Duties of a Bartender (1884)

George Winter’s short book How to Mix Drinks: Bar Keepers’ Handbook was published in New York around 1884. It leans heavily on the work of the celebrated bartender, Jerry Thomas, who died just a year later in the same city. It was Winter, though, I thought of on a recent evening in Kansas City. After downing my first Boulevard (a local favorite) at a bar, I ordered a second. The bartender popped the cap off the second bottle and, while I was momentarily distracted in the business of shaking loose an ardent admirer, he poured the ale into the same glass. Hm. Tacky. Not send-it-back tacky — and I probably would not have cared in a dive — but it was an amateur’s mistake in a fairly swanky place.

Winter’s book came to mind for its ruminations on the duties of a bartender. “Under no circumstances,” he wrote, “should a stained or dripping glass be handed out to a customer or used in mixing a drink…” It's a maxim as true in 2014 as it was in the years before Wilhem II was crowned Emperor of Germany and king of Prussia.

Here’s the rest of Winter's

Duties of a Bartender

Probably in no other branch of business is the person in charge brought so constantly in contact with people of every class and disposition, as is the bartender, and he should therefore be an intelligent man and a good judge of human nature. He should be at all times polite and attentive to customers, and present a neat and cheerful appearance, having a pleasant look and word for each one who favors him with his custom.

It is the great aim of a successful bartender to make as many friends and to control as much trade as possible, and the surest way of doing this is to pay the closest attention to the wants of patrons and making such an impression upon the mind of the customer, through furnishing a good article of the liquor called for, as well as serving in such a gentlemanly and artistic manner, as that he will remember the place, call again himself and recommend it to his friends.

A bartender, like an actor, should never show that he is feeling unwell or in a bad humor, as it is calculated to make a bad impression on the patrons, who are to him what the public is to the actor. In short, he should sympathize with those who are not feeling well, appear jolly to those who are apparently light-hearted, and in general use good judgment in his conversation with all with whom he comes in contact while in the discharge of his duties.

With these few words on the general attributes of a good bartender, we will enter upon the details of his business. 

Glasses of all the various kinds should be arranged on the bench so that they will be handy when wanted. When a man steps up to the bar the bartender should at once present himself before him, and, producing a glass of ice water upon the counter, ask the customer in a polite and pleasant tone of voice what kind of liquor he wishes.

All mixed drinks should be made in full view of the purchaser, and such skill and dexterity should be used in handling the bottles, glasses, etc., as will gain the admiration of the customer and establish the bartender as an expert in his profession.

Under no circumstances should a stained or dripping glass be handed out to a customer or used in mixing a drink, and it is always advisable to have a number of glasses about two-thirds filled with water and ice on the bench ready for use at any time, but the customer should not be expected to pour out the water from a pitcher as is sometimes done.

Tomato Sausages

Just a handful of our tomato glut

After an early but slow start to our tomato season back in May, the plants are in full production mode now, pumping out newly ripe tomatoes every day. We've done our best to stay on top of the onslaught with BLT sandwiches, Caprese salads, green salads, chopped salads, and pasta sauces. I've snacked on the little cherry tomatoes out of hand like they were candy. Just this weekend, we seemed finally ahead of the recent glut with just a few tomatoes left in the kitchen.

I even wondered, as I put the finishing touches on an article Friday, whether there were enough tomatoes to use in a salad for dinner that night. I shouldn't have worried.

From the back of the house I heard the door close and, a few seconds later, the gentle thud of a stainless steel bowl against the granite counter in the kitchen. Investigation revealed: more tomatoes. The huge mixing bowl couldn't even contain all the new harvest. Tomatoes overflowed onto the counter; little cherry tomatoes and fat, ribbed Brandywines, bigger than my fist, all ready to go. Others were lined up, not quite ripe enough, but near enough to bring them inside before squirrels feast on them.

What the hell will I do with all these? More and more — and more — tomatoes every day. Then I remembered a short recipe from an old manual in the library that uses tomatoes and finely crushed crackers to augment fresh pork sausages.

The red paste of tomato pulp and crackers is an example of a panade: bread mixed with milk, stock, or other another liquid. The technique is common for making meatballs, meatloaf, and a variety of sausages, helping them remain moist after cooking — and add a bit of flavor.

I don't usually make sausage in the summer, but this may be just the recipe that'll inspire me to haul my stuffer down from the attic to inaugurate the coming of Autumn.

From A. W. Fulton's 1902 Home Pork Making, here's

Tomato Sausages 

Add one and one-half pounds pulp of choice ripe tomatoes to every seven pounds of sausage meat, using an addition of one pound of finely crushed crackers, the last named previously mixed with a quart of water and allowed to stand for some time before using. Add the mixture of tomato and cracker powder gradually to the meat while the latter is being chopped. Season well and cook thoroughly.

Goes well with:

• My hearty recommendation of Maynard Davies' Manual of a Bacon Curer.  If you even think you may try your hand at making bacon, the book is a must-have.
• And speaking of bacon, here's my recipe for bacon dumplings for a wicked hangover.
• Nigel Slater's recipe for a smooth and creamy pâté. 
• And then there's my take on Jennifer McLagan's book Odd Bits with its recipe for brain fritters.  Written almost two years ago, its opening line is still a bit of a conversation stopper: "I have licked the inside of a dead man’s skull, yet cannot bring myself to eat brains." 

The Coming of Red Likker to Kentucky

In 1929, as the failures of Prohibition had become manifest even to the most ardently braying temperance hounds, the prolific American author and inveterate blowhard Irvin S. Cobb published Red Likker, his love letter to bourbon and Southern honor. It is not a particularly rare book. It is not a particularly good book. But I've hung onto my first edition for decades because it deals with whiskey — a topic dear to my heart —and for Cobb's brazen manhandling of the English language, which is at turns entertaining and appalling. He does not present the South so much as a caricature of the South.

