scenes materials and roundups of what others are saying and writing about her books.
Feasting on Bones

On Licking a Human Skull

2011-09-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hamlet: That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once

~ William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1

I tell you this today — a slight foray into topics broader than food and drink — in order to tell you something tomorrow without miring us in macabre details.

Hamlet, Yorick, et al by W.G. Simmonds

While in graduate school, I studied physical anthropology. At the age of 25, I knew more about human osteology — the names of bones, their shapes, their characteristic bumps and markers — than did any of my friends who had chosen a career in medicine. Recent or ancient, intact, disarticulated, or fragmented beyond laymen’s recognition, I learned to identify and analyze human remains.

Of course, there was any number of widely taught techniques for doing so. One quick-and-dirty field trick, though, sticks with me. This isn't something you'd want to do with recent remains, but for older bones, it was a method of revealing which fragments of parietal bones are which. The parietals are two squarish bones forming the arched dome of your skull. Whole, the right and left sides are determined easily at a glace. They fit together like the fingers of two clasped hands. But if the head has been broken or shattered, right from left is not always so obvious.

Unless you lick the skull.

You heard me: lick it.

Pronounced grooves run along the inside of each parietal bone, unmistakable channels that, in life, accommodate vessels on the exterior of the brain. These channels in the bone branch like a shrub; few and thick near the front and lower interior surface, but dividing into more, and more delicate, grooves toward the top and rear of the bone. Alternately, they resemble river tributaries in reverse.

Parietal Bone from Gray's Anatomy

When such fragments are dirty or dusty, those grooves can become indistinct. Some physical and forensic anthropologists — not all, by any means — borrow a move from the archaeology crowd and dab parietal pieces on their moist tongues to reveal obscured details. An archaeologist might do this with, say, a dusty pottery shard to determine its composition.

Now, to be sure, anthropologists don’t slather head bones with drool, working every nook and cranny clean. These are not reliquary fetishists, but you can understand why they don’t put this one in the brochure. The dab of moisture dries quickly, but before it does, the grooves’ size and direction becomes apparent. Couple those details with the curve of the piece and the correct placement becomes apparent.

Did I lick the inside of a man’s skull? Bet your sphenoid I did. Like everyone else who got an A.

Why is this on my mind? Check back tomorrow. It comes round to food again.

[edit 9/20/11: that post is up here]

Goes well with:

“Oh, well, would you look at that?” Dan Aykroyd is holding my skull in his hands. Yeah, that Dan Aykroyd.

Secret Ingredient

2011-09-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

"Ahhh, a secret ingredient!" my admirer exclaimed. Fingers walked their way up my chest as he pulled nearer. "What could it be? I'm dying to know what you added. Could it...Oh, my god. It's garlic."

Yeah. I do that.

In fact, my father and I do the same thing — when it comes to garlic, anyway. If the cookbook recipe calls for 3-4 cloves, we'll each make it with 5-6. If the dish could take more without becoming unbalanced, I'll write it up in my notes as 8-10 cloves (come on now; this is probably some gumbo, chili, or shrimp thing we're talking about: dishes than can absorb — to a point — a lot of garlic). Next time I read my notes, I'll know that 8-10 is merely my own suggestion to myself. I probably meant a whole head.

And so it goes.

I Don’t Recycle Bottles

2011-09-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

I don’t recycle bottles. I won’t, in fact, recycle bottles.

In 21st century California, the idea is almost indefensible. Some would argue that it smacks of sociopathy. Recycling is, after all, a duty of responsible citizens, of those who care about our environment and who want to leave the world in a better condition than they found it. Of stewards.

My guess is that those who think so have never apprehended an intruder in their homes, an intruder who used innocuous bottles as part of his break-in strategy.

I have. Unarmed and in a towering rage, I cornered a man who had broken into our bedroom. It changed how I handle arms and home security. Not recycling bottles is one of the new things I do.

I'll soak a bottle. But recycle? Fuck that.

Earlier this year, while working in my home office, I heard a noise about 9:30 one morning, a sort of clumsy crash and a muffled thud. At first, I thought the cat had knocked over something. Odd. She’s usually quite graceful. I rose from my desk, but then saw that the cat, her tail all bushed out, was staring intently down the hall. I knew immediately that she hadn’t caused the noise...and that something was wrong. Furtive sounds in the bedroom told me that whatever was wrong was also alive. I paused to isolate the sounds, pictured exactly where they were coming from, and stepped in.

Say what you will about the appeal of finding an unfamiliar man in your bedroom, but if you haven’t invited him, understand that whatever is about to happen is not good.

A crackhead, his clothes blackened with grime, had popped the screen to one of our windows and used it to get in. Broad daylight. Bennett was his name. He’s in jail now. The detective handing the case told me that Bennett had a long history of breaking and entering homes. His favored access point was the series of alleys that run behind so many San Diego houses. All of these alleys have trash and recycling bins. One of his routines was to pretend to scrounge for bottles, while in reality, checking to see if anyone was home. The bottles gave a reasonable cover for someone who had no legitimate reason to be there.

Got him.

Not long after, I caught another man. Again, broad daylight. Again, filthy and unkempt. As I approached the back of our house after the gym one morning, the gate slammed and a guy bolted, his head down, a sudden speed walker. A quick scan confirmed that our windows were still shut, our door unforced. Then I hauled after him, yelling. I wanted every neighbor to hear me and I wanted him so rattled that he never came back. Chased him for a block and a half. Afterwards, I found the Dumpster lunch he had stashed outside the gate and, a little further away, a thick branch, freshly torn off a small tree, tucked against our wall. A tool? A weapon?

Yeah. I know. We should move. We’re looking at houses. Have been since the break-in.

But in the meanwhile, here’s the deal: recycling bins attract scavengers who cull bottles and cans to get the cash deposit. While I didn’t love the idea of strangers rummaging through ours, I could sympathize. That’s a hard life and, until this year, I never begrudged the clearly needy the meager forty or fifty cents they’d get by taking our empty whiskey bottles. The overwhelming majority of trash pickers want nothing more than to take away our discards and to do so in peace.

The day I realized, however, that a bin of bottles provides perfect cover for an intruder — even one — to scope out my home was the day I decided our bottle recycling was over.

I reuse bottles. I repurpose them. I give some to a local business that turns them into useful things. I’ve cut down on the number of bottles we go through. And I’ll recycle all the cardboard and paper that comes my way.

But I’ll be damned if I ever put another bottle out behind our house.

Goes well with:

Possum up a Guava Tree, a story about another uninvited visitor (with recipes)

The California Gimlet

2011-09-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

We drink gin year-round at the Whiskey Forge, but — to my taste, anyway — warm weather has always been a better fit for really gin-forward drinks. In fact, the hotter it is, the more gin seems to temper the heat. In the height of summer, for instance, a bracing gin & tonic shines. Recently, we have become enamored of the California gimlet, a simple, three-ingredient drink we picked up from Dale DeGroff’s book The Essential Cocktail.

A gimlet is classically made with bottled lime cordial such as Rose’s or Angostura. Swapping out fresh lime juice for the bottled cordial yields very a different, nearly daiquiri-like, cocktail.

We have made these with Beefeater, Beefeater 24, Hendrick’s, and Beefeater Summer Edition gins. In fact, we killed all of the bottles except for the 24 making this particular cocktail. What can I say? We like Beefeater. Each gin, however, made a delicious drink and I look forward to wrapping up the summer with more of these.

California Gimlet

2 oz gin
¾ ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
1 oz simple syrup
Lime wheel, for garnish

Combine the gin, lime juice, and syrup in a mixing glass with ice and shake well. Strain into a small cocktail glass or serve over ice in an old-fashioned glass, garnished with the lime wheel.

I include the lime wheel garnish from DeGroff’s original recipe but, as those who drink with me know full well, there are about 5,197 things I care more about than cocktail garnishes at home. He also suggests that a dash of Rose’s lime cordial may “remind the drinker whence their [sic] potation came.” Your call. The drink’s just fine without it.

DeGroff, Dale (2008)
The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks
272 (hardback)
Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0307405737
$35.00

Shake Dem Bones

2011-09-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I stopped by Pigment, a neighborhood store specializing in...well, green hipness, perhaps. I drop in about once a month to paw through birthday cards, books, and design-heavy preciousness. Sometimes I buy things, sometimes not.

There are art tomes aplenty, a selection of cookbooks for urban homesteader and DIY kitchen crowds (though, oddly, not even one DIY distilling book), whiskey rocks, thick felt drink coasters, letter press greeting cards, cool kids' toys, garden seedlings, ceramics, heirloom produce and flower seeds from Baker Creek, odd hand towels, and loads of eco-globes and wall-mounted terrariums.

Lots of knickknackery I may want, but nothing I truly need. In other words, it's fantastic place to find gifts for someone else.

This Sunday, a set of ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped liked stylized bones caught my eye. With two salt cellars and a workhorse of an old pepper mill at home, I have no use for something like this, but the set of shakers (made by California designer Chris Stiles) called to the mischievous meat eater in me. I may just have to reconsider the salt cellars and slide back over there before the week is out.

Hang on, though. Now that I...yeah, now that I think about it, I may just need a cinnamon shaker for those tiki punches we make around here...

Pigment
3827 30th St
San Diego, CA 92104
(619) 501-6318
Mon-Sat 11-7, Sun 11-5

Stiles in Clay salt and pepper shakers: $32 for the set.

Goes well with:

Should you find yourself with a batch of actual bones, I suggest you roast them and feast on them.
And if you're in San Diego, check out The Cookbook Store's going out of business sale. Word is, it'll all be gone before Christmas.

