Buttermilk Biscuits & Civilization, A True Story

Mythical Buttermilk Biscuit Cow

Just as pancakes are merely a vehicle for maple syrup, biscuits provide the perfect vehicle for blackberry, strawberry, raspberry, peach, or apricot jam. And just as I've always made jam, I've always made biscuits and scones. I also count myself among those who have sought in vain to differentiate scone from biscuit and biscuit from scone. So it was with eager anticipation that I read:

Biscuits and Scones Share Tender Secrets, in the New York Times: Dining & Wine, Feb 25, 2014.

In which Julia Moskin tells us that American biscuits originated in the British Isles as scones, first mentioned in print in the 16th century. Her source authority, Elisabeth Luard, a director of The Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery and the author of The Old World Kitchen.

The proto-scone is believed to come from Scottish kitchens, where rounds of oat and barley dough were cooked on large griddles, then cut into wedges. They were a simple combination of fat, flour and liquid, which became softer and lighter as wheat, butter and leaveners like baking soda and baking powder became widely available.

Not exactly breaking news, but good journalism with source clearly attributed. But what is it about the New York Times food writers? So often they choose to state opinion as fact. For instance:

Height is paramount to a good biscuit or scone.

I like a tall biscuit, too, but an acquaintance from Mobile, Alabama makes a traditional New Year's biscuit that is flat and nearly as crispy as a cracker. With a breakfast pork chop and gravy, it's delicious. That's opinion, because deliciousness is a matter of taste, not fact.

To be fair, opinions stated authoritatively can easily be taken as fact, but we want to trust the New York Times to at least get the facts right. To wit:

Buttermilk is a traditional liquid for biscuits and used to contain more butterfat, but today it is a lean and sour product.

This is not only wrong, it's gratuitous. Are we supposed to think that old-fashioned buttermilk made better biscuits? Let's set the record straight, which isn't too hard, because the name says it all (and there are plenty of sources, like this one from a cheese-making professor of biology and chemistry).

Traditional buttermilk was the liquid left behind after churning cream into butter. The fat solidifies into butter leaving a liquid byproduct, buttermilk. You can't buy traditional buttermilk, at least not in these parts, but you can make it yourself.

Try the recipe for Home-churned butter and buttermilk: the sweet-cream type, on page 245 of Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, by Anne Mendelson. She also goes into the differences between "true" buttermilk and the modern-day product. She finds both, delicious.

Commercially-available buttermilk is generally a "cultured" product, i.e. bacteria is added to milk and allowed to ferment. Like yoghurt, you can ferment any kind of milk with any amount of fat you choose. Most grocery store buttermilk appears to be a cultured, low-fat product. It's thicker than milk, thinner than yoghurt, and both pourable and drinkable. More importantly for our biscuits, it's more acidic than unfermented milk.

Cooking Chemistry 101: Acid + Baking Soda = Gaseous Lift

The chemical reaction creates carbon dioxide and gives baked goods a quick rise, which is why buttermilk is a traditional addition to biscuits, scones, and Irish soda bread, too. (It's almost St. Patrick's Day.)

Milk begets cream, sour cream, butter, buttermilk, yoghurt, kefir, and a long list of other fermented, cultured, and ripened products, including countless varieties of cheese.

Goats, sheep, or cow's milk, plus some milled grain, like wheat, oats, or corn, and you've got the dough of civilization. Let it sit around to collect yeasts, and you've got bread. If you're in a hurry to leave town, you've got matzo. Or you can move civilization forward to 1846, when Messrs Dwight & Church, two New York bakers, built the first baking soda factory (now Arm & Hammer), and matzos magically became biscuits. (Though a high-fat cream certainly makes a richer-tasting biscuit).

Leave out the double-acting baking powder and stick to buttermilk and baking soda, plus butter for richness and flavor. I'm going to have to try the crowding tip of "huddling" unbaked biscuits close together on the baking sheet so they've got no place to expand but up! But then again, nice flat crackers have their devotees, as well.

