slkinsey

Anyone who has an interest in the Manhattan (or indeed, more than a passing interest in cocktails at all) should proceed with great alacrity to purchase a copy of Dave Wondrich's newly published Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar. There is a very interesting section therein on the mixological trends that made the Manhattan possible, an outline of the various theories as to it's creator, and several recipes reflecting different takes on the drink.

Well, certain ingredients are going to be harder or easier to find depending on where you live. I bet you have a much easier time finding bones for moose stock than we do in NYC.

Have a look here: http://www.poppers.com/html/faq/home.asp

Pardon me for butting in, but isn't seared scallops a worldwide trend that is reflected in Montreal?

Not if you do the retrogradation trick (see here for the process for pureed potatoes). You could do the double-cooking process, store the cooled potatoes, reheat them to temperature, then puree. This would take longer at service time. Actually, even if I were going to puree the mashed potatoes ahead of time, I'd recommend the retrogradation trick.

You should do okay with cooked-ahead pasta for a baked dish if you remember to undercook the pasta significantly (which you should be doing anyway) The potatoes for mashed potatoes should be okay cooked ahead of time if you take the trouble to do Jack's retrogradation trick. It's fine to pre-cut your vegetables for roasting although, as others have said, I wouldn't do it with potatoes or any vegetable that browns.

What recipe is it that you have from 1914? The earliest recipe of which Dave Wondrich is aware (which means, for all intents and purposes, of which all of us are aware) is from Hugio Ensslin's Recipes for Mixing Drinks in 1916. I've never seen an Aviation recipe calling for applejack and absinthe.

Here's Doc's original text: If you figure the drink is being cut into half, that would mean an 8 ounce glass, 2 ounces of cognac and a half-ounce of Chartreuse. If you further reduce the drink to, say, a 6 ounce glass, you'd have 1.5 ounces of cognac and 1/3 ounce of Chartreuse. In practice, if I am recalling correctly, the bartenders I know simply drizzled over a few passes of the Chartreuse bottle.

More than you ever wanted to know about roasting pans here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=82857

The classic "changing cocktail" to me is the Jimmy Roosevelt. In the original, it's a gigantic drink, so I usually make it as adapted by Pegu Club: A large coupe is lightly coated with demerara syrup and a bitters-soaked sugarcube placed in the bottom. Then the glass is filled with cracked or crushed ice, then comes some cognac into the glass, then the glass is filled with champagne and Green Chartreuse drizzled on top. The drink is not deliberately layered, but there is also no deliberate mixing. Here's how I described it back in 2005:

In my experience there are wide differences in dash amounts between modern Angostura, Peychaud's, Fee and other brands of bitter -- and even wide differences in the same bottle depending on how full it is. As the owner of a few antique dasher bottles, I'd say that they dash within the expected range.

I gotta go with Steven on this one -- especially at 3 AM, it's not unheard of to wait 15 or 20 minutes for a train, and "never more than 5 minutes" is not reflective of my experience. That said, I also think Steven is stretching reality in the other direction by suggesting that 15-20 minutes is the averate non-rush-hour experience. What reflects my reality as someone who travels by subway 99% of the time is: "most often not more than around 5 minutes but occasionally 15-20 minutes." It's not unheard of to wait 15-20 minutes for a subway at any time of the day, if there's been some kind of delay, but of course, the same kinds of delays happen to trains and buses out of the City to NJ.

Steven: I'm not saying that I wouldn't use iodized salt if I had a young child just to be safe. Children may be at particular risk because they often pass through a stage in which they consume an extremely restrictive diet. There are lots of things we do with respect to children that represent huge overkill just to be on the safe side. But, considering some of the things you've written about accepted wisdom, official recommendations and doctors' instructions concerning consumption of fish and raw fish, I'd think you would take some of this with... well, a grain of salt. Given the other various sources of iodine in the American diet, it's not clear to me that the typical American would suffer from IDD if iodized table salt were no longer the norm. The UNICEF thing makes a lot more sense. The typical child living in, say, Zambia, is probably quite a bit at risk for IDD (not to mention a whole raft of other nutritional deficiency disorders). ETA: I'm not advocating that we discontinue iodization of salt -- especially salt used in processed foods, etc. In general, I am in favor of iodization (and fluoridization of drinking water, etc).

