`The Great Food Almanac: A Feast of Facts From A to Z,” by Irena Chalmers, is many things.
Boring is not one of them.
It’s a great big (4 pounds, 11 by 14 inches) compendium of the interesting, the odd and the esoteric. It’s part encyclopedia, part gazetteer, part cookbook. Its more than 2,000 factoids and trivial tidbits, coupled with 1,000 illustrations, are very useful, mildly helpful and highly amusing.
Useful? Well, there’s the essay on why diets don’t work-blame it on a brain that overrides caloric cues.
For helpful, there are 51 recipes, some names and phone numbers of industry associations and lots of fodder for cocktail party chitchat.
Amusing? Cartoons and quixotic quotes are ample throughout, including the typo that might well have been intentional, and in any event probably more interesting: “Lunch will be gin at noon.”
Here’s a motley mix of information from the pages of “The Great Food Almanac” (Collins San Francisco, $25).
– The world’s costliest coffee, at $130 a pound, is called Kopi Luwak. Essentially, it is the droppings from a type of marsupial that eats only the very best coffee beans. Plantation workers track them and scoop their precious poop.
– Some airlines offer a bland diet meal as an alternative to the meal for the masses, which may hardly be necessary. The book notes that (big surprise) all food is rather tasteless on an airplane. Taste buds, as it happens, are dulled at high altitudes.
– Though common to lower altitudes, catfish have 100,000 taste buds. One would guess they’re uniquely qualified to distinguish pond scum from silt.
– According to American Demographics magazine, lesbians buy more honey-whole-wheat bagels than the rest of the population, while men in suits tend to buy plain bagels during the week but go for wild and crazy varieties such as cinnamon-raisin and poppy seed on weekends.
– An average ear of corn has 800 kernels, arranged in 16 rows. A large percentage probably will get stuck in your teeth.
– Unlike most vegetables, which are more vitamin-packed when raw, cooked carrots are better for you than raw. Unless, of course, they’re draped with hollandaise sauce.
– Chicago’s contribution to the Bloody Mary cocktail is the stalk of celery, although it could have been a carrot. This reportedly happened at the Ambassador East Hotel when a patron was served his drink sans swizzle stick. He grabbed celery from the relish tray, thus stirring up a trend.
– Candy, which the book insists has no redeeming social value to speak of, is a $1 billion-a-year industry. Americans are slackers, though, consuming 20.7 pounds per person annually. The Dutch eat three times as much.
– There are more than 1,000 varieties of cherries in the U.S. The fruits of one tree in New York were so highly regarded at one time that Broadway jogs west at 10th Street so a single tree could remain standing. Soaring real estate prices no doubt have since claimed the tree.
– Since seedless cherries haven’t been developed, there still is a Pit Spit Competition. The slobbering record is an impressive 72 feet, 7 1/2 inches, which is more than 12 feet farther than the distance from pitcher’s mound to home plate.
– Cole Porter got a kick from more than just Champagne. He ordered 9 pounds of fudge every month from Arnold’s Candies in Peru, Ind.
– Per capita, the Irish eat more chocolate than Americans, Swedes, Danes, French and Italians.
– Weighing in at 750 pounds, the largest clam on record could have yielded linguine with clam sauce for a crowd of about 400. It’s not clear whether it was a male or female clam. All clams start out as males; some decide to become females at some point in their lives.
– Elvis’ last snack, just before he took a long walk down Lonely Street, was four scoops of ice cream and six chocolate chip cookies.
– Things indeed would have gone better with Coke if you had spent $40 on one single share of Coca-Cola stock in 1919, when the company went public. It now would be worth $92,500.
– The Philip Morris Cos. are smokin’. In addition to Marlboro cigarettes, the group markets more than 3,000 products in the U.S., including Entenmann’s baked goods, Boboli bread, Kool-Aid and Country Time, Sealtest ice cream, Cool Whip, Tombstone Pizza, all Nabisco and all Post cereals, Shake ‘N Bake, Cheez Whiz and Miller beer.
– Fig Newtons, the third best-selling cookie in America, is named for a Massachusetts town near the one in which they were invented in 1891. Marketing may not have been very sophisticated then, but it was far enough along for the cookie’s creators to know that Fig Cambridgeports probably was not a good choice.
– Cranberries are one of just three major fruits native to North America. The others are blueberries and Concord grapes.
– Despite Samuel Johnson having once sneered, “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing,” cucumbers rank 12th in cash value among all vegetables grown in the U.S.
– Louisiana may have one of the most original systems of crop-rotation in the world. Crayfish bury themselves in the mud of rice paddies during the summer to escape the heat. In fall, the paddies are flooded to harvest the rice and at the same time, the crayfish come out to spawn. In one fell swoop, the farmers harvest crawdads and rice, praise the Lord and eat gumbo.
