Tampopo

Since the early 1990’s, I must have seen writer/director Jûzô Itami’s 1985 film Tampopo a dozen times. Just recently, I watched it again on a flight from Berlin to London. Like John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, it is a touchstone for me, something to revisit every few years, a work of humor, love, and obsession. Several vignettes ostensibly unrelated to the main plot nevertheless touch on it and its themes. One of my favorites involves a shopkeeper and his troublesome visitor...



Until that trip from Berlin. I had not fully appreciated how much the film had grown to inform and shape some of my own values. In it, the truck driver Goro meets Tampopo, a widowed mother who serves mediocre noodle soup in her small shop. Goro and a growing cohort of accomplices embark on a mission to turn Tampopo’s shop into the very best ramen joint around. An old ramen master joins, a canny chauffeur wise in the way of noodles, and a contractor with a secret. Competitors are tricked into revealing their methods and outright spying goes down. Along the way, viewers gain insight into what may make a proper bowl of Japanese noodle soup.

Ramen, as central as it is to the plot, is also a red herring. The movie is a celebration of the dish, sure, but more so it’s about single-minded pursuit of an ideal and that's something I can get behind. My taste is simple; I buy good things. There’s little point in laying out hard-earned money for cheap tools, clothes, food, furniture, or gear of any kind. Not everything has to be deluxe all the time, and I appreciate good value and the occasional quick-and-dirty fix to a problem, but in general I patronize artisans, distillers, designers, and cooks who buy into the pursuit of ideals, too, people and firms with tightly focused skills, whether that’s in barbecue, spätzle, blankets, knives, boots, whiskey, rum, or even paper and pens.

Over the next six to eight weeks, I’ll be kicking out ideas for holiday gifts. Not for me, mind you; I’ve already got most of this stuff. Rather, they will be things I’ve used and like — some booze, some books, a bit of gear and kit, a few ingredients worth having around.

First up: Tampopo. Netflix has it as a DVD or you can score a copy of an all-regions, letter-boxed release with English subtitles through Amazon. 

Southern Foodways Short Film Grants Announced

A note came over the transom today from the Southern Foodways Alliance announcing grants of $750 for professional, amateur, and student filmmakers to make short films related to food and drink of the American South. Notice the theme of inclusion and exclusion at the Southern table. Maybe something on bourbon, moonshine, or mountain tonics?

Although I was a board member of the SFA for several years, I'm not actively involved in this project, just passing on the news. Here're the details from the SFA, including contact information:

The SFA wants to hire you to make a short, web-ready film (2–5 minutes) about Southern food and drink for our Greenhouse Films series.

Visit our film and oral history archives to get an idea of the sort of documentary work we already do. We are interested in commissioning films that highlight under-represented people and places. This is especially true as we move into 2014, when SFA programming marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and examines inclusion and exclusion at the Southern table.

Appropriate lenses through which to explore this theme include, but are not limited to:

• Race relations 
• Sexuality/gender
• The role of new minorities in the evolving landscape of Southern foodways
• Nutrition and food access, especially as they relate to socio-economic class 

This call is open to professional, amateur, and student filmmakers of all ages and backgrounds. Greenhouse films carry a stipend of $750. Filmmakers whose ideas are accepted will be paid $250 upon delivery of satisfactory proof of concept, and receive the remaining $500 upon delivery of a finished film of 2–5 minutes. We are unable to offer any equipment, technological assistance, or travel expenses beyond the $750 total.

**A satisfactory proof of concept will include ONE of the following:

• Trailer of 30 seconds to 1 minute, specific to your proposed SFA project.

OR

• Description of your proposed SFA project, accompanied by a previously completed short film that demonstrates your capabilities.

Please begin by sending us a brief e-mail introducing yourself and your project. Do not “blind submit” large files or links to file-sharing sites without contacting us first.

Applications are due by Monday, December 2.

SFA staff will choose projects based on director’s technical skills, narrative ability, and promise of topic. Successful applicants will be notified by December 16. SFA will work with accepted Greenhouse filmmakers to determine a reasonably prompt timeline for production.

To apply, please write Sara Camp Arnold at saracamp@southernfoodways.org.

