Actions that might even come true. From k.c. r w I'm having Kleiman And you're listening to good food. Good hotels good restaurants around on the. Exterior. That's too cute adversity Professor Henry Petroski I talked to him about dispensable back in 2000. Text Knology in culture this week we're sharing some of my favorite conversations from the past decade starting with this one so how far back to use. Goes back about 2000000 years we're pretty much all early toothpicks made out of wood out of twigs it seems pretty good that they are back as we can imagine paragraph 2 off a tree splinter out of it and use it I would imagine that in certain cultures and in certain times when I think about ancient China or Japan I think perhaps maybe toothpicks may have been made out of ivory or other objects and were sort of more precious is that the case yes that is the case for those that could afford those things it was common to carry around a personal to expect and for people who didn't have the means to they just would all their own a lot of people did that's right or they might use certain materials such as say iron which would effectively be a. Given that people will hold their own how did the idea of a manufactured product succeed I would imagine it had to be sold to people that something that they would have to buy would. More value than something they can just make themselves Well that's right back in the 19th century a lot of things began to be made by machinery it was really just a natural extension of the hospital revolution and there was a fellow from the New England area named Charles Forster who was working in Brazil and he noticed that the natives down there were carving toothpicks by hand he also noticed that the natives had a very white very clean tick a list t. He thought Well I think that I can make a fortune literally if I go back to New England and I begin to make toothpicks by machine and sell them in such a way that I could undersell even these natives in Brazil but it was not as easy to do it as he 1st thought he had to acquire the patent rights to machines that could make toothpicks and then had to develop the machinery and figure out exactly what wood was best for toothpicks that took him close to about 10 years when he finally was able to produce toothpicks in such vast quantities if found that well now we have to sell them to people and not only literally sell them but also in the sense of marketing them before we get into the marketing I'm just fascinated by the idea of making a toothpick my mind tends to go to a cartoon place where you have a tree and all the sudden the tree is on a lathe and what's left of the tree is this one little toothpick Well the beginning is actually correct it does start as a tree in fact white birch bark was taken off the tree and then it was literally put on a lathe and it was sort of peel the veneer was peeled from around it and sometimes as long as 100 feet and then that was bad into a machine that literally chopped off toothpicks the way we might cut cookies kind of cookie dough so let's talk about how he marketed this old tool in a new way can see here is pretty ingenious Well you remember in the 19th century just about everybody is. Or had a personal to expect that they carried around with ivory brass bronze whatever gold and silver so Forster had to figure out a way to break the habits of people and get them accustomed to buying to specs that they would then dispose of what he did as he hired students from Harvard to didn't arrest Ronson Boston after they enjoyed their meal they would call for the manager and ask where his wooden toothpicks were when the manager said Well I don't know what you're talking about socially stomped out of the restaurant and say will never come to this and stablished once again because you don't provide toothpicks for your guests after the meal of course the next day Charles Forster shows up at Lane precisely these things that the students had demanded naturally the restaurant manager can't refuse to buy some and distribute to his customers now what about this custom walking around with your walking stick in your top pad and having a toothpick in your mouth that you just sort of kept there and moved from side to side and chewed on was that an affectation that was marketed as well or did that just happen naturally that seems to have happened naturally as happened in the 870 s. And 18 eighties dandies who often had it came with them came to be known as the crutch of. Conversation. Next. Stay with us. Sponsors include humble maker coffee company California committed to enriching the lives of children with autism through surfing music and the great outdoors. Organic humble maker cold brew is now available at all Gelsen market locations Welcome back to good food and Casey r.w. Have been climbin Mormon recipes are not so different from typical Middle Western recipe. Mormons making jokes about their own food that sound just like the jokes Methodists make about their food. In the Mormon community we 1st aired this interview 6 years ago. In this process of you learning about Mormon women in the kitchen what did you find out our food and cooking an important part of the society or the are they always in the background they're in an important part of the society their congregation is called a ward and there are a lot of Ward cookbooks I study particularly the 20th century and they used to have lessons once a month called homemaking lessons where people would gather to learn how to cook or how to sell something or how to do something in the home but the letters from the leaders of relief society that went from Salt Lake City headquarters out to the individual wards they emphasized that food served at those meetings should be nutritious it should be economical it should be easy to prepare so that it was providing a model for the women who attended the meetings about how to prepare that kind of food at their home so they didn't want women just serving desserts at these meetings they wanted food to be nutritious easy to prepare and economical yet it's interesting I was looking at a recipe for funeral potatoes could you take us through the ingredients Yeah typically funeral potatoes have some kind of. Canned soup cream of chicken soup or cream of mushroom soup there are a few stalwarts who will great their own potatoes but usually it's an industrialised form of potatoes frozen hash browns they have sour cream in them they have cheese and them and then they normally have crushed corn flakes on top the popularity of here old protégé toes particularly to be served at funerals is based on the fact that these travel well they can be prepared