Bread from the Bread Baker’s Guild class I took a few weeks back at Johnson & Wales in Providence, taught by Richard Miscovich.
(Taken with instagram)
Robot Naked Lunch
When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, Sam Kashner, p. 130:
We waited on line at a health food store called Workingman’s Dead. It was run by fans of the Grateful Dead, and the album Workingman’s Dead was always playing on the record player. I had brought William Burroughs here the day before. Burroughs stood on line for a minute, looking over the sandwiches being prepared for customers holding their plastic trays. Burroughs said he couldn’t possibly eat any of the food.
‘I hate sprouts,’ he snarled. ‘They put them on everything they serve. Eating sprouts is like going down on a robot.’
Obscure food word of the day: Tracklement
Tracklement: n, any kind of condiment served with meat.
As seen in The Artful Eater, by Edward Behr, who (in “On French and English Mustards”) writes: “Tracklement is a curious word that means ‘a flavorful adjunct to meat’: mustard, onions, herbs, various root vegetables, mint sauce with lamb, applesauce with pork.”
Behr speaks highly of prepared mustards from Wiltshire Tracklements, which, alas, are apparently hard to come by in the US. I’d sure like to try a jar of that Beer Mustard someday.
[Not] Stupid Science Word of the Month: Shmoo
Shmoos are essential: without them, we would have neither bread nor beer.
by Jessica Ruvinsky
shmoo\’shmü\ n. [akin to schmo, from Yiddish schmuck, meaning penis or fool] (1974): A yeast cell preparing to mate.
When ready to have sex, a yeast cell looks like an elongated pear, a shape like Al Capp’s 1948 Li’l Abner character, the Shmoo. The cell shows its mating protrusion (the shmoo tip) in the presence of the pheromone “Kickapoo Joy Juice,” another Li’l Abnerknockoff. The word “shmoo” has appeared in nearly 700 science publications since 1974; it is used in labs studying the bread- and beer-making species Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
"The art of cooking is the release of fragrance and the art of imparting it. Fragrance: the bay laurel, Lauris nobilis, a sacred tree, how brightly, how fiercely it burns. Gather its dark leaved branches in summer if you can. Sweet the influence of rosemary, its ungainly shrubby stems bursting with pale lilac flowers. Pungent the mint trodden underfoot on the way to the orchard. Peppery and sweet the scent of wild marjoram, origano, self-drying in July on droughty limestone hillsides; lemon-scented the clumps of wild savory, poor man’s pepper, producing its minute snapdragon flowers in August, picked by quarrymen on their way down from the quarry. Irresistible the bunches of herbs sold in the market place by an old man who bothers to gather them, shrubby sprigs of thyme nibbled by hares in high pastures and green-leaved sage, and clary. Holy the Byzantine perfume of coriander leaves and seeds, recalling the smell of incense burning in a Greek chapel perched on the spine of a bare mountain. Passer-by, grasp the invitation proffered by fennel flowers and seeds on brittle stalks leaning out from the hillside. Savour the strange sweet taste of juniper berries, blue-black, picked in September on a chalk down where nothing much else grows. Wander through the maquis in spring when shrubby sages, thyme, rosemary, cistus, lentisk and myrtle are in flower. Inhale the fragrance of the wilderness."
Patience Gray, Honey From a Weed, p. 94
