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Mint chocolate chip ice cream, courtesy of Flickr user Mindful One

After a fun month of reminiscing about lost foods, it’s time to move on to a new Inviting Writing series. I was going to try to come up with a wedding-themed story for June, but I couldn’t think of one I hadn’t already written about. Instead, for this month’s topic I focused on something mentioned during most wedding ceremonies: sickness. Was there a special food your parents gave you to make you feel better? Something your grandfather swore staved off illness? Or even something you ate that made you sick? However you interpret the theme, send your true, original personal essays to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Sickness” in the subject line by Friday, June 3. We’ll read them all and post our favorites on subsequent Mondays. Remember to include your full name and a biographical detail or two (your city and/or profession; a link to your own blog if you’d like that included). I’ll get things started.

Minty Meditations
by Lisa Bramen

My version of Marcel Proust’s madeleines—the tea-soaked crumbs that unlocked forgotten childhood memories for the French writer—is mint–chocolate chip ice cream. One taste and my teeth ache, not because of the sugar or the cold, but from the memory of having my wisdom teeth pulled during my sophomore year of college.

I’m instantly transported to 1989. I was lying on the futon mattress on the floor of my dark bedroom, in pain despite the Tylenol with codeine I’d taken. It was the first time I didn’t have someone to take care of me when I was sick. My roommates—a dating couple—kindly picked me up from the oral surgeon, where I was too groggy from the anesthesia to notice them laughing at my chipmunk cheeks and catatonic shuffle (they later re-enacted it for me). They looked in on me occasionally, but were no substitute for a nurturing mother.

My mother would have made sure I followed instructions and didn’t take my medication on an empty stomach—apparently, a few sips of Mocha Mix non-dairy creamer do not qualify as food for pill-popping purposes—preventing me from such violent retching that I felt like my stomach was going to turn inside-out.

The one food I had thought to stock was a half-gallon of ice cream—mint chocolate chip—and once the nausea passed it became my main sustenance for the next week.

The book we were reading for my literature class was Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and I read it in dreamy, ice-cream-accompanied stretches between painkiller naps. Kingston’s memoir spoke to me with startling relevance, not because her Chinese-American childhood in any way resembled my upbringing but because she so beautifully expressed emotions I recognized as my own. One harrowing episode, in particular, resonated: writing of her struggles with speaking aloud in class, she recounted how one day she took out her self-disgust on an even quieter, meeker Chinese girl in the bathroom after school. She tormented the mute girl, trying to force her to speak, but she only ever sobbed.

College was a time when I was trying to outgrow my own shy, quiet tendencies, and this scene made me cringe with empathy for both the silent girl and her abuser. Only recently I had forced myself to confront a professor I felt had been sexist, but my triumph was followed immediately with the negating humiliation of having my eyes fill with tears.

Kingston wrote, “The world is sometimes just, and [after the incident in the bathroom] I spent the next eighteen months sick in bed with a mysterious illness. There was no pain and no symptoms, though the middle line in my left palm broke in two.”

Though my sick-bed days were briefer and less poetic, Kingston’s stories, read in the woozy and vulnerable state I was in, merged with my own memories as one long mint-scented fever dream. It’s taken years for me to be able to eat mint–chocolate chip ice cream without feeling a queasy ache. Yet somehow The Woman Warrior is still one of my favorite books.

Putting beer koozies to the test. Photo credit: Lisa Bramen

With the official kick-off of outdoor barbecue season this weekend also comes an alarming increase in beer waste. According to the Bureau of Bogus Statistics I Totally Just Made Up, as much as a third of every beer opened during the summer months goes unconsumed. The primary reason: the beer has gotten warm. When the mercury climbs, canned and bottled beverages don’t stand a chance of remaining palatably cold to the finish. With sodas or mixed drinks, it’s no big deal—just add ice. But beer doesn’t taste good with ice (even, in my opinion, when “ice” is just in the name).

Some people might say, “I don’t have that problem. I drink my beer in one long guzzle so it never has a chance to get warm.” Those people might have problems beyond warm beer.