ahead of time and these tend to be things that Mormon women would have in their pantries they have extensive pantries so you could call somebody and say so and so just died in 2 days we need you to bring funeral potatoes to serve the gas that the funeral and the woman would already have the things that she needed to be able to throw that dish together let's talk about these extensive pantries for a minute I understand that the Church advocates at least 3 months worth of food stored Why is this a few reasons in the 1930 s. The church was concerned about how many Utahns were on national welfare during the Depression they were worried that the Government sources of funding would run out and that people would be left really in trouble so they started their own welfare program the welfare was based on feeding the poor but it also had a strong component of teaching self-sufficiency they really taught people to store their own food so that in a time of need they would have resources they taught them how to save money not spend more than they should they teach that you shouldn't go into debt and I think for a house or education people would often use industrialized food products as a part of their food pantry initially you were to store 2 years worth of food and then they took it down in the last couple of decades keeping the garden was another important part of this and so people would grow their own food and then they would bottle the food or freeze. It or dry it so that was part of their food storage is there an ethical component of food choices there is a few years after Joseph Smith founded that Mormon church he received a revelation called the Word of Wisdom and that outlines something that would sound familiar to you know somebody like Michael Potter Barbara Kingsolver it says eat very little meat eat food in season feed the animals properly according to what they should be fed it's a little bit puzzling why some of those things are out there when this revelation was received in 830 days before food was really industrialized before eating out of season was a possibility but now it has strong powerful implications people tend to look at the aspects of the word of wisdom that forbid coffee and alcohol and focus on those instead of the aspects that have more in common with today's local force like the eating in season in the eating of little meat now part of your study has been to compare cultural significance of food in Mormonism with that of the Nation of Islam which seems like they wouldn't have very much in common right that's part of why I chose to compare the 2 groups both groups are considered new religious movements and both have some aspects that are quintessentially American but they're Chia graphically and racially quite distinct groups so I find it very interesting that both emphasize growing your own food having some land food storage for times of want both emphasize helped a great deal that's popular now and it's been popular all through the 20th century but there's a lot of rhetoric about health and eating properly and in order to honor the body that God has given you and in the case of the Mormons this is for the hereafter it's for now and the here after Mormon theology is very rooted in a no show. That people are supposed to be happy and that God wants them to be happy and God gives them rules so that they can be happy now and happy during the here after the Nation of Islam doesn't believe in life after death or didn't at least in the time of large Mohammad so they wanted to maximize their lives now wanted to be happy now wanted to be economically well off now to help with particularly important to them because it was related to longevity and they believed that if they ate correctly which included just eating one meal per day that they would be able to live long long lives like hundreds of years even what about the role the fasting of depriving oneself of food in both religions so for the Nation of Islam that was a lot about health and most of the language about it is health and Elijah Muhammad taught that if you allowed yourself 22 hours to digest your food then the food would no longer harm the body but if you were constantly feeding the body then there were harmful particles that wouldn't have the chance to be fully digested and expelled from the body so he taught that there were even some diseases some problems with high blood sugar that could be controlled if you would only eat one meal per day with the Mormons there are 2 main reasons they fast one is about spiritual power depriving the body of food puts you more in touch with spiritual matters it also shows your humility and the depth of your desire so you're more likely to get answers for prayers if you're fasting but the other interesting thing about Mormon fasting which is pretty unique to them is that even when Joseph Smith from the very beginning when he was teaching people to fast he said that the reason they should fast is so they could give the food that they did not eat to people who had no food so it was an effort directly related to alleviating poverty and so Mormons they skipped 2 meals during the 1st Sunday of each month and sometimes if they. Want they might fast and some additional period but what they're supposed to do is fast during the 1st Sunday of the month and then in a generous way calculate to help much money they may have spent on the meals that they skipped and then they put that into a general fund for the poor while we talked a little bit about the dish funeral potatoes aside from that what are some of the most common Mormon dishes in the early days of the church and now when their early days of the Church of Mormon say what you would see anybody in the areas they were in eating you know when they were in Missouri they would eat the way Missourians ate That's a little less interesting it in the middle 20th century they also looked a lot like it specially people in the middle of the country with a lot of industrialized food products and a lot of casseroles you know a leaf of lettuce with a little Jell-O. On top of it as a salad side what does set Mormon food apart a little bit is the emphasis on rotating food storage because if you have all of this wheat and all of these canned stored up wheat was a big deal then you need to be able to use them or else they spoil and you don't want waste whereas a regular cookbook from Ohio would have a recipe for zucchini bread that I called for all purpose flour them warm and version of zucchini bread was more likely to have some whole wheat flour and they were trying to throw whole wheat flour in wherever they could or nonfat milk that was a part of food storage