My latest story for Food & Wine is "Why the Shape and Size of Ice in Your Drink Matters."
Author: Camper English
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All of the Olives’ Brine Time to Shine
My latest story for the San Francisco Chronicle is about all the ways bartenders are liquifying olives in their Martinis – in the vermouth, gin, vodka, brine, leaf tinctures, oil-washing everything, and even an “olive turducken.”
Here’s a gift link so you can read it.
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Talking About Ice on the America’s Test Kitchen’s Proof Podcast
I did an interview with America’s Test Kitchen a long time ago, and it just went up. The first half of the episode is on the history of ice. I come in at around 27 minutes in.
The episode is called Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Ice?
Start your own ice obsession by buying books mentioned in the episode:
The Ice Book, by me! [amazon] [bookshop] More info here.
Ice by Amy Brady [amazon] [bookshop]
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How to Stretch a Lime – My Story in the SF Chronicle
I wrote about oleo citrate and super juice for the San Francisco Chronicle.
These are techniques for increasing the yield from citrus fruits by eight times or so, using a touch of citric and malic acid powder in a specific way to bump up the flavor and texture of citrus to extend it over a large volume.
Bartenders in the Bay Area have begun experimenting with the technique, not because our locals love high-tech processing of natural ingredients (our locals very much do not) but because threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico would make limes more expensive- as well as tequila and agave nectar.
The story may be paywalled, but check it out here:
Tariffs could make Bay Area cocktails more expensive. This ‘super juice’ may be a solution
By Camper English
Unless bartenders figure out something soon, margaritas could soon cause sticker shock on cocktail menus across the Bay Area. The tequila, limes and agave syrup used in them may all come from Mexico, and imports on them will face tariffs if President Trump follows through with his threats.
Eric Ochoa, partner at the bar Dalva in San Francisco’s Mission District, has been weighing his options and not finding any great ones. He could increase the price of the drink, or take the “shrinkflation” route, reducing the quantity of tequila or mezcal from 2 ounces per drink to 1½. Or he could swap out fresh-squeezed lime juice for “super juice” to cut costs on one ingredient at least. A citrus juice preparation resulting in six to eight times the liquid of regular juice from the same amount of fruit, it’s a technique that bartenders around the region and the country are testing out to squeeze their fruit for all it’s worth.
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Don’t Drink and Send Telegrams – and Other Advice from 100 Years of Cocktail Etiquette Books
My first story for Food & Wine just went live.
I took advice from 95 years of cocktail etiquette books, beginning in 1930 and ending with the publication of How to Be a Better Drinker last week [amazon] [bookshop].
I had fun going through my cocktail book collection to find other etiquette books, including The Official Preppy Handbook, to cite.
Anyway, check out the story here!
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Why Did The Lake Ice Industry End?
Another section cut from my Vinepair article on lake ice from Norway (yesterday I shared the section on different types of ice blocks) is this one below. In it I explain why lake ice went out of fashion. It wasn’t only that ice making machines got better….
Rise of the Machines
In her book Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks–a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, author Amy Brady describes the downfall of the natural ice industry. Now that ice had become a daily necessity in America toward the end of the 1800s, ice companies harvested blocks from local rivers adjacent to cites; not just from far-afield crystalline lakes. The water was often polluted with agricultural and industrial waste, and in some years the bacteria-laden ice caused outbreaks of disease. (Even more problematically, these same source rivers were used for the drinking water.)
Bartenders noticed. The Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages, published in 1897, noted, “Some dealers put shaved ice into the soda water when served. It is a tedious process to grind the ice on a shaver, and makes the process of serving drinks much slower; ice is usually impure, and the beverage is really not fit to drink; and lastly, the beverage quickly loses its gas and tastes flat.”
Dirty soda wasn’t the only issue impacting the old-school ice business. The period of natural global cooling known as the Little Ice Age was ending- 1850 is usually cited as the end of the era. Many lakes previously harvested for ice didn’t freeze as deep as they used to; in some years not at all.
Machine-made ice also became less expensive into the early 1900s, especially after manufacturers switched to using ammonia as a coolant. Brady writes, “Withing a few years of [World War I in 1918] ending, the electric refrigerator went from being a novelty of the rich to one of the country’s most common household appliances.”
Machine ice had become the new standard, so some extant companies clinging to solvency tried to rebrand their old-fashioned lake ice handmade by Mother Nature as a craft luxury good. It didn’t catch on at the time, but maybe one of these days…
Read the original article on Vinepair here.
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Ice Blocks Are Made in Many Different Ways
In the story I wrote for Vinepair about harvesting lake ice in Norway, a couple sections got cut out. They weren’t essential to the story, but I liked them a lot!