Bitter Disappointment from Japan

2011-09-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working on a documentary project that requires a comprehensive representation of cocktail bitters. Given the burst of interest in the field and ever-increasing new producers, that imminently manageable — and largely historical — project has metastasized into a monster.

Monsters, I can handle. Work goes on. Heartbreak, however, wasn’t part of the plan.

One of the last bottles of Hermes Orange Bitters

When I discussed the project earlier in the year with San Francisco barman Neyah White, I asked him whether Suntory still made Hermes brand orange bitters. Stocks had seemed to dry up both online and in bricks-and-mortar stores. As West coast ambassador for Suntory whisky, White was in a position to know the status of the company’s products.

The brand was dead, he reported. There had been discussions in Japan to revive it in light of America’s resurging interest in cocktails, but...no dice. It had become an extinct ingredient. Some time later, he wrote that he had secured for me a single bottle, used, only partially empty, but with a broken cap.

He wrote:

Last night in Tokyo, we hit the best Whisky Shop in the City...totally solid shop, vintage Chartreuse, vintage whisky (as in things bottled in the 50's and 60's), tons of Amari, 13 Ichiro's Malts, rums I have never seen, 5 Pimm's, etc., etc.. I ask politely about Hermes and the owner smiles sadly, goes to the back brings out his last bottle, it has a slightly broken top so he set it aside and never sold it. He says he is sad it won't come back and is hanging on to this as a sample. I say that is great.

We keep poking around and showing our appreciation for things we find and he grabs some glasses and pours all drams of Wild Turkey bottled in the 70's. Not crazy good, but very cool. One of the guys with us is Lincoln Henderson (former Master Distiller for Jack Daniels) and tells the owner how he is an old friend on Jimmy Russell and how this is some of the first stuff that Jimmy both made and bottled, pretty important really. The next thing I know a bottle of medicinal rye from 1927 gets opened and each get a nip of that. shockingly good, very maple-y.

To say thanks, I pull out .375 of St. George's Grappa that I had lugging around (I brought gifts for the Suntory folk, had extras) and present it too him. He promptly turned around and grabbed the Hermes Orange and gave it to me.

Where do I send it?

I’m no fool. I told him. When the package didn’t come, I assumed White simply hadn’t shipped it yet. But, in fact, he had. The shippers had misplaced it and the package languished for months. White eventually tracked it down.

I was so happy when that box finally arrived. Happy that I had my hands on such a thing and that Neyah White had thought enough of me to send his only bottle — and one with such a great story. This truly was passing on a kindness. I brought the small brown box inside, opened it, and carefully pulled back its first two flaps.

A potent orange aroma arose from the box mixed with something...else. Was it cardamom? Cloves? I closed my eyes and tried to place it. Almost instantly, the smell registered as “wet cardboard." My eyes shot open and I sucked air in through my teeth. Brad Pitt's line from the film Se7en springs to mind: What’s in the box? I grabbed a bone folder from the counter and, with trepidation, shifted packing peanuts aside. What’s in the fucking box? Even stronger smells of warm, wet cardboard and orange wafted out. Underneath the top layer: shattered green glass, a torn label, packaging material that had shriveled and shrunken into hard little knobs.

The only bottle of Hermes orange bitters I’d seen in years was splayed out, utterly destroyed. During its time in courier limbo, the bottle’s broken cap had slowly trickled bitters — drip, drip, drip — onto biodegradable packing peanuts. The peanuts did what they were designed to do; they began to shrivel and dissolve. With the padding reduced to a fraction of its original size, the bottle was freed to bang around within the box. All it needed was rough handling to crush its precious cargo.

Life, as it must, goes on, as does the bitters documentary project. But not with Hermes. Not today, anyway.

Goes well with:

A look at Chris Bunting's Drinking Japan. If I visit Japan any time soon, I'm taking his book.
And I'll probably do some more studying of Mark Robinson's Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook
If you are a modern producer of cocktail bitters and we haven't spoken about including your products, shoot me an email (moonshinearchives at gmail dot com) and I'll give you the skinny.

It’s All Going to Biscuits

2011-09-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

Summer slurs into Autmn subtly in Southern California, but there's no denying that cooler weather is creeping upon us.

With the onset of light blanket nights, I’ve begun drinking more hot tea and resumed baking — pies mostly, but buttermilk biscuits as well. These are for me comfort foods and lately I’ve been craving a bit of comfort.

Biscuit, butter, and peach preserves

But hot buttermilk biscuits cry for some kind of...something, even if it’s just butter or honey. So, before Summer slipped way entirely, I scored one last flat of peaches and made a big jar of preserves for slathering on my steamy little indulgences.

There had been vague plans for using these peach preserves in a barbecue sauce, as a base to sweeten and flavor juleps, with roast pork, or maybe even to complement a batch of bitterballen, but at this rate, I think it’s all going to biscuits.

Peach Preserves

About 2.5 pounds ripe peaches
2.5 cups sugar
2-4 oz fresh lemon juice
one half teaspoon unsalted butter

Plunge the peaches in boiling water for about 1 minute to loosen the skins. Remove them with a skimmer to an ice bath and slip off the skins. Cut the skinned peaches in half, remove their pits, and cut each half into small, bite-sized pieces. Place the pieces in a large, heavy, nonreactive pan (I use a big old enameled Le Creuset Dutch oven). If you prefer an even more fine preserve, use a pastry knife to cut pieces into bits a little larger than grains of rice. Add the sugar and lemon juice. Let stand about ten minutes.

Turn the heat to high, add the butter (to help tamper down foaming) and cook about 10-14 minutes, until it holds its shape on a chilled saucer.

Ladle into jars and either process or keep in the fridge.

Makes about a quart of preserves.

Goes well with:

Pies. Try ginger pie, lemon buttermilk (a half teaspoon of ground cardamom is a righteous addition to the filling), or a rum-spiked chocolate number.
Homemade egg noodles: also one of my cool-weather cravings. Aw, dang. Now that I think of it, I know what I'm having for dinner.

Yeah, Like I Need Another Cookbook

2011-09-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

Now that I've plundered the place and plucked what I've wanted for my own shelves, it's safe to tell you about a San Diego cookbook store that's going out of business.

I've been shopping at Barbara Gelink's secondhand cookbook store since moving to town. Tucked away in a little Kensington strip mall behind a liquor store, it's always been easy to overlook. There's no particular reason to peek down the narrow parking lot if you didn't have business there. Do so this week, however, and you'll notice a bright yellow banner announcing her going out of business sale. Her goal? Liquidate the stock and close shop by Christmas.

Grilled Fogas from József Venez's 1958 Hungarian Cuisine

As of September 1st, her entire inventory of secondhand cookbooks is half off. I understand there will be steeper discounts next month. For now, though, the shelves are still laden with culinary books from around the world. There's the 1948 Malay recipe book for $25 (er, rather, $12.50) I considered (twice) but left behind. Though her stock is mostly in English and heavily focused on the United States, there are cookery books in Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, and more. Some Charles H. Baker, some Trader Vic. I saw several copies of the Oxford Companion to Food, each marked at under $20. Less than $10 with the sale.

I didn't pay retail for my copy, but, damn; it wasn't that cheap.

The thing about secondhand American bookstores is that I've been prowling through them for years. Decades, actually, at this point. In casual hunting, many of the titles I find that grab my attention already sit on a shelf somewhere at home. Those secondhand books I do buy tend to be unusual, old, or esoteric. In the Kitchen with Rosie? Absolutely no interest; every thrift store from here to Rochester has copies to burn. At Gelink's, a fat overview of Austrian cookery, however, caught my eye. I picked up Das große Sacher-Kochbuch and four others for a total of $19.

For the next few days, I'll pick my way through a history of die österreichische Küche, some startling recipes from Hungary, a catalog of brumalian sweets, and, predictably, even more on German and Southern cookery.

What will you get?

The Cookbook Store
4108 Adams Avenue
San Diego, CA 92116
(619) 284-8224

Goes well with:

My Culinary Library: What Good Does It Do? Once you find yourself with a few thousand books about food and drink, you've got to ask yourself: What's the point? Here's what I came up with.

Hurricane Season

2011-08-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

Photo: Ryannan Bryer de Hickman

As Hurricane Irene bears down on the Eastern seaboard, I understand the concern that friends and family back East feel. Powerful cyclones can be frightening and this one looks like a doozy. At last word, New York City hospitals were being evacuated. My advice? Get to a safe and secure place with whatever supplies you need. Then turn on some music, break out the rum, throw yourself a little New Orleans-style hurricane party, and wait it out — with the appropriate cocktail.

In the Winter 2011 issue of The Zenchilada, I wrote a column about an iconic New Orleans cocktail, beloved by visitors, if not necessarily by each and every local.

It’s not true, as some claim, that Crescent City natives neither eat Lucky Dogs nor drink Hurricanes, but that drink is a decidedly tourist affair aggressively seasoned with dark rum. After that, opinions diverge on ingredients. If you order a Hurricane in New Orleans today, you likely will be served a strong red drink. None of what you’re likely to get is particularly good. Whether from a bar or a clandestine street vendor, the rule for concocting one seems to be “Make it red, make it rum”—but that’s not how it started, and that’s not what growing numbers of drinkers around the world are mixing when they want to evoke the French Quarter and Mardi Gras.

The article traces the history of the drink and gives five recipes from the original 1940’s version (that was not red, though it was rum) to modern interpretations and quotes from tiki historian Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, “King Cocktail” Dale DeGroff, and Matt “RumDood” Robold. Rounding out the pack of drinks authorities is Tiare Olsen, the Tiki Queen of Sweden, with her “Funky Hurricane” bolstered with Smith & Cross, a funky, funky pot-stilled Jamaican rum.

