Above, in a new video created by Wired, Hoffmann continues his educational mission, “answer[ing] the internet’s burning questions about coffee. What’s the difference between drip and pour over coffee? What’s the difference between iced coffee and cold brew? Does darker roast coffee have more caffeine?” Taken together, he covers a lot of ground in 22 minutes.
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Drink our coffee. Or else. That’s the message of these curiously sadistic TV commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961.
Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. market, according to the Muppets Wiki: “The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.”
Within those eight seconds, a coffee enthusiast named Wilkins (who bears a resemblance to Kermit the frog) manages to shoot, stab, bludgeon or otherwise do grave bodily harm to a coffee holdout named Wontkins. Henson provided the voices of both characters.
Up until that time, TV advertisers typically made a direct sales pitch. “We took a different approach,” said Henson in Christopher Finch’s Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show. “We tried to sell things by making people laugh.”
The campaign for Wilkins Coffee was a hit. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area,” said Henson in a 1982 interview with Judy Harris, “we were the number one, the most popular commercial.” Henson’s ad agency began marketing the idea to other regional coffee companies around the country. Henson re-shot the same spots with different brand names. “I bought my contract from that agency,” said Henson, “and then I was producing them–the same things around the country. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time. At the point, I was making a lot of money.”
If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can watch many of the Wilkins Coffee commercials above. And a word of advice: If someone ever asks you if you drink Wilkins Coffee, just say yes.
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“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grandseñores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court etiquette and sumptuous records of luxurious living. In ancient Rome, cookbooks functioned similarly, as the extravagant fourth century Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome demonstrates.
Written by Apicius, “Europe’s oldest [cookbook] and Rome’s only one in existence today”—as its first English translator described it—offers “a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life.” It also offers keen insight into the development of heavily flavored dishes before the age of refrigeration. Apicus recommends that “cooks who needed to prepare birds with a ‘goatish smell’ should bathe them in a mixture of pepper, lovage, thyme, dry mint, sage, dates, honey, vinegar, broth, oil and mustard,” Melanie Radzicki McManus notes at How Stuff Works.
Early cookbooks communicated in “a folksy, imprecise manner until the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s,” when standard (or metric) measurement became de rigueur. The first cookbook by an American, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, placed British fine dining and lavish “Queen’s Cake” next to “johnny cake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack,” Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald write at Smithsonian, all recipes symbolizing “the plain, but well-run and bountiful American home.” With this book, “a dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.”
Cookbooks are windows into history—markers of class and caste, documents of daily life, and snapshots of regional and cultural identity at particular moments in time. In 1950, the first cookbook written by a fictional lifestyle celebrity, Betty Crocker, debuted. It became “a national best-seller,” McManus writes. “It even sold more copies that year than the Bible.” The image of the perfect Stepford housewife may have been bigger than Jesus in the 50s, but Crocker’s career was decades in the making. She debuted in 1921, the year of publication for another, more humble recipe book: the Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society of Chicago’s Pilgrim Cook Book.
As Ayun Halliday noted in an earlier post, this charming collection features recipes for “Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy,” and it’s only one of thousands of such examples at the Internet Archive’s Cookbook and Home Economics Collection, drawn from digitized special collections at UCLA, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. When we last checked in, the collection featured 3,000 cookbooks. It has grown since 2016 to a library of 10,600 vintage examples of homespun Americana, fine dining, and mass marketing.
Laugh at gag-inducing recipes of old; cringe at the pious advice given to women ostensibly anxious to please their husbands; and marvel at how various international and regional cuisines have been represented to unsuspecting American home cooks. (It’s hard to say whether the cover or the contents of a Chinese Cook Book in Plain English from 1917 seem more offensive.) Cookbooks of recipes from the American South are popular, as are covers featuring stereotypical “mammy” characters. A more respectful international example, 1952’s Luchow’s German Cookbook gives us “the story and the favorite dishes of America’s most famous German restaurant.”
There are guides to mushrooms and “commoner fungi, with special emphasis on the edible varieties”; collections of “things mother used to make” and, most practically, a cookbook for leftovers. And there is every other sort of cookbook and home ec. manual you could imagine. Thearchive is stuffed with helpful hints, rare ingredients, unexpected regional cookeries, and millions of minute details about the habits of these books’ first hungry readers.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. – Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill had a reputation as a brilliant statesman and a prodigious drinker.
The former prime minister imbibed throughout the day, every day. He also burned through 10 daily cigars, and lived to the ripe old age of 90.
His comeback to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s boast that he neither smoked nor drank, and was 100 percent fit was “I drink and smoke, and I am 200 percent fit.”
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt marveled “that anyone could smoke so much and drink so much and keep perfectly well.”
