The Great British Pudding Mystery: What, Exactly, Is a Spotted Dick?

August 31, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Revisiting the “Great British Bake-Off” reunion you didn’t know you needed, thanks to the team at Gastropod

It’s a near-annual tradition every time The Great British Bake-Off returns: We all celebrate the balm it slathers over everyday life, get inordinately interested in dishes we’d previously never heard of (dampfnudel? sure!), and then Desserts Week and/or Pudding Week hit the calendar and confusion ensues. I thought every dessert in the U.K. was called a pudding? What’s the difference, then? Why doesn’t that pudding look like the pudding we know in the States? And what in god’s name would lead anyone to name a dessert featured in a series four GBBO episode a “spotted dick”?

To unpack all of these essential questions, three beloved Bake-Off alums — Tom Gilliford, Selasi Gbormittah, and Yan Tsou — joined the Gastropod crew and one ringer American baker, Tim Buntel, in a mini-bake-off challenge focusing on all things pudding. The four bakers tackle a one-dish challenge to make the best spotted dick, a quintessentially British steamed pudding traditionally made with flour, sugar, dried fruit (these are ultimately the “spots” that appear within), suet as the main moisture agent, and custard that’s served alongside the final baked product. But as to be expected from a group of bakers indoctrinated by the need to come up with a Signature Bake every single week, each uses the traditional recipe as a jumping-off point. Tom gets boozy with his custard, Yan re-attempts the flavor combination that booted her off her season, and Selasi’s laid-back approach to baking resurfaces again. After a season of GBBO that felt slightly off in its approach, it’s a Bake-Off return to basics you didn’t know you needed:

As with all other Gastropod episodes, hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley take a deep dive into the history, answering the flurry of original questions that surfaces alongside each Pudding Week. So what makes a pudding a pudding, you ask? Ultimately, puddings can be savory or sweet, with haggis being the mother of all puddings; nowadays though, many agree a pudding is something sweet, created by steaming that’s part of the cooking process. “While all desserts can be pudding, not all puddings can be dessert,” says Regula Ysewijn, author of The National Trust Book of Puddings.

And as the four bakers discover, those old-school steaming methods, when combined with a modern and sometimes unexpected approach, can yield sweetly delicious results. No spoilers here, but to recreate the top two recipes in the Great Gastropod Pudding-Off, head over to the Gastropod website.

The Ultimate Guide to Tequila

August 31, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Are you a silver, reposado, or an añejo kind of drinker?

Tequila is unique in its versatility. Open-air fermented blancos can have the wild essences of mezcal, while extra añejos are smooth and as pleasing as sweet, woody XO cognacs. But tequila is an often-misunderstood spirit in the United States, despite the fact that a staggering 80 percent of the tequila from Mexico’s five tequila-producing regions is sold and consumed in the U.S. In fact, stateside bars have larger selections of regional mezcal made with agave tequilana variedad azul (or blue agave) than you’ll find in Mexico. The dizzying array of options is perhaps why interested drinkers facing a wall of tequila behind a bar or the well-stocked aisles of liquor warehouses are often lost when venturing out from Don Julio or Patrón.

Getting to know the various styles of tequila is key to choosing the right bottle for all occasions, whether drinking palomas at your Mazatlán beach condo, sipping aged tequila as a digestif, or slowly savoring fruity, smoky ancestral tequila at the end of the day. And as the pandemic increased demand for premium tequilas, including artisanal productions that are turning back the clock to pre-industrial methods, now is a particularly exciting time to expand your tequila shelf. Here’s everything you should know to shop for tequilas in the four main categories — silver, reposado, añejo, and extra añejo — plus a few recommendations for the best well tequilas for mixing up any tequila cocktail you desire.

A tequila primer

Tequila is a regional style of mezcal, traditionally called tequila de mezcal, or vino de mezcal. To make tequila, producers bake the hearts of the agave plant in an oven or autoclave. The juice is then extracted by a stone wheel called a tahona, or a roller mill, and is fermented in stainless steel or wood tanks, and, typically, distilled twice.

The most popular tequilas fall into a few categories: silver, unaged tequila, called blanco; and reposado, añejo, and extra añejo, aged in new oak or used whiskey casks. For all of these, blue agave must mature between seven and eight years before jimadores (agave farmers) remove its leaves with a coa (agave-harvesting tool) to send to the distillery. Less popular are mixto tequilas made with 51 percent blue agave and 49 percent sugars, and tequila joven, or gold tequila, which are adulterated blancos. The latest trend is pricy platinum tequilas, which are aged, triple-distilled, then filtered to remove the color, producing a smooth, white spirit.

Tequila is actually a denomination of origin comprising all of Jalisco, and some municipalities in the states of Nayarit, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. To qualify as a tequila, Mexico’s most famous spirit can only be made with agave tequilana Weber azul, or blue agave, from this region. The finished tequila must have a minimum of 51 percent blue agave, although the majority of tequila is 100 percent blue agave, allowing for up to 1 percent additives. Tequilas must also be a minimum of 35 percent to 55 percent ABV, and bottles sold in the United States require a minimum ABV of 40 percent (water is used to lower the proof to the desired number).

These strict regulations do still offer considerable variations to the tequila consumer. There are some 1,377 brands registered by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the regulatory board that upholds the standards of tequila manufacturing tracked by the Norma Oficial Mexico (NOM) for the Appellation of Origin. But the system is not without its flaws. In recent years, the CRT has allowed brands to add up to 1 percent additives to 100 percent blue agave tequila without disclosure. It has also allowed celebrities to easily release tequilas, including George Clooney, Xzibit, and Kendall Jenner, who has faced backlash for cultural appropriation over the launch of her 818 Tequila. It’s a practice that seems at odds with a legal body tasked with preserving tequila and Mexican tradition.

The CRT also draws criticism for primarily benefiting the largest tequila producers in Mexico, and standardization has handcuffed small distilleries looking to employ ancestral methods like pit-roasting and hand-maceration. Agave distillates that use such nonstandard production methods or aren’t produced in one of the denomination of origins, including mezcal, tequila, raicilla, and bacanora, are labeled “destilados de agave.” But while the label might deter some customers, destilados de agave, tequila, and raicilla are all in the family of mezcal, a drink that was born long before the DO.

Well tequila

All tequila collections should include at least one affordable mixer for making margaritas and palomas, or for when a dozen of your friends show up and want to do shots. The moment they ask for salt and lime and slam the empty caballito on your table, you’ll be glad you didn’t pull out the Casa Dragones.

Olmeca Altos

It’s rare to find such a reasonably priced tequila that uses agave steamed in ovens and not an autoclave, which has a faster cooking time but produces less caramelized flavor and complexity. In the highlands of Jalisco, maestro tequilero Jesus Hernandez partially extracts the agave’s sugars with a tahona and distills the tequila in copper pots. With ample notes of citrus, pepper, and green herbs, this might be one of the best utility tequilas in the $20 range and works just as well as a sipper as it does for mixing.

Bracero Blanco

This industrial tequila (meaning it’s made entirely with industrial tools, including an autoclave, roller mills, and steel tanks) from a small distillery in El Arenal is a solid everyday sipper, full of earthy agave. You almost don’t want to pour it into a cocktail, but at this price, you can make premium cocktails on the cheap.

Cabrito Blanco

From the well-respected Tequila Centinela S.A. de C.V, NOM 1140 distillery comes this old-school highlands tequila that’ll earn you respect from your abuelo and tio’s table for its agave-forward flavor and value.

