July 28, 2017
Days Until. . .
Satchmo Summer Fest 9
Coolinary Summer Specials Begin 4 days from today
Food Calendar
It's National Milk Chocolate Day. Milk chocolate became popular in the United States when Milton Hershey rejected methods already perfected in Europe for blending milk into chocolate and devised his own. His technique--still a closely-guarded secret--caused the milk to sour a little, giving Hershey's chocolate a distinctive taste that Europeans find unappetizing. But it's so well established as the flavor for milk chocolate here that everybody imitates it, to one degree or another. Milk chocolate is in decline these days, however, as dark chocolate takes over more and more of the market because its alleged health benefits.
Deft Dining Rule #118
A restaurant with a bowl of mint-flavored chocolates at the entrance charges on average a dollar more for everything than a restaurant with Starlight mints.
Edible Dictionary
white chocolate, n.--A version of standard milk chocolate from which cocoa liquor has been omitted. Since the liquor is what gives the chocolate flavor, white chocolate doesn't qualify as chocolate at all. It does have the same texture, thanks to cocoa butter--the fats that come from the processing of cacao seeds. Cocoa butter has a melting point at about the temperature of your mouth, and so eating white chocolate is reminiscent (except in flavor) of eating true milk chocolate. Sugar, milk solids, and vanilla round out the recipe. So the flavor is not chocolate but vanilla.
Annals Of Vegetables
Potatoes are widely eaten throughout Europe, and each country has a special way of preparing them. But none of that existed before this date in 1586, when Thomas Harriot brought the first spuds to England. They came from Columbia, not far from where the plant originated. It's hard to imagine what European food was like before potatoes and all the other New World plants arrived. I guess when they wanted French fries they had to use parsnips.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Duckville is an unincorporated town of about 125 people in central Massachusetts. It's on the small but otherwise well-named Swift River, in rolling, mostly wooded countryside. Duckville was once a station stop on the Boston and Maine Railroad, whose track now dead-end there. The town has become a neighborhood of Bondsville, just south. There's a Subway in Ducktown, but you have a better shot at getting duck three miles south at Pinocchio's Restaurant. Unless they're lying about that.
Music To Eat Gumbo By
Delfeayo Marsalis, jazz trombonist and arranger, was born in New Orleans today in 1965. He is one of the several brilliant musicians who are the sons of jazz piano great Ellis Marsalis.
Kitchen Inventors
Earl Tupper was born today in 1907. As a chemist working for DuPont, he picked up scrap pieces of polyethylene and messed with it. From those experiments came the food containers that bear his name. Critical to the product's usefulness was the design of the lids, inspired by the airtight lids of paint cans. (If only he'd invented a way to keep the lids with their matching containers in the pantry when you're looking for them.) At first, Tupperware was sold at retail like any other product, but in the 1950s his marketing manager came up with the idea of selling them exclusively at parties in people's homes.
Big Mouths
The comedian Joe E. Brown was born today in 1892. He portrayed a fey wise guy--a popular character in the 1930s and 1940s. He was best known for his enormous mouth, which he opened wide to yelp, "Hey! Heaaaaeay!" He could fit an entire apple in his mouth.
Annals Of Popular Cuisine
Many sources say that on this date in 1900, Louis Lassing created the hamburger at his lunch wagon in Connecticut. But I don't believe that or any other citations of the hamburger's origin. Ground, grilled meat appears too often in too many cuisines in too many parts of the world for anyone to claim originality. And I couldn't find anything about this Lassing guy in my books.
Annals Of Food Writing
The first edition of the New Orleans Menu to be distributed electronically was published today in 1997. N. O. Menu was already in print for over twenty years when I pulled a few articles together and sent them to people by e-mail. It started with a few hundred addresses collected from radio listeners. I wasn't quite sure whether doing this were even legal. Nothing untoward happened, so I continued to send the newsletter out every week. It increased in frequency to three times a week six months later, then to every weekday six months after that. Even after losing a lot of subscribers after the storm, some 40,000 people read one edition or another of The New Orleans Menu every week.
Food Namesakes
Rachel Sweet, musician, was born today in 1962. . . Marilyn Quayle (Mrs. Dan) was borne todaye in 1949. . . Austrian philosopher Karl Popper was born in 1902 on this date. A "popper" can be either a food (peppers stuffed with something or other, usually meat) or a drink (beer with a liqueur stirred into it--yuck).
Words To Eat By
"Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate."--Sandra Boynton, American greeting-card author and artist.
Words To Drink By
"The worse you are at thinking, the better you are at drinking."--Terry Goodkind, sci-fi writer.
