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

in Art, Film, Food & Drink | December 12th, 2018

In the early 1980s, Danish experimental filmmaker Jørgen Leth came to America intent on capturing it live as it was actually lived across that vast, still-new, and often strange country. The result, 66 Scenes from America, offers images of roadside motels and diners, desert landscapes, the Manhattan skyline, miles of lonely highway, and stars and stripes aplenty. Halfway through it all comes the longest, and perhaps most American, scene of all: Andy Warhol eating a fast-food hamburger. A few moments after he accomplishes that task, he delivers the film’s most memorable line by far: “My name is Andy Warhol, and I just finished eating a hamburger.”

“Leth did not know Warhol, but he was a bit obsessed with him so he definitely wanted to have him in his movie,” writes DailyArt’s Zuzanna Stanska. And so when Leth came to New York, he simply showed up at Warhol’s Factory and pitched him the idea of consuming a “symbolic” burger on film. “Warhol immediately liked the idea and agreed to the scene – he liked it because it was such a real scene, something he would like to do.”

When Warhol showed up at the photo studio Leth had set up to shoot the scene, complete with a variety of fast-food hamburgers from which he could choose, he had only one question: “Where is the McDonald’s?” Leth hadn’t thought to pick one up from the Golden Arches as well, not knowing that Warhol considered McDonald’s packaging “the most beautiful.”

Warhol had a deep interest in American brands. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Surely the same could be said of any particular fast-food burger, even if Warhol couldn’t have his preferred brand on that particular day in New York in 1981. In the event, he chose a Whopper from Burger King, still a well-known brand if hardly as iconic as McDonald’s — or, for that matter, as iconic as Warhol himself.

Above, you can see Leth talking years later about his experience filming Warhol.

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

Andy Warhol Digitally Paints Debbie Harry with the Amiga 1000 Computer (1985)

Warhol’s Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties (1989)

The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Minutes

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Celebrate Emily Dickinson’s 188th Birthday with Her Own Cake Recipes: Coconut Cake, Gingerbread, Doughnuts & More

in Food & Drink, Life, Poetry | December 10th, 2018

Happy Emily Dickinson Day!

What are you doing to celebrate the poet’s 188th birthday?

The Emily Dickinson Museum took advantage of the weekend to celebrate the occasion a couple of days early with Victorian crafts, readings, festive piano music, a display exploring the Dickinson family’s gift-giving tradition, and slices of coconut cake, baked from the birthday girl’s own recipe.

Given the Belle’s penchant for home-baked goodies, we’re dispensing with the more high-minded endeavors to concentrate on the sweet side of this literary holiday.

LitHub reports that

…whenever Dickinson saw children playing in her family gardens, “she headed for the pantry, filled a basket with cookies or slices of cake—often gingerbread—carried it upstairs to a window in the rear of the house (so their mothers wouldn’t see), and attached the basket to a rope to slowly lower it to the “storm-tossed, starving pirates” or the “lost, roaming circus performers” eagerly waiting below.

Truly, we owe it to her to return the favor.

Shall we start with some Emily Dickinson doughnuts?

Like many experienced home cooks of the period, Dickinson’s instructions are a bit vague. She seems to have gotten the recipe from an acquaintance named Kate, jotting down measurements and ingredients, after which, she knew what to do.

If you’ve never worked with yeast before, you might want to proceed straight to her Black Cake recipe…

Or not. You may have 5 pounds of raisins on hand, but this is no spur-of-the-moment recipe.

As librarians Heather Cole, Emilie Hardman, and Emily Walhout demonstrate below, this whopper needs to spend 3 weeks wrapped in a brandy-soaked cheesecloth after it comes out of the oven.

Onward then to Miss Dickinson’s gingerbread.

As if those with December birthdays aren’t overshadowed enough by the tyranny of Christmas! Must their special day’s cake flavor be dictated by that big gorilla too? (For those who say yes, Rosa Lillo of Pemberley Cup and Cakes breaks the recipe down 21st-century style, adding a simple icing sugar glaze and an embossed floral pattern.)

Perhaps that famous coconut cake really is the best choice for observing Emily Dickinson Day.

See if you can detect a note of inspiration in that buttery flavor. As was her habit, Dickinson flipped the scrap of paper on which she’d listed the ingredients, and pencilled in the beginnings of a poem:

The Things that never can come back, are several —

Childhood — some forms of Hope — the Dead —

Though Joys — like Men — may sometimes make a Journey —

And still abide —

We do not mourn for Traveler, or Sailor,

Their Routes are fair —

But think enlarged of all that they will tell us

Returning here —

“Here!” There are typic “Heres” —

Foretold Locations —

The Spirit does not stand —

Himself — at whatsoever Fathom

His Native Land —

Those whose Emily Dickinson Day gift giving list includes a poetry lover / amateur cook may wish to stuff their stockings with a copy of the 1976 book Emily Dickinson: Profile of the Poet as Cook with Selected Recipes.

