Some YouTuber posted online a pretty nice clip of an espresso shot being pulled from a La Marzocco FB80 espresso machine at 120 frames per second. They recommend muting the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous soundtrack for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll be damned, it syncs up pretty well. Have a better soundtrack to recommend? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
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The South Korean capital of Seoul, where I live, has in the 21st century astonished visiting Westerners with its technology, its infrastructure, and its sheer urban vitality. It strikes many of those Westerners (and I include myself among them) as considerably more developed than anywhere in the countries they came from. But however much Seoul may feel like the future, nowhere in Korea has the past wholly vanished. Take the bulbous earthenware jars still visible on more than a few of the country’s terraces and rooftops, meant to hold condiments like soybean and red pepper paste as well as that world-famous symbol of not just Korean cuisine but Korean culture itself, the fermented cabbage known as kimchi.
Commonly called hangari, or more traditionally onggi, these jars essential to the fermentation of kimchi and other Korean foods are today produced in large numbers with industrial methods. But there are also Korean potters who’ve stuck to the old ways — and in a select few cases, the very old ways indeed. Take Jin-Gyu, the subject of the video above, a short documentary from Eater’s “Handmade” series.
“I’m the youngest of the intangible cultural assets in Korea,” he says, referring to the official list of Important Intangible Cultural Properties introduced to protect long-standing traditions in music, dance, and craft just as the country began its unprecedented surge into modernity. The making of onggi itself, a process Jin-Gyu demonstrates from start to finish in the video, is Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 96.
After pounding his clay into shape while describing how its soil first flows down from the mountains, Jin-gyu places it onto his wheel and gives it the distinctive shape recognizable from all those terraces and rooftops. This requires constant use of his hands, occasional use of his feet, and even the application of traditional tools that he also made himself. The contrast with traditional Japanese pottery, its emphasis on small-scale elegance and near-existentialist attitude toward the final product, is instructive: the Korean variety, as Jin-gyu practices it, has a different energy, more of an emotional and physical rusticity. “This makes me so happy,” he says after removing finished jar from the kiln originally built by his onggi-potter father. “After 300 years, it’ll return to the soil.” But there are plenty of hearty meals to be had in the meantime, none of them without kimchi.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miranda is casting around for source material for his next American history-based blockbuster musical, may we suggest American Cookery by “poor solitary orphan” Amelia Simmons?
First published in 1796, at 47 pages (nearly three of them are dedicated to dressing a turtle), it’s a far quicker read than the fateful Ron Chernow Hamilton biography Miranda impulsively selected for a vacation beach read.
Slender as it is, there’s no shortage of meaty material:
Calves Head dressed Turtle Fashion
Soup of Lamb’s Head and Pluck
Fowl Smothered in Oysters
Tongue Pie
Foot Pie
Modern chefs may find some of the first American cookbook’s methods and measurements take some getting used to.
The book’s full title is an indication of its mysterious author’s ambitions for the new country’s culinary future:
American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.
As Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald write in an essay for What It Means to Be an American, a “national conversation hosted by the Smithsonian and Arizona State University,” American Cookery managed to straddle the refined tastes of Federalist elites and the Jeffersonians who believed “rustic simplicity would inoculate their fledgling country against the corrupting influence of the luxury to which Britain had succumbed”:
The recipe for “Queen’s Cake” was pure social aspiration, in the British mode, with its butter whipped to a cream, pound of sugar, pound and a quarter of flour, 10 eggs, glass of wine, half-teacup of delicate-flavored rosewater, and spices. And “Plumb Cake” offered the striving housewife a huge 21-egg showstopper, full of expensive dried and candied fruit, nuts, spices, wine, and cream.
Then—mere pages away—sat johnnycake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack, made of familiar ingredients like cornmeal, flour, milk, water, and a bit of fat, and prepared “before the fire” or on a hot griddle. They symbolized the plain, but well-run and bountiful, American home. A dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.
American Cookery is one of nine 18th-century titles to make the Library of Congress’ list of 100 Books That Shaped America:
This cornerstone in American cookery is the first cookbook of American authorship to be printed in the United States. Numerous recipes adapting traditional dishes by substituting native American ingredients, such as corn, squash and pumpkin, are printed here for the first time. Simmons’ “Pompkin Pudding,” baked in a crust, is the basis for the classic American pumpkin pie. Recipes for cake-like gingerbread are the first known to recommend the use of pearl ash, the forerunner of baking powder.
Students of Women’s History will find much to chew on in the second edition of American Cookery as well, though they may find a few spoonfuls of pearl ash dissolved in water necessary to settle upset stomachs after reading Simmons’ introduction.
