Online Joy

The more things change, the more they change. Eighty years later, The Joy of Cooking has a new website. Nostalgia aside, it’s a great online rendition that is run by the “Joy family” — though in daily blog post time that means primarily Irma Rombauer’s great-grandson, John Becker, as well as Megan Scott.

Not to worry, Becker assured me in a recent email exchange that the fantastically simple Joy cookbook format is not being updated into a blogger step-by-step, over-sized photo, kitchen of me/myself/I cookbook anytime soon. That brings me Joy (apologies, impossible to resist).

For more on the book’s online recipe renovation, head over to LA Weekly for the rest of the story.

Pie Evolution

If you are considering what to make for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June (You are planning an elaborate tea party to celebrate, yes?), the Detroit Free Press has an excellent suggestion: Lamprey Pie. But even if you don’t care to make the circa 1672 recipe, the article that accompanies it is full of fantastic little chewitts (small Stuart-era meat pies used as garnishes).

Things like a reminder that King Henry I may very well have died (1135) from eating too many of the blood-sucking eels — at least from the eyes of Charles Dickens’ storybook tales. There’s even a Lamprey Hotel in honor of the slippery little buggers in Gloucester.

A handful of eels are being shipped over to England from Michigan for the Queen’s celebration, as the lamprey is protected in England but just so happens to be an invasive, and overabundant, predator in the Great Lakes. Here’s the full article, should you still be lamprey curious (And really, how could anyone not be?).

Should you be actually considering making that lamprey pie recipe, take a look at the gorgeous 17th century savory pie renditions from historian Ivan Day over at Historicfood.com. A forewarning: His gorgeous royal crown pie dough rendition will forever render all of your future lattice crust-making complaints obsolete.

Cappuccino Views At The Getty

If you’ve ever found yourself completely devoid of compelling reasons for a friend to meet you at a museum on a gorgeous, beer-on-the-beach sort of Saturday (the dark galleries are at least air conditioned, the tram to the Getty is sort of fun), you have new food fodder: The Getty Restaurant is serving up multi-course meals coinciding with the museum’s Herb Ritts: L.A. Style exhibition on view through August. The exhibition is a survey of Ritts’ largely L.A.-centric work.

The exhibition is a survey of Ritts’ largely L.A.-centric work. And thus, to get to the meat of the matter (seafood, actually… sorry), short of a road trip to L.A., you’ll have to head over to LA Weekly. It’s worth the online trek to see Ritts’ stunning photo, “Djimon with Octopus” (Hollywood, 1989). A man wearing an octopus, actually. And who knows, maybe they grilled it with a little olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, after the shoot.

Wax Moth Larvae Taco (Photo: Don Bugito)

A “pre-Hispanic snackeria.” That’s what Monica Martinez of Don Bugito calls her small food business that, as she describes it, creates “amazing dishes that simply happen to have an unexpected ingredient.” The unexpected ingredient? Bugs.

No, wait. If your image of bugs as food remains comfortably plated in the novelty realm — grub worm lollipops, chocolate-covered ants, Anthony Bourdain popping a few grasshopper snacks here and there — you really need to meet Monica.

And if you’re feeling like a blue corn tortilla taco filled with wax moth larvae sautéed with garlic/pasilla peppers and served with red pickled onions, herb salsa and queso fresco (photo above), well, you can munch on that while she’s telling you about her bug food cart ideas.

Rather than yet another sensationalized candied bug affair, Don Bugito is rooted in culinary history (bugs were part of pre-Hispanic cuisine in her native Mexico), yet with a fresh (literally) take on an ages-old ingredient. Translation: Those (toffee) mealworms  needed a little vanilla ice cream with cactus syrup flavor update.

The idea came from an art project-turned-micro farm in her backyard that eventually morphed into a worm high-rise instead. You can watch her video over at LA Weekly.  It’s quite well done, and worth a watch and yeah, a few tokens in the hat collection box. And no, I’m not buggin’ (Sorry, couldn’t resist). Donations for the start-up can be made at Kickstarter until Friday, April 27. The seed capital will go to a food cart that Monica, an artist/designer, plans to construct (The Kickstarter catch: She only gets no money unless she reaches her $40,000 goal).

