Hot Buttered...Tea?

Three months in, we’re still learning the quirks of our new home. The old Craftsman house is built over a slope that levels out into a deep back yard. Unlike any other place — every place, in fact — I’ve ever lived, there’s a crawlspace underneath. Towards the back of the house, right where the lot evens out, there’s so much clearance under the floorboards that, if I stoop just a bit, I can almost walk comfortably. This means we have decent storage for lawn equipment, surf boards, paint buckets, and like that.

It also means, with all that circulating air right under our feet, that the mornings at the new digs are cold as hell. Daytime, it’s still warm enough for shorts in winter here in San Diego, so I’m not complaining. Well, not much, anyway. But I wake before dawn most days when the house is coldest. On these bracing mornings, it’s big, flannel shirts for me, thick socks, multiple layers, and tea: plenty of hot tea.

As I mentioned, tea alone is a thin fuel, so when I stumbled across the cream-bolstered, buttered tea from Tibet known as pocha, I decided to give it a go. Nate Tate writes about his experience with the stuff in Feeding the Dragon:

"He [drink],"Tenzin said, handing me a chipped ceramic bowl filled with warm butter tea, called pocha. I was tired and sore from days of trekking in the high mountains, and the buttery tea soothed my parched throat and the bowl warmed my cold hands. Tibetans drink dozens of cups of this restorative butter tea a day. Not only does it quench thirst but it is also a satisfying drink packed with energy to sustain people throughout the day.

It’s not my everyday tea, and I’ll ditch it once we’re clear of the worst of our winter storms, but with the sun just starting to peek through the shutters and no one — not even the cat — yet stirring, it’s just the thing to stave off the frigid morning air. In Tibet, you're likely to find this tea made with yak's milk. You'll forgive me, I hope, if I stick with cream. There's only so much authenticity I care to tackle at six in the morning.

Tibetan Butter Tea
Serves 4

4 cups water
1 heaping Tbl loose black tea
½ tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 Tbl unsalted butter
2/3 cup half-and-half

Combine the water and tea in a medium saucepan, bring to a boil, and then turn off the heat and let steep for 5 minutes. Use a fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth to strain the liquid over a large bowl; discard the tea leaves. Transfer the liquid back to the saucepan and bring to a boil, then decrease the heat to a simmer. Add the salt, sugar, butter, and half-and-half and whisk until the butter has completely dissolved and a little foam forms on the surface. Serve the tea in small bowls.

Mary Kate Tate and Nate Tate (2011)
Feeding the Dragon: A Culinary Travelogue Through China with Recipes
304 pages (paperback)
Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449401112
$24.99

Goes well with:

• Iced tea. It's my quotidian quaff, my everyday guzzler. Here's how I make the stuff by the gallon.
• Buttered tea is not so far from the spiced masala chai (well, you know, ditch the butter, add the spices) I tend to make by the quart and keep in a Thermos to warm me on mornings like this.
• Nasty. An iced tea encounter prompt me to ponder the approaches of two businessmen and what the most vile things I've eaten may be.

Homemade Thai Iced Tea

Cool your boots with a tall Thai tea

Summer is coming. With it comes blazing sun and sweltering nights, the kind of nights you don't want anyone coming near you in bed, much less actually trying to snuggle up next to you. It is the season of cool showers, cold beers, and punch-spiked watermelons — anything to keep the sweat demons at bay. Iced tea production, common enough around here any time of year, goes into overdrive. Some days, I'll guzzle a gallon of plain black Assam or orange pekoe iced teas. For particularly hot nights, though, or when I want a counterbalance to some ferocious curry, I'll make a batch of Thai tea. Poured over ice and dolled up with dairy, it's sweet, soothing respite from the heat.

For many, the making of Thai tea is a mystery. Oddly orange with unidentified exotic smells and tastes, its concoction is often left to restaurateurs and vendors who specialize in such things. That's a pity when it can be made so cheaply and easily at home. And the tastes, while they may be exotic, are familiar enough in other contexts: vanilla, cinnamon, star anise, black tea, and tamarind. Orange flower water as well as artificial dyes sometimes go into the dry tea blend. Come on; you didn't think that orange color came just from natural, wholesome tamarind and tea, did you? The brand I use, Pantainorasingh, comes in one-pound bags and is readily available at many Asian markets or through Amazon.

Thai Iced Tea 

4 cups water
½ cup Thai tea blend (Pantainorasingh brand)
½ cup sugar (white or — my preference — demerara)
3-4 Tbl half-and-half* 

In a 1.5-2 liter pot, bring the water to a boil. Add the tea blend and sugar, then return the mixture to a slow, soft boil. Boil five minutes, then turn off the heat and let the dark, aromatic mix cool 10-15 minutes. Strain it with a fine-mesh sieve or a cotton strainer into a jar or large bottle and refrigerate. 

To serve, fill a 16-20 glass with ice, then pour cooled, sweetened tea to within two fingers of the rim. Finish the drink by pouring in 3-4 tablespoons (1½ -2 oz) of half-and-half.

*The term "half-and-half" confuses some people, so allow me to quote from an earlier piece about goat cheese ice cream:

Half-and-half is, nominally, half cream and half milk in the United States. But that ain’t necessarily so. As Anne Mendelson explains in Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, it is a “term with no uniform meaning.” Practically, it refers to a light, creamy liquid with 10.5-18% milkfat, depending on the state and manufacturer. Richer than milk, not as rich as heavy cream. Since light cream can range from 18-30% milkfat, there may be some overlap between it and half-and-half. Experiment and substitute at your peril/discretion.

Goes well with:

• Brown Cubes of Joy (coffee ice cubes) in New Mexico.
• Soulless Ginger Lemonade (and plain without the ginger)
• I get serious about the preparation of a proper cup of tea, but still have enough sense to laugh at myself for doing so. I'm not the only one: Rip it. Dip it. Sip it. 
• Masala chai is something I'm less likely to make in the summer months, but when I do brew up a batch on those mornings when I'm up at 4:30, here's how it's done.
• If you know it's going to be especially hot, lay in some bread pan ice blocks for your cool drinks.
• Finally, making plain, everyday, unsweetened iced tea is even simpler than the Thai tea here. Grab some loose tea, a gallon of water, and get brewing. 

Fat Lips Spill Sips

Hey, bartender! You spilled something...

I don't drink coffee, so I use my Bodum French coffee press for tea. The press is elegant, it’s a perfect size, and it can withstand the shock of boiling water I pour over loose leaves. It also usually stays in the cabinet because when I pour from it, it spills. Every time.

When we spill liquids, we do so for very specific reasons. We are drunk, for instance, or clumsy. I myself am stranger to neither state. But even the most steady and sober imbiber can end up with a spreading wetness when pouring from a vessel that has the wrong kind of lip. As much as I like the Bodum press, its lip — thick, rounded — is the wrong kind.

I’ve been reading up on the physics of pouring lately to learn how best to avoid dribbling hot tea on my hands and the counter. The search led me to India, physics journals, and that bar-raising Canadian, Jamie Boudreau.

Any number of videos online may be found showing Indian chai wallahs “pulling” or “throwing” tea for their customers (see, for instance, this one). Bartenders may recognize the move as first cousin to the back-and-forth tossing of high-proof whiskey needed to create a Blue Blazer. Well, minus the flaming whiskey. Some think that thick mugs able to withstand high temperatures are de rigeur for bartenders and home enthusiasts wanting to recreate the 19th century Blue Blazer. But it turns out that they may be handicapping themselves by using clunky old pewter mugs.