In No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, author David Lough documents Churchill’s disastrous alcohol expenses, as well as the bottle count at Chartwell, his Kentish residence. Here’s the tally for March 24,1937:
180 bottles and 30 half bottles of Pol Roger champagne
20 bottles and 9 half bottles of other champagne
100+ bottles of claret
117 bottles and 389 half bottles of Barsac
13 bottles of brandy
5 bottles of champagne brandy
7 bottles of liqueur whisky
All that liquor was not going to drink itself.
Did Churchill have a hollow leg? An extraordinarily high tolerance? An uncanny ability to mask his intoxication?
Whiskey sommelier Rex Williams, a founder of the Whiskey Tribe YouTube channel, and podcast host Andrew Heaton endeavor to find out, above, by dedicating a day to the British Bulldog’s drinking regimen.
They’re not the first to undertake such a folly.
The Daily Telegraph’s Harry Wallop documented a similar adventure in 2015, winding up queasy, and to judge by his 200 spelling mistakes, cognitively impaired.
Williams and Heaton’s on-camera experiment achieves a Drunk History vibe and telltale flushed cheeks.
Here’s the drill, not that we advise trying it at home:
BREAKFAST
An eye opener of Johnnie Walker Red – just a splash – mixed with soda water to the rim.
Follow with more of the same throughout the morning.
This is how Churchill, who often conducted his morning business abed in a dressing gown, managed to average between 1 – 3 ounces of alcohol before lunch.
Apparently he developed a taste for it as a young soldier posted in what is now Pakistan, when Scotch not only improved the flavor of plain water, ‘once one got the knack of it, the very repulsion from the flavor developed an attraction of its own.”
After a morning spent sipping the stuff, Heaton reports feeling “playful and jokey, but not yet violent.”
LUNCH
Time for “an ambitious quota of champagne!”
Churchill’s preferred brand was Pol Roger, though he wasn’t averse to Giesler, Moet et Chandon, or Pommery, purchased from the upscale wine and spirits merchant Randolph Payne & Sons, whose letterhead identified them as suppliers to “Her Majesty The Late Queen Victoria and to The Late King William The Fourth.”
Churchill enjoyed his imperial pint of champagne from a silver tankard, like a “proper Edwardian gent” according to his lifelong friend, Odette Pol-Roger.
Williams and Heaton take theirs in flutes accompanied by fish sticks from the freezer case. This is the point beyond which a hangover is all but assured.
Lunch concludes with a post-prandial cognac, to settle the stomach and begin the digestion process.
Churchill, who declared himself a man of simple tastes – I am easily satisfied with the best – would have insisted on something from the house of Hine.
RESTORATIVE AFTERNOON NAP
This seems to be a critical element of Churchill’s alcohol management success. He frequently allowed himself as much as 90 minutes to clear the cobwebs.
A nap definitely pulls our re-enactors out of their tail spins. Heaton emerges ready to “bluff (his) way through a meeting.”
TEATIME
I guess we can call it that, given the timing.
No tea though.
Just a steady stream of extremely weak scotch and sodas to take the edge off of administrative tasks.
DINNER
More champagne!!! More cognac!!!
“This should be the apex of our wit,” a bleary Heaton tells his belching companion, who fesses up to vomiting upon waking the next day.
Their conclusion? Churchill’s regimen is unmanageable…at least for them.
And possibly also for Churchill.
As fellow Scotch enthusiast Christopher Hitchens revealed in a 2002 article in The Atlantic, some of Churchill’s most famous radio broadcasts, including his famous pledge to “fight on the beaches” after the Miracle of Dunkirk, were voiced by a pinch hitter:
Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners. Perhaps Churchill was too much incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself.
When it comes to chili, Texas, Kansas City and Cincinnati, will cede no quarter, each convinced that their particular regional approach is the only sane option.
Hot dogs? Put New York City and Chicago in a pit and watch them tear each other to ribbons.
But pizza?
There are so many geographic variations, even an impartial judge can’t see their way through to a clear victor.
The playing field’s thick as stuffed pizza, a polarizing Chicago local specialty that’s deeper than the deepest dish.
Wait, though. We all have an acquaintance who takes perverse pleasure in offbeat topping choices – looking at you, California – but other than that, isn’t pizza just sauce, dough, and cheese?
How much room does that leave for variation?
Plenty as it turns out.
Crusts, thick or thin, fluctuate wildly according to the type of flour used, how long the dough is proofed, the type of oven in which they’re baked, and philosophy of sauce placement.
(In Buffalo, New York, pizzas are sauced right up to their circumference, leaving very little crusty handle for eating on the fly, though perhaps one could fold it down the middle, as we do in the city 372 miles to the south.)
Sauce can also swing pretty wildly – sweet, spicy, prepared in advance, or left to the last minute – but cheese is a much hotter topic.
