Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

The original bartender’s guide, some of which is in verse

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on September 25, 2011

A bartender making a "blue blazer". New York City, 1862, or Portland, 2011?

Here’s a fun book I found – “How to Mix Drinks, or, The Bon-Vivant’s Companion”, published in 1862 (and it’s free!). This is the original bartender’s manual. It has lots of arcane and delicious-sounding recipes, charming pictures, comments (“refrigerate with all the icy power of the Arctic”) and contemporary advertisements at the front and back.

You should take a quick look at it yourself, but there are a few specific things I wanted to mention.

First of all, the method for extracting citrus flavors. Instead of zesting a lemon, the guide instructs that “the ambrosial essence of the lemon must be extracted by rubbing lumps of sugar on the rind, which breaks the delicate little vessels that contain the essence, and at the same time absorbs it” (p.18 of the PDF). This seems like a really tedious and possibly inefficient method to me, but I wonder if it’s still used today in some cases, or if it’s been superseded by the availability of the zester?

Secondly, check out the first few lines of their recipe for mulled wine, which is in verse on page 61 (the whole thing is in the gallery below this entry):

First, my dear madam, you must take
Nine eggs, which carefully you’ll break
Into a bowl you’ll drop the white
The yolks into another by it.
Let Betsy beat the whites with switch
Till they appear quite frothed and rich –
Another hand the yolks must beat
With sugar, which will make them sweet…

The eggs are eventually mixed with spices, wine and nutmeg. I really like that this recipe is in verse, and it seems to have been taken from The Ladies’ New Book of Cookery by Sarah Buell Hale, though that’s just the earliest occurrence of this poem, which shows up in a bunch of cookery books from the 19th century. I wonder why only this one is in verse, though? Is it because it’s a popular holiday drink that many people knew or wanted to know?

Thirdly, the second half of the book is in some ways even more interesting than the first. It’s a DIY manual for manufacturing your own liqueurs, as well as many other important bartending ingredients such as syrups. This would have come in very handy in the 19th century, I’m sure, before the advent of easily-accessible liquor shops all over the country. Here’s their recipe for gin:

How to make gin. Where do I get juniper oil?

I’ll have to try these out one day, though that is a lot of gin. Here are a few more selected recipes from the book (you can click the thumbnails to read them):

Mulled wine in verse.

Ginger wine - one of the many "temperance drinks" listed in the manual

"Arf and Arf"

The many-layered "pousse l'amour"

I like the cooling method of having a giant block of ice in the punchbowl (though it dilutes the drink after a while).

A drink made from eggs and ale.

"Then smile."

Vinegar’s Mom

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , — Justin Dunham on May 12, 2010

Mother of vinegar.

Recently I used apple cider vinegar to create a brine that I could soak some carrots in (more on that later). When I picked up the bottle, I noticed some weird floating strands in it. Vinegar manufacturers must get this question a lot, because my thought at the time, “what are these floating strands in my vinegar?”, was printed verbatim on the side of the bottle. These, the bottle went on to explain, are called “mother of vinegar”. I will now repeat the bottle’s vague explanation, together with some additional information.

As far as I can tell, vinegar is basically acetic acid in some of kind of alcoholic solution. For example, cider vinegar is cider, with ~5% acetic acid. Just as alcoholic beverages, such as beer, are produced through the action of microorganisms that convert sugar to alcohol, vinegars are produced through the action of microorganisms that convert alcohol to acetic acid. As a result, all vinegars are produced from alcoholic liquids (wine, cider, beer, etc.).

Making vinegar is apparently straightforward, and you may have done it accidentally by not drinking wine quickly enough. Once a bottle is uncorked, the appropriate bacteria – Acetobacter – float in. (Alternatively, you can apparently buy vinegar cultures to be sure that the appropriate bacteria are being used.) In the presence of oxygen, these bacteria create acetic acid.

That’s the basic process, though here is a more detailed set of instructions.

As these bacteria create acetic acid, they also create cellulose. The wispy “mother of vinegar” strands are just cellulose and bacteria. They can be left in, or filtered out, with no ill effects. Here, by the way, is the Wikipedia article on mother of vinegar, and here is the Vinegar Institute’s Vinegar FAQ; both of these were helpful in learning how this works.

