How Eating Kentucky Fried Chicken Became a Christmas Tradition in Japan

This time of year, the inter­net thrills to the fact that the Japan­ese eat Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en for Christ­mas. Those Japan­ese cus­tomers who want a pre­mi­um KFC din­ner with all the trim­mings ready by Christ­mas Eve should reserve it well in advance, much as they do with the elab­o­rate­ly dec­o­rat­ed kurisuma­su kee­ki that fol­lows it as dessert. Less well-under­stood are the ori­gins of this curi­ous mod­ern cus­tom. The Japan­ese them­selves, even those who reli­gious­ly tuck into a Colonel Sanders-brand­ed Christ­mas din­ner each year, are sub­ject to cer­tain mis­con­cep­tions. At least in my expe­ri­ence, every Japan­ese per­son has expressed sur­prise when told that KFC at Christ­mas­time is not an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion.

KFC’s mar­ket­ing in Japan has long exploit­ed an asso­ci­a­tion with Amer­i­can her­itage, implic­it­ly or indeed explic­it­ly.” Colonel Sanders is dis­cov­ered as a boy of sev­en bak­ing rye bread in the roomy kitchen of his ‘old Ken­tucky home,’ ” writes Japa­nol­o­gist John Nathan in his mem­oir Liv­ing Care­less­ly in Tokyo and Else­where, describ­ing a KFC tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial of the 1980s.

“ ‘A life­time lat­er,’ the nar­ra­tor intoned, ‘this same tra­di­tion of excel­lence was trans­ferred by the Colonel to his fried chick­en.’ The pre­pos­ter­ous sell­ing point was KFC as tra­di­tion­al, aris­to­crat­ic food from the Amer­i­can South. I couldn’t imag­ine a more amus­ing exam­ple of an Amer­i­can adver­tis­er play­ing to Japan’s nation­al obses­sion with Amer­i­can val­ues and man­ners.”

This com­mer­cial appears in The Colonel Comes to Japan, a 1981 half-hour doc­u­men­tary Nathan filmed for the WGBH busi­ness series Enter­prise. So does Loy West­on, the Amer­i­can exec­u­tive in charge of KFC’s Japan­ese oper­a­tions, who insists that the aris­toc­ra­cy angle offers no “con­sumer ben­e­fit.” But when informed by a Japan­ese exec­u­tive that the spot test­ed bet­ter than any they’d pro­duced before, he responds sim­ply: “I give up. This is Japan.” Four decades lat­er, West­ern­ers who want to suc­ceed doing busi­ness in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun must still share that atti­tude — espe­cial­ly when pre­sent­ed with strate­gies they lack the cul­tur­al ground­ing to com­pre­hend.

KFC’s pres­ence in Japan goes back to 1970, when its first store opened for the Osa­ka World Expo. Its man­ag­er Takeshi Okawara was the one to think of pro­mot­ing the chain’s “par­ty bar­rels” of chick­en as a fes­tive sub­sti­tute for an Amer­i­can-style turkey din­ner. The inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to the Ched­dar Exam­ines video at the top of the post, was being asked by a local school to deliv­er chick­en to its Christ­mas par­ty dressed as San­ta Claus. (His will­ing­ness to do so no doubt played a part in his lat­er becom­ing Japan­ese KFC’s chief exec­u­tive.) With­in a few years “Ken­tucky Christ­mas” had become a house­hold phrase, and one still used in the more recent TV com­mer­cials com­piled just above.

In Japan, a coun­try where Chris­tians con­sti­tute just one or two per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, eat­ing KFC has become one of Christ­mas’ pri­ma­ry cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions. The Christ­mas song “Sutek­ina Hol­i­day” by Mariya Takeuchi — now world-famous as the singer of the revived-by-Youtube 1980s dance tune “Plas­tic Love” — is com­mon­ly known as “the Ken­tucky Christ­mas song.” With Christ­mas­time busi­ness account­ing for a star­tling ten per­cent of Japan­ese KFC’s sales in any giv­en year, mea­sures have been tak­en to ensure that the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic does­n’t put too much of a dent into it: the intro­duc­tion of some social dis­tanc­ing, for exam­ple, into its noto­ri­ous­ly long hol­i­day lines. Ken­tucky Christ­mas has proven a suc­cess year after year in Japan, but thus far it has­n’t been adopt­ed in oth­er Asian coun­tries. It cer­tain­ly has­n’t in Korea, where I live — but then again, we’ve got much bet­ter fried chick­en out here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hōshi: A Short Film on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

In Japan­ese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learn­ing As It’s About Eat­ing

