Bookshelf: Tiki Mugs: Cult Artifacts of Polynesian Pop

The fact that many of the mugs

were purchased (or even stolen)
by our parents and grandparents,
during nights of naïve debauchery
in their heyday,
was just cool.

~ Holden Westland

When I was a kid, my mother’s expression tiki-tacky captured her disdain for vulgar kitsch of any kind. Around our house back then, the faux-Polynesian escapism of mid-century drinkers was the epitome of bad taste; outside a velvet Jesus, tiki was about as lowbrow as you could get.

These days, tiki’s star is looking a lot more polished. If you are too young to have caught it the first time around, you’re in luck—tiki is on the rise again in America. Enthusiasts up and down the west coast and across the nation are donning Hawaiian shirts, digging out Martin Denny music, and cracking open rum and homemade orgeat to blend some of the best tropical drinks we’ve seen in a very long time. They’re also hunting down the right mugs in which to put those drinks.

Even in the Whiskey Forge, a growing little herd of ceramic tiki mugs graces the copper-topped dry sink where my grandfather mixed his nightly manhattans. Two of them, orange-lined matte black Miehana mugs, are birthday presents to Morpheus from…my mother.

What a difference a few decades make.

One or two mugs doesn’t make a collection. But a little herd—especially a growing one—starts to sound suspiciously like something that would benefit from a guide or a handbook to explain what’s what. Stepping up nicely is Jay Strongman’s Tiki Mugs: Cult Artifacts of Polynesian Pop.

Strongman spends nearly 60 pages laying out the origins and evolution of tiki, an American construct and romanticized mashup of South Pacific designs, architecture, food, art, history, natural history, anthropology, and sex brought together brought together under the umbrella of drink.

In its heyday in the 1950’s-70’s, tiki was everywhere. More than any other aspect of tiki culture, the mug is perhaps the best known and most widely available. A recent tiki revival centered in California has created a broader demand for old mugs and inspired modern artists to produce original designs. Some are eye-popping.

Unlike your everyday coffee mug or teacup, tiki mugs are figural representations of humans, idols, monsters, and fanciful animals. Heads usually dominate the design. The mugs draw on Polynesian arts, but also tap other traditions. So, mugs styled after Hawaiian, Maori, Rarotongan, or Easter Island Moai patterns and carvings are clearly tiki, but skulls and Amazonian Jivaro-style shrunken heads are popular. Monkeys and apes, too. Even spaceships, aliens, and robots. Some you can put in the dishwasher—others deserve spots in museums. [This is not idle/idol praise: with degrees in anthropology and museum administration, I am a curatorial collector by inclination, training, and practice.]

By the time I learned about tiki as a kid, it was already passé and the mugs were practically cast-offs at garage sales, flea markets, and swap meets. The larger bowls meant to hold communal drinks were sold as planters for ferns and aspidistra. These days, you can still collect some without breaking the bank, but be aware that particularly rare mugs fetch hundreds of dollars and limited releases sell out quickly.

With hundreds of color photos over 175 pages and an introduction by Tiki Farm’s Holden Westland, Strongman’s enthusiasm shines through on every page. Tiki Mugs guides the would-be collector and casual enthusiast though the major producers and designers, lists websites for buying and trading mugs as well as covering tiki culture more broadly, and breaks mugs down into easy-to understand categories.

Quite simply, each and every tiki enthusiast from San Clemente to Vladivostok should own a copy.


Tiki Mugs: Cult Artifacts of Polynesian Pop
Jay Strongman (foreward by Holden Westland) (2009)
Korero Books
London
ISBN: 0955339812
$34.95
Buy it here.


Goes well with:

• For tiki aficionados on the go, the canny Beachbum Berry has introduced an iPhone app that presents—with photos—nearly every drink recipe from four of his books. Use it. Repeatedly.
• An old clip of Martin Denny playing his classic "Quiet Village" in totally, absolutely, not-at-all-idealized and 100% authentic Hawaiian village:
  

Oh, and for my birthday? It’s in August. Tiki mugs. Just sayin’.

Bookshelf: Sips & Apps

Should we finish off the beluga

or should we have
some smoked salmon and nibbly things?

~ Edina Monsoon
Absolutely Fabulous

Its cover notwithstanding, a books’ title does reveal something about what’s inside. Kathy Casey’s Sips & Apps trumpets its approach from the very first word. Who else other than those “in the biz” would refer to cocktails as “sips” or, more pointedly, to appetizers as “apps?”

The title lets you know that this writer—and, by extension, her readers—are busy and efficient people who simply don’t have time for superfluous syllables. Furthermore, Casey’s accomplishments listed in the back—celebrity chef, mixologist, TV and radio personality, author of nine cookbooks, founder of a food and beverage consulting firm, owner of cafes and a specialty food line—anchor the book firmly in the realm of multitasking food professionals. Those who aspire to emulate such professionals will find much to like here.

If your tastes run to Martha Stewart-style presentation, Sips & Apps is going to be right up your alley. The book is clearly laid out with straightforward instructions and some inspired recipes. Be warned, however, that a strong sense of precious pervades the pages, both in names and execution.