By the way, French speakers will recognize the “vin” in vinegar as meaning wine (some English speakers will recognize “vine”, which is etymologically related).

“Egar” comes from an old French word, “aigre”, meaning “sour”, and which shows up in English as “eager”. “Aigre” is ultimately derived from Latin “acer”, meaning “sharp” (“acerbic”, “acrimonious”). So vinegar is literally “sour wine”.

Braised Short Ribs, Polenta and Collard Greens

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , — Justin Dunham on March 21, 2010

The completed dish.

A little while ago I made this recipe. It was a chance to cook (a) short ribs, and also (b) polenta. I’ve cooked polenta before, but it was basically a big disaster and I had to throw it out. Later in this entry I’ll come back to what I learned that improved it this time.

The way this dish works is, basically, as in a coq au vin or a lot of other classic braised dishes, you add a meat to a sauce and cook it for a very, very long time (hours). As a  result, the meat almost disintegrates. This technique can help make very cheap cuts of meat, or cuts of meat that would otherwise be hard to eat because of connective tissue – such as ribs – extremely delicious.

Cooking the meat for a long time in a sauce has several advantages. One, it keeps the meat moist and also gives it some additional flavor. Two, I’m pretty sure it lets you cook the meat much longer without risk of burning. Three, because the connective tissue in the meat melts, it seeps out into the sauce. When the sauce cools again, it gelatinizes somewhat because the molecules of the connective tissue solidify, which gives you a richer sauce. Plus the sauce picks up some of the flavor from the meat in turn. Four, because of all the positive effects previously listed, you can use much cheaper cuts of meat (or hard vegetables, for that matter) and still have them taste wonderful. In fact, cheaper cuts of meat are probably preferable.

Braising does all this. I’ve heard an expression that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. One of the things I really like about cooking is that you uncover many magical chemical reactions that allow you to create delicious food not very expensively. They further substantiate this idea.

Anyway, the recipe says to braise the ribs for about three hours in a sauce with some wine, vegetables, and other stuff. The local supermarket didn’t have short ribs, so I used – I want to say “back ribs”? – I can’t remember what, exactly. If you look at this page they say there’s only short ribs and back ribs, and the back ribs are less meaty. That sounds right. (They weren’t baby back ribs, by the way).

I was a little frustrated at the time that I couldn’t find short ribs, since the back ribs I was buying didn’t look meaty enough. How wrong I was. The ribs came out really well, and one rib per diner – which I would originally have thought would not be enough for anyone – was in fact perfect along with the collard greens and polenta. I must have left the lid off the dutch oven by accident, so the sauce mostly evaporated into an oily mess, but the ribs were still pretty delicious.

I served them along with polenta and collard greens. Collard greens are really bitter, so I blanched them, then steamed them, then sauted them with some pepper flakes, garlic and onions, and salt and pepper. I used these instructions, which I’m reasonably sure are overkill. Blanching (boiling quickly) the greens seemed to make sense, but I don’t know why steaming would help. I also cut up the stems and cooked them along with the leaves, since I don’t like to waste food. If you leave them to boil a few minutes longer than the leaves, it works out.

I had never cooked polenta before, except that one time I mentioned before. Let me just say that, now that I have cooked it properly, polenta is amazing. Like rice and beans, or risotto, the trick is to cook it with a very flavorful liquid, such as wine or broth (in this case both). And it’s literally just corn meal that you buy at $2 for 10 servings, or whatever.

It’s very easy to make, since you don’t have to give it nearly as much attention as, for example, risotto. It is also really delicious, so the next day I made polenta with cream and butter as a breakfast side.

The trick with polenta, by the way, is to whisk for your life as you pour it into your cooking liquid. Otherwise it gets lumpy. Whisking vigorously seems to be important in a lot of things, such as this caramel sauce. This is another magical thing to me – just basically stirring for a while makes the difference between deliciousness and inedibility.

Oh yeah, one thing I’ve noticed you often do with braised dishes is sautee some bacon in your pot before adding the stuff you actually mean to cook. (The fat and flavor end up in the dish, the bacon itself is discarded). I threw the cooked bacon in with the collard greens.

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