Slashfood http://www.slashfood.com Slashfood http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.slashfood.com/media/feedlogo.gif Slashfood http://www.slashfood.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/Macaroons Stack the Deck in San Franhttp://www.slashfood.com/2010/02/09/macaroon-daydream/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/02/09/macaroon-daydream/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/02/09/macaroon-daydream/#commentsFiled under: ,

paullette macaronsPaulette macarons. Photo: chiarezza.dolce, Flickr.


If New York has given it up for whoopie pies, San Francisco is a city that has sold its soul for a box of macaroons. And I don't mean the coconut kind that get stuck in your teeth - I mean French-style macaroons (often called macarons); little, round, pastel-colored puffs of perfection. If you've ever fantasized going to San Francisco with some flowers in your hair long after the Summer of Love turned to fall, I'm here to tell you: This is where the magic went. Tune in; turn on; add ten pounds.

Like the whoopie pie in NYC, French macaroons have been dubbed "the next cupcake" here, though I don't think the fair cupcake has to pack her bag quite yet. Macaroons are cookie sandwiches made with almond meal (or flour), powdered sugar, egg whites and food coloring, surrounding a filling of buttercream, ganache or jelly. Compared to the humble cupcake, the macaroon is rarefied - and at $1.60 each, they still go faster than Oreos, and are not the kind of snack you'll be buying for your ten-year-old's birthday party.

But forget the children for a moment, and get over your French-bashing and savor the flavor of these macaroons from Paulette San Francisco. First, dig the pretty colors, man. Caribbean chocolate, lemon, Sicilian pistachio, violet cassis - each box is like a rainbow, and lasts about as long. I brought six of them to the movies with me (The Blind Side) and had to stop myself from eating the whole sample set before the film was over. (And yes, I could discern the flavors in the dark.)

Continue reading Macaroons Stack the Deck in San Fran

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>macaronsmacaroonsmiettepaulette san franciscosan franciscoSean ElderTue, 09 Feb 2010 16:00:00 ESTWhoopie Pieshttp://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/29/whoopie-pies/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/29/whoopie-pies/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/29/whoopie-pies/#commentsFiled under:

whoopie piePhoto: georgie grd, Flickr


At some point in the last year, America's love affair with cupcakes started to cool off. We as a nation weren't thinking about cupcakes all the time. We didn't return the cupcake's calls as quickly as we used to. We just weren't that into cupcakes anymore.

It might have had something to do with cupcakes putting on airs. We could still recall a time when cupcakes were what your mom made for a kid's birthday party -- and not even her favorite kid. They were what you made when you couldn't be bothered to make a proper cake. How on earth could someone charge five dollars for one?

So we moved on. Sure, we still saw cupcakes sometimes, shared some jokes, maybe even a few nibbles. But when we went home and wiped that cream off our lips, we didn't feel that old frisson anymore.

Now we were making whoopie.

Continue reading Whoopie Pies

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>cookiescupcakesdessertDessertsfeaturedwhoopie piesSean ElderFri, 29 Jan 2010 11:00:00 ESTFood Packaging and the Race Cardhttp://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/25/food-packaging-and-the-race-card/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/25/food-packaging-and-the-race-card/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/25/food-packaging-and-the-race-card/#commentsFiled under:

Photo: Everett Collection.


After writing about Aunt Jemima for a previous Slashfood post, I became curious about the dark side - racial images used in food advertising - and it seems I'm not the only one. Texas A&M journalism professor Marilyn Kern-Foxworth wrote a whole book about blacks in advertising, entitled "Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Rastus" (the guy on the Cream of Wheat box). But what's more amazing is that all three of these icons are still found on packaging today.

Okay, there is nothing inherently racist about putting black people on breakfast boxes, or else Wheaties would be in a lot of trouble. And I'm sure that the popularity of those icons, not to mention their products, had something to do with the diaspora of Southerners throughout the country, who associated freed slaves and faithful retainers with the comfort food of their ancestral home. The derogatory nature of some of these ads (a 1915 Cream of Wheat ad showed Uncle Sam looking at Rastus, bearing a bowl of cereal, and saying, "Well, you're helping some!") changed with the times.

Continue reading Food Packaging and the Race Card

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>Aunt Jemimachun kingfrito banditoracismred stripeSean ElderMon, 25 Jan 2010 15:00:00 ESTModern Morphing Male Mascotshttp://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/06/modern-morphing-male-mascots/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/06/modern-morphing-male-mascots/http://www.slashfood.com/2010/01/06/modern-morphing-male-mascots/#commentsFiled under:

Photo: Everett Collection

Speedy Alka-Seltzer is one of our more durable male advertising mascots, though you wouldn't know it to listen to him. The high-pitched voice heard in over 200 TV advertisements between 1954 and 1964 (courtesy radio actor Dick Beals) could have belonged to a Madison Avenue castrato, sent to school an overindulgent nation on the error of its ways.