For the article and recipes, go to The Zenchilada.com, and navigate to page 32 of the Winter 2011 issue about carnivals and feasts. Or download the PDF here.

Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned

2011-08-25T11:51:00.001-07:00

Craft distilling and moonshine do not have shared goals.

~ Max Watman

[Edit 29 August 2011 — I've been wretchedly sick for weeks without the concentration or stamina to write as coherently as I might. What follows should more properly have been two separate essays rather than the mashup I put together. The core idea was that very concept of "legal" moonshine is flawed from inception: If laws permitted the manufacture of moonshine, it would cease to exist. I ought to have stopped there. Instead, I plowed on with — and didn't finish — a second idea: that moonshine carries with it unavoidable connotations of unwholesome corruption. Marketers who seek to tap the mystique of illicit liquor must understand that such spirits don't simply signify positive traits such as independence and cultural identity, but are a red flag of danger and, if they want their brands to be more than novelties, must be willing to invest money and hard work into countering generations of negative connotations. Piedmont Distillers in North Carolina does an admirable job of that with celebrity endorsements, a festival centered on 'shine, aggressive public appearances, and high-profile placement (and, full disclosure; they helped sponsor the session on America's new distilleries at this summer's Tales of the Cocktail).

See my full comments in the comments section below.]

Moonshine has, and will always have, a soiled reputation.

That hasn’t stopped a growing number of American distillers from developing brand identities and marketing plans based on that rattiest of American spirits. Yes, I know. Such distillers may hope to tap into American ideals of freedom and liberty (moonshine is, if nothing else, rebellion in a jar). Some evoke regional pride, others the history of a particular time or place, or a sort of pre-Prohibition Nirvana when the smoke from still fires wafted over countless thousands of American homesteads. I admit, these are appealing images.

Moral objections — and they are strong and widespread — to moonshine notwithstanding, the stuff has posed a very real danger to drinkers for generations. Customers, quite literally, have died from drinking what passes for moonshine and continue to do so around the world.

One may object and say “Well, that’s poison, not real moonshine” or “That’s the fault of bootleggers, not moonshiners,” but the truth is that the general public — presumably one’s customer base — doesn’t readily make such distinctions. Only absinthe comes close to offering the temptation and trepidation held forth by that good old mountain dew, a mistrust that’s been with us for most of the last century.

In his 1971 survey of Southern cookery, bon vivant Eugene Walter devoted an entire chapter, naturally enough, to beverages. A devotee of the charred barrel, Walter was not shy about sharing his opinions on the region’s drinks. “Most of America’s hard liquor — the best and the worst — comes from [the South],” he wrote.

He went on:

The worst, or at least the roughest, is moonshine, that bone-shattering, unaged, illicit variety of corn whiskey also known as com likker, or white lightning. Its familiars drink this powerful brew without batting an eye. You will see one of them turn a jug up to his lips, take a big pull from it and wipe off his mouth with the back of his hand, and you will think there could hardly be anything in that jug stronger than tea. But then you take a swig yourself, and it knocks off the top of your head. Tears come to your eyes; your vocal cords seem to be paralyzed; you gasp for breath and your inside feel as though they are on fire.

The humorist Irvin S. Cobb sounded an even more strident warning in the 1939 WPA guide to Kentucky:

It smells like gangrene starting in a mildewed silo, it tastes like the wrath to come, and you absorb a deep swig of it you have all the sensations of having swallowed a lighted kerosene lamp. A sudden, violent jolt, of it has been known to stop the victim’s watch, snap his suspenders, and crack his glass eye right across — all in the same motion.

If you’ve read my book and previous writing on the subject, you know that I champion good moonshine and those who make it — in truth, I dote on the stuff — but actual moonshine may not be purchased at liquor stores, through websites, or in other legal venues. Yet here we are: “moonshine” is on offer in stores across the country.

Positioning what otherwise might be perfectly acceptable commercial spirits as “moonshine “ or “legal moonshine” is a willful corruption of the scofflaw folk distilling traditions that inspire them. They are artificialities, oxymora on par with “original copy” or “living dead.”

They are also, if one has a philosophical bent, simulacra. That is, they are copies much as Colonial Williamsburg, parts of Las Vegas, or Disneyland are, things that simulate the real world, but which are, in fact, fakes. Think of Jim Carey in The Truman Show and you’ve got a snapshot of the legal moonshine customer, conned — perhaps willingly — into thinking he’s got the real deal.

Last May, I went on, admittedly, a bit of a rant after reading an execrable moonshine article in Time magazine. I wrote, in part:

The single, universal, and defining characteristic of moonshine is that it is made outside the law…That’s your litmus test. If you can you buy it in liquor stores, it’s not moonshine.

Other drinks writers and journalists have picked up that baton. Quoting Chasing the White Dog author Max Watman, Craig LaBan writes in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the new crop of “white” whiskeys and their relation to moonshine:

Such sophisticated spirits don't necessarily jibe with the hillbilly marketing that clings to much of the white whiskey genre - a contradiction Watman thinks is potentially troubling for the longevity of the movement.

"Being able to access a little bit of outlaw-dom . . . is a very tempting angle for people," he says. "But associating yourself with a product people don't inherently trust is not a recipe for long-term success. Craft distilling and moonshine do not have shared goals."

In The Atlantic this week, Clay Risen comes out swinging even harder against “fake” moonshine. He takes particular aim at Moonshine® Clear Corn Whiskey, but that’s just the exemplar:

Moonshine may be a tasty dram; I've never had it. But that's not the point. The problems are all in the name. First: If there is one thing that drives whiskey nerds nutty, it's the often-willful misuse of the word "moonshine." If it's sold on liquor store shelves, it's not moonshine. If it has a fancy website, chances are it's not moonshine. If its owners were ever arrested by the ATF, it might be moonshine. Something tells me that the folks behind this product, "serial entrepreneur" Brad Beckerman and "Internationally renowned barbecue chef" Adam Perry Lang, are not, nor ever have been, wanted by the feds.

Not many people get moonshine right. Watman and Risen nail it every time.

If you have legal moonshine on your hands, you have been conned. But perhaps you already knew that when you plunked down your money at the liquor store. Did you use a debit card? Was it a state store? Well, honey, pack your bags: we're going to Disneyland.

Goes well with:

It’s a Nice Day for a White Whiskey, a bit about the schizophrenic regard in which Americans hold moonshine.
As Surely as Thunder Follows Lightning — a talk I gave last year for the American Distilling Institute about the state of American moonshine.
Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, an anecdote revealing just how very low moonshine is in some peoples' eyes.
Walter, Eugene et al. (1971) American Cooking: Southern Style. Time-Life Books, New York.
Federal Writers' Project (1939) Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York.

Feasting on Bones

2011-08-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

Once every two months or so, I make a huge pot of beef stock, some to be used within a few days, some for freezing. If I’m ambitious, some gets cooked down even further with additional ingredients into a tiny amount of thick demi-glace. There’s sautéing of vegetables and roasting of bones involved. It’s kind of a pain. It’s not that it’s hard; it’s not at all. It’s just mindless work. Doing it correctly means we eat well.

So I bribe myself to get it done by sliding into the oven — while the bones for stock roast — an extra pan of sawed-off little leg bones. As the stock simmers, I end up with a few spoons of delicious roasted beef marrow: something to snack on, the sort of treat for cooks that never makes it past the kitchen door.

If you’re not into marrow, or offal, or “variety meats,” “the fifth quarter,” or whatever you care to call suspicious animal bits, I can understand skipping this little lagniappe. But you’d be missing out.

By the time I take the pan of sizzling marrowbones from the hot oven, I’ve drizzled a bit of olive oil on rough chunks of bread and lightly toasted them. With the end of a long wooden spoon, I’ll nudge plugs of softened, hot marrow from each bone and press them, crushing them just the slightest bit to make them stay in place, onto the toasted bread. A quick grind of coarse grey sea salt between my thumb and the side of my forefinger over the whole thing and it’s ready.

I'll spare you the infantile onomatopoeia of a degrading "nom nom nom," but forgive me if I wish you...bone appetit.

Hit in the Boing Loings

2011-08-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Someone got hit in the boing loings.

Hit in the boing loings.

Boing loings.

Somebody got hit in them.

~ Ice King

After a burst of work earlier this month, I dropped from sight: my Twitter and Facebook accounts fell quiet and the blog showed nothing new at all. That sore throat I wrote about had turned into a raging upper respiratory infection that knocked me flat out for two weeks. I'm still, as the kids say, a bit stoopid.

I was just trying to show you how many weeks you had

I've missed my own birthday, rescheduled for sometime next month, and, with almost no appetite for either food or drink, I've lost about eight pounds (but, hey, there are worse things that could happen to a guy). Today I've started to catch up on emails. If you've tried to get in touch with me, I'm sorry for the delay in answering — there have been times this week I wasn't even sure what language I was using.

I watched movies and documentaries, read snatches of a few books, and absolutely fell for Adventure Time, a Cartoon Network show about the surreal adventures of a 12-year old boy named Finn and his flexible dog Jake. It has nothing to do with whiskey, moonshine, cocktails, or cured meats, but when I've felt so crappy, exhausted, befuddled, and weak these past two weeks, Adventure Time made me smile almost every day.

Three cheers to Pendleton Ward for creating such a fantastic show and making me forget, at least for a while, that I've often felt as if I'd truly been hit in the boing loings.

Peace out.

Elise Hannemann's Liverwurst

2011-08-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Even though one of my Irish grandfathers' families hails from Cork, a city known for its appreciation of offal, and the other from County Mayo, my wurstlust is traceable to another side of the family entirely.

