B12 Solipsism

Is corned beef and cabbage Irish? Probably not, but maybe they ate something similar in previous centuries.

Francis Lam reports:

It was my first inkling of how strange Americans are about traditions on St. Patrick’s Day, a feeling reinforced years later by watching people of all races and ethnicities pretend at Irishness by getting plowed on green beer and painting themselves like leprechauns. But despite all this, maybe the most straightforward of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, eating the corned beef and cabbage, is secretly one of the strangest.

“My Irish family never ate corned beef,” the letter began. I’d just written a story about new immigrants in Queens, called “Where Curry Replaced Corned Beef and Cabbage,” and a reader was gently protesting my mention of that stereotypical dish.

“My grandmother was perplexed that Americans associate corned beef with being Irish. In Ireland, most people ate pig. Lots of bacon, lots of sausage (lots of trichinosis).

…Corned beef was made popular in New York bars at lunchtime. The bars offered a ‘free lunch’ to the Irish construction workers who were building NYC in the early part of the 20th century. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You had to buy a couple of beers or shots of whiskey to get that free lunch. And that’s how corned beef became known as an ‘Irish’ food. My grandmother hated the stuff and wouldn’t allow it in her home. I myself first tasted corned beef when I was in my thirties at some non-Irish-American person’s ‘St. Paddy’s Day’ party.”

Dismayed, I sent that letter to a friend from Dublin. “Every word of that post is pure gospel,” she wrote back. “We NEVER eat corned beef and cabbage. We mock Americans and their bizarre love of that ‘meat’.”

[Click to continue reading St. Patrick's Day controversy: Is corned beef and cabbage Irish? - Francis Lam - Salon.com]

“Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration” (Hasia R. Diner)

According to Irish food experts Colman Andrews and Darina Allen, corned beef was, in fact, a major export of Cork from the 17th century, shipping it all over Europe and as far as the sunny British West Indies, where they still love their corned beef in cans.

Most of the Irish who came in massive waves to America during the Potato Famine in the late 1840s were from around Cork, so they probably knew corned beef well enough. But, as the historian Hasia Diner argues in “Hungering for America,” they may have been trying to forget altogether what they were and weren’t eating back in Ireland

The Irish are/were great lovers of all things porcine, but corned beef had less of a stigma:

Many farmers in Ireland raised pigs for sale to help pay the rent, but somewhere along the line in America, that tradition mixed with the bitter cocktail of prejudice and xenophobia to turn it into a slur: “Paddy with his pig in the parlor.” The phrase may have had rhythm, but it wasn’t pretty.…

By the 1910s, pigs were all over St. Patrick’s Day cards and novelties, including a game called “Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig” for kids. “Irish Americans,” Casey wrote me in an e-mail, “vigorously protested an alignment of their ethnicity with an animal that carried all sorts of connotations about dirt and disease.”

But “by this time,” she continued, “much of Irish America had moved beyond mere survival. They ate pork and beef, salted or not. It was just as easy to claim corned beef as their choice for holiday meals as it was to claim pork. When the latter became stigmatized, one became preferable to the other.” Of course, by this time, old memories of the corned beef back in Cork may have bubbled back to the surface. In 1960, we had the first St. Patrick’s Day card reference to corned beef and cabbage, and before we knew it, little Chinese boys in the suburbs would be pretending to be Irish in the middle of March.

You should click through, and read the rest

Was wondering why there was such a dearth of good tomatoes in the grocery store. At least the shortage can’t be linked to corruption in the FDA and food corporations…

A shortage of tomatoes from weather-battered Florida is forcing restaurants and supermarkets to ration supplies amid soaring prices for America’s most popular fresh vegetable.

Fast-food restaurant chains such as Wendy’s have stopped automatically including tomatoes in sandwiches; now customers have to know to ask.

Even then, consumers might not get what they usually do. At Lloyd’s, a white-tablecloth restaurant across the street from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, signs went up this week warning that only plum tomatoes are available.

“People love having tomatoes in their salad and in sandwiches but we want people to know ahead of time that the quality just isn’t what they are used to,” said Sam Berngard, president of Taste America Restaurant Group LLC, which operates Lloyd’s and two Chicago seafood restaurants.

