Podcasts

Facts about Champagne: Part 1 Marketing, marketing, marketing

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champagne bottle as cannon

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:47 — 22.4MB)

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Cherubs crush grapes

Le Petit Journal celebrates the bicentenary of the "invention" of champagneGraham Harding studied history at university and then built the biggest independent branding and marketing consultancy in the UK. Having cashed out, he went back to school, to research a doctoral thesis on the rise of champagne in Victorian England. Very appropriately, because that rise seems to have been driven almost exclusively by branding and marketing. What was originally a fault – re-fermentation that exploded barrels and was a liability in the cellar – became a feature that encapsulated gaiety and joi de vivre. And that got you drunker, quicker. From the all-seeing Dom Pérignon to the young bucks of London’s high society, champagne’s true history is absolutely intoxicating.

This is the first of two episodes in which Graham Harding pulled back the curtain on the myths that surround champagne.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 090 Sushi is a donut

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  1. My absolute favourite this issue is The Cube Rule, though a real topologist would say that there are actually only four foods, rather than six. Andy Baio, who sent me there, also linked to Soup-Salad-Sandwich Space.
  2. Scientists Are Fighting For The Stricken Pickle Against This Tricky Disease. Proof, if proof were needed, that when some people say “pickle” they mean “cucumber”.
  3. A ruminative essay on the nature of terroir, prompted by studies of the microbes found on the same grapes, grape must and wines in different places. More research needed.
  4. What price cheap Wagyu beef? More cellular stuff, as the Just company (you know, egg-free mayo) inks an agreement to start its cow-free beef with actual Wagyu animals raised at Toriyama Ranch. And yes, there is a genetic component to the beef’s texture, but sheesh.
  5. Which makes it imperative I just leave this one here: What Kinds of Food Do You Serve at a Funeral?
  6. Quiz time: what is (claimed to be) Australia’s national drink? Where did it come from?
  7. Bread magazine has a started a series on Heirloom, Ancient, Heritage, and Landrace Grains. Part two covers The Biological Species of Ancient and Modern Wheats.
  8. The latest Salmonella in beef recall is up to 12 million pounds. That’s a lot of quarter pounders; 48 million, approximately.
Podcasts

Good things from Nürnberg Getting to the heart of a Christmas essential

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uwe felch in front of his old brick ovens

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:52 — 16.8MB)

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lebkuchen turntableNürnberg, or Nuremberg if you want to avoid umlauts, means different things to different people. Indeed it means different things to a single person: me. There’s all the nasty stuff, and then there are the artists, the composers and, first and foremost – the cookies. Lots of things call themselves lebkuchen, but the ones from Nuremberg are the only ones with a protected geographical indication. They are one of the high spots of German festive baking, but one that I have never attempted myself.

coloured woodcut of nuremberg

For ages, I have wanted to know what makes Nuremberger lebkuchen so special, but the first time I visited the city it was springtime and all the traditional lebucken shops were, quite properly, closed. My second visit was last October, in the full flood of lebkuchen season, and I was incredibly lucky that the person I was going to see happened to know of someone he called “a lebkuchen superstar”.

Notes

  1. Uwe Felch has a website for his traditional Nürnberger lebkuchen but I don’t think he does mail order.
  2. If you really want to try making Nuremberger lebkuchen at home (I still haven’t) I did find one recipe online that looked authentic and manageable, although I wouldn’t bother with the glaze. No gilded lilies for me. Kim even has a recipe for the spice mixture, though whether it is the same as Uwe’s, only Uwe would know.
  3. Nürnberger Bratwürste also have an IGP and are also delicious. Maybe next time …
  4. Music by the St. Thomas Boys Choir, Leipzig.
  5. Cover and other photos by Joschi Kuphal. Banner photo by me. Coloured woodcut of Nuremberg, aptly, from the Nuremberg Chronicle.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 089 Be lucky

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A shrill and sensationalist article in Eater a couple of weeks ago took tech-bro bread bakers to task for taking over artisan bread. It’s had quite enough fanfare and spirited criticism already, so I’m not even going to bother linking. Instead, I’ve got …

  1. An unusual threat to an iconic breadstuff: The death of the Montreal bagel?. Note that question mark. It generally presages the answer “No”. To which, in this case, I’d maybe add, “not yet”.
  2. Speaking of bagels … 9 Inconvenient Truths About Jewish Food (That Nobody Wants To Talk About) has some choice conversation starters if you do want to talk.
  3. Biscuits in Britain and biscuits in America share one fundamental characteristic: they need low-protein flour. Which, apparently, bakers outside the American South can’t find for love or money.
  4. Those tech bros muscling in on hearth and home? They’re doing turkeys too, and doing it all wrong.
  5. Fish are in no better shape. Not for this New Zealander, nor in the European Union. (By the way, if that Economist article is not available to you, I apologise. It is becoming fiendishly difficult to know what I can share with ease and what will require you to do some jumping through hoops.)
  6. Which is why I jumped through the hoops for you on this one. I saved Wired magazine’s article on The Government’s Role in the Rise of Lab-Grown Meat to the Internet Archive, so it ought to be there for anyone to read, for a long time. Which reminds me, it is about time I made another donation to support the Internet Archive.
Podcasts

Is that a pickle … Let's not argue about definitions

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:47 — 19.1MB)

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To me, a pedant and a purist, a pickle by rights ought to have gone through a proper fermentation. It might have been pasteurised afterwards and bottled, but at some stage it needs to have supported microbial activity. And yet, I don’t think of kombucha as pickled tea or yoghurt as pickled milk. Maybe that’s because they aren’t salted. Just being boiled in vinegar or soaked in brine doesn’t qualify either, for me.

Luckily Jan Davison, author of Pickles: A Global History, has a much more open mind, which is great, because I learned a lot from her little book. And it gave us plenty to talk about.

However, there was plenty we didn’t talk about, or at least not in detail.

Sushi I had no idea about the history of sushi, so I went looking.
* From the bibliography in Jan’s book, I found Traditional Japanese Foods and the Mystery of Fermentation, which in turn led me to Food Culture, a journal published by Kikkoman. That will keep me occupied for years.
* Far less demanding, a little article on Fermented Sushi, the origin of Sushi.
* And if that gives you a taste for the real thing, Tokuyamazushi: Wild dining from lake and forest in Shiga in The Japan Times has the lowdown.

Refrigerator pickles Again, my ignorance knows no bounds. So while I have been perfectly happy slicing cucumbers and onions, sprinkling them with a bit of salt and leaving them in the fridge overnight, I’ve never thought of them as pickles. There are scores and scores of recipes for such things; I’ll leave finding them as an exercise.

Piccalilli Truly, I had forgotten the delight of mixing bright yellow picalilli into the mash that invariably accompanied English sausages in my youth. I like to think it was about taste as much as it was about colour, but I may be fooling myself. While I have never made my own, I am resolved to give it a go, using the recipe and instructions shared by my friend Katie Venner at Tracebridge in Somerset. They give lessons too, in fermentation and sourdough.

Notes

  1. If you haven’t already seen it, Samin Nosrat’s wonderful series on Netflix is a joy. Episode Two, on salt, has a fair bit on Japanese pickles.
  2. Photos by me, in Izmir, Turkey, and at home.

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