Nathan Handwerker ran a nickel hot dog business at the corner of Stillwell and Surf that became as much a part of Coney Island as Dreamland, Steeplechase and the Wonder Wheel. In the summer of 1916, according to one of the more apocryphal tales about the workingman’s lunch, Nathan’s held the first in what would become its annual Fourth of July hot-dog eating contest, a competition that pitted four immigrants against each other. The winner scarfed the most hot dogs as a demonstration of his American-ness. The contest still endures but it wasn’t the stand’s only stunt that brought in hungry visitors, nor was it the most convincing.

Handwerker, a Polish immigrant, got his start in New York as a dishwasher at Max’s Busy Bee. On weekends, he moonlighted at Feltman’s in Coney Island, an ocean pavilion home to Tyrolean singers, Swiss wrestlers, carousels and, according to one writer, its hideous noise. (The owner of the place, Charles Feltman, may have, in 1867 or 1874, commissioned a wheelwright to make him a wagon with a burner unit, thereby inventing the practice of serving sausages plonked inside a sliced “milk” bun, although Feltman railed against these mobile vendors in 1886, telling the Brooklyn Eagle, “Sausages must go.”) “A swank place, Feltman’s charged 10 cents for its hot dogs,” The New York Times wrote in 1966. “Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, then singing waiters at Coney Island, complained that a dime was a lot of money for a frankfurter.”

So, in 1916, Nathan opened his eponymous hot dog stand and sold frankfurters for five cents each. The crowds, he later recalled, were initially stand-offish and a cut-rate frank remained a suspect food. This was 1916, remember, only a couple decades after the birth of the term “hot dog” and inexpensive meat came with questions. “Hot” was code for dodgy, and, as Barry Popnik, the co-author of a 300- page book called Origin of the Term “Hot Dog” writes, the phrase probably originated a kind of joke. Take, for instance, this popular 1860 song:

Oh! Where, oh! Where ish mine little dog gone?
Oh! where, oh! Where can he be?
His ear’s cut short, and his tail cut long:
Oh! Where, oh! where ish he?

Tra, la la….

Und sausage is goot: Baloney, of course,
Oh! where, oh! where can he be?
Dey makes ‘em mit dog, und dey makes ‘em mit horse:
I guess dey makes ‘em mit he.

Customers in Coney Island had good reason to suspect Nathan’s original five-cent dogs would be of lower quality, maybe even the sign of an unscrupulous horse- or dog-killer—taboos that would become more un-American as the 20th century progressed. The Times had also reported that the “rottenest of all” the offal from New York’s hotel ended up in Coney Island’s frankfurters. “So Mr. Handwerker hired whi[t]e-jacketed young men to stand in front of his stand munching hot dogs. This brought in the ‘class’ visitors. They had decided that Nathan’s franks ‘must really be good because all the doctors are eating them.’”

The stunt with the “doctored” hot dogs apparently worked, immortalized as recipes for success in books like Selling: Powerful New Strategies for Sales Success. Medical marketing claims still sells food (“nitrate-free” hot dogs, anyone?), although the American carnival in Coney Island only, on rare occasion, includes any scientific, made-for-TV gastrointestinal scrutiny.

Moreover, the early gimmicks proved to be neither the first nor the last on the boardwalk. In 1954, Handwerker went to Miami Beach and left his son, Murray, in charge of the store. A man named Leif Saegaard approached him with a proposal to include a 75-foot long, 70-ton embalmed finback whale. Soon, Nathan’s Famous had a cetecean display, but thanks to an unexpected heat wave, the whale soon became a stench and was towed out to sea.

And with that, dear readers, I take my leave. This post concludes my time as a twice-weekly contributor to Food and Think. Follow me on Twitter or go to my website, where the show will go on.