Silver (Plata) tequila

Silver tequilas are both valued as sipping tequilas before a meal and for making cocktails. For purists, this is tequila in its truest form, and for aficionados, this is the tequila category to watch, as more and more next-generation distillers turn to artisanal practices, such as cooking in ovens and earthen pits, crushing the piñas with a tahona, open-air fermentation, and distilling with copper stills, the go-to for master distillers for its superior heat conduction. In the last two decades, master distillers like Carlos Camarena (Tapatio, Tequila Ocho), and Fortaleza owner Guillermo Sauza (grandson of Javier Sauza, founder of Sauza Tequila) have led the way, with semi-artisanal productions, using ovens along with heavy machinery like roller mills. Today, there are several labels producing high-proof (45 percent ABV and above), ancestral expressions of unaged, silver tequila worthy of the names mezcal de tequila or vino de mezcal.

Cascahuín Plata 48%

There is perhaps no better example of the future of artisanal tequila than Salvador Rosales Briseño Jr.’s high-proof tequila, made from select lots in El Arenal and never exceeding 2500 liters of production. Those bottles are full of sweet agave with a buttery finish, accented by pepper, herbs, and light cinnamon. This is one of the distilleries to watch for the finest tequilas in Mexico.

Fortaleza Still Strength

Guillermos Sauza’s high-proof (46% ABV) tequila blanco delivers a long caramellic, nutty roasted blue agave taste and finish from select agaves roasted in brick ovens, crushed with a tahona, fermented in wooden barrels, and distilled twice in a copper pot still.

Tapatío Blanco 110

Legendary master distiller Carlos Camarena never changes the recipe for his 55 percent ABV blanco distilled in a copper still, allowing each production to express the terroir and seasonal variations of this famed highlands label. It’s a well-balanced expression of pepper, grass, and green fruit-flavored blue agave that’s a benchmark tequila blanco and affordable enough to make premium margaritas and cocktails.

Reposado

Reposado tequilas, which have been rested in new, used, or neutral barrels (barrels that have been used three times) for a minimum of two months and up to just under a year are the ideal sipper for agave lovers who want some complexity from wood. New, toasted oak barrels from France or America can impart vanilla flavors and smoky notes. Neutral barrels, meanwhile, are great for softening the tequila while maintaining its blue agave profile. If you’re getting American rye whiskey, bourbon, or Jack Daniel’s (hello Partida) in the nose and on the palate, your reposado was rested in used barrels, which mostly come from the U.S.

Siembra Valles Reposado

From the esteemed Cascahuín distillery, NOM 1123, maestro tequilero Don Salvador Rosales Briseño applies a touch of vanilla accent to the robust baked agave in this tequila, which is rested in proprietary oak barrels fashioned from Missouri white oak. The pale-yellow-colored expression is aged a mere three months, making this mint- and citrus-tinged reposado an ideal choice for blanco lovers who prefer that distinct agave flavor.

Volcán de Mi Tierra

In 2017, the brand moved from an industrial workroom in a sugarcane field near Huaxtla in the Tequila Valley to the Moët Hennessy portfolio. This also came with investment in the distillery, allowing for a more traditional production for this fruity, grassy reposado, which was previously cooked in an autoclave, an entirely industrial process. It was good then and has only gotten better.

El Tequileño Reposado Rare

Founded in 1959 in the pueblo magico of Tequila by Don Jorge Salles Cuervo, the La Guarreña distillery continues under Don Jorge’s grandson, Jorge Antonio Salles. This intense, woody reposado is fermented in cement tanks, cooked with copper pot stills, and aged six years in giant wooden tanks, making for a truly rare high-end reposado. The extra time and production methods yield big natural vanilla, caramel, and spice flavors and aromas.

Añejo

Wood aging between one and three years lessens the characteristic blue agave taste in añejo tequilas as they gain considerable qualities from the barrel. Like other aged spirits, añejos are an ideal drink for celebrations and special occasions, enjoyed by many for their smooth taste.

Tequila Ocho Transatlantic

Master blender Alexandre Gabriel uses copper stills and open-air fermentation to draw bacteria into the tequila, which is aged in rum and cognac barrels sourced from Trinidad, Fiji, Panama, and across the Atlantic.

Caballito Cerrero Chato Añejo

Caballito Cerrero, founded by Don Alfonso Jiménez Rosales, a co-founder of Tequila Herradura in Amatitán, has rejected the tequila Appellation of Origin so it can make this unique mezcal de tequila, officially labeled destilado de agave, free of the limitations and costs imposed by the powerful bureaucracy. The key to this exquisite añejo is a combination of estate-grown blue agave, water from an uphill spring, and open-air fermentation.

Arette Añejo

From the El Llano distilleries, one of the oldest in the Tequila Valley, this well-respected good-value añejo is distilled in a stainless steel still with a copper coil, and gets its signature vanilla and caramel sweetness from a blend of white American oak, bourbon barrels, and used barrels.

Extra añejo

The DO established this fourth category of tequila in 2006 for tequilas aged in wood for three years and beyond, and it’s seen more growth than any other category as demand for premium tequila has soared in recent years, stoked by sleek advertising and marketing campaigns. A rival to fine cognacs, whiskies, or rums, EAs are ultra-smooth, rested in a range of barrels. They tend to attract collectors and sippers seeking luxury, and are accessible to all for their ease of drinking. However, agave lovers often miss the core flavors of tequila, as the vanilla, caramel, and sweet flavors of wood dominate.

Reserva de la Familia Jose Cuervo

It would be hard to find a better EA at this price, an approachable splurge to sip on special occasions and the perfect gift for a tequila collector. Jose Cuervo, the biggest tequila brand on the planet, located at the La Rojeña distillery in Tequila, uses only the hearts of select, mature blue agaves, aged between 10 and 12 years. The agave hearts are then baked in ovens at the La Rojeña distillery and aged in both French and American oak — some charred — with older batches blended in to maintain consistency. There’s a nice balance of smoke, vanilla, sweetness, and whiskey, while the process has preserved enough blue agave in the glass to remind you it’s a tequila.

El Rey Sol

Carmen Villarreal Trevino’s San Matías distillery ages El Rey Sol in French oak for six years. The result is a luxurious mouthfeel, full of nuts, butterscotch, and layers of sweetness and an attractive burnt sienna color that lights up the smiling sun decanter, designed by Mexican artist Sergio Bustamante.

Patrón en Lalique

This collaboration between the French glassmaker and master distiller Francisco Alvarez combines tequilas aged an average of seven years in French and American oak and sherry casks. The blend of fine, aged tequilas has a long, buttery finish, with a nose that bursts with sharp citrus, and tropical fruit, all bottled in a hand-crafted crystal vessel.

Bill Esparza is a James Beard Award-winning writer and author of LA Mexicano.
Michelle K. Min is a food photographer based in San Francisco.

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August 30, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

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The Best Meatball Recipes, According to Eater Editors

August 30, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

From Ottolenghi’s turkey and zucchini meatballs to Chinese lion’s head pork versions, the meatball recipes we keep returning to

The meatball is a vehicle for easy comfort. It’s a truly simple weeknight dinner staple, where with the right recipe, that perfect meatball juiciness is an easily achieved part of the early equation and not something that needs to be belabored, whether or not your meatball is slathered or simmering in a sauce. Here now, Eater editors’ go-to recipes for turkey meatballs, Asian-style meatballs, and everything in between.