The Restau­rant of Mis­tak­en Orders: A Tokyo Restau­rant Where All the Servers Are Peo­ple Liv­ing with Demen­tia

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A 13th-Century Cookbook Featuring 475 Recipes from Moorish Spain Gets Published in a New Translated Edition

Some of the dis­tinc­tive­ness of Spain as we know it today comes as a lega­cy of the peri­od from 700 to 1200, when most of it was under Mus­lim rule. The cul­ture of Al-Andalus, as the Islam­ic states of mod­ern-day Spain and Por­tu­gal were then called, sur­vives most vis­i­bly in archi­tec­ture. But it also had its own cui­sine, devel­oped by not just Mus­lims, but by Chris­tians and Jews as well. What­ev­er the dietary restric­tions they indi­vid­u­al­ly worked under, “cooks from all three reli­gions enjoyed many ingre­di­ents first brought to the Iber­ian penin­su­la by the Arabs: rice, egg­plants, car­rots, lemons, sug­ar, almonds, and more.”

So writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Tom Verde in an arti­cle occa­sioned by the pub­li­ca­tion of a thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry Moor­ish cook­book. Fiḍālat al-Khiwān fī Ṭayyibāt al‑Ṭaʿām wa-l-Alwān, or Best of Delec­table Foods and Dish­es from al-Andalus and al-Maghrib had long exist­ed only in bits and pieces. A “mad­den­ing­ly incom­plete car­rot recipe, along with miss­ing chap­ters on veg­eta­bles, sauces, pick­led foods, and more, left a gap­ing hole in all exist­ing edi­tions of the text, like an emp­ty aisle in the gro­cery store.” But in 2018, British Library cura­tor of Ara­bic sci­en­tif­ic man­u­scripts Dr. Bink Hal­lum hap­pened upon a near­ly com­plete fif­teenth- or six­teenth-cen­tu­ry copy of the Fiḍāla with­in a man­u­script on medieval Arab phar­ma­col­o­gy.

The Fiḍāla itself dates to around 1260. It was com­posed in Tunis by Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī, “a well-edu­cat­ed schol­ar and poet from a wealthy fam­i­ly of lawyers, philoso­phers, and writ­ers. As a mem­ber of the upper class, he enjoyed a life of leisure and fine din­ing which he set out to cel­e­brate in the Fiḍāla.” The Chris­t­ian Recon­quista had already put a bit­ter end to all that leisure and fine din­ing, and it was in rel­a­tive­ly hard­scrab­ble African exile that al-Tujībī wrote this less as a cook­book than as “an exer­cise in culi­nary nos­tal­gia, a wist­ful look back across the Strait of Gibral­tar to the ele­gant main cours­es, side dish­es, and desserts of the author’s youth, an era before Spain’s Mus­lims and Jews had to hide their cul­tur­al cuisines.”

That descrip­tion comes from food his­to­ri­an Naw­al Nas­ral­lah, trans­la­tor of the com­plete Fiḍāla into an Eng­lish edi­tion pub­lished last month by Brill. In some of its sec­tions al-Tujībī cov­ers breads, veg­eta­bles, poul­try dish­es, and “meats of quadrupeds”; in oth­ers, he goes into detail on stuffed tripe, “edi­ble land snails,” and tech­niques for “rem­e­dy­ing over­ly salty foods and raw meat that does not smell fresh.” (The book includes 475 recipes in total.) Though much in the Moor­ish diet is a far cry from that of the major­i­ty in mod­ern Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries, inter­est in his­tor­i­cal gas­tron­o­my has been on the rise in recent years. And as even those sep­a­rat­ed from al-Tujībī by not just cul­ture but sev­en cen­turies’ worth of time know, what­ev­er your rea­sons for leav­ing a place, you soon long for noth­ing as acute­ly as the food — and that long­ing can moti­vate impres­sive achieve­ments.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Did Peo­ple Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cook­book Explain

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

A Data­base of 5,000 His­tor­i­cal Cook­books — Cov­er­ing 1,000 Years of Food His­to­ry — Is Now Online

Dis­cov­er Japan’s Old­est Sur­viv­ing Cook­book Ryori Mono­gatari (1643)

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Down­load 10,000+ Books in Ara­bic, All Com­plete­ly Free, Dig­i­tized and Put Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How New Yorkers Dodged Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws by Inventing the World’s Worst Sandwich

Three men feast on free lunch in a draw­ing by Charles Dana Gib­son

In one of my favorite episodes of The Simp­sons, beer-swill­ing Homer falls in love with a sand­wich. He spends his days nib­bling away at the “sick­en­ing, fes­ter­ing remains of a 10-foot hoagie,” Nathan Rabin writes, “long after decen­cy, self-respect, and sur­vival would all seem to dic­tate throw­ing it out.” The sand­wich may be yet anoth­er instance of the show pulling some obscure detail from Amer­i­can his­to­ry for com­ic effect — or maybe writer David M. Stern read Eugene O’Neill’s The Ice­man Cometh, in which the play­wright describes “an old des­ic­cat­ed ruin of dust-laden bread and mum­mi­fied ham or cheese.”