Photos: “‘Hot Dog’ Coney” (date unknown)/Bain News Service/Library of Congress ; “[Nathan's Famous; Patsy's Beer: Surf Ave-W. 15th St., Brooklyn] (1934)”/New York Public Library

Two friends on a remote Maine island set out to clear a piece of land, felling white pines by axes and handsaws, and build a home entirely by hand. In the fall of 2007, there was nothing but a hole in the ground, a mess of timbers and only one man, Dennis Carter, left to finish the job. Today, the Garrison front, saltbox-style house, based on the 17th-century homes of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is a hostel. I stayed here while reporting a story on Ted Ames, a Stonington fisherman turned scientist, best known for his receipt of the MacArthur genius grant award. The hand-built hostel feels like a wooden ship of a place, lost in another time—only when the weather turns and it starts blowing, nothing sways; you are firmly moored to Deer Isle.

It was here that I had my first taste of surströmming. The cans were swollen, surreptitiously imported from one of the host’s family in Sweden. (The canneries in Maine are gone so any herring caught here tends to end up as lobster bait). We all held hands and said what we were thankful for (I remember saying something about fish) and then we ate together from the can of whole, fermented Baltic herring. Madjes might be the traditional midsommar meal, but, to me, surströmming is the taste of mid-summer. The entrails, inside their little silver bodies, are optional for eating, we’re instructed, although the host says she would save those for her father as a specialty. We eat the fermented fish with mashed potatoes and onions and sour cream on rye crackers.

The salty herring ferment inside the sealed can thanks to a salt-loving, anaerobic bacteria that produces two distinctive volatile organic acids—propionic acid, commonly found in Swiss cheese and sweat, and butyric acid, probably most familiar as the characteristic odor of rotting butter. According to one study, the anaerobes contribute to the intense flavor and appear in about 10 times the concentration of those found in the fermented fish sauces of Southeast Asia. Pungent stuff, indeed.

But I don’t remember thinking about the smell that night and it wasn’t like I had to choke the fish down. What I remember most was the next day; the kitchen smelled so incredibly rotten and I thought, how did I possible eat that night without holding my nose? Yet, we had feasted on fermented fish from a can and they were, I must say, delicious.

Midway up the Maine coast, a tidal estuary known as the Damariscotta River has long been the epicenter of oyster shucking. Shell heaps rise on both its banks—towering middens of flaky, bleached white shells discarded between 2,200 and 1,000 years ago when American oysters (Crassostrea virginica) flourished in the warm, brackish waters.

The early abundance didn’t last, probably due to predatory snails brought on by a rise in sea level, rather than overharvesting, and neither has the subsequent introduction, in 1949, of European flat oysters (Ostrea edulis, or Belons). Today, though, hundreds of thousands of native oysters are once again being cultivated by oyster farmers like Dave Cheney, who recently took me on a tour aboard his boat, the Juliza.

Below the Great Salt Bay, where the river bisects two shell middens, the western bank looks like a white sand beach below a white cliff. Upon closer inspection, the Glidden Midden is an impressive pile of oysters—a large accumulation of small things, hundreds of years’ worth of kitchen waste.

Early 19^th century estimates put the sum total of Damariscotta’s middens at somewhere between 1 and 45 million cubic feet, according to David Sanger’s “Boom and Bust on the River,” and the size inspired considerable speculation. In 1886, the Damariscotta Shell and Fertilizer Company began barreling up and selling the shells in Boston for chicken “scratch.” (Eating oyster shells hardens up the birds’ calcium carbonate-rich egg shell.) Two hundred tons sold for 30 cents a pound. After questioning the practice, a reporter for the Lincoln County News observed in “civilized countries, archaeological remains are protected by civil governments and reserved for scientific purposes.”

The sole scientific observer, Abram Tarr Gamage, a local antiquary, watched the mining operation every day for ten hours a day at a day rate of two dollars per day. He too filled barrels with skulls, shells, and antlers once used as oyster knives, and sent them to Harvard’s Peabody Museum in Cambridge. By the year’s end, Gamage reported that he had little to do; the midden had nearly dwindled away. The miners never made it across the river.

