STUFFED (45)

Published Date : April 18, 2020
Author : tnealon

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One in a popular series of posts by Tom Nealon, author of Food Fights and Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste. STUFFED is inspired by Nealon’s collection of rare cookbooks, which he sells — among other things — via Pazzo Books.

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STUFFED (44)

Published Date : March 17, 2020
Author : tnealon

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STUFFED (43)

Published Date : February 13, 2020
Author : tnealon

SOUP v. SANDWICH

It’s hard to imagine how we arrived at this place, this crime scene of a soup and sandwich advertisement (c. 1960, shown above). Out of context, it seems alien, a mixture between a minor Abstract Expressionist work commissioned by the CIA and a SYSCO delivery truck jackknifed on an interstate in Iowa. To decipher it we would need the lunch equivalent of blood spatter analysis (if such a thing weren’t, apparently, largely nonsense). What brought about this vicious attack, this complete abnegation of sandwiches and all that they stand for? The seeds for this internecine violence go back to the dawn of human cookery…

Somewhere between 400,000 and 20,000 years ago humans started making soup. It was probably a gradual process as humans perfected the use of fire and figured out how much easier it is to eat roots and grains and the weird bits of giraffes if you boil them for awhile beforehand. Somewhere around 14,000 years ago, people started making bread — and while it’s pretty easy to imagine people eating gazelle on a flat barley loaf or a nice megalotragus and fernwich, the sandwich as we know it was not really popularized in the west until after the Renaissance.

Of course, things like the sandwich — flatbreads with various toppings, proto-tacos of corn masa and beans, pizza-adjacent Roman street foods — would have been around almost as long as bread, but for millennia soup had room to roam without running into much competition in the lunch arena. (While soup and sandwich originally sparred over supper, it was lunch where the battle was ultimately joined in earnest). A pot of soup could be left boiling all day, adding water and more ingredients as needed, for people to eat as they saw fit. Extra meat tender enough for a quick sandwich was much more aspirational for most of humanity’s formative years. Soup was how we lived, how we made food digestible, how we fed the old and the young and how our jaws shrank as we chewed less and less to make extra room in our heads to dream up the sandwich.

Which we did! Or named it, anyway, after an 18th-century English earl who had no doubt eaten one during his travels in the Middle East — where putting things between bread had been popular for some time. The first English book on salads had been written by John Evelyn not long before (Acetaria, 1699), and meat pies had been kicking around since before English people used plates or forks — and all of these wanted a piece of soup’s action.

But it was a tough sell: Lean, tender meat for a sandwich was still unobtainable for most people; salads didn’t have enough calories for 18th and 19th century lives; and while meat pies continue to do well (despite being linked — no doubt by soup and sandwiches — to cannibalism in works like Sweeney Todd and Titus Andronicus), they had trouble with the leap to the colonies; they were undermined by Jamaican beef patties, empanadas, calzones, knishes, corn dogs, etc.

Soup held on. But as the Enlightenment and the burgeoning middle class first lifted salads and sandwiches, the industrial revolution furthered their gains. Cobb, wedge, caesar, chef, Waldorf, Niçoise, salads tempted lunchgoers and lunch wagons served soup and sandwiches. In fact, it was the end of the 19th century that first saw a “soup and a sandwich” appear on menus — and you had to know that it wasn’t long before the reckoning would come. And yet soup remained blithely unaware, spreading itself thin (and, er, thick). Stew, chowder, gumbo, burgoo, potage, goulash, bisque, pot au feu — a profusion so vast it is a miracle there were bowls enough to hold them. For a moment in time, like the British Empire, the sun never set on soup. But it was teetering on the edge of disaster.

The word restaurant is from the French, meaning “to restore” and specifically referring to a class of thick soups that would be sold in taverns — eventually joints specializing in such fare took the name of the dish they served, and restaurants were born. In fact, one of the first restaurants in the U.S. was opened by a Frenchman and called Julien’s Restorator (open from 1793–1823). Julien, who bailed from France just before the Reign of Terror commenced, was known as the Prince of Soups. A restaurant, literally, is a place that serves soup. So the invention of canned, condensed soup in the last decade of the 19th century was a time bomb thrown into the world’s biggest pot of soup.

Canned by Campbells, dried, powdered, diminished in every way, soup limped into the postwar period a once great thing now hobbled and confused. It was too late to draw its far-flung bits back into itself — stew had wandered off to the dinner hour, chowders were balkanized in the Northeast, exciting newcomers like chili wanted nothing to do with it, broths and consommés had become the sole purview of the infirm. We celebrate this period in soup history — Warhol’s set of paintings date from 1961–62 — but the canning of soup was only good for the can, not so much for the soup.

It was a time of canned soup and fresh sandwiches and while it’s easy for us to see that it was already too late, I can understand how soup talked itself into this desperate maneuver of counter lunchification — the Lexington and Concord, the Archduke Ferdinand, the remember the Maine — of the lunch wars. They waited, poised, and detonated themselves, hoping to obliterate the very idea of the sandwich by physically drowning it in soup. Madness. Mad, too, that so few remember this moment. “Broiled Soup Sandwiches” has been erased from the history books, discarded like sandwiches in the rain.

The aftermath wasn’t much kinder. Soup joined forces, in abject desperation, with their old nemesis the salad in the 1970s. Souper Salad, the most memorable result of this unholy union, had a good run but has slowly succumbed to the realization that soup doesn’t really go that well with salad. Buffets, college dining halls, and chain all-you-can-eat spots leaned on the soup and salad thing pretty hard through the 1980s and ’90s. Soup and salad was ultimately a bust.

But I shouldn’t act like it’s over — it’s never over. Look at ramen! If they could survive cup noodles and those dehydrated rectangles, who is to say that soup can’t have a Renaissance?

To address the broiled soup sandwich ideas promoted by the ad with which we began:

Ham-Asparagus soup sandwich: The strategy here is clear — begin with the most bat-shit insane of the combinations and the one where the sandwich elements are most successfully obliterated. However, the self-abnegation evident is the combination of the cream of chicken soup with mayonnaise is, I think, why this stratagem ultimately fails.

Bacon-Tomato soup sandwich: An immediate pivot reveals that the first soup-sandwich was just highballing. I like the idea here. Bacon, tomato, Worcestershire sauce, mushrooms — it’s an umami bomb. Do people still cook with cream of mushroom soup? My mother used to make some weird western NY casserole with it — what a nightmare. (But I am trying to be objective, here).

Bean-Frank soup sandwich: I don’t see how this one can be viewed as anything other than a multifarious blunder. Why drag hot dogs into this fight? Now, I’m not an expert on the state of the hot dog-as-sandwich debate as it existed 60 years ago, but I’m certain it wasn’t settled. And is beans with bacon even a soup? What is going on here?

Tuna-Egg soup sandwich: A reasonable finish, though I bet it smells funny with the celery soup activating all that canned tuna. Not sure it needed the eggs which disguise the fact that it’s the only one of these where the soup and the sandwich have some connection (we put celery in tuna salad — well, we don’t, since I don’t eat tuna salad, but my understanding is that people do this).

Plus, this is the moment where you realize — insanity aside — this is all a straw man argument anyway. Three open-faced sandwiches and a hot dog? Do you think we are fools?

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STUFFED (42)

Published Date : January 20, 2020
Author : tnealon

SQUEEZED OUT

In his Natural History written in the first century A.D., Pliny describes the Roman’s extreme love of the fish sauce garum which led them to start turning all sorts of sea creatures into sauce — mackerel guts, cockles, tunny, crabfish, sea nettles, lobsters, and barnacles were all salted and left to sit in the sun until pressed and bottled for use. Though their unbalanced love of fish sauce was new, fish sauce itself was borrowed from the Greeks and Phoenicians who filled amphorae with the stuff and shipped it from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and likely much farther afield. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if a condiment made from fish fermented in salt was nearly as ancient as condiment uses of garlic, onion, or chile pepper (all thousands of years BCE); the umami flavor that is released when fish guts are salted and fermented really does seem to have near universal attraction to humans.

Mosaic depicting a “Flower of Garum” jug

Which is why the U.S. had its own bacchanalian period of turning everything into an umami ketchup — walnuts, cockles, apples, anchovies, mushrooms, barberries, cucumbers, currants, gooseberries, grapes, herring, mussels, peaches, rum, squash, and whortleberries all got the ketchup treatment. However, unlike Roman fish sauce which retained a wide variety of purities, flavors and virginities, here we landed on endless iterations of the same tomato ketchup. Plain, Heinz style. Which was enough for a long while — it had incorporated so many flavors, vinegar, sugar, umami, bitter tomatoes, and the spices (or fake flavors simulating them) from the spice trade that had been popular in England for hundreds of years: cloves, nutmeg, black pepper, ginger. With how much lamenting there has been about the American predilection to put ketchup on everything — fries, eggs, hot dogs, steaks — it is easy to imagine it having been less popular. But can we imagine it having been moreso? A world where there were 57 varieties… of ketchup?

As we’ve learned with IPAs and the siracha craze, Americans love nothing better than novel flavors turned banal through repetition. It should have been easy to add ketchup flavors over the years as American’s palates changed, but somehow, most of the times it has been done, it has been done idiotically. Recently we’ve seen self-abnegating versions like sriracha ketchup and “mayochup” emerge. If they’d been called spicy ketchup and pink ketchup, I might be writing a different ketchup piece right now, but, alas, at some point, ketchup manufacturers began to lean in to their own undoing, embracing the criticisms “it’s for children,” “it’s not a vegetable,” “it’s unsophisticated.” Not to mention the relationship with asshole presidents: Nixon put it on cottage cheese, Reagan claimed it was vegetable, Trump puts it on $80 steaks etc etc.

But why did it fail? What stopped ketchup just short of its goal? If it had continued to barrel along, adding flavors, absorbing ideas, barbecue sauce would have been unnecessary (as a supermarket condiment), the existence of alternate-reality ketchups like the Costa Rican salsa lizano, Japanese bulldog sauce, and English HP, are all testaments to ketchup’s failure. It didn’t go too far, it failed to go far enough, it stopped short at the precipice of greatness and failed to leap bravely into the void and, instead, sat and redesigned its container. Ketchup began by boldly trying to be all flavors at once — sour, umami, salty, sweet, bitter. It tried a few times to add more spiciness — pungent, in the terminology of taste scientists — but it never caught on. Not too surprising since most of the attempts were in the mid-20th century when chile peppers were still — outside of cayenne powder and maybe tabasco in the tellingly tiny bottles — mostly terrifying. So we have three grades of ketchup — fancy, extra standard and standard — all of which deal with such mundane issues as presence of peel or seeds and color.

As the gustatory overton window of the average American begins to expand in the 1970s and ’80s, we saw salsa become a thing, Dijon mustard suddenly become a way to feel rich, horseradish end a run of success and balsamic emerge from Italian attics to be faked all over America and ketchup… switch from one of the most iconic packages in the universe to a squeezable container. We’ve all heard about how much easier it was to use after, what a pain it was getting ketchup’s thixotropic ass out of the bottle, and how children everywhere thanked Heinz for the innovation. But it is undeniable that much of the magic of ketchup was lost with the bottle, and that right up until the switch, Heinz was advertising the thickness and the wait as features, not bugs, of the process. What the hell?

