Food History

I should learn.

Every time I promise you things, life gets in the way. Last night I couldn’t get onto the Food History site to post and today I marketed in the morning and have slept since. If I don’t make promises to blog on a particular subject and a particular day, then all is well, isn’t it? It’s only when I say something that the universe steps in and says “No, not gonna do that.”

So, The Next Food Network Star. What did I see in it that got me so excited?

First of all, it’s a fairly typical reality show in a bunch of ways. Each of the contestants fits at least one of our assumptions of what an aspiring star ought to be. There is the young and sensitive lad who knows not of the Big World and cried when he fails. There’s the chirpy battler with scads of personality. There’s the comedienne who tells herself so often she has to be funny that she dries up when push comes to shove. There’s the man who calls someone else a diva and puts her down then finds himself paired with her for an exercise. All reality shows have this feeling to the first episode. We only find out who the contestants actually are as the season progresses, and sometimes not even then.

This means I’m interested in the contestants that were selected, but not fascinated. I was fascinated by the number of them who, given a half hour to cook something, chose comfort food that was hard to cook in a hurry. I was enthralled by the fact that all those cooking qualifications don’t actually engender depth of food knowledge.

I was intrigued by the TV food expert who explained the essence of TV food in his first sentence. He pointed out the obvious: we can taste or smell or touch the food through the TV screen, yet food is something that appeals to all senses, not just sight. He instructed the finalists to remember that they had to do something special in terms of communicating, given that screen between viewers and the food they talk about.

One of my students commented that you can’t taste the food from a recipe. That’s only true for some people. At least one of my friends and I look at each other when we encounter ingredients. We combine them in our mind and yes, we can taste them ahead of time. What surprised me was that my student was right in terms of the cooking show: we couldn’t taste what they were doing. Somehow, instead of creating a bond between us and food, they put up barriers.

I wish that I could see the whole season. I want to learn how those barriers break down as these cooks learn to communicate with their audience. I want to see who fails and why. I want to know if any of them communicate what Jennifer and I do instinctively – taste food by thinking of it. That’s what the successful cooking show host does, after all: they connect us with food and make it special and worth pursuing.

Mostly, I want to know if the guy from Iron Chef will be subtitled the whole season and if he says any more condemning things about dishes. He’s obviously the no-holds-barred judge and he has a very good way with a one-liner.

From a food history point of view, this program would be very revealing. It’s worth watching to see if using the spotting and development of celebrity through competition leads to changes in the way we identify with cooks and see our food. It’s a new juxtaposition of old components. Celebrity chefs (Taillevent – the Middle Ages), celebrity teachers (Francatelli and Soyer – 19th century), celebrity gourmands (Apicius – Ancient Rome) – these have all appeared separately in lots of our pasts. Now, though, they all appear together, in a competition to find an Escoffier. Except it isn’t really a competition to find an Escoffier. It’s a competition to find a TV host for a food show. A kind of mini-Escoffier. Somewhere down the food chain. Popular, but not a world leader.

I so wish that this was being shown in Australia. American Idol for foodies has so much potential for entertainment of the snarky sort and so much inherent possibility for food history analysis.

It starts this week. And yes, I still want to know who left the show that first episode, should any of you happen to see it.

Today is day #1 of a special two day post. The Food Network kindly sent me a DVD of the first episode of the next season of “The Next Food Network Star.” I have some thoughts on its value for food history, but I’ll get to them tomorrow. Today I have two quite particular things to say.

The first was that the review DVD did not include the final few minutes of the session (for obvious reasons), where I would have found who was thrown out that day. May I put in a plea to at least one of my US readers to let me know what happens? I so want to know who leaves the show and why!!

The second was that food TV is becoming an increasing part of our food history. Sometimes it plays the same part as the 1920s detailed instruction manuals I was reading earlier in the year. Sometime it gives teaching techniques to the novice, and fills part of the role of nineteenth century writers like Francatelli. Sometimes it has that star factor and gives us the temper tantrums and joyous antics of the famous chef or gourmand (I’m hoping that they follow Escoffier in this and not Apcius).

Food TV doesn’t meet just one aspect of our food needs – it covers a whole range of them. So what about the “The Food Network Star”? What roles does it fill?

See you again, same time, same station, where all will be revealed.