George Orwell on Picking Hops in the English Countryside

One can talk and smoke as one works, 

and on hot days there is no pleasanter place 

than the shady lanes of hops,

 with their bitter scent—an unutterably refreshing scent, 

like a wind blowing 

from oceans of cool beer.

Eric Blair

The New Statesman and Nation, 17 October 1931

I've been refreshing my memory of Eric Blair's work lately in preparation for a talk in Denver next month. Blair's novels (writing under his better-known pseudonym George Orwell) include 1984 and Animal Farm, but I've been diving into his more ephemeral essays on language and meaning. While digging though the library, I stumbled across an early essay of his on picking hops in the English countryside. In it, Blair tests the idea that a seasonal worker, wanting to get away from London for a bit, might high-tail it to Kent and make a decent bit of income stripping hops from vines for the English brewing industry.

The squalid camp conditions, dishonest measurers, and exploitive owners, however, left Blair realizing that hop picking, as practiced in early 20th century England, was a wretched experience. "What keeps the business going," he wrote,

...is probably the fact that the Cockneys rather enjoy the trip to the country, in spite of the bad pay and in spite of the discomfort. When the season is over the pickers are heartily glad—glad to be back in London, where you do not have to sleep on straw, and you can put a penny in the gas instead of hunting for firewood, and Woolworth’s is round the corner—but still, hop-picking is in the category of things that are great fun when they are over.

His full essay is here.

A 1929 silent newsreel from the archives of BFI shows families, including children, harvesting hops from right around the time Blair wrote Hop-Picking.



Goes well with:

• We like Orwell around here. See Do it to Julia! Pink Cloves and Gin at the Chestnut Tree Café, a look at the pink gin and cloves Winston Smith took to drinking once he was a broken man.
• Gooseberries in Hops Syrup, a recipe from Helen S. Wright's 1912 The New England Cook Book.
• William S. Burroughs' Birthday Beer, a recipe using two varieties of hops for the writer's 80th birthday while we were neighbors in Lawrence, Kansas. 
• Rock Out with Your Cock Ale. Hops come into play into a number of old English beverages, but for that special kick, why not use poultry? As the anonymous recorder of the 18th century recipe noted, you may sweeten it with sugar candy to your liking. 
• More from the BFI archives here. 

On the Making of Vintage Glassware: Bert Haanstra's 1958 'Glas'

You may be tough, but are you roll-your-own-cigarette-
and-light-it-on-a-blazing-hot-jar tough?

Craft bartenders around the country pour vintage cocktails in vintage glassware as a matter of pride. Stemware, tumblers, and other barware from the 1930's-50's are easy enough to find even now that pikers know to check out thrift shops for great finds. We cocktail geeks like these glasses. Empirically true or not, a Champagne cocktail served in an elegant, hollow-stemmed 1915 coup tastes better than the same drink served in an Ikea coffee mug. Even delicate, small vintage glassware has a heft of historicity. They are mute witnesses to much of the liquid history we try to recreate (or surpass).

But we rarely see how such things were made. A nearly wordless documentary gives us a look inside micentury glassmaking, both hand-blown and industrial. Distorted VHS pirate copies of Bert Haanstra's 1958 Glas used to make the rounds among glassblowing students. The tape I saw in the 1980's was a copy of a copy of a copy, going back untold generations. I was very much into the glass sculptures of Dale Chihuly, but that old bootleg of Glas was nearly unwatchable.

The short industrial film is on YouTube now, however, in a much cleaner copy. Set to a light jazz score, it follows craftsmen and factory workers as they blow, turn, smash, and form glass into bottles, stemware, candlesticks, pitchers, and jars. Some of the men try to inject a little dramatic interpretation in their scenes, but most just roll and blow, roll and blow.



Goes well with:

• Predating Glas by only a few years, Hans Fischerkoesen's nightmarish Durch Nacht zum Licht ("Through Night to Light") pitches Underberg Bitters. I enjoy Underberg, but I'm pretty sure this wet-sheet nightmare of a campaign would not get greenlighted today.