The novel concerns the fictional Bird family of Kentucky and in particular Colonel Attila Bird who distilled a great deal of the red likker in question and who lived long enough to see Prohibition descend on America. In my mind, his voice hovers somewhere between that of the 1940's Senator Beauregard  Claghorn and that of Mel Blanc's diminutive Kentucky colonel from Dog Gone South. In other words, he's a joke, son. Or at least comical, though Cobb, a Kentuckian. no doubt intended to impart almost heroic qualities.

In an early section, Cobb describes an exchange from the 1790's between brothers Isham and Shadwell Bird. Before then, the whiskey with which the brothers Bird were familiar was white, none of this fancy barrel-aged stuff we take for granted more than two centuries on.

In his hand Isham held what Shadwell had bade him seek for in the saddle-bag. It was a wickered case-bottle, stoppered with a corn-cob.
 
"Tried it yet?" said Shadwell, his voice thickened,
 
"Not yet."

"Well, you'd best not lose any more time then. It's prime. Man, I tell you it's just prime! Primest ever I swallowed anywheres or any place."
 
"What is it ?"
 
"Likker. What else would it be but likker?"

"But it's red!" Isham was holding the flask up to the west and through the meshes in the plaiting the glass, by reason of its contents, showed him a deep russety-amber shade. That was puzzling.

"Shore, it's red. That's the joke about it. Red as stinkabus rum, e'en near it, yet powerful well-flavored. Take a swig and then tell me if it ain't about the potentest likker ever you put lip to."

Goes well with:

• The Maine Julep  Cobb's unrelenting style in on show here as he excoriates a Maine bartender — “a criminal masquerading as a barkeeper” — who dared serve a julep that was not up to his Kentucky standards.
• Red Likker is not a terrible book; it was just a product of its time, written by an author with a distinct brash voice, and has not aged well. If you'd like a copy, even first editions can be picked up online for less than $10. Jerry Thomas he is not.
• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, a look at how far white whiskeys have come in a few short years. 

Cthulhu Tiki Mug

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

~ Cole Porter

A casual look around the Whiskey Forge reveals that we are modest in our affection for neither liquor nor books. Even the barely interested can see that whiskey and cookbooks practically bow our shelves. The slightly more curious may note that there's an awful lot of rum as well...and swizzle sticks...and there, in the corner, a small case of tiki mugs. Downright nosy sumbitches will realize that someone, at some point, acquired an inordinate amount of materials by and about the American weird fiction writer, HP Lovecraft.

That would be me. 

Horror in Clay prototype

My days of actively prowling for Lovecraft books and ephemera are behind me. The hunt was far more enjoyable before the coming of the internet. Every book, pamphlet, or document I uncovered in a Pennsylvania barn or a Kansas City estate sale seemed like a little gem, like some real accomplishment. "I found this," I would think, "because I am very good at what I do and know the market better than these people." Now? Eh. Now when I want a title, I search online auction and antiquarian book sites in North America, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and — with a flurry of keystrokes — have the thing in my hands in no time at all. Effective? Sure. Fun? Not really.

But I do still leave room for serendipitous discoveries. And sometimes they come by way of that same internet that's sucked so much joy out of book hunting. 

Jonathan Chaffin's campaign on Kickstarter brought a smile to my face and made me realize that I can make some room on the shelf for at least one more tiki mug. Chaffin is pimping a prototype of a mug he calls The Horror in Clay. It's taken from a line in Lovecraft's 1928 story The Call of Cthulhu about the dreams of artists and madmen the world over whose febrile nightmares are stirred by Cthulhu, a giant tentacled and winged entity who slumbered fitfully in the sunken South Pacific city R'lyeh. At least, it slumbered at the beginning of the tale...

Chaffin is looking for various levels of contributions to his funding campaign to make a full run of several hundred mugs. Tiki folks will go for it. Lovecraft geeks will want in on the ground floor. The level I'm interested in starts at $40. For that, contributors get a finished 28-ounce mug. Mo' money, mo' mugs.

This leaves me with two questions: (1) When will they be cool enough to handle? and (2) What would Cthulhu drink?

Goes well with:

• Jonathan Chaffin's Horror in Clay campaign is here. 
• My review of Jay Strongman's book (with an intro by Tiki Farm's Holden Westland) Tiki Mugs: Cult Artifacts of Polynesian Pop  
• We've covered Lovecraft here at the Forge before. There's both the candied Cthulhu-head citron I made last November as well as a short film based on HPL's 1926 story of horror in the Cool Air.
• Lovecraft's not the only oddball writer whose stuff I snagged at every turn. Of a once-huge collection of Charles Bukowski materials, one of the few remaining items is a goof, a counterfeit, a sheet of fake stamps that would fit right in Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49.
• My Culinary Library: What Good Does It Do? I've spent the better part of three decades collecting books on food and drink. Why? What good could possibly come of it? Here are some thoughts on the value of such a collection.
• Finally, if you believe that's a Cole Porter quote, I've got a mug I want to sell you for $80.

The Maine Julep

Derby season is nearly on us and, as every year, readers will be subjected to odes and plaudits for that Kentucky stalwart, the mint julep. Now, my father is a Kentucky Colonel and I myself enjoy a bracing mint julep on occasion; the julep was for years and years the standard drink in our house. But I do not engage in the kinds of blowhard battles over their proper preparation that passed as performance art in years past. Your julep is yours and mine is mine.

Perhaps no greater bullshitter than Irvin S. Cobb waxed (and waxed and waxed) eloquent over the julep, however, any chance he was given. Cobb (1876–1944) was a journalist and humorist — and a renowned drinker. His 1936 pamphlet for Frankfort Distilleries details his supposed encounter with “a criminal masquerading as a barkeeper” that may ring a bell with anyone who’s brushed against particularly florid examples of the craft of modern cocktologists.