…

Fresh tomatoes are in short supply because of the unusual spell of freezing temperatures that hugged Florida in January. The cold temperatures that dented citrus production also destroyed roughly 70% of the tomato crop in Florida, which is the largest source of U.S.-grown fresh tomatoes this time of year.

Reggie Brown, executive vice president of Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, a Maitland, Fla., trade group, said Tuesday that a 25-pound box of tomatoes is trading for $30, compared with $6.45 a year ago.

[Click to continue reading Florida Tomato Shortage Hits Restaurants, Supermarkets - WSJ.com]

Winter tomatoes kind of suck anyway, I can wait until locally grown varieties start appearing again. And climate change is thankfully not refuted in this article¹.

1. since it isn’t relevant, probably [↩]

If the Drown-The-Baby-in-the Bathtub Republicans ever get their way¹, the federal regulatory infrastructure would get stripped, and there would be a lot more deaths from tainted food. The current system of food inspection is pretty corrupt, but least there is some restraint, and occasionally a corporation will commit such a heinous act that they will get sanctioned. Like SK Foods, and their buddies, Kraft, Safeway, and others:

Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft’s plants.

The check would soon be in the mail, the broker promised. “We’ll have to deduct it out of your commissions as we move forward,” he said, using a euphemism for bribes.

Days later, federal agents descended on Kraft’s offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry. And because the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato products with high levels of mold or other defects, the case has raised serious questions about how well food manufacturers safeguard the quality of their ingredients.

Over the last 14 months, Mr. Watson and three other purchasing managers, at Frito-Lay, Safeway and B&G Foods, have pleaded guilty to taking bribes. Five people connected to one of the nation’s largest tomato processors, SK Foods, have also admitted taking part in the scheme

[Click to continue reading SK Foods at Center of Bribe Scheme to Sell Tainted Tomatoes - NYTimes.com]

Food corporations claim innocence, but I assume there was a lot of winkin’ and noddin’ going on, just no hard evidence.

1. Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and the rest of that group of thugs [↩]

Excellent news reported by Chuck Sudo of the Chicagoist: a delightful pub within stumbling distance of me

Construction is currently underway on Haymarket Pub and Brewing, in the former Bar Louie space at 741 W. Randolph. The project is a partnership between Pete Crowley, senior brewer at Rock Bottom Chicago, and his friend John Neurauter. We’d been hearing rumblings for weeks about Haymarket and Crowley, who’s also president of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild, was more than happy to fill us in on some of the details.

Crowley said that Haymarket will focus on “classic Belgian and contemporary American ales and lagers paired with hand made sausages, pulled pork, pizza and rotisserie chicken.” There are plans for an outdoor beer garden, full bar, dining area with pool tables and games. About 600 square feet downstairs will be allocated for a barrel room for aging and blending. The centerpiece of the pub will be a walk through kitchen and brewery that leads to a “drinking and writing” theater

[From More Brewing In Town: Haymarket Pub and Brewing - Chicagoist]

Let’s hope it has better luck than the several previous occupants of this location (at least five businesses that I can think of have cycled through in the last decade)

Written about Great Britain and Ireland, but could apply to the US as well

Do we go on pretending, like every deluded boozer, that alcohol is a habit we’ll kick someday soon? Or do we accept that it’s as much a part of our culture as wearing clothes or driving cars? If we do decide that we have to live with alcohol, then we need to figure out how, collectively, we can best handle it. Before we start teaching our kids how drink can be accompanied with most pleasure and least damage, we need to know those things ourselves.

Real discussion about alcohol tends to get lost between two competing – and equally unrealistic – kinds of discourse, one utopian, the other dystopian. The first is medical. Doctors believe that alcohol is a public health problem, equivalent to a disease, and they are trained to believe that all diseases are, in principle, eradicable. They tend to see drink as a social illness that will one day be cured. Even when they’re saying sensible things, this attitude makes it hard for them to connect with the majority of people for whom a few pints or a bottle of wine represent, not an illness, but a temporary relief from the symptoms of modern life.