because it has a longer shelf life and so whereas other bread recipes would call for fresh milk Mormon red recipes would be more likely to call for the dehydrated milk or for candy evaporated milk Holbert is a historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day say. We're going to hop out of the way back to come back to the press. Avery shopping for this week at the Santa Monica farmer's market I'm happy to be visiting with Noel Carter who is the test kitchen director for the Los Angeles Times she writes about seasonal produce she publishes the culinary s.o.s. For those hard to find beloved recipes and know well you're here today you're going to tell us a little bit more about the test kitchen and also tell us about the taste Well it's this weekend and it's our 8th annual Taste and it's bigger and better than ever I'm hosting one of the events the Sunday block party with Sherry are you know her from Spa go and now she's a tough tavern and it's just going to be a fun event and what exactly are you 2 crazy ladies going to be Don Oh gosh we've got a bunch of things going on we're going to be chatting about brunch Sherry's doing a demo and then I'm going to be watching over the ultimate biscuit if you want to know how to make good biscuits Ellie has a great biscuits and we've got David and Jason full of coming in and they're going to show like tips and tricks for making awesome biscuits. A jar to cut little circles. But you know there are there are a few like really good hints like keep your ingredients cold I use a pastry cutter my mom she was a big baker growing up and I learned a lot of what I know from her and you know you cut in those ingredients so when the butter melts it creates the steam so you've got all these flaky layers but I know David and Jason are going to have some great tips to share Will they be baking biscuits for us to taste they will be we will have samples with all the demos this year which will be awesome that sounds amazing and no one else like is something that's new that we should be kind of looking for you know it's funny walking around the markets and I see you every week it's so good to see oh we've got figs are like really really big right now and it's have such a small season and they're such a delicate fruit actually they're like several 100 kinds of figs out there and you know we've got several beautiful ones out here beyond just the mission figs or the turkey figs there are a bunch of great I love making a jam with goes really well with biscuits and you know it's just it's that time of year and it's it's a perfect. Right and probably one of the best ways to preserve the seasonal magic of this market is like you said Noel to make the jam with for example figs you know it's funny I was so much of the great produce it's like you put everything in a pot with some sugar or maybe some pectin and you cook it down you might flavor it with a thing or 21 of my favorite things to do with figs is do a little bit more of a savory take on it and I do a fresh veg salsa which is super simple to make a little all of loyal you saute an onion until it's nice and soft add maybe a half pound of figs chopped up and you just cook them down for a few minutes until they start to break down and they're getting like all nice and go away and then I like to add some white wine and a little chicken stock and I cook that down until you get that perfect Jamey consistency toss in some more figs even out the consistency a little with with a little extra chicken stock if you like and it's perfect on a freshly baked biscuit with a little bit of butter some really nice butter perfect snack and tell us a little more now about the test kitchen what goes on in there oh gosh every single recipe that runs in the food section is tested and frequently retested until we get it right because we want to make sure that the recipes work before they run in the section which I think are one of just a handful of newspapers and publications that still actually have a test kitchen so who gets to come into the Test Kitchen You are the head test kitchen tester and I mean I'm the one that tests most of the recipes but we have people from the sections neighboring sections that come in sometimes we've got travel and books that are nearby us and they offer their pallets to sample the dishes as we're testing them we just had a big brownie story and we had we tested about a dozen different kinds of brownies and so we had people from all over the paper coming in it was work related trying all these brownies somebody has got to do it I got to do it it's a tough job. All right well this is exciting so the taste is Saturday and Sunday September 1st through 3rd Friday night through Sunday and 5 events I'm going to be hosting the 1 tomorrow morning on Sunday come on down at the Paramount backlot and you're going to have a great time. Sunday morning sounds like a date so see there that was Noel Carter she is the test kitchen director for the l.a. Times she also writes a lot of the columns you'll see the culinary s.-o. As a seasonal market report on what produce is in season and urging us all they head on over to Paramount backlot and taste l.a. I'm talking now with Farmer Stephen Murray from Murray family farm up in the Bakersfield Arvin area and the Murrays bring in the earliest cherries in California they have a beautifully eclectic wonderful farm and several varieties of figs as well tell us how many varieties of figs you grow well it's kind of actually a little bit hard to say because I've collected a lot of varieties at Scion exchanges across California so I think I have about 15 or so 15 varieties and of those how many can you bring to market on a regular basis so the varieties that I bring regularly I have elected a Bordeaux which I have one customer that they buy most of them the other one is the white coat which was originally cultivated in southern Italy we have black mission which is you know the ancient variety from from California from the mission time period in brown Turkey we also grow some that I was kind experimental figs which are basically the ones I lost the tags. And we have one that is a purple striped Fig which every once while I have a few of those but today they they sell out by about. 