I'm not quite sure I understand your point here. Mirepoix is certainly the most canonical and important of any of these traditions. And an understanding of the role played by mirepoix should certainly extend to other traditions, such as Spanish, Italian, Creole, etc. I am especially mystified by your example of sofrito, which you speak of as though it were a codified base. It isn't. "Sofrito" is different depending on whether one is Spanish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc. The Italian soffritto is simply a word for softened vegetables used as the base of a dish, usually including onions but sometimes including one or more of carrots, celery, garlic, mushrooms, and dozens of other vegetables. Perhaps he should have said that similar principles are at work in X, Y, and Z other traditions? Um... no. Iodized salt did not solve the problem of iodine deficiency in the United States. This is because there was never really a widespread problem with iodine deficiency in the United States to begin with. People experience iodine deficiency-related health problems when they live in areas of the world where they subsist on foods grown in iodine-poor soils and the diet is low in marine products. This describes approximately no one living in the United States today. Historically, iodine deficiency-related health problems were confined mostly to the "goiter belt" around the Great Lakes and perhaps one or two other localized areas. This was, however, back in the days before World War I, when people in these areas were eating produce grown in relatively local, iodine-poor soils for the most part, and had zero access to salt-water fish. In today's world where we all have access to fortified cereals, there is widespread distribution of marine foods, food production is concentrated in California and people all across the country eat foods produced all over the globe... it's unclear that iodized salt is necessary for the prevention of iodine deficiency-related health problems. Perhaps I'd use iodized salt if I lived in Michegan, but there's little reason for most of the rest of us to use it (and I don't). ETA: It's also worth of note that the US RDA for iodine (150 micrograms per day) is triple the amount deemed sufficient to prevent prevent hypothyroid, cretinism and endemic goiter.

If the point of veal stock is "neutrality," then why, in your recipe in Elements, do you call for browning the bones and meat and adding tomato paste and mirepoix? It seems to me that if you want something that adds a silky texture and no discernible flavor of its own, you'd do better to make a white veal stock -- no browning, no aromatics, no tomato paste. I mean, I'm all for brown stocks, but surely a brown veal stock will be nearly as robust as a beef stock -- certainly more so than chicken. Because you want more than just a silky texture. What makes veal stock special is that it has a combination of things that other stocks do not have on their own. It has a less distinctive flavor than beef stock, but carries plentiful flavor compounds (here I have to disagree with Fat Guy... beef stock has a much more distinctive flavor). It also has plentiful umami (thus the brown stock with it's mailliardization instead of a white stock) than a chicken stock, which is typically white. And it has far more gelatin than chicken stock. It's a strong all 'rounder. Steven's point is well made that the highest-end restaurants nowadays are more likely to simply have brown and white versions of beef stocks, rabbit stocks, pork stocks, and so on (I would argue that there's no such thing as shellfish "stock" but rather shellfish "broth" -- you're not getting gelatin and a silky texture out of a shellfish broth). However, for anyone other than the most fanatical home cook, this model is unsupportable. If one were able to keep around only one reduced stock for culinary purposes, it would certainly be veal stock. I think you've touched on what makes MR so rapturous about veal stock. Rather than "least essential", I would substitute "most ineffable". I think that some experiences might be ineffable; I'm not sure that veal stock is one of them. It may not be a particularly romantic notion, but I'm quite sure that whatever veal stock does for a sauce can be described, and at least in part explained. In this case, I'd say that the veal stock adds a silky texture due to the gelatin, further amplifies the other present flavors due to the umami contributed, adds its own background flavors which contribute to the overall richness of the sauce -- and does all these things without necessarily screaming "veal!" Indeed, it has been my experience that most people would never guess that a sauce thus enrichened actually contains veal stock (that is edsel's "ineffability"). Of course, in his example, the wine is what he says to use to deglaze, not the stock. Veal stock goes in later. And I would bet that if you substituted water and a pinch of MSG, you'd get a very similar "something more." No, you sure wouldn't. I suppose if you added an envelope of rehydrated gelatin, a shot of light soy sauce and pinch of MSG you might get some of the same effects -- but you wouldn't get anything near "very similar." That's like saying, "wine is primarily used because of the acidity it contributes. And I would bet that if you substituted water and pinch of tartaric acid, you'd get something very similar." I think we can all agree that you wouldn't. (edited to fix bizarre formatting error)