The other discourse is legal. Governments don’t want to hear what public health officials have to say. Alcohol consumption can be reduced by raising the price and banning advertising. Since one upsets voters and the other annoys powerful industries, governments prefer to talk about the law – better regulation, punishment for drink-fuelled rowdyism, the enforcement of the rules aimed at stopping young people doing what young people have always done. While the doctors dream of a perfect future, the politicians see themselves as soldiers in a low-level but eternal war.

But what if drinking is neither primarily a medical nor a legal issue? What if it’s actually, at heart, a cultural question? In a striking piece in the current issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that the evidence from anthropology, sociology and psychology is that what matters most is not how much people drink but how they drink it. The social context – the rules a particular culture imposes and the rituals through which it reinforces them – determines the way we behave as drinkers.

…

People in different cultures behave very differently when they’re drunk and the same drunks behave in different ways on various occasions. As one writer has snappily summarised the findings of Drunken Comportment: “A single species (Homo sapiens), a single drug substance (ethanol) and a great diversity of behavioural outcomes.” Depending on the context, boozers can feel elated or depressed, slobberingly sentimental or savagely violent. It is not, after all, the drink that does it. What matters is the culture around drinking. McAndrew and Edgerton concluded: “Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get.”

Gladwell suggests that “culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics or the law” and that what young people need is not more admonition but “a positive and constructive example of how to drink

[Click to continue reading Don't heed the prohibitionists – we should teach our children to drink | Fintan O'Toole | Comment is free | The Observer ]

The US has a third kind of discourse, the Christian Taliban, but we should ignore them whenever possible. They really aren’t interested in being part of our society anyway, just at imposing a kind of theocracy on the rest of us.

If alcohol was just a simple part of meals, enjoyed in moderation, I bet there would be a lot less binge drinking among teenagers.

California is going to have to make some hard decisions about its water¹ fairly soon. Their current model is just not sustainable. Doesn’t sound like Senator Feinstein’s plan is the solution, at least from where I sit²

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who angered environmentalists, fishing groups and other Democratic lawmakers by proposing to divert more water to California’s farmers, said on Friday she was working to avoid controversial legislation.

Feinstein’s plan would ease Endangered Species Act restrictions to allow more water to be pumped out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta for growers in the state’s Central Valley.

Dramatic cutbacks in irrigation supplies this year alone from both California and federal water projects have idled about 23,000 farm workers and 300,000 acres of cropland in America’s No. 1 Farm state.

Feinstein’s proposal has quickly become a flashpoint in the state’s epic and long-running water wars as opponents say it could ultimately lead to the extinction of Sacramento River salmon and eliminate up to 23,000 jobs in the Pacific coast fishing industry.

[Click to continue reading Senator suggests truce in California's water fight | Reuters ]

So divert water so that California agribusinesses get it to spray wastefully on their crops? Short term fix, of course, but what happens in two years? Maybe iceberg lettuce is not what should be grown in the first place, nor year-round tomatoes and canteloupes. Maybe food cannot be as cheap as it once was. Something has to change, or this water war will continue forever.

And if California cannot figure out what to do, there are precedents of worse to come:

Yemeni water trader Mohammed al-Tawwa runs his diesel pumps day and night, but gets less and less from his well in Sanaa, which experts say could become the world’s first capital city to run dry.

“My well is now 400 meters (1,300 feet) deep and I don’t think I can drill any deeper here,” said Tawwa, pointing to the meager flow into tanks that supply water trucks and companies.

From dawn, dozens of people with yellow jerricans collect water from a special canister Tawwa has set aside for the poor.

“Sometimes we don’t have any water for a whole week, sometimes for two days and then it stops again,” said Talal al-Bahr, who comes almost daily to supply his family of six.

The West frets that al Qaeda will exploit instability in Yemen to prepare new attacks like the failed December 25 bombing of a U.S. airliner, but this impoverished Arabian peninsula country faces a catastrophe that poses a far deadlier long-term threat.

Nature cannot recharge ground water to keep pace with demand from a population of 23 million expected to double in 20 years.