O’Neill’s sand­wich is so his­tor­i­cal, it has a name, the Raines Sand­wich, named after New York State Sen­a­tor John Raines, the author of an 1896 law that raised the cost of liquor licens­es sub­stan­tial­ly, upped the drink­ing age from six­teen to eigh­teen, and banned alco­holic bev­er­ages on Sun­days except in large hotels and lodg­ing hous­es which served a com­pli­men­ta­ry meal with their drinks. The law tar­get­ed work­ing peo­ple and their one day of respite, and it hit bar own­ers hard. “After all,” writes the Irish Exam­in­er, “labour­ers most­ly worked six days a week, with Sun­day their only full day for drink­ing, and Sun­day was the most prof­itable day for saloons.”

The com­pli­men­ta­ry-meal-with-drinks man­date, as it were, was designed so that wealthy patrons at lux­u­ry hotels could drink on Sun­days, but low-rent saloon own­ers seized on the loop­hole, trans­form­ing dive bars into room­ing hous­es overnight with table­cloths and “alleged bed­rooms” made from attics and base­ments. “It was then that the loos­est pos­si­ble def­i­n­i­tion of a ‘sub­stan­tial meal’ became the Raines Sand­wich.” The sand­wich might be made of any­thing, even a brick between two slices of bread; it was rarely eat­en. Some­times, it would be served to a guest with their beer or whiskey, then whisked away and giv­en to some­one else. A sin­gle Raines Sand­wich might last the day, or even the whole week.

Some estab­lish­ments tried to get away with serv­ing crack­ers and moldy cheese alone (stal­wart New York Irish pub McSor­ley’s gave away crack­ers, cheese, and onions — a dish for which they now charge). But the courts required a sand­wich, at the very least to be served, and the city enforced the law with right­eous vig­or — thanks in large part to a young Theodore Roo­sevelt. As Dar­rell Hart­man writes at Atlas Obscu­ra, New York Repub­li­cans in Albany “spoke for a con­stituen­cy large­ly com­prised of rur­al small-town church­go­ers” wor­ried about urban vice. But Raines had a city ally in Roo­sevelt, then a “37-year-old fire­brand… push­ing a law-and-order agen­da as pres­i­dent of the city’s new­ly orga­nized police com­mis­sion.”

Roo­sevelt can­vassed the Low­er East Side with patrol­man Frank Rathge­ber, send­ing him into saloons in plain clothes to inves­ti­gate. “Rathge­ber said he saw many sand­wich­es but only one bed,” writes author Richard Zacks in Island of Vice. The sand­wich­es were moldy, and were tak­en away uneat­en. “He nev­er was asked to buy a sec­ond sand­wich” with sub­se­quent drinks, “or even to eat the first one.” Despite the reform crack­downs, the shady busi­ness of the Raines Sand­wich let saloon own­ers skirt the law until it was repealed, final­ly, in 1924. As Hart­man notes, behind the pur­port­ed good inten­tions of the Tem­per­ance move­ment lay a deter­mined cul­ture war:

Those in favor of the Sun­day ban, gen­er­al­ly mid­dle-class and Protes­tant, saw it as a cor­ner­stone of social improve­ment. For those against, includ­ing the city’s tide of Ger­man and Irish immi­grants, it was an act of repression—an espe­cial­ly spite­ful one because it lim­it­ed how the aver­age labor­er could enjoy him­self on his one day off. The Sun­day ban was not pop­u­lar, to say the least, among the city’s Jews, who’d already observed their Sab­bath the day before.