The Online Emily Dickinson Archive Makes Thousands of the Poet’s Manuscripts Freely Available

An 8‑Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City through December 20th in the 10th anniversary production of Greg Kotis’ apocalyptic holiday tale, The Truth About Santa, and tonight, as the host of the book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The First House Powered by Coffee

in Food & Drink, Technology | November 8th, 2018

Since 2006, Dunkin’ Donuts has used the tagline “America Runs on Dunkin’,” presumably alluding to the coffee and donuts that get millions of Americans through each morning. But maybe, all along, they’ve had something more in mind. Above, Dunkin’ presents a tiny home powered by biofuel made from spent coffee grounds, a process masterminded by a company called Blue Marble Biomaterials. Working with luxury tiny homebuilder New Frontier Tiny Homes, they’ve created a process–notes a Dunkin’ press release–that works something like this:

Step 1: Extract excess oils in the spent coffee grounds. There can be natural oils left in spent coffee grounds, all depending on the coffee bean type and original processing methods.
Step 2: Mix and react. These oils are then mixed with an alcohol to undergo a chemical reaction known as transesterification. This produces biodiesel and glycerin as a byproduct.
Step 3: Refine. The biodiesel is washed and refined to create the final product.

When all is said and done, 170 pounds of used coffee grounds translates into one gallon of fuel. From 65,000 pounds of coffee grounds, you got enough juice to power a 275 square foot home, at least for a while.

Take a 360 degree interactive tour of the tiny home here.

via New Atlas

A Rollicking French Animation on the Perils of Drinking a Little Too Much Coffee

Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Season of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials

J.S. Bach’s Comic Opera, “The Coffee Cantata,” Sings the Praises of the Great Stimulating Drink (1735)

“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Disgusting Food Museum Curates 80 of the World’s Most Repulsive Dishes: Maggot-Infested Cheese, Putrid Shark & More

in Food & Drink, Museums | November 8th, 2018

Often we get to know each other by talking which foods we like. Perhaps even more often, we get to know each other by talking about which foods we hate. Entertaining disagreements tend to arise from such discussions, usually around traditionally divisive comestibles like anchovies, cilantro, brussel sprouts, or the Japanese dish of fermented soybeans known as natto. But however many of us prefer to avoid them, these foods all look more or less conventional compared to the dishes curated by the Disgusting Food Museum, which the Washington Post’s Maura Judkis describes as “the world’s first exhibition devoted to foods that some would call revolting.”

“The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods,” says the museum’s official site. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?” Judkis notes that “the museum’s name and its contents are pretty controversial — one culture’s disgusting is another culture’s delicacy.

That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant larvae eaten in Mexico, or shirako, the cod sperm eaten in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chinese dish of nests made from bird saliva.” It all goes to emphasize the Disgusting Food Museum’s stated premises: “Disgust is one of the six fundamental human emotions. While the emotion is universal, the foods that we find disgusting are not. What is delicious to one person can be revolting to another.”

With interest in food seemingly at an all-time high — and not just food, but traditional food from all around the world — the cultural studies wing of academia has begun to get serious mileage out of that proposition. But the Disgusting Food Museum has taken on a less intellectual and much more visceral mission, placing before its visitors durian fruit, banned from many a public space across Asia for its sheer stinkiness; casu marzu, which the museum’s site describes as “maggot-infested cheese from Sardinia”; and hákarl, which Judkis describes as “a putrid shark meat dish from Iceland that the late Anthony Bourdain said was one of the worst things he had ever tasted.”

You can learn more about these and the Disgusting Food Museum’s other offerings from the Associated Press video at the top of the post, as well as at Smithsonian and the New York Times. If you’d like to see, smell, and even taste some of its exhibits for yourself, you’ll have to make the trek out to Malmö, Sweden. The project comes from the mind of Samuel West, a Swede best known for creating the Museum of Failure (previously featured here on Open Culture), whose half-American parentage has made him familiar with several items of U.S. cuisine that gross out non-Americans, from Spam to Jell‑O pasta salad (shades of James Lileks’ midcentury midwest-focused Gallery of Regrettable Food) to Rocky Mountain oysters. Despite being American myself, I’ve never known anyone who likes that last, a dish made of bull testicles, or at least no one has ever admitted to me that they like it. But if someone did, I’d certainly feel as if I’d learned something about them.

Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine

What Prisoners Ate at Alcatraz in 1946: A Vintage Prison Menu

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Wagashi: Peruse a Digitized, Centuries-Old Catalogue of Traditional Japanese Candies

in Books, Food & Drink | October 30th, 2018

If you’ve been to Japan, or even to any of the Japanese neighborhoods in cities around the world, you’ve seen wagashi (和菓子). You’ve probably, at least for a moment, marveled at their appearance as well: though essentially nothing more than sweet treats, they’re made with such striking variety and refinement that you might hesitate to bite into them.

First created in the 16th century, when trade with China made sugar into a staple in Japan, wagashi have developed into one of the country’s signature delicacies, appreciated for their taste but beloved for their form. You can browse and download a three-volume catalog of wagashi designs, itself centuries old, at the web site of Japan’s National Diet Library: volume one, volume two, volume three.

The site also has a special section about wagashi, though in Japanese only. The catalog itself, of course, also contains text in no other language, but wagashi isn’t about words.

Even without knowing Japanese, you can flip through each volume’s pages (volume one — volume two - volume three) and recognize the look of dozens of sweets you’ve seen or maybe even sampled in real life, where their colors may well look even more vivid than on the page.

Like most realms of traditional Japanese culture, wagashi demands painstaking craftsmanship. Often brought out at festivals and given as gifts, it also celebrates different aspects of Japan: its seasons, its landscapes, chapters of its history, and even its works of literature. Some wagashi designs do this abstractly, while others lean toward the representative, replicating real sights and symbols in a form both recognizable and edible.

Many wagashi, as Boing Boing’s Andrea James writes, “still look the same as they did hundreds of years ago when the art form flourished in the Edo period” of the 17th and 18th century. Instagram, as she points out, has proven a natural online home for not just the kind of traditional wagashi seen in these catalogs but designs that pay tribute to figures of more recent vintage, such as Rilakkuma and the aliens from Toy Story.

And though Halloween may not be an originally Japanese holiday, it hasn’t stopped modern wagashi-makers from bringing out the ghosts, skulls, and jack-o-lanterns in force.

via BoingBoing

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

How Japanese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bamboo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

20 Mesmerizing Videos of Japanese Artisans Creating Traditional Handicrafts

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

in Economics, Food & Drink, History | October 8th, 2018

We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of years to get used to money in the form of coins and bills, though exactly how long we’ve used them varies quite a bit from region to region. Of course, some spots on the globe have yet to adopt them at all, as anyone who’s heard the much-told story of the Yap islanders and their huge limestone discs knows. But the history of money is, in essence, the history of bartering — trading something you have for something you want — becoming more and more abstract; now, with digital crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, it looks like money will ascend one level of abstraction higher. But to imagine what a truly non-abstract currency looks like, just look at the ancient Mayan civilization, the members of which paid their debts with chocolate.

“The ancient Maya never used coins as money,” writes Science’s Joshua Rapp Learn. “Instead, like many early civilizations, they were thought to mostly barter, trading items such as tobacco, maize, and clothing.” Thanks to the work of archaeologist Joanne Baron, a scholar of murals, ceramic paintings, carvings and other objects depicting life in the Classic Maya period which ran from around 250 BC to 900 AD, we’ve now begun to learn how chocolate took on a major, money-like role in the Maya’s economy.

Some images depict cups of chocolate itself, which the Mayans usually enjoyed in the form of a hot drink, being accepted as payment, and others show chocolate traded in the coin-like form of “fermented and dried cacao beans.” In many scenes, Maya leaders receive their tributes (or taxes) most often in the form of “pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quantity of dried cacao beans they contain.”

Cacao beans eventually became such a valuable currency “that it was evidently worth the trouble to counterfeit them,” writes Smithsonian’s Josie Garthwaite in an article about the early history of chocolate (a subject about which you can learn more in the TED-ed video above). “At multiple archaeological sites in Mexico and Guatemala,” she quotes anthropologist Joel Palka as saying, “researchers have come across remarkably well-preserved ‘cacao beans’ ” that turn out to be made of clay. “Some scholars believe drought led to the downfall of the Classic Maya civilization,” Learn notes, and according to Baron, “the disruption of the cacao supply which fueled political power may have led to an economic breakdown in some cases.” That may sound strangely familiar to those of us who — even here in the 21st century, among the many who have gone nearly cashless and may soon not even need a credit card — have breakdowns of our own when we can’t get our chocolate.

