Charles McIlvaine/Photographer unknown/Mycotaxon, 1986

In 1881, Charles McIlvaine, a veteran of service to the Union in the Civil War, was riding his horse near his cabin in West Virginia—passing through dense wooded areas blackened by fire—when he stumbled upon a “luxuriant growth of fungi, so inviting in color, cleanliness and flesh that it occurred to me they ought to be eaten.” He wrote, “Filling my saddle pockets I took them home, cooked a mess, ate it, and, in spite of the prophecy of a frightened family, did not die.”

That edible epiphany in the Appalachian wilderness initially supplanted an unvaried fare of potatoes and bacon, and it soon became an all-absorbing quest: McIlvaine would taste every mushroom he found. By 1900, he had tasted at least 600 species and established himself as an eager experimenter. (By comparison, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Annual Report of 1885 recommended 12 edible species.) In a letter to New York mycologist Charles Peck, McIlvaine wrote, “I take no man’s word for the qualities of a toadstool. I go for it myself.”

In 1900, McIlvaine published a richly illustrated, 700-page tome, One Thousand American Fungi: Toadstools, Mushrooms, Fungi: How to Select and Cook the Edible: How to Distinguish and Avoid the Poisonous. “It ought to be in the hands of all who collect fungi for the table,” one naturalist said. McIlvaine offers 15 pages of recipes for cooking, frying, baking, boiling, stewing, creaming and fermenting mushrooms, including advice from Emma P. Ewing (early celebrity chef and narrative-cookbook author). He exhibits a remarkable ability to stomach mushrooms considered poisonous (he’s sometimes known as “Old Iron Guts”), but what’s remarkable is that his extensive, idiosyncratic commentary mentions not only the natural morphological variations, but also the range of culinary possibilities.

Photograph by Huron H. Smith/One Thousand American Fungi/The Bowen-Merril Company, 1900

Consider the oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus): “The camel is gratefully called the ship of the desert; the oyster mushroom is the shellfish of the forest. When the tender parts are dipped in egg, rolled in bread crumbs, and fried as an oyster they are not excelled by any vegetable and are worth of place in the daintiest menu.”

Or the woodland agaricus (Agaricus silvicola): “It has a strong spicy mushroom odor and taste, and makes a high-flavored dish. It is delicious with meats. It is the very best mushroom for catsup. Mixed with Russulae and Lacterii or other species lacking in mushroom flavor, it enriches the entire dish.”

Or the vomiting Russella (R. emitica):  “Most are sweet and nutty to the taste; some are as hot as the fiercest cayenne, but this they lose upon cooking… Their caps make the most palatable dishes when stewed, baked, roasted or escalloped.”

Or even the parasitic jelly fungus (Tremella mycetophila): “Cooked it is glutinous, tender—like calf’s head. Rather tasteless.”

Photograph by James R. Welst/One Thousand American Fungi/The Bowen-Merril Company, 1900

Outside the ranks of today’s amateur mycologists (the North American Mycological Association’s journal is called McIlvainea), the man who explored the furthest frontiers of American mycophagy is little known. There is no authoritative biography, no major conservation organization named for him. In fact, as David W. Rose writes, McIlvaine endures “through—rather than in spite of—his brilliant eccentricity.” McIlvaine maintained a private home for the insane; he was partial to whiskey and sexual dalliance (eventually leading to his expulsion from Chautauqua); his busiest years were marred by a “housequake” of a divorce, including allegations that his wife poisoned him (truly curious for a man who ate mushrooms now considered poison). He died of arteriosclerosis in 1909, at age 68 or 69.

John Cage, composer and devoted mushroom eater, wrote, “Charles McIlvaine was able to eat almost anything, providing it was a fungus. People say he had an iron stomach. We take his remarks about edibility with some skepticism, but his spirit spurs us on.” (Also curious to note: Something Else Press reprinted McIlvaine alongside Cage, Marshall McLuhan, Bern Porter, Merce Cunningham, and Gertrude Stein.)

McIlvaine’s book endures as an attractive guide to anyone with the faintest interest in fungi, less as a primer for collecting or for lining your cellar with horse dung and more as a reminder to amateurs: in order to eat these species, you must know them well. His spirit inspires us to head out far beyond the supermarket’s insipid white button mushrooms, to where the wild things grow, for a taste of something that might make Old Iron Guts proud without our joining him in the grave.

Beatrix Potter/The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin/1903 by Frederick Warne & Co.

One of world’s largest and oldest living organisms also happens to be one of its least-respected. Nicholas P. Money’s most recent book, Mushroom, is something of a corrective and an enthusiastic outpouring for all things fungal—from a 2,400-acre colony of Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon to the supermarket’s white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) right on down to the stuff that makes dandruff (Malassezia). In a testament to his passion, Money criticizes an amateur collector who’s removed a giant bolete the size of her head. “Why do people view mushrooms as so different from other living things?” he says. “Imagine, a meeting of the local Audubon Society that ended with the janitor tossing a sack of songbird eggs in the Dumpster.” Or whaling for research purposes.

Amateur mycologists foster a rare scientific partnership with professionals (a claim that perhaps only astronomers can boast of). Amateurs pioneered the study of mycology and the often-inseparable practice of mycophagy. One of these amateur mycologists was Beatrix Potter. She made careful observations of fungi and lichens, and her watercolors illustrate the 1967 British book Wayside and Woodland Fungi. Potter studied spore germination and wrote a scientific paper, but after being repeatedly snubbed—both for radical botanical views and because she a woman—she turned her attention elsewhere. Money writes:

Potter was, nevertheless, a pioneering mycologist, one whose intelligence and inquisitiveness might have been channeled into a career in science had she possessed the Y chromosome required for most Victorian professions. Fortunately, her considerable artistic talents gave her other outlets for her ambition.