As a child, if I were particularly antsy, my mother would rebuke me with an exasperated "Sitzt du!" and I would know to sit and immediately unfuss myself. Asked what I wanted for my birthday dinners, I declared the tedious "rouladen" more often than she probably liked to hear, and in my grade school, I was one of the only children — certainly the only freckled one — who toted Braunschweiger and mustard sandwiches for lunch. To this day, if you startle me, you're as likely to get a German expletive as an English one.

The unavoidable conclusion is that somewhere in the woodpile lurks a beer-drinking, sauerbraten-making, spätzle-simmering subject of the Kaiser. Suspicion falls squarely on my great grandmother whose maiden name, depending on which relative you asked, was either Schultz or von Hasenberg. As a small child, I once asked why some of our cousins had German names. She konked me on the head with the back of her hand and chided me. "We are not," she insisted, "German. We are Prussian." Years later, I think it may have been a joke...but, then, Lily von Hasenberg (if that was her real name) was not known for levity, so who knows?

That Braunschweiger above is a spreadable pork liver sausage, a subcategory of the wider liverwurst clan, and one likely to be found at family gatherings at my great-grandmother's massive lawn parties in the 1970's. To be honest, the kids generally eschewed it; those who didn't like it really didn't like its mineral bite. To me, though, it was one of the perks of no-class summer diversions. Broadly, Braunschweiger — known as BS to some of its admirers — is mixed with finely ground bacon, stuffed in hog bungs, simmered, then smoked. Because lately I've been both on a liverwurst kick and struck with bouts of insomnia, I've been digging up recipes that elucidate the whole category of liver sausages — and make sense of my childhood snacking.

On a hunt for Braunschweiger recipes in particular, I came across one in my library for "Leberwurst" from Elise Hannemann's 1904 Kochbuch. The book is dedicated to Hannemann's patron, Ihrer Majestat der Kaiserin ["your Majesty the Empress" (i.e., Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II)] and is a revealing look at middle class German cookery in the years before World War I. Although Hannemann does not call this particular sausage "Brauschweiger," the bacon and optional smoking would make recognizable to American Midwesterners as exactly that.

Klicken Sie hier

My somewhat free translation is below. Following that is my transcription of the original — as always, feel free to correct my translations. The original recipe's Fett- oder Krausedärme refer to slightly different natural hog casings. Those sold as 2.5-3-inch "bungs" (no snickering) in the US are just fine for a finely ground and simmered sausage like this. Wurstkräuter are simply herbs and spices for seasoning wurst. Although Hannemann doesn't specify, white pepper, marjoram, nutmeg, allspice, and even cloves would not be out of place. Start with a 3/8" plate, then grind twice more with a 1/8" plate.

Liverwurst

Very Good. In winter, it will last three weeks.

500 g liver
400 g of cooked bacon
1 whole egg
Sausage herbs
Dried truffles or fresh anchovies
Salt
Pepper

Run the liver and bacon through a grinder three times, then thoroughly mix in the herbs, salt, pepper, finely sliced truffles or chopped anchovies. Stuff this mixture loosely into hog bungs and let cook slowly for a half an hour* in boiling water. Then remove them immediately place in cold water.

The sausage for slicing and is especially good if they are smoked two days.

*Note that some modern authorities suggest cooking liverwurst until its internal temperature is 165°F.

Transcript of the above image:

Leberwurst.

Sehr Gut. Im Winter 3 Wochen haltbar.

500 g Leber
400 g gekochter Speck
1 ganzes Ei
Wurstkräuter
Getrocknete Trüffeln oder frische Sardellen
Salz
Pfeffer.

Die Leber und der Speck werden dreimal durch die Fleishhackmaschine genommen, mit den Krautern, Salz, Pfeffer, kleingeschnittenen Trüffeln oder gehackten Sardellen gut vermischt, lose in Fett- oder Krausedärme gestopft und ½ Stunde langsam in kochendem Wasser ziehen gelassen; dann werden sie herausgenommen und sosort in kaltes Wasser gelegt.

Die Wurst wird zum Ausschnitt verwandt und ist besonders gut, wenn sie zwei Tage gerauchert wird.

Goes well with:

I am a Meat Wagon —When I say "wurstlust," it's not a joke. I crave sausages and cured meats; my last stop out of New Orleans was at Butcher where I scored two types of bacon we can't get in San Diego . I even tempt the TSA in a story about getting stopped smuggling andouille after a trip to LaPlace, Louisiana.

Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me

2011-08-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

These days, it's not uncommon to find white whiskeys in the fanciest of American cocktail bars. These clear, unaged (or minimally aged) whiskeys were little more than curiosities 10 years ago. Even five years ago, you generally had to know someone with a connection to a distillery to get a taste of one. The stuff was a little too close to moonshine for most drinkers' tastes. Now you can walk into almost any well-stocked liquor store and make your selection.

What a difference a few years make.

In 2005 I was spending a lot of time on the road interviewing moonshiners, home distillers, federal agents, and anyone else with a connection to illicit distillation in the United States. Naturally, I spent a lot of time in the South. Whenever I found myself near New Orleans, I would find an excuse to drop in for a few days or a even few weeks at a time. Cooling my heels one afternoon at the Bourbon Pub, I was approached by a hustler.

I knew he was a hustler from the very second I laid eyes on him. Handsome, mid-20's, jeans, white tank top, muscled but skinny. He was leaning against a brick wall, scoping out the room. Given my line of research, a certain amount of criminality is expected. This guy was screaming it. I avoided eye contact. That is, until I forgot about him and happened to look across the bar directly into his eyes.

Shit. Within seconds, he had disengaged from the bricks and appeared at my side. I rested my forearm on the wallet in my front pocket. He clearly figured me for a mark. I glanced at Kevin, the bartender I had known for more than 15 years, and flicked up an eyebrow. Kevin glanced at the hustler, gave an almost imperceptible shrug, and went back to cleaning a glass. Ok, so the guy wasn't dangerous.

He introduced himself, and launched into a well-oiled anecdote about how his mother and father — a nun and a priest — had met when their motorcycles crashed on a Guatemalan mountaintop during a rainstorm. It was all bullshit, of course, but the kid had a gift for storytelling. He finished his beer. I bought him a new one. What the hell: It was a great story and happy hour beers were cheap. After I bought him the beer, he tried so hard to get me to admit I was a cop. Convinced, finally, that I wasn't, he shifted closer and had a proposal.

Ah, I thought with the familiar lump of my wallet under my arm, here it comes.

"You know, I can get us some weed."

"I'm cool," I told him. "And I'm still working on the beer."

"Yeah, that's cool." He paused a few beats. "You know, if you want something harder, I know where we can get some cocaine." That's not how I thought the sentence was going to end.

Kevin was watching while not, you know, watching. "Naw, seriously," I demurred. "I'm good."

"Yeah," he agreed. "That's cool."

But he wouldn't drop it. "I've got a place nearby. It's not my place, but we can go there. I know a guy who can get us some heroin if you want." Yeah, ok. "We" can get some heroin. After turning down weed and coke from a complete stranger, I'm going to shoot for heroin. When I declined, his demeanor changed.

Kevin came over and placed his hands, palms down, on the bar. "Everything ok here?" I asked for another beer. "Just one."

The hustler edged a little closer. I found myself ready to strike while trying to look very casual. "Look." He was trying a different approach. There was a plaintive softness in his voice now, as if on the verge of a confession that everything up until now was all just a smokescreen. "I just got out of lockup yesterday." Probably a lie, but maybe not. "I could really use some money." There. This was beginning to sound true. He was also getting fidgety. I saw no track marks on his bare arms, but his toes were likely another story. "I do have a place we can go. We can't stay there. It's kinda like an alley by where my friend stays. But if you want" — and here he looked down and away before plowing on — "but if you want, I'll let you fuck me there for ten dollars."

The proposal didn't shock me. The price, though, was breathtaking, the desperation almost heart-wrenching.

"No," I said as gently and quietly as I could. Even junky hustlers have dignity. "No, I'm good right here."

He sat back on his bar stool, deflated. "I don't understand. What do you want?"

I cocked an eyebrow. "Honestly?"

He perked up, leaned in again, and started to bring the beer bottle back to his mouth. "Tell me. I can make it happen."

"I'm looking for moonshine." The bottle stopped cold inches from the hustler's face. He turned to face me, his lip curled in a snarl of disgust. He let out a grunt and heaved himself away from me: "Ugh. Nasty!"

The kid who held forth promises of weed, coke, heroin, and — for ten measly bucks — his own body had standards after all.

When I see so-called "legal" moonshine in chichi bars serving white Manhattans and other such concoctions, I can't help but think of how far our American white spirits have traveled in just a few short years.

Shoot, these days, whatever else it may get you, ten bucks might not even cover the cost of your drink.

Hot Whiskey Punch for a Torn Up Old Man

2011-08-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

My everyday speaking voice is low, quiet, and soft. Making myself heard over high-pitched squeals and laughs in packed bars means I have to talk louder and louder — almost a low yell — in order to get my baritone voice to carry.

I don't like yelling, so I tend to avoid clubs, dance crowds, and packed venues. Sometimes, though, that's exactly where friends want to meet. I go because I adore my friends.

Over the last year or so, though, my hearing has started to change. I can still hear quiet, subtle sounds around the house or office just fine. That hasn't changed. But in those loud settings, the background noise seems to have grown into a Phil Spector-style wall of sound. The voices and music just ooze together into an unintelligible roar, a constant crescendo.