Today, horseshoe crabs gather at the river’s edge. Airholes pocket the softshell clam beds and that crumbling white western bank still holds a heap of shells—their age and size at least double those cocktail oysters anyone slurps in Grand Central Terminal. Across the river, the former Whaleback Midden, now a state park, looks much like an overgrown field. While it’s hardly surprising that the Damirascotta remains an epicenter for East Coast oysters, I found it remarkable that, given the demands of poultry farmers,  that any of its middens still exist at all.

Top photo: Whaleback Midden/Damariscotta River Association collection. Author photo.

Soak grain in water and a seed begins to sprout. Dry out that tiny protoplant, or acrospire, roast it, and you’ve got malt—the basis for fermenting beer (and distilling whiskey too). The process can be crude; soaking can take place in a puddle, drying on the roof of a house. I wrote about the small-scale revival of the malting process, of the more modern variety, in The New York Times last week and it’s curious just how far the process predates the current garage-scale renaissance, the flourishing of regional malthouses in the 19th century, or even the English maltsters who first set up shop on American soil four hundred years ago.

The late historian Peter Damerow, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, published an examination of 4,000-year-old cuneiform writings found near present day Turkey, including a mythic text from ancient Sumerian tablet known as the “Hymn to Ninkasi.” Ninkasi was the goddess of brewing. In the paper, published earlier this year, he explains that the hymn accompanied “a kind of drinking song” dedicated to a female tavern-keeper. It’s the first recipe, of sorts, for beer:

Ninkasi, you are the one who handles dough (and) … with a big shovel,
Mixing, in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics.
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grain.
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the earth-covered malt (“munu”),
The noble dogs guard (it even) from the potentates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt (“sun”) in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads the cooked mash (“ti-tab”) on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes …
Ninkasi, you are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort (“dida”),
Brewing (it) with honey (and) wine.
Ninkasi, [...]
[You ...] the sweetwort (“dida”) to the vessel.
The fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on (top of) a large collector vat (“laÌtan”).
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is (like) the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

As archeologist Patrick McGovern has written in Uncorking the Past, the domestication of barley in the Fertile Crescent led to the emergence of a forebear to modern beer some 6,000 year ago, providing a possible motive for a decisive step in the development of human culture and the so-called Neolithic Revolution. Beer may have come before bread. Still, these cuniform tablets are notoriously difficult to translate and leave only a rough outline of the process—so, despite the best efforts to replicate the Tigris-like rush of ancient Sumerian beer today, unanswerable questions about the beer’s exact composition remain. When, for example, did they interrupt the germination of the “earth-covered” malt, a crucial step enabling a grain to undergo alcoholic fermentation?

Damerow suggests there’s reason to doubt whether these brews even proved to be much of an intoxicant 4,000 years ago: “Given our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol.” Then again, would we really have kept the ancient process alive for so long if it just gave us better nutrition and didn’t also make us feel good?

Image: Woolley 1934, pl. 200, no. 102/Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, 2012

The Dixie Cup, the Kleenex of paper cups, the ubiquitous, single-serving, individual drinking vessel, was never meant to be shared. The paper cups were not built to last. Drink. Toss. Repeat.

Their story starts with a Boston inventor named Lawrence Luellen, who crafted a two-piece cup made out of a blank of paper. He joined the American Water Supply Company, the brainchild of a Kansas-born Harvard dropout named Hugh Moore. The two began dispensing individual servings of water for a penny—one cent for a five-ounce cup from a tall, clumsy porcelain water cooler.

Soon they were the Individual Drinking Cup Company of New York and had renamed their sole product the Health Kup, a life-saving drinking technology that could help prevent the transmission of communicable disease and aid the campaign to do away with free water offered at communal cups, “tin dippers,” found in public buildings and railway stations. Make no mistake, because of this scourge, one biologist reported in a 1908 article, there was “Death in School Drinking Cups.”