Would The Tale of Peter Rabbit have been conceived had it not been for the biases of Victorian era science? Maybe not. In the paper “Bamboozled by botany, Beatrix bypasses bigoted biology, begins babying bountiful bunnies. Or Beatrix Potter [1866-1943] as a mycologist: The period before Peter Rabbit and friends,” Rudolf Schmid suggests that “her exclusion from botany has been said to have a direct analogy to Peter Rabbit being chased out of Mr. McGregor’s garden, that is, the garden of botany.”

Curiously, though, fungi rarely appear in Potter’s tales, and then mostly as a decorative or whimsical addition. Field mushrooms sprout in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin; Agaricus campestris is a species squirrels collect, and elsewhere Potter noted their “nasty smell” and “good flavour.” The species also laid the groundwork for cultivated mushrooms and Heinz ketchup. It’s certainly one of the more subtle depictions of food in a genre rift with delightful donkey picnics and a champagne toast between mice.

As many hundreds of times as I’ve heard the story of Flopsy, Mopsy and Peter Cottontail, I never read it as a tale of enthusiasm for the natural world. Yet, at a time when animals are apparently falling out of favor in picture books (at least among Caldecott-award winners), I thought these observations made by an amateur naturalist were a testament to looking, you might say, where no one else had—towards the lowly fungi.

Guest blogger Dana Bate last wrote for Food & Think about Salisbury’s medieval market.

The Sally Lunn bun (left) and the Bath bun (right). Photo by the author

England’s historic city of Bath is known for its Georgian architecture and Roman baths and as the one-time residence of Jane Austen. But the city is also the birthplace of two of the country’s famous yeasted buns: the Sally Lunn and the Bath Bun, both of which have a fabled and dubious history.

Of the two buns, the Sally Lunn has the plainest appearance and flavor: at nearly six-inches in diameter with a soft, domed top, it is like a brioche bun on steroids. But its simplicity belies the elaborate and fanciful story that accompanies its history.

According to the legend, the Sally Lunn Bun was invented by a 17th-century Huguenot refugee from France named Solange Luyon, who landed a job at a bakery in Bath. She introduced the baker there to the French style of egg- and butter-enriched breads, which residents began to call Sally Lunn Buns, in a perversion of her French name. The buns were served at public breakfasts and teas and soon became a part of Bath’s baking tradition. The original recipe was lost in the late 1800s, but (the story goes) the recipe was rediscovered in the 1930s, when it was found in a secret cupboard in Sally Lunn’s former home.

So-called Bath Buns, on the other hand, are smaller and sweeter than Sally Lunn Buns, with a lump of sugar baked into the bottom, crushed sugar sprinkled over the top and, often, currants or raisins swirled throughout. Like many aspects of Bath’s history, this bun, too, comes with a story.

The most popular involves an 18th-century physician named William Oliver, who would treat patients visiting the city’s Roman baths and, allegedly, furnish them with sweet, yeasted treats called Bath Buns, which he supposedly invented. As the story goes, Oliver went on to invent the Bath Oliver – a hard, dry cracker, similar to a water cracker—after the Bath Buns made his patients pack on a few too many pounds.

Unfortunately, both stories are full of as many holes as a fluffy loaf of brioche.

According to British food historian Laura Mason, there is no record of the Solange Luyon story before the 20th century, and, in her opinion, the whole Sally Lunn tale is complete fiction. “People were very fond of making up these kind of stories,” she says, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Another source describes the Sally Lunn story as a fabrication by a woman named Marie Byng-Johnson, who bought a rundown townhouse in 1937 and concocted a story about a French refuge and a mysterious cupboard to attract visitors and popularize the site as a tourist attraction.

Some claim the name “Sally Lunn” comes from the recipe for “solilemne,” a rich, yeasted, French breakfast cake popular during the same period, but, while plausible, the connection has never been confirmed.

As for the Bath Bun, the recipe likely derives from the Bath Cake and has no connection to either Dr. Oliver or his overweight patients.

In both cases, Munson says, the cakes likely link to an 18th-century baking tradition of yeast-leavened rich breads, which were popular for breakfast. As for the legendary stories…well, they’re just that: stories. Good for a laugh and not much else.

But whether the stories true or false, the charms of the buns themselves cannot be denied: a sweet, sticky Bath Bun goes perfectly with a hot cup of tea, and a Sally Lunn Bun makes a fine partner for a bowl of soup, regardless of its dubious legacy.

Eintopf. Image courtesy of Flickr user siggi2234.

Author Ron Rosenbaum recently revisited The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer’s landmark book that offered an extensive look at why and how the Nazi party rose to power. Where Shirer focused on the political and cultural environment, scholar Lizzie Collingham offers a unique perspective of the war years in her new book The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food.

“It is perhaps the quiet and unobtrusive nature of death by starvation which explains why so many of those who died of hunger during the Second World War are largely forgotten today,” Collingham writes in her introduction. ”During the Second World War at least 20 million people died just such a terrible death from starvation, malnutrition and its associated diseases.” Her book addresses how the major powers on both sides of the war handled food issues, and she shows how food was a major factor in the Reich’s war machine.

German soldiers on the front lines were encouraged to live off the land, appropriating goods from civilians along the warpath. “We live well,” one foot soldier wrote during the 1941 invasion of Eastern Europe, “even though we are sometimes cut off from the supply lines. We supply ourselves, sometimes chickens, sometimes geese, sometimes pork cutlets.” This placed the burden of staying fed on the conquered; in essence, the Nazis found a way to export hunger. They also killed people they considered “useless eaters,” including the Polish Jewish population.

On the home front, Germany managed to keep its citizens relatively well fed in part due to the government’s reshaping the nation’s eating habits. Starting in the 1930s, well before the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Reich officials acclimated civilians to a wartime diet centered on bread and potatoes, encouraging people to forgo meat and butter in favor of fish and margarine.

“But the ultimate Nazi food,” Collingham writes, “was the Eintopf or casserole.” The slow-cooked meal was designed to stretch low-quality cuts of meat and make them more flavorful. And since a single vessel was required to cook it (Eintopf literally translates to “one pot”), it also had the advantage of being fuel-efficient. Families were supposed to prepare the casserole on the first Sunday of the month and donate their savings to the Winter Help Fund, a charity established to assist less-fortunate Germans during the colder months. Even the higher-ups in the Nazi Party would encourage people to hop on the casserole bandwagon, posing for photographs while eating Eintopf along Berlin’s Unter den Linden. ”This transformed the drive for autarky [self-sufficiency] into a social ritual which was supposed to unite and strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft through sacrifice.”

