Melvyn Bragg has a very pleasant conversation with professors Judith Hawley, Markman Ellis, and Jonathan Morris on the history of coffee. They discuss how early medicinal reports seem to be just marketing, and how coffeehouses formed around the drink and business needs of customers as well as the side benefit of coffee being non-alcoholic.
Category Archives: Coffee, Tea, Drinks
Doctor Who Eating Reindeer and Chocolate: Christmas Gifts Report
Recommend Tea for All Reasons to tea lovers.
I suppose I should update you on the food gifts we got for Christmas. I mean, that’s what friends do, right?
My sister-in-law sent us a remarkable ready-to-eat package of salmon, pork, beef, and reindeer from Alaska Sausage and Seafood. Jerky sticks, sausage, and smoked salmon made a few good lunches. We opened the salmon for New Year’s Eve while watching the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice. Not pretentious food, but it’s not a pretentious show either.
I may not know how to eat meat sticks. Are they just an add-on? It’s not like you can wrap a bun around one or two and call it a sandwich. No one ever calls a hotdog a sandwich but I suppose it is. Speaking of which, this tweet:
To which, writer Tony Woodlief replied, “Read this as ‘writer’s kilts’ and instinctively reached for my credit card.”
I also received Ghirardelli dark chocolate mint squares and a box of Andies. This has settled me on the only snacking chocolate I care to have year round. Keep your M-Ms, your Reese’s, your Cadbury eggs. I love Andies and these Ghirardelli’s are superb. I could make room for Peppermint Patties.
I gave the family a big bundle of tea from Tea For All Reasons, a company owned by an friend who took it over from her mother. I bought the Doctor Who sampler and the Jane Austen sampler. Some are delicately blended teas, others boldly satisfying. Starry Night in the Doctor Who set is honestly beautiful. It smells wonderful and looks like its name due to the cornflowers and blueberry. If you love tea and want to break away from the typical blends you find in most stores, look through the many options on this site.
Rewriting the Portrait, Coffee
Atlanta pastor John Onwuchekwa has a side angle in trying to start a coffee business in the city’s west end. They got off the ground just before the shutdown hit us.
“Initially our business plan and marketing were built off this idea of building community through pop-ups and in-person events,” founder and barista Aaron Fender said. But with those options shot for a few months, they considered other ideas.
“We started doing a lot of Instagram Live interviews with entrepreneurs, artists, and thinkers to build community. We started a coffee delivery service to your doorstep. We made a coffee club coffee subscription.”
Onwuchekwa explained the vision of Portrait Coffee to Atlanta Magazine. “One of the first things Frederick Douglass did when he finally learned how to read and write was [to write] a narrative of his life. It was a way for him to insert himself back into a history that was often too eager to forget the people who helped build it. As we think of coffee, we tend to feel like the industry as a whole is the exact same thing. We wanted to start a shop, trying to pour a new narrative of the picture that comes to mind when you think of specialty coffee.”
Plantations Rebranding: Tea, Rum, and Plimoth
Several days ago, I wrote about Osayi Endolyn’s questions about products that brand themselves with the word plantation. She was specifically interested in Plantation Rum, an excellent French brand with a pineapple rum she loved. I heard her story on an episode of The Sporkful, and today I learned Plantation Rum would be rebranding to get away from the negative connotations of that word in American markets (also via The Sporkful).
Bigelow Tea has changed the name of it’s Plantation Mint to Perfectly Mint. It owns the Charleston Tea Plantation brand, which it has now rebranded at the Charleston Tea Garden.
Changing brand names looks like a step in the right direction, but I’m not sure about changing living history museums and state parks, like Plimoth Plantation changing to Plimoth Patuxet. This reminds me of a tweet I saw this week, saying we are asking for civil equality and they are just naming things Martin Luther King crabs.
What Is Meant by Branding a Product “Plantation”?
When someone introduced food writer Osayi Endolyn to Plantation Pineapple Rum, she says she was immediately suspicious. Plantation was not a neutral word for her because her grandparents had fled from the Jim Crow South years ago. But the rum was good enough to put those thoughts aside for a while.
Later she asked a bartender for the name of the pineapple rum in her drink. The woman seemed embarrassed to admit it was Plantation Rum.
Why would anyone be embarrassed about a brand called plantation? What would a company mean by choosing that name? Bigelow sells a Plantation Mint tea and Charleston Tea Plantation sells a variety teas. Plantation Peanuts of Wakefield sells gourmet peanuts grown in Virginia. Carolina Plantation sells rice. Many recipes have plantation in their name, such as Plantation Skillet Cake and Auntie Crae’s Plantation Chews, so surely the word connotes an idea or mood the owners wish to convey to others. (This is has begun to change.)
