Homegrown Booze at Hangar One

On a weirdly desolate ex-military corner of Alameda, an island floating off on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, there is a magical place where a hardworking crew of booze aficionados craft small batches of carefully made spirits. Starting in 1982 as the side experiment of a German hobbyist distiller, St George Spirits has undergone a series of growth spurts in size and popularity, beginning with what has since become their biggest seller, Hangar One Vodka, first launched in 2002.  Their offerings have now expanded to include a number of fruit and spice infused vodkas, eaux-de-vie, and a handful of new experiments like single malt whiskies and absinthe.


This wasn't my first trip to the Hangar, but upon learning that an arriving out-of-town guest was interested in paying a visit, I was eager to check in for an update on their latest adventures. I can happily report that innovation is chugging along at full speed, certainly not confined to their core competency of vodka. St. George's distillers appear to be working their way through the entire catalog of distilled spirit categories. On this visit, I saw that their don't-call-it-tequila-because-it-isn't-from-Tequila, an agave spirit called Agua Azul, is available in a couple of varieties, including something already worthy of being called Anejo. Their St. George single malt whiskey is already in two varieties: an 8-year and an 11-year were being poured during today's tasting. Both were clearly more than simple experiments; these are serious contenders in their respective categories. Devoid of the shackles of regional heritage, these West Coast pioneers are subtle, complex, and poised to set a benchmark by which any future such endeavors will be judged.


Their Absinthe Verte, a headline grabber when it was released last year, has graduated from its first initial small batch, and remains complex and nuanced in the face of the crowd of bland competitors that have hit the market. Several of the other bottles in this category are merely hangers-on to the Hangar One, lacking the oily and herbal notes that this historical recreation embodies.

The hangar, with stills on display and New Year's decorations in place

The happiest gift shop on Alameda

A locals-only bar - stocked with spirits made literally 150 feet away

Absinthe, sublimely undergoing sublimation

Lastly, and possibly of the most interest to me because it wasn't available today, is something called Eurydice, a rum also being persuaded from these hallowed copper stills. It's made from California sugar cane, and has been produced in a highly limited release specifically for Smuggler's Cove, a new chapel of rum owned by Martin Case in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. Even polite prodding to the barstaff produced nothing more than acknowledgement of the arrangement, but sadly, no rum in my glass. Word is that St. George is working on a rum of their own, for possible release later in 2010. Sounds like I'll be paying another visit across the bay sometime in the new year...

Panini and Circuses

Not everything related to food was better in the past. 

This evening I've just been to a performance of Cirque du Soleil's Ovo here in San Francisco. Cirque is the updated and more conscientious alternative to the often cruel animal-based circuses, employing amazing and fully consenting human talent instead of prodded wildlife to elicit oohs and aahs from an adoring audience. And on the food front, the concession stands that follow the convoy of Cirque trucks around the world has similarly upgraded their fare from the olden days of fairs and traveling shows. 

Panini, crèmes brûlées, sparkling, white and red wine, and a selection of beers, including local ones, were for sale by cheerful staff behind well-attended stands. More familiar staples like popcorn and chocolates could also be had, but overall, this was a caliber beyond the standard peanuts and cracker jacks found at most public spectacles.

 

Gourmet food under the Chapiteau

Whether this is an indication of an ongoing shift towards improved concession food in general or simply the natural influence of a French circus troupe, I welcome the change. May the new year reveal more such pleasant surprises. Bonne année!

Quality over Quantity in 2010

Most New Year's resolutions are related to food and drink, and to be honest, most are utter failures. As soon as their champagne hangovers begin to fade, people herd themselves into the gym, crowd the jogging trails, and fill their freezers with boxes of Healthy Choice or Smart Ones to repent for their earlier food sins. But by the end of January, most people have returned to their old routines, usually just in time for Super Bowl parties where diets are discarded in favor of fried chicken wings and endless pitchers of beer.

The trouble with most of these resolutions is that they're too specific, too restrictive, and only serve to make life less enjoyable. Stiff rules break, but flexible ones merely bend. My humble suggestion? Eschew quantity for quality. Instead of relegating foods to a Forbidden or Permitted list, simply limit your selections to include small portions of foods that actually taste good. 

 Missing the point completely

We could all take a lesson from the French, whose cuisine is devoid of Olestra fat substitutes, Splenda, or flavored rice cakes. All of these puffy vapid foods are endemic of the peculiarly American tendency to insist upon hollowing out the joy from what were once tasty treats, rendering them into bizarre-tasting and unsatisfying sources of bulk. It doesn't have to be this way.

From a tirade against light beer by Rebecca Kelley in the Daily Fork:

If you have a craving for a milkshake, you don't say "Ooh, I really want a milkshake, but I'll substitute water for the milk and frozen cottage cheese for the ice cream and blend that atrocity together so I can drink a few of them without feeling guilty-wilty about the extra calories."

Let this stick in your mind the way it has in mine. Skip desserts for awhile, eat some fruit instead, or find someone to share that piece of cake. But if your cravings begin to shout too loudly, don't turn to some crappy rendition of what you're actually craving. To Rebecca's well-phrased example, I'll raise a single pint (perhaps one of only two for the whole evening) of a well-crafted but highly caloric beer. To a restrained new year!

Nachos? Not Mine Either.