Turkey Ricotta Meatballs

Julia Turshen, The Kitchn

In my world, ground turkey has exactly one purpose, and that is for making Julia Turshen’s turkey ricotta meatballs. For the most part, I avoid turkey, because it tends to get dry and crumbly. To avoid this, Turshen recommends using dark meat, but even if you’re stuck with ground white meat, ricotta and parmesan folded into the mixture will give your balls the needed moisture to come out juicy and delicious. While a simple tomato sauce is simmering on the stovetop, the recipe has you brown the meatballs in the oven which, while less exciting than searing them, is quicker and makes for much less cleanup. Once the balls are browned and the sauce is simmered, all that’s left to do is combine the two, and you’re good to go. A very good case for eating more turkey. — Elazar Sontag, Eater staff writer

Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs

Kay Chun, NYT Cooking

I’m not sure what makes these inherently “Korean barbecue-style,” but these are a great baseline meatball: the Ritz crackers are a delightfully retro ingredient that keeps them moist and light in the middle. To this basic recipe I usually add regular soy sauce (instead of the light soy sauce and added salt the recipe calls for), a couple inches’ worth of diced ginger, a splash of sesame oil, and a heaping tablespoon of sambal oelek for spice. They bake beautifully in the oven, developing a nice crust in the outside that gives way perfectly when you stab them with a fork. — Erin DeJesus, Eater.com lead editor

Greek Chicken Meatballs in Lemon Cream Sauce

Little Spice Jar

The algorithm got me on this one: I saw a photo of these meatballs on my Instagram Explore page and had to have them immediately. If you love an absurd amount of lemon like I do, this will be the recipe of your dreams. Little Spice Jar’s chicken meatballs were ridiculously easy to make — as most meatballs are, I’d say — but the addition of feta to the mixture really kept them from getting dry and crumbly. The sauce process is a little bit more involved but still manageable — just heed the author’s advice about keeping an eye on its thickness as it sets a bit more with time. Mine certainly did, but I whisked in a little chicken stock at the end and thinned it back out to a pourable consistency. I paired ‘em with buttered orzo and the leftovers held up perfectly for days. — Stefania Orrù, supervising producer

Chinese Lion’s Head Pork Meatballs With Vermicelli and Cabbage

Shao Z., Serious Eats

A few years back, I made it one of my kitchen goals to cook 52 different meatball recipes in a year, and many of my favorites came not from recipes, but from improvisation — figuring out for myself how to make riffs like buffalo chicken or chicken marsala meatballs. But for some of the more elaborate one, I needed some guidance, and these lion’s head meatballs from Serious Eats were among those. Delicate in nature, large in size, and with multiple proteins, this style of meatball can be tricky to pull off; it’s a bit of a process. But this recipe ensures they come out tender, without falling apart. Simmered with broth, vegetables, and vermicelli noodles, it’s a comforting one-dish meal. — Missy Fredrick, cities manager

Turkey and Courgette Burgers With Spring Onion and Cumin

Ottolenghi

Americans don’t give turkey enough love. If it’s not Thanksgiving, most folks think of turkey as a healthier alt meat, especially in contexts where beef or pork shine a little brighter, like meatballs. If there’s a dish to convert naysayers, it’s this one for turkey and courgette “burgers,” which I originally found in the cookbook Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (turkey is very popular in Israel). The turkey shines alongside courgette (zucchini), which adds moisture, while the coriander (cilantro), mint, cumin, garlic, and green onion add nuance and pep. Plus, the excellent, zingy sumac sauce would taste delicious on an old shoe. Despite the word burger in the name, these are like bullet-shaped meatballs, ideal for snacking by hand or plopping on a grain bowl along with more of that sumac sauce. — Nick Mancall-Bitell, associate editor

Sotto’s Grilled Pork Meatballs

Steve Samson and Zack Pollack, adapted by Cathy Chaplin
For a while, my favorite Italian restaurant in LA was a little basement place off Pico Boulevard called Sotto. The food was exclusively, obsessively, rigorously southern Italian (down to the chef’s refusal to use Parmigiano Reggiano) and I loved pretty much every dish. One of my go-to orders was these super light grilled pork meatballs — like the summer garden party of the meatball world. They were bright, electric actually, with loads of acid from the grill char and the fresh herby flavor of parsley. It’s the kind of thing you want atop a pile of bitter greens, not spaghetti. Sotto closed in January of 2019, but luckily LA writer (and current Eater LA associate editor) Cathy Chaplin had included a recipe for the Sotto meatballs in her 2013 compilation cookbook Food Lovers’ Guide to Los Angeles, and the local public TV station KCET excerpted it for their site not long after publishing. It is very much worth digging up today, even if you don’t have the Sotto sense memories to draw on. They’re petit, porky, and perfect. — Lesley Suter, travel editor

Margaritaville and the Myth of American Leisure

August 30, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Margaritaville, as Parrotheads will tell you, is a state of mind. But it’s also — delightfully, sometimes inexplicably — a real place now open in Times Square.

The 5 o’Clock Somewhere Bar does not open until 5 o’ Clock, which puts a crimp in trying to live out the metaphor of its name. The whole point of the phrase is a justification to start drinking early, before the workday is done, because somebody, somewhere is off work. But no, for the 5 o’Clock Somewhere Bar, one of four restaurants and bars at Manhattan’s new Margaritaville Resort Times Square, you must wait until the workday is over. I am furious about this. Sure, the License to Chill Bar opens at 2, but it’s the principle of the thing. Jimmy Buffett would not wait until the boss says you can go home.

The Margaritaville Resort Times Square sounds like an oxymoron. “Resort” conjures pristine beaches with reservable cabanas, room service delivered with an orchid, spas, and restaurants that will just charge your room, so you needn’t worry about even carrying a wallet on the grounds. To me at least, it does not mean a 32-floor hotel in Times Square. Like, I have been to a Times Square hotel bar before, and while I’ve enjoyed myself, it has never been a transformatively relaxing experience.

I’m biased though; being from here makes it hard to view the city through a tourist’s eyes. But while I can picture wanting to visit New York for many things — the museums, the theater, the history, the chance to meet a pigeon who’s eaten a whole slice of pizza — I can’t imagine coming here to engage in leisure. The kind of leisure where you get on a plane and check into a resort just to not leave for a week, to see no other sights besides the novelty tiki drink cups lining the hotel’s bars.

But this is the kind of leisure Margaritaville is built on. Almost all the Margaritaville restaurants and resorts — a vaguely tropics-themed hospitality empire inspired by one of Jimmy Buffett’s most popular songs — exist within massive tourist destinations like Cozumel, Mexico, or Atlantic City, New Jersey. On the surface, Times Square feels like a natural addition. But while other locales can at least offer some seclusion from the world in the form of a beach or an island, Times Square is in the middle of everything. It is hectic, crowded, overpriced, and blatantly capitalistic, a place where no one actually lives and few New Yorkers hang out unless they’re seeing a show or bringing their out-of-town niece to the Disney Store. It has no chill. But maybe the point is it’s not unsalvageable. Amid the stress and the noise, if you delude yourself enough, you can turn off your brain and have fun. So for 24 hours, I tried.

Walking into the resort on the lower border of Times Square, at the corner of West 40th Street and Seventh Avenue, I am first greeted by a statue of a gigantic blue flip-flop, with one of the straps busted, and a gigantic discarded pop top just in front of it.

If you are a Jimmy Buffett fan, you probably already get the reference (if not, look up the lyrics to “Margaritaville”). The entire resort is like if Ready Player One was only Jimmy Buffett references. There is a painting of a naked woman made to look like a parrot, asking, “Can you spot the ‘woman to blame’?” There is live-laugh-love-esque wall art of lyrics and sayings as generic as “strummin’ on my six string,” “thank God the tiki bar is open,” and a pillow in my room that read “changes in attitude, changes in latitude.” The surfboards on the wall of the Landshark Bar & Grill ask you to put your “fins up,” and the televisions on the walls play footage of Parrothead (Jimmy Buffett fan) tailgates. Oddly, I did not actually hear a Jimmy Buffett song for many hours.