In their book Mangoes & Curry Leaves, Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid describe the long arcs of hot liquid Indian tea sellers pour to froth their tea:

“Throwing tea” is a subcontinental tradition. A person making tea will often pour the milk and tea mixture from one container to another and then back again, over and over, in order to blend and froth the tea. You’ll see people do this all over the Subcontinent, but nowhere as dramatically as in South India where a tea maker will have an arc of tea that is three to four feet long flying through the air. An expert thrower never spills and can work with the smallest of containers, even while gazing in a completely different direction…

They go on to say, almost in passing, that one of the tricks to learning the move is to use containers with thin lips. This is an important note. It turns out that fat-lipped containers are particularly prone to dribbles and spills. In fact, there’s a name for the phenomenon: the teapot effect.

The teapot effect is as old as creation, but it wasn’t explained until 1957, when Joseph B. Keller of New York University tackled the problem of why tea dribbles from the spout of teapots rather than pouring without incident into cups. In his later essay, Spilling, Keller explains why liquids tend to dribble at the point of the pour:

It is simply that at the pouring lip the pressure in the liquid is lower than the pressure in the surrounding air, so that the air pushes the liquid against the lip and against the outside of the pouring container.

In a pouring container with a thick, fat, or rounded lip, this actually can cause the liquid to flow backwards along the rim of the pouring container and along its outer surface. That’s where the dribble comes from and why I end up with tea on the counter. There’s more — much more — to be said about the teapot effect; streamlines, flow rates, atmospheric pressure, velocity vectors, etc. Jearl Walker offers a more detailed examination of the forces at work here.

The take-home points for bartenders, drinks enthusiasts, and those who would practice throwing tea with minimal spillage, though, are:

• Use containers with thin lips. Most two-part Boston shakers, for instance, are perfect. But pouring from the metal canister rather than the glass is less likely to cause spills.
• Pour from containers that are only partly full. Once it hits the lip, the liquid from a partially full glass is moving at a greater velocity and is less likely to spill along the outer container. Also, in order to spill, the liquid would have to turn a large angle — which is unlikely.
• Increase the angle of the pour as much as possible. Poured at a right angle (90°), a liquid has far more opportunity to travel back along the outer surface of the pouring vessel. Increase that angle, and you’ll end up with a cleaner pour. 
• Pour quickly. Liquids traveling at greater speed is more apt to go where you want it. 

Jamie Boudreau demonstrates a Hot Toddy done Blue Blazer-style below. Notice that the lips on his metal mugs (1) are relatively thin and (2) actually angle away from the mugs’ apertures, thereby increasing the angle the burning liquid would have to overcome in order to spill along the outer surface. Seems especially important when dealing with flaming overproof rum, no?



I still use the Bodum press — after all: perfect size, can withstand boiling water, and all that. But after reading Keller, I now know why it's better not to fill it quite so much and to pour quickly. There's nothing I can do about that lip, though.

Goes well with:

• Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid (2005) Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent. Artisan Books, New York.
• Joseph B. Keller (1957) Teapot Effect. Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 28, No. 8, pages 859-864.
• -- (1988) Spilling. In Kurti, Nicholas and Giana (ed) But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Adam Hilger, Philadelphia. I mentioned this book a few weeks ago in a confession for my love of port wine.

Bad News for Iced Tea Drinkers

The pain was so bad 

that once it felt 

like I was delivering a child 

made out of razor blades.

~ Mark Mulac, former iced tea drinker

I have said elsewhere how much I enjoy iced tea. If all the liquids I've consumed over my life were tallied, iced tea would dominate the list. More than beer, more than whiskey, more than soda (which I hardly drink anyway), and certainly more than plain water, I guzzle the stuff. Oh, I drink hot teas, too, but I can go a day without hot tea. Not iced.

Imagine my dismay when I read that plain ol' iced tea contains high concentrations of oxalate, a key chemical in the formation of kidney stones. In fact, John Milner, a urology instructor at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, says "For many people, iced tea is potentially one of the worst things they can drink."

Kidney stones are crystals that form in urinary tracts. Word is they're exquisitely painful. I've never been afflicted with any, but I do recall with horror a scene in the HBO series Deadwood in which the bestial Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane) is laid low by gleets — another name for the things — and passes them. Warning: the clip t'aint for the squeamish.



Adding lemon juice to tea supposedly helps since its citrates inhibit the formation of stones in the first place. But damn. At more than a gallon per diem on hot days, I'm going to have to re-think my drinking habits.

Who knew it'd be iced tea I'd be reconsidering?

Goes well with:

• Tea and Whiskey, including my standard recipe for making iced tea by making a preliminary concentrate. 
• Nasty, an encounter with iced tea in San Diego that left me skeeved for days.

Tea and Whiskey

Water? Isn’t that the stuff they put under bridges?
~ unattributed

Must be my Irish blood that leads me to drink more tea and whiskey than water. The water is fine here—after all, I use it to brew the tea and, on occasion, to mellow and cool my whiskey—but drinking straight water is something I do almost exclusively at the gym or on long drives. Face it, during long drives, whiskey does not recommend itself.

How much iced tea do I drink? Made a gallon yesterday. It’s gone. Time for a new batch. Here’s how I make the quotidian stuff...by starting off with an infusion strong enough to stand up to old-school alcoholic party punches.


Everyday Iced Tea

24 g (just shy of an ounce) black tea, such as orange pekoe, either loose or in bags
3 cups/750 ml water

Bring the water to boil in a non-reactive pot with a tight-fitting lid. Turn off the heat, add the tea, and cover. Let steep five minutes. Meanwhile fill a gallon pitcher ¾ full with cold water (you’re going to add very hot strong tea in a few minutes, so the cold water absorbs the heat and prevents the pitcher from cracking/melting).

After five minutes, strain the tea from the water (or lift out the tea bags, if using them) and pour the resulting strong tea into the cold water. Top off with more cold water to make a full gallon.

Pour over ice in individual glasses right away or refrigerate.

Sweet tea is another topic. We’ll tackle that some other day.

.

Brown Cubes of Joy: Coffee Ice Cubes in New Mexico

Yo, dawg; I heard you like coffee in your coffee.

Even though I don't drink coffee, I guzzle tea and prefer local to corporate coffee shops for my caffeine fixes. This isn't strictly a buy-local sentiment (though that plays into it). Rather, I like the attention to details the small players often show. Something as simple as a bottle of simple syrup put out next to the granulated stuff lets me know there's an iced tea drinker in-house who dislikes gritty undissolved sugar as much as I do. Individual glasses of iced tea brewed to order are a nice touch. Then there's coffee ice cubes, something I'd never seen done at Starbucks.*

When we were in Santa Fe this weekend, the sidekicks and I stopped for our morning doses at Station Coffee & Tea in an old railyard now repurposed for restaurants and shopping. Station offers iced coffee. Nothing new there; nearly every American corporate shop does. The difference is that Station keeps two buckets of coffee ice cubes in its ice cream case. When an order for iced coffee comes in, barristas simply use these cubes rather than plain water iced cubes. The boys marveled at the goodness of the coffee and the fact that as the cube melted, their coffees stayed strong.