The following advertisement in this month's Real Simple magazine almost drove me to profanity. It's a big two-page spread that refuses to be ignored, and proclaims without a trace of shame, "What's the key to great nachos? Hint: not the lettuce", followed by some horn-tooting about Kraft's skills at making cheese. I nearly choked on my own sense of revulsion.

Good gracious no, the secret is certainly NOT lettuce! Nor is the secret to a great bouillabaisse the addition of persimmons. Who in their right mind would ever dream of bringing such a culinary mismatch to life? Now I'm not a recipe fundamentalist; I think riffing on established recipes is a great way to invite culinary serendipity. Having said that, I cannot let the suggestion of lettuce persist as an unpunished assault on my beloved nacho. Let's look back at what nachos really are:


Ignacio Anaya, chef at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, a stone's throw across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas, gave his name to this dish that we now take for granted (In Spanish, 'nacho' is a diminutive form of Ignacio). Concocted in 1943 in response to a late-night shortage of ingredients for a visiting group of American women, Ignacio's first eponymous dish was simple, and a product of the Tex-Mex blend of tastes undoubtedly as familiar to him as it was during my upbringing in Texas. It consisted of wedges of corn tortilla fried in oil until crispy, sharp cheddar cheese, and slices of pickled jalapeño. It's blindingly simple, but that's why it works. 

There are no cold ingredients here to lessen the gooey-ness of the sharp tangy cheese or to make the chips soggy. There are no wet slimy tomatoes, no beans, and no guacamole. Neither of those additions would be as nonsensical as lettuce, but nor would they allow a completely undistracted nacho experience. The secret to good nachos is to spare them the bounty of the garden, to let the components sing loudly on their own. The bite of the jalapeños cuts through the fattiness of the cheese, and the addictive crunch of this dish comes solely from the fried corn chips; no vegetal addition is necessary. The lack of greenery may elicit accusations of unhealthfulness, to which I must also point out that nachos are, as should be evident to anyone with the faintest notion of nutrition, not a meal. They are a delightful late night snack, and have nothing to gain from lettuce.

I'm not sure where Kraft's mutant Midwestern interpretation of Tex-Mex has come from, but I'll be quite happy to see it return, never to reveal itself again. One cannot simply dump a mound of dip materials onto a pile of chips and call it nachos - such a misguided casserole might appeal to some poor neglected palates, but it is no nacho.
 

Where No Animal Fat Has Gone Before

Humphry Slocombe is a boundary-pushing ice cream shop in San Francisco. It's near my house, and I've made several trips to sample their bold flavor experiments, like Hibiscus Beet sorbet and Secret Breakfast ice cream (the latter a mixture of vanilla, frosted flakes and bourbon). Recently they've made a foray into sweet snacks, sold in little cellophane bags. This year, two of their offerings made up the representatives from California that I brought for the holidays to Texas.

Alongside the standard dark chocolate souvenir box from See's Candies, these peculiar little experiments offered a counterpoint to the traditional. My verdict: bacon and peanut brittle are an unlikely but harmonious pairing. Salty, sweet, crunchy and chewy, they were a justifiable use of calories.

Lard and caramel - not so much. The low melting point of lard means that these candies never quite solidified, and were greasy to the touch. The flavor wasn't offensive, but it was unclear throughout the experience just exactly what the lard was bringing to the party. Butter is smooth and clean, and rounds out the simmered brown flavor of cooked sugar. Lard, on the other hand, seems to sit on top of the sugar flavor like a malcontented lump of swine. It's an admirable experiment, but not a fruitful result in my opinion. For the time being, I'll stick with my bacon brittle and hold onto hope for the next addition to the series - duck fat pecan pie...

The tried-and-true and the experimenters

Texas - A Whole 'Nuther Country

As is typical during this season of excess and celebration, I have been spending a lot of time in bars and restaurants during my holiday visit to Texas. These convivial spaces, serving the role of "third place" between the public and private realms, offer a glimpse not only into the eating and drinking habits of Texans, but also into their social values and unusually self-aware sense of state pride.

It's a big state, and always has been. Texans will proudly remind foreigners (this includes residents of other states in the Union) that Texas was once its own sovereign country. But the boasting is most poignant to me when it's manifested in visual form.

I leave you today with a series of illustrative photos taken at Fred's Texas Cafe, an outpost of Texan beer, loud voices, and good-natured but unapologetic pride.

 

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." - Frank Zappa

But what if I don't live in...? Ah. Okay, I see.

"Coldass Beer" - presumably meant to counteract whatever that Srirachi is going on

Frank Zappa may have forgotten to mention a toast.

Gifts of Food Knowledge

I have made no secret of my obsession with micro-detailed deep investigative books on highly specific food topics. As a result, I've been fortunate that among the many thoughtful gifts from my family and friends this year, my Christmas has included a few literary treasures that I've been really looking forward to absorbing. I have a few weeks of reading to do:

Spice: The History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner

Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook, by Robb Walsh

America Eats!: On the Road with WPA..., by Pat Willard

The Food of A Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky

The Devil's Picnic: Travels Through the Underworld of Food and Drink, by Taras Grescoe

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky 

Whew.