The result is that, unless I'm huddled in a conspiratorial ring, I miss big chunks of conversation. So I watch the crowd, observe the bartenders, say hello to passing friends. And, when I do follow the conversations, I yell to be heard in response. Last night, I yelled on and off for three hours. This morning, my throat feels like someone took a bottle brush to it. Raw, red, sore; hurts to swallow, hurts to draw air across it.

Time to deploy my mom's recipe for soothing sore throats. I realized earlier this year (only because I'd never really thought about it) that the sore throat/chest cold remedy my mother used to recommend was nothing more than a portion-controlled 19th century Irish whiskey punch; hot black tea, honey, lemon, whiskey. Proportions to taste. Vague memories of a clove floating in there, but it was strictly optional — as was everything but the whiskey.

We are, after all, Irish.

Goes well with:

Poitin Fails to Induce Rowley Coma, in which I write about the hunt for homemade Irish whiskey and open with "My family is not a whiskey making family, but we are, in large measure, Irish; that is, we are a whiskey drinking family."
I bit I wrote when everyone in the house was sick about Pei Pa Koa, a honey-loquat sore throat syrup from Hong Kong.

Salsa de Chile de Arbol

2011-08-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

The weekend is nearly on us. Given the current heat wave and our local drinking habits, that means beers, margaritas, chips, and salsa. Anything that keeps the kitchen from getting needlessly hot.

We're loaded up on fresh limes, Cointreau, Combier, and Grand Marnier, so the margaritas are under control. Beers are cooling and chips acquired. I just tossed a double handful of green tomatillos on the grill and made a batch of green salsa with tomatillos and dried chiles de arbol, those pencil-thin, long red chiles so common once you know to look for them.

Tomatillos, also called tomates verdes, resemble hard green tomatoes in husks, but the resemblance ends there. Though the tart little fruits can be used raw, I like them best cooked and have been known to give them a quick boil or to char them a bit on the grill. I'm particularly fond of the tomatillo/chipotle combination and have made quick stews of little more than chicken, squash, roasted tomatillos, lime, salt, chicken stock, and smoked peppers.

The idea for this salsa came from Patricia van Rhijn's La cocina del chile. This isn't as smoky as chipotle versions, but packs a pleasant heat. If you don't like tart tastes, you won't dig this, but if you do — tuck in. Want a stronger garlic kick? Don't roast it with the other ingredients. Make sure everyone eats some, though; you don't want to be the only one with superhuman garlic breath.

My interpretation and quantity tweaks are below. Her original follows that in case you'd like to double check my imperfect Spanish.

Salsa de chile de arbol

8 dried chiles de arbol
8 tomatillos
6 cloves garlic
1 tsp (cider or pineapple) vinegar
Dash of salt

Clean and wash the tomatillos. Grill them with the chiles and garlic.

Once the ingredients are roasted, remove and discard the hard core of the tomatillos, grind everything in a blender with vinegar and add salt to taste. I like to leave discernible chunks of garlic and chile in mine.

And here's van Rhijn's original directions:

Salsa de chile de arbol

Ingredientes (para 1 taza)

6 chiles de arbol secos
6 tomates verdes
3 dientes de ajo
1 cucharadita de vinagre

Preparacion:

Los tomates se limpian y lavan. Se ponen a asar junto con los chiles y los ajos.

Una vez que los ingredientes esten asados, se muelen con el vinagre y se agrega sal al gusto.

Patricia van Rhijn (2003)
La cocina del chile
Introduction by Laura Esquivel, photos by Ignacio Urguiza
Editorial Planeta Mexicana
Hardback (191 pages)
ISBN 9706908684

Kenny Shopsin, "Orange Julius," and the Tennessee Caviar Scam

2011-08-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I knew a guy who sold caviar: Ossetra, Sevruga, and Beluga, as well as plump red salmon eggs, Tennessee paddlefish eggs, whitefish roe, tiny grains of tobiko, and more. He even imported Scandinavian kelp-based pellets that, given dim light and enough aquavit, might come off as caviar-like. That inky kelp imposter notwithstanding, his fish roe was good, he cared about keeping it under the right conditions, and, when you recall that lightly salted fish eggs are a luxe dish in the first place, his prices were reasonable.

I learned a lot tasting his products. I learned that I prefer Ossetra to the more expensive Beluga; that salmon roe less than excellent is shudderingly vile; and that Southern paddlefish roe — while I wouldn't mistake it for the Caspian Sea article — is worth tracking down. I also learned that the contents of his carefully packed tins were not always what the invoices declared.

Oh, if you were a regular, you’d get what you ordered as long as he had it in stock. Most people did, in fact, get what they ordered. The owner of a football team who regularly had big tins of Beluga shipped to him certainly got the real deal. But if the Caviar Guy was out of something and he thought he could get away with it…well, the Sevruga sometimes shipped out with a definite Tennessee accent.

I hadn’t thought of that asshole in months.

But the memory of him and his various cons washed over me when I was reading Kenny Shopsin’s book Eat Me. Shopsin, the Greenwich Village cook and subject of the documentary I Like Killing Flies, writes about Morris, a purveyor from whom he used to buy turkeys:

One day Morris was bragging to me that he had been on that corner for fifty years. Way back in the ‘40’s, he said, chicken was really rare. When he couldn’t get it, he used to take veal cutlets and sell them as chicken cutlets. He said nobody ever noticed the difference. I don’t know how he expected to inspire trust in me by telling me he sold veal for chicken. He was telling me the story to show how times had changed, but what I got from it was that he was a liar and a crook.

I had seen I Like Killing Flies a few months ago, but the strength of that passage right there is what made me buy the book. It told me that Shopsin didn’t just understand the extent of the sneaks, cons, cheats, and shorts endemic to the restaurant business, but that, like him or not, and despite his protestations to the contrary, he was one of the good guys.

His own restaurant, Shopsin’s, was a New York institution for decades. It's since closed and he's moved on to a new, smaller location on Essex Street. While I knew it existed at the original spot, I always got distracted when I was in New York and never visited. Pity. The menu was about 900 items long and the dishes were, well, not classics since so many bore Shopsin’s own imprint on what they should be, but they were familiar — pancakes and French toast, but also Mac and Cheese Pancakes and Bread Pudding French Toast. Not just ho cakes, but Slutty Cakes as well. One mugshot lineup of griddle cakes in the book includes varieties such as chocolate peanut butter, coconut, cinnamon raisin, oatmeal, cranberry orange, brown sugar banana, bacon, chorizo corn, and a few more. Shopsin is particularly good at running with a basic concept.

The recipes are strong on breakfast foods — or, at least, the sorts of things I like to eat for breakfast. But there are plenty of salads (“I think a lot of salad eaters are dishonest people — people who eat for reasons other than sating their true desires.”), soups (“I put something like forty soups on the menu all at once, and from there I kept adding them, one at a time or ten at a time.”), and sandwiches (“In addition to sliced roast beef, turkey, shit like that, I also had pork loins, smoked ham, bacon, Canadian bacon. You could get roasted chicken, grilled chicken, fried chicken, red onions, grilled onions, fried onions, fresh tomatoes, roasted tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, fried green tomatoes.”).

Shopsin’s writing is vulgar, opinionated…and sounds a lot like me in my own kitchen.

Here’s his take on an orange drink I myself had seen when I was a kid, but was never allowed to have:

“Orange Julius”

When I was a kid, Orange Julius was strictly a California thing. I didn’t discover it until late in life, and then I fell completely in love with it and had to have it at my restaurant…Legally speaking, I am probably not allowed to call this an Orange Julius because the name must be copyrighted or some crap like that, which is why I put the name in quotation marks. I could have called it an Orange Julius-ish. Or maybe I can get away with it if I just say that this is my idea of what an Orange Julius is. The truth is that mine is different from the original. It’s better because we squeeze the orange juice fresh.”

1 cup fresh orange juice

1 tablespoon powdered egg whites

½ cup powdered sugar

2 cups crushed ice (or 3 cups ice cubes)

Put the orange juice, egg whites, and sugar in a blender and blend quickly to combine the ingredients. Add the ice and blend until the ice is finely crushed and the drink is frothy. Do not overblend, or the ice will begin to melt and the drink will start to flatten.

Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño (2008)

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

Knopf

ISBN: 0307264939

$24.95

How About You Drink China Instead?

2011-08-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

One street behind San Diego's pan-Asian supermarket 99 Ranch Market, beyond banners announcing its perpetual grand opening and the all-you-can-eat $18 hot pot, lies Mr. Dumpling, one of my default lunch joints.

I am enamored of Mr. Dumpling's xiao long bao (called on the menu "pork juicy buns" and elsewhere known as Shangahi soup dumplings). The steamed dumplings are little more than tiny pork meatballs and a splash of stock wrapped in a thin caul of dumpling wrapper. The trick to eating them is to bite a small hole at the bottom edge, slurp out the stock, and only then tackle the rest of it. Invariably I dunk mine in a soy/chile/black vinegar concoction I mix at the table. Sure, I'll order other things once I'm there, but those fat little rascals are the reason to go.

Naturally, the staff have come to know me. Small dishes sometimes appear unbidden on our table; pickles, boiled peanuts, little pancakes. One day when eating alone, I was engrossed in Chris Bunting's book Drinking Japan. When the waiter brought dumplings, I set the book aside and he read the title.

"Drinking Japan?" he exclaimed, in (mostly) mock indignation. "How about you drink China instead?"

"Sure, ok." You see, I'm agreeable about these things. "Where can I get Chinese liquor in San Diego?"

"Hmm. Maybe 99 Ranch Market."

"Yeah, I saw their sake and shōchū, but I didn't notice any Chinese spirits."

