The Food Almanac: May 17, 2011
In The Food Almanac, Tom Fitzmorris of the online newsletter, The New Orleans Menu notes food facts and sayings.
Food Calendar
Today is National Chocolate Fondue Day. Chocolate fondue is the traditional final course of a fondue dinner, served after you've been through the bread dipped in melted cheese and the meats passed through hot oil or hot broth. It is clearly the favorite kind of fondue, involving cubes of pound cake and various fresh fruits, dunked in the molten chocolate long enough to coat it. You eat it still warm from the pot, and from the end of long fondue forks. The chocolate is usually combined with cream or evaporated milk (otherwise it might seize up) and some flavored liqueurs or even coffee. Fondue has never been common in New Orleans, because it's the sort of eating that is best done when it's cold outside. Which it is only about three months a year, if that here.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
You can melt chocolate in a double boiler or in a microwave oven, but no matter how you do it don't wander far. Taking your eyes off melting chocolate is like punching a button in an elevator with your eyes closed, and you don't even get to meet new people.
Annals of Popular Cuisine
On this date in 1989, retired Rolling Stone guitarist Bill Wyman opened an American-style restaurant in London called Sticky Fingers. Its menu reads like a cross between those of Houston's and Outback. Its website features an almanac of its own. For example, we learn that on this date in 1968, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull moved into 48 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London. However, the site does not report that on this day in 1975, Mick punched a restaurant's window in, and had to be taken to the hospital for 20 stitches. Wyman's place has no connection with an American chain of barbecue places with the same name.
World Food Records
On this day in 1985, Les Anderson caught a 94-pound, four-ounce chinook salmon in Alaska — a record. He used rod and reel, yet. I wonder what such a thing would taste like, or whether you'd even try to eat it.
Appetizing Places
Salmon, population 3,300, is in east central Idaho, 10 miles from the Montana state line. The closest major city is Butte, Mont., 142 miles away. It's named for the Salmon River, which itself is named for the several species of the delicious fish that spawn in these waters. The Salmon River Mountains to the west and the Bitterroot Range to the east both tower over 4,500 feet above the town of Salmon, which lies in the center of the river's valley. Lewis and Clark came here during their 1805 expedition. If you're hungry, try the Burnt Bun, right in the middle of town.
Food and the Arts
Sandro Botticelli, who painted the iconic "Birth of Venus," was born today in 1444. His masterpiece is known to foodies as "Venus on the Half Shell."
Annals of Food Research
Elvin Charles Stakman, a plant pathologist, spent his life combatting world hunger by researching and fighting diseases in food plants, notably wheat, corn, and other cereals. His passion for his work was fueled as much by concern for the poor (especially in Mexico) as by scientific imperatives. He was born today in 1885.
Edible Dictionary
chinook salmon, n. — One of a number of names for the largest member of the salmon family. (Another common one is king salmon.) It's one of the world's best eating fish, much appreciated in all the places where it lives. In the Western Hemisphere, it's found from San Francisco up to the Bering Strait, and down the east coast of Asia to Japan. It spends most of its life in the ocean, but at spawning time it swims up rivers. One population travels about 1,800 miles up the Yukon River. These fish have so much stored fat that they are the most prized of all salmon. You won't likely see these in a restaurant, though, because the fishery is so isolated. The fish is named for a group of Native Americans in the Northwest.
The Saints
This is the feast day of St. Pascal Baylon, a lay Franciscan brother who lived in sixteenth-century Spain. He worked as a cook, and is one of many patron saints of cooks.
Food Namesakes
Sir Nicholas Hickman Ponsonby Bacon, 14th Premier Baronet (an hereditary knighthood in England) was born today in 1953. The famous racehorse Seabiscuit died today in 1947, at fourteen. Sugar Ray Leonard, the boxer, was born today in 1956.
Words to Eat By
"It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance." — Virginia Woolf.
Words to Drink By
"Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer." — Arnold Schwarzenegger.