Merry Industrialized Christmas

Ho Ho Heinz

The journey from our agrarian food past to our sanitized, engineered and manufactured present is an endless source of fascination to me. Food habits are a bellwether of larger cultural changes, and it is during times of war, migration and massive lifestyle shifts that people are the most apt to change what they put into their bellies. Inevitably, there are hiccups along the way as habits are adapted.

The stalwart to all of this change is typically the holiday traditions; if a dish has been passed down for generations, then its proponents will feel obligated to continue to honor it. When this respect for traditions is coupled with the rapid pace of food technology and marketing, the results can be hilarious. Broccoli cheese and mushroom soup casserole, and mounded molds of bright green vegetable-suspension gelatin are among the few hybrid mutants that have emerged from the most recent transition in the mid 20th century.

Today's example comes from a 1938 advertisement for Heinz. Santa has apparently decided to moonlight from his gig with the Coca-Cola company to hawk canned and pickled holiday delights. Enjoy this snippet from the era when tradition was colliding with technology:

Santa's an epicure - don't ever doubt it. Just take a look at the festive fixin's (sic) in his basket! There are Heinz Home-style Soups - Cream of Tomato, Cream of Mushroom, Green Pea - for impressive first courses. There are Heinz Jellies, six varieties of Pickles to grace the fowl - and Heinz Puddings and Mincemeat for a scrumptious finale. Somebody's going to have a real old-fashioned Christmas dinner - homemade by Heinz!

Barbecue - A Holiday Tradition

I've recently waxed on about the wonder of suburban and rural American barbecue traditions. But after a second look, I may have been too complimentary, and need to clear a few things up. During my annual holiday visits back to Texas, I get vivid reminders that for reasons unknown, in certain regions barbecue is a matter taken much more seriously, and held closer to the cultural heart, than in others.

Texas is one of those places. Tasting barbecue from a nice little chain like Kinder's in Northern California, I can't help but feel like I'm making countless concessions for them, feeling encouraged by their local fanbase and their heritage, when all the while, in all honesty, I feel a little sorry for them. Here in Texas, it's easy as a native to take good, slow, smoky, red-lined brisket beef barbecue for granted, but after comparison to other regions, it becomes painfully obvious how how foolish this is. My appreciation has only developed after having left my home state for the west coast, and I cherish these trips back every year.

In Texas, barbecue may include pork, but beef is the star of the show. Brisket is justifiably at the top of the menu, and without it, the Texas tradition would have little right to claim its superiority. It is no coincidence that the Fort Worth Stockyards, the historical nexus of the cattle trade, remains studded with a galaxy of meaty meaty stars.



Riscky's Barbecue is one of them. It's a small regional chain, with a flagship restaurant in historic downtown Fort Worth. It was on these red brick streets that real Western gunfights took place; it is in that spirit of taking public opinion seriously that Riscky's has continued to please customers with spectacularly inspired barbecue.
 
My lunch today embodied much of what makes Texas barbecue special. In my chopped (not sliced, thankyouverymuch) brisket sandwich, I experienced the perfect balance of deep woody smoke, caramelized and vinegary tomato-based barbecue sauce and perfectly soft and tender slow-cooked beef. It is simple, served on a plastic tray on paper with a Polish pickle, a pickled jalepeño, a slice of onion.
 
I do not completely understand it; I could not dream of reproducing it myself, and respect anyone who can. But I know it when I taste it, and I am proud to have it as a birthright. Happy Holidays, y'all.

The paper towels are a sign of taking things seriously.

Fried corn nuggets - what could be wrong with that?

The heart of the Texas mystery

Not all traditions are classy

Soupy Days

Soupy weather outside the office window

It’s a gloomy twenty-first day of December. The clouds here in San Francisco have floated eastward over the hills to sink and settle into the valleys, casting damp grey light over the rows of old wooden houses. Cars swoosh cautiously through shiny streets, and the otherwise bright Victorians are sulking impatiently in the light rain, their drooping eaves dripping with mist.

The holidays are still a couple of days away, but instead of anticipation and streets full of festive twinkliness, San Francisco has the dull silence of empty kitchens and dark offices. Most residents here have originally come from somewhere else, and many have already packed up and headed out of town to spend a few days back home.

Today, more than almost any other day, calls for basic quiet food that nourishes and reassures. This is the shortest day of the year, and it needs soup.

Rich extravagance is nigh; we don’t need to upstage pending celebratory meals that will come later this week. A thick stew would be too hearty; that kind of food is for genuinely cold days later in the winter. No, this sleepy “calm before the storm” evening calls for something simple and filling, like split pea soup.

I’ve made minor adaptations to a Swiss recipe from Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book of Soups and Stews. It’s based on one from a Peter Rifibach at the Hotel Bären in Guttannen, and fits today’s mood perfectly.

Half a pound of yellow split peas
A quarter pound of lardons, pork cracklings or bacon
Two tablespoons of butter
Half a turnip, chopped
Half a cup of chopped celery
One cup of leeks, washed and sliced
Six to eight sprigs of parsley, tied in a bundle
Three quarters of a pound of potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
Six cups of beef stock
A cloth spice bag (sachet d’épice) containing two bay leaves, two cloves, six black peppercorns and a crushed clove of garlic
A teaspoon of salt
Two cups of cream
Half a cup of chopped parsley

Soak the split peas in water for a 8-10 hours beforehand. Drain them.

