Going Lardcore: the Cover

Here's the cover for the new collection. It turned out a lot better than I thought it would.

I actually took all the photos myself. That any of them were usable is a bloody miracle.

Going Lardcore: A Pending eBook Launch

Learning the Hard Way: Galley Proofs are Still Important

A couple of years ago, intrigued by Amazon's then-still-new Kindle Direct Publishing, I undertook to publish my own e-Book. More than anything, I just wanted to understand how the whole process worked and what the possibilities were. I knew e-Books and Internet distribution promised to transform the book publishing industry and the business of writing even more than the Paperback Revolution of the mid-20th century had, and I want to get inside and take a look around.

The result was The Fried Green Tomato Swindle, a collection of various pieces I had written over the years. I cobbled the text together pretty quickly because I wanted to get to the actual production of the eBook, which requires everything from creating HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to designing a book cover. I figured it would be a good learning experience, and, boy, was it. I stumbled through various versions and iterations, and perhaps the hardest part was just figuring out what tools to use and how the ePub books are structured and how to make it all work so the text looks good in the end on the various reading devices.

And so it was with a feeling of accomplishment and a little nervousness when I had my "final" file ready. I uploaded it to Amazon (and, subsequently, to Barnes and Noble for the Nook), waited a few days until it had been approved, then purchased it on my Kindle and became my own first customer. The text downloaded to the device in less than a minute, and I was holding in my hands a published version of my writing, all delivered electronically, and all put together by me and me alone (except for the massive Amazon infrastructure, of course.)

"This is really cool," I thought to myself. I could feel the disruptive potential of the technology, how it might open whole new worlds for ambitious and creative authors.

People more ambitious and creative than me, that is. I figured I would probably be both my first and my last customer, since my mom doesn't own a Kindle. So, imagine my surprise when a few days later I checked the stats and saw that three people had bought the book. And every day or two another sale would occur. And, this was just from people stumbling across the book by accident: the extent of my promotion had been to put a link on my blog.

And that's when I realized that I probably should have paid a little more attention to the text when I was rushing to get the thing assembled. There were typos and misspellings, the kind of things that close editing would have caught, as well as numerous issues with formatting and rendering, since I had created the book through a convoluted process of going from word processor to HTML to ePub, which created a lot of styling and markup issues.

Fortunately, unlike printed books, it's easy to make corrections to eBooks and distribute the revised version, except, of course, for the hours of work involved. So, I undertook a thorough proofreading and made extensive revisions . . . and then learned the pain of trying to incorporate changes into an ePub and also updating and maintaining the right versions on multiple platforms. Changes I thought I had made mysteriously wouldn't show up out in the actual ePub ready for downloading, some changes overwrote others, etc., etc.

After a month or two of wrestling with it and still having problems, I pulled the book down and stopped selling it. My plan was to take it all the way back to the manuscript (that is, Word processor) stage, re-do the whole thing, and get it back out there the right way. Which is to say, to go back to the exact same process--manuscript to galley proofs to page proofs--that I knew well from the old fashioned dead-tree publishing world.

And that takes a lot of work, which meant it kept getting pushed aside for more pressing (i.e. paying) projects, and it's been sitting dusty on the shelf ever since. In the years that have passed, I've produced a lot more material on the same themes as the contents of that original eBook--especially, Southern food history and dining in the contemporary South today. Finally, it seemed like I had the critical mass needed to take another stab at a collection. And this time, I started back at the beginning of the processes and, having been through the whole thing before, was able to avoid about 90% of the pitfalls that tripped me up the first time.

And, so, I'm preparing to roll out a new eBook collection, which I've entitled Going Lardcore: Adventures in New Southern Dining. It includes what I felt were the best pieces from the old eBook collection, and adds in a bunch of new stuff, including several long pieces on liquor and cocktails as well as a look at the current state of "good eats" like burgers and barbecue. As a whole, it provides a multifaceted look at a remarkable decade of dining in the South at large and Charleston in particular.

Going back over old pieces and revising and combining them together into a longer form has been quite rewarding, a nice way to look back and reflect on how the Southern dining scene has grown and evolved since I first started writing about it in the early 2000s. All told, it's been a great time to be an eater in the South, one full of rewarding experiences like the ones captured in Going Lardcore.

So that's the backstory. I'm putting the final touches on the "page proofs" (ePub file) right now and should have it out to the world through the magic of the Interwebs in just a few days.

More Rye Whiskey (And a Recipe, Too)

Having just uncorked a post on the enduring appeal of high-end bourbons, I wouldn't be true to my most recent hobby horse if I didn't follow that up immediate with an update on rye.