Take, for instance, the Lemon Meringue Puff cocktail with an actual baked meringue garnishing the drink. Or the Douglas Fir Sparkletini based on a Douglas fir-infused gin. Other than, perhaps, Kaiser Penguin, even the geekiest of cocktail geeks I know will balk at baking meringues for the sole purpose of floating on a cocktail.

And that…that sparkletini? The ingredients sound fine but its vapid “fun” name is deeply off-putting. Call the drink a Lumberjack and I’m much more likely to want one, even to make a batch myself. Check Casey’s instructions below and decide for yourself.

Overall, the recipes seem designed to elicit little gasps of pleasure and delight. Rather than say, a tailgate party, the appetizer recipes suggest special occasions such wedding receptions, bridal showers, gallery openings, and other catered events. Possibly holiday dinners, brunches, or cocktail parties that call for signature drinks and snacks.

Among the food recipes, highlights include lamb sliders on homemade rosemary buns; bacon, blue cheese & pecan cocktail cookies; sausage olive poppers, and croque monsieur puffs. Spiced nuts, salmon, and shrimp show up, too. Teriyaki chicken wings. So maybe, with a little retooling, there are some tailgate ideas here after all if I just loosen up and decide to make it…fabulous.

Who should score a copy? Sips & Apps makes a solid hostess gift for anyone who does even occasional entertaining at home. Your gay uncle or coworker could very well dig it. On the professional side, catering managers, bar managers, and anyone charged with developing a beverage program will appreciate the creative takes on familiar drinks (the Tuscan Rosemary Lemon Drop, Bistro Sidecar, or Grapefruit Negroni) as well as some more adventuresome (the Blue Thai Mojito, Strawberry Shag, or the Fortunella—simply a lychee-infused vodka garnished with a lychee).

Douglas Fir Sparkletini

1½ oz Douglas Fir Infused Gin (recipe follows)
¾ oz white cranberry juice
1½ oz fresh lemon sour (1:1 lemon juice and simple syrup)
Splash of brut Champagne or dry sparkling wine
Garnish: tiny Douglas fir sprig and a fresh or frozen cranberry

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Measure in the infused gin, cranberry juice, and lemon sour. Cap and shake vigorously. Strain into a martini glass and then top with a splash of Champagne. Garnish with Douglas fir sprig and float a cranberry in the drink.

Douglas Fir Infused Gin

1 bottle high-quality gin, such as Aviation
A 5 – 6" sprig Douglas fir branch, rinsed

Place Douglas fir branch into gin and let sit 24 hours. Then remove branch and discard.

Kathy Casey (2009)
Sips & Apps: Classic and Contemporary Recipes for Cocktails and Appetizers.
Photos by Angie Norwood Browne
Chronicle Books
ISBN 978-0-8118-6406—0
$19.95

Goes well with:

• The design of Sips & Apps, right down to the fancy ribbon page markers, seems to emulate, notably, Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres Handbook. If you do any entertaining at all, both books are solid additions to your library.
• Barbara Kafka’s Party Food: Small and Savory.
• James Beard's & Hors D'oeuvre And Canapes.

Oh, fer Feck’s Sake: Scott Beattie’s Artisanal Cocktails

Those of you in the San Francisco Bay area this week are in for a treat. Like Martin Cate before him, Scott Beattie, author of Artisanal Cocktails, will be tending bar as a guest at Bourbon and Branch this Thursday and Friday (May 14-15). Go if you can. The man is doing something truly special.

Those of you not in the Bay area—well, you can just suck it.

Missouri? Suck it. North Carolina? Suck it. Mississippi? Iowa? Nebraska? Maine? Suck it. Even New Orleans, with one of the most vibrant cocktail scenes in the world, you know what to do. In more ways than one, you can’t make it.

Beattie’s subtitle—Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus—belies the real inspiration here. This is undeniably a book rooted in California’s bountiful wine country. The drinks—beauties, each and every one—call for fresh produce, brilliant edible flowers, top-shelf liquors from craft distillers, esoteric essential oils, and fresh herbs to such a degree that cocktail enthusiasts outside that organic heirloom microcosm might feel themselves just…taunted.

There are foams and homemade pickles, amaranth spears and bamboo springs, tomatoes, watermelon cubes, celery root threads—garnishes that make the orchids on our home bar seem downright pedestrian. Some of his cocktails are so freighted with produce that they become as much conversation pieces as refreshment. Straw? Fork? Camera? Peterson’s Field Guide to North American Wildflowers? What do I reach for here?

Unlike Beattie, who grew up in Northern California with its vibrant foodie culture, I’m from the Midwest. You know, the place where the citrus is waxed, the hearts of palm canned, and the shiso is…wait, the what? Might as well call for moon rocks and muddled hen’s teeth.

Seriously, this isn’t a recipe book. This is cocktail porn. If you enjoy cocktails to begin with but also revel in the inherent escapism of National Geographic magazine or the Travel Channel, then you may get a serious kick out of Artisan Cocktails.

Hats off to Sara Remington for her gorgeous photography—lots of bokeh beads of condensation glimmering on glasses, Technicolor blossoms, and cocktails that resemble table centerpieces more than something you’d actually drink.