But not even the best propaganda machine can completely convince a nation to sacrifice flavor in the name of national spirit. ”Breakfast and supper at our house usually consisted of bread and marmalade or evil-tasting margarine,” Ursula Mahlendorf recalls in her memoir about her childhood in Nazi Germany. “Dinners were monotonous. Most days we had Eintopf, a casserole of potatoes and various vegetables boiled in bouillon and thickened with flour.”

To learn more about how food figured into how the major powers fought the war, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food will be published in March 2012.

Adam Bernbach making drinks with organic local gin.

From guest blogger Jeanne Maglaty

Earlier this month, Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery unveiled a new portrait of Alice Waters, the legendary owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, and pioneer of the farm-to-table movement.

In the photographic portrait, a mulberry tree looms over Waters, looking chic in black in the Edible Schoolyard, her organic teaching garden and kitchen project in Berkeley that connects kids to “real” food and encourages healthy eating.

“The thing that I love most is that I’m very small and nature is very big,” said Waters as she stood beside the portrait, teary-eyed.

Waters’ acolytes gathered around her as she spoke in the museum’s Kogod Courtyard, some as teary-eyed as she. But hundreds of other hungry guests dared not move closer and risk losing their place in line for the food at the event.

Washington, D.C, culinary celebrities had prepared edible innovations for a glittery reception.  Here’s who and what you missed if you weren’t there:

Chef Cathal Armstrong of Restaurant Eve: Rappahannock River oysters with coriander migonette and green goddess vinaigrette

Chef Haidar Karoum of Proof and Estadio: Roasted winter vegetables with wheat berries and garlic and anchovy dressing

Chef-owner José Andrés of ThinkFoodGroup: Jamón Ibérico de Bellota Fermin—Acorn-fed, free-range Ibérico ham; Selecciónes de Embutidos Fermin—Selection of cured Spanish sausages

Chef-owner Mike Isabella of Graffiato: Crudo of wild striped bass with kumquats, cranberries and arugula

Chef-owner Nora Pouillon, Restaurant Nora: Winter root vegetable & Mushroom gratin with Ecopia Farms microlettuces

Chef-founder Todd Gray of Equinox Restaurant: Lightly smoked duck breast with savory fig chutney and French baguette crostinis

Owners Sue Conley and Peggy Smith of Cowgirl Creamery: Mount Tam cheese—bloomy, rinded triple crème, mushroomy, buttery; Red Hawk cheese—washed rind, triple crème, unctuous, aromatic; Wagon Wheel cheese—pressed and aged cow’s milk cheese, medium strength, semi-firm

Bar manager Adam Bernbach of Proof and Estadio: Catoctin Creek Gin with Tarragon-Pear Soda

Who could resist a single morsel? My daughter and I went back for seconds.

Waters has espoused her culinary philosophy based on using fresh, local products for 40 years. I asked cheesemonger Adam Smith of Cowgirl Creamery if it was difficult to decide what to serve at a reception for such a prominent person in his field.

Not at all, he answered.  He selected three cheeses that the Petaluma, California, creamery made from organic milk purchased from a neighboring dairy.

Nearby, Bernbach mixed cocktails using gin that was distilled (from organic rye grain) only 50 miles away from the nation’s capital in Purcellville, Virginia.

Dave Woody’s selection as the portrait’s artist came with his first-prize win in the gallery’s Outwin Boochever competition in 2009. You can see the new portrait of Waters on the museum’s first floor near the G Street NW entrance.

"Frito Favorites," circa 1954/Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press and Frito-Lay North America, Inc.

The curvy chips crinkle and crunch. Top the salty, golden corn chips with chili and you’ve got yourself a Frito pie, sometimes portioned out right inside the silvery, single-serving bag. The Frito pie is also known as a “walking taco,” “pepperbellies,” “Petro’s,” “jailhouse tacos,” or officially—under Frito-Lay North America, Inc.’s trademarked “packaged meal combination consisting primarily of chili or snack food dips containing meat or cheese corn-based snack foods, namely, corn chips”—the Fritos Chili Pie®. Call it what you will. It’s a soupy, creamy street food that’s recently entered the realm of haute cuisine.

Fritos got their start in Texas with the “Tom Edison of snack food.” The legend goes something like this, as Betty Fussell writes in The Story of Corn: “In San Antonio in 1932, a man named [Charles] Elmer Doolin bought a five-cent package of corn chips at a small café, liked what he ate and tracked down the Mexican who made them.” In another version of the story, Clementine Paddleford writes:

The flavor tickled his fancy, it lingered in memory. He found the maker was a San Antonian of Mexican extraction who claimed to be the originator of the thin ribbons of corn. The Mexican, he learned, was tired of frying the chips; he wanted to go home to Mexico and would be glad to sell out.

The café was more likely an icehouse, and the man who made the corn chip was named Gustavo Olquin, according to C.E. Doolin’s daughter Kaleta, who wrote a 2011 book Fritos Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More. She says her father worked briefly as a fry cook for Olquin and paid Olquin and his unnamed business partner $100 for a customized, hand-operated potato ricer, their 19 business accounts and the recipe for fritos—the patentable Anglo re-branding of Mexican fritas, or “little fried things.” Doolin borrowed $20 from the business partner; the rest came from his mother, Daisy Dean Doolin, who hocked her wedding ring for $80.

C. E. Doolin tinkered around with the recipe, mechanized the chipping process, and, in 1933, patented a “Dough Dispensing and Cutting Device” and trademarked the Fritos name. He worked on breeding custom varieties of hybrid corn. Doolin invented a “Bag Rack” and adopted the now-familiar practice of deliberately misspelling products to draw attention—“Krisp Tender Golden Bits of Corn Goodness.”