I am, as ever, willing to consider whether it was a vast right-wing conspiracy. Were they trying to stick it to the common man while they invested in Grey Poupon futures? After all, few things could have been worse for ketchup’s reputation than being associated with Richard Nixon and his disgusting cottage cheese. Except, possibly, being called a vegetable by the Reagan administration. Are these coincidences? Now, that’s not really what happened with Reagan, of course; it was an independent FDA that suggested ketchup (and relish) be counted as vegetables for purposes of school lunch machinations. But ketchup suffered all the same. Maybe relish too, though they might deserve it for what they tried to do to pickles. This was a time, after all, when the right was openly hostile to working-class ketchup eaters, even the white ones, so the story made sense — even if it was assembled from a collection of half-facts, and it always seemed like the sort of thing Reagan might do. (This was all in contrast to an actual 2011 bill passed in Congress that suggested the tomato sauce on pizza be counted as a vegetable — that really was just to make money for lousy food companies on the backs of poor children).

Or perhaps it was a Russian disinformation campaign — ketchup has a funny history in Russia. Anastas Mikoyan, the People’s Commissar for the Food Industry and mastermind behind the pervasive Book of Tasty and Healthy Food brought ketchup to the Soviet Union around 1936 (after visiting the US to study food production). Mikoyan advertisements in the 1930s claimed ketchup was “the best, sharp, aromatic relish for meat, fish, vegetables and other dishes.” That’s what I’m talking about. However, after WWII, ketchup ceased to be imported and it was removed from subsequent editions of the cookbook and ketchup more or less vanished from the USSR until it began to be imported through Bulgaria in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, ketchup on mushroom pizza was wildly popular in iron-curtain Poland around the same time — was ketchup a victim of KGB black propaganda? Were they trying to ruin ketchup’s shiny American reputation because they knew it’s return was inevitable? Maybe a little. Like the CIA they had their hand in everything back then, but it was probably just bad timing: Nixon, vegetables, dumping the bottle, and a failure to imagine ketchup being continuously reinvented, as it had been in the 19th century.

But imagine what we’ve lost! We could have have had orange (mustard), pink (mayo), purple (something blue) ketchup, spicy, astringent, garlicky ketchup, sour, bitter ketchups, thin, vinegary ketchups you can use as marinades or do shots of, extra thick ketchups that never even come out of the bottle but spread a ketchup miasma over your meal, but no, instead all we have is Heinz, 36 years later trying to bring the bottle back by putting the label on sideways. Heinz could have powered through the ’70s and ’80s, buying up tomato producers, chile farms, growing mushrooms in caves throughout Vermont, inventing strains of grapes to bring tannins back to ketchup, cornering the vinegar market, buying hop producers to make IPA ketchup for hirsute bespoke velocipede riding hop addicts, inventing new chiles for endorphin craving machismo deranged heat heads, selling reusable bluetooth-enabled chemical-analyzing ketchup bottles-pushing recommendations to our phones. They’d have been so successful that they could have gone the way of other icons when millenials stopped being interested and their stock stalled — bought up by a private equity firm and sold off piece by piece, all those farms and chile patents and mushroom caves and high tech bottles, suddenly worth more than the ketchup business. The ketchup industrial complex, once so vibrant that the door of the average refrigerator was filled with 14 different types of ketchup and maybe a vinaigrette, now chopped up and sold for parts.

And here we’d be in 2020, no ketchup at all, with millennials tik-toking away, oblivious, and our kids acting like we were idiots for constantly telling them what ketchup meant to us, or about the first time we ate a french fry, why orange ketchup #2 (the one with relish) shouldn’t be eaten after Labor day. But then we’d bounce back, we would make our own. Small batches, ketchup speakeasies for old folks and the deranged, we would exchange recipes and mason jars like our great-great-great grandpappies did back in the aughts. Screw those millenials and private equity, we’d make our own goddamned ketchup. 57 varieties. At least.

We can rebuild.

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STUFFED (41)

Published Date : December 19, 2019
Author : tnealon

The world’s largest collection of hot sauces

THE ARK OF THE CONDIMENT

We all have our plans for the end of the world — our underground bunkers, islands we’d hide on, maps of neighbors we’d eat first, etc., etc. — but have we thought enough about rebuilding civilization? If god appeared to you as a burning bush or a talking frog, and told you to build an ark of so many cubits by so many cubits and told you that you could take only a certain number of condiments with you, would you be ready with a list?

I worry about this stuff.

Athanasius Kircher wrote a book about Noah’s Ark (because of course he did) where he talks about some of the logistics of putting every single animal in the world onto a large, but definitely finite, boat. There’s a huge folding plate in the book that shows the different compartments with clever innovations like space for ferrets and snakes and whatnot to live between decks. Still, it was pretty obvious to Kircher that it was going to be difficult to fit all of the known animals on this one ark — even when you drop off some of the ones that didn’t make it on (like the unicorn whose absence from the ark puzzled Kircher). His innovation was to realize that most animals were hybrids — giraffes are a mixture of leopards and camels, leopards are lions and panthers, armadillos are turtles and hedgehogs, etc etc. Once you start thinking this way it can be pretty compelling — I spent a couple weeks seeing animals and shouting out combinations: snakes are sharks mixed with iguanas, cows are horses and goats, (wild) pigs are dogs mixed with porcupines… it wore off eventually.

So, clearly this is how we’d fit the condiments on the ark — oil, vinegar, garlic, chile peppers, mustard, honey, salt, butter. Some of the choices are going to be easy and obvious — all of those things are condiments themselves, as well as being ingredients. Soy sauce we will bring — there won’t be room for doing advanced fermentation (but maybe we’ll make sour cream and yogurt). Eggs? Well, this is the ark, presumably we can borrow one from someone. Eventually we get into trouble. What of the fish sauces? Central figures in many cuisines, beloved of ancient Romans, Vietnamese, Worcestershire is a fish sauce… but anchovies, can we bring them on the ark? And to get to ketchup — if we are going to rebuild human civilization, we will need, no matter what you may think of it, ketchup — will we bring tomato sauce or call ketchup its own, unique thing? Kirchner had a couple ringers, so it’s not completely out of bounds. He was sure — SURE — that sirens existed because he had a dried-up one in his collection, but he couldn’t figure out what creatures they were a mixture of, so he allowed them on as themselves in specially built compartments. Which, now that I think about it, is weird because I always thought the sea creatures were basically left to fend for themselves in the water. Why not sirens? Makes me wonder about the anchovies again, but perhaps we expend a waiver on ketchup, fully formed, too distinct and obnoxiously itself to be a hybrid; it’s a siren.

Then we can make mayo with the oil, vinegar, eggs, make some fake Russian with some ketchup, if the rain ever stops we will be OK on sandwiches. But can we bring tomato sauce, even if not to make ketchup? Mayo used to be a sauce — a mother sauce, more or less, with hollandaise. I’d argue hollandaise is probably a condiment now too, and tomato sauce, vinaigrette, also mother sauces. Hmmmm.

In the past, it was assumed that a sauce becoming a condiment was a fall — a failure, a demotion. The general view privileged sauces over condiments as the domain of the chef, the professional. Over time, though, a generally unspoken change has reversed this thinking. Now, maybe, a sauce that fails to become a condiment, to spawn further uses, a fan base, has swapped onto the other side of the dichotomy — or, worse, been forgotten. Who thinks of sauce Espagnole anymore? Or veloute? We barely make hollandaise, béarnaise, beurre blanc.

I stand in the supermarket condiment aisle and do I feel inspired? Maybe at H-Mart, once in a while, but even that is just because of all the chile products and the reassuring lack of things described as creamy. But no, I am not inspired, I am oppressed, worn down by the requirements of shelf stability and focus grouped viscosity, hemmed in by partially hydrogenated soybean oil (just hydrogenate it for fuck sake, why all the half measures) and high fructose corn syrup. Is this a foundation for rebuilding the world? Maybe we should leave it all behind.

Am I talking myself into reversing course once again? I dunno — many things are natural condiments: mustard, soy, fish sauce, the emulsion of garlic and oil called allioli that gave birth to mayo and aioli. But these other condiments that have been plucked from the sauce world, often as half-made, broken things, the store mayos, flaccid vinaigrettes full of xanthan gum and despair, the McDonald’s dipping sauces of the world. The unspeakable things that have taken refuge as “salad dressings” often blamed on foreigners: French, Russian, Italian, Catalina, Greek, and, of course, ranch. What of relish? The sad corpse of a pickle, replaced by chutneys and, really, pickles themselves back for revenge.

I always associated condiments with democratic principles; a bottom up view of society. Sauces were imposed on us by chefs beholden to the wealthy; condiments, at least, we choose. Eat the rich and do it with the condiments of the people, I figured. But what if we’ve let our condiments become debased? Is it really an act of freedom to put terrible condiments on your food? Or is it futile — or worse than futile because we delude ourselves while all the while hiding behind a refrigerator door full of atrocities? Qui condietis condimenta?

Maybe there is a reason that I’m thinking about this flood. When I began, I thought I was constructing a joke too elaborate for the payoff, a light piece for the holidays. But no, I’ve fooled myself, trapped myself in a corner as surely as Larry who only talks about annuities will trap us all in a corner at someone’s office Christmas party. Years ago, I joked that an over-reliance on debauched versions of fish sauce led to the fall of the Roman empire and that I thought sriracha might be our undoing. But maybe it wasn’t sriracha — or not just. Maybe the flood is coming because we took our condiment freedom and ruined it, cheapened it, took it for granted, bottled and tamed and domesticated it until it was a pale, insipid simulacrum of itself.

If we brought it all on the ark would we just go right back to eating shitty, soggy, sandwiches, pasta salad, and befowled bowls of iceberg lettuce? And why is everything so thick? Even our once reliably thin hot sauces have congealed thanks to sriracha. I know it was the fashion at some point in the distant past, possibly a mass psychosis brought on by ketchup, that condiments be thick, but I wonder whether it isn’t the whole shelf stability thing again. It sounds benign, shelf stability, but it’s a weird thing. The requirements of capitalism dictated that these things not require refrigeration, but also won’t go bad. They are frozen in time at the factory with some sort of preservative — natural or unnatural (insofar as those have any meaning when, for example, sodium benzoate originally came from trees and refined sugar is about as unnatural an idea as one could construct) — so that no “spoilage” occurs after it departs. Spoilage, they say, but they really mean fermentation — our condiments used to be alive — and sure, like with all living things, they could turn on us. But it’s something to think about.