For Alka-Seltzer is not food, of course, but its antidote. In this Sixties spot, Speedy promotes the product as good for political headaches and Mardis Gras hangovers. The original model (brainchild of ad man Chuck Tenant and graphic artist Bob Watkins) was retired for decades, but made a triumphant comeback last year. In a series of Web videos, Speedy accompanied the Conchords-like singing duo Rhett & Link as they crossed the country in a tricked out AMC Gremlin dubbed the Speedmobile, playing chicken (and burger and falafel) with heartburn and stomachaches.

Speedy wasn't alone in the world of mascots. Though it's become harder to find Thomas Lipton on a box of Lipton tea these days, his spirit lives, Tom Joad-like, in every bag. Sometimes called the father of modern advertising, the Scots-Irish entrepreneur was celebrated for stunts such as parading hogs through Glasgow wearing signs that read, "I'm going to Lipton's! Best shop in town for Irish bacon!" (I guess you had to be there.) Lipton went from one teashop to over 300 in twenty years and was famed in the U.K. for his healthy, abstemious lifestyle. For that and underselling the competition.

Lipton went on to buy (and revive) blighted British tea plantations in Ceylon and pioneered the "flow-thru" tea bag that helped Americans overcome their fear of the stuff. His use of the word "brisk" (tea-taster code for leaves that weren't stale) was revived most recently in the canned ice tea commercials featuring Claymation puppets modeled after Bruces Willis and Lee, among other cultural icons, who exclaimed of the beverage, "That's brisk, baby!"

Continue reading Modern Morphing Male Mascots

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>Alka SeltzerAlkaSeltzercolonel sandersfood mascotkfcSean ElderWed, 06 Jan 2010 11:00:00 ESTFood Mascots - Yesterday and Todayhttp://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/15/food-mascots-yesterday-and-today/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/15/food-mascots-yesterday-and-today/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/15/food-mascots-yesterday-and-today/#commentsFiled under:

GasolineHorses, Flickr

It's tea season in our house and I noticed something missing from Celestial Seasons' Sleepytime tea package: the Sleepytime Bear's family.

You know the Bear: dozing in front of the fire, cat in his lap. Used to be you saw Mrs. Bear and the kids on the side panel, headed off to be while dad dozed. Now the whole family has gone mysteriously missing and Mr. Bear has acquired a big blue radio -- a touch that just screams midlife crisis.

This change in personnel got me to thinking about other iconic food mascots and the makeovers they've received. Today we'll start with the women, with pride of place going to that fictional earth mother, the dark goddess of America's ready-made food unconscious, Aunt Jemima.

Continue reading Food Mascots - Yesterday and Today

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>advertisingfood advertisingfood mascotsmascotsmorton saltsara leeSean ElderTue, 15 Dec 2009 13:00:00 ESTIn Defense of Fruitcakehttp://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/09/fruitcake/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/09/fruitcake/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/09/fruitcake/#commentsFiled under: , ,

fruitcake

Generous Fruitcake. Photo: Beekman 1802.

The first of many seasonal catalogues from Saks Fifth Avenue just arrived at my house. There are only three words of text on the cover: Better Than Fruitcake.

And so it begins, the ritual insults of the gift that time forgot, the humble yet seemingly inedible confection called fruitcake.

There are gag fruitcakes like this inflatable one ("The fruitcake they'll actually want to get!") and corny fruitcake jokes -- there's even a Society for the Preservation and Protection of Fruitcake.

But when did fruitcake become the punch line to a hundred jokes (and not Borscht Belt stuff either: a Jewish friend of mine assures me that fruitcake is strictly for the goyim)?

Food historians suggest that fruitcake -- any cake in which dried fruits and nuts do battle with the batter -- is older than Moses. Ancient Egyptians entombed fruitcake, while Romans carried it into battle, probably for the same reason: Fruitcake is built to last, and did, well into medieval times.

Continue reading In Defense of Fruitcake

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>beekman 1802christmasedible giftsfeaturedfruitcakefruitcake jokesfruitcake recipeSean ElderWed, 09 Dec 2009 13:00:00 ESTFlavors Without Borders - Chef Charlie Ayershttp://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/09/flavors-without-borders-chef-charlie-ayers/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/09/flavors-without-borders-chef-charlie-ayers/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/09/flavors-without-borders-chef-charlie-ayers/#commentsFiled under:


charlie ayers

Photo: Charlie Ayers

When Google held its first analyst day in February 2005, the investors who had come to kick the tires of the already exploding search-engine company probably expected to hear from the CFO -- if not from founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Instead they got a lecture from the company's chef, Charlie Ayers, on the proper way to grill pork tenderloin, the centerpiece of that day's lunch.