And once, in Farther Maine, a criminal masquerading as a barkeeper at a summer hotel, reared for me a strange structure that had nearly everything in it except the proper constituents of a julep. It had in it sliced pineapple, orange peel, lemon juice, pickled peaches, sundry other fruits and various berries, both fresh and preserved and the whipped-up white of an egg, and for a crowning atrocity a flirt of allspice across that expanse of pallid meringue. When I could in some degree restrain my weeping, I told him things. "Brother," I told him, between sobs, "brother, all this needs is a crust on it and a knife to eat it with, and it would be a typical example of the supreme effect in pastry of your native New England housewife's breakfast table. But, brother," I said, "I didn't come in here for a pie, I mentioned a julep; and you, my poor erring brother, you have done this to me! Go," I said, "go and sin no more or, at least, sin as little as possible."

Julep or Pie?

Irvin S. Cobb (1936) Irvin S. Cobb’s Own Recipe Book. Frankfort Distilleries, Incorporated, Louisville.

Goes well with:

• The Barkeeper's Favorite Weapon, in which New Orleans maestro Chris McMillian wields a massive hammer and recites poetry while mixing a perfectly acceptable, non-pastry, mint julep.
• Mint Abomination. Ok, maybe I do take offense at some attempts at mint juleps. So does Portland bar man Jeffrey Morgenthaler. Here's a short bit (with video) of how not to do it. Whether or not Woodford Reserve is your go-to whiskey, that's no way to treat a bourbon.

Bar and Cocktail Library up for Sale

A secondhand story came to me from a friend of Louis Szathmary, the great cookbook and culinary ephemera collector. Szathmary, owner of over 10,000 food and drinks books in addition to some 17 semi-trailers of culinary postcards, kitchen tools, dining sets, drinking vessels, and more explained his desire to hand over his collections as he grew older. “Every collector,” he said “has two great joys. The first is the hunt. The second comes later; it is giving away the prize.”

If you collect historical cocktail and drinks material and have not yet reached the point where you wish to divest yourself of your collections, there’s good news: the hunt is on.

Cocktologists would kill you in your sleep for just one

Brian Rea, onetime bartender at New York’s 21 Club and the Little Club, was tending bar back in the Mad Men days and later developed bar management programs for UCLA and Cal Poly University. He came to be known, by those in the know, as having one of the most extensive collections of bartending books in the world. Most of that collection is now in Germany, but Brian emailed earlier this week with word that he’s ready to sell off the remainder.

He writes:

About five years ago I sold the bulk of my Barchives Library and Collection, and I am offering for sale, the balance of the collection, which consists of:

• 300 plus Cocktail books, many of them quite scarce
• “21 Club” collection

Plus artwork, old labels, discontinued liquor brands, bar utensils, ephemera and other good stuff. If there is additional information about any of these items desired, just contact me at my email address, barguru@aol.com.

This unique collection could be an excellent reference library for book collectors, distillers, importers, U.S. Bartender Guild Chapters, liquor distributors, Hotel Restaurant Administration colleges, etc.

I prefer to sell the collection in its entirety, as that enhances the value of the entire library, but if that is not possible, will sell same by category, or possibly by individual books online, and in chronological sequence.

If you are interested in obtaining a list of the collections contents, please send an email to barguru@aol.com to obtain a copy. I will be posting the date of the sale on February 21, 2012, as well as the method of bidding.

As you may know, I'm a food and drink book collector myself. I’ve just bought a house, though, and dipped into the book budget to do it, so I won’t be buying Brian’s collection. Before Germany claims the rest, you may want to email him.

Please note: I’ve got nothing to do with the sale, can’t answer questions about titles, conditions, prices, methods of payment, or any of that. I’m just passing on word. Follow Brian’s directions above for getting in touch with him and check out his website, TheBarKeeper.com (where, I imagine, more details will be forthcoming).

Happy hunting.

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

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:

1. Discarding seeds and veins makes a more texturally refined dish
2. 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. 

A Whiskey Forge/Tales of the Cocktail Giveaway

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Kill the Open Bottles

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. 

Yeah, Like I Need Another Cookbook

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. 

Remember the Maine? Hell, I Barely Remember the Walk Home.

Treat this one with the respect it deserves, gentlemen.

~ Charles H. Baker, Jr.

Charles H. Baker, Jr. — bear with me, drinks people; I know you know this, but others may not — is a towering figure in cocktail literature. His 1946 two-volume The Gentleman’s Companion was one of the first serious cocktail books I bought almost twenty years ago. Because bars sometimes base cocktail programs on his recipes more than half a century after publication, a passing familiarity with them helps tipplers navigate options at bars that trade in old-school drinks.

This weekend in Portland, I was pleased to recognize Remember the Maine, one of his classics, featured at Teardrop Lounge. It's not unlike a Manhattan, but with an absinthe kick, you wouldn't mistake one for the other. The drink's name refers a popular slogan that decried the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana's harbor, thus sparking the 1898 Spanish-American War. Baker invokes the slogan in his typically florid and heavily-capitalized prose: 

REMEMBER the MAINE, a HAZY MEMORY of a NIGHT in HAVANA during the UNPLEASANTNESSES of 1933, when EACH SWALLOW WAS PUNCTUATED with BOMBS GOING OFF on the PRADO, or the SOUND of 3" SHELLS BEING FIRED at the HOTEL NACIONAL, then HAVEN for CERTAIN ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY OFFICERS

His original recipes reads: Take a tall bar glass and toss in three lumps of ice. Onto this foundation donate the following in order given: one jigger good rye whiskey, ½ jigger Italian vermouth, one to 2 teaspoons of cherry brandy, ½ tsp absinthe or Pernod Veritas. Stir briskly in clock-wise fashion -- this makes it sea-going, presumably! —turn into a big chilled saucer champagne glass, twisting a curl of green lime or lemon peel over the top.

That "cherry brandy" has caused some confusion — or at least room for interpretation — among bartenders since both Cherry Heering (a dark, sweet, cherry-infused brandy) and Kirsch or Kirschwasser (a clear distillate of cherries, nearly double the proof of Heering) may be used. I find the lower-proof Heering rounds out the drink nicely, but feel free to experiment. The drink doesn't call for much absinthe, but tread lightly if you're unsure whether you enjoy the taste; its presence is not a subtle one.