I think Kircher had it right: simplify. We want the building blocks of our condiments — oil, vinegar, honey, chiles, garlic, soy, etc. Would it kill someone to bring some citron seeds? No. In Kircher’s ark book he lamented that the unicorn was left to drown and he wondered why — had they stopped believing in it? Surely they are real and one of God’s creatures, why let it drown? I’m sure they had their reasons. Noah, after all, was a practical sort, especially as nutters go. It was probably unicorns and their mythic ilk who ruined everything and brought on the Flood in the first place.

So we will leave ketchup and his whole sordid family to the thick flood, to drown the same whether it is a unicorn or siren, because, after all, Kircher’s siren was a desiccated hoax — and unicorns are dicks.

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STUFFED (40)

Published Date : November 22, 2019
Author : tnealon

FLASH THE HASH, pt. 2

In 1788, William Grose published A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a lowbrow collection of the colorful slang and cant terms and idioms that Samuel Johnson had left out of his highbrow 1755 dictionary. Recently, I pored over Grose’s dictionary in search of food- and drink-related words. Here’s what I’ve found, from J through Z.

Jerrycummumble: To shake, towzle, or tumble about.

Irish Apricots (in this dictionary I is interspersed with J, I guess because it’s a “classical” dictionary): Potatoes. It is a common joke against the Irish vessels to say they are loaded with fruit and timber, that is, potatoes and broomsticks.

Kettle of Fish: When a person has perplexed his affairs in general, or any particular business, he is said to have made a fine kettle of fish of it.

Kickshaws: French dishes: corruption of quelque chose.

Kill Priest: Port wine.

Kissing crust: That part where the loaves have touched in the oven.

Kitchen Physick: Food, good meat roast or boiled.

Lamb’s Wool: Apples roasted and put into a strong ale.

Lareovers for Medlers: An answer frequently given to children, or young people, as a rebuke for their impertinent curiosity, in enquiring what is contained in a box, bundle, or any other closed conveyance: perhaps from a layover, or turnover, a kind of tart not baked but made to contain the fruit by turning one end of the crust over the other. Medlar tarts were probably so made in former times.

Line of the Old Author: Dram of brandy.

Liquor: To liquor one’s boots; to drink before a journey.

Lobscouse: A dish much eaten at sea, composed of salt beef, biscuit, and onions, well peppered and stewed together.

Maccaroni: An Italian paste made of flour and eggs. Also a fop: which name arose from a club called the Maccaroni Club.

Mackerel: A bawd.

Marinated: Transported to some foreign plantation.

Marrow Bones: The knees. To bring any one down on his marrow bones; to make him beg pardon on his knees. Marrow bones and cleavers; principal instruments in the band of rough music; these are generally performed on by butchers, on marriages, elections, riding skimmington, and other public or joyous occasions.

Maundering Broth: Scolding.

To Milk the Pigeon: To endeavor at impossibilities.

More-ish: This wine has but one fault, and that is, it is more-ish: i.e. more of it is wanted, or there is too little of it.

Munster Plumbs: Potatoes.

Nipperkin: A small measure

Norfolk Capon: A red herring.

Nutmegs: Testicles.

Nyp, or Nip: A half pint, a nyp of ale: whence the nipperkin, a small vessel.

Nyp Shop: The Peacock in Grays Inn Lane, where Burton ale is sold in nyps.

Oats: He has sowed his wild oats; he is staid, or sober, having left off his wild tricks.

Oil of Barley or Barley Broth: Strong beer.

Ostler: Oatstealer.

Oyster: A gob of thick phlegm spit by a consumptive man; in law Latin, unum viridum gobbum.

Pap: Bread sauce; also the food of infants.

Papler: Milk potage.

Parell: Whites of eggs, bay salt, milk, and pump water, beat together and pored into a vessel of wine to prevent its fretting.

Peck: Victuals. Peck and booze; victuals and drink.

Peekin: water cyder.

Pickle: An arch waggish fellow. In pickle, or in the pickling tube: in a salivation. There are rods in brine, or pickle, for him; a punishment awaits him, or is prepared for him. Pickle herring; the zany or merry Andrew of a mountebank.

Pigeon’s Milk: Boys and novices are frequently sent on the first of April to buy pigeon’s milk.

Pork: To cry pork; to give intelligence to the undertaker of a funeral: metaphor borrowed from the raven whose notes sounds like the word pork. Ravens are said to smell carrion at a distance.

Potato Trap: The mouth.

Pudding: The guts.

Pudding-Headed Fellow: A stupid fellow.

Pudding Sleeves: A parson.

Pudding Time: In good time, or at the beginning of the meal. To give the crows a pudding; to die. You must eat some cold pudding to settle your love.

Rabbit: A Welch rabbit; bread and cheese toasted, i.e. a Welsh rare bit. Rabbits were also a sort of wooden canns to drink out of, now out of use.

To Roast: To arrest — also to jeer, ridicule or banter. Roast meat clothes; Sunday or holiday clothes. To cry roast meat; to boast of one’s situation. To rule the roast; to be master or paramount.

Rot Gut: Small beer; called beer-a-bumble — will burn one’s guts before ’twill make one tumble.

Rough Music: Saucepans, frying-pans, poker and tong, marrow bones and cleavers, bulls horns etc beaten upon and sounded in ludicrous processions.

Rum ____: see illustration

Sacheverel: The iron door, or blower, to the mouth of a stove: from a divine of that name who made himself famous for blowing the coals of dissention in the latter end of the reign of Queen Ann.

Salmon-Gundy: Apples, onions, veal or chicken and pickled herrings, minced fine and eaten with oil and vinegar: some derive the name of this mess from the French words selon mon goust, because the propositions of the different ingredients are regulated by the palate of the maker; others say it bears the name of the inventor, who was a rich Dutch merchant: but the general and most probable opinion is that it was invented by the countess of Salmagondi, one of the ladies of Mary de Medicis, wife of King Henry IV of France and by her brought into France.

Salt: Lecherous.

Sandwich: Ham, dried tongue, or some other salted meat, cut thin, and put between two slices of bread and butter; said to be a favourite morsel with the Earl of Sandwich.

Sangaree: Rack punch was formerly so called in bagnios.

Sauce Box: A term of familiar raillery, signifying a bold or forward person.

Scotch Chocolate: Brimstone and milk.

Scratch Platter or Taylor’s Ragout: Bread sops in the oil and vinegar in which cucumbers have been sliced.

Sir John Barleycorn: Strong beer.

Sir Loin: The sur, or upper loin.

Slap-bang Shop: A petty cook’s shop where there is no credit given, but what is had must be paid down with ready slap-bang, i.e. immediately. This is a common appellation for a night cellar frequented by thieves, and sometimes for a stage coach or caravan.

Slush Bucket: A foul feeder, one that eats much greasy food.

Smash: Leg of mutton and smash; a leg of mutton and mashed turnips.

Spatch Cock: A hen just killed from the roost or yard and immediately skinned, spliot, and broiled: an Irish dish upon any sudden occasion.

Split Fig: A grocer.

Stingo: Strong beer or other liquor.

Sugar Stick: The virile member.

Sugar Sops: Toasted bread soaked in ale, sweetened with sugar and grated nutmeg: it is eaten with cheese.

Tears of the Tankard: The drippings of liquor on a man’s waistcoat.

Three Threads: Half common ale mixed with stale and double beer.

Tie of the Buttery: A goose.

Tiffing: Eating or drinking out of meal time, disputing or falling out; also lying with a wench. A tiff of punch; a small bowl of punch.

Toad: Toad in a hole; meat baked or boiled in a pye crust.

Toasting Iron or Cheese Toaster: A sword.

Toddy: Originally the juice of the cocoa tree, and afterwards rum, water, sugar, and nutmeg.

Turkey Merchant: A poulterer.

Twiddle-Diddles: Testicles.

Victualling Office: The stomach.

Vinegar: A name given to the person who with a whip in his hand, and a hat held before his eyes, keeps the ring clear at boxing matches and cudgel playings; also, in cant terms, a clock.

Water Bewitched: Very weak punch or beer.

Whirlygigs: Testicles.

Whisky: A malt spirit much drank in Ireland.

Yaffling: Eating.

Yarmouth Pye: A pye made of herrings highly spiced, which the city of Norwich is by charter bound to present annually to the king.

Yarum: Milk.

Zany: The jester, Jack Pudden, or merry Andrew, to a mountebank.

***

STUFFED (39)

Published Date : October 20, 2019
Author : tnealon

BRUNSWICK STEW: B.S.

In August, I drove with my family from Boston to visit my brother in Durham, NC. On the way down we stopped in Atlantic City because it was 1) cheaper than anything else around and 2) I thought some exposure to late-stage capitalism would be good for my kids.

My daughter, on seeing our somewhat beleaguered hotel room at the zombie end of the boardwalk, seemed less sure, and when we walked out into the thick evening air, saw the grey tide breaking, and the handful of remaining casinos blinking desperately at us from their huddle at the far, far end of the boardwalk, was sure to tell me that I’d done a dumb thing. Maybe — but I’d never been, and thought it was sort of grimly cool. We stayed right next to the cast-off husk of the one-time Golden Nugget (built by Michael Milken in 1980! It was also the Bally’s Grand, The Grand, Atlantic City Hilton and ACH before it was assumed into casino heaven) right on Pacific Avenue — which is a really nice property in Monopoly.

Anyway, we drove down the Jersey shore and took the car ferry across Cape May — which is reasonably priced and lovely. We saw dolphins and oil tankers and sat in adirondack chairs. The ferry takes you to where, apparently, they keep Delaware. It was nice — seemed suspiciously recently washed and a little like a movie set of what people who didn’t know what Delaware looks like might expect Delaware to look like. Even the couple of (pretty) good old boys wearing faded Megadeth t-shirts and trucker caps who jaywalked in front of us somewhere near Rehoboth Beach were conspicuously well groomed. From there we drove through the Delaware portion of Virginia and then through/over the aptly named Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel where a GPS malfunction/bridge-tunnel-induced driving coma resulted in us going in circles for a while. Looking east, it’s easy to imagine shiny infrastructure projects like this all over the country, but, of course, on the other side are the endless Navy shipyards, a depressing reminder that war is still the only easy way that tax dollars get spent on anything cool.

When we emerged, we turned inland, and looking at the map, now, I see that we passed by the Great Dismal Swamp while cutting across Virginia in search of I-85. It’s a funny drive because you are stuck in a sort of null space for so long, everything has the sameness of an airport terminal, all the way from Boston to the end of the bridge-tunnel. Compared to, for example, driving I-40 where the convenience stores are changing all the time, selling you pecan logs or hot chicken, and billboards shout about weird local enthusiasms. It’s not until you pop out and head west that a sense of place reemerges and you start to get boiled peanuts and sweet tea and gas station marts that take their chicken seriously.