50 so I'm the figs there's so many different varieties and figs bear twice a year tell us tell us about their crazy season figs are very different from other plants and how they reproduce so a lot of figs are wasps so there's some figs that if they don't have a wasp then they don't produce edible fruit and there's also types of figs that are the San Pedro type and they have one crop year and then there's figs that are the common type which has 2 crops here the 1st crop is called the bread a crop which is earlier in the summer and it's on last year's would. And there's the 2nd crop which is called the main crop which grows on new growth from during that season somewhere in the late harvest now yes we are Ok And how long will this go on so for us we're probably going to have figs for another at least quantities for another maybe 2 or 3 weeks now how many of the ones you're bringing are the ones that have to be whatever fertilized by a wasp so I have one variety at the I 5 that is a wasp there is a tree in my backyard that was from seed that for 5 years in a row it all the figs were just opening in the like a puffball of dry stuff but we finally had the last was arrived in our area so now all of our fig trees are washed pollinated and that variety went from being a dry. You know ball of the terribleness to a sweet delicious lush fig and the wasps just somehow find the figs you don't bring in or import the wasps by pollinators the wasps made it their own by themselves when I buy a basket of figs I want them all to be softer right because after they've been picked and they're in the basket they're not going to get any softer or better once they're off the tree figs don't really change much after they're picked so figs or not they will a little bit so things will get a little bit softer but it's not going to be like like an avocado So when I go through a basket of figs I'm kind of like trying to pinch them all to make sure that they're all soft That's how I would do it yeah I do you know yeah the way I like figs I like them to be real Jamey I like softer figs and I like really sweet stuff some of them literally there'd be a green outside or a white outside and you buy it and it's like a big blob of strawberry jam that's the best that's that's what I like and we also have the white coat as are famous because they'll have a drop of honey on the bottom to. A restaurant that's been asking me if I could go out and collect the honey and process it for him so that he could buy it and then it was good but I don't think that the Labor on that would really as love. Well I mean it's all the stages of the feed you know life cycle are fascinating and it's so nice to see so many varieties here at the market now and we can taste new kinds of figs and make the jam that Noel was talking about so thank you for growing numb and we enjoyed a yeah and we're planting even more varieties next year I should have some of the tiger Shrike fig that's a really nice type and I'm going to be propagating more of my purple striped fit which was created by a breeder in the last Hills area so we're the only ones that have that ready Ok Right well it's always good to go to years again you do have quite an eclectic variety of things to look at so thanks for everything you do that you're much more that was Stephen Murray Jr of Murray family farms and they grow up in Bakersfield and are bringing just such a great variety of items to the farmers' market they come to Wednesday Santa Monica Virginia Avenue Park Santa Monica Sunday Santa Monica and very soon in October we're going to a massive October festival with lots of awesome activities in Bakersfield so come check it out thank you Stephen for the market report this is Laura a very. In a minute really true to oldies but goodies from the Good Food archive this segment covers and gently but very sticky flooded Stay with us support comes from downtown Santa Monica Inc in partnership with the city of Santa Monica presenting Rome an interactive public art series The program begins this August with Emmy Award winner hottie known for his wide collaboration's with Sesame Street and the Sydney Opera House let his large scale exhibits trigger personal emotions and memories as you walk the vibrant streets of downtown Santa Monica info at Rome Santa Monica dot com . The u.s. Has come to the aid of the Philippines to fight a jihad threat the 2 countries have a long history as allies bad Filipino president Roderigo deter take has increased his verbal attack. On United States Maryland to be at the time that they will blow up the amended I'm seeing the metadata on explosive we look at the state of this relationship and what it means for the truck administration larger strategy toward Asia next time on America abroad Monday noon on Keith you're w I'm having Simon and you're listening to good food I think he's here w i j 5192300000 gallons of molasses swept through Boston stores and when a large storage tank collapsed that's Steve Julio the former newspaper reporter wrote a best seller about the great Boston the last a slide of 919 it's called Dark Tide I talked to him about it back in 2010 to 21 people injured 150 many many very seriously and caused enormous property damage and box stores and then really spawned one of the largest civil action lawsuits in Masters's history to this day why was there such a huge vat of molasses there anyway what was the role of molasses in 1900 Sure molasses was a federally protected industry at 119 for the very reason that it was distilled into industrial alcohol and then further processed and used in the munitions production process for the 1st world war it was used to create nitroglycerin t.n.t. High explosives in the company that owned the tank United States industrial alcohol private company with United States in the name had as some of its largest customers the French and British governments before the u.s. Entered the war some of the larger unisons producers in the United States and then once the u.s. Enters the War of $117.00 the u.s. Government becomes a large customer and so the last mistake was a essentially a holding tank for the raw molasses which was then transported but a mile away to a distant planet where it was put into this process and this. Alas this tank was not inside the building it was outside the building correct that is correct a free standing tank 200 feet from the shoreline and so the big molasses steamers that came up from Cuba and Puerto Rico in the West Indies and they held 700800000 gallons worth of glasses of their olds could offload their product into this tank and then from there the molasses was off loaded into rail cars maybe we would think of them as oil cars today and then transported to the distilling site picture a large 5 story steel tank held together with thousands of rivets in the midst of an extremely congested residential and commercial neighborhood the tank leaked from the 1st day when it was installed so much so that it was actually painted their color so that the leaks wouldn't show so much u.s. Industrial alcohol was under tremendous