The Raines Law was as much about enforc­ing reli­gious obser­vance and cul­tur­al con­for­mi­ty on immi­grants as it was an attempt to com­bat crime, pover­ty, and vio­lence in the city. Those whose beliefs did not pre­vent them from enjoy­ing them­selves on Sun­day saw no rea­son to take the law any more seri­ous­ly than they would a rot­ting week-old sand­wich or a brick between two slices of moldy bread.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore Thou­sands of Free Vin­tage Cock­tail Recipes Online (1705–1951)

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

The Sci­ence of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promis­es to Enhance Your Appre­ci­a­tion of the Time­less Bev­er­age

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Andy Warhol’s Vibrant, Impractical, Illustrated Cookbook from 1959: A Feast for the Eyes


Gor­geous­ly illus­trat­ed cook­books fea­tur­ing sump­tu­ous images of fan­cy desserts and oth­er spe­cial occa­sion food can be quite an intim­i­dat­ing propo­si­tion to self-doubt­ing begin­ners.

The recipes them­selves are daunt­ing, and as every Great British Bak­ing Show view­er learns, watch­ing the top con­tes­tants squirm in advance of co-host Paul Hol­ly­wood’s icy judg­ment, fla­vor can’t save an edi­ble cre­ation that fails as art.

Andy Warhol’s approach to cook­ery appears rather more blithe.

His 1959 cook­book, Wild Rasp­ber­ries — the title is a play on Ing­mar Bergman’s Wild Straw­ber­ries — dis­plays lit­tle inter­est in its read­ers’ cook­ing abil­i­ty… or, for that mat­ter, its authors.

Fan­ci­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tions of such del­i­ca­cies as Gar­doons a la Mous­se­line are pret­ty as a pic­ture… and stress free giv­en that no one is actu­al­ly expect­ed to make them.

Wild Rasp­ber­ries is all about atti­tude… and ambi­tion of a pure­ly social nature.

Warhol’s co-author, inte­ri­or dec­o­ra­tor and soci­ety host­ess Suzie Frank­furt, recalled hatch­ing the idea for this col­lab­o­ra­tion, short­ly after encoun­ter­ing the young artist at New York City’s fabled sweet spot, Serendip­i­ty: “We thought it would be a mas­ter­piece and we’d sell thou­sands. I think we sold 20.”

It’s pos­si­ble the endeav­or was a few decades ahead of its time. We can imag­ine Wild Rasp­ber­ries doing quite well as an impul­sive lifestyle type buy at Urban Out­fit­ters.

Sec­ond­hand copies of a 1997 reprint occa­sion­al­ly resur­face, as do auc­tion lots of the orig­i­nal 34 lith­o­graph sets, hand-col­ored by four school­boys who lived upstairs from Warhol, pri­or to hand-bind­ing by rab­bis on the Low­er East Side.

After con­sign­ing a few copies to Dou­ble­day and Riz­zoli book­stores, Warhol and Frank­furt gave the bulk of the first edi­tion away as Christ­mas presents to friends, who were no doubt well equipped to appre­ci­ate the tongue-in-cheek nature of its “recipes,” hand-let­tered by Warhol’s moth­er, Julia — whose spelling boo-boos were pur­pose­ful­ly allowed to stand.

The instruc­tions eschew crass men­tion of mea­sure­ments or cook­ing times… per­fect for any­one with hired staff, stand­ing reser­va­tions at Upper East Side hot spots, or a social X‑Ray diet reg­i­men.

Instead, read­ers are direct­ed to send the Cadil­lac round to Trad­er Vic’s tiki bar for a suck­ling pig of suf­fi­cient size for a par­ty of 15, or to gath­er morels should they find them­selves hol­i­day­ing in the vicin­i­ty of Nor­mandy.

Salade de Alf Lan­don, a bombe of lob­ster tails named for FDR’s oppo­nent in the 1936 Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, crowned with aspara­gus tips and hard­boiled plover eggs, seems like it could dou­ble as a fetch­ing cha­peau, espe­cial­ly when paired with one of Warhol’s whim­si­cal fan­ta­sy  for footwear com­pa­ny I. Miller’s week­ly ads in The New York Times.

In fact, near­ly every­thing in this vibrant­ly hand col­ored “cook­book” makes for plau­si­ble mid-cen­tu­ry millinery, from Torte a la Dobosch to an imprac­ti­cal­ly ver­ti­cal arrange­ment of Hard Boiled Eggs.

 

 

Wild Rasp­ber­ries may have been a swipe at aspi­ra­tional, host­ess-ori­ent­ed late-50s cook­books, but Green­gages a la Warhol’s ref­er­ence to hyper­local pro­duce would fit right in with with Portlandia’s 21st cen­tu­ry food­ie spoofs.