Melt the butter in a large pot with the pork. Add the turnip, celery, leeks and parsley. Cover and cook over medium-low heat for about 15 minutes, or until vegetables are tender.

Add the potatoes, peas and beef stock. Cover and simmer for at least 2 hours. For the last half hour of cooking, add the spice bag and parsley bundle.

Remove the spice bag and the parsley bundle. Remove the pot from the heat, add salt and cream, and puree the soup in a food processor.

Ladle into warm bowls, garnish with parsley.

Take a deep breath. Enjoy.

Champagne and Priorities

 Yes, and advertising dollars apparently come from trees.

An enormous advertisement in downtown San Francisco has recently been emblazoned on the side of a building, no doubt in preparation for this season of celebratory toasts and cork popping, in the hopes of raising awareness about champagne. Specifically, it's an effort by an organization called the Office of Champagne USA, acting on behalf of champagne producers to raise awareness about a major problem challenging French winemakers. There are confusing legal allowances here in the US that permit sparkling wines to be labeled as "champagne" even if their only relation to the eponymous region in northern France is the hopeful optimism of the marketer. In other words, this organization has been founded to defend the namesake of real champagne, in the hopes of acquiring the regionally-protected nomenclature rights granted to champagne in Europe. 


I believe in this the purpose behind this champagne campaign, because I feel it's important to maintain Champagne (the region)'s significance in the minds of consumers; there are clear historical and cultural differences between champagne (the wine) and prosecco or sekt or espumante or cava or asti, or any one of the other forms of sparkling wines. If the names become legally meaningless, then consumers will know less about what they're buying, brands and labels will lose their meaning, and the market value of champagne will plummet, harming winemakers in France and making the consumer experience more difficult for everyone who buys wine. 


But this billboard makes me smack my forehead. I'm really flabbergasted at such a waste of money.



The billboard says, "Champagne only comes from Champagne. Unmask the truth at www.champagne.us"


Think about that statement. Let's try to look at this objectively, stepping back from the point of view of a marketing schill for a champagne trade organization, or even from the perspective of someone reading a food blog. This ad isn't in a highly-targeted wine magazine, or at a table at a wine festival. It's on a street corner in a metropolitan area, near a bridge underpass full of abandoned shopping carts. "Champagne only comes from Champagne", it says, next to a bottle of American Champagne wearing a mask. Imagine you're in the prime target audience for whom this ad was intended; you're someone who hasn't the foggiest notion that the word champagne has any meaning past "bubbly wine". The people at Office of Champange USA want to let you know that this word should only be used in reference to bottles from a small part of France. 

Champagne (bubbly wine) is only from Champagne (bubbly wine?). What? 

Wait, "from Champagne".. so, Champagne makes champagne? Okay, so bubbly wine comes from other Champagnes. That's weird. Wait - there's a mask. Bottles wearing masks. What??

And the audience walks on down the street, confused as ever.


If you're the kind of person who already knows that Champagne is both a product and a region, you're already starting off as a rarity. And chances are, you already know from dinner party conversations that similar wines from elsewhere in the world should be called "sparkling wine". The mask makes sense, the ad makes sense, but you're not learning anything new. Message received, no knowledge gained, money completely wasted.



But if you're the average billboard reader who doesn't know about this mysterious double meaning, you represent the hope of achievement of Office of Champagne USA's goals. Unfortunately, to you, this ad makes no sense whatsoever. A bottle wearing a mask - what on earth is that supposed to convey to someone who hasn't already spent time contemplating this issue? Wine industry reps are well familiar with the idea that a dilution of the word "champagne" represents an unjust and undeserved association with the real thing, and a duplicity akin to a deceptive disguise. A useful image would be perhaps one of France, or a photo of a French countryside highway sign identifying the word Champagne as something more than a generic term. 


I'm getting pedantic here, but honestly, it riles me up to see good money, earned by people producing a product that I believe in and enjoy and want to see respected, floundered on a piece of marketing so ill-informed and wasteful. 


Champagne only comes from Champagne - this is both true and important to remember. Don't spend your money on a bottle from somewhere else that capitalizes on the word's cachet. But please, just as importantly, don't spend your money on billboards if you don't know how to use the medium.

Supplying Your Own Home Restaurant

Depending on your point of view, cooking may be a profession, a passion, a hobby or a chore. But in any case, it cannot be denied that cooking requires a few basic tools. Sur La Table, Williams-Sonoma and a slew of department stores will gladly take your money in exchange for tools imbued with misty notions of fairytale domesticity and twee French farmhouse fantasies, all perfectly capable of performing tasks but with spectacularly marked-up prices. I get swept up in this kind of romance regularly, and would join the associated support group if it existed. 

But let's not forget that these are tools, not lifestyle accessories. For restaurant professionals, this truth cannot be denied; frugality is essential. Succumbing to the siren's promise of retail romance would take the already-thin margins of the business and whittle them down to nothing. So where do they buy their tools? 

Restaurant supply warehouses.

Every city with a certain number of restaurants is bound to have one, typically located as far as possible from the shopping bag-laden throngs of zombie customer cows that clog the high streets. Here in San Francisco, there are a half dozen decent ones, and Economy Restaurant Fixtures is my current favorite; I find myself driving over to Potrero Hill on a fairly regular basis to peruse their aisles of culinary tools and accessories. Their prices are reasonable, and although they won't always have a lower price than similar outfits here in San Francisco, their quality doesn't seem to waver either. One thing is for sure - they provide a cheerful relief from the prices at any retailer with a catalog and national advertising budget to offset.