I recently made the following inflammatory claim in a story on the revival of rye whiskey for the City Paper: "We Southerners need to disabuse ourselves of the delusion that bourbon is the 'quintessential spirit of the South.' Bourbon is about as authentically Southern as Hazzard County, Georgia, and Bo and Luke Duke. . . . Rye whiskey, not bourbon, should properly bear the mantle of the South's favorite spirit."

I stick by that assertion (see the article for the evidence), and also by my prediction that rye's best days are still ahead of it. In recent news, we're seeing more and more of the big boys from the bourbon business agree and starting to move into the rye market.

The latest of the crop is Diageo, which just came out with a 90-proof rye whiskey in its George Dickel line, which previously consisted solely of bourbons.

Retailing around $25 for 750 ml, the Dickel is not quite as cheap as the reliable Old Overholt (which you can consistently find for  under twenty bucks), but it's firmly in that much-needed category of affordable ryes that you can use in abundance in stiff classic cocktails without needing to take out a second mortgage on your house.

I figured it would be worthwhile to try it side by side against some Old Overholt and see how it stacked up. Both have the same sharp, dry bite that is the hallmark of ryes, though the Dickel is a little darker in color, slightly richer in aroma, and a little smoother on the tongue, too. That's a good candidate, in my book, for cocktails with citrus and fruit juices, like the Cherry Rye Sour (recipe below).

Fast on the heels of Diageo, Bacardi Brown-Forman is bringing out its own rye whiskey in its Jack Daniels line. In an interesting twist, it will be an unaged rye whiskey.

Why unaged? The Cocktail Enthusiast relates that the company distilled 800 barrels of rye in 2011, with the intention of putting them into barrels to mature. But, the distillers liked the flavor of the unaged stuff so much that they decided it was worth releasing. In an interview with The Spirits Business, Jack Daniels' master distiller Jeff Arnett added, "We would all agree that white dog is not going to be the best thing to ever produce, but it’s a seller that can be offered as a teaser to say 'Hey, we’ve got this new aged whiskey coming, do you want to try it in its raw state?'”

It sniffs a little of a company trying to play catch up with the market, and at fifty bucks for a 750 ml bottle, it's pretty darn expensive for a teaser (a bottle of the splendid Willet Rye retails for just $40). Perhaps I should wait to judge until the JD unaged version hits store shelves, which it should in the next few weeks, and I can actually sample it. In any event, that rye bandwagon is getting pretty crowded now, and I couldn't be happier.

Rye: the original whiskey of the South. Its comeback continues.

Pappy Just Keeps Getting Harder to Find

The Most Wanted Man
in New York City

About a year ago, I wrote a story on the recent boom in high-end bourbons and highlighted Pappy Van Winkle as the patron saint of the genre. I wondered at the time how long bourbon's vogue would last.

So far, it seems to be just getting stronger. Over on the Atlantic Wire, Jen Doll has a short piece on the scarcity of Pappy Van Winkle in New York City, where a bottle of the 23-year-old stuff can run $250 and customers are harassing liquor store owners to try to get a spot on waiting lists that are already nine-pages deep.

In my bourbon boom piece, I shared what was then the insider's trick for getting a jump on the competition in the hunt for a rare bottle. Watch the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery's Facebook site, I advised, where they announce when each state's allocation ships, and "you can start staking out your local liquor store and hounding the owner for your bottle."

Turns out a lot of people took just that tactic. This fall, the Van Winkles are no longer posting the ship dates for states allocations because, "we had big backlash from retailers and wholesalers who were bombarded with phone calls as soon as we posted that shipments had gone out, even though we would suggest giving it a couple of weeks for inventory to arrive."

So, don't expect to just walk into a liquor store near you and pick up a bottle of Pappy any time soon. And please, let's take it easy on our poor liquor store proprietors. It ain't their fault.

In Case You Just Can't Get Enough Middlebrow

Earlier this week, in the guise of reflecting on Pete Wells's New York Times dope-slap review of Guy Fieri's American Grill and Bar, I managed to sneak an essay on middlebrow culture past the editors at the City Paper.  As is usually the case, my first draft was considerably longer, and I had to chop out a lot to keep from putting the paper's entire readership asleep.

Originally, I had more material musing on the high-, middle-, and low-brow split and why being middlebrow was so contemptible. Here's just a little of it:

Ever heard of the novelist James Gould Cozzens? You might have if his much-anticipated 1957 novel By Love Possessed hadn’t been labeled by Commentary’s Dwight MacDonald as “the latest episode in The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution”, sinking him without a trace from the American literary canon. Cozzens, MacDonald charged, was writing the kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage that made upper-middle-class insurance salesmen feel like they were reading great literature, and off course no self-respecting high-brow would want to come anywhere near that.  