The recipe is simple; it's coffee. What? You...you need more? Ok. Freeze it in ice cube trays. Use those cubes rather than plain water ice cubes when making iced coffee or coffee cocktails. At home, you could store them in a sealed plastic bag or other container that won't pick up freezer odors (or impart their own to the freezer's contents; coffee-flavored butter, anyone?). My mom used to do the same thing with orange juice in the summer when I was a kid for my morning juice. Nice to see it back in play.

Station Fine Coffee and Tea
530 South Guadalupe Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.988.2470
stationcoffeehouse.com

* I should say I've never seen coffee ice cubes done on purpose at Starbucks. There was always something vaguely unpleasant about their iced tea. I'd go, though, to visit with friends who liked the place. Not until I left a cup of iced tea sit untended for a long stretch and then reached to finish it did the unpleasantness hit me: the melted ice cubes taste of coffee. Maybe the ice absorbs ambient coffee molecules in the air. I don't know. That's my guess, anyway. This isn't a problem for — or even noticeable to — coffee drinkers, but for finicky-ass tea drinkers like me, it was a deal-killer. That was the last time I ever bought Starbucks iced tea.

Goes well with:

• Ever wonder why some vessels dribble liquids more readily than others? The teapot effect comes into play. Whether you're pouring from teapots, cocktail shakers, French presses, or coffee cups, there's a reason you want to go with narrow lipped vessels. Read on to learn why.
• Of course, I like hot tea, too. On chilly mornings I'll crank out a pot of masala chai — sweet hot tea spiced with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and a few other odds and ends — to fuel the morning work.
• Rip it. Dip it. Sip it. Are you man enough for tea?

Swedish Punsch (and Lemon Punsch Pie)

In which Rowley steals a recipe and lays the groundwork for updating an old Shaker classic dessert

(which was posted later that week).

I was skeptical of the boozy tea-and-cardamom flavored liqueur called Swedish punsch (or, punch), mostly because I’m leery of Scandinavian culinary delights such as lutefisk, reindeer, and whale. I shouldn’t have worried. There is aquavit, after all, and a robust home distilling tradition in those frosty northern climes. Plus, I like tea; cardamom can be delicious; and punch usually goes down without a fight.

Final realization? I should have made this long ago.

Given the cardamom and lemon, two flavors that find their way into cookies, pies, and cakes, the recipe also got me thinking about how the spent lemons (used to flavor the spirits) could be incorporated into baking instead of getting pitched once they'd given up their flavor to the punsch.

Now, you could drink this liqueur neat, chilled, but there’s a tradition of using it as a cocktail ingredient that’s a better route. First thing to do (that is, if you can’t find a bottle of the actual stuff) is to score a bottle of Batavia Arrack von Oosten, a Javanese rice-and-sugar cane spirit that is once again available in the US through Haus Alpenz. That will give a noticeable funky character to the final product. Which is good.













For a recipe using the Arrack—please, the Indonesian stuff, not the eastern Mediterranean anise liqueurs—I turned to Erik Ellestad’s Underhill Lounge. Erik’s recipe makes about three liters; a little much for something I’d never tried to make before, so I scaled the recipe to make one liter.

If I had known how good it would be, how fantastic in mixed drinks, I would have gone for the full three-liter batch.

Next time.

Swedish Punsch (one liter yield)

Spirit Base

• 17 oz/500ml El Dorado 5 Year demarara rum
• 8.5 oz/250ml Batavia Arrack van Oosten
• 3 lemons, sliced thinly and seeded

Put the lemon slices, along with any accumulated juice, into a half-gallon non-reactive container with a sealable lid (e.g., a big ol’ Mason or le Parfait preserving jar). Let macerate six hours. Don’t leave it all day or overnight; you don’t want to extract too much of the bitterness from the lemon. It is important to slice the lemons as thinly as possible, say no thicker than a credit card (note that I don't follow my advice in the picture; the pie would've been much more tender had I done so).

Meanwhile, prepare the tea syrup (below) and allow it to cool to room temperature. After six hours, pour the arrack/rum infusion off the lemon slices (don’t squeeze them). Set the enhooched lemon slices aside (you may want to use them to make the lemon punsch pie. If not, pitch 'em, compost 'em, or slop the hogs with them).

Pour the flavored rum mix through a funnel into the one-liter bottle containing the tea syrup. Shake gently to mix and set aside at least one day to mellow.

Tea Syrup

• 8.5 oz/250ml boiling water
• 1 Tbl/6 grams orange pekoe tea
• 2 cardamom pods, crushed
• 1 1/3 cups/280g demarara sugar

Place the dry loose tea and crushed cardamom pods in French press. Heat a small pot of water to the boil, then measure 250ml. Pour this hot water over the tea and cardamom and steep for six minutes.

While tea is steeping, pour sugar through a funnel into a one-liter bottle.

After six minutes, strain the tea (through a coffee filter or a dampened paper towel or cheesecloth if necessary) into the bottle containing the sugar. Seal the bottle and shake the holy living bejesus out of it until the sugar dissolves completely.

To get you started on some tasty drinks, here’s a trio of recipes that use punsch. Try them all and for more recipes, check out cocktaildb.com.

Boomerang
3/4 oz rye (Sazerac)
3/4 oz Swedish punsch
3/4 oz dry vermouth
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 dash fresh lemon juice

Stir in mixing glass with ice & strain.

Doctor Cocktail
2 oz Jamaica rum
1 oz Swedish punsch
1 oz fresh lime juice

Shake in iced cocktail shaker & strain.

~ from Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails

100% Cocktail
2 oz Swedish punsch
½ oz fresh orange juice
½ oz fresh lemon juice
One drop of Angostura bitters (for garnish)

Shake punsch and juices with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a single drop of bitters.

~ from Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz’s The Art of the Bar: Cocktail’s Inspired by the Classics

And that pie recipe that uses the spent lemons from the arrack/rum infusion? Hold yer horses. It's coming. [edit: now it's posted]

Texas Tea, a Punch in Disguise

Texas food has been on my mind, apparently, for years. When I pulled down my accretion of Lone Star cookbooks, the stack reached to my hip. As I research something else entirely, I’m earmarking drinks recipes. Tequila, as you can imagine, looms large in the ingredients lists. Beer, too. Lots of citrus juices and occasional jolts of mezcal come into play.

It’s with no surprise that I suddenly remember my Texas cousins measuring driving distance in units of beers: “Oh, it’s about two beers east of here.” Serious? Joking? Just testing my reaction? It occurs to me that “Texas dent” may refer not just to the indentation one puts on a can of beer to mark it as one’s own, but to car and truck bodies influenced by overindulgence in barley pop.

Mary Faulk Koock’s midcentury The Texas Cookbook puts a slightly more elegant spin on Texas sips. Her method of adding water to a strong tea base is pretty close to how I make iced tea. But then notice what gets served alongside as a matter of course.

Darjeeling Tea (for 40 to 50 cups)

Save time by making a tea concentrate beforehand. Bring 1 ½ qts cold fresh water to a full rolling boil. Remove from heat and immediately add ¼ lb. loose tea. Stir to immerse leaves. Cover. Let stand 5 minutes. Strain into teapot and leave until tea time. At the table, pour about 1 oz. concentrate into each cup, and add fresh boiling water from a teakettle. Serve with a choice of lemon slices, rum, sugar, and cream.

