Category Archives: Food History

Historic Blizzard: Dairy Queen of My Heart

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dairy queen blizzardI grew up on the edge of the Great Lakes Snow Belt, so impressive snowstorms were no rarity. Any notable storms of my childhood, however, only caused my parents and elder siblings to reminisce about THE storm, the one that had wreaked havoc in the 1970s before I was born. “Remember when Dad shoveled a tunnel through the eight feet of snow on the porch after we’d been stuck inside for three months?” they’d sigh, with nostalgia and, one hopes, some measure of exaggeration. “Now that was a real blizzard.” This weekend it seems that I narrowly missed another historic storm, New York now a slushy, melting mess while our neighbors to the north are still shoveling themselves free. Even so, it has put me in mind of another blizzard, one that I know very well.

It is my firm belief that even people who are largely devoted to healthy or carefully prepared meals have a few fast food skeletons lurking in their pantries. One of mine is the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Dairy Queen opened their first shop in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois (just a hop, skip and a jump away from where the original Ray Kroc McDonald’s would descend fifteen years later), and they first coined the term “blizzard” for their ultra-thick milkshakes. It wasn’t until 1985 that they introduced the Blizzard as we know it today—candy or other sweets crushed and mixed with soft serve ice cream into a cholesterol-laden sludge so dense that it will not slide from the cup when a Dairy Queen employee turns it upside-down. (At small outposts of the chain, they will still enact this ritual for you, unbidden). I love them.

I don’t think I have ever eaten a Blizzard without feeling slightly nauseous afterward, but that’s not important. To me, Blizzards are sacred totems of the open road.

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Popcorn, Mon Amour

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popcorn cart

"Better make that a double; I'm going to see Die Hard: With a Vengeance."

I was sitting in a darkened theatre on Saturday, munching handfuls of popcorn, when suddenly the entire tradition of movie popcorn struck me as absurd. In Brooklyn, so much as whispering through a movie would probably get me punched in the face, but I am allowed to eat the loudest, smelliest snack possible a mere two feet from another patron’s head, and no one is allowed to say anything. I think this revelation was spurred mostly by the fact that we were watching the dismal and quiet French film Amour (spoiler alert: unhappy beginning, unhappy middle, unhappy ending, followed by me extacting a sworn statement from Jason that he would never smother me with a pillow, diapers or no), but even so, I couldn’t help but consider the weirdly powerful love affair between celluloid and popcorn. After all, potato chips and corn chips and pretzels have the same salty-oily-crunch factor, and though those snacks are more popular in virtually every other venue (including the realm of house cats), cinemas are the domain of popcorn alone.

Apparently, like any number of romantic pairings, the match between popcorn and movies began because both parties were in the right place at the right time. The portable popcorn popper and the nickelodeon were bright young things together in the late 19th century, and it didn’t take long for popcorn vendors to start parking their carts outside the theatres to take advantage of the crowds. Later, the popcorn moved inside to boost theatre profits during the depression. Not even war could tear the two asunder: sugar was rationed during World War II, so candy disappeared from concession stands, but the War Department gave the official go-ahead to theatres to continue to serve popcorn. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Vitis vine, César Chávez, and the Winning Ayatollah Khamenei (6,000 B.C. – present)

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Grapes.  They are the fruiting bodies of the genus Vitis vine, have been cultivated for food and libation since at least 6,000 B.C., are frustratingly expensive at the grocery store, and are generally recognized as being wicked yummy.

(Did you know that Syrah is thought to be “Syrah” because in the Persian city of Shiraz, the noted A+ wine producer of the 9th Century Middle East, the origin of the Bahá’í religion, and the home of that religion’s founder, which was demolished and paved over in ’79?  Nor did I.  But then I wandered down the Wikipedia Hole.)

So grapes; yes, yummy, expensive, and that takes us to Mister César Chávez.  Now I recall Chávez from elementary school posters that celebrated the grand and peacefully dissenting rainbow that is America, and I suppose that’s where I learned he organized migrant farm workers.  But that’s about all I knew.  Barack Obama, however, declared 105 acres of the Tehachapi Mountains in California a National Monument in October, and that sent me to the aforementioned Wiki Hole. Continue reading →

Cool Things I Learned from “The New York Times Magazine’s Food & Drink Issue”:

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Isn't this a nifty way to get them out? Yes, it is.