Yet it wasn’t health that ultimately paved the way for the disposable paper cup’s ubiquity and commercial immortality. One day, Moore stopped in at the Dixie Doll Company and asked the dollmaker if he could borrow their name for his cup, because, apparently, the vessels were now as reliable as old ten-dollar bills (dixies, from the French dix) issued by Louisiana prior to the Civil War, according to Anne Cooper Funderburg’s account in Sundae Best. The cup’s reputation was further cemented when soda fountains introduced an automatic machine to that could fill a cup with two flavors of ice cream at the same time, ushering in paper-wrapped wooden scoops and disposable cups known as Ice Cream Dixies.

Dixie cups offer something at once refreshing and profoundly sobering, a pioneering product that ushered in the wave of single-use items—razors, aerosolized cans, pens, bottles of water and the paper cups you can find at doctor’s offices, backyard barbecues and, of course, the office water cooler.

Drawing: Lawrence W. Luellen, 1912. Drinking Cup. Us Patent 1032557.

The average American consumes about 175 calories per day in sugary soda, at least according to the numbers presented by Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the recent roll-out of New York City’s anti-obesity campaign. Where do these statistics come from, and how accurate are they? After all, we can measure how much soda is being poured into the system, how many 12-ounce bottles and cans are sold on the open market (so-called “dispersal” data), but no one’s actually measuring the volume going down our collective hatch (“consumption” data). Moreover, if you ask city residents, they’ll tend to say, “Oh no, I don’t drink soda. I’m on a liver and cottage cheese kick.”

This phenomenon of underestimating junk food and overestimating healthy food in self-reported dietary surveys is known as the “Lean Cuisine syndrome.”

William Rathje, a forefather of modern garbology (the academic study of garbage, not a fancy name for street-sweeping), gave the phenomenon its name in his 1992 book Rubbish!. After examining trash bags full of soda cans and liquor bottles, Rathje found that what we claim to have eaten and drunk rarely lines up very closely with the actual stuff stuffed in the trash bag—especially when it comes to soda and liquor.

In other words, we are what we eat, but we tell the truth about it only in what we leave behind. Rathje is not a psychologist and doesn’t spell out exactly why we lie, but perhaps it’s a coping mechanism. After all, it’s tough to own up to another statistic—that a third of our food goes to waste.

Photo: Donald Sultner-Welles “[Roadside pollution, ca. 1950-1960]”/ National Museum of American History. Thanks to Edward Humes, whose latest book, Garbology, describes Rathje’s work.

In 1906, Liberty Hyde Bailey, the father of American horticulture, predicted that America’s next big wild fruit, joining the ranks of strawberries, cranberries and gooseberries, would be the common elderberry, which he wrote was “almost certain to become the parent of a race of domestic fruit-bearing plants.”

Elderberries can be pressed into a magenta wine. The plant is a distant relative of honeysuckle, and its distinctive umbrella of cream-colored flowers makes an aromatic alcoholic cordial. Within the past decade, this elderflower elixir and its sui generis floral flavor has been given some credit for reviving the popularity of liqueurs. The most recognizable version behind the bar is a bottle of St. Germaine. The European elder (Sambucus nigra) gives Sambuca its name, although the modern version of the Italian liqueur tastes more like licorice.

Many alcoholic elder-containing concoctions came about, much like Angostura, as remedies, inspired by elder’s age-old medical claims; the plant was thought to have the ability to ward off colds, for instance. Some of these folk remedies may potentially have some basis. In 2009, researchers found that elderberry extracts in vitro compared favorably with Tamiflu® (a drug that is derived in part from star anise) in blocking the swine flu virus.

Despite its remarkable history, the primary use of elderberry today in the United States has little to do with anything Liberty Hyde Bailey or the early European apothecaries could have foreseen. Its pigments are extracted and made into a food-safe dye. And unless you’re a vegetarian or slaughtering your own meat, you’ve probably benefited from the elderberry. When the USDA inspects meat and its inspectors stamp a label—”U.S. Inspected” or “USDA Prime”—they use a purplish, food-safe dye that comes in part from elderberries.