Remember the Maine (modern adaptation)

2 oz rye
.75 oz sweet vermouth
2 bar-spoons Cherry Heering
½ bar-spoon absinthe

Stir briskly with a bar spoon in a mixing glass with ice. Strain into another glass and serve up.

Goes well with: A stop at Teardrop if you're in Portland. In fact, it's one of the reasons to visit.

Teardrop Lounge
1015 Northwest Everett Street
Portland, OR 97209-3117
(503) 445-8109
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Fez Monkeys

I am, sad to say, fascinated with fez monkeys. Have been for decades. You know what I'm talking about. You've seen them. Chimps, spider monkeys, organ-grinding monkeys, monkeys dressed in human clothing or just behaving as humans do, but always with a red fez on their little heads. They've been used as pencil tops, calling card holders, windup toys, wall sconces, and countless other decorative arts.

C'est si bon!

The imagery is old and fabulous in the word's truest sense. Animals have since before Aesop been used to illustrate the best and worst of human behavior and monkeys, so human in their stance and demeanor, are no exception. With rare exceptions, monkeys wearing red fezzes are bad monkeys, indulging in alcohol, smoking, and other human vices.

I've found old French porcelain statuettes of simian gentlemen in finest 18th century garb, aping humanity. When the fez in particular came into play, I haven't been able to tell. My gut tells me that for the answer to that, we should look to French-occupied North Africa — Tunisia, Morocco, or Algeria — but I don't yet have the resources to track down earliest examples.

I do, however, collect images of these red-hatted monkeys behaving badly when I travel. About ten years ago, I wandered into a postcard shop in Paris. Cartophilia was jammed, floor to ceiling, with boxes of old postcards. They were organized by themes familiar to those who prowl such shops: hotels, railroads, clowns, butchers, etc. When I entered, the owner was engaged in low conversation with another old man. I smiled. "Bonjour." He looked me over and turned back to his conversation with a polite but dismissive "Bonjour, monsieur."

I had been weighed and measured — and apparently did not meet standards. The two continued to talk, paying no further attention. A younger woman in the shop glanced up and smiled at me, then went back to her box of old cards. My French is self-taught and far from perfect. But I hauled it into use.

"Excusez-moi, monsieur"

He looked up. "Oui?"

"Je suis à la recherche d'une carte postale."

He thrust out his chin, gave his shoulders a shrug, and indicated the hundreds of boxes around him like I was an idiot for not seeing them myself. "Oui?"

"Je suis à la recherche d'une carte postale," I continued, "avec une image de singes..."

"Les singes?!" he exclaimed ("Monkeys?!"). Whoever heard of such a thing?

"Oui." I plowed on. "Oui, mais...mais les singes avec des chapeaux rouges." Monkeys with red hats. He looked at me, a face filled with incredulity. An imbecile stood before him. Impossible to conceive that such a thing did or ever could exist.

"No." He turned back to his conversation.

At that point, the pretty young woman cleared her throat. In lightly accented English, she asked "Are you looking for monkeys wearing fezzes?" I admitted that I was.

She turned to the old man. "Papa. Un chapeau tunisien."

"Ahh!" His face lit up like fireworks. "Un chapeau tunisien!" Monkey with a red hat he'd never heard of, a conceptual impossibility, but a monkey with a Tunisian hat? Well, that's a different story entirely! One was located within 2 minutes.

I bought my postcard with its bad booze-drinking monkeys and learned that when I return to France on the trail of these fez monkeys so popular with the tiki crowd, I shall hunt for les singes avec des chapeaux tunisien.

But I'm sure something else will be wrong.

My Culinary Library: What Good Does It Do?

[I intended to call this post Julia Child, Dorie Greenspan, and the Coke Fiend in my Bed, but then decided it would be disrespectful to Ms. Greenspan, to the memory of Ms. Child, and to whomever is in my bed. The story has those elements, but it’s about how I use — and want others to use — my culinary library. So. Boring title rather than the titillating one.]

 * * * 

In the final days of the last century we had a home in Philadelphia. It was a little three-story house in Bella Vista, a neighborhood that included the city’s bustling Italian Market. Eventually, I came to work in the market, but before then when I was a museum curator, I was a regular at the shops, buying cheeses, fresh bread, olive oils, charcuterie, and all sorts of kitchen equipment that I use to this day. Food and cooking were a big part of my life.

I also had cookbooks. Thousands of them. And not just cookbooks, but bartending guides, ice cream manuals, corporate histories of food and drinks companies, biographies, sausage making texts, and many more. The books were in English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch and spanned three centuries. I used them every single day for research. In the decade we spent in Philly, I nearly doubled the size of my culinary library. For much of that time, though, I didn’t allow anyone else to use the books — as I mentioned, it was my library. That changed, though, when I met fellow collector Chef Fritz Blank and when someone made off with my copy of Baking with Julia.

Baking with Julia was a gift. As such, it held additional importance to me beyond its utilitarian use. Written by Dorie Greenspan, it was an offshoot of a Julia Child-hosted PBS series. Its well-crafted recipes for savory and sweet breads, pastries, flatbreads, pies, tarts, cakes, and the like kept me company for a few weeks one summer: I kept it on a nightstand for reading at night and toted it to the kitchen in the morning. It was, in short, a keeper.

Until it disappeared, that is. We’d driven to Montreal for a week or so and came back to find the book wasn’t where I’d been putting it. Looked around. Nope. Not anywhere. Gone. When I asked if he’d seen it, our houseguest mentioned that he’d had a friend over one night while we were away. This friend, he explained, had slept in our bed and was a bit of an amateur baker.

Yes, it's bad to store books this way

Ugh.

I went to change the sheets and found a black plastic straw under a pillow. It had been cut down to about 2 inches, one end dusted in a white residue.