This first section is about ice blocks – I was researching the blocks people use at different ice hotels and ice carving festivals to see if they were machine or nature-made. The results are fascinating:
Other Lakes, Other Places
Not all ice blocks are equal. The Minnesota Ice Festival this year features the world’s largest ice maze, with all the 3,452, 425-pound blocks for it produced by a fast (and semi-clear) brine-cooled block-making machine owned by Minnesota Ice.
Orderud of DesignIce in Norway says that the blocks for a lot of other ice mazes and ice hotels (the non-see-through parts anyway) are typically made from compressed snow, rather than ice. Clear Clinebell blocks are sometimes used for the windows.
The Songhua River is the source for “most” of the thousands upon thousands of ice blocks used for the huge annual Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China, not too far from the northern border with Russia. Reportedly there are more than 2000 sculptures and constructions in the theme park built from ice or snow, and some of the ice structures reach over 150 feet in height.
And at the World Ice Art Championships, held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska, blocks are taken from gravel ponds and standardized to 6 by 4 by about 2.5 feet (depending on how thick the ice is that year). Leigh Anne Hutchison, member of the Ice Alaska Board of Directors, says of the pond blocks, “Some even are cool enough to have methane bubbles in them.”
That sounds a bit more “scary” than “cool,” until you realize that nobody is trying to eat that ice. (The blocks with methane bubbles do look pretty groovy though; she sent me pictures.) As far as Orderud is aware, none of the naturally frozen ice for these or any other festivals is served in drinks.
Read the story on Vinepair here, and imagine this section in it.
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The Return of Ice from Lakes
I visited Norway late last year to see an “ice farm.” I wrote it up for Vinepair.
The story I turned in was about twice as long (my bad) so I’ll also share some of the stuff that was cut out here over the next couple of days. For now, here is the story.
Frosty, cooling drinks like juleps and cobblers were trending in early 1800s America, their popularity driven by the recent year-round availability of ice. Blocks of it were cut from ponds and lakes in Massachusetts and Maine in the winters, then sold locally or exported abroad on ships specially insulated to keep as much of it solid as possible.
When the cold cocktail trend caught on in the United Kingdom, thanks in part to books like Charlie Paul’s “Recipes of American and other Iced Drinks,” London ice delivery men wore uniforms with eagle buttons to reinforce the product’s U.S. provenance. Initially, ice was a luxury product over there, and the Wenham Lake Ice Company (located just north of Salem, Mass.) was the leading provider in London, at least until counterfeit cubes flooded the market.
In 1873, The Food Journal reported that “the use of ice has gradually increased among our population in the last twenty years, at an ever-accelerating rate, although it is as yet by no means as necessary an article in our domestic economy as among our American cousins,” and also that most of the U.K.’s ice now came from Norway. The country had a long-established relationship selling ice (usually along with fish) to the U.K. and wanted in on the cool new action. In fact, one Norwegian company renamed one of its local lakes from Lake Oppegård to Wenham Lake so that it could sell its ice under the same name as the famous American company.
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The Only Good Alcohol is Made from Wine
I’ve read in other sources that when grain distillation became available in the 1400s and 1500s, it was viewed as a far less healthy alcohol than that distilled from grape wine.
The sources I’m thinking of were from Germany, at a time when distilled spirits were still technically medicinal, even if people were dipping into the medicine enough that governments passed laws about how much medicine could be dispensed at one time.
I also knew that when absinthe came into vogue in the early 1800s, it was initially made with a wine base, but due mostly to phylloxera that killed of the vines in France, producers swtiched to alcohol made from grain or beets.
I knew they called absinthe “artificial” and this pointed to it being flavored with wormwood and anise. I got the sense that the base spirit was considered “artificial” as well.
I have just started reading The Hour of Absinthe, an academics look at the popularity and downfall of absinthe in France and its colonies. I have the feeling I’m going to get a lot of use out of this book.
Anyway, the author Nina S. Studer makes it explicit:
So that’s cool. I look forward to continuing to read the book.
Buy: The Hour of Absinthe A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink Volume [amazon][bookshop]
Your purchase supports my research as well.
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Esquire’s Best and Worst Cocktails of 1934
Esquire magazine printed an article with the Ten Best Cocktails of 1934 – the year after Prohibition was repealed. They included at the end a list of the Worst cocktails as well.
Esquire’s link to the story is here, but it requires a subscription to view.
DiffordsGuide has the list of best and worst, but not the entire article it comes from.
Here’s the Worst list:
I’ve seen this list in a lot of places online, but never the full article, so I went to the San Francisco Public Library yesterday and took it out of the archives.
I didn’t realize that not only was Esquire huge in size something like 11 x 17 back then, but also had a ton of pages. It was basically a book every month.