If you’re at all into cocktails, check out the book. It’s not like others you may own. But as a practical manual for mixologists outside northern California, it’s best viewed as inspiration for using your own local produce and resources to make amazing cocktails. How so? Well, if you intend to make each drink in the book, you’ll need (this is just a partial list);

• 500 micrograms of B12 powder
• kefir lime leaves
• lotus root
• rosemary blossoms (the little purple flowers, not the leaves)
• fresh hearts of palm
• pickled fennel
• black sea salt
• red sea salt
• verjuice
• anise hyssop leaves
• fennel fronds
• fenugreek
• candied rhubarb
• bamboo sprigs
• lemongrass (for candying)
• sunflower petals in chiffonade
• yuzu juice
• dehydrated peach chips
• jasmine blossoms
• heirloom tomato water
• pickled celery root threads
• powered vitamin C

So, you’re in Kansas City, Wilkes-Barre, Des Moines, or Tupelo. Unless you’re willing to pay extraordinary shipping charges, there are some drinks here you just can’t make. But you can follow Beattie’s lead and make cocktails that are so rooted in your hometown that anyone tasting it would know exactly where it came from.

Get to know your florist. Become a regular at your farmers’ market. Suss out the local liquor in your area. Got recent immigrants in your hometown? Find out where they shop and begin learning their flavors. Start a garden to supply your bar with the garnishes you want to use. Cooks do it, why not bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts?

Say you’re in Western North Carolina. The nearest lotus root is in Atlanta. Skip that drink. Maybe try a bloody mary with local heirloom tomatoes, pickled ramps, and, what the hell, a rim of coarsely powdered pork rinds. If you’ve got respectable moonshine, ditch the vodka and go all-local. You get the idea.

I’m not likely to make recipes exactly as presented in Beattie’s book, but it’s got me wondering what, other than margaritas and micheladas, San Diego cocktails might become. I haven’t put the thing away in three weeks.

Scott Beattie (2008)
Artisanal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus.
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1580089216
$24.95

Order here from Beattie's website.

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Bookshelf: Joanne Weir’s Tequila

First in my roundup of summertime cocktail books is Joanne Weir’s enthusiastic primer Tequila: A Guide to Types, Flights, Cocktails, and Bites. In case you should miss it, the James Beard award-winning writer has become an evangelist for 100% agave spirits. Don’t bother her with the golden mixto tequila one usually finds in happy hour margaritas. “Only a fool,” she insists, “would drink mixto.” Mixto, made from almost half sugar, is the common stuff that has helped bestow tequila with its race-to-the-bottom-of-the-bottle, girls-gone-wild, I-don’t-remember-how-I-got-here reputation.

Tequila is a solid introduction for drinkers who want to expand their understanding of how to enjoy this Mexican spirit. It’s not the last word in tequila or even history, but the book primes the conversation by outlining the production and characteristics of blanco (or plata), reposado, añejo, and extra añejo tequilas, suggesting ways to enjoy them as flights, and then diving into recipes.

To that end, Weir has enlisted some of today’s better-known bartenders to present tequila cocktails. Now, a tequila cocktail isn’t as easy as it sounds. Gin is a fantastic mixer, as is rum. And vodka? Making tasty vodka drinks is no harder than combing your hair. But tequila can be troublesome, its big flavors prone to shouldering into and overwhelming a drink. Other than margaritas and shots, most drinkers aren’t sure what to do with it. Why fix, the thinking goes, what ain’t broke?

Well, because the world is tastier than frozen margs.

Enter mixologists such as Lucy Brennan (Mint) Audrey Saunders (Pegu Club), James Meehan (PDT), and Philip Brady (Death & Co.). In all, almost two dozen well-known enthusiasts step up to the challenge of crafting tasty tequila cocktails. Herein you’ll find the Aperol Sunset, la Chupparosa, the Chartreuse-spiked Kama Sutra, and the Surly Temple (ok, perhaps the girls still go just a little wild). Duggan McDonnell of San Francisco’s Cantina, offers his

All the King’s Men
1 ½ oz reposado tequila
½ oz Averna
½ oz ruby port
1 tsp agave nectar
1 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 to 2 oz ginger beer
1 paper-thin ginger slice, for garnish

Combine tequila, Averna, port, agave nectar, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Cover and shake for five seconds. Simultaneously strain the mixture and pour the ginger beer into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish with the ginger slice.

And because this isn’t a one-tequila-two-tequila-three-tequila-floor celebration, but an introduction to more sophisticated drinking, Weir offers cooking recipes. Gonna drink? Gotta eat. All her recipes—from red chile pepper pickles and chorizo hand pies to carnitas and, yes, even cupcakes—include 100% agave tequila, sometimes at multiple stages. I’ll pass on the tequilamisu, but with recipes for ceviche, grilled steak, and chilled melon soup that won’t heat up the kitchen, Tequila makes for some inspirational summer reading.


Goes well with:

• Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History by Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata & Gary Paul Nabhan.
• Tequila: A Traditional Art of Mexico edited by Alberto Ruy-Sanchez
• Dianne Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking
• Patricia Quintana’s El Gran Libro de los Antojitos Mexicanos (in Spanish)

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Bookshelf: Cordial Waters

Volodimir Pavliuchuk is so well known among hobbyist distillers that if he spent a week in internet silence, home distillers from New York to New Zealand would call his local police to make sure the man had not fallen in his boiler.

Pavliuchuk, better known as Wal, is a pillar of Yahoo’s online distillers’ group. His near daily posts about and links to historical recipes, PDFs of old distilling manuals, ethnographic accounts, essays, and dissertations on producing spirits spur hobbyist distillers to recreate bygone, lost, and forgotten spirits. Or, at least, to know about them.

And now Wal has a book. Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World hit the shelves recently and home distillers everywhere should be breaking out wallets right about…now.

The book covers distilling basics, including simple recipes for creating vodka, whiskeys, brandies, rum, and other spirits from primary ingredients. Purists may balk at plain white sugar in some recipes or additives for emulating peat or barrel aging, but recall that the recipes are for home enthusiasts who may not have access to expensive professional equipment. If those bother you, skip them. There’s plenty enough here worth digging into.















The meat of Cordial Waters—the reason you want to buy this book—is 260 recipes Wal gives for flavored spirits; cordials, liqueurs, flower waters, crèmes, gins, flavored whiskeys and brandies, citrus infusions, bitters, kümmel, pastis, absinthes, monastic liqueurs, genevers, vodkas (flavored with bison grass, tormentil, tobacco, birch buds, spruce, and more), spiced rums, cream liqueurs, spirits spiked with beans and nuts, shrubbs, and—for you tiki fans—Hawaiian okolehao. Hell, he’s even got mesquite mash. And mastic liqueur. Laudanum. Crazy shit with alkermes, cochineal, and ants. So many more culled from sources spanning centuries and continents.

The recipes have been scaled to standardized 1- or 4-liter batches. Many readers—perhaps especially those with little experience, or patience with, interpreting older recipes—will find this a great convenience since such recipes often call for outdated or uncertain measurements [hands, drachms, “enough,” two bottles (what size?), until it becomes a stiff paste, etc.]. By presenting the recipes in liters and grams, Wal skillfully works around the uncertainties a novice might encounter.

Readers with a tenacious historical or bibliographic bent, however, will regret that the book does not present original recipes alongside the adaptations nor does it cite each recipe’s source. This redaction—understandable given the book’s space restrictions—nevertheless is frustrating because original recipes contain valuable clues about techniques, procedures, purposes, and sometimes even reasons why mixtures were made at certain times and not others.

An 1890 falernum recipe, for instance, calls for milk, presumably cow’s. Milk? Really? See, that’s interesting in and of itself. I trust Wal, but want to learn about its role from the original. Was it a fining, maybe? Combined with lime juice, allowed to settle, then racked and strained, that may just work, but modern versions from the cocktail crowd and rum enthusiasts don’t use it. A citation would give enough information to start a library hunt in earnest. Ah, well. Second edition perhaps.

Regardless, Cordial Waters is a delight. Those who want to learn more no doubt will latch onto innumerable nuggets of insight larding the book. Buried in notes for a rosa-solis recipe, for example, is mention of a 1609 recipe that calls for Brasilwood boiled in rosewater to create a red color. What New York or San Francisco bartender is doing that? Also noted is that drying celandine (Chelidonium majus) reduces its toxicity and that adding 0.1 gram of silver nitrate/liter prior to redistilling causes hydrogen cyanide in stone fruit spirits to precipitate as insoluble silver cyanide. These are good things to know.

It’s not all fancy, outrageous, or outré concoctions. There are plenty of recipes that can be made with little more than store-bought vodka and fresh herbs or spices. Knowing something about cocktails and liquor, though, would be a great help in understanding procedures and, occasionally, when to veer from directions.

Of particular use is an appendix explaining the Pearson Square. Homebrewers and winemakers are familiar with this handy diagram that allows mixers to calculate quickly the amounts of two liquids required to fortify or dilute alcoholic beverages. Several examples (including one suggesting that Pavliuchuk likes his martinis 7:1) show in clear detail how to make simple calculations using the square.

Who should buy it? Every hobbyist distiller. Who else? Bartenders, cocktail enthusiasts, drinks historians, botanists, ethnopharmacologists—anyone who enjoys making cordials and liqueurs. Certainly anyone with a still will find inspiration here. In these tight times, and with the long-overdue ascendancy of cocktail culture, that’s a lot of people.

Who else should buy it? You.

Do so here.

Goes well with:

• Moonshine! ~ my own novice's guide to distilling. Publisher's Weekly calls it "the last book one will ever need on the art of in-house hooch." Perfect for Father's Day.
  
• The Compleat Distiller ~ Mike Nixon and Mike McCaw's treatise on the science of making spirits, a classic among modern hobbyist distillers.
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails ~ Ted Haigh's erudite profile of cocktails fallen into obscurity and now enjoying a renaissance. Second edition is forthcoming.

Volodimir Pavliuchuk (2008)
Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World
152 pages, paperback.
Published by The Amphora Society
Pakuranga, New Zealand
$25


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Bookshelf: The Sovereign People are in a Beastly State

Inishowen swarms with private stills
and an active person is necessary
to suppress them.