Fantastic. A stranger in my bed, snorting cocaine, and poaching my library. The humorist in me mused “You can only have two of the three, Rowley” but the truth is, I wasn’t amused by any of it. Bastard probably snorted the coke right off the book’s cover. Poor Julia.

My cocaine-dusted Baking with Julia had been a gift from Blank, the chef I mentioned. Before he retired, he was owner of a high-end French restaurant in Center City named Deux Cheminées. At 10,000 volumes, his culinary collection was certainly larger than mine. In fact, his massive library made the 2,000 books in my own home seem…not the least bit crazy. It seemed to reflect the perfectly reasonable efforts of a connoisseur, not a lunatic hoarder. There was an important difference, though: while I kept my books to myself for research and pleasure, anyone who knew about it could ask to study in the dark quiet library on the second floor of his restaurant.

His openness got me thinking about my own miserly — and typical — approach to book collecting. The thief made me want to lock away my own library and keep it from anyone other than my family and me. I hated that fucker. People, clearly, were not to be trusted. Even friends with the best intentions had occasionally forgotten to return books I’d let them borrow.

What's behind those books? Oh. More damned books.

On the other hand, the library would be useful to others in the field. Why should I be the only one allowed to use it? Despite my smoldering resentment at the thief (I never replaced the book, just so I can squint my eyes and seethe a little every time I see a copy), I realized that I could open my library to others without losing books. Well, not likely lose them, anyway.

The thief brought into sharp focus how I want my library to be used. First and foremost, it’s my collection. I use it at all hours of day and night for myself. As far as I know, it’s the most extensive culinary library — private or public — in San Diego.

Secondly, though, I want others to use it. For the last ten years, I’ve let chefs, cooks, writers, historians, graduate students, journalists, culinary students, bartenders, charcutiers, and others come to my home and research whatever it is that interests them. No one may borrow books (remember — even friends, best of intentions, and all that), but those in the business of food and drinks may pull up a chair, take notes, and find answers to questions they sometimes didn’t even realize they had.

I once helped a chef rejigger her churros recipe by letting her compare recipes in a dozen books. As thanks, she assured me that I could come to her restaurant as often as I liked for free churros and chocolate. Another time, a meat curer came to research sausage recipes and ended up with ham cures he didn’t know he had wanted. More than one distiller has come to use the English and German distilling handbooks on my shelves.

I like this so much better than my earlier book-hoarding ways. By using the library here, researchers aren’t taking anything from me. It’s not like they’re using all my sugar or drinking down my whiskey (though both sometimes happen). My pleasure in my collection is not diminished by their use of it. In fact, it’s not uncommon for visitors to bring samples and gifts. I don’t demand or even expect it and I certainly don’t charge to use the library, but how nice is it to receive bottles of spirits made by the distiller standing in my living room? Likewise, a box of benne wafers, a loaf of rye bread, a few dozen Amalfi lemons, homemade sausages and cured meats, a box of homemade beers, or even books inscribed by their authors make me glad that I’m making new friends and helping others.

French confiture books wrap around the case

Libraries ought to be used. If you have one, even if it’s not as large as mine, let others use it. In my experience, they’re not likely to take advantage of you, steal your books, rip out pages, or use bacon as bookmarks (talk to public library librarians sometime about what they find as bookmarks and take appropriate cautions). Set reasonable rules about what users may and may not do with the books and be clear about what those rules are. You will help others, you will earn new friends, and if you’re as interested in your subject matter as much as I am in mine, you will learn as much from your guests as they learn from you.

I may no longer be a curator, but I still think like one.

An Excess of Port

I am inordinately fond of port wine. Tawny, ruby, vintage, late bottled vintage, Portuguese, Australian, even those of my own state, California. Whatever is at hand, I’m game. I was, nevertheless, taken aback that this weekend’s inventory revealed that fully 27% of our home wine stock is port. The numbers skew high because we’ve been drinking the other wines and not replenishing the supply. Plus, frankly, I’d lost track of how much port I’d laid down in the first place. But still. Damn.

I’m acquisitive, sure, but no hoarder. It’s time to reduce the stock. The inventory made me think, naturally, of grabbing a wedge of Stilton cheese, port’s classic postpriandal sidekick.

It also got me thinking of a fantastic little tome in the back library called But the Crackling Is Superb. The book is a collection of essays by members of The Royal Society (Britain’s long-standing academy of sciences) dealing broadly with the intersection of food, drinks, and science. If you read Harold McGee with pleasure, you’ll like this volume. In the collection, we see one of the earlier public displays of what’s now called molecular gastronomy and mixology. I’ve had it nearly twenty years and still find surprises in its pages.

Contributor John Postgate was Professor of Microbiology at the University of Sussex. His essay "Two Aperitifs" deals with concocting compounded drinks on a base of cheap British port. That’s the essay that popped into my mind as I mulled our port situation. Fresh out of cheap British port, I’m considering using his recipe for Corsican Aperitif, but deploying some of our stash of proper port — which he warns works less well. Hmm. We’ll see if Professor Postgate and I have similar tastes.

The recipe was developed with his father as the two of them sought to create something akin to French aperitifs such as Dubonnet, Byrrh, and Cap Corse. Postgate’s notes are included in brackets.

Corsican Aperitif
(John Postgate)

Take 1 bottle of British Ruby or Tawny Port wine, sometimes marketed ‘of Port character’ [1]. Add 2 to 4 drops of quinine bitters [2]. Insert a vanilla pod [3] and leave to steep in the bottle at room temperature for at least 3 weeks [4]. Decant from the pod (which can be re-used) and serve with ice, with a slice of lemon, or straight.

Notes

[1] Gratifyingly, the cheaper the British wine, the better. Real port and Cyprus port-type work less well.

[2] A thimble of Campari, not available at the time of our researches, is ideal.

[3] Nonsense, Use 2-3 drops of vanilla essence and skip the decanting. My parent was rather against essences.