"They also have umeshu," he offered, naming a Japanese plum liqueur.

"Chinese umeshu?" I pressed.

He smiled, caught. "Yeah, Chinese stuff is pretty hard to find. Maybe it's ok if you drink Japan sometimes."

And so I do.

Mr. Dumpling
7250 Convoy Court (not Convoy Street)
San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 576-6888

Goes well with:

My take on Andrea Nguyen’s excellent book, Asian Dumplings.
Mr. Dumpling staff aren't the only ones who disapprove of my drink choices. An eerily similar remark came from a TSA agent in Kentucky who took a dim view of my Tuthilltown Spirits bottle as I worked my way through Louisville airport security.

Bookshelf: Thai Street Food

2011-08-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

In any provincial town, and in many crowded areas of Bangkok, there is always a place — a corner or two, a few blocks or a square — that is brightly lit well into the night. These are the night markets of Thailand and they are filled with people, food and noise, as flames lick around woks and wood smoke from charcoal grills lingers in the still night air.

~ David Thompson

We’ve come to expect big things from Australian writer and Michelin-starred chef David Thompson, but let’s just get the obvious out of the way. Thompson’s Thai Street Food is enormous. The book is over 13” tall, racks up 372 pages, and weighs almost as much as three liters of good Kentucky Bourbon. It’s big.

It’s also gorgeous. Years ago, my in-laws gave me Thompson’s earlier book, the opus Thai Food, as a birthday present. Although a more manageable height, it, too, was huge. 674 pages. Hell, the introduction was almost as long as my entire book Moonshine. It taught me more about Thai cookery than all the other Thai books in my library combined.

Sure, you could use it in a bar fight as a formidable weapon, but Thai Food’s length is justified by the scholarly and eminently readable copy. Thompson goes into exquisite detail from historical and gustatory angles on how big and complex Thai flavors come together into harmonious wholes. Likewise, Thai Street Food makes sense when you consider the topic. Huge, full-page color photographs by Earl Carter evoke the hustle and bustle of Bangkok markets and street vendors on a scale that isn’t possible with a smaller, shorter book. A guide to Bangkok’s street vendors might fit in your pocket, but it’s not going to prepare you for the vibe of what’s there when you hit the streets.

I’ve been cooking out of Thai Street Food for a few months now and it’s just a stunner. I’ve a soft spot for street- and market- type takeaway in the first place, but when it’s flavored with hits of fish sauce, garlic, basil, chiles, ginger, galangal, bitter greens, coconut, lime, cilantro, tamarind, and more — ah, man, my knees go weak.

Bags of sweet chile sauce (photo: Earl Carter)

The book is broken down into three main sections following the arc of the day and the street foods one might find sold then; Morning (with breakfast and morning snacks as well as some noodle dishes), Noon (lunch, curry shop, snacks and sweets, and more noodles), and Night (made to order, Chinatown, and desserts). For those unaccustomed to Thai cookery, an appendix includes ingredient and basic technique descriptions.

Recipes cover the expected such as Pat Thai (even if Thompson’s ambivalence about this ubiquitous Thai restaurant dish — invented for a WW II-era noodle recipe contest — is obvious) and mangos with sticky white rice. But don’t shy away from sour orange curry of fish, banana rotis, deep-fried dried beef with a chile-tamarind sauce, prawns and chile jam, sour pork sausages, barbecue or roasted pork, and…well, all the recipes I’ve tried simply work. Don't shy away from any of them.

One of Thai Street Food’s strengths is Thompson’s consistent hand-holding for those unfamiliar with Thai ingredients or techniques. This isn’t some best-hits collection of Thai restaurant favorites, but clearly a work of someone who has eaten and cooked these dishes time and again and understands the variations that can come into play and why one might choose to do one thing over the other.

Thompson is not adamant that readers use unfamiliar ingredients, but describes them in a way that certainly makes me want to. Take, for instance, his description of maengdtaa fish sauce that goes into the above chile-tamarind sauce. Now, I like fish sauce as much as the next guy, but blink and you may miss what makes this one special: “I like to use maengdtaa fish sauce (made from rice roaches, bugs that scurry through the paddy fields), for its haunting aroma, but any good-quality fish sauce will do.” Out came my shopping list: M-A-E-N… No luck so far finding it in San Diego, but I still look.

Muu Bing (photo: Earl Carter)

We’ve taken a shine to Muu Bing, simple grilled pork skewers akin to Indonesian or Malaysian sate. Thompson calls for using an optional pandanus brush, so some explanation is in order. Pandanus (also called pandan, duan pandan, rampe, bai toey, lu dua, or screwpine) has been called the vanilla of Southeast Asia, but perhaps only for its ubiquity; its flavor and scent are all its own. Fruits and flowers of some species are edible, but recipes that use the plant more frequently call for the long, thin, green leaves. Torn or crushed and tied in knots, they are not generally eaten but are removed after cooking much like knots of lemongrass. Fresh leaves are scarce in the US, but may be found frozen in many Asian grocery stores.

Muu Bing (Grilled Pork Skewers)

Thompson writes “I am addicted to these.” Try them; you’ll see why.

300 g (9 oz) pork loin or neck
50 g (2 oz) pork back fat (fatback) — optional

MARINADE
1 teaspoon cleaned and chopped coriander roots
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon chopped garlic
½ teaspoon ground white pepper
2 tablespoons shaved palm sugar
Dash of dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

12-15 bamboo skewers
3 pandanus* leaves (optional)
about ¼ cup coconut cream

Slice the pork into thinnish pieces about 2 cm (1 in) squares. Cut the pork fat, if using, into small rectangles, say 2 cm x 5 mm (1in x ¼ in).

Next make the marinade. Using a pestle and mortar, pound the coriander root, salt, garlic and pepper into a fine paste. Combined with sugar, soy sauce, fish sauce and oil. Marinate the pork and the fat in this mixture for about three hours. The more cautious can refrigerate this but, if doing so, then it is best marinated overnight.

It’s a good idea to soak skewers in water for about 30 minutes. This prevents them from scorching and burning as the pork grills. Some cooks like to use a brush made out of pandanus leaves to baste the pork. To make a pandanus brush, fold each pandanus leaf in half then trim to make and even edge. Cut up into the trimmed ends four or five times to make the brush’s “bristles.” Tie the pandanus leaves together with string or an elastic band to make a brush. Of course a regular brush will do too.

Prepare the grill. Meanwhile, thread a piece of fat, if using, onto the skewer first followed by two or three pieces of the marinated pork. Repeat with each skewer. When the embers are glowing, in fact beginning to die, gently grill the skewers, turning quite often to prevent charring and promote even caramelisation and cooking. Dab them with the coconut cream as they grill. This should make the coals smoulder and impart a smoky taste. Grill all the skewers.

On the streets, they are simply reheated over the grill to warm them through before serving, although this is not entirely necessary as they are delicious warm or cool.

David Thompson (2010)

Thai Street Food: Authentic Recipes, Vibrant Traditions

372 pages (hardback)

Ten Speed Press

ISBN: 158008284X

$60.00

Bookshelf: Drinking Japan

2011-07-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in Japan, I used to walk around looking for “pubs” on the theory that I knew what they were. It is not as simple as that. In Japan, the word “pub” can refer to various types of drinking establishments, not all of which serve reasonably priced drinks. There are “English pubs” and “Irish pubs” offering exactly what you might expect but there are also “sexy pubs” that sell something else.

~ Chris Bunting

Drinking Japan

Living in California where sushi joints are as common as coffee shops and devoting no small portion of my life to the study of distilling and drinking, I have some familiarity with Japanese whisky, shōchū, and sake — but only as an American understands these things. That is, I drink what I can get in the United States. Consequently, the breadth and depth of drinking choices in Japan itself has been a matter of trawling for hearsay, quizzing bartenders and distillers who have visited Japan, and reading.

For the last several months I have been trying to remedy that with a crash course in Japanese spirits and cookery.

One of the most useful books on drinking alcohol in modern Japan to come across my desk is, appropriately enough, Drinking Japan by Tokyo-based journalist Chris Bunting. Subtitled A Guide to Japan’s Best Drinks and Drinking Establishments, Bunting’s book is something of a revelation.

As with all guidebooks, some of its information — hours, addresses, or staff, for instance — is bound to be obsolete by the time it lands in your hands. Accept it and move on. The rest is a meaty mix of history; tips to avoid cultural misunderstandings (that extra charge on your bill isn’t sneaky thievery — it’s there on purpose and everyone at the bar but you understands this); suggestions for dealing with unfamiliar drinking environments; warnings on harsh penalties lashed out to drunk drivers (and passengers of drunk drivers); pronunciation guides; detailed guides and maps to bars, distilleries, and liquor stores; and profiles of Japan’s noteworthy alcoholists.

With so much of Americans' focus when it comes to Japanese drinking on sake and, to a lesser degree, whiskies, it was a surprise to me that Japan has a robust craft brewing scene. Obviously, Japan has breweries, but in California, I have known only light and, let’s face it, undistinguished brands such as Kirin and Sapporo. Bunting devotes an entire chapter to what he calls the “glories of Japanese beer” and breaks down where to get it and how to drink it.

One of the more engrossing chapters for me concerns awamori, an Okinawan distilled rice spirit that can be traced clearly to the early 1500s, but in all probability is older even than that. Awamori was, from its earliest days, an aristocratic drink. Bunting writes “Only forty individuals were given permits and all distilling was done under royal patronage; the stills and the ingredients were owned and loaned out by the kingdom and all of the liquor had to be returned to it, save for 5.4 liters left as payment with each maker. Unlicensed distilling brought the death penalty and transportation of the culprits family to a prison island.” This, naturally, suggests that moonshining was enough of a problem that draconian laws were put in place to stem the flow from illicit stills (or perhaps a little side action on those royal stills when nobody was looking). Awamori had its ups and downs since the 18^th century — not unlike American moonshine — but modern distillers seem to understand that the success of the class is anchored in quality product.

