Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Ice Cream

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Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: America's first ice cream scribe

Our nation’s love of food runs deep. Thomas Jefferson was a known gourmand who kept notes on French cooking, and is thought to have scribbled down the first American recipe for ice cream. So this Fourth of July, pull out your Sabotiere (that’s the inner canister of an ice cream maker, for those of you not up on your 18th century lingo), and give Tom’s recipe a try. No word on who made the first American ice cream cone, but my money’s on Benjamin Franklin.

6 yolks of eggs
1/2 lb sugar
2 bottles  of good cream

Mix the yolks and sugar together. Put the cream on a fire in a casserole, first putting in a stick of Vanilla. When near boiling, take it off and pour it gently into the mixture of eggs and sugar. Stir it well. Put it on the fire again, stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent its sticking to the casserole. When near boiling, take it off and strain it thro’ a towel. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Hotdog, from Maximilian II to Jimmy Durante (1200s & 1916)

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Two days from now, many New Yorkers and perhaps a greater number of tourists will celebrate the 236th anniversary of These United States by watching a group of Americans stuff as many hotdogs down their gullets as they can.  I refer, obviously, to the famous hotdog eating contest Nathan’s Famous hosts each year.

The hotdog seems to me a most American food.  You can eat it with one hand.  It’s  inexpensive on the Wallet of Now but maybe not so much on the Self of Tomorrow.  Its immigrant origins are hotly debated by those jockeying for brand superiority in a never ending race in which only one can be the victor.

So I poked around.  Here’s what I found: Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Roller Coasters and Rotary Clubs

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painter

Touching up the boardwalk signs for the mermaids

Nathan’s was already selling many a hot dog when I stepped off the F train at Coney Island at 11:30 a.m. They did not, however, sell coffee, so I got some at the clam shack next door and asked the man at the cash register whether he was looking forward to the Mermaid Parade the following afternoon (the official kickoff of the summer season) or if he was dreading it. He smiled at me kindly. “Dread,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Coney Island is one of those over-the-top places that seems as if it has been dressed like a movie set specifically for your benefit. It has the frenzied carnival feel of amusement parks everywhere, mixed with the anything-(and-anyone)-goes mentality of New York. I doubt if there are many places on Earth where can you see Buddhist monks strolling on the beach and Orthodox Jews waiting in line for the Wonder Wheel. But with all the tattoos and swimsuits, it’s easy to forget that this is a real neighborhood where real people live and eat. I wandered down off the boardwalk to look for some of them. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: English Peas on Eastern Parkway

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If you take Brooklyn’s shuttle train south to Botanic Garden stop you’ll come on Eastern Parkway between the intersection of Franklin Avenue and the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf.  There’s a huge tree that has been propped up with a fifteen-foot-high cone of poured concrete and a great bicycle and pedestrian lane, canopied by trees, that runs almost all the way to Coney Island.

A bit to the right of that stop, you’ll find PitchKnives’ most recent installation of English Peas

The Allure of the Secret Ingredient

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Chartreuse bottleWhen I was working my first job out of college, my boss Cathy and her husband Ken were a charming and sophisticated and unfailingly cheerful couple, the kind of couple that it is easy to envy, the kind of couple that one suspects of stumbling upon some hidden secret to a happy life.  If there was, indeed, some magical key to their happiness, they never told me what it was. But Ken did once tell me how to make amazing mashed potatoes.

“Do you want to know how to make the best mashed potatoes in the world?” he asked me. He had a glow of office-party wine and benevolent wisdom about him.  “Do you?”

And I did. In fact, I was dying to know. There is something alluring, maybe even thrilling, about the idea that just one simple component has the power to utterly transform the whole.

There are, in my opinion, a few different categories of secret ingredients. Continue reading →

Independence Food: The Contest

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Independence Food!The Fourth of July is approaching fast, and we know that our PitchKnives readers can do better than just a ho-hum Frankfurter on the grill. So send us your recipes for your favorite Independence Food and tell us why you think it’s patriotic. Is it red, white and blue? Is it a favorite dish of one of our forefathers? Does it remind you of amber waves of grain? Write to us at submissions@pitchknives.com and tell us all about it. And don’t forget the photos to document your genius!

We’ll feature some of our favorite submissions here next week, so prepare yourself for the tastiest Fourth of July yet.

Dead Man Gnawing: The Netherland Carrot vs. the Byzantine Carrot (500 & 1700 C.E.)

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There is a World Carrot Museum.  It’s only virtual, which leaves me feeling a bit had, but at least there’s a place where you can find the sentence: “Welcome world wide web traveler to the World Carrot Museum, dedicated to telling the fascinating story of the wonderful Carrot.”  A clause in the book The Edible History of Humanity sent me searching, but more on that in a minute.