~ 1750’s parliamentary report

With St. Patrick’s Day fast approaching, let’s talk about Irish whiskey. For now, the illicit kind.

At almost 300 pages before the index, Aiden Manning’s 2003 account of illicit distilling in Donegal, a single Ulster county perched in the very northwest of Ireland, is a work of love. Or possibly an historian’s obsession with liquor and those who make it in secret. His densely packed and thoroughly annotated pages are underscored by tales familiar to those who follow moonshine narratives in America—killings, beatings, corrupt police, high-minded reformers, and clergy whose sermons railing against local distillers may in fact be fueled by the products of clandestine stills.

If the stories are somehow familiar, it is no doubt because Ulster, that province so rife with strife for hundreds of years, hosted an ingrained culture of smalltime distilling. Many Ulstermen (and women) who migrated to Pennsylvania in the 18th century subsequently migrated south along the Appalachians, where mountain distilling took on a distinctly Irish cast that continues to this day. Even the distilling vocabulary of Irish poitin-makers aligns with that of American moonshiners. Those interested in Appalachian distilling would do well to look to its Irish antecedents and parallel developments: Donegal Poitin fills the role nicely.

Manning looks at the products of private distilling (that is, poitin or Irish moonshine) from its early years through the 1850’s when Ireland’s revenue police disbanded and the aftermath of a series of famines diverted official attention from the matter. He reviews in meticulous detail evolving legislation against poitin as the Irish try to come to grips with the moral, economic, and theological ramifications of endemic private distilling.

For most of the period he covers, illicit distilling truly was endemic and startling, given the number of small stills seized, destroyed, and sometimes put to use by shady revenue agents. To back up his claims about the ubiquity of illegal distilling, Manning taps voluminous records of revenue agents, governmental ministers and magistrates, and court officers as well as old deeds and private accounts from the National Archives of Ireland, Trinity College, the British Library, and other venerable collections. It is, admittedly, sometimes dry reading.

But stick with it and an image emerges of centuries-old battle of wits between those who would uphold revenue laws and seemingly every man, woman, and child in the county hellbent on either making or selling whiskey. Manning’s first words, in fact, are “I am deeply indebted to illicit distilling, as without it, I would probably not exist.” His father, a Garda (or policeman), had been sent to Connemara to suppress poitin-making while his mother was there to teach knitting as an alternate skill. We are fortunate that their efforts to quash the practice led to a damn fine celebration of it.

Despite the charts and facts and figures, Donegal Poitin is indeed a celebration of the Donegal people distilling barley, sometimes oats, and very rarely potatoes into spiritus loci. Distilling kept the Ulsterfolk through all but the hardest of times and, despite crushing poverty, Manning paints many locals as (mostly) honest people beset by corrupt revenue agents spurred on by poorly-planned and special interest-sponsored legislation.

Herein, revenue agents are not villains per se: as in America, local constabulary are often portrayed as sympathetic to distillers’ needs while poorly-paid officers dispatched from other areas widely lacked such sympathy and often turned to bribery, thuggery, and sometimes outright murder to earn what they could. The 1830’s reforms enacted by Colonel William Brereton cut almost 2/3 of the revenue police as incompetent, corrupt, and more of a danger to the populace than the distillers they were charged with to put down. Though the revenue police disbanded officially about twenty years after this, the professional code of conduct Brereton established greatly improved the respect such officers commanded—at least when they were within sight. The light of the moon may have revealed an entirely different story.


Donegal Poitin: A History
Aiden Manning (2003)
Donnegal Printing Company
Letterkenny
€13.95

Goes well with:

A Whiskey Forge review of John McGuffin’s In Praise of Poteen.

Bookshelf: Pickled

A popular conceit holds that only the freshest in-season foods should grace our tables for proper, healthful and, let’s face it, morally sound meals. Unchecked, such policies might leave us bereft of such preserved pleasures as martini olives, colonial-era rum shrubs, country hams, lowcountry atjar, chow-chows, and pickled okra to grace bloody mary cocktails. Lucy Norris soundly plugs this philosophical bunghole with Pickled, her paean to the brined, fermented, and otherwise mildly rotten foods we can’t live without.

Pickled weaves oral histories gathered for New York’s NY Food Museum project among some eighty family recipes documenting ethnic picking traditions. The celebrated pickles of Eastern Europe’s winter larder—dills, beets, sauerkraut—bob to the surface, but Norris successfully dips deeper for fried dills, watermelon flesh (the other watermelon pickle), Korean kimchis, pickled fish, and preserved lemons.

Whether you regard them as summer in a jar or corruption in the cupboard, do yourself a favor: Make pickles before winter sets in for good. None of Norris’ recipes holds universal appeal—pickled duck tongues, anyone?—but the book is a gem for sensible cooks willing to buck a trend that implies pickles are déclassé, too much trouble or, worst of all, just plain make you a bad person.

Book Review: Gumbo Tales

When you consider that brown liquor
defined my childhood as much as, say,
snow days and sunburns did,
my predilection for the Sazerac
begins to look predestined.