Lemon, sugar, tea, and rum in your cup? Oh, Texas. You may call it tea, but I know punch when I see it. It’s a shame you’re 132 beers away or I’d visit more often.

Goes well with:

• Mary Faulk Koock (1965) The Texas Cookbook: From Barbecue to Banquet — an Informal View of Dining and Entertaining the Texas Way. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. 
• Homesick Texan, Lisa Fain's blog about the food of Texas from her digs in New York. Ms. Fain, as you can see plainly, takes better photos than I.

Ginger Tea After Shouting at the Pipes

Sunday nights, I often meet friends out for beers and tequila. Not last night.

Last night, as my friends gamely tried to have as enjoyable a time as they could manage without me (this is how I imagine it goes when I'm not around), I was curled on my bathroom floor, sweating, shivering, too weak even to reach for the phone. "Come," I wanted to plead. "Bring me water." I had an inexplicable, insatiable craving for butterscotch candies. My febrile hallucinations were occasionally interrupted with bouts of roaring at the porcelain. Afterwards, the cool tile floor felt so, so good.

When Dr. Morpheus came home hours later, the verdict was swift: food poisoning.

Though we didn't have butterscotch candies, I got water and, after a while, ginger tea. We call the stuff ginger tea, but the hot drink is more properly a decoction. That is, it's a highly seasoned liquid that's been flavored by long, low cooking of plant matter in water. See? It's kinda like tea. Calling it a decoction around the house, though, is like calling a possum an opossum; technically correct, but a bit contrived.

Ginger has long been regarded as soothing to upset stomachs. You may recognize it from that ginger pie I sometimes bake. I break out this decoc...this tea now and then to combat queasiness. Even if the effect is a placebo, sipping this hot, bracing tea helps me feel just a little better. But I tell you this: when I'm wrapped in a towel to ward off chills and my clammy, sweaty head is pressed against the cool toilet like it's dispensing God's own heavenly grace, a little better makes a world of difference.

Ginger Tea for an Upset Stomach

The proportions here are to taste, but the end result should smell and taste strongly of ginger. I like a bit of honey to round out taste and to soothe my throat, but leave it out if you got some beef against honey.

1 quart/liter of water (more or less)
8 oz/ 230g fresh ginger
Honey (optional)

Wash but do not peel the ginger. Slice into fat coins or ovals. Put them in a nonreactive pot big enough to hold around 1.5 quarts. Pour the water over it. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes. Strain some into a glass or mug, sweeten with honey to taste, and return the pot to a low flame.

Top off with fresh water now and then as you strain off more to drink until the ginger loses its potency or you just get sick of the stuff. 

I haven't tried this next bit, but it stands to reason that when you're done with the drink and there's some left in the pot, you could strain off the solids and add twice the volume of sugar as tan ginger water is left. Heat just until the sugar dissolves and you've got yourself a nice ginger syrup for cocktails or drenching cakes or whatever.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I still feel wrecked, like I've been mauled by a cougar or fell off a speeding truck. I'm off for some Ibuprofen and tea.

Masala Chai

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.

Rip It. Dip It. Sip It.

When people ask me "Who do you write for?" my stock and somewhat glib answer is "Whomever pays me." The food and drink jobs undeniably are some of the most fun work, but I write and edit for physicians, politicians, film directors, governments, universities, museums, other authors...if there's a paycheck involved, we're halfway there.

Through it all, I drink tea. Hot tea, iced tea, Assam, Earl Grey. If it's Camellia sinensis, I'm in. Now, when I'm at the keyboard, I myself am never bothered by thoughts that drinking all this tea is somehow unmanly, some effete affectation. I do, however, understand that lesser men occasionally may be plagued by such doubts. For them, I offer a short video and words of inspiration: Empires will fall! The steam will rise!

Are you man enough to watch?


Goes well with:

• Professor Elemental knows a thing or two about tea. Here he is singing its praises. 
• My writing site is here: www.matthew-rowley.com

Martin Cate Blows the Lid (Almost) off Tiki Oasis

Whatever you do, do it with all your might.

~ PT Barnum (1880)

The Art of Money Getting

PT Barnum, Robert Tilton, Huey Long — showmen all, masters of swaying their audiences. To their ranks, consider adding San Francisco bar man Martin Cate.

At the recent Tiki Oasis in San Diego, Cate presented The Persuasive Power of Punch, a thumbnail history of the origins of alcoholic punch. What’s he know about punch? Plenty. As owner of the San Francisco rum bar Smuggler’s Cove, Cate presides over a drinks menu that spans centuries, going back far earlier than the mid-century tiki drinks for which he is widely known. But from Planters’ Punch to the Zombie, tiki has its share of potent multi-ingredient drinks that fall squarely in the punch tradition.

The room itself in the Crowne Plaza Hotel was divided into five main sections, all arranged in a rough circle around a tarp-covered central table. Now, tiki crowds skew slightly older, whiter, straighter, and more coupled than I’m used to in drinkin’ buddies, but a more friendly crowd you couldn’t ask for. The room quickly filled with Hawaiian shirts, tropical dresses, and a handful of fezzes. There were vintage cat’s eye glasses, beehive hair, coconut purses, and pineapple bracelets. And the attendees were positively gleeful.

The crowd filed in, grabbed cups of welcoming punch, and started heading for spots at the surrounding tables, each of which was outfitted with a small cup covered in plastic wrap. Each section’s cups contained different liquids. As I tried to make out what they were, a volunteer pointed me to a seat. “If you sit where I tell you,” she sighed, “this would all go a lot faster.”

So I did. And Martin launched into his history of punch — its origins in India and introduction to Europe through the British East India Company. He discussed how the very name punch is said to derive from the Hindustani word panch, meaning “five” (for the five ingredients common in 17th century punches), its place in pre-industrial England and America, and how its popularity declined over the years.

But those cat’s eye glasses, those fezzes, and those clusters of beehives kept turning back to the tarp in the center of the room. Fingers stealthily moved toward the cups, worrying loose edges of plastic wrap. Noses went into the cups as the audience tried to suss out their contents. Mine was clearly strong black tea. Cate, seemingly oblivious, began using a punch ladle as a pointer for his slides. It only made the audience more antsy.

He shared some tips for finding recipes and serving punches out of various vessels from bowls to coolers. “So…anyway,” he wrapped up, “that’s it. Thanks for coming. I hope you guys had a good time.” Scattered light applause began to ripple through the audience while shouts of “No, no!” arose in other parts. “What?” he asked. “Did I forget something?” After more teasing, he acknowledged there might be one more thing to do.

“I am here” Hands begin drumming the tables.
“To present to you” The drumming gets faster, harder, while yelps and cheers leap forth.
“The single most powerful weapon ever crafted.” The cheers get even louder.
“Behold!” The tarp is drawn back in one dramatic reveal.
“The world’s. Most. Powerful. Volcano bowl!” The crowd goes absolutely apeshit.

There, on the table, is an enormous volcano bowl fashioned from a Home Depot koi pond. Men and women — with, one presumes, respectable day jobs — are on their feet, snapping pictures, recording video, looks of delirious joy on their faces. Is this a talk about punches or a dustbowl tent revival? The glory and the power of rum has struck these poor souls and I’ll be damned if some of them aren’t speaking in tongues. Hawaiian, if I’m not mistaken.