From cookie cutters to digital scales, roasting pans to ice buckets, springform pans, glassware, and even pizza delivery accoutrements, restaurant supply houses have it, often stacked unceremoniously and without excess packaging or merchandising. They feel reassuringly like the Home Depots they should resemble, and for the home cook buying just one cocktail strainer for $2.32 instead of $16.95 downtown, it's enough to make even the chore of shopping into a joy.

Tiny whisks, normal whisks, and yes, even giant three-foot long whisks

  

Strainers, chinoises, and colanders, oh my!

  

More cookie cutters than you can shake a whisk at

 

Everything required for that pizza delivery man Halloween costume

Convening with the Cocktail Canon

Antique User's Manual

My copy of The Bar Tender's Guide: How To Mix Drinks, by the venerable Jerry Thomas, has just arrived. I'm more excited than usual about this addition to my culinary library, because this is a special book. This 1862 classic, the first widely-read of its kind ever written, is rare and very expensive in its original form. Now Mud Puddle Books in New York has created not just a reissue, but an unusually accurate reproduction, as part of a collection of seminal books now available as reasonable priced alternatives to dusty and pricey antiques. Mud Puddle is a small imprint, and they still don't offer wholesale pricing, so even my favorite purveyors Cask and Omnivore Books have been unable to offer their covetable items on their shelves. I had to order mine directly from Cocktail Kingdom, the site from which I imagine owner Greg Boehm may actually ship the orders himself.

It feels particularly satisfying to hold the original incarnation of an author's work, bereft of the pesky rubber-gloved preciousness automatically conferred upon objects that have become old. Here is a faithful reproduction of not only the expressed thoughts of a 147-year old book, which could easily be extracted and conveyed on a webpage, but also the binding, gilt-embossing, and fine illustrations. As David Wondrich writes in the introductory pages, it is a time machine, putting the reader "back among the pioneers" of the mixological era that was about to be.

No photocopied nonsense here

Even if I don't work my way systematically through this book's recipes, from Brandy Punch through Ginger Wine (and to be honest, that's exactly what I plan to do), I'll be able to build a historical understanding of the development of the modern cocktail. Now to trek chronologically forward through Mud Puddle's other revivals. Next stop: O.H. Byron's Modern Bartender's Guide from 1884.

Liquor.com Launches, National Cocktail Knowledge Poised to Embiggen

I’m having a lot of fun this evening exploring the newly-launched Liquor.com. Set up here in San Francisco by acquaintances of the Bourbon and Branch / Rickhouse / Cask crowd, it’s a well-arranged site with a useful collection of drink recipes, some historical nuggets about specific spirits, and eloquently written ponderings on matters alcoholic.

They’re clearly serious about the venture if they’ve splashed out on such a covetable domain name, but time will tell whether it develops into a definitive authority on anything. However, judging from the company they keep, my hopes are high. Bearded cocktail guru David Wondrich, the co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, is on their roster of contributing writers, as are a host of other respected mixological leaders. 

It looks like Liquor.com is making a serious effort to raise the collective cocktail intelligence level, and to that, I'll raise a glass.

Cooking Magic on an iPhone

Cookery and geekery go hand-in-hand, it seems. It's a lucky coincidence that Northern California is home not only to rampant culinary enthusiasm and some of the best farmland in the country, but also the seat of much of the world's high-tech industry. Randomly eavesdrop on a San Francisco street, and words like "biodynamic compost" will blend together seamlessly with things like "browsing scrobbler". It's a weird beautiful mix, and makes this part of the world a fun place to live.

The Bay Area mindset is perfectly within the crosshairs for the recent release of Ratio, a new culinary iPhone app. It's been developed on behalf of Michael Ruhlman, the writer, chef, cookbook author, and fellow food adventurer with the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Alton Brown. I've heard the hype, and this morning, took the $5 plunge and downloaded it myself.

The brilliance of this app is almost eclipsed by its simplicity. The basic premise here is that a few simple ratios of ingredients make up an enormous culinary canon of recipes. Understanding these ratios, for the fat, flour and water in a pie dough recipe, for instance, unlocks techniques to enable countless recipes to be created with confidence and ease.

Volumetric measurement, or using cups and teaspoons to mete out compactable ingredients like flour and sugar, is laughably unreliable. A humid day or a heavy hand with the measuring cup will cause even the most carefully concocted recipe to fail. The solution? Weigh everything instead. Weight is the only precise measurement to use for portioning ingredients. Unfortunately, most American cooks don't use a scale, and most cookbooks are simply lifestyle porn clogged with flowery prose, not specificity. This app makes a good effort to clear the barriers for entry into a more sober and scientific style of cooking - just buy a scale, and this app will give you all the information you need. 

The content runs deeply - it outlines doughs, batters, custards, fat-based sauces, stocks and thickeners, dessert sauces, and in a nod to Ruhlman's previous triumph, Charcuterie, also includes ratios related to sausage, mousseline and the like. My five dollars have been well spent.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some highly precise cooking to do.