Stavely and Fitzgerald observe how “she thanks the fashionable ladies,” or “respectable characters,” as she calls them, who have patronized her work, before returning to her main theme: the “egregious blunders” of the first edition, “which were occasioned either by the ignorance, or evil intention of the transcriber for the press.”
Ultimately, all of her problems stem from her unfortunate condition; she is without “an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press.” In an attempt to sidestep any criticism that the second edition might come in for, she writes: “remember, that it is the performance of, and effected under all those disadvantages, which usually attend, an Orphan.”
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Do you think you would recognize a coffee plant if you came across one in the wild? Not that it’s likely outside the so-called “coffee belt,” the region of the world most rich in soil, shade, mild temperatures, and copious rainfall. Farmed coffee plants “are pruned short to conserve their energy,” the National Coffee Association notes, but they “can grow to more than 30 feet (9 meters) high. Each tree is covered with green, waxy leaves growing opposite each other in pairs. Coffee cherries grow along the branches. Because it grows in a continuous cycle, it’s not unusual to see [white] flowers, green fruit and ripe [red] fruit simultaneously on a single tree.”
That’s a festive image to call to mind when you brew—or a barista brews—your coffee beverage of choice. After watching the TED-Ed video above, you’ll also have a sense of the “globe-spanning process” between the coffee plant and that first cup of the morning. “How many people does it take to make a cup of coffee?” the lesson asks. Far more than the one it takes to push the brew button…. The journey begins in Colombia: forests are clear-cut for neat rows of shrub-like coffee trees. These were first domesticated in Ethiopia and are still grown across sub-Saharan Africa as well as South America and Southeast Asia, where low-wage workers harvest the coffee cherries by hand.
The cherries are then processed by machine, sorted, and fermented. The resulting coffee beans require more human labor, at least in the example above, to fully dry them over a period of three weeks. Further machine sorting and processing takes place before the beans reach a panel of experts who determine their quality and give them a grade. More hands load the coffee beans onto container ships, unload them, transport them around the country (the U.S. imports more coffee than any other nation in the world), and so on and so forth. “All in all, it takes hundreds of people to get coffee to its intended destination, and that’s not counting the people maintaining the infrastructure that makes the journey possible.”
Many of the people in that vast supply chain are paid very little, the video points out. Some are paid nothing at all. The history of coffee, like the histories of other addictive commodities like sugar and tobacco, is filled with stories of exploitation and social and political upheaval. And like the supply chains of every other contemporary staple, the story of how coffee gets to us, from plant to cup, involves the stories of hundreds of thousands of people connected by a global chain of commerce, and by our constant need for more caffeine.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, First Fridays at the Frick were a gracious way for New Yorkers to kick off the weekend. Admission was waived, participants could take part in open sketching sessions or enjoy live performance, and curators were on hand to give mini lectures on the significance and historical context of certain prized paintings in the collection.
Rather than pull the plug entirely when the museum closed due to the pandemic, the Frick sought to preserve the spirit of this longstanding tradition with weekly episodes of Cocktails with a Curator, matching each selection with recipes for make-at-home themed drinks, with or without alcohol.
Much as we miss these communal live events, there’s something to be said for enjoying these wildly entertaining, educational mini-lectures from the comfort of one’s own couch, drink in hand, no need to crane past other visitors for a view, or worry that one might keel over from locking one’s knees too long.
But the greatest delight is Salomon’s talent for imbuing 19th-century art world gossip with a sense of immediacy.
Sip a sake highball (or a virgin sangria-style refresher of plum juice and mint) and chew on the true nature of the artist’s relationship with his shipping magnate patron’s wife.
Sake Highball sake (of your choice) club soda (as much/little as needed) lots of ice
Alternative Mocktail plum juice ice cut orange, lemon and apple (sangria style) mint leaves sugar (as needed)
Commissioned in 1755 to serve as over-door decorations for King Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour, they now reside in the Frick’s ornate Boucher Room.
Salomon draws comparisons to another swooning Frick favorite, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s series Progress of Love. While the romantic nature of these works is hardly a secret, Salomon is able to speak to the erotic significance of dolphins, grapes, and tiny 18th-century shepherdess bonnets.
Those who are respecting COVID protocols by courting outdoors this winter will welcome Salomon’s thoughts on Winter’s central figure, a coquette riding in a sleigh driven by a well-bundled man in Tartar dress:
Her hands may be warmed by a muff, but her upper body is completely exposed. It’s a combination of luxury and seduction typical of Boucher, all treated in a fanciful, even humorous manner.
Also, is it just us, or is Curator Salomon taking the opportunity to enjoy his Proust-inspired Time Regained cocktail in a kimono? (A perk of the virtual office…)
Time Regained 2 oz. Scotch whisky 0.75 oz. Dry vermouth 0.5 oz. Pisco 0.25 oz. Jasmine tea syrup (equal parts of jasmine tea and sugar)
Alternative Mocktail Cold jasmine tea One spoonful of golden syrup Top with tonic water
Salomon hands hosting duties to colleague Aimee Ng for Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, one of three works by the Dutch Master in the Frick’s collection.
