UnFancy and Crafty

Sasha is busy making the UnFancy Food Show medals while I am busy staring adoringly at her. How can I not love someone who reminds me that every once in a while, or more often than not, it is SHOT O'CLOCK! Thanks again to the UnFancy Food Show and New Amsterdam Market.

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Before he was a Butcher he was Bitter

Bitter isn't a flavor that most people think of fondly. But bitters, well they're another story. Tom Mylan started making bitters for our bars years ago. And thanks to Josh Wiles, master blender, you can now get the handmade gold at the Marlow & Sons store. He taught our very own Peter Hale, wealth of knowledge and fiend behind the bar, who in turn talked to me about how it's done.


Essentially, making bitters involves infusing distilled spirits with herbs, bark, seeds or fruits for the desired effect. For a long, long time that effect meant curing the ills of the body as bitters were patented medicines made by local apothecaries. But the last 100 years have seen a marriage between bitters and cocktails. And we couldn't be happier about it.

A cocktail, historically, is a combination of liquor, citrus, sugar and bitters. In this potent mix "bitters are the yang to sugar's yin," explains an oddly zen Peter. You can use a variety of starter distillates, but Peter prefers over-proof vodka. The usual burnt and barky additions are cardamom, coriander and caraway. Star anise and cinnamon also appreciate a batch of bitters. In terms of aging, the woodier the flavors the longer you age, the more citrus the shorter. Sometimes Josh and Peter finish their bitters with burnt sugar. But the essential thing is extracting oils from the fruit and tannins from the herbs. All the rest is icing on the (liqueur-steeped) cake. Take today's batch: sassafras in vanilla vodka, hanging out in a 2-liter mason jar.

In the mood for juice? Try Peter's recipes. You thought you knew these classic sluggers until you tasted them with homemade bitters.

-Leah Campbell

Stir these with ice, strain, and serve up in cocktail glass.

Manhattan

dash citrus bitters
2 oz red, aka, sweet vermouth
3 oz rye whiskey


Brooklyn

3 oz bourbon
dash citrus bitters
2 oz maraschino liqueur

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The "Buzz" About the Office

Today our top articles included Royal drinking and driving. A very wealthy dog named Trouble and some cosmic lotto numbers from Kirsten: 41, 51, 61, 48 and 17.

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Week Two: A History Doomed to Repeat Itself

I had one week to grasp the hominid's carnivorous history. Tom suggested I start with a tome on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons called Larousse Gastronomique, written by Frenchman Prosper Montagné and prefaced by Escoffier, "king of cooks and cook of kings." Inside its decaying covers I found an encyclopedic pastiche of butchery's past, which began with the kind of scene depicted in ancient Greek bas-reliefs – a man with outstanding posture slitting the throat of some hulking animal. Within half of a page, however, this history had so noticeably morphed into nationalistic prose nostalgic for the heights of French butchery under Napoleon's reign as to make me doubt its veracity.

After all, this is the kind of armchair anthropology that makes me physically uncomfortable – the kind that touts France as the last in the line of civilization's evolution, the natural height of human cultivation. And meat, a symbol for the physical domination and incorporation of other animals, is the perfect language to write such a history in. In Eating Meat: Evolution, Patterns and Consequences, Vaclav Smil writes, "There is little that is neutral about meat." And Larousse's truth is anything but neutral.

But truth – ultimate, un-biased and objective – is not the aim of this post. Which is to say, these things happened, and may have happened. As I read, I realized I couldn't put together a complete and neutral chronology of meat-eating any better than Larousse. But I did begin to see parallels between ancient practices and modern values. As Tom said in the walk-in, "You can tell a lot about a culture by the way it cuts up its animal." And we can think about the state of meat processing today in light of these histories.

In Egypt, sacrifice brought royalty closer to the divine. Take, for example, this zealous charge by Thutmose III in his Coronation Inscription: "... that I might supply with food his altars upon earth; that I might make to flourish for him the sacred slaughtering-block with great slaughters in his temple, consisting of oxen and calves without limit" (J.H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt; Part Two, § 149). Without limit! Ancient political sovereignty gorged on meat. For centuries, meat was the essential foodstuff to invigorate marching armies. And just as an Egyptian ruler had to prove his power in meat, so do our politicians, as we saw in last week's post. This is the context in which right-wing radio show host Michael Savage called Obama the "Tofu Messiah."

It was the Romans who outsourced slaughter. The higher classes disdained the "gross practice" of butchery, and a class of butchers took up the lowly job. Even though these butchers provided the essential service of preparing the sacrificial carcasses, their work was considered uncivilized and degrading. In return for tainting themselves with the flesh of animals, the butcher halls were made as monumental as the Aqueducts and Baths. This was a life in paradox.

And something of the Roman paradox remains. We depend on meat, but we want its journey to our plate to be out of sight, out of mind. We extend the process by which it gets to us to the point of near total ignorance. I recently read that chopsticks were first used in the eleventh century B.C. because a Chinese rule of etiquette banned knives from the table since they reminded diners of the slaughter of the animal. Today we continue to pass the death of domesticated animals down the line. Most butchers no longer kill the animals they prepare – that's done at slaughterhouses. PETA would have us go so far as to no longer kill, and therefore raise, animals at all. They recently announced that they would give one million dollars to anyone who could grow meat in a petri dish that could be sold at competitive prices by the year 2012. Any takers?


Leah Campbell

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Words of the week:

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence.

—Wendell Berry, "Word and Flesh" in What Are People For? (1990), p. 200.

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