The original kitchen whisks were handfuls of twigs used in 17th Century Europe.  Two hundred years later, the Victorians began making them out of wire.

Al Michaels has “never eaten vegetables.”

Ital food, the food of the Rastafarian religion, is vegan except for the inclusion of fish.  And here I was thinking that the West Indian places in my neighborhood that sell “soy chunk stew” with roti were making concessions to the marketplace.  As if Rastas make concessions.

5,000 years ago much wine was made in qvevris, huge beeswax-lined clay pots that are buried in the ground.

California’s Central Valley is the world’s largest Class 1 plot of soil.  It’s the largest supplier of canned tomatoes in the world and grows most everything under the sun.  Three of its cities are among the five poorest in the nation, and the microscopic dung from industrial megadairies and feedlots and the exhaust trapped between the valley’s mountain ranges make the air taste like shit and rank amongst the most polluted in the country.  The place is going down it it doesn’t get checked.

A farmer named Paul Buxman is promoting his California Clean system, which unlike an organic classification system allows for chemical fertilizers but limits participants to farms less than 100 acres and which have active plans promoting healthy soil and local ecosystems.

We have no national food or farming policy that protects our farmland from depletion or promotes the public health.

The Times ran an illustrated telling of the Frederick the Great Potato Scheme I believed I had noted here (but was apparently mistaken, and which I will now have to address next week), adding the fact that folks to this day place potatoes on Old Fritz’s grave

There exists a photo of Bob Dole eating a hot dog in such a way that it sure looks like he’s giving a blowjob.

Because there's no better way to turn The Politician into The Common Man than making him eat in public.

The Stillness before Second Crack: Adventures in Coffee Roasting

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coffee plant

Coffee is actually the seed of this fruit, not a bean at all...

I read recently that Honoré de Balzac took his coffee very seriously. He made his own special blend from three specific beans that could only be found in separate neighborhoods of Paris, necessitating a journey that took no less than half a day every time he needed to concoct a new batch. He eschewed common preparation methods in favor of the complex Chaptal-style coffeemaker, and during periods when he was actively writing, he lived on little more than fruit and coffee. Balzac said, of coffee’s influence, “Ideas swing into action like battalions in the Great Army on a battlefield…Memories enlist at the double…and flashes of inspiration join the skirmish; faces take form; the paper is soon covered in ink.”*

You might think that the attention Balzac paid to coffee sounds so extreme that it has the ring of fiction, that it can be easily dismissed as no more real than the obsessive attributes of his characters. At some point, I probably would have agreed with you. And then I started working at Solid State.

Ask anyone at the small IT firm and they will stridently claim that they are not coffee experts, merely hobbyists, but they will say it in the same breath as they deride the tobacco undertones to the most recent inferior cup they happened upon. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Rock n Roll Dinner Demise II (1972)

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Last week I wrote about Duane Allman’s death and the lore surrounding the band’s subsequent album, Eat a Peach.  Now on to Mama Cass.

Long before I knew who Duane Allman was, I knew that Mama Cass died from choking on a ham sandwich.  I don’t know why I knew about Cass and not Duane, except maybe that my mother would have appreciated the Mamas and the Papas’ harmonies and have had no idea whatsoever of what to do with the Allman Brothers.  As I type this, though, I now recall a Scooby Doo episode with the Mamas and the Papas.  I never dug Scooby Doo that much, except for those celebrity guest stars.  Hello, Laurel and Hardy.  And didn’t Don Knotts and the Apple Dumpling Gang make an appearance?  Am I making this up?  Somebody help me out.

Anyway, word was that Cass choked to death on her sandwich in a London flat.  This word was passed because the doctor who pronounced her dead on the scene reported to The Daily Express, “She appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Coca-Cola while lying down – a very dangerous thing to do.”