Photogram of elderberry blossoms by Bertha E. Jaques/Smithsonian American Art Museum

Herman Melville devoted an entire chapter of Moby Dick to the substance. The Chinese believed it to be dragon spittle hardened by the sea. Ambergris (that’s French for gray amber) is an opaque, hardened orb that floats for months or years at sea, until its waxy mass washes up ashore. It has have sometimes been described, inaccurately, as sperm whale vomit. Ambergris comes out the other end—the cetacean approximation of a human gallbladders stone, formed in a whale stomach as a protective barrier around sharp, indigestible squid beaks, and then excreted.

Of all the world’s feces, ambergris may be the only one prized as an ingredient in fragrances, cocktails and medicines. It’s eaten, too. Persian sherbets once included ambergris along with water and lemon. Casanova apparently added it to his chocolate mousse as an aphrodisiac. French gastronome Brillat-Savarin recommended a shilling’s worth of ambergris in a tonic of chocolate and sugar, which he claimed would render life more easy, like coffee without the restless sleeplessness.

Christopher Kemp, a molecular biologist who works (by intention, it seems) at a desk “cluttered with marginalia” exhumes these enigmatic tidbits in his new book Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris. He includes obscure recipes found in footnotes to the annotated edition of John Milton’s Paradise Regained, in which “grey amber” was melted like butter onto roasted game encased in pastries.

Kemp also cooks with a piece of white ambergris: “It crumbles like truffle. I fold it carefully into the eggs with a fork. Rising and mingling with curls of steam from the eggs, the familiar odor of ambergris begins to fill and clog my throat, a thick and unmistakable smell that I can taste. It inhabits the back of my throat and fills my sinuses. It is aromatic—both woody and floral. The smell reminds me of leaf litter on a forest floor and of the delicate, frilly undersides of mushrooms that grow in damp and shaded places.”

Enigmatic, yes. Legal, no—at least not in the United States, where the mere possession of ambergris is illegal under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, as is the eating of whale meat itself. The taste remains mostly unknowable, an apt metaphor, perhaps, for the mysteries contained in our oceans at large.

Have you heard the one about putting the banana in the paper bag with the unripe avocado? Leave the bag on the counter for a couple of days and the avocado ripens up. Those are fruits communicating. They’re smelling each other.

Fruits that ripen after being picked, called climacteric fruits,* become softer and sweeter thanks to a plant hormone called ethylene. The gas, produced by the fruits themselves and microorganisms on their skin, causes the release of pectinase, hydrolase and amylase. These enzymes ripen fruits and make them more appealing to eat. A plant can detect the volatile gas and convert its signal into a physiological response. Danny Chamovitz writes in What a Plant Knows that a receptor for ethylene has been identified in plants, and it closely resembles receptors in the neural pathway we have for olfaction or smell.

The gas was discovered in 1901 by a 17-year-old Russian scientist named Dimitry Neljubow of the Botanical Institute of St. Petersburg. I like to imagine Neljubow at his window, gazing at trees twisted and abnormally thickened by their proximity to street lights—why did lights do that?

Neljubow appears to have come to his revelation about ethylene through the careful study of germinating pea plants inside his lab. He planted peas in a pair of pitch-black boxes. Into one, he pumped air from the outside; the other he fed air from his laboratory. Those peas fed the laboratory air grew sideways and swelled up. He then isolated ethylene found in the “illuminating gases” burned by lamps in his lab and on the streets at night 

In the 1930s, Florida orange growers noticed something similar. When they kept fruits warm with kerosene heaters, the heat itself did not ripen up the oranges, and yet the fruits ripened (and sometimes rotted). The fruits smelled the ethylene in kerosene, much like you or I would get a whiff wafting over from a neighborhood barbecue. And that’s something we know because of a chance discovery hastened by some leaky pipes in Neljubow’s lab.

Photo of peas grown in increasing concentrations of ethylene by J.D. Goeschle/Discoveries in Plant Biology, 1998. Thanks to Robert Krulwich for inspiration on this one.