Hot Bagels (with Ham)

We enjoy a many excellent things here in Southern California. Our bagels, regrettably, are too soft, too airy, too...bland. They should be chewy, savory, just a little tacky to the tooth. When I stumbled across a digitized version of Hot Bagels this morning, I was reminded of everything I miss about well-made bagels from back East; making by hand, simmering in scalding water, and tearing into a hot, fresh one with my teeth. Really. You doesn't just daintily nip off the part you want; that part needs to be pulled apart with a strong bite and a firm grip. 

The bulk of the old 16mm film  from the Brooklyn Public Library shows bagels being made in Brooklyn.  In it, bagel — enthusiast is too tame a word. Obsessive? Yes, bagel obsessive Marty Rosenblatt can hardly contain his excitement to order a dozen. Ham isn't often found in bagel shops, but here Rosenblatt lays it on thick:

Hiya, Freddie baby, give me a dozen...my life's blood! Without bagels, what is a day? Yeah, make it a dozen assorted. Dat's it, give me the garlic, the sesame, the onion; give me them all baby, that's it! They're still handmade eh? Hot bagels! Wait a second, let me PAY yah! Here you are, kid. 

Goes well with:

• Everything Bagel from the Brooklyn Public Library.
• The BBQ Films of Joe York

The BBQ Films of Joe York

The Southern Foodways Alliance's annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi starts in a few weeks. This year's symposium — the fifteenth — is Barbecue: An Exploration of Pitmasters, Places, Smoke, and Sauce. Rumor has it that tickets sold out in twelve minutes this year. One of the constants in good barbecue is low and slow. What the hell happened? A lot of people who missed out on tickets were bummed by that, but word is that the unexpected rush has inspired some changes in how future events will be managed. Good on them.

Those of us who will be elsewhere that weekend can still get in on some of the action from afar through the short films of documentary filmmaker Joe York. After the video is a list of some of York's other barbecue-themed films. But first, let's start with Joe York's CUT/CHOP/COOK which profiles Rodney Scott of Scott's Bar-B-Q in Hemingway, South Carolina.

List continues after the video.



From John T. Edge and the rest of the SFA crew comes a list of York's films they recommend viewing as preparation for paying attendees of this year's symposium. But you? You can watch them for free on the SFA's site (link below).

Oral History and Film Resources

“The Southern Barbecue Trail: An SFA Documentary Project”       www.southernbbqtrail.com
                                                                                                    
Our filmmaker, Joe York, has made a number of documentaries about barbecue. All are available to stream at southernfoodways.org. They are:

BBQBBQ is a short profile of Big Bob Gibson’s Bar-B-Que, the origin point for white barbecue sauce, in Decatur, Alabama.

Capitol Q: Travel to Ayden, North Carolina’s Skylight Inn and meet the Jones family, cooking whole hog barbecue since the 1830s.

CUT/CHOP/COOK profiles Rodney Scott of Scott's Bar-B-Q in Hemingway, South Carolina.

Dial S for Sausage focuses on Southside Market in Elgin, Texas, and its famous hot links.

Helen’s Bar-B-Q is a celebration of pitmistress Helen Turner of Brownsville, Tennessee.

Mutton: The Movie focuses on Owensboro, Kentucky, where barbecued mutton is on the menu at Catholic church picnics and restaurants, too.

Something Better Than Barbecue documents the life and religious beliefs of Chuck Ferrell of Chuck’s Bar-B-Q in Opelika, Alabama.

To Live and Die in Avoyelles Parish celebrates Louisiana’s cochon du lait tradition—the Cajun equivalent of barbecue.

Whole Hog codifies whole hog barbecue culture in west-central Tennessee and showcases Ricky Parker of Scott’s-Parker’s Bar-B-Que in Lexington.

*                      *                      *

Our friends at Foodways Texas have recently begun making short films as well. Check out Vencil Lives Here, a profile of octogenarian pitmaster Vencil Mares of Taylor Café, by filmmaker Keeley Steenson with additional camera work by Joe York. (Available at foodwaystexas.com.)

Filmmaker Stan Woodward, who made the 1980 food-doc classic, It’s Grits!, gave similar treatment to South Carolina hash in the film Carolina Hash. (Available at folkstreams.net.)