[Click to continue reading Yemen's water crisis eclipses al Qaeda threat| Reuters]

1. and other topics too [↩]
2. which is about a mile from one of the Great Lakes, a source of fresh water for many years to come. Full disclosure and all that [↩]

There is talk of soda and other sugary drinks being publicly identified as being a culprit in our nation’s worsening health

In their critics’ eyes, producers of sugar-sweetened drinks are acting a lot like the tobacco industry of old: marketing heavily to children, claiming their products are healthy or at worst benign, and lobbying to prevent change. The industry says there are critical differences: in moderate quantities soda isn’t harmful, nor is it addictive.

The problem is that at roughly 50 gallons per person per year, our consumption of soda, not to mention other sugar-sweetened beverages, is far from moderate, and appears to be an important factor in the rise in childhood obesity. This increase is at least partly responsible for a rise in what can no longer be called “adult onset” diabetes — because more and more children are now developing it.

[Click to continue reading Is Soda the New Tobacco? - NYTimes.com]

So what to do? Well, in the best Washington manner, the answer is to tax the offending party and hope this changes behavior:

A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men’s Health magazine last fall that such a tax is “an idea that we should be exploring. There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda.”

…

Small excise taxes on soda are already in place in Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, and Chicago imposes a 3 percent retail tax on soft drinks. Soda taxes were proposed in at least 12 other states in 2009, though none were approved. Mississippi is considering legislation that would tax the syrup used to sweeten soda; the mayor of Philadelphia is weighing a tax on soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks, and Gov. David Paterson of New York has indicated that he will recommend a penny-per-ounce tax on sugared beverages in his 2011 budget.

The penny-per-ounce tax, favored by Dr. Brownell and others, would produce a significant increase in retail costs: the 12-pack of Coke on sale for $2.99 would go for $4.43 and a 75-cent can would rise to 87 cents. These increases, Dr. Brownell estimates, would reduce the annual per capita consumption of soda by more than 11 gallons, to 38.5 gallons. “And the revenue,” he says, “could be used to subsidize fruits and vegetables, fund obesity prevention programs for children and home economic classes in schools, and more.”

A couple of points in response. One, I’ve heard the 50 gallons per person a year claim before. That’s a hell of a lot of soda. Especially when household’s like my own are considered. Even if you add in cocktail ingredients like tonic water, ginger ale and tomato juice, we probably drink ten 12 ounce containers, which is 1 gallon a year in our entire household. But the oft cited average is 500 12 ounce containers annually, or nearly 1.5 cans a day. That’s a lot, and of course, this is only the average person.

Two, Mark Bittman’s article doesn’t mention a topic that Michael Pollan and others have argued quite compellingly, namely that the US Government is complicit in soda remaining so cheap because of the Federal Farm Subsidies to high fructose corn syrup producers like ADM and Cargill. On the one hand, the government gives tax money to agribusinesses to grow corn, and on the other, the government taxes products like soda made with the byproduct. Of course, PepsiCo and other cpgs¹ depend upon cheap ingredients as part of their business model, so they cannot talk too loudly about the injustice of it all.

1. consumer package goods [↩]

Apologies to ZZ Top for misappropriating their title

Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, have found beer is a rich source of silicon and may help prevent osteoporosis, as dietary silicon is a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density.

These were the findings after researchers tested 100 commercial beers for silicon content and categorized the data according to beer style and source.

Previous research has suggested beer contained silicon but little was known about how silicon levels varied with the different types of beer and malting processes.

“We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer,” researcher Charles Bamforth said in a statement.

The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, found the beers’ silicon content ranged from 6.4 milligrams per liter to 56.5 mg per liter. The average person’s silicon intake each day is between 20 and 50 mgs.

The researchers found there was little change in the silicon content of barley during the malting process as most of the silicon in barley is in the husk, which is not affected greatly during malting.

They found pale ales showed the highest silicon content while non-alcoholic beers, light lagers and wheat beers had the least silicon.

[Click to continue reading Study toasts beer as being good for your bones | Reuters ]

So quaff a couple of pale ales this evening, for health reasons only.