Life Magazine Reveals Liquor from the Past

I have a stack of old issues of Life magazines from the 1950s and 1960s that I’ve picked up for a few dollars each at Half Price Books. They’re a cheap and amusing trip back in time, and I am especially enthralled by the advertisements. The complete lack of cynicism and oh-gee obsession with new technological conveniences remains addicting today – after a weekend afternoon spent flipping old pages, it usually takes a good half hour to shake the lust for Oldsmobile’s new fins, the urge to smoke Tareytons and to mix my Manhattans with Four Roses whiskey.

Much to my delight, Google has recently added the full archives of Life to their Google Books index, allowing searchable full-color scans of every page from 1935 to 1972. Now at my fingertips are the long bizarre treatises on the superiority of Calvert’s premixed cocktails, the thirst-quenching wonder of Sanka coffee, and the anti-dandruff power of Listerine (really).

Amongst this wondrous digitized Kodachrome cavalcade, there are also articles. I was pleased to discover that some of these aren’t so bad either. Case in point, an encyclopedic celebration of liquor, from late May of 1946. Prohibition was still fresh in the nation’s collective memory, and this article reveals a similarly fresh enthusiasm for the connoisseurship that had only been legally possible again for 13 years. 

We begin with the standard “history of booze” section, sporting William Hogarth’s now-obligatory 1751 Gin Lane woodcut, plus a charming Currier and Ives lithograph tracking the stages of drunkenness from “a glass with a friend” through “death by suicide”. Then there’s a beautiful color lineup of 1940s liquor bottles, from the era when booze packaging was as serious and official-looking as currency (with the exception of the cute little Haig dimple pinch bottle – don’t you just want to squeeze it?) and my favorite – a full-color two-page spread of thirty popular cocktails, each posed in gorgeous glassware and annotated with recipe instructions. Here we find a clove-studded Hot Toddy, the eponymous but now-rare Bacardi, plus our elusive friend Crème Yvette, who stars in the bizarre layered Pousse Café.
 

My kind of menu

Near the end is a celebration of famous American bars, then a stunning finale, and something I desperately want to see revived. Page 75 shows us the Vesuvius, a terrifying pillar of booze capped with a flaming rum-soaked orange from a bar called Town House in Los Angeles. There isn’t much information about this Town House place today, although there’s a New Town House that reveals no stated interest in signature cocktails. But judging from the white-coated barman and the $5 price tag on this tower of post-war alcoholic confidence, this was a cocktail destination in its heyday, 63 years ago.

 

I'll have what he's having

I’ve got loads of exploring to do now, with more issues of Life than I ever could have imagined perusing. And who knows – maybe all of this optimistic wonder will inspire me to bring some culinary ghosts back out of the archives. Anyone for a Vesuvius?

Nouveau Hanukkah Culinary Genius

This blurry photo barely attests to the bevy of spectacular Hanukkah culinary treats that I was fortunate to enjoy this evening in the warm hospitality of friends. It may not be a traditional canon with which I'm intimately familiar, but one of the defining aspects of a Hanukkah dinner is the respect given to fried foods, like jelly doughnuts, fried chicken, and potatoes, so I'm an easily-won participant.

Among the mountain of crispy latkes and tender fried chicken, the citrus-infused kugel and the little brightly colored cookies lurked a less commonly seen addition. It's dead simple to make, and born not from thousands of years of tradition or from an heirloom passed from anyone's old country, but from simple American packaged food genius. You ready for it? They're little hard pretzels with a Rolo chocolate caramel melted on top. The end. That's it, but the end result is as compelling as the most nuanced salted-caramel whotsit for sale at the latest twee boutique. Sweet, salty, crunchy, chewy, and both ingredients available, in a pinch, from a convenience store. 

I'm stealing this genius-inspired creation for my own holiday festivities, and if you're smart, you'll do the same.

There’s Meat In Them Hills

Whenever I venture immediately eastward from San Francisco toward the central portion of California, I am reminded of some cultural truths. Contrary to a belief commonly-held by many residents of the City by the Bay, the west coast is not some distant outpost of the United States, culturally removed from the heartland like some kind of misplaced European satellite. San Francisco might be a quirky enclave of stubborn iconoclasts, both committed to and paradoxically resistant to change, but much of this fades quickly after a few miles on the eastbound highway. Right there on the other side of the bridge are strings of Applebees and Sizzlers, houses on big lots with swimming pools, big box stores and SUVs and all the components of Everytown USA.

This is not necessarily lamentable. As a product of Central time zone suburbia myself, I feel a familiar tug at my heart when I travel through towns delineated entirely by freeway exits. And today, en route to Sacramento in the town of Hercules, I found another reason to love them. 

For reasons unknown, barbecue seems to flourish best in rural environments. The flashier and more sophisticated a barbecue outlet, the more suspect I become of the product. The typical authentic story of a real barbecue joint, whether in Texas or the Carolinas or elsewhere, goes like this: Someone, often already involved in the raising, butchering, and/or purveying of meat, comes to develop a particular skill at preparing said product, and decides to augment their sales by retailing the finished product to the public. Word spreads, sales and popularity increase, and the original business becomes ancillary to the thriving sale of barbecue. Multiple locations ensue, often in low-rent unremarkable locales, and a couple of generations pass, so that communities and families develop shared sets of fond memories of the establishment. I've seen this pattern in my home state of Texas countless times.