Cory Doctorow Dons Chicken-Little Suit to Fight DRM in HTML5, Why?

©The Simpsons

Holy smokes, Cory Doctorow thinks The End is Near! We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.

I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. -Cory Doctorow

Either Doctorow knows something we don't, or he's been infected with Chicken-Little virus and believes the sky is falling. But Doctorow is not so easily dismissed. In fact, we like and admire him and his works. He writes smart stuff and he understands the Web. He's seriously concerned with the free and open sharing of ideas and information, and he's not greedy.

Doctorow is the sworn enemy of DRM, Digital Rights Management, and is an active, articulate, and vociferous leader for a DRM-free world. When the "W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards," Doctorow responds: "I can't let you do that, Dave."

To make matters even scarier, no less than Tim Berners-Lee is openly supporting the W3C's decision! This feels to many like a betrayal, as if TB-L cares more about streaming his favorite Hollywood movies over Netflix, than about genuine Net Neutrality and Openness. (Though one wonders if TB-L ever watches movies.)

But we must take a step back and reflect again on Doctorow's contention that this has anything to do with "losing the Web." What's really happened and what are the implications?

On September 30, 2013, the W3C announced that W3C content protection for video is "in-scope" for discussion in the HTML Working Group. This is a euphemism for the inclusion of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in HTML5, a form of DRM that the movie industry has been lobbying for.

The HTML5 standard includes the necessary video tags to support streaming media within browsers, including encryption. But vendors who wish to enforce their copyrights must turn to browser plug-ins for DRM.

EME would provide a Web Standard platform for plug-ins, like Flash, which may or may not make a huge difference to end-users, but might make life a little more transparent for developers. But this is hardly the issue.

As much as we're sympathetic to Doctorow and the forces for an open Web, it's hard to see the W3C's decision as a threat to the Web's survival.

TB-L, never at a loss for detailed explanations, says:

if content protection of some kind has to be used for videos, it is better for it to be discussed in the open at W3C, better for everyone to use an interoperable open standard as much as possible, and better for it to be framed in a browser which can be open source, and available on a general purpose computer rather than a special purpose box.

We concur: 2014 will not be the end of the Web, including some kind of EME platform within HTML5 will not create an opaque experience for users and developers (as Doctorow claims), and the sky is not falling.

We also support Doctorow's quest for a DRM-free world, but can't how the W3C's pragmatic support for DRM will bring about the end of the world. In the inimitable words of Science Officer, Spock, "It's not logical."

-Professor Walrus

Halloween iPad Dreams—A Life Transformed

It's Halloween! No costume, no candy, not even a fucking pumpkin to carve into a Steve Jobs jack-o-lantern. But tomorrow, my ancient, first generation iPad will magically become an iPad Air! I'm very excited.

This calls for a celebration. So in honor of All Saints iPad Day, I'm going to attempt a NaNoWriMo. I'll also be losing 20 pounds and gaining immense self-respect. Damn I'm good! Where to begin?

Obviously, the celebration begins with a trip to the Apple store for a 64GB, 4G model. This is such a life-improving event that I'm going to need a maximally-equipped model. And I need 4G for the times I spend in my mobile office.

Don't need a keyboard. Do need a case. Don't need a car charger, do need AppleCare. Don't need software, do need software, but I'm not sure what and won't know until I get used to my new life with this new iPad.

What I really need is what everyone needs, to get better organized, to be better organized, and to stay better organized. Since my whole life is changing, it's a good time to put some of my not-yet-lost weight behind this effort.

It's about productivity. I know this is so, because I admire productive people and rail against my own lack of accomplishments. Just as a better camera would make me a better photographer, I know that a new, faster, more-capable iPad will make me a more productive person (though I doubt it will cure me of incipient irony).

I'm having second thoughts about becoming a completely different person, but I'm still buying a new iPad, tomorrow. I want a white one, because my old one is black.

Good for You: People Purple Eaters

Everyone else is wrong and I'm right, but for the sake of world peace (whirled peas?), let's just say it's my problem.
Purple eggplant skin is not an especially healthy food!