~ Sara Roahen

During Tales of the Cocktail this past July, Mike McCaw and I mosied up to a table where a lithe young woman was talking to all comers and mixing Sazeracs and brandy old fashioneds for any who cared to sample. Bottles of brandy, whiskey, bitters, and the local anise spirit Herbsaint were at the ready, though running low, as the hordes of reveling attendees wound down Cocktail Hour.

Suddenly, she went wide-eyed. “Oh my gosh! Did that guy just steal my book?” Sure enough, the russet-and-red hardback she had authored with its cover of a time-worn cocktail sign was now nowhere to be seen, nor was the unsteady admirer who had been thumbing it moments before. That week, with the Hotel Monteleone was awash in premium swag, some thieving cad absconded with Sara Roahen’s personal copy of Gumbo Tales.

Just because the thief was in his cups doesn’t mean he was wrong. In fact, he might have made off with one of the choicest take-aways in the hotel. If New Orleans has ever been good to you, then take his lead and beg, borrow, or steal buy a copy of Gumbo Tales without delay.

Roahen, a Wisconsin transplant, has proven her food chops—as a line cook, restaurant reviewer for the New Orleans weekly Gambit, board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and, tenaciously, in her attempts to trace Wisconsin’s brandy old fashioned cocktails back to the Sazerac through an anonymous Mississippi riverboat captain.

She has written a book at turns both gut-wrenching and bust-out-loud funny about finding her place at the New Orleans table (and, apparently, not a few bars). In the process, she wrestles with defining gumbo, boiling live crawfish, the city’s seeming disinterest in vegetables (unless breaded, fried, cooked down, or dressed up with crab, ham, sausage, and cheese), its cult-like following of Hansen’s sno-balls, its robust St Joseph’s Day feasts, po-boy sandwiches, and an influx of newcomers, learning how and why, as she does, to remain in that postdiluvian city.

Those of us interested in the drinking and food cultures of New Orleans savor classic cookbooks such as Lafcadio Hearn’s 1885 La Cuisine Creole for shedding light on the origins of creole cooking. Others help explain the growth of both creole and Cajun cookery, such as Paul Prudhomme’s 1984 Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen or John Folse’s recent encyclopedic tomes on South Louisiana cookery (all of which, by the way, contain an abundance of recipes for alcoholic beverages, sips, and nips from absinthe drips to brandy milk punches).

Roahen’s book belongs on the same shelf, though it is something else. For one, it has no recipes. Like the city itself now, Gumbo Tales is defined by what some have called the federal floods, but which many just call Katrina. Here, the floods are both a lens for examining, and a touchstone that unites, everyone with connections to the city.

Katrina doesn’t mean just the 2005 hurricane itself, but also its evil twin Rita. It means the broken levees, the flooding, the deaths, the harrowing devastation, the political ineptitude, the broken families, and displaced lives that followed the storm and which continue to affect daily life in the city. All of that is enough to make even courageous constitutions turn to drink.

Listen to her take:

Earlier this week, from my car, I saw a man walk past a water-stained sofa that someone had hauled to the curb weeks ago. He got a few feet beyond it and then doubled back to arrange two of the sofa’s cushions that had gone askew. My throat tensed at this small gesture toward fixing our overwhelming mess.

Your throat may tense while reading Gumbo Tales, too. Mine did. It also prodded me to mix a Sazerac, made my mouth water, my stomach growl, and the walls echo with belly laughs as she readily points out her own foibles and outright lies:

No one but my kindergarten teacher flinched when at six years old I mentioned my desire to become a cocktail waitress when I grew up.

Or, in an effort to convince a reluctant Vietnamese restaurant owner that she was a seasoned trencherman:

I eat duck blood all the time.

Concerning a certain New Orleans fascination with a revered sno-ball queen:

Most of her followers do not want to date Ashley Hansen. We want to be her.

Some have said “Let New Orleans sink. It’s their own fault for living there.” The first chapter alone lays open that imbecilic rationale that could only be meant by those who’ve never been or, having been, never left the French Quarter and who know it only as a modern Gomorrah of tacky t-shirts, cirrhotic livers, hustles, and corruption.

To think that way is to say that humans are all teeth, toenails, and elbows. Yes, of course, we have those things—and what would we be without them?—But that’s so laughably far from reality nobody could seriously believe it.

Intentionally or not, the book is an eloquent argument for why the Crescent City is worth saving. Even after the storms, it remains one of the most vibrant cities in the United States (I’m not unbiased: my own mother recently referred to the place as “your beloved New Orleans” so take my endorsement with a grain of rice). Read the book, but when you’re done, put it away and high-tail it to New Orleans. Go for the first time, go for the tenth time. Just go.

Though she denies Gumbo Tales is a guidebook, a newcomer to the city or an inquisitive visitor who wants to get to know the place more intimately than a casual conventioneer does could do worse than to get a map, a highlighter, and a notebook to mark out, neighborhood by neighborhood, a hit list of po-boys, sno-balls, esoteric cocktails, bakeries, miscellaneous eateries, and watering holes.

New Orleans is one of the world’s great culinary destinations because of the people who love it so much. Roahen nailed it when she writes that people love the city as they love a person. And few have captured its residents’ obsessions with eating and drinking more poignantly and lyrically than a transplanted Midwesterner who has embraced the New Orleans table with the zealotry of a convert.