Detroit’s pizza is distinguished by the inclusion of Wisconsin brick cheese.
St. Louis is loyal to Provel cheese, a homegrown processed mix of cheddar, Swiss, and provolone and liquid smoke.
Miami pizzas cater to the palates of its Cuban population by mixing mozzarella with gouda, a cheese that was both widely available and popular before 1962’s rationing system was put in place.
Rhode Island’s aptly named Red Strips have no cheese at all…which might be preferable to the Altoona, Pennsylvania favorite that arrives topped with American cheese slices or – the horror – Velveeta.
(This may be where we part ways with the old saw equating pizza with sex – even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.)
Cut and size also factor in to pizza pride.
Washington DC’s Jumbo slices are pretty much the standard issue New York-style thin crust slice, writ large.
In the land of opportunity, where smaller towns are understandably eager to claim their piece of pie, Weird History Food gives the nod to Old Forge, Pennsylvania, optimistically dubbed “the Pizza Capital of the World by Uncovering PA’s Jim Cheney, and Steubenville Ohio, home of the “oversized Lunchable” Atlas Obscura refers to as America’s most misunderstood pizza.
For good measure, watch the PBS Idea Channel’s History of Pizza in 8 slices, below, then rep your favorite local pizzeria in the comments.
One of the New York Times’ most compelling regular features is Overlooked, which gives remarkable individuals whose deaths passed unremarked by the Timesobit column a rousing, overdue sendoff.
Sally Schmitt – “one of the great unsung heroes of California Cuisine” as per Michael Bauer, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s fearsome former food critic – is not one of those.
Schmitt received a grand obituary that delved into her personal history, philosophy, and her connection to Napa Valley’s The French Laundry, a three star Michelin restaurant which Anthony Bourdain hailed as the best in the world.
The French Laundry’s renown is such that one needn’t run in foodie circles to be aware of it, and its award-winning chef/owner, Thomas Keller.
Keller, however, did not found the restaurant that brought him fame.
Schmitt did, with the help of her husband, Don and their five children, who pitched in in both the kitchen and the front of the house.
Family was important to Schmitt, and having deferred her dreams for the many years it took to raise hers, she was determined to maintain balance between home and work lives.
In Ben Proudfoot‘s New York Times op-doc, above, Schmitt recalls growing up outside of Sacramento, where her mother taught her how to cook using in-season local produce.
Meanwhile, her father helped California produce make it all the way to the East Coast by supplying ice to the Southern Pacific Railroad, an innovation that Schmitt identifies as “the beginning of the whole supermarket situation” and a distressing geographic disconnect between Americans and food.
The Schmitts launched The French Laundry in 1978, with a shockingly affordable menu.
Julia Child, a fan, once “burst into the kitchen,” demanding, “My dear, what was in that dessert sauce?”
(Answer: sugar, butter and cream)
Sixteen years after its founding, The French Laundry was for sale.
Schmitt’s facial expressions are remarkably poignant describing the transfer of power. There’s a lot at play – pride, nostalgia, fondness for Keller, a “really charming young chef, who’d made a name for himself in New York…and was down on his luck.”
Schmitt is gracious, but there’s no question she feels a bit of a twinge at how Keller took her dream and ran with it.
“In high school, I was always the vice president…vice president of everything,” Schmitt says, before sharing a telling anecdote about her best friend beating her out for the highest academic honor:
I went home and cried. Yeah, I thought that I should have it, you know. And my mother said, “Let her have her moment of glory. Don’t worry. There will be moments of glory for you.”
This documentary is one, however posthumous.
Accompanying it is a brief essay in which Proudfoot contrasts the lives of his workaholic late father and Schmitt, with her “delightfully coy candor a message about the rewards of balance and the trap of ambition:”
I made this film for all of us who struggle “to stir and taste the soup” that already sits in front of us.
Sally Schmitt’s Cranberry and Apple Kuchen with hot Cream Sauce
Serves 8
KUCHEN:
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for the pan
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 cup milk or light cream
3 to 4 Gravenstein or Golden Delicious apples
1 cup cranberries or firm blueberries
Cinnamon sugar: 1 tablespoon sugar mixed with 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
HOT CREAM SAUCE:
2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9-inch round cake pan.
2. For the kuchen: Using an electric mixer, beat butter, sugar and egg together until the mixture is fluffy and lightened in texture.
3. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg. Add dry ingredients and the milk alternately to the butter mixture; mix just until combined.
4. Peel and core apples. Slice them into 1/4-inch wedges
5. Spoon batter into the pan. Press apple slices, about 1/4-inch apart and core side down, into the batter, working in a circular pattern around the outside edge (like the spokes of a wheel. Arrange most of the cranberries in a ring inside the apples and sprinkle remainder around the edges of the kuchen. Sprinkle kuchen with the cinnamon sugar.
6. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of the kuchen comes out clean. Set on a rack to cool.
7. Combine the cream sauce ingredients in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 5 to 8 minutes, to reduce and thicken it slightly.
8. Serve the cake warm or at room temperature, drizzled with the hot cream sauce
Home baked sourdough had its moment during the early days of the pandemic, but otherwise bread has been much maligned throughout the 21st century, at least in the Western World, where carbs are vilified by body-conscious consumers.
This was hardly the case on January 18, 1943, when Americans woke up to the news that the War Foods Administration, headed by Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard, had banned the sale of sliced bread.
The reasons driving the ban were a bit murky, though by this point, Americans were well acquainted with rationing, which had already limited access to high-demand items as sugar, coffee, gasoline and tires.
Though why sliced bread, of all things?
Might depriving the public of their beloved pre-sliced bread help the war effort, by freeing up some critical resource, like steel?
War production regulations prohibited the sale of industrial bread slicing equipment for the duration, though presumably, existing commercial bakeries wouldn’t have been in the market for more machines, just the odd repair part here and there.
Wax paper then? It kept sliced bread fresh prior to the invention of plastic bags. Perhaps the Allies had need of it?
No, unlike nylon, there were no shortages of waxed paper.
Flour had been strictly regulated in Great Britain during the first World War, but this wasn’t a problem stateside in WWII, where it remained relatively cheap and easy to procure, with plenty leftover to supply overseas troops. 1942’s wheat crop had been the second largest on record.
There were other rationales having to do with eliminating food waste and relieving economic pressure for bakers, but none of these held up upon examination. This left the War Production Office, the War Price Administration, and the Office of Agriculture vying to place blame for the ban on each other, and in some cases, the American baking industry itself!
While the ill considered ban lasted just two months, the public uproar was considerable.
Although pre-sliced bread hadn’t been around all that long, in the thirteen-and-a-half years since its introduction, consumers had grown quite dependent on its convenience, and how nicely those uniform slices fit into the slots of their pop up toasters, another recently-patented invention.
A great pleasure of the History Guy’s coverage is the name checking of local newspapers covering the Sliced Bread Ban:
An absence of data did not prevent a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal from speculating that “it is believed that the majority of American housewives are not proficient bread slicers.”
One such housewife, having spent a hectic morning hacking a loaf into toast and sandwiches for her husband and children, wrote a letter to the New York Times, passionately declaring “how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household.”
The more stiff upper lipped patriotism of Vermont home economics instructor Doris H. Steele found a platform in the Barre Times:
In Grandmother’s day, the loaf of bread had a regular place at the family table. Grandmother had an attractive board for the bread to stand on and a good sharp knife alongside. Grandmother knew that a steady hand and a sharp knife were the secrets of slicing bread. She sliced as the family asked for bread and in this way, she didn’t waste any bread by cutting more than the family could eat. Let’s all contribute to the war effort by slicing our own bread.
Then, as now, celebrities felt compelled to weigh in.
There was a time when one could hardly hope to enter polite society without knowing one’s Cabernets from one’s Pinots and one’s Chardonnays from one’s Rieslings. That time has not quite gone, exactly, and indeed, a greater variety of pleasures await the oenophile today than ever before. But in the twenty-first century, and especially in twenty-first century urban America, one must command a certain knowledge of beer. Even those who partake only of the occasional glass will, after a decade or two, develop a sense that they prefer a lager, say, or a stout, or the perennially trendy IPA. Yet many will also be at a loss to explain what they like about their preferred beer’s flavor, let alone its origins.
Enter Master Cicerone Pat Fahey, whose title bespeaks his vast knowledge of beer: of its nature, of its making, of its history. He puts his mastery of the subject on full display in the hourlong Wired video above, in which he breaks down every style of beer. Not most styles: every style, beginning with lagers malty and hoppy, moving through an even wider variety of ales, and ending with an extended consideration of lesser-known beers and their variations. Most all of us have sampled American lager, English porter, and even German pilsner. But can you remember when last you threw back a Flanders red ale, a doppelbock, or a wee heavy?
Fahey knows his beers, but he also knows how to talk about them to the general public. His explanatory technique involves providing generous amounts of context, not just about the parts of the world in which these beers originate (a geography and language lesson in itself) but about the ways they’ve been consumed and produced throughout history. Of that last he has a fair amount to work with, since the oldest recipe for beer, previously featured here on Open Culture, dates to 1800 B.C. The nearly four millennia of beer evolution since then have produced the formidable tap rows with which the bars of Portland, Austin, and San Diego confront us today — and which, with Fahey’s guidance, we can more credibly navigate.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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