I wore a tropical-print shirt and sandals to get in the mood, but when the concierge complimented my choice during check-in, I felt like I had worn the band’s shirt to the concert. I dropped my stuff in my room — which was all white and teal faux-clapboard, evoking breezy porches that none of the rooms seemed to have — and headed out for my first meal.

When I was a teenager my mom and I spent a spring break driving around the Florida Keys, and I ate coconut shrimp every single day. This, to me, was luxury, and also what I assume retirement is like. So I figured that should be my order at the Landshark Bar & Grill on the building’s sixth floor. The restaurant opens out onto an actual patio covered in sky-blue lounge chairs and yellow umbrellas, which surround a pool that was torturously not open (they were waiting on a last inspection). Laying in a chaise by the pool with my Pink Cadillac margarita would have really been resort life, but instead I settled for eating my coconut shrimp with coconut ranch (??) at a table next to it. My partner got a lobster roll and some drink that came with a full wedge of pineapple in it. We ate everything, but decided it all tasted lightly of sunscreen.

Still, eating at a table next to the pool was relaxing in its own right; something about having water nearby did distract from the Midtown of it all. I felt the sun and the breeze, and saw a woman with daiquiris embroidered on her lime-green T-shirt. I’m doing it, I thought, I’m relaxing. I made a mental note to return to Landshark once the pool opened and we headed one floor up, to the License to Chill Bar.

The vaguely tropical theme is woven throughout the resort, from the coconut-fried shrimp to the beachy guest room’s pillows.

Margaritaville does an incredible job of catering to every type of person who might be in Times Square. While Landshark may have been for Parrothead tourists or New York Times employees on an ironic lunch break, License to Chill is more like an outdoor wine bar, with cushioned bucket seats that looked like the baskets I learned to weave in Girl Scouts, and a fireplace that was thankfully not lit in July. Also, for some reason, there was a screen showing a live feed of the traffic at the intersection right outside the hotel, in case you wanted to keep tabs on the WEED WORLD truck parked on Seventh Avenue.

I ordered an $18 drink with “botanicals” and ginger syrup, and my partner got what was basically a $20 gin and tonic. We nestled into our bucket chairs and took out our books, and for two hours, decided to lounge and read while our drinks slowly sweated. To my shock, I could barely hear any traffic, and as I snuggled into the pile of pillows, some emblazoned with a compass to let you pretend this was an exercise in great world adventuring, I did feel distant from home. Then again, I reminded myself, that was probably because this was all going to be on Vox Media’s dime. I’m technically here for “work” and not spending any of my own money. So of course I’m not worried about anything, except how to properly waste away.

The song “Margaritaville,” which forever solidified Jimmy Buffett’s persona as the king of the beach bums, was off his eighth album, and it only took seven years between the release of “Margaritaville” the song (1977) and the opening of Margaritaville the restaurant (1984). The first location was in Alabama, as Buffett couldn’t get the trademark rights in Florida for the name “Margaritaville” because “there are so many using the name around the country,” he told the press at the time. Eventually, he won.

Margaritaville, the one Buffett sang about, is actually an awful place. He allegedly wrote it after ordering a margarita in Austin, Texas, and was also inspired by an influx of tourists to Key West, Florida, where he was living at the time. It’s about a man “wastin’ away” in a touristy beach town, whose only solace from hinted-about heartbreak and foot injuries is tequila. This is not a song about someone who rejects the pressures of workaday life in order to pursue radical pleasure. This is about a man who is depressed and perhaps on the run from the law, for whom shrimp and sea and tattoos provide no peace, and who needs blended beach drinks to “hang on” to whatever semblance of a life he has left. It is not escaping. It’s fleeing. And it’s sort of pathetic.

But fans have instead turned it into a “national anthem for generations of college kids on spring break, burnt-out stockbrokers, and wishful thinkers who long to leave careers behind and let their biggest worry be which beach to sleep on that night,” wrote Dan Daley for Mix. The song has been completely recontextualized so that not even Jimmy Buffett himself can declare this man’s life an unsalvageable mess. Instead of a song about despair, it’s a song about defiance, insisting despite all evidence to the contrary that you are having a good time.

It’s a specific type of fun, though. Jimmy Buffett made his name with “gulf and western music,” a style that combines American country and rock with instruments and tonalities more commonly found in the Caribbean. But while his songs are full of steel drums, lyrically they are mostly about being a white American man dreaming of a Bahamas without Bahamians. It’s an overworked man in a bar, imagining moving to an island paradise, without all the pesky stuff that’s already on the island. There are now more than 60 Margaritaville bars and restaurants across the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, selling this fantasy of “island” drinks and American foods with coconut or pineapple added to them, sometimes on top of the very places those flavors were taken from. It’s a shame, but not a surprise, how popular a sell that is.

I called another friend to join in the festivities, and he arrived just as I was about to doze off in my bucket seat. By then, it was 5:30, and we were finally allowed to head up to the two-story 5 o’Clock Somewhere Bar, on the hotel’s top floors with views of nearly the whole island. There was barely a smack of Jimmy Buffett there. Inside there were smooth midcentury modern chairs and tasteful patterned wallpaper. A woman with a guitar was singing mellow pop covers. On the outside deck, aqua booths were separated by fabric ferns, and the bar was lined with brushed-brass cocktail shakers. The altitude also seemed to have a filtering effect on the clientele. Except for a group of clearly teenagers, who I assume were served mocktails, trying to live out some joke of an adult night (why does every group of teens trying to go out on the town consist of five girls in cocktail dresses and sparkling chokers, and one gangly boy in jeans who never talks?), the patrons looked like they were all meeting for a 10-year business school reunion. I stared as they ordered Landsharks and drinks named “All Right, All Right, All Right” with straight faces. They knew they could go to any other rooftop bar in Midtown, right? The place is lousy with them! And they all look like this! Was it a joke that they were here or did they all also love Jimmy Buffett? Finally, a man in a Phillies “Margaritaville Night” giveaway shirt sat at the booth next to us, and I felt some sense of normalcy again.

I could see why the business bros wanted to be here, though. Despite all having names like “Jamaica Mistaca,” the drinks at the rooftop bar were of the upscale kind that perhaps warranted the $20 price tag, or at least the aura of wealth. Instead of the juicy, sweet frozen daiquiris of 25 floors down, these were made with things like allspice dram, pineberry, and yuzu puree. Drinking a “W. 40th St & Agave,” a margarita made with Earl Grey agave, and looking out over the Manhattan skyline, I felt... sophisticated? Rich? If not like Shiv Roy, then at least like Cousin Greg? This is my city. This is my time!

At this point, I had not had anything to eat since the coconut shrimp. Neither bar’s kitchen was open yet, which once again reminded me that while it may be 5 o’clock literally here, the spiritual essence of 5 o’clock evaded me. My plan of having a snack of ceviche or wagyu sliders to tide me over was foiled. I switched to wine, but I was still many strong drinks in. I kept referring to being in Manhattan as “being on island time.” I felt far away from all my problems, most likely because I was drunk, but also because my surroundings were so different. I had, in the parlance of the resort, escaped. Finally, it was time to descend to the main event.