Still not convinced there’s enough meat on those wax moth larvae? Monica already has the support of  La Cocina, a women-in-business nonprofit support group in San Francisco, and she has a pretty realistic dream for those grubworms, with history museums and schools already mapped out on for her future edible education cart plans. Well, let’s just say I’m glad she’s the one doing it, not me, as Monica sure sounds like the right (Bugito) woman for the job of bringing bug cuisine back onto our dinner tables.

Artisan Spirits = The Commercial Side of Homemade

The imbibe-worthy bonus of the current craft-everything movement is we are starting (I’d say “sip-by-sip” but then you’d require a stiff drink) to get back to that pre-Prohibition craft spirits mentality. And the likelihood there’s a little guy (or maybe a big guy, depending on his apple pie girth) who likely now makes moonshine right down the street that is great.

Sure, some are spirits we didn’t have in mind for cocktail hour inspiration today because we don’t know about them just yet (no crazy expensive advertising campaigns, no silly scantily clad sorts doing promotional events). But we will. Or so we hope — no more “Sober Times For Artisan Distillers” articles, please (yeah, not a lot of research “fun” writing that article).

Which gets us (Me? You? Internet pronoun uncertainties) to the annual Artisan American Spirits Awards, which were released last week. Though keep in mind, it’s best not to judge those rather bland winner’s circle photographs on the trade association’swebsite. That’s a good thing, really, as it means there is more money spent on what’s in those bottles than on how they look/their marketing campaigns.

This is the sort of awards list you scroll through when you want to find the most interesting artisan spirits for sipping, not just for bar shelf visual appeal – though if that’s your thing, there’s an “excellence in packaging” award here, too. But mostly you’ll find moonshine and bourbon that hails from distilleries with names like Dark Corner or Ole Smoky, and rums that have been affectionately dubbed Three Sheets (from San Diego’s Ballast Point, which took home several awards) and Cane and Abe (“Old Abe” was the name of a Civil War-era bald eagle mascot in Wisconsin).

The Man Booker Prize of moonshine, if you will. Get the list of this year’s artisan American spirits over at — surprise! — the American Distilling Institute‘s website (or my write-up in the LA Weekly). Though keep in mind, like all awards (even the most genuine), there are gobs more great artisan distillers out there whose spirits are not on this list, including several of my favorites (Sub Rosa in Oregon, Ventura Limoncello and Tru Organics in California). I’m sure you have your own to add to the list (please share). We all can’t enter every competition — or win them all, for that matter.

The Huntington's Marmalade

If you live in Southern California, no doubt you have been to the Huntington Library. If not, you really should make a leisurely day trip out of it. The museum, in its luxury former (Henry E. Huntington) estate form, dates to 1903, but the San Marino property was originally a 600-acre working ranch with citrus groves, fruit orchards and various other crops. Today, it is still a 200+ acre canvas for inspired recipes.

Which gets me to some really great (semi-quarantined) marmalade made on the historic property. Get more on that + the Huntington’s great cookbook, which I’ve been flipping through with carnation petal candy anticipation for years, here. There’s also the restored Kyoto teahouse that was installed in the museum’s (also restored) Japanese Gardens this week, which itself is celebrating a century of marmalade moments on the property — complete with a dedication performed by Soshitsu Sen, the iemoto (grand master) of Japan’s Urasenke tradition of tea.

Yeah,  time for some celebratory tea. And marmalade.

Ms. Crocker At 91-Years-Old

At a moment in our culinary history when even our everyday weeknight dinner focus — or fuss, depending on your recipe perspective — is on (more) sustainable, farmers market-friendly, nose-to-tail cooking, we were curious what we might find among the pages of a modern Betty Crocker cookbook. Slow-cooker pig trotters with Weiser Farm potatoes? Right. But surely, at least no more powdered mashed potatoes?