pressure to meet these quotas and the tank was rushed to completion shoddily completed and didn't leak from day one really long 50 foot leaks that would stream down the side of the tank so much so that children used to come and scoop up molasses that had pooled around the bottom of the tank and yes one of the responses by the company was to paint the tank from a steel gray color to a brownish red color the color of molasses and there was lots of talk in court testimony that followed how that sort of camouflaged leaks though not totally sure paint us a picture of what happened when it 1st was like it's tsunami I mean how tall was the wave of this substance coming down the street sure this was almost literally like a small tidal wave if you could picture this tank is scorched its contents of molasses and it came out high and hard 35 feet high at the outset about 35 miles per hour to start it levels off at about 20 feet high and $160.00. Feet wide and it quite literally scours the Boston waterfront in the north and neighborhood just as a wave would do it picks up people it picks up domestic animals it picks up the year and produce everything that was delivered to the Boston docks for shipping during this early part of the 20th century and it destroys buildings that turn the buildings in the area into kindling there were stables nearby where municipal horses were kept scooped up those horses scooped up the stables 20 horses were killed in the great Boston molasses flood in addition to 21 people so if you can think of it just Aubut orating this Boston waterfront area much as a tidal wave would do as the molasses wave scoured the waterfront is finally stopped flowing and it's there this pool this sea of molasses want to mess how did they clean it up that evening the cleanup began and firefighters to try to hook up their hoses to municipal hydrants and it didn't do much good because by then the molasses had begun to congeal and harden it doesn't totally harden but it does begin to congeal finally one enterprising firefighter had the idea that maybe salt water the brine from the salt water would begin to cut the molasses and that's exactly what they did they pumped millions of gallons of water out of Boston Harbor and begin that process of washing the molasses away most of it was washed into the harbor the harbor we stayed Brown for months afterwards and the molasses that had filled the cellars in the basements of the houses nearby up to the 1st floor that was pumped out with really crude hydraulic pumps of the day but most of the molasses cleanup began by washing it with salt water back into Boston Harbor wow is it sure that on a hot day people in that neighborhood still smell molasses one of the great folklores of the flood is that but it is it true you still can't smell it you could smell it for years afterwards some of the people who used to work for companies like Boston. Yes and the electric companies in Boston who used to venture into those basements to read meters in the late 1950 s. And early 1960 s. Reported smelling molasses in those walls sensually many many years afterwards but you know you can't smell it in the air anymore I've been down there on hot days many many times but it is one of the great bits of folklore I think that surfaced about what Steve probably is book is about this great Austrian molasses flood of 1919 it's called dark ties. To. Me a total food nerd who is also into languages means that I'm fascinated with the words we use to describe our food when I learnt language stand he had written a book called The Language of 4 years ago I jumped at the chance to talk with him and here's our conversation from 24 I'd like to start with the research that you did on menus language it's pretty revealing but also kind of funny and sad too Can you contrast the language of really high end menus today and more middlebrow places yes there's a number of really fun differences this is research my colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford and I did and so we looked at about 6500 menus online and we did find a lot of differences between your fancy high priced menus and your cheaper menus so just to give one little example the cheaper the restaurant the more the word to you is mentioned your way or any way you like a more your choice whereas the more expensive the restaurant the more it's about the chef you get phrases like Chef choice or chef selection it's as if the cheaper restaurants the menus are really appealing to you at the diner and in the expensive restaurants you know it's really more like theater you're going there to see what the chef is going to offer you and they make that clear in the menu what about the descriptive language of menu item. Also very different so you're expensive restaurants very terse they might have fancy long words like Paris she for not but they're not very many of them you know a dish will have a name and maybe a few listed ingredients with commas where we see a lot of vocabulary is in fact in the middle priced restaurants your cheesecake factory or your California Pizza Kitchen that's where you see all these beautiful adjectives fresh rich mild crispy tender golden brown It's as if the expensive restaurants they don't tell you your food is crisp you're supposed to assume the food is crisp the middle price restaurants they're kind of protesting too much they need to convince you the food is crispy the fact that they say crispy tells us the reader is that in fact they think you might not believe it's crispy and they have to do some work to convince you I'm never going to look at a menu the same way. You know it's so interesting the word delicious So if you see delicious or tasty or scrumptious that's the really cheapest menus that's your cheapest small diners they're not going to talk a lot about Krispy golden brown and tender but they're just going to use this vague positive word like delicious you can't sue somebody if your food is not delicious one of my favorite parts of your book is how you trace certain dishes or ingredients from one part of the world to another through language the food that most intrigued me was the pickled fish which starts in the Middle East that's a great story put yourself in 6 century Persia and in fact the story goes back even older but we'll start there so this is the sonnet Persian Empire the Shah he had a favorite dish and the stage was called sick and sick is still the modern Farsi word for vinegar so sick bodge was a kind of vinegary stew was like a sweet and sour stew it had beef it had vinegar it had all these spices ruined parsley and Salon trow it had sugar there's all these great stories about the shop . And his favorite dish and the different chefs you know he had all the chefs into a competition about who could cook the best dish and of course they all picked his favorite dish to cook then the next empire the Islamic Abbas a caliphate it's established in Baghdad they built this beautiful new city Baghdad the city of peace in an area that was formally Persian speaking so they hired all these Persian speaking shops and so sick again becomes the favorite court dish and now it begins to spread with the Muslim empire around the Muslim world so let's say by the 10th century you can see it's mentioned as a fish dish so now not just vinegar and beef dish it's a vinegar and fish dish often with onions and the dish now it moved to Christian Europe and of course in those days the medieval period there are lots of fast days for Christians in Europe Wednesdays and Fridays are meatless days no meat no dairy and so there's lots of fish in the cookbooks and how has the name changed or what are the names Yeah so the names move with the dish so we 1st see evidence in the south in Italy as areas that are under Morris control or that neighbor on Muslim areas so you see a name called a scumbag or. And then as it moves north the word changes as the food changes so for example this fried fish served cold the broth of the fried fish is now a kind of jelly and this cold fish jelly is called. In Arabic and that gets borrowed into Latin. And then it turns into aspic in French so that's the origin of our meat jelly aspic and then the word moves again west through Europe gets to Catalonia and Spain and it's called now as a modern dish you still have a fried cold dish it's usually fish but it can be vegetables now soaked in vinegar and onions and then the food leaves the Iberian Peninsula and I bunch of fabulous ways Pizarro in his Spanish shoulders they go to Peru and they bring a version that uses sour orange juice instead of vinegar and they find the local much the Indians. Are eating a raw fish in Chile dish and the 2 dishes somehow merge and that gets called and then the Portuguese the Jesuits go to Japan to establish missions there and they bring Portuguese cookbooks and we have evidence for early Portuguese cookbooks in Japan that talk about a fried dish called tempura and sure enough the Japanese fried fish and fried vegetables dition which are battered and deep fried borrows there's a Portuguese word temper comes from the Portuguese were just for seasoning again at the same time it's amazing all this is happening at the same time the Jews are kicked out of Spain and Portugal and they bring a version of this sick bodge dish to England and the version they bring you bread the fish to fry it and you eat it cold with vinegar and then potatoes fried in drippings arrive and the 2 dishes are combined and fish and chips is invented so fantastic fish and chips which is still served with malt vinegar as a condiment Absolutely and it's the remnants of how the king of Persia likes to eat his meat stew in the 6 century and in fact it goes older the oldest cookbook we have is from about $700.00 b.c. It's in Akkadian the language of ancient Mesopotamia and their recipes for stews with vinegar and the same kind of herbs that we see was sick bodge a rule and so on that suggest that really this dish has been cooked in the Mediterranean for 4000 years and we're still eating all of its descendants who are all cousins of each other. The language of published in 24. That's the sound of the kitchen and calories that far Chinatown. Johnny Ray's own open the restaurant with his wife Amanda Chapman last year Jonathan Gold says it is the place to go for a national style hot chick in l.a. There's a Nashville started. A place called princes about 50 years ago of hot chicken and the legend is fat some relative of the current owner had a girlfriend who was tired of his messing around so she made a batch of fried chicken with enough cayenne pepper and it was actually killers and he liked it he liked it a lot backfired too emotional hostage or a benefit for whereas the chicken follows a lot of the principles of really good fried chicken very extreme heat is the point of it and if you get it at the level which they call howlin hot it becomes a decision that will take over your next 2 days so we're not allowed to have it like not quite Helen hot Oh sure you can I mean there's all kinds of levels and I don't think I will ever order it how in hot again but you should probably have at least one piece that way to see what they do you know medium is extremely hot mild is as hot as say other decent How chicken places will have it and then they have they call it country style or something that has no at all anyway we're here with the housing hot chicken you get it and it's straight out of the fryer when you get it you burn your fingers when you're trying to tear it in half the seasoning which is this vivid scarlet will work its way under your fingernails and all over your hands you put it in your mouth you try to get as much of the crunchy part as you can and it's just a good piece of chicken you know solved with crunch and garlic and there's sort of fads must be must be dried pepper taste and it's not as bad as you think it is 2 seconds later it takes over and it's like you've been punched in the face. It's like the lawyer there who just punched. It's funny and the last time it was at the far East Plaza I was there to eat Che go yeah and so I was just watching everybody else mop their faces with copious amounts of damp and well gears the thing you've got the stuff on your fingernails and the sweat just to run it's from your body but especially from your face and your head and so it's a hot day and you're outside and you want Congress to use the back your hands to wipe the sweat off and then you realize you've got a situation there too because it feels has been lying on the beach for 3 hours without sunscreen I know it is when I was watching people eat this the sandwich looked mighty good to the sandwich is really good you can get the sandwich that hot too if you like it is I don't know it's a chicken sandwich there's a sort of like a soft there's Letta's there's something called Comeback sauce which is big in Mississippi which is basically somewhere between 1000 island dressing and Remillard and there's a. Slab of chicken like almost the whole breast You can also get that howling hot if you like this delicious you can get it you can get a pile of wings that you can put come back sauce over and have your chicken that way what makes this chicken hot isn't just kind and I'm he also uses extracts of habaneros from goes Tapper in there there's some reds