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As I’ve mentioned before, I live in the boonies, which is lovely but not exactly hopping with art museums, ethnic cuisine or cool historic bars where you can order a vintage cocktail. So, when I visit my family in Los Angeles (or go to any big city), I try to cram in as much of that stuff as I can.

Aviation cocktail, courtesy Flickr user jen_maiser

On my latest trip, last week, I went in search of a liqueur called Crème de Violette that was recently reintroduced in the United States after decades off the market. I had read about it on the blog Rowley’s Whiskey Forge, where Matthew Rowley reported that floral, especially violet, scented cocktails were all the rage at the latest Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans. Austrian distiller Rothman & Winter makes a Crème de Violette from Alpine violets that is imported by Haus Alpenz. Now, Robert Cooper of  Philadelphia-based Charles Jacquin et Cie has resurrected his family’s recipe for Crème Yvette, another violet-scented liqueur that was discontinued in 1969. The company already had a hit with its elderflower-flavored liqueur, St. Germain, introduced in 2007.

The idea of violet liqueur intrigued me. I occasionally like to buy those old-fashioned violet pastilles in a tin, and, despite my earlier rice pudding disaster, I find rose water similarly appealing. Some flavors can transport you to another place; the light perfume of violets somehow evokes another era of dainty gloves and nosegays. The fact that the Rothman & Winters Crème de Violette comes in a sleek art deco bottle made it all the more attractive to me. I am a sucker for good package design—even if you don’t end up liking the contents, the bottle will look good on your bar.

But I wondered: Why the sudden revival of floral flavors now? Robert Hess, co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, told me he thought the resurgence was ”tied up with the overall renewed interest in the old pre-Prohibition classics.”

Even the venerable, though soon-to-be-defunct, Gourmet magazine had an article about violet liqueurs in its October issue. Pulitzer-winning food writer Jonathan Gold (whose column in L.A. Weekly I always read when I lived in California) wrote, “Violet-scented cocktails, once fairly common, almost disappeared 50 years ago, dismissed as auntly and old-fashioned, unable to compete with the more immediate pleasures of Mai Tais or Rusty Nails.”

He wrote about a drink made with Crème Yvette, called an Eagle’s Dream, that he was served at a speakeasy-type establishment behind the legendary Cole’s sandwich shop in downtown L.A. (Cole’s purports to be the inventor of the french dip sandwich, a claim disputed by rival Philippe’s “The Original” a few miles away). So, when it turned out that my fiancé and I would be meeting up with a friend who lives a block away from Cole’s, I seized my opportunity to try a violet cocktail.

The speakeasy wasn’t open yet, but the regular Cole’s bar—which, according to a sign outside the building, is the oldest “public house” in the city, established in 1908—had Crème de Violette in stock. The dapper bartender mixed me up a classic cocktail, the Aviation. It was made with—in addition to the violet liqueur—gin, lemon juice, Luxardo maraschino liqueur and simple syrup (a deviation from the original recipe), and finished with a gorgeous, deep-red, imported maraschino cherry (which bears no resemblance to the candied pink version you usually find in domestic bars). The cocktail was a beautiful cloudy violet color, and tasted even better than I had imagined—slightly sweet and somewhat sour, with the faintest hint of violet perfume. My fiancé said it tasted like a purple Sweet Tart, which he meant as a compliment.

Now that I’m home, I’m kind of wishing I had picked up a bottle to grace the wet bar in my house. There are some other classic violet cocktails, such as the Blue Moon, I’d like to try.  I guess I’ll have to wait until my next L.A. trip.

I depend on coffee for my morning caffeine, but I prefer the more delicate flavor of tea when I need an afternoon warmer or a mild pick-me-up. The various international rituals and accoutrements of tea I’ve encountered in my travels are also part of its appeal for me: I loved how, in Turkey, every social or business transaction began with some steaming çai served in a graceful little glasses on a silver tray, and that I never entered a home in Ireland or Great Britain where a kettle wasn’t immediately put on to boil for some milky tea.

A silver Italian teapot, circa 1840. Photograph courtesy of Fowler Museum, UCLA

So, during a recent visit to my hometown Los Angeles, I was interested to catch an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum called “Steeped in History: The Art of Tea“. Aside from seeing some beautiful artifacts, including teapots, tea caddies and Japanese netsuke, I absorbed enough historical tidbits to ace a tea category if I ever make it onto Jeopardy.

For starters, I learned that steeping didn’t become the preferred method of preparing tea until the Ming Dynasty in China, which began in the 14th century. The ancient Chinese compressed tea into cakes, then shaved off portions to boil in water. By the 10th century, during the Song Dynasty, powdered tea, which was whipped with hot water using a bamboo whisk, became popular.