Just our (my) luck, the latest in Ms. Crocker’s series, The Big Book of Weeknight Dinners, was released earlier this year. Get the rest of my powdered mashed potatoes-enhanced review (Betty, oh my dear, dear Betty, it’s 2012) over at LA Weekly.

A 900-year-old Song dynasty ceramic dish has sold at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for $26.7 million. Now that’s an expensive bowl of cereal.

Or cup of tea, as what we consider bowls were often used for beverages in China. Or maybe it’ s neither, as The Washington Post called it a dish first, then a “flower-shaped bowl.” Ah, semantics when you’re dealing with $26.7 million dollars of history.

Which, incidentally, if you missed the UCLA Fowler Museum’s Art of Tea exhibition a few years back, the guest curator, Beatrice Hohenegger, has an interesting book on the history of tea if you’re looking for a matcha sort of reading moment. And yeah, “bowls” and such are discussed.

Photo: “Generation” Teas From The Japanese American National Museum.

Only Onion Marmalade Slime Here

“Pink slime” has long been in plenty of things we’ve eaten over the decades (fast food burgers, most grocery store lean ground beef). Now the meat product made from processed beef trimmings has suddenly been facing online outcries typically reserved for presidential candidates. [Actually, that sounds pretty much how every political firestorm (candidate?) evolves over the years. Case in point: When pink slips recently became the outcome at beef processing plants, Rick Perry offered up his pink slime support.]

But we were talking about pink slime history. It’s all turned into such a confusing (to say “slimy” is tempting, but no doubt countless others have done it the past few weeks) mess that ground beef processors are now filing for bankruptcy. The cause, as we all are very much aware by this point, has been the bellowing, by respected public health figures such as Marion Nestle and backyard grilling fans alike, of anti-pink slime accusations with such thunderous conviction, it would make a Game of Thrones script editor proud. Are the accusations true, false or a little of both?

At this point in the story, it doesn’t really matter. The Internet functions quite like a Medieval royal court, it seems. Once those accusations have been spread throughout the land whether via ravens or Facebook, it’s off with the his/her/the beef industry’s head no matter what the truth may be. That good old “perception is reality” saying holds true in the Information Age as much as it did in the Dark Ages.

Or as Jonathan Bernstein of Bernstein Crisis Management was quoted as saying this recent Los Angeles Times article on the pink slime slippery slope, the beef industry “lost control of the message… if enough people perceive that something is wrong, it’s wrong. Reassurances that something’s safe from groups that are now distrusted are useless at this point.”

Personally, I’m not a fan of the idea of pink slime in any form, being more of a grass-fed beef sort when my pocketbook allows, but the beef industry’s cries of a witch hunt do seem to have some merit, perhaps (?) more so if you pause to take a look at the history of said slime (the nickname alone is enough to ruin an organic strawberry’s reputation).

Witch hunt or valid democratic prosecution? That’s up to we-the-jury to decide on our own. But first, you might want to check up on what Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew (I interviewed her a few years back for this article on rice beer history) and now the upcoming book (2013) Meat: An American History, has been up to in the beef research realm lately. Here is her interesting brief summary of pink slime’s history.

Lowell Novy And Friend (Photo Novy Ranches)

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lowell Novy, a veterinarian who owns Novy Ranches. At his Northern California ranch, he produces grass-fed beef at fantastic prices (he recently turned the retail corner). As we chatted, he offered up some fantastic nuggets about the grass-fed beef industry, the commercial side of the cattle industry equation, and what approaching a food business the old fashioned way means to him:

“I want to educate people. If we bring to the plate something that’s nutritious and tastes good, that’s a good thing. We should all be trying to do that…. You see, Jenn, I’m 75-years-old, and this is my last hurrah before I run over the edge of the hill or whatever, and this is something I think that is worthwhile. You get to my age and you do these things if you’re lucky enough like I am to have the [financial] opportunity.”

And so in light of all of the pink slime throwing going on right now (more on that later), it seemed like a good time to revisit a good, old-fashioned (honest, devoted, no slime fighting here) rancher. To talk about beef, plain and simple.