Granted, Google always did things its own way. But when Ayers was hired in 2000 to bring "eclectic, high-flavor, low-fat food" to the engineers and data crunchers that made up the staff there, he had already logged time working as a personal chef for members of the Grateful Dead: Unorthodox was relative. But where the band might have started off at the crunchier end of the food spectrum, the geeks at Google were used to thinking of food as fuel, the more high-octane (Jolt, pizza) the better. It was up to Ayers to wean them of frozen fish sticks and introduce them to the pleasures of grilled striped sea bass. His menus became the stuff of legend and the Google cafeteria was the envy of Silicon Valley.

Ayers left the company in 2005 with a boatload of stock and the dream of starting a chain of organic fast-food restaurants. Today the first Calafia ("Slow food cooked fast") is nestled in the midst of the Town & Country Village, across from the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif. The tasteful interior of the 120-seat eatery is all wood and stainless steel, a far cry from the sort of interactive video-game environment he had envisioned. (One investor told him his original concept sounded like "an adult Chuck E. Cheese, and I wanted to kill myself.") It's also become the new go-to lunch place for the local digerati.

Continue reading Flavors Without Borders - Chef Charlie Ayers

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>CalafiaCharlie AyersGrateful DeadSilicon Valleywest coastSean ElderWed, 09 Dec 2009 11:00:00 ESTEd Brown: Confessions of an Angry Zen Chefhttp://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/07/ed-brown-confessions-of-an-angry-zen-chef/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/07/ed-brown-confessions-of-an-angry-zen-chef/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/12/07/ed-brown-confessions-of-an-angry-zen-chef/#commentsFiled under: , ,

ed brown

Angry Zen Chef Ed Brown. Photo: Cookyourlifemovie.com.

It was Jean-Paul Sartre, no Buddhist, who wrote, "Hell is other people." Buddhists don't necessarily believe in hell (except the ones we make for ourselves through our desires and attachments), but Zen Buddhist priest and cookbook author Ed Espe Brown ("The Complete Tassajara Cookbook") would often prefer to be alone in the kitchen.

"Over the years I've asked other cooks at the Zen Center, 'What's the most difficult part about cooking?'" he says in the 2007 documentary "How to Cook Your Life." "They almost invariably answer, 'the people,' having to work with others, having to work with yourself. The food takes care of itself."

For someone who's been practicing Zen for 40 years, Brown can be rather peevish. At a daylong retreat at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in California's Marin County, Brown broke from periods of sitting and walking meditation to tell stories of his own anger. When he returned as a guest chef to San Francisco's famed Greens restaurant -- a pioneering vegetarian place that he helped found -- he was asked if he had been a chef there before.

"Excuse me, I'm Ed Brown!" he recalled himself wanting to say. "And I was working here, doing five jobs in the kitchen, before you were born!"

Continue reading Ed Brown: Confessions of an Angry Zen Chef

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>ed browned espe brownEdBrownEdEspeBrowntassajara cookbookTassajaraCookbookzen chefZenChefSean ElderMon, 07 Dec 2009 15:00:00 ESTThanksgiving Clean-Up: Reclaiming Your Kitchenhttp://www.slashfood.com/2009/11/26/thanksgiving-cleanup-reclaiming-your-kitchen/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/11/26/thanksgiving-cleanup-reclaiming-your-kitchen/http://www.slashfood.com/2009/11/26/thanksgiving-cleanup-reclaiming-your-kitchen/#commentsFiled under:


Photo: Getty RF.
The guests have finished gobbling and you've waved off all offers of help. Now you're stuck with the mess. The pros share their post-holiday triage tips.

Nothing quite kills the glow you get from preparing a big feast for family and friends during the holidays like finding yourself alone in a trashed kitchen, trying to deal with the ruins while your guests slip away into the night or pass out before the television set.

"It can really sour a meal, especially if you like football and don't want to be stuck with your bitter head in the dishwasher," says New York caterer Serena Bass.

While grimacing through the holidays and hating everyone while pretending to have a heart full of good cheer may make sense to some WASPs, it's best to avoid the resentment by allocating some of the clean-up duties ahead of time. First, says Bass, know your players.

"Don't give a stranger putting-away duties, as you'll never find things again. That's your job. Get a Virgo at the dishwasher, putting things in, and someone else at the sink rinsing and scrubbing the crusty stuff.

"You'll need one or two to clear the tables -- and tell them where the dirty linens go; one or two to put the tables and chairs back where they belong; and one person to put away leftovers. Be sure to have plenty of plastic containers and Ziploc bags -- and make space in the fridge beforehand!"

Continue reading Thanksgiving Clean-Up: Reclaiming Your Kitchen

Permalink | Email this | Comments

]]>leftoversthanksgivingthanksgiving cleanupthanksgiving dinnerthanksgiving leftoversSean ElderThu, 26 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST