Monday, January 27, 2020
Veuve Clicquot Toasts Saints. Skitch. Mozart. Chocolate Cake. Bridges. Bulbs. Worms. Tortes. Cakes Creek.
Food Calendar
Today is National Chocolate Cake Day. It's no longer enough to make just chocolate cake anymore. It must be Chocolate Suicide cake. Or Death by Chocolate cake. Or Better Than Sex chocolate cake. Isn't a good chocolate cake good enough? It seems essential now that it gives one a headache to be taken seriously. Although it will not do that to serious lovers of chocolate. My wife and daughter, for example, recognize no limit to the richness of a chocolate cake.
Chocolate cake's makeover came in the 1990s, with the advent of the flourless chocolate cake. All of a sudden, every restaurant with a pastry chef was serving the new, shallow, intense dessert. Waiters spoke of it with a pride previously reserved only for one's newborn child. They made it seem like a magic trick. Not that magical. It's basically a chocolate mousse stiffened with an unusually large amount of eggs, then baked in a water bath so slowly that the egg foam dries out and hardens.
Delicious-Sounding Places
Cakes Creek flows into the North River, a tidal inlet on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. Cakes Creek is tidal itself, draining and occasionally filling a marsh on Whites Neck, one of the many peninsulas extending into the bay. The land is half farm fields, half wooded. Numerous docks extend into a creek, where it is very likely that crabs and oysters grow in harvestable numbers. (Or did at one time; the Chesapeake area is having environmental problems.) Quite a few restaurants can be found five miles away in Mathews. Among them is Cap'n Ralph's.
Edible Dictionary
torte, n., French--A very rich cake, usually layered and covered with smooth, shiny icings all around and between the layers. What makes a torte different from a standard cake is its higher percentage of egg and a smaller amount of flour. Some tortes substitute ground nuts for some or even all of the flour component. More chocolate tortes are made in more styles than all the non-chocolate tortes put together. The most famous is the Sachertorte, the famous cake of the Sacher Hotel in Vienna. Only a layer of apricot jam between the layers relieves the rich chocolate. The Marys were unimpressed with this cake. Not dark chocolate enough for them.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez: When you melt chocolate in the microwave oven, know that the chocolate can hold its shape when it's melted. Stir it every thirty seconds or so, or you can burn the chocolate waiting for it to look melted.
Music To Eat A Midnight Snack By
Skitch Henderson was born today in 1918. He's best known as the bandleader on The Tonight Show during the early years of the Johnny Carson era. When the show moved from New York to Burbank, Henderson stayed and went on to many other projects, of which the last major one was the New York Pops Orchestra. He and his wife wrote two delightful cookbooks based on the goings on at The Silo, a farm and cooking school they ran in New England. He was on my radio show twice to talk about those books, one of which had a Christmas theme. I pull it out every Christmas season to get me into the spirit. Skitch died in 2005 at 87.
Music To Dine Expensively By
Speaking of musicians: today is also the birthday (1756) of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. How many restaurants have played how many thousands of hours of his works as background music?
Sounds Like Food, But Isn't
The Diet of Worms began today in 1521. It's not what you think. Look it up. Clue: Martin Luther was there.
Inventions For Finer Dining
On this date in 1880, Thomas Edison received a patent on the incandescent light bulb. Think about this: Antoine's, Tujague's, Bruning's and many other restaurants were open before the light bulb existed. Try to imagine what that was like. If you can't, go upstairs at Muriel's, where they still illuminate some rooms by (fake) candlelight.
Food Namesakes
Pro football kicker Matt Stover was born today in 1968. . . Union Brigadier General Samuel Allen Rice was born, 1828. . . Bobby "Blue" Bland, a Memphis blues singer who played around New Orleans a lot, was born today in 1930.
Words To Eat By
"Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate."--Sandra Boynton, greeting card writer and artist.
