After elaborate Christmas or Hannukah meals (see the comments from our previous post for some great descriptions of absurdly time-consuming puddings, potica, buche de Noel and almond macaroons), and after plenty of champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, it’s no wonder traditional New Year’s Day meals tend to be humble.
Humble in the hope of wealth, that is. In the South, people eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s, the logic being that if you eat poor at the beginning of the year, you’ll eat rich during the rest of it. Collared greens, another tradition, are supposed to represent money.
The hope for a prosperous year pops up all over the world. In the Philippines, round fruit are supposed to represent money. Lentils serve the same purpose in Hungary and Italy. And in Spain people eat 12 grapes at the strike of midnight, a tradition that supposedly turns 100 years old today.
Happy New Year! And enjoy whatever food or drink are part of your celebration.
Image courtesy of Piano Castelluccio/Wikimedia Commons
Dive into your beer with our year-end review. Image courtesy Flickr user Atilla1000
I’ll say it. The best beers in the world today are being made in the U.S. Let foreigners joke about our watery “macrobrews,” but meanwhile our craft-brewing tradition has gathered steam the way all endeavors do in our young country: with enthusiasm, ingenuity, and heaps of technology. Give us a thumbnail sketch and a couple of engineering degrees and we can found a tradition in anything you want.
And it pays to try them all. Beer is inherently unstable (unlike wine, its flavors start to get musky after a few months in the bottle), so there’s no real reason to hold a blind allegiance to the beers you’re comfortable with—they have likely only been getting worse on their long journey from the brewery. Why not try a beer from just down the block? With some 1,500 smaller names scattered around the country, finding great new beers is just one more benefit of traveling.
So here’s my personal month-by-month review of the top 12 beers of 2008. That’s 12 down, 1,488 breweries left to try. At this rate, my beer-tasting career should last me until the year 2132. It’s shaping up to be a tasty century.
January: I emerged into 2008 on the South Island of New Zealand, fresh from a nearly beer-free month in Antarctica. I wound up in Riverton, along a lonely stretch of coast beaten by the mighty Southern Ocean. The only open restaurant turned out to be closed when I walked in, but they invited me for “staffies” anyway, serving up three foamy, deep-yellow Speight’s Gold Medal Ales in succession and refusing payment. It was the perfect accompaniment to stories of gales, fish tales, and what climate change is doing to the local paua (abalone) crop.
February was deadline month, and my deadline beer is the Lost Coast Brewery’s Indica Pale Ale, brewed deep in Northern California’s “Humboldt Nation” (a county infamous for a certain controversial medicinal herb). The beer’s name is a rather adolescent pun, but as an India pale ale it’s straightforward and serious. Bitter hops explode from it, perfuming your mouth and nose in little aromatic puffs.
March is the month for Lost Coast’s Eight-Ball Stout, a beer so good I started calling my surfboard after it. Springtime in northern California sees the year’s coldest water temps. As you emerge from 50-degree water, wetsuit dripping, clambering over mussel-pocked rocks and holding a slender fiberglass plank in one raw pink hand, it helps to have something to look forward to. If it’s a thick, toasted, molassesy oatmeal stout dark enough to blot out the gorgeous California sunset, so much the better.
April saw visits to the Koreatown of San Jose, California, where I investigated the ultra-fresh Korean fried-chicken fad. You eat popcorn while the chef fries the drumsticks from scratch. When it arrives, the crispy skin is an airlock holding back scalding, partially vaporized chicken juice. The only solution is a giant bottle of OB Blue shared in small glasses with everyone at the table. Served extremely cold as damage control for the impatient eater, it’s exactly right.
In May I was involved in a neat project using technology to save whales from ship traffic off Boston (the Boston Globe described it here). Parts of Boston resemble a far-western county of Ireland, and one upshot is you can walk into any bar and get the world’s most famous stout, Guinness. Fizzed with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide, the bubbles are tiny and soft, yielding a creamy taste rather than a carbonated sting. This beer is much milder (and lower in alcohol) than its reputation. Order it on a whim.
By June I was ensconced in an upstate New York lifestyle complete with a backyard vegetable garden and nonstop bicycling. During those sweltering months two brews from the Ithaca Brewery kept me alive: the fearsomely hopped Cascazilla Ale and its only slightly less wanton sibling, Flower Power India Pale Ale. Cold, fruity in the throat, and searingly carbonated.
A return to the West Coast over July 4th brought me back inside the blessed distribution halo of the Deschutes Brewery. If it’s hot, you drink Mirror Pond Pale Ale. If it’s cold and damp, Black Butte Porter. And if night is falling and your time out West is nearly over, you spend all your energy drinking Obsidian Stout. Many people fault this beer for being too complex for a stout. It’s smoky, peaty to the point of whiskeyness, with a sweetness that vanishes halfway through the sip. My longtime favorite beer, it’s like drinking mouthfuls of the winter solstice.