High and low com­bine to great effect with wink­ing ref­er­ences to Gre­ta Gar­bo and gos­sip colum­nist Dorothy Kil­gallenLucky Whip dessert top­ping, a “Seared Roe­buck,” and store-bought super­mar­ket sponge cake (the lat­ter in Wild Rasp­ber­ries’ most legit-sound­ing recipe, some­thing of an upgrade from the recipe for “cake” Warhol shared in The Phi­los­o­phy of Andy Warhol — a choco­late bar served between slices of bread.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

MoMA’s Artists’ Cook­book (1978) Reveals the Meals of Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Andy Warhol, Louise Bour­geois & More

300 Rarely-Seen, Risqué Draw­ings by Andy Warhol Pub­lished in the New Book, Andy Warhol: Love, Sex, and Desire. Draw­ings (1950–1962)

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Explore Thousands of Free Vintage Cocktail Recipes Online (1705–1951)

Where do the hip­ster mixol­o­gists of TokyoMex­i­co City and Brook­lyn take their inspi­ra­tion?

If not from the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle des Vins et Spir­itueux’ free col­lec­tion of dig­i­tized vin­tage cock­tail recipe books, per­haps they should start.

An ini­tia­tive of the Muse­um of Wine and Spir­its on the Ile de Ben­dor in South­east­ern France, the col­lec­tion is a boon to any­one with an inter­est in cock­tail cul­ture …dit­to design, illus­tra­tion, evolv­ing social mores…

1928’s Chee­rio, a Book of Punch­es and Cock­tails was writ­ten by Charles, for­mer­ly of Delmonico’s, tout­ed in the intro­duc­to­ry note as “one who has served drinks to Princes, Mag­nates and Sen­a­tors of many nations”. No doubt dis­cre­tion pre­vent­ed him from pub­lish­ing his sur­name.

Charles appar­ent­ly abid­ed by the the­o­ry that it’s five o’clock some­where, with drinks geared to var­i­ous times of day, from the moment you “stag­ger out of bed, grog­gy, grouchy and cross-tem­pered” (try a Charleston Brac­er or a Brandy Port Nog) to the mid­night hour when “insom­nia, bad dreams, dis­il­lu­sion­ment and despair” call for such reme­dies as a Cholera Cock­tail or an Egg Whiskey Fizz.

As not­ed on the cov­er, there’s a sec­tion devot­ed to favorite recipes of celebri­ties. These big­wigs’ names will like­ly mean noth­ing to you near­ly one hun­dred years lat­er, but their first per­son rem­i­nis­cences bring them roar­ing back to the­atri­cal, boozy life.

Here’s cel­e­brat­ed vaude­vil­lian Trix­ie Frig­an­za:

In that nau­ti­cal city of Venice, I first made the acquain­tance of a remark­ably deli­cious drink known as ‘Port and Star­board’. Pour one half part Grena­dine or rasp­ber­ry syrup in a cor­dial glass. Then on top of this pour one half por­tion of Creme de Men­the slow­ly so that the ingre­di­ents will not mix. Dear old Venice. 

Indeed.

Pre­sum­ably any cock­tail recipe in the EUVS’s vast col­lec­tion could be adapt­ed as a mock­tail, but Charles gives a delib­er­ate nod to Pro­hi­bi­tion with a sec­tion on alco­hol-free (and extreme­ly easy to pre­pare) Tem­per­ance Drinks.

Don’t expect a Shirley Tem­ple — the triple threat child star was but an infant when Chee­rio was pub­lished. Expand your options with a Sarato­ga Cool­er or an Oggle Nog­gle instead.

Before attempt­ing to recite the poem that opens 1949’s Bot­toms Up: A Guide to Pleas­ant Drink­ing, you may want to slam a cou­ple of Depth Bombs Cock­tails or a Mer­ry Wid­ow Cock­tail No. 1.

In an abstemious con­di­tion, there’s no way this dit­ty can be made to scan…or rhyme:

The Advent of the Cock­tail

A lone­ly, aban­doned jig­ger of gin
Sat on a table top. “Alas”, cried he,
“Who will join me?” And he tried a friend­ly grin.
Came a pret­ty youth, Mam’selle Ver­mouth,
Who was bored with just being winey.
Said she to Sir Gin: “You’d be ever so nice
With Olive and Ice. And so they were Mar­ti­ni.

The cock­tail recipes are sol­id, through­out, how­ev­er, as one might expect from a book that dou­bled as an ad for spon­sor First Avenue Wine and Liquor Cor­po­ra­tion — “for Liquor…Quicker.”