Cate asks each section to come forth and contribute its ingredient from the plastic cups. In goes cup after cup of fresh lime juice. “Come up here and feed it. Feeeeed it.” The bowl’s capacity is said to be 40 gallons. The sweetness of a rich Demerara sugar goes in. “Yes, yes, give it more … Excellent.” Vanilla and cinnamon Trader Tiki syrups. After that, tea, tea, and more tea. The crowd chants “Rum! Rum! Rum! Rum!” They get their wish: in goes a healthy dose of two rums. Our MC uses first a giant whisk, then an electric immersion blender to mix the ingredients. Red lights come on at the bottom of the bowl and the bubbler kicks in.

“This needs something,” Cate notes. “Maybe it’s fire.” 

And with that, this modern-day Barnum blew the roof off Tiki Oasis. Well, not literally. But the fire marshal might’ve gotten a little freaked as the audience screamed its approval. A large crouton, soaked in 160-proof lemon extract is set in place above the bubbling liquid, lit, and then blown into a huge fireball.

Audience pandemonium.

Almost in a frenzy, Cate passes around long straws, tells the crowd to put two together to make even longer straws. Some clatter to the floor in a maelstrom of tiki madness. From each section, a contingent springs forth to sample with double-long long straws. My photographer — it’s his first Tiki Oasis — looks at me in amazement. “These are grown-ass adults,” he marvels “acting like they’re 21 years old.”

And that’s maybe part of the magic of Tiki Oasis and tiki crowds in general. Grown-ass adults sometimes need to act like kids. If that entails drinking and setting things on fire, then so be it. I had a blast (a contained one) and will be back next year.

Tiki Oasis 10th Anniversary Punch

1 oz Rhum JM VSOP
1 oz Zaya rum
1 oz strong Darjeeling tea
1 oz fresh lime juice
.25 oz Demerara simple syrup (optional/to taste)
.5 oz Trader Tiki Cinnamon Syrup (see below)
.5 oz Trader Tiki Vanilla Syrup (see below)

For a single serving, mix together with ice. For a crowd, just multiply each ingredient, ice it, and serve it forth.

Goes well with:

• A big block of ice. Note that punch gets less watered down if all the mixed ingredients are chilled and served on a single block of ice.
• Trader Tiki syrups are fantastic vehicles for adding exotic spices and flavorings to tropical cocktails. Check them out here.
• Smuggler's Cove, Martin Cate's bar in San Francisco.
• Tiki Oasis, the annual San Diego tiki gathering. I'm already planning to hit up Tiki Oasis next year. If you go, get tickets early: they sell out fast. 

Photos © 2010 by Douglas Dalay. 

Bookshelf: How to Drink

In all honesty, I gave Victoria Moore’s book short shrift when a copy landed on my desk. Plain jacket, presumptuous title. How to Drink? I’m Matthew Rowley, damn it. I’m a connoisseur of teas, have designed stills, own more bitters than shoes, have hauled endangered bottles across borders, hunted forgotten ingredients, and faced down violently paranoid moonshiners without incident. If I know how to do anything, I bloody well know how to drink, thank you.

I can only imagine I was in a monumentally Irish mood when the book arrived.

How to Drink is a delight. It works on two levels. First, there’s the design — an old fashioned, charming sensibility is at work that blends typeset with illustration and suggests at turns both Arts and Crafts Movement and Hatch Show Print fonts. With so much of our modern media reliant on videos and photos, it’s refreshing to find playfulness in something so simple as letters turned slightly askew to become something else entirely.

Second, and more to the point, Moore’s is an opinionated but commonsense and welcoming tone. She writes most frequently on wine in her columns — a genre I largely avoid — but the book also covers tea, coffee, juices, cocktails, cool weather drinks, hot weather drinks, glamorous sips, and homey quaffs. I’m especially taken with her concept of a “good” drink as the right drink poured at just the right moment. 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.”

Although she has her own voice, I’d put Moore's writing on the same shelf with Nigel Slater’s, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s, and even — there at the end — H.E. Bates'. It is writing such as hers that lays the rationale of nostalgia: we take time to do things properly because doing so coaxes the very best out of us and what we do, eat, and drink. Moore is very much about the rituals of drinking, say, having a favorite tea cup that makes tea from any other less enjoyable or even a downright insult. She devotes four pages to the gin & tonic, then spends another nine pages on gin — what it is, which brands she prefers, and why. Very sensible. She is as exacting in her approach to an old fashioned as I am and I suspect we could each make the other a pot of tea and be happy with the results.

Yet as much as I know about the hows and whys of drinking, Moore offers surprises. I detest coffee, yet she brings as much attention to detail to bear on the subject that, despite myself, I read every word. I’m still not buying any, but if I had to do so for someone else, I’ve got a better grip than I did of how to go about doing it. Far from being a toss-off, How to Drink is exactly the kind of book with which I like to curl on the couch and mull over why we drink as much as what we drink. 

Since blood oranges are in season, I offer you what Moore calls her favorite drink (and her family calls “the Campari and blood-orange thing”). Simple, light, a solid balance of bitter and sweet. I’m putting it on the menu as our weather warms and my mind turns to lazy weekend brunches.

1 bottle sparkling white wine
2 cups blood orange juice
5 to 6 ounces Campari

Pour the ingredients into a jug. Serve in small champagne flutes or wineglasses.

Victoria Moore (2009)
How to Drink
344 pages (hardback)
Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740785745
$18.99

Goes well with:

• Moore may be familiar to British readers from her wine column in the Guardian.
• Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee, has for years put out fantastic posters. I don’t yet have one of their big woodblock prints on my wall, but one day…

Dreams of Salt and Honey

Salt, honey, Guinness, and chocolate

For decades, I’ve bought ice cream books: professional catalogs, technical manuals, and amateur how-to books from the 19th century, 20th century, and the latest offerings that cater to America’s increased love of bold flavors. They inform what goes on my table both at home and when I'm on the road. From cider ices in New England and cinnamon gelato in Amsterdam to Midwestern frozen custards laced with chunks of cherry pie, I've eaten my share of ice creams. Last week, I hit Scoops ice cream shop in Los Angeles. Their salt and honey ice cream is one of the best I’ve had in years.

Scoops has a few standard ice cream flavors in the case such as brown bread, but on any given day, you may also find Jim Beam and ricotta, Guinness and chocolate, white chocolate and Oreo, avocado and banana, pistachio and jasmine, and the straightforward Earl Grey.

Click to enlarge

A white board against one wall is scrawled in red and black suggestions for additional flavors from customers. The ideas range from earnest-seeming pleas (AVOCADO! and Sugar free for diabetics) through the intriguing (sweet potato, Cheddar/apple pie and — I'd like to see them pull it off — pad thai) to the merely nasty (cheeseburger: cold beef fat is particularly vile). Some that popped for me:

• elderflower
• green tea
• mango-chile-lime
• coconut-basil
• IPA
• ginger and Hennessey
• Thai ice[d] tea
• PBR
• bacon
• black licorice
• jasmine-green apple
• bacon-maple doughnut

I may pass on the sex and KFC original recipe flavors if they ever get made. Jackasses. Thai tea, though, is great as a sorbet drizzled with cream. An orphaned bottle of Thai tea syrup in the fridge got me thinking What the hell am I going to do with that? Make delicious dessert, that's what.

