The Food Almanac: June 16, 2011
In The Food Almanac, Tom Fitzmorris of the online newsletter, The New Orleans Menu notes food facts and sayings.
Eating Calendar
This is International Chorizo Day. Chorizo is a dense pork sausage made in Spain and Portugal, as well is most of the former colonies of those two countries. The pork is chopped and packed with a visible amount of fat, along with seasonings. Smoked paprika is one of the major spices, which give the sausage a little piquancy and a red color. Most Spanish chorizo is cured and smoked, and can be eaten as is. In this part of the world, however, there's another kind: chorizo fresca. This must be cooked before being eaten. Chefs are finding more uses for both kinds of chorizo in their cookery. It's good almost any way it's used: with eggs, as a seasoning meat, in a salad, with mussels, or as tapas. A restaurant that takes chorizo seriously — Rio Mar, for example — may have several varieties of the sausage.
Today is also allegedly National Fudge Day. Oh, fudge. We had a wonderful dog once named Fudge. My mother made a super-sweet fudge which was one of the few things she cooked that I never liked. That's all I've got.
Appetizing Places
Fudgearound, Tenn. is almost exactly in the center of the state, 57 miles southeast of Nashville. It's in Coffee County, which somehow sounds right. Fudgearound is an S-curve in a local road through the low, wooded hills and fills in the area. A few farmhouses are there, but I suspect the name may be a reference to a story we will never know. The most appealing place to eat is four miles up the road in Beechgrove, a place called Pig EQ Barbeque.
Edible Dictionary
ganache, n. — A rich chocolate filling or frosting, used between and over the layers of cakes when a major chocolate statement is being made. Ganache is made with chocolate and whipping cream. The former is chopped into small pieces, and the latter is warmed and whipped with the chocolate chunks until well blended. Depending on the amount of cream, used, ganache can range from thick and intense — almost like a fudge — to fluffy and mellow. Either way, the flavor is much more explosively chocolaty than chocolate alone. Ganache is also used to make chocolate truffles.
Annals of Junk Food
Today in 1903, the Patent Office granted a trademark for Pepsi-Cola. It's named for pepsin (an enzyme that was supposed to help digestion) and the kola nut, which supplied not only a distinctive flavor but also caffeine. The formula also included vanillin and fruit extracts. Pharmacist Caleb D. Bradham was its creator; like most druggists, he had a soda fountain in his establishment.
Today is the birthday (1893!) of Cracker Jack. The achievement of its creator R.W. Rueckheim was to coat popcorn and peanuts with caramel in such a way that they wouldn't stick together. The name was slang at the time for something that would be called "awesome" today. Sailor Jack and his dog Bingo were on the box from the beginning.
Food in Literature
This is Bloomsday, so called by avid fans of James Joyce's Ulysses. The peripatetic wanderings of Leopold Bloom and the other characters in the book began on this day and ended the next. A lot of eating and drinking goes on. I once made the mistake of trying to listen to an audiobook of Ulysses, and found it impossible. Fortunately, I have the actual book, which I should have read in college. Someday I will finally get around to reading it, and turning in my report to the professor in hopes of having that D reversed.
Food and the Environment
Archie Fairley Carr, a marine biologist, was born today in 1909. He spent much of his career studying sea turtles, and as a result discovered why their numbers were decreasing so rapidly. His work had two results: we no longer use green sea turtles for turtle soup (as we did as recently as the 1980s), and the turtle populations are beginning to rebound, leaving them free to get covered with BP oil.
Food in the Movies
The movie Grease premiered today in 1978, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Not the kind of grease we encounter in culinary work. But it gives me an opening to bring up a usage matter. "Grease" is an ugly word to use when talking about food. My skin crawls when I hear a cook saying something like, "Then you put the soft shell crabs into the hot grease..." To me, the only acceptable uses of the word are in a pejorative context, as in, "The pot of chili had a half-inch-deep layer of orange grease floating on top." Let's eliminate "grease" from the language of fine cooking.
Deft Dining Rule #183
Restaurants that use the word "grease" in their descriptions of their food are very likely to serve greasy food.
Food Namesakes
Jim Dine, a major force in Pop Art, made his first strokes today in 1938. August Busch III, the boss of Anheuser-Busch, the country's biggest brewer of beer, showed his head today in 1940. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates made her first statement today in 1941. I've read many of her short stories, but never her big works, like The Time Traveler. Any good? The Dan Quayle Vice-Presidential Center and Museum opened today in 1993, in Huntington, Ind.
Words to Eat By
"Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes. It makes people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt." — Judith Olney, food writer.
"I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them." — Barbara McClintock, American botanist, born today in 1902.
Words to Drink By
"I'm going to be around until the Atomic Energy Commission finds a safe place to bury my liver." — Phil Harris, comedian and musician, and early king of Bacchus. The AEC must have found the spot in 1995.