For the rest of us, some marketing genius out there invented the koozie. The koozie, in case you are unfamiliar with the term, is a little foam insulating sleeve that fits around an aluminum can or, in more recent versions, a bottle. No one seems to know the origin of the name (or of the product itself, which became popular sometime in the 1980s), but my best guess is that it is a corruption of the word “cozy”—as in a tea cozy, meant to keep the teapot warm—with an extra “o” so it sounds like “cool.” Switching the “c” to a “k” must have been a byproduct of the era when bastardized spellings and superfluous umlauts were considered cool (see “Mötley Crüe”).

Whatever the origin, the koozie has several undeniable benefits: It keeps your hand from getting cold and covered in condensation. It’s a good way to identify one’s beer at a party, where it could easily be confused with look-alikes—the second most common cause of beer waste, according to the BBSITJMU. It can be used as camouflage: a friend of mine who was pregnant, but not ready to reveal her status to friends, covered her nonalcoholic beer in a koozie to avoid arousing suspicion. Finally, it’s a personal billboard, allowing you to proclaim your allegiance to a sports team; declare important sentiments, like that you’re “not as think as you drunk I am”; or go formal with a tuxedo koozie. You can even support independent crafters by buying felted, crocheted or cowhide koozies on Etsy.com.

But how well do they actually work at keeping your beverage cold? In the interest of preventing beer waste, I put them to the test. Recently, my husband and I conducted an experiment with three bottles of beer: I held one in a koozie, my husband held one without, and a third one, also koozieless, was set down between sips. We drank them at the same rate, alternating between the two held beers and the third beer, stopping at five-minute intervals to evaluate the temperature. The air temperature was 67 degrees Fahrenheit (not exactly sweltering, but it was early evening).

Within five minutes, there was already a subtle but noticeable difference between the beers we were holding—with koozie and without—and the unhandled one. The latter was still frosty, while the others had already started to lose their chill. The gap widened over the next ten minutes. At 15 minutes, the one without the koozie was warmer than the one with, but the unhandled beer was still coldest. Finally, at the 20-minute mark, all three were less than refreshing, but the one that had been held least remained coolest.

Our conclusion: the koozie helped, but not as much as limiting the beer’s time in hand.

Would the results have been different if we were using cans? If the air temperature had been warmer (especially if it had been warmer than human body temperature)? If we had a beer in a koozie that we set down between sips?

Hard to say. If any science-minded beer drinkers out there care to conduct their own experiments, be sure to let us know the results.

Bee bim bap, courtesy of Flickr user heavylift

Today’s guest post is by Amy Rogers Nazarov, who was the inspiration for a post earlier this year about cooking salmon in the dishwasher. Her blog is called Word Kitchen.

Eating Bulgogi for Three

By Amy Rogers Nazarov

Churning a fried egg into bee bim bap at a Korean restaurant on a frigid night in early 2007, I tried to imagine the face of my future son.

My friend Laura was showing me how to christen the dish—a bed of white rice topped with wedge-shaped dollops of crispy sprouts, julienned carrots, spinach leaves and shreds of marinated beef—with a blob of spicy red bean paste called gochujang.

“Now we mix it all together,” she said, digging down into the bowl to ensure every rice grain and vegetable shard got coated. She turned over a bit of crispy rice from the bottom of the hot pot. “See the crust the sesame oil forms?” She took a bite. “Isn’t it amazing?”

She was referring to the meal, which tasted homey and exotic at the same time. Yet what I found most amazing as I chewed was that my husband and I would travel to Seoul within the year to meet our baby—the person we’d feed, diaper, bathe, protect, adore and see into adulthood.

The year prior to my bee bim bap initiation, Ari and I had begun the process of adopting a child from South Korea. Late in 2007, we finally saw his face in photographs.

Taewoo’s hair stood straight up. He had a strawberry birthmark on his shoulder. In some of the photos, he was embraced by his foster mom, who beamed at him. We placed the pictures in resealable plastic bags and pored over them too many times to count, as though we could divine from them clues about what he might be like.

The Nazarov family (Amy, Jake and Ari) at the National Arboretum in Washington. Credit: Jose Rodriguez

If we knew little about Korean cuisine, boy, we knew even less about parenting. How would we know what Taewoo—whom we intended to call Jake, preserving the name his birth mom gave him as his middle name—wants when he cries? What if he throws up in the grocery store? What if we can’t get him into that great local preschool? How on earth will we—two Caucasians– teach him to respond to subtle or overtly racist comments? What if Jake turns 18 and buys a one-way ticket to Seoul, claiming he’s off to find his “real” parents?