PS I’m still open to additions to my list of topics to explore here over the next six months. Speak up, and speak often, which is way more ethical than voting early and often.

Tonight is devoted to the fine art of class preparation. I have 16 hours of teaching in two days, so I have to do every scrap in advance.

What does this mean for food history? First of all, it means that I shall be doing my first review post for a new food program tomorrow night my time, and maybe the second (if there is a second) the night after. This is of special interest to US readers who are interested in Food Network programs, because it’s my thoughts about the forthcoming (incoming? upcoming?) program from them. At this moment the only thing I can tell you is that I wouldn’t make their shortlisting. They assume formal culinary attainments or truly impressive teach-yourself stuff: PhDs in history are not the right qualifications.

I’m going to leave you with a question, in lieu of a proper blog post. You can answer in the comments or send me an email (and Laura, that travel soup recipe is already in the answers). What I want to know is what you want more of over winter/summer. Retro recipes? Ancient recipes? Information about books? Information about ingredients? Bad jokes? Interviews of luminaries? All of the above? Something else entirely? Giveaways? More bad jokes?

The more people who tell me what they want to see, the more likely it is that the blog will be exactly what you want it to be. No answers mean that Laura gets her soup recipe and I talk about what I feel like talking about each and every day. Well, maybe she doesn’t get her soup recipe each and every day. Once will be enough for that, I should think.

Sari gave me a family recipe a while back and I just realised I never gave it to you. I feel rather guilty, because those of you with waffle irons and a love of SE Asian food will want to taste this one.

Australia is culturally mixed. Sometimes we’re culturally mixed up, but that’s another issue entirely.

This recipe is a small illustration of how some recipes survive when cultures combine into a family and some don’t. In my family, as you’ve seen, the festive meals have a touch of central and Eastern Europe about them, but everyday we have eaten a very Anglo cuisine for as long as I can remember. My family, however, has been here at least 150 years (on my father’s mother’s side, at least) – many families tended to Anglo-centrism a hundred years ago. These days things are different. Sari’s family has kept many more dishes from more diverse cuisines, which means that some of their food is just fantastic. Kue Kape is one of those dishes.

Kue Kape
Ground fresh sticky rice (ground in a shop, 2 days in advance and soaked overnight before cooking), fresh coconut cream, eggs and white sugar. Mix dough.

Light coals and put the waffle iron on coal and heat until hot. Add batter and tip over base. It cooks almost instantly, especially if you use the preferred thin layer of dough. Excess batter runs into a bowl. Close the iron for maybe 2 minutes. Peel off thin wafer with fingers. Person sitting next to you folds it after you have cooked it. It will cool and crisp very quickly, less than a minute.

This dish is a very social one. Creating it is a family event, like Australian Italians making passata. Sari’s family makes their own and stores it in a tin.

PS I’m making oxtail soup, which means my whole unit smells of … oxtail soup.

Tonight I don’t feel at all well. If I knew why, I’d do something to improve my lot, but I don’t, and my magic wand for mysterious and ick happenings is unaccountably absent. So, while I go off and feel unaccountably not up to much, here are some of those 1950s recipes from my grandmother. That’s the thing about family, they can sometimes be there for you even when they don’t know what they’re doing. Since my grandmother has been dead for nearly fifty years, so it’s particularly nice of her to help out, under the circumstances. Please enjoy the Flummery in particular, since Flummery is such a gorgeous name.

Passionfruit Flummery
One tablespoon gelatine 1 cup cold water, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 cups cold water, 1 cup sugar, juice of 2 oranges and 1 lemon, pulp of 7 passionfruit.

Soften gelatine in 1 cup cold water. Blend flour with little of remaining water. Heat remainder of water and sugar, stir in flour and cook over boiling water for 10 minutes. Add gelatine, stirring until dissolved. Add pulp of passionfruit and whisk until thick and creamy.

Date Sponge Pudding
1 oz butter, 2 egg half cup sugar, 1 teaspn of baking pwd, 1 cup flour, ½ cup of dates & almond mixed. Beat butter & sugar & eggs well together add dates & almonds finely chopped, then add flour & baking pwd, & mix enough milk to make it as thin as batter; put into a well greased basin, steam an our; serve with sweet sauce flavoured with almond

I’ve been watching Eurovision and have completely forgotten what I was going to post about tonight. I nearly gave you a food history vision of Eurovision instead, but decided that was pushing things a bit far.