Rack header/Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press and Frito-Lay North America, Inc.

Whether fritas become fritos as an accidental Anglofication or as a deliberate “sensational spelling”—in the vein of Dunkin’ Donuts, Froot Loops, Rice Krispies—remains something of an open question. Prior to Doolin’s trademark, though, fritos does not appear to have referred to fried corn chips in Mexican Spanish. Either way, snack foods with distinctive, masculine “Os” persevered: Doolin would go on to create Cheetos and Fritatos; the company he founded would introduce Doritos and Tostitos.

What’s remarkable in retrospect is that he appears to have intended Fritos as a side dish or even an ingredient. In fact, the first recipe Daisy Dean Doolin came up with in 1932 was a “Fritos Fruit Cake”; its ingredients include candied fruits, pecans and crushed Fritos. Another early recipe for a company contest submitted by the woman who would later became C.E. Doolin’s wife, Mary Kathryn Coleman, described a “Fritoque Pie,” a chicken casserole with crushed Fritos. Her prize: $1. (This recipe has been lost and the lack of documentation probably contributes to competing claims about Frito pie’s origins at a New Mexico Woolworth’s in the 1960s.)

Pies aside, the fried corn chips became a pantry staple and an easy-to-use replacement for cornmeal, salt, and oil. Their versatility was practically unlimited. Advertisements from the 1940s said, “They’re good for breakfast, lunch, snack-time and dinner.”

Even more surprising for a man who revolutionized American corn chips and presaged the meteoric rise of the “Anglo corn chip,” which firmly cemented itself when Frito-Lay’s unveiled Doritos in 1966: Doolin did not eat meat or salt. He was a devoted follower of Herbert Shelton, a Texas healer, who ran for president on the American Vegetarian Party ticket.

I thought this transformation of Fritos loosely mirrored that of the Graham cracker, a whole-wheat health food that evolved into a sugary snack. I called his daughter, Kaleta Doolin, and asked about the apparent disconnect. “Fritos have always been a salty snack,” she said, “unless you’re at the factory and take them off the assembly line before they go through the salter, which is what we did.”

Rack header/Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press and Frito-Lay North

As much scorn and derision as today’s leading nutritional gurus heap onto processed foods, it’s worth noting that Fritos arrived here by way of a Mesoamerican staple and their invention and flavor owes a debt to one of the greatest food processing technologies ever invented: nixtamalization. The 3,000-year-old tradition adding calcium hydroxide—wood ash or lime—so greatly enriches the available amino acids in masa corn that Sophie Coe writes in America’s First Cuisines that the process underlies “the rise of Mesoamerican civilization.” Lacking this technology, early Europeans and Americans (who considered corn fit for slaves and swine) learned that eating a diet exclusively based on unprocessed corn led to pellagra, a debilitating niacin deficiency causing dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death.

As we approach one of the biggest snack days of the year and as “Anglo corn chips” continue to make up an increasing percentage of the snack foods market, perhaps it’s also worth celebration the incredible corn processing technology that brought us masa, tortillas fritas, Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger-flavored Doritos and, of course, the Frito pie.

Poster via Gulf of Maine Cod Project, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries/Courtesy of National Archives

In 1951, the Richfield Spring Mercury ran the following:

Bravely doing his bit to combat the high cost of meat, the manager of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company’s cafeteria recently listed on the menu “pot roast of whale-prize beef of the deep.”… It was an experimental project, resulting in varied reactions to the finny fare, even though it was “on the house” Some said it tasted like fish, though the whale is a mammal. The overall reaction, however, was good enough to warrant a return of the mammal delicacy on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.

Sixty years later, whales rarely, if ever, enter our cafeterias or our culinary consciousness. The prevailing approach to the charismatic megafauna plays out in the cat-and-mouse game (with its own sensationalist reality TV show) between whaling ships and environmentalists in the waters around Antarctica. We tend to see whales as symbols of conservation, and sometimes even symbols of conservation’s excesses.

A temporary worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect in 1986, but given its exceptions and loopholes, more whales are being killed annually than before the ban. Something is awry. If the efforts of whale huggers worldwide aren’t working, then could markets be the solution? Three American scientists recently resurrected an idea first floated by ecologist C.W. Clark in 1982 to save the whales by setting a price on their heads. The article appeared in the journal Nature. Much like carbon credits, conservationists could buy whale quotas, pocket the credit, and save as many whales as money could buy. A minke might fetch $13,000, whereas fin whales might be priced at $85,000.

It’s an intriguing proposal—one that made me wonder if we’d soon be eating whale again. Well, barring the unforeseen and unlikely overturn of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, don’t expect to see whale margarine or “beef of the deep” making a comeback.

Here’s where D. Graham Burnett, the author of an epic history on cetacean science called The Sounding of the Whale comes in. With the help of artist Keil Borrman, he’d like to give you a taste of the taboo flesh—or rather a reproduction of the flavor and texture taste of whale meat. On Saturday, he’s planning to serve an elk carpaccio infused with jojoba oil essences (a botanical alternative to spermaceti oil), a pan-fried pork belly served with jellied crustacean court-bouillon and a lightly smoked ham prosciutto, served in linen. So it’s not exactly whale.

“We want to sensitize people to the quirkiness of the different possible relations one can have with these animals,” Burnett told me. “Nineteenth century whale men had certain kinds of intense intimate relationship with their quarry—in part based on food. They not infrequently ate from the carcasses whales they killed. They cut them up right there.”

We no longer experience those tastes and senses. They’ve long been cut off from the modern cafeteria—perhaps for good reason—but the playful provocation does raise the question of what it really means to know these animals.

D. Graham Burnett’s book launch and “whale” meat tasting will be held on January 28 in Brooklyn.

The Eagle headed across the harbor at Dane

The first aeronauts who ascended the sky in a candy-colored hydrogen balloon brought with them mercury barometers, thermometers, telescopes and bottles of champagne. Later, when the acrobatic balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi took off in London, he lunched on chicken legs as he “rowed” across the sky. As Richard Holmes writes in The Age of Wonder, Jean Blanchard and John Jeffries packed bread, chicken and brandy on their hairy trip across the English Channel in 1785.

