An excerpt from Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages
“Homogenization disrupted the chemical structure of the milkfat so drastically as to release a torrent of enzymes that promptly turned raw milk rancid. Even when dairy chemists learned to sidestep rancidity by combining the steps of pasteurizing (which inactivated the enzymes) and homogenizing, there remained the age-old consumer habit of judging milk by its richness—i.e., the thickness of the cream layer on top. When packaging in glass bottles came in toward the start of the twentieth century, one of its advantages from a buyer’s point of view was the plainly visible ‘creamline.’ The fact that homogenized milk in glass tended to acquire an unpleasant oxidized flavor on exposure to light more rapidly than creamline milk was another strike against it.
“As a result, until shortly after World War II few people saw any reason to want homogenized milk. Milk for drinking was almost without exception available in only two degrees of richness: with or without all the original fat. Skim milk, or what was left when the cream was separated for other purposes, was the ugly sister. Health experts warned mothers that it was paltry stuff, deficient in crucial nutrients. (Most states required that it be fortified with vitamin A to replace the fat-soluble beta-carotene that disappeared along with the cream; this step is still mandatory for fat-free and most reduced-fat milk.) At the nation’s creameries skim milk was an unvalued by-product, often dumped for lack of any profitable use.
“As early as the late 1930s a few dairy processors had been trying to win people over to homogenized milk. The turning point came with a postwar shift to opaque or cardboard containers in place of returnable milk bottles. This in turn accompanied another shift away from home delivery and toward supermarket purchases of milk. Consumers and supermarket managers adored the convenience of throwaway packaging, Milk processors and distributors loved the fact that cardboard couldn’t be seen through, which incidentally solved the oxidation problem. It was the perfect moment for abolishing creamline milk and substituting a product whose appearance had previously weighed against it.”
A few notes from A Year and A Pig in Provence
I just finished reading two similarly titled books, A Year in Provence, and A Pig in Provence. The former is a bestselling classic of travel literature, chronicling the events that comprise the life of a British couple’s first year after relocating to the Provencal countryside. The latter is more of a food memoir, the story of how Provence left an indelible mark on one woman and her family’s culinary traditions.
A Year was published in 1989, and each chapter concerns a single month from January through December 1987. A Pig was published in 2007, but concerns events primarily from the 1970s. So in a way, they are both rooted in the past, pre-dating even Stephanie’s experience growing up there.
It’s probably not a coincidence that I decided to read these books before embarking on my third trip to France next week. I’m not someone who likes to read up on a place before thrusting myself into it, but since I’ve already had the opportunity to travel there twice, I felt like it was safe to read the perspectives from a few other “outsiders” like myself. What follows are a few of my notes, food-focused, of things that were new to me.
A Year in Provence
Everyone drinks marc. What the heck is marc? Even Stephanie didn’t know. I finally looked it up and discovered that marc is the French word for brandy made from grape skins. To us, it’s better known as the Italian grappa or the French eau-de-vie.
At one point they go to a butcher to get veal for a stew called pebronata. Again Stephanie gave me blank stare. A quick search turns up that it’s a braised veal or pork ragout with peppers and tomatoes. Sounds tasty.
They say the best olive oil is from Maussane-les-Alpilles from the Coopérative Oléicole de la Vallée des Baux. Turns out we drove right through this area during our first trip, when we visited Baux-en-Provence. I think we might even have picked up some oil from a boutique in Baux.
A Pig in Provence
There was a lot of pork offal happening in this book. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for caillettes, basically organ meat burgers, and pied-et-paquets, tripe “raviolis” in tomato sauce. These are not things I would normally pursue, but given the loving way in which they were described, if I saw either of them on a menu, I’d have to go for it.
There was a lot of discussion of mushroom foraging, centering around three varieties in particular. Chanterelles most everyone has heard of, but cèpes and sanguins I didn’t know. Turns out most Americans know cèpes by their Italian name, porcinis, but I’m unfamiliar with sanguins in any language. Apparently they are known here as saffron milk caps or red pine mushrooms.
Reading this book really made me want to try a real bouillabaisse with rouille. Apparently in Marseilles.
Stephanie’s dad made soupe au pistou (pesto vegetable soup) for us once, but I’d like to have it again. French pistou is essentially Italian pesto without the pine nuts, and optionally gruyere along with or instead of parmesan.
Stephanie’s never had brandade de morue, a pureed salt cod gratin, but it sounds just crazy enough that I’d like to try to make it sometime.
Finally, I think it’s time I get over my lifelong aversion to mayonnaise-like sauces and make a homemade aioli.
Burn Rate, a dotcom time capsule
Do you ever find yourself wondering what it would have been like to live through the dotcom craze, circa 1996? More specifically, a New York based publishing-cum-media company with grandiose aspirations? Probably not, but still the fact that an artifact like Burn Rate exists is interesting in and of itself. Burn Rate is the story of a company that I’d never heard of, written by the founder himself, whom I’d never heard of. Which means the book could only end badly. But for that reason alone it was entirely fascinating, watching all the wrong turns and moments of personal hubris lead towards greater and greater humiliations.
Burn Rate was published in 1998, and concerned events that occurred roughly within a three year period starting in 1994. Let’s put this in context. “The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998, in the form of a $100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist”. So the book ended with nary a mention of Google—the 800 pound gorilla was not yet a figment in the minds of its eventual founders. And yet all throughout the book I could sense it right around the corner.