You really don't want to bring polytetrafluoroethylene (aka PTFE, aka "Teflon") above 500F. Because it will cause the PTFE to break down, which isn't good for the long-term survival of the nonstick coating. The "bad news into the air" referenced by phatj is what's known as "ultrafine particles," and these can clog the breathing apparatus of birds, killing them. Not particularly a concern with respect to the lungs of humans or other mammals in the amounts generated by a roasting pan in a hot oven or a frypan on the stove. Similarly, humans don't have anything to fear from ingesting any potential particles of PTFE that may find their way into food due to a degraded PTFE coating. PTFE has excellent biocompabitility with humans, and indeed is used in things like artificial heart valves and tendon repair. The reason I wouldn't recommend a PTFE-coated roasting pan is that eventually the coating will start to degrade and the roasting pan will have to be replaced. Why spend money on a roasting pan that won't last the rest of your life? If cleanup is a serious worry, there are measures that can be taken. Some people line the roasting pan with tinfoil, although I think this practice limits the usefulness of the pan. Personally, I think it makes sense to get a heavy stainless steel roasting pan (some of which are made with a heavy aluminum base, and others with an inner core of aluminum -- not necessary but perhaps worth it if you can get a good price). When the pan has a stainless steel exterior, you can simply spray oven cleaner on the outside of the pan and leave it in the kitchen sink overnight. Any normal amount of cooked-on gunk will come right off the next morning. (Don't try this with anodized aluminum -- the oven cleaner will ruin the anodized layer.)

Ok, so impeccably clean distillation, a refusal to abandon the full, traditional proof and a fearless embrace of the juniper berry are now indictable offenses? I'll make a note. Yea, I'm with Dave in giving this one a big "huh?" Tanqueray is, in my opinion, the Gold Standard for London dry gin. I am 100% in agreement with busboy that a good way to learn about gin is to avail yourself of a bartender or friend with a wide selection and a good knowledge of gin mixology. Unfortunately, while it's often possible to find a friend with a good knowledge of gin mixology and it's often possible to find a bartender with a wide selection of gin, it is often not possible to find a bartender with a good knowledge of gin mixology or a friend with a wide selection of gin. I mean... you can find those things easily if you live in New York City and have cocktail geeks for friends -- but I'm lucky in that regard. This brings me to my second disagreement with busboy: I think the Martini is a terrible cocktail with which to introduce one's self to gin. If someone is already a little shy about liking gin, the most gin-forward cocktail in the repertoire isn't a very gentle introduction. It's like taking someone who isn't sure whether they like opera to see Parsifal (all 5 Wagnerian hours of it). Rather, there are plenty of drinks that include gin as an ingredient, and in which gin is a discernible ingredient but one that plays with other flavors. I could see starting with something like a Juniperotivo, then later a Corpse Reviver #2, then later a Monkey Gland, then a Martinez... and then a Martini (not on the same night, mind you!). Anyway, if juniper-forward gins are scary, I'd suggest Plymouth gin instead of London dry gin. It has a softer overall profile, and mixes beautifully.

It's one thing to talk about the low opportunity cost of public transportation when you travel by car. It's another thing entirely when you have to avail yourself of that public transportation yourself. Suddenly the opportunity cost for the same trip gets a lot higher. Steven: if you pledged to travel exclusively by public transportation for a month, and to stay in your apartment working until no earlier than 6:00 every weeknight (i.e., making special trips only on weekday evenings and weekends) you might find that the opportunity cost is a good bit higher than you suppose it to be. WRT Fort Lee... As someone who has lived on the A line for 17 years, I would also remark that the A line shoots up to the GWBBS with impressive alacrity only for someone who is traveling from below 59th Street -- and then it's only impressive because it's such a long distance and the train runs express for most of that time. For those of us above 59th Street, it's the B or C train up to 125th and then a transfer to the A. And the trip averages 30 minutes once you figure in the transfers. I gotta tell you... Tommy's less-than-ringing endorsement of the Fort Lee experience isn't exactly making me want to jump on the IND and grab a bus over the bridge.

I've actually had a few things that took me to Ridgewood on the train. To be more clear, it's around 14 bucks round trip per person, the trip averages between 50 minutes to almost an hour (that's in addition to getting to Penn Station by subway or cab and arriving early enough to buy your ticket and get on the train), and there are only two return trains per hour (roughly on the hour and 20 minutes after the hour) on weekday evenings and around one per hour on the weekends. That's a pretty serious time and expense investment. Figure a party of four is going to expend a minimum of 3.5 hours to the trip and 56 bucks on the train. I'd rate it quicker to get to Franny's in Park Slope, and quite a bit easier to get to Una Pizza Napoletana in Manhattan or Fornino in Williamsburg -- not to mention that there is no transportation cost to a NYer with an unlimited MetroCard. Would you say that the payoff for A Mano is big enough to warrant that kind of time and travel for a special trip?

I should point out that I don't think Chris was out of line for giving it a go, nor do I think he should have asked permission. It was probably 50/50 that it would have been okay. As far as I can tell, it went just as it should have gone.

We're presumably talking about a place that wants to be a cool cocktail spot. And, you know... let's not get ahead of ourselves here. There are maybe 25 bars in America where you can expect that the bartenders will be recognize and be able to make you a Last Word, and you're in Providence.