The average American eats 195 pounds of meat a year. That’s a lot of muscle, and it’s laden with meaning—in terms of human evolution, social habits and modern marketing. Men, on average, consume more meat than women. Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and the man responsible for the best-selling phrase “omnivore’s dilemma,” recently published a study establishing a metaphoric link between masculinity and meat.

He and his colleagues tested subjects on a variety of word-association and other tasks and placed different foods along a spectrum of male-linked to female-linked. On the male end of the spectrum were raw beef, steak, hamburger, veal, rabbit, broiled chicken, eggs (hard-boiled followed by scrambled). Milk, fish, sushi, chocolate, chicken salad and peaches were more toward the feminine side. This division loosely lines up with articles in 23 foreign languages using gendered nouns—as in le boeuf (male) or la salade (female)—but curiously phallic-shaped meats like sausages and frankfurters appeared no more linguistically “masculine” than did, say, ground beef or steak.

The study reports some counterintuitive findings. For example, cooking and food processing tend to be associated with femaleness, except when it comes to medium-rare or well-done steaks, which outrank raw beef or blood in terms of manliness. And if you thought placenta and eggs fell under the feminine category, you’d probably be the exception (although, admittedly, the study did not consider the male approximation, such as testicles or milt). Even more perplexing, the undergraduate men surveyed listed orange juice right up there with medium-rare steak and hamburger.

Really, though, what do these food metaphors have to with anything? Well, according to the Rozin and his co-authors, “If marketers or health advocates want to counteract such powerful associations, they need to address the metaphors that shape consumer attitudes.” This lends a certain credence to the practice of slapping artificial grill marks on a sausage-shaped soy patty, an otherwise potentially emasculating cut of protein—and it offers a compelling a lesson for those attempting to make fake or in-vitro “meats” here to stay. Make them manly, boys.

Photo: “Chorizo (Basque Sausage) and Fried Eggs” by Carl Fleishlauer/Library of Congress

The stuff is goopy, gelatinous, bright-red—at once a bland “culinary atrocity” and an essential part of summer. These days, the condiment is almost always made out of tomatoes. But ketchup wasn’t always that way. Indeed, the word appears to derive from pickled fish sauce. And for centuries, the English pickled everything from walnuts to celery in catsups. As late as 1901, the inveterate forager Charles McIlvaine recommended making ketchup out of mushrooms, adding a quart of red wine for every gallon of liquid. Either that or brandy, of the finest available kind.

Nearly a century earlier, in 1812, one of the first published American recipes for tomato ketchup, fruits that were then called “love apples,” appeared in Philadelphia physician James Mease’s book, the Archives of Useful Knowledge. (Mease credits the French for his recipe, although as Mark Kurlansky writes in Salt: A World History, “The French have never been known for their fondness of tomato ketchup, so it is thought, given the date, that the French he was referring to were planter refugees from the Haitian revolution.”) The doctor’s book includes a number of recipes for home distillation and, no surprise, his recommendation for “Love-Apple Catsup” calls for alcohol:

Slice the apples thin, and over every layer sprinkle a little salt; cover them, and let them lie twenty-four hours; then beat them well, and simmer them half an hour in a bell-metal kettle; then add mace & allspice. When cold, add two cloves of raw shallots cut small, and half a gill of brandy to each bottle, which must be corked tight, and kept in a cool place.

Ketchup’s changed in color and texture, going from a brown liquid to a viscous red one, but the condiment also went from one fermented ingredient (alcohol) to another (high-fructose corn syrup). This happened, historian Andrew F. Smith suggests in “From Garum to Ketchup,” as 19th century Americans developed a liking for sweet foods. Sugar added to ketchup hastened fermentation, causing ketchups to sour—and in some cases explode. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 banned any chemical preservatives that slowed fermentation, leaving us with a familiar and shelf-stable blend of salt, sugar, vinegar, and ripe tomatoes. Now, of course, we slather burgers and fries with this so-called “Esperanto of sauces” and tend to take any alcohol on the side.