Given the legacy of polar exploration and the abysmal reputation of modern in-flight cuisine, I was curious to find out what S. A. Andrée packed to eat during his intended flyover of the North Pole. Of the 19th century explorers—a parade of some 751 fanatics—who tried to reach the last mysterious destination on earth, risking cold and starvation, only Andrée, a single-minded Swedish futurist, made the attempt in an aerostat. He had become fascinated by hydrogen balloons after visiting Philadelphia in 1876 and, upon returning to Sweden (on account of some stomach troubles he attributed to drinking ice water!), he set about designing balloons that could be used for exploration. In 1897, Andree took off for the pole on board the Eagle, complete with a tuxedo he intended to wear upon his arrival in San Francisco.

In Alec Wilkinson’s new book The Ice Balloon, he describes what the three men ate on their voyage into the unknown. “Around noon, they had a meal: chateaubriand, the king’s special ale, chocolate with biscuits and raspberry syrup, and water”—an intriguing al fresco dining experience amid the polar fog.

Andrée never returned. His voyage remained a mystery until 33 years later when sealers found the expedition’s remains, including photographs and journals, on the island of Kvitøya. The balloon had only flown for less than three days and the men then fought their way across the ice. Some suspected that the explorers’ subsequent fare sealed their fate—both in terms of what they had eaten (eating polar bear liver causes hypervitaminosis A; eating undercooked meats runs the risk of trichinosis and botulism) and what they had not eaten (lack of fresh foods and vitamin C leads to scurvy). The tale that Wilkinson tells nearly defies the imagination, the least of which is because the foolhardy polar adventurer did something almost unheard of today: He ate extraordinarily well in the skies.

Photographer unknown/Skeletal Growth of Aquatic Organisms/Science

The necks of geoduck clams can grow up to two and a half feet long. Pick one up and it’s hard not to conjure up a tender part of the human anatomy. As Mark Kurlansky writes, the “long phallic neck squirts water and then sadly falls flaccid.” They’re also a staple of the Chinese New Year, served as xiàng bá bàng (“elephant trunk clam”). Since geoducks (pronounced goo’e duk and originally meaning “dig deep”) live for over 150 years, they can become really meaty—up to 14 pounds.

Just how big they get came into question in 1981, when J. D. Barnes published a review of the textbook Skeletal Growth of Aquatic Organisms in the journal Science. The book explains, among other things, how mollusk shells contain biochronologies of geophysical and paleoecological information, like the rings of a tree—albeit in an organism pulled by the tides and the moon. “They are now seen as virtual transcripts of what happened in their environment during their deposition,” Barnes wrote. “Of course, the transcripts are in code, and the deciphering of the codes has only just begun.”

Scanning electron micrograph of the ring structure from a 163-year-old geoduck/Are Strom/American Geophysical Union

Clamshells essentially act as kind of natural instrumentation for recording environmental conditions in their annual growth rings—from changes in lunar magnetism to the detonation of atomic bombs. First identified as climate proxies in 1992, the bands on a geoduck shell also provide a century-old record of fluctuations in the ocean’s surface temperature. Fascinating and important stuff, indeed.

What’s odd is that the 1981 book review included an intriguing photograph, found in the book and attributed to an unknown photographer, of a boy hunched over a wheelbarrow. The photo depicts a massive geoduck clam with its distinctive growth bands. The only problem: It’s a jackalope of the sea—except that rather than a mythical creature invented in 1934 by a skilled Wyoming taxidermist, the oversized geoduck is an unnatural exaggeration of an actual organism.

“The light on the clam comes from the right side and above, while that on the boy’s face and hand is clearly from the left,” biologist Stuart Landry wrote Science. “A clam the size shown would exceed the size limits for a sessile filter feeder.” Another reader reported that, indeed, he had seen the very photo in a gift shop, right alongside the postcard of a jackalope. (One collector identifies the photographer as Johnston #1768, and, indeed, there are other postcards involving gigantic clam wrestling.)

Perhaps the over-sized geoduck provides a lighthearted invention, exhibiting regional pride, like other tall-tale postcards depicting corn that fills an entire railcar or squash the size of trucks. The image may also hint at a more troubling issue—the indelible changes in the environment that are being inscribed onto clam shells. Certainly, something to chew on this year.

Want to learn how to cook geoduck? Check out the video below:

“Penguin Interviews,” via Frederick Cook’s Through the first Antarctic night, 1896-1899.

Frederick Cook was an American surgeon and a polar explorer who set out for the edge of the unknown: Antarctica. It was the first major scientific expedition of the Heroic Age. The year: 1897. The ship: the Belgica.

On its way back to South America, the ship got stuck in the ice for an entire cold, sun-less Antarctic winter. What little they had to eat, they ate—cans of mysterious tinned meat and fishballs that supposedly contained cream. Even Nansen, the ship’s cat, went a little crazy.

Eventually, penguins began flocking to the ship and the birds were—Cook wrote—“of equal interest to the naturalist and the cook.” He began eating penguins. They taste like “a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce”—but eventually he convinced the crew’s leader to make everyone eat penguin. Remember, Cook was a physician and was essentially prescribing this fresh meat as medicine.

Raoul Amundsen was a member of the crew, who perhaps should be remembered not just for reaching the South Pole first, or even going on to reach both poles first, or even passing through the icy waters of the Northwest Passage. Because Amundsen and his Belgica shipmate Frederick Cook ate penguin meat, they were able to stave off scurvy—a vitamin C deficiency that plagued nearly every explorer of the Heroic Age. They’re some of the very few explorers of that era who can make that claim.

What the crew of the Belgica also stumbled upon was a novel method for hunting the birds. According to a recent paper in Endeavour, Jason C. Anthony (also the author of forthcoming book on polar cuisine), writes:

By the end of July they were living mainly on penguin meat, with a marked improvement in the crew. Gerlache, the captain, was the last to consent, and thus the last to be cured, but soon offered rewards to the crew for bringing in penguins for the larder—one frank for living birds, fifty centimes for dead ones. This was easy money, as it turned out. The crew learned in their final months that they could summon both penguins and seals to the ship by simply playing a tune on their cornet.

