Tag evolution

We’ll start with a little sad news for local foodies here in the Greater Boston Metro Area: Francis Cardullo (originally Frank Cardullo, Jr.) passed away this week. She was the son of Frank Cardullo, Sr., who owned and operated the famed eponymous gourmet shop in Harvard Square. When Frank, Sr. passed away several years ago, Francis (who was still Frank Jr. at the time) took over the business. Not long after her father’s death, Cardullo underwent sexual reassignment surgery, which often contributes to health issues and foreshortened lifespans for the patients, but the details in the assorted death notices are scant. With so much of “old” Harvard Square disappearing, one certainly has to wonder whether or not Cardullo’s will last much longer now that both Franks are gone. The boom in gourmet shops has long since ended, but for decades Cardullo’s had the loyalty of every ex-pat in Cambridge who needed their favorite goodies from home, and perhaps that will keep them going where other gourmet shops have vanished.

I loves me some whoopie pies, and I loves me some caramel. So I gotta think that this recipe for salted-caramel buttercream whoopie pies just can’t suck. What? You’re not up to speed on the wonderment that is salted caramel? Quel dommage! Salted caramel is presently high on the list of trendy foods that every trendy foodie needs to know. It’s pretty much what it sounds like — caramel with a little bit of salt added as it is nearly cooled so that the salt doesn’t dissolve into the caramel but remains crystallized so that as you eat the caramel you get little bursts of salty flavor. The saltiness both enhances and contrasts the sweetness of the caramel. Obviously, you have to use salt that comes in large crystals or flakes, such as Kosher salt, to get the effect. The first time I ever tried salted caramel, it was in a gift box of gourmet goodies from France that my friend Tony sent me for Christmas about ten years ago. At first, I was underwhelmed, but it grew on me so that by the time I was near the end of the box of wrapped caramels, I was hooked. And as far as whoopie pies go, that’s just part of growing up in Maine (the birthplace of the whoopie pie). The whoopie pie filling recipe just calls for a little regular table salt, which I think would defeat the purpose of trying to recreate the experience of salted caramels, so you might consider going Kosher for these.

See the pretty birdie? It’s a pugo, also called a Worcester’s buttonquail, and it used to live on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. I say “used to” because the pugo has been listed as unobserved by ornithologists for some time and was thought to be extinct. Then this little fellow turned up in a hunter’s catch. This photo, in fact, is the only known photo in existence of a live pugo; previously there were only naturalists’ drawings of the bird.

And so what do you expect happened to this literal rara avis, who could quite possibly be the very last individual of his entire species? Oh, yeah, you got it…they killed and ate it.

Writing in the Times of London, columnist Camilla Cavendish complains about eating habits in the U.K. revolving more and more around fast food and take-aways from the supermarket and the value of rediscovering “real” food (preferrably local) as well as the joys of preparing your own meals at home. It’s a common charge these days in Britain, which is catching up to us in our gluttonous obsession with fake food. Here, of course, people who call for eating less fast food and getting back to cooking at home are castigated as looney liberals or elitist snobs, but in the U.K. they’re not quite so far gone yet that these sort of arguments can still be had in earnest and capitalize on the support of celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. If you read the link I had earlier this week about the tomato workers of Immokalee, Florida, you’d see why it’s worth paying attention to in this country as well.

One more reason cooking is good for you: The Economist cites research by Harvard professor Dr. Richard Wrangham, who offers fossil evidence that cooking food is the mechanism that allowed the early hominids to experience rapid and significant brain development, resulting in the evolution of those hominids into modern homo sapiens. Coquo, ergo sum, as it were. I’ll bet Dr. Wrangham buys stuff at Cardullo’s.
Ogden Nash famously wrote “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”, so the obvious thing to do is combine them. Cybele the Candy Blogger recently posted about a pair of chocolate candies, one filled with whiskey and the other filled with orange-flavored Cointreau. Liqueur-filled chocolates are not big sellers in the American candy market, where we have to be thinking of the children all the time, but I love the taste of Cointreau over most other orange liqueurs and will have to set out looking for them sometime soon. Chambourd would be good, too, I imagine.
Unquestionably, Robert Parker has been the most influential person in the world of wine in the last half-century. But, as inevitably happens with figures who become so overwhelmingly dominant in their spheres, the time comes for backlash. Via Grace Lee, the Depraved Librarian, (who almost never posts anymore, sadly), here is a link to a story in Conde Nast Portfolio about the growing unwillingness among winemakers and wine merchants to subject their wines to his point-scale scoring. Much has been written about Parker’s notorious fondness for “big reds” and how his influence on American consumers has pressured a lot of winemakers, especially in France, to tinker with their formulas (Americian wineries tend to favor “big reds” in the first place, but between the change in tastes and the overall drop in sales for French wines, they’ve been compelled to be more reactive). Now there’s a reappreciation for subtler wines, and a desire among winemakers to not feel so much market pressure, and Step One for them is ignoring Parker.