Sara Roahen has found her place.


Goes well with:

• As I mentioned, the book has no recipes, but I buy the argument that they don’t fit, that they might derail the narrative flow. Sara Roahen has collected them, however, and you can email her for those. Check out sararoahen.com for her blog, new photos, and contact info. Signed copies are available here, but she'll even personalize inscriptions for you if you email her.
  
• In this KCRW interview, Roahen offers this morsel: “Once you respond well to someone’s cooking, you are a friend of that place for life.” [Scroll down to the bottom of the linked page for the whole thing].
• If gumbo is your thing, check out The Southern Gumbo Trail, a Southern Foodways Alliance oral history project that profiles a mess of the cooks and places mentioned in Gumbo Tales.
  

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Review: In Praise of Poteen

Throughout the book

I have spelt the word ‘poitín.’
This is the correct Irish spelling;
the reason for the emasculated
‘poteen’ on the cover
is my publisher’s idea.

~ John McGuffin
In Praise of Poteen

During the Troubles (Na Trioblóidí), those tragic years not so long ago when Ireland nearly tore itself apart in armed conflict, Irishman John McGuffin penned a lighthearted tribute to that most Irish of spirits, whiskey poitín. In light of the armed and bloody conflict going on, McGuffin’s sly humor comes across as almost subversive in its ability to appeal to audiences on either end of the conflict as he weaves together anecdotes about illicit distilling.

Among Americans, even American distillers, a popular notion holds sway that the illicitly-made poitín is nothing more complex than fermented and distilled potatoes, which Ireland has in great abundance. No doubt, it can be, and has been—I’ve met Irish distillers who related convincing methods for wresting liquor from spuds—but potatoes are not the easiest thing to convert to spirits, and authentic poitín has been made of barley, oats, and other grains for centuries before taters put down rootlets in Irish soil. Barley recipes are particularly venerable. But a lack of grains doesn’t mean it’s not the real McCoy. As with American moonshine, now very old recipes call for sugar, either granulated or as treacle.

McGuffin knows this all too well. In fact, in one “grain bill” he gives us:

At least four stone of oranges
8 pounds of sugar (brown)
1½ ounces yeast
10 gallons of water

“When properly made,” he assured us in 1978, “it doesn’t taste too bad.” Looks like there was at least a gallon of the stuff to go around once all was said and done. As anyone who has made a custom of sampling clandestine liquor since then can tell you, McGuffin admits that some poitín is rubbish, while other examples clearly outshine “parliament” (that is, tax-paid) whiskey.

I had heard while traveling in Ireland that the Troubles were hard on the moonshine trade. McGuffin elaborates. Distributors hauling illicit whiskey in carts, wagons, and—later—cars and trucks have always used subterfuge to slip the product past guards, into towns, in markets, and even courthouses. The Troubles and the violence they entailed changed the way that the Gardaí (the police) looked at suspicious vehicles and behavior. Routine search-and-seizure gambits gave way to more serious investigations into suspicious activities. Autos and lorries on the roads were more likely to be searched, especially near the border with Northern Ireland, since the contraband might just as easily be arms and explosives as a drop of home-distilled whiskey. Hauling a load of empty bottles? Who’s to say they are not for Molotov cocktails rather than homemade liquor? Across the border, local constabulary and the British Army were also on the hunt as vehicles were examined with dogs and mirrors on poles. Under such scrutiny, many haulers decided the time was right to get out of the business.

If it’s straight-up recipes and detailed how-to you’re wanting, this isn’t the book. The few recipes included serve as embellishments to stories about Irish whiskey, its illegal production, its history, and the cat-and-mouse games of diversion and detection between distillers and Gardaí who pursued them. Overall, his rueful tale is one of a craft in retreat except in remote areas long known for an appreciation for “the cratur.” Given the importance of Irish folk distilling in shaping the tenor, methods, and even vocabulary of American moonshiners, however, it’s an important read for understanding the parallel rise of folk distilling on these shores.

Buy it: Appletree Press released a new printing in 2002 that is available from Amazon and Amazon UK. Or, if you're in Dublin, drop by the massive Hodges Figgis (56-58 Dawson Street, Dublin 2) and score a copy.

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Book Review: Water of Life

It was while preparing a conference paper on the history of alcoholic spirits in Britain, in the 1970’s, that I first encountered the medieval Latin aqua vitae treatises, and was puzzled by their insistence on the power of distilled wine to improve the memory, and to restore youth to the elderly—properties that seemed contrary to real-life experience.

~ C. Anne Wilson

If your family’s closets harbor skeletons, pray that C. Anne Wilson’s attention lies elsewhere. Otherwise she will haul them into the light of day, noting along the way the manufacturer of the doorknob, the origin of light bulbs, the nature of light, and quite possibly the history of hangers, closets, wardrobes, and—in passing—steamer trunks.

Wilson, former Keeper of Special Collections at Leeds University Library has penned in-depth studies on British foodways including The Book of Marmalade and Food and Drink in Britain. This time she has turned her considerable intellect and scholarly prowess to bear on the origins and progress of spirituous distillation in Water of Life: A History of Wine-Distilling And Spirits; 500 BC - AD 2000 (ISBN 1903018463, 300pp, £30/$60).