The Woodcuts of Loren Kantor

When I first started carving woodcuts, 

every portrait 

oddly seemed to resemble 

Steve Buscemi.

~ Loren Kantor

Unlike sculpture, it's easy to pack a lot of works on paper — prints, posters, drawings, and like that — into very little space. And so I do. Of all these flat bits of art, I've been mesmerized by woodcuts since I was old enough to turn pages. Old anatomy diagrams, Albrecht Dürer's famous rhinoceros, early 20th century German prints, the Malleus Maleficarum (I was a precocious reader), Hatch Show Prints, and more. Even as a kid, before my parents deemed it wise to allow me access to woodcarving tools,  I learned to make simple prints with crudely carved potatoes and finger paint; flowers, animals, movie monsters, Latin and Cyrillic letters — whatever struck my meandering and occasionally morbid imagination. Alas, as I grew older, I turned to bending copper rather than carving wood.

But I never lost my fondess for those woodcuts. Lately, I've been taken with Loren Kantor's contemporary examples. Kantor lives in Los Angeles and the influence of cinema both old and new shows clearly in his work. His Absinthe is inspired by a 1913 silent film of the same name, an early bit of temperance propaganda.

Food, drink, and mania show up elsewhere in his prints; there's the ruined mug of Charles Bukowski, a bespectacled Colonel Harlan Sanders, the panic-struck face of Peter Lorre from Fritz Lang's 1931 classic M, and Gary Busey who, wild eyes notwithstanding, gets a sympathetic presentation.

Kantor presents these and more on his blog, Woodcuttingfool. Most seem to be about 5" x 7" — a good size for a desk or that blank spot on your office wall. Me? I'm trying to decide between Absinthe, Colonel Sanders, or the Richard Nixon print which uses an actual slogan from his 1972 reelection bid: “You Can't Lick Our Dick.”

Ahem.

Of course, if Halloween is as big a deal around your house as it is in ours, the Boris Karloff print may be just the thing for you.

Email him for pricing and shipping. Absinthe, for instance, is $35 and will ship for $3 in the United States. Loren Kantor: lorenwoodcuts (at) gmail (dot) com

Goes well with:

• Mikey Wild (1955-2011), a nod to Philadelphia institution Michael "Mikey Wild" DeLuca whose art, while very different, I hold onto with great affection. 

I Woke This Morning Thinking of Tits

I woke this morning thinking of tits.

"So what?" you may ask. "I myself think of tits no less than 329 times a day." Yeah, ok, fair enough. You and a bunch of my friends. But bear with me. This is noteworthy for several reasons. I do not recall ever, in the last forty-some years, greeting the day with thoughts of tits. Oh, I can appreciate a nice rack when I see one. I'm gay, not blind. But I spend just slightly more time mulling them over (even in passing thoughts) than I do thinking about which kosher wine I'll serve with breakfast, what's in this month's issue of Cat Fancy, or whether this is the weekend I'll finally crochet a cover for my oven.

To clarify: I do none of that.

Bardot and her, um, raccoon eyes

But here's the thing: I was thinking specifically of Brigitte Bardot's tits — and this despite the fact that no concrete image of Brigitte Bardot came to mind as I stretched under the sheets. Some European sex kitten, I vaguely recalled, whose popularity peaked before I'd learned to walk. Blonde, perhaps.

They were being talked about in my mind in the gravelly, booze-worn voice of British actor Michael Gambon. Though Gambon is known to younger generations as Professor Dumbledor in the Harry Potter movies, his roles as dangerous, dastardly men are what stick in my mind. Albert Spica, for instance, in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover or Eddie Temple in Layer Cake. The voice, though I could not make out particular words, had a distinctly lascivious tone. Not wholly unexpected, given that these were, after all, tits being talked about, but the voice was overbearing, boorish. I pictured him pawing at me while explaining something...something that clutched at the edges of my memory, then slipped away. This had to do with dinner. I was sure of it. Did Bardot, perhaps, pen a cookbook? And it wasn't jugs, or hooters, or headlights; it was...