An almost heart-wrenching section — that is, from a drinker’s point of view — describes the utter destruction during World War II of awamori stocks that were well over 100 years old. After a bombardment by the battleship USS Mississippi annihilated the center of awamori making in Okinawa, “[S]tocks of black kōji spores necessary for making awamori destroyed. After a desperate search, a straw mat with traces of kōji on it was found under the rubble of one distillery and, after several failed attempts, the mold was successfully cultured.” Kōji (Aspergillus oryzae) is not much used in the West, but the fungus is essential for converting starches to sugars in several traditional types of Japanese fermented food and beverages.

Awamori Distilleries from Drinking Japan

At the time of printing, Bunting noted only 46 awamori distilleries remaining. Fortunately for the curious traveler or Japan-based drinker, he profiles a number of bars that specialize in the spirit. One of these days, I will get to Japan and I will sample awamori in situ. And Japanese whiskeys. And sake. And shōchū.

Until then, I have Drinking Japan to help me plan where and what to drink when I get there.

Cheers, Mr. Bunting, for the read.

Bookshelf: Drinking Japan

Chris Bunting (2011)

Drinking Japan: A Guide to Japan’s Best Drinks and Drinking Establishments

288 pages (paperback)

Tuttle

ISBN: 4805310545

$24.95

Goes well with:

My take on Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook, one of the first books that made me really want to get to Japan.

Children in Restaurants (Or, Mr. Rowley, Your Blog Stinks)

2011-07-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

Mr Rowley, I will be sure to never read your blog,

nor follow you on Twitter,

but I can feel free to say that

your blog stinks,

as do your tweets.

~ S_Templar
San Diego Union Tribune commenter

I wrote in a recent San Diego Union Tribune article that I'd rather see a dog loose in a restaurant than children. This is true, but the operative word in the sentence is neither dog nor children. It is loose.

Clearly, older children who have been taught civility, table manners, and inside voices are not what I'm talking about, nor am I opining on those who color quietly or eat their meals in peace with their families. They can't in any meaningful way be said to have been let loose in a restaurant.

The very young, however, are inherently problematic. Admittedly, children do exist who are quiet, curious, polite little angels, even at a young age. But they are rare. Teething babies wail. Toddlers throw tantrums. Invariably, some have full-blown, red-faced meltdowns. I do not blame children who aren't in control of themselves; they are, after all, children. If they were in control, they could hold down jobs — or at least make me a respectable bourbon old fashioned.

I do, however, heap contempt on parents who don't understand — or don't care — that children who haven't been taught how to behave have no place in restaurants that cater to adults.

You know the children I mean — the loud-talkers; the screamers; those who scamper around the place while guardians seem oblivious to their kids' actions (or safety); the throwers of food; the interrupters and squealers; the climbers of booths; the little Hessians making a grab for something on your table; those floor mongrels egging on younger siblings to crying jags; the off-balance simpleton who quietly stares while digging in his nose as if a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory were buried deep in its recess.

McDain's Restaurant and Golf Center in Monroeville, Pennsylvania recently banned kids under the age of six. This is an extreme measure, but to owner Mike Vuick, I say: bravo, sir. I myself frequent no-kid joints all the time.

They're called bars.

Goes well with:

The original story in the San Diego Union Tribune in which I made the dog comparison.
A story and great comments on the Atlanta Journal Constitution's blog about Vuick's no-kids policy.
The Wall Street Journal's story on the same.
Malaysia Airlines has banned children in first-class flights. A child on a plane is a different matter in my mind than in a restaurant, but if I had to go to Kuala Lampur, I know what airline I'd be taking.
Christine Sismondo's inadvertent advice for avoiding kids, even in bars.

America's New Distilleries: A Bonus

2011-07-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to understand that there are more distilleries in the United States than there were ten years ago. But just how many more, where they are, and how to distinguish one from the other is not at all clear. And I say this as someone who studies these things, counts distillers among my friends, and sometimes travels solely to visit places that turn grains into something you'd want to drink.

Though I composed this post last week, I am at this very moment in front of an audience of distillers, bartenders, writers, and cocktail enthusiasts in New Orleans with Chasing the White Dog author Max Watman in a sold-out, SRO session called America's New Distilleries. We're about fifteen or twenty minutes into it and I am probably blathering on about the geographical distribution of DSPs and membership in the American Distilling Institute as indicators of distillery density in the US.

Those of you in the audience will understand these maps; they are here for your reference when the talk moves on. If you use them (and be my guest for online use), please link back to this post. If you want to print them, get in touch and tell me what you have in mind. Once this Tales of the Cocktail session is over, and I'm back safe and sound in San Diego, I will post a follow-up to this with a little more narrative and context.

For now? This is a bonus for coming to see us in person. Click each image to enlarge.

2011-07-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

Ah, New Orleans. I'd say this is where I make a pig of myself, except that would imply that I do not also do so in other towns and, as those of you who know me may attest, that's just not true. We landed Tuesday for the annual Tales of the Cocktail ho-down and it's been non-stop go-go-go.

Friday morning, I'll share the podium with Max Watman for a sold-out session called America's New Distilleries. Because so many of today's distilleries are small businesses, it seemed more fitting to gather together a group of them to sponsor the session rather than one of the larger distillery groups that produce millions of cases a year.

Those who abed this day will miss a chance to sample products from nine separate new American distilleries. Spirits will range from aged peach brandy (which readers of David Wondrich's excellent book, Imbibe, may think is extinct) and triple-smoke whiskey to sarsaparilla-tinged gin, 100-proof cherry hooch, and a chai liqueur that just grows on me more and more.

If you're not in the room ~~drinking~~ learning with us, here are links to their sites;

Tiki Tuesdays

2011-07-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

Whether the house specials are tropical drinks or tacos, it seems as if Tiki Tuesdays are cropping up in bars all over these days. Some tikiphiles don't even bother with bars and simply make delicious rum concoctions at home before the work week is even half over. Me? I don't know why we have to make it Tuesday. Seems Tiki Wednesday and Sunday are perfectly fine days to mark the passing of the week. That's not to say I would turn around and leave if I should stumble across a full-blown Tiki Tuesday in progress...and that's exactly what I found at Rogue Ales public house in Portland last month.

Because I intended to catch up with Blair Reynolds of tiki syrup fame, Craig Hermann (aka Colonel Tiki), and their families while there, I packed along a Hawaiian shirt. For this, I was roundly mocked at home. This was, of course, not the first time that has happened. Whenever I don one of those floral shirts, my sidekick Dr Morpheus asks "Is that what you're going to wear?" Sometimes, admittedly, I put one on just to elicit this response. I never said I was not mischievous. Photographer Douglas Dalay will more blatantly lean in closer to me, cup one hand to his ear, and make the most pained expressions when he sees me wearing such a shirt. "What?" he'll mock-shout. "What?! I can't hear you over that loud shirt."

So with those two in tow, I dropped by Rogue Ales to take a load off and try to catch up with distiller John Couchot. John was offsite that day, so we visited him at another Rogue property, but not before discovering that Rogue, too, had a Tiki Tuesday. The deal was that anyone walking in wearing a Hawaiian/tropical shirt would get a free beer. Mine was locked away in the rental car a block away. Ah, well. After much travel, it felt good to sit and enjoy a cool beverage and I wasn't about to go get it.

Dalay had other ideas. Not one to pass up a good deal, he asked for the keys and disappeared. About five minutes later, who should stroll through the front door talking smack about free beer? I wasn't sure because I had one hand cupped to my ear, leaning in, and trying to make out what he was saying over the loud, loud shirt.

Goes well with:

Simbre Sauce, the pre-batched cinnamon-allspice-vanilla-bitters syrup we use at home for Nui Nuis, ice cream, over granola, etc., is named after Douglas Dalay.
Rogue Ales. There are several venues for Rogue, but the one we dropped in that day for Tiki Tuesday was at 1339 NW Flanders in Portland, OR [(503) 222-5910]. They also host a Bacon Wednesday. At least, that's what the sign by the host station read. I didn't have a shirt for that.
Other Portland stories include Remember the Maine? Hell, I Barely Remember the Walk Home and Pok Pok's Chicken Wings (with recipe).

Bookshelf: America Walks into a Bar

2011-07-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Years ago, during one of my extended stints in New Orleans, the city was struck by a tropical depression. Wave after wave of winds and driving rain buffeted us and water began rising ominously. This was before Katrina and, while everyone was monitoring the situation, few seemed concerned that the weather would actually turn dangerous. Many did, however, rule that things had become entirely too treacherous to stay at work or at home.

The books and papers in my cloth satchel were bound to be ruined by the torrents of rain, so I quickly ducked into the Bourbon Pub, an old gay bar at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann. Taking refuge in a neighborhood bar, I realized, wasn’t my solitary genius idea. The place soon filled with locals. As much time as I have spent in New Orleans, I had never — to that point — been to a hurricane party. Everyone in the bar knew the weather was bound to get bad before it got better. Clearly, these locals felt, no work could be done while the storm raged and the rain blew nearly sideways. So, what better way for the community to come together then within the bowels of an old brick building where video poker, indoor smoking, and a seemingly endless supply of liquor that fueled a convivial — yes, even party — atmosphere?

