In one time-lapse minute, you can watch Bigfoot Barleywine Style Ale, made by Sierra Nevada, turbulently sloshing around, rising and falling, over the course of six days. The clip is set to the music of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. Now if you want to put this visual display into a bit of a larger educational context, then we recommend you spend another two minutes watching a short animated video explaining the beer-making process, from start to finish. For the impatient, the fermenting comes at the 1:20 mark.
Norman Rockwell, prolific painter and illustrator of 20th century Americana, often worked so single-mindedly that he missed his meals. In 1943, Rockwell exhausted himself to such a degree that, while completing the Franklin Delano Roosevelt-inspired series of paintings entitled Four Freedoms, he lost 15 pounds over the course of seven months. This drop in weight is, perhaps, all the more shocking when given some context: Rockwell was far from being a corpulent man. In fact, when the then 23-year-old artist attempted to enlist as a serviceman in the U. S. Navy during World War I, he was judged to be eight pounds underweight, standing at six feet and tipping the scales at 140 pounds. Rockwell, however, was not to be deterred by something so trivial as his bodily composition. He gorged himself on bananas and doughnuts when he came home that evening. The next day, Navy recruiters dully welcomed the sufficiently bloated Rockwell to the fold.
Just in time for a hard-drinking Christmas, the Village Voice brings us the “top secret” eggnog recipe from “Angry Man of Jazz” Charles Mingus. Despite his generally irascible temperament, Mingus had a legendary “zeal for parties and drink” and “felt the yuletide spirit—or spirits, if you will—according to biographer Janet Coleman.” Mingus passed his recipe to Coleman over the phone, and she published it in Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs. The ‘nog, the Voice tells us, “calls for enough alcohol to put down an elephant,” so if you happen to be hosting one, this might just come in handy. Humans seem to dig it too. Coleman called it “a concoction so delicious and mind-blowing, you would do anything to make sure you saw him at Christmas.”
Charles Mingus’ “Top Secret” Eggnog
* Separate one egg for one person. Each person gets an egg. * Two sugars for each egg, each person. * One shot of rum, one shot of brandy per person. * Put all the yolks into one big pan, with some milk. * That’s where the 151 proof rum goes. Put it in gradually or it’ll burn the eggs, * OK. The whites are separate and the cream is separate. * In another pot- depending on how many people- put in one shot of each, rum and brandy. (This is after you whip your whites and your cream.) * Pour it over the top of the milk and yolks. * One teaspoon of sugar. Brandy and rum. * Actually you mix it all together. * Yes, a lot of nutmeg. Fresh nutmeg. And stir it up. * You don’t need ice cream unless you’ve got people coming and you need to keep it cold. Vanilla ice cream. You can use eggnog. I use vanilla ice cream. * Right, taste for flavor. Bourbon? I use Jamaica Rum in there. Jamaican Rums. Or I’ll put rye in it. Scotch. It depends. See, it depends on how drunk I get while I’m tasting it.
If you’re drinking tonight, make sure you drink responsibly!
British cooking has been the butt of many jokes, and serious thought-pieces have been devoted to “why British food was so bad for so long.” While that article blames WWI for the decline of English Cuisine, the stigma long precedes the 20th century. In his unpublished essay “British Cookery,” for example, George Orwell opens with a quote from Voltaire, who wrote that Britain has “a hundred religions and only one sauce.” This, Orwell writes, “was untrue” and “is equally untrue today.” His “today” was 1945, before the best British cuisine was Indian. And though he does defend his country’s cooking, and did so in another essay published that year in the Evening Standard, Orwell also makes some critical comments that confirm some of the stereotypes, calling the British diet “a simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet” and writing: “Cheap restaurants in Britain are almost invariably bad, while in expensive restaurants the cookery is almost always French, or imitation French.”
The essay is an exhaustive survey of the British palate of the time, and it concludes with some of Orwell’s own recipes for sweets, including treacle tart, orange marmalade, plum cake, and, lastly, Christmas pudding. You can see the stained typescript of the last two recipes above, and read the full transcript of Orwell’s “British Cookery” here (the recipes are at the end). Having no experience with the strange world of British sweets and pies, I’ll have to take The Guardian’s Alex Renton’s word when he tells us that “the Orwell Christmas pudding is nothing radical.” Nonetheless, I’m tempted to try this recipe more than any of the others Renton mentions, even if I may not get my hands on real suet or sultanas. Read a transcript of Orwell’s Christmas pudding recipe below.
CHRISTMAS PUDDING.
Ingredients:
1 lb each of currants, sultanas & raisins
2 ounces sweet almonds
1 ounces sweet almonds
1 ounces bitter almonds
4 ounces mixed peel
½ lb brown sugar
½ lb flour
¼ lb breadcrumbs
½ teaspoonful salt
½ teaspoonful grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon
6 ounces suet
The rind and juice of 1 lemon
5 eggs
A little milk
1/8 of a pint of brandy, or a little beer
Method. Wash the fruit. Chop the suet, shred and chop the peel, stone and chop the raisins, blanch and chop the almonds. Prepare the breadcrumbs. Sift the spices and salt into the flour. Mix all the dry ingredients into a basin. Heat the eggs, mix them with the lemon juice and the other liquids. Add to the dry ingredients and stir well. If the mixture is too stiff, add a little more milk. Allow the mixture to stand for a few hours in a covered basin. Then mix well again and place in well-greased basins of about 8 inches diameter. Cover with rounds of greased paper. Then tie the tops of the basins over the floured cloths if the puddings are to be boiled, or with thick greased paper if they are to be steamed. Boil or steam for 5 or 6 hours. On the day when the pudding is to be eaten, re-heat it by steaming it for 3 hours. When serving, pour a large spoonful of warm brandy over it and set fire to it.