Of course, the vacuity of middlebrows has long been ridiculed in literature and film, from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt to that one damning word in The Graduate, “plastics”, which sends poor Benjamin Braddock plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool. (Am I the only one who thinks that was actually sensible career advice for a young man?) 

There’s always the question of bias when critics take on the middlebrow, as Mr. Wells can bear witness. Are they lashing out at the thing itself, or do they just not like what the thing represents or the kind of people who like it? Highbrows rarely show disdain for the low, but, of course, the lowbrow poses little threat. The lines are murkier between middle and high. Those booboisee a critic is mocking may well be the exact sort of people the critic came from they came from and desperately needs to separate ones. One's parents from Des Moines might think a night at Guy's American Grill and Bar quite delightful, especially after seeing the matinee of The Jersey Boys and shopping at the Disney Store

To me, that's what makes wading into the waters of reviewing middlebrow restaurants so perilous. Can one step back and ask, am I slamming this thing because I simply don’t like the food and the experience? Or, is it because I don’t like the whole concept of the restaurant? Because I don’t want to be associated with the type of people who like this type of thing? It's a hard line to navigate, but I think it can be done and should be done.

So there it is. And I'm sure all you highbrows out there appreciate it. Not appreciating it would be so, well, middlebrow.

Breaking Out the "Company" China

My Pho

One Thanksgiving a good decade or more ago, my younger brother brought his then-fiance and now-wife to meet his extended family for the first time. This is an experience that, though they don't realize it until years later when they've had a chance to  compare notes and commiserate with their fellow family-by-marriage inlaws, is something akin to a gang initiation or high-school sorority hazing ritual, except that my family has no idea that there's anything painful or even out of the ordinary going on.

So, we were in my now-departed grandmother's house, and my now-sister-in-law Margaret wanted a glass of wine. My brother started to open the china cabinet to get her a wine-glass. "Oh, no, Jim," my grandmother declared, deeply shocked, as if he had begun to micturate on her rug. "That crystal is for company!" Poor Margaret had to make do sipping her wine from a clear plastic tumbler.

I couldn't help wondering something: if my grandmother's future granddaughter-in-law, whom she had never even met before, didn't rank as "company," well, then, who the heck would? Perhaps she was expecting a visit from the Secretary of State or perhaps a Nobel Prize laureate in the next day or two, and we just hadn't heard about it yet.

This whole Thanksgiving memory was sparked by the fact that none of the commenters on my recent review of Mì Xào, Mt. Pleasant's new Vietnamese take-out joint pointed out a slight issue with the photographs.

I clearly indicate in the review itself that, when I ate there at least, everything was served in take-out containers except the pho (a.k.a. London broil soup), which came in a plain white ceramic bowl. The photographs illustrating the review? Elegant blue and white china with ornate wood chopsticks, absolutely beautiful and (unless I managed to catch them on two bad days) nothing like what is actually served to patrons.

This is not at all a complaint, mind you. The food at Mì Xào is delicious and it doesn't need fancy china to improve it. I just found it amusing (and a reminder of why we do these review anonymously) that there's good china socked away somewhere in the back room, waiting for someone super important--like a newspaper photographer--to show up.

But, if you drop in for a bowl of pho and it comes out in a plain white bowl, don't be offended. You may not rank as "company", but I bet you'll still enjoy the meal.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Nate Silver

I somehow managed to spend way much time this morning reading about the recent flap over the New York Times blogger and poll-geek Nate Silver's prediction that Obama has a 77.4 percent chance of winning the election on Tuesday. This, predictably, has raised the ire of numerous commentators (mostly those in the Romney camp) who called into question the validity of the number. And that, in turn, has raised the ire of Silver defenders, who have taken pot shots back at the pot shot takers and accused them of many egregious things, such as not being good at math.

Paul F. Campos's piece in Slate is a good example of the "learn your math, dummy" counter-reaction, and he closes it by raising the spectre of the Monty Hall Problem, an old counter-intuitive chestnut. I hardly think this is fair, since the Monty Hall Problem is a sort of optical illusion of logic that fools all sorts of smart people the first time they tackle it, and it's hardly a good litmus test of someone's basic statistical literacy. The statistical concept here is a much more fundamental one.

It's a fun sort of thing to while away a Sunday morning pondering, but in the end, does Silver's prediction even really matter? Should Romney supporters take a look at the numbers and, disheartened, fold up the tent?