I’m sure the real science is more complex and nuanced, but hey, beer! Billy Dee Williams would approve…

A solution in search of a problem

The
Bagel Guillotine, introduced 15 years ago, sells steadily at 80,000 a year. By Mr. Ricard’s calculation, that makes it history’s most successful bagel-control device. He says, “We achieved a paradigm shift in bagel cutting.” He sees no need for new bagel slicers. And yet people keep inventing them — people like Dennis Moss and his son Michael. As long as the BRI menace persists, they believe, bagel-safety technology is open to improvement.

On a recent evening, Dr. Moss, a 66-year-old radiologist, was at home in Rochester, N.Y., watching his son saw through a bagel with their latest innovation: a slender knife fitted inside a molded-plastic guard. They call it the Brooklyn Bagel Slicer.

“My dad and I have a mission,” said Michael Moss, who is 36. Said Dr. Moss, “If we keep anybody out of the emergency room it saves health-care dollars.” His son said, “Dad’s against unnecessary procedures.” They call bagel injuries “an epidemiological scourge.”

In 2008, according to an analysis of fingers cut by knives as reported in the government’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, 1,979 people appeared in ERs with a BRI. Chicken-related injuries (3,463) led the category, but recorded bagel injuries were otherwise exceeded only by potato, apple and onion injuries.

Bagels, in fact, were implicated in more finger cuts than pumpkins (1,195) or cheese (1,236). Fewer than 100 incidents in 2008 involved turnips; ditto for wedding cakes.

(Of course, many BRI victims skip ERs and go to urgent-care offices. Or they stay home and eat breakfast anyway.)

When bagels were on a roll in the 1990s, moving beyond the urban enclaves where they first landed from Eastern Europe, some attributed the BRI problem to untrained slicers in white-bread regions. Untrue, say bagel-control experts. Every American now eats an average of 11.06 bagels a year at home, according to the market-research group NPD. But the crux of the issue is bagel authenticity.

As Maria Balinska tells it in her book,
The Bagel,” fear of bagel-injury litigation led Lender’s to sell its frozen bagels pre-sliced, even before they hit the Midwest in the 1970s. Today, bagels at Wal-Mart or Dunkin’ Donuts are steamed before baking. They may be round and have a hole, but they’re fluffily sliceable.

[Click to continue reading To Keep the Finger Out of Finger Food, Inventors Seek a Better Bagel Cutter - WSJ.com]

Pippen in Meat Locker, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

every time I open the refrigerator, Pippen comes running. Usually he just flops in front of the door, this time he leaped up into the meat and cheese drawer. Nut-ball.

Lots of fun smells I suppose.

decluttr

Republished:
lifehacker.com/5452142/diy-refrigerator-care-saves-money-…

If I’m going to drink bourbon¹, a deftly-created Old Fashioned is probably my favorite way to drink it.

That’s when I come back to the Old Fashioned. As prone to becoming the subject of polemic, revisionism and endlessly repetitive arguments as any other cocktail — barring perhaps the cult-like madness that often accompanies the martini — when the computer is turned off and I place the whiskey and bitters on the kitchen counter, ultimately it’s just a drink. Not that I don’t recall the nagging questions as I mix, nor the ways I’m sure the drink would annoy partisans at polar ends of the mixological range: first a dab of sugar syrup in the bottom of a glass followed by a couple of dashes of bitters (hardcore Old Fashionedistas mandate the physical crushing of a sugar cube, possibly with a swath of orange or lemon peel); then a measured dose of bourbon or rye whiskey, depending on the mood; a quick stir for everyone to get acquainted in the glass, followed by large chunks of ice and, for that inner five-year-old with maturing tastes, a single bottled Italian wild cherry for color, rinsed of any cloying syrup

[Click to continue reading Are You Friends, After an Old Fashioned? - Proof Blog - NYTimes.com]

Personally, I skip the cherry, and usually skip most of the sugar syrup too.

Jonathan Miles adds, in a requiem for the decade just over:

No, the real story was in rediscovered in drinks like the aviation cocktail, a sublimely floral combination of gin and maraschino liqueur (and later, as cocktail historians dug deeper into its origins, the violet-flavored crème de violette) that was a Web sensation before bars like Milk & Honey started featuring it on cocktail lists.