Making Chocolate the Traditional Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Documented by Pollution Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Modern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vases & Artisanal Glass

Bitcoin, the New Decentralized Digital Currency, Demystified in a Three Minute Video

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

MIT Students Solve the Spaghetti Breaking Mystery That Stumped Richard Feynman

in Food & Drink, Physics | September 3rd, 2018

Even thirty years after his death, Richard Feynman remains one of the most beloved minds in physics in part because of how much attention he paid to things other than physics: drawing and painting, cracking safes, playing the bongos, breaking spaghetti. But a physics enthusiast might object, and reasonably so, that all those activities actually have a great deal to do with physics, given the physical phenomena they all demonstrate and on which they all depend. In recent years, considerable scientific attention has even gone toward spaghetti-breaking, inspiring as it did Feynman — and computer scientist Danny Hillis, who happened to be in the kitchen with him — to pose a long-unanswerable question: How come it always breaks into a million pieces when you snap it?

Maybe spaghetti doesn’t always break into a million pieces, exactly, but it never breaks in two. Discovering the secret to a clean two-part break did require a million of something: a million frames per second, specifically, shot by a camera aimed at a purpose-built spaghetti-breaking device. The results of the research, a project of students Ronald Heisser and Vishal Patil during their time at MIT, came out in a paper co-authored by MIT’s Norbert Stoop and Université Aix Marseille’s Emmanuel Villermaux, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team found, writes MIT News’ Jennifer Chu, “that if a stick [of spaghetti] is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.”

As for why spaghetti breaks into so many pieces without the twist, a question taken on by the Smarter Every Day video just above, French scientists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch won the Ig Nobel Prize by figuring that out in 2005: “When a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a ‘snap-back’ effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick.” If you twist the stick first, “the snap-back, in which the stick will spring back in the opposite direction from which it was bent, is weakened in the presence of twist. And, the twist-back, where the stick will essentially unwind to its original straightened configuration, releases energy from the rod, preventing additional fractures.”

So now we know. But the fruits of what might strike some as an obsessive and pointless quest could well further the science of fracturing, which Patil describes to the Washington Post as an outwardly “chaotic and random” process. This research could lead, as Chu writes, to a better “understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.” That’s all a long way from the kitchen, certainly, but even the most revolutionary advancements of knowledge grow out of simple curiosity, an impulse felt even in the most mundane or frivolous situations. Richard Feynman understood that better than most, hence subsequent generations of scientists’ desire to pick up whatever piqued his interest — even broken bits of Barilla No. 5.

via MIT News

The Drawings & Paintings of Richard Feynman: Art Expresses a Dramatic “Feeling of Awe”

Learn How Richard Feynman Cracked the Safes with Atomic Secrets at Los Alamos

Richard Feynman on the Bongos

What Ignited Richard Feynman’s Love of Science Revealed in an Animated Video

A Free Course from MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Free Course from MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once

in Food & Drink, MIT, Online Courses | August 13th, 2018

At MIT, Dr. Paola Rebusco usually teaches physics to freshmen. But, on behalf of the MIT Experimental Study Group, Rebusco has devised an appealing course — Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full — where she combines teaching two things many people love: learning to speak Italian and cooking Italian food. The course summary reads:

The participants in this seminar will dive into learning basic conversational Italian, Italian culture, and the Mediterranean diet. Each class is based on the preparation of a delicious dish and on the bite-sized acquisition of parts of the Italian language and culture. A good diet is not based on recipes only, it is also rooted in healthy habits and in culture. At the end of the seminar the participants will be able to cook some healthy and tasty recipes and to understand and speak basic Italian.

As Rebusco explains in a short video, this course has the advantage of making the language lessons a little less abstract. It gives students a chance to apply what they’ve learned (new vocabulary words, pronunciations, etc.) in a fun, practical context.

Above, we start you off with the first language lesson in the seminar. It begins where all basic courses start — with how to say your name. Below, you can watch the class learn to cook fresh pasta. Along the way, the course also teaches students how to make espresso, risotto, homemade pizza, bruschetta, and biscotti. Lectures for the course can be found on the MIT web site, YouTube and iTunes. Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full also appears in our collection of Free Foreign Language Lessons and 1200 Free Courses Online. Buon Appetito!

Ingredients & Cooking Instruction:

Food Preparation

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site way back in 2012.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essential Cooking Techniques: From Poaching Eggs to Shucking Oysters

Science & Cooking: Harvard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course

David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Surrealist Video

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art

How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread Dating Back to 79 AD: A Video Primer

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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

Celebrate Emily Dickinson’s 188th Birthday with Her Own Cake Recipes: Coconut Cake, Gingerbread, Doughnuts & More

The First House Powered by Coffee

The Disgusting Food Museum Curates 80 of the World’s Most Repulsive Dishes: Maggot-Infested Cheese, Putrid Shark & More

Wagashi: Peruse a Digitized, Centuries-Old Catalogue of Traditional Japanese Candies

How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

MIT Students Solve the Spaghetti Breaking Mystery That Stumped Richard Feynman

A Free Course from MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search