Right on the North Carolina border lies Brunswick County (population ca. 16,244). It’s pretty sleepy but does have a piece of I-85 as well as a stretch of US-58 which connects I-95 to I-85 and continues to points west (including South Boston, VA, where it is extremely unlikely that you will be called upon to bang a uey in order to stop at Dunkies). We were on 58 heading towards I-85 for a short drive to Durham and I remember thinking — blithely, ironically, forebodingly — that I should stop speeding, since the risk/reward was now tilting the other way. You can make up a lot of time speeding for 10 hours, but I try to keep it sensible towards the end of trips. Anyway, naturally, I get pulled over for doing 70 (which seems high, but no doubt he was set up to catch me at the bottom of a hill or some shit) in a 55 which, I think most of you will agree, isn’t really speeding at all (to most right-thinking people, 65 means “under 80” and 55 means “under 70,” amirite?). The trooper is younger than some boots I own, calls me sir a lot, and, of course, is wearing a dumb hat, all of which is irritating. His explanation is sort of long, but I’m mostly just nodding politely and hoping (once I realize, despite what a nice yankee family we so obviously are, that he is actually going to give me a ticket) he’ll just yank the bandaid and let me out of there.

Only later did I realize, after eight (!!!) law firms sent me solicitations after my case was docketed, that it’s not a ticket at all — it’s a summons sucking me into their bullshit jurisprudence-for-profit scheme. You have to show up for court or else “pre-pay” your fine — a nice, dystopian turn of phrase, that — and if you have the temerity to pay, you will be pleading guilty and they’ll put however many points on your license they decide is most entertaining. In fairness, as much as I might want to play the persecuted yankee, the scheme is pretty obviously designed to extract maximum money from North Carolina triangle residents. Brunswick County has less than 1/10th of 1% of the population of NC’s research triangle through which I-85 conveniently passes and it’s easier to get your license suspended in NC than most places. It’s punishment for passing through: They stop you, take a little, let you go on your way a little poorer, your attitude a little worse and, if you’re me, a permanent, seething hatred of Virginia boiling ceaselessly in your belly.

Anyway, what’s past is prologue and sometimes literally: While hanging with my brother in Durham, we talked a lot about local food traditions, pulled pork (of course) but also pimento cheese, and Brunswick stew — which, he said, was popular in North Carolina but which had conflicting origin stories in Virginia and Georgia: “I bet they are all bullshit,” I said, “and maybe I can prove it’s not from Virginia and pay those fuckers back for this ticket.”

I wasn’t just talking out my ass. Almost all food origin stories are nonsense (as I’ve tried to show over the years), and tend to rely on contrived situations and unlikely accidents.

In October 1940 the Prospect Hill School Parent-Teacher Association (Prospect Hill, Caswell County, North Carolina) organized a Brunswick stew sale at the tobacco warehouses in Mebane, Alamance County, North Carolina.

Brunswick stew is a folk recipe, a half-wild meal, so there is elasticity in the ingredients. But most basically, it is: meat, potatoes, tomato, corn, and vegetables and beans. There are, I’ve found, adherents to various belief systems based on the type of meat — squirrel, possum or other small game, some lapsed and using chicken along with pork evangelizers and beef apostates further south — potato/tomato ratios, beans (lima vs. butter), and vegetable (corn, okra, others). There are thickness venerators, potato disbelievers, corn true believers, and dogmatics that will die on each and every one of these hills, including, in true Southern fashion, whether it’s a main course or a side dish. It is slow-cooked for hours, often in giant cauldrons, until the oversized spoon stands up on its own.

Virginia claims to have invented the stew some time in the 1820s, Georgia in 1898, while North Carolina, where there is also a Brunswick County, makes no claim to ownership. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in Cross Creek Cookery (1942), says it was one of Queen Victoria’s favorites and came originally from Braunschweig, Germany, but no one really thinks that’s right. (Though Brunswick, Virginia was, in fact, named after the Duchy in Germany).

Like all stews it is a melange, cooked for so long that the flavors commingle and collaborate. You might well give some side-eye to a pile of butter beans on a dinner plate, but you’ll be thrilled to find them in a stew.

The earliest origins proposed are from the 1820s where James Matthews, a veteran of the war of 1812 and famed squirrel-hunting Lothario (“it was his way of cooking squirrel which gained him much popularity and éclat with the ladies” says an 1886 newspaper article on the stew’s origins) developed the beginnings of the stew which he then served, maybe, to President Andrew Jackson (naturally)… and I’m going to stop them right there. How is this a thing? He had a special way of cooking squirrel where you slow-boiled it until it fell off the bone, you strained the bones, added some spices and nothing else (no vegetables, nothing), and why is this Brunswick stew? Why not just say you invented soup? Or squirrels? Or boiling? Anyway, according to an account based on the “brunswick stew letters” discovered in 1907, this squirrel soup recipe was handed down a few generations until someone thought to add tomato, potato, butterbeans and corn in the 1830s. Most of the origin stories make a point of tomato being a new ingredient in the 1830s — apparently angling the stew as cutting-edge — but Mary Randolph’s 1824 Virginia Housewife had recipes for stewing tomatoes with lamb and for tomato catsup and tomato marmalade. So the tomato was sort of on the early side, but not groundbreaking. Over time, according to this legend, squirrel often became chicken, pork, or other meats, and other vegetables were added or subtracted as fashion and tastes dictated.

In Brunswick, Georgia, they have a giant kettle which produced, they say, the first Brunswick stew in 1898 on nearby St. Simons Island. The date puts them way behind the inventions of their northern competitor, and the pot being moved to Brunswick is pretty sketchy… but their story is not without inherent credibility. St. Simons island was home to the indigenous Creek people and, later, the Gullah Geechee people, who both made stew in the 18th century. Geechee cuisine is famous for not only gumbo, but their use of game like squirrel (the terrific 1970 cookbook/memoir Vibration Cooking by Verta Mae even has a simple squirrel soup recipe along with the varied gumbos and stews). Presumably some Georgians found out about Geechee stew on St. Simons island, then hightailed it back to Brunswick where they kept the stewpot as both evidence against Virginia’s version of events and to permanently implicate themselves in the original theft of the stew? But I’m hardly the first to wonder some of this: Way back in 1987, John Egerton, in Southern Food, offered that it was likely that Native Americans were stewing meat, corn, potatoes and local vegetables in that very spot before Virginia or Georgia were even glimmers in some colonizer’s eye — absolutely accurate, but also spoken like a man who got pulled over in Brunswick Country, Virginia. After all, corn, tomatoes and beans were at the center of the North American diet when Europeans arrived with their notions and their turkeys. Two sisters and an aunt (lacking only the third sister, squash).

These stories, true or not, bring up more complicated, ontological questions: with the continuous substitutions over time of different meats and vegetables, as well as amounts of each — when can we say a dish is invented? When does squirrel soup become Brunswick stew and can we then trace the stew back to that and claim the whole chain of events? Why not the imperfect squirrel soup that preceded that one? And so on — you could have squirrel soups all the way down, I’m sure.

It’s not a disingenuous question (well, mostly not disingenuous) either. Most recipes start this way, trial and error for a period of time until something special emerges. Here the story frames it as a process of decades, but it could just as easily be centuries. Stews like this — if it’s even a stew, many of the regional formulations seem more like a potage (stew cooked until it is similar in consistency to a porridge) a ragout (thick main course stew) or a chowder (just kidding) — where ingredients are added as available, have been well documented for some time, and have even become a part of folklore. The “Stone Soup” folk tale, where clever but hungry travelers trick one person after another into adding ingredients, a bit of meat, carrot, potato, etc etc, to their stone soup (just water and a rock) so that they can try some of the end result which the travelers have assured them is delicious, has been around for at least 300 years and includes regional variations spanning the globe and using buttons, axes, wood, and nails instead of a stone. The story was first published in America in 1808, just before Matthews and his squirrel soup appeared.

Irish stew, the national dish of sorts, is a close relative both in flexibility of ingredients and in arguments over what constitutes a proper concoction. Lamb vs. mutton, carrots or no carrots, and on it goes. Irish stew was carried across the Atlantic and adopted as the patron stew of the itinerant, most often as mulligan or hobo stew, a communal dish where individuals each give what they can in order so that everyone could eat something better — stone soup without the trickery. In fact, one of my original plans to discredit Virginia’s stew was to claim that it was called Brunswick stew because of Irish people who came down from New Brunswick in the 19th century (this part really happened) introduced Virginians to Irish style stew made with some meat and whatever you could find. Couldn’t stick the landing on that one, though, so here we are, with a short history of vernacular stew.

In addition to Irish and mulligan and hobo stew, there are food traditions the world over that involve making stew from whatever is available (as the geographical range of the stone soup story demonstrates). Vernacular recipes that would have circulated around the three Brunswicks (I’m not leaving you out, Brunswick, NC, no matter what you might say) include the Scottish dish hodge-podge or hotch-potch which was originally a stew made with vegetables, often mutton, potatoes, but, by definition made with whatever was available. The Scottish National Dictionary has it first appearing in print in 1712, but probably circulated for a long time before that.

Burgoo is a thick stew made with things on hand; it is common in the South and lower Midwest US. It used to be a sort of porridge served on ships and was also called loblolly, but, the OED tells me, a loblolly in the US is a mudhole with a deceptive crust — lovely, that. In Kentucky, burgoo holds a pride of place in the local cuisine that is similar to Brunswick stew’s in Virginia (though less desperate). Lolblolly is old, in print in 1597, burgoo in 1743. In fact the first appearance of burgoo in this sense also included a Native American food technology called ruhiggan. This was made by pounding dried meat (venison, caribou, bison, moose, polar bear — it was a widespread invention in North America) and adding fat and usually other ingredients for interest, taste and nutrition (cranberries, lichen, dried fish, etc.). This could then be rehydrated when needed into a stew — an improved version of the portable soup that European military strategists were always hunting after.

In the upper Midwest they have booyah which is similar both culturally and gastronomically — like burgoo and Brunswick stew, it is frequently made in large batches (booyah pots are huge). Haricot (or harico) is a mutton stew and first showed up in print in 1611, a gallimaulfry (16th century through late 19th) was a ragout or stew of various things on hand and was often, like hodge-podge, used metaphorically and pejoratively. Rubaboo is a stew of meat, (bear, other game) fat, corn, other vegetables, and often, dried meat and maple syrup. It was a staple of Canadian trappers and, especially, the Métis. Gumbo is a stew made of almost anything and thickened with okra. Most of these would have been swirling around Brunswick, Virginia for a century, at least, before Matthews’ squirrel soup.

I can’t prove this, but here is what I think happened: Some guys were making stew in Brunswick, it was probably their “thing” — you know how guys are with slow cooking, they get obsessed, it becomes an all day excuse to sit around drinking and avoiding actual labor. Anyway, it’s the late 19th century, these guys are sitting around making all-day stew and they start to notice a lot of other people making similar stews. Maybe they go over to a friend’s house for dinner and what’s for dinner? Stew. Stay at an inn a county over while on a business trip buying barrels for their filling-barrels-with-things business and what are they serving for dinner? Right, stew. They get nervous. They aren’t worried about who they nabbed the stew from in the first place, they are worried about their current situation. How can they keep this thing special so spending all day, or all weekend, cooking this stuff will seem like a reasonable, even laudable, thing to be doing?