[4] Chemists will find this difficult to believe, but 3 weeks at domestic room temperature transformed it from vanilla-flavoured port into a drink with its own character. I’ve kept it for six months longer without further improvement.

Postgate goes on to offer Solace, “a good cheap aperitif” that “goes down well for elevenses with cake.” It is nothing more than a bottle of (again, cheap British) white port flavored with a swath of orange peel (sans pith) and decanted after two days. Postgate warns not to use orange essence which would make the aperitif “surprisingly nasty.”

Well worth tracking down:

• Kurti, Nicholas and Giana (ed) (1988) But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Adam Hilger, Philadelphia.

Caring for Old Cocktail Books, Part 1: Water Damage

Keep a shotgun under the bar if you like, but a hundred-year-old cocktail guide has no place next to it. Bars and kitchens—right where they’d be most useful—are some of the very worst places to keep old bartending manuals—and cookbooks for that matter. The water, the ice, spilled drinks, and (let’s face it) the drunks put valuable books under constant threat of irrevocable damage. And those aren’t the only danger zones.

Fortunately, caring for them is not difficult.

Mixing drinks and book collecting are complementary pastimes, but not in the same place. I know: I’ve done both for more than twenty years.

In a former life, I was a museum curator and still advise historical organizations on managing collections, libraries, and archives. Since the 1980’s, I’ve assembled about a 2,000-volume food and drink library at home, so caring for books—and making sure they last at least my lifetime—is something I do daily.

Of the most pernicious threats to your liquor library, light and water are two of the biggest. You can have cocktails in the dark, but you can’t have them without water so, for now, we’ll look at the wet stuff.

My library spreads over almost every room of the house, but there are four places I’d never store valuable books:

• The kitchen, bar, or back bar
• Bathrooms
• The attic
• The basement

Their common problem? Humidity. Paper, like humans, does best with a certain amount of moisture. Too much or too little and your books, pamphlets, and other paper cocktail ephemera react badly. For paper objects like these, conservators recommend 45-60% relative humidity—the amount of gaseous water in air at a certain temperature, expressed as RH%. Humidity above this range invites bugs and microbes as well as plain old structural damage to your collection—warped covers and curled pages, the kind of hurt you can see just looking at a book from several feet away.

Although it isn’t practical to measure RH at home or in your bar, you can use common sense to avoid very wet and very dry zones.

Too wet: Do not store or even use valuable books if liquids—water, ice cubes, liquor, bitters, syrups, fruit juices, soap, etc—are nearby. This means kitchen counters, bar tops, back bars, any food or drink prep area, and anywhere even near a sink or hand washing station. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to pour yourself a beer and cry into because there will be a spill or a splash. Pages will stick together, bindings will swell, inks will run, or the books may just get so waterlogged that they have to be thrown out. And the kicker? You didn’t need a museum curator to tell you this: it’s common sense.

There are a few water threats, though, that may be less self-evident. Do not store books on, under, or near:

• Windows and skylights
• Air conditioners
• Outside walls
• Ice machines
• Refrigeration units

Because each of these tends to be a different temperature than the air in the room, water is more likely to condense in these places—and it’s not always apparent. Slowly, quietly, small amounts of unseen water can do big damage to your books long before you realize it.

Likewise, never store books under or near roofs, sprinkler heads, pipes, hoses, soda guns, faucets, beer engines, or valves of any kind; they may leak. They may leak? Who are we kidding? If they can leak, they will. The only question is when.

Whenever possible, it’s best to keep the books at least six inches off the floor, preferably on metal bookcases. If there is a spill, the sprinkler system goes off, or the dishwasher overflows, your books will be safer. Wooden bookcases can draw standing water up their posts and into the shelving, but generally only for a few inches; that’s why you want the lowest level of books about six inches off the floor.

But even ambient water in the air can be damaging. Like a whiskey barrel, paper expands and contracts. Makes sense: they’re both made of trees. The espresso machine, a shower, dishwasher, stove, washing machine, drier, or a teakettle can change the surrounding humidity enough to cause structural damage to a book when its paper expands or contracts too quickly. The obvious results could be wrinkles, splayed covers, and twisted spines. Your cocktail books will look like characters in a Bukowski story. Simply do not store books in rooms prone to high humidity. In your home, this means the kitchen, the bathroom, and the basement are definite no-go zones.

Water damage could, on the other hand, be subtle. High humidity encourages mold and, some say, foxing, those reddish brown spots that appear throughout older books. There’s nothing to be done about it. Once foxed, always foxed. Keeping such books away from water and high humidity, as outlined above, should help prevent further foxing. Mold is another thing entirely.

Mold is the herpes of your library. Never—and I mean never—bring home a book that’s already got mold. In addition to its distinctive unpleasant musty smell, mold produces enzymes that break down paper and binding. It is a pernicious infection that will spread to other books through direct contact as well as during handling when mold spores are disturbed. Mold can be halted, cleaned, and even—sometimes—eradicated. But those are expensive procedures: it’s easier just to keep books away from high-humidity settings in the first place—and from already-infected books.

Finally, damp areas (think of rathskellers, basement tiki bars, and basements in general) tend to attract vermin. I know. I know. Not your basement. Other people’s. So this is for those other people. Such areas at first might just attract insects that thrive in damp environments, insects that feast on the paper, glue, and fibers in books. Silverfish, cockroaches, firebrats, bookworms—these are the enemies of your books. Bad enough that they eat the paper, spines, and bindings, but they also attract insectivore predators, including mice and rats. Think a bookworm is bad for your books? Try a mother rodent shredding all that lovely, warm, insulating 19th-century paper to build a nest for her precious, tiny, pink newborns.

Keeping your book storage area dry is no guarantee of a pest-free home, but it helps keep the rodents and insects at bay. More importantly, dry storage is vital to maintaining your books’ structural integrity and limiting their exposure to mold.

Another day we’ll take a look at light. Sunlight arguably has done wonders for George Hamilton, but it’ll destroy your old food and drinks books.

.

Eggs, William S. Burroughs — Wait, What?