Here the drama is less explicitly informed by the boudoir, though there’s a big reveal around the 10 minute mark, thanks to recent advances in infrared reflectography and some well-coordinated art sleuthing.
As to the contents of the message the maid proffers her ermine trimmed mistress, we’ll never know, although those of us with ready access to the Dutch spirit genever can have fun speculating over a glass of Genever Brûlée.
Genever Brûlée 2 oz genever 1 teaspoon brown sugar A few dashes of classic bitters A dash of orange bitters A splash of sparkling water Garnished with a caramelized orange slice
Alternative Mocktail
Juice of half an orange 2 dashes orange blossom water A splash of sparkling water Garnished with a caramelized orange slice
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Apparently, the Monastery of Alcobaça’s resident monks were eating plenty of other things, too.
Eventually their reputation for excessive plumpness became problematic.
A hefty physique may have signified prosperity and health in 1178 when construction began on the UNESCO World Heritage site, but by the 18th-century, those extra rolls of flesh were considered at odds with the Cistercian monks’ vows of obedience, poverty and chastity.
Its larders were well stocked, thanks in part to the rich farmland surrounding the monastery.
On one side, loads of game and venison were heaped up; on the other, vegetables and fruit in endless variety. Beyond a long line of stoves extended a row of ovens, and close to them hillocks of wheaten flour whiter than snow, rocks of sugar, jars of the purest oil, and pastry in vast abundance, which a numerous tribe of lay brothers and their attendants were rolling out and puffing up into a hundred different shapes, singing all the while as blithely as larks in a corn-field.
Later he has the opportunity to sample some of the dishes issuing from that kitchen:
The banquet itself consisted of not only the most excellent usual fare, but rarities and delicacies of past seasons and distant countries; exquisite sausages, potted lampreys, strange messes from the Brazils, and others still stranger from China (edible birds’ nests and sharks’ fins), dressed after the latest mode of Macao by a Chinese lay brother. Confectionery and fruits were out of the question here; they awaited us in an adjoining still more spacious and sumptuous apartment, to which we retired from the effluvia of viands and sauces.
Later in his travels, he is taken to meet a Spanish princess, who inquires, “How did you leave the fat waddling monks of Alcobaça? I hope you did not run races with them.”
Perhaps such tattle is what convinced the brass that something must be done.
The remedy took the form of a porta pega-gordo (or “fat catcher door”), 6′ 6″ high, but only 12.5” wide.
Allegedly, each monk was required to pass through it from the refectory to the kitchen to fetch his own meal. Those who couldn’t squeeze through were out of luck.
Did they have to sit in the refectory with their faces to the walls, silently eating the sins of the people (respicite quia peccata populi comeditis) while their slimmer brethren filled their bellies, also silently, face-to-the-wall, as a reader read religious texts aloud from a pulpit?
History is a bit unclear on this point, though Beckford’s enthusiasm waned when he got to the refectory:
…a square of seventy or eighty feet, begloomed by dark-coloured painted windows, and disgraced by tables covered with not the cleanest or least unctuous linen in the world.
According to a German Wikipedia entry, the monks passed through the porta pega-gordo monthly, rather than daily, a more manageable mortification of the flesh for those with healthy appetites.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
If you are assembling a bucket list of destinations for when we can travel freely again, consider adding this beautiful Gothic monastery (and the celebrated pastry shop across the street). Your choice whether or not to suck it in for a photo in front of the porta pega-gordo.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Have you ever wondered what generations hundreds or thousands of years hence will make of our strip malls, office parks, and sports arenas? Probably not much, since there probably won’t be much left. How much medium-density fibreboard is likely to remain? The colorful structures that make the modern world seem solid, the grocery shelves, fast food counters, and shiny product displays, will return to the sawdust from which they came.
Back in antiquity, on the other hand, things were built to last, even through the fires and devastation of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Archaeologists will be discovering for many more years everyday features of Pompeii that survived a historic disaster and the ordinary ravages of time. In 2019, a team fully unearthed what is known as a thermopolium, a fancy Greek word for a snack bar that “would have served hot food and drinks to locals in the city,” the BBC reports. The find was only unveiled this past Saturday.
You can see the excavation in a subtitled virtual tour at the top conducted by Massimo Osanna, Pompeii’s general director and the “mastermind,” Smithsonian writes, behind the Great Pompeii Project, a “$140 million conservation and restoration program launched in 2012.”