They played them music, almost like polar snake charmers intent on eating the birds they charmed. Cook reported on December 16 (p. 382):

At meal time, a cornet is used to call the men together, and the penguins, it seems, also like the music; for when they hear it they make directly for the ship, and remain as long as the music lasts, but leave once it ceases. In this manner we have only to wait and seize our visitor to obtain penguin steaks, which are, just at present, the prize of the menu.

Of course, the music may have played only a bit part in the overall conquest of the South Pole. And, as Ernest Shackleton later learned, not all music was a recipe for catching a potential penguin dinner. As Fen Montaigne writes in Fraser’s Penguins:

One of his men pulled out a banjo and began playing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” which, as Shackleton recounts in South, “The solemn looking little birds appeared to appreciate.” The bagpipe, however, was another story, and when a Scottish member of the expedition began to play the national instrument, the Adelies “fled in terror and plunged back into the sea.”

Thin Mints. Image courtesy of Flickr user Amy Loves Yah.

In a 1992 essay for The New Yorker, Susan Orlean took an inventory of the inventory left at the recently vacated Girl Scouts of America the USA headquarters building on Third Avenue. Aside from the people who make this youth service organization hum, it’s readily apparent that something more is missing.

Twelfth floor. Orange Hermann Miller Eames chairs, straight-backed wooden desk chairs, plastic stackable shell chairs in various colors. Troop Camper activity badges embroidered with little tents and trees, which Mom always promised to sew on when she had a free minute but never did: none. Cookies: ditto.”

With every floor there is another round of disappointment with the absence of the Girl Scouts’s signature edibles.

“Fifth floor. Acoustical office dividers covered in Scout-green fabric. Several boxes of green No. 2 pencils, embossed with the Girl Scout logo. No sunshine ponchos made by cutting up one of your mother’s cocktail dresses. Cookies: still none, although an employee of Affordable Furniture walking by confirmed having sighted and then eaten several boxes of Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Sandwiches and Peanut Butter Patties.”

The unfulfilled promise of Girl Scout cookies is absolutely cruel.

These brightly colored boxes of baked goods, hawked to us every year by little girls in scouting uniforms, they have lent themselves to loving parody, recipe ideas and even cocktails. This year, the classic lineup of Thin Mints, Samoas and shortbread trefoils was joined by Savannah Smiles, a lemony cookie dusted with powdered sugar, introduced to honor the 100th anniversary of Juliette Gordon Lowe’s founding of the Girl Scouts. But when did the annual cookie drive tradition get its start?

Cookie sales began as—and still are—a means for troops to fund activities and programs. The earliest known cookie drive was organized in December 1917 by Muskogee, Oklahoma’s Mistletoe Troop. Instead of being sold door-to-door, the baked goods were sold in a local high school cafeteria. In the 1920s and and 1930s, troops across the nation independently organized cookie drives, baking simple sugar cookies in their own kitchens and selling parcels of wax-paper-wrapped treats for anywhere between 25 and 35 cents per dozen. By the mid-1930s, commercial bakers were being approached to produce the cookies, and by 1951, the line included three varieties: a sandwich cookie, shortbread and a chocolate mint, now known as Thin Mint cookies, which currently account for 25 percent of all Girl Scout cookie sales. Currently there are two bakeries licensed to produce eight varieties, and your access to certain cookies depends on your location. (There’s a cookie locator app you can use to track down which goods are available near you.)

The cookies have, however, run into a few problems over the years. The flour and butter shortages that came with World War II halted cookie drives, and scouts instead sold calendars to raise funds. The cookies later came under fire for their trans fat content. In 2005 cookies with zero trans fats were introduced, the organization using the occasion to impress upon scouts the importance of label reading when making eating choices. (Subsequent reporting suggests that the cookies abide by the FDA’s definition of what constitutes zero trans fats—any amount less than .5 grams—and that there are indeed some artery clogging dietary fats therein.) But the Girl Scouts are perfectly sensible in the advice they dispense regarding consuming their own product: “As with all treats, they should be enjoyed in moderation.”

Some cookies have gone extinct, varieties that didn’t sell well and were consequently retired—including an ill-fated venture into the cracker market with Golden Yangles.

What are your favorite Girl Scout cookies—and what do they say about you? And if you have memories of selling cookies, share them in the comments section below. And for those of you who are wanting to get a Girl Scout cookie fix in the off season, you may have to satisfy (torment?) yourself with a line of lip balms that come in Samoa, Thin Mint and Tagalong flavors. Just try to refrain from eating the stick.

A "pooping log" courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Lorenzo

I was about five or six years old when I figured out that Santa Claus was a fictional character. (Although my family is Jewish, we used to celebrate Christmas with our half-Christian cousins, so my parents played along with the ruse.) When I told my mother I wanted something or other for Christmas, she slipped and said, “We can’t afford it.” She quickly caught herself and said, “I mean, that’s a little expensive for Santa Claus,” but I was on to her. Instead of being upset, I thought I was really clever.

I ran upstairs and bragged to my older brother that I had figured out that Santa was really just our parents. “Duh,” he said. “I learned that a long time ago.”

If I had thought about it, there were plenty of other causes for skepticism. I mean, how does one guy in a sleigh—even one pulled by flying reindeer—deliver goodies to every household around the world? Does he outsource?

In a way, yes. Although tubby, red-suited Santa Claus is the gift delivery man in most of North America and other countries, many places have their own traditions about who—or what—is responsible for bringing Christmas candies and toys. It also helps that he spaces out the festivities so that in some countries, distribution happens on a night other than the one before Christmas.