These days, even convenience stores carry the formerly exotic dulce de leche ice cream — but Jim Beam and ricotta or bacon-maple doughnut? I either need to make that kind of thing myself or hunt it down. Because I can’t just haul my ass to LA whenever I get a hankering for unusual ice cream, you know I’ll be tweaking salt and honey recipes.

Let me know if you've got a workable recipe for that, eh?

Scoops
712 N Heliotrope Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(323) 906-2649

There’s a Scoops website, but it’s less about the business than the art that rotates through. Better to check out Scoops' Yelp page for useful information about the ice cream itself.

.

Drinking Advice from Sarah Josepha Hale, 1839

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

After her husband died in 1822, Sarah Hale took on writing work to support her five children. Chances are, you are familiar with her work; the song Mary Had a Little Lamb was based on her 1820 poem. She edited Ladies' Magazine from 1828-1837 and later became editor of the influential Godey's Lady's Book. Among her other works, she published in 1839 The Good Housekeeper. Her advice to housewives of the time strikes sensible notes: beer and warm tea are, indeed, wholesome drinks. Well. Hot tea, anyway; warm tea has no life in it. One can almost see her lips pursed in disapproval, however, when it comes to "fermented liquors." By the time she hits stride with her not-one-drop approach to distilled spirits, we realize that we've tumbled down a rabbit hole into a Puritanical realm of proto-Prohibition.

From The Good Housekeeper, here is Mrs. Hale and her take on appropriate beverages for American households:

WHAT SHALL WE DRINK?

Why water — that is a safe drink for all constitutions and all ages — provided persons only use it when they are naturally thirsty. But do not drink heartily of cold water when heated or greatly fatigued. A cup of warm tea will better allay the thirst and give a feeling of comfort to the stomach which water will not.

Toast and water, common beer, soda-water, and other liquids of a similar kind, if they agree with the stomach, may be used freely without danger. 

Fermented liquors such as porter, ale, and wine, if used at all as a drink, should be very sparingly taken. Distilled spirituous liquors should never be considered drinkable—they may be necessary, sometimes, as a medicine but never, never consider them a necessary item in house-keeping. So important does it appear to me to dispense entirely with distilled spirits, as an article of domestic use, that I have not allowed a drop to enter into any of the recipes contained in this book. 

As the primary effect of fermented liquors, cider, wine, &c is to stimulate the nervous system, and quicken the circulation, these should be utterly prohibited to children and persons of a quick temperament. In truth, unless prescribed by the physician, it would be best to abstain entirely from their use.

Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell. 1839. The Good Housekeeper: Or, The Way to Live Well and to be Well While We Live: Containing Directions for Choosing and Preparing Food, in Regard to Health, Economy and Taste. Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company.

Goes well with:

• William "The Only William" Schmidt pontificates on Why Men Drink in his 1891 bartending manual The Flowing Bowl. 
• W.O Rigby gets into the spirit of Prohibition by thumbing his nose at Volstead with his 1920 fake-out Prohibition Schooners.

Bookshelf: Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook

Ever since Japan’s triple disasters earlier this year, I’ve been getting in as much as I can about Japanese cuisine; this new direction is reflected, predictably, in a growing accretion of books and bottles.

To my pile of books, I recently added Mark Robinson’s Izakaya. It’s a few years old now, but the book is so engrossing that I read it cover-to-cover on a flight to Salt Lake City. The future of Japanese whisky in the wake of this year’s tsunami originally sparked my interest in that country’s distilleries. That initial concern has grown into a broader interest in Japanese eating and drinking habits — in which I am far from expert.

It’s not that I am wholly unfamiliar with Japanese food. After all, friends live in Japan and we have a handful of Japanese markets nearby. But I lean to big, bold flavors and would rather eat any number of Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, or regional Chinese dishes than yet another Southern California sushi roll. Of course, Japanese cuisine is more than sushi, sake, and Sapporo — but it’s a pity we don’t have more authentic izakaya to help us understand the bigger picture.

Robinson is an Australian journalist based in Tokyo. He clearly has spent considerable time in izakaya (pronounced roughly ee-ZAH-ka-ya), small Japanese pubs that are as much about food as they are drink. In fact, he offers “pub” only hesitantly as a translation. Here he sets the scene for one of his favorites and the first of eight profiled in the book:

Every neighborhood deserves a Horoyoi.

Amid the babble of nighttime Ebisu, in southwestern Tokyo, among the mind-numbing array of flashy restaurants dueling for customers, their touts playing the streets, this diminutive semi-basement izakaya has been a fixture in my life since the early 1990s.

I never consciously made it so. Indeed, it was years before I realized that Horoyoi had grown on me — or I had grown into it — to the extent that I relied on it as much as the average Japanese might his or her own “local”: as a modest, welcoming place that came instantly to mind whenever I was arranging to eat and drink with friends and colleagues; to casually celebrate birthdays and New Year’s; to entertain relatives; or to introduce newcomers to izakaya. Over time, I found that it had transcended its status as an occasional destination to become a regular venue for marking some of my life’s milestones: a personal repository of good memories. With minimal décor, reliable, simply seasoned food and cool-headed service, it was a place where I felt at the same time comfortably well known and sufficiently anonymous to be completely myself. I could bring whomever I please, stay as long or short as I wanted, ask questions about the menu, be gregarious, or simply sit and observe. And that’s what the best neighborhood izakaya should be.

He goes on to give about a dozen recipes from Horoyoi and about as many again from each of seven other spots. The recipes range from almost down-home comfort food to a handful of more complex dishes. It would be a mistake, however, to describe any of the recipes as particularly complicated. Pork, noodles, clams, tofu, and potato salad (yes, potato salad) are almost old hat to Western eaters. For ingredients that may not be so familiar, Robinson includes photos and descriptions — wood ear mushrooms, gardenia fruit, yuzu, daikon radish sprouts, wagarashi (Japanese hot mustard), shichimi spice powder, lotus root, and more.

Some of the highlights include asparagus and pork tempura rolls, soy-flavored spareribs, chicken gizzards, cucumber pickles, duck breast with ponzu sauce, miso-cured tofu, steamed and grilled pork with salt, deep-fried tilefish, and the bizarre —but no less intriguing — Raclette-stuffed deep-fried tofu. There’s not one single thing in this book I wouldn’t eat.

This year’s tight travel budget means I have no immediate plans to visit Japan, but I am laying plans to come drinking and learning what to eat with those cocktails I’ve been hearing so much about the past few years.

From the Tokyo izakaya Buchi, sweetened glazed walnuts take on the fermented tenor of the esteemed aged Chinese tea, pu-erh. No pu-erh? Robinson suggests substituting Earl Grey.

Pu-erh-Glazed Walnuts

8 oz. (230g) walnut halves
5½ oz. (155g) granulated sugar
⅓ oz. (8g) pu-erh tea
Vegetable oil for deep-frying

In a sauté pan, lightly toast the tea over low heat until fragrant. Pulse to a powder in a food processor. Bring water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Blanch the walnuts for one minute and strain. Toss with sugar while hot.