In Britain it is unusual to mix into each pudding one or two small coins, tiny china dolls or silver charms which are supposed to bring luck.
Let’s now head 600 miles south, to the Riviera city of Nice, where some café owners opted for another way to keep bad behavior in check. At the Petite Syrah, they’ve implemented a simple pricing scheme that works like this:
If you ask for “a coffee” (it’s most likely an espresso), it will run you 7 euros, or $9.50.
If you ask for a “coffee please,” the charge drops to €4.25/$5.80.
But if you start your order by saying “Hello, may I have a coffee, please,” the bill becomes a manageable €1.40.
Now, truth be told, the pricing scheme is more carrot than stick. The café’s manager readily admits that he has never actually charged any of the punitive higher prices. But that’s not to say that the scheme doesn’t work. According to manager/owner Fabrice Pepino, regular customers quickly took note of the sign and began to “say, ‘Hello, your highness, will you serve me one of your beautiful coffees.” Eh voilà, no more coffee jerks.
Here’s a quick scenario for you. You’ve poured yourself a fresh cup of black coffee, and you want to keep it hot until you’re ready to drink it. Are you making a mistake by adding cream to that coffee? Does coffee with cream cool faster than black coffee left alone? Intuition says yes. The laws of physics lead to a different conclusion.
1) Black coffee is darker, and dark colors emit heat faster than light colors. As such, “by lightening the color of your coffee, you slow the rate at which it cools,” if only slightly.
2) The Stefan-Boltzmann Law (apparently) says that hotter surfaces radiate heat faster than cooler ones. So if you add cream to a cup of black coffee, it might lower the temperature of that cup of coffee. However that cup could still cool at a slower rate than a cup of hot black coffee.
3) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, “adding cream thickens the coffee (adds viscosity), so it evaporates slower.” And, in turn, less heat gets carried away by the evaporation.
To top things off, Modernist Cuisine also produced a video showing cream being poured into coffee in super slow motion. Even if you don’t care to consider the physics of coffee & cream, it’s pretty cool to watch an average cup of joe getting turned into a roiling sea.
Bonaverde is “a small, dedicated team of young, sleepless Berliner entrepreneurs that [have] made it their goal to revolutionize the coffee world.” How? By building the world’s first “Roast-Grind-Brew Coffee Machine.” Other machines might grind and brew the coffee. This one will roast the beans too, which is no trivial innovation. It promises to significantly decrease the number of steps, and the amount of time, it takes to turn a harvested coffee bean into your morning cup of joe, which means a much fresher cup of coffee. And perhaps a cheaper one too.
Bonaverde has already developed a prototype. (See how it works below.) Now the venture needs to bring the machine into production. Through a Kickstarter campaign ending on December 8th, the venture initially hoped to raise $135,000. But it has already blown past that figure, raising $582,693 thus far. Anyone who contributes $250 (or more) to the campaign will get one of the very first Roast-Grind-Brew Coffee Machines, plus 6.6 lbs. (3kg) of green coffee. Theoretically all you need to brew one very fresh cup of coffee. Find more information on the next-generation coffee machine over on Bonaverde’s Kickstarter page.
The once-surrealist (and, in a sense, always surrealist) Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel made such classically bleak, humorous, and bleakly humorous pictures like Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and That Obscure Object of Desire. He also made personal connections with an international range of idiosyncratic creative luminaries including Federico García Lorca, Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Picasso, Bertolt Brecht, Octavio Paz, Alexander Calder, and Salvador Dalí (his collaborator on the notorious short Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or). Having lived a life like that, Buñuel surely couldn’t help but write one of the most fascinating autobiographies in print. To become such a human cultural nexus, one needs not make motion pictures as enduringly striking as Buñuel’s, but one must certainly make a dry martini on the level of his own. Fortunately for the aspiring Buñuels of the world, My Last Sigh, that formidably intriguing life story, includes his personal recipe.
Dangerous Minds has posted the relevant excerpt. “To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini,” writes Buñuel. “To be frank, given the primordial role in my life played by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page.” He recommends that “the ice be so cold and hard that it won’t melt, since nothing’s worse than a watery martini,” then offers up his procedure, “the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients—glasses, gin, and shaker—in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade). Don’t take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Stir it, then pour it out, keeping only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, stir it again, and serve.” In the clip above, you can witness the man himself in action, a sight that gets me wondering whether Buñuel ever crossed paths with John Updike. Imagining such a meeting sets the mind reeling, but few quotes seem as apropos here as the New England novelist’s observation that “excellence in the great things is built upon excellence in the small.”
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