How about: I went into the bar, ordered a drink, sat down to drink the drink and prepared to enjoy the drink, the bar, and the people there -- while painting a watercolor landscape on a small canvass. Or: -- while knitting a blanket. Or: -- while taking out some supplies and working on my "ship in a bottle." Or: -- while wearing my "wifebeater" undershirt after removing my shirt. Or: -- while snorting a few rails of coke off the tabletop. These are all things that would be acceptable in certain mileux, from a university pub to a hippy wannabe fern bar to a biker bar, but not in a cool cocktail spot. Hard to say. But for myself, I find the idea of a guy scribbling a few things on a legal pad a whole lot more vibe-appropriate -- especially in a darkened bar -- than the glow from a laptop and some guy tapping away. Pecking away on a laptop in a bar is just too reminiscent of middle managers on business trips sending emails from the lounge at Holiday Inn.

I don't see why there's even a question here: The guy doesn't want people working on laptops in his restaurant bar. Presumably he has good reasons for this, and I can think of several. Open laptops bring to mind Starbuck's, not a cool cocktail spot. And clearly what this guy wants is a cool cocktail spot, not some combination of airport lounge and cocktail bar. Part of what you pay for when you go into a bar or restaurant is the atmosphere provided not only by the bar or restaurant itself, but also by the patrons who are in there with you. This is why, for example, certain restaurants have dress requirements. It's also why bars like Milk & Honey have strict behavior rules. You're not paying to go into Milk & Honey to be seated next to a bunck of Yaeger-shot taking, whooping and hollering frat boys trying to hit on your date. That's an extreme example, but I'm also not paying to go into a cool cocktail spot to hang out with three or four guys nursing a beer and tapping away on their laptops, reading the newspaper or playing a game of Bridge. Bars, in particular, are highly dependent upon image and "vibe." Don't be so sure, by the way, that the other bars and restaurants mentioned wouldn't ask someone to close their laptop or stop playing cards. Chris: Perhaps if you had been there at 4:30 instead of during the traditional cocktailing hour, you wouldn't have hadf any troubles. Perhaps if you had decided to write out your work longhand on a legal pad, you wouldn't have had any troubles. On the other hand, if you had a big folder of research and papers spread out over the table, you probably would have. That's the kind of thing for the coffee shop or perhaps the English model of the country pub -- but not for the urbane, sophisticated cocktail spot this place is trying to be. And I don't see that the fullness or emptiness of the room has anything to do with it whatsoever. If they don't want people opening laptops and/or working in there, they don't want people opening laptops and/or working in there. I think the guy handled it as well as he could have. It's never easy to tell people they can't do something in your establishment that they clearly think is or should be okay (my first reaction upon being approached would have been to immediately close my laptop and apologize). And, of course, no one likes being told those things. Among my cocktail-world friends, I've known some who have had to ask customers to close laptops or put away work, stop playing cards, and even to either start ordering drinks or free up the seats for the long line of waiting customers.

Here's an interesting take that recently occurred to me, and it reflects some of my thinking with respect to this subject: It's increasingly clear that the cocktail revival is one of the major culinary trends of the last five years, and it is only increasing in importance, influence and reach. New York City is the epicenter of that revival. If one is interested in covering the interesting culinary ground in metro-NYC, I would argue that visits to Flatiron, Pegu, Milk & Honey, PDT, Death & Company and Tailor are more fundamentally must-go culinary experiences than getting really good sliders or visiting a Japanese market in New Jersey -- not only in terms of the metro-NYC culinary scene, but also with respect to nationwide culinary trends. . . . If you don't care about that sort of thing, of course you shouldn't go. But in my opinion there is a much larger gap in someone's metro-NYC culinary experience for not visiting these 6 places than there is for not visiting Mitsuwa, Ironbound, White Manna, Cucharamama, Moksha and Rutt's. One can say, "but it's only cocktails -- it should be enough to go to just one." But we wouldn't say that if it were "haute cuisine" instead of "cocktails," and I'll argue that those six places are just as important in the general scheme of things as the last six 3 star-level places to open in the City.

i would recommend that you consider integrating a trip to Ridgewood's A Amano into your calculus. not for shopping, but for Neapolitan-style pizza. Definitely the sort of place I'd want to know about if I were going to be in Jersey. Not sure it seems that much better than or uniquely different from Una Pizza Napoletana/Franny's/Fornino/etc. to be worth a special trip (although I remain open to such an argument) -- but for sure the kind of place I'd incorporate into a trip in the area.