In a large saucepan, heat the oil to 430ºF. Have ready a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Deep fry the walnuts until the sugar caramelizes, about 4-5 minutes, then transfer to the baking sheet. While hot, sprinkle with the tea powder and toss well. Separate the walnuts and let them cool completely. Store in an airtight container.

Mark Robinson (2008)
Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook
160 pages (paperback)
Kodansha USA
ISBN: 4770030657
$25.00

North Carolina Barbecue Sauce

Sundays are my lazy days, a weekly chance to read papers, enjoy of cup of tea or five, and do kitchen tasks. Sharpen knives, clean the fridge, refill containers — inventory and maintenance type stuff mostly. For a few hours this past Sunday, I had the house to myself, so I pulled out all the spices and dried herbs from the cabinets, washed the shelves, and took stock of what was there.

Plenty of kala jeera, but not enough barbecue sauce.

Simple enough to fix. After making ice, it's one of the easiest recipes I know. The vinegar-spiked red pepper sauce I’d learned to make in North Carolina was nearly gone. Unlike the thick, tomato-based Kansas City-style sauce we see today, the stuff I came like so much in North Carolina has no tomato, onion powder, or other such embellishments. Other than vinegar, in fact, it has only four ingredients; chile powder, salt, pepper, and a touch of sugar. Some recipes call for “crushed” red peppers. Wrong. You don't want the stuff that goes on pizzas. What is needed here is powdered chile, preferably Chimayo red from New Mexico.

I’d come to appreciate the style at a BBQ place called Bullock’s in Durham, North Carolina while living in the area. It was also at Bullock’s where I had the epiphany that heavily-sweetened iced tea perfectly matched the tart vinegar sauce on the pulled pork. The less-sweet tea of my Kansas City youth made sense as well: not as much vinegar in the sauce there, so it doesn't need sweetness to balance the meal.

When I was leaving North Carolina, I pulled up to Bullock’s, ate my last pulled pork and hush puppies plate, and bought a liter of barbecue sauce on the way out the door. I’d brought my own bottle. I doused eggs with it, dashed it over collards and kale, drizzled some over fish, and, naturally, paired it with slow-cooked pork.

This isn’t Bullock’s recipe (I didn’t even bother asking), but it does put me solidly in a North Carolina state of mind. It's fair to say I haven't been without it for 15 years.

This stuff’s been known to eat through metal caps, so I store it in glass bottles with plastic screw-on caps. Some refrigerate it, but I hardly see the point. Mine stays in the cabinet where I can grab a bottle without rummaging around.

North Carolina Barbecue Sauce

4 cups/1 liter vinegar, divided (see below)
4 Tbl/60ml New Mexico chile, powdered
2 Tbl/30ml salt
2 Tbl/30ml black pepper, freshly ground
1 Tbl/15ml sugar

For a little over a liter/quart of this thin, piquant sauce, combine all the spices with 3c/750ml vinegar in a large measuring cup, jar, or pitcher. Whisk thoroughly. Before it has a chance to settle out, pour through a funnel into a clean glass bottle. Add the remaining cup/250ml of vinegar to the mixing container, swirl it around to get any spices that might be adhering to the sides, then quickly pour it into the bottle. Cap and set aside to cure for a few days (though, in a pinch, you could use it right away).

Which vinegar to use? Plain ol' grocery store distilled white is fine. Better still, use cider vinegar. That's the stuff I like. You can certainly use rice wine vinegar, but I wouldn’t waste the money on champagne vinegar. Balsamic is the wrong flavor entirely. Might be good in some other BBQ sauce. Not this one.

Ginger Pie, a Rescued Recipe

Harold and Maude—Hal Ashby's’ black-humored 1971 film—once inspired me to bake a pie. If I’d known how much research eventually would be involved in making the simple dessert, I’d’ve said to hell with it. The perseverance paid off.

In the movie, Ruth Gordon’s seventy-nine year old Maude invites a much younger Harold (played by Bud Cort) into her rail car home. Maude—eccentric, art-loving, vivacious—stands in wild contrast to morose Harold whose faked suicides are sad jokes staged to wring some evidence of warmth from his frosty mother. In the rail car, Maude offers him oat straw tea and ginger pie. While prospects of oat straw tea did nothing for me, I was left dumb in the wake of increasingly irrelevant dialog at the mention of ginger pie.

Ginger pie? I’m no stranger to baking, but I’d never heard of it. At first, I mistook the pie for a physical thing. It had a homespun, old-timey ring that reminded me of something long forgotten. Dandelion wine, maybe, or spring tonic. At first dozens, then hundreds, then—literally—thousands of cookbooks stymied me as I hunted for a recipe. Gingerbread, ginger tea, ginger snaps, stir-fries, ginger syrups, ginger cordials, chutneys, beers, ales, candies, ginger-lacquered duck, and more, but no ginger pie.

Since nothing suggested or resembled what I was looking for, I put together working notes on a recipe of my own. Some of the ingredients were obvious, but I felt as if I were reinventing something that should be easy to find: Pie? No problem—got pans, got dough. Next! A great big mess of ginger. And eggs. And…um… sugar, of course. Plus…maybe…damn. There’s got to be a recipe in one of these books.

But I forged on. Southern chess pie had a sturdy, crack-topped custard that seemed a versatile base—But what kind of ginger? Fresh? Candied? Dried and ground? Preserved in syrup? In sherry? Just ginger juice? I try each of those. Fresh ginger turned out to have the strongest, most assertive flavor, giving racy overtones to an otherwise sweet and homey pie.

Fresh ginger holds promises of liveliness and sass, of exotic and ancient histories. There is a potency in a fat hand of fresh ginger that just might inspire a breath of fire when it's reduced to tiny, tiny cubes and strewn throughout a rum-laced custard.

The search for the recipe and subsequent experiments with what I thought ginger pie should be brought me a deeper understanding of what I was stalking. When I failed to uncover any recipes, I went back to Maude, the root of my inspiration.

Her eccentric, nuts-to-tradition take on life is a big part of the film’s appeal. During a memorial Mass, she psst, psst, pssts Harold’s attention with sibilantly inappropriate offers of licorice. Her wistful reminiscences hint at a past built on old world loves and tragedies. Once a firebrand activist, Maude continues in small ways undermining worldly complacency by finding joy in simple, everyday things; somersaults, a field of daisies, raucous songs, and seagulls, as well as frequent and spontaneous episodes of grand theft auto.

I came to realize that ginger pie was not some old-fashioned recipe fallen out of favor. It was more than that. By offering a slice, Maude extends not only hospitality, but a slyly camouflaged offer of herself and Harold’s first hints of escape from his doleful life. With the point of that pie, she wedges open Harold’s somber soul and floods it with bracing warmth and sweetness, the distillate of her own fading life’s fire and spice. Harold’s change is so profound that he picks up a banjo, abandons his mourning suits, turns cartwheels, and declares his intention to marry a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

This pie doesn’t affect those sorts of change; it’s not likely—not likely, mind you—to prompt proposals. Sitting here with a late-night wedge pilfered from the kitchen, though, I can’t help but smile. In the end, I don’t know what Maude’s recipe was, but I’ve cemented friendships over slices of this rich, ginger-and-rum custard pie. Surely that is the sort of thing she meant to dish up.