Firstly, why is the combo of sandwich and soda dangerous?  The implication is that drinking, say, water would be better if lying down.  Is there a similarity here to the stone-cold fact that you should never mix carbonated beverages with Pop Rocks?” Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Duane Allman Was a Man of Peaches and Mutton (1971)

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Dead rock stars occupy a strange place in the pantheon of Humanity’s heroes.  You’ve got brave, doomed soldiers and noble, self-sacrificing leaders and visionary, steadfast iconoclasts and idealistic, graceful martyrs.  And then 1938 rolls around, Robert Johnson is poisoned, and shortly thereafter you’ve got dudes who choke on their own vomit in the backseats of cars floating up to Heaven to chill with Hercules and Abe Lincoln and St. Thomas Aquinas.  Rock star deaths tend to be violent or self-indulgent, which upon reflection seems to make them the perfect heroes of the Western World’s 20th Century.

Plane crashes, car wrecks, and suicide aren’t the prerogatives of PitchKnives.  And though we do cover booze, instances of rock stars drinking themselves to death are pretty pedestrian.  There are, however, instances of food becoming entangled with the myths of pop’s premature deaths, one of which I’ll note now, the first in a short series.

Duane Allman was, I was shocked to discover when researching this piece, only 24 when he died.  Jesus Christ!  The mutton chops on the man made him look 40.  And mutton is certainly a food.  Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion Part II (1786)

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So, picking up on Monday’s tale of the potato’s rise to the status of staple food and, more specifically, the height of fashion:  When France sent its army out against Frederick the Great’s in the Seven Year War, a 19-year-old pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier signed up.  He ended up locked in a Prussian prison, escaped, was recaptured, etc. until he served, by some accounts, a total of five stints in the cooler.  Frederick, you’ll recall, had forced his starving Germanic masses to eat potatoes through the delicate wielding of the lash, and so Parmentier found himself eating nothing but during his stay.

In spite of the fact that the potato was banned as human fodder in his home country because it was believed to cause leprosy, Parmentier did not, in fact, lose any digits.  So when he made it home in 1763 and took the job of pharmacist at the Invalides Hospital, he tried to push the food.  Alas, the Catholic Church ran the hospital, and we know how open they are to new and healthful ideas.  Not even Parmentier’s win in a 1770 essay contest on “Foodstuffs Capable of Reducing the Calamities of Famine” changed their minds, nor the Paris Faculty of Medicine’s reclassification of the spud as legit food two years later.  So Parementier searched his brain, scratched his long, cartoonish chin, and discovered his inner Charles Barnum. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion (8,000 B.C. & 1740)

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The historical trajectory of potatoes joined ours sometime between 8,000 and 5,000 B.C.  The Incas developed enough different varieties that, according to National Geographic, they could glean every nutrient needed for survival from a potato-only diet.  They included spuds in their prayers.

The rest of the world was not so enamored.  When the Conquistadors introduced potatoes to Europe in the 1500s, folks suspected them not merely deficient for human consumption, but injurious.  They are not mentioned, after all, in the Bible.  Their lumps and eyes suggested disease in an age in which the appearance of a vegetable was often thought to reflect the maladies it could cause or cure.  In 1633, French Burgundy felt the need to pass a law forbidding people “to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy.”  Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Aztec Peanut Paste and the Birth of Skippy (1519 & 1932)

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Among the wonders the Conquistadors discovered upon setting foot on the Americas was peanut butter.  Well, it would have been more of a peanut paste—just roasted, mashed nuts—but the essentials were there in 1519 when Cortez and his lunatics showed up.  Let’s assume the Aztecs had a long history with peanut butter because peanut butter is awesome and so are storied, long-dead ancient empires.

And now let’s jump to the 19th century.  We’re jumping because even though peanuts spread around the globe after the colonization of the Americas and folks surely smashed and ate them, the public record rarely takes note of what Average Joe and Jane ate.  It does take note, however, of issued patents.

In 1884, a Québécois named Marcellus Gilmore Edson received a patent for the process of milling roasted peanuts into a semi-fluid state between heated surfaces.  When the goop cooled, it achieved, in Edson’s words, “a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment.”  Yum. Continue reading →