In 1945, the American author William S. Burroughs may have had a dish named after him by the French chef who claimed to have created Crêpes Suzette. Why?

At the time the recipe was written, Burroughs had not yet published any books and had no particular reason for being known outside his circle of friends. There’s a chance Henri Charpentier’s Eggs, William S. Burroughs referred to someone other than the author of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and Cities of the Red Night. But that’s no fun.

I don’t know for sure how the two may have known each other, but I’ve got the recipe from a privately printed book now in my library, some backstory, and a tenuous connection. Perhaps someone with access to more extensive archives can fill in the gaps in this burning, all-consuming literary mystery.

Henri Charpentier (1880-1961) was once a well-known French chef who worked at the Savoy in London with Escoffier and at several other posh kitchens. His claim to fame was accidentally inventing, so he said, the orange liqueur-spiked dessert Crêpes Suzette while a young assistant in Monte Carlo. Later, he moved to the United States and eventually died in California. Before California, however, he had restaurants in New York and Chicago.

In New York, he worked at Delmonico’s but saved to open his own restaurant—Original Henri Restaurant & Bar—around 1906. For the next three decades, he took a role in several New York restaurants and was a celebrity in his own right. His customers included luminaries, presidents, and foreign heads of state. In 1938, he closed shop and moved to Chicago where he opened Café de Paris. By 1945, he had moved on to Southern California. Eventually he opened a restaurant, of sorts, in Redondo Beach: a single table, in his own home, where the reservation list was so long, it might take a year to secure a seat.

In a nutshell, that’s Charpentier.

So. William S. Burroughs. It’s possible Burroughs ate at one of Charpentier’s places in New York. Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. While he was there, after all, he made trips to New York to explore the city with Richard Stern, a friend from Missouri. Maybe, possibly, there’s a connection there. I’m not feeling it, though.

My gut tells me the connection—if there is one—lies in Chicago. For a few years, in the early 1940’s, Burroughs lived in Chicago while Charpentier ran Café de Paris in the city’s Park Dearborn Hotel. He had a few jobs in Chicago, including a stint as an exterminator, a role that would resonate through his writing for decades. Exterminators don’t make bank, but with an allowance from his well-to-do family, Burroughs probably could afford to eat well. And he was definitely a character: he’d sawn off one of his own fingers in an effort to impress a man with whom he was infatuated. I’m guessing that even in 1943, William S. Burroughs made an impression.

I’m also supposing it was during this time, while Burroughs and Charpentier where both in Chicago, that the French chef caught a wild hare and decided to name a dish after an eccentric customer. Of course, this wouldn’t have been a unique honor. I don’t think ol’ Henri buttered toast without naming it after some American celebrity, friend, hero, or other person he’d want to compliment.

In fact, when Charpentier privately published 1,000 copies of Food and Finesse: The Bride’s Bible for friends and customers, he included hundreds of recipes of the kind Americans once thought were terribly fancy. The recipes read like a Who’s Who of American history: Pheasant, Samuel Morse; Lamb, Grover Cleveland; Cauliflower, Eli Whitney; Peaches Barbara Fritchie, Guinea Hen, Ulysses S. Grant; Brandy Apples, Amelia Earhart. There, on page 426, is the recipe for Eggs, William S. Burroughs.

Other than this single thing, I’ve never seen a reference to Burroughs in Charpentier’s writing. I admit I haven’t read every single thing Burroughs penned, but I don’t recall the chef showing up ever. Dr. Benway, yes; Chef Henri, no.

That’s all I got. If someone can make the connection, please let me know. I’m not exactly losing much sleep over this—any sleep, really—but it would be nice to put this mystery to bed.

Of course, in his mania for naming every dish under the sun for Americans known for one thing or another, Charpentier may have named an egg-and-pasta casserole after William Seward Burroughs (1857–98), inventor of the adding machine and grandfather to the beat author. I’d like to think the historical record’s so sketchy, though, that we’ll just never know.

Eggs William S. Burroughs
By Henri Charpentier, 1945

Chop one onion and place it into a pan with 1 tablespoon of butter. Brown it.

Take the green part of 1 chicory salad (keep the white part for a salad). Chop it fine and add it to the onion. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Then add 4 chopped hard-boiled eggs, 1 clove of garlic that has been crushed into a little chopped parsley, 2 chopped peeled tomatoes, 1 more tablespoon of butter, 1 teaspoon of meat stock, 1 pinch of pepper, one pinch of salt, and one sherry-glassful of claret. Cook for 5 minutes.

Boil 2 handfuls of noodles for 15 minutes. Strain. Be sure they are free of all water. Place them on the bottom of a baking dish. Cover with the chicory, etc., and bake in a preheated moderate oven of 350°F for 15 minutes. Season to taste.

Henri Charpentier (1945) Food and Finesse: The Bride’s Bible.
Privately printed, Chicago, IL

Goes well with:

• William S. Burroughs' Birthday Beer, a for-real Burroughs recipe with a legitimate provenance from his days as my neighbor in Lawrence, Kansas.
  

Senator Tydings and the Kentucky Breakfast

As a meal familiar to bartenders around the world, Maryland Senator Millard Tydings (1890-1961, pictured left) offered his recipe for a Kentucky breakfast in Frederick Philip Stieff 1932 recipe collection Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland.

Under the heading “The Reminiscent Toddy,” Stieff relates the Senator’s instructions precisely calibrated to each individual diner’s tastes, a recipe within a recipe:

This potation, to be thoroughly enjoyed, should be prepared in the following manner:

Supply each guest with a glass containing about one-half inch of water and one-quarter teaspoonful of sugar, and a spoon.

All should sit comfortably and stir the sugar until it is thoroughly dissolved. The host should tell the following story in a low voice while the sugar is being stirred:

"Have you gentlemen ever participated at a Kentucky breakfast?"

The answer is likely to be in the negative.

Then some guest will probably ask:

"What is a Kentucky breakfast?"