Or the old-fashioned, once dowdy but reinvigorated by bartenders like Don Lee, who recast it as the celery and nori old-fashioned at Momofuku Ssam Bar, and Phil Ward of Death & Company, whose Oaxaca old-fashioned — with tequila standing in for whiskey — proved how versatile a spare, 200-year-old formula could be.

These were artisanal drinks with history and gravitas and a contrapuntal range of flavors — sweet, sour, savory, bitter — that hadn’t been balanced in generations. They’re representative of a lost American art — the art of the cocktail, as practiced by pre-Prohibition bartenders — that, after the ’00s, can no longer be called lost.

[Click to continue reading Shaken and Stirred - The Last Decade Was Good for Cocktails, Anyway - NYTimes.com]

“Mad Men: Season 3 [Blu-ray]” (Matthew Weiner)

You’d have to add Mad Men chic to the equation too: the Old Fashioned was Don Draper’s signature drink, the drink that won him Connie Hilton’s ad business, as described amusingly at A Dash of Bitters.

It happens to all of us, eventually. You’ll be at the country club, at a party hosted by your boss, who’s in the midst of a humiliating midlife crisis. He’ll be the fool in blackface, serenading his new bride, who’s 30 years his junior. Disgusted, you’ll walk away and seek out another old-fashioned. Alas, no bartender will be on duty, and the famous hotelier who’s rooting around behind the bar will declare that he’s on the same mission as you, but to his dismay, there’s no bourbon.

With a James Bondian flourish, you’ll leap over the bar, rummage a bit, and find some good Old Overholt. You’ll take a couple of glasses, drop a sugar cube in each, and dash in some bitters. While the bitters soften the sugar cubes, you’ll find any old tall glass behind the bar and fill it about halfway with ice. Free-pour the rye over that, open a bottle of soda water, and splash some in. Muddle the sugar cubes. Roughly thrust a barspoon up and down in the tall glass three times, and then pour the drink, ice included, half into one glass and half into the other.

You’ll drop a wedge of lemon into each glass, then, but you won’t bother stirring the sugar into the drink, probably because you’ll be making out with someone else’s spouse by the time you’d reach the sugary sludge. And you’ll have yourself an old-fashioned rye cocktail. Hand one off to the hotelier and drink up.

[Click to continue reading Don Draper’s no-nonsense old-fashioned for two — A Dash of Bitters]

Indeed. No precision required, just American can-do-ism.

1. not in my top ten of alcoholic drinks, well, maybe number 10 or 11. [↩]

Strange byproduct of EU food rules: Stilton cheese is not really Stilton cheese, and probably will never be.

STILTON, England — This small hamlet shares its name with a famous curd. But under European Union law, it’s illegal to make Stilton cheese in Stilton.

The bar on producing Stilton cheese here is a curious consequence of EU efforts to protect revered local foods by limiting the geographical area where they can be made.

The EU’s protected list of more than 800 foods and drinks includes famous names like Champagne and Parma as well as lesser-known delicacies such as Moutarde de Bourgogne, Munchener Bier and a Spanish chili pepper called Asado del Bierzo. It even covers Foin de Crau, a hay for animals from the fields of Bouches-du-Rhône in southern France.

But to the chagrin of locals, no cheese made here can be branded as Stilton. That’s because a group of outsiders, called the Stilton Cheesemakers Association, raised a formal stink.

The association, whose members have been making the cheese for more than a hundred years, in 1996 sought to protect the “Stilton” name by applying for a Product Designation of Origin from the EU. In its application, the group wrote that “the cheese became known as Stilton because it was at the Bell Inn in this village that the cheese was first sold to the public.” The 17th-century inn, which still stands in the main street, is the village’s oldest.

[Click to continue reading English Village Tries to Milk a Connection to Its Cheesy Past - WSJ.com]

Gotta love this detail:

One 18th-century notable who dropped by was Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe.” He wrote about the inn, and the cheese he enjoyed there, in a travelogue published in 1724. He remarked that the cheese, unfettered at the time by EU product rules, was known as the English Parmesan, and he offered a mouth-watering description of how it was consumed. The cheese, he wrote, “is brought to Table so full of Mites or Maggots that they use a Spoon to eat them.”