The Margaritaville restaurant within the Margaritaville resort takes up two floors. The walls are lined with the same TVs playing the same footage of Parrotheads, the floor-to-ceiling windows give you a great view of the Lot-Less discount store across the street, and in an atrium-like space in the middle, there is a massive Statue of Liberty bust holding a margarita instead of a torch that takes up both stories, big enough that it can be seen from the street. The giant Statue of Liberty rules. It just rules. It’s so cool. I’m drunk and I’m screaming and I am ready to fight the people who get to eat at the lone table inside the giant Statue of Liberty because I want to sit in there so badly.

After the pseudo-sophistication of the upper floors, the Margaritaville restaurant smashes vacation resort vibes with the madness of Times Square tourism. It is LOUD. There are novelty glasses everywhere. My friend Dan and I order various takes on punch, while my spouse gets a “Lime In D’Coconut,” and we ponder how much Jimmy Buffett wishes he had written that song, which is actually good. It comes with an extra can of coconut Red Bull, a flavor I didn’t even know existed.

As we shared our Caribbean chicken egg roll appetizer, I was reminded of a time my spouse chatted up a tourist on his way back to LaGuardia airport while they were both on the bus. The tourist said he loved the city, but complained of the food being too expensive. My spouse said that’s quite possible, but that there was plenty of amazing, affordable food to be found, and asked where he had eaten. The tourist said he and his daughter went to the Times Square Red Lobster. I know these large chain restaurants exist because they are popular, because they are fun or family-friendly or because in a trip probably full of decisions and risks, ordering a burger at a restaurant with name recognition is at least one thing you don’t have to worry about. Here at Margaritaville, I frankly didn’t care what I put in my body, I was just having fun and taking in the fact that on one TV they were playing footage of Parrotheads, and on another was Nancy Pelosi talking about the January 6 riots.

But the mediocrity of my fish tacos almost pulled me out of it. They were grilled and dry and slightly mealy, served with plain rice and black beans that tasted like they had just been dumped out of the can. I was suddenly too aware that I was not actually on vacation and that all the pressures I desperately needed a break from were going to need my attention tomorrow, and that some might be filling up my text messages at that very moment. There were CSA vegetables in the fridge that needed to be cooked before they turned, and invoices to send, and family to check in on, and a job that I was technically at that I hadn’t taken an actual vacation from in a year and a half because of a global pandemic, because oh God I need my job, I need health insurance, everything hinges on this. And I was too aware that there were other restaurants in this city, other things I could be doing that would make me happier, but instead I was here. I was working. I was not escaping. There was no escape.

Then, suddenly, the lights went out. From behind me, music started blaring even louder than it already had been. Something was happening with the giant Statue of Liberty. Dan and I jumped out of our seats and ran to see a light show projecting onto her majestic margarita, choreographed in time to the music. There were neon dolphins, erupting coral reefs, flames giving way to ice cubes fading into a shimmering mirror ball. It was overwhelming like Times Square is overwhelming, and for the first time I understood how this level of light and noise could be awe-inspiring rather than just annoying. It forced all other concerns and worries out of my head and replaced them with the phrase DISCO MARGARITA. It was aggressive, it sent me to the edge of my joy and had me teetering on panic, but I couldn’t think of anything else — the taco-induced, work-is-killing-me crisis of moments before was gone. No thoughts, just Buffett. I became aware that, for the first time that day, “Margaritaville” was playing.

The two-story Lady Liberty and her psychedelic margarita is the centerpiece of the resort’s main event: the Margaritaville Restaurant.

The 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar wouldn’t exist if work didn’t end at 5 o’Clock. The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, states in Article 24 that “everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” This article came after, and seems likely to have been influenced by, labor movements around the world at the turn of the 20th century, as activists campaigned and died for things like a weekend, or the eight hour workday. The concept of leisure, what economist Thorstein Veblen defined as the “non-productive consumption of time,” for anyone but the richest classes, was still new in the 20th century. But by 1948 more people had time for it.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen outlines the concept of conspicuous leisure — essentially being nonproductive in order to brag about it, rather than for your own rest and self-betterment. At the time he wrote it, he said it was a behavior of the idle rich, who would rather risk whittling away their fortune by devoting their days to obscure hobbies than work a factory floor. But as the middle class grew and labor protections were enshrined, especially in America, leisure time began to be more available, and began to resemble the activities that previously belonged to only the wealthiest. In 1950, the French Club Med pioneered the all-inclusive resort, which seemingly overnight existed everywhere. You could drive to Florida or California, or fly to Hawaii. You could do nothing, but do it somewhere exotic, and bring a souvenir back to show everyone. Tans, bikinis, and a drink in hand. A beach at the end of the world.

People of all classes can now engage in conspicuous leisure, or at least emulate it. Not to be all “everyone be on their phones,” but leisure increasingly exists to be simultaneously documented and publicly acknowledged. A resort like Margaritaville is foremost designed to be looked at: the novelty of sitting by a pool in Midtown, the overwhelming Statue of Liberty light show, the view from the rooftop bar. However, conspicuous leisure has taken on a different flavor as it has spread. The rich who spent their days breeding dogs did not have a job to return to at the end of the week. The rest of us do. So when we engage in conspicuous leisure, there is a tinge of anxiety. Staying at Margaritaville may not result in anyone’s rest or self-betterment, but we need to convince ourselves it does. And we do that by trying to convince others it has.

In America leisure only exists in relation to work, and we are a culture that fetishizes work. Even leisure, that nonproductive time, is spoken of through its value to production, how we all need time off so we can be better workers when we return. And our leisure time is being eroded. “In a number of developed countries, steady jobs – with benefits, holiday pay, a measure of security and possible union representation – are increasingly giving way to contracts,” warns the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Workers in the U.S. take relatively few vacation days compared to workers in other countries, maybe because we aren’t afforded any paid time off on a federal level, and often work far longer than eight-hour days. Dolly Parton bastardized her own ode to the working woman by releasing “5 to 9” as part of a Super Bowl ad, an uncritical appreciation of working more in one’s free time. People aren’t even guaranteed paid time off to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

That culture of hustle and greed disguised as effortless relaxation created Jimmy Buffett and Margaritaville. Many of his songs, and now his resorts and restaurants, and the entire aura he projects, are about escape from your life, which assumes your life is something you want to escape. If the inspiration for Margaritaville is a song about a man who has left it all behind to do nothing, the resort may as well be a theme park for conspicuous leisure — you too can leave it all behind, and then come back and brag about how you left it all behind to assure yourself you indeed did that. Leisure becomes an exercise in labor. The “eight hours what we will” the Wobblies fought for is increasingly slipping away. You have this rare opportunity for nonproductive time, something to be scrimped and saved for, so you must chill out. You cannot waste this.

In short, the whole ethos behind the resort is acknowledging that work sucks and no one wants to do it, but that ethos can only thrive in relation to work. If work didn’t suck, no one would be there. Though the executives behind the Big Flip-Flop may not have intended it, there is a desperation in the song “Margaritaville” that permeates the Times Square resort. Entering the building was like signing a contract, that everyone here is agreeing to buy into the facade so as not to kill the vibe. Everyone here needs this, on some level, and while I’m also aware of the organized fun of it all, I also need it.

As I returned to the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar for a final drink before collapsing in my room, I thought of what Margaritaville might look like if we acknowledged we had enough resources to go around, that no one has to work as hard as they do for as little as they get. What would a vacation, a nice meal, or a rooftop cocktail look like if it didn’t have to carry so much weight? I don’t think it would involve a two-story light-up Statue of Liberty. For a second, that makes me sad.

The next morning I realized my mission to not leave the resort would be nearly impossible when it came to breakfast. The room came equipped with two bottles of water and a Keurig machine with four coffee pods (one of which was, surprise surprise, coconut coffee). However, there was no cream or sugar, and the mini fridge was empty. I scrounged the drawers for a room service menu and found there was none, and when I attempted to call the front desk, there was no dial tone. The restaurants didn’t open until 11.