Because the story they planted in the paper in 1886 is crazy. Squirrel soup in the 1820s? Europeans had been here trying to avoid starving for 200 years and native people for millennia and this struck people as a fresh idea? The first thing people must have noticed when they disembarked and walked into the forest was the squirrels running around looking basically edible. Or the second thing, anyway, after they got over their surprise that the turkeys they had gone through all the trouble of carrying across the ocean had somehow beaten them here. But, improbably, this squirrel soup thing stuck, and they added ingredients over the years until, at some point, they stopped (notionally, anyway) and called it Brunswick stew.

When do we decide a recipe is done? When the last addition has been made, the stone soup finished, the last allowed substitution ratified, and we’ve locked it. How do you come to own even a part of a stew like this? To carve your name into it? Whether this stew wandered by, perhaps on some ancestor of route 58, was there already, or a mix of the two, the Brunswickans tried to take it, to make it their own, and then freeze it in place, a fine, feral stew, petrified. But it never works with this sort of thing. Sure, haute cuisine might be perfected and then left unchanged, and bourgeois cuisine calcified until replaced by something better… but vernacular foods like stew are harder to pin down. They wander off, get chicken in them, brisket, okra, potatoes, no potatoes, take a trip down to North Carolina and get all filled up with pulled pork. They don’t care.

But, for all that, they’ll probably call it Brunswick stew forever.

***

STUFFED (38)

Published Date : September 27, 2019
Author : tnealon

FLASH THE HASH

Adam’s Ale: Water

Apple Dumplin Shop: A woman’s bosom.

Apple-Pye Bed: A bed made apple-pye fashion, like what is called a turnover apple-pye, where the sheets are so doubled as to prevent any one from getting at his length between them.

Bacon: He has saved his bacon, he has escaped.

Baker’s Dozen: Fourteen.

To Baste: To beat.

Beef: To cry beef, to give the alarm.

Beverage: Garnish money, or money for drink, demanded of any one having a new suit of clothes.

Blue tape: Gin.

Brace: The brace tavern; a room in the S.E. corner of the King’s Bench, where, for the convenience of prisoners residing thereabouts, beer purchased at the tap house was retailed at a halfpenny per pot advance.

Bragget: Mead and Ale sweetened with honey.

Bread and Butter Fashion: One slice upon the other.

Brewes: Oatmeal boiled in the pot with salt and beef.

Brown George: An ammunition loaf.

Bubbly Jock: A turkey cock.

Bub: Strong beer.

Bubble and Squeak: Beef and cabbage fried together.

Butcher: A jocular expression used at sea, or by soldiers on a march, when one of their comrades falls down; and means — Butcher! butcher ! Where are you? Here is a calf that has the staggers and wants bleeding.

Butter Box: A Dutchman.

Buzza: To buzza one is to challenge him to pour out all the wine in the bottle into his glass… it is commonly said to one who hesitates to empty a bottle that is nearly out.

Cabbage: When the scrotum is relaxed or whiffled, it is said they will not cabbage.

Cake: A foolish fellow.

Calves Head Club: A club instituted by the independents and Presbyterians to commemorate the decapitation of King Charles I. Their chief fare was calves’ heads, and they drank their wine and ale out of calves’ skulls.

Candy: Drunk

Cheese Toaster: A sword.

Cock Ale: A provocative drink.

Colcannon: Potatoes and cabbage pounded together in a mortal, then stewed with butter.

Coriander: Money.

Cracker: Crust, sea biscuit, or ammunition loaf; also the backside. Farting crackers; breeches.

Cucumbers: Taylors, who are jocularly said to subsist, during the summer, chiefly on cucumbers.

Damper: a luncheon, or snap before dinner: so called from its damping, or allaying, the appetite; eating and drinking being, as the proverb wisely observes, apt to take away the appetite.

The Dip: A cook’s shop, under Furnivals Inn, where many attornies clerks, and other inferior limbs of the law, take out the wrinkles from their bellies.

Doctor: Milk and water with a little rum and some nutmeg: also the name of a composition by distillers to make spirits appear stronger than they really are, or, in their phrase, better proof.

Duck Fucker: A man who has the care of the poultry on board a ship of war.

Durham Man: Knocker-kneed, he grinds mustard with his knees; Durham is famous for its mustard.

Dutch Feast: Where the entertainer gets drunk before his guests.

Eat: To eat like a beggar man, and wag his under jaw; a jocular reproach to a proud man. To eat one’s words; to retract what one has said.

Field Lane Duck: A baked sheep’s head.

To Flash the Hash: To vomit.

Flummery: Oatmeal and water boiled to a jelly; also compliments; neither of which are over nourishing.

Fork: A pickpocket. Let us fork him; let us pick his pocket. —The newest and most dextrous way which is to thrust the figners strait, stiff, open and very quick, into the pocket, and so closing them, hook what can be held between them. N.B. This was taken from a book written many years ago: doubtless the art of picking pockets, like all others, must have been much improved since that time.

Freeze: A thin, small, hard cider, much used by vintners and coopers in parting their wines to lower the price of them, and to advance their gain, A freezing vintner; a vintner who balderdashes his wine.

French Cream: Brandy: so called by the old tabbys and dowagers who drank in their tea.

Galimaufrey: A hodge-podge made up of remnants and scraps of the larder.

German Duck: Half a sheep’s head boiled with onions.

Giblets: To join giblets; said of a man and woman who cohabit as husband and wife without being married; also to copulate.

Gingerbread: A cake made of treacle, flour, and grated ginger; also money.

Grub: Victuals. To grub; to dine. To ride brub; to be sullen or out of temper.

Gutting a Quart Pot: Taking out the lining of it; i.e. drinking it off. Gutting an oyster; eating it. Gutting a house; clearing it of its furniture.

Hams or Hamcases: Breeches.

Hand and Pocket Shop: An eating house where ready money is paid for what is called for.

Hasty: Precipitate, passionate. He is none of the Hastings sort; a saying of a slow, loitering fellow: an allusion to the Hastings pea which is the first in season.

Hasty Pudding: Flour and milk boiled to a moderate thickness and eaten with sugar and butter. Figuratively, a wet, muddy road: as, The Way through Wandsworth is quite a hasty pudding. To eat hot hasty pudding for a laced hat, or some other prize, is a common feat at wakes and fairs.

High Eating: To eat skylarks in a garret.

Hogo: Corruption of haut gout, high taste, or flavour; commonly said of fish somewhat tainted. It has a confounded hoho: it stinks confoundedly.

Hook and Snivey, with Nix the Buffer: This rig consists in feeding a man and a dog for nothing, and is carried on thus: Three men, one of whom pretends to be sick and unable to eat go to a public house; the two well men make a bargain with the landlord for their dinner and, when he is out of sight, feed their pretended sick companion and dog gratis.

Hot Stomach: He has so hot a stomach that he burns all the clothes off his back; said of one who pawns his clothes to purchase liquor.

Huckle my Buff: Beer, egg and brandy made hot.

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STUFFED (37)

Published Date : August 31, 2019
Author : tnealon

THE ISLAND OF LOST CONDIMENTS

A thousand years ago it was hip to put piles of expensive spices in your dishes, a way of expressing that you were at the center of the grand caravan of goods traveling around the world, and not just some beer soup-eating ding-dong.

In ancient Rome, you were judged by the sophistication of the garum in your larder. Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, the Pompeiian garum mogul, made versions for various tastes and budgets, for example, and dispensed them in branded amphorae. In the 17th century, wars were fought over the islands where cloves were grown, and the British East India company drew ton after ton of turmeric out of Indian soil. In the 19th century, the first product marketed around the globe was Worcestershire sauce; bundled up and taken on early cruises and then handed or sold out by the ship’s steward at the end of the voyage. Now it waits in your refrigerator to be dispensed in sad shakes into Bloody Marys, soups, meat stew — or maybe you use it all the time, I don’t know your life. The point is, it’s there, along with some standards: ketchup, mustard, four hot sauces (only one of which you use), barbecue sauce, taco sauce, HP Sauce in case your anglophile cousin Jerry visits again, a pot of Tewkesbury mustard that Jerry left last visit, a few odds and ends.

These are clutter, yes — dumb purchases, vague intentions, dishes made once and discarded now just a condimental synechdoche. But they also form a counterweight to the long-ago ravages of the spice trade, an egalitarian balance made up of squeeze bottles and funny little jars. The profusion of 20th century condiments in the US means that while we may not have saffron, whole nutmeg, cardamom, and vanilla beans laying around, even after all these years, we do have 14 jars of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. The unifying element to all of these condiments? The sloppy joe.

The sloppy joe injects some order into our cluttered refrigerator doors: this array of purchases, good, bad, and indifferent, suddenly can make a sort of sense. At least, until Manwich came out in 1969 and buggered the whole dream.

For decades, sloppy joes were a muddled memory of things we have eaten recently, or thought we might eat — or not even that, the things that we meant to put on the things we were going to eat, but maybe didn’t. At least I always thought that’s what they were meant to be — assembled yourself from these condiments both loved and unloved, whatever you found in your refrigerator was fair game for mixing together with that meat (fresh, freezer grey, or in between), into a riotous bouquet. Sure you’d screw it up now and again, have to sweep your mistakes under the rug with extra worcestershire and ketchup, but it was your mess, at least, where you could stage your own condiment triumphs and catastrophes within the broad confines of what constitutes a sloppy joe: ground meat, tomato sauce of some sort, spices.

If condiments are how we express our freedom as we eat, free from the tyranny of restaurants, then sloppy joes are an ecstatic version of that, an outpouring; messy, ocasionally stupid, overwrought and ill advised, but often delicious. Just like America.

At first blush, sloppy joes do seem like the most American thing this side of baroque jello salads, and there are reasons it emerged as such an American, and 20th-century, phenomenon. For centuries, most ground meat (it took awhile for technology to make grinding meat an industrial-scale affair) found its way into sausages, especially across the Atlantic. For example, Hannah Glasse had a couple recipes in her famous 1747 cookbook: Hamburgh Sausages (minced beef, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, a great quantity of garlic, vinegar, salt, red wine, rum stuffed into a casing) and another for a similar mixture stuffed inside a turkey and roasted (nice one, Hannah Glasse, using a turkey as a sausage casing). If it wasn’t sausage, most ground meat ended up as a meatball or in a pie, leaving the bulk of free ground meats for America.

Around the country there are parallel sandwiches to sloppy joes, especially in the midwest where they specialize in a dry variety grouped (notice I won’t say loosely) under the “loose meat” moniker. Bunched up together, they include sandwiches called: Loose meat, “rubble”, maid-rite, tavern sandwich, barbecue, dynamite, hot tamale, yip yip, slush burger, steamer and wimpie. Adjacent to loosemeat and sloppy joe style sandwiches are similar but not quite identical varieties like the chop cheese of the Bronx (lacking some of the meat spices but adding cheese and panache), and Cincinnati chilli (noodles in lieu of a bun — or, in even more pleasing fashion, used as a condiment itself). Loose meat sandwiches are traced to Sioux City, Iowa in the 1920s (some try to trace sloppy joes there as well, even though they were never popular there as near as anyone can tell). Loose meat sandwiches are sloppy joes’s more earnest cousin — a little less crazy, delicious maybe, but cautious, sensible: it’s surprising they didn’t catch on in New England. Because you can’t really can the ingredients of loose meat, they were never aggressively co-opted — though there is still a small chain of loose meat restaurants called Maid-Rite founded in 1926 with 33 restaurants across the midwest.