Face it, when the power fails, the phones go down, and the streets are filling with water, where would you rather be: your office or a bar?

We may have no hurricane parties in San Diego, but gathering in bars and taverns in times of turmoil is nothing unique to New Orleans or, indeed, new. In her new book, America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo places the bar squarely at the heart of American social life. Call it the tavern, a pub, a saloon, or any other style of watering hole, the bar has for centuries been where Americans gather to share news, hatch plots, settle wagers, and predetermine the outcome of political races.

The book covers political intrigue, secret societies, court officers, and unionists all brought together in front of the brass rail. Sismondo also writes about marginalized populations who have assembled and amassed in bars for most of the last three centuries. The Molly Maguires are there, as are feminists, African-Americans, and gays. One hears about New York’s famous Stonewall Inn and how a police raid there resulted in riots that helped launch the modern gay rights movement. What we hear less about is what the place was actually like. Sismondo digs up historical references that make the mob-run bar sound every bit as dangerous and squalid as a Luc Sante opium den.

Ms Sismondo would like her drink refreshed

Inadvertently, perhaps, Sismondo drops one of the most useful bar tips I have ever heard. Over the last decade, I’ve noticed an increasing number of thirtysomething hipster parents bringing their young children with them to bars and gastropubs. Now, I’m not one of those crusty old curmudgeons who hates children in every setting. I adore some babies and don’t even mind kids in bars. However, when the place gets a reputation among young parents as child-friendly, it’s only a matter of time before strollers, booster seats, escaped Cheerios, and the stomach-churning smell of vaguely sour milk comes to define a place. That’s fine. I just don’t want that place to be my neighborhood bar. Sismondo, writing about the “nonbreeding” parents of Park Slope, opines that, faced with a similar choice, such “residents seemingly have no choice but to retreat into upstairs spaces that can’t be accessed…”

I enjoyed the book's breezy, almost conversational tone, its historical anecdotes, and its look into how America’s bars have long stood as a vital “third space” in our communities, but that bit about retreating into upstairs spaces is one I’m going to put to use. I’ve always quite liked second-story bars for the views they offered of the surrounding neighborhoods, but I realize now something else has always nestled in the back of my brain: not many parents will schlep a stroller up a flight of stairs.

Christine Sismondo (2011)
America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops
314 pages (hardback)
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019973495X
$24.95

For those of you attending Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, Christine Sismondo will be speaking next Thursday, July 21 on The Bad Bad Boys of Saloons and signing books at the popup bookstore in the lobby of the Hotel Monteleone. See www.talesofthecocktail.com for details.

Hellz Yeah: It's Tiki Oasis Time

2011-07-12T16:50:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, one of the best things about having been born in August was that I never had to go to school on my birthday. These days, I have something else entirely that captures my attention at the tail end of the summer: Tiki Oasis.

Every August, as they have since 2006, tikiphiles gather in San Diego for a four-day extravaganza of Polynesian Pop madness. Rum, obviously, plays into the long weekend, but I will say this about a tiki crowd: no other group of drinkers is as open, friendly, and welcoming.

According to the official history,

Originally conceived as a fundraiser to support the rehabilitation of the Palm Springs Caliente tropics Motel, Tiki Oasis outgrew its original 88 room location and Southern California-centric following and in 2006 moved to its current location in San Diego where the event sells out a 400 room hotel and draws over 2500 attendees from all over the world.

The theme this year is South of the Border. From 18-21 August, revelers will lounge around the pool, attend educational sessions, buy and sell tropical-themed merchandise, and enjoy a musical lineup that explores the Latin roots of exotica music, a cornerstone of tiki culture. I'll be busy with birthday shenanigans during Tiki Oasis, but some of them may just have to shift over to the hotel. After all, it's about three miles from my house — how could I pass up the chance to spend time with such a fun crowd?

Goes well with:

The Tiki Oasis website has all the official details, schedules, musical lineups, and more. Check it out here.
Find Tiki Oasis on Twitter here.
Finally, be sure to check out my piece on Salon.com about last year's anniversary punch made by San Francisco barman Martin Cate. Recipe — and enormous fireball — included.

KABOOM! Ryan Chetiyawardana on High-Temperature Distillation

2011-07-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

I do not own a rotary evaporator. Three possible reasons for this spring immediately to mind. To wit:

Rotary evaporators are effete affectations of so-called molecular gastronomists and have no place in a traditional kitchen such as my own.
Rotovaps are dangerous and those who would use them foolhardy.
They cost a lot of money

Rotary evaporators are ingenious industrial stills that have been around since the 1950's, no more dangerous than any other piece of kitchen gear. The sole reason I don't have one is the cost. Even a small, one-liter countertop model can run into thousands of dollars.

But not everyone is dissuaded by the cost. They've been showing up in forward-looking professional kitchens and the backrooms of bars that play host to experimental bartenders. In a nutshell, they allow low-temperature distillation of alcohol in very low atmospheric pressure. Delicate and ephemeral tastes and scents that perhaps could have been captured laboriously only en fleurage in past centuries can be, with a rotovap, cranked out on one's kitchen counter.

Rotovap: click to enlarge

In the latest issue of CLASS magazine, London bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana discusses his rotary evaporator. Specifically, he writes about the traditional low-temperature/low pressure technique for which the high-tech still is known and then, pulling a Father William, he turns it on its head, inverting the process to become high-pressure/high-temperature distillation.

Chetiyawardana writes:

One of the main culprits for this thinking was black pepper. I've always found it a very complex spice and found notes ranging from red berries all the way through to wood, tobacco and coffee. When run through a low pressure distillation, the delicate floral notes shine through. On trying pot still distillations, this yields some of the spice, but it wasn't until I ran a high pressure distillation that I finally achieved the wonderfully fragrant, oily and earthy distillate I wanted.

The still — for that's what a rotary evaporator is — has been dubbed Chetiyawardana's "Kaboom Still." Hats off to him for pushing distillation into new directions.

Goes well with:

Chetiyawardana's article, The 'Kaboom' Still - High Pressure Distillation.
Tap That CLASS, my take on Simon Difford's lushly photographed alcoholist magazine

Bread Pan Ice Blocks

2011-07-08T16:51:00.000-07:00

It's been so goddamned hot this week. Friends in other parts of the country regularly beset with summer scorchers have no sympathy.

"How hot?" they ask. "Seventy-seven degrees? Eighty? Poor you, living in paradise all year. You can't take a little heat."

Yeah, they're cloudy. Know what else they are? Cold.

To an extent, they're right. San Diego just doesn't get more than, say, nicely warm most of the year. But when the mercury spikes, we're not used to it. Even locals like me who've come from sultry — even swampy — places and know the soul-sucking power of truly hot days and nights have grown accustomed to the temperate year-round pleasantness of it all.

I only remind friends who expect unbearable heat in the summer and whose houses are built to deal with it: most San Diego homes seem not to have air conditioners. Us? We have a window unit that sits in storage 10 months out the year. The two months it's installed, we turn it on maybe a dozen times.

We're due to set a record this year. That contraption is on every night now. When I'm not sleeping directly under its cool airplane engine gusts, I'm keeping the heat at bay with uncharacteristic shorts, a nearly unheard-of and ungentlemanly bare chest, and ice. Big chunks of ice.

Rather than fuss with fancy silicone ice cube trays that still wouldn't yield enough ice, I simply filled two large bread loaf pans with filtered water and froze them. When I need a cube or three, I break the thick ice logs into rough blocks about 3" to a side with a stainless steel surgical hammer. In they go, into a sawed-off spring water bottle I now use as an iced tea glass. Top off with cold tea from the fridge and — for a while, anyway — stave off the worst of the San Diego sweats.

It's good practice for New Orleans.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a short, short clip based on H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story Cool Air. I'd even take on Dr. Muñoz's ailment if it meant I could have continuous, blessed cool air.

Distiller Wanted: New Orleans

2011-07-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Celebration Distillation, the makers of Old New Orleans Rum, is looking for a new distiller. Parker Shonekas sent me the job description this morning. As usual, when I note distillery job openings, I have nothing to do with the company (other than, in this instance, a deep appreciation for the Cajun spiced rum and admiration for [edit: former*] head distiller Chris Sule). Just passing on information, so it's no use asking me questions about the position or applying for it by sending me your resume. For that, you've got to get in touch with Parker Schonekas (parker@oldneworleansrum.com).

If I lived in New Orleans, you can be damn sure I wouldn't be posting this. I'd be at the distillery this very minute.

Barrels o' rum at Celebration Distillation

Production Team: Distiller

Celebration Distillation, the makers of Old New Orleans Rum, is seeking a motivated and hard working individual to work with our Production Team and to train to become an Old New Orleans Rum Distiller. We are the oldest premium rum distillery in the United States, and we produce three distinct and delicious rums - Old New Orleans Rum - Crystal; Amber; Cajun Spice.

Job Description:

Work in the production of Rum and other products
Run Stills
Perform fermentations, filtrations, and final blends
Upkeep and Maintain Equipment
Keep facility and workspace clean
Assist in the analysis of process and equipment efficiencies
Assist in the analysis and installation of upcoming expansions
Occasionally work events or parties hosted at the distillery

Expectations:

Work Flexible Hours
Time Expectations: Minimum of 40 hours per week

Qualifications:

Commitment to Quality
Any knowledge or experience in alcohol production or food production is preferred
Any technical experience in pipe fitting, welding, process engineering, chemical or mechanical
knowledge is preferred.
21 Years of Age and Over

*My thanks to Todd Price who clued me in that, as of two days ago, Chris is now working at NOLA Brewing. A quick phone call to Celebration confirmed it. Good luck brewing them beers, Chris.