My eyes snapped open. I had it! In my best Michael Gambon voice, I barked out "...roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits." A muffled hrrmpf came from the other side of the bed. Not everyone was awake yet.

The phrase that had been haunting me was from A.A. Gill's essay Tour De Gall in last April's Vanity Fair. The piece is so good, so anchored in my memory, that it seemed to have had me wondering whether I'd switched teams in my sleep. In it, Gill wrote about the Paris restaurant L’Ami Louis, frequented by titans of state and screen and which he excoriates, in devilish detail, as the Worst Restaurant in the World. I like the passage below dealing with the recommendation best in the Michael Gambon voice. Try that bit in Michael Caine's if you like, but not soft, velvet Old Michael Caine: Young Michael Caine, all loud and nasal and vaguely threatening.

In all my years as a restaurant critic I have learned that there is a certain type of florid, blowsy, patrician Brit who will sidle up and bellow, with a fruity bluster, that if I ever happen to find myself in Paris (as if Paris were a cul-de-sac on a shortcut to somewhere else) there is this little place he knows, proper French, none of your nouvelle nonsense, bloody fantastic foie gras, and roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits, and that I should go. But, they add, don’t bloody write about it.

If you missed it the first time around, read Gill's essay. L’Ami Louis may or may not be the worst restaurant in the world, but Tour De Gall is the most enjoyable restaurant review I've read in a long time.

And if you still can't quite place Gambon, here he is as Albert Spica in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Not entirely Safe for Work, but, then, you're sitting there reading about tits, so either you're not at work or you suffer from the delusion that nobody knows what you're doing on company time. That's Helen Mirren with the hair and a very young Tim Roth at the table.

 

Not Unlike the Dude, Pimento Cheese Abides

Fundamentally, it just feels good in your mouth.

~ Ted Lee

Canned pimentos? Roasted red peppers? Miracle Whip? Mayonnaise? People get mighty particular about their pimento cheese — and profess dismay and horror over some of the variants out there. Pimento what? Pimento cheese? Oh, come off it. You know what pimento cheese is. I ate it as a kid in Missouri and it's so widespread that even the local Trader Joe's carries tubs of the stuff in sunny San Diego.

Early 20th century pimento cheese box, packed for A&P

Regardless of its modern geographic promiscuity, pimento cheese (or minnow or menner cheese or a few other pronunciations) is a touchstone of Southern eating. The spread has been around for a little more than a century and really got a boost when farmers around Griffin, Georgia began growing Spanish pimientos (we usually drop the second "i" in English) in the early 20th century. At its most simple, pimento cheese is a blend of shredded cheddar cheese, cooked red peppers or pimentos, and mayonnaise. After that, things get personal. Shredded or minced onion gets added. Garlic, pickle juice or relish, curry powder, cumin, cilantro, red and black peppers, Worcestershire sauce, and even liquor are not unheard of.

Mississippi pastry maven and chef Martha Foose politely disapproves: "Oh, I've seen so many affronts to pimento cheese through the years."

Foose and others, including Lisa Fain (Homesick Texan), Ted Lee (the bespeckled half of the Lee Brothers), barbecue pit master Carey Bringle, Robert Stehling of Charleston's Hominy Grill, and Jason "Oh, God, No" Alley of the restaurant Comfort in Richmond, Virginia are featured in the short film Pimento Cheese, Please! by documentarians Nicole Lang and Christophile Konstas.

For a look at what the stuff is, where it came from (New York what?), and what it means to some Southerners, check out the film:

Bread Pan Ice Blocks

It's been so goddamned hot this week. Friends in other parts of the country regularly beset with summer scorchers have no sympathy.

"How hot?" they ask. "Seventy-seven degrees? Eighty? Poor you, living in paradise all year. You can't take a little heat."

Yeah, they're cloudy. Know what else they are? Cold.

To an extent, they're right. San Diego just doesn't get more than, say, nicely warm most of the year. But when the mercury spikes, we're not used to it. Even locals like me who've come from sultry — even swampy — places and know the soul-sucking power of truly hot days and nights have grown accustomed to the temperate year-round pleasantness of it all.