Sloppy Joes, on the other hand, are traced to the eponymous restaurant in Key West which opened in 1933. Before that, Jose Abeal Otero ran the original Sloppy Joe’s in Havana from around 1917 until it closed following the revolution in 1959. They served a sandwich, a sort of regular man’s mash-up of ropa vieja and picadillo on a bun, that was quite popular and carried the bar’s name with it when it washed ashore in the U.S. The Key West bar, originally called the Silver Slipper, was changed to Sloppy Joe’s, the story goes, at the urging of Ernest Hemingway, in honor of his favorite Havana joint — and it’s no effort to imagine Ern drinking mojitos and socking away a half dozen or so sloppy joes. Hemingway famously called Key West “the St. Tropez of the poor,” so his part in importing the sloppy joe there is certainly on point.

Like the regional sandwiches, ropa vieja and picadillo vary, but typically contain onions, garlic, tomato, spices and, sometimes for ropa vieja and generally for picadillo, raisins, and capers or olives. Ropa vieja is made with ragged strips of flank steak (thus the name – old clothes), picadillo with ground meat (usually beef). Simplified slightly, Worcestershire instead of capers or olives, for example, it’s basically a sloppy joe. But no one would have been bothered in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s that a widespread American sandwich, and one that was enlivened by proletarian sensibilities commingled with democratic ideals, originated in Cuba. It wasn’t until the revolution that the sloppy joe would have even begun to attract scrutiny.

The original Sloppy Joe’s closed right after the end of the Cuban revolution and the Cuban people, who presumably had other things on their mind, lost touch with the sloppy joe sandwich. But in the U.S. it gained in popularity, becoming a staple of home cooking — through the ’60s it appeared frequently in community cookbooks and on school lunch menus, but by the end of the decade it had attracted the attention of Norton Simon, a major player in both the food and media businesses. Simon had made a fortune with Val Vita foods and merged it with Hunts in 1943. Purchasing undervalued businesses post WWII, he eventually rolled them up with Wesson-Snowdrift, Canada Dry and McCall’s Publishing into Norton Simon Inc. in 1968. The following year, Hunts launched Manwich brand sloppy joe sauce.

All of a sudden, Hunts was bumped up against the publishing world —which at the time was a hotbed of mind control and CIA operations both obvious and clandestine. California, where most of these businesses were located and founded, was itself a weird vortex of CIA ops and public opinion manipulation. UCLA had, also in 1969, just lured Louis Jolyon West to be head of their psychiatry department. West had been at the University of Oklahoma where he worked with the CIA on MK-Ultra and became infamous for overdosing an elephant with LSD to see if he could make it more tractable. Norton Simon board member Franklin Murphy, already well known for his work with the CIA, was chancellor of UCLA from 1960–68 and still has buildings there named after him. So did the CIA create Manwich to commodify this freewheeling cuban sandwich? Impossible to say, but certainly, this was the sort of thing that they did routinely. After all, they had recruited Gloria Steinem in the 1950s to work for their Independent Research Service which sought to disrupt leftist youth festivals. Many of Steinem’s early feminist articles were published by Independent Research Service associated persons (notable Clay Felker) and when she was named McCall’s Woman of the Year in 1971 it declared that the feminist movement was now in “Phase II” and that “radicals were necessary for getting the thing started … but the ‘moderates’ were now in control.”

There was a great deal of CIA money and ideas floating around publishing, advertising and marketing in these years, some of it guiding, some pushing, and some shoving things into an order that they preferred. So many people were in bed with the CIA in some fashion that you could assume lots of things were influenced by the CIA, and maybe you should. Whether it was the CIA, the industrial marketing machine, or the invisible hand of the condiment-hating prepared meals sector (and who is to say they aren’t all the same people?), it happened.

In any case, sloppy joes began in 1969 on the path they remain on today: codified, trapped in a can and defined by their confinement. They live on, but sadly. While in the decades previous to the 1970s recipes show up regularly in fundraiser cookbooks, magazine and newspaper stories, in the decades after, it is mostly ideas for school cafeteria lunches and strategies for slipping in some textured vegetable protein. Someone had succeeded in hobbling the great sloppy joe. And it limps on still. But if everyone of you will go to your refrigerator now and then and look around, pick a few ingredients that speak to you (making sure one is tomato-based), and slam them together, we might be able to bring the sloppy joe back as it once was: brave and sloppy and free.

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CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)

Published Date : August 13, 2019
Author : tnealon

One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating some of our favorite action movies from the Seventies (1974–1983).

EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE | d. JAMES FARGO | 1978

The suggestively named Philo Beddoe (Clint Eastwood) is a trucker who doesn’t do much trucking, and instead drives around with his brother and manager Orville bare-knuckle boxing for cash and getting into bar fights. He has an orangutan, Clyde, that he won from a zoo in the desert in a match. He meets a girl, beats up some Nazi bikers, loses the girl, and they drive around the West looking for her as hilarity and pugilism commingle.

At its core, Every Which Way but Loose is a picaresque that takes place in a version of America that was just wrapping up: a pre-Reagan America full of dusty corners, vague lawlessness, fraught but meaningless encounters. It’s Rabelais, but with Eastwood as Gargantua, and an orangutan as Pantugruel. Instead of the impending end of the Renaissance, it’s the end of random, weird, dumb America; instead of sausages, it’s punching people in the face.

The Nazi bikers who Clint keeps beating up (and stealing — and then selling — their bikes) glom together and follow him across the country as he lazily searches for the country singer he (sort of) fell for. The Washington Generals of Nazi biker gangs, they get ruined in a bar fight, shot at by Clint’s mom, and finally pummeled en masse by Clint while Orville destroys their bikes. Meanwhile some cops that Philo accidentally (not knowing they were cops) beat up in a bar are also on his tail. Pursued by the law and the lawless, but, either way, pursued by idiots. When a cop finally catches up, he is dispatched with a fish to the face, his truck sunk in a lake.

It’s all played for laughs — too silly to be camp, too serious to be slapstick — but it isn’t exactly funny. The cops and bikers are bad, certainly, but too ineffectual to be antagonists in this story that might not even have a protagonist. It’s not camp or rom-com, western, action or road movie, though it waves at all of them (sometimes gently, sometimes fervently). Too serious to be whimsical, too whimsical to be taken seriously, Every Which Way but Loose could be accused of repeatedly undermining its own purpose if it had one. Unlike most movies where weird thoughts about them occur to you afterwards, even while watching this you feel that maybe it was stuck together like Queaneau’s Elements of Style and, somewhere there are a thousand more versions of the movie where the scenes are jumbled differently. I bet most of those are pretty good, as well.

The final fight is against a bare-knuckle giant, a sort of tall tale who has been mentioned throughout the movie. But he’s old, washed-up, the crowd turns on him as Clint is handling him fairly easily — they mock the old guy and you hear them plot to turn Clint into their new meal ticket. Clint realizes that his work is being commodified — that what he was experiencing as rootless beating the shit out of people is about to make him just another cog in a parallel economy every bit as exploitative as the one he was resisting (or ignoring). Or maybe he sees his end laid out and decides to chart another course — refusing to be the inevitable collision with modernity in this (small) tall tale. So he takes a dive.

The America where you can just wander around doing fuck-all is gone. Now we have reasons for things, expectations that our actions are considered so as to lead somewhere. Which is funny, since we’ve all destroyed our attention spans and are even less capable of this sort of structure than we were in 1978. Yet we persist at bludgeoning our giant square selves into stupid round holes. If I was in charge, all orangutans would be provided with pugilistic truck drivers and everything would be pointless again, as it should be.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

STUFFED (36)

Published Date : July 23, 2019
Author : tnealon

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION

In the middle ages there were outbreaks of “dancing sickness” all over Europe. Sometimes smallish groups, sometimes thousands of people at a time, would dance erratically until they all collapsed from exhaustion.

No comprehensive explanation has ever been arrived at for the dancing mania — even though it occurred with some frequency for around a thousand years, from the 7th until the 17th century. Sometimes musicians would search out the dancers, thinking that it might help or at least be funny if they provided some accompaniment, so some of the madness was festive, at least in appearance. But mostly it was weirdness punctuated by tragedy: In the 13th century, a few hundred dancers collapsed a bridge in Germany; a famous case in the early 16th century resulted in numerous deaths of exhaustion and heart failure as hundreds of people were inspired by a single dancer, Frau Troffea, to dance and dance and dance. Reports have a dozen people dropping dead every day by the end of a month of uninterrupted dancing. And this was before social media.

Over the centuries many theories have been advanced to try to explain what, I think you will agree, is some pretty weird shit.

One explanation that has hung around is that all of this can be explained by ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungal disease of rye and other cereals; ergot poisoning (or St. Anthony’s Fire, as it was known) can cause confusion, spasms, convulsions. When ground with the grain and eaten in profusion, ergot can, in theory, cause mass hysteria. The People’s Crusade of 1096 — where something approaching 100,000 poor Europeans followed Peter the Hermit, an itinerant crackpot, to the Middle East to fight the infidels, while murdering thousands of Jews along the way — has been blamed by some on ergot poisoning. Today ergot is still around, growing here and there in the wet and unpredictable spring weather brought on by climate change.

Over the centuries many cases of witchcraft, bewitchment, and general ensorcellment have been laid at ergot’s door. You can see the appealing simplicity of the ergot story — everyone eating the same infected bread and hallucinating together — but the scale and geographical spread of the dancing mania seem to argue against it. Italy even had its own version: tarantism, so named because it was thought to be the result of a tarantula bite. But it turns out most of the dancers were found to have been “infected” by someone they believed had been bitten, which isn’t really how spider bites work. Likewise, St. Vitus’s dance, or Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disease that does have many of the movements associated with the dancing, was long associated with the phenomenon — but Sydenham’s chorea is far too uncommon to be a reasonable culprit.

We’ll likely never know the precise culprit for these strange events, but the situation in Europe was often extremely volatile. Fragile mental states created by a dangerous and prolonged mixture of extreme poverty, rampant superstition, and centuries of Church dogma that had encouraged a suggestible and ingenuous populace, created a situation in which dancing until you quite literally expired apparently seemed like a reasonable thing to do, or maybe the only thing. Though gruesome and sad, the dancing manias are picturesque, at least in the imagination — especially when you compare them to millenarian cults that grab onto an apocalyptic ideology instead of a twitchy dance in their embrace of thanatos.

I guess what I’m trying to say, in my round about way, is: I can’t wait for all these bewitched white nationalists to just drop dead.