– At the Stage Door Deli in Los Angeles, the menu of celebrity sandwiches includes the Oprah, a triple-decker mouthful made of corned beef, turkey, pastrami, roast beef and Swiss cheese.
– The smattering of sesame seeds on a McDonald’s hamburger bun adds up. The chain uses 2,500 tons of sesame seeds a year.
– Translating French food to American plates often is an iffy proposition. Several years ago, Jean Troisgos, a French chef, served his signature dish of fresh foie gras, tiny French green beans and warm vinaigrette dressing to an American food writer. She was impressed and graciously shared the recipe with readers, but in a form she thought they’d really like: sliced bologna, frozen green beans and Thousand Island dressing.
– Food pyramids and five-a-day plans aside, the average American is eating 4 pounds less fruit each year than he did in 1985.
– “Love bunny” may be more than a term of endearment. Subjects at the Los Angeles Institute for Sexual Longevity reported that their sex lives markedly improved after eating rabbit two or three times a week.
– Ole goats! It hasn’t happened yet, but a spokesman for Texas A&I University predicted that goat meat will be the fajita of the 1990s.
– The elusive cure for baldness might lie in an old wives’ tale: A smeared-on-the-balding-pate poultice of dark-roasted hazelnuts and suet will restore a lush head of hair.
– Half of Americans polled believe that the Slim Fast-guzzling Willard Scott is the third most credible culinary expert in the U.S. He trails only Julia Child and Jeff Smith.
– Next time the boss complains about lack of productivity, take umbrage in the fact that in its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12 teaspoon of honey.
– The recently enacted food labeling law required some compromise for small packages. Chicken of the Sea tuna had to lop off the graceful tail of the mermaid that is the company logo.
– Pizza orders are way up at the White House since Bush bowed out. Between Clinton and his staffers, pizza deliveries are up 31 percent. When Hillary is away, the number increases. In a related vein: Delivery drivers have noted that there is a direct correlation between the length of the driveway and the size of the tip-longer driveway, smaller tip. Though there is a fairly long driveway at the White House, there are no official reports on Democratic tipping policies.
– The much-ballyhooed report that salsa now sells more than ketchup isn’t such a hot item after all. Americans still buy and use more ketchup than salsa. It’s just that salsa costs a whole lot more, so we spend more money on it.
– Pretzels might be the most sacred of all snack foods. They were invented in the Middle Ages by an Italian monk. He designed them to resemble arms folded in prayer.
– Truffles-the fungus, not the chocolate candies-can cost $800 to $1,500 a pound, although some people say they’re just the pits. The precious puffs are sniffed out by female pigs, which apparently detect a compound that is in the saliva of male pigs as well. The same chemical is found in the underarm sweat of human males.
– And finally, just so you know the latest findings when Aunt Tootie hands you her famous holiday fruitcake this year: A research firm polled 1,000 Americans about what they did with fruitcake. Slightly more than a quarter of them ate it. Thirteen percent used it as a doorstop while 9 percent fed it to birds. Thirty-eight percent practiced creative recycling by giving it away.
2 HOT DISHES FROM THE ALMANAC
Here are two cold-weather recipes adapted from “The Great Food Almanac.”
SENATE BEAN SOUP
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Soaking time: Overnight
Cooking time: 3 hours
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
1 1/2 cups dried Great Northern beans
1 meaty ham bone or smoked ham hock
1 medium potato, peeled, diced
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup diced celery
Salt, pepper
Chopped parsley for garnish
1. Soak beans in a generous amount of cold water 12 hours or overnight; drain and place in a pot with cold water. Heat to a boil and cook 1 minute. Remove from the heat and let stand 1 hour.
2. Drain beans and return to pot. Add 8 cups cold water and the ham bone. Cover and simmer gently 2 hours. Add potato, onion, garlic and celery; cook until beans are soft, 1 hour.
3. Remove ham bone or hock; dice meat. Transfer 1 cup of the beans and some of the liquid to a blender or food processor; puree and return to the rest of the soup along with the diced ham. Season with salt and pepper; serve hot garnished with parsley.
MASHED POTATO AND PARSNIP CASSEROLE
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour
Yield: 6 servings
4 medium each: parsnips, potatoes
3 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons sherry or Madeira
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large eggs, separated
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Salt, pepper to taste
1/4 cup soft bread crumbs
1. Peel parsnips but not the potatoes. Put both in a large pot and cover with water. Cook until both are soft, 25 minutes. Peel the potatoes when they are just cool enough to handle.
2. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Mash parsnips and potatoes with a potato masher or ricer. Add milk, sherry, 2 tablespoons butter, egg yolks, nutmeg, salt and pepper; mix well.
3. Beat egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Fold into vegetable mixture. Transfer to a medium casserole, sprinkle with bread crumbs and dot with remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Bake until crumbs are golden, 35 minutes.