I only remind friends who expect unbearable heat in the summer and whose houses are built to deal with it: most San Diego homes seem not to have air conditioners. Us? We have a window unit that sits in storage 10 months out the year. The two months it's installed, we turn it on maybe a dozen times.

We're due to set a record this year. That contraption is on every night now. When I'm not sleeping directly under its cool airplane engine gusts, I'm keeping the heat at bay with uncharacteristic shorts, a nearly unheard-of and ungentlemanly bare chest, and ice. Big chunks of ice.

Rather than fuss with fancy silicone ice cube trays that still wouldn't yield enough ice, I simply filled two large bread loaf pans with filtered water and froze them. When I need a cube or three, I break the thick ice logs into rough blocks about 3" to a side with a stainless steel surgical hammer. In they go, into a sawed-off spring water bottle I now use as an iced tea glass. Top off with cold tea from the fridge and — for a while, anyway — stave off the worst of the San Diego sweats.

It's good practice for New Orleans.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a short, short clip based on H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story Cool Air.  I'd even take on Dr. Muñoz's ailment if it meant I could have continuous, blessed cool air.

You Can Go to the Store and Get You a Bottle of That There NyQuil

Several years ago when I was spending a lot of time on the road and in the field in search of home distilled liquors, I pulled over in Baltimore to take a call from documentary filmmaker Kelly L. Riley. Riley was director of Moonshine. (note the period — it comes into play in the narrative), a short documentary about distiller Jim Tom Hedrick who makes and consumes moonshine in the North Carolina mountains.

Riley and I never did meet up in person, but we compared a few notes and he sent me two VHS copies of his film. One I gave to John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi since it seemed like the kind of thing that ought to be shared and preserved. The other I kept and watched with many nods and smiles as I recognized familiar distilling methods, accents, and distillers’ outlooks, even if the people were new to me.

Though Jim Tom Hedrick is ostensibly retired from the distilling scene, that’s just the cover story — and a thin one at that. Moonshiners' secret: few of them ever really retire. They just become more secretive or make less often, but distilling is hard bug to shake. Jim Tom looks completely at ease talking about making liquor, drinking it, scrounging parts for his stills, Jesus, and blowing into his truck’s built-in breathalyzer to make it start.

That’s right: Jesus. In the clip below, sidekick Gilford Williams holds forth on the role of ethanol in the time of the Nazarene. Take this backyard philosopher with a grain of salt…or a dose of honey. The recipe he gives for his father’s cold remedy is one I’ve found from New England to California.



Both Moonshine. and its follow-up Still Making Moonshine are available now on DVD.

Goes well with:

• Kelly L. Riley's site High Proof Films
• How to Hit the Sauce, a look at Gabe Evans with his own takes on alcohol as the inestimable How to Batman!

Do it to Julia! Pink Cloves and Gin at the Chestnut Tree Café

Under the spreading chestnut tree

When I held you on my knee,

we were happy as can be

Under the spreading chestnut tree.

Under the spreading chestnut tree

I'll kiss you and you'll kiss me

Oh how happy we will be

Under the spreading chestnut tree.

~ traditional British song

Some months ago my friend Scott Heim asked me about pink clove cordial. He is, in his own words, a bit of a gin purist and his interest in this old obscurity was an outgrowth of his cocktail-centric tippling habits. I confessed I had none. We agree on the virtues of good gin, but I’m slightly leery about adding cloves to it. Since I had not seen the cordial in the US, I sent him for advice to London boozer Jay Hepburn writing at Oh Gosh!

Turns out that pink clove cordial is common enough in the UK where J.R. Phillips makes — among its several cordials — a 5.3% abv clove version. Of this one, cocktailingredients.co.uk writes it is “…still one of Devon's most popular imbibes. Pink Cloves adds a rosy hue and great flavour to punches, gin or vodka.” Seems most British online shops sell it for around £8/700ml.

I admit a certain degree of interest in the stuff, though — honest to god — a little clove goes a long way.

Scott’s question sprang to mind recently because I’ve been pecking at a first British edition George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on and off for a few weeks. Because I like to attack a topic from a few angles, I also watched the 1984 film adaptation with friends. At the end of the novel, Heim’s gin and cloves show up as the habitual drink of protagonist Winston Smith. It’s a taste that’s been knocking around, it seems, since at least the middle of the last  century.