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STUFFED (35)

Published Date : June 22, 2019
Author : tnealon

ELECTRIFIED BREADCRUMBS

It’s alive, alive! Now I know it is really possible… — Dr. Henry Frankenstein, Frankenstein (1931)

Breadcrumbs. In the Middle Ages they were the main thickener of sauces. They’ve been used: to make trails, both actual (watch out for birds) and metaphorical; to coat almost anything for frying; for making fake au gratin on mac & cheese; and for inducing arguments about how terrible it is to put breadcrumbs on mac & cheese.

For these, and myriad other purposes, some of them too explicit to detail here, we have used bread crumbs. But until about halfway through the 20th century, we made them all the same way, by grating ordinary bread. Sometimes stale, leftover bread (especially if the crmubs were being toasted and used as a coating), sometimes closer to fresh bread (if being used as a binder in meatloaf or something similar). Gradually though, and then all at once, most people started buying pre-crumbed bread and breadcrumbs became not a thing that we do with bread, but a thing unto themselves.

This is how it was for decades: Stale bread was thrown away, we bought breadcrumbs, plain, weird oregano flavor, or… no. that was about it, for some reason. And they were OK — I don’t want to run them down, like some people. They are convenient, the weird oregano isn’t that weird, and you don’t have to spray your kitchen with bread bits or get out the cuisinart.

But then someone introduced panko breadcrumbs from Japan (pan from the Portuguese for bread, ko from the Japanese for powder) and everyone suddenly had a breadcrumb preference again. Panko are lighter, feathery almost, and leave fried foods lighter but crispier than ordinary breadcrumbs. They are a specialty breadcrumb, ill-equipped for life as a binder or filler in meatloafs, balls, or burgers, and a little weird on top of mac & cheese. But they excel as a coating.

What is their deal, really? Before Panko breadcrumbs stole our hearts, what were they up to? The story with panko breadcrumbs is that they are made with electricity — which is what makes them so light and airy. When I first heard this, I assumed they were more or less normal breadcrumbs that had been electrocuted, maybe put on giant wire racks with a current running through them. The actual story — if it is to be believed — is weirder.

Panko breadcrumbs are slow-cooked by electrocution, the dough dropped into metal buckets after an extended rising process — which creates a crustless, slightly jiggly, finished loaf. The loaf is slow-dried, then crumbed. The current is mild enough that the dough, apparently, never even warms up. It’s a crazy process, but certainly not any crazier than the slow drying of bonito. What is crazy is that the only origin story for this process is as follows.

Japanese tank Type 95 Ha-Go captured by Soviet troops after battle of Khalkhin Gol

Late in World War II, after the Yalta conference in 1945, the Japanese were involved in a land battle with Russia. A tank crew hankering for fresh baked bread, but worried that a fire would give away their location, attached their tank’s battery to a hunk of dough and electrocuted it. They found that this made the leftover crumbs light and fluffy — and, over an unspecified period of time, the process was honed to created panko breadcrumbs.

Now, this yarn has many of the hallmarks of food origin tales: very specific story; owes a great deal to accident and/or circumstance; accepted as truth despite being completely implausible on the face of it (e.g. mayo whipped up by the Admiral’s chef after the battle of Mahon because he ran out of whipping cream, mole poblano discovered when a pot of chocolate blew into a nearby sauce cauldron being prepared for the Archbishop’s arrival, Reese’s peanut butter cups invented during a sidewalk collision, etc.).

Still I decided to take the story at its word and went about trying to recreate it. Luckily, I have a friend who is both electrically competent and relatively easily sucked into ridiculous projects. So we built what is basically a miniature version of the tubs shown in the Panko manufacturing videos that we found, while also keeping in mind that this would be done in the field while hiding your tank from Russians.

We built a box (shown above) by splitting a loaf pan and separating it with wood, then electrifying the sides with a voltage inverter that was putting out around 12 volts. We didn’t know if that would be quite enough — a WWII Japanese tank battery likely would have been more like 24 — but we figured it was a good start.

It worked a little? Or maybe the dough just rose a lot:

It’s hard to say which. After almost 24 hours the dough looked like this:

The green is a reactive from running the current through the lousy loaf pan — thanks a lot, Savers.

Not that great. We tried again, this time hooking the current directly into the dough and amplifying it somewhat with a thingy (shown). But the results were even less inspiring:

We will return to the kitchen, and either use a modified version of the first system, or jumper cables and an actual battery, or just plug the dough directly into the wall with a snipped off lamp cord.

Watch this space!

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SERIOCOMIC (23)

Published Date : June 6, 2019
Author : tnealon

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.

MEGATON MAN

Sole survivor of a dying world fired towards Earth, the infant was exposed to cataclysmic rays, raised by a lost tribe of intelligent kangaroos, bitten by a radioactive frog, caught in the grips of a space-time-continuum blast, snuck a vial of top-secret premium soldier syrup while no one was looking and became MEGATON MAN. Disguised as dull reporter Trent Phloog, he would fight crime while trying to keep his secret identity safe (by wearing reporter clothes over his costume) despite his co-worker Pam Jointly’s tendency to fall out of windows.

Before The Tick (who he preceded by two years) there was another idiotic, over-muscled, superhero wandering the indies. Megaton Man’s first issue (the opening page of which features him fighting a mechanical version of himself — on the cover of issue 999 of Megaton Man) gently roasts the Fantastic Four (The Megatropolis Quartet) the X-Men, Superman, Orson Welles (as President of the United States, for some reason), Doonesbury (there’s an entire 16 panel Doomesbury comic on page 16 that gives a run-down, in real time, of the political ramifications of Megaton Man’s fight with Dr. Software), and neofuturist architecture (Megaton Man vaporizes a skyscraper during his battle, but a bystander assures everyone it was empty: “It was a John Portman”). These gags are interspersed with Jack Kirby-style splash pages, narrative-shattering backstory, 4th-wall breaking, and anything else, apparently, that Simpson could think of.

I’m sure I was overwhelmed as a kid, but all I remember is being completely charmed. All of this self-aware, self-referential stuff seems a little bit tired now, and maybe if I hadn’t read MM at such an impressionable age I wouldn’t have spent SO MUCH TIME ingesting postmodern literary criticism… but at the time, it was completely novel and sphincter-tightening.

Some of this I would have been exposed to from MAD Magazine and the like, but Megaton Man is so much more exuberant and benign; it’s the wink of a lover of dumb superhero comics, mostly devoid of mockery. It’s smart, biting, but gentle — maybe what made it appealing to a thirteen-year-old. Every comic-loving kid needs a burst of kind-hearted satire, absurdity, self-referentiality, manic fun-making that tears down the things that you love so you can see that they aren’t nearly so fragile as they seem. Because what doesn’t seem fragile to a thirteen-year-old — on the precipice of feeling teenager indestructible, we live that interim time feeling constantly, highly destructible.

Plus, Megaton Man was a fool immune to his own foolishness — and what teen doesn’t dream of that? Like The Tick (at least as I remember him), he was never in on the joke, yet never humiliated by it. Mostly because he was too dim, but that’s OK too. Any refuge from the storm.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

STUFFED (34)

Published Date : May 16, 2019
Author : tnealon

Tom Nealon working on a soon-to-be-revealed invention

MUSICAL TASTE

The Enlightenment, an 18th-century European fad that brought us such notions as freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of property (or happiness, here in America), not to mention democratic government, a certain skepticism of accepted wisdom, and toleration of our fellow man — all of which either failed to be implemented or have gone by the wayside, some of them fairly recently — was, as is now apparent, a failure. Its lasting legacy, from the vantage point of 2019, seems to be the imaginary but widely influential idea of free-market capitalism, and the widely internalized prison surveillance system (and metaphor for 21st century life) known as the panopticon.

However, the Enlightenment was not always as leadenly serious as is often reported. No, once in a while it provided fanciful answers to questions that hadn’t even been asked yet.

This last thread of the Enlightenment is nowhere more apparent than in Polycarpe Poncelet’s Nouvelle Chymie du Goût et de L’Odorat (New Chemistry of Taste and Smell). In this 1755 book, Poncelet describes his theory that taste functions just as music does, with flavors either being in harmony with each other or combining in unpleasantness. He believed that the correspondence with music was so great that you could actually represent them on a musical staff: A – sour, B – insipid, C – sweet, D – bitter, E – harsh, F – bittersweet, G – piquant. In his book’s second edition (1774), he describes a “taste organ” that does exactly that, combining flavored liquids that flow into a reservoir as keys are depressed and bottles opened. Play a little tune and have a taste, the mysteries of the senses elucidated in a series of flavors commingled in a structured, repeatable way.

Of course, it didn’t really go anywhere — and even Poncelet admitted that he gamed the flavor mixtures a little, putting tastes together that he knew would be complementary rather than truly allowing the music analogy to play out.

Even if in reality it seems to have disappeared, the organ does appear now and again in fiction, most famously in Huysmans’s 1884 decadent novel À rebours (translated as Against the Grain). Huysmans’s protagonist, Jean des Esseintes, invents a similar device that he eventually masters in order to play symphonies in his mouth. Esseintes has retreated from the bourgeois world, which he feels alienated from, into an idealized realm of the senses; he immerses himself in color choices, interior decoration, and becomes, like his jewel-encrusted tortoise, beautiful but immobilized by affectation. À rebours was famous enough in its time to be ridiculed at Oscar Wilde’s trial as “sodomitical”.

Symbolist poets — Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé — transformed these sorts of ideas into poetry, taking the only recently medically explored field of synesthesia and using its concepts to describe obliquely phenomena from the sensory to the philosophical that are difficult or impossible to describe directly. The idea of a melding musical notation with flavors has poked its head up now and then, but each time failed to catch on. Willy Wonka should have had one, certainly, but somehow didn’t.

Nowadays, nobody even seems to be thinking about taste organs. Firing cars into outer space, advertising algorithms, racist facial recognition, securitizing debt obligations in new and dangerous ways, sure — but taste organs are off somewhere with our jetpacks and great public transportation, gathering dust. The closest thing we have now, though it is the difference between giving someone a clarinet and giving them a classical music album, is the now ubiquitous tasting menu. The conceit of the proper tasting menu is that the chef is going to tell you a story with flavors, perhaps play your taste buds like a musical instrument? The metaphor is muddled, but the ideas motivating the enterprises are the same — flavor can be used as a form of expression. The difference is that it’s not under the user’s control — you’re experiencing someone else’s taste symphony.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, and would be just another choice except we never got our taste organ, just this debased relic from the Enlightenment fueled by the cult of personality and our weird lingering obsession with rich people. It’s the itch of the American dream, a phantom limb that still, impossibly, throbs with dumb hope.

As tasting menus have gone from a $500 treat for the wealthy to a $150 night out for the aspirational, the conceit has only become more articulated. Restaurants like Tom Sellers’s Story in London are unselfconsciously portraying the tasting menu as an exercise in flavor as symphony, as narrative. There is a restaurant called Story in Kansas City with a $75 tasting menu, The Musket Room near SOHO in NYC that has a “Short Story tasting menu” for $95, and so forth.