It’s been a long time since I’ve given you an overview of a particular ingredient. In fact, it’s been such a long time you’ve probably forgotten I promised more. This means I need to be very sweet to make up for lapse. This can only mean sugar as the topic of the day. So here’s some stray information about sugar, in no coherent order.

Sugar maple is acer saccharum. Maple sugar is boiled down from the sap of the sugar maple, in autumn.

Sugarcane (saccharum officinarum) is that green stuff that grows on the side of the road in Northern NSW or Queensland, you know, the stuff that always used to be burning. Fresh sugarcane has a high water content and is squeezable by the very strong. This makes sugarcane juice a very sweet alternative to fruit juice in Singapore and other tropical places.

In less-interesting countries like Australia, people use the processed results to cook with. The white sugar we use is very processed sugar, as cane sugar naturally has a great amount of ‘other’ stuff in it, some of which gets marketed as molasses and some of which gets added back into the sugar to create blends such as ‘raw’ sugar, ‘brown’ sugar and demerara.

Beet sugar (produced in Europe) reaches its state of pristine whiteness much more easily. It comes (obviously) from beet(beta vulgaris). Beethoven was famous for growing up among them (“Beet hoven” = “Beet fields” - sorry, but it really was about time for a bad joke); related to the mangel wurzel which is such a resonant name I had to include it somewhere here. It is also related to Swiss chard which is the leafy bit, not the root. The classic beetroot soup is, of course, borscht. The cheat’s way of making borscht is with the juice from a tin of beets, a bit of shredded beet, and sour cream. And that’s your recipe for the day.

As far as I can find out, beet wasn’t a source of sugar until Napoleonic times. The story as told to me (which one day I do need to check out) was that all the main sources of sugar during the Napoleonic Wars were either controlled by Britain or blockaded by Britain and so Napoleon encouraged the development of a local source of sweetness. Why this needs checking is that the French had access to all the regions they governed, which included quite a bit of turf where sugarcane was grown in, say, the Middle Ages.

PS There are lots of other sources for sugar, but not today. Today all sugar is found in obvious palces. One such place is not the picture, which is of heritage carrots.

My life sometimes seems like a never-ending war with paper. Sometimes it seems like a never-ending war with dust. Today I declared truce on both. The truce is over, however, because I want to put another of my cookbooks away and I can’t put it away until I’ve blogged about it. Such little rituals we choose as frames for our lives.

Today’s community cookbook was published in 1988 by the Greenup County Extension Homemakers as the Anniversary Cookbook. It’s a lovely example of a standard cookbook that has been extended and personalized by a particular group, in this case the Greenup County Extension Homemakers Association (their punctuation, by the way) in Greenup Kentucky. I would so love to know the origins of the name ‘Greenup’ for a place. It fits the rich green that I encountered in my one visit to Kentucky. The grass was green enough to belong somewhere fictional.

Anyhow (and sorry for the digressions – I watched Eurovision tonight and my brain thinks in flashy images rather than linear thoughts, such is the power of Eurovision) the pro forma book that was the basis was from Kansas and the owners of it call themselves “World’s Largest Publisher of Personalized Cook Books.” It’s very much a descendant of the fundraising cookbooks of the 1950s.

These fundraising cookbooks are a very important part of local food history. They provide a consistent method of sharing food knowledge in a community. From a research point of view, the variants in them where a community has modified a standard product, such as the Greenup version, can give us valuable insights into a community and allow us insights into its distinctiveness. So many writers use phrases like “All small towns are the same,” but even slight differences can be crucial in understanding their history.

The last thing Mary had to say about the drinks testing was that she was going to bed to sleep it all off. Before she drifted away from the 1920s, however, she tested one final drink for us. This time she included audio signals, like so: “[sound effects of Mary whacking ice cubes in a plastic bag with the bottom of a jar]”.

There have definitely been changes in size and perhaps shape of glasses since the 1920s. Mary pointed out that “My champagne flutes are only 6 oz. in capacity, so by the time I’d added everything else, there was hardly room for even a jigger of ginger ale. That seemed to throw the proportions off completely. So we dumped our [name of drink, mysteriously cut by Gillian] into Collins glasses and added more ginger ale on top.