Still, there was the Joe Merchant’s Coffee & Provisions stall in the lobby, and I thought there might be at least something to eat there. I took a shower with St. Somewhere Spa-branded body wash that smelled mostly of teenage-boy cologne, and went downstairs, hoping to find a Calypso Breakfast Sandwich or Parrothead Parfait or whatever weird beach-branded meal they offered. Instead, I found a mediocre bodega, with plastic-wrapped bagels and tuna sandwiches and granola bars. I could find this, and better, outside. I wanted to go back outside.

My partner and I packed up and left. We got bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches and iced coffee on the way home, and since we had already budgeted having that afternoon off, we enjoyed them on our real-life balcony in the sun. I took a midday nap on the couch, content in the knowledge that there was nowhere I had to be and nothing I had to do at that moment. It could be like this all the time. It’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.

Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer.

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How Ice Cream Became the Ultimate American Comfort Food

August 27, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

From Prohibition comfort to wartime morale booster, ice cream has played a surprisingly significant role in the country’s history

The premise of The Secret History of Food is straightforward: There’s an interesting story behind almost everything we eat. And in the book, out August 31, Matt Siegel fills chapters with the kinds of strange, real-life anecdotes you’ll find yourself reeling off at your next dinner party with the set up, “Fun fact...”

In this except, from a chapter on vanilla that addresses precisely how the flavor came to be a stand-in for the dull and commonplace when the plant itself is anything but, Siegel explains how ice cream traversed Prohibition and World Wars to become the ultimate in American comfort foods. — Monica Burton

Flavored ices and frozen desserts have been coveted for thousands of years, across many cultures, by people who have gone to great lengths to procure them. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to climb mountains to harvest ice they’d mix with wine or honey to make sorbet, a word that comes from the Arabic sharba (“drink”) and sharbat, a drink made by mixing snow with various spices and flower blossoms. The Chinese made sherbet by covering containers with snow and saltpeter (also used in making gunpowder) to lower the freezing point of milk mixed with rice, and the Mongols made ice cream by riding horses in subfreezing temperatures while carrying cream stored in animal intestines, which would then freeze and be churned smooth by the galloping of their horses.

Even as late as the eighteenth century, ice cream was often reserved for those patient enough to wait for snowstorms or wealthy and patient enough to harvest ice from mountains or frozen rivers and keep it from melting in underground pits insulated with layers of sawdust, straw, or animal fur.

So part of the reason ice cream was so coveted is that, like vanilla, it was scarce and impracticable. And yet, even as its availability and practicality increased, so, too, did its associations with comfort.

When the Eighteenth Amendment outlawed the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol in the 1920s, many early American breweries such as Anheuser-Busch and Yuengling turned to making ice cream and soda to stay afloat, capitalizing both on shared manufacturing processes, like bottling and refrigeration, and the fact that ice cream’s ingredients (fat, sugar, and vanilla) made a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.

In fact, ice cream stood in for alcohol as a source of national comfort and diversion to such a degree that by 1929, ice cream consumption had grown by more than 100 million gallons annually, peaking at more than a million gallons per day. Its consumption dipped with the crash of the stock market later that same year, when the Great Depression ushered in a decade of depressing foods like mustard sandwiches and mock apple pies, which substituted crackers for apple slices. Yet even then ice cream endured — not just in spite of rocky times but because of them.

There are disputing claims as to who created the flavor Rocky Road, but we do know that it was popularized by William Dreyer and Joseph Edy, two California ice cream makers who began marketing it as a culinary metaphor in 1929 to help people cope with the Great Depression. Toppings at the time were primarily relegated to the point of sale and sprinkled on top, so the idea of mixing in broken chunks of marshmallows and nuts (originally walnuts but later almonds, which, the story goes, Dreyer cut up with sewing scissors borrowed from his wife) was pretty much unheard of. The name “Rocky Road” has since blended into the vernacular in the same way we’ve appropriated “Popsicle” to mean “frozen ice pop,” when really it’s a protected trademark owned by Unilever, the only brand that can legally sell “Popsicles”; but it used to be symbolic of comfort and perseverance — a reminder that life could still be sweet amid broken, rocky pieces.

Yet probably the most critical contribution to the comfort of ice cream and vanilla came during World War II. For thousands of years and across cultures, the military focus on food was primarily caloric: maximize the food intake of your own soldiers (and that of their horses and wives and children, who remained at home while much of the workforce was off fighting) and minimize that of your enemies. But that changed during World War I, when Herbert Hoover rallied Americans on the importance of food not just for calories during wartime but for comfort, officially classifying ice cream as “essential foodstuffs” during the war and making it an inseparable part of the American war machine from that point forward.

You see, before Hoover became the United States’ thirty-first president in 1929 (and before the United States entered World War I in 1917), he was a philanthropist who organized food relief in Belgium, which was caught in the middle of a conflict between Germany and Great Britain. Essentially, the entire nation of Belgium was on the brink of starvation in 1914 because the Germans had invaded it on their way to France and were eating all the food — and the British navy was blocking shipments of food because they didn’t want it to go to the Germans and didn’t trust the Germans not to take it from the Belgians.

Fortunately, Hoover, who at the time was living in London, intervened and convinced both sides to let him organize food relief as a private citizen, essentially creating his own pirate nation with its own flag, naval fleet, and railroads. Between 1914 and 1919, Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium fed about 10 million civilian refugees in occupied France and Belgium, delivering, in total, about 4,998,059 tons of flour, grain, rice, beans, peas, pork, milk, sugar, and miscellaneous staples and food items valued at $861,340,244.21 (roughly the equivalent of $13,436,907,809.70 today).

But Hoover’s neutrality ended when the United States entered the war in 1917; his pirate organization continued to provide food relief as a neutral entity, but Hoover himself volunteered to head the newly established US Food Administration, hoping to do for his own country what he’d done for Belgium — and even offering to take the position without pay.

He basically became czar of the US food supply, exerting totalitarian control over prices, distribution, and purchasing. But Hoover didn’t want control; part of the reason he’d insisted on taking the job without salary was to demonstrate sacrifice to the American people. So while nations on either side of the conflict imposed mandatory rationing to conserve food supplies — as they’d always done in wartime — Hoover saw this as un-American (“of the nature of dictatorship”) and appealed instead to the American “spirit of self-denial and self-sacrifice.”

Not only did he promise Americans that “food will win the war,” but he promised a win without losing the very freedoms and values they were fighting for — including simple pleasures like good old American ice cream and the freedom to purchase ingredients at will.

And Americans were eager to help. Within months he’d built a force of nearly half a million volunteers and convinced more than 10 million households to sign pledge cards vowing to “Hooverize” their meals by cutting down on staples such as wheat, fat, and sugar.

Corporate America also contributed. Restaurants and public eateries saved more than 250 million pounds of wheat, 300 million pounds of meat, and 56 million pounds of sugar (enough to feed 8 million soldiers for a month) by observing days such as Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays; food manufacturers spent their own advertising budgets patriotically urging consumers to consume less of their commodities; and newspapers, retailers, and ad agencies volunteered their expertise and ad space — culminating in an estimated $19,417,600 in donated services and displays. Even the White House pitched in by grazing sheep on the front lawn.

The result was a tripling of US food exports almost instantaneously, producing 18 million tons of food exports in our first full year of war alone.