Photograph: Federal Security Agency/Food and Drug Administration/National Archives

When the submersible was finally floated again the following year, scientists discovered something unexpected: the crew’s lunch—stainless steel Thermoses with imploded plastic tops, meat-flavored bouillon, apples, bologna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper—were exceptionally well-preserved. Except for discoloration of the bologna and the apples’ pickled appearances, the stuff looked almost as fresh as the day the Alvin accidentally went all the way under. (The authors apparently did a taste test; they said the meat broth was “perfectly palatable.”)

The authors report that after 10 months of deep-sea conditions, the food “exhibited a degree of preservation that, in the case of fruit, equaled that of careful storage and, in the case of starch and proteinaceous materials, appeared to surpass by far that of normal refrigeration.” Was the ocean bottom a kind of desert—a place barren of the vast microbial fauna found flourishing on earth? (Here the authors make an appeal for landfills and caution against dumping garbage into the ocean, where decomposition appeared to have slowed to a near stop.) Or was something else slowing microbial growth?

Four decades later, food scientists are floating the latter idea. Because water exerts a downward pressure—at 5,000 feet down, it’s about 2,200 pounds per square inch, more than enough to rupture your eardrums—the depth of the Alvin’s temporary resting place probably acted as a preservative for the bologna sandwiches. At sea level, this kind of ultra high-pressure processing is used for a variety of foods, including oysters, lobsters, guacamole and fruit juices. In a study published earlier this year, a team of Spanish food scientists juiced strawberries and stored the liquid inside various pressurized chambers. Even at room temperature, they found that high-pressure (hyperbaric) storage slowed the growth of microbes that would otherwise spoil the juice. They suggest that the technology might even prove to be more effective than freezing or refrigerating. And they say the promise of this novel food-processing technology was first demonstrated by the accidental sinking of sandwiches on board the submersible.

Photograph: “Food materials recovered from Alvin after exposure to seawater at a depth of 1540 m for 10 months”/Science, 1971.

Food books worth reading. Photo by the author

Whether you’re a craft pickler with a budding small business, a doomsday prepper with a bunker stocked with necessities, or just a home cook curious about that middle ground between fresh and rotten, pickling represents one way of saving the fleeting tastes of spring. These are four short reviews of interesting books that have crossed my desk. They offer instruction, context and recipes for pickling, and they should interest both the earnest experimenter or the armchair historian.

The Art of Fermentation
Sandor Katz, an exuberant post-Pasteurian evangelist who lives on a wooded commune in Tennessee, shares his characteristic blend of instructional advice, contemporary folk wisdom from around the globe and a layman’s take on microbiology. The resulting book has depth enough for home fermenteurs and professional chefs. Includes a recipe for fermented eggs made with miso (a fermented soybean paste).

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning
Originally published as Keeping Food Fresh, this Old World recipe collection offers ultra-simple, if slightly idiosyncratic-sounding, advice from organic farmers and gardeners in France, Belgium and Switzerland. The authors favor salt and time to opening the freezer or turning on the stove. Includes a recipe for verdurette, a salted, ground-up vegetable stock that could replace a bouillon cube in soup.

Putting Food By
This primer, first printed in the 1970s, offers instructional advice on preserving food with boiling water baths, salt cures and root cellars. Its emphasis on safety in home kitchen should appeal to the cautious canning neophyte. Includes advice on the best types of jars, rubber rings and lids for home canning.

Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods
A series of scholarly essays from the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery addresses such topics as the geographic dispersal of Jewish pickles in North America, the theoretical underpinnings of fermentation’s ability to keep our species well fed and the tradition of shad planking. Includes a recipe, of sorts, for garum, approximating the ancient Roman methods for making fermented fish sauce in a modern greenhouse.

