Books for Hungry Young Readers

From the always interesting Simmer Til Done.

And it's not Mardi Gras until you've had your King Cake.

Confederate Coffee

Ran into this in the doc's waiting room the other day:

How a coffee shortage killed the confederacy, in Mental Floss.


Turns out it wasn't the substantially larger population, industrial infrastructure, or transportation assets, but coffee that determined the outcome of the Civil War.

For those of you who want to really get down to the details at your next re-enactment, here's a coffee recipe from The Confederate Receipt book, 1863.

Take sound ripe acorns, wash them while in the shell, dry them, and parch until they open, take the shell off, roast with a little bacon fat, and you will have a splendid cup of coffee.

A letter to the Tennessee Baptist in 1861 claimed that okra coffee is indistinguishable from the real thing:

We Have Tried It.—We have been somewhat skeptical about the various substitutes that have been proposed for coffee.—We have doubted whether any thing would have the flavor of the genuine article. But, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." We have tried the okra coffee, and had we not known it to be okra, we should have supposed it the best of Laguyra or Java. It has all the rich spicy aroma of the genuine article, and we have no doubt, is equally nutricious [sic] and probably less injurious.
We would advise all our friends to reserve a large space in their gardens or farms, for planting okra. It will do, and no mistake, blockade or no blockade.

Me, I'm going to stick with good old coffee beans for now.

Training Table Reading List

Daylight Savings Time is almost over, and we'll revert to the hours as nature intended for us to experience them, before rush hours and must see TV and all of the other chronological cues of modern society. We will soon have lots of dark evenings, with nothing better to do than to grab a book and sit by the fire, so here are a couple that I plan to leaf through over the next few months.

The Cheese Chronicles, by Liz Thorpe

From Science Friday: A simple recipe with a lot of variations ... Take some milk, add some bacteria to spoil it. Add some mold, and don't forget to add some rennet, which comes from the stomach lining of livestock, then heat the mixture, drain out some of the liquid, then let it sit around for a few months. Sounds good? Well, maybe if we call it by its popular name, cheese.

The Cheese Chronicles is an insider's look at the burgeoning world of American cheese from one lucky person who has seen more wedges and wheels, visited more cheesemakers, and tasted more delicious (and occasionally stinky) American cheese than anyone else. Liz Thorpe, second in command at New York's renowned Murray's Cheese, has used her notes and conversations from hundreds of tastings spanning nearly a decade to fashion this odyssey through the wonders of American cheese. Offering more than eighty profiles of the best, the most representative, and the most important cheesemakers, Thorpe chronicles American cheesemaking from the brave foodie hobbyists of twenty years ago (who put artisanal cheese on the map) to the carefully cultivated milkers and makers of today.

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

There's nothing I can say about Kenny Shopsin that hasn't been said better by Calvin Trillin, so I'll point you instead to one of his New Yorker articles here.

And the New York Times did a piece on him about this time last year, here. Macaroni and cheese pancakes, anyone?

And finally, one I've been meaning to get to forever is Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand. Again, I'll defer to the Times in their description of Mr. Harrison:

Jim Harrison is not your average foodie. He is no pinkie-in-the-air fusspot who finds delight in taste-testing balsamic vinegar or drizzling sea salt from some distant shore on his blanched asparagus stalks. In this collection of his essays and correspondence, ''The Raw and the Cooked,'' he presents himself as the Yosemite Sam of dining -- a rootin', tootin' culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel and Sam Peckinpah. His eats with vigor and writes with unbounded gusto. His enthusiasms are so visceral that readers may put the book down feeling as if they have just been trampled by the bulls at Pamplona.

The History of Chinese Food in America

Fun Fact: There are more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald's in the whole world.

The Exchange: Chop Suey.

Is there anything more American than Chinese food?

Tomato Soup on a slow Saturday

Everyone's sick here... head colds, coughs, runny noses.

So it looks as though we'll be spending this sunny day in bed or on the couch.

Fortunately, I made a quick and easy tomato soup (with grilled cheese on the side, of course, because you can't have tomato soup without grilled cheese) so we have lunch already made, if nothing else.

Z-Man will need something else, as he made clear to us by going through the cookbooks and bringing to our attention the things he wanted to try.


The soup is too easy... just the thing when no one really feels like cooking.


2 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 medium carrot, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 tablespoons flour
4 cups chicken broth
1 28-ounce can diced fire-roasted
tomatoes, drained
3 tablespoons tomato paste
2 teaspoons sugar
¼ cup half-and-half or heavy cream
Salt and freshly ground pepper
½ cup garlic or cheese croutons, for serving


Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add onion, carrot, celery and garlic and cook over moderate heat, stirring, for about 5 minutes. Reduce heat to low and stir in flour for 1 minute. Add broth, tomatoes, tomato paste and sugar. Bring to a boil. Partially cover and cook over moderate heat until vegetables are tender, about 15 minutes.

Puree half of the soup in a blender or immerse a hand blender into the saucepan and pulse for a few minutes. Return to pot and add the half-and-half or cream and cook until heated through. Season with salt and pepper and swirl in an additional 2 tablespoons of butter if desired.

Serve with croutons. Makes an excellent accompaniment for our Crispy Crab Cakes (page 8, Great Tastes — available as a free PDF download).

Fake Baking

This weekend's The Splendid Table featured Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg, who explained how everyone can enjoy homemade artisan bread in just five minutes a day. Really.

I'm still trying to find five free minutes. Make it "artisan bread in just three minutes a day," and you might have me.

While I wait for their three minute update, I've been playing around with fake bread. Beer bread, that is.

There really is nothing easier. Mix up the flour, pour in a beer. Bake. Eat.

"Ahhh, but you're missing the point. There is nothing easier than bread," you say. Au contraire, my friends. Baking in general and bread in particular can be easy, if you're the type to follow directions. But you're talking to the guy who put Old Bay Seasoning in his chicken noodle soup the other day, just to see what would happen.

Baking is all about precision and attention to detail and following directions. And if I could do that... well, let's just say my military career would have turned out a bit differently.

Cooking is like jazz or mountain biking. You go with the flow, improvise, pick a line and see what happens. Baking is like surgery or carpentry. You need to know the steps, do everything according to the directions, and the results are dictated by science, chemistry, math and engineering.

Beer bread gives you a chance to put a wee bit of jazz into the chemistry mix. The ingredients remain the same: 3 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 3 Tablespoons sugar (or honey, agave nectar, or other sweetener), 1.5 teaspoons of salt, and one beer. Mix the dry, add the beer, pour into a greased loaf pan, and bake for an hour at 375º.

But there's room for improvising by picking the beer. Go with a wiessen or wheat beer and you can get clove or banana flavors from the German yeast strains. Lb Brewer's American Wheat, American Hefeweizen, or Flying Bison Rye are all good choices, but only available in western Kansas; so is Breckenridge's Agave Wheat, which is available all over the Front Range and High Prairie. Or go with a heavier beer for a bread with more body. My favorite so far has been Left Hand Brewing Company's Milk Stout, which gave the bread a malty, coffee flavor.

Yeah, I know... beer bread is cheating. Three minutes to mix, an hour to bake, and you're done. You're getting the flavor out of a bottle, not from the chemistry or artisanry. Okay, guilty as charged. So maybe if someone will send me ARTISAN BREAD IN FIVE MINUTES A DAY for my birthday, I'll come around to the other side.