Understand that Ms. Wilson’s forte is historic British foodways—how, why, what, and with what Britons have eaten and imbibed in the past. If she missteps in her discussion of cocktails in more recent times, she should be forgiven for the study of the history of cocktails is a new field and we have others who take on the task admirably. While I trust authors such as Ted Haigh and David Wondrich for revealing the material culture of mixology, we are fortunate in the third degree that Wilson grew intrigued in modern alcohol’s precedents. In so doing, she’s changed at least my understanding of where my nightly cocktails come from—and the very meaning of alcohol.

Perhaps taking a cue from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Water of Life is divided into three parts—(1) The Ancient and Early Medieval World: The Eastern Mediterranean Region, (2) The Later Middle Ages: Western Europe, and (3) From Early Modern Times to AD 2000: The British Isles.

To say that the first is dry misses the point. It is also brilliant. Wilson traces the origins of wine distilling not to medieval Europe or even Arab alchemists as nearly every author has ever done (including yours truly), but to the philosopher-chemists of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, arguing that alcoholic distillation began around 500 BC with the cult of Dionysius. This is about 1,400 years before the introduction of Arab rosewater distillation methods to Europe, and therefore presents alcoholic distillation much earlier in the timeline we’ve come to accept.

Early distilling had nothing to do with beverages or even medicine, she writes. It was instead an ultra-secret practice of religious cults. Unlike the Gideons, however, whose messages grace hotel rooms around the world, the texts of these cultists either never existed or have been destroyed. To get at what they might have held, Wilson examines philosophical treatises, histories, court records against heretics, household account books, paintings, song, and literature.

Because the historical record is so spotty and because, even to this day, distillers remain prone to speaking in circumlocution and code, Wilson makes well-reasoned suppositions and jumps of logic, all the while explaining the symbolism employed by early distillers and the religious language of recipes, even when copied by scribes who didn’t understand that the recipes might in fact have been pre-Christian initiation rites considered by Rome heretical. She is especially adept at tracing the language of secret distilling texts and the vocabulary of still parts through the ages and across languages. In fact, she lays down such a well-structured argument in the first section that by the time she brings up Parzival and the Holy Grail in part two, you realize she’s going to claim it before she does: The Holy Grail was a still.

Oh yeah, she throws down like that.

Yet she’s led us so carefully down the path of Gnostic and Cathar initiation rites and baptism—by still-born fire, of course—that she’s damn convincing. Makes you wonder what the whole water-into-wine deal was about at the Canaan wedding. Holy Spirit? Don’t get me started.

Wilson makes Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code look like Dick & Jane for the short bus set.

More meaty and familiar for modern distillers and cocktail enthusiasts is the entire second section and much of the third which trace distilling from the later middle ages in western Europe to the year 2000.

Armed with an understanding of Gnostics, Cathars, Jabirians, Nestorians, and Knights Templar as well as the philosophical underpinnings of transformation, transmutation, and the nature of nature, we move beyond the symbolism of primordial distilling and get into liquor distilling as we understand it today. The monastic liquors take on new meaning; brandies, whiskies, and various “waters” enter the picture on a wide scale; and the role of woman in distilling comes into focus. With a duty to manage household expenses, Tudor, Elizabethan, and later generations of women kept stillrooms and household stills for producing various waters and spirituous medicines.

Household manuscripts and early printed works start appearing fast and furious—as Wilson concentrates on home distilling and the business of distilling and the rise of spirits in England, Scotland, and Ireland with occasional forays into North America.

After such an exhaustive examination of the topic, Wilson injects a discordant note at the end as she despairs over ever-increasing alcohol consumption in Great Britain. Anyone who has witnessed packs of drunken British youths descend on Amsterdam during weekend benders will understand her concern, but the last section with its awkward “water of death” line would have stood better as a separate essay.

Don't let that dissuade you. In an era of unprecedented access to information, moonshiners, home distillers, and professional spirits-wranglers would do well to learn as much as they can about the history and practice of their craft. Here is one book not to miss.

PS: Hats off to the indexer. Putting together a comprehensive, useful, and accurate index is a thankless task. This one is a gem.

Goes well with:

• The Da Vinci Code. Just kidding.
  
• Sample pages of Water of Life (click on the link to download a pdf)
• Wheelock’s Latin Grammar
• A.J. Forbes’ A Short History of the Art of Distillation from the Beginnings Up to the Death of Cellier Blumenthal
• Petits Propos Culinaires, a pocket-sized journal of food history founded by Alan Davidson, author of the Oxford Companion to Food (and whose bookplate occasionally surfaces in my own library of secondhand books)
• The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, one of the world's best-known annual gatherings of culinary historians.
  

Ordering

In North America order from
The David Brown Book Co.
PO Box 511
Oakville, CT 06779
860.945.9329

In the UK, order from
Prospect Books
Allaleigh House
Blackawton, Totnes, Devon TQ9 7DL, UK
Telephone [+44] (0)1803 712269 • Fax [+44] (0)1803 712311


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