We’ve yet to try any­thing from the “wines in cook­ery” sec­tion — but sus­pect that stur­dy fare like Pota­to Soup and Baked Beans could help sop up some of the alco­hol, even if con­tains some hair of the dog…

Shak­ing in the 60’s author Eddie Clark’s pre­vi­ous titles include Shak­ing with Eddie, Shake Again with Eddie and 1954’s Prac­ti­cal Bar Man­age­ment. 

Clark, who served as head bar­tender at London’s Savoy Hotel, Berke­ley Hotel and Albany Club, gets in the swing­ing 60s spir­it, by ded­i­cat­ing this work to “all imbib­ing lovers.”

William S. McCall’s decid­ed­ly boozy illus­tra­tions of ele­phants, anthro­po­mor­phized cock­tail glass­es and scant­i­ly clad ladies con­tribute to the fes­tive atmos­phere, though you prob­a­bly won’t be sur­prise to learn that some of them have not aged well.

Shak­ing in the 60’s boasts dozens of straight for­ward cock­tail recipes (the Beat­nik the Bun­ny Hug and the Mon­key Hugall fea­ture Pern­od), a sur­pris­ing­ly seri­ous-mind­ed sec­tion on wine, and a cou­ple of pages devot­ed to non-alco­holic drinks.

If your child turns up their nose at Clark’s Remain Sober, serve ‘em an Alber­mar­le Pussy­cat.

Clark also draws on his pro­fes­sion­al exper­tise to help home bar­tenders get a grip on mea­sure­ment con­ver­sionssup­ply lists, and toasts.

So con­fi­dent is he in his abil­i­ty to help read­ers throw a tru­ly mem­o­rable par­ty, he includes a dishy par­ty log, that prob­a­bly should be kept under lock and key after it’s been filled out. We imag­ine it would pair well with the Morn­ing Mashie, anoth­er Pern­od-based con­coc­tion ded­i­cat­ed to “all those enter­ing the hang­over class.”

Delve into the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle des Vins et Spir­itueux’ free col­lec­tion of dig­i­tized vin­tage cock­tail recipe books from the 1820s through the 1960s here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Dig­i­tal Library for Bar­tenders: Vin­tage Cock­tail Books with Recipes Dat­ing Back to 1753

A New Dig­i­tized Menu Col­lec­tion Lets You Revis­it the Cui­sine from the “Gold­en Age of Rail­road Din­ing”

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Very First Webcam Was Invented to Keep an Eye on a Coffee Pot at Cambridge University

The inter­net as we know it today began with a cof­fee pot. Despite the ring of exag­ger­a­tion, that claim isn’t actu­al­ly so far-fetched. When most of us go online, we expect some­thing new: often not just some­thing new to read, but some­thing new to watch. This, as those of us past a cer­tain age will recall, was not the case with the ear­ly World Wide Web, con­sist­ing as it most­ly did of sta­t­ic pages of text, updat­ed irreg­u­lar­ly if at all. Younger read­ers will have to imag­ine even that being a cut­ting-edge thrill, but we did­n’t real­ly feel like we were liv­ing in the future until the fall of 1993, when XCof­fee first went live.

This ground­break­ing tech­no­log­i­cal project “start­ed back in the dark days of 1991,” writes co-cre­ator Quentin Stafford-Fras­er, “when the World Wide Web was lit­tle more than a glint in CERN’s eye.” At the time, Stafford-Fras­er was employed as one of fif­teen researchers in the “Tro­jan Room” of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Com­put­er Lab. “Being poor, impov­er­ished aca­d­e­mics, we only had one cof­fee fil­ter machine between us, which lived in the cor­ri­dor just out­side the Tro­jan Room. How­ev­er, being high­ly ded­i­cat­ed and hard-work­ing aca­d­e­mics, we got through a lot of cof­fee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often did­n’t last long.”

It occurred to Stafford-Fras­er to train an unused video cam­era from the Tro­jan Room on the cof­fee pot (and thus the amount of cof­fee avail­able with­in), then con­nect it to a com­put­er, specif­i­cal­ly an Acorn Archimedes. His col­league Paul Jardet­zky “wrote a ‘serv­er’ pro­gram, which ran on that machine and cap­tured images of the pot every few sec­onds at var­i­ous res­o­lu­tions, and I wrote a ‘client’ pro­gram which every­body could run, which con­nect­ed to the serv­er and dis­played an icon-sized image of the pot in the cor­ner of the screen. The image was only updat­ed about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slow­ly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the cof­fee.”