NY Times restaurant reviewer Pete Wells, in 2012, poked holes in some of the problems with the hegemony of the tasting menu — though this was before breaking the $100 barrier was too common. But what I am concerned with is our sudden desire to be dictated to, our eagerness to put ourselves under the thrall of some chef or another and let them feed us a story. In the 1900s we had the chafing dish; in 1939, at the Swedish Pavilion of the World’s Fair in New York, the Smörgåsbord was introduced and immediately carved a place in the American imagination. The buffet, upscale, downscale, Golden Corral scale, has always been something that needed no explanation in the U.S. Even the salad bar (the sad, shrunken, 1980s version of the buffet), perhaps a reaction to the coke-infused junk bond Miami Vice era that spawned it, offered an array of choices that harmonized with the American character.

So what happened? Why the sudden hankering for this autocracy of the tasting menu? Are we just exhausted from food’s ubiquity? Soylent — a cultural pertuberance (proterbation?) that is the tasting menu approached from the opposite direction, an autocracy of eating instead of taste, just recently expanded their food-replacing beverage product line to include food-replacing bars.

Years ago I wrote (at some length, over and over again) about condiments and democracy. I was half kidding, and, again, I half kid about the relationship between the “taste organ”, tasting menus, and our increasingly welcoming attitude towards fascism. Though I even went on New Hampshire NPR in 2015 to warn that our reliance on sriracha was going to bring down our republic as surely as Rome’s obsession with fish sauce brought down theirs. I was roundly ignored, and you see where that got us. And this does comes just as what is perhaps the most central Enlightenment ideal — skepticism — has really taken it on the chin. The internet (special thanks to those deep thinkers at Facebook) and Freakonomics has turned everyone into an outside-the-box, counterintuitive genius. We are so skeptical that we’ve wrapped around and become ingenuous idiots instead, susceptible to the most obvious ploys imaginable because we live in constant fear of being cleverly led astray.

As tasting menus move downmarket (the wealthy were born to rules and order, hugging them close lest they, or their children, someday have to mingle with the unwashed, so I’m not concerned with their love of authority), I worry that what we are saying over and over again, is: “Everything is hard, and confusing, and weird, and terrible, just tell us what to do, please.”

So, even if just to humor me, maybe skip the tasting menu and buy some weird shit and cook it from home once in a while.

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STUFFED (33)

Published Date : March 23, 2019
Author : tnealon

MAYO MIXTURES

While there may never be a bad time to talk about mayonnaise-derived sauces, Heinz’s launch of mayochup (#mayochup) makes this an especially good time. Is it really necessary — my brain says no, but my heart and history say “sure”.

We have always wanted red mayo (#redmayo) and this is just another iteration of a centuries-old love. Is it more self referential, needlessly ironic, and contorted than usual? Of course, but isn’t that who we are? How else to market a product that is two things that everyone already has in their refrigerator, mixed together?

And what of Russian and Thousand Island? Are they to be cast aside before we even figure out what the difference between them is? Is mayochup just dumbed-down sauce andalouse (Belgian fry sauce with tomato and mayo)? It doesn’t matter — condiments wait for no one, so I salute Heinz for their pluck, latecomers to the mayo wars though they may be. But some deep background on this new name for an old condiment would be helpful before we paint it all pink and leap into a mayochup future.

Even before mayochup burst, Kool-Aid Man-like, through the brick wall of our condimental hearts, we have had a love affair with mayo mixtures — especially Russian and Thousand Island (or Islands? Only recently did we settle on the singular) dressings. Much ink has been spilled trying to sort, separate, and suss out what the difference is between them, where they came from, and how Thousand Island emerged victorious, more or less (at least until mayochup catches on) from their brutal internecine conflict.

Are they almost the same or meaningfully different? Are the “islands” pickle bits? Why is is called Russian? Because it’s pink(o)? Was it made from sour cream or horseradish? Include caviar? Did it fall out of fashion during the Cold War? Was it all the fault of McDonalds and their not-so-secret sauce? What, in short, is going on with these ubiquitous yet mysterious dressings?

The earliest mention of both Thousand Island and Russian date to the same period — around 1910 — and it has always been assumed that they developed concurrently. This makes sense since it was a golden age of salad — hotels and restaurants were first exerting their food influence in this period and inventing salads in a spiraling salad arms race (caesar, cobb, chef, crab louie, Waldorf etc.). It was also a popular time for red foods both naturally and unnaturally colored (in 1878 the food coloring amaranth dye, later called red dye no. 2, was invented). These dressings would have filled a need for a red-hued dressing to put on all of the new salads being churned out by the Salad Industrial Complex. It was also, in general, a time period where products that had been made at home or in small batches were starting to be produced in industrial quantities.

People have remarked over the years at the differences in the recipes for Russian and Thousand Island, but most of them are cherry picking — the actual recipes are very similar and contained mayo, chilli sauce, and/or ketchup, and usually something else. People over the years have claimed that hard-boiled eggs are in Thousand Island and not Russian, or that TI has ketchup and Russian chilli sauce, but it’s common to see both those rules broken. Thousand Island does tend to have more junk in it — chives, relish — that you don’t see in Russian, and it often had Worcestershire or anchovy sauce (though Russian recipes sometimes include Worcestershire).

Even the chilli sauce and ketchup weren’t as far apart as they seem: Chilli sauce of the time was mostly tomato with some added cayenne, more similar to tomato ketchup than sriracha or Cholula. Tomato ketchup itself had only but lately come out on top during the great ketchup wars of the 19th century, where it bested walnut, mushroom, oyster, and a host of other half-remembered ketchups to be the one true ketchup that we know so well. It is always good to remember that many of these ingredients were more fluid, more in flux than we might suppose from the staid bottles we see in the supermarket.

Both dressings sometimes had whipped cream (!), which I have to (need to) assume was more often sour cream in the wild, but because sour cream had only just arrived in the U.S., it was expressed as whipped cream in cookbooks, and once in a while you see horseradish in Russian. The most striking difference — and the origin of Russian’s name — is that early on, it often had caviar in it. Though it would have made sense for the caviar to be the islands in Thousand Island, this never seems to have been the case.

As to the origins of the dressings themselves, they are a jumble. A guy named Colburn in Nashua, NH supposedly invented Russian around 1910-13 and produced it for sale (Thomas Rector reportedly built an emulsifying machine out of a milk homogenizer around the same time and produced Russian, tartar sauce and mayo) and, Thousand Island, the story goes, was invented in the Thousand Islands region of New York State. The inventor of the latter is alternately a chef on a luxury yacht caught short of ingredients and forced to improvise (a much repeated story about the origins of mayo itself is a version of this trope) — sometimes the yacht was George Boldt’s and the chef was Oscar from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel — or an actress on a yacht who was friends with George Boldt and brought it to the Waldorf, or, even more improbably, it originated at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. Recently a recipe apparently postmarked 1907 with a similar list of ingredients (but not called Thousand Island) surfaced in the region and has been hailed as the actual origin recipe.

Whatever really happened to muddle these two together happened very quickly because a 1912 community cookbook from Illinois is already giving recipes for “Russian or Thousand Island Salad Dressing” and Mrs. Rorer’s popular 1917 cookbook Mrs. Rorer’s Key to Simple Cookery suggests making Russian dressing by adding caviar to Thousand Island. According to data at the NY Public Library menu project (which is incomplete but interesting), Russian first appeared on a menu in 1914 and peaked in 1950. Thousand Island first appeared in 1918, passed Russian in popularity in the early 1950s and peaked in 1981.

We all like a story, and stories with a clear beginning are easier to tell and simpler to remember. Food stories tend to be messy, poorly documented things — at best they take place off the radar and away from written histories and, often, even written cookbooks. It’s why people can lay claim to culinary inventions like Russian dressing or Thousand Island and have the stories repeated for decades — it’s hard to disprove them and the arc of a made-up story is usually more appealing than the ambiguity of a real one, especially when it is engaged with capitalist fantasies of brilliant men inventing things and selling them. So while, by the same token, it is difficult to demonstrate that these origin stories are complete fabrications, here is why I believe that to be the case.

In the mid-19th century, when the vogue for red foods that would lead to the discovery of food coloring (mauveine in 1856, amaranth in 1878) was just getting going, the popular cookbook author Elizabeth Acton published a recipe for “Red or Green Mayonnaise Sauce” in the 1860 edition of her much reprinted Modern Cookery, In All Its Branches; Reduced to a System of Easy Practice, for the Use of Private Families.; In a Series of Receipts, which have been Strictly Tested, and are Given with the Most Minute Exactness. The green, colored with spinach, never really caught on, but the red, colored with lobster roe (often called lobster coral) was a minor hit. It pops up over and over again in recipes for the next 50 years. This red mayonnaise meandered through the decades until the turn of the century when people began coloring their mayo with tomato, a cheaper and far more ubiquitous colorant — a recipe for tomato mayonnaise in an issue of The Delineator from July, 1902 described the concoction as “comparatively new.”

The inflection point for this red mayo is found in the 1910 Settlement Cookbook (and reappears as this seminal cookbook was reprinted) where red mayonnaise is first given as tomato but suggests lobster roe as a substitute. The 1916 Anglo-Chinese Cookbook goes a step further, suggesting tomato, lobster coral or carmine (the red dye made with the cochineal insect) for coloring. By 1920 the Children’s Mission Cook Book gives a recipe for Russian dressing as “Add Russian caviar to Thousand Island Dressing” and by 1922 in The Castelar Crèche Cookbook Los Angelinos had enlisted either Thousand Island or Russian with capers, chili sauce, and “1 small box of caviar” for their Avocado Cocktail, a dish that seems to have been but lately invented by the California Avocado Association, which was founded in 1915.

In fact, the dressings do seem to have undergone some changes as they traveled to California, though they were similarly muddled on the journey. The Hotel St. Francis Cookbook (1919) includes recipes for both, but they are nearly identical (mayo, french dressing, olives, pimentos, chili sauce — the only difference was that Russian also had Worcestershire sauce).

The kernels of what we now call Russian and Thousand Island were out there in the world for at least 50 years before someone “invented” them. If that seems like a lame origin story, it’s only because we’ve been trained to think that way — some guy invented this, filled this need, got rich, endowed a museum, or blew it all on whiskey and dice. Some guy.

The world is big and various and our foods a wild, sprawling mess — shouldn’t we embrace that instead of reductive folk tales? Isn’t it wild that it all started with lobster roe? Who would have thought? Lobster roe: that is pretty cool. Or it started with something earlier and red that I didn’t turn up — something that led to lobster roe, which branched into caviar (Russian branch) and tomato (Thousand Island branch). Mayonnaise itself, after all, hung around Spain and Provence for a thousand years as aioli/allioli before it caught on in 18th-century France. So it’s hardly surprising that red mayo would do the same.

A version of this essay appeared in the Winter 2019 Book Club of California Quarterly.

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