Yet the ice cream industry demanded more. An editorial in the May 1918 issue of The Ice Cream Review (an offshoot of Milwaukee’s Butter, Cheese & Egg Journal) spooned out sharp criticism for the scant availability of ice cream overseas and cried for Washington to intervene by subsidizing Allied ice cream factories across Europe: “Reports from nearly all the camps show that the per capita consumption of ice cream is nearly twice the figure for the average of the entire country. Are these boys going to miss something out of their lives when they go across? Yes, they are, and it is a shame that no one has thought to provide this home comfort.”

And it wasn’t just comfort the ice cream industry sought to provide for soldiers but good health and morale:

In this country every medical hospital uses ice cream as a food and doctors would not know how to do without it. But what of our wounded and sick boys in France? Are they to lie in bed wishing for a dish of good old American ice cream? They are up to the present, for ice cream and ices is taboo in France. It clearly is the duty of the Surgeon General or some other officer to demand that a supply be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The ice cream industry was still in its infancy. Flavors were still largely limited to chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, and ice cream on a stick wasn’t even invented yet; it wouldn’t be patented until 1923. Refrigeration was also in its infancy, and a lot of the cooling technologies that did exist depended on toxic gases like ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide (as opposed to Freon, which was introduced in the 1930s and merely killed the environment). So refrigeration was not only expensive and inadequate but potentially deadly.

Meanwhile, sugar was in shorter supply than Hoover had let on. Despite conservation efforts, the United States was still consuming far more of it per capita than her allies overseas — and before the war had imported the bulk of its sugar supply from Germany, which obviously wasn’t going to happen anymore; plus, not only had Germany stopped exporting sugar to the United States, but it had started taking it from their neighbors, too, making the market even more competitive.

So rather than building ice cream factories overseas, Hoover was eventually forced to ask manufacturers to reduce their use of sugar domestically — ruling in the summer of 1918 “Ice cream is no longer considered so essential as to justify free use of sugar in its manufacture.”

Still, the ice cream industry fared better than others, having to cut just 25 percent of its sugar use as opposed to a 50 percent cut for manufacturers of “less essential” commodities such as chocolate, soda, and chewing gum. And Hoover’s support for ice cream, coupled with the industrial boom of the postwar economy and a returning workforce who fondly recalled eating it in wartime camps and hospitals, helped the industry soar soon after the war ended.

In fact, we owe a lot of ice cream’s postwar popularity not just to Hoover, Yuengling, and Rocky Road but to a World War I veteran named Howard Johnson who, after returning from service in France, purchased a dilapidated drugstore with a soda fountain and brought it back to life with an ice cream recipe he purchased from a German street vendor. Howard Johnson’s (truncated as “HoJo’s”) might not be a household name anymore but at one point it was the largest food chain in America, with more than a thousand locations and a new location opening every nine days.

The postwar twenties also saw the debut of the Eskimo Pie; the Popsicle (originally called the “Epsicle” by its creator, Frank W. Epperson, whose children took to calling it “Pop’s Sicle”); and the ice cream bar, created in Youngstown, Ohio, by a candy maker named Harry Burt, who inserted lollipop sticks into bars of vanilla ice cream coated in chocolate and called it the Good Humor Sucker, later changed to the Good Humor Bar. By the summer of 1921, authorities on Ellis Island had even begun handing out ice cream to immigrants as part of their first American meal.

So by the time World War II came around, ice cream (still largely vanilla, which accounted for roughly 80 percent of the market) had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. Once again the rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars). This time, however, the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines; delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.

And you’re goddamn right we won the war.

In 1942, when Japanese torpedoes struck the USS Lexington, then the second largest aircraft carrier in the navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship — but not before breaking into the freezer and raiding all the ice cream. Survivors describe scooping it into their helmets before lowering themselves into shark-infested waters. US bomber crews used to make ice cream while flying over enemy territory after figuring out that they could strap buckets of ice cream mix to the outside of their planes during missions; by the time they landed, the mix would have frozen in the cold temperature of high altitude and been churned smooth by engine vibrations and turbulence, if not machine-gun fire and midair explosions. And soldiers on the ground took to using their helmets as mixing bowls to improvise ice cream from snow and melted chocolate bars.

Ice cream became so tied to national morale, in fact, that when the most decorated member of the Marine Corps, General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, called it a “sissy food” in the 1950s and tried to convince his marines that they’d be tougher on a diet of beer and whiskey, he drew so much national backlash that the Pentagon had to intervene with an official statement promising ice cream would be served no less than three times a week.

None of this is to suggest that ice cream was the only food to provide comfort during the war — or that it was easily obtained. “No G.I. who passed through Europe in 1944 or 1945 could have failed to notice the plight of its inhabitants,” writes historian Lee Kennett, who describes GIs going through chow lines two or three times to grab extra food for impoverished locals and guards turning their backs while food and fuel supplies mysteriously went missing.

Meanwhile, for American POWs being held captive overseas — where they were often forced to survive on things like maggot-infested rice, stale bread, rotten vegetables, and often far less or far worse — comfort food was, in the words of one POW, “as obtainable as a slice of the moon.”

“Somebody listening in may have heard us talking about politics or sport, or anything else,” recalls British WWII veteran Harold Goulding, who spent more than three years in Japanese POW camps, “but I think really those were just symbols and we were really talking about food all the time.”

Other symbols, says Goulding, were less cryptic, like pictures of food they found in old magazines and plastered to the walls of bunks as if they were pinups. Others passed the time by sharing recipes and filling scrap paper with menus for the elaborate Christmas dinners they’d cook if they made it back home.

“During the forty three months that I was a POW I spent a lot of time just writing out food and holiday menus to keep myself somewhat sane and focused,” recalls Mess Sergeant Morris Lewis.

And while these menus included far more than just vanilla ice cream, they also highlight what it is that makes it so comforting.

Explains Sue Shephard, who catalogued many of these menus in her paper “A Slice of the Moon,” presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, “Few tried to recall the elegant meals, in restaurants, of scallops and oyster, Dover soles, pheasant or Chateaubriand steaks. That wasn’t the food they wanted to remember; it was home food of childhood which represented unconditional love, without cares or responsibilities.”

And few foods represent that better than ice cream.

Vanilla, in particular, takes us back to a time when life and ice cream felt simpler — even if the process of making ice cream might not have been: a time before the intrusion of artificial flavors, colors, stabilizers, emulsifiers, and preservatives.

Clinical research seems to confirm this. Researchers testing the neurological effects of ice cream, chocolate, and yogurt found that only ice cream inhibited the human startle response across genders with statistical significance, leading them to theorize that there’s more at play than fat, sugar, and cold temperatures and that a large degree of ice cream’s comfort is psychological: a result of learned associations from memories pairing ice cream with things like summer, vacations, and friendship.

Not to get too Freudian, but it’s possible our comforting memories of ice cream and vanilla go back even further, all the way back to our very first comfort food, given that vanilla is a common flavor in human breast milk (and theoretically in amniotic fluid) — and the tendency of such flavors to impact lifelong food preferences. Indeed, human breast milk isn’t really much different from vanilla ice cream base, minus the ice crystals, considering that human milk is significantly sweeter than cow’s milk and also contains more fat.

Perhaps that’s why, at least in one POW camp, “ice cream” was the code for “news from home” — because, as ex-POW Russell Braddon, that was “what all prisoners of war crave more than anything else.”

From the forthcoming book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOOD: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat by Matt Siegel. Copyright © 2021 by Matt Siegel. To be published on August 31^st by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

A Gummy for Whatever Ails You

August 27, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

From adult vitamins to CBD and THC versions, gummies have come a long way from the candy aisle. But how did we get to this place?