Of course not. What Silver's model is saying is, based upon the way the poll numbers look right now and past performance of those polls, if you ran 100 elections, Obama would win 77 of them. But that also means Romney would win 23, so hope is by no means lost. If your favorite football team was down one touchdown going into the 4th quarter and you knew in similar situations the trailing team lost 77% of the time, would you leave the stadium and quit cheering? Of course you wouldn't.

And, what's more, those polls can still continue to change over the last few days leading up to the election. How much of a move in the polls themselves does it take to adjust that 77.4% likelihood down to 65%? To 55%? To a coin flip?

To my mind, Silver's predictions shouldn't change the behavior of Obama or Romney supporters one way or another. If you are in the Obama camp, you wouldn't want to take the foot off the gas, any more than either of those football teams wants to slack off in the 4th quarter. If you're in the Obama camp, it means this election is by no means a sure thing. Better buckle down and get that number close to 100%. If you're in the Romney camp, it means it isn't over yet. One strong last minute drive and those numbers can totally change around . . .

Hmm . . . I just checked back at Nate Silver's blog. The morning he updated Obama's chances to 85.1%. Not looking too good for the trailing team . . .

In any event, come Tuesday, I predict I am 100% likely to be glad the whole thing's over.


  

The Great Mint Julep Controversy of 1933

Eddie of the Astor (L), Irvin S. Cobb (R), and
Heywood Broun (seated) at the Infamous
Mint Julep Trial, July 1933

What's the proper liquor for use in a mint julep? Bourbon whiskey or rye? What about rum or brandy, or even gin? 

Most drinkers today would immediately answer, "Bourbon, of course," but it wasn't always this way. Back in the 19th century, any one of those liquors might be found in a julep. Rum, in fact, was the original base, though it was supplanted by brandy in the early days of the Republic. Whiskey rose to julep prominence only after the Civil War, and Kentuckians and Marylanders debated hotly whether Bourbon or rye was the proper variety for juleps.

Last year in the Charleston City Paper, I speculated that the near-ubiquity of Bourbon as the liquor of choice for mint juleps today was largely due to the Kentucky Derby, at which juleps have been the signature cocktail for over a century. But, the more I look into matters, the more I suspect that the Kentucky-born newspaper man and humorist Irvin S. Cobb might actually share a lot of the blame.

In July 1933, still several months before the repeal of Prohibition, Cobb challenged “Eddie of the Astor”, a well-known bartender from the Hotel Astor, to a mint julep showdown. The challenge was sparked when Cobb overheard Eddie say that a proper julep should be made with brandy. “Brandy?” Cobb reportedly said. “Putting brandy in a mint julep is like putting ketchup in iced tea.” The contest was set for July 13th at Cobb’s Park Avenue apartment.

As late as 1933, it seems, there was still a rich diversity of liquors employed in the julep world. Cobb’s challenge, columnist H. Allen Smith noted, originated out of “a controversy over the potability of the Kentucky mint julep as compared with all other forms of julep.” 

H. L. Mencken, the famed Baltimore journalist and critic, upon hearing of the contest, harrumphed that both Cobb and Eddie were wrong. “In Maryland we use rye whiskey. Bourbon puts too much meat on the consumer,” a perhaps not so veiled dig at Cobb's substantial girth. Mencken declined to participate, saying he had to head back home to Baltimore “to watch the hanging of a gentleman who put Bourbon whiskey in a julep.”

Cobb enlisted Heywood Broun, the popular columnist for the New York World-Telegram, to serve as the contest's judge. For his “Kentucky julep”, Cobb broke out a bottle of Belmont Bourbon distilled in 1901 and obtained from Louisville’s Pendennis Club. Eddie of the Astor was given a bottle of brandy  by Cobb and, when he requested a bit of Jamaican rum for his “Cosmopolitan julep”, he was provided with the closest thing Cobb could find in his basement: Bacardi.

In alternating succession, Broun downed three of Cobb’s Bourbon juleps and three of Eddie’s brandy ones, then retired to a bedroom for a nap. He awoke a half hour later, fortified himself with three cups of coffee, then banged out his decision on Cobb’s typewriter. “Judgment is rendered in favor of Mr. Cobb and the mint julep compounded out of Kentucky Bourbon,” he declared. “Eddie of the Astor is guilty of a heresy in using brandy as a base.” He took the opportunity to take a swipe at rye, too, declaring it “Communistic, Atheistic, and against the dignity of man” to commit “such gross violations of the code as using rye whiskey, or that great abomination, the gin julep.”

