The Food Almanac: June 21, 2011
In The Food Almanac, Tom Fitzmorris of the online newsletter, The New Orleans Menu notes food facts and sayings
Looking Up
The summer solstice occurs at 1:16 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. This ought to be a holiday. It's one of the four special days that have the same meaning for every living thing on earth.
Eating Calendar
Today is allegedly National Peaches and Cream Day. As popular as that saying is, when's the last time
you ever had that combination? Most of the time the cream part is ice cream. That's more than a little good.
Appetizing Places
Peach Creek is a small tributary of the Navasota River in southeast Texas. The community named for the creek is a country crossroads 10 miles southeast of College Station, the home of Texas A&M. They mainly raise cattle around here, with big open fields interspersed with live oak trees spread well apart. For more pulse-pounding action, the Texas International Speedway is about a mile west, and there are rodeo grounds right there in Peach Creek. But you have to drive the six miles into College Station for a bite to eat, at the Cotton Patch Cafe.
Annals of Cajun Food
Halifax, Nova Scotia was founded today in 1749. It was established by the British, who in the ensuing years would force the existing French Acadian population in the area to either give up Catholicism or move. Most of them moved to the French colony of Louisiana, where they created the unique Cajun (a slurring of "Acadian") culture. Meanwhile, Halifax grew to be an important port. It's a city of significant size, but the funny thing about it is that it's unincorporated. I've been there twice in the past few years. The lobsters, mussels, and scallops around there are as good as any in the world.
Moving Food Around
On this date in 1933, the first grain barge ever to travel from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico down the Mississippi River arrived in New Orleans. It left Lake Michigan by way of the Chicago River, then down the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal to the Illinois River, then the Mississippi.
Music to Eat Fruit By
O.C. Smith, whose biggest hit record was Little Green Apples, was born today in 1932, in Mansfield, La. His real name is "Ocie," so the second initial doesn't stand for anything. Before he went solo, he was a big-band jazz singer with Count Basie's matchless orchestra.
Edible Dictionary
pippin, n. — An apple — generally a good one — from a tree grown from a seed. Since the apples on ungrafted seedling trees are almost never like the apple the seed came from, when a good apple results from such a tree it's considered a lucky break — a "pippin." (Most fruit from chance seedlings are very bad for anything but making cider.) The most famous American pippin is the Newtown pippin, a green apple from a tree that grew on Long Island, N.Y. in the 1700s. Trees grafted from that one were grown throughout the American colonies. It is still considered one of the best of the green apples.
Food Namesakes
Siméon Denis Poisson, a French mathematician who has a famous equation named for him, presented his first problem today in 1781.
Words To Eat By
"'The bigger the better' is, though a common, not a universal rule; it does not, for instance, apply to fish." — George Saintsbury, British historian and critic.
Words To Drink By
"We borrowed golf from Scotland as we borrowed whiskey. Not because it is Scottish, but because it is good." — Horace Hutchinson, early star golfer.