Category Archives: Food

In Search of the Missing Malt

Posted on by The Old Wolf

“Malted Milk.” The phrase used to be as common as “Ice Cream Sundae.” Now, you’re lucky if you can find a place that even knows what that is.

Walk into Wendy’s and ask for a malt, and they’ll probably serve you a blank stare. Explain what it is you want, and they’ll say, “Oh, you mean a Frostie.”

No, I most definitely don’t. If I want a filet mignon, don’t offer me a hot dog, just because they’re both meat. Although in the case of the hot dog, that’s questionable.

No, a Frostie is an artificial abomination concocted in the frozen heart of Satan himself, and that goes for every fast food joint that serves something similar, so don’t think I’m picking on Wendy’s.

Some places still offer them – Dairy Queen is one – but I’ll have to be honest: I have not recently had a malt anywhere that I could distinguish from a shake. They must dispense the malt with a salt shaker.

Malt.

It’s a powdered mixture of malted barley, wheat flour, and whole milk, which is evaporated until it forms a powder. It comes in two versions, diastatic (used by bakers to create a good crust on dough) which contains enzymes that convert starch into sugar, and non-diastatic malt which is used for flavoring.

Flavoring, do you hear me? That means you use more than a smidgen.

You know how Peter and Walter Bishop, and Olivia Dunham, and Colonel Broyles1 work? Yeah, their weird shit-o-meter starts at 9.5.

With a good malt, you start with at least a tablespoon and work up from there.

To find a good malt nowadays, you have to find a roadside shop that’s run by old-school people, not a major chain. Their shakes and malts will be made with real ice cream, not that Mogg-accursed soft hqiz that probably has more chemicals in it than your average shampoo. No, real ice cream, scooped from a tub; real whole milk, lovely natural flavorings, whole fruit, perhaps some real whipped cream, and real malt. Lots of it. As much as you ask for. And it will be made in something like this,

not extruded into a cup like the ejecta of some spawn of Tophet.

If you’re fortunate enough to find one of these, check the thickness of the final product. If they’re knights of the old code, the spoon (a metal one, please) will stand up straight.

I know where one or two of these are. One is a tiny ice-cream shack in Broadway, Virginia. Another is Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard Street in San Francisco. The others… well, I’m not saying. You’ll enjoy the hunt more if you find one yourself.

But now you know what to look for.

The Old Wolf has spoken, and now he’s drooling.

1If you’re not familiar with Fringe, you’re missing out. More, I cannot say lest I spoil the fun. Go buy the DVD’s and enjoy the ride. This season (V) is the last, but not because it wasn’t popular with its fans.

Vintage or Elusive Candy

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Love. Gone forever.

Love. Not easy to find in some parts of the country.

Still available, but at $1.00 for 10

Wowee wax whistle. A favorite at Hallowe’en time.  Gone forever.

Teaberry gum. Still available. Long my favorite in high school.

A movie theatre standby, as ubiquitous as Raisinets. Loved these little guys.  Still available.

B-B Bats. A favorite at the penny candy store, often bought in conjunction with Sugar Daddy bars. Still available.

Chunky. Still available, although the original used to be wrapped more tightly, and cost 5¢ back in the day.

So many more, and most are listed elsewhere on the Interwebz.

And now, let us pause for a moment of silence:

Third from the top – Sara Lee All Butter Chocolate Brownies. Came in a frozen tin; you took the cardboard lid off, and there was a little paper cutting guide, which I routinely ignored, cutting myself massive slabs straight from the freezer. I pester Sara Lee to bring these back on a regular basis. Perhaps they will someday – after all,

was successfully resurrected from the dead because enough people clamored for it.

I’ll keep clamoring.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[Edit: Ooh, I forgot one.]

Used to get these when I’d go ice skating in New York. They were my favorite, sort of a cross between a Milky Way and  a Three Musketeers. Gone forever.

The Old Wolf has spoken again.