The highlight of August was a friend’s wedding, and with it the opportunity to drink from a keg of authentic, locally brewed root beer. If you haven’t done this recently, give it a try. Good root beer (non-alcoholic, of course) is sweet, rich, and caramel, with that woodsy taste of birch twigs and fragrant roots, reminding me of damp Appalachian hollows and fallen leaves.
In September my carefully planned birthday weekend on Martha’s Vineyard coincided with a drive-by drenching from Hurricane Kyle. Under the circumstances, huddling in the Offshore Ale Company in Oak Bluffs was a good way to spend the afternoon. I drank the Steeprock Stout and shelled peanuts as rain poured down in torrents through our car’s sunroof.
October. Foolish brewery names are a constant risk in an industry dominated by young guys who spend a lot of time drinking. But don’t write off Smuttynose Brewery just yet. (It’s actually the name of a quaint island off New Hampshire.) One way or another, their Robust Porter gets the name exactly right. Great beers should evoke tastes rather than ladle them onto your tongue, and that’s the way this beer treats its dark sugars and woody bitterness.
In November I discovered Butternuts brewery’s Moo Thunder canned stout. It’s a good, Guinness-like stout that gets extra points for delivery. Aluminum takes much less energy to recycle than glass, so putting beer back into cans, and keeping the flavor intact, strikes a blow for the environment. Pour it into a glass and feel virtuous while you watch the head develop.
I’m still auditioning brews for the role of “beer of December”, and I have high hopes of encountering some promising newcomer as I head out on a holiday-season road trip. Surely someone out there can offer a suggestion or two?
Most of us eat too much during the winter holidays—even though we know that all those latkes, lefse, or gingerbread men can linger around our waistlines well into the new year. It’s easy to see why advertisements abound for “easy weight loss” products. But is there such a thing?
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the FDA chose late December to issue a consumer warning about tainted weight-loss pills. Apparently, many of the so-called natural weight-loss remedies now on the market contain “undeclared active pharmaceutical ingredients” that pose health risks for consumers. Some ingredients, like rimonabant, are not FDA-approved for marketing in the United States, while others are approved for a very different purpose—phenytoin, used in “3X Slimming Power” and “Extrim Plus,” is actually an anti-seizure medication. And phenolphthalein, found in at least eight brands of weight-loss pills, is a suspected carcinogen. Sibutramine, present in nearly every brand of pill on the FDA’s list, is a powerful appetite suppressant that is approved only for prescription use (brand name Meridia) because it can cause serious increases in blood pressure and heart rate.
Many herbal supplements, like chitosan or guar gum, have proven unlikely to cause weight loss, and can cause unpleasant side effects like constipation, flatulence, and bloating. Green tea extract might boost metabolism and curb the appetite, but at the cost of similarly nasty side effects.
Though the shocking prevalence of obesity in America is a relatively recent trend, the hunger for an easy cure dates back at least a century:
“It is all a matter of food,” declared a 1904 Chicago Tribune article titled “How to Get Fat or Thin.”
The author explains the differences between carbohydrates (”fuel foods”), protein and fat, and offers this advice: “If anybody who finds himself or herself beginning to get too fat will simply give up potatoes and bread for a while, the tendency will promptly cease… As for meats (if lean), as well as eggs, they are muscle and blood makers, and could never contribute fat to the most corpulently inclined individual.”
The best strategy, of course, is simply to know what your body needs and eat accordingly. And in case you needed a little extra motivation, consider that Tribune writer’s closing argument: “How many old people do you know who are overfat?…The reason is that corpulent persons rarely reach old age; they die first.”
Gingerbread men, courtesy of Flickr user Gaetan Lee
Tis the season to be gingerbread! The sweet-and-spicy treat flavored by a lumpy little root is a ubiquitous celebrity in fall and winter, starring in everything from cute cookies and overpriced lattes to edible construction projects. You can even buy gingerbread-scented mascara or dog shampoo, if you really can’t get enough of the stuff.
As I bit the head off a gingerbread man the other day, I wondered: Whose bright idea was this delicious concoction, anyway?
Fueled by a piece of Starbucks gingerbread loaf (which proved rather disappointing), I followed a trail of crumbs (okay, just a helpful librarian) to “The Gingerbread Book.” According to sugarcraft scholar Steven Stellingwerf (I want his job!), gingerbread may have been introduced to Western Europe by 11th-century crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. Its precise origin is murky, although it is clear that ginger itself originates in Asia.