According to Chinese legend, an emperor named Shen Nong discovered tea nearly 5,000 years ago, when the wind blew some leaves into his kettle of boiling water.

During the Ming era, Xü Cishu wrote a tea manual called Chashu, which listed appropriate times to drink tea. These included “When bored with poetry,” “After tipsy guests have left,” “When skies are overcast,” and “In perfect weather.” In other words, anytime.

Tea was introduced to Japan during the early Heian period (794–1185) by monks who returned after studying Zen Buddhism in China. The traditional Japanese tea ceremony was formalized in the 1500s, and was believed to offer a path to enlightenment through everyday gestures performed “in mindful awareness of the present moment.” At first performed solely by men, the role eventually became associated with women.

An alternative, less formal ceremony called Senchado emerged later. It was based on the wu wei principle of “yielding to the stream of life rather than working against it.”

Europeans didn’t start drinking tea until the 17th century. It caught on first with the Dutch, who were the only traders allowed to enter Japan after it enacted a closed-door policy in 1639, and even they were only allowed as far as an island in Nagasaki harbor.

No place today is more associated with tea drinking than the United Kingdom, and the exhibition devotes some space to both English tea culture and to the political ramifications of the kingdom’s former imperial practices in India, where most of its tea was grown, and in the American colonies—where, of course, tea-related taxes and restrictions eventually helped spark a revolution.

Steeped in Tradition: The Art of Tea continues at the Fowler through November 29.

I may not like the taste of Red Bull, but I’ve got to give them props for clever marketing. The first (and only) time I’ve ever tasted their energy drink was in a very unexpected place—on my favorite hiking trail the mountains of northern Vermont, a few years ago. I’ve been there hundreds of times in my life, and it’s usually fairly deserted, so imagine my surprise when a guy decked out in Red Bull gear suddenly appeared in front of me.

“Need some energy?” he asked. Before I could answer (actually, I was stunned speechless), he pulled a can out of the soft-sided cooler slung around his neck, thrust it into my hand with a perky smile, and hiked on down the trail.

Since caffeine can be dehydrating, it’s pretty much the last thing I want to drink while exercising. I finally cracked open the can when I got back to my car a few hours later…and after a few sips, decided it was pretty much the last thing I wanted to drink under any circumstances. (To be fair, it probably tastes better cold, and I don’t like soda anyway, so I was a tough sell.) I prefer my caffeine in the form of a good cappuccino.

Last night, I got another taste of the company’s marketing genius when I stopped by the opening reception for Red Bull’s “Art of Can” exhibition at DC’s Union Station. They’d managed to transform the train station’s main hall into a nightclub-like environment, complete with multiple bars, colored spotlights, a DJ and a gaggle of young women in miniskirts and logoed shirts (whose main purpose appeared to be asking guests, “Are you having fun?”).

The art exhibit consisted of 56 pieces by artists in the United States and a dozen other countries, in media that ranged from sculpture to paint to glassblowing. The only requirement of the contest was for artists to “utilize the blue-and-silver can literally or simply as inspiration,” according to the catalog. Most of the pieces involved actual cans, cut and shaped into other forms: A knight, a parrot; a rescue dog; a skull; a shark; a hula dancer; a ball cap; and of course, several bulls. Weirdly, two artists both decided to shape the cans into cigarette boxes (at least one of them understood the irony, titling the piece: “One Addiction Deserves Another”).

I felt sad for the 25-year-old student who used the cans to build a cute little faux-robot with a bouquet of flowers in his hand and a “love meter” on his chest. The plaque by the work stated that she “was inspired by the idea of having a boyfriend who genuinely cares about her.”

And I couldn’t help but chuckle at the passive-aggressive tone in the statement accompanying another piece, which featured stuffed bulls with wings, dangling from some sort of musical mobile. This was apparently the artist’s response to a critic’s negative review of his entry in an previous “Art of Can” exhibition. The artist “may not have a lot of formal training,” the statement explained, “but at least he can appreciate a work of art that someone took the time to make.”

I left feeling impressed with the artists’ hard work and creativity, and secretly proud of myself for avoiding the actual product the event was intended to sell. And then I opened the “press kit,” which was packaged in a cardboard tube… darn it, I should have known!

The “Art of Can” exhibit will be on display at Union Station, free and open to the public, through October 19.

Panforte, a specialty of Italy. Courtesy of Flickr user James.Whisker

When I tell friends and colleagues that I vacationed in Tuscany, many want to know what I ate there as well as which great works of art I’d seen. Well, of course, I ate lots of gelato — blueberry, pineapple and tangy lemon were my favorites. More intense flavor and less butterfat are the big differences between American ice cream and the Italian variety.