This did *not* work! ”

I ought to look into this one day, but for Conflux we’ll just use what the hotel provides.

Anyhow, Mary provided scoring and some extra notes on processes, which you need because you must share the mental vision of so much jam. The scoring suggests that this cocktail gets deleted. Mary thinks it has potential, but Steve made a face and Andrew gave it only 2/5.

To finish off her reports with a flourish, here’s “The (long) Saga of the Syrup”

Steve and I head out to pick up a small bottle of Torani’s raspberry syrup. We wind up at the local warehouse and restaurant supply store, which caters to local small coffee houses and therefore stocks every flavor of Torani’s syrup. Normally the warehouse store has a selection of small bottles — but not this time! The smallest amount of raspberry syrup we can buy is… a quart! Now, it’s not correct to say that my dear husband is a cheapskate… but he does display the same abhorrence of waste and unnecessary expense stereotypically attributed to his Celtic ancestors. So Steve gives me the Fish Eye (TM) at the thought of buying an entire quart of raspberry syrup to make a mere three cocktails. What to do, what to do? Aha! Thinking quickly, I grab a jar of raspberry jam. “Look, sweetheart! I can dilute it with a bit of hot water and cook it down to a syrup, and we’re sure to eat the rest of it on toast and such. Okay?” Okay!
Saturday and Sunday then proceed to break records for high temperatures. (The three of us go out to see a movie just to be someplace with air conditioning!) Only this evening is it finally cool enough to think about using the stove. I proceed as follows:
- Put a cup or so of raspberry jam into a saucepan.
- Add hot water from the tea kettle.
- Stir till jam is dissolved.
- Pass resulting solution through a fine mesh strainer to remove the seeds.
- Simmer solution carefully until it’s reduced to a syrup, using low heat, because if I scorch this batch, I’ll have to do it all over again!
- Grab wide-mouthed canning funnel and nearest clean glass jar.
- Fill jar with alarmingly liquid syrup and put it in the fridge to cool and (hopefully) thicken.
Results: Syrup thickened and held its flavor fairly well, though I still think Torani’s would have been better. We now have enough raspberry jam to last through a month of breakfasts and several batches of jam tarts. (I did mention that we went to a warehouse store… )”

Until the last tests come in, that’s it for alcohol! Thank you, Mary.

Since 5 pm I’ve been slowing down. I’ve had a very busy few weeks and, all going well, now I have a few days to myself to take a breather. This is why tonight you’re getting a news post, with little bits of updates, rather than anything substantial.

In my kitchen, the last of the medlars are bletting and in my lounge room there is a big bowl of persimmons ripening gently. I have three nice coking apples waiting for my imagination to take fire and a freezer full of good stuff for winter cooking. There’s also a big bowl of navel oranges helping me stave off winter bugs.

All my liqueurs are made for the year. Last year and this were dedicated to replenishing my very depleted stocks. Only some years bring forth suitable cherries, for instance, or sport blackberry picking. There were no blackberries these last two years. All the friends I used to go picking with have moved interstate and the other blackberry lovers and I turned out to be very busy during the crucial weeks.

So there is no more blackberry liqueur. There are cherry, various varieties of medlar liqueur and bullaces marinating nicely in quiet dark places. This gives me a nice warm feeling.

I’ll get an even nicer warmer feeling when I decant the drink and eat the fruit. I’m eating alcoholic medlars now, in fact, as I decanted my first-ever medlar liqueur last week. Even after the inroads made into it in March, I have about 600 ml left of that very first bottle. I doubt it will last until the end of winter, because so many people are curious about it. Drinking the liqueur is apparently less worrying than eating an unfamiliar fruit.

I’m not doing food history research this winter as far as I know. If someone desperately needs something, things might change, but I hope I have time to return to a larger project, concerning how modern authors handle the Middle Ages.

This means no cute new insights will grace the blog: you’ll have to wait until I’m teaching the subject again. There’s still a bit of reporting to happen (and some drinks testing) for the prohibition banquet. So it’s not all curious tidbits and interesting books and food ephemera here over winter.

And that’s where I am right now. It’s a tired night and a tired time of year, but there is a quiet peace in it. And there’s lots of warmth emanating from those dark corners where the alcohol is hidden.