The Ball Tip sandwich, deserving of its fame

In Hercules, the place is called Kinder's Meats & Deli. Started as a deli in San Pablo, California, it's now in its fourth generation, with locations spread (albeit not too widely) around the area. The Hercules outlet is in a strip mall, and they continue to sell raw meat and branded grocery items along with their now-famous barbecue. I tried their acclaimed Ball Tip Sandwich, with tender meat and a sweet barbecue sauce on soft bun that resembled an upgraded Vietnamese banh mi. I didn't regret my choice at all, and although I'm still not sure what distinguishes Ball Tip from Tri-Tip, I can say that it makes for a tasty sammich. 

This was my first visit to Kinder's, but it's familiar to me all the same. These kinds of local restaurants are pleasant roadside alternatives to the national chains, and the kind of place I look for when I travel on American highways. Keep up the good work!

Manufactum, Purveyor of Good Things

Manufactum is a great retailer based in Germany that scours the globe for old-fashioned, handmade and just plain old reliable goods. From gardening tools to cleaning supplies, clothing to sporting goods, everything they sell is charmingly and unselfconciously retro. But what makes it particularly unique from other similar vendors is that this catalogue is assembled by Germans, not a people known for embracing the faux-finish country cottage shabby-chic retro crap that enchants so many Americans. Theirs is a nostalgia for – wait for it, and say it with a furrowed brow - superior utility.

Ever since discovering them online a couple of years ago, I’ve spent hours poring over their catalogue, and someday, I may work up the justification to place an order, perhaps for a set of these super-cool apothecary spice jars or a special edition Rimowa steel suitcase.

Their restrained criteria for products to sell translates to lots of cast iron, steel, glass, brass and leather, with nary a bit of plastic to be found. Fountain pens, wool coats, boar bristle shaving brushes - it’s as if all technological advances made after 1920 have been categorically ignored. The end result is a special, albeit expensive, world full of authentic handcrafted and durable goods, where everything is made by an artisan and nothing is toxic or over-engineered.

What’s so cool about this? They also sell food.

The packaging alone is like a walk through some mythical Beaux-Arts corner store, full of delightfully ornate graphic indulgences for simple items like cookies and Italian nougat. There are glass bottles of vinegar with intricate labels that resemble nineteenth century letterpress handbills, twee little jars of preserves with paper lid skirts, and earthenware mustard crocks with cork lids secured by wax and string. Accordingly, the contents of these beautiful packages are made with the same respect for tradition and rejection of technological adjuncts as the housewares. It’s yet another vote for bringing back the good old days of food – all I need now is a stateside purveyor…

Food Time Travel with the Prelinger Archives

Last Friday evening I joined a crowd of history nerds at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco for a lecture and screening of ephemera films by Rick Prelinger. His famous archives of corporate films, public service announcements and home movies have amazed me for a couple of years now on archive.org, so I was excited to see what gems he'd unearthed most recently. Prelinger brings to life films chock full of storyless minutiae, without narrative or context, sometimes even without a soundtrack. Films of trips to the gas station in the family Model A, families dressed in formal attire for weekend visits to long-since-demolished amusement parks - these glimpses of the banal affirm the comforting ways that, despite all of the bewildering and relentless pace of change over the last hundred years, basic parts of everyday life haven't changed at all.

After the screening, the lecture host and founder of the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand, started the question-and-answer session with a question about the power of moving pictures versus still photos. There's certainly a deeper emotional connection created with moving images; there's a personal relevance that is intrinsically conveyed when viewed in four dimensions. It was certainly true for that evening - I'd just been laughing and smiling with a couple of hundred strangers while looking at old footage of the Bay Bridge being built. Still photos would've put us to sleep.


I continually posit a belief that food in the past, and people's relationship with it, was somehow better, or more authentic, than it is today. I look in old cookbooks and vintage menus and magazine ads, searching for insightful details and facts to back up this claim, and honestly, I may never know for sure whether there were any "good old days". Nostalgia is a glaze that covers truth, and especially for something as emotionally stirring as food, it may not be possible to clear it completely from the lens of history.


But through the lens of a camera, there have been fascinating films made about food, and they stand a chance of actually showing what it was like in the days before things like Chai Latte Non-Dairy Creamer. I invite you to explore the Prelinger Archives yourself - you may enjoy the trip. 


Here are a few of my favorites:

Pork People Like - With plenty of sound purchasing advice for the meat buyer of 1956.
Food For Fighters - Uncle Sam on the importance of wartime nutrition.
This is Hormel - A super-comprehensive treatise on pork in the 1960s.
The Restaurant Operator - From 1946, some advice on selling food to the public.

Wherefore Art Thou Cutie?

One of the treats of this wintertime season is the abundance and variety of citrus fruit. To me, growing up without any real appreciation for the seasonality of foods, I would have guessed that citrus was a summertime treat, given the strong resemblance of their vivisected form to a burst of sunshine. It remains one of the least intuitive seasonal food groups around, and I'll always consider it forgivable to assume that oranges and tangerines should appear along with strawberries and peaches, when they have so much sweet juicy character in common.