Panforte, a nut-studded flat cake coated with confectioner’s sugar, was displayed in nearly every Siena bakeshop. Traditionally eaten at Christmas time, panforte’s main ingredients are candied orange and lemon peels, almonds and hazelnuts, honey and sugar, all held together by a little flour. Hmmm, sounds like grandma’s fruitcake. Close, but different. A Siena specialty dating back to the 13th century, panforte literally means “strong bread” because it’s heavily spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, though my family and fellow travelers decided the cake’s name derived from its density and chewiness.

We stopped at a farm in Lucca to sample olive oils, but the revelation for me was in tasting traditional balsamic vinegar in a Florentine enoteca, a wine shop. What many Americans are familiar with is a doctored imitation of Italy’s artisanal condiment. The real thing is made from cooked grape must (unfermented grape juice), not wine vinegar, sugar and coloring as found in many commercial brands. A good balsamic vinegar is aged at least 12 years, the shop owner told us, and sometimes for decades, in a succession of small wooden casks—such as oak, cherry, chestnut, and juniper—to develop a balance of sweet, sour and woody flavors. It has a deep reddish brown color and a nectar consistency. We sampled three balsamic vinegars at various ages, and the differences were very apparent, ranging from tangy to mellow to sweet and syrupy. It takes only a few drops of true balsamic to perk up salads or cheeses or berries. Good thing, because the cost of the real stuff can leave a serious hole in your travel budget. Prices for about three and a half ounces of the shop’s 25- or 30-year-old traditional balsamic vinegars exceed $200. A two-ounce bottle of the 100-year-old variety, prettily packaged like Chanel perfume, sells for about $500.

The chefs favor big chunky shapes for pasta, which they top with savories like rabbit or duck ragout or porcini mushrooms or tiny shrimp and squid. Italian dinners can be long and leisurely and heavy. Pasta is a separate course but not the main course. After appetizers (antipasti) and a hearty bowl of pasta, a meat or fish dish is served. My family members started sharing the pasta course or ordering it as the main course after a couple of “I’m stuffed” evenings, but those innovative pasta concoctions never disappointed.

The reviews were more mixed on an Italian delicacy called lardo, Italian for lard, and in this case the fat right under the skin along the back of the pig . Served in paper-thin slices on bread, lardo is white and silky smooth with a hint of ham and herbs. Lardo is cured for several months with salt, garlic and herbs. It used to be a traditional staple for laborers. Workmen would pack a sort of lardo sandwich that they could take into the marble quarries around Carrara. Now, fatback is haute cuisine.

– by Marian Smith Holmes

Can you name a substance that comes from the earth, is refined by heat, and is used daily by millions of people worldwide? Hint: It’s a black liquid.

Nope, not oil. Try what is often called the world’s second-most valuable commodity*—coffee.

Coffee beans, roasted and unroasted (center), courtesy Flickr user cgfan

Collectively, we drink four billion cups of coffee a year, enough to fill Yankee Stadium 85 times, according to Jonathan Silvertown’s book An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds. Silvertown calls coffee beans “the world’s most prized seeds,” and it makes me smile to consider that in that respect, we’re not much different than squirrels or birds, scurrying around in search of seeds to fuel our daily existence.

The appeal of this particular seed for most of us, of course, is caffeine. Sure, I enjoy the taste and aroma of coffee as well, but if I’m honest, that’s not my primary motivation—I drink coffee to wake up (or stay awake). It’s startling to realize that I’m basically drinking poison, from the coffee plant’s perspective:

Caffeine is an all-purpose defensive compound that is poisonous to insects, inhibits the growth of bacteria and fungi, [and] kills slugs and snails,” Silvertown writes. But in human brains, caffeine inhibits something else—a substance called adenosine.

Adenosine acts like a brake on the firing of neurons,” he explains. “So when caffeine gets in the way of this brake, the human machine speeds up.” (And as we learned earlier this year, too much caffeine may drive you crazy.)

Humans have been messing with their own brakes for a long time, apparently. A colleague just showed me a paper he found while perusing an online archive. It’s from an 1879 edition of The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and has the horrifyingly antiquated title “Ethnological Hints Afforded by the Stimulants in Use Among Savages and Among the Ancients.”

The author, a pompous (and blatantly racist) chap named A.W. Buckland, points out that pretty much all civilizations known at that time had “found means of manufacturing some sort of stimulating drink” which often “produce an agreeable exhilaration, and an increase of strength and courage.”

Hmm. In other words, coffee is a mark of progress and higher intelligence?

Well, it seems I’ve already accomplished a lot today.

*This “second-most valuable” detail is frequently published by reputable sources, but as a recent article by Mark Pendergrast points out, this may be erroneous. Coffee is definitely a leading agricultural export in most developing countries, but its ranking depends on what factors you include in calculation. Statistics are rarely simple!