For every generation, for every affliction, there’s a gummy. Supplement brands like Grummies promise they can reduce inflammation (with 260-milligram doses of turmeric rhizome extract) or “detox and cleanse” (with 500 milligrams of apple cider vinegar) in a gummy product made without fillers, glucose, corn syrup, or gelatin. Wana Brands promises to “enhance [people’s] lives physically, creatively and emotionally” with its THC gummies, emphasizing product consistency and science in its branding. High-end CBD brand Gossamer sells the idea of luxury, with small-batch, high-end flavor; the publication/consumer brand’s first foray into edibles is a Turkish delight gummy by pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz. And there are gummies for those who just need a break. A recent ad for Martha Stewart’s CBD gummies features a styled scene of domestic disarray: a puddle of milk dribbling from a downed sippy cup, a laptop displaying a packed calendar, a toy car ominously perched on the keyboard. A product lineup appears on the bottom with the weirdly on-brand tagline: “Find your inner Martha.”

In other words, gummies — which can be made of polymers like plant-based starch (Swedish Fish), pectin (Fruit Gems), or animal-based gelatin (Haribo bears) — have come a long way from the candy aisle. The first mass-produced gummies appeared in England in the middle of the 19th century. Recent applications like vitamins and cannabis are new uses for an old form. Often, they’re associated with adults using a childlike delivery vehicle for something close to wellness: The Wall Street Journal Magazine recently asked if gummies are “The Only Way Gen Z Will Take a Vitamin?” Within the supplement category, “the term ‘gummy’ has grown 70.8 percent since last year,” says Yarden Horwitz, co-founder of Spate, a company that tracks wellness consumer trends through online search analysis. Searches for specific health ingredients like ashwagandha, touted as an all-purpose stress-reliever, have been increasing, too. But for others that have had their heyday, like CBD and apple cider vinegar, numbers are waning. “It’s almost like all these ingredients that are on their way out are seeing growth with gummies, making gummy actually more of the trend,” says Horwitz.

Outside of vitamins, popularized in the early 2000s, the most common association between gummies and wellness probably involves CBD and weed. Today, gummies make up about 80 percent of the overall edibles market, which itself comprises about 15 to 20 percent of the overall cannabis market. “It dominates,” says Joe Hodas, chief marketing officer at Wana Brands, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of cannabis gummies. “It’s not even close.” That trend has only grown since the start of the pandemic. According to Horwitz, CBD gummies had been gaining in popularity prior to a spike in searches in March 2020, during the early days of COVID, and the pandemic accelerated what had been a slow-building rise.

It’s easy to see why gummies have become so popular for cannabis products, but their ubiquity makes it hard to forget that they haven’t been around that long. “Early days, it was not necessarily fait accompli that gummies were going to be the superstar of the edibles industry,” says Hodas. When adult recreational use was legalized in Colorado in 2014, Hodas was working for a company that made other products, like beverages, which didn’t really take. But consumers quickly “demonstrated a very strong affinity for gummies,” Hodas says, which worked well for manufacturers looking to make a consistent, shelf-stable product. “They’re small, portable, discreet. They taste good, and don’t require a ton of eating.”

Yael Vodovotz, professor of food science and technology at Ohio State University, says that “from a scientific point of view,” gummies are a particularly flexible delivery vehicle. Vodovotz leads the university’s Center for Advanced Functional Foods Research and Entrepreneurship and has created gummy confections that deliver bioactives (compounds with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, or antifungal benefits that go beyond basic nutrition) derived from grapefruits, strawberries, and black raspberries. Gummies can be made with many different polymers, which allow for a range of inclusions — you can “take your drug of choice and put it inside that matrix,” she says. Some have proteins, some have carbs. Vodovotz uses seaweed-derived agar for her grapefruit confections, to balance the effect the acid has on the gummy’s texture. Pectin is popular in Europe and Asia, but less so in the U.S., where starch dominates the market. “It’s a very crackly bite compared to the gelatin or the pectin, which are much more chewy,” Vodovotz says. “But it just depends, they have different properties and uses.”

Finding the right balance of THC in gummy form requires “a lot more science than many other platforms,” says Mike Hennesy, Wana’s vice president of innovation. Wana recently released a gummy that encapsulates cannabis oil in a water-soluble outer layer, which Hennesy says allows the body to metabolize it more quickly. Wana also has plans to add more active compounds from the cannabis plant besides THC and CBD, like terpenes, which have psychological responses in the brain that create their own effects. “There’s going to be a lot more use cases that are more specific rather than just a ratio of cannabinoids,” says Hennesy, “which I think parallels with what we’re seeing for other use cases for gummies outside of the cannabis market.”

And that’s creating an increasingly squishy relationship between health, food, and consumerism. More than, say, powders or pills, gummies make wellness, however you define it, feel convenient and cutting-edge, something to be savored instead of swallowed. “The thing about gummies is that they help you stick with a routine,” says Nick Michlewicz, a self-described health nut and co-founder of Grummies, which he launched this past year with partner Colin Darretta. “They make health feel more accessible and more fun, there’s like a reward to do it.” The language surrounding gummies — a “learn more” page on Wana’s site guides users with words like “science,” “chemical constituents,” and “body’s regulatory network” — suggests precision and predictable results. That’s attractive to consumers who have grown accustomed to fine-tuning the way their minds and bodies feel at any given time.

Because they’re so endlessly customizable, gummies have a way of creating their own use cases, or solutions to problems that consumers may not have known that they had or might not really have at all. Is your skin looking sallow? There’s a gummy for that. Have you been feeling cranky? Perhaps you’ve been having trouble sleeping? Gummies turn supplements into products that promise specific benefits, making personal what was once clinical. They lend an air of science and specificity to something that was nebulous and holistic. They give consumers a sense of control, in a self-contained package. Clicking “add to cart” on a gummy that’s formulated with a trendy active ingredient, and branded by a trendy agency? Doesn’t seem too labor-intensive. (Day Job, which did design and copy for Grummies, also worked on “we canned a feeling” beverage brand Recess.)

Playful branding has become a requirement for even the most mundane of products (underwear, acne care), and supplements, especially gummy ones, are no exception. The comparative seriousness of a brand like Moon Juice (“Self care for communal care”) launched in 2011, versus Grummies (“Part of a widespread conspiracy to trick you into being healthy”), both of which pitch themselves as ambassadors of the plant-based wonders of the world, is indicative of how much wellness products have become lifestyle products — complete with branding that sells Fun. Packaging design emphasizes bright or pastel colors, direct-address copy, fonts designed to look good both on-screen (say, in an Instagram ad) and, eventually, on a store shelf, alongside other products that vie for your eye. The same goes for low-sugar gummy candies like Smart Sweets and Behave, which in another decade might have been presented as priggish. That gummies have become a trusted form at a time when so many consumers are fixated on purity in terms of ingredients, on being able to pronounce everything on a nutrition label, speaks to their unique classification as medicine/candy/consumer product.

The global wellness industry has more than doubled since 2010, going from an estimated $2 billion to $4.5 billion annually. Gummies are a natural progression of a dynamic that’s slowly been shifting away from doctors’ advice and toward individual choice, leaving consumers to wade through various claims and products. In the vast world of wellness, gummies are familiar. They’re an easy sell that can be used to sell anything. A blend of consistency, novelty, and small wins, in the form of products that can be bought again and again. They make our obsession with our bodies and ourselves seem less like a struggle, and more like a game. Gummies aren’t always controlled substances, but they make you feel in control.

Rachel del Valle is a freelance writer and copywriter based in New York. Paulina Almira is a graphic designer and digital illustrator whose work draws from retrofuturistic styles to create playful, surreal compositions.