We had no idea how we would respond to any of these situations. But dining out? That we were aces at.

“Daddy and I used to eat kimchee like it was going out of style,” I pictured myself telling Jake. “We wanted to learn everything we could about you, or at least the place where you came from.”

So Ari and I crunched through beet-dyed lotus root at another D.C. restaurant, named after a Korean dumpling served steamed or fried. The magenta-hued tuber was part of the banchan—an assortment of shared appetizer-like dishes—served before the main meal in virtually every Korean restaurant. They range from tiny whole fish redolent of the sea to chopped, sautéed eggplant to several grades of kimchee: hot, extra-hot, and throat-melting. Everything demanded to be tasted, even when its burn forced you to croak out a plea for ice water. Perhaps every bite would help us understand Korea—and by extension, the child in the photos—a fraction more.

Sometimes friends who’d adopted came along. Sarah and James’ daughter was born in Korea, and at one place in Maryland, just over the District line, I watched Tara pluck buckwheat noodles from her plate of naengmyeon one at a time, dangling them over her mouth, laughing as they flopped against her cheek.

“We tried to imagine the sound of your voice,” I would tell our child. “We talked about which restaurant we’d take you to first.”

Even as massive amounts of paperwork remained and references were yet to be collected, we took my parents to still another Korean restaurant, this one in Virginia, to introduce them to bulgogi and chapchae. We talked about the logistics of their meeting the three of us at Dulles airport when we returned from Seoul. We brainstormed how to make Jake feel safe with us, the strangers chosen to parent him.

In February 2008, Jake came home, and proceeded to prove himself a very good eater.

Today he has a taste for kimchi and a passion for noodles. I’ll never know if this is genetic, or because every single night when he was 2 years old, we read the book Bee-bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park. Maybe it’s partly due to repeated exposure to the foods of his birth country, where I picture us three eating abalone porridge (jeonbokjuk) one day when he’s in his teens. But travel plans will have to wait; it’s dinnertime.

“More, please,” says my boy, polite as a prince when a cheese pupusa or his grandmother’s meat loaf is on the line, as naughty as any almost-four-year-old when he’s not angling for more to eat. “More, please, Mama.”

Vintage radio, courtesy of Flickr user Fernando Candeias

Scientists say that the sense of smell has at least as much to do with enjoyment of food as taste buds do. Texture and appearance are nearly as important. But what about the remaining sense—hearing? Where does it fit into the equation?

Most restaurants use music to set a mood. And the results of a recent study published in the Journal of Culinary Science and Hospitality suggest that music and noise level can affect people’s enjoyment of what they eat. According to the abstract (the full article is available online to subscribers, but a blog written by a former doctor gives a good run-down), soft classical music increased diners’ satisfaction, while loud music and silence both had a negative impact.

The researchers didn’t experiment with different styles of music, but it would be my guess that classical isn’t the only genre that can color people’s eating experience. Cheesy though it may be, I like it when a restaurant plays tunes that fit with the ethnicity or style of the food I’m eating—a little bluegrass with BBQ, some sitar with tikka masala, opera with orecchiette, 1980s arena rock with hot wings (just kidding about that last one). I can’t even hear mariachi or ranchera without getting hungry for tamales.

Other research has looked at the effect of music on how much and how quickly people eat. One study, published in the journal Appetite in 2006, found that listening to music increased the amount of food eaten and the duration of meals, but that the speed and volume of the music didn’t have a significant effect. Other studies have found a correlation between music speed and rate of eating, which seems to make sense. I know that up-tempo music has a huge impact on how hard I can work out (I highly recommend “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio or “Running Free” by Iron Maiden), so it sounds plausible it could also cause other activities, including eating, to speed up.

And, although I confess that the most frequent musical accompaniment to weeknight dinners in my household is the Jeopardy! theme song, on evenings when I have time for more leisurely cooking and eating, a little mood music can be just the thing. Nothing too overbearing—no Iron Maiden here. Maybe a little Edith Piaf to give some vintage French ambiance (plus, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien is an inspirational sentiment to remember when kitchen experimentation has gone awry). Movie scores can also make for good meal soundtracks. Jon Brion’s for Punch-Drunk Love is a good one.