Japanese knotweed—a common spring edible and a relative of rhubarb, quinoa and spinach—grows like crazy, so much so that it’s considered an invasive species. Brought here as an ornamental, it’s now better known as a blight; Monsanto even makes a herbicide dedicated to its eradication. On my afternoon jogs, I’ve often wondered what might happen if all my neighbors descended on the rapidly proliferating patches and harvested the tender young shoots for tart, tangy additions to their dinner.

The idea that armies of hungry knife-wielding “invasivores” could eradicate exotic invasive flora and fauna has taken hold in popular culture and among conservation scientists. There are at least two invasive species cookbooks. Fishermen hold tournaments to chase down the Asian carp, which escaped Southern ponds and now threatens to invade the Great Lakes, and biologists have even attempted to re-brand the fish as delicious “Kentucky tuna.”

Eating invasive species might seem like a recipe for success: Humans can devastate a target population. Just take a look at the precipitous decline of the Atlantic cod (PDF). Perhaps Asian carp and lionfish, too, could be sent the way of the passenger pigeon. It’s a simple, compelling solution to a conservation problem. Simply put, “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.”

However, as ecologist Martin A. Nuñez cautions in a forthcoming article in Conservation Letters, edible eradication strategies could backfire and might even lead to a greater proliferation of the target species. First off, harvesting plants or animals for food doesn’t always correspond with ecological suppression. (Harvesting knotweed, for example, doesn’t require uprooting the plant, which can easily reproduce even after being picked). While the eat-‘em-to-beat-‘em effort calls attention to unwanted species, in the long run, Nuñez says popularizing an introduced species as food runs the risk of turning invasives into marketable, regional specialties (as with Patagonia’s non-native deer, fish and wild boar).

Before dismissing his cautionary note about incorporating alien flora and fauna into local culture, it’s worth remembering one of America’s cultural icons, a charismatic animal that may help underscore the questionable logic behind the invasivore diet: the Equus caballus, a non-native species originally introduced by Spanish explorers to facilitate transport in the Americas. Now, Nuñez writes, these “wild” horses have become “so deeply rooted in American culture and lore that control of their populations is nearly impossible, and eradication unthinkable.” To say nothing of eating them.

Drawing of Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum)/Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Volume 106, 1880.

Thanks to Roberta Kwok at Conservation magazine, who brought my attention to the study.

I love my mom and all, but I also want to recognize another set of mothers—those blobs of yeast and bacterial cultures found floating in unpasteurized cider, wine vinegar, and other fermented liquids, like cloudy constellations of pond scum. The Dutch have a word for mud and mire (modder) that may have lent its name to these mothers, but given the proliferation of the term across Europe—French mère de vinaigre or Spanish madre del vino—etymologists suspect that these slimy sediments of mother derived from the mother who takes care of you.

Two mothers seemingly at odds, right? Well, thankfully, the Oxford English Dictionary made a valiant, if somewhat perplexingly worded attempt, to tease out exactly why the lees at the bottom of the barrel came to be named for your female parent:

The transition of sense is difficult to explain; but most probably the scum or dregs of distilled waters and the like was regarded as being a portion of the ‘mother’ or original crude substance which had remained mixed with the refined product, from which in course of time it separated itself. (The term may possibly have belonged originally to the vocabulary of alchemy.) An explanation sometimes given, that ‘mother of vinegar’ was so called on account of its effect in promoting acetous fermentation, does not agree with the history of the use. It has been pointed out that ancient Greek γραῦς old woman, is used in the sense ‘scum, as of boiled milk,’ but the coincidence is probably accidental.

Wine left out in the open air will spontaneously ferment into vinegar if the right airborne microbes land on the surface (Acetobacter bacteria and Mycodermi aceti yeast); the oxidation process can also be kick-started by mixing in the cloudy undefined bacterial and fungal cultures left at the bottom of an old vinegar container—an old, yet reliable, mother. These cultures work in much the same way that yeast or sourdough starters give rise to beer and bread (why these cultures are more often called starters and not mothers remains one of the many vagaries of the English language). Perhaps, then, it’s not all surprising that one mother gave birth to another.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Shannalee | FoodLovesWriting