If I'd been left to figure it out on my own, I would have called upon memories of my grandmother's stories of Christmases celebrated with stockings full of oranges. She grew up in a small German community in North Texas, where presumably, even citrus from south Texas was special enough to warrant a yuletide honor. This is an easily-measurable gap in knowledge of the year's food fluctuations, and a way to see exactly how long it's been since my family felt a connection to the natural rhythm of crops; for me, it's two generations. By the time my mother came around, food distribution was becoming an industry, and sturdy navel oranges were on their way to year-round nationwide ubiquity.

But some things remain seasonal. As has become customary this time of year, my local markets have begun stocking their shelves with Cuties, a variety of easily-peeled and cheap clementine sold by the boxload. I had one with my breakfast this morning, and began to wonder about them. Why is it that I don't remember these little guys from my childhood? Are Cuties simply a brand name for something that had already been around, or could they somehow be new?

Wearing their holiday attire

I asked my Larousse Gastronomique, from 1961. It offers a few clues. The "sweet orange tree", as it differentiates from the older bitter variety, "does not always reproduce itself faithfully from seed", and comes from many different countries, etc. Hmm. Nothing there.

I asked my book Citrus: A History, by Pierre Laszlo, and I get a story about Portuguese citrus exports to Britain influencing Spanish colonists in California, how the Protestant work ethic of later settlers played a role along with the climate of Southern California to produce an industry...sheesh. Nothing on Cuties, or even basic clementines, for that matter.

To the internet, where I find my answer, on the Sun Pacific website:

"Back in the early 2000’s Sun Pacific introduced the Cuties® brand California Clementine from our ranches in the San Joaquin Valley. Already being a Citrus grower since 1969, we understood the fine art of growing excellent quality fruit."

It seems we have clever Southern California orange-growers to thank for these Cuties. This enthusiastic page goes on to tout the many "features" of this orange, including its portability and its provocative-sounding "zipper skin".  Whether and how their heritage traces back any further than a twinkle in a marketer's eye will have to wait for some deeper research. For now, I'm going to go unzip a few more and enjoy the results.

Nothing to Fear about Tarts

They say baking is difficult. Unlike a stir fry or a casserole, where there's boundless room for forgivable errors, baking is a game of precision, where weights matter more than volume, and small discrepancies will turn flaky into flabby, or delicate into deflated.

But let's not blow these little challenges out of proportion - plenty of cookbook authors and self-righteous baker snobs have done that enough already. Not everything related to flour-based treats has to be hard. Here's a weekday creation that I whipped up without any fear of failure, because it's so mind-numbingly simple - an apple tart.

Making pastry dough is like playing chess, making love, or rock climbing. Anyone can try it without much training, nobody's very good their first time, and few people are genuine experts. Don't be scared.Get yourself the following:

One cup of all-purpose flour

Three-quarters of a stick of butter, cut into tiny cubes and put in the freezer for 3-4 minutes

A quarter cup of ice water

A pinch of salt

Two apples, any kind you like, peeled and sliced up into thin little half-apple shaped discs

You won't need a food processor, or any weird expensive tools. Just a bowl, a fork, a rolling pin, and something to cook your tart in. I like the $3 two-piece 10-inch stainless steel one I got at the restaurant supply house. Some cookbooks will tell you that you don't even need a pan, but I find the folded-edge tarts such advice suggests to be just a tad too rustic. I'm also partial to the little ridged edges created by a tart pan.

Delicious ridges

Start off by dumping your flour into the bowl and rescuing your butter blocks from the cold. Using the fork, (your hands are too warm and would melt the butter) smush the butter and flour together until you have a bowlful of floured butter chunks. You'll need that water now, to turn your floured butter into dough. Pour it in slowly enough to allow the flour to soak up the water as it trickles into the mixture, but not so slowly that anything heats up. There's a reason these ingredients are cold; just keep the butter from melting and you'll be okay.

Once your dough is a dough, you can go ahead and get your hands involved, albeit briefly. Make a ball. That's it - just make a ball, wrap it in a towel or some plastic wrap, and pop it in the fridge. If you're like me, you were so eager to get started that you didn't bother cutting your apple slices yet. Now's a good time for that.

Wait at least an hour, then bring the ball back to the counter. Roll it out until it's large enough to cover your tart pan; that'll give you the right thickness. (If you're slow at this sort of thing, your dough might turn warm, sticky and troublesome, which is no good. A frying pan or jelly roll pan kept in the fridge for a few minutes beforehand will make a nice device for re-cooling your dough should such a thing happen. Simply dust your sad melty dough with a little flour and rest your flat cold thing on top, and presto - cold dough all over again.)

But I'm making this sound complicated, when in reality, you'll have invested all of 10 minutes actually working in the kitchen at this point. The rest is super-intuitive:

Bring the oven up to 400 degrees. Place the flat dough into the tart pan, press into the inside so that it's more of a carpet than a tent, then fill it up with apple slices. You can be clever with how you place them; a pile will work, but try concentric circles or rows if you feel compelled.

In my opinion, we have enough butter in this dish already, so I'll avoid any melted butter-sugar glazes to shine up the apples as they cook. But some color on the edges of the fruit wouldn't be so bad. My apricot jam, heated briefly in a saucepan to thin it out, added a nice crunchy glimmer and a little extra sweetness to the tart apples. Bake for 45 minutes before checking on it, and cook a little longer if the color hasn't darkened sufficiently.

And there you have it - a dessert easy enough for a Tuesday.

It's hard to make it ugly.