Eddie of the Astor, for his part, took the defeat graciously, though he did note that he was a little out of practice, thanks to the whole Prohibition thing, and added, “I wish the press to know that it was not really Mr. Cobb that won, but really his liquor.” He did have  a point: it’s sort of hard to compete with 32-year-old Bourbon when all you’ve got is a bottle of Prohibition-era brandy and some bootleg Bacardi.

Predictably, newspapers in Maryland and in New Orleans cried foul. Marshall Ballard, the editor of the New Orleans Item, protested that what Cobb had actually created was not a mint julep but a mint smash. “Both are good,” he declared, “but the julep demands more solicitude and time.”

With a smash, Ballard explained, either Bourbon or rye is put in a glass with sugar, mint leaves, and crushed ice and agitated with a spoon until the mint leaves are crushed and the outside of the glass coated with a fine frost. For a julep, “you soak as much mint as possible in as much Bourbon as you can afford for about three weeks.” The resulting greenish brown liquor is stored in a jug and mixed with ice and sugar just before drinking, and is, Ballard claimed, a “slightly smoother and mellower product” than the quick-made smash.

Cobb's contest may not have decided the issue once and for all, but in the wake of Repeal more and more Americans turned to Bourbon when stirring up a frosty julep. I, for one, am partial to rye, but almost a full century of Kentucky propaganda puts me decidedly in the minority.

Small Barrel Failures

Barrels Aging in the Buffalo Trace Warehouse
Courtesy Buffalo Trace Distillery

A little interesting news coming out of Frankfurt, Kentucky: Buffalo Trace Distillery has been experimenting with making "small barrel" bourbon, and they've now declared those experiments to be, well, a failure.

An ordinary bourbon barrel (in which, by law, corn whiskey must age at least two years before being able to be called straight bourbon whiskey) is 53 gallons in capacity. Starting in 2006, Buffalo Trace took smaller barrels of 5, 10, and 15 gallons and filled them with the same mash bill and aged them side-by-side to see what would happen.

What happens, it appears, is something akin to cooking a burger on too hot of a grill or a pork roast in too hot an oven. In whiskey aging, its the barrel itself providing the "heat", the charred wood filtering out the congeners from the distillate and imparting a dark color and smoky, mellow flavor to the whiskey. "As expected," Master Distiller Harlen Wheatley noted in the press release announcing the results, "the smaller 5 gallon barrel aged faster than the 15 gallon version." But faster isn't necessarily better. "It's as if they all bypassed a step in the aging process and just never gained the depth of flavor that we expect from our bourbons."

The distillers sampled the progress of the experiment each year, and finally this year threw in the towel, deciding the small barrel versions just weren't going to get any better.

It must be to their chagrin, for if distillers were able to use smaller barrels to speed the aging process but still keep the quality then they would be in a better position to react to changes in the market--like the recent resurgence in rye popularity that has left distillers and wholesalers with a shortage of stock.  When your product has to sit in a warehouse for four or more years before being ready to sell, there's not much you can do to ramp production quickly to meet the rising demand.

For now, it seems the 53-gallon barrel--and lots of time--remain the formula for success.

I am HUGE in Vietnam

Cookshop in Huế, Vietnam. Courtesy Thomas Schoch. 

Holy canoli. Just a few short days after making my publishing debut in Spanish (thanks to a SFA blog post picked up by CNN and lifted by one of their Mexican affiliates), now I get the thrill of seeing my own prose translated into, of all things, Vietnamese.

Unfortunately, I don't speak Vietnamese. Fortunately, Google Translate (which is built into the Chrome browser) makes it easy.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much I can trust the automated translation. The headline of the piece translates as "Bread Vietnamese 'gulp' American city like?", which I've got to think is missing a little of the nuance from the original version.

But, the cool thing is that, in the eyes of  Zing.com Vietnam, at least, it's apparently newsworthy that the press in the "second largest city of the state of South Carolina" has picked up on Vietnam's classic street food. Here's how Google translates the one original paragraph written by some Vietnamese scribe before he or she blatantly pirated my text:

In The Charleston City Paper Charleston - the second largest city of the state of South Carolina, U.S., author Robert Moss has expressed his impression filled with dizzying speed of bread Vietnam food market this place.

Again, I expect something might have gotten lost in translation there, and as my editor and her repeated patient but firm deadline reminder emails will attest, "dizzying speed" is not something often used to describe my writing process.

But, how bizarre is it to think that there are people over in Vietnam reading my commentary on the sandwiches their own country invented? It is a small, strange, and almost unbelievable world sometimes.