of Vienna which used to be the hottest pepper in the world before the Trinidad scorpion took over that prize this pepper thing is kind of insane and I know this is completely gratuitous but do they have anything for dessert and they have chocolate chip cookies but you're in the small so you may well want to after your 1st 3 bites of chicken turn tail and run directly into the scoops for ice cream for ice cream after. Or what flavor would you like to taste I don't care. What kind of ice for me to like now and there's also of course endorphin coffee which is one of my favorite coffee stands in the city which is right there and if a clean and perfectly where they make a pond on spiced ice latte that's absolutely perfect for super spicy food oh that's crazy and you have plenty of time in that line to go get it you have time for seconds and thirds I go to this place more often than the last time I was in this liners 2 and a half hours and as much as I love this place I'm not sure I'm up to that every week and it's sort of like waiting in one of those endless lines Knott's Berry Farm and seeing people just stagger completely drained of blood off one of those roller coaster that is turned upside down 400. If you'd like to skip those lines. One more fried chicken suggestion. Chicken who's running this chicken joint. The 1st branch was in a small town in Tennessee it's famous and it's not. 620 other cities in the country and this is its 1st you know branch on the West Coast people haven't really decided to. Name of this neighborhood crunch I just take Arlington Heights mid city I found it really interesting that they chose that neighborhood because usually when chains come in from the outside they pick somewhere like downtown l.a. Or Santa Monica I love the neighborhood there and I mean there's a couple of places that I like to go to right around there I mean the wonderful Korean barbecue slash pork neck Sue plays Sanji park is right down the block. Wonderful Guatemalans of each area lots of each area is very close but it's not what you call a restaurant neighborhood. Exactly I mean it's don't it's in like sort of a retrofitted to corner place I think it was Korean bar before that maybe recording studio some time and it's distant past yeah part of me feels like it was either a Originally maybe a post office or bank it's a really beautiful building so let's talk about the fit well the food is fried chicken basically not only basically a mess the only protein on the menu it's hot chicken they call it but it's nothing like incredible heat of the Nashville style chicken it's not punitive No it's like you put a little bit of hot sauce in there somewhere when 1st comes on the fryer it's magnificent it's really crunchy there it's sort of a burnished bread gold the pieces are bigger than they are small and the heat just creeps up on you in a way that's really pleasant unlike the national style it places like Halle Ray's or nickel diner it becomes noticeably less crunchy over about 10 minutes so is that the kind that if you don't attack it right away you end up with sort of the flabby skin and not so exciting breading it's better than that I mean it hasn't Taggerty but you're definitely missing part of its glory it's not great as next day picnic chicken What about take home chicken it will probably last long enough till you get home I think they do a huge part of their business as takeout it's much better if you eat it there that's a lot of the deep frying effect anyway right as I don't know what's even Winchell's is incredibly good if you get it right out of the fryer are you eating half chickens parts a sandwich or all of the about I personally tend to order. Specials so you can get like a dozen wings reeking Gadd 8 or 16 pieces of dark meat you have a whole table full of people around you order all the sides I think they sell mostly in the form of plates which will be you know 2 or 3 pieces that you get to choose plus baked beans and slaw it white bread there's always white bread involved. And you can get it a lot of other ways let's say you ordered a piece dark which is I think a strong move. It comes out on a big platter there are 3 pieces of white bread that let's face it nobody's going to touch but it has to be there it's part of the architectural form of Southern chicken plates you want to make white bread tacos you could make white bread top of the big beans or standard the seasoned fries are actually pretty good there's a really nice Goo We mac and cheese it's not the kind that somebody has spent a lot of time working on the bench for it's like a stove top Yeah it's your grandma back in chief if your grandma make good back in cheese and really sort of meaty Porky greens with that sort of a little bit of college saying I like that little bit of college thinking yeah good greens are very important that's kind of it you might want to start with than appetizer why that's true why except Are there advertising sort of thirds the best fried pickles I've ever had and I actually would claim to have a certain amount of expertise in the fried pickles Department and I've been to the famous fried pickle places in the south they're actually really really good at every place I've ever had them before they do the pickle chips and the Bradley fried here they cut them into Spears that's very nice you get the meeting as of it it preserves sort of her. Well integrity the pickle integrity that the garlic flavor comes through their coated really nicely with the batter it doesn't slip off almost everywhere you get fried pickles you have one bite then you're left with a really. Sort of an empty checker shaped pickle casing. Made out of batter they have integrity here they're fried green tomatoes are really good too probably in the same way and for the same way Wow. Then you're done and you get a piece of chutzpah if you have room for it or probably even if you don't just buy is undeniable good thing I think this might be one of these instances in which people are listening and they are turning their cars Well it's a check towards the sound of the fry Thank you John Thank you Evan By the way if they ask if you want your chance by David say no now is the heating it gives a nice. Consistency but it's just destroys the crust spoken by a man who knows. That's Jonathan Gold Pulitzer Prize winning 3 writer for the l.a. Times talking about how men raised in Chinatown and gas is fried chicken in what I'm going to call Mid-City Tex the words good food to 69866 to get Jonathan's weekly restaurant recommendations. We close out the show with one more blast from the past this time we're talking about a cocktail of a very particular sort don't