“The darker the eggplant’s skin, the more it has to offer in terms of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.”

I gagged on this sentence when I read it in the New York Times, Recipes for Health: Easing Into Fall, Taking Eggplant With You. It's a recipe for Eggplant and Tomato Pie by Martha Rose Shulman, but not just any recipe. It's a Recipe for Health.

We have tomatoes, we have eggplants, and we like eating them together, especially as pizza pie. But that line about the antioxidant-rich anthocyanins sticks in my throat, and I will not make this recipe; I don't care how healthy it purports to be!

I'm reminded of an early episode of Julia Childs's, The French Chef. As I recall, she was making a classic ratatouille and explained that eggplants with innies tended to be bitter, while those with outies were not. This was wisdom she had gleaned from her green grocer referring to the flower end of the fruits.

What?! So much for the wisdom and bitter nonsense of experts. And now back to anthocyanins or anthocyans (the cyan root should give you a hint of color). Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

from Greek: ἀνθός (anthos) = flower + κυανός (kyanos) = blue) are water-soluble vacuolar pigments that may appear red, purple, or blue depending on the pH.

Not surprisingly, the purpler the eggplant, the greater the concentration of anthocyanin, at least in the skin. It's also true that anthocyanins act as powerful antioxidants, which many people want to believe provides untold health benefits (the keyword is untold). Here's an authoritatively well-footnoted quote from Wikipedia addressing the consumption of anthocyanin-rich foods (click here if you need to verify the footnotes):

“Although anthocyanins are powerful antioxidants in vitro,[34] this antioxidant property is unlikely to be conserved after the plant is consumed. As interpreted by the Linus Pauling Institute and European Food Safety Authority, dietary anthocyanins and other flavonoids have little or no direct antioxidant food value following digestion.[35][36][37]”

What are the health/nutrition/science editors at The Times thinking? Eat more eggplant skin, it's good for you? And don't bother eating white eggplants (they're called eggplants for a reason!), which have no detectable anthocyanins. That's according to The Handbook of Vegetable Science and Technology, in table 6 on page 234. Though the same table shows that white eggplants have a higher fiber content than most of the others tested.

Time for a radical conclusion: We may have to decide on the basis of flavor or seasonal availability which eggplants to put on our pies.

Business application: Sell dried purple eggplant-skin flakes, packaged in shakers like red pepper flakes, as a flavor enhancer and healthy addition to tofu and other favorite foods in need of enhancement. Call them AnthoFlakes and sell them in red, purple, and blue varieties—the world will beat (not beet) a path to your door!

All Things Meta—In Pursuit of Metafiction

I saw this tweet, followed the link, and read the review in The Atlantic online:

Review: #Rush is great Hollywood entertainment, and one of Ron Howard's best movies http://t.co/vPjdG3911t

Not a long review, nor profound, but amusing, which is pretty much what the review says about the movie. A link to another Atlantic review caught my attention:

The Transcontinental Novel That Won't Win the Booker Prize

I'm hooked and being reeled into the endless connections of the social Web—the great distraction of my working days. The novel sounds interesting, more interesting than the Ron Howard movie. But the reviewer, Joe Pinsker, is telling me too much of the plot, more than I want to know. I have to stop reading, and this chain of links comes to an end…, almost.

Pinsker describes the novel as "an unabashedly metafictional work." I've never heard of metafiction. It sounds like something I wouldn't like, though I don't know why, and feel the need to know more—another link to follow.

Much of my link chasing ends (and/or begins) with a visit to Wikipedia, and here I am, again.

Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, uses self-reference to draw attention to itself as a work of art, while exposing the "truth" of a story.

Metafiction has been around at least since Homer, and, unbeknownst to me, I've read and loved numerous works in the genre. This Wikipedia entry doesn't say who coined the term or when, but it feels like a category beloved of late 20th century literary criticism—fecund ground for Ph.D. candidates to explore.