It was a fun read because I knew how it was going to turn out. Well, I know how things are now. When the author mused on whether the future would go this way or that, I knew exactly which way it went. When he nailed the future on the head, he sounded completely prescient, but when he was doubtful, he ended up parroting the recycled fears of the traditional media world—that we still hear to this day. Still, I really enjoyed reading one history of what led to where we are now, even though this book mostly encompassed the wrong turns, dead ends, and “corrections”.
In some ways it read like a work of historical fiction. I knew all the major companies at the time, like AOL, Excite, CNet, Yahoo, and Microsoft, and yet the names of all the players seemed imagined. I found myself wondering, what ever happened to Michael Wolff, the author, and his company Wolff New Media? A quick Google search told me that he’s involved in yet another online venture I’d never heard of (Newser) that sounded like wistful throwback to the days of traditional media. And in somewhat sadder news, I found his recent affair and divorce plastered all over Gawker. Telling.
Where is the Daily TCP/IP?
The Daily Telegraph is such a great anachronistic name for a newspaper. A name which has become so commonplace in the market that you don’t ever stop to think about what it actually refers back to. Given the pending collapse of the newspaper industry, I’ve found myself wondering: where is the Daily TCP/IP? (Or god forbid, the Daily Tweet.)
Obviously it’s all around us, the blogosphere, Google, Twitter, Bloglines, Facebook. Boing Boing probably comes the closest, as far as a functional analogue recast in the new medium, but still, for nostalgia’s sake, I’d love to see someone bring thedailytcpip.com to life.
On telegraphs and newspapers
So I just finished reading this book called The Victorian Internet about the transition between the pre-telegraph age, and the post-telegraph age, a transition that took less than 20 years, in which the maximum velocity of messages accelerated from the speed of a horse or boat to the speed of electric current in a wire.
It seems to parallel very nicely the messy transition we’re experiencing right now between the newspaper age and the internet age which Clay Shirky’s crystallized in his recent post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”:
As an aside, it’s somewhat scary to think of a newspaperless world. How will I explain to my grandmother, the first female editor of the Ohio University Post, the first women hired by the Editor and Publisher located in NYC, copy editor of the Buffalo Courier Express, editor of the Amherst Bee—a newspaper woman if there ever was one—that newspapers are becoming obsolete. Not news, and certainly not journalism, but the newspaper format she knows and loves. This time Clay Shirky has something quite hopeful to say:
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
Thinking back to the book, I was really taken by a story from the Crimean War, which was the first large conflagration fought in that post-telegraph era. Previously the British newspapers had published the times and details about ships’ comings and goings, partly for transparency, partly to ride the wave of popular support for the war. In the pre-telegraph era, news of a departing military ship traveled no faster than the ship itself. So there was no security risk of publishing that information in the paper. Tom Standage writes:
Normally the troops would have outstripped the news of their arrival. But with the telegraph network marching across Europe to the enemy in St. Petersburg, daily reports of the British plans, lifted from that day’s copy of the Times, could be telegraphed to Russia.
This is inconceivable to us firmly entrenched in the post-telegraph era. It’s hard to imagine a world where the very act of printing something doesn’t also make it instantly knowable and accessible.
Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts
I don’t need this book, but I want it!
Also see: The Laptop Repair Workbook
(In a similar vein as xkcd’s Flow Charts)
Do you know what an ambigram is?
When you rotate the cover of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the Princess Bride DVD by 180 degrees, it still reads “princess bride”. Go ahead, turn your laptop upside down.
I just discovered that this is known as an ambigram.
Dark Magic
Way back in July of 2007 I got this email out of the blue:
Hi, Justin,
I’m an author and I ran across your blog while searching for descriptions of San Francisco homes or apartment buildings.
I have a series of books set in San Francisco, and in this particular book I have law enforcement officers who are conducting a raid on a home. Would you mind answering a few questions? I need to know things like are there alleyways behind the homes, or are the only exits through the front windows, front entrance, and garage entrance? I know it probably depends on the home and the neighborhood, but I don’t want to stick alleyways somewhere they shouldn’t be, etc. I do like to make things as difficult as possible for my characters. :-)
Thank you in advance.
In typical Justin-fashion, I responded with a minor treatise on San Francisco apartments’ entrances, exits, and alleyways. Fast forward to just before Thanksgiving of this year, and Cheyenne wrote back to let me know that the book had been published, and asked whether I’d like a copy? Of course!
Here’s the front cover
And here are the acknowledgments
Where she writes:
Special thanks to Justin Watt of justinsomnia.org who gave me a little extra advice on San Francisco when I tracked him down on the Internet. And surprisingly didn’t run when I started telling him about Demons, warrior Fae, and modern-day witches in his city.
Aww, thanks! It’ll take more than some warrior Fae to scare me away. *Googles warrior fae*
You know you want to read the back cover…
Obviously my curiosity is piqued by Jake Macgregor’s “broad, chiseled shoulders,” but, should I just read Dark Magic, or should I really expand my horizons and start at the beginning of the series, with Forbidden Magic, Seduced by Magic, Wicked Magic, and Shadow Magic? Hmm, tough one.