Ginger Pie

1 unbaked pie crust
¼-1/3 cup minced young ginger
2.5 oz aged rum*
1.5 cups sugar
8 Tbl unsalted butter, room temperature
¼ tsp salt
3 eggs
2.5 Tbl all purpose flour
¼ cup heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest

At least one hour before beginning, combine the ginger and rum in a small bowl or jar and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add eggs one at the time and mix after each addition. Add remaining ingredients, including the rum and ginger, and combine thoroughly.

Pour the mixture into the unbaked pie crust and bake at 350F about 50 minutes, until the center has mostly set, but is still just a little wobbly – it will firm on standing. It should have a slightly darkened, crusty top. If necessary, cover the pan with a tented piece of aluminum foil or an overturned stainless steel bowl to prevent overbrowning while the pie bakes.

Warm, the pie cries for heavy dollops of whipped cream barely able to hold itself together. Cold, it’s best to sneak mall slivers while the rest of the house sleeps.

* Appleton Estate V/X or Clement VSOP are both grand rums for the pie. You want something with some age to it. In a pinch, you could use a white rum, but avoid spiced and dark ones: After all, this is a ginger pie, not a rum pie.

Bookshelf: The Drunken Botanist (and a giveaway)

“Do you know of this?” my friend EJ emailed. “I just stumbled upon it and think I am going to pick one up.” The link in his note was for Amy Stewart’s new book The Drunken Botanist. Within seconds I typed back: “Buy it immediately.”

Scroll down for a chance to score a free copy

The last decade has witnessed an avalanche of drinks books: encyclopedic cocktail guides; histories of various liquors; reproductions of early bartending manuals; buying guides; essay collections; paeans to bars from New Orleans to Wisconsin. Most are undistinguished. Many cocktail manuals in particular are interchangeable. Some released only in the last few years have begun to feel like remnants of trends not yet played out, already dated. Not Stewart’s.

The Drunken Botanist is the most useful and entertaining drinks book of the year and one of the most engaging of the last several years.

I've been to liquor stores with distillers, bartenders, and go-go boys but never a botanist. Until I manage that, this little green tome can serve as a crash course in what's actually in those thousands of bottles. Sure, cocktail recipes — good ones, too — are scattered throughout the book but those are not the reason I've been heaping plaudits on it. Rather, it's the unrelenting thoroughness of Stewart's writing that's so impressive. The book is an exploration of plants (and a few bugs and fungi) that contribute flavors, aromas, colors, tactile sensations, and base materials for fermentation and distillation.

Stewart frames the scope in her introduction:

Around the world, it seems, there's not a tree or shrub or delicate wildflower that has not been harvested, brewed, and bottled. Every advance and botanical exploration or horticultural science brought with it a corresponding uptick in the quality of our spirituous liquors. Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world's greatest drinks, it's a wonder there are any sober botanists at all.

Bartenders beware.

Since Caesar famously divided Gaul into three, authors have followed suit. Stewart breaks down over 150 plants we drink into three sections. First come plants that, when fermented (and sometimes distilled) yield beer, wine, ales, and various spirits. These include obvious selections like corn, apples, grapes, sugarcane, wheat, and barley as well as fermentable bases less often seen in the North America or western Europe such as tamarind, sweet potato, jackfruit, banana, and marula. Next are those used to flavor those spirits and low-alcohol brews: coriander, anise, meadowsweet, hyssop, wormword, fenugreek, vanilla, cinnamon, elderflowers, saffron, Douglas fir, oak, mastic, and dozens more. Finally, flowers, berries, herbs, and others added a la minute to drinks — think celery stalks in a bloody mary, cucumber in a Pimm's cup, and tiki drinks garnished with endless pineapple, mint, and cherries. They are all here, each backed up with horticultural, chemical, medical, historical, anthropological, and ethnnobotanical research.

The Drunken Botanist covers much of the same ground Brad Thomas Parsons reached for in his Bitters, but where Parsons stumbled, Stewart soars. Her graceful, easy style belies the sheer amount of facts and data packed into nearly 400 pages. Line drawings accompany many of the entries. Each plant entry starts with the common name immediately followed by its Linnean taxonomic designation and the family to which it belongs and then a page or more on its use in alcoholic drinks.

Take myrrh, for instance. Commiphora myrrha to botanists, it's in the torchwood family, more properly known as Burseraceae. Wait. WAIT. Do not let your eyes glaze over. Myrrh was one of the gifts of the biblical wise men. If Jesus was down with myrrh, you can give it a minute. Stewart writes:

Myrrh is an ugly little tree: scrawny, covered in thorns, and nearly bereft of leaves. It grows in the poor, shallow soils of Somalia and Ethiopia, where it is a gloomy gray figure in a barren landscape. If it weren't for the rich and fragrant resin that drips from the trunk, no one would give it a second look.

The rest of the entry concerns its use among ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, including the Roman practice of blending it with wine to offer during crucifixions. Well, ok, maybe Jesus wasn't always a fan. We learn that in modern times it is a common ingredient in vermouth, bitters, aromatized wines, and cordials such as Royal Combier and that bartenders' favorite, Fernet Branca. The Fernet mention leads us to a discussion of aloe (also found in Fernet Branca), which is related to agave, and that brings us to tequila, and from there to Damiana whose supposed aphrodisiac qualities led one doctor to write in 1879 that it could be given to female patients "to produce in her the very important yet not absolutely essential orgasm." On and on they go, these analog hyperlinks, each entry suggesting another, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book for drinkers.

Boozehounds, brewers, distillers, oenologists, sommeliers, bitters-makers, bartenders — even tea freaks and soda makers — will find this a timeless reference work for understanding not only what's in the spirits we drink, but perhaps ways to craft new ones. Her engaging prose and attention to detail all but assures that Stewart's latest book will remain a useful tool even a century from now for those who make drinks at home or work.

Amy Stewart (2013)
The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks 
400 pages (hardback)
Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616200464
$24.95

Goes well with:

• My review of C. Anne Wilson's Water of Life, an exhaustive examination of the origins and progress of spiritous distillation. 
• A look at Brad Thomas Parsons' Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas. A qualified success, but still worth buying. 
• Volodimir Pavliuchuk's 2008 recipe book Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World. 
• Do It to Julia! A look at pink cloves and gin as Winston Smith's habitual (I'll refrain from calling it his "favorite") tipple in Orwell's 1984.

How About That Free Copy?

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, the publisher of  The Drunken Botanist, has offered to send a free copy of the book to five Whiskey Forge readers. There are only two rules: (1) winners must have a US or Canadian mailing address and (2) readers must leave a recipe in the comments below to qualify.

A recipe? What? Hell, yes. I want to read about your favorite alcoholic drink that relies on plants to give it some distinguishing character — a cocktail, a homemade cordial or bitters recipe, your grandmother's amaro or your college roommate's homemade absinthe. Whatever. But it's got to have booze, beer, or wine (nothing against tea, but tea hardly makes botanists drunk) and it's got to demonstrate some distinctive plant characteristic. What that means is up to you: I want to see what you've got.

Next Friday (April 26th), I'll post the names of five randomly chosen winners here.  Each will have until Friday, May 3rd to email me a shipping address.

NOTE: The giveaway is now closed and the winners (plus their recipes) are announced here. The comments, however, are still open. Please feel free to chime in with your own recipes. [edit 27 April 2013]