Our hero carrot’s history is “surrounded by doubt and enigma.”  As far as we know, cultivation started around 3,000 B.C. in Afghanistan.  Imperial Rome grew them for medicinal means and as ingredients for aphrodisiacs.  After the fall of Rome, Europe went carrot-less for ten centuries until the Arabs reintroduced them.  The original carrots (and I’m talking about the roots that we eat here) were purple, white, or yellow.  China developed a foreshadowing red carrot around 1700.  Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: From Jamaica to You

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Tastee PatteeI really wasn’t sure what neighborhood lay at the end of the L line, but I figured that everyone would know about it soon enough. After all, the L is like the frontier train of creative cool—Williamsburg became the new Lower East Side, and then Bushwick became the new Williamsburg, so I was off to see what was probably already on it’s way to becoming the new Bushwick.

When I got off at the Canarsie stop and walked a few blocks down Rockaway Parkway, the busiest restaurant I saw was McDonald’s. My Woodlawn odyssey had given me new faith in my orienteering skills, though, so I decided to just wander around for a bit. I kept my eyes peeled for signs of trendiness. Art galleries? Expensive bars? Strange mustaches? Hasids? I saw none of these things.

100% Playground

All playground, all the time.

Salle du Royaume

Jesus est bon, oui?

Here are some of the things I did see: The mammoth Breukelen Houses projects, the offices of congressman Edolphus “Ed” Towns, a sort of elepahant’s graveyard for MTA paraphernalia, the 100% Playground, a place selling “human hair and African movies” and a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall for Francophones.

Almost every restaurant I saw was a chain fast food place, but then I spied Tastee Pattees and realized that maybe it was time to introduce our readership to the phenomenon of the Jamaican patty shop. Continue reading →

Community News: The Southeast’s Best at the Bonnaroo Oasis

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My family always does a decent job packing in our own food to each Bonnaroo; we’ll equip camp with trail mix and fruit and bread we’ve already toasted so we can make PB&Js or cheese sandwiches.

But we inevitably end up eating at least one meal a day inside Centeroo, the main concert area, the first years out of convenience but now out of a sense of adventure and excitement.  Each year, the festival has grown its food presence.  You’ve got your typical “event” food, tweaked toward a more pleasant pitch: the traditional fries, sausages with peppers, and crappy beer in plastic bottles, as well as the Samosa Man, jambalaya, and a Broo’ers tent selling handcrafted beers.

Last year, they hopped the American food truck craze and established a Food Truck Oasis.  It perches on a slight rise up between the This Tent and the Other Tent.  At night, with the Christmas lights that outline truck awnings flashing pinpoints in the dark and the diffuse yellow bulbs from the kitchens throwing shadows of the along the metal, you can stand at a distance and believe that you’re watching a caravan in the desert or a circus camping down for the night.  It’s beautiful. Continue reading →

Feature: The Amish, doughnuts, & Bruegel the Elder @ the Roo

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I did not grow up on doughnuts; we were not a junk food household.  I’d have them occasionally, of course.  I was always jealous of a friend whose old man would disappear the mornings after sleepovers and return to leave a box of Krispy Kreme on the kitchen table to greet us on the way from the bedroom to the den to catch Saturday morning cartoons.  I came to adore Krispy Kreme (at the store, you could watch a massive, sweating, silver machine turn out newborn doughnut after doughnut after doughnut).  I also worked briefly at age 16 for Dunkin Donuts (who trucked their doughnuts in from some unseen source twice a day) and eventually came to lament that Dunkin secured a niche on the country’s coffee addiction train and spread its subpar sugar rings across the national landscape, forcing Krispy Kreme to the fringes.

Living in New York City, I have been lucky enough to discover the Doughnut Plant.  Eating at the Doughnut Plant was my first step to experiencing the doughnut as art; they do things like stuff handmade doughnuts with homemade peanut butter and glaze them with homemade jam, buy bushels of in-season lavender from the farmers market for a beautiful gray-blue glaze, concoct tres leches cake donuts and other artisanal delights.  Stumbling upon this place was like stumbling upon El Dorado when the most precious metal previously known was tin.

But gold isn’t the only precious metal (it’s softer than Sabbath) any more than the Doughnut Plant’s gilded doughnuts are the only doughnuts.  The hands-down, full-on, good-goddamn-a’mighty culinary work of art at the Bonnaroo Music Festival this year was the Amish Baking Company’s doughnuts.  Continue reading →