A quick correspondence with my personal go-to guy for literary criticism, Chris Goodrich, yields additional information:

Wikipedia sez, "William H. Gass coined the term “metafiction” in a 1970 essay entitled “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”."

1970, the year I entered college at Washington University, where Professor Gass was the great man of the English Department. I remember hearing him speak, once, remember liking his lecture and being impressed, but I have no memory of what he said. And now, like so many who are ignorant of history, I am doomed to repeat it. In my ignorance, I'm accused, by Taylor Beck, our editorial intern, of practicing metafiction—of writing meta-jokes, as in the FastCoLabs Newsletter of 9/20/13:

It’s a well established fact that your favorite professor is the funniest Walrus in the Bering Sea. “I have a joke,” I told Big Katharine, my favorite cow in our Ugly. “A funny tweet happened on the way to the MIT Media Lab forum,” I said. “What’s funny about that?” she said. “It’s very funny,” I assured her, “you just don’t get it.” But she’d already flipped her flukes and swum away.

Time for me to end this pursuit and return to work, but first, how can I resist this link to the Adorable Care Act Tumblr, wherein baby animals explain Obama's Affordable Care Act using irony.

It's so meta!
 

John Harbison’s, The Great Gatsby, in Tanglewood Debut Concert Performance

Is The Great Gatsby a great opera? I can't say, because I've only seen the concert performance presented in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood this past Thursday night. But the performance felt more like a Handel Oratorio than a Grand Opera, which is probably a very good thing.

In fact, I enjoyed this performance in a number of ways. Most obviously, The Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music and the soloists for the production were wonderful—the playing confident and full of color, the singing strong and full of emotion in both chorus and solos, while conductor and artistic director, Ryan Turner, showed great understanding of the score and the story. 

Remarkably, I felt as though we were really "seeing" Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, and Tom behaving badly and ruining their lives, while Nick looks on and narrates, just as Fitzgerald intended. It was certainly more "real" than the movie version (though I can't claim to have seen the latest, Baz Luhrmann, edition. 

It's not an accident that this opera, even in the “concert” presentation, feels like the genuine article. If you had set out in 1995 to identify the best person to write it, you'd probably have picked John Harbison. As we learned during the pre-concert discussion (viewable from the BSO Media Center), one of Harbison's inspirations for the piece was his father, who like Fitzgerald himself, was a member of  the Triangle Club, Princeton's musical-comedy group. Harbison's uncle graduated from Princeton in Fitzgerald's class, or what would have been his class had Fitzgerald graduated.

Harbison is something of a man of letters—Harvard B.A., Princeton M.A., professor at MIT, frequent lecturer, published critic. During the talk, he admitted to writing poetry as a young man. As a musician and composer, he's always loved jazz and is considered an expert on the subject. There's abundant evidence of his understanding of the American literature of the Jazz Age in general, and Fitzgerald in particular, in this work.

The music is scored for a big, lush orchestra, plus banjo, saxophone, and drums for the pop numbers, all of which are original to the opera, and with original lyrics by Murray Horwitz. The interplay of instrumental emotion from operatic to foxtrot is one of the most compelling aspects of the work. The effect of Nick and Jordan conversing operatically in the foreground while Gatsby's party strums and beats along underneath works well, and pulls listeners between these two opposite forces, heightening the tension.

Harbison's orchestration is full of non-musical texture: automobiles and traffic, trains, city bustle, rain, and the green light at the end of Daisy's dock flashing its leitmotif. Gatsby's frequent "old sport" refrain had its leitmotif, as well. So many elements come together and play off each other, but not so obviously as to feel heavy-handed. There is the sense of a skilled and experienced craftsman at work, enjoying the complexity without showing off.

The oratorio effect of this concert performance is also handled with skill and subtlety. The characters were onstage only while singing, which meant they had entrances and exits. They wore period-like attire and sang to each other in a conversational style, with visible emotion. It all helped give the performance a dramatic feel.

There was much that was praiseworthy. But, and I almost hate to admit it, the evening ultimately fell short, though in ways that seem to plague almost all contemporary opera.