Today I’m posting a little early. By ‘a little early,’ I mean at least twelve hours early. This is because today is unbelievably busy and I really don’t want to do what I normally do on an unbelievably busy day and post after midnight. Tomorrow, you see, is likewise frantic.

Today I want to talk about persimmons and medlars. This is partly because I have both in the house. I have one small bowl of medlars and have just made three giant jars of liqueur not to be opened for at least eighteen months. I have a giant bowl of persimmons and still have to decide what to do with them.

When the English settlers saw persimmons in North America, they compared them to medlars because both have very distinctive ways of ripening. You can’t eat them straight from the tree, but have to wait until they go all mushy. Both of them are early winter fruit and the ‘rotting’ that has to happen to make the fruit edible is triggered by frost, I believe.

This is called ‘bletting’ in a medlar, and I talked about it this time last year, when I set myself the exciting task of watching many medlars undergo the process. This year I was all kinds of blasé about bletting until I discovered the link made with persimmons because of it. I think my favourite mention (courtesy the OED because I couldn’t remember where I aw the quote originally) is from around 1612 where a guy called Strachey wrote in a work about Virginia “They haue a Plomb which they call Pessemmins like to a Meddeler in England, but of a deepe tawny cullour.”

Anyhow, all that is the background. What’s interesting about the Strachey statement and others is that they imply that persimmons were new to each and every one of the writers in question. This implies that they are solely found in North America.

Persimmons are North American, true, but they’re also found in China and Japan, as native species. What’s more, at least one of the major Japanese varieties doesn’t need its innards to jellify before it’s perfectly edible. You can cut it like an apple and crunch into it the moment you have it in your hands.

What’s interesting about this is that it means that the great travelers who wrote about persimmons in North America and compared them to plums and medlars had not actually traveled in China and Japan or to any place close enough to them to know about persimmons. This is using food history to help show the shape of the world. Lots of people knew lots about China and Japan in the seventeenth century. Just not everyone.

I guess I’m saying that different groups had different understanding of the world. Those people who were focused on the New World didn’t necessarily know much about other parts of the Old World.

There are good reasons for this, political and religious and socio-cultural, but what’s interesting to me is that how those people who were curious about all these new places could be entirely ignorant of the foodstuffs of their neighbours (from the same continent equals neighbouring in my book!). The Silk Road meant that there was far more regular travel between the two regions, than between Europe and North America at the same time. Yet regular contact still only meant irregular knowledge.

This is how persimmons and medlars can help us understand the shape of knowledge. Understanding the history of the way we see fruit can help us understand the way we see ourselves and our place in the world.

No new drink tests today. I don’t know whether this makes me very happy (return to normal posting!) or terribly sad (after all, watching other people get drunk at my behest isn’t something that will happen often in my life) but I’m resigned. Expect more reports when they appear.

Tonight’s normal posting is a cook book. I wanted it to be a meme; there’s a fun one going round asking everyone to say one word about the person blogging – I thought it would be cool to ask everyone to say amazingly over-the-top wonderful things about my blog, then evilly use them for promotional purposes – but this would be very wrong and so there is no meme tonight.

I have made up for my disappointing virtue by selecting a community cookbook that has a picture of a cannibal boiling a balding man. It suggests novelties that don’t eventuate inside the book, but it satiates the obviously evil inner Gillian that has emerged tonight. (I know where it’s come from, too – today was migraine day.)

This is a celebratory cookbook, despite the cover. It was put out last year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Gymea North Public School (NSW, Australia, for anyone who needs to know). Initially the school had four teachers and 118 pupils. Right now it has 300 pupils, but it doesn’t say how many teachers. Or if any of the original four are still active.

The book is an important aspect of the social history of the school. All of the recipes are from students (part and present) and teachers. They were selected to show us the family recipes linked to the school and, as such, they show us an important element of the foodways of this particular community. This sort of book is a godsend for helping understand the culture of a particular community group. All primary schools have foodways, and outsiders very seldom get to see what they look like.

What I like particularly about this book is the chapter dedicated to 1967 recipes. I was at primary school in 1967, and some recipes are very familiar (French Onion Soup) and some are very alien (Portmanteau Steak).