Know what you’re eating

Posted on by The Old Wolf

According to an article at Nation of Change, in three months, Californians will vote on Prop 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act, and the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association is teaming up with Monsanto (in my opinion, the most evil company on earth) to block its passage. Now, I’m not one for hyper-regulation and nanny-state laws, but this is one I can get behind. One of my Facebook friends pointed me to justlabelit.org, and there I expressed my support for a GMO-food labeling effort. Here’s what I wrote to the FDA:

“Dear Commissioner Hamburg,

Europe has long been ahead of us in labeling, and rejecting, genetically modified foods. I’m personally not sure whether I trust GMO’s or not – the bottom line is that they haven’t been around long enough, and sufficient research on long-term effects of human and animal consumption of GMO’s has not been done. That said, I want a choice. I want to know if the food I am eating has been genetically tweaked, or if animal products were raised with GMO feeds. Please require foods to be so labelled. Yes, it’s a complex issue. Yes, it will cause administrative headaches, and probably result in increased prices in some areas. To me, it would be worth it for the opportunity to protect my health. Thank you.”

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a knee-jerk, technology-is-bad, save-Mother-Gaia response. I love science, it amazes me and blinds me on a regular basis. Scientists worldwide are examining the issues of using genetic manipulation to increase food yields, and asking all the right questions about long-term effects. In my case, it’s just a gut-level sense of hesitation about injecting GMO’s into the food supply before all the data are in. The human genome is just so mind-blowingly complex, and for all the amazing progress that’s been made in the area of genetic manipulation, we’ve barely scratched the surface. At this point it seems the pinnacle of incautiousness to be injecting unknown factors into the human system, where one wrong change could possibly cause an unforeseen cascade reaction thousands of times more complex than an elaborate domino fall.

So yeah – let’s keep doing the science. Let’s see what we can do to feed the world and raise the human condition. But in the meantime, let’s also have the courtesy to let consumers know what they’re eating, so that they have a choice. The fact that food producers and distributors are putting their economic interests before the health of those who consume their products is mightily disturbing, and I join my voice with those who oppose their callous greed.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Huîtres Variées

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Earlier this month, I posted a brief reflection on John Howard Griffin. Often my mind floats back to his seminal book Black Like Me, nudged there by something I see, or hear, or smell – the language of the book is simple but evocative, and I have read it so often that many paragraphs are always close to the surface of my memory.

One such bit comes to mind when I think of New Orleans, which I have never visited but once, briefly, of an early morning while driving from Los Angeles to Key West in the summer of 1972. I stopped in at a little greasy spoon for breakfast, somewhere close to Interstate 10, possibly in the midst of the area destroyed by Katrina, but far from the French Quarter, which I know of only by hearsay and the Disney-esque reproductions that one sees from time to time.

Griffin wrote, “At Broussard’s, I had supper in a superb courtyard under the stars – huîtres variées, green salad, white wine and coffee; the same meal I had there in past years. I saw everything – the lanterns, the trees, the candlelit tables, the little fountain, as though I were looking through a fine camera lens. Surrounded by elegant waiters, elegant people and elegant food, I thought of other parts of town wher I would live in days to come. Was there a place in new Orleans where a Negro could buy huîtres variées?“1

While I speak fluent French, I have never encountered that phrase except in Griffin’s book. I began to wonder what huîtres variées were, because I love seafood (drooling now at the thought of oyster stew and steamed clams at Joseph’s Original Cap’n Cat Clam Bar in Franklinville, NJ, or a huge plate of mixed shellfish eaten at a lakeside restaurant in Torcy, France) and because I would love to try them in honor of Griffin’s life and work. Yet the only hits on the Internet lead back to the book itself or are oblique references; no restaurant seemed to offer the specific dish, except an old menu from Ben Gross restaurant in 1966, horribly misspelled as huîtres variées cheaudes et frôids, and the Grand Hôtel de Maubeuge, on the French border close to Belgium.

I had more luck when I looked up Broussard’s – they’re still there, and it does look like a lovely place to dine.

Copyright photo viewable here.

Broussard’s courtyard by day

The dinner menu at one point offered oysters as a specialty:

Definitely oysters, and prepared in various ways. So if I were a betting man, I’d say that Griffin had something like the Gulf Oyster 2-2-2, and simply chose to give it a French name, or else back in 1961 they had something similar on the menu. Sadly, the dinner menu has changed somewhat and these are no longer featured. Perhaps a seasonal change? I’ll have to keep my eyes open in the spring and summer.

Unless someone can dig up a menu from Broussard’s of that era, we may never know. What I do know is this: I gotta get me down to New Orleans.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

1Griffin, John Howard, Black Like Me, Signet Books, 1960, p. 11