Endolyn dug into the meaning of the rum brand by talking to its owners and learning a bit of French and Barbadian history that supported using the word plantation over the equivalent farmland. What would you expect from those words in food brands? Are they interchangeably applicable to rice, butter, peanuts, leaf tobacco, bread flour, and beef?
For a short time, you can listen to an episode of The Sporkful in which they ask about this idea to as many brand owners as will take their questions. Bigelow, for example, wouldn’t talk about it. But some people said the word calls back to an easier way of life. When you think of it that way, you may start to ask whether life was easier and for whom.
Ew, When Did You Last Wash that Mug?
Starbucks, Intelligentsia, and Peet’s Coffee have stopped accepting a personal tumbler or mug in which to put your special brew. Concerns over spreading the coronavirus have lead to changed practices and a few store closures.
If you’re thinking all the talk of coronavirus sounds fun, I encourage you to skip this one. It’s a real drag; not like the old days when you could count a popular bug or flu to get things swinging. Ahem.
Your home or office coffeemaker could be hatin’ on you with mold and bacteria. A 2011 study found 50 percent of the coffeemaker water tanks tested had mold or yeast inside. The Chicago Sun-Times has recommendations for cleaning your favorite kitchen device as well as other nasty substances people have found in coffeemakers.
Panera hopes you’ll skip a germ-ridden cup o’ joe at home and have it with them instead. They have launched a subscription plan that will provide free coffee and tea to patrons willing to part with $9/month via the MyPanera app. Mary didn’t like it enough, though it could have advantages if it ran smoothly in your area.
Photo by Mazniha Mohd Ali Noh on Unsplash
An Ode to Brewer’s Yeast and Its Produce
Last Tuesday was Mardi Gras; next month we’ll see St. Patrick’s Day again. In this vein, allow me to point your attention to this Irishy nerd-fest on the chemicals that make up alcoholic beverages.
Everyone Loves Food
“While I was writing The Lost Family, I cooked a lot—to meditate on the day’s writing as well as to kitchen-test all the recipes I then featured on the book’s menu. Some of my favorite lines for the book would bubble up that way, as if from a Magic 8-Ball, and one of them was ‘vegetables have no language.’ I revised this slightly for the novel, but it means that food is universal. The produce and spices will vary from country to country and cuisine to cuisine, but if you love food, you have a vast family out there. We can all communicate about how our beloved dishes are different—and how they are the same.” – Jenna Blum, The Lost Family
Crystal King, whose book about Vatican chef Bartolomeo Scappi, The Chef’s Secret, came out this year, quotes eleven authors on including food in their writing.
“Writing, in a way, is an extension of my cooking, and vice versa. Cooking taught me how to create, that I needed to create.” – Phillip Kazan
Photo by Jonathan Borba from Pexels
Coffee Is a Slow Poison, Voltaire
Dear Quote Investigator: Coffee enthusiasts enjoy sharing an anecdote about Voltaire who savored the aromatic beverage throughout his life. The famous philosopher’s physician warned him that coffee was a slow poison. He replied, “Yes, it is a remarkably slow poison. I have been drinking it every day for more than seventy-five years.”
But did this exchange occur between Voltaire and his doctor or was it someone else and someone else’s doctor? What are the facts interfering with this story? The Quote Investigator spells it out.
What America Loves Most: Ice Cream
When you think of American wealth, what evidence comes to mind? If it’s not on your list already, jot this one down: the abundance of ice cream.
In Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide, authors Robin and Carolyn Weir explore the history of ice cream and how it was a dessert of luxury 200 years ago. In Colonial America, a pint of ice cream could have cost a week’s wages.
In 1921, The Soda Fountain, a monthly trade magazine to the soda industry, published an article touting “Ice Cream as Americanization Aid,” declaring that serving ice cream to [immigrants] on Ellis Island would help them acquire “a taste for the characteristic American dish even before they set foot in the streets of New York.” This would not only help new immigrants assimilate to the American “standard of living,” but it would also inculcate American values: “Who could imagine a man who is genuinely fond of ice cream becoming a Bolshevik?
I can’t say what results any field tests of this idea might have been produced, but it came at a time when America was starting to crank ice cream as if it would churn up a great, big, beautiful tomorrow.
During Prohibition [1920-1933], ice cream parlors filled some of the void left by closed bars, and brewers, including Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch, re-opened their operations as ice cream factories. The Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers could not have been happier — members reportedly sang a chorus at their conventions that went, “[Father] brings a brick of ice cream home instead of beer!”
(via Prufrock News)