Dutch children, for instance, leave out their shoes—those cute wooden ones, traditionally—on December 5, the eve of St. Nicholas’s feast day. In the morning they find that Sinterklaas has filled them with chocolate coins, small toys and spice cookies called pepernoten. This Sinterklaas fellow has a similar name and appearance to the American Santa, but he dresses more like a bishop and arrives on a horse. Maybe the reindeer union doesn’t allow them to work more than one night a year? He also has a politically incorrect sidekick named Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) who wears blackface and metes out punishment to misbehavers.

In Italy, it’s La Befana who comes bearing sweets for good little girls and boys. La Befana is an old witch with a broom and raggedy, patched clothing; according to folklore, she declined an invitation to accompany the three wise men on their quest to bring gifts to the baby Jesus, then thought better of it and wandered the land looking for them. Now she comes down the chimney on the eve of Epiphany (January 6) to fill children’s stockings and shoes with caramelle—or coal, if they were naughty.

But I’d have to say the most colorful, and amusing, candy-bearing Christmas character is the tió de Nadal, or Christmas log—also called cagatió, or pooping log. Beginning on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, children in the autonomous Catalonia region of Spain “feed” their log; meanwhile, their parents discreetly make the food disappear. Come Christmas, the kiddies beat the log with a stick and order it, via catchy little songs, to poop candies for them. The parents then make it appear that the log has indeed eliminated treats such as turron, a type of nougat. When the log plops out an egg or a head of garlic, that means the party’s pooped till next year.

Strange? Yes. But is it really any less plausible than flying reindeer? And when you consider that this was also the land that produced Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, it all begins to make sense.

Christmas pudding, courtesy of Flickr user minor9th

By guest blogger Derek Workman

English cuisine has always been laughed at by its European neighbors as bland, greasy and overcooked. This may or not be true, but one thing is for sure—not one of our European neighbors’ cuisines can measure up to the Great British Pudding. The variety is endless, and even the French were forced to admit British superiority when Misson de Valbourg said, after a visit to England in 1690, “Ah what an excellent thing is an English pudding!”

Most British puddings are rich and sweet (a “sweet” is another name for a pudding) with the recipes often going back hundreds of years. The quintessential English pudding incorporates fruits that are grown in England: apples, redcurrants and raspberries, bright red rhubarb, or gooseberries, which apart from being a green, sour, hairy fruit, is the name given to someone who goes out with a couple on a date without a partner for the evening himself.

When is a pudding not a pudding? Yorkshire pudding isn’t a pudding; it is a savory pastry case than can be filled with vegetables or served, full of gravy, with that other English staple, roast beef. And neither is black pudding—that’s a sausage of boiled pig’s blood in a length of intestine, usually bound with cereal and cubes of fat. Ask for mince in the United Kingdom and you will be served ground beef. But that Christmas delight, mince pie, is actually filled with a paste of dried fruits. Confusing!

A pudding may be any variety of cake pie, tart or trifle, and is usually rich with cream, eggs and butter. Spices, dried fruit, rum and rich dark brown sugar, first brought into England through the port of Whitehaven in Cumbria, were items of such high value that the lord of the house would keep them locked away in his bedroom, portioning them out to the cook on a daily basis. The port was where the last invasion of the English mainland was attempted, in 1772, during the American War of Independence, when John Paul Jones, the father of the American Navy, raided the town but failed to conquer it.

The names of some puds stick in the mind. “Spotted Dick,” a hefty steamed pudding with butter, eggs and dried fruit folded into a heavy pastry, has been a gigglesome name for generations of schoolboys. Hospital managers in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, changed the name to “Spotted Richard” on hospital menus, thinking patients would be too embarrassed to ask for it by name. No one knows where the name came from, other than that currants traditionally gave the pudding a ‘spotted’ appearance. A gooseberry fool isn’t an idiot whose friends don’t want to have him around; it is a deliciously creamy summer pudding. And despite its French sounding name, crème brulee, the creamy dish with the burnt sugar topping, was actually created in Cambridge in the early 19^th century.

An inescapable addition to any British pudding, especially the steamed ones, is custard; rich, golden and runny, it is poured hot over a steaming bowl of treacle pudding, apple crumble, plum duff or any other delicious pud hot from the oven. Another complication: Ask for “a custard” in a British bakery and you will be given a small pastry with a thick, creamy filling, which you would eat cold. Pudding custard is a flowing nectar made from egg yolk, milk, sugar and vanilla pods, and the thought of licking the bowl after your mum had made it fresh must linger in the top five of every Brit’s favourite childhood memories.

The Christmas pudding reigns supreme, the highlight of the Christmas dinner, especially if you were served the portion with the lucky sixpenny piece in it.Copious quantities of currants, candied fruit, orange peel, lemon peel, eggs and beef suet bind the Christmas pudding together. Then go in the spices, cloves and cinnamon; brandy if you want it and a good slug of sherry. It’s then steamed for an hour, maybe two hours, it depends on the size of the pudding.

But it isn’t just the wonderfully rich pudding that is important, it’s how it is served. You warm yet more brandy and then light it, pouring it over the hot Christmas pudding moments before it is carried to the table. If served when the light is low, the blue flames dance and sparkle around the traditional sprig of berried holly stuck into the top of the pudding.

So, you may laugh at our fish ‘n’ chips, make rude comments about our drinking warm beer, or call us a nation of tea drinkers, but you will never, even in your wildest gastronomical dreams, match the rich British pud!

Derek Workman is an English journalist living in Valencia who “delights in searching out the weird, the wonderful and the idiosyncratic, which Spain has by the bucketful.” He blogs at Spain Uncovered.

For immigrant Jewish populations, Chinese food offered an exotic spin on familiar foods. Image courtesy of Flickr user dslrninja.

The custom of Jewish families dining out at Chinese restaurants, especially on Christmas Day, has long been a joking matter. “According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5749,” one quip goes. “According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4687. That means for 1,062 years, the Jews went without Chinese food.” Even Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan made light of the tradition during her Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Granted, Chinese restaurants are typically among the few businesses open on December 25th, but it turns out that there are historical and sociological reasons why these two cultures have paired so well.