At this point the sugar is completely dissolved. The host passes around a bottle of Bourbon and each person pours into his glass, containing the dissolved sugar, such amount as suits his inclination. This is stirred for a while, during which time the most replies:

"A Kentucky breakfast is a big beefsteak, a quart of Bourbon, and a houn' dawg."

One of the guests will then ask: "What is the dog for?"

The host then replies: "He eats the beefsteak."

Ice water is then passed around in a silver pitcher to dilute drink to meet the requirements of the discriminating taste of each. A part of the Kentucky breakfast is then consumed.

(In order to extract the nth power of enjoyment from this receipt, when stirring the sugar and water, each should sit on the very edge of his chair or sofa, rest his arms on his knees with a slightly forward posture. Unless this is done the train will taste just a little less good.)

It takes no great imagination to adjust the recipe to one's circumstances, leading, perhaps to a Kentucky brunch, teatime, coffee break, or luncheon.

Order up!

.

Bar Food: Spanish Fig Cake

With San Diego temperatures plummeting to the mid-60’s, I can’t help but recall our decade in Philadelphia where—to make it through the harsh winters—I guzzled hot tea by the liter. Occasionally bits of Spanish fig cake helped. But it isn’t just for tea. As a bar snack or part of an appetizer spread, fig cake complements Manchego cheese, a slice of membrillo, and a small bowl of olives. It doesn’t hate a glass of sherry or port if you roll that way.

Now fig cake isn’t your typical baked cake like red velvet or a pound cake; it’s a dense little drum of dried figs mixed with Marcona almonds or sometimes hazelnuts. Done properly, it’s not overly sweet since there’s little more than figs and nuts in it. Mitica makes a popular version and Zingerman’s sells chucks of the stuff.

But there’s also a way to make it at home with no cooking at all.

While researching sweetened whiskeys this morning, I came across a recipe for A Spanish Dessert Treat in a 1904 English candy-making manual. Yeah, I said candy-making manual. I like sugar work and collect old candy books. You wanna make something of it?

The little brown tome bearing Alan Davidson’s fishy bookplate I picked up for a measly $30 from Bonnie Slotnik*. The Treat inside it was a dead ringer for the fig cake I knew back East.

This recipe calls for fresh bay leaves to be inserted between layers of the cake. It’s not just a matter of taste. Old importer guides and grocer manuals report that bay leaves packed in bundles of imported figs helped prevent insect infestation. Layer some in if you have access to fresh bay and like the taste. Dried sounds…unappetizing. Ignore Mrs. Rattray’s suggestions of gilding this particular lily with sugar.

A Spanish Dessert Treat

Split some fresh-dried figs of the best quality, “pulled figs” [see below] by preference, and arrange in each three or four split blanched almonds; close the fruit and put it in layers in a screw tin, such as a small brawn tin, or into a jar in which increasingly heavy weights can be put; between each layer put a few fresh bay-leaves; when the whole mass is perfectly solid, the pressure having been daily increased, lift it out and cut into slices with a sharp knife. These may be formed into the basis of a sweet, dusted with icing sugar, and decorated with royal icing.

Mrs. M. E. Rattray (1904)
Sweetmeat-Making at Home.
C. Arthur Pearson, London.

Pulled figs note: Since this is (at least) a 105-year old recipe from a British source, I hit the shelves to see what the Brits would have meant by “pulled figs” just as the 20th century was getting its sea legs. According to The British Pharmaceutical Codex (1907),

“Natural" figs are those which are packed loose and retain to some extent their original shape. “Pulled" figs have been kneaded and pulled to make them supple; these are usually packed into small boxes for exportation, and are considered to be the best variety. "Pressed” figs have been closely packed in boxes so that they are compressed into discs.

Snip off any remaining stems regardless of which kind of dried figs used.

*I’ve scored a few of Andy Smith’s discards from Bonnie as well. Few trips to New York are complete without a stop in her little used cookbook store. At least not when you’re a book geek like me.

Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks
163 West Tenth Street
New York, New York 10014-3116
phone: 212-989-8962
fax: 212-989-8102
bonnieslotnickbooks@earthlink.net

Bittered Wine

Among bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts who make their own bitters, some recipes stand out for their uncommon ingredients—cocoa, chipotles, or mahleb, for instance. Others for their technique.

The usual method is to macerate seeds, bark, roots, leaves, and other aromatic and bittering agents in alcohol. Sometimes all the ingredients are put in a container all at once in a mass. Other methods call for a series of alcoholic tinctures (e.g., one jar of bitter orange peel, one of cardamom, one of gentian, one of cherry leaves or celery seeds, etc.) to be mixed once each has achieved a sufficient concentration.

M. E. Steedman falls under the "unusual technique" camp by calling for an actual fermentation of an aged bitter wine. Though related to cocktail bitters, bittered wines are older, less alcoholic, and more clearly intended to be tonic medicines. Here, his technique for a wormwood and gentian mash gets a dose of yeast to create a low-alcohol wash (probably around 6% abv), but not before boiling part of it. Finally, it’s cleared with isinglass and further fermentation stopped by adding brandy.

Slainte!

Bitter Wine

Boil 6 gallons of water, 15 lb. pure cane sugar and 3 oz. ginger together for half an hour, skimming when necessary, then pour into a large vessel containing 1½ pints of wormword, 3 pints each of red and green camomile, 3 oz. of camomile flowers, 1½ oz. of gentian root, and 2 handfuls of rosemary. Cover and infuse for five days, then boil part of the liquid and add it to the remainder to make the whole lukewarm. Stir in 6 table-spoonfuls of liquid yeast, and strain into a cask (reserving about a gallon to fill up the cask as the fermentation subsides), bung lightly til the hissing noise ceases, then add one and a half ounces of dissolved isinglass, and one and a half pints of good brandy. Stop the cask securely, and in 9 months bottle off and keep for six months longer.

~ Home-Made Beverages and American Drinks
M. E. Steedman (nd) The Food and Cookery Publishing Agency, London.

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