turn that dial. Henry Rollins here to let you know that morrow night at 8 pm my special guest will be a graphic artist. Shepard Fairey will be with me for the entire show bringing in the music and as you can imagine there's a lot to talk about. At 8 pm right here. K c r w is proud to. Partnering with the library foundation of Los Angeles for allowed at the Central Library this month allowed welcomes walk in artist collective to do though goes for a conversation about their new murals for Central Library as part of the library's exhibition visualizing language in l.a. Part of p s t l l a this exhibition includes a series of free and then throughout Los Angeles through January 28th for more info visit k.c. r w Dot com slash events Welcome back to good food on k.c. I w I'm Evan Kleiman you might have followed a weird story a few weeks ago about a Yukon toe that went missing in 2008 we learned about said Town in one of my favorite segments of all time it's about a strange cocktail being served at the downtown hotel in Dawson City in the Yukon Here's the bar's proprietor Dick van or strand Ok so when I hear the words sour cocktail I imagine. In a drink that's exactly why it's a petrified big toe it's a real toe gnarly big toe a real tough Ok Are they preserved in some way or or nuked within an inch of their lives to make them palatable Well they're there and they should be preserved of course from the time that they're removed through through a secretive process which is basically petrified and when they're not in pure alcohol in a drink and they're kept in a clean salt to keep them dried out what color are they well after they have been through quite a few drinks they're fairly dark brown so they look externally bruised or do they look like a logger Yeah they look like a bit of a log but the most popular one that we have and it's a pretty big nail on it and it's pretty gnarly So it's you wouldn't be mistaking it for a piece of work you just said the most popular one you have so you have toes that people actually ask for. We have 2 toes that we kind of circulate in and out of view so they don't end up getting soft or tall gosh a soft that that would be worse than a set of patches my job you don't put the telling your mouth to tell goes into a straight shot of alcohol you know what. One of the most popular things is you can jack that which is a basically only available up here and it's a type of rum but you know like vodka gin riot Scotch anything and then the toad just the whole history of it is that the tone must touch your lips you can drink the drink faster you can drink it slow but the tone must touch your lips and the captain must witness that and you're the captain I am the captain sometimes. Sometimes you just utilize others well in the summertime I have to other parts of the business to take care of tell me the story behind the Saratoga cocktail Captain Dick Stevenson was a river boat captain on the Yukon River for many years later on and in his career he decided that he needed someplace to be able to get away in the summertime and found out about a cabin up river on the Yukon River so he made arrangements to purchase it and took some bodies down river to kind of clean the cabin up and get it ready to go so they could use it for that summer and when they got into the cabin to start their work one of the things they found was a quart Seaver jar with this petrified toad light in the bottom of it they had heard the story that the fellow that on the cabinet had suffered from frostbite one winter and then they'd heard that he had maybe ended up cutting off his big toe to save himself from impending getting rain and they grabbed the toe and they proceeded to go to a local bar and sit down and every day I've got this tell when there's a little bit of talk about how Alaska has these ice worms and now you've got this toso Well why don't you just try that drink and throw that toe into it and that's where it was born. My goodness Ripley's has been out here to film it and it's pretty famous worldwide and has the health department we had it I donated 10 years ago one of the health department people from one of the other jurisdictions found out about it and they decided that they would get officious as those people sometimes like to do it and decided that they would challenge the whole thing and that just didn't go anywhere there's absolutely no issues with the guitar does it tell you have a natural life as a cocktail accoutrement or do you have to occasionally get a new toe and if so where does it come from well I can't imagine that they would outlive their natural life the problem is that we have had macho dude chew them up we've had them mistakenly thrown out by the bartenders and haven't been paying attention so we have gone over the years we have gone through a few toes and we're always looking and need some back up toes we've had people that are members of the club who have e-mailed us and said You know I put you in my way also that when I die that you're going to be able to get my big toe in so we are in some people's wells we haven't got any of those yet but we've just part of perhaps this story will be due to a new source of talk about what we need now I understand for those of us who might not want to go there you have an option that's a sweet Well we took the toad down to Vancouver quite a few years ago and added a premium chocolate making company down in Vancouver do a mold of the taco and so we have dark Belgian chocolate toes Oh I love that that's like a foot fetishist stream now they're you going. To get to spend very much fun talking with you thank you. Sweet and Sour we 1st aired that unforgettable conversation with Dick Van Nostrand about the Saratoga Kodjoe in 2008. And they found the town it's back at the bar. That's it for this week's show if you missed any part of it as always you can listen to the show on our website or on case here Debbie's mobile app and you can also download it where every get your podcast. From as always so many thanks to the Good Food team and here they are Clarence r.c.m. Joseph storm. Rush. And I'm having time and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Good Food. And it is. A game. To tune in Saturday mornings at 11 o'clock for good food with me here on never supported k c r w Santa Monica Los Angeles k d r w Santa Barbara. Brings keys here you sure are a. Community service some Santa Monica College n.p.r. For southern California. In just a moment we'll have headlines from National Public Radio and then Casey music for the day begins courtesy of and let it be followed by. 3 o'clock Krista reviews is in at 6 and at 8 o'clock it's lies or Richards.