Or you can go truly thematic and match the lyrics to the menu. A friend once guest-D.J.ed on a local radio show and played two hours of songs about chicken. Or how about a cheeseburger in paradise? Do you like pina coladas?

What kind of music enhances your cooking and dining pleasure?

Anatomy of a hamburger, courtesy of Modernist Cuisine. Click to enlarge.

Anyone familiar with Popeye the Sailor—be it the comic strip or the animated cartoons—is also probably familiar with J. Wellington Wimpy, the cowardly mooch with a penchant for plotting schemes for how to get food without paying for it. Notably, Mr. Wimpy has an insatiable appetite for hamburgers, offering his  famous catchphrase, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” when he’s trying to score a patty. But he’s certainly not alone in his burger lust. With Memorial Day kicking off the summer vacation season, people all over the United States are firing up grills and getting their fill of the little beef cake sandwiches that have become a part of our national identity. But how did this country come to “own” the hamburger?

First off, let’s get a few things straight and define what a hamburger really is: a perfect marriage between a beef patty and a bun. Sliced bread is for sandwiches and patty melts. Bona-fide burgers require a carbohydrate complement specially engineered to absorb the meat juices of the patty and any toppings thereon. That said, as with many food origin stories, the hamburger’s beginnings are hazy; however, author Josh Ozersky did some serious detective work into tracing how this food came to be in his simply-title book The Hamburger: A History.

The hamburger had its forerunners—such as the Hamburg steak, a hodgepodge of mixed meats similar to our modern-day Salisbury Steak, that provided the poorest of the poor a cheap meal. Furthermore, it did not come from Hamburg, Germany; the earliest references to hamburger-like dishes come from English cookbooks. A number of people claimed to have had the brilliant idea of flattening a chunk of ground beef and slapping it on a bun. And trying to sort through all the “he says/she says” stories to figure out which one is correct is little more than an exercise in futility. Ozersky does, however, credit fry cook Walter Anderson and insurance salesman Billy Ingram for firmly planting hamburgers into the American consciousness.

Together, the pair founded White Castle, the first restaurant chain that mass-produced and sold burgers to the public. Ozersky credits Anderson, who started his first hamburger stand in 1916, with creating the modern-day hamburger and having the idea of replacing sandwich bread with specially-designed buns. But it was Ingram who knew how to market the product. A relentless promoter, he hawked hamburgers as a perfect foodstuff for tea parties, touted that they were good for one’s health and created a restaurant aesthetic—stately, white  and regal—that subliminally told customers that burgers were safe and wholesome to consume. (In the wake of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed the unsanitary conditions of the meat packing industry, Americans were taking a harder look at their food before they ate it.) Together, the White Castle team elevated burgers from working class junk food to a food for everybody. Other hamburger chains began to spring up and by the 1940s it was a quintessential American meal.

And hamburgers have proven to be a versatile medium—some blogs are entirely devoted to the art and architecture of crafting a burger. The Hamblogger combines burger lust with photojournalism to capture the entire hamburger dining experience, documenting the eateries and their own special spins on the all-beef patty on a bun.

And then there’s the Modernist Cuisine, that lavishly and innovatively illustrated compendium on cooking wherein the authors take a hardcore look at how hamburgers are—and ought to be—prepared. For starters, they dispel the myth that searing meat locks in juices and gives you that desirable crust: all the liquid you want to hold in is escaping into the pan and creating those tantalizing sizzling noises. Their solution is to cook the patty sous vide to cook the meat, and then freeze the burger with liquid nitrogen before deep frying it in oil in order to create a crust. (They say the freeze/fry method prevents the patty from breaking apart during cooking.) Some have tried preparing the high-maintenence burger—it takes roughly 30 hours from start to finish, including making the buns and sauces. And of course the finished product doesn’t look nearly as photogenic as the illustration in the book.

But for most of us, I’m sure a grill will work just fine. And for those who don’t feel like toiling in the kitchen, you can download a Burger GPS app to find a fun hamburger spot nearby.