XCof­fee, the result­ing pro­gram, was meant only to pro­vide this much-need­ed infor­ma­tion to Com­put­er Lab mem­bers else­where in the build­ing. But after the release of image-dis­play­ing web browsers in 1993, it found a much wider audi­ence as the world’s first stream­ing web­cam. Stafford-Fraser’s suc­ces­sors “res­ur­rect­ed the sys­tem, treat­ed it to a new frame grab­ber, and made the images avail­able on the World Wide Web. Since then, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have looked at the cof­fee pot, mak­ing it undoubt­ed­ly the most famous in the world.” Stafford-Fras­er wrote these words in 1995; in the years there­after XCof­fee went on to receive mil­lions of views before its even­tu­al shut­down in 2001.

In the Cen­tre for Com­put­ing His­to­ry video above, Stafford-Fras­er shows the very Olivet­ti cam­era he orig­i­nal­ly used to mon­i­tor the cof­fee lev­el. (He’d pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the Olivet­ti Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry, whose par­ent com­pa­ny also owned Acorn Com­put­ers.) “We could see things at a dis­tance before,” he says. “We could view tele­vi­sion pro­grams, we could look through tele­scopes.” But only after the Tro­jan Room’s cof­fee pot hit the inter­net could we “see what’s hap­pen­ing now, some­where else in the world,” on demand. Thir­ty years after XCof­fee’s devel­op­ment, we’re mes­mer­ized by live-stream­ing stars and sur­round­ed by “smart” home appli­ances, hop­ing for noth­ing so much as way to con­cen­trate on our imme­di­ate sur­round­ings again — to wake up, if you like, and smell the cof­fee.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Web Cams of Sur­re­al­ly Emp­ty City Streets in Venice, New York, Lon­don & Beyond

Sci-Fi “Por­tal” Con­nects Cit­i­zens of Lublin & Vil­nius, Allow­ing Passers­by Sep­a­rat­ed by 376 Miles to Inter­act in Real Time

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An Archaeologist Creates the Definitive Guide to Beer Cans

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

As a bev­er­age of choice and neces­si­ty for much of the pop­u­la­tion in parts of the ancient world, beer has played an impor­tant role in archae­ol­o­gy. Beer cans, on the oth­er hand, have not. Unlike mil­len­nia-old recipes, beer cans seem like no more than trash, even in a field where trash is high­ly trea­sured. This is a mis­take, says arche­ol­o­gist Jane Busch. “The his­tor­i­cal archae­ol­o­gist who ignores the beer can at his site is like the pre­his­toric arche­ol­o­gist who ignores his­toric pot­tery.”

David Maxwell, an expert in ani­mal bones who trained as a Mayanist, has rec­og­nized the truth of this state­ment by turn­ing his pas­sion for beer can col­lect­ing into beer can archae­ol­o­gy, a tiny niche with­in the small­er field of “tin can archae­ol­o­gy.” Maxwell became the reign­ing expert on beer can dat­ing when “in 1993, he pub­lished a field-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion guide in His­tor­i­cal Archae­ol­o­gy,” notes Jes­si­ca Gin­grich at Atlas Obscu­ra, “which has since become an indus­try stan­dard and his most-read work.”

The first com­mer­cial canned beer appeared in 1935, after sev­er­al unsuc­cess­ful exper­i­ments start­ing in 1909. Exper­i­ments in beer can­ning took a hia­tus dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion, and canned beer itself went off the mar­ket dur­ing WWII as sup­plies of tin plate were rerout­ed to the war effort. Dur­ing that inter­reg­num, only the mil­i­tary shipped canned beer, to sol­diers over­seas in olive and camo-col­ored cans. When sales resumed after the war, beer cans assumed more rou­tinized design ele­ments. Maxwell him­self became fas­ci­nat­ed with beer cans from afar. “While canned beer sales explod­ed in the Unit­ed States after World War II, Gin­grich writes, “the indus­try failed to take off in Cana­da until the 1980s.”

As a child in Cana­da, Maxwell col­lect­ed bot­tle caps. “All the beer came in the same shape bot­tle,” he says. Cans seemed exot­ic, espe­cial­ly those of an old­er vin­tage. “They had punch­es to open them instead of pull rings, and all I knew was that they pre­dat­ed me.” The val­ue of dis­pos­able arti­facts less than 100 years old isn’t imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent to most peo­ple, says Jim Rock, a pio­neer of tin can stud­ies who calls cans “the Rod­ney Dan­ger­field of arche­ol­o­gy. They just don’t get any respect.” But the fact is “all arche­ol­o­gy is garbage,” says Maxwell.