My second favourite bit of the book is the advertisement on the back inner flap. It gives a recipe for File Cake (cake specifically created to smuggle a file into prison). I do hope that this doesn’t suggest that the any student of Gymea North Public School might have need of such a thing.

You want a recipe from the book, don’t you? The best one of the lot is one that almost every Aussie primary school child has made at one time or another. Some of us lost teeth over these delicacies. Some saucepans were burdened. Some fingers and hands were burned. It’s good to know that the recipe for toffee hasn’t changed since I was a child.

Old Fashioned Plain Toffee

2 cups sugar
¾ cup cold water
1 tablespoon vinegar

Place all ingredients in a saucepan. Stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Bring to boil – do not stir. Cook until syrup is golden brown. Remove from heat and let bubbles settle. Pour into small paper patty pans. Sprinkle with 100s and 100s. Refrigerate until set.

Dave Postles is someone I want to meet one day. He is consistently generous with his research results, making sure that anyone with an interest in any of his subjects is well-treated. Once he sent me a book on names and I kept meaning to email a thank-you, but then I changed computers and lost his email. So he doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, unless he remembers me very slightly as an ungrateful Australian.

Anyhow, his latest gift to the world has some food history connotations, so I thought you needed to know about it and about him. He has put a whole book of his online, free for the taking. It’s called Oseney Abbey Studies and was officially published in Leicester in 2008.

The whole book is full of fascinating stuff for other types of history, but the bits of particular interest for food history start on p. 124, where he talks about markets in Oxfordshire from 1086-1350. These aren’t the international cloth markets or places to buy high-bred horses or Spanish leather, but markets for rural produce, some of which might have been the Medieval equivalent of the market I bought my persimmons at today. (I was going to write a post about those persimmons and their strange relationship with medlars, but it can wait. If you don’t want it to wait too long, though, you might have to remind me.) (more…)

We’re having a rather bitter winter and it’s slowing me right down. It’s just as well that I have drink reports to warm the cockles of my heart. They warm the tester in a much more immediate way, I should think.

Today’s tests are from Cath, who you can find at The Canberra Cook. She apologised very nicely for having fewer notes than some other testers, but, truly, there are so many ways of reporting these things and her notes were perfectly fine. I assured her of this over lunch, where we met for the first time. The longer I blog, the smaller the world becomes.

The first recipe took some deciphering, since it didn’t include measurements. Cath interpreted the recipe a bit differently to me, but her measurements produced a fine drink and we have no idea what mine would have produced, so we’ll use hers.

What Cath actually said about it was:

“This one was really pretty good - a semi-sweet martini in style, but with some darker caramel citrus notes from the martini rosso. It’s a pale amber colour, and a maraschino cherry is the perfect garnish. I liked it, but fans of the ultra-dry martini will not. Also, our visiting mixologist was aghast at the idea of shaking gin. Martinis must be stirred, not shaken! We deferred to her righteous indignation and stirred this one.

I actually liked this enough to have a second one another day.”

I liked the idea that we have caused a mixologist to fall into righteous indignation. We need to find more mixologists to create a pool of increasing wrath. This is not a useful activity, but it is another warming thought on a very icy night.

On to Cath’ second test. She found this one terrifying because of the sheer quantities of spirits. Two people each drank a quarter of the original recipe. It turned out just as well they didn’t bother with a full-size trial.

“The result? Well, it looked pretty in strawberry pink. But blah - it’s unpleasant. Not undrinkable and vile, it’s not that dramatically bad. Just blah. The ingredients battle rather than merge.” Though I think my favourite bit was “It’s an empty start, very sweet middle, and a slight bourbon finish. We tipped the remainder down the sink after making the notes.”

The third was possibly the most useful. Cath says:

“This is a bit safer! It’s reminiscent of the modern mojito. It’s complicated enough to be interesting; and not very sweet, which is a big plus for this pair of tasters, but may not suit everyone. It’s very refreshing - not too alcoholic, plenty of ice, just the thing for a hot summer afternoon . This recipe would be a keeper if we normally kept the variety of juices on hand. Sweet drink fans might like to add a dash of simple syrup.”

Of the last, Cath says “Dead simple, this one.” She also said, though, that it was “just OK, I guess, sort of, if you like ginger ale. But I still much prefer a G&T.”