After Smith’s brutal torture in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, he settles in at the shabby Chestnut Tree Café, where broken traitors and thoughtcriminals go to eke out their days. In the film the café’s grubby and disinterested waiter delivers room temperature government-issue gin — and three dashes from a bottle. I expected the little dasher to be bitters at first, but the book reveals it’s “saccharine flavoured with cloves.”

Smith getting his dose of gin and cloves

In that dark and drab 1984 film version of the story, John Hurt plays Smith and Richard Burton plays his nemesis and savior O’Brien. It’s a harrowing view of humanity. You may or may not care for the Eurythmics musical score. But after reading the entire novel, Orwell’s original description of Smith in the café is chilling:

The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.

Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.

By dragging Orwell into it, I don’t mean to suggest that Phillips’ pink clove cordial is anything less than good and wholesome. The serendipitous connection between Heim and Orwell — two writers I admire — amused me, is all. In fact, I hope to get my hands on several varieties of Phillips cordials one of these days for experimentation…and studiously to avoid any place even resembling the Chestnut Tree.

Goes well with:

• Jay Hepburn's site, Oh Gosh!
• Scott Heim's site
• Cocktailingredients.co.uk

Oh, rats. Do it to Julia.

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.

Scoffin' the Law

I want to be a scofflaw
And with the scofflaws stand;
A brand upon my forehead
A handcuff on my hand.
I want to be a scofflaw,
For since I went to school,
I hate to mind an order,
I hate to keep a rule.

~ anonymous poet C.W.
in Franklin P. Adams’ column
New York World, Jan 16, 1924

Delcevare King was a staunch prohibitionist and big mahoff with the Anti-Saloon League during Prohibition. His story is old hat to linguists and cocktail mavens, but the rest of us could use an introduction for his contribution to the drinking arts. In October 1923, he wrote a letter to the Harvard Alumni Bulletin (he was class of 1895) protesting the Harvard Glee Club’s singing of Johnny Harvard, the “most drinking of drinking songs…that comes pretty near to scoffing at the prohibition law.”

Even prohibitionists sometimes can have a point. Given some of the song’s lyrics, a reasonable person might conclude that alcohol—illegal for beverage purposes at the time—might figure subtly into undergraduate life at the university:



Drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink.
Yes, drink.




King took umbrage and launched a national contest to come up with a new word describing those who flaunted their disregard of laws banning beverage alcohol. A $200 award was to be dispensed for the word “which best expresses the idea of lawless drinker, menace, scoffer, bad citizen, or whatnot, with the biting power of ‘scab’ or slacker.’”

There were something like 25,000 entries. Also-rans, according to the Boston Herald, include; vatt, still, scut, sluf, curd, canker, scrub, scuttier, dreg, drag, dipsic, boozlaac, alcolog, barnacle, slime-slopper, ell-shiner, still-whacker, sluch-licker, sink, smooth, lawless-ite, bottle-yegger, crimer, alcoloom, hooch-sniper, cellar-sifter, rum-rough, high-boozer, and law-loose-liquor-lover.

Whew. Lawless-ite ranks up there with deadites from the Evil Dead movies for words that hurt my ears, but I quite like bottle-yegger and even scuttier has a ring to it. Next time I'm giving someone the high hat, I might have to use that. I wonder—is there still a stash of submission letters somewhere? Some Boston-area archives?

Of the 25,000 entries, two contestants came up with the same term: scofflaw. The prize was split between Henry Irving Dale and Kate L. Butler. Within days, Harry’s Bar in Paris was offering a “Scoff-Law Cocktail.” The cocktail faded for a while, but the word stuck. A shame about the fading drink, though: it really does deserve a spot in your repertoire.


The Scofflaw Cocktail

1.5 oz rye
1 oz dry vermouth
3/4 oz lemon juice (freshly squeezed, please)
3/4 oz grenadine*

Shake with ice in a shaker for a slow count to ten, then strain into a cocktail glass and, if you like, add a lemon twist.

Yes, drink.