Richly decorated with brightly-colored paintings, preserved by ash, the Thermopolium of Regio V, as it’s known, features a scene of a nereid riding a sea-horse. Surrounding her on all sides of the counter are illustrations of the food for sale, including “two mallard ducks shown upside down, ready to be cooked and eaten,” notes the official Pompeii site, “a rooster,” and “a dog on a lead, the latter serving as a warning in the manner of the famed Cave Canem.”
Undeterred and spurred on by the Romans’ famed love of graffiti, someone scratched a “mocking inscription” into the frame around the dog: “NICIA CINAEDE CACATOR—literally ‘Nicias (probably a freedman from Greece) Shameless Shitter!’” The message may have been left by a disgruntled worker, “who sought to poke fun at the owner.” Also found at the site were bone fragments in containers belonging to the animals pictured, as well as human bones and “various pantry and transport materials” such as amphorae, flasks, and other typical Roman containers.
Despite its elaborate design and the excitement of its discoverers, the thermopolium was nothing special in its day. Such counters were like Starbucks, “widespread in the Roman world, where it was typical to consume the prandium (the meal) outside the house. In Pompeii alone there are eighty of them.” Will future archaeologists thrill over the discovery of a Cinnabon in a thousand years’ time? We’ll never know, but somehow I doubt it. Learn much more about this discovery at the official site for Pompeii, which hopes to reopen to visitors in the Spring of 2021. All images come via Pompeiisites.org.
You need never endeavor to make any of the recipes world renowned chef Jacques Pépin produced on camera in his 2008 series More Fast Food My Way.
The helpful hints he tosses off during each half hour episode more than justify a viewing.
The menu for the episode titled “The Egg First!,” above, includes Red Pepper Dip, Asparagus Fans with Mustard Sauce, Scallops Grenobloise, Potato Gratin with Cream, and Jam Tartines with Fruit Sherbet so simple, a child could make it (provided they’re set up with good quality poundcake in advance.)
Delicious… especially when prepared by a culinary master Julia Child lauded as “the best chef in America.”
And he’s definitely not stingy with matter-of-fact advice on how to peel asparagus, potatoes and hard boiled egg, grate fresh nutmeg with a knife, and dress up store bought mayo any number of ways.
Many of the dishes harken to his childhood in World War II-era Lyon:
When we were kids, before going to school, my two brothers and I would go to the market with my mother in the morning. She had a little restaurant… There was no car, so we walked to the market—about half a mile away—and she bought, on the way back, a case of mushrooms which was getting dark so she knew the guy had to sell it, so she’d try to get it for half price… She didn’t have a refrigerator. She had an ice box: that’s a block of ice in a cabinet. In there she’d have a couple of chickens or meat for the day. It had to be finished at the end of the day because she couldn’t keep it. And the day after we’d go to the market again. So everything was local, everything was fresh, everything was organic. I always say my mother was an organic gardener, but of course, the word ‘organic’ did not exist. But chemical fertilizer did not exist either.
If you have been spending a lot of time by yourself, some of the episode themes may leave a lump in your throat—Dinner Party Special, Game Day Pressure, and Pop Over Anytime, which shows how to draw on pantry staples and convenience foods to “take the stress out of visitors popping in.”
The soon to be 85-year-old Pépin (Happy Birthday December 18, Chef!) spoke to Zagat earlier about the pandemic’s effect on the restaurant industry, how we can support one another, and the beauty of home cooked meals:
People—good chefs—are wondering how they will pay their rent. It is such a terrible feeling to have to let your employees go. In a kitchen, or a restaurant, we are like a family, so it is painful to separate or say goodbye. That said, it is important to be optimistic. This is not going to last forever.
Depending on where you are, perhaps this is a chance to reconnect with the land, with farmers, with the sources of food and cooking. This is a good time to plant a garden. And gardening can be very meditative. Growing food is not just for the food, but this process helps us to reconnect with who we are, why we love food, and why we love cooking. With this time, cook at home. Cook for your neighbor and drop the food off. Please your family and your friends and your own palate with food, for yourself. This is not always easy for a chef with the pressure of running a restaurant. Cooking is therapeutic…
Many people now are beginning to suffer economically. But if you can afford it, order take-out, and buy extra for your neighbors. If you can afford it, leave a very large tip. Think about the servers and dishwashers and cooks that may not be able to pay their rent this month. If you can be more generous than usual, that would be a good idea. We need to do everything we can to keep these restaurants in our communities alive.
…this moment is a reassessment and re-adjustment of our lives. Some good things may come of it. We may have the opportunity to get closer to one another, to sit as a family together at the table, not one or two nights a week, but seven! We may not see our friends, but we may talk on the phone more than before. Certainly, with our wives and children we will be creating new bonds. We will all be cooking more, even me. This may be the opportunity to extend your palate, and to get your kids excited about cooking and cooking with you.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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