Farmers Market Garlic, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Green City Market

View On Black

from last Sept

Amusing tale of the intersection between historic food collection and capitalism aka the criminal element.

It is a great French autumnal tradition that furnishes an essential ingredient in some of the nation’s finest dishes. Yet the once tranquil pastime of mushroom hunting has fallen victim to organised crime as city-based gangs descend on the countryside in search of a fungus that brings quick, easy profits.

With professional pickers from France, but also Spain and Romania, gathering ceps, milk-caps, black trumpets and other delicacies worth thousands of euros, forest owners have decided to strike back.

They are planning to introduce mushroom picking licences to regulate an activity that has become a lucrative business, The Times has learnt.

[Click to continue reading Organised crime mushrooms as French fungi trade becomes lucrative - Times Online ]

The old ways of communal sharing are being replaced by quick-get-rich schemes:

landowners had traditionally allowed their neighbors to hunt mushrooms to cook with their omelets, chestnuts or scallops.

“The law says mushrooms belong to the landowner, but the practice was always tolerated so long as it was for family consumption.”

However, over the past couple of years, gangs — notably from Marseilles — have been pillaging woods in southern France and selling their finds on the black market to the restaurant trade and food industry. “An experienced picker can make between €5,000 and €7,000 in a fortnight, which is significant revenue,” said Mr Lauriac.

I’d not heard much mention of either of these local businesses, but I’ll have to investigate the matter further.

The phrase “Chicago distilleries” tends to elicit visions of cinematic gunfights and bullet-pocked Cadillacs — not hyper-educated Gen Xers surrounded by 60 pounds of raw ginger. Welcome to the new era of boutique spirit making in Chicago.

Your local guides are Sonat and Robert Birnecker and Sonja and Derek Kassebaum, the young couples who own and operate the area’s only two artisan distilleries, and whose meticulously made spirits have been called “impeccable” and “second to none” by local tastemakers like Kyle McHugh and Charles Joly.

At first glance, the Koval Distillery (owned and run by the Birneckers) and North Shore Distillery (the Kassebaums’ outfit) could not be more different. Koval, in Ravenswood, is proudly urban, while North Shore’s operations sit well outside the city, in north suburban Lake Bluff. The Birneckers’ stars are luscious, intense liqueurs in flavors like rose hip and ginger; the Kassebaums specialize in subtle, sophisticated riffs on old favorites, including vodka, gin and aquavit.

But take a closer look and you’ll find the two companies run along parallel paths: the proprietors are dedicated, with a single-minded fervor that borders on the evangelical, to the promotion of choice local ingredients, to spirits produced in small, fastidiously monitored batches, and, most emphatically, to reintroduce Americans to that oft-forgotten inalienable right: the freedom to get sauced on booze made in your own backyard.

[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Koval and North Shore - Hometown Distilleries in a Beer City - NYTimes.com]

North Shore, in Lake Bluff, is known for Distiller’s Gin #6

Distiller’s Gin No. 6 is extremely smooth, with a complex blance of citrus, spice and floral notes. We create No. 6 (90 proof) by infusing our grain-based spirit with hand-selected botanicals from all over the world, along with fresh lemon zest and lavender blossoms.

If you have never tasted this gin, or you think you don’t like gin, we strongly recommend trying No. 6 neat (straight) before mixing it into a cocktail or martini. This will allow you to smell and taste the complex nature of this gin. We know you will be amazed at how much you like this gin.

[Click to continue reading North Shore Distillery - Award-winning Distiller's Gin No. 6 - Modern Dry Gin]

Koval makes several kinds of spirits, including an intriguing-sounding rye, something made from levant spelt, pear brandy, and other tasty items.

Koval Inc. is the first boutique distillery located in Chicago. Its founders, Robert and Sonat Birnecker, gave up academic careers to bring the distilling traditions and techniques of Robert’s Austrian grandfather to America. Certified both organic and kosher, Koval holds itself to the highest standards of purity and craftsmanship. Koval avoids the common industry practice of outsourcing the production of neural grain spirits for rectification, making all of its products from scratch. Each step of the distilling process, from the “mashing” to the bottling is carefully monitored to insure that only the best spirit reaches your lips.

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