And that’s it for today. Unless I get more results in, tomorrow I’m back to those cookbooks which still need to be reported on and still need to be put away. One day I’ll return to regular posts. Maybe. It depends on how cold it is and how quickly my winter stash of chocolate runs out.

Mary has given me the most wonderful reports. I feel as if I’ve made you lose out bigtime because I can’t give them in their entirety without giving away the recipes. In fact, I have made you lose out bigtime, there’s no doubt of it. To make up, I’ll give you just a bit more of her notes, without telling you what bits of recipe they’re note of. If it’s confusing, blame me, not Mary.

For one recipe, Mary needed shaved ice:

“Off I go to get the trusty food processor down from the shelf. Andrew stops me, saying, don’t bother, he’d rather have his on the rocks and he doesn’t see that it would make much difference to the taste anyway. My appeals to historical authenticity fall on deaf ears. Steve is out for a walk and therefore of no help. ;-)”

Obviously the ice was not a problem, because the results went something like this (which means this drink is on the rather-long list and possibly straight through to the final):

“Andrew: 3 out of 5 stars — still too sweet for him. (At this point we theorize that 1920s bartenders might have been sweetened their drinks more than we do nowadays to cover up any harshness or off-flavors that might have been present in the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin they were obliged to use!)

Mary: 4 out of 5 stars. Quite nice. I’d like to try it with a better brandy and served over shaved ice, the “right” way! (Mary gives Andrew “The Look”, but Andrew is now watching TV and is therefore cheerfully oblivious)

Steve (back from his walk): 5 out of 5 stars — he says it’s his new favorite! :-)”

I have one more report from her to go (ie in my in-box) and it’s a very simple one. As ever, she worked through the instructions and explained what she did. Her final report read:

“Phooey! Our club soda has gone flat. Well, I still give it 4 out of 5 for the lively citrus flavor, though Steve gives this one only 3 out of 5. I would definitely try it again with fresh soda.

Average: 3 1/2 out of 5.”

And that’s it from me until more people report in.

Thank you everyone, so far. I’m looking forward to seeing what appears in my in-box over the next few days.

I’ve finished my drinks testing, so this is the last report about me as an intending drunk. Several other people have finished theirs, too, and everything ahs been assigned. This means there won’t be an unlimited number of posts about moderns tasting early 20th century mixed drinks, which ought to make a few of you happy. I didn’t realise how much blogspace the reporting would occupy and how colourful it would all be. I’ll miss the emails with their exclamations and wry comments, so I’m a bit relieved we’re not quite there yet. In fact, I’m only being reassuring because not all of you are drinkers and maybe want to read about other things.

My last two drinks were really straightforward. One was brandy-based and warm and friendly. The other was rum-based and not.

The first had a really unpromising list of ingredients, so the taste was a nice surprise. The last had a list of ingredients that made me think “Pirates!” and it turned out such a dark black drink that I instantly wanted to rename it and turn it into a Goth-drink for the convention. This perfect pirate-gothic drink, alas, tasted like liquid molasses. My thought was that some people will give it a try, but very few will actually enjoy it. By the end, I was enjoying it, but that’s because we’re talking about a great deal of rum. By the end I would have enjoyed almost anything. It was pirate-potent. I have no hangover, but I was too tired to get out of bed at a regular time, so maybe it’s a good thing that this drink was unloveable. Our convention would have been … curious.

Rachel’s last drink was also not a success. She summed it up in one word “Yuck.” She added some interesting thoughts, though:

“I was so looking forward to this one, it seemed like such an interesting combination. It even has a good name, with a matching greeny-orange colour and murky like a swamp. But it’s sooo bad. In fact I didn’t quite trust in my own cocktail mixing skills the first time, so I made it again several nights later. Still bad.

The first mouthful is medicinal, but unlike a lot of drinks that start out that way, this one does not improve. Which got me thinking about the whole medicinal-tasting drinks thing and which came first and all. So I looked it up and Benadryl (diphenhydramine) was invented in 1943. So perhaps the taste was preferred and adapted to the pharmaceutical industry? Unlikely, but it’s not a review without a preposterous theory.”

I’ll do another post for Mary’s – don’t want to get things too crowded. Besides, you have your preposterous theory and it needs space to stew. I bet that space is greeny-orange in colour.