Hint: She’s black.
The coffee of yesteryear
Buffalo china cups, Victor mugs
Those enormous coffee mugs and gigantic paper coffee cups are symbols of the rat race. Once upon a time, it was understood that a cup of coffee was something to relax with and savor. The drinking vessels reflected that.
There is a science, of course, behind the new style and the old style of coffee drinking.
The science of the new style is simple: Get all the coffee you’re going to drink into a single vessel, and chug it fast while on the run. Still, it’s guaranteed that the first third of it will be too hot, and the last third will be too cold.
The science of the old style was much more complex and sophisticated. It required skill and attention from whoever was serving the coffee. The drinking vessels were made of heavy china. The cups absorbed heat from the first pouring of coffee, cooling it to a more drinkable temperature. Thereafter, there was the ritual of “warming up” the coffee, which required pouring more coffee at just the right time, before the cup was empty. This not only refilled the cup, it also brought the coffee back to the ideal temperature. This ritual was repeated until you’d had enough coffee. This is how the English serve — or at least used to serve — tea from a teapot.
To my lights, the ideal coffee mug was the mug made by the Victor Mug Company. This mug holds about 8 ounces when filled to the brim, or about 7 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. The ideal coffee cup was made by the Buffalo Pottery Company. These cups hold about 7 ounces when filled to the brim, and about 6 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. These mugs and cups were sold as restaurant china. They’re now collectable.
When looking for cups in the housewares section of a couple of chain stores, I was not terribly surprised to find that they don’t even carry cups and saucers anymore, and all the mugs are huge. eBay is the answer.
I really feel for the people who have to drink their coffee from huge vessels, on the run. Now that I’m retired, I drink coffee (well, a coffee substitute) the old-fashioned way. I used my large set of Victor mugs during my working years. But now I’ve slowed down to cups and saucers.
A classic poem for a classic snow day
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
— Robert Frost, New Hampshire, 1923
The photos were taken under the shelter of my front porch.
Potassium broth
Now that I’m back on the cold and snowy East Coast, I’m remembering how good it is to have an arsenal of warm drinks. How about a bit of old-fashioned broth?
It was from Jethro Kloss, in the hippy handbook Back to Eden, that I first heard about potassium broth. Kloss’ version of potassium broth included oats and bran to give the broth extra body. He frequently prescribed it for people who were sick and couldn’t handle solid food. If you Google for “potassium broth,” you’ll find many versions. They all involve fresh vegetables, peels and all, simmered for four hours or so and strained.
The broth I made today included a beet, a turnip, a couple of potatoes, some celery, onions, turnip leave stems, collard stems, and the outer leaves from a cabbage. It’s still simmering, but I think I will add some tomato paste to the broth after I’ve strained out the vegetables, to make it taste more like vegetable soup.
It seems a waste to strain the broth and discard the vegetables, but I’ll drink the electrolytes, and my chickens will be happy to get the pulp.
Moonset
With the snow clouds gone, the snowscape was very bright last night from the nearly full moon. Here the moon sets during a very cold sunrise — 13 degrees. The photo was taken from the window of my radio room.
The same photo, converted to grayscale, with contrast increased.
Snow day
It’s been snowing for about 20 hours. Here in Stokes County we have about 10 inches or more on the ground. On my deck, where the snow and rain pour down from the valley on my roof, the yardstick is showing a pile of snow 31 inches deep and growing.
Lily does not like the snow. She’ll go as far as the front porch, tiptoe around for a few minutes with a look of wonder and disgust on her face, and then demand to be let back in the house.
This has been a pretty good winter for replenishing the underground water aquifers. The nearest USGS measuring wells are in East Bend and Mocksville.
A fuller full moon
The moon will be full tonight. It will be the biggest full moon of the year. That’s because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, and the moon will be at the apogee of its orbit, about 30,000 miles closer to earth than at its perigee. According to Spaceweather.com, that’s makes the moon 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full moons.
Unfortunately the moon probably won’t be visible here. The sky is cloudy, and up to 16 inches of snow is forecast between now and Saturday night.
Solastalgia?
New York Times
The New York Times Magazine for Sunday has an interesting piece on the developing field of ecopsychology, which explores the ways in which mental processes and mental health are affected by the environment.
Solastaglia is a word for what we experience when we see damage to our world. This experience varies from place to place. But around here, that would be what we experience when we see a beautiful farm we knew as children bulldozed away for a development. Or woods cut down for timber, leaving behind stumps and mud. Or a new road cut through the countryside. It makes us feel sick.
Biscuits vs. rolls
Biscuits and rolls are so similar, and yet so different. They’re not interchangeable. Who would want rolls and gravy and scrambled eggs?
There’s one way that rolls win hands down: they’re healthier. The shortening adds a lot of fat to biscuits, and the soda or baking powder is a big hidden source of sodium. Biscuits are quick, though.
Still, I think you can make perfectly decent rolls in 90 minutes or even a little less. Just let them rise once, in the baking pan. I think rolls have a better texture if they have no oil in the dough at all.
A foodified quandary
A Walmart avocado
When I lived in San Francisco, shopping at Walmart was unthinkable. All big box stores (or book stores) were scorned for a number of reasons, not least for what has happened to small, neighborhood merchants. But it also was easy to not shop at Walmart in San Francisco. I’d have had to drive way out into the suburbs to get to one, and there were so many other alternatives in the city. Heck, one day when I was in line at Borders book store on Union Square in San Francisco, Armistead Maupin was in the checkout line in front of me. It’s a fair question, and I don’t claim to have an answer: How far should we go to support local businesses when a big business has something better, for cheaper?
If we pay more for something when we could have gotten the same thing cheaper at Walmart, we’re basically making a donation to a business. Is that the best form of charity? I have my doubts.
In any case, here in the rural South, everything is different. There aren’t so many choices. And we don’t have big-city incomes to spend in better stores, even if there were lots of better stores. So I don’t know.
This winter I’ve bought avocados at Walmart, for $.99 to $1.08 each. Every one of them has been good and has ripened beautifully. Should I pay $2.39 each for avocados at a grocery store, half of which rot before they ripen or are stringy and dry?
I buy at Walmart only those things that seriously beat the competition. For another example, Walmart has the best deal in organic, unsweetened soy milk. That’s the best accommodation I’ve been able to come up with so far.