Harbison, the interpreter of Fitzgerald, used dialog from the novel as his libretto, and for the many of us who've read and loved Gatsby, this was good news—the conversations are nearly poetic. But the dialog also carries the entire plot of the opera, and the expository quality of the lyrics is often awkward, especially for singing.

Also, the musical scene-painting is so wonderfully descriptive of time and place, and so remarkably evocative of the changing moods, that it leaves almost no room for aria. And there really aren't the sort of romantic arias—the confessions, love duets, angry declarations of self-worth or self-pity that cause opera audiences to interrupt performances with applause. They are not a necessary ingredient of opera, but these moments of pure singing, so wonderful that even the plot stands still to listen, give many great operas their transcendent quality, and they are notably missing from Gatsby. 

Instead, the opera is talky like baroque recitative—not the impetus for modern audiences to want to pay large sums of money to empathize and swoon at the Metropolitan Opera. I've got nothing against Handel's, Haydn's or Bach's great oratorios, but a whole opera of recitative feels tedious.

Just one more thing, really a question. (Spoiler alert, as if it mattered.) Do we need to see Wilson, the garage mechanic, husband of Myrtle, shoot Gatsby? In the novel, we come upon the dead body in the pool at dawn. We don't know who shot Gatsby, and there are several suspects. More importantly, this ambiguity heightens the tragedy.

Nonetheless, and despite my reservations and misgivings, this is a worthy opera, and it was a terrific performance. I was particularly impressed by the happy combination of musical forces. John Harbison's musical life has included a long association with the Emmanuel Players, the BSO, and Tanglewood. This was an extraordinary undertaking and we felt well-rewarded to be there. 

P.S. This performance was also reviewed in The New York Times by Zachary Woolfe: The Rich Are Different: They Can Sing. Woolfe's conclusions might lead you to believe that we had seen different performances, but, in fact, we were in the same place at the same time. However, it's evident that we had different expectations for the evening and that we have different sensibilities. Woolfe is a "professional" reviewer and has the advantage of greater experience and knowledge. I share my opinions by writing reviews, but without the onus of the professional to pass some sort of larger judgement. It makes for an interesting comparison.

Performed Thursday, July 11, 2013
Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, by:
Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music

Ryan Turner, artistic director and conductor

Gordon Gietz, tenor (Jay Gatsby)

Devon Guthrie, soprano (Daisy Buchanan)

Katherine Growdon, mezzo-soprano (Myrtle Wilson)

Krista River, mezzo-soprano (Jordan Baker)

Lynn Torgove, mezzo-soprano (Tango Singer)

Charles Blandy, tenor (Radio Singer)

Alex Richardson, tenor (Tom Buchanan)

David Kravitz, baritone (Nick Carraway)

James Maddalena, baritone (Meyer Wolfshiem)

Dana Whiteside, baritone (Minister)

David Cushing, bass (George Wilson)

Donald Wilkinson, bass (Henry Gatz)

Eat Not the Ortolans in Strife Lest Ye Remain Ill-tempered

Good Ideas Just Come to Me

Ortolans Bunting: Emberiza hortulana

My admirers often ask me how I come up with so many winning ideas, to which the only answer I have is, They just come to me. I'll give you an example.

While chewing the fat with some friends here in Savoonga, it occurred to me that blubber is the ultimate fast food; loaded with fat and it fries in its own juices, so to speak. What a brilliant idea for a new fast food chain, me thought (which is how my brain works). Just as quickly, the name flew into my head, Try It Out; Brilliance upon brilliance, if I do say so myself.

Alas, and much to my chagrin, not everyone has read Moby Dick or knows that what you do with whale blubber is to try it out, which any whaler can tell you is a really messy job! Worse still, "*Try It Out* is 1981 single by Montreal-based singer, Gino Soccio." This according to Wikipedia, but who in sardine Hell is Gino Soccio?

It's a humbling experience to shelve what seems like a brilliant idea because civilization isn't sufficiently advanced to understand it, but such is the life of an entrepreneur. Nonetheless, the seed of an idea was planted, and all that was needed was the right inspirational fertilizer to bring it forth into full bloom, if you receive my meaning, and that's exactly what happened.

Sometime later, while playing Letterpress with relatives (we're pretty much all related here in Savoonga), inspiration struck! I should explain that we're addicts, which means we've come to terms with the Letterpress dictionary, arbiter of word correctness. We accept the fact that Navvy, Drownding, Subdew, Woolcharts, Paxwax, Overfrank, and Fuckwit are acceptable, while fudgiest, pitbull, and motherfucker are not. It pays to try everything, even finchfry, which is not a word.

FICHFRY!? Wow, thought I, Finchfries just sounds delicious! I do a quick check: whois finchfry.com? Answer: finchfry.com is available, would you like to purchase it? You bet I would, and I do, because my idea has blossomed and I'm in marketer's heaven. I'm on a roll—bulkie roll, egg roll, it hardly matters, because ideas flow out like duck sauce.

Pistolets bruxellois, photographiés
dans une boulangerie bruxelloise

What's everyone's favorite fried finch? It's obvious, Ortolans en Brochette (skewered-grilled buntings eaten whole)! Drench with special sauce—garlicky aoli, spicy Habanero chili,  smokey Pimentón,  stuffed into a Pistolets bruxellois—it's toasted, and we have a hit before dipping a single endangered species in a vat of hot oil. LEDs are going off in my massive cranium like flash bulbs!

That's the inspirational part, but there were still a few implementational details to work out. For instance, it's illegal to hunt the wild ortolans bunting, on account of beak-spitting French gourmands eating the helpless critters to near extinction. No problem! In the U.S., no such ban exists, not even in Alaska. In fact, no such species of finch exists in the Western Hemisphere.

It didn't take long to find a suitable substitute. I know a knowledgeable group of worldly diners, and inquired of the, "What does ortolans taste like." "Like little juicy chickens," they all agreed. This was music to my taste buds. Baby chicks, dipped in batter, flash frozen, and quick fried—crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. We retain the ortolans-like crunch of tiny bones, and the idea that took flight earlier in my mind acquires legs. Why, it's practically running away from me.

We located a chick hatchery so large it can be seen from outer space. This is important, because we'll be expanding rapidly. It's not in the U.S., but there's always room for one shipping container full of frozen chicks on China's giant freighters. (Did I say China? I meant Liberia.) You can fit a shitload (also not a Letterpress word) of small birds in a single container and with room leftover for a drum or two of cottonseed oil.

In our test kitchens, opinion was nearly unanimous that our Fabulous Finch Fry tasted just like chicken! We just don't have the heart to tell our customers it really is chicken, which is why we have to say that it's BETTER than chicken.

That's pretty much the story of FinchFry's Famous Succulent Small Birds. You'll no doubt agree that it's nicely serendipitous, but as Louis Pasteur famously quipped, probably while enjoying a dish of ortolans, "Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés." Which is kind of like saying: In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared.

This episode puts me in mind of Malvolio's inspiring words from Act II, Scene V of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

And since I such a very lit'ry Walrus, I'll also share this poem about the ortolans that we intend to have framed and mounted in every one of our ultra-hygenic FinchFry restaurants:

Oh, better no doubt is a dinner of herbs,
When season'd by love, which no rancour disturbs
And sweeten'd by all that is sweetest in life
Than turbot, bisque, ortolans, eaten in strife!
But if, out of humour, and hungry, alone
A man should sit down to dinner, each one
Of the dishes of which the cook chooses to spoil
With a horrible mixture of garlic and oil,
The chances are ten against one, I must own,
He gets up as ill-tempered as when he sat down.
-Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton), Lucile (1860), Part I, Canto II, Stanza 27.

Though we've shortened it to the following:
Eat not the ortolans in strife lest ye remain ill-tempered.

I remain your ever-faithful and doubly-tusked pinniped,
-Professor Walrus