In a 1992 study, sociologists Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine focused their attentions on New York City, where there are substantial Jewish and Chinese immigrant populations. No matter how different the cultures may be, they both enjoy similar foods: lots of chicken dishes, tea and slightly overcooked vegetables. For Jewish newcomers, Chinese cooking offered a new twist on familiar tastes. Then there’s the matter of how food is handled, a matter of great importance to observant Jews. Chinese food can be prepared so that it abides by kosher law, and it avoids the taboo mixing of meat and milk, a combination commonly found in other ethnic cuisines. In one of their more tongue-in-cheek arguments, Tuchman and Levine wrote that because forbidden foods like pork and shellfish are chopped and minced beyond recognition in egg rolls and other dishes, less-observant Jews can take an “ignorance is bliss” philosophy and pretend those things aren’t even in the dish.

Chinese restaurants were also safe havens, the sociologists observed. Jews living predominantly Christian parts of the city might have to contend with the longstanding tensions between those groups. Furthermore, an Italian restaurant, which might bear religious imagery ranging from crucifixes to portraits of the Virgin Mary, could make for an uncomfortable dining experience. A Chinese eatery was more likely to have secular decor.

There was also the sense among some Jewish participants in the study that Chinese dining, with exotic interiors and the strange-sounding menu items, was a delightfully non-Jewish experience. Furthermore, like visiting museums and attending the theater, Chinese restaurants were seen as a means of broadening one’s cultural horizons. “I felt about Chinese restaurants the same way I did about the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” one of the study’s unnamed interview subjects remarked. “They were the two most strange and fascinating places my parents took me to, and I loved them both.”

For a fuller explanation on how this dining trend came about, you can read Tuchman and Levine’s study online [PDF]. And if you have memories of a Chinese restaurant experience, share them in the comments section below.

Consider food—and food-themed gifts—this holiday season. Image courtesy of Flickr user Vanessa Pike-Russell.

Shopping this time of year is nothing short of stressful, especially if you (like me) are still trying to figure out the tokens of affection and appreciation you are going to give to those you hold dear. Throw in a mob of similarly indecisive and uninspired shoppers, and the ability to enjoy this time of year can go down the tubes. For those considering food-themed gifts this year, here’s hoping the following gift ideas will ease your last-minute shopping woes.

Food: Let’s start with the obvious. Food can make a great gift for people who are impossible to shop for, are downsizing or trying to de-clutter their home, or really don’t want anything material for the holidays. Consider their everyday eating habits and give them foods that you know they’ll love and maybe throw in a few things that might expand their horizons a bit, but aren’t so off the beaten path that they’ll go to waste. (For example, if they enjoy a cup of hot tea, offer something standard like Earl Grey or English Breakfast and pair it with a blend from your local tea shop that you probably won’t find on your standard supermarket shelf. Throw in some teatime nibbles, maybe some tea-themed trivia cards and you have yourself a themed gift basket.) If you’re going out of town to visit friends and family, give foods from your hometown or state, like peanuts and ham if you’re from Virginia. It takes a little bit of careful thought and planning, but a DIY food basket can make for a very considerate present.

Jewelry: Have your food and wear it too! But if you are in the D.C. area and can make a trip out to the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery gift shop, they offer a selection of pins created by artist Debbie Tuch, who encases foods—from slices of citrus to candy corn and peanuts—in glittery resin, turning them into wearable, fabulously fun pieces of food art.

Toys: A while back I did a post on food-themed toys for the young and the young at heart, and of the items on that list, the lightsaber chopsticks would be a fun stocking stuffer for older children and teens. I can also personally attest that the newly redesigned Easy Bake Oven, which forsakes the soon-to-be-retired 100 watt lightbulbs in favor of a built-in heating element, hit store shelves for the holiday season. For kids who see the kitchen as a science lab, ThinkGeek offers a home carbonation kit that lets you add some fizz to your favorite drinks by way of the chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar. (Don’t worry, those ingredients don’t make it into whatever you’re sloshing down.) For the baby who has everything, they also offer an illuminated bib with the picture of an airstrip and an accompanying jet-shaped spoon, perfect for an epic game of “here comes the airplane.” And again, be mindful of shipping deadlines if you need to have your internet-ordered goods by a certain date.

And then there are gifts for the bookshelf.

Feed Our Small Word: For little chefs, this Disney book introduces children to international cuisine by way of simplified recipes and fun facts. I also appreciate the few recipes where the authors point out that cooking is a creative medium and that it’s OK to do something different from what’s pictured—like trying different fillings for quiche, finding your own mix of veggies to use in quesadillas or making substitutions to suit your palate, like using kielbasa to make a mild version of paella.

Culinary Reactions: Learning about chemistry shouldn’t be relegated to the classroom, and Simon Quellen Field’s book explains why food does what it does. The writing style is very personable and he does a great job of illustrating concepts with recipes, such as a tutorial on homemade cheese after a lesson on suspensions and emulsions.

Essential Pépin: Chef Jacques Pépin has been in the business for six decades and here he collects some 700 recipes, revised and updated for the modern cook. Each recipe is preceded by a short introduction from Pépin that offers advice for preparation as well as personal anecdotes. It reads like a warm invitation from a master chef to come into his kitchen and savor a meal, and with recipes that range in difficulty, there ought to be something in here for everybody. And for those who need a little extra help, an DVD explaining all the techniques used in the book is also included.

The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook: This is an old standby that I think is perfect for someone who is hesitant about cooking or is just starting out. I probably use this one the most for my day-to-day cooking. It gives you nutritional information and cooking times for recipes, which makes it easier to figure out if something is going to ruin your diet or if you can manage to fit it in your busy schedule. (College students and young professionals, I’m looking at you.) Furthermore, I like this one because the recipes, while good on their own, are also basic enough that anyone who is culinarily curious will feel free to tinker around with recipes to personalize them.

Menu Design in America: If your interests include both food and the visual arts, there is no passing on this extensive volume published by Taschen. A stunning compilation of menu art from the 1800s through the late 20th century that documents changes in dining culture and graphic design, it’s the perfect accompaniment to your coffee table.