Gingerbread was a favorite treat at festivals and fairs in medieval Europe—often shaped and decorated to look like flowers, birds, animals or even armor—and several cities in France and England hosted regular “gingerbread fairs” for centuries. Ladies often gave their favorite knights a piece of gingerbread for good luck in a tournament, or superstitiously ate a “gingerbread husband” to improve their chances of landing the real thing.
By 1598, it was popular enough to merit a mention in a Shakespeare play (”An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy ginger-bread…”). Some even considered it medicine: 16th-century writer John Baret described gingerbread as “A Kinde of cake or paste made to comfort the stomacke.”
Stellingwerf notes that the meaning of the word “gingerbread” has been reshaped over the centuries. In medieval England, it referred to any kind of preserved ginger (borrowing from the Old French term gingebras, which in turn came from the spice’s Latin name, zingebar.) The term became associated with ginger-flavored cakes sometime in the 15th century.
In Germany, gingerbread cookies called Lebkuchen have long been a fixture at street festivals, often in the shape of hearts frosted with sugary messages like “Alles was ich brauch bist du” (All I need is you) or “Du bist einfach super” (You’re really super). As far as I can tell, Germans also invented the concept of making gingerbread houses, probably inspired by the witch’s candy cottage in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel.
North Americans have been baking gingerbread for more than 200 years—even George Washington’s mother gets credit for one recipe—in shapes that ranged from miniature kings (pre-revolution) to eagles (after independence).
These days, as The New Food Lover’s Companion (a lovely early Christmas present from my inlaws-to-be) explains it, “gingerbread generally refers to one of two desserts. It can be a dense, ginger-spiced cookie flavored with molasses or honey and cut into fanciful shapes (such as the popular gingerbread man). Or, particularly in the United States, it can describe a dark, moist cake flavored with molasses, ginger and other spices.”
Of course, when gingerbread cookies are shaped like everything from popular politicians to baby animals, polite consumption can be tricky. Is it barbaric to bite off the head first? Or worse to start by amputating an extremity? If you nibble on decorations first, does the plaintive voice of that character from Shrek echo in your imagination (“Not my gumdrop buttons! “) ?
Does your family have a traditional holiday dish that you eat at only one time of year—and for good reason? It’s not that the dish tastes bad. Maybe it requires obscure ingredients or specialized equipment, or maybe it takes an absurd amount of time or upper body strength to prepare. Is there some recipe you make that, in its disdain for modern conveniences, makes you feel sort of Amish for the day?
In my family it’s lefse, a Scandinavian potato tortilla (basically). You peel potatoes (get all the eyes or they’ll come back to haunt you), boil them, mash them, rice them, mix them with flour and cream and butter and sugar, press the mix into loaf pans, chill overnight (yes, it takes two days), cut into slices, roll VERY thin, use a lefse stick to drape one piece onto a lefse griddle, bake, flip, and fold. Then slather it with butter and sugar, roll it up, and eat. (Or follow the directions in poem form.)
Several people around Smithsonian.com HQ have similar stories. Sarah from Surprising Science says her mom makes Polish cookies: “Cruschiki are little knots of crispy fried dough covered in powdered sugar. The recipe has several steps, and the dough is hard to roll out.”
An associate editor’s parents make baccala, a fish soup. The hardest part is finding the main ingredient—salted, dried cod—and then you have to soak the cod until it’s plump and some of the salt has dissolved away.
Beth, from Around the Mall, brought in caramels the other day made according to her grandma’s recipe. Beth says that if the preparation goes really wrong, the burned caramel sticks to the pot and you have to throw the pot away.
A Venezuelan friend of Diane makes hallacas. You roll a complicated mixture of meats and spices up in a cornmeal dough, then wrap with plantain leaves and steam. A lot of work, but a great excuse for friends or family to sit around a table together getting their hands dirty.
Anika’s mom makes Jalebi, “a fried funnel cake covered in sugary syrup. It requires saffron, cardamom, and a kadhai (the Indian version of a wok).”
Andrea, who used to live in Greece, says cookies called melomakarona appear there this time of year. They are made of honey, lemon juice, walnuts and semolina. She points out that the ingredients would have been available in ancient Greece, possibly traded by the Phoenicians, and an alternate name for the cookies is “Phoenikia.”
Jesse’s dad’s side of the family makes fried oysters, which used to be readily available only around Christmas. His mom makes pizzelles—thin, waffle-like cookies that require a special iron, and are “supposed to be the culinary equivalent of catching snowflakes on your tongue.”
Aside from a few odd proteins (or, in Hugh’s case, ethanol), most of these family traditions seem to involve a lot of starch and sugar, nature’s two finest food groups. Everybody feeling nostalgic now? Or maybe just hungry? Let us know about your own quirky traditional dishes.
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