Dat­ing cans gives arche­ol­o­gists a pic­ture of mod­ern con­sump­tion pat­terns — and pat­terns of eco­log­i­cal destruc­tion — in the refuse tossed on high­ways and the stra­ta of trash found in con­struc­tion sites, land­fills, and even ancient dig sites, where dat­ing beer cans can tell arche­ol­o­gists when ear­li­er tres­passers might have arrived, removed or altered arti­facts, and left their trash behind. Maxwell, who has recent­ly down­sized his col­lec­tion from 4500 to 1700 cans to save space, admits that a nar­row focus on the beer can takes a spe­cial com­bi­na­tion of skills.

“Col­lec­tors are a fab­u­lous resource for aca­d­e­mics,” he says. “These are the guys who do the grunt work” — the end­less­ly curi­ous cit­i­zen sci­en­tists of archae­ol­o­gy. “I can’t think of any­one else who would do that except some­one who is obses­sive about what it is that they are col­lect­ing.” In Maxwell, the obses­sive col­lec­tor and rig­or­ous aca­d­e­m­ic just hap­pened to come togeth­er to pro­duce the defin­i­tive guide. (See Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archae­ol­o­gist online.) But even he has had to “face the ques­tion of what deserves to be archived and kept,” Nico­la Jones writes at Sapi­ens. In dis­card­ing 3,000 of his own cans, most of them acquired through col­lec­tors online, he had to admit that “though the rusty cans were a part of his­to­ry, they weren’t worth much to the rest of the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beer Archae­ol­o­gy: Yes, It’s a Thing

The Sci­ence of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promis­es to Enhance Your Appre­ci­a­tion of the Time­less Bev­er­age

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch Anthony Bourdain’s First Food-and-Travel Series A Cook’s Tour Free Online (2002–03)

At the time of his death in 2018, Antho­ny Bour­dain was quite pos­si­bly the most famous cook in the world. With­out ques­tion he held the title of the most famous cook-trav­el­er, a sta­tus rest­ing pri­mar­i­ly on No Reser­va­tions and Parts Unknown, the tele­vi­sion shows he host­ed on the Trav­el Chanel and CNN, respec­tive­ly. But it all began with A Cook’s Tour, which the Food Net­work orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast in 2002 and 2003. That series, Bour­dain’s very first, took him from Japan to Moroc­co to Mex­i­co to Aus­tralia to Thai­land — and through many points in between — in search of the world’s most stim­u­lat­ing eat­ing expe­ri­ences.

Now A Cook’s Tour has come avail­able free to watch on Youtube, thanks to the stream­ing chan­nel GoTrav­el­er (who also offer the show through their own ser­vice).

A Por­tuguese slaugh­ter­ing-and-roast­ing par­ty; vod­ka-fueled ice fish­ing in St. Peters­burg; an explo­ration of the Amer­i­can “Bar­be­cue Tri­an­gle” con­sti­tut­ed by Kansas City, Hous­ton, and North Car­oli­na; and a best-faith effort to lose him­self in Chi­ang Mai: if you caught these or oth­er of Bour­dain’s ear­ly inter­na­tion­al culi­nary adven­tures those near­ly twen­ty years ago, you can relive them, and if you missed out, you can enjoy them for the first time.

Dur­ing the launch phase of his rise to fame (after decades of restau­rant work and years of writ­ing, an effort that first pro­duced a cou­ple of food-themed mur­der-mys­tery nov­els), Bour­dain man­aged to tap into a new wave of gas­tro­nom­ic inter­est then ris­ing in Amer­i­ca. He did so with a street-smart sense of humor that appealed even to view­ers with no par­tic­u­lar invest­ment in the world of cook­ing and din­ing, as long as they had an inter­est in the world itself. With A Cook’s Tour, he took food tele­vi­sion out of the kitchen — way out of the kitchen — and over the eigh­teen years since its con­clu­sion, the series’ influ­ence has become so per­va­sive as almost to be invis­i­ble. Antho­ny Bour­dain may be gone, but parts of his per­son­al­i­ty live on in every high-pro­file trav­el­er out there cook­ing, eat­ing, and get­ting lost today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Antho­ny Bourdain’s Free Show Raw Craft, Where He Vis­its Crafts­men Mak­ing Gui­tars, Tat­toos, Motor­cy­cles & More (RIP)

Antho­ny Bour­dain Talks About the Big Break That Changed His Life — at Age 44

Life Lessons from Antho­ny Bour­dain: How He Devel­oped His Iron Pro­fes­sion­al­ism, Achieved Cre­ative Free­dom & Learned from Fail­ure

Al Jazeera Trav­el Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food

Watch 26 Free Episodes of Jacques Pépin’s TV Show, More Fast Food My Way

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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