* Lagniappe: Make Your Own Grenadine

The cocktail crowd over at eGullet has an ongoing discussion of how best to make one's own grenadine from fresh pomegranate juice rather than relying on the scarlet corn syrup we knew growing up. If you want that bright Shirley-Temple-Cocktail red, then a brand such as Rose's would turn the trick. But it's worth experimenting with sugar and pomegranate juice to come up with your own house version. Here's what I do:

1 cup POM pomegranate juice
1 cup white table sugar
3-4 dashes of orange flower water

Put all the juice and sugar into the container in which you will store it—a plastic squeeze jar, a repurposed vermouth bottle, or even the POM bottle itself after using half the contents—and shake the hell out of it. Once the sugar goes into solution, add the orange flower water, give it a few swirls, and store in the refrigerator.

Note that this version, while red(ish), is much more dark and even slightly muddy-looking. The taste it great, but it's emphatically not the stuff of Kiddie Cocktails.


Goes well with

• The Harvard Song Book
  
• Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success by Allan Metcalf
• Metcalf has been the long-standing executive secretary of the American Dialect Society
• David Wondrich's Imbibe!, a modern classic in mixology and the stratigraphy of cocktails
• Miller's Crossing, a script by Joel and Ethan Coen
  

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Satan's Bloody Whiskers

I've an educated taste in whisky and women,
waistcoats, and bills of fare.
Though I've had few chances to exercise it lately.
'Cause them that govern
spend all their time making up new laws
to stop men like you and me getting any.

~ Peachy Carnehan

Michael Caine made an indelible impression on me when I was a kid—not as just any character, but as ex-Army scalawag P.T. "Peachy" Carnehan in John Huston’s 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King. In their doomed scheme to become kings of remote Kafiristan during the time of the British Raj, Peachy and his compatriot Danny Dravot come across what they think are “blokes, twice as big as us” in the snow. He blurts out to Sean Connery’s Dravot “God’s holy trousers!” The phrase stuck and rattled around in my mind for decades.



It came back to me tonight. For the past few days, I’ve been hankering for a Satan’s Whiskers cocktail. The classic old gin drink has enjoyed an all-too limited renaissance lately among liquor geeks like me, in no small part to Dr. Cocktail’s take on it. It actually comes in two versions—straight and curled. No worries if you’ve never heard of it or its variants. The only difference between them is that straight calls for orange curaçao and curled calls for Grand Marnier (think of them as tricked out gins & juice).

There’s orange all over this thing; plain ol’ juice, plus orange liqueur and orange bitters. Squeeze the juice yourself and you also get orange oil expressed from the peel for a four-knuckled citrus whammy. Now, I like both versions, and fresh orange juice really does make a difference, so try it curled or straight; unless gin just skeeves you, you’re bound to like one of ‘em. But it’s the height of blood orange season in San Diego and, as I looked at a bowl of blushing little Moros on the counter, I could almost hear Peachy Carnehan’s staccato voice exclaiming “Satan’s Bloody Whiskers!”

Swapping out blood for navel or Valencia oranges gives the finished shaken cocktail a devilish crimson hue, but the ephemeral berry taste of blood orange juice comes on stronger as the drink slowly loses its chill. Moros are the variety you want, not just for their taste, but because they are often much smaller than navels and fit in a citrus squeezer nicely. Make these with regular orange juice and you've got a plain ol' Satan's Whiskers. Give it a shot either way.


Satan’s Bloody Whiskers (straight)

1 oz blood orange juice
1 oz gin
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 oz dry vermouth
4 tsp (20ml) Cointreau (just under ½ oz)*
1-2 tsp (5-10ml) orange bitters**

Shake over ice , strain into a large cocktail glass.

* for the curled version, substitute Grand Marnier.

** The Savoy Cocktail Book calls for mere dashes of bitters while Dr. Cocktail calls for a healthier dose. You could lay off the bitters some, but don't leave them out entirely. The most readily available in the US are Fee Brothers and Regan's. LeNell's keeps a great selection and may be able to hook you up with even more brands.


Goes well with

• The Man Who Would Be King
• The Savoy Cocktail Book

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